To Drill or not to Drill

Related;
Accord on the Tire-Gauge Question;

“Senator Obama said we should inflate our tires,” Mr. McCain said, according to a pool report of the evening. “I think we ought to inflate our tires. I’m all for it. The Triple A said we should inflate our tires. But that’s not all we should do.”

Tired of Talking Tires Yet?

Obama pokes at McCain over tire - pressure issue;

In mocking Obama, McCain told a motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D.: ''My opponent doesn't want to drill, he doesn't want nuclear power, he wants you to inflate your tires.'' The Republican National Committee widely distributed tire pressure gauges labeled ''Obama energy plan'' and suggested that was the Illinois senator's only idea for reducing oil imports, although both candidates have offered multifaceted energy proposals.

Equivalent of Bees to Ecosystem are Taxi Drivers to...?

Taxi drivers have become more fractious as fines for bad driving or declining to pick up passengers have eaten into pay packets that have also been eroded by the weakness of the United Arab Emirates dollar-pegged dirham against currencies in their home countries.

The Idea that is America at its best

In a pointed gesture, the U.S. Olympic team has voted Lopez Lomong, a member of the track team who gained American citizenship in 2007 after fleeing Sudan and spending a decade in a Kenyan refugee camp, as its flag bearer for the opening ceremony in Beijing.

-Sudanese refugee voted American flag bearer

Book recommendation

My Stroke of Insight

Cool link of the Day

Britain from Above

Tribal Leadership?

Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

In a rigorous eight-year study of approximately 24,000 people in over two dozen corporations, Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright refine and define a common theme: the success of a company depends on its tribes, the strength of its tribes is determined by the tribal culture, and a thriving corporate culture can be established by an effective tribal leader. Tribal Leadership will show leaders how to employ their companies' tribes to maximize productivity and profit: the authors' research, backed up with interviews ranging from Brian France (CEO of NASCAR) to "Dilbert" creator Scott Adams, shows that over three quarters of the organizations they've studied have tribal cultures that are merely adequate, no better than the third of five tribal stages.

Is this book worth reading?

Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim

Mr. Fooster Traveling on a Whim

This book represents an unusual collaboration between Tom Corwin—who is a musician, producer and author, and Craig Frazier—who is a designer, illustrator and author. Tom will read from the book accompanied by a visual and live musical presentation. Craig will reveal his developmental sketches and process. Together they will describe their own 'creative boomerang' that gave Mr. Fooster wings.

Next Big Thing in Book Marketing; Karaoke Books

Do we Need another Good magazine

NEED magazine creates exposure for humanitarian aid via an educational, artistic, visual narrative of human stories.

Related; Good Magazine

Cool Political Yard Signs

Nudge one more time

Richard Thaler goes to UK - Nudge: improving decisions about wealth, health and happiness

Here's a link to the video.

Photo of the Day

via Flickr

Murketing

The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are
Rob Walker

Podcast of the Day

Robert Barro on Disasters

Stolen Money Fact of the Day

According to one estimate, corrupt money flowing abroad from developing countries is now $40 billion per year which amounts to 40% of annual official development assistance funds.

-Putting the focus on Stolen Assets

Something useful from UN- Open Training Platform

The objective behind this platform is to empower trainers or/and trainees with free resources, offer them a structured collaborative space to share their training but also to promote and value the “open” training materials, which are freely and openly accessible for trainers and self-learners to use and re-use for non commercial purposes such as teaching, learning and research.

Some of the links on the platform;

A Standard Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model in GAMS

Handbook on Environmental Economics

UNEP Project Manual: Formulation, Approval, Monitoring and Evaluation

Strategic Planning

Assorted Five

THE FED'S STATEMENTS

Does the wrangling of interest groups corrupt politics—or constitute it?

Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide

What does the GDP deflator measure?

Gelman's Graphical Treat

Need for Speed!

The Driver- My Dangerous Pursuit of Speed and Truth in the Outlaw Racing World
By Alexander Roy

Is the Rainbow Nation dead

What's the value added of World Bank?

"The bank thought it financed an electric power station, but in fact financed a brothel."

- Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, 1961 (source: The Rise and Fall of the World Bank Economic Department)


An interesting recent book on The World Bank;
The World Bank and the Gods of Lending by Steve Berkman

As a non-economist at the Bank, I was periodically reminded by my superiors of my obvious inability to grasp the full essence of economic development and all the nuances of the economic process. They were probably right, as I was, after all, just a technical specialist, and while specialists could only advise on their specialty, economists could advise on anything they damn well pleased because they were economists and had the inside track on everything. They were the economic managers, and their solution to the world’s problems was to produce more economic managers. And so the Bank would fund all sorts of training (Ph.D. degrees in economics being one of the more popular approaches), conferences, seminars, workshops, and whatever, to that end. The economists at the Bank were in essence cloning themselves, and they seemed to be quite pleased with the whole business...

I recall a regional management meeting in 1995 during which we were reviewing “problem projects” in our lending portfolio for Africa. We had at the time over five hundred ongoing projects in an $11 billion portfolio5 that required supervision by Bank staff to ensure that implementation was on track, loan agreement conditions were being met, and that project objectives would be achieved. As my PRT work had morphed into institutional development and public-sector management, and I had been doing skills-mix analyses for many of our borrower institutions, I decided, prior to our meeting, to examine the skills mix of our regional staff to see if this might have any correlation to our portfolio problems. Lo and behold, it seems that we had roughly 300 economists of various persuasions, 10 financial analysts, 10 public-administration specialists, and roughly 150 technical specialists (engineers, architects, educators, health services specialists, and so forth).

I raised this matter at the meeting and inquired how we could effectively handle the financial and institutional management issues, which were our major problem areas, with only ten financial and ten public administration specialists on our staff. I also asked what project-management expertise three hundred economists were adding to our ability to supervise our portfolio adequately.

Photo of the Day

Trove of Endangered Gorillas Found in Africa

Assorted Five

Five readings on currencies and monetary policy

Inside the Economist's Mind: A Book Review

Nobel Prize winner Robert Lucas recalls that when he was a little boy, in the 1940s, his father asked him if he thought there were any differences in the quality of the milk delivered by the five or six dairies that sent truck to their neighborhood. The young Lucas replied that the milk was probably quite similar. His father then told him "that under socialism only one truck will deliver to all the houses on each block, and the time and gasoline wasted in duplicating routes will be used for something else."...

Friedman pooh-poohs the notion that he wielded great policy influence on U.S. presidents, saying that they "would have acted as they did if they had never seen me or heard from me." He also dismisses as grandiose the view that he had a well-thought out agenda for restoring the luster of capitalism and free markets: " ... people have a tendency to attribute to me a long-term plan; they think I must have planned this campaign. I did no planning whatsoever. These things just happened in the order in which they happened to happen. And luck plays a very large role, a very large role indeed." Samuelson also talks about his "incredible luck" in stumbling upon economics at a time when the subject had "myriads of challenging open problems ...I once described this as being like fishing in a virgin Canadian lake. You threw in your hook and out came theorem after theorem."

And speaking of fishing, one other common trait of these eminent economists seems to be that they like to fish. The book has several interesting photographs, quite a few of which show these economists with the fish they have just caught. Perhaps fishing is an activity that involves practical problem-solving and yet allows time for deep thinking about abstract economic matters

Economic Forecasts: Too Smooth by Far?

Gelman's Great Book

Map Your Neighborhood, by the Numbers
A new Web site allows home buyers, real-estate developers, nonprofit groups and any other interested parties to map neighborhoods for free using a wide range of data, such as per-capita income, education levels and unemployment. PolicyMap is a clever tool that makes government statistics more useful and accessible, though it also highlights some limitations in the U.S.’s numerical self-knowledge.

Can you deter a suicide terrorist?

Is 4Ds (Deterrence, Dissuasion, Defense and Defeat) the best way to deal with terrorism?



Related;
START

Book recommendation

Inventing Human Rights: A History by Lynn Hunt

Review of the book by NYT

Artist of the Day

Ira Meyer

How to Manipulate Irrational Voters

The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st Century American Politics with an 18th Century Mind, by George Lakoff

Or download the podcast

Responsibility of Artists- To defeat the lie

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Dies at 89;

He wrote that while an ordinary man was obliged “not to participate in lies,” artists had greater responsibilities. “It is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie!”...

Many in the West did not know what to make of the man. He was perceived as a great writer and hero who had defied the Russian authorities. Yet he seemed willing to lash out at everyone else as well — democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers.

David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Soviet Union and visited Mr. Solzhenitsyn, wrote in 2001: “In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the 20th century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler? And yet when his name comes up now, it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has been.”

In the 1970s, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger warned President Gerald R. Ford to avoid seeing Mr. Solzhenitsyn. “Solzhenitsyn is a notable writer, but his political views are an embarrassment even to his fellow dissidents,” Mr. Kissinger wrote in a memo. “Not only would a meeting with the president offend the Soviets, but it would raise some controversy about Solzhenitsyn’s views of the United States and its allies.” Mr. Ford followed the advice.

The writer Susan Sontag recalled a conversation about Mr. Solzhenitsyn between her and Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet who had followed Mr. Solzhenitsyn into forced exile and who would also become a Nobel laureate. “We were laughing and agreeing about how we thought Solzhenitsyn’s views on the United States, his criticism of the press, and all the rest were deeply wrong, and on and on,” she said. “And then Joseph said: ‘But you know, Susan, everything Solzhenitsyn says about the Soviet Union is true. Really, all those numbers — 60 million victims — it’s all true.’ ”...

In the autumn of 1961, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a 43-year-old high school teacher of physics and astronomy in Ryazan, a city some 70 miles south of Moscow. He had been there since 1956, when his sentence of perpetual exile in a dusty region of Kazakhstan was suspended. Aside from his teaching duties, he was writing and rewriting stories he had conceived while confined in prisons and labor camps since 1944.

One story, a short novel, was “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” an account of a single day in an icy prison camp written in the voice of an inmate named Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a bricklayer. With little sentimentality, he recounts the trials and sufferings of “zeks,” as the prisoners were known, peasants who were willing to risk punishment and pain as they seek seemingly small advantages like a few more minutes before a fire. He also reveals their survival skills, their loyalty to their work brigade and their pride.

The day ends with the prisoner in his bunk. “Shukov felt pleased with his life as he went to sleep,” Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote. Shukov was pleased because, among other things, he had not been put in an isolation cell, and his brigade had avoided a work assignment in a place unprotected from the bitter wind, and he had swiped some extra gruel, and had been able to buy a bit of tobacco from another prisoner.

“The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one,” Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote, adding: “Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three days were for leap years.”

Mr. Solzhenitsyn typed the story single spaced, using both sides to save paper. He sent one copy to Lev Kopelev, an intellectual with whom he had shared a cell 16 years earlier. Mr. Kopelev, who later became a well known dissident, realized that under Mr. Khrushchev’s policies of liberalization, it might be possible to have the story published by Novy Mir, or The New World, the most prestigious of the Soviet Union’s so-called thick literary and cultural journals. Mr. Kopelev and his colleagues steered the manuscript around lower editors who might have blocked its publication and took it to Aleksandr Tvardovsky, the editor and a Politburo member who backed Mr. Khrushchev.

On reading the manuscript, Mr. Tvardovsky summoned Mr. Solzhenitsyn from Ryazan. “You have written a marvelous thing,” he told him. “You have described only one day, and yet everything there is to say about prison has been said.” He likened the story to Tolstoy’s moral tales. Other editors compared it to Dostoevsky’s “House of the Dead,” which the author had based on his own experience of incarceration in czarist times. Mr. Tvardovsky offered Mr. Solzhenitsyn a contract worth more than twice his teacher’s annual salary, but he cautioned that he was not certain he could publish the story.

Mr. Tvardovsky was eventually able to get Mr. Khrushchev himself to read “A Day in the Life.” Mr. Khrushchev was impressed, and by mid-October 1962, the presidium of the Politburo took up the question of whether to allow it to be published. The presidium ultimately agreed, and in his biography “Solzhenitsyn” (Norton, 1985), Michael Scammell wrote that Mr. Khrushchev defended the decision and was reported to have declared: “There’s a Stalinist in each of you; there’s even a Stalinist in me. We must root out this evil.”

The novel appeared in Novy Mir in early 1963. The critic Kornei Chukovsky pronounced the work “a literary miracle.” Grigori Baklanov, a respected novelist and writer about World War II, declared that the story was one of those rare creations after which “it is impossible to go on writing as one did before.”

Novy Mir ordered extra printings, and every copy was sold. A book edition and an inexpensive newspaper version also vanished from the shelves.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn was not the first to write about the camps. As early as 1951, Gustav Herling, a Pole, had published “A World Apart,” about the three years he spent in a labor camp on the White Sea. Some Soviet writers had typed accounts of their own experiences, and these pages and their carbon copies were passed from reader to reader in a clandestine, self-publishing effort called zamizdat. Given the millions who had been forced into the gulag, few families could have been unaware of the camp experiences of relatives or friends. But few had had access to these accounts. “A Day in the Life” changed that...

In an interview last year with Der Spiegel, Mr. Solzhenitsyn said that Russians’ view of the West as a “knight of democracy” had been shattered by the NATO bombing of Serbia, an event he called “a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals.” He dismissed Western democracy-building efforts, telling the Times of London in 2005 that democracy “is not worth a brass farthing if it is installed by bayonet.”

In 2007, he accepted a State Prize from then-President Putin — after refusing, on principle, similar prizes from Gorbachev and from Yeltsin. Mr. Putin, he said in the Der Spiegel interview, “inherited a ransacked and bewildered country, with a poor and demoralized people. And he started to do what was possible — a slow and gradual restoration.”

Related;

‘Powers that be’ and 'Powers that aren’t in Iraq

“The most prominent dividing line in Iraqi politics now is between the ‘powers that be’ and the ‘powers that aren’t,’ ” Sam Parker, an Arabic speaker who works for the United States Institute of Peace, a policy center in Washington, told me recently. “The ‘powers that be’ spent much of the 1980s and 1990s in open opposition to Saddam. Nearly all of these leaders spent substantial time outside of Iraq. They have well-organized parties but lack a strong social base and have an outsize degree of influence in the national and provincial governments. Because of their disproportionate dominance of the political process, they only stand to lose by any movement toward political openness.

“The ‘powers that aren’t,’ ” Parker added, “are fragmented and weak. What they want is in.”

Where does the U.S. stand? “They seem to be working hard for provincial elections,” Parker said, “which would make the system more inclusive and give the ‘powers that aren’t’ and the popular forces they represent an opportunity for a share of the power. But at the same time, the United States’ main priority appears to be buttressing the state security apparatus that belongs to the ‘powers that be.’ ”

In an ideal world the two policy imperatives would be balanced. The politics of inclusiveness would lay the foundation for the long-term stability of the country, while improvements in Maliki’s capacity to govern would lead to a state that could supplant the Hobbesian state of nature that has typified Iraq — and make it easier for the United States to reduce forces. Iraq, however, is far from an ideal world, and Maliki’s growing confidence in his own power leaves the U.S. steadily less able to shape events.

-The Last Battle

My Index is bigger than your Index

Should I start using Cuil search engine;

Cuil, the search engine that launched with widespread publicity Monday, claimed in the first paragraph of its introductory press release that it “has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.” But it turns out that neither Cuil nor anyone else has enough information to verify that claim. It’s also not clear that a bigger index is better.

Representatives for Google, Yahoo and Microsoft — which together control 90% of the U.S. search market, according to Nielsen Online — told me they don’t reveal the size of their indexes. So Cuil based its claim on “past knowledge and tests,” Cuil spokesman Vince Sollitto told me. These tests could include counting search results for “searches for the intersection of rare words.” He added, “It is disappointing that others won’t state their index size publicly, as we think it is important that people know how much of the Web is being searched on their behalf.”

For Google, specifically, Cuil had some prior knowledge because its co-founder and president, Anna Patterson, previously worked on Google’s search index. “Anna knows how big it was when she built it a couple of years ago,” Mr. Solitto said.

But is it still that size? Last week, Google announced that it was processing one trillion unique links online. The Google index doesn’t include all of the pages found at these links. Mr. Solitto said Cuil’s research has found that the average Web page has almost 20 links, which would suggest that there are more than 50 billion pages in Google’s index. Google also removed an undisclosed number of duplicate pages.

Qualification to be a president- skill at giving exams?

Akhil Reed Amar writes;

Barack Obama’s exam questions and answers engaged me on several levels.

First, As a constitutional law professor, I came away impressed — dazzled, really — by the analytic intelligence and sophistication of these questions and answers. A really good exam — an exam that tests and stretches the student, while simultaneously providing the professor with a handy and fair index to rank the class — is its own special art form. Composing such an exam is like crafting a sonnet or a crossword puzzle. We don’t have Obama’s answer key every year; but the questions themselves are in many instances beautifully constructed to enable students to explore the seams and plumb the depths of the Supreme Court’s case law. I am tempted to use variations of several of these questions myself in some future exam. (I won’t say which, lest I tip my students off.) When I read Jodi Kantor’s piece, I was very interested to hear that the University of Chicago Law School was willing to offer Obama tenure. In these materials I see why.

Second, as a student of history, I couldn’t help thinking of Lincoln. Not just because we have a skinny guy from Illinois who is largely self-made and who can write a great speech — I knew that already. Lincoln was a brilliant lawyer, who did his own thinking and writing and cut to the essence of hard legal issues with amazing incisiveness. Lincoln understood the Constitution and its deepest structures as well as or better than any of the Justices on the Supreme Court of his day. These materials helped me see Obama in a similar light.

Which brings me to the last level — the moral level. Like Lincoln, Jefferson and Madison were also brilliant. But Jefferson and Madison lived and died as slaveholders and did much less than they could have done to put slavery on a path of ultimate extinction. Nixon had a keen legal mind, but a large moral blind spot. Lincoln had a rare combination of moral depth and legal brilliance. Make no mistake, he was a politician who understood how to tack and trim. But he was a politician with a strong moral compass and a deep understanding of the rule of law. Similarly, there is a great deal of moral seriousness in Obama’s legal materials. They are not just about technical and technocratic legal questions. Some of the great mysteries and tragedies of human life and American society — involving marriage, divorce, childbearing, cloning, the right to die with dignity, infertility, sexual orientation, and yes, of course, race — are probed in these materials in ways that encourage students to think not just about law, but about justice, and truth, and morality.

Source: The Caucus Blog

The Art and Practice of Teaching Statistics

US Fact of the Day

How Are We Doing?

A.J. Jacobs: My year of living biblically

Shipping Inflation

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to the United States has risen to $8,000, compared with $3,000 early in the decade, according to a recent study of transportation costs.

Shipping Costs Start to Crimp Globalization

Assorted Podcasts

Human rights in China

Fareed Zakaria

No more than one
Since its introduction in 1979 it has transformed Chinese society and Chinese families. We take a look at the 30-year history of China's one child policy.

Linguistic typology
The polyglot linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald describes the study of linguistic typology: classifying how languages are structured and comparing them to ascertain recurrent patterns and variations.

Me and other languages
Marking the United Nations-declared International Year of Languages, as well as its goal to preserve and promote linguistic diversity, the linguist Alexandra Aikhenvald tells the story of her own multilingualism, which reflects the story of a country that no longer exists.

Stoics at war
Recent philosophical debate on war has focused on the idea that you don't just have to fight by the rules; you also have to be fighting in a just cause. But does this ignore much of the moral context of a soldier's life. What binds comrades in arms together? What about stress and what about grief, and what does the ancient Roman philosophy of Stoicism have to tell us about it?

Literature, law and ethics - The case of Billy Budd
A visiting legal ethicist talks to us about why a novella by Herman Melville, involving mutiny and an execution at sea, has become required reading for those interested in the intersection of literature, law and ethics.

Is being gay in your biology?
What makes someone gay? The quest for the biological roots of sexual orientation remains rife with controversy. Is it in your genes, handedness, or the hormonal soup of the early foetus? Or, is the answer hidden deep inside the brain? Homo or hetero - the science of sexual attraction captures everyone's attention.

The Trials of the Templars
At dawn on 13 October 1307 all the Templars in France were arrested by royal order, on the charge that they had been involved in secret blasphemous rituals. This led to other arrests of Templars in Europe, and an investigation by Pope Clement V. The University of Sydney Rare Books and Special Collections Library recently obtained trial documents from the Vatican archives, which John Pryor discusses with Rachael Kohn.

Modelling the origin of time: science and religion at "the horizon of mystery"
Does science make belief in God obsolete? Cosmologist and mathematician Michal Heller's answer to this 'Big Question' this year won him the world's largest monetary prize given to an individual, the Templeton Prize. On Encounter Professor Heller explores 'creative tensions' between science and religion and talks about his research for a quantum gravity theory that might explain the Planck Epoch. And astronomer Guy Consolmagno SJ has things to say about meteorites, the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan, and beauty.

Snoring kills

Sisters and babies
Why do humans, of all the primates, have so many babies? And what happens when sisters offer to carry babies for other members of their family? What happens to kinship? Professor Marilyn Strathern, a social anthropologist at Cambridge and head of Girton College, and Karen Kramer, another anthropologist at Harvard, have been tracking the complexities of motherhood and babies across many cultures, with surprising results.

New coral alga discovered in Sydney Harbour
Coral in Sydney Harbour has been found to contain a previously undiscovered alga. The coral encrusts rocks under the water. The alga lives in the coral and give it sugars. The family tree of algae based on sequencing DNA shows the alga is in a new position on the tree, and is related to the malaria parasite. The alga is seen as a missing link between another alga and a parasite. It was previously thought to be extinct.

The last environmental taboo
Today Richard Begbie from Canberra looks at the environmental cost of air travel. Airplanes add around 750 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year to the atmosphere and in the process burn 250 million tonnes of a non-renewable resource.

Harry Gordon: Living, breathing and writing the Olympics

The Role of NGOs in Achieving the Millennium Development Goals

What Does It Take to Achieve High, Sustainable, and Inclusive Growth in Developing Countries?

The Pentagon`s New Map

Zimbabwe: Beyond the Endgame

How Inflation Robs Zimbabwe


George Will's America
How Fannie and Freddie Got Big

Escaping Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa

India: The Emerging Giant

Globalization and the World's Rising Living Standards
G8 and Aid for Africa,

Author Wallace Says Gates Surrounds Himself With Smart People

Global Democracy

“Fungal footbaths” could save the honey bee
Globally, the honey bee population is in decline. This has serious implications for the cross pollination of commercial crops and wild plants. One of the major causes of this decline is the “Varroa Destructor” mite. However, researchers at Warwick University may have found a natural solution to this problem. Dr Dave Chandler from Warwick HRI explains how.

'Art Gives One Complexity'
Novelist and academic Eva Hoffman has been awarded an honorary degree at Warwick. Here, she talks about her life experiences and the inspirations behind her best selling memoir ‘Lost in Translation’ and her new novel ‘Illuminations’.

‘Troubles in Zimbabwe must be resolved peacefully’
Dr George Kanyeihamba, one of this year’s honorary graduates, helped establish democracy and the independent judicial system in Uganda, and is considered the ‘Founding Father’ of human rights in Africa. Here, he talks about his experiences, and the need for peaceful resolution of events in Zimbabwe.

Channeling Ahmadinejad

Americans worried about Old Beijing

The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed
by Michael Meyer

Related;
A review from NYT

Another American living in China

A love story of a different sort

Chris & Don. A love story


NYT Review;

The three-and-a-half-decade relationship of the British writer Christopher Isherwood and the American portrait artist Don Bachardy is one of the ultimate true stories of a proto-gay-marriage succeeding in a forbidding climate....

Early in their relationship the two developed a special coded language to discuss themselves through notes and cartoon drawings in which Mr. Bachardy was a cat and Isherwood an old horse, and the movie develops these dialogues into short animated sequences. During a rocky period in the early 1960s when Mr. Bachardy began pursuing sexual encounters outside the relationship, they referred to his behavior as “mousing.” Mr. Isherwood’s anxiety, in which he imagined living without a partner, was reflected in his novel “A Single Man.”

In this pre-Stonewall era Isherwood’s increasingly acute political consciousness led him to make “the treatment of the homosexual a test by which every political party and government must be judged.”

The last section of the film, devoted to Mr. Isherwood’s slow decline from prostate cancer, is its most wrenching. Mr. Bachardy, determined to make Isherwood’s death “something we were doing together,” chronicled his deterioration, executing as many as 9 or 10 drawings a day, including one of his corpse.

Isherwood would have told him, “That’s what an artist would do,” Mr. Bachardy reflects, then adds, “And that’s what an artist did do.”

----

I’ll bet Shakespeare compromised himself a lot; anybody who’s in the entertainment industry does to some extent. But are you going to sink or swim? There’s a most awful daintiness in the idea that everything you write should be just so—perfection—and all the rest carefully destroyed so that it won’t hurt your image. Often this is a dangerous kind of vanity. Goodness knows, I’ve written lots of stuff that I hate, but there it is, flapping around in the vaults of various motion-picture studios; and sometimes I’ve done good work for the cinema. If you want the money, and you want to live that way, you’ve just got to take it. I suppose, under ideal circumstances, I would say, have some other profession and keep your writing for yourself.

Religions protect against disease

Corey Fincher, of the University of New Mexico, has a different hypothesis for the origin of religious diversity. He thinks not that religions are like disease but that they are responses to disease—or, rather, to the threat of disease. If he is right, then people who believe that their religion protects them from harm may be correct, although the protection is of a different sort from the supernatural one they perceive.

Mr Fincher is not arguing that disease-protection is religion’s main function. Biologists have different hypotheses for that. Not all follow Dr Dawkins in thinking it pathological. Some see it either as a way of promoting group solidarity in a hostile world, or as an accidental consequence of the predisposition to such solidarity. This solidarity-promotion is one of Mr Fincher’s starting points. The other is that bacteria, viruses and other parasites are powerful drivers of evolution. Many biologists think that sex, for example, is a response to parasitism. The continual mixing of genes that it promotes means that at least some offspring of any pair of parents are likely to be immune to a given disease.

Mr Fincher and his colleague Randy Thornhill wondered if disease might be driving important aspects of human social behaviour, too. Their hypothesis is that in places where disease is rampant, it behoves groups not to mix with one another more than is strictly necessary, in order to reduce the risk of contagion. They therefore predict that patterns of behaviour which promote group exclusivity will be stronger in disease-ridden areas. Since religious differences are certainly in that category, they specifically predict that the number of different religions in a place will vary with the disease load. Which is, as they report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, the case.

Proving the point involved collating a lot of previous research. Even defining what constitutes a religion is fraught with difficulty. But using accepted definitions of uniqueness, exclusivity, autonomy and superiority to other religions they calculated that the average number of religions per country is 31. The range, though, is enormous—from 3 to 643. Côte d’Ivoire, for example, has 76 while Norway has 13, and Brazil has 159 while Canada has 15. They then did the same thing for the number of parasitic diseases found in each country. The average here was 200, with a range from 178 to 248.

-Religious diversity may be caused by disease


I guess with evolutionary psychology and statistics one can prove almost anything.

Egypt is reforming!

Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an outspoken critic of the Egyptian government, has been sentenced to two years in prison.

The sociologist and human rights activist, who is currently in the United States, was convicted for "tarnishing Egypt's reputation," the country's official MENA news agency said.

-Exiled Egyptian activist sentenced


Related;

Saudi Arabia's First Goodwill Ambassador

Muna Abu-Sulayman interview with Riz Khan;

'I had a great time in US'

'My role models in my divorce was Demi Moore and Bruce Willis'

Her real secret- she was born and raised in America. So the best thing for Saudi reform- raise more Saudis in US.

Related;
I Am Honored to Be Named as Young Global Leader: Muna Abu Sulayman
Young and Restless

Rent-seeking Consultants?

Ashraf Ghani, the Alexander Hamilton of Afghanistan, blames World Bank for neglecting higher education in Afghanistan (emphasis added);

In Afghanistan in 2002, World Bank and UN officials insisted that the government should not invest in higher education and moreover should invest very little in secondary and vocational education despite the fact that Afghanistan had seen its professional class decimated by war, disease, and flight. Citing the focus of the millennium development goals (MDGs) on primary education, they considered higher education and vocational training a luxury that Afghanistan could ill afford. But without trained doctors, teachers, engineers, and managers, it was not clear at the time whether Afghanistan could get back on its feet. Five years later, the fact that the country’s operating budget is overshadowed by the cost for technical assistance (TA) to make up for the “poor capacity” of the government testifies to the debilitating expense of failures to invest in the training of professional staff, future leaders and administrators.

In many parts of the world, the neglect of higher education has to led to poor-quality administration and spiraling TA bills. The price for TA amounts to roughly $ 20 billion per annum, with consultants often paid around $ 200, 000 a year. Nor is this technical assistance provided by Westers donors of high quality in many cases.

- "Fixing Failed States", Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart, p. 142

For Discussion: Should we try to rate the output quality of consultants? Who should rate it and how should we do it?

A Challenge to Chris Blattman: Create a consulting agency that delivers quality consulting services in the development field to low-income countries for FREE.

Suicide Bombing Fact of the Day

• More than 85 percent of female suicide terrorists since 1981 committed their attacks on behalf of secular organizations; many grew up in Christian and Hindu families. Further, Islamist groups commonly discourage and only grudgingly accept female suicide attackers. At the start of the second intifada in 2000, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of Hamas, claimed: “A woman martyr is problematic for Muslim society. A man who recruits a woman is breaking Islamic law.” Hamas actually rejected Darin Abu Eisheh, the second Palestinian female attacker, who carried out her 2002 bombing on behalf of the secular Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

• For one, 95 percent of female suicide attacks occurred within the context of a military campaign against foreign occupying forces, suggesting that, at a macro level, the main strategic logic is to create or maintain territorial sovereignty for their ethnic group

• All secular organizations that employ suicide bombings have used female attackers early and often. For instance, 76 percent of attackers from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey have been women, as have 66 percent of those from Chechen separatist groups, 45 percent of the Syrian Socialist National Party’s and a quarter of those from the Tamil Tigers.

-Behind the Woman Behind the Bomb

Related;
A Sociobiological View of Palestinian Suicide Bombers;

Suicide bombings have been one of the major hurdles to the Israeli-Palestinian peace and over the past four years, acts of terrorism have killed 958 Israelis and maimed thousands of others. In America, the typical explanations for this behavior center around three themes: poverty, lack of education and mental illness. The limited amount of research that exists on suicide bombers, however, suggests that these assumptions are wrong. It appears that suicide terrorists have no appreciable mental disorders and demographic data shows that they tend to be no less educated and no poorer than the surrounding population. Given the gravity of the situation and the inaccuracy of current explanations, I propose that alternative methods be used to assess the behavior of Palestinian suicide terrorists. With this paper, I combine sociobiology (a.k.a. evolutionary psychology), memetics and game theory to help explain the emergence of Palestinian suicide terrorism and to analyze the motives of the individual bombers. Bringing together research from these different fields, it becomes clear that suicide bombers act as a result of a confluence of generally adaptive psychological traits that are brought together in a maladaptive way by the peculiarities of the Palestinian situation. Suicide bombers are motivated by religious factors, particularly the notions of martyrdom and jihad, and other social factors including groupishness, the obedience to authority, xenophobia, reciprocity, the inclusive fitness of relatives and the protection of territory. Furthermore, the frequency and motives of male and female suicide bombers seems to be in keeping with their evolved sex strategies and gender roles. While these adaptations may have been beneficial in the ancestral environment, I show that combined today under the auspices of violent terrorist organizations has led to the emergence of suicide bombers.

Cool Art Blog

patriciasilva

Another Book if you want to understand America

Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes

Related;
Photographer Kyle Cassidy's 'Armed America' captures images of gun owners next door

The Return of History

Fukuyama and Kagan debate The Return of History and the End of Dreams at Blogging Heads

Well Souled- New Age Tourism?

Mitah Shah and Mark Leibowitz at Google;

At the heart of Well Souled is the belief that lasting impressions are those that come naturally through the people you meet on your travels and how they connect you to the context, sharing their perspectives on the attitudes, sounds, colors, and textures that surround you. This is how travel becomes emotional -- soulful. Well Souled translates this kind of cultural immersion into lifestyle products that celebrate the sensory experience of travel.

Religion, Culture and Tribe are mixed up on Indian Subcontinent

A holy relic, believed to be a hair from the beard of Prophet Muhammad, was displayed before Kashmiri Muslims during special prayers on the occasion of the Islamic festival of Shab-e-Meraj at Hazratbal Shrine in Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir.

Related;
Pakistanis Aided Attack in Kabul, U.S. Officials Say

American intelligence agencies have concluded that members of Pakistan’s powerful spy service helped plan the deadly July 7 bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, according to United States government officials.

Explainer on Turkey Crisis

So people can wear tank-tops to the universities?

Sure, no problem with that. When we talk about Turkish secularism it's almost a misnomer. It's not the secularism that we enjoy here in the United States, where people can wear whatever religious garb they want. In Turkey, the authorities are directly involved in controlling religion. The state is directly involved in engaging surveillance of the public sphere to ensure that religion doesn't enter the public sphere. And that's the difference. It's state control of religion to enforce this principle that religion shouldn't enter the public sphere.

Related;
Economic survey of Turkey 2008

Ms. Economy calls Olympics a `Nightmare' for China

Elizabeth Economy Calls Olympics a `Nightmare' for China
Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, talks with Bloomberg's Tom Keene about pollution in Beijing, preparation for the Olympics, which begin Aug. 8, and criticism of China's government.

The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them)

The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them)
by Peter Sagal