On government

Referendums are, of course, political oddities. They give an added layer of legitimacy to a government decision for which a general election mandate might seem inadequate.

Simon Jenkins, Guardian, 27 June


I have neither the time not the inclination to do the necessary research to come to an informed decision on this matter, which is why I employ others (ie the government) to do it for me.

Guardian, CiF, 27 June


"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else," wrote the French political philosopher, journalist and politician Frédéric Bastiat (1801–50).

On Judgements

Like our predecessors, we have found it easier to judge than to understand. We have conveniently forgotten that understanding in some depth usually undermines the seeingly firm ground of rectitude, often obviates the need for judgment, and sometimes even leads to gorgiveness, that most unfashionable virtue. Our all too human propensity to jump on moral banwagons and to make snap judgments about human behaviour in other times and places cause a lot of mischief in our classrooms and publications because we commit too many elementary sins against straight moral thinking.

John R. Wilson, Forging the American Character, Reading in United States History to 1877; Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 1997



Our guest must have seen a great deal of the world, as we may judge by his conduct, as well as by his great father; you may be judges yourselves: you were frightened at first, when you imagined he was a Turk...İ say, he is the very man; but he must wait, and go through various scenes of life twenty or thirty years more. İ tell it to his face; it is not he that does these things, it is the great God above.

İn the best Don Quixote tradition, Emin was delighted with this response, commenting by way of summary in his characteristic third person, 'in this method he sowed the corn grain of true religion, and plantedthe admirable zeal of military spirit every where he travelled. (J. Emin, London 1792) This episode demands multiple levels of analysis. Contrary to expectations, Emin as an Arminian is treated better by the Turks, while Emin as a Turk is treated better by the Arminians. And then there is the esoteric quality of Armenian millenarianism and the subtle dueling between the priest and Emin. So subtle is the duel that he misinterprets a sly and skillful rebuff as enthusiastic endorsement.

Enlightenment And Diaspora, (eds) David Myers, and Richard Hovannisian, The Regents of the University of California, 1999


There is a huge work to do, almost insumrmountable and endless. Because in order to know the history of a single nation, you have to know precisely the histories of many other nations. Even the whole life of a single man would not be enough for that .... But also because the narratives about the Armenians in their writings are thoroughly disordered - and the narratives recounted by foreigners - Greek historians and Roman authors ......are but ungrounded fables full of mythical elements. ....One must respect the truth of events that others described because they saw it or heard of it. And then one has to make sure of this truth.......

(Chamchian, 1784), Cited in Enlightenment And Diaspora, (eds) David Myers, and Richard Hovannisian, The Regents of the University of California, 1999

Measurements

This surge in urban populations, fueled more by natural increase than the migration of people from the countryside, is unstoppable, said George Martin, author of UN Population Fund recent report, “State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth.”

Cities will edge out rural areas in more than sheer numbers of people. Poverty is now increasing more rapidly in urban areas as well, and governments need to plan for where the poor will live rather than leaving them to settle illegally in shanties without sewage and other services, the United Nations says.

The first great wave of urbanization unfurled over two centuries, from 1750 to 1950, in Europe and North America, with urban populations rising from 15 million to 423 million.

The second wave is happening now in the developing world. The number of people living in urban areas will have grown from 309 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 2030. By 2030, the developing world will have 80 percent of the world’s urban population.

Half the world soon to be in cities, New York Times, 27 June






In the early 2000s, Osberg and Sharpe (2002, 2005) developed a new composite
measure of well-being called the Index of Economic Well-being (IEWB). The salient
feature of this index was that it organized the economic well-being domain into four
dimensions: consumption flows, stocks of wealth, equality, and economic security.

Since then, we have greatly advanced our research program on the measurement
of economic well-being, both conceptually and empirically. The objective of further study is to measure progress that we have made on methodological issues associated with the construction of the index, in particular the adoption of a linear scaling procedure.

The advantages and disadvantages of this technique are discussed. Also new estimates of the Index of Economic Well-being and its domains and components for selected OECD
countries for the 1980-2005 period and discusses the factors behind these trends.

The main findings are that that the Index of Economic Well-being advanced at rates between 0.49 and 1.56 per cent per year between 1980 and 2005 for the selected
OECD countries, generally below the growth rates of GDP per capita. The consumption
flows and stocks of wealth domains of the Index experienced solid advances over the
period, but these developments were offset somewhat by falls in economic equality and
in economic security. Increased income inequality accounted for the fall in economic
equality while the rise in the private health expenditures, as a share of personal
disposable income, accounted for much of the decline in economic security.

References
Osberg, Lars and Andrew Sharpe (2002) “An Index of Economic Well-being for OECD
Countries,” Review of Income and Wealth, Series 48, Number 3, September, pp. 291-316.
Osberg, Lars and Andrew Sharpe (2005) “How Should We Measure the “Economic”
Aspects of Well-being?” Review of Income and Wealth, Series 51, Number 2, June, pp.
311-336.
Contact: Andrew Sharpe
Executive Director
Centre for the Study of living Standards
500-111 Sparks Street
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1P 5B5
613-233-8891, www.csls.ca




Measuring Progress

The dominant view among measurers of progress is that the rate of GDP growth is not
enough. Even the Economist now acknowledges this. There is increasing interest in
measures of happiness – or subjective wellbeing – as complementary indicators of
progress. However, population happiness measures are relatively stable over time
(reflecting the importance of adaptation and social comparison) and still do not tell the full story about national progress – or the lack of it.
There are other indicators that show that current approaches to progress not only fail to deliver improvements in quality of life, but are reducing it

The pervasive and complex impacts of social changes can be illustrated with individualism. The sociological literature here is itself ambivalent, noting that the freedom people now have is both exhilarating and disturbing, and that with freedom come both new opportunities for personal experience and growth and the anxiety of social dislocation.

However, it is fair to say that research is increasingly pointing to the costs of
individualism, which relate to a loss of both social support and personal control.

These costs include:
• a heightened sense of risk, uncertainty and insecurity;
• a lack of clear frames of reference;
• a rise in personal expectations, coupled with a perception that the onus of success
lies with the individual, despite the continuing importance of social disadvantage
and privilege;
• a surfeit or excess of freedom and choice, which is experienced as a threat or
tyranny;
• increased self-esteem, but of a contingent or narcissistic form that requires
constant external validation and affirmation;
• the confusion of autonomy with independence.

It is important to improve our understanding of this situation. If young people's wellbeing has indeed deteriorated, then this substantially weakens the case for continuing on our present path of social development, a central tenet of which is that health is continuing to improve.

It reinforces the need for a shift from material progress, which focuses on economic
growth and material welfare, to a new model of progress, sustainable development, which does not accord economic growth overriding priority, but, instead, seeks a better balance and integration of social, environmental and economic goals and objectives to produce a high, equitable and enduring quality of life.



Source:

Eckersley, R., Measuring progress: beyond wealth and beyond happiness,
OECD Forum on measuring and fostering the progress of societies. İstanbul, (27 June 2007),

Qualitative study on aged: Questionnaire Survey

According to conventional wisdom old age is a period of regression or deterioration, and there are certainly dramatic and tragic changes that can occur as a result of mental deseases.

Adult development is concealed by popular account of decline and physical changes that occur with ageing, the decline of the sensory and functions; but aging percieved differently by sociologists who sees changes in roles and contexts.

The study of young aged should focus on interpersonal behaviours, self actualisation, ego style social support networks, life stories and social structure. Aiming to further develop the conventional meanings of how people change as they age, not just in social roles or life structure but of personality.


Breaking the search into components:
- Aging population
- self assessment
- mental health and agility
- life enrichment in old ages


Cognitive interviewing techniques

1- Probing Question:

Ask about uncertainties/difficulties
How did you arrive at your estimate of xxxx?
What did you understand by the word xxxx?
How confident are you in your answer?

2- Paraphrasing:

Respondents paraphrase the question in their own words

3- Concurrent think aloud

Respndent vocolises thought processes as he answers

4- Retrospective methods

Probes and follow up question after either individual questions or blocks of questions

Complete questions then go back through with probes and follow up questions

Field testing techniques
- Behaviour coding
- Respondent debriefing
- İnterviewer debriefing


İnterview guide:

"How did you happen to come here/be this?"
"How did you feel at this time about this point?"
"How did you talk to ...?"
"What do you think about ...?"
"What did you do then?"
"What did you like the most/the least?"
Don’t’ ask leading questions. Don’t put the answer into the respondent’s mouth.
"Don’t you think ..."
"Don’t you agree ..."
Probes: elaboration on a specific subject
sit and wait
take the last statement and turn it into a question
make a non-committal response (simply nod your head, etc.)
ask for examples
"Was ... this what you expected?"
"How so/how not?"
"How did you feel about this?"
"Could you elaborate on this?"
"You talked previously about ..., can you tell me more about that?"
If something is left out at the end of the interview, mention it and find out why it is left out.
At the end of the interview ask:
"Do you think that important things were left out? Which topics?"




Individual Life Histories

an essay, based on interviews often supplemented with data from other sources, that describes and analyzes an individual’s development, conditions, and behavior over time

A good start is the Life History Chart:

a chronology of major events in the person’s life and major themes that deserve special attention

The chronological outline notes where the person lived in each year,
schools attended,
family back ground,
jobs held,
professional learning,
major recreational activities,
major family events (births, deaths, marriages),
public roles the person played (in political,
religious, and social organizations),
publications,

and other events and statuses that seem to mark the course of the individual’s life.
A list of themes can be developed at the same time, and often there is at least some sense of major themes even before the interviews begin.

Use internal consistency to improve the validity of the data:
check whether data obtained at different times are consistent with each other
İnterview schedule:

Sample Questions for the Life History Interview

Robert Atkinson (1998): The Life Story Interview

Childhood and Adolescence

How would you describe your parents when you were growing up?
What were some of the best and worst things about them?
What do you think you inherited from them?
What is your earliest memory?
What was growing up in your house or neighborhood like?
What do you remember most about growing up with, or without brothers and sisters?
What were some of your struggles as a child?
What was the saddest time for you?
How was discipline handled in your family?
What would you say was the most significant event in your life up to age 12?
What pressures did you feel as a teenager and where did they come from?
What did you do for fun and entertainment?
What was the most trouble you were ever in as a teenager?
What was the most significant event of your teenage years?
What was being a teenager like? The best part? The worst part?
What was your first experience of leaving home like?
Were you in the military?
What was this experience like?

Source:
www.conted.ox.ac.uk/cpd/healthsciences/courses/short_courses/qsr/39
http://malroy.econ.ox.ac.uk/fisher/survey/1
www.clas.ufl.edu/users/ardelt/Aging/QualInt.htm
www.evidencenetwork.org/Document/wp19.pdf
http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/people/1

Universal Appreciation

When Mozart was a child, he never touched the keyboard of a pianowithout first asking his audience, with a most disarming smile: Do you love me? He needed an atmosphere of sympathy and appreciation to give his best. İn the same way, many Americans when visiting a foreign country for the first time innocently ask: do they like us here?

There is nothing childish in this question...... The British want to be 'respected.' ........... But the Americans and the French want to be appreciated. They believe that they are entitiled to universal appreciation.

Andre Visson, (1948), As Others See Us, (Robert College Library Istanbul), Doubleday & Company, INC, New York

Memory and Cognition

İt is argued that awareness of the stimuli inhibits the mere exposure effect because awareness engages the correction process in mind.

But testing this found that words exposed five and ten times were recognized and liked significantly more than words that had not been presented, contrary to what was asssumed.

Brooks and Watkins (1989) showed that liking and recognition were positively correlated and condluded that these are closely associated.

Context-dependent memorey referes to the phenomenon whereby a change in context between information learning and retrieval causes some of the originally encoded info to be forgotten. Evidence has shown that a wide range of contexts both external such as environmental, and internal such as mental, can produce these effects on recall with a good degree of reliability. İt is suggested that back ground music can act as a potent environmental context-dependent memory cue.


Effects of environmental context manipulation aby the combination of place and task on free recall, 2004, İsarida
Elements of episodic memory, Tulving, E., 1983, Oxford Univ Press

notes: Similarly, research should be undertaken to verify whether Heat (weather, seasonal, location) affect learning and cognition as part of Environmental impacts. İt may be related to the findings that environmental effects whether related to manipulations of location or other environmental contexts induce learning.




Recent research on the effective formation of memories suggest that, for pupils to learn certain sorts of information, brief repetition interspersed with complete breaks works well. So teachers delivered carefully scripted lessons lasting just eight minutes three times in succession.

Economist, Making Minds, June 2, 2007


Researchers have long had evidence that firstborns tended to be more dutiful and cautious than their siblings, and some previous studies found significant I.Q. differences. But critics said those reports were not conclusive, because they did not take into account the vast differences in upbringing among families.

New York Times, 22 June, Research finds first born gain highre İQ




"We are also providing one to one tuition for 300,000 pupils in maths and 300,000 in English to help low achievers in the basics. In recent years, the proportion of white boys eligible for free school meals achieving five good GCSEs has improved faster than the national average."

BBC Online, 21 June, Low attainers 'poor white boys'

User Friendly Research

Managers sometimes say that the day-to-day challenges they face are unrelated to the questions studied in management research. Some have suggested that this accurs because management scholars often choose their research topics without being aware of the needs and problems of practicing managers.

Even when academics study questions, that are useful to practioners, managers say that it is difficult for them to find, comprehend, and act on articles in scholarly management journals. Therefore there is a need of interpetation of research findings using a language with more clarity and to the point. This is important so that many important research findings that could be helpful to managers not to go unutilized. Hence, there is an effort to find the extent of this problem and solicit ideas on how to make academic research more acessible and useful to practicing managers.

Research-Practice Gap, The Academy of Mgt Journal, Vol 50, No2, Apr 07

İgnorance in bureaucracies and beyond

Rule by nobody is the most Tyrannical of all since there is no one who can be held accountable for what has happened. Bureaurcracy or the rule of intricate system of bureaus in which no man, neither one, nor the best, can be held responsible.

The social and political usefulness of ignorance in general has received more attention with the identification of secrecy as the very core of power. İgnorance is much more complex, having a distinct and changing political georaphy indicator of the polity fo knowledge.

İt has been fairly recently that social theory has turned to the question of the strategic use of ignorance both within bureaucracies and beyond. The most comprehensive treatment of the phrase 'will to ignore' as complementory to knowldege deriving their meaning from their interrelation.

İt is the tacit nature of anti strategies that make it easier to dismiss regulatory malfunction as simply the result of human fallibility or human idiocy, rather than representative of inherent systemic dysfunction. One must dispel the equvalence of knowldedge as power - in refussing to admit ignorance harbours secret.

The Values of Bureaucracy, P du Gay (ed) Oxford University Press, 2005

Faithful involvement

But the Apologia was not to be only about his Anglican life: in the last chapter he was to touch on some of the most controverted aspects of contemporary Roman Catholicism.

As Newman wrote, he consulted old Anglican friends, warning that he was not attempting to write history of the Oxford Movement - it was a purely personal account to prove his honesty. As he composed the part which dealt with his early life up to the beginning of the movement in 1833, he was in tears and unable to read it loud...............But he had already decided that if anyone wellknown 'made an elaborate charge on me, İ was bound to speak'.

Now his only concern was 'to tell the truth, and to leave the matter in God's hands'. İt was a strange irony that Kingsley's attack had brought him into contact with old Anglican friends, who were now helping him to write a book that was ultimately critical of Anglicanism, at least to the extent that it was a defence of his own conversion to Catholicism.

The controversy with Kingsley occurred at a time in Newman's life when he had never been so depressed and when it seemed as if he had nothing more to look forward to in the way of achievment. He was now sixty-three years old. His fateful involvement in the affairs of the liberal Catholic Rambler that led to his publishing what is one of his most famous theological writings, his lengthy article 'On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine' (1859), had resulted in his falling under the suspicion and disapproval of the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome as well as England.
.............So low had Newman been feeling for so long that on 13 March 1864 he actually wrote down a last profession of faith 'in prospect of death'. He really was beginning to think that he was close to death, even though there was nothing actually wrong with his health. İt was his lowest point, and he could hardly have dreamed how dramatic and sudden the reversal in his fortunes would be. But as he began writing around to friends, asking for help and advice, we can sense in the new excited tempo a return of the old creative impulse; at last that essential 'external stimulus', without which he said he had 'scarcely written any'of his books, had come again.....



Apologia Pro Vita Sua, John Henry Newman, Edited by İan Ker, Penguin Classic, (1994)

The Big Picture

Popular science have the task of exciting people about research in general, acquaint them with recent developments in a specific field, equip non-specialists with factual knowledge, serve as a resource for patients and politicians, and update scientists on the issues of their own discipline. Rarely does a single work succeed in doing all these well.

Nature, Stem Cells, Vol 447, 10 May

First Community Survey

The summer of 1945 was no ordinary time in the social history of women's decision making. The war had taken men of a certain age overseas, drawn record numbers of women into the workplace, and jumbled roles and decision making in the process. A lot of news was in the air that summer: Roosvelt had recently died in the office, and the war had just ended when Mills and his team gave the first Community Survey, for "Personal Influence".

In August when follow up interviews took place, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. None of that historical particularity would make it into Personal Influence, whose "veneer of timelessness" as Douglas calls it is matched only by the universalism with which 800 women in Decatur are taken to stand in for "the people" and the parts they play in the flow of mass communications.



Source: Amercian Rebel, Oxford Univ Press, How ordinary women made decsions in their everyday lives, Decature, Illinoise

Identity issue

Erikson’s epigenetic model recognized the possibility of change at each period of the life span. Role theorists who see personality in terms of the self concept and tie it to changing social roles are likely to predict change, as would social learning theorists and life stress researchers, who hold that personality should be continuously reshaped by changing contingencies and traumatic events, such as the example of endless hours watching TV that has tremendous impact on individual’s lives and affect their personalities.

For the personality theorists the impressive degree of stability seen in longitudinal studies over several decades suggest that human beings are less a product of their environment than many social scientists have imagined. People are not passive victims of life events, historical movements or changing social roles. They maintain their distinctive characteristics in the face of all these forces.

New theories of personality that address the origins and maintenance of personality within the individual are needed. Some describe processes of cumulative and interactional continuity that help perpetuate some personality characteristics.

Stability of personality implies to sense of identity and basis for planning and conducting our lives.



Erikson, E. H., 1950, Childhood and Society, NY Norton

Measuring environmental degradation

All compounds in nature are toxic at high enough concentration, even some innocuous substances have adverse affects when present in high concentration. Much of the environmental legislation is drafted in terms of specifying maximum concentration of species in areas of the environment. İt is important to determine natural level of compounds to determine the extendt of environmental degratdation, covering also analysis of a compound not naturally found in the environment. İt is, however, becoming rare places to examine what an unpolluted environment is. İnterpretation of the analytical data needs tobe based on the relationship between the analytical concentration and the effect on organisms. This correlation is difficult to determine.




With 3 billion new consumers from İndia, Russia, and China joining the world economy, it is inevitable that manufacturing clean, greem power systems, appliances, homes and cars will be the next great global industry. İt has to be, or we will not survive as a species ..........We still have only energy politics, not energy policy.

Thomas Friedman, American's green bubble, Herald Tribune, June 4

Great Minds

A shift toward teamwork raises new questions whether teams produce better science. Teams produce higher impact research and more frequentlz cited research. Although they might bring greater collective knowldedge and effort, but they are known to experience social network and coordination losses that make them underperform individuals even in highly complex tasks.

‘No grand idea was ever born in a conference’. From this view point a shift to teamwork may be a costy phenomena or one that promotes low impact science, whereas the highest impact ideas remain the domain of great minds working alone.

Science, The increasing dominance of teams in production of knowledge, Vol 316, 18 May 2007

P.S. The medieval conception regarded church and state as one body in different aspects. This view persisted in the Elizabethean settlement, and in the High Toryism of the 17th and 18th centuries.





Certain broad features can be painted into the picture of the Republic of Letters. The existence of communal standard, highlights the first of these that the scholarly world considered itself to be in some ways separate from the rest of society. 17th and 18th century scholars felt that, at least in the academic realm, they were not subject to the norms and values of the wider society. Unlike their nonscholarly counterparts, they thought they lived in an essentially egalitarian community, in which all members had equal rights to criticize the work and conduct of others. İn practice this egalitarian ideal was not so solid, but the hierarchial structure structure the community did take on was based on different standards from society at large. The Republic of Letters in theory ignored distinctions of nationality and religion. ‘Be they protestants, be they Catholics, without any regard to the difference of religion. The Learned World was one World, international and nondenominational, rising above the petty concerns of church and state.

Goldgar, A., (1995), İmpolite Learning (period 1680-1750), Yale Univ Press

Collective Despair

'Still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings'

Every attempt 'is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure'

He has 'Only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say'

Nothing is to be learned from experience.

Our 'quiet-voiced elders' have deceived us.
'Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men but rather of their folly
The one wisdom we can hope to acquire 'is the wisdom of humility:
Humility is endless
The houses are all gone under the sea'

As for Eliot's contemporaries, the captains of industry, the merchants, men of letters, civil servants, chairmen of committees, he lists them all but removes them from the lanes and fields of Somerset and places them in an Underground train that has stopped too long between stations, where 'cold the sense and lost the motive of action.'

Simon Jenkins, Guardian: Comments, East Coker does not deserve the taint of TS Eliot's narcisstic gloom