Oxfam’s Policy Paper

Health

Oxfam’s health programme addresses four broad themes:

access to basic health services (including the issue of financing)
access to essential medicines
access to water and sanitation
responding to HIV/AIDS

Oxfam programme work focuses on reducing inequities, including those based on gender, and improving the quality of services. Local projects support some of the most marginalised and impoverished groups. Others address the health needs of communities affected by conflict or natural disasters. Drawing on this experience and on research findings, Oxfam seeks to work with others to change policies, practices, ideas, and beliefs that affect poor people’s health.

Oxfam's strategy to respond to HIV/AIDS is based on mainstreaming HIV concerns into all programmes. This means that Oxfam analyses the impact of the disease on the affected population, and adapts its development and humanitarian programmes to address this impact.

In Southern Africa we are piloting programmes to integrate responses to HIV/AIDS into development work.

In India, Oxfam’s HIV/AIDS programme aims to increase access to prevention, treatment, care, and support for those infected and affected, as well as raising public awareness about the disease.

In Sri Lanka, South Sudan and Liberia, Oxfam supports the rehabilitation of community health centres and the development of basic services, including medicine supply.

In the Caucasus, Oxfam runs community-based health schemes which provide communities with treatment and essential drugs, and provide training for health workers. We operate a similar scheme in Yemen, where we are also training midwives and traditional birth attendants.

The Network for Consumer Protection, an Oxfam partner in Pakistan, promotes people’s access to, and the rational use of, essential drugs. In Afghanistan, Oxfam has ensured that basic health services have been made available to remote communities in the highlands.

Oxfam is widely known for its public health work in emergencies. The rapid supply of clean water to populations displaced from their own homes is vital, and Oxfam has particular expertise in this area. In recent years, major programmes have been established in the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa, in the Balkans, in Angola, and in the State of Orissa in India.
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The challenge to ensure that millions of poor people can get the medicines they need remains huge, given the appearance of new diseases; the re-emergence of ‘old’ diseases; the threat of pandemics; and the growing burden of non-communicable diseases in developing countries. Malaria claims the lives of one million people every year – mostly children and pregnant women.2 Two million people die annually from TB. Half of the global cancer deaths are in developing countries. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that the occurrence of asthma is increasing on average by 50 per cent every ten years in cities in the developing world.3 Currently 85 per cent of the world’s population is being priced out of the industry’s market.4

It is clear that there are pressures on the pharmaceutical industry to change course. Increased financial burdens on health systems due to ageing populations and changing disease burdens are stimulating calls for lower prices from both North and South. The industry is now challenged to be more transparent about its price rationale so that governments and public-health advocates can request greater alignment between the prices set and purchasing power. The intellectual property regime and the market-driven model of drug development are criticised for not delivering real innovation required to relieve the global public-health crisis.

At the same time, investors are clearly concerned that this industry is not delivering the profits that it used to. Emerging market economies are being identified as the possible panacea to this flagging growth. There are enormous opportunities in these markets, including lower costs to conduct R&D and clinical trials, and low-cost manufacturing. These economies also offer substantial market potential. However, for this to be realised, the industry will have to recognise that serving these markets requires a vastly different approach: one which reflects the significance of massive income disparities, the impacts of high prices on increasing vulnerability and insecurity, and the need for medicines that are relevant and adaptable to poor settings.

The epidemiology of public health is changing, with a more diverse range of diseases that require appropriate products. For developing countries particularly, their specific contextual realities need to be taken seriously: new products are needed, formulations need to be usable, and drug information and labelling should be comprehensible. R&D will have to be tailored to end-use realities.

Now is the time for companies to take a bold look at new ways of doing business, incorporating a social equity bottom line into their thinking, working more flexibly, transparently, and practically with a wide range of stakeholders. The current inertia on access to medicines can be overcome by placing concerns about affordability and availability at the core of business decision-making processes and operations. To do so will require strong leadership and long-term vision.

Oxfam also believes that integrating access to medicines into the core business model will institutionalise a framework for the industry to predict, respond to, and satisfy the needs of people in developing-country markets. Investors who are encouraging pharmaceutical companies to enter emerging market economies identify the need to adapt prices, to have more flexible distribution systems, and to make products that are relevant to the markets being served, as necessary elements of a business strategy.

Source: Oxfam Policy Paper; Investing for Life, Nov 2007

2 www.theglobalfund.org/en/about/malaria/ (last accessed January 2007).
3 World Health Organisation (2005) ‘Preventing chronic diseases: a vital investment’, Geneva: WHO. Available at: www.who.int/chp/chronic_disease_report/en/ (last accessed October 2007).
4 “15 per cent of the world’s population consumes over 90 per cent of the world’s pharmaceuticals” which translates to 85 per cent of the population consuming less than 10 per cent of the world’s pharmaceuticals. P. Hunt (2007) ‘Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in relation to Access to Medicines’, draft for consultation prepared by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

Oxford

Ever since Richard Doll, who first identified the link between smoking and cancer, joined the University in 1969, Oxford has been a byword for cancer epidemiology. Now that research into diagnosis and treatment has reached a critical mass, Oxford is on its way to being a byword for cancer research generally: a powerhouse across a huge range of research and treatment.

The great advantage to cancer researchers in Oxford is what might be thought of as a ’cancer hub’: a new Institute for Cancer Medicine to open in 2008 stands next to the Richard Doll building (housing epidemiological studies and clinical trials services), near cancer research in the Churchill and John Radcliffe hospitals, and right over the road from the city’s new £100m cancer hospital.

The Institute will bring together three world-leading researchers in cancer. Professor Gillies McKenna studies radiation biology and oncology. Professor David Kerr studies clinical pharmacology. The third, Professor Xin Lu, directs the UK branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, an international research trust with nine centres in seven countries. She is bringing the UK branch from London to Oxford in order to be part of Oxford’s new cancer hub.

These researchers and their teams will not only be close to the city’s hospitals but will be surrounded by other cancer researchers in nearby centres and departments. ‘The location means clinical science and basic science will be able to interact at multiple levels – from protein and gene structures to population science and epidemiology,’ says Dr Ken Fleming, Head of Oxford’s Medical Sciences Division. ‘There’s no other centre of this size or scope,’ agrees Professor McKenna. ‘It’s unique internationally.’


www.ox.ac.uk

Canonical

(Historically = "according to religious law")

A standard way of writing a formula. The usual or standard state or manner of something. The term acquired this meaning in computer-science culture largely through its prominence in Alonzo Church's work in computation theory and mathematical logic (see Knights of the Lambda-Calculus).

This word has an interesting history. Non-technical academics do not use the adjective "canonical" in any of the senses defined above with any regularity; they do however use the nouns "canon" and "canonicity" (not "canonicalness"* or "canonicality"*).

The "canon" of a given author is the complete body of authentic works by that author (this usage is familiar to Sherlock Holmes fans as well as to literary scholars). "The canon" is the body of works in a given field (e.g. works of literature, or of art, or of music) deemed worthwhile for students to study and for scholars to investigate.

The word "canon" derives ultimately from the Greek "kanon" (akin to the English "cane") referring to a reed. Reeds were used for measurement, and in Latin and later Greek the word "canon" meant a rule or a standard. The establishment of a canon of scriptures within Christianity was meant to define a standard or a rule for the religion. The above non-technical academic usages stem from this instance of a defined and accepted body of work. The usages relating to religious law derive from the use of the Latin "canon". It may also be related to arabic "qanun" (law).

Hackers invest this term with a playfulness that makes an ironic contrast with its historical meaning. A true story: One Bob Sjoberg, new at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some annoyance at the incessant use of jargon. Over his loud objections, GLS and RMS made a point of using as much of it as possible in his presence, and eventually it began to sink in. Finally, in one conversation, he used the word "canonical" in jargon-like fashion without thinking. Steele: "Aha! We've finally got you talking jargon too!" Stallman: "What did he say?" Steele: "Bob just used "canonical" in the canonical way."
Of course, canonicality depends on context, but it is implicitly defined as the way *hackers* normally expect things to be. Thus, a hacker may claim with a straight face that "according to religious law" is *not* the canonical meaning of "canonical".
(2002-02-06)




Peerage


In the old days Society was an assemblage of people who, either by birth, intellect or aptitude, were ladies and gentlemen in the true sense of the word. For the most part fairly, but not extravagantly, dowered with the good things of the world, it had no ulterior object beyond intelligent, cultured and dignified enjoyment, money-making being left to another class which, from time to time, supplied a select recruit for this corps d'elite. Now all this is changed, in fact, society (a word obsolete in its old sense) is, to use a vulgar expression, 'on the make'.

Lady Dorothy Nevill, daughter of the Walpole Earl of Orford, 1906


From the 1880s, although some of the nouveaux riches continued to buy country houses and landed estates, however small, for themsleves it was now a matter of choice and style not a social necessity. Wealth by itself was enough to gain entry, not only to 'society' but to the peerage and even to the royal entourage, as financiers like Sir Ernest Cassel and chain shopkeepers like Sir Thomas Lipton became intimates of the Prince of Wales.


Harold Perkin, The rise of Professional Society (England since 1880), Routledge, 1989

Coherent response

An overwhelming desire to burn more is major motivating factor in a deadly competition to control energy resources. The complexity of the competition game has become a life consuming task, where no one has time to loose to be concerned about the unwanted consequences. As such we are causing troubles out of negligence by missing strategic response to priorities of our time. In this context UK is coming up with ambitious plan to alleviate unwanted consequences on poverty and global warming. However, at present UK policy is far from coherence. Different government departments control policies in each of contested areas, energy, poverty and environment. Energy policy is mostly formulated within the Department of Trade and Industry. Environment policies are mostly fashioned within the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Development assistance strategies are planned in the Department for International Development. Energy security fluctuates as a public concern in the United Kingdom depending upon the appearance of spectres such as wars in the Middle East causing shortages of oil supplies, terrorists destroying gas pipelines, or Russia turning off the tap to Europe’s gas supply.



Ref.:
Ngaire Woods, Christopher Allsopp, Robert Wood, Jeniffer Coolidge; Energy Politics and Poverty, Oxford Univ., June 2007

Pace of Development

Local tribal people ................ develop at their own pace. This is not the usual story of tribal extinction by evil outside moneylenders because the inner line permit prevents it. In fact it’s an amazingly cosmopolitan society, ......... So although they are protected , they seem to want the same kind of development as the rest of India and to become less and less exceptional as times goes on and the economy is at a stage of free for all – plundering nature on the one hand and the state on the other.

Barbara Harriss-White, Oxford Univ., The Land of the Sun, Oct 2007

Training in Bioinformatics

Definitions:

Adult (or somatic) stem cell—An undifferentiated cell found in a differentiated tissue that can renew itself and differentiate (with certain limitations) to give rise to all the specialized cell types of the tissue from which it originated. It is important to note that scientists do not agree about whether or not adult stem cells may give rise to cell types other than those of the tissue from which they originate.
astrocyte—a type of supporting (glial) cell found in the nervous system.
Blastocoel—The fluid-filled cavity inside the blastocyst of the developing embryo.
Blastocyst—A preimplantation embryo of about 150 cells produced by cell division following fertilization. The blastocyst is a sphere made up of an outer layer of cells (the trophoblast), a fluid-filled cavity (the blastocoel), and a cluster of cells on the interior (the inner cell mass).
Bone marrow stromal cells—A mixed population of stem cells found in bone marrow that does not give rise to blood cells but instead generates bone, cartilage, fat, and fibrous connective tissue.
Cell division—Method by which a single cell divides to create two cells. There are two main types of cell division: mitosis and meiosis.
Cell-based therapies—Treatment in which stem cells are induced to differentiate into the specific cell type required to repair damaged or destroyed cells or tissues.
Cell culture—Growth of cells in vitro in an artificial medium for experimental research.
Clone—Generate identical copies of a molecule, cell, or organism.
When it is used to refer to cells grown in a tissue culture dish, a clone is a line of cells that is genetically identical to the originating cell. This cloned line is produced by cell division (mitosis) of the originating cell.
The term clone may also be used to refer to an animal produced by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).
Cloning—See Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).
Cord blood stem cells—See Umbilical cord blood stem cells.
Culture medium—The liquid that covers cells in a culture dish and contains nutrients to feed the cells. Medium may also include other growth factors added to produce desired changes in the cells.
Differentiation—The process whereby an undifferentiated embryonic cell acquires the features of a specialized cell such as a heart, liver, or muscle cell.
Directed differentiation—Manipulating stem cell culture conditions to induce differentiation into a particular cell type.
DNA—Deoxyribonucleic acid, a chemical found primarily in the nucleus of cells. DNA carries the instructions or blueprint for making all the structures and materials the body needs to function.
Ectoderm—Outermost germ layer of cells derived from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst; gives rise to the nervous system, sensory organs, skin, and related structures.
Embryo—In humans, the developing organism from the time of fertilization until the end of the eighth week of gestation, when it is called a fetus.
Embryoid bodies—Rounded collections of cells that arise when embryonic stem cells are cultured in suspension. Embryoid bodies contain cell types derived from all 3 germ layers.
Embryonic germ cells—Pluripotent stem cells that are derived from early germ cells (those that would become sperm and eggs). Embryonic germ cells (EG cells) are thought to have properties similar to embryonic stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells—Primitive (undifferentiated) cells derived from a 5-day preimplantation embryo that have the potential to become a wide variety of specialized cell types.
Embryonic stem cell line—Embryonic stem cells, which have been cultured under in vitro conditions that allow proliferation without differentiation for months to years.
Endoderm—Innermost layer of the cells derived from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst; it gives rise to lungs, other respiratory structures, and digestive organs, or generally "the gut".
Enucleated— A cell with its nucleus removed.
Feeder layer—Cells used in co-culture to maintain pluripotent stem cells. For human embryonic stem cell culture, typical feeder layers include mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) or human embryonic fibroblasts that have been treated to prevent them from dividing.
Fertilization—The joining of the male gamete (sperm) and the female gamete (egg).
Fetus—A developing human from approximately eight weeks after conception until the time of its birth.
Gamete—An egg (in the female) or sperm (in the male) cell. See also Somatic cell.
Gene—A functional unit of heredity that is a segment of DNA found on chromosomes in the nucleus of a cell. Genes direct the formation of an enzyme or other protein.
Germ layers—Fertilization of an egg stimulates cell division, and the resulting cells are organized into three different layers, called germ layers. The three layers are the ectoderm, the mesoderm, and the endoderm.
Hematopoietic stem cell—A stem cell that gives rise to all red and white blood cells and platelets.
Human embryonic stem cell (hESC)—A type of pluripotent stem cell derived from the inner cell mass (ICM) of the blastocyst.
In vitro—Latin for "in glass"; in a laboratory dish or test tube; an artificial environment.
In vitro fertilization—A technique that unites the egg and sperm in a laboratory, instead of inside the female body.
Inner cell mass (ICM)—The cluster of cells inside the blastocyst. These cells give rise to the embryo and ultimately the fetus. The ICM cells are used to generate embryonic stem cells.
Long-term self-renewal—The ability of stem cells to renew themselves by dividing into the same non-specialized cell type over long periods (many months to years) depending on the specific type of stem cell.
Mesenchymal stem cells—Cells from the immature embryonic connective tissue. A number of cell types come from mesenchymal stem cells, including chondrocytes, which produce cartilage.
Meiosis—Cell division of a gamete to reduce the chromosomes within it to half the normal number. This is to ensure that fertilization restores the full number of chromosomes rather than causing aneuploidy, or an abnormal number of chromosomes.
Mesoderm—Middle layer of a group of cells derived from the inner cell mass of the blastocyst; it gives rise to bone, muscle, connective tissue, kidneys, and related structures.
Microenvironment—The molecules and compounds such as nutrients and growth factors in the fluid surrounding a cell in an organism or in the laboratory, which play an important role in determining the characteristics of the cell.
Mitosis—Cell division that allows a population of cells to increase its numbers or to maintain its numbers.
Multipotent—Ability of a single stem cell to develop into more than one cell type of the body. See also pluripotent and totipotent.
Neural stem cell—A stem cell found in adult neural tissue that can give rise to neurons and glial (supporting) cells. Examples of glial cells include astrocytes and oligodendrocytes.
Neurons—Nerve cells, the structural and functional unit of the nervous system. A neuron consists of a cell body and its processes—an axon and one or more dendrites. Neurons function by starting and conducting impulses. Neurons transmit impulses to other neurons or cells by releasing neurotransmitters at synapses.
Oligodendrocyte—A supporting cell that provides insulation to nerve cells by forming a myelin sheath (a fatty layer) around axons.
Parthenogenesis—Artificial activation of an egg in the absence of a sperm; the egg is "tricked" into behaving as if it has been fertilized.
Passage—A round of cell growth and proliferation in cell culture.
Plasticity—The ability of stem cells from one adult tissue to generate the differentiated cell types of another tissue.
Polar Body—A polar body is a structure produced when an early egg cell, or oogonium, undergoes meiosis. In the first meiosis, the oogonium divides its chromosomes evenly between the two cells but divides its cytoplasm unequally. One cell retains most of the cytoplasm, while the other gets almost none, leaving it very small. This smaller cell is called the first polar body. The first polar body usually degenerates. The ovum, or larger cell, then divides again, producing a second polar body with half the amount of chromosomes but almost no cytoplasm. The second polar body splits off and remains adjacent to the large cell, or oocyte, until it (the second polar body) degenerates. Only one large functional oocyte, or egg, is produced at the end of meiosis.
Pluripotent—Ability of a single stem cell to give rise to all of the various cell types that make up the body. Pluripotent cells cannot make so-called "extra-embryonic" tissues such as the amnion, chorion, and other components of the placenta.
Preimplantation—With regard to an embryo, preimplantation means that the embryo has not yet implanted in the wall of the uterus. Human embryonic stem cells are derived from preimplantation stage embryos fertilized outside a woman's body (in vitro).
Proliferation—Expansion of cells by the continuous division of single cells into two identical daughter cells.
Regenerative medicine—A treatment in which stem cells are induced to differentiate into the specific cell type required to repair damaged or destroyed cell populations or tissues. (See also cell-based therapies).
Reproductive cloning—The goal of reproductive cloning is to create an animal being identical to the animal that donated the somatic cell nucleus. The embryo is implanted in a uterus and develops into a live being. The first animal to be created by reproductive cloning was Dolly the sheep, born at the Roslin Institute in Scotland in 1996. See also Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).
Signals—Internal and external factors that control changes in cell structure and function.
Somatic cell—any body cell other than gametes (egg or sperm). See also Gamete.
Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT)—A technique that combines an enucleated egg (nucleus removed) and the nucleus of a somatic cell to make an embryo. SCNT is the scientific term for cloning. SCNT can be used for therapeutic or reproductive purposes, but the initial stage that combines an enucleated egg and a somatic cell nucleus is the same. See also therapeutic cloning and reproductive cloning.
Somatic stem cells—Non-embryonic stem cells that are not derived from gametes (egg or sperm cells).
Stem cells—Cells with the ability to divide for indefinite periods in culture and to give rise to specialized cells.
Stromal cells—Non-blood cells derived from blood organs, such as bone marrow or fetal liver, which are capable of supporting growth of blood cells in vitro. Stromal cells that make the matrix within the bone marrow are also derived from mesenchymal stem cells.
Subculturing— Transferring cultured cells, with or without dilution, from one culture vessel to another.
Surface markers—Proteins on the outside surface of a cell that are unique to certain cell types, which are visualized using antibodies or other detection methods.
Teratoma— Scientists verify that they have established a human embryonic stem cell (hESC) line by injecting putative stem cells into mice with a dysfunctional immune system. Since the injected cells cannot be destroyed by the mouse's immune system, they survive and form a multi-layered benign tumor called a teratoma. Even though tumors are not usually a desirable outcome, in this test, the teratomas serve to establish the ability of a stem cell to give rise to all cell types in the body. This is because the teratomas contain cells derived from each of the three embryonic germ layers.
Therapeutic cloning—The goal of therapeutic cloning is to create cells that exactly match a patient. By combining a patient's somatic cell nucleus and an enucleated egg, a scientist may harvest embryonic stem cells from the resulting embryo that can be used to generate tissues that match a patient's body. This means the tissues created are unlikely to be rejected by the patient's immune system. See also Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).
Totipotent—A totipotent stem cell can give rise to all the cell types that make up the body plus all of the cell types that make up the extraembryonic tissues such as the placenta. (See also Pluripotent and Multipotent).
Transdifferentiation—The process by which stem cells from one tissue differentiate into cells of another tissue. See also Plasticity.
Trophectoderm—a term used to refer to trophoblast cells in mice.
Trophoblast—The extraembryonic tissue responsible for implantation, developing into the placenta, and controlling the exchange of oxygen and metabolites between mother and embryo.
Umbilical cord blood stem cells—stem cells collected from the umbilical cord at birth that can produce all of the blood cells in the body (hematopoietic). Cord blood is currently used to treat patients who have undergone chemotherapy to destroy their bone marrow due to cancer or other blood-related disorders.
Undifferentiated—A cell that has not yet generated structures or manufactured proteins

characteristic of a specialized cell type

Dr Charlotte Deane, Dept. of Statistics & Dept of Contunuing Education, Oxford Univ.
http://bioinfomsc.stats.ox.ac.uk/open/lecture/intro_lec_files/frame.htm

Strong to the end

But I revelled in his verse. He was strong to the end and his glorious irony never left him.

And yet more faintly, now and then is
heard,
Closer, underneath my hand,
Dry whisper of a turning page,
As I peruse, with awful delectation,
The Oxford Book of Death.

So remember, all you drifting, drinking, despairing, self-demeaning schoolmasters. Hidden at the back of your class, pretending to be sullen and resistent, is a boy in whose imagination lurks unknown a spark waiting to be blown to flame. Scannell was even better than a good poet. He could teach.

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk
Guardian, CiF, 23 Nov.



Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens
Your faithfulness to the skies.

Your rightfulness is like the mighty mountains
your justice like the great deep.

O Lord you preserve both man and beast
how priceless is your unfailing love!

Both high and low among men
find refuge in the shadow of your wings.

They feast on the abundance of your house;
you give them drink from your river of delights.

For with you is the fountain of life;
in your light we see light.


Psalm 36:5 - 10

Comparing belief models

One study used Bayesian procedure to draw inferences about the relative accuracy of Cournot and fictitious play. The procedure started with prior probabilities that each of the two theories are true. Then simulations were used to generate likelihoods for different observations. Using the priors, the simulated likelihoods and the actual data, Bayes' rule can be used to infer the posterior probability that each theory is true. This procedure is applied to experiments on dominance-solvable games by Knott and Miller (1987) and coordination games by Cooper et al (1990). Cournot is much worse on a dominance-solvable game and about equally good on a coordination game, so it is much worse overall.

A huge advantage of the Bayesian approach is the ability to naturally integrate results from different experiements. For example, if one theory is much better on one data set and much worse on another, by multiplying the likelihood ratios together (a procedure that assumes experiments are independent, which is sometimes unlikely) it is often possible to declare a clear overall winner rather than simply concluding that one study favoured each theory.

Colin F. Camerer, (2003) Behavioral G ame Theory, Sage, p. 299

Insight

Words such as hope, want, and wish can give us some insights into our meaning making world. The role of belief in our lives is to set up the space of possibilities in which we try to realize our desires. So what desires are is a specification, given a range of possibilities which we believe to be open to us, of which of these possibilities we should strive to make our world real. However, the consequences aren't always desirable.

Cognitive styles

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

Political scientists and psychologists have long noted differences in the cognitive and motivational profiles of liberals and conservatives in the USA and elsewhere. Across dozens of behavioral studies, conservatives have been found to be more structured and persistent in their judgments and approaches to decision-making, as indicated by higher average scores on psychological measures of personal needs for order, structure and closure. Liberals, by contrast, report higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity, and greater openness to new experiences on psychological measures. Given that these associations between political orientation and cognitive styles have been shown to be heritable, evident in early childhood, and relatively stable across the lifespan, we hypothesized that political orientation may be associated with individual differences in a basic neurocognitive mechanism involved broadly in self-regulation.


David M Amodio1, John T Jost1, Sarah L Master2 & Cindy M Yee,Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism; Nature, Vol 10, No 10, Oct 2007

Time of Truth

Truth is very old, but the merit of seers is not to invent but to dispose objects in their right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount, whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality than any other.

Time stills the loud noise of opinions, sink the small, raises the great, so that the true merges without effort and in perfect harmony to all eyes; but truth of the present hour, except in particulars and single relations, is unatainable.

The most elaborate history of today will have the oddest dislocated look in the next generation. The wise cannot descend into the turbid present without injury to his rarest spirit. Hence that necessity of isolation which genius has always felt.

It is a costly proof of character, that the most renowned scholar of England should take his reputation in his hand and should descent into the ring; and he has added to his love what ever honour his opinions may forfeit..............that there is a message which those to whom it was addressed cannot choose but hear.

Everyman's Library, edited by Ernest Rhys, (1912)





Unhappy and sensitive the United States may have been at times over the past twenty years. But surely no society has so systematically; so doggedly; almost, it sometimes seemed, so masochistically; invited the criticism of foreigners.
Fanny Kemble wrote 'Such an unhappily sensitive community surely never existed in this world.' 'The vengeance with which they visit people for saying they dont admire or like them would be truly terrible, .................if the said people were but as mortally afraid of abuse as they seem to be........I live myself in daily expectation of martyrdom.' (Godfrey Hodgson, 1978)

Education

Governments not just here but elsewhere too have argued that higher education should be expanded in order to increase the rate of economic growth, and to promote social cohesion. There is no objective evidence that either of those propositions is true. While it is the case that it's difficult to see a competitive economy based on ignorance, if you consider what's happened in Europe in the last few years, an expansion in higher education across the board has been accompanied by a deceleration in economic growth.

The case for greater social cohesion is no more convincing. Although more young people from working-class backgrounds have a university education, the number of middle-class people receiving higher education today as a proportion of total students is pretty much the same as it was when I was here - when only 6 per cent of 18-year-olds went to university. So while I'm totally supportive of opportunities for all young people, if you're really concerned about social cohesion you should be focusing on preschool, primary and secondary education.

Lord Chris Patten, Chancellor of Oxford Univ., Hilary Term, 2004









Economic Behaviour

The Mayor of NY, Bloomberg, said ‘The economic uncertainty our two countries face’ – and he means Britain and America – ‘is beginning to feel similar to the economic downturn we experienced six years ago. But this time the stakes are higher because more people owe more debt and so do our governments. It is time for us all to get our house in order because the sun is rising on our borrowing bacchanalia’. But Allan Greenspan, do not agree. He is observing a fairly dramatic acceleration of the degree of globalisation, consequences of the end of the Cold War, as one of the key characteristics of the switch in geopolitical events which occurred when central planning fell into full disrepute.

He says: 'When Berlin Wall came down, it revealed the economic room behind the Iron Curtain that was just unanticipated and remarkable; shifting economic activity engendered in the developed world to the developing world. That is largely because so many of them which had been under various forms of central planning as Third World nations have moved towards the export model of the Asian Tigers and created a very rapid rate of increase in growth.

But we are also getting a significant dispersion of what economists call surpluses and deficits of all types of economic units. One of the characteristics of that is that you get a significant increase worldwide of both assets and debt. So it is certainly the case that debt has gone up significantly relative to incomes, but then so has assets. So the question of evaluating the degree of bacchanalia or whatever you wish to call it really requires to get a sense of where the stresses in the system are – and there are unquestionably stresses – but it is not that leverage is all that much greater or its consequences are greater. It is that we are dealing with a world economy in which the balance sheets have all grossed up at a faster pace than, say, nominal gross domestic income worldwide. Clearly, if you look at the ratio of debt to income, it has been going up – but it has been going up for a hundred years. No one has been arguing for a hundred years that the world is coming to an end.


I am critical of Administration letting public spend imprudently, as my concern is with the Republican Congress, who came into majority rule in 1994 with a platform which a libertarian such as myself was very much in favour – I should say liberal, now that I am in Britain. They started off all right but then they morphed into a different type of party which essentially sought to cement their power. As I say in my book, the Republican Congress largely swapped principle for power and in the end achieved neither. It manifested itself in one of the most extraordinary expansions in
fiscal levity, if I may use a comparable term, and it could have been stopped if President Bush had been willing to use the veto.

But the critical issue is not the current deficit issue – it is the fact that we are about to undergo a tsunami of major dimensions with respect to the movement of the fairly productive, so-called baby boom generation into retirement. That is going to double the number of retirees and where, for example, our medical system is quite capable of handling the existing retiree load, it very clearly under existing law is not going to be able to do it henceforth.

That same problem does not exist here in Britain. The situation here is not anywhere near the type of demographic structure that we are going to be running into in US. There is also an interesting question about what people’s motives are. You can say that they are seeking power – I happen to know in the case of the Republican Congress that that is what they were doing. The reason I know it is they said so. With respect to people who are expanding governmental programmes because they believe they are appropriate, that is a wholly different issue. You can make judgments as to whether or not they are funded properly or they are properly structured, but when you are talking about motives you have to have evidence.

The worry about consumer debt here in Britain refers to the problem that you have variable interest rates. In the States, we have a very significant amount of our consumer debt at fixed interest rates and therefore when short-term interest rates change, it has very little impact on the debt. Here it is different. I have always thought, and indeed it has certainly been the case in the United States,
that consumers by and large know what they can afford. They very rarely get
themselves in trouble.

What happened is that in order to diversify you had to securitize – put all the mortgages into pools and then sell assets against them, securities against them. What happened was that we sold a very large part of them all over the world. That is why the problems that are existing – both in UK and US.

Sub-prime asset-backed securities (as they are technically called) had very large yields because they were subprime. Numbers of hedge funds, pension funds, investment banks, all seeking to improve their yield – which had been pushed down by a long-term decline in interest rates – started to buy these things very aggressively. So the securitisers, who were selling them very quickly, started to put pressure on the lenders to give them more mortgages. They said: We’ll buy anything you give us.

The first sign of any form of crisis occurs when it became evident that the valuations of these securities were just wrong. What occurred then is everybody pulled back immediately. To be sure, a lot of the very questionable lending practices showed up as, first, defaults. In many cases it was default on the first payments.

It fell apart, and the reason it fell apart is we had one of these euphoric bubbles where everything is going up and the thought that they might ever go down is just never considered. That, I might add, is an extraordinary characteristic of every bubble. Human beings do not learn from one bubble to the next. We are now coming to the end of honeymoon period of globalization. we have been through a golden period, and the golden period is essentially the economic consequences of the end of the Cold War. That is a one-shot event. It is not a permanent change in the rate of change, it is a level adjustment. We are now approaching, if we have not already passed, the maximum rate of change. The disinflation which that produced is gradually dissipating and inflationary pressures are beginning to mount and you are beginning to see the effects which you point out. It was truly a golden period and it is in the process of being over.

There is a famous event in the United States where one bank which was in serious trouble and had lending lines in Japan, some rather inexperienced – maybe he had only a four-year term, who knows – inexperienced funder called up his Japanese counterpart and said, ‘We’re having trouble funding our balance sheet in the United States. Can you help us out?’ The answer on the other end was, ‘Give us some time to think about it’. The next minute their whole balance disappeared from Japan. In other words, if you say you are in trouble, that is not going to attract funds. That is going to make it go in the other direction.


With regard to the health system in the US my problem is profound, in the sense that what we are not recognising is that we have got a system currently which if you press it out over the long run – in other words, take the nature of the Medicare benefit, extrapolate it to essentially twice the size of the current retiree population, and match it against the tax structure which is creating revenues – you conclude that with frankly what appears to be a very optimistic forecast of a level of medical expenditures out fifteen or twenty years, meaning lower than I think the normal trend would suggest, you can balance the system, if there were no tax increases, by cutting benefits in half – or alternatively, doubling the tax rate.
All I hear on the stump in the United States is people one way or another trying to create new benefits for somebody. In every case, in all the ways in which they are coming at it, it is painless. The one thing I am certain about is it is not painless. Indeed, it is going to be a very painful fiscal adjustment. The longer we wait, the more painful it is going to be. Unless and until I see somebody stand up and say let’s solve this problem and recognise what the problem is – that we do not have enough real resources out in the year, say, 2025 to meet the physical requirements of a Medicare entitlement – because remember, it is not only cash for entitlements really. We do not have enough, in any realistic sense, numbers of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, nurses, doctors. In short, the promise is not essentially fulfillable. Talking about how you are going to expand it or change it – incidentally, all the ways that everybody is talking about, whether you are spreading costs, it is all painless. I think that is a grave disservice to
the American electorate.

I came out of the mathematical school. I am sort of academically deeply steeped in all the complexities of econometrics. The only problem I have is that I would trade all the full information system calculations – wonderfully elegant mathematical systems – for a single series which told me: one, what is the relative state of euphoria on the one hand or fear on the other? And how do I know when it is going to swing from one to the other? If I had that, I could build the most clever econometric model which would have remarkable forecasting capabilities. I can
do a model which will capture the expansion phase of the business cycle and the fearbased part of the correction, which is often twice as fast as the other side, so that the coefficients are in general twice as large. So that when you mix them together, which is what most econometricians do, you get what mathematicians would say is a highly biased set of coefficients. But I can separate them and I would get very good results.

My only problem is I do not know what button I push to find out whether it is the
expansion/euphoria or the fear thing – both of which are fundamental characteristics,
innate characteristics, of all of us. We swing back and forth.

It is the only way that over the years I began to realise what it is we are dealing with. One of the things which hit me very recently was I was reading an article that was going over the various bubbles that have gone on over the generations. It asked: why is it that we do not learn from bubbles? My answer back to the page was immediately: but human nature does not change. Indeed, it is really awesomely eerie how one of these crises looks like the other. I should not say even looks – it feels like the other. In other words, the degree of fear is all over it. What they really are is – I am a banker, I am afraid to lend to you because I do not think you are going to pay me back. You may look at me and say: I am wealthier than you are and I have got a lot more money than you.

But the system freezes up because the issue of trust, which is so critical to a market system, disappears. You take trust out of the market and it will collapse. These are all human traits which are incapable of being improved upon because they are the same, generation upon generation upon generation.'

Allan Greenspan, Chatham House, 1 Oct 2007

Creating incentives for more discovery

To maintain a given percentage rate of growth, rate of discovering new products must increase. So if each discovery is worth X and you want to grow from 6 percent from a level of, say, $10,000 per capita, you've got to add $600 worth of value in new things. But if you want to grow at 6 percent when you're starting from $30,000 per capita, you've got to add a lot more new things. What it looks like is, as we learn more it's getting easier to discover new things, so somehow knowledge is building on itself. Newton had this great evocative phrase that he can see farther because he "stood on the shoulders of giants."

And there what it looks like is we've been putting more and more people to work on the discovery process. We've been training those people who do discovery more.
We're getting the combined effects of knowledge building on knowledge that makes it easier to discover, and having more and more people all engaged in the discovery process. And these seem to explain why we've had growth rates which are actually getting faster over time, not slowing down.

About 40 percent in 1900 were involved in agriculture in US. Where are we ever going to find jobs for all of those people if agriculture becomes a much smaller source of employment? Well, what we've done is we've educated the children and grandchildren of those farmers, and many of those people are now engaged in the discovery of better ways to do things. As productivity has grown, we've freed up human resources which really is, in some sense, the scarcest commodity: the power of the human intellect. We've freed up more of that power to engage in this discovery activity. Now how did we get more and more people aiming at discovery? Some of that has come purely from population growth. There are just more people around. But the most important part of it has come from changes in our institutions.

We have things like universities, and we have things like patent laws, and we have things like research grants which have created incentives for those individuals to engage in more discovery. The institutions—again, the rules of the game—create incentives. And we've found ways to create incentives for people to do more discovery. So a meta-idea would be something like the modern research university.

We in the United States did two things that were complementary, that reinforced each other. One of those things was committing to what we were just talking about: education, universal primary education, then universal secondary education, developing the university system, and encouraging research. We committed heavily to institutions of learning and discovery. But we also committed heavily to the market mechanism, to property rights, to free entry, to competition, competition in all its many forms.

The institutions of the market and broadly speaking, the institutions of science—we got both of those right. And it's the combination of those two which has been so powerful. Many nations of the world have tried to push the institutions of science alone and are learning but have been slower to adopt the full institutions of the market.

Everybody's in favour of growth but nobody wants change. It'll be interesting to see how Europe copes if we're right, and I think we are, that the cost of their desire for security is going to become increasingly apparent.

Why do you think we've grown at a faster rate in America over the last 100 years than other western economies? Technological opportunity in these countries are relatively similar. We don't have access to secret technology that they didn't know to use. What are some of the reasons they might have grown more slowly than we did? And other nations, for that matter, over the same period.

........The question about the U.S. growing faster during the past century compared to other countries is a harder question about not copying things that are already known, as today countries do for economic growth, but developing brand-new things. In the United States, we developed a set of institutions. Institutions are the rules—the rules of the game that structure what everybody does in the nation.

We developed a set of institutions which encouraged more rapid discovery. We discovered and implemented things more rapidly than they did in other industrial countries. And the interesting question that historians and economists are still struggling with is, "What were the precise details of our institutions that made them better, just enough better to get an extra half a percentage point per year compared to other similar economies?"

One of the reasons that we're able to do it is that we import people. You talked about China importing technologies. We imported—because we have relatively open borders, we've imported a lot of smart people from overseas that have helped us.

...........This notion that there's a kind of a rivalry with winners and losers when we think about nations, it's really very misleading about the underlying economics. This, by the way, was one of the advantages the United States had in the early part of the twentieth century. We were already a big free trading block when a lot of the world was still relatively closed.

www.econlib.org

Atmosphere of freedom

Persons of genius are, it is true, rare and are always likely to be a small minority, but in order to have them, it is necessary to prepare the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom.

– J.S. Mill (1806-73), On Liberty






Democratic theory rests on the idea that individuals will vote for their own self-interest. In America, institutions were built upon that idea; the constitutional framers assumed that men were selfish and formed a government functioning under that assumption.

However, things seem to have gone awry. At some point, people stopped voting for themselves and started voting for others in an attempt to reverse perceived social inequalities. Even as the voting population remains mainly middle class, employed, and salaried, more and more they have voted for social justice programmes like minimum wage, unemployment, and government health care. Governments have instituted these programmes dutifully and expanded a bureaucratic and inefficient system based not on what the less fortunate want for themselves, but for what the middle classes feel bad for having.

This is more dangerous than self-interested voting because it destroys the idea of a responsive government. In America, those voting for minimum wage hikes and increased national medicine, with the possible exception of the labour unions, are not those living on minimum wage or government health care programmes. If the people receiving the benefits aren’t the ones voting on the benefits, then nothing is done about ineffective policies and the supposed beneficiaries have a system imposed on them that

Source: www.adamsmith.org/blog





Central to the civil approach is the recognition of the need to overcome the influence of confused and flammable readings of human relations that generate group-specific disaffection and hatred. Even though all human beings have many affiliations, with many distinct patterns of sharing (including the important commonality of a shared human identity), these multiple identities are systematically downplayed in the cultivation of group violence, which proceeds through privileging exactly one affiliation as a person's "real identity", thereby seeing people in an imagined confrontation against each other across a single line of prioritised divisiveness.

Guardian, Cif, Amartya Sen, 10 Nov






There can have been few more exquisite moments for lovers of the iron way. On Tuesday evening, St Pancras enthusiasts gathered at last for the resurrection of the life. The war had been long and bruising, but this was sweet triumph. The occasion was gatecrashed by the Queen..................................

But how much blood has flowed over these old stones? On Tuesday one thousand of the great and good congratulated themselves at the marvel of Barlow's shed and the detailing of Gilbert Scott's great hotel, at his gargoyles of drivers and engineers, his majestic brick arches, his great ticket hall like a cathedral confessional, his towers, gables, dormers, fireplaces, swirling staircase and celestial ceiling. They marvelled today, but once they condemned as "heritage freaks" those without whom all this would have vanished.

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

The term of office

The term of office of Rushdi Pashas, one week, is the shortest on record save one; the predecessor had a mob of Janissaries preventing his taking his seat .....The longest recorded service as Grand Vazier was that of Halil Pasha, for 25 years. The record showed that 26 Grand Vaziers have been executed while in office besides these officially recognized executions, many Grand Vaziers have died in office. This expression, when used in connection with a Turkish official, may signify a good deal. Apoplexy is a disease which was formerly epidemic with Grand Vaziers. The word damla used by the Turks for apoplexy, is also the word commonly used for drops. Hence, when a Grand Vazier is said to have died of damla, uncharitable minds are at liberty to suspect that he died of poisonous drops, administrated by hostile hands.

Henry Dwight; June 7,1881; Turkish Life in War Time;



Armenia is so situated that it has been trampled and devastated in all the great movements of the races of Western Asia, while its population has literally been scattered to the ends of the earth....there are now possibly two million of these people in the whole Turkish empire.....

Being Asiatic, they have more than any other Chrisitian race in Turkey the confidence of the Turks; while as christians they are eager to receive and adopt the results of christian civilization....The Arminian Church more than either the Greek or the Roman Church, allows to its members freedom of independent thought. This freedom of the Arminian people has afforded room for the success among them of American missionaries. These missionaries have erected evengelical churches among them; have fostered a strong desire for educate advantages, manifested by the appearnace of large numbers of Arminian schools; and have created a taste for reading which affords a steady demand for newspapers and books...........