A few years ago, I posted on the Poverty Action Lab and its approach to development: randomized trials to see what works and what doesn’t. The new issue of the Boston Review is out, and in its New Democracy Forum, Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, the Lab’s director, has a piece on sensible developmental aid policies.

It has been established that figuring out what works is not easy—a large body of literature documents the pitfalls of the intuitive approach to program evaluation. When we do something and things get better, it is tempting to think that it was because of what we did. But we have no way of knowing what would have happened in the absence of the intervention. For example, a study of schools in western Kenya by Paul Glewwe, Michael Kremer, Sylvie Moulin and Eric Zitzewitz compared the performance of children in schools that used flip charts for teaching science and schools that did not and found that the former group did significantly better in the sciences even after controlling for all other measurable factors. An intuitive assessment might have readily ascribed the difference to the educational advantages of using flip charts, but these researchers wondered why some schools had flip charts when a large majority did not. Perhaps the parents of children attending these schools were particularly motivated and this motivation led independently both to the investment in the flip charts and, more significantly, to the goading of their children to do their homework. Perhaps these schools would have done better even if there were no such things as flip charts.

Glewwe and company therefore undertook a randomized experiment: 178 schools in the same area were sorted alphabetically, first by geographic district, then by geographic division, and then by school name. Then every other school on that list was assigned to be a flip-chart school. This was essentially a lottery, which guaranteed that there were no systematic differences between the two sets of schools. If we were to see a difference between the sets of schools, we could be confident that it was the effect of the flip charts. Unfortunately, the researchers found no difference between the schools that won the flip-chart lottery and the ones that lost.

Randomized trials like these—that is, trials in which the intervention is assigned randomly—are the simplest and best way of assessing the impact of a program.

Also see the comments by Ian Goldin, F. Halsey Rogers, and Nicholas Stern; Mick Moore; Ian Vásquez; Angus Deaton; Alice H. Amsden; Robert H. Bates; Carlos Barbery, Howard White, Jagdish Bhagwati, Raymond C. Offenheiser and Didier Jacobs, and Ruth Levine.

In the Guardian Unlimited, Crooked Timber’s Daniel Davies on farm subsidies.

You would not think, in the normal course of events, that a sensitive and intelligent person would go to Ghana, spend a few days walking round and talking to locals, have in-depth briefings on the local economy and come away with the following policy prescription:

“What a great country! You know what they really need though? More expensive food!”

You would not think this, but the fact is that this is basically what Bob Geldof said a year ago, it is the official position of the Make Poverty History campaign and it figured in three of the four articles CiF published yesterday about the collapse of the Doha Round of trade talks. It is perhaps the silliest and certainly the most tenacious commonplace of the development world; the view that farm subsidies are intrinsically evil.

The trouble is that the truth is a little bit too simple to be credible. Farm subsidies in the EU and USA mean that we sell some kinds of foodstuffs (mainly grains, milk products and sugar) to Africa and other countries cheap. So cheap, in fact, that the Africans etc can buy our imported goods cheaper than they can produce them for themselves. This is good news.

No, stop, yes it is. If you can buy something for cheap, then that is good news. Food being cheap is good news for Africa. It isn’t bad news. I promise you it is as simple as that.

From The Washington Post:

OATH BETRAYED: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror. By Steven H. Miles

Vulnerable in body and mind, we look to our physicians for compassion — which makes torture that’s abetted by the medical profession especially horrific. Jacobo Timerman, a victim of Argentina’s “dirty war,” wrote of the special pain of seeing a doctor present in the interrogation room, of the sense of abandonment that lay in knowing that a person of science “is with you when you are tortured by the beasts.”

But the link between healing and torture is hard to sever. In the Renaissance, special “torture doctors” helped inquisitors choose their interrogation methods. In August 2004, Steven H. Miles, a bioethicist and professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota, reported in the British medical journal the Lancet that the United States had, in effect, returned to the era of the torture doctor. In Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Miles wrote, “The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations.” Miles’s charges were detailed: Death certificates had been falsified, he wrote, and military health personnel had reported incidences of torture belatedly, if at all.

More here.

From BBC News:

Bumblebees can navigate their way home over distances of up to 13km (eight miles), a UK research team has shown. The study also found only worker bees seemed to have this homing ability. Bees pollinate flowering plants and therefore play a crucial role in food webs, but numbers of the insect in Britain have been declining recently. The team said the homing research would inform conservation strategies that sought to adapt landscapes to create optimum habitats for bees.

The University of Newcastle-led group took some 20,000 bumblebees belonging to the common species Bombus terrestris and tagged them with tiny identification numbers. The bees were then dropped in different places around north-east England and left to make their way back to the nest. The scientists set up a webcam in the hive to record the homecomers. Early results show the bees will fly varying distances but some that were left at a garden centre in Heddon on the Wall in the Tyne Valley – about 13km from their nest – could get home safely. This is a big leap on from previous studies which had suggested bumblebees could forage out to about 5km (three miles) from the hive.

More here.

Nicholas Wade in the New York Times:

Researchers believe they have found a second code in DNA in addition to the genetic code.

The genetic code specifies all the proteins that a cell makes. The second code, superimposed on the first, sets the placement of the nucleosomes, miniature protein spools around which the DNA is looped. The spools both protect and control access to the DNA itself.

The discovery, if confirmed, could open new insights into the higher order control of the genes, like the critical but still mysterious process by which each type of human cell is allowed to activate the genes it needs but cannot access the genes used by other types of cell.

More here.

Ashley Parker in the New York Times Magazine:

It hit me. I was becoming my 17-year-old sister. Though I was five years older, full sentences eluded me, and I had subconsciously decided that abbreviating all of my thoughts was fun. And cute.

Justine’s love affair with language — or rather, the anti-language — started gradually enough, and I think that’s why I never noticed it. At first, when my mom would ask Justine if she had a lot of homework, Justine would reply, “Obvi,” or “The usu.”

Then things got worse. Awkward became awk, actually became actu, typical became typ, amazing became amaze and hilarious became hilar. Something utterly hilar, of course, became TOPOSH — Top of the Pillar of St. Hilar — but there was nothing TOPOSH about the situation. As the older sister, I tried to do my part. Sometimes that involved throwing my sneakers at her, and sometimes it was as simple as, “Hey, Justine, you’re an idiot.”

“That is so rudabega,” she would say, before rolling her eyes and gliding out of the room.

More here.

From The Independent via Jason Kottke:

A short while ago, I came across this Anthony Bourdain piece on the tiffinwalas of Mumbai.

In the BBC, the tiffinwalas may be seeing changes in how they work:

[I]n an attempt to boost awareness about their service they are going a little bit more high tech.

They tiffinwalas have set up a website and an SMS service to increase customer numbers.

This has come as a surprise to many, as many of the lunchbox carriers are illiterate.

Savvy about their business and finance as they are, very few of them have even heard of the internet.

The new technology has been built for them by a software engineer Manish Tripathi who has been adopted as an honorary tiffinwala.

To put this a different way, if Pop art can be understood as high art’s homage and submission to popular culture, in acknowledgement that it was better to join an enemy with which one could not compete than be slaughtered, then Conceptual art can be understood as high art’s suicide in acknowledgement not only of its psychosocial irrelevance but also its meaninglessness. Its need to be taken over and supplanted by philosophy — Hegel thought this was inevitable, that is, consciousness, knowing itself, would become a matter of pure ideas in no need of materialization to become self-evident — follows from its loss of purpose in the modern world. Art was beside the point of modern life — it could never feel secure in an age of science and technology — but philosophy was never beside the point, because it always had the last word, like some deus ex machina. If the owl of philosophy flies at dusk, as has been said, then the philosophicalization of art that occurs in Conceptual art symbolizes the night that is falling on art.

more from Artnet Magazine here.

It may be hypocritical to assert that courses dealing with ethnicity are designed to foster what is imagined by university professors to be “culture.” As the product of two generations of neo-Marxist teachers, the idea of teaching ethnicity is not very different from the “folk” cultures fostered under Stalinist bureaucracy. Ethnic Studies might be educationally useful for some white Americans of what is disingenuously termed our “mainstream culture,” since perforce they know little or nothing about the ethnic groups proliferating in their midst. Conceivably such courses could be helpful in accommodating social tensions because they afford a democratic means of political manipulation, for supporting “culture.” Notwithstanding, Ethnic Studies is quintessentially a university notion: it mistakes documents for reality. And providing an Ethnic Studies center or department is your typical administrative device for defusing the unhappiness of minorities in a pluralistic society headed always towards the Western achievement (eclectic only in dress, music, arts, and cuisine). It is also a vicious product of the ignorance and anxiety of our school bureaucrats — scientists and sociologists — for, by politicizing scholarship, it avoids critical thought about values. In essence, our Ethnic Studies centers exist to placate political demands; unfortunately, academics rush to develop and elaborate courses of study that are products of their long hours of lucubration in a library … or surfing the worldwide web’s inchoate cloaca of unfiltered documents.

more from California Literary Review here.

From Guardian:

In Ben Jonson’s celebrated phrase, he was not of an age, but for all time. Universal and timeless, Shakespeare remains a mirror to every generation. Ours is no exception. Recently, to an unprecedented degree, we have seen ourselves as much through his life as in his work. The past decade has seen a festival of celebrity Shakespeare, the pop-culture bard. So, in Tom Stoppard’s witty and suggestive film, he was ‘in love’. In Stephen Greenblatt’s 2004 bestseller he became the ‘Will’ of Will in the World. In Dominic Dromgoole’s recent memoir, Will and Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life, he is ‘Will’ again, a fellow thespian, and by implication the perfect side-kick and mentor to the new director of London’s Globe. Last week his First Folio was auctioned at a price (£2.8m) that would not disgrace a top impressionist.

More here.

From Nature:

A new study helps to explain why smokers tend to have boozier nights out than non-smokers. The work, done in rats, shows that a heavy dose of nicotine can cut blood-alcohol levels in half. If cigarettes similarly lower intoxication in people, it could mean that smokers need to drink more than non-smokers to get the same buzz.

Many studies have shown that smokers tend to drink more alcohol than non-smokers, and a number of reasons are proposed for this. People who indulge in one habit may be simply more inclined to indulge in another, and socially both habits tend to go hand-in-hand at pubs and parties. Researchers also know that both nicotine and alcohol trigger a release of the feel-good brain chemical dopamine, but that indulging too much in either habit can breed tolerance to the drugs and reduce this pleasurable reward. So heavy users of one may boost use of the other to help bring their dopamine response back up.

More here.

In The Nation, Adam Shatz looks at what Sheik Sayed Hassan Nasrallah hopes to achieve.

Nasrallah’s objectives most likely lie elsewhere. Since the 2000 Israeli withdrawal (“the first Arab victory in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” as Nasrallah often notes), Hezbollah has faced mounting pressure, from the West but also at home, to lay down its arms and become a purely political organization–a fate the party dreads, since it prides itself on being a vanguard of Islamic resistance to American and Israeli ambitions in the Middle East. This pressure dramatically intensified with UN Security Council resolution 1559 (2004), which called for the disbanding of all Lebanese militias, and with the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon last year. By conducting a raid that was likely to provoke a brutal Israeli reprisal, Nasrallah may have gambled that the fury of the Lebanese would soon turn from Hezbollah to the Jewish state, thereby providing a justification for “the national resistance” as Lebanon’s only deterrent against Israel. So far, Israel (with the full support of the Bush Administration) has played right into his hands, inflicting more than 300 casualties, nearly all of them civilians, and pounding the civilian infrastructure, eliciting sympathy for Hezbollah even among some Lebanese Christians. By striking at Israel’s Army during its most destructive campaign in Palestine since 2002’s “Operation Defensive Shield,” Nasrallah must have known that he would earn praise throughout the Muslim world for coming to the aid of Palestinians abandoned by the region’s authoritarian governments, a number of which have pointedly chastised Nasrallah’s “adventurism.” And by bloodying Israel’s nose, Hezbollah could once again bolster its aura in the wider Arab world as a redoubtable “resistance” force, a model it seeks to promote regionally, especially in Palestine, where Nasrallah is a folk hero, and in Iraq, where Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the radical Shiite Mahdi Army, has proclaimed himself a follower of Hezbollah and has threatened to renew attacks against US forces in solidarity with the Lebanese.

Cosma Shalizi is guest blogging at Crooked Timber and begins with a discussion of the mechanics of disordered systems and optimized criticality, based on the work of Osame Kinouchi and Mauro Copelli. (For those of you who missed it, see also Azra’s piece on self-organized criticality and cancer.)

Neurons, like muscle cells, are “excitable”, in that the right stimulus will get them to suddenly expend a lot of energy in a characteristic way — muscle cells twitch, and neurons produce an electrical current called an action potential or spike. Kinouchi and Copelli use a standard sort of model of an excitable medium of such cells, which distinguish between the excited state, a sequence of “refractory” states where the neuron can’t spike again after it’s been excited, and a resting or quiescent state when the right input could get it to fire. (These models have a long history in neurodynamics, the study of heart failure, cellular slime molds, etc.) Normally, in these models the cells are arrayed in some regular grid, and the probability that a resting cell becomes excited goes up as it has more excited neighbors. This is still true in Kinouchi and Copelli’s model, only the arrangement of cells is now a simple random graph. Resting cells also get excited at a steady random rate, representing the physical stimulus.

Kinouchi and Copelli argue that the key quantity in their model is how many cells are stimulated into firing, on average, by a single excited cell. If this “branching ratio” is less than one, an external stimulus will tend to produce a small, short-lived burst of excitation, and there will be no spontaneous activity; the system is sub-critical. If the branching ratio is greater than one, outside stimuli produce very large, saturating waves of excitation, and there’s a lot of self-sustained activity, making it hard to use a super-critical network as a detector. At the critical point, however, where each excited cell produces, on average, exactly one more excited cell, waves of excitation eventually die out, but they tend to be very long-lived, and in fact their distribution follows a power law.

Lucio Boschi. Untitled (Skulls of Ancestors).

Gelatin silver print.

More on the photographer here and here.

In Counterpunch, Najla Said on the tragedy of Lebanon.

How do I even start this? How do I write about my Beirut? My heartbreak, my home, my safety, my loss. again.

I suppose I just start.

I have experienced true terror a handful of times. The first was in 1983. The first time I evacuated Beirut. We had gone to visit my jiddo Emile, my teta Hilda, as we did every summer. Just after we arrived,the airport was shut down, Israeli soldiers were everywhere, the mountains were filling with smoke. We spent the next week in the staircase of our building as shells fell around us. My brother Wadie was almost hit by shrapnel.

My father, Edward, was in Switzerland. He knew we were in danger. I had no idea he wasn’t with us because he was Palestinian. I didn’t understand. Although I was born in 1974, I never knew about the war until the summer of ’82 — the first summer we didn’t go. The summer we spent in Illinois. I did cartwheels in the living room trying to get Mommy and Daddy’s attention. But all they did was watch the news and eat nuts and look worried. I wish I’d known how my Mommy’s heart was breaking. I know now.

“The idea of pugnacious literary supremo Bill Buford taking orders from anyone is laughable. So why did he leave ‘The New Yorker’ to become a lowly ‘kitchen slave’ for one of New York’s best restaurants? Danuta Kean asks him what he learnt among the pans.”

From The Independent:

It all started at a dinner party in Buford’s Manhattan apartment. Among the guests was Mario Batali, TV chef and proprietor of acclaimed New York eatery Babbo. He turned out to be the dinner guest from hell. Within moments of his arrival chez Buford, the writer knew inviting him was a mistake. Batali, one of the new breed of alpha-male cooks whose main rule is excess, took over, treating his host to his first lesson in muscular cookery and other guests to a night of macho drinking.

Buford has alpha-male tendencies of his own (at Granta the testosterone levels of many contributors were as high as his: Redmond O’Hanlon and Raymond Carver were regulars). But he was hooked and accepted the chef’s challenge to work in his kitchen as a slave for whom no task was too debased. In exchange he would learn real cooking.

More here.

After reading Letter from Beirut here at 3QD, a producer from Radio Open Source got in touch with us and wanted to know more about the writer of that letter, Rasha. We put them in touch with Rasha, and she has agreed to write and report from Beirut for them. This is from Radio Open Source:

Rasha’s letter from Beirut on 3 Quarks Daily last week floored us. She’s a Lebanese/Palestinian/Syrian/Turkish/Bosnian writer, now living in a suburb of Beirut. “I’m a product of the Ottoman empire,” she says, “and I say it with pride.” She’s generously agreed to string for us now. Here’s her first installment:

Today was a particularly strange day for me because I was granted an opportunity to leave tomorrow morning. I hold a Canadian passport, I was born in Toronto when my parents were students there. I left at age two. I have never gone back, for lack of opportunity and occasion, no other reason. …For days I have been battling ambivalence towards this war, estranged from the passions it has roused around me and from engagement in a cause. And yet when the phone call came informing me that I had to be ready at 7:00 am the next morning, I asked for a pause to think. I was torn. The landscape of the human and physical ravages of Israel’s genial strategy at implementing UN Resolution 1559, the depth of destruction, the toll of nearly 250 deaths, more than 800 injured and 400,000 displaced, had bound me to a sense of duty. It was not even patriotism, it was actually the will to defy Israel. They cannot do this and drive me away. They will not drive me away.

The roads to Damascus are not safe. Its many different ways are shelled everyday. Drivers know what “calculated” risks to take, I am assured, but one never knows. Everyday the way out becomes more difficult. I decided to stay, I don’t know when I will have another opportunity to leave.

–Rasha, in an email to Open Source, July 20, 2006

More here.

“In 2002, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a two-part article examining the radical Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, which he called ‘the most successful terrorist organization in modern history’.”

From The New Yorker:

Shiism arose as a protest movement, whose followers believed that Islam should be ruled by descendants of the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin Ali, and not by the caliphs who seized control after the Prophet’s death. The roots of Shiite anger lie in the martyrdom of Ali’s son Husayn, who died in battle against the Caliph Yezid in what is today southern Iraq. (I have heard both Shiites from southern Iraq and Iranian Shiites refer to their enemy Saddam Hussein as a modern-day Yezid.) At times, Shiism has been a quietist movement; Shiites built houses of mourn-ing and study, called Husaynias, where they recalled the glory of Husayn’s martyrdom.

In Lebanon in the nineteen-sixties, the Shiites began to be drawn to the outside world. Some joined revolutionary Palestinian movements; others fell into the orbit of a populist cleric, Musa Sadr, who founded a group called the Movement of the Deprived and, later, the Shiite Amal militia. Hezbollah was formed, in 1982, by a group of young, dispossessed Shiites who coalesced around a cleric and poet named Muhammad Hussayn Fadlallah.

Read the rest of part 1 here, and part 2 of the article is here.

“Fifty years old this month, the album chart has tracked the history of pop. But only a select few records have actually altered the course of music. To mark the anniversary, Kitty Empire pays tribute to a sublime art form, and our panel of critics argues for 50 albums that caused a revolution. To see the 50, click here.”

From The Observer:

Alongside film, the pop album was the defining art form of the 20th century, the soundtrack to vast technological and social change. Once, sets of one-sided 78rpm phonograph discs were kept together in big books, like photographs in an album. The term ‘album’ was first used specifically in 1909, when Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite was released on four double-sided discs in one package. The first official top 10 round-up of these newfangled musical delivery-modes was issued in Britain on 28 July 1956, making the pop album chart 50 years old this month.

Singles were immediate, ephemeral things. Albums made pondering pop and rock into a valid intellectual pursuit. Friendships were founded, love could blossom, bands could be formed, all from flicking through someone’s album collection. Owning certain albums became like shorthand; a manifesto for everything you stood for, and against: the Smiths’ Meat is Murder , Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

More here.