A chip off the old moon

 [Stunning 360° stiched panoramas of the surface of the moon!]

OK, it's the 20th anniversary of a giant step for (hu)mankind, a step taken by Americans and motivated, to some extent, by Kennedy's fears that the Soviet Union would dominate "space." Bravo, NASA! As Tom Wolfe points, out, however, Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was for NASA a "giant leap to nowhere," signaling the shrinkage of our space aspirations that would result from an immediate 40 percent cut to the NASA budget. 

That denouement notwithstanding, the US did manage to accomplish a very specific, very ambitious goal, on schedule, through an intensely collaborative process of science and engineering. Bravo, USA! 


A few years ago, on a break from work I was doing with Jhai Foundation, I visited the Royal Palace Museum in the mountain town of Luang Prabang in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR). The French-colonial-style museum was built in 1904 as a summer retreat for the Lao royal family. The summer palace was converted to a museum when the current Pathet Lao government defeated the royalists. 

Among the museum displays are perhaps 100 gifts given to the last king, Savang Vatthana, before he was deposed. Almost all of these objects are works of inspired craft performed in precious materials. Among the most memorable was an intricately carved ivory sphere with 18 or so smaller, equally intricate, freely rotating spheres that had been carved inside it. We spent a long time imagining the sculpting process, the precision required, the patience, the absence of fear. 

Many of the other gifts testified to similar skill and care. (And mind you, these gifts were given to a government, a king, that had presided over factionalism and civil war since its independence from the French in 1954, a teetering government that was about to fall.) 


The US government had sent a gift as well. The US offering comprised a plastic model of the lunar landing module, about 8 inches across, and a round black rock. The size of a hazelnut. It took a few seconds to figure out what we were looking at.

Of course it was a piece of the moon. A moon rock brought back Neil Armstrong, Alan Shepard or another of the 10 or 12 people who have ever walked on the moon. 

My first reaction was "American arrogance!" (I'm of that generation, I'm afraid.) The gifts from other countries, in any event, showed much better than the US offering--a plastic model and a rock. 

But today, on the 40th anniversary of the event, and as globalization ushers in the diminishment of America's technical and research strength, as I ponder the US race to the moon I acknowledge vanishing drive, patience, and lack of fear not altogether different in quality from the skills need to carve free-rotating spheres out of a block of ivory.

The MDGs won't be met. Is anyone surprised?

The UN hasn't given up the fight for progress toward the Millennium Development Goals, but 90 million MORE people are living on <US $1.25 / day than in 2007! Other indicators also show regression: 

Major advances in the fight against extreme poverty from 1990 to

2005, for example, are likely to have stalled. During that period,

the number of people living on less than $1.25 a day decreased

from 1.8 billion to 1.4 billion. In 2009, an estimated 55 million to

90 million more people will be living in extreme poverty than

anticipated before the crisis.

Likewise, the encouraging trend in the eradication of hunger since

the early 1990s was reversed in 2008, largely due to higher food

prices. The prevalence of hunger in the developing regions is now

on the rise, from 16 per cent in 2006 to 17 per cent in 2008. A

decrease in international food prices in the second half of 2008

has failed to translate into more affordable food for most people

around the world.

The news is all-over terrible: about at 20 percent increase in the numbers of working poor in development countries; no reduction in the number of under-nourished people; unsurprisingly, world unemployment (6.1%) and the unemployment rate of women (6.5%) [and how do they measure _that_?] has lurched upward, and so on.

Where is the good news? Well, Universal Primary Education is increasing! (Whoo Hoo.) And more people have mobile phones.  

The question, at least for me, is who is outraged about this failure? The development agencies are the purported implementers of solutions, the business-end of the development "mechanism," they perceive themselves as too culpable in relation to these failures on many fronts to call much attention to it. Except insofar as they can keep using the MDGs (and Bono, and Angelina) to inflate public interest and understanding. The 180+ governments who signed the MDG charter or whatever it is are equally uninterested in complaining about the crummy job done by the development agencies, because they understand that they themselves routinely fail to meet their commitments for funding. And there are no votes involved, after all. 

The question is, who does that leave?

You, me, and William Easterly, who as usual offers a more powerful and informed critique. (A bit more self-interested, perhaps.) 

7/14/09 14:24 Interest in computer science is DECLINING among US girls According to an extensive study by the Nat'l Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT):

Among female college-bound-high-school seniors taking the SAT in 2006, only one percent--fewer than 5,000 students--indicated computer and information sciences as an intended major This is a nearly 50 percent decline from 1996, when women comprised one-quarter of all students intending to major in computer and information sciences.

The study, "Evaluating Promising Practices in Informal Information Technology," goes on to state that the number of B.S. in C.S. degrees awarded to women in the US was the same in 2004 as it was in 1985.

Although I don't know the overall distribution of bachelor's degrees among women and men, this situation doesn't seem like good news for a country and economy that are becoming increasingly reliant on innovation. 

The race between technology & education ("book report, pt 1")

This is a sort of book report, part 1. Claudia Gilpin & Lawrence Katz have written The Race Between Technology & Education (Cambridge, Mass., and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University; 2008), which is chock full of interesting data and which might, if fully understood, tell us a lot about the impact of infusions of capital and new technologies on labor forces and on the demand for skilled workers, about the education levels and characteristics of those workers, and about economic growth and economic inequality.

And you gotta admit it, those seem like particularly worthwhile topics at this juncture. So what follows is a review of my first claw-through of about 100 pages. The book is thick with stats, and at times it's way clumsy--but worthwhile. I’ll go back in subsequent posts to fill in detail, and I’ll go forward to catch up to my reading. (Thanks to Claudia Lamoreaux, who is sharing this book with me.)

It turns out that, to put it in lay terms, increases in levels of education are linked to increases in inequality. Who knew? But if you consider the situation for a while, you might guess that the connection runs through a “demand channel”: As the demand for more-educated workers increases, so does the price premium paid to them. One year of high school in the first half of the 20th century is worth something (about 11 percent per year, as near as I can make out). These returns diminish over the course of the 20th century to about 8.7 percent. Meanwhile, returns to a year of college clock in at 14.8 percent in 1914 and 14.8 percent in 2005.

(Many, many questions aren’t answered by Katz and Gilpin. Like, these are annual returns, yes? And the returns to a year of college are relative to those of a high school graduate? Or…? And so on. Even at its best, which is sometimes very good, this book swerves into the most aggravating prose imaginable.)

As mentioned, this is a demand-driven phenomenon. However education as a commodity is variably supplied, was variably supplied in the US to some degree even in the early 20th century. Which means that the premium paid to education—a year of high school, a year of college—wasn’t available to every young woman or man.

(Interestingly, the US provided equal education more or less to girls very early on in the history of the republic. In the early 20th c, more girls than boys graduated from high school. However because the labor market was less egalitarian than the education system, girl graduates had very limited impact on the demand for skilled workers in manufacturing.)

So demand is going up as a result—according to Gilpin and Katz—of technological changes in manufacturing that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Earlier in the Industrial Revolution, say from the late 18th century through almost all of the 19th, changes in manufacturing process decreased the need for specific skills: goods ranging from hats to carriages that were produced by artisans and craftspeople were increasingly replaced by similar goods that were produced in factories, taking advantage of inventory controls and other processes. In the early 20th, however, manufacturing processes began to involve batch operations for the manufacturing of chemicals, dairy products, liquor and what-not, and continuous-process operations for products that need little assembly, such as oats or canned foods. Both of these processes apparently (I mean, it’s not my field) depended on better-skilled workers.

So, here’s the titular race as it’s presented in The Race Between Technology and Education: As technology increases in complexity, demand for skilled workers increases, as does inequality; as the education system in—ponderous, poorly executed—response increases opportunities for students to acquire high-demand skills, productivity increases as a result of more-full usage of technology, and inequality decreases. Except that it’s obviously not a race, it’s a journey or a kind of “impossible journey” quest, in which technology, education and capital are all involved collaboratively, in some ways, and in which other forces, such as property ownership, ethnic or gender primacy and so on, operate competitively.

That’s it for the first 100 pages or so. More in a while. Except to note that while Race between technology and education focuses on the US, in the main and in comparison with other countries, there are potential corollaries to the economic and educational dynamics of large and diverse developing economies, such as Indonesia’s or India’s, and for small economies in transition, such as Rwanda’s.

Democratizing Innovation ("book report")

There's a lot of focus on innovation--the development of new ideas that improve products and production--is the current best candidate to drive global change in education. A few reasons....

• Globalization has increased competition among manufacturers and other companies in different companies. 
• Governments are recognizing that innovation is: 
  • Definable and measurable
  • The product of specific enabling conditions
  • A key factor in corporate competitiveness and so a factor in economic growth

What's more, governments are also coming around to the position that they have the capacity--through incentives, regulation, allocation of resources and other activities--to influence innovation across their economies. 

In his 2005 book, "Democratizing Innovation," Eric Von Hippel, a pioneer in the field, suggests that businesses in certain sectors (outdoor sports and sporting goods  being one of them) should look at their customers. Malcolm Gladwell, in "Outliers," demonstrates that world-class innovators in business and other fields tend to arise out of a confluence of conditions--economic, cultural, intellectual--that are if not common throughout society at least common to specific cohorts within it. 

Education, its quality, its ubiquity and its characteristics, is routinely cited as a factor in the emergence of an effective culture of innovation, but the link between education and innovation has not been analyzed in much detail, especially once you drop down below higher ed. However...

Can Governments Till the Fields of Innovation?
... governments are increasingly wading into the innovation game, declaring innovation agendas and appointing senior innovation officials. The impetus comes from two fronts: daunting challenges in fields like energy, the environment and health care that require collaboration between the public and private sectors; and shortcomings of traditional economic development and industrial policies. The rising worldwide interest in innovation policy represents the search to answer an important question: What is the appropriate government role in creating industries and jobs in today’s high-technology, global economy?

That central issue animated much of the discussion at an unusual gathering earlier this month at a lodge north of San Francisco. This invitation-only affair was organized and moderated by John Kao, a former professor at Harvard Business School and founder of the Large Scale Innovation. A few speakers covered big-think issues like climate-altering geoengineering and water-management technologies. But the main participants were innovation-policy practitioners from nine countries: Australia, Brazil, Britain, Chile, Colombia, Finland, India, Norway and Singapore....

In Britain, a national innovation agenda is beginning to take shape with policy documents and the creation of a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.

Finland has long taken a comprehensive approach to innovation policy, investing in areas as varied as an outstanding national education system and high-speed Internet connections for its residents. It has also produced a power in the cellphone industry, Nokia.

Other governments are also focusing on targets of potential advantage. In Australia, the government is looking to nurture industries that arise from its harsh climate and a scattered population. So research centers are working to improve strains of drought-resistant wheat and cotton for export as adaptive technologies to cope with climate change, said Terry Cutler, who recently headed a government-appointed expert panel on innovation in Australia. And Boeing last year selected Australia as the location for a Phantom Works lab for developing unmanned aircraft, he said.

“Test flights don’t bump into things,” he said. “Sparsity can be a global competitive advantage.”

In India, the government and industry have financed research into products and services that reverse the traditional pattern of innovation flowing gradually from wealthy nations to the rest of the world, said R. A. Mashelkar, chairman of the country’s National Innovation Foundation. Early evidence of the trend, he said, includes the $2,000 Nano automobile, and low-cost drugs for tuberculosis and psoriasis. 

What's interesting in this? First, of course, Finland, the UK and Australia are all pushing changes in education that emphasize the development of comprehensive cognitive skills. But as important, look at the examples that are being cited here: Australians capitalizing on sparseness, Indians on their vast population of poor people (altho it's arguable whether the Nano represents an innovation or simply the expansion of an unsustainable activity 10x), and Finland is re-framing the demand for support and services within its graying population as an opportunity that coincides with an anticipated societal need. 

Is it me, or do all these examples all seem like real-world / large-scale versions of project-based-learning activities? Middle-school students challenged to find Australia's underused resources and dream up uses for them... High-school students in Finland terrorized by their teachers painting pictures of a wealth-sucking population of the elderly... (Primary students in India imagining that their parents could buy cars. "I've got an idea! Let's build cheap ones!")

On the one hand, there are probably a raft of short-term actions that governments can take to increase the likelihood of innovation in industry, which will have payoffs much more swiftly than changes made in schools. However the bulk of potential government support for innovation happens through the construction of incentives and disincentives, or through other indirect actions. Schools and education systems, on the other hand, are--you might recall--themselves government programs. While politicians like short-term results, in cases where measurement of those results is difficult or the potential outcomes are of dubious real value, those politicians will accept short-term outputs, such as the introduction of innovation-specific programs for students. 

Ltd uptick in school enrolments in Africa through 2025?

I've been checking out www.many-eyes.com, which hosts a collaborative visualization tools. The site lets visitors post data sets, create charts/conceptmaps and other "visualizations" of the data, rate data sets, add comments on specific views. it's cool.

It also includes a representation of projected school enrolments in Sub-Saharan Africa through 2025. Not all that optimistic, when you look at the percentage views. Nigeria underperforms, bringing its percentage of unschooled kids down from 5 to 3 over the course of the next 15 years.

You can view, play with, and comment on the chart at:

http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/visualizations/projected-youth-15-34-population-by--5