A Europe in Whose Image?

Over at New Statesman, Prof. Brendan Simms presented and extended a review of the 'European problem' in July.

The two essays together trace a fascinating arc of the relevant history and make for necessary reading. It was amusing though to see USA and UK painted as more perfect unions than the EU, not to mention sort of disinterested bystanders in the European project. (In the case of UK, a particularly prescient bystander, quietly shaking her bowed head just outside the ring. In the first article, he upholds a case of British exceptionalism not dissimilar to one that he singles out France to be chided for in the second.)

Characterizing the British and American unions as exemplary is particularly curious in 2015. Federal-state friction in the US has crippled policy areas from healthcare and immigration to marriage and gun laws. Since the last general elections in the UK, meanwhile, Scots have one foot out the door with all the new MPs taking every opportunity to dole out statistics as to how well they'd do on their own. Sure, Europe has dug for itself a unique fiscal-monetary predicament, but judging on solidarity alone, judging on what eventually happens every time the union is threatened, I'd give the EU a soild 8/10, the UK, a 6.2. And the US? Ask me again in 2017.

I agree, of course, with the main thrust of both articles.

Media and Social Media

Apart from everything else, The Economist's book review-gate reveals a conflicting pair of forces that media feels from social media: too much information constantly emerging to cover well, too many eyes to scrutinise and rapidly excoriate it en mass.

The review and subsequent apology went viral. I bookmarked the book author's latest. But that is the old hat - no such thing as bad publicity and all that.

The newest thing is the evident pressure under which esteemed information brands of our lifetime seemed to caving: Fareed Zakaria, The Economist. Nature. As the information age demands ever faster coverage of an ever growing human ken, more people seem to have access to the 'Send' button on the content management systems of hallowed publications than is manageable to a high standard. Things gets published before an experienced editor has seen it. It would seem that the busiest editors now see some content after thousands of twitter users have commented on it, perhaps only if thousands of twitter users comment on it!

She's Just Not Interested

Female CEOs always make headlines (recently GM, Yahoo). Several media outlets have spent much space lately to commentary on women in science. Few would bury their heads in sand and deny the gender disparities in the workplace and outside. And there is no dearth of arresting visual statistics on the yawning gender gaps.

If you thought gender parity is the only reason we need more #WomeninScience: http://t.co/cR7Acx1lLr http://t.co/PcgUyekuWi
— Sachin Kumar Badkas (@voxveri) May 9, 2014

But the analysis that proclaims the gaps rests on assumptions that rarely figure in the discourse. Observers speak of vocations and industries missing out on “half the population”. If I were to ask for a pause to consider the assumptions, you might dread this is headed towards unsavoury territory. But bear with me. The conversation on gender representation in vocations is generally driven by discussion of ability and opportunity. What about interest?

Both opportunity and ability seem easier questions to engage with than interest. Opportunities are not equal for the genders, period. We know that. No question. The question of equal ability only has pieces unsolved that are both too trivial and too pointless to discuss. The scarce evidence from neuroscience is for minor and poorly understood differences, and moreover, even finding significant differences would give no ground for prejudice in single cases.

Interest is different. Unlike innate aptitude or opportunity, one does not make a normative argument: everyone is not expected to be equally interested in everything. Quite to the contrary, the only normative claim one might make is that we may not assume interest on anyone’s part. So why make the assumption that the genders should or would be equally interested in every vocation? Can we not make room for interest to vary despite exactly equal aptitude? There is evidence that given equal ability interests might indeed drive the discrepantly low representation of women in science.

If equal interest is not assumed, then actual numbers of a gender engaged in any occupation cannot be taken as a measure of opportunity. Opportunity must be measured by testing provision, not uptake.

The place of women in society then is not a simple variable to understand. Besides the question of interest, presumptions about geography are equally rife. Genders are not quite equal anywhere, but is the picture we have of how the gap varies by age and region accurate? Let us contrast two regions to take a snapshot.

Across large parts of India, opportunities for young girls are severely restricted compared to boys. Sexual assaults on young women were always a problem but have received widespread attention in recent years. But also in India, CEOs of about 20% of major private banks and financial institutions happen to be women, in contrast with virtually none in the US or the EU.

Arguably, little girls in Norway or Netherlands are no different than boys at their school. But there is a very real pay gap in the private sector, with disparity even more noticeable at the higher executive levels, which is why every new female Fortune 500 CEO in the US makes big news. Norway has quotas in place for female board members in private firms that other countries in Europe have tried to emulate.

The place of Indian women in a socio-cultural context too appears to be different from the West. It may not be the best means to assess gender parity in films, but Hindi films do significantly better on the Bechdel Test. The test is certainly not conclusive for arguments about culture. But precisely because the requirements on the test are so basic, significant differences in scores do prompt one to wonder. It would seem that Hindi films are more likely to have named female characters discussing women than English films.

Given that it is difficult variable, gender differences between vocational inclinations would likely be very difficult to disentangle from all the noisy confluence of factors. Sure, we must continually strive to ensure that opportunities are not skewed or denied. But the uptake of those opportunities might not be the best way to assess the results of efforts.

If it turned out that with everything else equal, women really are less interested in a science career or editing Wikipedia entries, that would be okay right?

Of course we must raise both boys and girls with acute awareness of gender disparity and to be on guard for biases in their own thinking and to fight unfairness when they see it. But equally, in a post-modern world, we do not wish to inhibit little girls from expressing their true interests for the fear they might fall on the wrong side of the strict line of expected equality between the genders. It should suffice to teach children not to a priori assume or expect either skills or interests of the other people based on their gender.

Saudi Filmmaker Breaks New Ground With #WADJDA: http://t.co/3ApgnzCOJW Opens Friday at Varsity Cinemas in Toronto! pic.twitter.com/DqsNaPIPXm
— Mongrel Media (@MongrelMedia) October 1, 2013

In one of last year's sweetest films, 'Wadjda', when a ten-year-old girl's last recourse to earning a bicycle is thwarted, Abdullah, her next-door friend, offers her his bike. "Then how will we race?", she replies, not attempting to hide a mix of indignation and exasperation. It is an error all too common in talk of gender disparities. One assumes the problem because one of the problems is obvious. Sure it is wrong that girls should be denied bikes where boys take them for granted. But in Wadjda's case, presuming that the delivery of one bike delivers her from the specific disadvantage she wishes to overcome is prejudiced reduction. Next time, let's just ask her, shall we?

J'analyse donc je suis

Writing a letter in prison, Bertrand Russell wrote, "No one has the least idea how much I get into a day". Stephen Wolfram, in some ways his latter day intellectual heir, has the answer: Personal Analytics.

He has logged every single keystroke for 30 years and every morning gets an email summary of all his activity – including emails. Let's not focus on the circular analytical trail there yet. That tells him how productive he has been the previous day. To doubt Mr Wolfram’s genius is to call one’s own semblance of an intelligence into question. But let’s ask the fundamental question anyway. Does everyone need or want or stand to gain from his brand of analytics? Carefully perusing through smartly visualized reports of one’s digital activity is arguably only productive for someone who is planning to commercialize and sell that sort of analysis to the masses, as he is. To everyone else, it is one more thing to do they got by without just fine until someone invented it for sale and profit. At that personal level at which he intends to track it, what is productivity?

Why was I not as productive yesterday as the same day last week? Because on my way to work, I paused in the park as I caught a whiff of the most delightful scent on the air, and on following it, espied a glorious bloom of rose bush (a literal truth). Why was I less productive in the month of May 2011 than in May 2010? Because in 2011, my girlfriend left me, whereas in 2010 we were just back from a very happy holiday. I remember both events vividly. Why was I apparently shirking work in August 2000? Simply cannot remember. And should I? Those that write journals or personal blogs can quickly check. Others do not write journals for various reasons. It might entertain them to look for unexplained patterns in digital data and wonder some day when they have nothing better to do and they have just been through old photos. But do we all need to dissect and analyse every single blip in the data, constantly?

Bust of Omar Khayyam
Photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim
From WikiMedia Commons

If I scrutinised my productivity so thoroughly every morning I expect two things: A) I expect to deliver ideas equivalent to being the Omar Khayyam of my time. B) I expect I will see the daily analytical report as a waste of the time that I might better spend working on whatever makes me that great. If I take a break to pause and smell roses, I would rest in peace knowing that every such single instance over the course of my life was well considered and justified at least in that moment, regardless of whether I remember for all time to come. If I do not remember, I shall trust my judgement in the past and also allow for it to evolve in a way that my present disagrees with the past but without regrets. Thanks for the software then, Mr Wolfram, but I think I will spend the cash otherwise. A book on Indo-persian algebra, perhaps.

And there's the connect - the kind that this blog scouts for. It is a weak but direct link to a couple of recurrent themes - Productivity and Work-Life Balance. I've said before: any talk of productivity is meaningless without spelling out the values being produced. Even the simple case of a sensory experience of natural scents involves multiple values. In the moment, I value that experience very highly indeed, and there is very little the world offers that I would trade it for. In general, I value the memory of such simple pure pleasures from the countless occasions in the past. I also value the conceited knowledge that I seem to have the increasingly rare appreciation for these self-anointed values! I could go on, but you get the idea. If ever in the future they make an app for a wearable devide that somehow records the metadata for that experience, or fate forbid, attempts to assess the quality of the scent of the particular rose, I would elect to ignore it. (You know where I stand on this. I brought it up with that story of the schoolchildren scaling tall ladders en route to a school set in pristine wilderness.)

Analysing 'personal' productivity means scrutinizing either what one produces 'for' oneself or 'out of' oneself. Surely, even for the self-employed few, that includes many things that in no way help bring in an income? Whichever gender, we certainly cannot 'have it all'. It comes down to setting one's priorities early on and keeping an interal tab on how we fare. When it is time to take stock, judge leniently. After all, we did not rely on an app logging everything and presenting it to us with the morning coffee. And may that email that I eagerly read before leaving for work be from a friend or colleague in another time zone. For I can handle any number of emails from friends - and colleagues, if the request is within a very broad reading of my job description. (I'm looking at you. Yeah, you know who you are!) Just as long as it is not a bot that sent me an email about my email traffic.

Decades after that prison stint, Russell came to write, "A great deal of work has come upon me, neglect of some of which might jeopardise the continuation of the human race”. Now there's a candidate for it!

To Arrive Where We Started

Man moves. Without migration, the history of mankind would have been a blip in the Pleistocene epoch, and the epoch would not have that name. And yet, once we settled, subsequent migration has always brought conflict in its wake. Once a people get attached to a piece of land, they take to seeing all who arrive after them as usurpers. The attitude is familiar to anyone who has as a child fought over a trifle - invariably one side cites the fact that they found or used it first as a pre-emptive trump.

It is not saying anything new to remark that in post-millennium political landscapes in all parts of the world, political constituencies thrive on taking and propagating that myopic view of migration and immigrants. In some cases though, the pairing of the complaining destination population and the group of hopeful new arrivals is pregnant with irony.

Inspecting immigrants entering America
circa nineteenth century, Source:The Wellcome Library via Europeana	...and in the twentieth. Source: U.S. National Archives via Europeana

Germany, just as other countries in Western and Northern Europe continues to see polarising discourse on immigration, assimilation, integration, ‘multiculturism’ and other sundry ‘-tions’ and ‘-isms’. Not everyone uses so many words, but the conflicting sides each stem from set worldviews concerning expectations, responsibilities, prejudice, promises, roles, culture and every such thing.

The debate descends into a chicken-and-egg stalemate. In the case of Germany and Turkey though, to speak to those who know only the language of who-saw-it-first, one only need look further back in time to stumble across shudder-inducing irony. Overwhelming DNA evidence is now confirming a picture of early migration in the region. All indications are, that not only are a majority of modern Europeans descended from a wave of new arrivals (c. 7000 years ago) from Anatolia who dominated the earlier indigenous population, those arrivals also brought with them the knowledge of farming. Listen to the narrative as told with a view of current borders: agriculture came to Germany with Turkish immigrants, who then settled there and replaced much of the then hunting-gathering population of Germany.

The Face of (Wildebeest) Migration (in Profile)
Photo by Ganesh Raghunathan, under Creative Commons Licence via Flickr

Another face-scratchingly gigantic irony lurks in the fears that Chinese immigrants uniquely inspire in the West. When I read of the widespread notion that the China’s rapid progress is built on top of technological secrets stolen from university research labs and replicated back home, I sigh. The concerned suspicion not only extends to tuition-paying students that universities need, but transfuses prejudice to much larger contexts. Consider this from an article in Foreign Policy: “The Chinese are still busy copying technologies we built over the past few decades. They haven't cracked the nut on how to innovate yet.” The language that another commentator uses in the Business Insider to counter that view is, if anything, even more telling: “Does anyone in their right mind think the Chinese people are any different than the Japanese or any other human society? Don’t worry. The Chinese will ‘crack the nut’ too.” Future tense.

I sigh because I seem the only one to remember from primary school when I was taught a long list of inventions that took longer to make their way from the Chinese heartland to the rest of the world which then marvelled at how they ever managed without those gadgets for centuries. I am weaker than the temptation to reproduce the list in part. The enterprising folk invented: the flush-toilet, porridge, printing, brandy, bells, whiskey, wheelbarrows, kites, compasses, crossbows, calendars, oil drilling, fishing rod, whips, helicopters, mechanical clocks, hot air balloons, parachutes, the iron plough, relief maps, suspension bridges, umbrellas, water pumps, seismographs, and arguably many more such besides the more commonly known silk, paper, abacus, gunpowder/fireworks/matches and, of course, china (ceramics). Talk about freeloading, violating patents and piggy-backing your technological revolutions in the distant wake of pioneers!

Diagram of a Ming dynasty mariner's compass

via Wikimedia Commons

Yes, property rights were codified much later and intellectual property recognised as such relatively recently, but that does not detract from the fact that the timing was more convenient for some regions than others. The concept of stealing has been doubtless known to mankind ever since we fought over scarce meat that a few had hunted for many. Any ancient society could have prevented the stealth of ideas - penalties were much more deterring back then. That it did not occur to them is a sign of virtue. Imagine trying to assess today the benefits of learning of farming or paper just a bit earlier from a foreign visitor.

1562 Map of America ("Hold that compass still!")

via Library of Congress

Patterns of migration often show complex interdependencies and cross-flux of values, with the new arrivals sometimes bringing in priceless wealth of knowledge and ideas that may help the receiving population leap-frog great strides on the path of human progress. Irony aside, the moral is that migration, much like travel, is good for innovation and progress. People meeting new people is like fertility treatment for the birth of ideas. Peace-time movement is rarely the same as a horde of have-nots invading upon a group of gullible haves, sneaky alien parasites leeching off every last drop of the bounty that attracted them. If we must look to population interaction in nature rather than history to shape our expectations for human societies, parasitism is a curious pick from a whole continuum of cases. Symbiotic organisms depend on the mutual benefits and often co-evolve into fitter forms. Many parasites do the host no discernible harm. Think of your school days when the word 'bacteria' put you in mind of fearsome disease-inducing pathogens. Whereas we now know that human physiology would be inconceivable without the trillion bacteria we host. Imagine a bag of skin that carries far more bacterial DNA than the human kind viewing an approaching bacterial colony with prejudiced suspicion.

Children and School: A Snapshot on 3 April

Threading four news items reported this morning:

A bunch of children shown climbing a tall ladder in news videos inspire everyone the world over. That they brave near-vertical cliffs for school is a popular meme on twitter today. The BBC reporter inevitably draws a link to China’s rapid development having eluded the region. Is it easy or necessary though to constantly judge one region’s conditions compared with another's? It is hard to ignore the pristine cloud forests in the backdrop there (Sangzi, Hunan). Roads destroy and divide habitats such as that. Unless she has severe acrophobia, would the child necessarily be better off caught in the midst of a school traffic phenomenon so severe it has its own Wikipedia entry? With all our common knowledge of the advantages of modernised urban life, can we also acknowledge and not dismiss the perks of an active life in wild surroundings?

A child in Port-au-Prince,

in Dakhla,

Speaking of comparisons between Chinese and American schoolchildren, an interesting account of what happens when immigration eventually does pit them together: something about the success of tuition classes aimed at local students in Chinatown is now attracting non-Chinese students from all over New York City. Not that proximity matters today. Even when they remain separated across the pacific, comparisons with their Chinese counterparts appears to be high on the policy agenda in the US.

in Mazar-i-Sharif,

and in Mulliyavalai. Photos courtesy United Nations, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons License

Whether you face a difficult trek to school and happen to get low grades, or face perilous traffic conditions and yet consistently top the class, surely what matters most is that you are cared for and you have a school that you are motivated enough to go to every day. That you were not abandoned either by those that nature entrusted with your care or those that society elected to be responsible, as continues to happen to far too many children in almost all parts of the world.

Old School

Much of what we (25 and over) learned in school is now moot.

Makes me wonder how schools cope with the lag in updating textbooks in the Information Age. Even the most advanced teachers who largely dispense with texts in favour of videos and such cannot hope to keep up with students who follow science blogs. I imagine schools turning into battlegrounds – at least those that have teachers like mine who encouraged students to challenge them in class. And if you think I am exaggerating the issue, let us take stock of the magnitude of what has changed.

Religion may have led to settlement and necessitated agriculture, rather than the other way around. That is a big one. For all the militant atheism supposedly sweeping the world, it seems we might need a second look at religion after all. To understand who we are and where we come from, we examine how we progressed from a gloriously natural animal existence to the present. It is profoundly central question - what came first? Did the need to transcend our physical existence to seek a higher spirit give rise to the first fixed building or did the discovery of cultivating a food surplus finally allow us to settle down?

You might want to sit down for this next one. I often goes after E, never mind where C is. And this is not even a new finding. Turns out, there are – and have always been – far more words that flout that rule than otherwise! English teachers around the world - yes, including English English teachers - just never bothered to check. Many, I fear, still continue to refer to it while helping students to spell better. Imagine the shock they get when they leave school. Even Harry Potter was stumped, which is some consolation.

Champagne Pool, Wai-O-Tapu, near Rotorua, New Zealand © Christian Mehlführer, Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

Life arose in the sea, we were told and always thought. It certainly added to the awe I felt during pre-dawn strolls along sea shores; apart from its sheer vast spread and unfathomable depths, it was also where we came from. Evidence since uncovered suggests that the first living cells may have emerged in geothermal pools on land. The open ocean just got a little less enigmatic.

Pluto used to be planet. There were nine. But this one I expect they must have corrected even in texts by now.

(Update: We have far more than five senses, including thermoception, proprioception, equilibrioception, and nociception. And oh, glass is back to being consdered boringly solid. I remember being fascinated to hear in class that window panes of old churches get thicker at the bottom because it 'flows'.) From revisionist accounts of history and alternative economic models to genuinely new insights in physics and biology, there is plenty more that is rapidly changing in the human ken. I just hope teachers learn some way to deal with it.

New Form of Carbon is Stronger Than Graphene and Diamond http://t.co/4aQ4X5wKci — MIT Tech Review (@techreview) August 17, 2013

Anomie at the Top

Goldman Sachs short-sold clients, Morgan Stanley covered up ginormous losses, Barclays toyed with the LIBOR rate, HSBC aided money-laundering, and Wegelin helped evade tax. Peter Doyle of the IMF has since pulled a Greg Smith; the Fund now has its own whistle-blowing exit. There is a lot to infer here about global finance. Hopefully, experts and leaders alike will put their heads together to react to the big picture. There is, though, a bigger picture.

Door Detail at the Bank of England / Photo: Paul (HOWZEY), via Flickr under a Creative Commons License

Ever since the unprecedented oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico directly hurt British pensioners, we have known that as with finance, the management of our environment, the other global common, is subject to the same kind and degree of failures. That climate change is not the only pathway of global environmental harm and the harm may not necessarily be in the supra long term or even necessarily environmental. News and information is another global common. The top leadership there is not doing much better either.

Why are we failing to check or even detect critical failures in vast networked organisations? How can they happen when they need an organisation-wide support to be hushed-up?

The answer may lie in advice that Neil Barofsky received, before commencing his job of policing the TARP bailout. It may seem a paradoxical connect to a contemporary discourse on work-life balance. David Brooks, Umair Haque, Anand Giridharadas and more recently, Anne-Marie Slaughter, have been singing of this in various tunes: the idea has gained ground that we face a choice between living for our careers or defining what else we live for and balancing that with our work. But the career-driven societies of the day present other more direct trade-offs at work itself. Mr Barofsky was told, the New York Times reports, not to be “too aggressive” and risk damaging his future career. In that subtle menace lurks the devil.

The recent spate of revelations about mischief of the highest order across global financial institutions on both sides of the Atlantic, at a multinational oil company and global news outlets makes one wonder. As societies evolve, get rich and tidy up, as institutions of governance improve, how could managers through the ranks be apparently devoid of morals? A few rotten eggs rising to the top is easily explained. But how can an entire organisation conspire to cover something up?

It would appear that the advice that Mr Barofsky received has widespread adherence anyway. Simple, honest people go along with it, lest they jeopardised their carefully built careers. Every little honest achievement of their past, earned with decades of consistent hard work and countless daily sacrifices big and small, leads them to that university and onwards to that coveted job, even if still far from the top, at that big bank. Or at that intergovernmental organisation. The way success is pegged, these good hard-working people fear for a single bad word in the progress report, one less-than-stellar recommendation from the top.

No surprises then that Greg Smith so famously spoke out only when leaving Goldman Sachs, and Peter Doyle, when leaving the IMF. We never seem to hear from current incumbents in-charge who discovered in the course of duty how bad things were, before they are in the dock. Mr Barofsky also wrote an Op-Ed on his last day.

The consequence of a university-branded career-driven society is not just that a vast majority of people lose sight of what used to make people happy until the previous century. Most people are also readier, once they deem themselves successful, to compromise on the values that for the most part earned them their early successes. That is faulty design logic at the least.

It is now common enough to signal shortcomings greater than of the individual. Universities like to take credit for spectacular successes. Let us start by shaming them for colossal failures. For every list of illustrious CEOs to have graduated from a school, let us also publish lists of alumni summoned to a parliament or a court to explain dubious oversight or criminal misconduct. Let us publish the costs of damage to contrast against figures that signal success for the benefit of prospective students and future managers.

Productivity and Value

(First published at the UNU MERIT blog on 19 September 2012.)

At one of our regular Thursday seminars (at UNU MERIT) earlier this year, the speaker repeated what we have often heard more casually: the productivity of an academic worker goes down when assigned administrative tasks; administration is not productive work.

The remark passes for a platitude, seldom questioned, and yet, if one dispenses with prejudiced frames for a moment and gives it a second deliberate thought, it should seem a paradox. Administration is not productive work? Why ever not? The answer may well be obvious, but that second thought doesn’t hurt. It lies in the definition of what is being produced. The seminar speaker implied an assumption. That particular piece of research was concerned with producing new knowledge - publishing. Naturally, administration of taught programs adds little to research output and the assumption is quite valid.

If we look at academia more broadly, however, the product can be variously defined. Here at our institute, we offer graduate programs. That is the other product, apart from research. Arguments about the concatenation of appropriate metrics for the combined product stream are irrelevant here. If we were to acknowledge that the taught part of our product catalogue is a ‘well-administered graduate program’, suddenly the very definition of the product deems good administration a productive activity.

I’m not trying to make a point exclusively about what we value in academia, although the above is hardly a trivial point. There is a larger discussion. Assessing productivity has much to do with how products are defined. And defining products has to do with value propositions.

Take cars. (What else? Indeed, nothing is more symbolic of the old economic paradigm. But this is to connect to words of a promising young scientist I have closely followed for a while. He uses the example of cars. And it ties in nicely with two previous posts on this blog.) You leave home every day at 0830, arrive at office 0850 and park your car. Your neighbour leaves at 0910, arrives 0925, and parks. Your colleague has a lunch appointment at a hotel near your house, leaves 1225, arrives 1245, parks. All the cars parked for hours do not provide anyone with any value. Usually, they are just taking up precious space, arguably a drain on the economy if anything.

In a more wired world, where sensors at home and office and in phones and vehicles could coordinate and synchronise it all for us beautifully, we could share cars. Fewer cars would need to be produced to give equivalent or greater value. Why then be in the business of selling cars? Why not be in the business of selling person-kilometres? At my old institute (IIIEE at Lund University), we were accustomed to asking questions of that sort. At my current institute (UNU at Maastricht), would we not want to recalibrate the study of productivity?

We are nearly there - a world where less is more, a world with a more sustainable economic engine. We ought to redefine value propositions, products, productivity, and yes, our term for the creation of new value - innovation.

Scale Europe up

The peace prize for the European Union is the most fitting accolade, even if this year the Norwegian committee has chosen to replicate the decades-long gap between the work recognised and the award as with the academic prizes awarded by the Swedes. While observing its war-preempting and human rights credentials, the citation actually omits significant impacts of the bloc’s environmental stewardship role.

Vrijthof, the main square in the city of Maastricht, the birthplace of the EU, where this blog is written. © oy0.org 2012

The primary goals of the experiment with an overarching union may well have been facilitating trade and perhaps to promote a sense of political integrity across the continent to avert further wars. Regardless, border-blind policy spheres such as the environment have benefitted immensely from the European experiment. When confronted with environmental problems and with a political motivation to set itself apart from other economic behemoths on some value, the European Union rallied its members around a strict code of environmental stewardship. Regulation that would be considered too stringent at a national level in some states found a supranational back door to get formalised into binding law. There is clearly something about transacting policy beyond the arena of national politics that makes for the adoption of otherwise unpalatable solutions.

The global issues of today seem intractable - from impending currency or trade wars to balancing securities of many kinds with fiscal discipline. Nations seem to waiting with bated breath to see who blinks first. Perhaps it is time to scale-up the European experiment and institute a supranational structure that will synchronise the blinking?

Posed in the context of a big idea, the titular question ("Why not?") doesn't sound quite as rhetorical as usual, does it?

Citation and Review in Research

(First published on the UNU MERIT Blog, on 30 august 2012)

Citation and peer review have been unchallenged central tenets of academic epistemology for at least as long as the keywords in this sentence have been around. To most in the field today, the very suggestion that they should ever be challenged is something akin to anathema. Yet that suggestion is on its way from a murmur to a roar. Three recent commentaries and trends that undercut the importance of citation, at least as we understand it in academe:

The very concept of knowledge is changing or poised to change. In a world where it is no longer impossible for a digital encyclopaedia to contain every fact about every entity in every corner of the planet, netizens may be excused for expecting it to. Just as surely, authors may wish to add entries on subjects that no one else has ever bothered to write on. As an instance, the Times article linked above mentions the Malayalam entry regarding an indigenous game known to ‘only’ a few million in a
part of India, for which the authors improvised a new form of citation. On such a vast trove of knowledge, is the place and significance of citations of the conventional kind intact? How would we reconcile the old with the emerging forms of authority? 

An educationalist at the Pope Centre argues that the customary research paper expected of students at every level does little to train them in the techniques of laying arguments and ideas of their own. Many do a satisfactory job of reviewing existing literature, even an exhaustive one of which takes little effort online. Few ever try to expound a thesis of their own. It is not expected of them, as it was of scholars of the age when the foundations of scientific philosophy were being laid, the age of the
word 'thesis' itself. They leave college unable to write their mind and explore an all-new idea in the manner of the research articles that they routinely review in abundance. Should we train them at universities or leave it to the select few who will continue to age in academia to muddle through it at their own pace? 

Lastly, concerns are rising over the awkward inefficiency of transacting scientific progress by way of academic journals, in a globalized, wired world. Given the skewed compulsions and perverse incentives embedded in the system, grassroots efforts have emerged to allow researchers to share negative results. It shan't be long before some crowd-sourced authority online could tell you whether or not you should be undertaking a particular research question. Oh why not?