by Alex Evans | Dec 7, 2007 | Conflict and security, Influence and networks
While we’re thinking about infectious disease: how I love the complexity theory boffins at the Santa Fe Institute. This month they’ve been thinking about the role played by fear in how infectious diseases spread, under the glorious title of “Coupled Contagion Dynamics of Fear and Disease“. Here’s the abstract:
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We model two interacting contagion processes: one of disease and one of fear of the disease. Individuals can “contract” fear through contact with individuals who are infected with the disease (the sick), infected with fear only (the scared), and infected with both fear and disease (the sick and scared). Scared individuals–whether sick or not–may remove themselves from circulation with some probability, which affects the contact of individuals and thus the disease epidemic proper. If we allow individuals to recover from fear and return to circulation, the coupled dynamics become quite rich, and include multiple waves of infection, such as occurred in the 1918 flu pandemic. We also study flight as a behavioral response. In a spatially extended setting, even relatively small levels of fear-inspired flight can have a dramatic impact on spatio-temporal epidemic dynamics.
In short: freaking out can be a highly constructive component of resilience strategies.
by Alex Evans | Dec 7, 2007 | Africa, Conflict and security, Economics and development
It should probably set alarm bells ringing automatically when you read stories that begin like this:
A mysterious fever has killed 14 people and infected 37 others in western Uganda over the last three months, a Health Ministry official said on Friday.
as this Reuters story did on November 16th. It’s now clear that the illness is a new strain of Ebola – that kills victims of fever, rather than hemorrhagic bleeding. The BBC says Kenya has set up screening stations on the border. Ebola’s fatal in 80 per cent of cases, and there’s no cure. The Avian Flu Diary blog has a hair-raising photo that shows the weaknesses in the local public health system: the nurse has no gloves, no goggles, and an inadequate surgical mask.
by Alex Evans | Dec 7, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) have just launched a major three year programme to work with religions on climate change. Details:
The UN Development Programme (UNDP) and ARC will manage the programme which involves major traditions in eleven of the world’s faiths drawing up seven-year plans of action to be launched in early 2009 at Windsor Castle, and to run through to 2016.
Baha’i, Buddhist, Christian, Daoist, Hindu, Jain, Jewish, Muslim, Shinto, Sikh and Zoroastrian leaders will each be invited to commit their faith and their followers to projects and programmes that will address climate change and the protection of the natural environment in practical ways – from forestry conservation to organic farming schemes to introducing, promoting and financing alternative energy sources.
“This is an extremely exciting development which will have a real and long lasting impact on the health of the environment and on people’s lives,” said ARC’s secretary general Martin Palmer, who is working as a co-chair on this programme with the UNDP’s deputy director Olav Kjorven.
Interesting factoid: religious faiths own more than 7% of habitable land on the planet (so ARC say, at least).
by Alex Evans | Dec 7, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Economics and development, South Asia
FT Asia Editor Victor Mallett’s analysis piece on India yesterday is a worth a look. Scarcity issues are slowly assuming centre stage:
It is slowly dawning on Indian policymakers that the country’s much-trumpeted “demographic dividend” – the population surge that will increase the workforce to 800m by 2016 and make India the world’s most populous nation – may turn out to be more of a threat than an opportunity.
Who will create the jobs to absorb the net increase of 71m young people of working age over the next five years? Most are poorly educated and only a fraction will find regular work.
Who will feed them and supply them with water and fuel? India has 18 per cent of the world’s population but only 4 per cent of its fresh water and just over 2 per cent of its land area. Many of the country’s groundwater aquifers are already in critical condition. Available per capita water supply has declined since 1975 and water demand is set to exceed all usable sources of supply by 2050.
The bulge of young people today, furthermore, will in time become a bulge of pensioners in a country where only 11 per cent of the working-age population have formal pension arrangements. India will thus face the same problems of ageing and high dependency ratios as Japan and Europe today, only on a larger scale.
All six risks facing India identified by the WEF and the CII – inequality within a rising population, water shortages, high oil prices, global protectionism, climate change and infectious diseases – originate, at least in part, in the alarming growth of the Indian population.
by Alex Evans | Dec 6, 2007 | Off topic
I am reading The Black Swan. It is exquisite. How can you resist a book that begins like this?
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encylopaedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others – a very small minority – who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge on its itself on its head. Note that the Black Swan comes from our misunderstanding of the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.
Let us call this an antischolar – someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a possession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device – a skeptical empiricist.
