UN Security Council Reform

Continuing the earlier post on UN Security Council reform, developing countries now make up more than two-thirds of the total UN membership, but are grossly underrepresented on the Security Council. I guess many of these countries did not exist as sovereign independent states at the time the organisation was founded. Nevertheless, it is clear that the structure of the Security Council is unreflective of the current realities of the post-cold war world. More importantly, the Security Council decisions in the recent history have been greatly impactful on the developing nations, and it is perhaps not a matter of great debate that the impact has not always been the best.

Proposals for its reform, however, have not been met with enthusiasm by the permanent members. The biggest counter argument appears to be the economic contribution of the nation to the UN. In addition to this, there is the question - "Is more better"? However, with a U.S. global presence as great as that of any empire in history, it seems to be becoming more difficult to control U.S. actions at the UN. Today, there are two world “organizations”: the UN—global in membership—and the United States—global in reach and power. Clearly, initiative stays in Washington, not NY.

Will the inability to reform the UN Charter compromise the credibility of the Security Council, particularly regarding matters shaping the future use of force? This is not really clear. Changing the composition of the Security Council might not overcome its core weaknesses—the veto and almost total reliance upon U.S. military power.

Thomas Weiss says "The war on terrorism provides an evident example of overlapping U.S.and international security interests. Fighting this plague obviously requires cooperation across borders if policies are to be even modestly successful instopping financial flows to terrorist organizations or improving intelligence. The Security Council, for example, responded instantly to the attacks onthe World Trade Center and the Pentagon by passing an unequivocal con-demnation of terrorism in Resolution 1368 on September 12, 2001."

I wonder where the UN was for over two decades when tens of thousands were killed in Kashmir - the cross-border terrorism issue was only internationalized and continues to be so today.

Related Links: UN Security Council Reform, Thomas Weiss' "The Illusion of UN Security Council Reform"

A visit to Shristi

This weekend I went to a place called Shristi Special Academy, some of us at Asha have been thinking of sponsoring some of the projects here. Shristi Special Academy (http://www.shristi-special-academy.org/) a non-profit organisation, headed by a team of trained, qualified and experienced special educators who provide quality services and well designed and structured intervention programmes to children with mental retardation, autism or any other intellectual impairment. They started off in 1995 with about 3 teachers and 4 children and have now grown to about 100 kids, and about 40 odd teachers, with various specialities.

We first went to the Shristi office in Basaveshvarnagar. This is their main administrative office, and they have about 25 children here in the ages of 1-5. We met with some of the specialist teachers there – this place conducts most of the consulation with specialist doctors from NIMHANS, St. John’s, Manipal hospital, etc. Most of the kids here come in with severe disabilities – absence of any neck movement, hand-eye-legs coordination, ability to speak, lots more than I can remember. They also have a small physiotherapy section which is used to help children with walking disabilities, etc. This programme is for children below the age of 5 years, with delayed development and psycho motor retardation. It gives specific emphasis on sensory motor training and is aimed at reducing deficits and atypical traits by training children in activities to promote development and learning of new skills which might not occur by itself or naturally due to developmental delay. It was quite heart rending to see such small children suffering from so many unheard-of ailments, and yet awe-inspiring to see this small bunch of teachers trying to make a difference to these kids.

Their bigger school is about 15 km away in a place called Channenhalli. We went with two of the teachers and it was quite a ride on Magadi road. But once we left the city limits, and approached the Shristi campus, it was greenery on all sides. The Shristi school is located on a donated 2 acre farm. A large part of the area is being used for cultivation, growing vegetables, etc. But all this was later…the first thing that greeted us as soon as we entered was this amazing bunch of children of all ages, who immediately recognised their favorite teachers and came running to the car greeting us. It was quite amazing. They ran by the car till we parked, held our hands while we got out & led us into the building.

The mentally challenged are between one and three percent of the population. However, as intellectual impairment is an invisible handicap, it is generally not recognized and little is known about it. Further, a majority of existing institutions have stipulations for admission such as refusing services for children who are not toilet trained or individuals with severe retardation and seizure disorders. Very few institutions have programmes such as vocational training for those over 16 years, this implies that many individuals who are mentally challenged do not get opportunities to realize their potential and generally live lives of neglect. Shristi tries to help by identifying skills of such children, nurture them and help them grow these skills into a vocation by which they can try to lead a normal life. They also have tie ups with some of the regular schools where they can send children who have recovered.

The intervention programme offers system and routine for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder and children with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. A combination of therapeutic approaches is provided to manage the multi symptomatic presentation of inattention, overactivity and impulsivity along with other clinical symptoms.

We spent a good couple of hours there, had lunch with the teachers and some other volunteers, and soon, it was time to leave. We went back to the classrooms, to say good bye to the kids. They went away with their teacher and came running to us with gifts to remember them by.

As I stood outside gazing at the green fields around me, the children waving good bye to us, I couldn’t help marvel at these kids trying to etch out a living, the small group of dedicated individuals who were trying to help make a difference these kids and contrast it with the extravagant inconsequentialities my own daily life held. I knew I wanted to come back here more often…

Introduction to Edward Said, Orientalism and Postcolonial studies

Amardeep has a superb post today on orientalism and post colonialism of Edward Said taken from his talk at Lehigh. Very nice general introduction.

Democratisation of the UN

Yesterday, our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called out for reform in the UN Security Council in his first address at the UN General Assembly. Clearly calling out India's bid for a seat in the Security Council, Dr. Manmohan Singh carefully, and I think intelligently, avoided drawing out too much attention to Kashmir, much as Parvez Musharraf did the same in his address the day before. "What is missing is our sustained commitment to the democratisation of the United Nations," he told the UN's general assembly in New York. Here is the transcript of the speech by Dr. Singh.

Nitin had a very informative recent post on India's bid for a UN Security Council seat, including the international politics happening between India, Japan, Brazil, and Germany. Obviously, Pakistan is against India's bid, China is hesitant about both India and Japan, but has apparently indicated that it might side India, if India opposes Japan.

Within the General Assembly, all nations regardless of wealth, military power etc., have one vote. The same is true in the specialist agencies (Economic & Social Council, International Court of Justice, etc.) - one nation one vote. In contrast is the veto system at the Security Council for its permanent members (US, GB, China, France, Russia). This has been challenged by the newer members of the UN who want one nation one vote in the Security Council as well. The five permanent members of the Security Council have fought to keep the system as it is claiming that as the five permanent members invest far more money into the UN’s budget and, as a result, should have more sway than nations that pay far less into the UN’s budget.

Some numbers here: in 1985, America provided the UN with 25% of its budget; the USSR provided 10.5%; Angola 0.01% and Saudi Arabia 0.86%. If the ‘Big Five’ withdraw their financial support or reduce it to the level of other nations in the UN, then the UN itself would face near bankruptcy. Throughout the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s, the UN run up debts nearly totalling $1 billion. America pointed out that 85% of the UN’s budget was paid by just 20 nations yet many smaller nations were trying to reform the way the UN was run (especially its voting system) without making the same financial commitment to the UN.

So now, the UN appears to have split in two: the richer old established nations that essentially funded the UN on one side and the newly established but poorer nations on the other side. Within just 60 years of its birth, the UN is at a crossroads. If it divides into rich and poor nations, where does this leave the whole concept of all nations working for one common goal?

Related Links: Vijay Dandapani's guest column, BBC's analysis of India's bid

Gates of the Arctic

NPR has this amazing series of programs called NPR Radio Expeditions, a collaboration between NPR and National Geographic. The latest program is called Gates of the Arctic, a trip to one of the most remote places in the US - the Gates of the Arctic National Park, north of the Arctic Circle in the Brooks Range of Alaska. There are 8.5 million acres of wild country here, and some of the landmarks are unnamed -- the mountain passes, the lakes, the valleys full of caribou and grizzly bears.

Boy, am I glad these programs are online.

Ed Said Miscellany

Towards the end of The Politics of Dispossession, there are some essays on books and people - on Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem, Noam Chomsky, Nelson Mandela to mention a few.

Rarely have I read such a scathing review of any book, no matter what the content! Ed Said simply tears apart Friedman's book in this essay called The Orientalist Express: Thomas Friedman Wraps up the Middle East. I had been recommend Freidmans book as a classic on the Israel-Palestine conflict, I am not so sure anymore. To give a bit of a background, Friedman is a Jew who pretty much grew up in the US, studied Arabic and Jewish history at Brandeis and Oxford and went on to become a journalist, covering the Middle East for a good part of two decades. Said does say that the book is good reading despite its gargantuan length, except for the parts where "Friedman gets overly sentimental with his testimonials about his feelings, or when he offers advice to everyone about how much better they could be doing if they paid attention to him". He goes on - "What Friedman and the Orientalists espouse is a threadbare repertoire of often racist cliches, all of them bearing the marks of colonial knowledge now allied with Naipaulesque disenchantment". I read it to mean that Friedman is often quoting and preaching ideas or idealised situations that are just drawn from a theoretical knowledge of the situation and the incredibly disgusting condescending attitute that is so typical of Naipaul. If any of my readers think I am interpreting this wrong, please let me know...

In an intensely personal situation in one of the essays, Said describes how he & his family get back to the part of Palestine where he was born & grew up during his early years. After a while, they manage to find the house...now occupied by a right-wing Christian fundamentalist and militantly pro-Zionist family...."More than anything else, it was the house I did not, could not, enter that symbolised the eerie finality of a history that looked at me from behind the shaded windows, across an immense gulf I found myself unable to cross". Must have been an incredibly powerful feeling...

Poincare Conjecture Proved?

Last week, it was reported that the famous Poincare Conjecture might finally be proved. The Poincare conjecture is one of the Seven Millenium problems. A media-shy Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman is said to have proven a more general case of the conjecture. Here is Wolfram's MathWorld discussing the news. This is also a highly mathematical description of the problem, so for the rest of us, here is a layman's version about what the conjecture is about. More links here, and here.

The conjecture is about topology, or the study of shapes. It is the study of the properties of an object that do not change under continuous deformations (such as stretching and bending (but not tearing)). Just as there is only one way to bend a two-dimensional plane into a shape without holes -- the sphere -- there is likewise only one way to bend three-dimensional space into a shape that has no holes. If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. We say the surface of the apple is "simply connected," but that the surface of the doughnut is not.

Poincaré, almost a hundred years ago, knew that a two dimensional sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity, and asked the corresponding question for the three dimensional sphere (the set of points in four dimensional space at unit distance from the origin). This question turned out to be extraordinarily difficult, and mathematicians have been struggling with it ever since.

Though abstract, the conjecture has powerful practical implications - apparently from the study of DNA knot formation and protein folding to the shape of the universe.

To Outsource or not

Following up on the previous post on Paul Samualeson's outsourcing comments, Deep pointed me to this blog of Daniel Drezner, a pro-outsourcing Republican and an assitant professor of political science at Univ of Chicago. I would recommend you to read the whole post, but here a few interesting notes. Daniel asks the following questions:

1) Just how many well-educated workers are there in China and India?
2) Will U.S. firms have an incentive to offshore sophisticated value-added work in areas where the United States currently has a comparative advantage?
3) Will the United States continue to be a locus for value-added innovations?
4) To what extent are wages and employment in the affected industries declining because of outsourcing as compared to technological innovation standardizing and commodifying what used to be highly complex (and highly paid) tasks?

In the past, my answers to these questions have been a) not as many as you think; b) no, c) yes, and d) not a lot.

Of course, these economists & political scientists are way, way more brilliant and qualified than me, but here are my views:

1. Ok, so I may not be entirely right, but about (1) above, I am not aware of any research study that actually details these numbers, but at least in India, I daresay the number of qualified professionals will be a good number. In addition to the hundreds of undergraduate colleges specializing in engineering, there are literally zillions of professional training institutes that impart the necessary training to non-engineering students (with pretty much any backgrounds - commerce, biology, physics, etc.). This is surely some trend to reckon with. While this has certainly done a lot of damage to the lack of encouragement and opportunities for students with interests in advanced degrees in the fields of pure science, literature, etc. this has certainly contributed to the ease of availability of well-qualified professionals.
2. About outsourcing sophisticated work, I believe we are now seeing this trend. The main reason, and I strongly feel about this being true - most corporations are realizing that the US is not the only place with smart/qualified people who can do research in advanced science and engineering fields. One has to only look at the large corporations setting up advanced R&D centers all over the world, especially India & China. India has research labs set up by Texas Instruments, Lucent Technologies, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Daimler Chrysler, GE (the more recent Jack Welsh research center), IBM, to name a few. According to some studies I recently read about, Bangalore has had one of the highest VC funding for biotech companies recently. A recent article on NY Times talks about China becoming a hotbed of advanced research and innovation.
3. The US still has a very strong advantage and will continue to be the locus of advanced technology in pure science and engineering research. However, the other growing Asian giants - South Korea, Japan definitely have more "technology penetration" as compared to the US. A recent article on Fortune just shows how far ahead S. Korea is with 75% broadband penetration (as compared to a little over 20% for the US), they even have gigabit to the home! WoW! This naturally fuels an immense amount of digital content being pumped into these fat pipes, leading to a much faster adoption of technologies like digital TV, interactive video/TV, etc.
4. I am not sure how many jobs have actually moved from the US to India/China/elsewhere, but here is a recent article from Seattle Post Intelligence that claims that the US has lost over 400K jobs since 2001.

Although outsourcing has done its good bit for the Indian economy and lifestlyes people lead here, especially in Bangalore (I havent seen too many other cities), there are certainly some ill effects that I see. These are highly subjective, and I will try to organize them in another post. That is it about it on outsourcing for today.

On Outsourcing

Well, outsourcing has been talked about a lot. A more recent article is this one from NY Times (you might be required to register at NY Times) by Paul Samuelson, the Nobel prize winning economist, now at MIT. I think his strong point about long term outsourcing could lead to wage losses in the US ("If you don't believe that outsourcing changes the average wages in America, then you believe in the tooth fairy") was true (see Amardeep's blog also), especially with highly technical research and development work also being outsourced in addition to just things that made simply economical sense. I didnt quite get the rebuttal by Jagdish Bhagwati (In Defence of Globalization):

Mr. Bhagwati and his co-authors write that such an assessment of the education systems of India and China "almost borders on the ludicrous." In an interview, Mr. Bhagwati said, "You have a lot of people, but that doesn't mean they are qualified. That sort of thinking is really generalizing based on the kind of Indian and Chinese people who manage to make it to Silicon Valley." The Samuelson model, Mr. Bhagwati said, yields net economic losses only when foreign nations are closing the innovation gap with the United States.

An interesting point, but I think education turnout (in terms of number of students graduating), at least upto the undergraduate level is much more in India and China than the US. Bangalore alone produces over 35,000 undergraduates from different streams each year.

On the down side, I have heard some really sad stories about people being exploited in call centers here in Bangalore. I am trying to find some press articles on this, more on this soon.

I have been blogged!

Thanks to Amardeep for linking me from his blog! That was a nice surprise. Ever since that, I have been under a self-imposed pressure to keep up the writing! I would like to add that conversations with him have always been quite thought provoking - the last time we met up in Bombay we discussed a gamut of topics - from Ed Said & the Zionist movements (I really didnt know the differences between Zionism and anti-Semitism, so much for my reading:)) to the modernism of Rabindranath Tagore.

Why is the question "Is P=NP?" important?

There was this recent article on Technology Review by Simon Garfinkel, a researcher in computer security at MIT on the relevance on the question "Is P=NP?" as it relates to computer security. The question whether P equals NP has been on the seven "Millenium Problems" by the Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge, MA.

There is a nice overview article of the relationship between P and NP, although I was a bit surprised to see that he mentions that mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists are "racing to dismantle" this fragile foundation. I am not a theoretical CS guy, but I think Lance Fortnow's recent post on this article made sense - that mathematicians are not really in a race to prove (or disprove) the question.

Here is a superb overview paper on the P versus NP debate by Michael Sipser, a pioneer of theoretical CS and complexity theory at MIT, that includes a translation of letters from Godel to Von Neuman on the topic.

The Science of Word Recognition

I came across this fascinating paper in cognitive psychology on how we recognize words. It is called "The Science of Word Recognition or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma". It is by Kevin Larson, a disgracefully young cognitive psychologist at Microsoft Research's Advanced Reading Technology Group. I highly recommend this paper, it was absolutely fascinating to even learn about the basics of the theories of word recognition. Apparently bouma means the shape of the word. One of the theories of word recognition says that we recognize words from their shape, and psychologists call this image the "bouma shape". This is however, not thought to be true anymore. The bulk of scientific evidence says that we recognize a word’s component letters, then use that visual information to recognize a word. In addition to perceptual information, we also use contextual information to help recognize words during ordinary reading, but that has no bearing on the word shape.

Anyways, I will let Kevin's paper do the talking.

The Acre and the Goat

I did manage to get through Part 3 of NPR's radio show on Middle East: A Century of Conflict. Also a couple more essays from Edward Said's The Politics of Dispossession. I am now at a very intersting review of the shaping of American foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine. More on this soon.

Continuing my previous recap of the historical events in the tumultous history of the middle east:

The Creation of Israel

• By 1939, Britain was finding it difficult to control the strife between the Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In not small measure, the millions of Jewish immigrants into Palestine as a result of the holocaust before, during and after WWII did not aid to the situation. The world at large, was generally sympathetic about the injustice done to the Jews. Britain did place a ceiling limit on the immigration, this only enraged the Jews and wide protests against the British resulted. This was also the time that saw the rise of future Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion, and the extreme right-wing Yitzhak Shamir.
• By 1946, Britain handed over the problem to the UN, which had just been formed a year ago. The Jews were being offered 55 percent of Palestine when in fact they had owned only 7% of the country. 450,000 Palestinians were going to end up within the Jewish state, and they did not see any reason why they should go along with that kind of inequality. According to historians, the Arabs were not politically organized to handle the situation.
• The UN General Assembly voted for the creation of Israel, and thus Israel was born. Immediately full scale war broke out, but the Arab armies were weak and disorganized and Israel ended up occupying more territory (78%) than it was granted. The majority of Palestinians became refugees, and Palestine - the geographical term Palestine - disappeared from the map.
• The Palestinians fled to refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza, and what is now called the West Bank. Thousands with their children and grandchildren live in those camps until now. And from those camps would spring the Palestinian movement -- the guerrilla fighters and bombmakers and political leaders -- who would continue to fight Israel and challenge its right to exist, down to this day.

The Acre and the Goat - the title for this post comes from Ed Said's book. In one of the essays, Said addresses the general ignorance in the West about the origin of the situation in Israel, due to the silence of most Western intellectuals on what happened in Palestine in 1948 and the effects of an extremely efficient American and Israeli propaganda machine. The view is widespread in the West that the Zionists settled in a largely uninhabited land in 1948 and that they 'made the desert bloom'. Nothing could be further from the truth, Said says. About 750,000 Palestinians, 70 % of the population, were forcefully made to flee their homes and became refugees in surrounding countries. Before 1948, only about 7% of the land in Palestine was owned by Jews. This increased to about 50% after 1948. In 1967, the Israelis annexed East Jerusalem and occupied the rest of historic Palestine. One of the founding fathers of Zionism is supposed to have remarked that their plan was to acquire all the land in Palestine 'acre by acre, goat by goat', hence the title.

Said also doesn't spare Arafat and his followers in the PLO, criticising their undemocratic, corrupt and brutal practices, including the widespread use of torture. Although the Jews have suffered the holocaust, this does not give them right to oppress others, he says, at the same time he distances himself from other Arabs who think the Holocaust is not their problem. Sadly, most efforts at peaceful dialogues with sympathetic Israelis is frowned upon in much of the Arab world as 'normalization' with Israel.

The least I can say is that I am deeply saddened by this conflict. I wish there were a peaceful way of resolving this...how many more millions have to die....but then, that is me...