My brown-skin baby they take him away, re-visited

For some reason, lately, people are looking for Bob Randall’s masterpiece, My Brown-skin baby (they take him away), and finding this previous post, containing that song and a few others, including some poetry.

If this is you, please feel free to email me for the song – it’s no longer sitting at the other end of that link, but I’m happy to share it with you.

WTO: herding cats is childs-play

News today that the World Trade Organisation is having another go at securing any sort of positive result from the Doha round of trade negotiations.

For the record, and as I’ve intimated previously, I do not envy these people their jobs. I’m sure the money is good, and I’m sure there is some heady power on hand, but I still would not like to do it. The job:

The trade body issued a lengthy proposal in Geneva laying out possible compromises by 150 countries involved in the trade talks, which officials said was aimed at breaking a deadlock on myriad trade issues that have eluded compromise since last summer.

Key words: “lengthy” and “150 countries” – and that is only after getting a handful of principal countries to agree. Ratification by 150?

Intransigence is another appropriate word:

The Bush administration reacted cautiously to the new document, which calls on the United States to lower its so-called trade-distorting farm subsidies to a range of $13 billion to $16.5 billion a year. The last U.S. offer in the talks was to lower them to $17 billion a year. In 2005 the United States paid out $19.7 billion in farm subsidies, a figure that fell in 2006 to $12 billion as food prices rose. But Americans say that, historically, they have been much higher.

…

The proposed reduction in farm subsidies is likely to be opposed by American farmers, even though the numbers are in the range of what subsidies have been in the last couple years. But American farmers worry that the need for subsidies could rise if world food prices fall in future years.

“Compromise” is the final word:

Last summer discussions were suspended outright when Europe and the United States refused to lower their farm barriers beyond what was being demanded by the developing world.

Efforts to restart the talks, most recently among the United States, Europe, Brazil and India last month in Potsdam, Germany, ended in discord, with Schwab accusing India and Brazil of backpedaling on what they had been willing to offer in terms of lower barriers to farm and industrial products from the West.

Many trade officials involved in the talks, speaking anonymously, say that India and Brazil are fearful of lowering their trade barriers on industrial goods because of a concern that China will move in and wipe out their new industries, much the way Chinese competition has hurt manufacturing in the West.

Schwab used tough language toward India and Brazil last month, charging that their trade barriers were hurting the poorest 60 or 70 countries of the world, many in Africa, more than they were hurting the rich countries.

India and Brazil countered angrily that the United States was keeping its own subsidies of farm products high. Some officials said that India and Brazil had been prepared to lower their tariff barriers but decided against it because of what they viewed as intransigence in Europe and the United States.

Will this work? Honestly, no. Probably not. For a start, the Bush administration can hardly afford to piss off the GOP base further. Cheney may be happy with 13% approval ratings, but he must be the only one. Even Republicans aren’t that out of touch with reality. New French president Sarkozy’s belief that pigeons are for putting cats among will also not help – in the near-term, at least – EU cohesion. And that still leaves 130-odd countries, including Brazil, India and China. Compared to this, cats herd themselves.

Wind power

First, here is what I had considered, without question, the coolest use of wind power:

That’s right: OMFG! Yes: amongst others, SkySails (“Turn wind into profit!”, sadly, is their slogan – come on, people) are in the business of wind-powered supertankers. If you consider that shipping post I put up the other day, it’s not such a bad idea. Consider (again) the traffic out there:

How much could we stand to benefit from needing less oil for each of those (not just in terms Consumption, but terms Pollution and terms Environmental Catastrophe)?* It is, for me, a perfect example of intelligent designs for optimising the use of renewable fuels. Principally, besides how freaking awesome a kite-powered supertanker would be, this is because it employs Wind for a purpose for which Oil has, by and large, a huge advantage: transit. We cannot just plug sunlight, or wind, or (yet) garbage etc. into our cars. An application that can effectively substitute or supplement conventional fossil-fuel-powered engines with renewable-fuel power should be applauded, loudly. The engineers responsible should get all the girls. Or boys. Or both, but I really do draw the line there.

Today, I saw a competitor for this genius (it’s cool: I’m not the judge or anything): airborne wind-turbines. I.e., plugging wind into your house. From the makes-me-green-with-envy blog Inhabitat:

OMFG²! (that was really very sad, I am aware).

San Diego based Sky WindPower is developing a kite-like 1,100 pound Flying Electric Generator (FEG) capable of producing power for as little as two cents per kilowatt hour and flying between 15,000 and 30,000 feet. Four rotors at the points of an H-shaped frame provide the necessary lift to keep the platform floating in the air like a kite. Electricity generated by the spinning rotors is transmitted to the ground through aluminum cables tethered to the frame.

Score! One can only imagine what the Don’t Windmill-up Our Pretty View crowd will think of this:

Which is another idea: the laddermill, a series of wing-mounted turbines.

Speaking which, you might like to consider – if you are interested in such things – this approach to making wind turbines more approachable: put an observation deck in them.

Personally I quite like them, though I’m disinclined to go near one (I also don’t like going more than 4 stories up in any given building, or standing too close to them – I avoided as much as possible the front of the York Minster. I don’t care how long it’s been there: I just don’t trust buildings).

Just imagine, though, what might be achieved with even a little of the money governments pump into nuclear. I would remind you, meanwhile, that an earthquake won’t cause a wind turbine to leak radioactive material.

*Caveat: I am aware of the flipside to this, that lowering the economic and (potential) environtal costs could lead to a greater-still proliferation in sea-borne shipping, which could itself do more harm than good. On this point I would call myself agnostic, I guess. I don’t know whether or not it would, and I don’t know whether I think it would be a good thing or a bad thing.

Bear Stearns’ coffee spoons laid out

A reference to a previous post. I probably should have noticed this earlier in the day, but I’ve been watching DragonBall Z and painting on the wall in the kitchen.

The losses, properly counted, of Bear Stearns’ (with apologies to Lynne Truss) funds? Immense:

Bear Stearns on Tuesday told investors in two stricken hedge funds managed by the bank that one fund had lost all its value and the other had about nine cents remaining for every dollar invested following bad bets on the US subprime mortgage market.

…

The two funds at one point had more than $20bn in investments, much of it using borrowed money.

The funny thing about this, to me, is a neat story I did spot this morning, in the Financial Times, insisting that the market was fine (no, it is not some financial-analyst cousin of The Lunatic Bill Kristol).

Bear Stearns the company did not suffer too heavily for the worse-than-expected results:

If you look at the 3-month trend, you’ll see it’s mostly the same – small rallies interrupting a continued slide.

I loved also the news of whose head came off:

Warren Spector, co- president, is widely viewed as a possible successor to James Cayne, who is 73. However, Mr Spector was ultimately responsible for the subprime funds.

I like the idea that, in this game of pass-the-Frankendebt, one guy can be called ‘ultimately responsible’. “First publicy burned”, sure.

Mapping deprivation in England, and how it strengthens Democracy

From the Guardian, today:

Poor and wealthy households in Britain are becoming more and more segregated from the rest of society as the UK faces the highest inequality levels for 40 years, according to a study published today.

A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation provides a groundbreaking geographical analysis of changes in the distribution of wealth over time, and reveals an increasingly divided nation.

What I particularly liked about this story was not the ratification of that which anybody could have told you – that inequality is increasing in Britain, that the Noth/South divide is growing stronger and that urban clustering of poverty is increasing – but the use of so-called cartogram maps in presenting the results:

These are from the Guardian’s article, rather than the original report (whose images are not so easily-read). Although funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the work itself was by the Social and Spatial Inequalities Research Group at Sheffield University. I found the insanely delightful worldmapper via them, a while back. With these one can compare, for example, carbon emissions:

with population:

with, I don’t know, loss of forests:

Neat, no? So far the greatest visual display of information I have seen is Napoleon’s March by Charles Joseph Minard, a man whose position relative to his time blows my mind. The advances in Geographical Information Systems, which I have still to learn, are rapidly overtaking, though. A colleague of mine at the Centre for Health Economics uses it in his research, the bastard.

Empowering voters through statistics

Back to the deprivation report (the Social and Spatial Inequalities Research Group have their own maps page, also). The importance of this is with regard to the dissemination of information, of findings of research. With apologies to all those so philosophically mis-aligned as to believe, still, in Fukuyama (except the psychos and dicks from the Project for the New American Century, to whom no apology is warranted, for anything, ever), the US is not an application of the theory of democracy (big or little ‘D’), it is the embarrassment of the stagnation of representative democracy.

What this form of presentation of analytical results achieves, then, is the democratisation of statistics, demographics, etc. Knowledge, if you prefer, about the social, demographic, socioeconomic, etc. landscape in which we live. And by so doing, enable/empower ‘the public’ to enter, generate or influence the debate about the welfare of their society. I’m not suggesting people are stupid (although I believe Tommy Lee Jones was correct), but there’s a big difference between reading through a vaguely-made-prose set of statistics, and seeing the same information laid out, visually, legibly and accessibly, on a map.

The counter-argument, I would expect, is that it ‘dumbs down’ information, etc. I’m as sensitive to that as anybody else (I see I’m not alone disliking Harry Potter, by the way), but I don’t see this as the same. Some people, many people (most of my bloody students!) just do not respond to numbers. We take most of our information in visually – why not take advantage of that? In this instance, socioeconomic maps inform readers that what they they may thought was peculiar to their town, their class, their times, may (or may not) in fact be systematic, nation-wide: a matter for public policy to address. Consider this quote from the same story:

The employment minister, Caroline Flint, said: “Our commitment to ensuring everyone shares the nation’s increasing wealth has resulted in the rising trend of inequality recently stabilising. Since 1997, 600,000 children and over 1 million pensioners have been lifted out of poverty.”

Standard fare from politicians: have a statistic that supports our argument that we’re doing well, and so are you – even if you, the reader, personally, are not. The context of the quote is missing, though, entirely. For a start, so many children have been born since 1997, and so many people have retired, that those numbers might have turned out purely from demographics, not public policy. Moreover, what we want, why we vote, is for our government of the day to acknowledge, understand and address issues of the day. We won’t manage that by letting government and newspapers tell us what those issues are, while we aren’t able – or do not have the time – to sort through the information to find our own priorities. American readers, for example, may wonder why the New York Times, Washington Post, Fox News, etc. do not carrying stories such as this (mostly it’s because they are shit, while the Guardian is very good).

It’s just a thought. In the meantime, I encourage you to go and play with the worldmapper.