Relative Priorities

When is a mobile phone more important than food? Or when is having a satellite dish antenna based TV system more important than having a better house? When you are talking about Iraqi Refugees

On the other hand, the World Food Programme has announced that it will let Iraqi refugees in Syria know that food aid is available over sms on mobile phones.

Iraqi refugees in Syria will this week start receive U.N. text messages they can redeem for fresh food in local shops, the World Food Programme said on Tuesday.

The "virtual vouchers" worth $22 per family every two months will supplement traditional aid which rarely includes perishable goods, WFP spokeswoman Emilia Casella said, announcing the pilot project supported by the mobile company MTN.

...

The Syrian pilot will initially reach 1,000 beneficiaries in and around Damascus, and may be extended, the WFP said. Casella described it as a way to help refugees eat a more diversified diet while also supporting local farmers and businesses.

"We are not giving food away, we are actually creating an additional market for local shopkeepers," she said.

Quite an interesting situation, eh? where entertainment and communications are of higher priority than food and shelter. World is definitely changing for the better? (I think)

Why doesnt education actually help Africans?

This paper made me sit up. If a country like Nigeria, which contains 1/5th of the population of the entire African continent, one of the best educated countries, with perhaps one of the best resourced landscapes shows a return for education of approximately 2-3% (the increase in personal  income for every additional year of schooling) compared to approximately 10% for the USA, then its not surprising that quite a lot of the educated middle class of Nigeria (and rest of Africa) is trying to emigrate out of Africa into the western nations.

The abstract of the paper is as follows:

In the last two decades, the social and economic benefits of formal education in Sub-Saharan Africa have been debated. Anecdotal evidence points to low returns to education in Africa. Unfortunately, there is limited econometric evidence to support these claims at the micro level. In this study, I focus on Nigeria, a country that holds 1/5 of Africa's population. I use instruments based on the exogenous timing of the implementation and withdrawal of free primary education across regions in this country to consistently estimate the returns to education in the late 1990s. The results show the average returns to education are particularly low in the 90s, in contrast to conventional wisdom for developing countries (2.8% for every extra year of schooling between 1997 and 1999). Surprisingly, I find no significant differences between OLS and IV estimates of returns to education when necessary controls are included in the wage equation. The low returns to education results shed new light on both the changes in demand for education in Nigeria and the increased emigration rates from African countries that characterized the 90s.

Are you going to blame bad governments? corruption? bad technology? health problems? Geo political issues? Or what have you? At end of the day, the policy prescription has always been to increase the spend in education. See this graph for the implementation of free education in Nigeria:

The author states that the African continent lost 60,000 professionals in just 5 years between 1985 and 1990. That is a huge migration and loss for the countries concerned, specially when you consider how difficult it would be to train a lawyer, doctor, university lecturers in countries with resource constraints. And if this happens constantly, then the continent will be going into reverse! If this is what happens when you are educated, then its obvious that the enrolment rates are going to fall and economic development will fall.

Does greater education actually increase generational conflict?

This was quite an interesting if controversial paper. Its basically explained by the following chart.

 

 

As the authors state:

The flow chart illustrates the transition to a vicious cycle of population aging and a decline in public education. In the early phases of industrialization, compulsory schooling regulated child labor and promoted technological progress, thereby discouraging fertility. A major education reform was eventually triggered by the rise in the young's demand for skill acquisition. However, the increased population share of the old enlarged their political power to curtail the government budget for education. The resulting positive response of private education induced further fertility decline.

The authors review the Japanese, USA, British, French, German situations with respect to economic development, ageing, public education, child labour, poverty, etc. The basic premise is given above. I am not sure that this has been thought before but this requires much thought. Actually, what else can one do? Public education is required. Its important to educate society as the economic development happens to move from labour and agriculture intensive sector to intellectual property / knowledge sector employment. Increased automation will anyway force people to work on higher value add jobs or get demoted out of the labour market.

But running the statistics on the overall education spend on the OECD countries here, I am not sure that the level of educational spending is falling. I think this needs to be reviewed a bit more

Seafood medley

I was sort of told off last week from one of my chaps in India that I have stopped blogging and I should start it off. Well, here’s a tentative dip back into the wide world of blogging, lol.

Yesterday we were shopping for the Halloween Birthday party for the 2 witches at home (Joey’s birthday is 31st Oct and Diya’s birthday is 1st Nov) so we mix it up on Halloween day and then have decided to have a costume party :). Anyway, had quite a lot of fun with Karn in shopping for Halloween decorations.

Then we went to place an order for the cake at Waitrose. BTW, guys, Waitrose makes the bestest and greatest cakes :) Here’s one from last year when Ma was here and we celebrated her birthday. She is as ferocious and old as dinosaurs :)

 

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So there Kannu told me off for not having cooked for a long time. Ok, so asked him what he wants to eat and he expressed a desire for Salmon. So, went off to get a good set of Salmon fillets, then got some mussels and large prawns, some spring onions, some sugar snap peas (no spinach, they were all a bit limp), a small tin of 4 cheese sauce and some mushroom soup. It was a quick meal, heated up the soup, then cooked the mussels in some butter and garlic, tossed the prawns in some lemon and garlic. Grilled the fillets for 15 minutes. Boiled up some water with some vegetable stock and plonked the spring onions and sugar snap peas into it to steam a bit. Then all served up on a nice warm plate. He gobbled it all up and then, surprise of surprise, he kissed me, hugged me and said, thanks Dad for a great meal. Now we are talking, nice to know that his old dad can still get him up and going :)

Then we went for dessert. Ma (whom I met last weekend in Mumbai) made some of my favourite laddu’s. Sesame Laddu’s and Coconut Laddu’s. This tin was full up when she gave me last weekend and over the past week and here, you can see the depredations on this.

 

What factors drive Mathematics Achievement of students?

Quite an interesting paper, this one. The chaps analysed more than 100000 15 year old students and what did they find? Well, quite interestingly, they found that your scores in mathematics are better when:

• richer or more egalitarian countries;
• when living with two parents,
• without grandparents,
• with fewer siblings (especially fewer older siblings);
• with higher family SES,
• more books,
• cultural possessions,
• or cultural communication;
• or when they had greater interest in mathematics,
• more effort and perseverance,
• and higher self-efficacy or self-concept

Quite an interesting medley of factors, eh? Some surprises were there obviously. What on earth is the connection with grandparents? And nothing direct on teachers?

Arabs bear brunt of gene disorders

I am not sure if I mentioned this before but in the dim and distant past, i worked in the magic kingdom of Saudi Arabia and there, the wife of a friend of mine used to work in a maternity hospital. My friend is an expatriate with an international bank and has worked around the globe so his wife has experience of birthing internationally. Something that she said to me stuck to my mind, that she has never experienced the level of genetic disorders that she found in Saudi Arabia. I knew they usually go about marrying their cousins and frankly incestuous marriages are quite common, but…..

Here’s a more medically accurate report on this issue. I quote:

Arabs suffer from one of the highest rates of genetic disease in the world, according to a research institute. Some 906 genetic disorders have been identified in Arabs and their descendants, reports the Centre for Arab Genomic Studies (CAGS), and about 200 of those are prevalent among Arabs in the GCC alone.

So how big is this consanguinity problem?

About 63 per cent of the genetic conditions in Arab populations are due mostly to marriage between close relatives such as first cousins, clinically known as consanguinity.Such marriages, deeply ingrained in Arab culture, are on the rise in the UAE, where the rate is the fifth-highest in the Arab world. In Dubai, 40 per cent of marriages are between relatives, according to the latest statistics. In Al Ain that figure reaches 54 per cent, and in Abu Dhabi 32 per cent. Across the Arab world, Sudan and Mauritania have the highest rates, amounting to two-thirds of all marriages. However, consanguinity is on the decline in, for example, Egypt and Tunisia.

Will it change? I doubt it. In any case, I am sure it will turn out to be just a crusader or Zionist plot (just joking, for crissake!)

Are female students 'a perk of the job'?

Ouchie. The man is in trouble. I quote:

"Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

"Enjoy her! She's a perk."

Flashing a few literary allusions, he continued: "She doesn't yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife."

Displaying a more surprising familiarity with the etiquette at lapdancing clubs, Kealey added: "As in Stringfellows, you should look but not touch.

And the chap is a Vice Chancellor at a British University. Horny old goat. Well, there you go. BTW, no, its not allowed and most certainly one shouldn't do anything of this kind. Bad mistake and doesnt help out at all.

Does teacher quality affect student performance?

Yep, it sure does. As the old quote goes, the influence of a teacher ends at eternity. So what exactly is the impact? This paper investigated the impact of teacher quality on 1000 students in one Italian university. Guess what they found?

the researchers found that there is a statistically significant impact on student performance in subsequent courses. In other words, if you have a good teacher in the first year, then your performance in the later years would be much better than students who had crap teachers in the first year.

Another interesting result they found was that doing research doesnt really make that much of an impact on the students, and worse, if you are a teacher who does too much research, then the performance of a student actually gets impacted negatively.

Pretty sad, no? Our universities are rather mucked up, we drive our best teachers into the damn research organisations where they are worse for the students. And all the best teachers rarely teach the first years.

A Pakistani bibliophile fulminates

Sort of hit the spot for me. I can appreciate Masood’s angst.

This is of course very interesting and explains largely why we have continued to turn and twist inwards into our little shells because we simply do not wish to read any books any more. It is not difficult to conduct your own little survey and find out how bad things are. I frequently ask aspiring youngsters, both males and females, from some of the best universities and colleges and prosperous backgrounds, the name of the last book they have read and invariably have been treated to a show as they have looked heavenward, scratched their heads and wrung their hands but the name of the book has simply eluded them. Amazing. The conversation having by then degraded to lower levels, the next probes are names of authors they can recall, (Keat is one, Shakis – Pir another) but mostly it is, ‘sorry I can’t remember.’ Any book they read some time back that they liked? And here too most often, there is a large blank and a shake of the head. Of course no one reads newspapers and invariably no newspapers ever come into their homes. As for magazines, perhaps one or two but here too, they are unable to recall names. And it is more or less the same story at the numerous dinners and GTs that Pakistanis specialize in. There is never any talk of any book and no one is prepared to broach the subject almost as if doing so would in turn lead to a major catastrophe. But here I exaggerate. I would say that the notion of discussing a book simply does not figure anywhere on the agenda of most Pakistanis.

Protesting against Health Care

These were taken by somebody at the various rallies protesting against the Obama Healthcare initiative.

The mind boggles. But the best was Morans :)