After the explosions at the British consulate last night, at Third Avenue and 50th Street, there were lots of extra police around this morning at the UNDP and the main UN building.
[barefoot and learning]
Topic: Development
More on the subject of educational experiments in the developing world: BBC News has a photo essay on Barefoot College, which teaches basic skills and provides basic services to poor Indians in rural villages. Favorite quote:
Bhanwar Gopal, an artist from the Barefoot College, prepares masks for plays and puppet shows with material from recycled World Bank reports.
“We keep getting these reports that no one reads, so we decided to put them to some use,” Mr Roy says.
Learn more here.
[the nuclear option]
Topic: Disarmament
Fred Kaplan at Slate provides a useful summary of the issues at stake at the NPT Review Conference currently taking place in New York. His perspectives, furthermore, are quite similar to my own, and they’re in line with South Korea’s approach as well, although some of the more exotic suggestions — an anti-proliferation expeditionary force, for example — are no one’s stated policy, and I would have to think seriously about them before deciding they made sense.
Hopefully Ambassador Kim’s Deputy Minister Chun Yung-woo’s statement at the coference, which I worked on in its early stages, will be up on the Korean Mission website soon.
Update: The speech is now available here.
[the worst place on earth]
Topic: North Korea
Korea by night.
Christopher Hitchens argues in Slate that North Korea is a slave state, worse than the dystopia of Orwell’s 1984, where the entire population is not only enslaved but starving.
Hitchens concludes with a set of recommendations:
It seems to me imperative that the human rights movement, hitherto unpardonably tongue-tied about all this, should insistently take up the case of North Korea and demand that an underground railway, or perhaps even an overground one, be established. Any Korean slave who can get out should be welcomed, fed, protected, and assisted to move to South Korea. Other countries, including our own, should announce that they will take specified numbers of refugees, in case the current steady trickle should suddenly become an inundation.
I think he’s on the right track. We may not have a solution to the North Korea problem immediately at hand, any more than we had a solution to the Soviet problem in the 1980s, but the policy then of highlighting human rights abuses, shaming the Soviets and supporting dissidents was morally and tactically the right one, and the same should be true for North Korea today.
[peppermania]
Topic: Music
On June 2, 1967, my parents spent the day in the car. They were in Pennsylvania then, bored witless in the town of State College, where my father was getting an MBA from Penn State because it seemed like a better option than getting drafted and going to Vietnam, and my mother was working toward her (never finished) Ph.D. in German because they kept paying her more to be a graduate student than she could make being a secretary. I happen to know that they spent June 2 in the car because that’s the date that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in the United States, and I grew up with the story of how my parents drove around all day, listening to radio reports on the progress of the truck bearing the precious records to the local store.
As I got older and began to explore the Beatles for myself, I came to wonder just what it was about Sgt. Pepper that made it such a phenomenon. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great record. It deserves massive praise, and I love it dearly. It’s just that I couldn’t figure out why it was Sgt. Pepper and not its predecessor, Revolver, that got all the attention. Just like Sgt. Pepper, Revolver delves into Indian music, features a string quartet, has socially conscious lyrics and makes explicit reference to psychedelia. What did Sgt. Pepper have that Revolver didn’t?
A complete US release, that’s what. From the enormously helpful beatles-discography.com, I learned that the American release of Revolver is missing “I’m Only Sleeping,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and the all-important “Doctor Robert,” all three of which were released on Yesterday … And Today instead. Considering that the full version of Revolver is only 34 minutes, the truncated US release would have been barely more than an EP.
Sgt. Pepper, by contrast, was famously a complete album, not just a collection of songs. In fact, it was the first Beatles record that was the same in the UK and the US. And it benefitted from association with the singles that came out around the same time and were being talked up as part of the Sgt. Pepper sessions. In particular, “Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane” had come out in February, and people thought of them as part of Sgt. Pepper even though they weren’t on the final album. Likewise, “All You Need Is Love/Baby You’re a Rich Man” came out in July to much fanfare, so it would have been part of the blitz of radio play that accompanied Sgt. Pepper, which in turn was part of a tremendous sense of excitement around the Summer of Love.
So, as I had long suspected, the awe with which Sgt. Pepper is regarded, compared to other Beatles records, had as much to do with the particulars of time and place as with the actual music.
[how did you learn computers?]
Topic: Development
How did you first learn to use computers? If you’re under 40, chances are that you did it on your own, learning through trial and experiment on everything from a Commodore Vic 20 at the library to an Atari 2600 at your neighbor’s house to the Apple IIe in your middle school’s lab. The little bit of organized training I got in the Logo language was not nearly so helpful as just having a Commodore 64 on my desk, and it was not the earnest typing programs my parents bought me but the engrossing role-playing game Exodus: Ultima III and its successors that taught me to type. It seems that children have an innate ability to grasp complex computer technology with almost no instruction.
A new charity called Hole in the Wall is taking advantage of this idea by making Internet-enabled computers available to the poorest of poor children in India. According to a BBC News article, an Indian IT professional, Sugata Mitra, was struck by the disparity between his tech-savvy coworkers and the urchins sleeping in shanties just beyond the perimiter of his fancy IT campus. And he decided to do something about it, building kiosks that would give these street children access to computers (the kiosks are designed to keep out adults).
The results are astounding. Illiterate children quickly pick up not just computer skills, but also rudimentary English. As Sugata puts it, “Groups of children given adequate digital resources can meet the objectives of primary education on their own.” The implication of all this is that computer kiosks may be more cost effective — indeed, more effective, period — than human teachers.
So far, there isn’t nearly enough evidence to prove such a radical notion. But if Hole in the Wall merely brings literacy and education to a few hundred of India’s poorest children, who would otherwise go without, that strikes me as a good start.
[asian festival on sunday]
Topic: Around Town
This Sunday from 12 to 6 p.m. is the 26th annual Asian Pacific American Heritage Festival in Union Square. I’ve never been, but the website promises martial arts demonstrations, a mini film festival, food (of course!) and information tables galore. So if you’ve been dying to get your hands mendhied while you eat Filipino spring rolls, this is your weekend.
Also, they’re looking for volunteers.
Hope to see you there!
[sure, they all look alike, but …]
Topic: Around Town
A hint to the tourists: Koreans aren’t Chinese.
[metal mania]
When Jenny and I went to see Madeleine Albright recently, we had to pass through metal detectors to get into the auditorium. Considering the security atmosphere after 9/11, and considering that we were going to see the former Secretary of State, a little security was hardly surprising.
But here’s the thing. I walked through the metal detector. It beeped. And nothing happened.
In the lobby of the Korean Mission there is now a metal detector that does the same trick. You walk through it, and inevitably it beeps. Does this lead the security guard in his booth to stir from his taxing work of chatting on his cell phone? Not at all! And it isn’t just that I’m an employee and so above suspicion. No one is stopped. The metal detector is there simply to beep at anyone who comes into the building with a belt buckle, a katana sword or a small steel box of plutonium. (It will not, however, detect a glass vial of sarin gas or an anus full of plastic explosives.)
Considering that walk-through metal detectors run around three or four grand, you have to wonder who’s authorizing these purchases, and why. Unless there’s someone behind the metal detector who makes sure that you’ve revealed all your metal and passed through clean, all the metal detector does is beep. Without the human element, the metal detector is about as helpful as a truncheon without a cop attached.
But people love things that beep (truncheons do not), and perhaps people feel more secure knowing for absolute certain that there is metal inside the building. In the end, these proliferating metal detectors are just very expensive cupholders: devices to make you feel more secure, even as you’re becoming less so.
[npt review conference]
Today is the start of the 2005 Review Conference of the Parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. As happens every five years, representatives of the States Parties to the treaty — which at this point means every country on the planet except India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea — gather to discuss non-proliferation and disarmament and to consider ways to strengthen the NPT regime to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.
The conference in 2000 was only the second after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it was the first in decades to conclude with an agreed set of recommendations. Not only that, but it affirmed that the former Soviet states had renounced their nuclear weapons and become NPT members as non-nuclear weapon states.
The mood then was positive, but the last five years have been difficult. The good news is that Libya has given up its weapons. The bad news is that North Korea has developed nuclear weapons and withdrawn from the treaty, Iran is moving toward doing the same, disarmament has stalled completely (the treaty calls not just for limiting the spread of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states, but also for nuclear weapon states — China, France, Russia, the UK and the US — to reduce their stockpiles toward zero), the US is threatening to develop and test new weapons, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty has stalled, and the A.Q. Khan network in Pakistan has shown how easily nuclear materials might be diverted to terrorists.
All is not well.
One of the biggest issues on the table is how to limit trade in weapons-grade nuclear fuel. Under the NPT, compliant states have the right to nuclear technology for peaceful purposes including energy. The problem is that it’s very easy to convert such technologies, especially those for reprocessing spent fuel or enriching uranium, into weapons programs. There is now talk of banning such reprocessing and enrichment outright, limiting it to a small number of nuclear suppliers under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency. For countries like South Korea that rely on nuclear energy, this may ask too much: can they really be expected to put their national security in the hands of a suppliers group that could, at least theoretically, jack up prices or cut off supplies for political reasons?
It will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes of this conference. The UN News Centre has an article on Kofi Annan’s opening statements. I’ll post more as things develop.