brain

12 May 2017

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The Economist’s “A growing share of aid is spent by private firms, not charities” is worth reading as it crunches US and UK aid data to put numbers behind this trend: 25% of USAID and 22% of DFID spending went to private firms in 2016, both on the rise. The drivers behind this growth are: a shift from project-delivery to system-shaping requiring technical advice that firms are best equipped to provide; a “doing more with less” aid culture leading to more outsourcing; and private contractors’ ability to quickly match time-bound freelancer teams with complex development problems. Private contracts are also getting bigger leading to the market concentration of contractors and a growing number of consortium where small fish are used as “bid candy” by lead contractors. The Economist documents some of problems associated with these trends including higher delivery costs and risks of frauds, calling for aid agencies to take a close look at their bidding and contract practices.

WFP’s “At the root of exodus” puts numbers on the food/conflict/migration nexus. It models data from 88 countries with negative net migration and 178 countries with outflow of refugees during 1990-2015. It shows that the number of people migrating increases by 1.9% for each percent increase in the number of food-insecure people, and by 0.4% for each additional year of conflict. It also shows that migration can increase food insecurity both for those leaving and those staying behind, and that food insecurity is a significant determinant of the incidence and intensity of armed conflict. The study complements these findings with qualitative data collected through focus group discussions with 231 migrants from 10 countries in Greece, Italy, Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, and validated via 570 household phone surveys in Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. Once on the move, food and economic security are key determinants of whether people keep going or settle. Half of Syrians interviewed in Jordan and Lebanon want to move elsewhere while only a quarter of those in Turkey plan to.

My visual this week is from the Developing Human Connectome Project which just released its first open access data. The EU-funded project aims at creating 3D brain maps of fetuses and newborns to understand how the human brain develops and what triggers certain afflictions like autism. Adult brain maps already exists. So these guys are focusing on the 20-44 weeks post-conception window, and doing MRIs on hundreds of babies in the womb.

My quote this week is from Eurasia Ian Bremmer’s “The wave to come”: “Nationalism is alive and well, partly because the problems that provoked it are still with us. […] Now here’s the really bad news: an even larger crisis is coming. The popular fury convulsing Europe and the U.S. may well spill over into the rest of the world. Just as the financial crisis, which began in the West, produced rumbling aftershocks around the globe, so the nationalist explosion will rattle the politics of countries on every continent.”

5 May 2017

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The Financial Times Foreign Affairs chief Gideon Rachman published “Easternization: Asia’s rise and America’s decline from Obama to Trump and beyond”. I have not read the book but this interview gives the gist of the argument. It is not new, it strengthens the message around a trend that many have documented. What was interesting to me was Jessica Mathews saying that she was not convinced because (i) global leadership takes more than global economic (and even military) power; (ii) China has to balance between global, regional and national hot issues; and (iii) there are other forces in “the East”, such as the rise of India, that are still looking West. And what was equally interesting was to read, in parallel, Danny Quah’s (Eastern?) perspective. In “Can Asia lead the world?”, Quah agrees that it takes more than a growing economic, military and population footprint to lead globally. He argues that Asia’s leadership strategy should focus on soft power and that its driving values could be different from liberal democracy. Ultimately, he says that Asia will only be able to lead if it has a story. For him, that vision does not exist, yet.

Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson’s “Writing that works” is the book I recommended when a colleague asked me for guidance on improving writing skills. I love that book. It identifies the most common writing weaknesses and gives specific tips that you can use to practice, practice, and practice until you get it right. I don’t, so I go back to it regularly and am never disappointed. They give guidance on how to write memos that get things done, plans that make things happen, proposals that sell ideas, and resumes that get interviews. It is a good way to spend 11 dollars. At one point, I also had Josh Bernoff’s “10 top writing tips and the psychology behind them” pasted on the wall next to my desk so that I could check it from time to time. I should put it back.

My graph of the week is from NYU Center on International Cooperation’s Global Peace Operational Review which, among other things, tracks the new Secretary-General (SG)’s senior appointments (USG and ASG) throughout the system by gender and nationality. 17 male vs 14 female so far in 2017. That’s for his new appointees. Overall, at this level, the situation today is 71% male vs 29% female. Not great. The SG committed to reaching parity at senior level by 2021 and across the system before 2030 and he asked his Gender Parity Task Force to come up with a plan to get there. Let’s watch and see.

My quote this week is from 80-year old Nobel Prize Daniel Kahneman: “There are studies showing that when you present evidence to people they get very polarized even if they are highly educated. They find ways to interpret the evidence in conflicting ways. Our mind is constructed so that in many situations where we have beliefs and we have facts, the beliefs come first. That’s what makes people incapable of being convinced by evidence. So education by itself is not going to change the culture. Changing critical thinking through education is very slow and I’m not very optimistic about it.”

28 April 2017

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Tim Urban’s “Neuralink and the brain’s magical future” is a deep dive on the evolution of the brain from the first nerve appearing in a sponge 600 million years ago all the way to the future of brain-machine interface (BMI). I like Urban’s explain-this-to-me-like-I-am-a-5-year-old blog posts. They are long but entertaining. You can tell he spends hours going down the rabbit hole and processing tons of information to extract what the reader needs to know and to select the funniest, weirdest, and most beautiful illustrations. The post came out as Elon Musk launches Neuralink, a company developing BMI to connect humans and computers. Neuralink is the latest addition to Musk’s electric car/mega-battery/rocket/hyperloop futuristic empire. Musk’s plan is to “bring something to market that helps with certain severe brain injuries (stroke, cancer lesion, congenital) in about 4 years. [And he thinks that] we are about 8 to 10 years away from this being usable by people with no disability.” Before that announcement, the timeframe for having commercial BMIs for people without disability was 2050. So let me bring this home: his plan could make BMIs part of the “how” of reaching the SDGs.
When asked why he invested in this field, Musk responds that he tried to raise the alarm bell about the possible dangers of artificial intelligence [remember? the group of concerned tech/scientists writing that warning letter] with no traction, so he decided to go ahead and develop BMI options for the social good.
Should we invite him to the UN for an early conversation about BMI governance issues? He may enjoy this trip back in time. But in addition I would suggest that someone from the UN flies to San Francisco now to convince Musk to add an ethicist to Neuralink’s 8-member core team.

UNEP Inquiry’s “The financial system we need” is the second edition of a report that takes stock of the financial system’s alignment with sustainable development. It records a steady growth of sustainable finance initiatives across the banking, investment, and insurance sectors; a rapid expansion of the green bond market ($118 billion); and a growing number of supporting policies and regulatory measures (210 in 60 countries). While these represent only a fraction of the global financial system (eg. green bonds account for less than 1% of total bond issuance), the green movement has successfully infiltrated the finance world over the past decade and offers a number of lessons and opportunities on which the social sector can build from the pricing of externalities to the design of new financial instruments to the engagement with the G20.

My visual this week is from the WEF’s gender gap report browser. It’s the visual story of a decade worth of gender data from 144 countries. It is not new but was nominated for the 2017 Webby Awards for best web campaign, eventually given to UNWomen for their “Women footprint in history“, also really cool.

My quote this week is from Feedback Labs Dennis Whittle’s interview with Denver Frederick “when you put people into a system that does not face competition and that is top-down, and it has too much power, you get a culture where people are trying to impress each other more than having an impact on the ground where they are working. They’re listening to the voice of their colleagues rather than listening to the voice of the people that they seek to serve. That creates strange dynamics that are really unfortunate and sad.”

19 February 2016

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The “2016 Munich Security Report” came out ahead of the Munich Security Conference gathering diplomats, politicians, and military & security experts every February. A lot of dark suits and grey hair. It is a worth reading report with good illustrations. A few things that jumped at me: A table comparing ‘old’ international organizations with ‘new’ Chinese-led ones to show the creation of a parallel order [p.11]; a section on Daesh that raises more questions than provides answers – problematic for a prominent security report [18-22]; a map of Africa showing each country’s median age which I thought was a good reminder for those working with/for young people on the continent [p.32]; an assertion that “70 percent of nations worldwide explicitly qualify climate change as a national security concern” [p.44]. Discussions at the Conference itself were dominated by the Syrian conflict, the refugee crisis, and whether the NATO-Russia relation was heading towards a “new Cold War”. Noticeable was the first ever plenary session on global health security. While not much will be news to you, the growing emphasis on the health-security nexus in this forum matters for how it (re)frames the debate. Médecins sans Frontières President Joanne Liu urged attendees to not (i) focus on epidemic responses only (but also consider the security of health providers for instance), nor (ii) make national security the main driver of response (but rather follow humanitarian law).

Cesar Victora and al’s “Breastfeeding in the 21st century: epidemiology, mechanisms, and lifelong effect” pulls out a long list of killer facts from systematic reviews and meta-analyses on the relations between breastfeeding and children/mother outcomes: e.g., improving breastfeeding could save 820,000 under-5 children annually; longer breastfeeding can increase children’s IQ by 3 points; every year she breastfeeds, a mother reduces her risk of breast cancer by 6%. The wildest part of the research argues that the feeding mode was the second most important (after the delivery mode) determinant of an infant’s microbiome which in turn influences her immune and cognitive capacities. For more on this, get on page 486 of the paper and its super interesting references like this Nature article taking stock of the growing gut-to-brain research space.

My map this week is from Mekonnen and Hoekstra’s “Four billion people facing severe water scarcity”. Previous studies used annual water flow averages and large spatial units (river basin resolutions) to estimate that 1.7 to 3.1 billion people suffered severe water scarcity. This study focuses on monthly flows and uses a finer spatial resolution to show that 4 billion people are affected. That’s 2/3 of the world population! They live in areas with high population density, intense irrigated agriculture and/or low natural water availability. Half of them are in India and China.

My quote this week is from my son Liam confiding in his friend Oliver: “My mom works at UNICEF but doesn’t do the real UNICEF work; she just sits in front of a computer all day”.

4 December 2015

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You can add Frances Jensen’s “The teenage brain” to your Christmas gifts list. It is a useful and accessible read for anybody working with adolescents, including at home. She digests the latest neuroscience findings on brain development to show that adolescence is a critical window of vulnerabilities and opportunities. As connectivity of the brain matures from back to front lobes through childhood, 20% remains unwired when kids enter their teens. She shows the effects of stress, substance abuse, and physical shocks on the adolescent brain development and discusses implications for education and justice systems inter alia. This is mind-blowing stuff that Jensen thinks should be made widely available to practioners, parents and adolescents themselves. So we invited her to our Conversation with Thought Leaders series, see here.

Some of you asked me what I read about ISIS. Like many of you, probably too much. But here are some of the (non-book) write-ups that helped me think and take a long view. On the origins of ISIS, I found Tim Urban’s “From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s full story” clear and useful. On what ISIS is, I was interested in Graeme Wood’s “What ISIS really wants” because of the debate it triggered around the role of religion vs other pull factors attracting recruits. Lydia Wilson’s “What I discovered from interviewing imprisoned ISIS fighters”, for instance, points to “humiliated and enraged young men [seeking] a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.” For the Francophones, I would add Olivier Roy’s “Le djihadisme est une révolte générationnelle et nihiliste” because of his thought-provoking thesis, based on the study of recruits’ profiles, that we are witnessing the Islamization of (youth) radicalism rather than the radicalization of Islam [English speakers can read his Quartz interview here]. And Alain Bertho’s “Il faut être clair un monde a pris fin et il n’y aura pas de retour en arrière” which contrasts ISIS with the 1970ies political terrorism and post-communist social rebellions, and looks at the ideological vacuum they fill for destabilized young people. But I would like to hear which readings you found useful.

I found myself glued to the Bloomberg Carbon Clock, a real-time estimate of the global atmospheric CO2 level. Not very constructive. So my visual this week is from ITU’s “Measuring the information society report 2015”. The good news: 3.2 billion people are online, and 95% of the global population are covered by mobile-cellular networks. The interesting trend: Over the past year, mobile broadband subscriptions (47.2%) overtook households with internet access (46.4%). The bad news: multiple digital divides persist between and within countries; between rural and urban areas; between men and women; between rich and poor; between the more and less educated; and between social groups. The projections: by 2020 53% of people will be online globally; 45% in developing countries; but only 11% in LDCs.

My quote this week is from Nesta CEO Geoff Mulgan in “Meaningful meetings: How can meetings can be made better?”: “Some of the best meetings don’t happen.”