From the NYT: ‘Homegrown Aid’, by Jeffrey Sachs

Homegrown Aid , by JEFFREY D. SACHS

Published: April 8, 2009

PRESIDENT OBAMA has embarked on a promising new course to fight hunger and promote economic growth and political stability in countries like Cambodia, Honduras and Malawi. These countries, and many more, have large populations of impoverished farm families. Tough climates, environmental degradation and a lack of modern farm technology often limit food production to one-third or less of its potential. President Obama recently called upon Congress to double financial support for agricultural growth in developing countries to more than $1 billion in 2010. His program aims to help smallholder farmers get things like better seeds, fertilizer, small-scale irrigation and access to markets so they can overcome hunger and break out of extreme poverty. This new program could have amazing results — if it is properly carried out.

A crucial factor in determining the program’s success will be how Washington delivers aid to the farmers. The traditional approach, and the wrong one in this case, would be for Washington to try to decide what’s best for each country, and then spend considerable time and money on report-writing, site visits and professional advice. When aid programs are operated this way, they can end up spending half or more of their funds on United States-based travel, personnel and administration, and take years to get off the ground. The benefits for poor countries are then much too little and too late.

Rather than have Washington decide the kind of aid each country will receive, the recipient countries should be invited to prepare plans and budgets that would be reviewed by independent experts. These plans would describe the inputs needed by the farmers, the expected increase in production, how the strategy would be put into place and how much money would be required. Such plans, if described with care, could then be closely monitored by the United States and other donors to gauge results and avoid corruption.

Two international programs during the last decade, championed jointly by the United States, other governments and the Gates Foundation, have demonstrated the benefits of such a scientific, results-based aid approach: the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. These programs have saved millions of lives and protected hundreds of millions more from disease and infection. Here’s how they work: Low-income countries submit national action plans to the two programs, which then scrutinize the plans on their scientific, financial and management merits. If the plans are properly put into effect, recipients get more financing.

It’s time to adopt these strategies to fight hunger. The good news is that many poor and hungry countries already have elaborate and sophisticated plans for their smallholder farmers, but until now they’ve lacked the financial means and donor support to put those plans into action.

Read the full article here.

IHT: ‘Behind Facebook’s success: It takes a village’

Ever wonder why it’s so satisfying knowing a little about what is happening to everyone in your Facebook network, and, in the case of Twitter, knowing what is happening to people you barely know? Here is an interesting reflection on the subject

Behind Facebook’s success: It takes a village

By Anand Giridharadas, posted March 26th 2009

Twitter and Facebook are, OMG, so last millennium.

Or so it seems as I look out through my window in the forested Indian village where I am living, one of those places that the future has yet to invade.

A row of modest houses faces me. All day long, as I write, their inhabitants talk. And I have discovered through their talk that the age-old sociability of the village — ambient sociability, one might call it — harbors a strange likeness to the social-networking culture we think to be so new.

They don’t do one-on-one conversation here. They broadcast. If you have something to say, yell. Bring water! Go to school! Why did you tell her that thing? The people do not limit their talk to their own homes. Their scolds and praise and commands are for the village.

Privacy means little. Their doors are scraps of fabric. People come and go; it is hard to say who owns which house. Committing adultery or defaulting on a loan would be social suicide: everyone would know. A bargain has been made: There is more to gain from being in the network than from anonymity.

They stand in a stream of soothingly mindless hubbub. They hear opinions even when they do not ask, receive advice they do not need, get a little love from everyone and a lot from no one. Village sociability is not about sharing feelings. It doesn’t dwell on you. It asks for little. It just buzzes.

And what do the Internet’s social networks offer if not this village buzz? You build networks wider than your circle of close friends, and immediately you, too, stand in Hubbub Creek.

One friend “has been caring for an indescribably adorable baby bunny,” your Facebook news bulletin tells you. Another is “leaving for 10 days of backpacking!” Another’s iPhone has survived a “swim.” Once they are in your network, you are compelled, as in the village, to know their business. It’s strangely nice.

This is not about deep bonding. For that, stick to e-mail, the phone and — remember it? — human interaction. Social networks offer only ambient love. They maintain not your 10 key relationships, but your hundred semi-key mini-relationships. They are not about understanding or soul-baring, but about being simply, ambiently present — about knowing as soon as a relationship has ended, as they do in a village, even if you never learn why.

Read the rest of this article here.

IHT: ‘When stars Twitter, a ghost may be lurking’

Here is another reason why celebrities shouldn’t be role models: they are often the result of careful marketing strategies. What we think as coming from celebrities, i.e. what some people consider as the standards towards which they strive, are actually coming from a team of people manipulating that stars image. And, however obvious this argument might seem, it’s interesting to note that it isn’t really taken into consideration nowadays.

When stars Twitter, a ghost may be lurking

By Noah Cohem; posted on IHT.com on March 27th 2009

The rapper 50 Cent is among the legion of stars who have recently embraced Twitter to reach fans who crave near-continuous access to their lives and thoughts. On March 1, he shared this insight with the more than 200,000 people who follow him: “My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends.”

Those were 50 Cent’s words, but it was not exactly him tweeting. Rather, it was Chris Romero, known as Broadway, the director of the rapper’s Web empire, who typed in those words after reading them in an interview.

“He doesn’t actually use Twitter,” Mr. Romero said of 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III, “but the energy of it is all him.”

In its short history, Twitter — a microblogging tool that uses 140 characters in bursts of text — has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online, as well as giving the public the ability to speak directly to people and institutions once comfortably on a pedestal.

But someone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long. In many cases, celebrities and their handlers have turned to outside writers — ghost Twitterers, if you will — who keep fans updated on the latest twists and turns, often in the star’s own voice.

Because Twitter is seen as an intimate link between celebrities and their fans, many performers are not willing to divulge the help they use to put their thoughts into cyberspace.

Read the rest of this post here.

A new era of activism? From IHT: U.S. outcry forces chief of A.I.G. to give ground

By David Stout, published on March 18th 2009

WASHINGTON: As the lucrative bonuses paid to employees of the American International Group fueled fresh outrage at the White House and on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the embattled chief executive of A.I.G. said that he had asked some recipients to give at least half the money back.

The chief executive, Edward M. Liddy, made the announcement during his testimony on Wednesday afternoon before a congressional committee investigating the problems at the insurance giant.

“I have asked the employees of A.I.G. Financial Products to step up and do the right thing,” Mr. Liddy told lawmakers. “Specifically, I have asked those who received retention payments of $100,000 or more to return at least half of those payments.” (Sahar’s comment: ‘at least’ half? Seriously? I would say they should ‘at least’ give all the money back and perhaps not pay a hefty penatly!)

The A.I.G. chief said that some recipients had already offered to give up all of their bonuses, and he added later that he expected to get most of the money back.

Of the 418 employees who received bonuses, 298 got more than $100,000, according to the New York attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo. The highest bonus was $6.4 million, and 6 other employees received more than $4 million. Fifteen other people received bonuses of more than $2 million and 51 received $1 million to $2 million.

Before Mr. Liddy’s testimony, the A.I.G. affair prompted President Obama to declare that a culture of “excess greed” demonstrated in A.I.G.’s dealings should have no place in a new Wall Street.

“As we get out of this crisis, as we work toward getting ourselves out of this recession, I hope that Wall Street and the marketplace don’t think that we can return to business as usual,” the president said after meeting with his economic advisers.

Accordingly, Mr. Obama said, he will push for quick congressional legislation to create a regulatory framework for entities like A.I.G., which is not a bank, similar to the powers that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has over banks.

“I’m angry,” the president said. “What I want us to do, though, is channel our anger in a constructive way.”

(…)

The president did not call on Wednesday for the bonuses to be paid back, or taken back somehow. But there was strong sentiment on Capitol Hill over the $165 million in bonuses, and it was by no means clear that asking bonus recipients to give up half of their windfalls would appease the lawmakers. A.I.G. has received nearly $200 billion in federal bailout funds.

“We are the effective owners of this company,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, going on to suggest a lawsuit to recover the $165 million in bonuses. “I think it’s worth trying.”

By “we,” Mr. Frank made clear, he meant the American taxpayers, whose collective anger has been felt on Capitol Hill over the last several days. And no wonder, said Representative Gary L. Ackerman, a Democrat from Long Island. The typical taxpayer knows he is “the ultimate sucker” in the A.I.G. debacle, Mr. Ackerman said.

The lawmakers, having heard from their furious constituents, seemed unwilling to be mollified by the pledge from Mr. Liddy, who took the helm at A.I.G. last fall after it had begun imploding because of reckless investments, that the company’s 116,000 employees were united in wanting to work out of the morass, and work “shoulder to shoulder” with federal regulators. (Sahar’s comment: It doesn’t seem fair that all the regular AIG workers are going to have to pay, quite literally, because of mistakes of a couple of AIG employees).

(…)

“A million dollars is a sizable sum to the typical American family,” Mr. Kanjorski said, “and a million dollars is a lottery prize for anyone who has just lost a job.” He called on A.I.G.’s employees to join with the legions of Americans who “have made personal sacrifices to survive these difficult times.” For the American people, said Representative Paul Hodes, Democrat of New Hampshire, the initials ” A.I.G.” now stand for “arrogance, incompetence and greed.” (Sahar’s comment: Ouch!)

But Representative Scott Garrett of New Jersey, the senior Republican on Mr. Kanjorski’s subcommittee, said he had a question for those who are unhappy with the way the A.I.G. story has unfolded: “What did you expect, and why weren’t you asking more questions before?” (Sahar’s comment: Good point. Hopefully we will learn from our lesson. But it doesn’t excuse what AIG did.)

Read the rest of the article here.

Be careful what you upload, it might come to haunt you and there is nothing Dean Winchester can do to help

Careful what you put up… The officer who posted too much on MySpace

My next question: how to do a cleanup. Stat.

Note to all aspiring authors: there is still hope

The demise of the written word is predicted every couple of years since the inception of the Internet. I remember reading an gloomy article about how young people hoping to become internationally known published authors à la Stephen King should forget about that dream and settle for making moderate amounts of money with a book they could only hope to make it in a country or two.

And yet, while there has definitely been a slow down, there doesn’t seem to be signs of its impending doom. Quite the contrary: the written word seems to be here for awhile, as authors like Audrey Niffenegger make a killing on book deals, even on books that have yet been written.

As IHT reports: Audrey Niffenegger receives $5 million advance for second novel. FIVE MILLION? For a book that isn’t even finished? During an economic crisis? Granted, if her second book is anything like the first one, Niffenegger deserves every penny; The Time Traveler’s Wife was a beautiful yet very atypical love story written in such a way that at the end of it, one can’t really accept that one has read all of the 700+ pages. Which makes me all the more excited for Her Fearful Symmetry, which is described as: a supernatural story about twins who inherit an apartment near a London cemetery and become embroiled in the lives of the building’s other residents and the ghost of their aunt, who left them the flat.

Be still my heart. I can’t wait to get my hands on that book!

Read the ITH article here.

Change has already started to come; the White House ain’t that ‘white’ anymore, is it?

A family to herald diversity

by Jodi Kantor

Published on IHT.com on January 20th, 2009

The president’s elderly Kenyan step-grandmother came, bearing a gift of an oxtail fly whisk. Cousins journeyed from the South Carolina town where the first lady’s great-great-grandfather was born into slavery, while the rabbi in the family came from the synagogue where he had been commemorating Martin Luther King’s birthday. The president and first lady’s siblings were there, too, of course: his Indonesian-American half-sister, who brought her Chinese-Canadian husband, and her brother, a black man with a white wife.

When President Barack Obama was sworn in Tuesday, he was surrounded by an extended clan that would have shocked past generations of Americans and has redrawn the image of a first family for future ones.

As they convened to take their family’s final step in its journey from Africa through slavery to the slave-built White House, the group seemed like they had stepped right out of the pages of Obama’s memoir – no longer the disparate kin of a young man wondering how he fit in, but the embodiment of a new president’s promise of change.

For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its governing families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Obama and his wife Michelle is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English, Indonesian, French, Cantonese, German, Hebrew, African languages like Swahili, Luo and Igbo, and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole language of the South Carolina lowcountry. Very few are wealthy, and some – like Sarah Obama, the step-grandmother who only recently got electricity in her metal-roofed shack – are quite poor.

“Our family is new in terms of the White House, but I don’t think it’s new in terms of the country,” said Maya Soetoro, the president’s younger half-sister, in an interview last week. “I don’t think the White House has always reflected the textures and flavors of this country.”

Read the rest of this great post here.

When superficial actions aren’t a reflection of a deeper change

It often surprises me – and it definitely intrigues me – how people convince themselves that they are doing the right thing and that their actions will bring about lasting change in their lives, when clearly (at least, to those around them) they don’t. One example is weight loss; it absolutely amazes me how women seem to convince themselves that they are cutting calories when the Caramel Macchiato before them holds enough calories to feed a classroom of kindergartners.

Which is why, when I was sent the following article on iht.com, my first reaction wasn’t: “It’s about time”, but rather, “what are they going to come up with next to sell more drugs?”. Read on and let me know what you think.

No more free goodies for U.S. doctors

To Lehman Brothers, the retailer Linens ‘n Things and the blank VHS tape, add another American institution that expired in 2008: drug company trinkets.

Starting Thursday, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies – Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs – that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.

No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned with rhinestones that spell out B-O-T-O-X. So are pens advertising the Sepracor sleep drug Lunesta, in whose barrel floats the brand’s mascot, a somnolent moth.

Some skeptics deride the voluntary ban as a superficial measure that does nothing to curb the far larger amounts drug companies spend each year on various other efforts to influence physicians.

But proponents welcome it as a step toward ending the barrage of drug brands and logos that surround, and may subliminally influence, doctors and patients.

“It’s not just the pens – it’s the paper on the exam table, the tongue depressor, the stethoscope tags, medical calipers that might be used to interpret an EKG, penlights,” said Dr. Robert Goodman, a physician in internal medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City.

In 1999, Goodman started, No Free Lunch, a nonprofit group that encourages doctors to reject drug company giveaways. “Practically anything you can put a name on is branded in a doctor’s office, short of branding, like a Nascar driver, on the doctor’s white coat,” Goodman said.

The new voluntary industry guidelines try to counter the impression that gifts to doctors are intended to unduly influence medicine. The code, drawn up by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry group in Washington, bars drug companies from giving doctors branded pens, staplers, flash drives, paperweights, calculators and the like.

Read the rest of the article here – and let me know if you notice the caption for the picture heading the story. 1′200 pens! That’s enough to write for a whole lifetime, even for me!

From IHT: Even in recession, spend they must: Luxury shoppers anonymous

I read an article published on ITH.com that made my jaw drop – and not in a good way. I wanted to see other people’s reactions.

In short, the article is about the guilt rich people feel when shopping for extravagant items, and how a new niche market has been established, composed partly by invitation-only shopping events.

I’m all about enjoying the lovely things we have in this world – after all, why would they exist if we weren’t meant to enjoy them? However, when someone feels guilty about something, isn’t it worth exploring the reasons why and then dealing with the issue rather than ignoring it?

Even in recession, spend they must: Luxury shoppers anonymous

By Ruth La Ferla

Published on December 12th

Only a year ago, Maggie Buckley might have indulged a craving for, say, satin opera gloves or python sandals with a quick trip to Saks or Bergdorf Goodman. But now, in these recessionary times, she tends to avoid such public sorties.

“Shopping is almost embarrassing, and a little vulgar right now,” said Buckley, an editor at Allure magazine. Loath to be seen loading freezer-size parcels into the back of a waiting cab, she finds herself shopping at under-the-radar soirees in the homes of her friends.

Buckley is one in a coterie of shoppers turning their backs on conspicuous consumption but trawling for treasures nonetheless at invitation-only shopping events springing up in hotel suites, at private showrooms or in the well-appointed parlors of their peers. Feeling the pangs of conscience, they are shopping on the down-low, finding deals in places that are the retail equivalent of a safari on a private game reserve.

“People don’t want to be as public about shopping for luxury goods as they were in the past,” said Robert Burke, a luxury retail consultant in New York. “It’s a feel-good way to buy, and this is a time for feel-good things.”

Such covert shopping has long been enjoyed by the upper crust, people who could pay six figures for diamond-and-sapphire brooch or sable wrap — and the privilege of exclusivity. But in the current climate, stealth consumption has gained a more potent appeal, taking place at gatherings with an insiders’ feel.

“We’re like a little secret that people want to share, but not with just anybody,” said Eve Goldberg, an owner of William Goldberg, a diamond dealer in New York. Goldberg’s company recently opened a salon that caters to clients who prefer to shop discreetly.

“People are saying: ‘It’s that time of year; I want to buy something, but I feel a little weird,’ ” Goldberg said. “Often they tell me, ‘I don’t want to be out there making an announcement with a big bag that says Harry Winston.’ “

Private dealers, many of them dilettantes who acquire their wares from designer friends, at trade shows and from dealers and artisans in exotic locales, are the bane of recession-battered high-end merchants. Established retailers are hard pressed to compete with such luxury pop-up shops while maintaining inventories and absorbing the high costs of operating their businesses.

But under-the-radar parties offer the well heeled, and the well connected, a chance to snap up temptations without an inner censor chiding them for their spendthrift ways.

Read the rest of the article here.