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Re: Simulation
Didn't chaos theory grow out of weather forecasters being humbled by what their super computers were suggesting from simulations? Didn't it have to do with what happened when the number of decimal places being used were increased or decreased. Aren't measurements always approximations? Also, perhaps Jay should be more humble when he speaks with such confidence about empirical science. The history of science is full of confident pronouncements about all kinds of 'matters'. Physicists were boldly wrapping up the last few loose ends in physics as the 19th century came to a close. A guy named Einstein sorta changed that in the first few years of the 20th century. Humbly, Brian McAndrews ** * Brian McAndrews, Practicum Coordinator* * Faculty of Education, Queen's University * * Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6 * * FAX:(613) 545-6307 Phone (613) 545-6000x4937 * * e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]* * "Ethics and aesthetics are one"* * Wittgenstein * ** ** **
First Monsanto field burned in Karnataka
The global revolt against corporate globalization has begun: Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 13:09:22 -0500 (EST) To: NGO Community From: "Prof. Nanjundaswamy" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: Karnataka State Farmers Association Subject: [mai] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Precedence: bulk Ý *** please disseminate widely - apologies for duplication ** Dear friends, Today one of the field trials of Monsanto in Karnataka has passed away. The other two will soon follow. One of them is owned by the man who set up a ëgovernment friendlyí farmers organisation, so we will take some more time to convince him to participate in the action. The third field, according to the information given by the government, is in a valley that has disappeared under a dam reservoir (so much for the reliability of the Karnataka Agriculture Minister); we are still investigating. In this message you will find: * The press release given to the media at the action today, which includes extensive information about Monsanto and the illegal conditions under which the trial was conducted * A brief note sent after the action, describing how it took place If you want to receive more information please subscribe to the listserv [EMAIL PROTECTED] (which we hope is already in operation by now). In solidarity, Karnataka State Farmers Association Karnataka Rajya Raita Sangha (KRRS) Karnataka State Farmers Association FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monsanto's Cremation Starts in Karnataka Sindhanoor, India, 28 November 1998. - Today the farmers of Karnataka will reduce to ashes one of the illegal field trials that the criminal organisation Monsanto is carrying out in the country. This action will mark the beginning of a campaign of civil disobedience called Operation 'Cremation Monsanto', which will soon be continued in Karnataka and other Indian states. The field that will be burned today belongs to Basanna, who came to know what kind of plants were growing in his field only last Wednesday, when Byre Gowda (Minister of Agriculture of Karnataka) mentioned his name as he disclosed the three sites where Monsanto's trials are being conducted in Karnataka. According to Basanna's testimony, officials of Mahyco Monsanto went to his farm in July and proposed him to grow, free of cost, a new variety of cotton seeds, which they claimed would give very good results. He could not suspect that their intention was to carry out an experiment on genetic engineering without his knowledge and consent, risking the future viability not only of his farm, but of his complete community. The officials of Mahyco Monsanto, who have signed a written declaration admitting their illegal behaviour, went regularly to apply manure and pesticides to the Bt cotton, including heavy doses of insecticides. However, the plants are infested with bollworm (the pest that Bt cotton is supposed to control) and other pests like white flyÝ and red-rot. Despite the heavy use of chemical fertiliser, traces of which still can be observed in the field, the Bt plants grew miserably, less than half the size of the traditional cotton plants in the adjacent fields. No single biosafety measure (e.g. buffer zone around the genetically engineered cotton to reduce biopollution, construction of a fence around the field, etc) was undertaken by the Mahyco Monsanto. They did not even demarcate the field as biohazard area. The seriousness of this negligence can be assessed from the following report, published by the British newspaper Mail On Sunday on the 25th October: 'One of the worst fears of campaigners against genetically modified crops has almost come true. An experimental crop of oilseed rape that was altered to be resistant to herbicides has had to be destroyed after it pollinated nearby plants. The fear was that, left unchecked, a new breed of superweeds which normal chemicals could not destroy might have resulted with devastating effects for Britain's agriculture. Now, in what could be the first case of its kind in the UK, the Government is considering prosecuting the America chemical giant behind the experiment for allegedly contaminating the environment. If convicted, Monsanto, the world's leading producer of genetically modified foods and British based sub-contractor Perryfields Holdings Ltd face heavy fines. Monsanto's directors, headed by chairman and chief executive, Bob Shapiro, could even be jailed if found to have been negligent. Minutes of a recent meeting of the Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment reveal that Monsanto and Perryfields failed to prevent genetically modified winter oilseed rape cross-pollinating with another field of their normal oilseed rape. A pollen barrier, or buffer zone, of only two metres instead of the required six surrounded the test site. The minutes say that "a breach of consent occurred" and show that Monsanto officials had not visited the trail site even though it was the company's duty to do
pNa Globalization Threat to Food Security
This article contains very little that is new but it does serve to remind us of why commodity prices are so low, while retail prices remain high. It should also give food for thought to those who still believe that corporate free trade is a boon to all. Caspar Davis * FORWARDED MESSAGE * Delivered-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Tue, 1 Dec 98 10:55:58 - From: Global Times [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mime-Version: 1.0 Precedence: bulk Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: pNa Globalization Threat to Food Security To: "People's News Agency" [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by igc7.igc.org id BAA12561 x-sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] A People's News Agency (PNA) Dispatch . . AGRICULTURAL GLOBALIZATION: A THREAT TO FOOD SECURITY? Corporate agribusiness controls much of world food production and supply. Though portrayed as a modern marvel of efficiency, it is actually increasing food supply insecurity and undermining food purchasing capacity By David Griffin I n the sixteenth century, during and after the likes of Henry the XIII, something new was brewing in England. The monarchy had consolidated power to an unusual degree, and the agricultural countryside had become accessible through a well developed system of roads and waterways. The country's lords had lost much of their power to levy taxes and manage their estates as independent entities, but they none-the-less owned the majority of England's agricultural land. Meanwhile London was emerging as the hub of a national market. The English lords were in a unique position. The aristocracy in other European countries had extra-economic powers to extract wealth from the peasantry, which no king could take away from them. Outside England peasants generally owned the land they worked. Taxation was the only way to get anything from them. Without the power to tax, landowning English lords needed a new formula to increase their wealth and power, one not dependent on military force or loyalty. That power was economic production, and the formula would eventually evolve into modern day capitalism. An imperative thus emerged in the English countryside to produce a lot and to produce it efficiently. While agriculture on the Continent remained in the dark ages, English farming bounded ahead. New technologies were developed allowing lords to extract more production from their land holdings. Thus, the technologies of manuring, crop rotation, close planting, and weed control were advanced. The lords also increased their share of goods by decreasing the number of people working. If a landowner could have thirty tenant farm families do the work of ninety, well, that's sixty less families he had to share the crop with. So in England, technologies were also refined to increase the efficiency of labor. Horse-drawn plows and cultivators replaced people with hand tools, and a number of systemic changes were introduced to increase efficiencies of scale. Gradually the countryside was depopulated. Displaced tenants moved to the cities, where their cheap hire eventually made possible the industrial revolution. The Wealth Extraction Imperative So capitalism - the extraction of the surpluses of labor by owners, and the trade of that surplus in an open market - began with agriculture. Extracting greater wealth from the production of food has remained a challenge to the owners of capital to this day. Over the years the capitalistic quest for increased production and increased efficiency has moved agriculture through various technological "revolutions". First mechanization in the 1800s and early 1900s. Then chemical fertilization, pest, and weed control after WWII. And now genetic proprietorship. The difference between 20th Century capitalist extraction and the surplus extraction of the English lords lies in scale and the nature of the capital owned. Today about 90 percent of the value added in food production is not added on the farm. Thus, land has declined in value relative to the input, processing and trading industries. For example, chemical and seed companies make inputs for agricultural production. Through various "advancements", companies have increased the amount of chemicals and seeds it is desirous for farmers to buy. Hybrid seeds, for example, are a Twentieth Century invention. They can't be replanted by farmers so farmers have to buy the seed of hybrid crops, like corn, every year. The Delta and Pine Land Company and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have even come up with a terminator gene for non-hybrid crops. This gene will make the seed farmers save from these crops unable to germinate. Farmers in a few years will be unable to save and replant even non-hybrid crop varieties that companies choose to patent and insert with the terminator gene. One more way for the owners of capital to extract value from agriculture.
test
tues 1:30 pm
NORTH AMERICAN BOYCOTT AGAINST RICE TEC CORPORATION CALLED
With farmers burning Monsanto's test fields of GM cotton and this boycott, the rebellion against the corporate enclosure of genetic material has begun. I urge all Georgists and other right thinking people to participate in any way that they feel is appropriate. Caspar Davis * FORWARDED MESSAGE * BIO-IPR resource pointer AUTHOR: Nandita Sharma and Allison Campbell, Basmati Action Group TITLE: North American Boycott against Rice Tec called IN: submitted as campaign announcement to BIO-IPR DATE: 29 November 1998 PLACE: Vancouver, Canada NOTE: Please contact the Basmati Action Group for more information, to indicate your support to their campaign or to share ideas on explanding the campaign to other countries. BASMATI ACTION GROUP (BAG) c/o 1957 Kitchener St. Vancouver, B.C. Canada V5L 2W6 Tel. (1-604) 255-4910 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Website: http://www.eciad.bc.ca/~lolin/basmati/ NORTH AMERICAN BOYCOTT AGAINST RICE TEC CORPORATION CALLED November 29, 1998 The Basmati Action Group (BAG) has launched a North American boycott against the products of Rice Tec Corporation of Alvin, Texas, USA. Rice Tec claims to have invented the basmati rice they sell under the trade name, "Texmati" (Rice Tec products also include "Jasmati" and "Kasmati" rice). The purpose of the boycott is to heighten awareness of the issue of life-patents, organize public condemnation of this process and demonstrate that the patenting of life will be costly - not profitable - to those that pirate indigenous knowledge and nature's creative capacities. We ask that you support the Basmati Action Group in our boycott of all Rice Tec products. Why support a boycott on Rice Tec? Basmati rice has been grown in the Punjab region of India and Pakistan for centuries. Working with nature's own creative capacities, farmers in this area have, over time, cross bred and cultivated this distinct form of rice known for its fragrant aroma and unique taste. For the farmers of India and Pakistan, basmati rice is a vital subsistence food and source of income. In 1997, the powerful United States Patent and Trademark Office accepted Rice Tec's application to patent basmati rice (patent # 5,663,484). By cross-breeding two basmati rice varieties this corporation insists that it has "invented" a "novel" variety of basmati and has patented it as "basmati 867." The Rice Tec patent covers any basmati variety crossed with a semi-dwarf strain grown anywhere in the western hemisphere. Despite Rice Tec's claims of 'novelty', "basmati 867" has been derived from Indian and Pakistani basmati rice lines rossed with semi-dwarf varieties. The basmati varieties used to "invent" Rice Tec's "basmati 867" are farmers' varieties bred over centuries in South Asia. What Rice Tec has done with its patent is to pirate what until now had been communally shared and claimed it as their own private property. The crux of the issue is not whether the basmati rice variety bred by Rice Tec is "novel" and therefore patentable or not because the facts show that it is not. The real issue is that no one should be able to hold a patent over a life form. By taking out a patent on "basmati 867" Rice Tec is participating in what has been described as "biopiracy." Biopiracy is the theft of indigenous knowledge, the theft of the creative capacities of nature and the false claim by patent holders - mostly corporations - that they created the life form they have pirated. Biopiracy lays the groundwork for the colonization of creation - of life itself - by scientists and, ultimately, the corporations they work for. Life-patents further the power of corporations. Imagine a world where nothing is grown except crops that a corporation has claimed 'invention' of and can profit by. Imagine if nothing is grown without farmers having to go to corporations to buy back seeds stolen from them in the first place. Or a world where nothing can even grow without the permission of corporations (i.e. the "Terminator Technology" that prevents plants from reproducing themselves). This is the world that biopirates, and patents like the one on "basmati 867" are already helping to bring about! We need to fight against this trend. BAG is part of a world-wide movement of people who are protesting the corporate claims of "invention" that patents on life represent. We are not resigned to living in a world where the creative capacities of nature, of women and of communities of people are systematically denied and pirated. BAG calls for an end to patents on life forms that is currently being sanctioned by the World Trade Organization and enshrined in both national and international law. Victories have been won against corporations that have patented life forms! The US National Institutes of Health "disclaimed" its
POLITICS IN DISGUISE
From: Brian McAndrews [EMAIL PROTECTED] Also, perhaps Jay should be more humble when he speaks with such confidence about empirical science. The history of science is full of Just to keep the resord straight, the scientific method isn't perfect, but it's the best we have. (Permission to reprint is expressly granted!) POLITICS IN DISGUISE by Jay Hanson A large percentage of the Nobel laureates in economics live in cocoons. -- E.O. Wilson The problem is, of course, that not only is economics bankrupt but it has always been nothing more than politics in disguise ... economics is a form of brain damage.-- Hazel Henderson Economics should be seen as politics -- not science -- for two reasons: (1) Economists do not use the "scientific method". (2) The economist's agenda is explicitly "normative" (political). The scientific method is the best way yet discovered for winnowing the truth from lies and delusion. The simple version looks something like this: 1 Observe some aspect of the universe. 2 Invent a theory that is consistent with what you have observed. 3 Use the theory to make predictions. 4 Test those predictions by experiments or further observations. 5 Modify the theory in the light of your results. Go to step 3. [ http://www.xnet.com/~blatura/skep_1.html ] Economists will argue that "Economic systems are generally too complex to be replicated in a laboratory environment, so economists analyze the data." But consider the POLITICAL heart and soul of economics: the "rational utility mazimizer". "One of the peculiarities of economics is that it still rests on a behavioral assumption -- rational utility maximization -- that has long since been rejected by sociologists and psychologists who specialize in studying human behavior. Rational individual utility (income) maximization was the common assumption of all social science in the nineteenth century, but only economics continues to use it. "Contrary behavioral evidence has had little impact on economics because having a theory of how the world 'ought' to act, economists can reject all manner of evidence showing that individuals are not rational utility maximizers. Actions that are not rational maximizations exist, but they are labeled 'market imperfections' that 'ought' to be eliminated. Individual economic actors 'ought' to be rational utility maximizers and they can be taught to do what they 'ought' to do. Prescription dominates description in economics, while the reverse is true in the other social sciences that study real human behavior." [p. 216, Thurow, 1983, http://dieoff.com/page162.htm ] The reason that economists cling to nineteenth-century behavioral assumptions is because without them, they are out of a job! It's a fact of life that economic theories can only be replaced by better economic theories. And since economists can not invent a better theory because of a fundementally-flawed world view, they work to make the world match existing theory. If economists told the truth, they would be unemployed. The solution of course, is to junk economics, economists and start over: "No compelling reason has ever been offered why the same strategy [of consilience] should not work to unite the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities. The difference between the two domains is in the magnitude of the problem, not the principles needed for its solution." -- E.O. Wilson http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/bookauth/eow1.htm Jay - COMING SOON TO A LOCATION NEAR YOU! http://dieoff.com/page1.htm
Re: Caordic change and Greens?
From: Caspar Davis [EMAIL PROTECTED] I believe that a much more satisfying life is possible by substituting friends, community, conversation and caring for stuff. I largely If we don't follow Caspar's advise, there may not be ANY life a hundred years from now -- let alone "satisfying life". This is the subject of my next newsletter. With respect to simulation, I am surprised that no one mentioned the most famous simulation of all: The Club of Rome 1972: LIMITS TO GROWTH In 1992, Meadows published an update to the original work. Here is a composite graph: http://dieoff.com/Yourhere.gif "Business as usual" scenario from BEYOND THE LIMITS: "In Scenario 1 the world society proceeds along its historical path as long as possible without major policy change. Technology advances in agriculture, industry, and social services according to established patterns. There is no extraordinary effort to abate pollution or conserve resources. The simulated world tries to bring all people through the demographic transition and into an industrial and then post-industrial economy. This world acquires widespread health care and birth control as the service sector grows; it applies more agricultural inputs and gets higher yields as the agricultural sector grows; it emits more pollutants and demands more nonrenewable resources as the industrial sector grows. "The global population in Scenario 1 rises from 1.6 billion in the simulated year 1900 to over 5 billion in the simulated year 1990 and over 6 billion in the year 2000. Total industrial output expands by a factor of 20 between 1900 and 1990. Between 1900 and 1990 only 20% of the earth's total stock of nonrenewable resources is used; 80% of these resources remain in 1990. Pollution in that simulated year has just begun to rise noticeably. Average consumer goods per capita in 1990 is at a value of 1968-$260 per person per yeara useful number to remember for comparison in future runs. Life expectancy is increasing, services and goods per capita are increasing, food production is increasing. But major changes are just ahead. "In this scenario the growth of the economy stops and reverses because of a combination of limits. Just after the simulated year 2000 pollution rises high enough to begin to affect seriously the fertility of the land. (This could happen in the 'real world' through contamination by heavy metals or persistent chemicals, through climate change, or through increased levels of ultraviolet radiation from a diminished ozone layer.) Land fertility has declined a total of only 5% between 1970 and 2000, but it is degrading at 4.5% per year in 2010 and 12% per year in 2040. At the same time land erosion increases. Total food production begins to fall after 2015. That causes the economy to shift more investment into the agriculture sector to maintain output. But agriculture has to compete for investment with a resource sector that is also beginning to sense some limits. "In 1990 the nonrenewable resources remaining in the ground would have lasted 110 years at the 1990 consumption rates. No serious resource limits were in evidence. But by 2020 the remaining resources constituted only a 30-year supply. Why did this shortage arise so fast? Because exponential growth increases consumption and lowers resources. Between 1990 and 2020 population increases by 50% and industrial output grows by 85%. The nonrenewable resource use rate doubles. During the first two decades of the simulated twenty-first century, the rising population and industrial plant in Scenario 1 use as many nonrenewable resources as the global economy used in the entire century before. So many resources are used that much more capital and energy are required to find, extract, and refine what remains. "As both food and nonrenewable resources become harder to obtain in this simulated world, capital is diverted to producing more of them. That leaves less output to be invested in basic capital growth. "Finally investment cannot keep up with depreciation (this is physical investment and depreciation, not monetary). The economy cannot stop putting its capital into the agriculture and resource sectors; if it did the scarcity of food, materials, and fuels would restrict production still more. So the industrial capital plant begins to decline, taking with it the service and agricultural sectors, which have become dependent upon industrial inputs. For a short time the situation is especially serious, because the population keeps rising, due to the lags inherent in the age structure and in the process of social adjustment. Finally population too begins to decrease, as the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services." [p.p.132-134, Meadows; See also http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC36/Gilman1.htm ] Jay - COMING SOON TO A LOCATION NEAR YOU! http://dieoff.com/page1.htm
Re: NORTH AMERICAN BOYCOTT AGAINST RICE TEC CORPORATION CALLED
At 11:12 AM 12/1/98 -0800, Caspar Davis wrote: With farmers burning Monsanto's test fields of GM cotton and this boycott, the rebellion against the corporate enclosure of genetic material has begun. I urge all Georgists and other right thinking people to participate in any way that they feel is appropriate. Caspar Davis * FORWARDED MESSAGE * BIO-IPR resource pointer AUTHOR: Nandita Sharma and Allison Campbell, Basmati Action Group TITLE: North American Boycott against Rice Tec called IN: submitted as campaign announcement to BIO-IPR The authors of this paper suggest that there is class conflict involved, and take pot shots at corporations in general as well as against their named target. I do not find this approach helpful, however... I find no justification for patents of this kind. In fact, I find no justification for patent law at all, except for general contract law. Non-disclosure agreements, I can accept. If a firm wants to protect proprietary knowledge, databases, and other stuff, it can sign agreements with those it chooses to grant limited access. However, ehile as a libertarian I have no particular problem with corporations per se, I also have a big problem with using the force of government to prevent people from living freely, and using their own minds to do so. If someone makes a fast food restaurant and calls it McDonald's, well I can accept that others should not copy the layout and call it McDonald's, too. But if they want to call their restaurant Burger King, then they should not be infringing any patent. Same with rice. Victor Levis Freedom of Choice...Responsibility for Actions...Respect for Others
Corporate Welfare (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 01 Dec 1998 14:31:57 -0700 From: Chris Gibbons [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Corporate Welfare Time magazine published the third of a series on corporate welfare last week. This article focused on Seaboard Corp. of Boston who contrived to get various communities to fork over millions in subsidies while they continued to play shell games with their hog-processing plants. They moved from Albert Lea, Minnesota (after gettaing $3 million as well as $5 million from the state of Minnesota and $25 million from the federal government) to Guymon, OK where they received $21 million from the state and local governments. All in all, this $1 billion company milked nearly $100 million from Minnesota, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Kansas. Not all deals are like this, but it illustrates the point that smart companies are starting demand incentives everywhere they go -- a sort of blackmail for jobs. Time recommends five ways to end the "corporate welfare mess:" 1. Federally tax all incentives at 100% 2. File a lawsuit to declare incentives unconstitutional 3. Create a special commission to study the federal incentives 4. Shut of the flow of low-cost loans from lthe HUD that have helped fuel the competitoin to snag companies. 5. Sue state and local officials on behalf of former workers.
[41] Southern Africa Faces 'Disaster' as AIDS Spreads - L.A. Times(fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Tue, 01 Dec 1998 16:14:56 MET From: AF-AIDS [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [41] Southern Africa Faces 'Disaster' as AIDS Spreads - L.A. Times Southern Africa Faces 'Disaster' as AIDS Spreads Los Angeles Times - Tuesday, December 1, 1998 Dean E. Murphy, Times Staff Writer JOHANNESBURG, South Africa--Two startling reports on AIDS show the disease is spreading so rapidly in South Africa that it threatens to cripple the economy and devastate families for decades, perpetuating the ills of apartheid. Released to coincide with World AIDS Day today, the reports say that while the AIDS epidemic was slow in coming to South Africa and its neighbors compared with other parts of the continent, it now has arrived with a vengeance. The region has become the hardest hit in the world. One in 10 people infected with HIV worldwide lives in South Africa. "Some of the advances made by the new South African democracy will be reversed unless we act now," said J. David Whaley, who coordinates United Nations programs in South Africa. "South Africa's history demonstrates that in partnership the nation fought and overcame apartheid. It will surely not be defeated by an insidious new threat over which it can have control." U.N. officials, authors of one of the two reports released here Monday, have chosen to focus World AIDS Day for the first time on southern Africa because of what they characterize as an "unprecedented emergency" only fully recognized in the past year. On average, one person is infected with HIV--the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS--each minute in South Africa, according to data compiled by the U.N. Program on HIV/AIDS, or UNAIDS. If the trend continues over the next decade, government officials here say, the average South African can expect to live just 40 years. About 130,000 South Africans have died so far this year of AIDS complications, according to the South African Department of Health. The number of deaths annually is projected to double during the next three years, and to exceed 500,000 by 2008, if current rates of infection continue. The worst-affected countries in the world--Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe--are neighbors of South Africa, and the U.N. says South Africa is catching up rapidly. About 25% of the adult population is infected in Botswana and Zimbabwe. Estimated rates of infection vary widely across the major countries of sub-Saharan Africa, from 4% in Nigeria to 10% in Ivory Coast and 11% in Kenya. South Africa's rate is 13%. In the past year, according to one estimate, about 1.4 million people between the ages of 15 and 49 were infected in nine southern African countries. About half of the new infections were in South Africa. In all, more than 3.2 million people in South Africa are infected with HIV. "Be it man-made catastrophes such as apartheid, colonialism, or natural disasters such as drought, none of these will claim so many victims," said Dr. Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS. "We now know that despite these already very high levels of HIV infection, the worst is still to come in southern Africa. The region is facing human disaster on a scale it has never seen before." With the disease arriving relatively late to the region, government and community responses are lagging. Piot said his agency's stepped-up interest in southern Africa is meant to pressure governments to do more. Most Africans cannot afford life-prolonging drugs common in the United States. But some countries in Central and East Africa, where AIDS struck hard and early more than a decade ago, have established education and prevention programs that have helped reduce infections. Many southern African countries, by contrast, are just now understanding the dimension--and ubiquity--of the problem, U.N. officials said. A 1994 AIDS plan went largely unheeded in South Africa, for example; the government has only now put together a new national strategy for dealing with the economic, social and medical implications of the disease. Among other things, the strategy calls for dedicating more resources to community-based programs for women, who, statistics indicate, are more likely to be infected than men and who bear the brunt of AIDS' social and economic fallout. The government recently decided to stop subsidizing treatments with the drug AZT for nursing mothers, saying the drug was too expensive and the money better spent on treating other sexually transmitted diseases and tuberculosis--common illnesses of people with AIDS. Health officials say they also will devote resources to developing more community care programs, which are cheaper than hospitals and usually preferred by patients. "The reaction has been late here, that is for sure, but it is never too late," Piot said. "What matters now is there is a really good plan and a good strategy. But it has to be implemented."
some simulation ideas and requirements analysis
I've done some tentative impure requirements analysis for a simulation of the world economy. I say impure because I can't get design ideas out of my head. It is probably best to admit this up front and also to hint broadly at what these design ideas are. Currently I envision this project as implemented by a relatively simple program and a much more elaborate database containing a lot of carefully selected data. By 'database' I mean a collection of named files, probably bound together by a common base name and distinguished by distinctive extensions. The system that I envision is something like a spreadsheet that loops through a series of records making changes by applying certain rules which are also stored in these records, and indeed could be implemented as a spreadsheet, though I probably won't implement it as one. If you are in doubt about what I have in mind, try thinking of this as a spreadsheet and you probably won't be too far wrong. (Indeed, use of a spreadsheet for rapid-prototyping may be wise. People comfortable with spreadsheets may want to play around with this a bit, to see what is possible.) Ordinarily a spreadsheet loops though all fields (columns) of all records (rows) and does whatever updates are necessary as they are encountered, but no more than once per loop. That is not behaviour that a large scale economic model should use, because it would involve updating some records too often. What I have in mind could be thought of as a spreadsheet in which each record has a first field which is countdown timer, changed once per iteration, and all other data fields in the record have an implicit "and timer=0" condition, so they are only updated when the timer counts down to zero -- the timer itself resetting by coping its initial value from another field the iteration after it reaches zero. As I envision it, the program loops though a series of records in a database, reading and updating them according to "instructions" also contained in that database. By 'instructions' I don't mean computer programs but just important data values and limits, or symbolic expressions, such as could be represented in any cell of a spreadsheet. As I see it, a few of these instruction are hardly ever changed, and in fact cannot be changed without going through several steps of supplying appropriate passwords. Included in this list of special instructions are flags or values stating which instructions fall into this class, and which may be more easily modified. Some other instructions are (therefore) more easily modified but can only be changed by the operator, and a few more instructions can be modified by a running program. Broadly speaking I think there will be two main classes of records: 1. Population-geographic units, representing a region of the earth or a population-cohort (or, ultimately, a single individual). 2. Information-estimation units, which represent a fact or supposed fact, piece of information or estimate. What I have called "instructions", values or symbolic expressions central to the operation of this model fall into this class. Below I have a list of preliminary requirements, and after some of them a design or implementation hint based on this quasi-spreadsheet model. 1. The proposed simulator shall be an open system, available to anyone who wants it at no cost, in both source code and in binary format, with documentation, and written in a very popular programming language so it can easily be installed on almost any system. 2. The simulator shall be data-driven without any hardwired or hardcoded algorithms other than those of a fundamental mechanism for reading and updating entries in a database according to rules or instructions also represented as entries in a database. The term database in this requirement shall not be interpreted as implying any specific type of storage or retrieval system, but shall not include anything that involves changes to the source code of the simulator. (Symbolic expressions in cells of the (quasi-)spreadsheet would be considered data, and could be modified, but in general would be modified rarely and not normally by the operations of the program.) 3. The simulator shall be capable of generating, saving, copying, renaming, deleting, and reloading and running any one of several simulation-datasets and shall have a convenient mechanism for allowing the operator to choose from amongst a collection of named simulation-datasets kept in mass storage. 4. The simulator shall be capable of simulating the economic activity of arbitrarily large geographic regions up to the entire planet (solar system? !) and arbitrarily small regions down to the size of a human being, except as limited by disk space or other mass storage limitations. For the purposes
