Sunday, 24 November 2013

Start a Not-for-Profit; Lessons from Tony Blair's Faith Foundation

Tony Blair's faith projects

From extremism to malaria nets

WHAT does Tony Blair do these days? Anybody who follows the news will probably know that one of his jobs involves peace-broking in the Holy Land. Then there is a project that may be even closer to his heart. As Britain's prime minister, he was both passionately religious and shy of expounding his creed in public (for fear, as he once said, of being thought a nutter). Now he pours some of his unspent energy into an NGO called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation (TBFF), which has the stated aim of helping to prevent "religious prejudice and conflict and extremism [by] working with people of faith and none...."

In Mr Blair's vision of things, religion can be a force for knowledge and mutual understanding rather than benighted ignorance. In some contexts, that principle seems easy enough to accept. One of the TBFF's flagship projects is in Sierra Leone, a country where the Blair name still has cachet more than a decade after his intervention to stop an especially bloody civil war. The Foundation has been testing the principle that in the world's poorest places, the social capital of religion is indispensable in any effort to improve health and increase life expectancy.

Malaria kills more people in Sierra Leone than any other disease and at the end of 2010, insecticide-treated bednets were distributed all over the country. But many people did not know how to use them. Working with GSK, the global pharma company, the Foundation has helped 529 Muslim and Christian leaders to spread some basic health tips, including the need to protect as many people as possible, especially pregnant women and children under five, with nets. It is estimated that 1.7m of the country's 6m people have now been given malaria-prevention advice. Between autumn 2011 and summer 2012, the number who said they used nets frequently rose from 66% to 79%.

Fighting deadly mosquitoes sounds like a better way for Christians and Muslims to spend their time than fighting each other. But in other contexts, Mr Blair is making more contentious assertions about the power of religion-based knowledge. Addressing a UN panel, the Counter-Terrorism Committee of the Security Council, this week, he said the "scourge" of terrorism was, at bottom, a problem caused by false and poorly informed readings of religion.

Of course, politics plays its part in fuelling this extremism, and the extremists are adept at jumping on the back of political grievances...But the soil in which they plant the seeds of hate is the soil of ignorance, of warped thinking producing warped minds and in particular of a distorted and false view of religion.

I think most analysts of terrorism would at least understand what Mr Blair was talking about; there can indeed be a link between poor and superficial theology and extremist ideas and behaviour. The ideological mentors of al-Qaeda are in Islamic terms weak theologians, convinced that they can issue their own "fatwas" or religious determinations without having to defer to any accumulated body of scholarship. But deep knowledge and learning does not always turn people into paragons of pacifism and moderation. Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual guide of the Iranian revolution, was a highly educated man by the lights of his own tradition. And people who commit spectacular acts of mega-terror, from the 9/11 hijackers to the attackers of London's transport system in July 2005, are often university graduates.

Spreading knowledge of the right sort is certainly a necessary condition for overcoming disease and poverty. Unfortunately it's not a sufficient condition for overcoming political or religiously inspired violence, even though it's still a worthy aim.

Photo credit: Tony Blair Faith Foundation

Understand International Issues; case of Iran

Curbing Iran's nuclear programme

Modest, but still historic

CARPING is easy. The interim deal between Iran and six world powers hammered out in the small hours of November 24th to curb the former’s nuclear programme is a long way from perfect, but it meets two key tests. The first is that it will extend Iran’s so-called “critical capability”—the time needed for it to produce one or several nuclear devices following a decision to weaponise—by many months compared with the trajectory it was on before the agreement. Secondly, it forms the basis for a more permanent solution to the decades-long problem of Iran’s nuclear activities to be reached over the next six months. Moreover it has done so without giving too much away, either in the form of premature relaxation of the sanctions regime that has brought Iran to the negotiating table or by conceding its claim to an “inalienable right” to enrich uranium.

Under the terms of the deal, Iran has agreed to halt all enrichment above 5%, the level consistent with producing fuel for civil purposes, and to neutralise its entire stockpile of 20%-enriched uranium, which is just a few short steps from potential conversion to weapons-grade uranium. To that end its 20% stockpile will either be diluted back down to 5% or converted into fuel rods from which re-conversion is impossible. Presumably, this will be done under supervision by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog.

The second part of the agreement essentially freezes Iran’s fast-growing uranium-enrichment capability at its current levels, just before it was about to take a substantial leap forward. It will not install additional centrifuges of any type, nor install or use any of its more advanced next-generation centrifuges, which can enrich up to five times faster than the existing type. It will also leave inoperable roughly half of the installed centrifuges at Natanz, its main enrichment facility, and three-quarters of the installed centrifuges at Fordow, a smaller site buried deep under a mountain. That means Iran can only use about half of the 18,000 centrifuges it currently possesses. Furthermore, Iran will alter the configuration of some its centrifuges that enable them to spin up to higher levels of enrichment. By the end of the six-month period, Iran has agreed that its stockpile (currently about 9,000kg) of low-enriched 3.5% uranium will be no higher than it is now. Any newly enriched uranium will be converted to oxide.

Much of this had already been agreed at an earlier meeting two weeks ago. But this deal goes quite a bit further in restraining Iran’s possible plutonium route to a bomb—the heavy-water reactor that is under construction at Arak. Under the previous agreement, Iran merely committed not to begin fuelling the reactor up. It was the inadequacy of this that led to the French démarche that scuppered the last bid for a deal. The French (rightly) believe that all work on Arak should cease because once it is commissioned it cannot be attacked militarily due to the spread of radiation that would result. The new agreement goes significantly further than the previous one, although not quite as far as the French would like: production of fuel for the reactor is to be halted; there will be no additional testing of fuel; there will be no transfer of fuel and heavy water to the reactor site and no construction of a reprocessing facility without which plutonium cannot be separated from spent fuel. Under the terms of an eventual deal, Iran will almost certainly have to agree to convert Arak into a light-water reactor which would not pose the same threat.

The final aspect of Iran’s undertakings includes allowing much more intrusive inspections by the IAEA, including daily monitoring of the main enrichment facilities (with 24-hour camera surveillance) and access to Iranian scientists with the aim of establishing that there is no further (clandestine) facility. It also looks as if inspectors may at long last get some access to the Parchin military base near Tehran where Iran has long been suspected of having conducted tests for detonating a nuclear weapon.

In return for taking these steps, Iran will get what is being called “limited, temporary, reversible” relief from sanctions. The value of the relief package is estimated to be about $7 billion over the six months of the interim agreement. It includes giving Iran access to about $3.6 billion of its foreign currency holdings that are frozen in overseas bank accounts and some easing of restrictions on Iran’s trade in petrochemical products, precious metals and parts for aircraft and cars. The main sanctions on oil and banking that are crippling Iran’s economy remain firmly in place pending a final agreement that imposes more sweeping and permanent curbs on its nuclear programme.

Inevitably, Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has condemned this as a “bad deal”, while his unlikely ally, Saudi Arabia, talks darkly of a “plan B” (acquiring nuclear weapons of its own) if America fails to roll back the Iranian nuclear programme. There are also predictable rumblings of scepticism from American Congressional leaders who are still contemplating (much against the wishes of the White House) a further tightening of sanctions. On Barack Obama’s side, however, is recent polling evidence that the proportion of Americans who would support a deal with Iran is around twice the number who back military action against its nuclear facilities.

The deal struck this weekend is not yet even the beginning of the end of the danger to the world posed by the possible (actually probable) military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear activities. It is a modest first step and there is still an awful lot that could go wrong: in particular, there are irreconcilables on all sides who might prefer that it did. Nor can Iran ever be fully defanged unless and until its leaders believe that it is in their best interests for that to happen—and that is still a long way off. But compared with the situation just a few months ago, what happened in Geneva is extraordinary and does properly deserve to be described as “historic”.

_{Picture credit: AFP. The picture shows Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, shaking hands with John Kerry, the American secretary of state.}

The Credit Side of a Multilingual Immigrant

Multilingualism

Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities?

LAST week, Johnson took a look at some of the advantages of bilingualism. These include better performance at tasks involving "executive function" (which involve the brain's ability to plan and prioritise), better defence against dementia in old age and—the obvious—the ability to speak a second language. One purported advantage was not mentioned, though. Many multilinguals report different personalities, or even different worldviews, when they speak their different languages.

It’s an exciting notion, the idea that one’s very self could be broadened by the mastery of two or more languages. In obvious ways (exposure to new friends, literature and so forth) the self really is broadened. Yet it is different to claim—as many people do—to have a different personality when using a different language. A former Economist colleague, for example,reported being ruder in Hebrew than in English. So what is going on here?

Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist who died in 1941, held that each language encodes a worldview that significantly influences its speakers. Often called “Whorfianism”, this idea has its sceptics, including The Economist, which hosted a debate on the subject in 2010. But there are still good reasons to believe language shapes thought.

This influence is not necessarily linked to the vocabulary or grammar of a second language. Significantly, most people are not symmetrically bilingual. Many have learned one language at home from parents, and another later in life, usually at school. So bilinguals usually have different strengths and weaknesses in their different languages—and they are not always best in their first language. For example, when tested in a foreign language, people are less likely to fall into a cognitive trap (answering a test question with an obvious-seeming but wrong answer) than when tested in their native language. In part this is because working in a second language slows down the thinking. No wonder people feel different when speaking them. And no wonder they feel looser, more spontaneous, perhaps more assertive or funnier or blunter, in the language they were reared in from childhood.

What of “crib” bilinguals, raised in two languages? Even they do not usually have perfectly symmetrical competence in their two languages. But even for a speaker whose two languages are very nearly the same in ability, there is another big reason that person will feel different in the two languages. This is because there is an important distinction between bilingualism and biculturalism.

Many bilinguals are not bicultural. But some are. And of those bicultural bilinguals, we should be little surprised that they feel different in their two languages. Experiments in psychology have shown the power of “priming”—small unnoticed factors that can affect behaviour in big ways. Asking people to tell a happy story, for example, will put them in a better mood. The choice between two languages is a huge prime. Speaking Spanish rather than English, for a bilingual and bicultural Puerto Rican in New York, might conjure feelings of family and home. Switching to English might prime the same person to think of school and work.

So there are two very good reasons (asymmetrical ability, and priming) that make people feel different speaking their different languages. We are still left with a third kind of argument, though. An economist recently interviewed here at Prospero, Athanasia Chalari, said for example that:

Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk they begin their sentences with verbs and the form of the verb includes a lot of information so you already know what they are talking about after the first word and can interrupt more easily.

Is there something intrinsic to the Greek language that encourages Greeks to interrupt? Consider Johnson sceptical. People seem to enjoy telling tales about their languages' inherent properties, and how they influence their speakers. A group of French intellectual worthies once proposed, rather self-flatteringly, that French be the sole legal language of the EU, because of its supposedly unmatchable rigour and precision. Some Germans believe that frequently putting the verb at the end of a sentence makes the language especially logical. But language myths are not always self-flattering: many speakers think their languages are unusually illogical or difficult—witness the plethora of books along the lines of "Only in English do you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway; English must be the craziest language in the world!" What such pop-Whorfian stories share is a (natural) tendency to exoticise languages. We also see some unsurprising overlap with national stereotypes and self-stereotypes: French, rigorous; German, logical; English, playful. Of course.

In this case, Ms Chalari, a scholar, at least proposed a specific and plausible line of causation from grammar to personality: in Greek, the verb comes first, and it carries a lot of information, hence easy interrupting. The problem is that many unrelated languages all around the world put the verb at the beginning of sentences. Many languages all around the world are heavily inflected, encoding lots of information in verbs. It would be a striking finding if all of these unrelated languages had speakers more prone to interrupting each other. Welsh, for example, is also both verb-first and about as heavily inflected as Greek, but the Welsh are not known as pushy conversationalists.

Neo-Whorfians continue to offer evidence and analysis that aims to prove that different languages push speakers to think differently. One such effort is forthcoming: “The Bilingual Mind” by Aneta Pavlenko, to be published in April. Ms Pavlenko speaks to François Grosjeanhere. Meanwhile, John McWhorter takes the opposite stance in "The Language Hoax", forthcoming in February. We'll return to this debate. But strong Whorfian arguments do not need to be valid for people to feel differently in their different languages.

Choose Your Courses After Seeking self analysis and Advice Please

Education

Minding the gap

Education technology helps minorities do better at university

Only 40% of black college students graduate within six years; 62% of whites do. No one knows why. One academic has suggested teaching “grit” and “determination” in the face of obstacles. But what minority students often need is good advice. Higher education is a maze of different courses and programmes, which students who are the first in their family to attend college struggle to navigate. Some choose their courses simply because they begin late in the morning, or because their friends are doing them. As a result, they often fail.

Some institutions, such as Georgia State University, have improved results by getting faculty, advisers and older students to work more closely with minority students. But this takes time and money. Technology can help.

The University of Arizona has a system called eAdvisor. This keeps track of each student’s progress towards his degree, and can make sure that courses which are critical but difficult—such as maths or statistics—are taken early on. Thanks to this system, which came online in 2007, the proportion of students (of all races) who move up to the next year each year has risen from 77% to 84%.

New findings from four Tennessee colleges support the idea that eAdvisors work. Software called the Degree Compass (developed by Tristan Denley, a mathematician) makes course suggestions for students in much the same way that Netflix recommends films to watch and Amazon offers goods to buy. The program ranks courses by their usefulness to a student for the degree he is taking, and also predicts those in which he is likely to get the best grade.

Large-scale trials of the Degree Compass have been held at Austin Peay State University and three other institutions. Students who follow its course recommendations increase their number of credit hours and gain better grades. (Credit hours are the basic units that count towards a degree in America.) The usual probability of getting an A or a B at these institutions is around 62%. But if a student takes a course in which Degree Compass has predicted at least a B for him, there is a 90% chance he will get it.

When students take the courses they are recommended to, minority students show the largest gains in credit hours per term. These gains largely erase the achievement gap between whites and minorities at those particular southern colleges. This stood at two credit-hours per term in 2011; last year it was 0.7 hours. A similar result was found with poorer students on Pell Grants. And the software can also predict future course demand. This should help colleges tailor their schedules, so that more students get on to suitable courses and graduate in four years—without dropping out first.

Choice Countries For Further Studies..

Foreign study

Migrants with mortar boards

Foreign students love America, but other nations are wooing them

FUN, adventure, the aphrodisiac effect of a foreign accent—these are why 4.3m university students study abroad. Oh yes, and the need to prepare oneself for a global career. Worldwide, the number of migrants with mortar boards has more than doubled since 2000. And the number of foreign students at universities in America has risen by 40% over the past decade to a high of 819,644 in the 2012/13 academic year, says a new report from the Institute of International Education (IIE). Over the decade to 2011/12 the number of Americans studying abroad has risen by 76%, to 283,000 (see chart).

Students from China are the largest foreign contingent on American campuses—more than a quarter of the total and up by more than a fifth in a single year. Students from India and South Korea come next, but their numbers are declining, partly because more are heading to China to study, and partly because America has made it harder for foreigners to get work visas after they graduate. The dip in the number of Indians and Koreans at American universities is smaller, however, than the increase in the number of Brazilians and Saudis. The latter now make up the fourth-largest group of foreign students in America.

Ben Wildavsky, author of “The Great Brain Race”, says the global education marketplace is becoming more competitive. America is still the favourite destination for foreign students, but its market share fell from 23% in 2000 to 17% in 2011. Colleges in other countries have made themselves more attractive. Many now offer courses in English, regardless of the native tongue. They are also recruiting hard.

The competition is hardly zero-sum—Mr Wildavsky writes of a “free trade in minds” with the benefits widely shared. Colleges love foreign students because they tend to pay full fees. The IIE estimates that they contributed $24 billion to the American economy in the most recent academic year. The indirect benefits are probably greater: clever minds, wherever they are from, tend to produce clever research.

America is not trying to poach foreign brainpower, says the State Department. Rather, it wants to send foreign students home with fond memories and useful skills. Employers, by contrast, would like them to stay. But many are kicked out as soon as they graduate. As Barack Obama lamented last month, “It’s not smart to invite some of the brightest minds from around the world to study here and then not let them start businesses here.”

Foreign students tend to study in fields where America has skills shortages, like engineering, maths and science. Take Jared Ye, who came to America from Shenzhen and studied applied maths and economics at Rice University. He is now pursuing a PhD at Cornell University. “I have no plans to go back to China soon,” he says; on graduation he wants to work in America. About two-thirds of foreigners who earn doctorates remain in the country.

American students seem to take a more laid-back approach to foreign study than their Asian peers. Just 9% of them study abroad as undergraduates. After increasing for years, the numbers are levelling off. Those who do venture out tend to choose agreeable destinations such as Britain (12.2%), Italy (10.5%), Spain (9.3%) or France (6.1%), rather than strategically important ones such as China (5.3%). India does not even make the top ten, and the Middle East outside Israel is about as popular as spring break in North Dakota.

Allan Goodman, the president of IIE, thinks more Americans should study abroad. Passports should be as ubiquitous as student IDs, he says. Foreign colleges offer lower fees, lower drinking ages and cross-cultural experience. However, few have the prestige of the Ivy League.

From the print edition: United States