Do they know it's Christmas?

Once upon a Christmas, quite a long time ago, I had just returned from working with a charity in an East African desert. Two countries tore themselves apart there, while people who cared nothing for either the war or Christmas lived precariously from day to day. Weapons detonating every day cost more than the price of a lifetime's food and medicines for the populations of both countries. Before that, in West African mountains, I watched members of nomadic tribes pledge eternal loyalty by giving five grains of wheat.

Back here in the rich world where the weapons come from, I wandered along the main shopping street of a peaceful town. Advertising invited me to buy a battery powered toy for an amount which would feed a desert family for five years, a watch whose price would keep a mountain tribe in luxurious security for life. A sheet of gift wrapping paper could cost more than a year's starvation food.

The world seemed to disappear slowly down the wrong end of a telescope. For a time, I confused Christmas with what had been done to it; I lost my perspective for a while, and it would be some years before I start to find it again.

I'm an atheist who doesn't celebrate Christmas (and Christmas is a pagan, not Christian, festival at root), but the essential message of Christmas nevertheless seems to me an important one. Unfortunately, the message of Christmas can be very hard to find amongst the tawdry mess of christmas as I see it around me from mid November onwards.

Case in point

A collection of case studies from recent science literature highlight the importance of statistics...

• Beating the drought: using GenStat to investigate drought tolerance in chick peas.

• Reading the future: multivariate data analysis of brain patterns using IDL gives improved prognosis for improved reading in dyslexia sufferers.

• Committing fluicide: OriginPro analyses the viricidal potential of hydrophobic polycations.

• Fishy business: Statistica analysis of otolith microchemistry data illuminates population relationships amongst Atlantic herring.

• Wears the diamonds?: Multiple linear regression in SPSS offers a way to better prediction of wear rates in industrial cutting tools.

• Learning from past mistakes: Pursuing future geopolitics through historical data with Wolfram Mathematica.

Connections

“What has to be faced is that there is little international political motivation to effect any fundamental changes in the workings of the world economy, even in the aftermath of an extreme financial crisis in 2008-9, and in the context of current problems in the United States and Western Europe that could escalate rapidly in the coming months. Much of the street protest in the Middle East and North Africa has stemmed indirectly from the anger of the marginalised, and this has now spread to Western Europe. The violent street actions in Greece have attracted much attention, but the sustained, if less reported protests in Spain, may turn out to be much more important. They may even be the start of an awakening in western countries that turns out to be as significant as that in the Arab world.”

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• Paul Rogers, Awakening and famine in the global context. International Security Monthly Briefing 2011(2011-07).

Just deserts

According to Richard Lederer’s unnamed student^[1], deserts are defined by a climate "such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere" and have to be "cultivated by irritation". Say the word desert to most people in the industrialised west, and they will visualise somewhere hot, sandy, and utterly devoid of any life except, possibly, Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif striding (with or without camels) across photogenic dunes.

In the days when I was trying the patience of successive O-level geography teachers, we were given a more seductively precise and objective definition: annual mean rainfall of 250mm or less. That figure is still around, although it has generally been supplanted by more sophisticated relative concepts like relative moisture economy deficit (more water lost through evaporation and transpiration than is received in precipitation).

Generally speaking, the most widely used climatological classification systems go by distribution of vegetation, which both serves as an indicator of available water and decides the viability of other life. This approach naturally appeals to statistical data analytic bean counters like myself, though they do complicate matters by including temperature considerations. A desert, for my purposes here, is a region whose available water economy provides marginal (or nonexistent) support for life. It will usually be arid, but we won’t be too picky about semiaridity distinctions as many of the problems to be studied involve transition. It will often be megathermal, but not necessarily so.

Oceans cover about two thirds of the earth’s surface. Deserts account for roughly two thirds of what is left (and current trends, despite significant efforts at reversal, are towards net increase) so they are no small matter – either in themselves or in the computational challenges which they can present. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that only since the explosion of generally accessible scientific computing resources can they be realistically confronted at all. [More]

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1. Lederer, R., Anguished English : an anthology of accidental assaults upon our language. 1987, Charleston: Wyrick. 0941711048 (pbk.).

Less food for more future

In a comment to my Food for a future post (and the article from which it is extracted), Geoff Powell comments that “Eating less would help”.

He's right, of course.

So would discarding less. In Eire, more than a third of a tonne of edible food is thrown away per person per year; in the UK, more than one tonne; in the US, over a hundred tonnes.

Reduction in both consumption and waste fall into what I called in the article "the blue corner". Taken together, blue corner strategies in the developed world could reduce global food requirements by 40-90% (depending on definitions and assumptions) . Even just halving waste and overconsumption in the US and EU would significantly increase the net food supply in a world where one in three go hungry.

Food for a future

It’s fashionable to scoff at Thomas Robert Malthus’ predictions, two hundred years ago, that human populations would grow until stopped by famine, disease or ‘moral restraint’. He wrote before the arrival of modern scientific crop research or contraception, and it’s unfair to blame Malthus for not foreseeing those breakthroughs. However, he was essentially right: the food supply expanded but remains finite, and contraception has not fundamentally disrupted the shape of the population growth curve, which is asymptotically approaching the vertical.

What to do about it is a matter of vigorous debate. To simplify: in the red corner are those who focus on means of increasing supply; in the blue, those who emphasise a dietary shift away from inefficient use of that supply. An Isaac Asimov short story^[1] did suggest exploiting the ‘many worlds’ view of quantum physics to disperse a trillion-strong population by placing every family on its own otherwise uninhabited Earth, but that one is a little beyond the reach of even today’s scientific computing power. In the long run, if the upward population curve continues, neither red approach nor blue will do more than defer the problem; in the meantime, pragmatically, both are needed. [More]

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1. Isaac Asimov, “Living space”, in Science Fiction. 1956, New York (NY, USA): Columbia Publications.

Statistics and Esperanza

In the course of work, recently, I ran across the following paragraph:

“So, what does 107 million underweight children under the age of five really mean? Before you can answer that, make the child come alive. Give her a name. I call mine "Esperanza". It means that little Esperanza has probably gone to bed hungry for each or most of the 1825 nights that she has lived so far. And, there are 107 million Esperanzas in Asia.”

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• Rajat M. Nag ( Managing Director General, Asian Development Bank). Graduation ceremony commencement speech at the Asian Institute of Management Master in Development Management Program. 31 July 2009. Full text available here.