Why The Bottom Billion? This is the provocative title of Paul Collier’s book (more here) that asserts that not all countries less-developed than our own are equal, but we’ve forgotten about the least developed of all.

Maybe political correctness leads us to label all these countries ‘developing’, when some are failing, but Mr Collier hints at darker reasons why the poorest countries on the planet, those that are not developing, are also ignored. The development biz just isn’t interested in them:

Development biz is run by the aid agencies and the companies that get the contracts for their projects. They will fight this thesis with the tenacity of bureaucracies endangered, because they like things the way they are. A definition of development that encompasses five billion people gives them license to be everywhere, or more honestly, everywhere except the bottom billion. At the bottom, conditions are rather rough. Every development agency has difficulty getting its staff to serve in Chad and Laos; the glamour postings are for countries such as Brazil and China. The World Bank has large offices in every major middle-income country but not a single person resident in the Central African Republic. So don’t expect the development biz to refocus voluntarily.

Another reason it’s so easy to forget about the bottom billion is they’re not statistically significant - if you do the calculations the way the IMF does them:

The usual approach… is to average figures that relate to the size of a country’s economy. If we want to describe what the typical person experiences in the countries of the bottom billion, we need to work with figures based not on a country’s income but on its population. Does it matter? Well it does if the poorest countries are diverging from the rest… Because averaging by income dismisses the poorest countries as unimportant. The experience of their people does not count for much precisely because they are poor - their income is negligible.

Decomposing the ‘developing world’ reveals a billion people in 54 countries that aren’t developing at all, often war-torn, corrupt, and isolated states. The problems they face are quite different from the challenges faced by four billion people in countries like India and China. Economic growth averages 5% a year in the developing world, a much higher rate even than in developed countries.

Apart from a recent period of marginal and most likely temporary growth because of rising commodity prices, the poorest countries have been contracting for decades. The world is moving in two different directions and Mr Collier’s fear is that as the developing nations catch up, they’ll leave behind a forgotten, almost invisible rump trapped in abject poverty.

In Wired, Gary Wolf describes a multi-decade tussle between psychologists and teachers over how we remember. Psychologists tell us the harder we have to work to remember something the better we will remember it long-term, but that’s not how we are taught:

Precisely those things that seem to signal we’re learning well — easy performance on drills, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something — are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the future
…
The most popular learning systems sold today — for instance, foreign language software like Rosetta Stone — cheerfully defy every one of the psychologists’ warnings. With its constant feedback and easily accessible clues, Rosetta Stone brilliantly creates a sensation of progress. “Go to Amazon and look at the reviews,” says Greg Keim, Rosetta Stone’s CTO, when I ask him what evidence he has that people are really remembering what they learn. “That is as objective as you can get in terms of a user’s sense of achievement.” The sole problem here, from the psychologists’ perspective, is that the user’s sense of achievement is exactly what we should most distrust.

I have recent experience of Rosetta stone. The programme teaches language by challenging the learner to guess or recall words from pictures. Learning Italian had been fun. I’d progressed through the lessons with ease. It really wasn’t like learning at all.

In fact it wasn’t learning. When I visited Italy this Easter I could remember very little, and what I could remember I’d learned from much less enjoyable books and programs I’d tried before settling on Rosetta Stone.

Citing research, Mr Wolf says the best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it (i.e. when it’s hardest to recall, I suppose). And the best way to remember it is to reformulate information into questions that you will have to answer. Programs like Rosetta Stone make it far too easy to pluck information out of short-term memory, but, long-term, little sticks.

It’s better to select what you need to learn and revise it at the right time. But that’s harder work, and how do you know when you are about to forget?

According to Mr Wolf, a computer program called Supermemo can schedule learning. His article is largely a biography of its extraordinary inventor, Piotr Wozniak.

See also:

• Using Supermemo without a computer
• Remembering everything

Ted Nelson is a controversial figure in the fascinating history of the Internet. He invented a superior version of the World Wide Web, called Xanadu, before Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web. Wired magazine chronicled the failure of Xanadu to develop from a series of brilliant ideas into something that actually worked in 1995. The article was as controversial as its subject, who issued this rebuttal, and sent Wired this letter.

I was fairly new to the Web in 1995 and the notion that the ideas underpinning it went back decades inspired me (just Google Vannevar Bush or Memex). But another aspect of Ted Nelson’s story, one I don’t think he chose to dispute, also stuck. According the writer of the Wired article, Mr Nelson suffers from attention deficit disorder, and this inspired Xanadu:

Xanadu, the ultimate hypertext information system, began as Ted Nelson’s quest for personal liberation. The inventor’s hummingbird mind and his inability to keep track of anything left him relatively helpless. He wanted to be a writer and a filmmaker, but he needed a way to avoid getting lost in the frantic multiplication of associations his brain produced. His great inspiration was to imagine a computer program that could keep track of all the divergent paths of his thinking and writing. To this concept of branching, nonlinear writing, Nelson gave the name hypertext.

In 1995 he carried around pads, pens, cine cameras and cassette recorders to record everything significant, and forget nothing. Goodness knows what he’s carrying today.

I’m a bit of a hummingbird too. I rarely go out without a camera and a notebook. I’ve tried carrying PDA’s and voice recorders, but lost patience with them.

There are three problems that I’ve been unable to surmount in recording pretty much anything useful about my life: input, storage, and retrieval. Even when I’ve remembered to record potentially significant information it usually squats in my computer or a file somewhere as it slowly transforms into a lifeless morass.

But I’m wondering (not for the first time) if we’re approaching the time when recording your life (or at least the useful bits) and replaying it is feasible, without it taking over your life (as it seems to have taken over Mr Nelson’s).

The ructions at Evernote, a software company, prompted that notion.

Evernote is a superior notetaking application I’ve used for years that is changing in version 3 into a surrogate memory. To the horror of old timers who are afraid the company will drop some of the features they love because they are too hard to implement, or do not fit the new brief, it’s creators are re-engineering Evernote to synchronise across all sorts of computers, mobile ‘phones and the Web.

Since Evernote is incredibly fast to search and it recognises text in pictures you take, it could mean you can input and output your forgotten thoughts almost anywhere.

It’s not Xanadu, but it would be Nirvana for me.

I left the car for a service at MBT Motors in Barrington this morning and jogged home. It’s the twelfth day on the ‘trot’ I’ve been running after a six month ‘retirement‘. Retiring from competition should not have meant retiring from running - I forgot the beneficial effects of fitness on mind and body.

As I ran back over Barrington Hill with the sun on my back I thought about why I’m enjoying my come-back so much. OK it’s spring time, so it’s a good time to run, but running freely without the pressure of times or deadlines is supremely relaxing. Here are some ‘rules’ that I seem to be following, which might keep it that way:

1. Run every day. If you don’t feel like it after you’ve run half a mile then cut it short
2. Start slowly
3. Don’t take a watch, a GPS or a heart rate monitor
4. Never run the same route two days in a row
5. Take detours, seek out hills, and fresh air
6. Don’t aim to be back home by a certain time
7. If you feel good, run a bit further…
8. Or go for two runs that day.

I’m reading ‘The Bottom Billion’ by Paul Collier. The strapline is “why the poorest countries are failing, and what can be done about it”.The joy of this book is that it does what it says on the cover. It’s not a polemic. It’s the distilled knowledge of an economist who’s spent a long time investigating poverty.

Every chapter is a good example of the book’s mission, but I’ve just got around to writing my thoughts and I’m already on chapter 5. So I’ll use it to demonstrate.

Chapter 5 explains landlocked countries with scarce natural resources and undeveloped neighbours grow more slowly than other countries - or not at all. Transporting manufactured goods by any means other than sea is expensive, and manufacturing is the most reliable path to development. Switzerland is rich because it has rich neighbours with valuable markets and efficient transport.

Uganda…

…has Kenya , which has been stagnant for nearly three decades, Sudan, which has been embroiled in a civil war; Rwanda, which had a genocide; Somalia, which completely collapsed; the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the history of which was sufficiently catastrophic for it to change its name from Zaire, and finally Tanzania, which invaded it.

The economist Jeffrey Sachs did much of the work demonstrating the impotence of landlocked nations, but Mr Collier’s chapter reminds me of Jared Diamond, who, taking the widest perspective - the development of the human race - has long championed the notion that geography explains why peoples in one place develop faster than peoples in another.

Mr Collier explains why being landlocked is a peculiarly African problem:

In the developing word, excluding Africa, only 1 percent of the population lives in countries that are both landlocked and resource-scarce. Another way of saying this is that other than in Africa, areas that are far from the coast and don’t have resources simply don’t become countries. Pretty sensible, that: such areas are so dependent upon what the neighbouring areas do that it is better to be part of their polity rather than independent. But Africa is different. About 30% of Africa’s population lives in landlocked, resource-scarce countries. A reasonable case can be made that such places never should have become countries. However the deed is done: these countries exist and will continue to do so.

He doesn’t say it, but I think the deed, setting the African boundaries, was done by European colonists.

It’s sloppy thinking, but there’s a view that extreme poverty is an African problem, because much of it is in Africa. It’s a short step from there, to the belief that it is endemic in Africans. And then you are all but saying Africans are lazy, or they can’t govern themselves, and other racial stereotypes.

Think about poverty in terms of geography though (in fact Collier focuses on four ‘traps’; conflict, natural resources, being landlocked, and bad governance - geography has a role to play in all of them), and you understand the problem. Then you can do something about it.

As I said, the joy of Collier’s book is it does what it says on the cover. Having explained that landlocked states are starting from a position of weakness, Mr Collier outlines nine strategies they can use (I’m paraphrasing):

1. Encourage trade and build transport infrastructure with neighbours
2. Improve neighbours’ economic policies (i.e. lobby them)
3. Improve coastal access
4. Attract business through good governance
5. Invest in air transport and telecommunications
6. Educate emigrant workers, and encourage them to send income back home
7. Build infrastructure to encourage companies to prospect for resources
8. Develop agriculture
9. Attract aid.

He’s going to explain what wealthy countries can do later in the book. But I can already see it’s a great book.

Judge it by its cover.

I thought Stephen King’s Cell ended badly, ‘though I was so tired when I finished I may not have given the finale the attention it deserved. I read the last 200+ pages between 10.30 and 2.17 in an increasingly cold bath. It’s gripping, but the ended deflated me.

Don’t read this unless you want to know what happens:

A ‘pulse’ sent by mobile ‘phone sends the population of Boston and New England into a murderous frenzy. Clay, a survivor, is searching for his wife and son. At the finale he finds Johnny, but he’s a ‘phoner’, i.e. marginally less crazed than a ‘crazie’.

His brain is scrambled, he soils his pants, he can’t talk, though he may recognise his father and he’s prepared to tag along with him, more dog than human.

Jordan, a boy blessed with uncanny insight into crazies and phoners, and one of Clay’s companions, had suggested the cell ‘phone ‘pulse’ that scrambled Johnny’s brain might be reversed and the boys latent humanity return, if he were to be subjected to it again. Since the ‘pulse’ is mutating that seems unlikely (well, it seems unlikely anyway). Finding Johnny seemed unlikely.

Anyway Clay tries it. We don’t know the result. I don’t care. I’m too tired. And I’m disappointed.

I’m wondering if that’s always the way with thrillers - to travel is better than to arrive.

The Amazing Adventures are, in fact, shared by three people. Joe Kavalier and his lover, Rosa Saks, must come to terms with Joe’s escape from Nazi Prague. Their story is bracketed by Samuel Clay’s, Joe’s cousin and Rosa’s husband.

The adventures are also an alternate history of comic books. Until Joe’s grief forces them apart, Kavalier and Clay are a partnership that builds its fortune on a superhero called the Escapist. Clay writes and Kavalier draws. Kavalier uses his money to finance the evacuation of Jewish children from Europe, until the boat is torpedoed with his young brother on board.

Source: nickderington.com

The lives of all three characters are transformed. With the partnership is at its peak. Joe and Rosa in love, and Rosa pregnant and about to tell Joe, he enlists to “kill Germans“. Rosa marries Sam, who’s trying to repress his homosexuality, and they bring up Joe’s child as mother and father. When the war ends, Joe disappears and a decade passes with all three characters leading unfulfilled lives.

Then Joe sees his son, and Sam in a magic shop and contrives to strike up a covert relationship with the boy. It finally leads to the reunification of Joe and Rosa and the liberation of Sam.

So joyous is Joe and Rosa’s love, so tragic his brother’s death, and so fabulous is Michael Chabon’s reconstruction of pre- and post-war New York (and pre-war Prague and wartime Antarctica) and the characters he plants there, the book ought to be above criticism.

But words can’t describe the frustration I feel about the Adventures. Well, actually, 113 words can. That’s how many words I had to look up. Mr Chabon terrorised my memory by breaking off conversations mid-sentence to describe or explain situations in fractal detail, before resuming them long after I’d forgotten what the characters were saying.

To make it through the book I treated it like an academic text, compiling word lists and chapter summaries (there are 75, I think). I became so obsessed with the task, I fantasized that Mr Chabon started each chapter with one or two impossibly archaic, obscure, Jewish words as a test of resolve, particularly as the first page of each chapter isn’t numbered, forcing the reader to shuffle through the pages to note word, and page numbers.

I’ve never before been infuriated by the page numbering of a novel, but here’s another complaint - the ‘3’s’ look like ‘5’s’!

The problem with the two-steps-forward one-step-back rhythm is that my misunderstandings punctuated the novel, determining its pace. To be honest, it felt oddly paced anyway. At times, meandering in fifth gear, and at other times racing ahead but stuck in first.

I can’t compare this book to others I’ve reviewed. It’s so much more ambitious, and so much more demanding than, say, Fatherland that it shouldn’t be measured on the same scale. Is it ‘four stars’ or ‘five stars’? I don’t know. It’s unratable. This book is ‘worth the effort’, of the reader and the writer. That’s a much bigger compliment than it might seem because it was such an effort.

Take the Chabon test! Can you define these words? The answers are hyperlinked. They come from an array of religious, medical, cultural and historical dictionaries, and online discussions in which the participants, unable to find a definition, make one up.

• P 9 - Omniveillant
• P 12 - Prestidigitated
• P 44 - Exophthalmic
• P 52 - Goyische
• P 60 - Mezuzah
• P 100 - Homunculous
• P 119 - Phyrigian cap
• P 191 - Prognathous
• P 215 - Jambeaux
• P 226 - Satrap
• P 231 - Yuggogheny
• P 233 - Tenebrous
• P 385 - Donnybrooks

Unrated

It’s difficult to look beyond Forest Whittaker’s portrayal of Idi Amin and review The Last King of Scotland, so let’s get that bit out of the way first. He’s charismatic and terrifying, mesmerising and grotesque. There can have been fewer easier Oscars to decide.

James McAvoy is the fictional Dr Garrigan, a young Scot who went to Uganda to escape his father but finished up begging to return to him. We watch as Amin sucks Garrigan in, employing him as a personal physician, robbing him of his passport, and almost his life when he’s left hanging from meathooks at Entebbe airport.

They’re actually quite similar, especially when they first meet at a roadside, the carefree graduate and the childlike dictator. It’s not surprising a friendship develops, but as the film progresses the menace in Amin consumes them both, and the whole country. Like all good horror films, it builds up slowly until foreboding, excess and finally shock take over.

The last hour of the film imprints itself as a slideshow of chilling images. The mutilated body of Amin’s wife (Garrigan’s lover) her limbs sewn back on in the wrong order, Amin fingering a bottle of poisonous pills prescribed by Garrigan, Garrigan hoisted by his skin, the colleague who saves him shot point blank, and Garrigan’s escape among the hostages flying out of Entebbe airport.

It seems like five minutes have passed, but it feels like hours of drained emotion. By the end, we felt we’d watched a truly great film, but we were glad it was over. Apparently Whittaker felt the same way. He’d played a truly great part, but he wanted rid of it.

10/10

(You won’t recognise Scully in this one either!)

After the fire, and the feasting
The gristle and the fat and the laughter
After the stories, I felt compelled to draw.
To daub on the walls the fear and the thrill
So I’d never forget it.
How we’d surrounded the beast and teased it.
Jabbed it with our spears until blood flowed down its flanks.
How we dodged and dived and kept it turning on a hearthstone, grunting and snorting and kicking up dust until we could only smell the fear and the dirt and the invisible peril choking us, spinning and spitting as if it were attempting to excavate itself out of a certain death.
Digging a bowl in the dirt.
A stadium for the first bull fight.

Employing every sci-fi cliche from crop circles to alien abduction, Sign is much more supenseful than it deserves to be. In fact it doesn’t deserve to be suspenseful at all, but more of that later. First let’s deal with the aliens.

Guided by crop circles, they’ve come to harvest humanity. Evidently fantistically intelligent, strong and fast, these water-soluble beings are unable to break down locked doors, forgot to pack space suits, and chose to invade a planet that is, in the main, water.

Yes, the plot is very weak. Mankind discovers the invaders are allergic to water, we fight back with hoses, buckets and cups, and they flee. Fortunately that’s all incidental to the main plot, which isn’t really a plot at all, but more of that later.

We hear of the alien invasion, War of the World’s style, through radio and TV reports and the story unfolds through the eyes of a family barricaded inside its home. Mel Gibson is the father, a former preacher whose lost faith after the death of his wife. Joaqin Phoenix, his brother, has returned to help him with the kids.

M. Night Shyamalan, the director, builds the tension in tandem with the emotion as the family members face the aliens and face up to their own tragedy. There are theatrical scenes as they retreat into a cellar and torches illuminate fragments of action, plunging the viewer right into the chaos. It’s a procession of brilliant staged, increasingly tense, set pieces until…

Everything clicks into place. Mel’s wife died for a reason, so in her dying breaths she could tell him how to kill the aliens. The boy has asthma for a reason, so his “lungs are closed” when an alien tries to stun him with knock-out gas. Everything is predestined. The family survive. Mel’s faith returns. Six months later he’s a preacher again. Never mind the carnage.

It’s only when the credits roll and the film releases its grip that you realise it’s a con. There was no reason for tension. No need to care about these people. Because there was only one possible outcome. And a plot where people have no choice isn’t a plot at all, it’s just a sequence of events.

But what a sequence of events! The wise crowds on IMDB give Signs 6.9/10 and I’m going to do the same. It’s almost as if someone gave Shymalyan the most hackneyed backdrop imaginable and then denied him even the freedom to tell a story, and said, “now make something out of that.” He did!

7/10