Moral responsibility in the Computing era (SEP entry)

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy intermittently has new entries that have to do with computing, like on the philosophy of computer science about which I blogged before, ethics of, among others, Internet research, and now Computing and Moral Responsibility by Merel Noorman [1]. The remainder of this post is about the latter entry that was added on July 18, 2012. Overall, the entry is fine, but I had expected more from it, which may well be due to that the ‘computing and moral responsibility’ topic needs some more work to mature and then maybe will give me the answers I was hoping to find already.

Computing—be this the hardware, firmware, software, or IT themes—interferes with the general notion of moral responsibility, hence, affects every ICT user at least to some extent, and the computer scientists, programmers etc who develop the artifacts may themselves be morally responsible, and perhaps even the produced artifacts, too. This area of philosophical inquiry deals with questions such as “Who is accountable when electronic records are lost or when they contain errors? To what extent and for what period of time are developers of computer technologies accountable for untoward consequences of their products? And as computer technologies become more complex and behave increasingly autonomous can or should humans still be held responsible for the behavior of these technologies?”. To this end, the entry has three main sections, covering moral responsibility, the question whether computers can be more agents, and the notion of (and the need for) rethinking the concept of moral responsibility.

First, it reiterates the general stuff about moral responsibility without the computing dimension, like that it has to do with the actions of humans and its consequences: “generally speaking, a person or group of people is morally responsible when their voluntary actions have morally significant outcomes that would make it appropriate to praise or blame them”, where the SEP entry dwells primarily on the blaming. Philosophers roughly agree that the following three conditions have to be met regarding being morally responsible (copied from the entry):

 1. There should be a causal connection between the person and the outcome of actions. A person is usually only held responsible if she had some control over the outcome of events.

2. The subject has to have knowledge of and be able to consider the possible consequences of her actions. We tend to excuse someone from blame if they could not have known that their actions would lead to a harmful event.

3. The subject has to be able to freely choose to act in certain way. That is, it does not make sense to hold someone responsible for a harmful event if her actions were completely determined by outside forces.

But how are these to be applied? Few case examples of the difficulty to apply it in praxis are given; e.g., the malfunctioning Therac-25 radiation machine (three people died caused by overdoses of radiation, primarily due to issues regarding the software), the Aegis software system that misidentified an Iranian civilian aircraft in 1988 as an attacking military aircraft and the US military decided to shoot it down (contrary to two other systems that had identified it correctly) and having killed all 209 passengers on board, the software to manage remote-controlled drones, and perhaps even the ‘filter bubble’. Who is to blame, if at all? These examples, and others I can easily think of, are vastly different scenarios, but they have not been identified, categorized, and treated as such. But if we do, then perhaps at least some general patters can emerge and even rules regarding moral responsibility in the context of computing. Here’s my initial list of different kinds of cases:

1. The hardware/software was intended for purpose X but is used for purpose Y, with X not being inherently harmful, whereas Y is; e.g., the technology of an internet filter for preventing kids to access adult-material sites is used to make a blacklist of sites that do not support government policy and subsequently the users vote for harmful policies, or, as simpler one: using mobile phones to detonate bombs.
2. The hardware/software is designed for malicious intents; ranging from so-called cyber warfare (e.g., certain computer viruses, denial-of-service attacks) to computing for physical war to developing and using shadow-accounting software for tax evasion.
3. The hardware/software has errors (‘bugs’):
   1. The specification was wrong with respect to the intentionally understated or mis-formulated intentions, and the error is simply a knock-on effect;
   2. The specification was correct, but a part of the subject domain is intentionally wrongly represented (e.g., the decision tree may be correctly implemented given the wrong representation of the subject domain);
   3. The specification was correct, the subject domain represented correctly, but there’s a conceptual error in the algorithm (e.g., the decision tree was built wrongly);
   4. The program code is scruffy and doesn’t do what the algorithm says it is supposed to do;
4. The software is correct, but has the rules implemented as alethic or hard constraints versus deontic or soft constraints (not being allowed to manually override a default rule), effectively replacing human-bureaucrats with software-bureaucrats;
5. Bad interface design to make the software difficult to use, resulting in wrong use and/or overlooking essential features;
6. No or insufficient training of the users how to use the hardware/software;
7. Insufficient maintenance of the IT system that causes the system to malfunction;
8. Overconfidence in the reliability of the hardware/software;
   1. The correctness of the software, pretending that it always gives the right answer when it may not; e.g., assuming that the pattern matching algorithm for fingerprint matching is 100% reliable when it is actually only, say, 85%;
   2. Assuming (extreme) high availability, when no extreme high availability system is in place; e.g., relying solely on electronic health records in a remote area whereas the system may be down right when it is crucial to access it in the hospital information system.
9. Overconfidence in the information provided by or through the software; this is partially alike 8-i, or the first example in item 1, and, e.g., willfully believing that everything published on the Internet is true despite the so-called ‘information warfare’ regarding the spreading of disinformation.

Where the moral responsibility lies can be vastly different depending on the case, and even within the case, it may require further analysis. For instance (and my opinions follow, not what is written in the SEP entry), regarding maintenance: a database for the electronic health records outgrows it prospective size or the new version of the RDBMS actually requires more hardware resources than the server has, with as consequence that querying the database becomes too slow in a critical case (say, to check whether patient A is allergic to medicine B that needs to be administered immediately): perhaps the system designer should have foreseen this, or perhaps management didn’t sign off on a purchase for a new server, but I think that the answer to the question of where the moral responsibility lies can be found. For mission-critical software, formal methods can be used, and if, as engineer, you didn’t and something goes wrong, then you are to blame. One cannot be held responsible for a misunderstanding, but when the domain expert says X of the subject domain and you have some political conviction that you prefer Y and build that into the software and that, then, results in something harmful, then you can be held morally responsible (item 3-ii). On human vs. software bureaucrat (item 4), the blame can be narrowed down when things go wrong: was it the engineer who didn’t bother with the possibility of exceptions, was there a/no technological solution for it at the time of development (and knowingly ignore it), or was it the client who willfully was happy avoiding such pesky individual exceptions to the rule? Or, another example, as the SEP entry questions (an example of item 1): can one hold the mobile phone companies responsible for having designed cell phones that also can be used to detonate bombs? In my opinion: no. Just in case you want to look for guidance, or even answers, in the SEP entry regarding such kind of questions and/or cases: don’t bother, there are none.

More generally, the SEP entry mentions two problems for attributing blame and responsibility: the so-called problem of ‘many hands’ and the problem with physical and temporal distance. The former concerns the issue that there are many people developing the software, training the users, etc., and it is difficult to identify the individual, or even the group of individuals, who ultimately did the thing that caused the harmful effect. It is true that this is a problem, and especially when the computing hardware or software is complex and developed by hundreds or even thousands of people. The latter concerns the problem that the distance can blur the causal connection between action and event, which “can reduce the sense of responsibility”. But, in my opinion, just because someone doesn’t reflect much on her actions and may be willfully narrow-minded to (not) accept that, yes, indeed, those people celebrating a wedding in a tent in far-away Afghanistan are (well, were) humans, too, does not absolve one from the responsibility—neither the hardware developer, nor the software developer, nor the one who pushed the button—as distance does not reduce responsibility. One could argue it is only the one who pushed the button who made the judgment error, but the drone/fighter jet/etc. computer hardware and software are made for harmful purposes in the first place. Its purpose is to do harm to other entities—be this bombing humans or, say, a water purification plant such that the residents have no clean water—and all developers involved very well know this; hence, one is morally responsible from day one that one is involved in its development and/or use.

I’ll skip the entry’s section on computers as agents (AI software, robots), and whether they can be held morally responsible, just responsible, or merely accountable, or none of them, except for the final remark of that section, credited to Bruno Latour (emphasis mine):

[Latour] suggests that in all forms of human action there are three forms of agency at work: 1) the agency of the human performing the action; 2) the agency of the designer who helped shaped the mediating role of the artifacts and 3) the artifact mediating human action. The agency of artifacts is inextricably linked to the agency of its designers and users, but it cannot be reduced to either of them. For him, then, a subject that acts or makes moral decisions is a composite of human and technological components. Moral agency is not merely located in a human being, but in a complex blend of humans and technologies.

Given the issues with assigning moral responsibility with respect to computing, some philosophers ponder about doing away with it, and replace it with a better framework. This is the topic of the third section of the SEP entry, which relies substantially on Gotterbarn’s work on it. He notes that computing is ethically not a neutral practice, and that the “design and use of technological artifacts is a moral activity” (because the choice of one design and implementation over another does have consequences). Moreover, and more interesting, is that, according to the SEP entry, he introduces the notions of negative responsibility and positive responsibility. The former “places the focus on that which exempts one from blame and liability”, whereas the latter “focuses on what ought to be done”, and entails to “strive to minimize foreseeable undesirable events”. Computing professionals, according to Gotterbarn, should adopt the notion of positive responsibility. Later on in the section, there’s a clue that there’s some way to go before achieving that. Accepting accountability is more rudimentary than taking moral responsibility, or at least a first step toward moral responsibility. Nissenbaum (paraphrased in the SEP entry) has identified four barriers to accountability in society (at least back in 1997 when she wrote it): the above-mentioned problem of many hands, the acceptance of ‘bugs’ as an inherent element of large software applications, using the computer as scapegoat, and claiming ownership without accepting liability (read any software license if you doubt the latter). Perhaps that needs to be addressed before going on to the moral responsibility, or one reinforces the other? Dijkstra vents his irritation in one of his writings about software ‘bugs’—the cute euphemism dating back to the ‘50s—and instead proposes to use one of its correct terms: they are errors. Perhaps users should not be lenient with errors, which might compel developers to deliver a better/error-free product, and/or we have to instill in the students more about the positive responsibility and reduce their tolerance for errors. And/or what about re-writing the license agreements a bit, like accepting responsibility provided it is used in one of the prescribed and tested ways? We already had that when I was working for Eurologic more than 10 years ago: the storage enclosure was supposed to work in certain ways and was tested in a variety of configurations, and that we signed off on for our customers. If it was faulty in one of the tested system configurations after all, then that was our problem, and we’d incur the associated costs to fix it. To some extent, that was also with our suppliers. Indeed, for software, that is slightly harder, but one could include in the license something along the line of ‘X works on a clean machine and when common other packages w, y, and z are installed, but we can’t guarantee it when you’ve downloaded weird stuff from the Internet’; not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction. Anyone has better ideas?

Last, the closing sentence is a useful observation, effectively stretching the standard  notion of moral responsibility thanks to computing (emphasis added): “[it] is, thus, not only about how the actions of a person or a group of people affect others in a morally significant way; it is also about how their actions are shaped by technology.”. But, as said, the details are yet to be thought through and worked out in some detail and general guidelines that can be applied.

References

[1] Merel Noorman. (forthcoming in 2012). Computing and Moral Responsibility. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 Edition), Zalta, E.N. (ed.).  Stable URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/computing-responsibility/.

Some reflections on learning isiZulu

It didn’t go as fast as I hoped and planned for, and certainly slower than all the other languages I learned over the years. While it is true that learning one indo-European language after another is ‘easier’ because some words and grammar rules are quite similar within each branch, and there aren’t many words in common with isiZulu (in the Nguni language group), that is not the reason why it’s going slower.

The main reason is the lack of (adult) education opportunities and the learning material. There was one course offered, which I attended, but it was cancelled after 6 weeks due to a dwindling number of participants (from 6 down to 2), and despite checking the classifieds regularly, there are no ‘isiZulu tutoring’ offers (there are for maths and other subjects) and I’m told there is a shortage of isiZulu teachers even on primary and secondary schools. So this left me the options of self-study and the get-a-boyfriend one.

A consequence of the “English is the language of business” agreement for post-Apartheid South Africa is that now most South Africans learn and can speak English (yeah, what the Afrikaners couldn’t achieve by some awful law back in 1976 [that Afrikaans be the medium of instruction at all schools and everyone thus learns to speak Afrikaans], the English language mother/native tongue/home language speakers achieved by other means). So the get-a-boyfriend option doesn’t really work for learning the language, at least not to the same extent as in other countries.

I will focus on the self-study and learning material in the remainder of this post. Now, I am fairly disciplined in study habits, but as my fellow researchers can attest, being an academic is more than a 9-5 job, and conference paper deadlines, attending conferences, and additional teaching duties get in the way of keeping up with it. Perhaps some consider this a lame excuse, but the following one holds generally: one easily can get the pronunciation wrong if not corrected by a mother tongue speaker (some accent is always better than a distorted pronunciation), the lack of practice in conversation, the absence of inside knowledge to which of the newspapers to buy to decipher (i.e., which one has simplistic sentences vs. high-brow complicated sentences and larger vocabulary), and so on.

And then, the textbooks! I had bought one on the internet while still in Italy, as preparation before moving to South Africa: Teach yourself Zulu, which I wasn’t quite happy with, and, in hindsight, perhaps I could have guessed that, because I didn’t like the ‘Italian for English speakers’ either when I bought that one when I first went to Italy in 2004. Trying two others from here, it just got worse. I think the main problem is the lack of structure, as they are all terribly disorganized when it comes to grammar. I’m probably experiencing the same emotions as Carsten Graebler (a German exchange student who developed an online dictionary and a grammar cheat sheet because there was none and he needed one in his attempts to learn isiZulu).

Let me give an example. When personal pronouns come into play, it gives a list of examples in the ‘order’ of I, he, they, you, she, or as I, we, you, you, that have so-called “concords” with the verb. Anywhere else, the latter is called with its proper linguistic term conjugation, and in the order of I, you[singular], he/she/it, we, you[plural], they, with a corresponding list how to conjugate the verb. In roman languages, they are at the end of the stem, in isiZulu, at the start, so we have ngi-, u-, u-, si-, ni-, ba-; e.g.: ngithanda = I like, sifunda = we study and so on. They are just lists one has to memorize for the pronouns and nouns. Then, like in the roman languages, because the verb in the sentence already indicates who or what it is about, one can drop the subject (personal pronoun/thing) in the sentence. With a language that doesn’t have such heavy conjugations, you have to include it. (As an aside: the conjugation maps to the subject, not subject+pronoun, so, teachers, don’t include the latter nonsense in the textbooks and don’t teach Zulus a ‘translating the isiZulu’ in the ‘sort of English but the wrong way’ (and then spit on them for using it the wrong way)! I cannot recollect any of the Italians or Spanish make the same mistake when they speak in English, so that’s really due to bad teaching here.)

And, please, make an index of the grammar rules. Now, when I want to check how again, e.g., future tense is, I have to browse through the book, where the grammar is presented piecemeal in a fairly random come-along way that suits the mini-conversations of the chapter’s topic rather than a whole rule together in one place.

There are two related hypotheses about the lack of structure, like I’ve seen also in the English ‘teach yourself Italian’ textbook. One: it is due to the relatively simple grammar of English compared to the complex grammar of multiple other languages, so if one knows only English, it is harder to handle structure, glean from others ways how to structure things, or even think about looking for structure in another natural language. Two, with a grammatically simpler language, the onus is on the receiver of the message to decode the message in a way that is hopefully what the sender intended, whereas with grammatically richer languages, the onus is on the sender to encode correctly what s/he wants to say so that the receiver can understand precisely what the sender really meant. Like having more and less expressive ontology languages (e.g., using OWL 2 DL and SKOS, respectively), where the former allows the modeler to be more precise and the latter retains lots of ambiguity that easily can be misinterpreted by another modeler or software application. I don’t know whether anyone investigated this for natural languages, and to what extent that has an effect on conducting a conversation and learning and teaching a language.

Then there are the topics. In one isiZulu textbook, the topic of the first chapter is greetings, the second is on giving short commands (wait, listen, come here, do it, fill up, make tea!). Or a course structured so as to “teach you isiZulu so that you can instruct your domestic and gardener what to do”: no, I want to use it in everyday life and work (I don’t have a domestic, and not even a garden), like congratulating someone on his birthday, understand when they ask me where the registration office is and answer it, ask for the AV key to use the data projector in the lecture hall, and even better would be to be able to explain some computer science in isiZulu and give a compliment for a test well done. The Teach yourself Zulu textbook is at least somewhat better in this regard, as it handles early on also topics like celebrations, going to the supermarket and buying food, going for a drink, and asking someone for something instead of instructing the worker.

Last, I want to learn isiZulu, the language, not be indoctrinated in racist crap that “isiZulu is a new language; it only became one in 1905, when the colonists an missionaries started to write it down…before that, there were only many mutually incomprehensible dialects but no language…really, Afrikaans was a language before isiZulu” and that “yes, that’s what they [the Zulus] have, short little stories; they don’t have comprehensive histories like we have in the West”, to quote but two. And not to have illustrated the use of iyi- only with indoda iyisela (the man is a thief), whereas it just as well could have been illustrated with, if I understand the unexplained rule correctly, indoda iyinono (the man is a careful/tidy person).

So, overall, I haven’t managed to go beyond the very basics. Each university I’ve been before UKZN had a language centre, where students and employees could sign up for evening courses in multiple languages. It would help to have that here, too. Or the civic centre or community school/college could organize such courses. True, there’s a shortage of teachers, but there’s also a 29% unemployment rate in the country—surely some of them are capable of becoming isiZulu teachers. And teachers and teaching material could upgrade themselves with the latest tools (like the isiZulu spell checker, online dictionaries and conjugator), update the textbooks material to make it suitable for the 21^st century, and add some decent grammar compendium. In the meantime, I probably have to contend myself with flicking through the material trying to remember it all and with entertaining myself with some curiosities in the dictionaries.

Annotated list of books on (South) Africa I read last year

I mentioned in the New Year’s post that I’ve been reading up on (South) Africa to obtain some more background information than provided in the online and printed newspapers and monthlies (such as The Africa Report, with, e.g., its article on Google in Africa). The remainder of this post is an annotated list of fiction and non-fiction books, collections, and pamphlets on Africa I read in 2011, which to quite an extent had to do with availability in the nearby bookshops. Yes, I’m talking about hardcopies. Looking them up online for this post, some are out of print, and less than half are available as eBook, Kindle edition, etc. The links are to the Kalahari.com online bookstore, when available, but several are available also internationally through booksellers such as Amazon.

Suggestions for “must reads” that can help me to understand this complex country and continent are welcome!

Non-Fiction

Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela (1994, Abacus). Highly recommendable to anyone interested in the struggle and appalling situations and injustices under the Apartheid regime. It easily readable, and makes a man out of the myth. It is a personal account, and not so much an exposé of ideas (cf., e.g., Fidel’s “my life” or “la historia me absolverá”).

Terrific Majesty: the Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention by Carolyn Hamilton (1998, Harvard University Press). After the first chapter of academese, the remaining chapters provide a highly readable and fascinating picture of the life of King Shaka as well as the agendas of the multiple narrators of those times, somewhat alike a two-layered ‘soap opera’. 

The Racist’s Guide to the People in South Africa by Simon Kilpatrick (2010, Two Dogs). Illustrates well the new term I learned here, “equal opportunity offender”, although he does it in a satirical, witty, way. For the record, I can confirm Kilpatrick’s description of the Dutch [described in the same paragraph as the Germans]: yes, I do commit the cardinal sin of wearing socks in sandals, eat liquorice and lots of cheese, don’t leave a tip if the service or food is crappy, and as a child I went many times on summer holidays in France bringing most of our food from the Netherlands (indeed, that was cheaper). But, to some extent, I still wonder how accurate and/or exaggerated some of the descriptions of the other groups are. 

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs (2005, Penguin Books). Appeared to be written for people who politically lean to the right to convince them to move toward a centrist position, for Sachs’ ego as do-good-er within a capitalist framework, and serves as an appeal to the baby boomers to let go of the generational egoism so as to come off less bad (or a bit better) in history. 

Persons in Community: African Ethics in Global Culture, edited by Ronald Nicholson (2008, UKZN Press). Various essays of varying quality. Positive: Ubuntu from different perspectives and in different contexts. One can safely skip the annoying writings with Christian religious stuff, which has done more harm than good, notwithstanding the attempts at revisionary history writing.

African Renaissance (read in part), edited by Malegapuru William Makgoba (1999, Mafube Publishing). A collection of essays written in 1999 on problems and looking forward on what to do to realise a better future for South Africa and the continent. I think this will become a useful document for assessing if, and if yes how, the hopes and ideas have been realized over time. As an aside, it introduced me to the term “potted plants in green houses” that refers to certain academics in South Africa (note: they can be found in other countries as well, albeit due to different reasons).

Currently reading: Africa’s Peacemaker? Lessons from South African Conflict Mediation (currently reading), edited by Kurt Shillinger (2009, Fanele). The collection contains analyses of several conflicts in Africa, and lessons learnt of South African efforts in conflict mediation. From the parts I have read, this would have been useful to read for one of the courses of the MA in Peace & development I did a while ago.

Lined up to read: Chabal’s Africa: the Politics of Suffering and Smiling (2009, Zed Books).

Pamphlets

The following three pamphlets are from New Frank Talk, and give plenty of food for thought—not just to me, but if you do a search on it, you’ll see various sources, including news articles, discussing the topics.

Black Colonialists: the root of the trouble with Africa by Chinweizu. On post-colonial time, loathing Blacks in government who behave like their former colonialist masters.

Blacks can’t be racist by Andile Mngxitama. The thesis is that if you are not in a position of power, you cannot be racist, as one cannot act upon one’s prejudices about certain identified groups of people (if one has them); hence: ‘race’-based prejudice + power + acting upon it = racist. (Most) Blacks are not in a position of power, hence, cannot be racist, or so goes the argument in a nutshell. 

The white revolutionary as a missionary? Contemporary travels and researches in Caffraria by Heinrich Böhmke. On the ‘well-meaning left’ going to Africa to ‘help the poor and do good’ as a modern-day version of the colonialist-missionary with its negative influences.

Fiction

The Angina Monologues by Rosamund Kendal (2010, Jacana Media). One of those books you just have to finish reading quickly to see how events unfold with the characters. It describes the experiences of three South African interns in a remote hospital in South Africa and how they come to grips with that new situation and their heritage with the different situations and mores they each grew up with.

The Master’s Ruse by Patricia Schonstein (2008, African Sun Press). The author has been so friendly to me, but it was not easy finishing reading the book. Perhaps it is a good book, attested by the freedom of the reader to read in it what fits the reader (and that wasn’t pretty). 

Black Diamond by Zakes Mda (2009, Penguin Books). Criticism of recent developments in South Africa is woven into the storyline. It also claims to insert all sorts of clichés, which is harder for me to assess. Disappointing is the portrayal of most of the female story characters who all happen to have all sorts of negative character traits and behaviours, with the male lead—having fought in the struggle, but not getting his share of the money and fame to become a ‘Black Diamond’—the good guy. It reads as if it were a Bouquet-book but then for a male readership.

Can he be the one? By Lauri Kubuitsile (2010, Sapphire press). Now this is a real Bouquet-book (called Sapphire here), but then with a cast of successful Black South Africans.

Earlier

Regarding possible suggestions, I have read several fiction and non-fiction books over the years, so possible glaring omissions from the aforementioned list may have been covered already—or: if you consider reading something about (South) Africa and none of the above piqued your interest, then maybe one or more of these ones do. Some of those books are, in alphabetical order by surname of author:

I write what I like by Steve Biko (1987, Heinemann). A must read. Writings from the ‘70s, on the Black Consciousness Movement. Introduced me to the term “Whitey” and (problems with) the “White liberal left”.

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee (2004, Vintage).

Lettera ad un consumatore del nord by centro nuovo modello di svilluppo.

Concerning violence by Frantz Fanon (part of Wretched of the earth, which, when you search a bit, is available in whole as a free pdf download). Highly recommendable.

Hacia el reino del silencio by Miguel Díaz Nápoles (2008, Pablo de la Torriente, Editorial). On Cuban doctors in Ghana.

The challenge for Africa by Wangari Maathai (2010, Arrow Books). Highly recommendable. Interesting analyses of problems, ideas and successes for self-empowerment. If you have any difficulty choosing between this and Sachs’ book, take this one.

I am an African by Ngila Michael Muendane (2006, Soultalk CC). About decolonization of the mind. A must read.

How man can die better: the life of Robert Sobukwe by Benjamin Pogrund (version of 2006, Jonathan Ball Publishers). Highly recommendable to anyone interested in the struggle and appalling situations and injustices under the Apartheid regime; Sobukwe was with the PAC.

Inside rebellion: the politics of insurgent violence by Jeremy M. Weinstein (2007, Cambridge University Press). Highly recommendable, if you’re into this topic.

As mentioned, if you have any good suggestions, please leave them in the comments or email me off-line, lest I keep on picking books fairly randomly and hoping it is worthwhile the price and reading time.  But maybe I should venture more often into the real world, instead of ‘reading this one more book to be better prepared for it’.

TAR article on Google in Africa

The The Africa Report magazine’s cover story was “Is Google good for Africa?” [1] (the online page provides only an introduction to the longer article in the print/paid edition). Google is investing in Africa, both regarding connectivity and content: if there’s no content then there’s no need to go online, and if there’s no or a very slow connection, then there won’t be enough people online to make online presence profitable. In the words of Nelson Mattos, Google’s VP for EMEA: “Our business model works only when you have enough advertisements and lots of users online, and that’s the environment we are trying to create in Africa” (p24). Gemma Ware notes that “by investing now into Africa’s internet ecosystem, Google hopes to hardwire it with tools that will make people click through its websites”, and, as she aptly puts it: they have raised the flag first.

(Picture from WhiteAfrican's blogpost on "What should Google do in Africa?" (2))

On average, there is one web domain for every 94 people in the world, but for Africa, this is 1 in 10.000. Somewhere buried on p24 and p26 of the TAR article, two reasons are given: no credit card to buy space online and a ‘.[country]’ costs more than a ‘.com’ domain. There’s no lack of creativity (e.g., the Ushahidi platform co-founded by the new head of Google’s Africa policy Ory Okolloh, and much more).

In percentages of Google hits around the world, the USA tops with 31%, then India with 8%, China with 4.2%, UK 3%, Italy 2.3%, Germany and Brazil 2.9%, Russia 2.8%, France and Spain 2%, and at the lower end of the chart South Africa with 0.7%, Algeria and Nigeria with 0.6% and Sweden with 0.5%. The other African countries are not mentioned and have a lighter colour in the diagram than the lowest given value of 0.5%. These data should have been normalized by population size, but give a rough idea nevertheless.

40% of the Google searches in Africa are through mobile internet—including mine outside the office (unlike in Italy [well, Bolzano], here in South Africa they actually do sell functioning USB/Internet keys and SIM cards to foreigners). They estimated that there were about 14 million users in Africa in 2010 (the Facebook numbers on p26 total to about 28 million), which they expect to grow to 800 million by 2015. Now that’s what you can call a growth market.

There’s no Google data centre in Africa yet, but there are caches at several ISPs, which brings to mind the filter bubble. One can ponder about whether a cache and a bubble are better than practicing one’s patience. What you might not have considered, however, is that there are apparently (i.e.: so I was told, but did not check it) Internet access packages that charge lower rates for browsing national Web content and higher rates for international content where the data has to travel through the new fibre optic cable. So the caching isn’t necessarily a bad idea.

On content generation, Google has been holding “mapping parties” to add content to Google MapMaker, which also pleased its participants, because, as quoted in the article, they didn’t like seeing a blank spot as if there’s nothing, even though clearly there are roads, villages, communities, businesses in reality. There are funded projects to digitize Nelson Mandela’s documentary archives, crowd sourcing to generate content, Google Technology User Groups, helping businesses to create websites, and many other activities. In short, according to Google’s Senegal representative Tidjane Deme: “What Google is doing in Africa is very sexy”.

One of the ‘snapshots’ in the article mentions that Google now supports 31 African languages. I had a look at http://www.google.co.za, which has localized interfaces to 5 of the 9 official African languages in South Africa (isiZulu, Sesotho, isiXhosa, Setswana, Northern Sotho). As I have only rudimentary knowledge of isiZulu only, I had a look at that one to see how the localization has been done. Aside from the direct translations, such as izithombe for images and usesho for search, there are new concoctions. Apparently there is little IT and computing vocabulary in isiZulu, so new words have to be made up, or meanings of existing ones stretched liberally. For instance, logout has become phuma ngemvume (out/exit from authorization/permission) and when clicking on izigcawu (literally: open air meeting places) you navigate to the Google groups page, which are sort of understandable. This is different for izilungiselelo (noun class 8 or 10?) that brings you to Settings in the interface. There is no such word in the dictionary, although the stem -lungiselelo (noun class 6) translates as preparations/arrangements; my dictionary translates ‘setting’ (noun) into ukubeka (verb, in back-translation it means put/place, install; bilingual dictionaries are inconsistent, I know). It’s not just that Google is “hardwir[ing] [Africa] with tools”, they are ‘soft-wiring’ by unilaterally inventing a vocabulary, it seems, which reeks of cultural imperialism.

Admitted, I have not (yet) seen much IT for African languages, other than spell checkers for all 11 official languages in South Africa that work for OpenOffice and Mozilla, a nice online isiZulu-English dictionary and conjugation, and Laurette Pretorius’ research in computational linguistics—the former was heavily funded by outside funds and the second one a hobby project by German isiZulu enthusiast Carsten Gaebler. Nevertheless, it would have been nice if there were some coordinated, participatory, effort.

Writes the article’s author, Gemma Ware: “as Google’s influence grows, Africa’s techies are aware of the urgency to stake their own territorial claim”. This awareness has yet to be transformed into more action by more people. Overall, my impression is that ICT (and the shortage of ICT professionals) already has generated the buzz of excitement where people see plenty of possibilities, which makes it a stimulating environment down here.

References

[1] Gemma Ware. Is Google good for Africa?. The Africa Report, No 32, July 2011, pp20-26.

[2] Erik Hersman (WhiteAfrican). What Should Google do in Africa? June 28, 2011.

p.s.: The article does not really answer the question whether Google is good for Africa, and I didn’t either in the blog post; that’s a topic for a later date when I know more about what’s going on here.

Reports on Digital Inclusion and divide

The Mail & Guardian (SA weekly) reported on a survey about “digital inclusion”/digital divide the other day, with the title “India’s digital divide worst among Brics”. It appeared to be based on a survey from risk analysis firm MapleCroft and their “Digital Inclusion Index” (DII).

Searching for the original survey and related news articles, the first three pages of Google’s result were news articles with pretty much the same title and content (except for one, where the Swedes say they are doing well). As it turns out, the low ranking of India is the first sentence of MapleCroft’s own news item about the DII. Lots of more data is described there, and everything together not only can be interpreted in various ways, but also raises more questions than it answers.

186 countries were surveyed, the Netherlands being number 186 (highest DII) and Niger number 1 (lowest DII). India turned out to have a DII of 39 and is therewith in the “extreme risk” category, China 103, Brazil 110, and Russia 134, which are relatively a lot better and in the “medium risk” category, but China and “to a lesser extent Russia” in the ‘wrong’ way (limited internet freedom). To tease a little: instead of ‘India is the worst’ regarding digital divide, one also can reformulate it in a way that India is important enough to be a full BRICS member [even though it has/irrespective of] a low DII. The place of the new “S” in BRICS—South Africa—is not even mentioned in the Mail & Guardian article, but MapleCroft has put it in the “High Risk” category (see figure here, about halfway on the page).

According to MapleCroft, “Sub-Saharan Africa is by far the worst performing region for digital inclusion with 29 of the 39 countries rated ‘extreme risk’ in the index.”. Summarizing the figure, Africa and South-East Asia are mostly in the high or extreme risk categories, Latin America, East-Europe and North Asia are in the medium or high risk categories, and the US, Canada, West-Europe, Japan, and Australia are in the low risk category. One of my fellow members at Informatici Senza Frontiere (Alessandra Cattani, who did here thesis on the digital divide) provided me the information that internet access in Italy is less than 40%, yet they are also in the low risk category according to the DII.

At the bottom of MapleCroft’s page, there is a paragraph rambling about the position of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya in the ranking (81, 66, 77, respectively) and that “Internet and mobile phone technologies played a central role in motivating and coordinating the uprisings”. A third in Tunisia uses the internet, 16% is on facebook, whereas only about 5% of the Egyptians and 3% of the Libyans use facebook; all three countries are in the “high risk” category. This data can be ‘explained’ in any direction, even that facebook access is so low that it hardly may have contributed to motivate the uprisings (such as USAid and neoliberal policies in Egypt).

So, what exactly did MapleCroft measure? They used 10 indicators, being: “numbers of mobile cellular and broadband subscriptions; fixed telephone lines; households with a PC and television; internet users and secure internet servers; internet bandwidth; secondary education enrolment; and adult literacy”.

Considering fixed telephone lines is a bit of a joke in sparsely populated areas though, because it is utterly unprofitable for telcoms to lay the cables, so countries with low population density and a geographically more evenly distributed population are at a disadvantage in the DII. (and are all telephone lines and TVs digital nowadays?). Mobile phone use is relatively high in Africa, not just having one and using it to call family and friends, but also, among others, to handle electronic health records, disaster management, banking, and school-student communications, and the number of internet users has increased by some 2350% over the past 10 years (OneWorld news item, in Dutch). Even I can use mobile phone banking from the moment I opened my account here in SA and they were surprised I did not know how to do that (even after about 6.5 year in Italy, I still had to ‘wait a little longer’ for Italian internet banking—they do not offer mobile phone banking). Then there are the ATMs here that offer services that would fall under ‘online baking’ in many a European country. But MapleCroft has not considered the type and intensity of usage, or the inventiveness of people to enhance one technology as a way to ‘counterbalance’ the ‘lack’ of another technology.

Regarding bandwidth, fibre optic cables for fast internet access are not evenly distributed around the globe (picture), and even when they pass close by, some countries are prevented from plugging into the fast lines (most notably Cuba—the lines are owned by US companies who are prevented from doing business with Cuba due to the blockade).

The last two indicators to compute the DII may, to some, come as a surprise, but is not: one thing is to have the equipment, a whole different story is to be literate to read and comprehend the information, and then there’s a whole different story of having developed sufficient critical thinking to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff in the data deluge on the internet. India has and adult literacy of some 63%; this compared to adult literacy of 90% in Brazil, 100% in Russia, 94 in China, and 89% in South Africa (data from UNICEF). Secondary education enrollment is trickier, where UNICEF at least is more detailed, because it makes a difference between enrollment and attendance (and graduation and tertiary education, not covered by either one).

Then there’s digital inclusion, versus a digital divide. Both the bottom and the top echelon are “included”, according to MapleCroft, the former just with an extreme risk and latter with a low risk of falling behind. It certainly has a friendlier tone to it than considering the divide it has created between people and the consequences that follow from it, both economic and social.

Take the underlying social divide: who has access? For instance, if there is one PC in the household, who uses it? Recollecting my even younger years, the PC access pecking order was Father > Mother (practically skipped) > Brother > Sister (me, youngest, female), which obviously has changed over the years for both my brother and me. There are other parameters to consider here, such as occupation, level of higher education, and several countries have whole groups of people that are at a relative (dis)advantage due to socio-economic, political, ethnic, disability etc. factors. However, it is a separate line of inquiry to determine to what extent it affects the inclusion or exacerbates the divide. MapleSoft did not include it in the DII.

And then there is the time dimension. The DII diagram is a snapshot (I do not know which measurement date), but comparison along a time axis may reveal trends. So will percentages. Take, for instance internet users. Worldmapper has two beautiful figures as topically scaled maps (density equalized maps) for 1990 and 2002 data, which I showed earlier: the US shrunk relatively while Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa grew. No doubt they also grew a lot over the past 8 years.

Hence, overall, the coarse-grained ranking of the DII as such does not say much, and raises more questions than that it answers. Aside from serving an underlying political agenda, the real news value of the DII as such is rather limited.

Essay on the Nonviolent Personality

La personalità nonviolenta—the nonviolent personality—is the title of a booklet I stumbled upon in a bookshop in Trento in spring 2004 whilst being in the city for my internship at the Laboratory for Applied Ontology. The title immediately raises the question: what, then, actually does constitute a nonviolent personality? The author of the booklet, Giuliano Pontara, since recently an emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Stockholm, aims to contribute to answer this question that certainly does not have simple answer.

The booklet itself is out of print (having been published in 1996) and, moreover, written in Italian, which most people in the world cannot understand. However, in my opinion at least, Pontara’s proposed answer certainly deserves a wider audience, contemplation, and further investigation. So I set out to translate it into English and put it online for free. That took a while to accomplish, and the last year was certainly the most interesting one with multiple email exchanges with Giuliano Pontara about the finer details of the semantics of the words and sentences in both the Italian original and the English translation. Now here it is: The Nonviolent Personality [pdf, 1.7MB] (low bandwidth version [pdf, 287KB]).

So what is it about? Here is the new back flap summary of the booklet:

At the beginning of the new century, the culture of peace finds itself facing many and difficult challenges. This booklet surveys some of these challenges and the characteristics that a mature culture of peace should have in order to respond to them. Particularly, it investigates what type of person is more apt to be a carrier of such a mature culture of peace: the nonviolent personality. Finally, it addresses the question regarding the factors that in the educative process tend to impede and favour, respectively, the development of moral subjects equipped with a nonviolent personality.

The original Italian version was written by Giuliano Pontara, emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Stockholm, and published in 1996, but its message is certainly not outdated and perhaps even more important in the current climate. Why this is so, and why it is useful to have a more widely accessible version of the booklet available, is motivated in the introduction by Maria Keet, Senior Lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

A slightly longer description

The first chapter of the book, having been written in the mid-nineties, discusses the then-current political situation in the world. Pontara describes the post-Cold War situation, touches upon separatism, nationalism, fundamentalism, exploitation and totalitarian capitalism (among other challenges). This includes the “cow-boy ethics” and the return of the Nazi mentality, the latter not being about Arian supremacy, but the glorification of force (and violence in general) and contempt for ‘the weak’, the might-is-right adagio, and that cow-boy ethics has been elevated to prime principle of conducting international politics. You can analyse and decide yourself if the shoe fits for a particular country’s culture and politics, be it then or now. After this rather gloomy first chapter, the first step toward a positive outlook is described in Chapter 2, which looks at several basic features of a mature culture of peace.

The core of the booklet is Chapter 3, which commences with listing ten characteristics of a nonviolent personality:

• Rejection of violence
• The capability to identify violence
• The capability to have empathy
• Refusal of authority
• Trust in others
• The disposition to communicate
• Mildness
• Courage
• Self-sacrifice
• Patience

These characteristics are discussed in detail in the remainder of the chapter. Read it if you want to know what is meant with these characteristics, and why.

Chapter 4 considers education at school, at home, and through other influences (such as the TV), describing both the problems in the present systems and what can to be done to change it. For example, educating students to develop a critical moral conscience, analyse, and to be able to think for oneself (as opposed to rote-learning in a degree-factory), not taking a dualistic approach but facilitating creative constructive solutions instead, and creating an atmosphere that prevents the numbing of conscience, the weakness of the senses, consumerism, and conformism of the mass-media. Also some suggestions for class activities are suggested, but note that education does not end there: it is a continuous process in life.

The English writing style may not be perfect (the spelling and grammar checkers do not complain though); either way, it tries to strike a balance between the writing style of the original and readability of the English text. And no, the translation was not done with Google translate or a similar feature, but manually and there are some notes on the translation at the end of the new booklet. Other changes or additions compared to the Italian original are the new foreword by Pontara and introduction by me, an index, bibliography in alphabetical order and several Italian translations in the original have been substituted with the original English reference, and there are biographical sketches. I did the editing and typesetting in Latex, so it looks nice and presentable.

Last, but not least:

The Nonviolent Personality by Maria Keet is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

UNESCO’s take on engineering and development

UNESCO’s report on Engineering: Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities for Development that was published recently does not have any particular section about or message for computing, but that did not deter me from flicking through the roughly 400 pages and read a few sections. In short (according to the exec summary), the report “is an international response to the pressing need for the engineering community to engage with both these wider audiences and the private sector in promoting such an agenda for engineering – and for the world.”, given that “engineering, innovation and technology are part of the solution to global issues”.

Aside from the need for better statistics and more precisely identifying who is an ‘engineer’, there are sections on the national and international engineering bodies, engineering ethics with, among others, the World Federation of Engineering Organizations’ model code of ethics, engineering and the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), and several country-specific assessments.

Some SA statistics

It was through the latter topic that I stumbled upon the answer to questions and criticisms raised during the Annual NACI symposium on the leadership roles of women in science, technology and innovation that I reported on last summer. Several participants of the symposium wanted to se a breakdown of the numbers of publications by age group, as the suspicion was that it is old white men who produce most papers. Page 182 of the UNESCO report has the details, provided by Johann Mouton and Nelius Boshoff from Stellenbosch University. In 1990-1992, the numbers of engineering papers produced by researchers <30 years of age was 10%, but that gradually went down to a mere 5% in 2002-2004, whereas for the >=50 years age group, this went up in the same years from 26% to 39%, all the while that the percentage of engineering articles in the same period went from 5% to 7%. It has to be noted that the percentages for female authors went up from 6 to 11% and for African authors from 3 to 10%. There is also a table with a race-by-gender distribution of graduates at all third-level education degrees, measuring 1996 and 2006. Many things can be read in the numbers (see table, below), and I will not burn myself on my, relatively uninformed, interpretation of these data, except for noting that, given that there is a doubling of doctorates, to me it seems odd that there is relatively a lower output by young researchers. If anyone has an informed explanation, feel free to leave a comment.

Engineering and the MDG

Section 6 of the report looks into engineering and the MDG. The role of engineering to meeting the MDG goes from building infrastructure to have clean water and sanitation to roads (p253 has a large table with the relationship between physical infrastructure and the MDGs, in case you have any doubts they are related). Instead of prior mega-projects that have loose ends when it comes to ongoing operation and maintenance, one has to go to a needs-based approach using a so-called unified-design approach, argue Jo da Silva and Susan Thomas form Arup (pp250-252): “Taken seriously, a unified approach requires us to address issues in depth, in breadth, at their intersections, and over time. Behavioural psychologists, sociologists, physicists, anthropologists, economists, and public health officials all need to be engaged in a broader definition of the design and engineering.”. The remainder of section 6 considers the main MDGs and several case studies, including touching upon the greening of engineering, education and capacity-building, and the issues and challenges of the WEHAB agenda (Water and sanitation, Energy, Health, Agriculture productivity, and Biodiversity and ecosystem management) that are summarized on p262.

Ron Watermeyer form Soderlund and Schutte illustrates differences in priorities between “the ‘North’ (developed nations) and ‘South’ (developing nations)”, who have “‘green’” and “‘brown’” agendas, respectively (see figure). The former “focuses on the reduction of the environmental impact of urban-based production, consumption and water generation on natural resources and ecosystems, and ultimately on the world’s life support system. As such it addresses the issue of affluence and over consumption”, whereas the latter “focuses on poverty and under development. As such, it addresses the need to reduce the environmental threats to health that arise from poor sanitary conditions, crowding, inadequate water provision, hazardous air and water pollution, and the accumulation of solid waste. It is generally more pertinent in poor, under-serviced cities or regions.”. (p265-266). Now, link that to Silva and Thomas’ needs-based approach, mentioned above.

Further points are made in Section 6.1 about prevention and mitigation of risks, disasters, and emergencies where engineering can help out in such a way that certainly costs less than not doing anything.

Gaps

Perhaps I am a bit biased by my education, but I find it a pity that there is only one 1-page paragraph dedicated to agricultural engineering; a sustainable production column producing healthy food accessible to the people is of vital importance and with which one can prevent many other problems.

Anyway, throughout the text, agriculture is referred to at least still a lot more often than the “computer and systems engineering” and “software engineering” that are mentioned in Section 1.1 as a type of engineering, but somehow did not make it in the assessment for opportunities for development. That is short-changing ICT a bit, I think, as there are many issues and opportunities for ICT usage for development and contributing to meeting the MDG, which I wrote about in earlier posts, such as about ISF’s projects outlined during the Aperitivo Informatico at FUB, micro-credit with Kiva, ICT & peace & gender & Africa, ICT for development and sovereignty, and mobile electronic health records in Kenya, among many other online information sources and books on the topic and the ICT and Development Conference (ICTD 2010) that starts today in London.

Scientist vs. Engineer: still, again, even more so now, or not

The “World view” article in this week’s Nature amplifies an attack on scientists, focusing on a recurring debate about—by some perceived as a fracture between—science and engineering. Colin Macilwain tries to cast the debate in terms of the financial hardship and the hard choices that have to be made to allocate the diminishing amount of funding of universities’ research [1]. Regarding the funding, the argument goes that the bang-for-your-buck is higher when you bet on engineering, not on the sciences, as, it is claimed, there is much science that does not materialize into increased wealth anyway (‘wealth’ in this context, I presume, is measured in more money, profits, etc.) whereas engineering does, so therefore (myopic) government policy should favour the funding of engineering over the sciences. The UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering made an official statement in that direction (more polite than the previous phrase), and Macilwain, after some deliberations, closes with:

By casting a stone at their rivals, UK engineers have, at least, demanded better. They’ve also started a scrap between disciplines that will grow uglier as the spending cuts begin.

This is a disservice to the overall debate both on spending cuts and on the scientist “vs.” engineer. It is like bringing the recurring, lamentable, poor-on-poor violence into the realm of academia.

Luigi Foschini, scientist at the INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, already has written a useful blog post on the “two cultures” issue [2] in response to Macilwain’s article: the dichotomy is wrong and it is beneficial when a researcher knows about both science and engineering. He closes with the proposal that

[w]e have to make a Second Renaissance, with men and women able to develop an integrated culture, not rejecting any part because not in their backyard. Someone replies that today this is too complex, because the culture is too vast to be handled by individuals. This is not true. [...]. The main obstacles are of social origin

Taking into account the ‘detours’ I made during my education and comments I remember over the years in research: I tend to concur that the obstacles are of social origin. Fair enough, not many people have done as many and diverse degrees as I did, principally because they think they do not have the time or money (which is, essentially, a resource allocation decision—e.g., I paid for some of the studies myself instead of, say, buying a fancy car). But it is not impossible to do both, as Foschini, I, and multiple other researchers can attest. Moreover, having been indoctrinated in more than one paradigm really does have its advantages over mono-discipline training (more about that in a separate post some time later).

The other issue I have with Macilwain’s article is that it pits one group of researchers against another, en passant swallowing and propagating divide and conquer tactics and thereby feeding infighting within academia. But in the end, casting stones will leave everyone mutilated—even if think you are in the position to pride yourself on casting the first stone. And, as the saying goes, be hoist with one’s own petard.

A more constructive step to resolve the debate on the spending cuts was made last week with the open letter to cut military R&D, not science funding, and, more generally, to cut the obscene budgets for war and destruction. The world does not need more nukes, ‘smart’ bombs, chemical weapons and the like, and significantly reducing the size of offence-armies so as to, at least, end the perpetuation of inflicting ‘collateral damage’ and occupation of foreign countries will make one’s home safer for longer. Another place where there is, on average, a lot of money that can, in theory at least, be redistributed more fairly, is the growing pile of assets of the rich, being, by and large, the baby boomers. A different way of phrasing it, is that the trend of resource concentration with a certain dominant age cohort (and their generational egoism) should be reversed so that the resources will be distributed in the benefit of society at large, the latter obviously including science and engineering research. That redistributive taxation is not in vogue anymore in the USA and most of Europe does not mean it is impossible to do.

Indeed, on the one hand, investment in research in the sciences and engineering neither will bring instant gratification nor lift the West out of the recession by tomorrow morning. On the other hand, the bank bailouts did not do the trick to bring the economy back into the zone of profit- and increased employment, the initial élan for green technologies as the magic bullet to pull us all out of the economic crisis did not quite materialize either, and the military-industrial complex destroys more than that it provides toward a healthy sustainable economy anyway. So one might as well give science and engineering a chance—after all, in tandem, they have a proven track record to be to the benefit of society.

The scientist ‘vs.’ engineer should not be a versus but a both-and. (Ab)using the economic hardship as an excuse to pit one against the other is to the detriment of both in the long run, and I am tempted to state that any academic worth his or her education should (have) come to the insight not to fall into this trap. If you do not, then you might want to learn a bit more so as to peek over that disciplinary wall, punch a hole in that wall, or take a step or two to walk through a door that a fellow colleague might just be holding open for you.

References

[1] Colin Macilwain (2010) Scientists vs engineers: this time it’s financial. Nature, 467, 885.

[2] Luigi Foschini. Scientists vs Engineers or another version of “The Two Cultures”. The Event Horizon blog, October 21, 2010.

Aperitivo Informatico at FUB: new ways of inclusion and participation

One of the 28 events during the 5-day long “UniDays” (it, de) at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (FUB) was the “Aperitivo Informatico” (held this morning from 11 to about 2pm) that had as theme informatics & democracy with new forms of inclusion and direct participation, closing the digital divide, and online social networks.

The invited guests were: Gabriella Dodero, rector’s delegate for the “diversamente abili” (disabled), Rosella Gennari, FUB PI of the EU FP7 project TERENCE (Technology Enhanced Learning area) and national project LODE (a LOgic-based e-learning tool for DEaf children), Luca Nicotra, Secretary of Agorà Digitale, Paolo Campostrini, a journalist of the Alto Adige newspaper, and Paolo Mazzucato, a journalist for Radio Rai. My role as invited guest was to represent Informatici Senza Frontiere (ISF, Informaticians without borders, an Italian NGO).

The first topics that passed the revue were about what FUB does for the differently abled, noting that there is (and has been) support for blind and deaf people both in the FUB structures and providing suitable software etc, and Gabriella Dodero is also looking into support for people with dyslexia (even though in Italy it is not categorized as a disability). Rosella Gennari zoomed in on deaf children and development of suitable computer-supported learning environments for young poor comprehenders. Luca Nicotra introduced Agorà Digitale, a political/lobby organization concerned with democracy, privacy, net neutrality, and the way of dissemination of information that is an essential component of a well-functioning democracy.

I introduced various projects of ISF, which does not look so much at so-called trash-ware (shipping [dumping?] old hardware to less computerized locations), but, among others, putting effort into developing suitable software for the locale, such as the (open source) openHospital implemented in countries such as Kenya, Uganda, and Benin for day-to-day management of hospital data, installing financial software for managing microcredit in Madagascar, reconnecting Congo to the internet (hospitals and the University Masi Manimba in particular), openStaff in Chad to, among others, provide assistance to refugees, developing controlInfantil in Ecuador, as well as projects in Italy to narrow the digital divide, such as connecting hospitalized children with a long-term illness to their family, friends, and school in a hospital in Brescia, and a computer room and providing basic IT courses in the casa dell’ospitalità in Mestre. (note: some information about these and other projects is also available in English)

Other topics that passed the revue what the future might bring us for Internet & democratization and if the Internet merits to be awarded the Nobel Peace prize (see also Internet for peace). Response on the second topic was diverse, with Dodero continuing her work regardless if it were awarded a prize or not, Gennari jokingly mentioning that after Obama, then, well, why not, whereas Nicotra was not at all that positive about the idea because the Internet can be used for the worse as well and become monopolized like TV and radio before it. Like with most, if not all, technologies, they can be used for the benefit and detriment of society and humankind, and this holds for the Internet just as much and in all three principal components: regarding the hardware (and limitations to connect due to, e.g., blockades), the software for accessibility by diverse groups of peoples, and the generation & dissemination of (dis)information. That is, Internet technologies themselves are not intrinsically good and just (the first networked computers were at DARPA, a research facility of USA defense forces). And perhaps it is not too far fetched to stretch the information component to the ‘Web of Knowledge’ with its current incarnation as the Semantic Web—thus far, it has been used mostly to indeed share, link, and integrate data, information, and knowledge more efficiently and effectively; let us keep focussing on the positive, constructive, side of the usage of Semantic Web technologies.

South African women on leadership in science, technology and innovation

Today I participated in the Annual NACI symposium on the leadership roles of women in science, technology and innovation in Pretoria, which was organized by the National Advisory Council on Innovation, which I will report on further below. As preparation for the symposium, I searched a bit to consult the latest statistics and see if there are any ‘hot topics’ or ‘new approaches’ to improve the situation.

General statistics and their (limited) analyses

The Netherlands used to be at the bottom end of the country league tables on women professors (from my time as elected representative in the university council at Wageningen University, I remember a UN table from ’94 or ‘95 where the Netherlands was third last from all countries). It has not improved much over the years. From Myklebust’s news item [1], I sourced the statistics to Monitor Women Professors 2009 [2] (carried out by SoFoKleS, the Dutch social fund for the knowledge sector): less than 12% of the full professors in the Netherlands are women, with the Universities of Leiden, Amsterdam, and Nijmegen leading the national league table and the testosterone bastion Eindhoven University of Technology closing the ranks with a mere 1.6% (2 out of 127 professors are women). With the baby boom generation lingering on clogging the pipeline since a while, the average percentage increase has been about 0.5% a year—way too low to come even near the EU Lisbon Agreement Recommendation’s target of 25% by 2010, or even the Dutch target of 15%, but this large cohort will retire soon, and, in terms of the report authors, makes for a golden opportunity to move toward gender equality more quickly. The report also has come up with a “Glass Ceiling Index” (GCI, the percentage of women in job category X-1 divided by the percentage of women in job category X) and, implicitly, an “elevator” index for men in academia. In addition to the hard data to back up the claim that the pipeline is leaking at all stages, they note it varies greatly across disciplines (see Table 6.3 of the report): in science, the most severe blockage is from PhD to assistant professor, in Agriculture, Technology, Economics, and Social Sciences it is the step from assistant to associate professor, and for Law, Language & Culture, and ‘miscellaneous’, the biggest hurdle is from associate to full professor. From all GCIs, the highest GCI (2.7) is in Technology in the promotion from assistant to associate professor, whereas there is almost parity at that stage in Language & Culture (GCI of 1.1, the lowest value anywhere in Table 6.3).

“When you’re left out of the club, you know it. When you’re in the club, you don’t see what the problem is.” Prof. Jacqui True, University of Auckland [4]

Elsewhere in ‘the West’, statistics can look better (see, e.g., The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) survey on women 2004-05), or are not great either (UK, see [3], but the numbers are a bit outdated). However, one can wonder about the meaning of such statistics. Take, for instance, the NYT article on a poll about paper rights vs. realities carried out by The Pew Research in 22 countries [4]: in France, some 100% paid their lip service to being in favour of equal rights, yet 75% also said that men had a better life. It is only in Mexico (56%), Indonesia (55%) and Russia (52%) that the people who were surveyed said that women and men have achieved a comparable quality of life. But note that the latter statement is not the same as gender equality. And equal rights and opportunities by law does not magically automatically imply the operational structures are non-discriminatory and an adequate reflection of the composition of society.

A table that has generated much attention and questions over the years—but, as far as I know, no conclusive answers—is the one published in Science Magazine [5] (see figure below). Why is it the case that there are relatively much more women physics professors in countries like Hungary, Portugal, the Philippines and Italy than in, say, Japan, USA, UK, and Germany? Recent guessing for the answer (see blog comments) are as varied as the anecdotes mentioned in the paper.

Physics professors in several countries (Source: 5).

Barinaga’s [5] collection of anecdotes of several influential factors across cultures include: a country’s level of economic development (longer established science propagates the highly patriarchal society of previous centuries), the status of science there (e.g., low and ‘therefore’ open to women), class structure (pecking order: rich men, rich women, poor men, poor women vs. gender structure rich men, poor men, rich women, poor women), educational system (science and mathematics compulsory subjects at school, all-girls schools), and the presence or absence of support systems for combining work and family life (integrated society and/or socialist vs. ‘Protestant work ethic’), but the anecdotes “cannot purport to support any particular conclusion or viewpoint”. It also notes that “Social attitudes and policies toward child care, flexible work schedules, and the role of men in families dramatically color women’s experiences in science”. More details on statistics of women in science in Latin America can be found in [6] and [7], which look a lot better than those of Europe.

Barbie the computer engineer

Bonder, in her analysis for Latin America [7], has an interesting table (cuadro 4) on the changing landscape for trying to improve the situation: data is one thing, but how to struggle, which approaches, advertisements, and policies have been, can, or should be used to increase women participation in science and technology? Her list is certainly more enlightening than the lame “We need more TV shows with women forensic and other scientists. We need female doctor and scientist dolls.” (says Lotte Bailyn, a professor at MIT) or “Across the developed world, academia and industry are trying, together or individually, to lure women into technical professions with mentoring programs, science camps and child care.” [8] that only very partially addresses the issues described in [5]. Bonder notes shifts in approaches from focusing only on women/girls to both sexes, from change in attitude to change in structure, from change of women (taking men as the norm) to change in power structures, from focusing on formal opportunities to targeting to change the real opportunities in discriminatory structures, from making visible non-traditional role models to making visible the values, interests, and perspectives of women, and from the simplistic gender dimension to the broader articulation of gender with race, class, and ethnicity.

The NACI symposium

The organizers of the Annual NACI symposium on the leadership roles of women in science, technology and innovation provided several flyers and booklets with data about women and men in academia and industry, so let us start with those. Page 24 of Facing the facts: Women’s participation in Science, Engineering and Technology [9] shows the figures for women by occupation: 19% full professor, 30% associate professor, 40% senior lecturer, 51% lecturer, and 56% junior lecturer, which are in a race distribution of 19% African, 7% Coloured, 4% Indian, and 70% White. The high percentage of women participation (compared to, say, the Netherlands, as mentioned above) is somewhat overshadowed by the statistics on research output among South African women (p29, p31): female publishing scientists are just over 30% and women contributed only 25% of all article outputs. That low percentage clearly has to do with the lopsided distribution of women on the lower end of the scale, with many junior lecturers who conduct much less research because they have a disproportionate heavy teaching load (a recurring topic during the breakout session). Concerning distribution of grant holders in 2005, in the Natural & agricultural sciences, about 24% of the total grants (211 out of 872) have been awarded to women and in engineering & technology it is 11% (24 out of 209 grants) (p38). However, in Natural & agricultural sciences, women make up 19% and in engineering and technology 3%, which, taken together with the grant percentages, show there is a disproportionate amount of women obtaining grants in recent years. This leads one to suggest that the ones that actually do make it to the advanced research stage are at least equally as good, if not better, than their male counterparts. Last year, women researchers (PIs) received more than half of the grants and more than half of the available funds (table in the ppt presentation of Maharaj, which will be made available online soon).

Mrs Naledi Pandor, the Minister for Science and Technology, held the opening speech of the event, which was a good and entertaining presentation. She talked about the lack of qualified PhD supervisors to open more PhD positions, where the latter is desired so as to move to the post-industrial, knowledge-based economy, which, in theory at least, should make it easier for women to participate than in an industrial economy. She also mentioned that one should not look at just the numbers, but instead at the institutional landscape so as to increase opportunities for women. Last, she summarized the “principles and good practice guidelines for enhancing the participation of women in the SET sector”, which are threefold: (1) sectoral policy guidelines, such as gender mainstreaming, transparent recruiting policies, and health and safety at the workplace, (2) workplace guidelines, such as flexible working arrangements, remuneration equality, mentoring, and improving communication lines, and (3) re-entry into the Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) environment, such as catch-up courses, financing fellowships, and remaining in contact during a career break.

Dr. Thema, former director of international cooperation at the Department of Science and Technology added the issues of the excessive focus on administrative practicalities, the apartheid legacy and frozen demographics, and noted that where there is no women’s empowerment, this is in violation of the constitution. My apologies if I have written her name and details wrongly: she was a last-minute replacement for Prof. Immaculada Garcia Fernández, department of computer science at the University of Malaga, Spain. Garcia Fernández did make available her slides, which focused on international perspectives on women leadership in STI. Among many points, she notes that the working conditions for researchers “should aim to provide… both women and men researchers to combine work and family, children and career” and “Particular attention should be paid, to flexible working hours, part-time working, tele-working and sabbatical leave, as well as to the necessary financial and administrative provisions governing such arrangements”. She poses the question “The choice between family and profession, is that a gender issue?”

Dr. Romilla Maharaj, executive director for human and institutional capacity development at the National Research Foundation came with much data from the same booklet I mentioned in the first paragraph, but little qualitative analysis of this data (there is some qualitative information). She wants to move from the notion of “incentives” for women to “compensation”. The aim is to increase the number of PhDs five-fold by 2018 (currently the rate is about 1200 each year), which is not going to be easy (recollect the comment by the Minister, above). Concerning policies targeted at women participation, they appear to be successful for white women only (in postdoc bursaries, white women even outnumber white men). In my opinion, this smells more of a class/race structure issue than a gender issue, as mentioned above and in [5]. Last, the focus of improvements, according to Maharaj, should be on institutional improvements. However, during the break-out session in the afternoon, which she chaired, she seemed to be selectively deaf on this issue. The problem statement for the discussion was the low research output by women scientists compared to men, and how to resolve that. Many participants reiterated the lack of research time due to the disproportionate heavy teaching load (compared to men) and what is known as ‘death by committee’, and the disproportionate amount of (junior) lecturers who are counted in the statistics as scientists but, in praxis, do not do (or very little) research, thereby pulling down the overall statistics for women’s research output. Another participant wanted to se a further breakdown of the numbers by age group, as the suspicion was that it is old white men who produce most papers (who teach less, have more funds, supervise more PhD students etc.) (UPDATE 13-10-’10: I found some data that seems to support this). In addition, someone pointed out that counting publications is one thing, but considering their impact (by citations) is another one and for which no data was available, so that a recommendation was made to investigate this further as well (and to set up a gender research institute, which apparently does not yet exist in South Africa). The pay-per-publication scheme implemented at some universities could thus backfire for women (who require the time and funds to do research in the first place so as to get at least a chance to publish good papers). Maharaj’s own summary of the break-out session was an “I see, you want more funds”, but that does not rhyme fully with he institutional change she mentioned earlier nor with the multi-faceted problems raised during the break-out session that did reveal institutional hurdles.

Prof. Catherine Odora Hoppers, DST/NRF South African Research Chair in Development Education (among many things), gave an excellent speech with provoking statements (or: calling a spade a spade). She noted that going into SET means entering an arena of bad practice and intolerance; to fix that, one first has to understand how bad culture reproduces itself. The problem is not the access, she said, but the terms and conditions. In addition, and as several other speakers already had alluded to as well, she noted that one has to deal with the ghosts of the past. She put this in a wider context of the history of science with the value system it propagates (Francis Bacon, my one-line summary of the lengthy quote: science as a means to conquer nature so that man can master and control it), and the ethics of SET: SET outcomes have, and have had, some dark results, where she used the examples of the atom bomb, gas chambers, how SET was abused by the white male belittling the native and that it has been used against the majority of people in South Africa, and climate change. She sees the need for a “broader SET”, meaning ethical, and, (in my shorthand notation) with social responsibility and sustainability as essential components. She is putting this into practice by stimulating transdisciplinary research at her research group, and, at least and as a first step: people from different disciplines must to be able to talk to each other and understand each other.

To me, as an outsider, it was very interesting to hear what the current state of affairs is regarding women in SET in South Africa. While there were complaints, there we also suggestions for solutions, and it was clear from the data available that some improvements have been made over the years, albeit only in certain pockets. More people registered for the symposium than places available, and with some 120 attendees from academia and industry at all stages of the respective career paths, it was a stimulating mix of input that I hope will further improve the situation on the ground.

References

[1] Jan Petter Myklebust. THE NETHERLANDS: Too few women are professors. University World News, 17 January 2010, Issue: 107.

[2] Marinel Gerritsen, Thea Verdonk, and Akke Visser. Monitor Women Professors 2009. SoFoKleS, September 2009.

[3] Helen Hague. 9.2% of professors are women. Times Higher Education, May 28, 1999.

[4] Victoria Shannon. Equal rights for women? Surveys says: yes, but…. New York Times/International Herald Tribune—The female factor, June 30, 2010.

[5] Marcia Barinaga. Overview: Surprises Across the Cultural Divide. Compiled in: Comparisons across cultures. Women in science 1994. Science, 11 March 1994 263: 1467-1496 [DOI: 10.1126/science.8128232]

[6] Beverley A. Carlson. Mujeres en la estadística: la profesión habla. Red de Reestructuración y Competitividad, CEPAL – SERIE Desarrollo productivo, nr 89. Santiago de Chile, Noviembre 2000.

[7] Gloria Bonder. Mujer y Educación en América Latina: hacia la igualdad de oportunidades. Revista Iberoamericana de Educación, Número 6: Género y Educación, Septiembre – Diciembre 1994.

[8] Katrin Benhold. Risk and Opportunity for Women in 21st Century. New York Times International Herald Tribune—The female factor, March 5, 2010.

[9] Anon. Facing the facts: Women’s participation in Science, Engineering and Technology. National Advisory Council on Innovation, August 2009.