The Sri Lankan option: details

map here

Little poor Sri Lanka is suddenly a global model of successful COIN.  Everybody seems to forget how long it took (it stretches back to 1983) and instead want to know how the decisive punches were landed.

Louise Arbour, head of the International Crisis Group, sums up the model thusly:

1. Full operational freedom for the Army to pursue scorched-earth tactics;
2. Little concern for noncombatant deaths (pretty much a requirement for #1); and 
3. Dismissing international and media protests regarding #1 and #2.

Judging by Israel's latest mistakes in mishandling the protest flotilla (pen knives and deck chairs = a dozen-plus dead?), Tel Aviv is absorbing the message alright.

Whither Central Asia: the South Korean model

An exploration by Banyan in The Economist of the lack of progress toward democracy in Central Asia--and why it will matter more in coming years.

Nice point:  "Central" Central Asia is not, but rather a true periphery--or in my vernacular the Gap's hernia in Asia.

Key point I've been making for a long time WRT the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation:  "Not only America but also Russia and China view the region as a bulwark against militant Islam."  It either goes NE from the Persian Gulf or SW into Africa--or both. We create Africom in Africa as our instrument of bulwark, and Russia and China instinctively reach for what becomes the SCO.  Same concept, similar execution.

But what really seals Central Asia off from radical Islam is being pulled into China's economic orbit, thanks to mineral and energy resources--a 50-fold increase in trade since 1990.  Meanwhile, the West offers aid and advice.

But it's South Korea's growing presence that is the subject here, as well as the admiration for its national development model held by Uzbek president Islam Karimov, who is allegedly obsessed with the nation and its "cleanliness and order."

The analysis:

Yet Mr Karimov and others seem fundamentally to misunderstand the Korean model.  Although government resources were channelled to favoured companies, these firms then had fiercely to compete among themselves and on world markets.  In Central Asia the most successful companies are sinecures of nepotism.

What is more, South Korea's transition to liberal democracy entailed grassroots activism as well as top-down guidance.

Meaning the educated growing middle class was crucial.

Meanwhile, China is described as learning from Kyrgyzstan's mistakes by cracking down on its own NGOs.  

Sounds like China's got the wrong model.

Four approaches to fixing water

Economist editorial.

Great line:  "Although mostly unpriced, it is the most valuable stuff in the world."

A very true observation:  "So far the world has been spared a true water war, through the belligerency in Darfur comes close to being one . . .."  

No, the farmer and the cowboy are rarely friends.

The four obvious fixes:

1. Improve storage and delivery--much of which comes down to fixing leaky pipes
2. Make farms less thirsty--guaranteed requirement with global warming/droughts
3. Better desalinization technologies
4. "Unleash the market on water-users and let the price mechanism bring supply and demand into balance."

The clear way forward is--unsurprisingly--to do all four.

Lomborg makes the argument in various places that, if just #1 was done, there'd be more than enough water to go around.

GMOs are the unlocking mechanism on two.

Desal techs are coming and the price of that falls every time another major metro joins the experiment, but we're still talking less than 1/2 of one percent of fresh water and takes a lot of energy.

The biggest holdup is the widespread notion that water is a free good.

Then again, I've watched Americans change quite a few habits WRT drinking water in the past couple of decades--a process that should be joined regarding usage in the house.  But again, all this pales to the choices made by farmers and governments working with farmers.

And that's where I think work such as Venter's can be hugely impactful.

More on Venter's bid for godhood

FT full-page "analysis," plus Economist editorial and briefing.

FT first:

The first application for synthetic genomes may be the rapid development of new flu vaccines . . . "If this technology had been available last year, we could have cut the period needed to make a vaccine for H1N1 by 99 percent," says Dr Venter.  "We could have done it in a day."

The basic reminder:  most life extension is accomplished by defeating everyday disease, not revamping the body.  So the benefits of life extension tend to be fairly democratic, meaning everybody gets them--and not just the super-rich.

Venter, as indicated before here, is focused on creating algae that can suck CO2 out of the air and produce hydrocarbons--great stuff that should be happening here in America. 

From The Economist:

Is the answer lots of new rules?  The better answer is profound openness on developments, so a vote for open-source.  

A key glimpse of the future:  the falling cost of analyzing DNA sequences and the faster and cheaper DNA synthesis.

It's getting better all the time

Matt Ridley hawking his new book, "The Rational Optimist," in the WSJ weekend journal.

The line that got me from the piece, which is good:

Trade was the most momentous innovation of the human species; it led to the invention of invention.

More:

Trade is to culture as sex is to biology.  Exchange makes cultural change collective and cumulative.  It becomes possible to draw upon inventions made throughout society, not just in your neighborhood.  The rate of cultural and economic progress depends on the rate at which ideas are having sex.

Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange.

Once human beings started swapping things and thoughts, they stumbled upon divisions of labor, in which specialization led to mutually beneficial collective knowledge. Specialization is the means by which exchange encourages innovation: In getting better at making your product or delivering your service, you come up with new tools. The story of the human race has been a gradual spread of specialization and exchange ever since: Prosperity consists of getting more and more narrow in what you make and more and more diverse in what you buy. Self-sufficiency—subsistence—is poverty.

The fundamental rule-set that underlies all my thinking: connectivity drives code (my security focus) but likewise wealth (my argument that globalization is beneficial).

Strong finish:

The process of cumulative innovation that has doubled life span, cut child mortality by three-quarters and multiplied per capita income ninefold—world-wide—in little more than a century is driven by ideas having sex. And things like the search engine, the mobile phone and container shipping just made ideas a whole lot more promiscuous still.

Again, so much for the myth that we now enter a great period of deglobalization just because of the financial crisis of the past year-and-a-half.  Also, you realize what BS it is to declare globalization some top-down-driven, elite conspiracy.

People connect because they instinctively know it brings them a better, safer, more prosperous life.

Dream all you want about communitarian enclavism as the great alternative salvation, and then realize that it too will be accommodated under globalization--not as a solution but as a means of exploring and retaining individual identity.

Face recognition: the global ID card

Pic here.  FT article.

Google, like Facebook and just about everybody else on the web right now, is suffering privacy issues, hence it has "put the launch of controversial facial recognition technology under review."

But no one expects, argues the article, that Google will back off from the technology, as all sorts of powerful face recognition techs are just hitting the market.

Hell, my new--and tiny--handheld Canon HD digital camcorder/camera does a fascinating job of spotting and tracking faces live as I film or shoot, so if that low-level capacity has reached everybody's personal cameras, you just know that far more profound technologies are being massed by major players.

Most of us have bumped into this technology in travel or across our work days, and there's long been the simple stuff for identifying faces of friends in programs like Apple's iPhoto.  The iPhone's got that bit where you record a snippet of a song and then search the web for its title, so no surprise that companies are rolling out similar technology that allows you to do the same with faces off your phone.

One telecom exec: 

There isn't a single mobile company that isn't interested in this. There are some 800m camera-equipped phones sold each year, but most people don't really use the cameras.  Mobile phone companies are looking for ways to enhance the camera experience.

The fear is easy to imagine:  the ability to snap a photo of somebody, find out who they are, and then be able to pull info up on them instantly, increasing the capacity of stalkers everywhere. Naturally, an Israeli start-up firm, Face.com, is at the forefront of the technology, having already scanned 9bn photos, yielding 52m identities.  Face.com admits it is still defining the safeguards on such a system.

But some smart words from an exec of a Swedish tech firm:

Now people are scared when they see [facial recognition products], but three or our years from now it won't be like that. At the moment, it is hard to control privacy on social networks, but it won't always be that way.  We will see a lot of legal cases over this, and a lot more control given to the user.

I believe he's right, and that this is the normal catch-up phenomenon on rules.

Larger point:  this will be a powerful security tool in a world where violence has largely migrated down to the level of individuals.

Chart of the day: Water, water--everywhere

Just a nifty chart from a recent Economist special report on water.

The basics of the planet's layout when it comes to water.

The bits that always catch your eye:

• Only 2-3% of the water in the world is fresh, or non-salt water
• Of that, much is held in glaciers and ice caps
• Of the tiny fraction that is surface water, most of that is lakes.

The most counter-intuitive for me is that when we talk of water, it's mostly about rivers, but when you check the numbers, rivers are only 1.6% of surface/atmospheric water, which is 0.4 percent of fresh water, which is 2.5% of the world's water. 

The other big counterintuitive reality: domestic use of water is peanuts compared to agricultural.