LifeItself

My Dear Western Friends, Many of you have read my previous letter , dated May 4, 2015, and responded by email. Thank you. I think we still have a little problem: Your replies have been much too U.S.-centric.  Unfortunately,  the world today is far too interlinked, in good part because of the U.S. policies over the last 35 years, and all problems are global.  Please parse the last sentence again and try to understand that you can no longer get away with being over there and ignoring what is happening here and everywhere else.  The cheap clothing and industrial products you buy in the U.S. come at a very high price to all other parts of the world.  High price means environmental and social deterioration. Since hardly anyone cares about the environment until they can't breath, have no water to drink, food to eat, drown in floods or mudslides; or alternatively fall sick with cancer, Ebola, cholera, AIDS or Hepatitis, let's focus on the social deterioration an...

My Dear Western Friends, As one of the old classics said, and I paraphrase, "Where you look, defines your outlook."  By email, you asked me several questions. Below are some of my answers. As links in green, I picked two of my old blogs and kept on adding several articles from the New York Times that were published in the last few days.  I am not the only person who is morally troubled. On the fracking revolution It used to be that massive environmental destruction happened in the God forsaken foreign countries or the poor empty parts of our motherlands.  Not anymore.  Now heavy industrial activities come to where we live and work, and environmental damage happens in the ecosystems we actually care about.  That's the reality of resource exhaustion paired with the ever-growing appetite for these resources from us, the Bubble People. Take "shale revolution" as an example: 10,000 tons of clean, round, well-sorted fracking sand per well, or one hundred 100 t...

My American friend just expressed a concern that video-conferencing through Skype from Saudi Arabia (or Poland) might be unreliable and sound quality low.  Hmm...  Unreliable at which end?  I just checked the WiFi speed at my Red Sea home, and it averaged 69.93 Mega bits per second (Mbps) on downloads and 39.77 Mbps on uploads. On campus WiFi, I clock 150 Mbps on both downloads and uploads. Just three months ago, I was lucky if I got a sustained upload speed above 10 Mbps in Austin at home or on campus. Then there is telephony.  When my wife and I were in the savannah east of Al Ula, near Mada'in Saleh , we and our Saudi friends, as well as the Egyptian driver, were on a 3G network and the internet, checking out the missing details.  The network reception was excellent over the entire 2000 km we covered. The ancient town of Al-Ula, parts of which are 3000 years old. Our Saudi companions, a young Government Affairs person from KAUST (left) and the wisest...

Tonight, I switched from al Jazeera International to BBC World Service.  It took about twenty minutes before I quit with disgust and switched back. Here's what I saw.  Somewhere at the World Economic Forum in Davos, there was a stage lined with eight armchairs ready for a live BBC program.  Seated on the stage were Christine Lagarde, the current IMF director, a pretty African woman, likely representing the developing world, and several very important looking white men. I started watching the BBC Davos report when Ms. Lagarde made her points:  IMF is now anything but business as usual.  Three IMF economists did a lot of analytic work and arrived at the following conclusions: (1) Extreme income inequality is bad for economic growth , (2) income redistribution is good for growth , and (3) jobs for the masses keep people engaged and are good for sustainable growth . She told us that these points were met with great disbelief and scorn by her IMF colleagues, ...

Finally I am in Saudi Arabia.  So many new impressions and new thoughts. I customarily watch here Al Jazeera International and the French News 24 Channel, and I never watch American TV.  I am simply tired of American navel gazing and the low quality of U.S.-based programming available here. Today, on Al Jazeera I saw a program about a group of Iranian and French women and men, who wanted to have a public concert in Iran.  After a long struggle, the authorities relented and the group sang.  And what a concert it was! This was the introduction by an Iranian female singer: We are the free men, who are not scared We are secrets that never die We are voices of who resist We are free and our world is free. At the end, another Iranian woman sang in the most beautiful voice: Of the just and the unjust They only spoke and did nothing Oh, God! Oh, God! See the chasm between their words and their actions. In-between they sang the "Bird of Dawn," a metaphor for h...

In Part I and Part II of this series, I told you how desperately public universities play the U.S. News & World Report rankings game. Public academia appears to be unable to grasp the fact that school rankings are an elaborate scam set up to boost private schools and provide them with steady income and prestige.  This obsession with rankings also plays to the recurrent thinking in the U.S. that unless you are rich or an already highly-educated, ready-to-use immigrant like me, you are not worthy of a decent life and it is your own fault.  Yeah, shame on you, why aren't you rich or well-educated? In Part I and Part II, I also suggested that in undergraduate education public universities would never win or place high in the current rankings scam.  Simply put, the rankings carrot is dangled from much too high for the public universities to bite, no matter how hard they try to jump. Since I spent 18 years as a faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, a...

In Part I , I criticized current framing of disputes about the future of public higher education.  Now it's time for a positive proposal.  I will show you that private and public schools cannot be easily compared and should not be included in the same rankings.  As you will see, these unrealistic rankings compare equivalents of a leisurely weekend runner jogging at 5 miles per hour (private schools) with a hurried man barreling down a freeway sixteen times faster at 90 miles per hour.  It is impossible to apply the same criteria to the behavior and priorities of both. In my mind, current university rankings by the U.S. News and World Report should be soundly repudiated by public universities acting as a group, and a case should be made to split the ranking lists of private and public universities.  I am assuming here that we will continue to insist on numerical measures of academic success, however incomplete and distorted these measures are.  That's beca...