Jan 8, 2010

LCCR Coalition Members - Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Beginning in 1950 with 30 organizations, mostly civil rights and labor groups, the LCCR has grown in numbers, scope, and effectiveness. Here you will find a listing of the more than 200 national organizations that comprise the LCCR.

Bolded text denotes LCCR Executive Committee membership.

For information on how to become a LCCR member organization, please contact New Member Information at haywood@civilrights.org. Please note that to be eligible for membership, an organization must share LCCR's principles and purposes, be national in scope, and conduct an ongoing civil rights program.

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M - N - O - P - R - S - T - U - W - Y - Z

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National Survey of the Thai People

December 21, 2009

Bangkok's Democracy Monument: a representation...Image via Wikipedia

TH version Design_Opacity80_ThaiThailand continues to struggle for political stability three years after the September 2006 coup. To ensure that opinions from Thai citizens are represented during this time of political turmoil, The Asia Foundation conducted a nationwide opinion poll in 26 provinces to gauge the national mood toward election reform, participation in politics, amending the constitution, and more.

The survey, Constitutional Reform and Democracy in Thailand: A National Survey of the Thai People, reveals that the Thai electorate is pessimistic about the overall direction of the country, with less than a third saying the country is moving in the right direction. At the center of the national debate is the current Constitution, which voters approved in an August 2007 referendum, replacing the 1997 Constitution.

“The survey results shed light on emerging trends and changing attitudes of Thai voters, including compelling insights into controversial issues surrounding the calls for revisions to the 2007 Constitution, as well as hot button topics like political amnesty and impunity,” said Dr. James Klein, the Foundation’s Country Representative in Thailand. An overwhelming majority (84 percent) believes that a new or revised constitution should be ratified through a referendum.

English: National Emblem of Thailand, depictin...Image via Wikipedia

The survey also asked respondents their views on decentralization, vote-buying, influences in the voting process, their allegiance to political parties, and their level of trust in institutions. The complete findings are available in on our website in English and Thai.

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Eight to Watch: The Issues that Will Shape the World in 2010

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By SPIEGEL Staff

The past year seemed a fitting end to a decade during which the world lurched from crisis to crisis. The list of unfinished business is long and many pressing issues are set to demand attention in 2010. SPIEGEL presents the ones to watch.

The year 2009 seems to have left behind more unfinished business than accomplishments. Topping the list, of course, were climate talks in Copenhagen, which left behind little more than a vague roadmap for a possible way forward as the world searches for a joint strategy to combat global warming.

But there are myriad outstanding issues that still need to be tended to. Iran still seems intent on producing a nuclear weapon. Pakistan appears to be edging further towards the abyss. Afghanistan continues spiralling into violence, and fears of global terrorism are higher than ever after the failed Christmas Day attack on a Northwest Airlines flight from Europe to Detroit. Although the countries of the world pulled together to prevent a catastrophe during the worst recession since World War II, the global economy is still far from good health.

But 2010 won't just be a year of tending to crises. The football world championships, to be held this time around in South Africa, are once again rapidly approaching and China is set to host a massively lavish World's Fair at Shanghai's EXPO 2010. SPIEGEL presents the eight issues to watch in 2010.

One Sudan or Two?

People in Africa's largest country are scheduled to go to the polls in April, and the results could help determine whether Sudan will remain a unified country, or whether it will split. A referendum as to whether the south, made up primarily of Christians and animists, will break off from the predominently Muslim north, is planned for January 2011. But even now, the north has little interest in maintaining stability in the south of the country.

In theory, oil deposits in the south could make the region rich. Reality, however, looks different, with Sudan's south a classic failed state. It does not have a functioning government or a dependable judiciary. Nor is there an adequate police force, public administration or educational and health-care infrastructure. In 2009 alone, more than 2,000 people were killed in clashes and attacks, some of which were ethnically motivated while others were instigated by the north. Indeed, it seems unlikely that the elections scheduled for April will actually take place. The voting process is complicated, and both the north and the south have accused each other of tampering with electoral rolls in southern Sudan. More chaos is likely.

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An End to Iraq's Maliki Era?

One of the most important elections scheduled for 2010 will be held in Iraq on March 6. The vote will determine whether current Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will remain in office. The politician, who belongs to the country's Shiite population, has succeeded in establishing a degree of governability to what is surely the Middle East's most difficult country to govern.

All of al-Maliki's serious challengers are also Shiites, including ambitious Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani. But in Iraq, compromise candidates are often drawn from the ranks of lesser-known candidates, as happened with al-Maliki himself. If the process of choosing the next prime minister drags on for as long as it did in 2006, resolution of the problem may require hard-fought and extremely fragile compromises. They might have to be made between Sunnis and Shiites, Kurds and Arabs -- and between Baghdad, which wants to demonstrate its independence, and Washington, which wants to retain a high degree of influence even after its troops withdraw in August.

An Attack on Iranian Nuclear Facilities?

2010 might be the year that sees the United States and Russia make massive reductions in their stockpiles of nuclear weapons. And it might also be the year that sees Iran join the swelling group of the world's nuclear-armed nations. Or it might even be both.

In January, US President Barack Obama plans to push for the START pact, which expired in December 2009, to be renewed and for a reduction in the number of combat-ready nuclear warheads and launching equipment. Moscow is expected to agree to the proposals. Moreover, in May, the 189 countries that have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) are scheduled to convene in New York, where the nuclear have-nots are expected to pressure nuclear states to reduce their stockpiles. The United States and its European allies are demanding, first, that all countries sign the pact's additional protocol, which would allow UN inspectors to carry out unannounced checks and, second, that any country that pulls out of the treaty (to date, only North Korea has done so, but some politicians in Tehran are threatening to do so) should not be allowed to hold on to nuclear material it purchased while a signatory to the treaty.

Furthermore, in February, there may be a new round of sanctions against Iran, though the Iranian leadership has pledged to not let itself be influenced by any such measures. Given such a situation, it becomes even more likely that Israel or the US could launch an airborne attack against Iranian nuclear facilities at some point during 2010. Such an attack would have unimaginable consequences on the Middle East and the rest of the world.

Can an African Team Win the 2010 World Cup?

In 2010, Africa will play host to the football world championships for the first time ever. But when the World Cup tournament kicks off in South Africa on June 11, much more than just golden trophies and bragging rights will be at stake. Teams from six African countries -- Algeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and South Africa -- will be playing in the tournament and fighting for the identity and pride of the entire continent.

Even half a century after gaining their independence from colonial powers, things are still going rather poorly for many African countries. Poverty levels are rising, and the economic gap with industrialized nations is widening. The football tournament is coming at exactly the right time. Africa wants to show not only that it deserves to host such events, but also that it can hold its own -- at least when it comes to football. Indeed, the sport could provide an alternative form of therapy -- a way for an entire continent to confront its feelings of inferiority. "Every African nation has its internal problems," former South African striker Shaun Bartlett recently told the BBC, "but football can do wonders for people."

Climate Hopes in Bonn

After the disappointing minimal consensus that emerged at the climate summit in Copenhagen, 2010 will be the decisive year in determing whether a common approach to combating global warming is possible. In June, environment ministers from around the world will meet in Bonn, Germany, where they hope to reach a preliminary agreement on whether a binding treaty for fighting climate change can be signed in December at a summit in Mexico City.

Two scenarios are possible: Either the United Nations' system of global governance on the issue of climate protection will collapse entirely, or the breakdown of the Copenhagen talks will lead them to redouble their efforts in order to prevent a further failure.

The role played by the US and China will be decisive. The world's two largest polluters are key to any international approach. Should Beijing and Washington not live up to their responsibility, then it will likely lead to an expiration of the Kyoto Protocol without a successor agreement.

At stake, in other words, is not just a solution to the global climate crisis, but rather the entire mechanism of global governance. If the countries of the world are unable to unite over what is perhaps the greatest challenge facing humanity, then greater polarization could ensue between the world's richest and poorest countries along with a radicalization of climate activists.

A Reduction in Subsidies for Europe's Farmers?

The European Union spends more of its budget on cereal farmers, cattle-breeders and sugar manufacturers than on any other issue facing the 27-member bloc. Fully 40 percent of the EU's €123 billion annual budget is devoured by agricultural subsidies. In 2006, the EU agreed to spend a great deal of this money in the future on research, education and environmental protection. This year the discussion will take place over whether concrete cuts in subsidies should be initiated.

The debate will be rife with conflict -- it is difficult to find another issue in the EU that is as controversial as argicultural policy. Already, two seemingly irreconcilable camps are forming. One side, led by Britain, wants to slash agricultural subsidies by at least one-third. But the agricultural front, led by France and backed to a large degree by Germany, rejects drastic cuts. They argue that the financial aid ensure Europe's independence from food imports. The battle threatens to lead to years of blockading in the EU -- and to a typically weak European compromise.

A Generation Change for the Middle East

In the Arab world, there will be discussions in 2010 about who will succeed the old men who rule three of the major Arab states. Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak, 81, denies that he is grooming his son Gamal, 46, to be his successor, but Gamal Mubarak's influence is growing. A banker by profession, Gamal Mubarak supports the economic liberalization of his country.

Saudi Arabia's aging King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, 85, appointed his brother Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, 76, as deputy prime minister in March 2009. Given that Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, 81, is seriously ill, the appointment is seen as a preliminary decision in favor of the powerful Nayef and his conservative agenda as the king's successor.

In Libya, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, 37, is returning to the political stage after a period out of the spotlight. It is considered likely that he will succeed his father, Moammar Gadhafi, 67. The question is whether the colonel, who has been in power for 40 years, will show any interest in stepping down.

Show of Strength in Shanghai

Less than two years after the Beijing Olympics, China's Communist Party is putting on another gigantic spectacle: the World Expo in Shanghai. The aim of Expo 2010 is to showcase China -- both to the outside world and to its own citizens -- not only as an economic superpower, but also as a social model for the future. Some 70 million visitors are expected and the show will be to be larger and showier than any expo in the past.

The motto of Expo 2010 is "Better City -- Better Life." China wants to present itself as a pioneer of environmentally friendly urban development, sustainability and innovation. Construction work in the city has been going on for months, not only on the exhibition grounds but also to revive the city's infrastructure. The metro network is being expanded and the city's famous waterfront, the Bund, is being renovated. The Communist Party is spending the equivalent of $45 billion on the expo, despite the economic crisis. Hence 2010 could be the year in which the global balance of power shifts even further in the direction of Asia.


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Ten for the Teens

Pie chart of population distribution throughou...Image via Wikipedia

Posted on Friday, January 8, 2010

By Joshua Kurlantzick

It’s that time, and everyone is doing it, so I thought I should try my hand. Ten predictions for the teens, 2010-2020, in Southeast Asia. (I encourage colleagues to venture predictions for their areas of the world.)

1. China will replace the United States as the most important outside actor in Southeast Asia. It’s going to happen in other regions of the world, but this change will happen in Southeast Asia first – China’s backyard, and the place where many nations already are most comfortable with China as the key external power.

2. Japan is history. The biggest loser from China’s rise in Southeast Asia is Japan, not the United States. Despite its enormous commercial investments in Southeast Asia, Japan never reaped the political and diplomatic capital those investments could have provided. And it’s not going to happen now.

3. India’s government will not prove a serious challenge to China in Southeast Asia. India doesn’t “get” Southeast Asia – its low-key diplomatic style, the consensual management ethos, the slow-paced talk shop style of Asean meetings, the value of face time. India’s aid programs, infrastructure assistance, and soft power cultural programs also lag behind China’s. Though India may expand its military presence in Southeast Asia, it will never enjoy the kind of relationship it desires with Asean, and individual Asean members, until it better understands the Asean way of diplomacy.

Map: Asia (location), subregions as delineated...Image via Wikipedia

4. Indian companies will make their move into Southeast Asia. Unlike their government, Indian companies do get it. Their dedication to corporate governance, effective management, and successful retail promotion – all of these advantages make them far more appealing as partners than Chinese companies. The Indian firms’ skill in English helps in places like Singapore and the Philippines, and the Indian diaspora, though not as wealthy as Chinese in Southeast Asia, certainly enjoys critical business connections. India’s increasingly open home market, too, will entice Southeast Asian companies.

5. The United States will play a weakening hand well in Southeast Asia. After a decade spent trying to convince countries in the region to pick sides, which no one in Southeast Asia wants to do, and of losing out to China as Beijing lapped the United States in trade and investment deals, Washington seems to be waking up. It’s investing again in face time and diplomacy in Southeast Asia. This decade, the United States can afford to be the Britain of the 2000s, at least in Southeast Asia – the United States can cede ground to China, which has proven a responsible actor in Southeast Asia, without worrying about significant threats to core US security interests.

Countries of the world where English is an off...Image via Wikipedia

6. Thailand will melt down. The shakiest political foundations in the region, a looming class war, a raging insurgency in the south, a looming monarchical transition – no wonder my Thai friends are petrified of the 2010s.

7. Oil won’t help anyone (except leaders). Does it ever? The tapping of offshore discoveries in Cambodian waters will only foster more graft in one of the most corrupt countries in the region. Oil wealth in East Timor, similarly, will not keep that country from disintegrating into a failed state.

8. Terrorism will vanish from Southeast Asia. Well, not exactly, but of any region of the world Southeast Asia has made the greatest strides in addressing the root causes of terror, including poverty, political and social alienation, and Islamic extremism. Expect that to continue – and, with Indonesia as an example, countries in the region will combat terror without resorting to indefinite detention of suspects.

9. Despite all the hype, and China’s rise, Chinese won’t replace English as the language of business, diplomacy, and culture.

10. In 2020, benighted Burma will still be ruled by a military regime – perhaps the last junta left in the world.

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The Real Reason Profiling Fails

Aviation security is no laughing matterImage by goosmurf via Flickr

by Matthew Yglesias

Conservatives looking to engage in their favorite sport of national-security hysteria got their wish Christmas Day, when a young man named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded an Amsterdam-Detroit flight with incendiary chemicals stashed in his underpants. The would-be bomber failed to destroy the plane and certainly did no fundamental damage to the United States of America. He did, however, get Fox News personalities Brit Hume and Bill Kristol to proclaim the attack a success. Under ordinary circumstances, you would expect the conservative press to avoid acting as al-Qaeda’s hype-men. But with partisan hay to be made, an attack in which only the attacker was injured becomes a victory for America’s enemies.

Coupled with the failure-as-success narrative, new calls have come for stepped-up racial or ethnic profiling. Tom McInerney, a retired Air Force lieutenant general, offered an extreme version, proposing that we "be very serious and harsh about the profiling" to the extent that "if you are an 18- to 28-year-old Muslim male you should be strip searched." Andy McCarthy at National Review Online and Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal expressed only slightly more restrained versions of profiling enthusiasm.

These proposals to entrench systematic, formal discrimination against the world’s Muslim population raise troubling ethical issues. More fundamentally, they completely fail to grapple with the logic of anti-American terrorist violence or the responsibilities of a global power.

12 28 09 Bearman Cartoon Airline SecurityImage by Bearman2007 via Flickr

Al-Qaeda's capacity to damage the United States is actually very limited. Even the devastating mass murder of September 11 left the country’s economic strength, infrastructure, and military might entirely intact. Al-Qaeda has since hit some soft targets abroad and attempted -- but failed -- to blow up airliners. Obviously, it would be a bad thing if someone like Abdulmutallab or "shoe bomber" Richard Reid killed a plane full of people, and the government rightly seeks to avoid this sort of attack. But a clear distinction should be drawn between a threat on that order and genuinely big-time dangers to national security like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and nuclear proliferation.

Instead, what al-Qaeda can do to America is scare its citizens and try to prompt us into counterproductive actions. Systematic anti-Muslim discrimination, for example, really might be an effective way of making air travel slightly more secure in the short term. But air travel is already extremely safe, and the United States of America needs to consider the broader implications of such a policy. Right now, a promising Bangladeshi scientist considering competing job offers in the United States and Europe could be honestly told that he would likely find America a more welcoming place. That’s an important source of national strength. Conversely, if we start routinely strip-searching the younger employees of the Indonesian embassy as they fly to their new posts in Washington, we can expect to adversely affect our relations with that country. Right now, over 10,000 Muslims serve in the American military. Their service is valuable on its own terms, and all the more so because they may have cultural or language skills that most Americans lack. Should they really be singled out for special maltreatment because a co-religionist set his pants on fire?

Beyond that, is it better to live in a country where a teenage American Muslim reads on a message board that the United States is a racist country hell-bent on persecuting Islam and reacts, "No, it isn’t"? Or would we really prefer he think, "That’s why I got singled out for strip searches when we went on vacation last winter"?

At the end of the day, our greatest defense against terrorism is the simple fact that few people actually seem to want to blow themselves up in order to kill Americans. The exact number of al-Qaeda operatives isn’t known, but the total is thought to be only in the thousands -- more Muslims are employed by America's own government. And most al-Qaeda operatives are apparently not volunteering for martyrdom.

One of the most under-noted aspects of the Abdulmutallab case is that his own father tried to drop the dime on him. That kind of cooperation is invaluable, as are our commercial, cultural, diplomatic, military, and law enforcement ties with majority-Muslim countries. As are the contributions of America’s Muslim citizens. To throw this all out the window in response to -- of all things -- a failed terrorist attack would be a huge mistake.

Indeed, the steps the Obama administration has already taken in this direction, most notably compiling a list of 14 "countries of interest" whose citizens and residents will be singled out for enhanced security, already go too far. This is profiling by another name, and throwing Cuba into this list -- on the theory that it’s a state sponsor of terrorism -- is childish and fools no one. Less than a month ago, Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and said, "We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend." He was right. Too bad he’s lost sight of that.

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Zorba’s Guide to Free Ebooks

By Paul Biba

Screen shot 2010-01-08 at 9.26.17 AM.pngZorba Press has published the most comprehensive guide to free ebooks that I’ve seen so far. It is actually Chapter 3 from Michael Pastore’s 50 Benefits of Ebooks.

The Guide covers search engines, RSS feeds, public and university libraries and:

A. Free Ebook Websites
B. Ebook Directories: Sites That List Free Ebook Websites
C. Ebook Search Sites and Ebook Search Engines
D. Audiobooks
E. Ebooks About Aspects of Writing, Publishing, Internet, and Epublishing
F. Literature, Classic Books, Biographies
G. Nonfiction Ebooks (including Science, Technology and Computer Ebooks)
H. Scholarly Offerings
I. Children’s Literature
J. Pastore’s Picks: 1,001 Noteworthy Ebooks to Read Before You Diet

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Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog - Is Google Good for History?

Center for History and New MediaImage via Wikipedia

[These are my prepared remarks for a talk I gave at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, on January 7, 2010, in San Diego. The panel was entitled "Is Google Good for History?" and also featured talks by Paul Duguid of the University of California, Berkeley and Brandon Badger of Google Books. Given my propensity to go rogue, what I actually said likely differed from this text, but it represents my fullest, and, I hope, most evenhanded analysis of Google.]

Is Google good for history? Of course it is. We historians are searchers and sifters of evidence. Google is probably the most powerful tool in human history for doing just that. It has constructed a deceptively simple way to scan billions of documents instantaneously, and it has spent hundreds of millions of dollars of its own money to allow us to read millions of books in our pajamas. Good? How about Great?

But then we historians, like other humanities scholars, are natural-born critics. We can find fault with virtually anything. And this disposition is unsurprisingly exacerbated when a large company, consisting mostly of better-paid graduates from the other side of campus, muscles into our turf. Had Google spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Widener Library at Harvard, surely we would have complained about all those steps up to the front entrance.

The Internet Archive in the Bibliotheca Alexan...Image via Wikipedia

Partly out of fear and partly out of envy, it’s easy to take shots at Google. While it seems that an obsessive book about Google comes out every other week, where are the volumes of criticism of ProQuest or Elsevier or other large information companies that serve the academic market in troubling ways? These companies, which also provide search services and digital scans, charge universities exorbitant amounts for the privilege of access. They leech money out of library budgets every year that could be going to other, more productive uses.

Google, on the other hand, has given us Google Scholar, Google Books, newspaper archives, and more, often besting commercial offerings while being freely accessible. In this bigger picture, away from the myopic obsession with the Biggest Tech Company of the Moment (remember similar diatribes against IBM, Microsoft?), Google has been very good for history and historians, and one can only hope that they continue to exert pressure on those who provide costly alternatives.

Of course, like many others who feel a special bond with books and our cultural heritage, I wish that the Google Books project was not under the control of a private entity. For years I have called for a public project, or at least a university consortium, to scan books on the scale Google is attempting. I’m envious of France’s recent announcement to spend a billion dollars on public scanning. In addition, the Center for History and New Media has a strong relationship with the Internet Archive to put content in a non-profit environment that will maximize its utility and distribution and make that content truly free, in all senses of the word. I would much rather see Google’s books at the Internet Archive or the Library of Congress. There is some hope that HathiTrust will be this non-Google champion, but they are still relying mostly on Google’s scans. The likelihood of a publicly funded scanning project in the age of Tea Party reactionaries is slim.

* * *

Comparing Linux Search results in Google and BingImage by Andrew Mason via Flickr

Long-time readers of my blog know that I have not pulled punches when it comes to Google. To this day the biggest spike in readership on my blog was when, very early in Google’s book scanning project, I casually posted a scan of a human hand I found while looking at an edition of Plato. The post ended up on Digg, and since then it has been one of the many examples used by Google’s detractors to show a lack of quality in their library project.

Let’s discuss the quality issues for a moment, since it is one point of obsession within the academy, an obsession I feel is slightly misplaced. Of course Google has some poor scans—as the saying goes, haste makes waste—but I’ve yet to see a scientific survey of the overall percentage of pages that are unreadable or missing (surely a miniscule fraction in my viewing of scores of Victorian books). Regarding metadata errors, as Jon Orwant of Google Books has noted, when you are dealing with a trillion pieces of metadata, who are likely to have millions of errors in need of correction. Let us also not pretend the bibliographical world beyond Google is perfect. Many of the metadata problems with Google Books come from library partners and others outside of Google.

Moreover, Google likely has remedies for many of these inadequacies. Google is constantly improving its OCR and metadata correction capabilities, often in clever ways. For instance, it recently acquired the reCAPTCHA system from Carnegie Mellon, which uses unwitting humans who are logging into online services to transcribe particularly hard or smudged words from old books. They have added a feedback mechanism for users to report poor scans. Truly bad books can be rescanned or replaced by other libraries’ versions. I find myself nonplussed by quality complaints about Google Books that have engineering solutions. That’s what Google does; it solves engineering problems very well.

Indeed, we should recognize (and not without criticism, as I will note momentarily) that at its heart, Google Books is the outcome, like so many things at Google, of a engineering challenge and a series of mathematical problems: How can you scan tens of million books in a decade? It’s easy to say they should do a better job and get all the details right, but if you do the calculations with those key variables, as I assume Brandon and his team have done, you’ll probably see that getting a nearly perfect library scanning project would take a hundred years rather than ten. (That might be a perfectly fine trade-off, but that’s a different argument or a different project.) As in OCR, getting from 99% to 99.9% accuracy would probably take an order of magnitude longer and be an order of magnitude more expensive. That’s the trade-off they have decided to make, and as a company interested in search, where near-100% accuracy is unnecessary, and considering the possibilities for iterating toward perfection from an imperfect first version, it must have been an easy decision to make.

* * *

Google Books is incredibly useful, even with the flaws. Although I was trained at places with large research libraries of Google Books scale, I’m now at an institution that is far more typical of higher ed, with a mere million volumes and few rare works. At places like Mason, Google Books is a savior, enabling research that could once only be done if you got into the right places. I regularly have students discover new topics to study and write about through searches on Google Books. You can only imagine how historical researchers and all students and scholars feel in even less privileged places. Despite its flaws, it will be the the source of much historical scholarship, from around the globe, over the coming decades. It is a tremendous leveler of access to historical resources.

Google is also good for history in that it challenges age-old assumptions about the way we have done history. Before the dawn of massive digitization projects and their equally important indices, we necessarily had to pick and choose from a sea of analog documents. All of that searching and sifting we did, and the particular documents and evidence we chose to write on, were—let’s admit it—prone to many errors. Read it all, we were told in graduate school. But who ever does? We sift through large archives based on intuition; sometime we even find important evidence by sheer luck. We have sometimes made mountains out of molehills because, well, we only have time to sift through molehills, not mountains. Regardless of our technique, we always leave something out; in an analog world we have rarely been comprehensive.

This widespread problem of anecdotal history, as I have called it, will only get worse. As more documents are scanned and go online, many works of historical scholarship will be exposed as flimsy and haphazard. The existence of modern search technology should push us to improve historical research. It should tell us that our analog, necessarily partial methods have had hidden from us the potential of taking a more comprehensive view, aided by less capricious retrieval mechanisms which, despite what detractors might say, are often more objective than leafing rapidly through paper folios on a time-delimited jaunt to an archive.

In addition, listening to Google may open up new avenues of exploring the past. In my book Equations from God I argued that mathematics was generally considered a divine language in 1800 but was “secularized” in the nineteenth century. Part of my evidence was that mathematical treatises, which often contained religious language in the early nineteenth century, lost such language by the end of the century. By necessity, researching in the pre-Google Books era, my textual evidence was limited—I could only read a certain number of treatises and chose to focus (I’m sure this will sound familiar) on the writings of high-profile mathematicians. The vastness of Google Books for the first time presents the opportunity to do a more comprehensive scan of Victorian mathematical writing for evidence of religious language. This holds true for many historical research projects.

So Google has provided us not only with free research riches but also with a helpful direct challenge to our research methods, for which we should be grateful. Is Google good for history? Of course it is.

* * *

But does that mean that we cannot provide constructive criticism of Google, to make it the best it can be, especially for historians? Of course not. I would like to focus on one serious issue that ripples through many parts of Google Books.

For a company that is a champion of openness, Google remains strangely closed when it comes to Google Books. Google Books seems to operate in ways that are very different from other Google properties, where Google aims to give it all away. For instance, I cannot understand why Google doesn’t make it easier for historians such as myself, who want to do technical analyses of historical books, to download them en masse more easily. If it wanted to, Google could make a portal to download all public domain books tomorrow. I’ve heard the excuses from Googlers: But we’ve spent millions to digitize these books! We’re not going to just give them away! Well, Google has also spent millions on software projects such as Android, Wave, Chrome OS, and the Chrome browser, and they are giving those away. Google’s hesitance with regard to its books project shows that openness goes only so far at Google. I suppose we should understand that; Google is a company, not public library. But that’s not the philanthropic aura they cast around Google Books at its inception or even today, in dramatic op-eds touting the social benefit of Google Books.

In short, complaining about the quality of Google’s scans distracts us from a much larger problem with Google Books. The real problem—especially for those in the digital humanities but increasingly for many others—is that Google Books is only open in the read-a-book-in-my-pajamas way. To be sure, you can download PDFs of many public domain books. But they make it difficult to download the OCRed text from multiple public domain books–what you would need for more sophisticated historical research. And when we move beyond the public domain, Google has pushed for a troubling, restrictive regime for millions of so-called “orphan” books.

I would like to see a settlement that offers greater, not lesser access to those works, in addition to greater availability of what Cliff Lynch has called “computational access” to Google Books, a higher level of access that is less about reading a page image on your computer than applying digital tools to many pages or books at one time to create new knowledge and understanding. This is partially promised in the Google Books settlement, in the form of text-mining research centers, but those centers will be behind a velvet rope and I suspect the casual historian will be unlikely to ever use them. Google has elaborate APIs, or application programming interfaces, for most of its services, yet only the most superficial access to Google Books.

For a company that thrives on openness and the empowerment of users and software developers, Google Books is a puzzlement. With much fanfare, Google has recently launched—evidently out of internal agitation—what it calls a “Data Liberation Front,” to ensure portability of data and openness throughout Google. On dataliberation.org, the website for the front, these Googlers list 25 Google projects and how to maximize their portability and openness—virtually all of the main services at Google. Sadly, Google Books is nowhere to be seen, even though it also includes user-created data, such as the My Library feature, not to mention all of the data—that is, books—that we have all paid for with our tax dollars and tuition. So while the Che Guevaras put up their revolutionary fist on one side of the Googleplex, their colleagues on the other side are working with a circumscribed group of authors and publishers to place messy restrictions onto large swaths of our cultural heritage through a settlement that few in the academy support.

Jon Orwant and Dan Clancy and Brandon Badger have done an admirable job explaining much of the internal process of Google Books. But it still feels removed and alien in way that other Google efforts are not. That is partly because they are lawyered up, and thus hamstrung from responding to some questions academics have, or from instituting more liberal policies and features. The same chutzpah that would lead a company to digitize entire libraries also led it to go too far with in-copyright books, leading to a breakdown with authors and publishers and the flawed settlement we have in front of us today.

We should remember that the reason we are in a settlement now is that Google didn’t have enough chutzpah to take the higher, tougher road—a direct challenge in the courts, the court of public opinion, or the Congress to the intellectual property regime that governs many books and makes them difficult to bring online, even though their authors and publishers are long gone. While Google regularly uses its power to alter markets radically, it has been uncharacteristically meek in attacking head-on this intellectual property tower and its powerful corporate defenders. Had Google taken a stronger stance, historians would have likely been fully behind their efforts, since we too face the annoyances that unbalanced copyright law places on our pedagogical and scholarly use of textual, visual, audio, and video evidence.

I would much rather have historians and Google to work together. While Google as a research tool challenges our traditional historical methods, historians may very well have the ability to challenge and make better what Google does. Historical and humanistic questions are often at the high end of complexity among the engineering challenges Google faces, similar to and even beyond, for instance, machine translation, and Google engineers might learn a great deal from our scholarly practice. Google’s algorithms have been optimized over the last decade to search through the hyperlinked documents of the Web. But those same algorithms falter when faced with the odd challenges of change over centuries and the alienness of the past and old books and documents that historians examine daily.

Because Google Books is the product of engineers, with tremendous talent in computer science but less sense of the history of the book or the book as an object rather than bits, it founders in many respects. Google still has no decent sense of how to rank search results in humanities corpora. Bibliometrics and text mining work poorly on these sources (as opposed to, say, the highly structured scientific papers Google Scholar specializes in). Studying how professional historians rank and sort primary and seconary sources might tell Google a lot, which it could use in turn to help scholars.

Ultimately, the interesting question might not be, Is Google good for history? It might be: Is history good for Google? To both questions, my answer is: Yes.

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Mullahs, Guards, and Bonyads: An Exploration of Iranian Leadership Dynamics

An Exploration of Iranian Leadership Dynamics

Cover: Mullahs, Guards, and Bonyads: An Exploration of Iranian Leadership Dynamics

By: David E. Thaler, Alireza Nader, Shahram Chubin, Jerrold D. Green, Charlotte Lynch, Frederic Wehrey

The Islamic Republic of Iran poses serious challenges to U.S. interests in the Middle East, and its nuclear program continues to worry the international community. The presidential election of June 2009 that returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power and led to broad protests and a government crackdown presents yet another cause for U.S. concern. Yet the U.S. ability to “read” the Iranian regime and formulate appropriate policies has been handicapped by both a lack of access to the country and the opacity of decisionmaking in Tehran. To help analysts better understand the Iranian political system, the authors describe

  • Iranian strategic culture, including the perceptions that drive state behavior
  • the informal networks, formal government institutions, and personalities that influence decisionmaking in the Islamic Republic
  • the impact of elite behavior on Iranian policy formulation and execution
  • factionalism, emerging fissures within the current regime, and other key trends.

The authors observe that it is the combination of key personalities, networks based on a number of commonalities, and institutions — not any one of these elements alone — that defines the complex political system of the Islamic Republic. Factional competition and informal, back-channel maneuvering trump the formal processes for policymaking. The Supreme Leader retains the most power, but he is not omnipotent in the highly dynamic landscape of Iranian power politics. The evolving role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the vulnerability of the elite “old guard” to challenge, and the succession of the next Supreme Leader are key determinants of Iran's future direction. In light of complexities in the Iranian system, U.S. policymakers should avoid trying to leverage the domestic politics of Iran and instead accept the need to deal with the government of the day as it stands. Moreover, they must take as an article of faith that dealing with Iran does not necessarily mean dealing with a unitary actor due to the competing power centers in the Islamic Republic.

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Mideast Water Crisis Brings Misery, Uncertainty

by Deborah Amos

Hadi Mizban/AP

January 7, 2010

The Middle East is facing its worst water crisis in decades. For three summers, the annual rains have failed to come. Farmland has dried up across the region in Iraq, Syria, southeast Turkey and Lebanon.

While oil was the resource that defined the last century, water and its scarcity may define this one.

Experts say the climate is warming in the Fertile Crescent, the area of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, contributing to the water shortage and helping to create a new phenomenon — water refugees.

Middle East Water Woes

Droughts for several consecutive years and the damming of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers have the Middle East facing its worst water crisis in decades.

Middle East Water Woes

Source: United Nations Environmental Program

Credit: Alyson Hurt/NPR

This winter, rain has barely settled into the hard, cracked farmland in northern Syria. There was a time when the fields were green most of the year, but the summer droughts have taken a toll. Farther east is the Badia, a vast rangeland, where thousands of people tend herds of sheep.

Addami is a traditional village where the houses are white domes of baked clay. This summer, Addami was completely abandoned during the driest months.

"There was no water and too much sand," says villager Nofa Hamid, 51, who has been tending sheep since she was a child. "It got into everything, even the kitchen."

"It was crazy; the sand was everywhere this summer," she says.

Life has never been easy in Addami. But Ismar Mohammed, a 43-year-old shepherd wrapped in a black wool robe against the cold, says he was wealthy by local standards as the owner of the area's largest herd.

He had to drive his flock more than 150 miles for water. With no luck and no grass, he had to buy feed for his 275 sheep, and that meant he had to sell some of them to feed the rest.

"No question, I had to do this otherwise they would die, and I had to feed my kids. Before the drought, I used to have 400 head," he says.

"No question, we were doing fine, just except for this drought, which is affecting us very badly," he says."

'Perfect Storm' Creates Water Refugees

More than 160 villages are abandoned now in Syria alone. According to a United Nations report on the drought, 800,000 people have lost their livelihood. Hundreds of thousands left once-fertile land that turned to dust and pitched tents near the big cities, looking for any kind of work.

Nofa Hamid, 51, has been tending sheep since she was a child.
Enlarge Deborah Amos/NPR

Nofa Hamid, 51, has been tending sheep since she was a child. Her Syrian village, Addami, was completely abandoned during the driest months of the drought. "It was crazy; the sand was everywhere this summer," she says.

"It's an emergency," says Syrian economist Nabil Sukkar. "If we have two more years of drought, then we do ... have a crisis."

Formerly with the World Bank, Sukkar now heads a private consulting firm for development and investment. He has been researching the emergency, including its economic and social costs.

"I've gone out and I saw some people in the tents. I told them, 'From where you are coming? How do you manage?' They said, 'We find short-term work,' but this is not sustainable," he says.

The mass migration to the cities has created a new community of displaced people across Syria and Iraq.

"Water scarcity is forcing people off the land," says Hussein Amery, an expert on Middle East water management and a professor at the Colorado School of Mines.

He says the policy failures that have made the emergency worse. "Therefore, these refugees are very much water refugees, they are a product of water scarcity in the region," Amery says.

He says the water crisis has been building for years.

"The water refugees are a product of climate change, mismanaged water resources. It's a product of population explosion; it's a lot of things. It's a perfect storm that is wreaking havoc in the rural farming sector of Syria and Iraq," he says.

Changing History Of Outdated Techniques, Waste

Due east of the Syrian capital, Damascus, is the city of Palmyra, a popular tourist destination. The city's ancient Roman ruins are a draw for Japanese tourists — and a livelihood for the locals.

Palmyra, hit hard by the drought, is also the headquarters for the Syrian government response. Emergency measures include food aid for families and low-cost loans for farmers.

At the government office for development, Mohsan Nahas says Palmyra is experimenting with new water-saving techniques.

"I have talked about the oasis we've been setting up. That's being done with drip irrigation," he says.

Nahas offers visitors a slideshow to illustrate what he is up against — a dust storm so large it could be seen from space on Google Earth. Conditions on the ground were intolerable: Sand blew into houses, mixing with food and affecting people's eyesight.

With the widespread drought, a food crisis is looming. For the first time, Syria now has to import wheat.

Sukkar, the economist, says things won't get better unless the country changes a history of wasteful water management and outdated farming techniques.

"Unfortunately, we haven't introduced modern technology, and so we are dependent on rainfall, period," he says.

Politics, Not Climate, At Root Of Problem

But rainfall, or lack of it, is not the only culprit, he says. Syria and Iraq blame Turkey's huge network of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for reducing water supplies by 50 percent.

Turkey is the site of the headwaters of a river system that Syria and Iraq depend on. An informal agreement determines the flow downstream.

"When we had bad relations with Turkey, they reduced the flow of water despite the agreement, and now, thank God, we have excellent relations with Turkey, and hopefully, we will not see any cutoff of water," Sukkar says.

Turkey says there is enough water for everyone, but Syria and Iraq waste their share. Amery, the water expert, says the Turks are partly right.

"The issue is water but it goes far beyond water," he says.

Amery says the key to head off a water crisis is more efficient management of a scarce resource. But he adds politics, not climate, is the problem.

"A lot of Arabs believe that Turkey is trying to assert itself as a regional superpower," he says, "and water is being used as a tool to advance that interest."

Related NPR Stories

Jordan Faces Major Water Shortage Aug. 14, 2007
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Jan 7, 2010

N. Korean currency crackdown fuels inflation, food shortages

General Lecture Room, Demilitarized Zone, Nort...Image by yeowatzup via Flickr

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 7, 2010; A11

TOKYO -- Strong-armed currency reform in North Korea, which has confiscated the savings of small businesses and forbidden the use of foreign money, is now causing runaway inflation and contributing to food shortages, according to several reports from inside the closed state.

Currency reform is part of an aggressive crackdown on free markets by North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

His government has ordered the closure by the end of March of a large wholesale market in the northeastern port city of Chongjin, according to Good Friends, a Seoul-based aid group with a network of informants inside the country. Another major wholesale market near the capital, Pyongyang, was shut down in June.

After a decade of explosive growth, markets have substantially supplanted the central government as a means of employing and distributing food to North Korea's 23.5 million people. The kudzu-like spread of grass-roots capitalism -- and the government's inability to control it -- has angered Kim and his top lieutenants.

To hobble traders who acquire goods from neighboring China, the government has imposed controls on travel and lodging in border areas, ordered the public not to use the large suitcases that are popular with traders and increased punishment for illegal border crossing.

Coat of Arms of North KoreaImage via Wikipedia

North Korea is "not moving toward a free-market economy, but will further strengthen the principle and order of social economic management," an official of the North Korean central bank recently told the Choson Sinbo, a Tokyo-based newspaper that is a mouthpiece for Kim's government.

But reining in the markets is a formidable task, even for North Korean authorities, who preside over what is often described as the world's most repressive police state. United Nations officials estimate that half the calories consumed in North Korea now come from food bought in private markets. Recent surveys of defectors have found that as many as 75 percent of them were involved in market activities before fleeing the country.

At the end of 2009, North Korea moved suddenly to wipe out the wealth of all those who had profited from market trading. It revalued the local currency, the won, while sharply restricting the amount of old won that could be traded for new. The rules, as first announced, made it illegal for citizens to possess more than $40 worth of local currency.

The revaluation triggered widespread anger and rare public protests. The government, as a result, eased exchange limits and increased cash payments to farmers and some workers, according to several accounts from inside the country.

Besides penalizing traders, an apparent goal of the currency revaluation was to slow inflation, which has plagued North Korea for years. But the government's action appears to have backfired, with potentially disastrous consequences in a country that is chronically short of food.

The black-market value of "new" won has reportedly plummeted against Chinese currency, spooking private traders, who have pulled their goods out of markets. Outside economists say suspicion about the value of the won has made residents wary, increasing economic stagnation and worsening food shortages.

The central government held a teleconference in late December with officials in every province, city and county "to discuss how to supply consumer goods to residents in the aftermath of the currency exchange," according to Good Friends.

At year's end, the government also announced a ban on the use of foreign currency. The North's richest private traders kept their savings in foreign currency and used it to import Chinese and South Korean goods for sale in North Korean markets.

But euros, dollars and Chinese yuan are also the preferred currency of the North Korean elite, who used them at state shops to buy luxury goods unavailable to most of the population. The survival of Kim's government, many analysts say, depends on catering to the needs of a few thousand elite officials in government and the military.

The consequences of crimping their lifestyles are difficult to predict, but the South Korean government has expressed concern.

"It is difficult to estimate the threat to us that will arise in the aftermath of the currency reform," South Korean Defense Minister Kim Tae-young said in a year-end message to his country's armed forces.

Uncertainty, inflation and shortages triggered by currency reform come at a time when Kim, now 67 and recovering from a stroke in 2008, is laying the groundwork for a successor.

The rollout of his third son, Kim Jong Eun, 26, as the heir apparent may be gathering momentum, according to the North Korea Intellectuals Society, a defector group in Seoul.

Citing sources inside North Korea, it said that his birthday on Jan. 8 is the subject of a Workers' Party decree calling for a commemoration of Kim Jong Eun as "the other leader of us and our future."

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