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Development Strategy: Close Information Gap
A conference in Toronto last month discussed the disparity between "information rich" and "information poor" countries. Sponsored by the World Bank and the Government of Canada, the conference drew over 2,000 participants from around the world.
According to a front page article in the June 7th issue of The Wall Street Journal, the conference was an occasion for heated debate amoing delegates about the best strategy for reducing the "information gap" between "info-rich" and "info-poor" nations - those who have easy access to knowledge and those who don't. The delegates also debated the cost of closing the "information gap" and how closing the gap would be paid for.
Added the the conference participants' concerns is the vast gulf between Western industrialized nations and poor Third World nations regarding numbers of computers, telephones and the degree of literacy. Acccording to the Journal article the lack of reliable data makes it difficult to rank nations by their ability to absorb information.
Statistician Builds What May Be a
Better Data Mousetrap
An article in the June 8th issue of The New York Times discusses what is claimed to be a better statistical method of producing estimates from aggregate data. The new statistical methodology was devised by Dr. Gary King, a professor of government at Harvard University. Dr. King's methodology purportedly provides reasonable explanations when survey data are not available or too expensive to obtain.
Dr King's methodology is being used in voting rights cases argued before federal and state courts. Dr. King has written a book that explains his methodology, "A solution to the Ecological Inference Problem: Reconstructing Individual behavior from Aggregate Data," published earlier this year by Princeton University Press. Dr. King also provides an explanation of his methodology through his home page (http://gking.harvard.edu). Written by Times science reporter Karen Freeman, the article appears on page C8.
How Endless Information Restricts Your
View
(Book Review)
In the July 8th issue of The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviewed "DATA SMOG - Surviving the Information Glut," by David Shenk. The reviewer agrees with Mr. Shenk's view that we are"drowning in data" from a variety of sources, ranging from newspapers to junk e-mail. According to the reviewer, "data smog" is bad for your health (promoting stress and other psychological illnesses). It is also bad for society, splintering us into increasingly fragmented and fractionalized people who retreat into narrow special interest groups. The review appears on page B6. "DATA SMOG" is 250 pages long and is published by Harper-Collins. The retail price is $24. The review is also available from the Times's Web site (http//:www.nytimes.com).
U.S. Proposes Multiple Racial Identification
for 2000 Census
According to an front page article on July 9th by Washington Post staff journalists Stephen Barr and Michael Fletcher, the Clinton Administration is proposing that Americans for the first time be allowed to choose more than one racial category when identifying themselves for the census and other government programs. According to the article, the proposal could have broad implications not only for census tabulations but for scores of other federal programs, such as housing, education, and in determining whether racial discrimination exists in various social and economic areas.
The proposed change would allow individuals to mark as many racial categories as they want, on the theory that Americans know best how to describe themselves and do not like the design of the current form. The proposal represents the unanimous recommendation of 30 federal agencies that have studied the issue for three years. The proposal comes after numerous studies and four congressional hearings that attempted to resolve how the federal government should describe a population made up of an increasingly complex blend of racial and ethnic groups and growing numbers of people of mixed ancestory.
Previous research by government demographers showed that only 1 or 2 percent would classify themselves as multiracial. By allowing people to check as many boxes as they chose the new proposal would remove the "other" category from the 2000 census questionnaire, which was marked for over 10 million Americans in 1990.
The article concludes that the way federal agencies choose to tabulate and use multiracial reports will be an important political decision. For example, if 10 percent of people classify themselves as African American and another 2 percent classify themselves as both African American and white, how is the 2 percent that self-identifies as multiracial classifed for the purposes of various federal programs and deciding the boundaries of congressional districts?