22 Britannia Road

For newlyweds Sylvana and Janusz, World War II takes them to the limits of human experience.    Sylvana spends the war foraging in the forest with her son Aurek, after fleeing rape by German soldiers in her home in Warsaw.  Barely surviving, she needs every ounce of her courage and ingenuity to feed and protect herself and her son.

Meanwhile, Janusz joins a Polish unit that is routed and wiped out by the Germans.  He walks across several countries before finding refuge with a French family and making his way to England to join the army against the Germans and ultimately to settle at 22 Britannia Road in Ipswich..

22 Britannia Road opens as Sylvana and Aurek arrive in England from a refugee camp to rejoin Janusz.  Sylvana's obsessive protectiveness of Aurek and Aurek's paranoid distrust of Janusz make for a troubled household, but Janusz persists in constructing his dream home and family just as he meticulously cultivates his flowers in the back garden.


This is a story of three people trying to rebuild their life after the trauma of the war.  Dark secrets hang over their lives, threatening their new life in England.  Their progress toward understanding and acceptance is erratic.

The novel alternates between present day Ipswich and gradually unfolds the back story of their lives during the war.  The characters are well drawn and the description of their ordeals is most engaging, albeit not particularly credible.  This is Amanda Hodgkinson's first novel and I hope to see more of her writing.

History of the World Since 1300

In a previous post I described signing up for a course at Coursera and why I think MOOCs (massive open online course) are going to revolutionize education.  The first lectures will be posted next Sunday and today I received a message from Professor Adelman about how the course will be organized and what will be expected of me - and 70,000 other students!!!  If I want to take this seriously, it's going to be lots of work.

Here's what is on offer and what's expected of me:

Lectures

•  There are two 1-hour lectures a week.  These will be posted on Sunday night.  Each lecture will be available until the end of the course.  The lectures will be interpolated with quizzes that test assimilation of facts and also demand analysis.
• There was an earlier statement that there would be a progress metric - I'm assuming there will be an automated way of ascertaining if I actually watched the lectures and answered these quizzes.

Textbook

• The text Worlds Together, Worlds Apart has 11 chapters, and one chapter will be assigned each week, with one chapter spanning two weeks.  I've been sporadically reading this book for a couple of weeks now, and have completed a 'prequel' chapter and am most of the way through the first chapter.  Time to step up the pace.
• When I was shopping for the text in August, there was no e-book version, the hardcover cost $120 in Canada, $80+ in the US and there was a loose leaf version for $60+ in the US.  I opted for the loose leaf version, based on cost and the convenience of carrying around a smaller weight. Today, the book was ranked #203 on Amazon in the US and the text is out of stock in Canada.  We can certainly see one motivation for Adelman to do this course, as he's a co-author of the book.
• It's a long time since I read a text book.  This doesn't look anything like a text I might have had 'back in the day'.  Glossy pages, oodles of maps, text boxes of interesting excerpts from letters and diaries of the period, guiding questions for chapters and sections.  It feels a bit spoon-fed compared to my educational past, but very nice indeed.

Assignments

• There will be assignments every two weeks, six in all.  Students will have a choice of three different essay questions on which to write a 650-word essay.
• For a good essay, you must have strong evidence, a compelling argument and clear exposition.  Each student will be asked to evaluate five essays, assigning a score of 1 to 3 on each of evidence, argument and exposition.  When I heard there were assignments, I assumed we'd have to mark each others'.  There's a nice guideline to writing and evaluating essays.  I like the simplicity of the evaluation approach.  There's also a field for putting in comments.  I expect to learn a lot from reading other students' essays, as well as their feedback on mine.

Global Dialogues

• Each week there will be a live discussion between Princeton on-campus students and visiting professors.  Adelman will choose from questions submitted by on-line students to pose during the dialogue.  The discussions will be recorded and made available on the site.

Discussion Forums

• Students are invited to join in discussion forums.  Up-votes for the most useful posts will help students sift through the vast material.  Already, there are lots of posts there.  The first one I read provided links to the BBC radio series on the history of the world through 100 objects from the British Museum.  I hope they're all as relevant as that one.  Adelman responded to that one, so I expect we'll see him from time to time on the discussion forums.

Technology

• The site has an introductory video by Adelman, describing roughly what I've described above (and what's available in writing on the site).  I was happy to see him self-identify as a Canadian right off the top.  (Readers of this blog will know I'm Canadian myself).  The video was gorgeous high definition and the sound was perfect.  Really impressive.
• Hosting a course like this with so many students - did I mention 70,000 were registered? - is challenging.  There were a couple of moments today when I noticed the site was unavailable, and I suppose there will be a few more glitches before all is said and done. (added note:  there was a message from Coursera today saying that their domain name server Godaddy was down for a few hours yesterday but that Coursera had just switched to Amazon for domain name services and were now back up.  It would be fascinating to know just which off-the-shelf services Coursera is using to lick the technology challenge.)  But the experience so far is marvellous: nice organization, good navigation, intuitive and clear, and high quality.  It's great that such a great shared platform will be shared, not only by the students in this course, but the many other courses being offered.

I'm excited about the start of the course next week, and also filled with a bit of trepidation.  I'll keep posting on the subject.

Wealth of Nations

Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, but economists have done precious little to measure the comparative wealth of nations.  We have GDP as the main economic comparator among nations, but that is only about 'income'; there's been no metric for retained wealth.  Until now.  That gap has been addressed by a recent UN publication which lays out a metric for the wealth of nations and even analyzes what part of that wealth arises from Human, Physical and Natural capital.  In business terms, this gives us a balance sheet, as opposed to an Income Sheet.

Here is an extract from the report, as published recently in an article in The Economist chart section - boy I love that section!  As a Canadian, it's comforting to see our country ranks high on the list of wealthy countries, - very high indeed on wealth per person.  But the chart also emphasizes what we as Canadians already know: we are desperately dependent on our natural resources for all our wealth, and haven't been very good at developing our human or physical resources.

The authors of this report consider this a first cut at such an assessment and recognize that the process of measuring wealth will need many refinements before it has anywhere near the validity of GDP.

There is another Economist chart special (didn't I say I loved these charts?) that is all about measuring national well being instead of just financial strength.  This time the work was done by the OECD.

Once again, Canada is in the upper cluster on this metric, again confirming something we already knew.

Another interesting part of this chart is the indication of the difference in economic well being between the top 20% and the bottom 20%.  The US has a huge gap, confirming what we already know.  But South Korea's gap between rich and poor was startlingly large too.

Polio in India: Going, going, gone

Last year there wasn't a single reported case of polio in India.  Wow!  While there is still polio in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria, India is now off the list of countries where polio is endemic.  Against incredible odds, the World Health Organization and the Indian government, with funding help from Rotary International and lately the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been working for 27 years to reach this landmark.

2006 TED Prize winner Larry Brilliant described the eradication of smallpox in his ringing acceptance speech.  The last case of smallpox on earth was diagnosed on October 26, 1977.  Look up smallpox in Wikipedia and you'll read "Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans...." How powerful is that past tense!   Smallpox simply doesn't exist any more.  Polio might soon be referred to in the past tense as well.

However, polio will be tougher to lick than smallpox.  Since polio is usually transmitted through contact with the stool of an infected person, it is particularly tough to beat in densely populated, low-income areas with poor sanitation.  A long incubation period means that an infected person can pass it on to many people before being diagnosed.  And the vaccine requires multiple boosters to be effective.  In places where kids don't regularly go to school it can be hard to identify and inoculate all those who need it.

The states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the poorest in India, are perfect breeding grounds for polio.  A recent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review documents the size of the problem.   In Uttar Pradesh alone, 500,000 children are born every month. To vaccinate all children under five, that translates to 170,000M children to be vaccinated each year.  Just one national campaign involves stunning numbers: 700,000 vaccination booths, 2.5M vaccinators, and 200,000 homes visited.  And this combination of partners, led by the Indian government, have been doing this for 27 years.  27 years!

But the key to the campaign is communication.   This year's TEDxChange conference included a video about the Daredevils, a group of activist kids in a Kolkata squatter community who wanted to move their vaccination rate from 80% to 100&.  They started by wandering the neighbourhood with handmade megaphones announcing a vaccination clinic that weekend.

But they soon became even more effective with some outside help.  The community had never been mapped - a great big blank on Google maps.  So the kids created that map, numbering and plotting every house in the area.  Then, using smart phones equipped with GPS, they visit every home and record whether everyone has had all their shots and boosters.  If the adage is true that you succeed at what you measure, that neighbourhood should soon hit 100% vaccination rates.

Bruce Aylward, the Canadian physician who heads the polio eradication program at WHO, gave a passionate TED talk about polio.  Worried that the world could become complacent when the goal of total eradication is so close, he exhorted the world to continue supporting this important public health initiative.   The news that India has accomplished this feat should give heart to those out there fighting the disease.