“These women ended up becoming slaves”

Microfinance, the practive of lending the desperately poor sums that are tiny but enough to allow self-sufficiency, has recently been lauded as one of the most hopeful development strategies for global poverty, and its architects awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. However, in the country that served as microfinance’s first laboratory–India–the practice has taken a perverse and fatally counterproductive turn, as debt-saddled farmers began killing themselves:

More than 70 people committed suicide in the state from March 1 to Nov. 19 to escape payments or end the agonies their debt had triggered, according to the Society for Elimination of Rural Poverty, a government agency that compiled the data on the microfinance-related deaths from police and press reports.

Andhra Pradesh, where three-quarters of the 76 million people live in rural areas, suffered a total of 14,364 suicide cases in the first nine months of 2010, according to state police.A growing number of microfinance-related deaths spurred the state to clamp down on collection practices in mid-October, says Reddy Subrahmanyam, principal secretary for rural development.

“Every life is important,” he says.

On Nov. 8, police arrested two managers of lender Share Microfin Ltd. on allegations of abetting another suicide, this one of a 22-year-old mother. Share Microfin didn’t respond to requests for comment on this story. As India struggles to provide decent education, health care and jobs to millions still locked in poverty, microlending — the loaning of small sums to the world’s neediest people to help them earn a living — has taken a perverse turn.

Microcredit has become “Walmartized” by unrestrained selling of cheap products to the poor, says Malcolm Harper, chairman of ratings company Micro-Credit Ratings International Ltd. in Gurgaon, India.“Selling debt is like selling drugs,” says Harper, 75, the author of more than 20 books on microfinance and other topics. “Selling debt to illiterate women in Andhra Pradesh, you’ve got to be a lot more responsible.”

K. Venkat Narayana, an economics professor at Kakatiya University in Warangal, has studied how microfinance lenders persuaded groups of women to borrow.

“Microfinance was supposed to empower women,” he says. “Microfinance guys reversed the social and economic progress, and these women ended up becoming slaves.”

India’s booming microlending industry is part of a global phenomenon that began as a charitable movement but now attracts private capital seeking growth and high returns.

Banco Compartamos SA, a former nonprofit that’s now the largest lender to Mexico’s working poor, raised about $467 million in its 2007 initial public offering. The August IPO of SKS Microfinance Ltd., India’s biggest microlender, drew further attention to the industry. SKS began operating in 1998 as a nongovernmental organization led by Vikram Akula, 42, an Indian-American with a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago. The company raised 16.3 billion rupees by selling 16.8 million shares at 985 rupees each. SKS shares peaked at 1,404.85 rupees on Sept. 15. As of Dec. 28, they’d fallen to 652.85 rupees.

On Oct. 15, the government of Andhra Pradesh imposed restrictions that bar microlenders’ collection agents from visiting borrowers and required companies to get local authorities’ approval for new loans. The rules have crippled lending and repayments. Loan collection levels in the state have dropped to less than 20 percent from 98 percent previously, according to an industry group.

The upheaval in Andhra Pradesh is a long way from the vision of Muhammad Yunus. The former economics professor won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his pioneering work in Bangladesh providing small sums to entrepreneurs too poor to get bank loans.Yunus, 70, discovered more than three decades ago that when you lend money to women in poverty, they can begin to earn a living, and most of them will pay you back.Yunus started the Grameen Bank Project in 1976 to extend banking services to the poor. Since then, it has lent $9.87 billion and recovered $8.76 billion; 97 percent of its 8.33 million borrowers are female.

Yunus says he’s not against making a profit. But he denounces firms that seek windfalls and pervert the original intent of microfinance: helping the poor.The rule of thumb for a loan should be the cost of funds plus 10 percent, he says.“Commercialization is the wrong direction,” Yunus says, speaking in a telephone interview from Bangladesh’s capital of Dhaka. “An initial public offering is the triggering point for making a lot of money personally as well as for the company and shareholders.”

Any system of welfare or charity needs experiment and tweaking to achieve maximal effect, and micro-credit should not be abandoned at this juncture, but its practices must be reexamined and modified. Such might sound callous to say this when people are setting themselves on fire; but it is more cruel to seal off entirely a path by which more of the poorest people of the world, the poorest in history, might improve their lot.

A new (which is to say very old, but recently discovered) human ancestor?

Ewen Callaway writing in Nature News:

The ice-age world is starting to look cosmopolitan. While Neanderthals held sway in Europe and modern humans were beginning to populate the globe, another ancient human relative lived in Asia, according to a genome sequence recovered from a finger bone in a cave in southern Siberia. A comparative analysis of the genome with those of modern humans suggests that a trace of this poorly understood strand of hominin lineage survives today, but only in the genes of some Papuans and Pacific islanders.

Named after the cave that yielded the 30,000–50,000-year-old bone, the Denisova nuclear genome follows publication of the same individual’s mitochondrial genome in March¹. From that sequence, Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues could tell little, except that the individual, now known to be female, was part of a population long diverged from humans and Neanderthals.

Her approximately 3-billion-letter nuclear genome, reported in this issue of Nature², now provides a more telling glimpse into this mysterious group. It also raises previously unimagined questions about its history and relationship to Neanderthals and humans. “The whole story is incredible. It’s like a surprising Christmas present,” says Carles Lalueza Fox, a palaeogeneticist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in the research.

When the ancient genome was compared to a spectrum of modern human populations, a striking relationship emerged. Unlike most groups, Melanesians — inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and islands northeast of Australia — seem to have inherited as much as one-twentieth of their DNA from Denisovan roots. This suggests that after the ancestors of today’s Papuans split from other human populations and migrated east, they interbred with Denisovans, but precisely when, where and to what extent is unclear.

More answers could come from a closer look at Denisovan, human and even Neanderthal DNA. So far, conclusions about interbreeding have been drawn from a relatively small number of human genomes using conservative DNA-analysis methods, says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who led the Denisova analysis. “There may have been many more interactions,” he says. Pääbo says it may be possible to determine roughly when humans interbred with Denisovans by examining the length of DNA segments lurking in various human genomes, with shorter segments corresponding to more shuffling of genes and a longer elapsed time.

A molar discovered in the same cave also yielded mitochondrial DNA resembling that of the finger bone. But the Denisovans were probably more widespread, says Pääbo. Some fossils from China, for example, resemble neither Neanderthals nor modern humans — nor Homo erectus, an earlier human ancestor. Pääbo wonders whether they could be more closely related to Denisovans. His Russian collaborators plan to search for more complete Denisovan fossils that could be matched to others from China.

Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at London’s Natural History Museum, agrees that Asian fossils, such as the 200,000-year-old Dali skull from central China, could have links to the Denisovans. But he says that firm conclusions about such relationships will have to await the discovery of more complete Denisovan fossils.

Preserved DNA from other Asian fossils would also provide a clearer picture of the Denisovans, which Pääbo, to sidestep controversy, has opted not to call a new species or subspecies of hominin. The challenge will be to make sense of such discoveries and put them in the context of ancient human history, says Lalueza Fox. Palaeoanthropologists are just beginning to scrutinize the Neanderthal genome published earlier this year³ for clues to ancient human history. With the Denisova genome, “they will need to deal with another surprise”, he says.

Theory of mind might develop earlier than believed

Via Janelle Weaver, writing in Scientific American:

Babies as young as seven months old may be able to take into account the thoughts and beliefs of other people, according to a paper published December 23 in Science. Called “theory of mind,” this ability is central to human cooperation.

The finding provides evidence for the earliest awareness in infants so far of other’s; perspectives, says lead author Ágnes Kovács, a developmental psychologist at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. The research team made the discovery by measuring a simple behavior–how long infants stare at a scene–in experiments that did not require infants to explicitly assess other’s; thoughts or predict their actions.

Although many past studies have suggested that the ability to infer another person’s viewpoint does not arise until the age of four, scientists demonstrated in 2005 and 2007, respectively, that 15- and 13-month-old infants can, in some situations, comprehend the beliefs of others.

Showing that younger babies possess this aptitude is significant, says developmental psychologist Rose Scott of the University of California, Merced. It’s not known how babies acquire the capacity to understand other’s mental states, but some scientists have argued that conversation has a key role. Because seven-month-olds have little experience with conversation–responding to voices and babbling rather than speaking words–Scott says that this study “really changes the kinds of theories that we’re going to have to build for how these abilities develop.”

The researchers showed 56 seven-month-old infants an animated cartoon in which a Smurf-like character watches a ball roll behind a rectangle placed on a table through a number of scenes. The ball either stopped behind the rectangle and was hidden from view, or kept rolling along the table until it disappeared from the scene.

In some of the scenes, the “Smurf” character watched the whole process. In others, he left too soon to see the ball’s final position. For example, a ball that previously rolled behind the rectangle while the character was present would start rolling again and disappear from view after his departure. In the last scene, the rectangle dropped off, revealing no ball behind it.

The team found that the infants stared longer at the final scenes depicting a surprising outcome for the cartoon character when he retreated early (ball absent) than the anticipated one (ball present). Babies are thought to look longer at unexpected situations or events. So the researchers interpret the infant’s; behavior as indicating that they were surprised at the unexpected outcome, just as the cartoon character would have been. In other words, the babies seemed to process the character’s viewpoint, not just their own.

Although using looking times is a standard approach in the field, it is problematic because it is hard to know whether infants are attending to the right parts of the scene when they are looking at it, says developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik of the University of California, Berkeley. Tracking reaching behavior or eye movements will be necessary to substantiate the findings, she adds.

Gopnik also says that infant’s; responses could be explained by the perception of physical events, such as the sequence of ball movements, rather than the cartoon character’s;s viewpoint. The researchers would have to add a control scene with no characters in it to show that they influence looking times, she says.

The authors did include experiments that were meant to account for alternative explanations, such as visual discrepancies between the movies. For example, the researchers made sure that the timing of the ball’s movements and the total distance it covered was the same in all the movies. “I believe that we can be rather confident that the looking-time differences are really due to computing the cartoon character’s; beliefs, and not to some uninteresting differences between the conditions,” says co-author Ansgar Endress, a cognitive psychologist at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

If confirmed by future studies, the results would indicate that infants are sensitive to social information and to what others see. But this does not necessarily mean that they have the ability to comprehend others; beliefs in the same way that four-year-olds do, Gopnik says. “The most interesting question now is how children revise and change their early view of the mind based on the evidence they see around them.”

If “Star Wars” looked like every other movie from the ’70′s

Belgian priest, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, admits to abusing child

Via the Miami Herald:

A Belgian priest has confessed to a child sex-abuse accusation that came to light during a campaign to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work fighting globalization’s impact on developing countries. The confession was published in a Belgian newspaper Wednesday and confirmed by the organization the priest founded, deepening a sex-abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church in the country. After a spate of accusations this year, the church in September published the harrowing accounts of more than 100 victims of clerical sex abuse, some as young as 2 when they were assaulted.

In October, after supporters of 85-year-old Francois Houtart began working to nominate him for the Nobel, a woman contacted the nonprofit organization he founded and said the priest had abused her brother 40 years ago, according to its director, Bernard Duterme. Houtart resigned the next month from the board of Cetri, which publishes reports critical of developed nations’ actions in the Third World, Duterme said.

Houtart told the newspaper Le Soir that he twice touched “the intimate parts” of his cousin, an incident he called “inconsiderate and irresponsible.”

In her e-mail to Cetri and the committee to nominate Houtart for the Nobel Prize, the victim’s sister also pointed to her testimony in the church’s report, Duterme said. There, she details the abuse of her brother, which she describes as “rape,” by an unnamed priest.

She says the priest, who was a friend of her father, entered her brother’s room twice “to rape him.” “Before the third time, my brother went to tell his parents, who kept him in their room,” she is quoted as saying in the report. The priest isn’t named in the report.

Houtart is in Ecuador and didn’t immediately respond to phone calls and e-mail Wednesday, but he told Le Soir that he entered the boy’s room, when he was staying with the boy’s parents close to Liege, in eastern Belgium. “Walking through the room of one of the family’s boys, I effectively touched his intimate parts twice, which woke him up and frightened him,” Houtart is quoted as saying.

The committee in November ended its campaign to nominate Houtart for the 2011 Nobel Prize, saying the priest had requested its termination because “his age and his personal projects would not allow him to fully assume the role requested in such circumstances.” In a statement, the committee said “thousands of people” in 74 countries had participated in the signature campaign, recognizing Houtart’s role in the social justice and antiglobalization movement.

It has been a traumatic year for the Catholic Church in Belgium, beginning in April with the resignation of the Bishop of Bruges Roger Vangheluwe. Vangheluwe admitted to having sexually abused a nephew for years when he was a priest and a bishop. In June, authorities seized hundreds of case files from a church and used power tools to open a prelate’s crypt in Mechlin’s St. Rumbold Cathedral, seeking evidence. The raid was condemned by the Vatican and later ruled excessive by a Belgian court. However, the investigation into the abuse continued and in September the Catholic Church published an almost 200-page report detailing the testimonies of 124 victims of abuse by Catholic clergy over decades. In the church’s report, the victim’s sister says her father went to talk to the priest about the incident a few days later and asked him to apologize, but the priest declined and “told my father that there wasn’t anything more normal.”

Monday Morning Surrealism

Peter Howson, "Mechech," 1997

Comission finds collaboration between Irish pedophile priests

Via Irish Central:

The newly published Chapter 19 of the Murphy report gives details of how five of Ireland’s most notorious clerical child abusers developed close links with one another during the periods they were raping and molesting their victims.
 
This new evidence has prompted grave concern that there was a priest pedophile ring in the Dublin archdiocese. Prominent abuse survivor Andrew Madden told the Tribune the very thought “sends a chill down the spine”.
 
Those involved include Ballyfermot’s “singing priest” or “Fr Filth” Tony Walsh, Fr Bill Carney, Fr Noel Reynolds, Fr Francis McCarthy and Fr Patrick Maguire. Chapter 19 of the Murphy Report which was published last Friday gave details of Walsh’s crimes. It also explained how Walsh used a room provided by Reynolds in Kilmore to abuse his victims. Reynolds had given him a key. Walsh then took over leading altar boy’s trips to Clonliffe College from Carney and McCarthy. They were bought convicted of child abuse. The report described how these two men brought children on holidays and shared accommodation with two complainants. It states “A boy who was initially abused by Fr McCarthy was subsequently abused by Fr Carney.”
 
The report also describes how Carney abused children at swimming pools and was sometimes accompanied by a fifth abuser, Maguire, according to the Tribune. This information, for the first time, shows the extent of interaction between the five abusers.
 
Madden said that his new information gives another dimension to what is known. He said “The only thing that is missing is a record of the private conversations between these men…Pedophile rings are informal by nature. While somebody who is determined to abuse children will do so regardless, if there are people there who know the other will not say anything, then it facilitates the sexual abuse of children.

“It is certainly no coincidence that these five men appear together in the report and knew each other.”
 
The report itself stated that there was “no direct evidence” of a pedophile ring but noted that they found “worrying connections” between the five priests.

“Any sign that they have been remembered and not forgotten is going to mean something to them”

I, and I imagine many more even as myself, we of the nerdish persuasion, dislike the holidays. Aesthetically, they’re a nightmare. Red and green fuzziness is draped over every surface, kitsch sweaters march down the street without irony or shame. The same two dozen tinny, stupidly earnest (or else shamelessly manipulative) songs play on a loop in every public place for a solid month. We don’t like to be at the center of attention and are paranoid our gratitude is not adequately expressed, so being doted on by the friendlier relatives isn’t something we look forward to. Religiosity is lost on us. Even secular traditions radiate pointlessness like a bundle of redundant paperwork bound with tinsel (“Why get a tree at all? It just seems like a lot of money for a big, heavy decoration maybe six or eight people are going to see before we toss it out with the garbage at New Year’s. How can you possibly justify that ecologically?”).

And then there’s the lip service paid to genuinely noble principles of generosity and charity; Parson Brown drops a few bills into the donations plate, then spends a few hundred dollars on entertainments for the already fat and well-to-do folks who happen to share most of his genetic material or last name. But some actually take the principles of corporeal mercy to heart.

This year, an Olympian in the pantheon of geek mythology, comic book author Alan Moore, made a massive donation to the needy of his lifelong hometown Northampton, a city of an economic condition and reputation somewhat like Detroit does in the US. It’s a story to warm the cockles of the hearts of even the Grinchiest nerd:

[Moore] is donating 300 Christmas hampers to residents in sheltered housing in Spring Boroughs, which is the area he grew up in, and to the homeless drop-in centre at the Salvation Army. The 57-year-old, who still lives in Northampton and writes for and produces Dodgem Logic magazine which is based in the town, will donate the hampers, which are worth £3,000, in December.The hampers are being made up in re-usable cloth bags by the Co-op supermarket in Barry Road in Northampton, who are also funding 12 per cent of the costs. They will include long-lasting items such as mince pies, coffee, sugar, Christmas puddings and tinned food.

“This particular issue is dear to my heart as it’s the area I grew up in and it is one of the most deprived areas in the whole country. Those people who are living in sheltered housing and those going to the Salvation Army, who often don’t have homes, are living in very difficult circumstances and I think that any sign that they have been remembered and not forgotten is going to mean something to them…It’s not a lot that we are giving and it won’t sort out their lives, but at this time of year a lot of people get blue and I think this might be a little boost for them.”

One sentence of his statement particularly struck me, the one I quoted in the headline:

 I think that any sign that they have been remembered and not forgotten is going to mean something to them.

The donation of foodstuffs to the hungry is of course always worthy and necessary. But sometimes, to simply acknowledge someone’s plight, to empathize with it without pretending to undertstand, to show someone in the world gives a damn, can make the difference in a person’s existence. Food keeps one alive; but a gesture of recognized kindness can restore hunger to someone who has given up on eating.

Twas the Night before Postmodern Christmas

By Brian Stone of the Boston University School of Theology:

Twas a Postmodern Christmas, when all through the regime
Not a concept was stirring, not even a meme.
Essentialist dogmas were nurtured with care,
And imperialist ambitions still hung in the air

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
While grand narratives of progress danced in their heads.
And mamma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had just performed gender before taking a nap.

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.
Away to the window I flew in a craze,
And incarnated an internalized masculine gaze.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow
Hegemonically othered the objects below.
When, what to my binaried eyes should appear,
But a sleigh simulacrum, and virtual reindeer.

With a little old driver who had friends in Havana,
I knew right away it was postmodern Santa.
More rapid than eagles discourses they came,
As he named and destabilized each language game!

“Now Heidegger, Nietzsche! Now, Levinas and Lyotard!
On Derrida, Foucault! On Butler and Baudrillard!
To each modern foundation, to each stucturalist wall!
Now deconstruct! Deconstruct! Deconstruct all!”

His aesthetic was queer, from his head to his foot,
And his clothes juxtaposed with ashes and soot.
A bundle of kitsch he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a pastiche of red, white, and black.

What some crassly call fat, he called “differently weighted,”
The politics of hate in one stroke out-narrated
A wink of his eye and a twist of his head,
Intertextual clues I had nothing to dread.

He spoke less in words than ambiguous gestures,
And filled all the stockings with empty conjectures.
And laying his finger aside of his nose,
with critical distance, up the chimney he rose!

He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew heterotopically spatial
But I heard him exclaim, as I stood there half-dreaming,
“Liberation to all, and an excess of meaning!”

For such a clever piece, I hate to nitpick–who am I kidding, if not for nitpicking, I’d have nothing to get up for in the morning–but I’m not aware of the concept of the “meme” having any traction within the critical-theoretic culture. (The word appears in Stanza one, Line two.) The term, used to describe a hypothetical cultural “gene” contained in an idea which compells people to propagate it, was popularized by Richard Dawkins, who  has dismissed critical theory as “daffy.”  Most of the other  researchers to have taken up memetics have either been cognitivist psychologists or philosophers of the analytic tradition, and those two factions as a rule are hostile or indifferent to postmodern projects.

But of course, I don’t read critical theory professionally, nor do I prioritize it in my personal curriculums, so I might be totally off-base in this criticism.

“Disease of knowledge”

Beloved British satirist Terry Pratchett, 60, discusses his early-onset Alzheimers and the culture he finds himself in:

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s. There were times when I thought I’d have been much happier not knowing, just accepting that I’d lost brain cells and one day they’d probably grow back or whatever. It is better to know, though, and better for it to be known, because it has got people talking, which I rather think was what I had in mind. The $1million I pledged to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust was just to make them talk louder for a while.

It is a strange life when you “come out”. People get embarrassed, lower their voices, get lost for words. Fifty per cent of Britons think there is a stigma surrounding dementia but only 25% think there is still a stigma associated with cancer. It seems that when you have cancer you are a brave battler against the disease, but when you have Alzheimer’s you are an old fart. That’s how people see you. It makes you feel quite alone. It seems to me there’s hardly one family in this country that is not touched by the disease somehow. But people don’t talk about it because it is so frightening. I swear that people think that if they say the word they’re summoning the demon. It used to be the same with cancer.

Journalists, on the other hand – I appreciate that other people living with the disease don’t get so much of this – find it hard to talk to me about anything else, and it dominates every interview: Yes, I said I had PCA ten months ago, yes, I still have it, yes, I wish I didn’t, no, there is no cure.

I can’t really object to all this, but it is strange that a disease that attracts so much attention, awe, fear and superstition is so underfunded in treatment and research. We don’t know what causes it, and as far as we know the only way to be sure of not developing it is to die young. Regular exercise and eating sensibly are a good idea, but they don’t come with any guarantees. There is no cure. Researchers are talking about the possibility of a whole palette of treatments or regimes to help those people with dementia to live active and satisfying lives, with the disease kept in reasonably permanent check in very much the same way as treatments now exist for HIV. Not so much a cure therefore as – we hope – a permanent reprieve. We hope it will come quickly, and be affordable.

When my father was in his terminal year, I discussed death with him. I recall very clearly his relief that the cancer that was taking him was at least allowing him “all his marbles”. Dementia in its varied forms is not like cancer. Dad saw the cancer in his pancreas as an invader. But Alzheimer’s is me unwinding, losing trust in myself, a butt of my own jokes and on bad days capable of playing hunt the slipper by myself and losing.

You can’t battle it, you can’t be a plucky “survivor”. It just steals you from yourself. And I’m 60; that’s supposed to be the new 40. The baby boomers are getting older, and will stay older for longer. And they will run right into the dementia firing range. How will a society cope? Especially a society that can’t so readily rely on those stable family relationships that traditionally provided the backbone of care?

What is needed is will and determination. The first step is to talk openly about dementia because it’s a fact, well enshrined in folklore, that if we are to kill the demon then first we have to say its name. Once we have recognized the demon, without secrecy or shame, we can find its weaknesses. Regrettably one of the best swords for killing demons like this is made of gold – lots of gold. These days we call it funding. I believe the D-day battle on Alzheimer’s will be engaged shortly and a lot of things I’ve heard from experts, not always formally, strengthen that belief. It’s a physical disease, not some mystic curse; therefore it will fall to a physical cure. There’s time to kill the demon before it grows.