Jonathan's blog

From an article titled "Water policy 'fails world's poor'" by Mark Kinver on BBC News:

Almost 20% of the world's population still lacks access to safe drinking water because of failed policies, an influential report has concluded. The UN World Water Development Report also blames a lack of resources and environmental changes for the problem. The study calls for better leadership if a goal of halving the proportion of people without proper access to safe water by 2015 is to be achieved.

From a story in the BBC News, the candidates for the Aventis Prize for popular science writing have been announced:

• Electric Universe - How Electricity Switched on the Modern World, by David Bodanis (Little Brown)
• Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, by Jared Diamond (Penguin Allen Lane)
• The Elements of Murder - A History of Poison, John Emsley (Oxford University Press)
• The Gecko's Foot - Bio-inspiration - Engineering New Materials from Nature, by Peter Forbes (Fourth Estate)
• The Silicon Eye - How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete, by George Gilder (WW Norton)
• Parallel Worlds - The Science of Alternative Universes and our Future in the Cosmos, by Michio Kaku (Penguin)
• Power, Sex, Suicide - Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, by Nick Lane (Oxford University Press)
• Venomous Earth - How Arsenic Caused the World's Worst Mass Poisoning, by Andrew Meharg (Macmillan)
• Empire of the Stars - Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes, by Arthur I. Miller (Little Brown)
• Seven Deadly Colours - The Genius of Nature's Palette and how it Eluded Darwin, by Andrew Parker (Simon & Schuster)
• The Truth About Hormones - What's Going on when we're Tetchy, Spotty, Fearful, Tearful or Just Plain Awful, by Vivienne Parry (Atlantic Books)
• Stalking the Riemann Hypothesis - The Quest to Find the Hidden Law of Prime Numbers, by Dan Rockmore (Jonathan Cape)
• The Fruits of War - How War and Conflict have Driven Science, by Michael White (Simon & Schuster)

This is silly. According to Canada's ChronicleHerald (Halifax, Nova Scotia), Mount Saint Vincent University has banned Turnitin.com, the popular plagiarism-detection software. From the article "University expels cheater scan" by Rick Conrad:

Turnitin.com is an Internet-based subscription service that professors and others use to root out whether students' papers contain material copped from other sources without giving proper credit. It maintains a database of millions of essays and compares submitted papers not only against those but also against websites and other published works. It's recognized as a leader in helping keep students, academics, and sometimes journalists, honest. But many student groups believe that using a service like Turnitin is too punitive and automatically presumes guilt. Studies have shown that about 15 per cent of university students cheat regularly. "Everyone has the right to learn in an environment that is free of guilt presumption and fear, and Turnitin.com does exactly what it shouldn't be doing in a higher educational environment," Ms. Brushett said. "It creates a culture of fear, it creates a culture of guilt and to me, that hinders some people from pursuing higher education and doing it with an open mind." "We feel that Turnitin.com is a back-end approach. We need to promote academic integrity, we need to teach students what is plagiarism, what you should do, what you shouldn't do and have more personalized ways of checking for plagiarism.

Mike Cope has a recent series of interesting posts about the Bible. These are the kind of details that, I think, are typically not considered or ignored or glossed over by most of us most of the time. They shouldn't be. The B-I-B-L-E #1 - The Bible has to be Interpreted The B-I-B-L-E #2 - People Wrote the Bible The B-I-B-L-E #3 - the Bible wasn't written to me The B-I-B-L-E #4 - the Bible didn't come rolling off the presses as a single volume

This discussion is on at kendball.net. I don't know what the answer is. I don't think the answer for me is to ignore the needs that are out there and savor the comfort of my rich life. I don't think the answer for me is to give it all away tomorrow. Those aren't the only two options, and we shouldn't let the tension between them paralyze us. Let's be thankful for what we have. Let's be aware of the needs. Let's give generously and liberally as we are moved to meet them.