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Battling Ebola

Published May 7, 2015

A UC Berkeley professor has been part of a network of researchers working to apply local anthropological knowledge in the fight to contain the most deadly Ebola outbreak in history.

In the summer of 2014, UC Berkeley Anthropology Professor Mariane Ferme began collaborating with fellow anthropologists researching in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Republic of Guinea. Their goal was to understand how local communities were responding to international efforts to contain the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak in the region, which had come to the attention of local health authorities earlier in the year.

The efforts to contain the disease were not working, and some networks of anthropologists made the argument to the international community, as well as local non-governmental organizations, that they should leverage the untapped resource of anthropological expertise in the region to better understand how local populations perceive the emergency health interventions.

Melissa Leach, from the Institute of Development Studies, and James Fairhead, from the University of Sussex, enlisted Ferme for her knowledge about social life in rural Sierra Leone. As it turned out, the world’s worst EVD epidemic on record was exploding in the same area where she had been conducting extensive fieldwork since the 1980s.

Anthropological Interventions

Professor Ferme provided memos to the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform to be used in making actionable plans. She conveyed surprise that different emergency health intervention organizations, like the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) or Doctors Without Borders (MSF), did not understand the importance of proper greetings in rural Sierra Leone. She stressed in one of her earliest memos that it was important to give a token of money to paramount chiefs in greeting at organizational meetings, as they would have to travel to come see health workers and political leaders in the middle of the health crisis. The international community was strangely worried about the corrupting power of money, but if they were serious about gaining the respect of the paramount chiefs, health workers and organizers would have to acknowledge that real barriers exist to traveling without access to monetary means, as they were putting the burden on the chiefs to come to them for education about how EVD spreads and how to stop it. These tokens did not need to be very much – maybe 10,000 leones or US$2.50 – but it would be disrespectful not to offer them.

This was the moment that Professor Ferme realized just how few people actually conduct fieldwork in rural Sierra Leone and how little the international community understood how their own actions were perceived in the region. Understanding the local culture could not be abandoned because there was a crisis; the crisis was exactly the reason why understanding local culture was critical to the containment efforts’ success.

Understanding the local culture could not be abandoned because there was a crisis; the crisis was exactly the reason why understanding local culture was critical to the containment efforts’ success.

Ferme went on to collaborate with Njala University’s Paul Richards and other Dutch and Sierra Leonean colleagues on an article published by Public Library of Science’s Neglected Tropical Diseases division, emphasizing just how critical understanding local culture is to the success of the global health response to EVD. In the piece, “Social Pathways for Ebola Virus Disease in Rural Sierra Leone,” published in October 2014, Ferme and her colleagues focus on the fact that extended familial and exchange networks cross the borders of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea; that there is a history of violence in rural Sierra Leone that understandably has caused the local population to be suspicious of state authorities; and that more consideration should be put into understanding local practices of mourning.

Local funereal practices, particularly the practice of washing the dead, was identified early as a high-risk factor for infection, but Ferme and her colleagues emphasized that health authorities needed to explain very carefully to local populations that these practices have encouraged the spread of EVD, as people are often unwilling to give up their practices of mourning, particularly in an atmosphere of fear during a health crisis. And, the authors argued, the different organizations and health authorities should engage with the rural community members more effectively to better understand how their demands are perceived. For example, when health officials urged family members act to get their relatives to clinics for treatment from Ebola, they did not necessarily take into account that, for villagers living in rural Sierra Leone, the expenses of traveling to a distant health center were often out of reach, or could inhibit their ability to protect the rest of their family from possible infection.

It was in this rural region of northern Sierra Leone, a region characterized by intricate and cross-border familial and exchange relationships and lacking basic health infrastructure, that Ebola was able to spread, unnoticed by the health authorities, reigniting the outbreak that had been thought to be on the wane.

Delayed Reactions, Missteps, and Incomplete Infrastructure

The UN’s Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) was set up on September 19, 2014, more than nine months after the death of a two-year-old boy in the village of Meliandou, in the Republic of Guinea—a case recognized as the single index case of the outbreak. The reasons for this extremely delayed declaration of emergency in West Africa are many, but as the New York Times carefully chronicled, the fact that the EVD outbreak (according to the World Health Organization’s March 25, 2015 situation report) has infected 24,907 people, killed a total of 10,326 people, and raged for nearly sixteen months is tied particularly to the actions (or mostly inactions) taken during the two month period between April and May 2014.

As the New York Times reported, it was during this period of laxness that individuals “with Ebola-like symptoms” made their way over the extremely porous border to Sierra Leone to the south. Neither the Guinean Health Ministry nor the World Health Organization tracked and followed up with these individuals, nor did they notify Sierra Leonean health authorities. As global health institutions watched cases dwindle in Guinea, with the memory of recent short-lived EVD outbreaks in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, they assumed that the worst was over. In May 2014, the outbreak was understood to be situated firmly in Guinea and cases of infection had been declining steadily for a month. By June 2014, however, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) declared that the epidemic “out of control.”

Whither Global Health?

Many have indicated that the West African EVD epidemic should be regarded as an alarm call to the international community to invest in strengthening health systems and infrastructure in areas like the Republic of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, which are three of the least developed countries in the world. Medical Anthropologist and Partners in Health (PIH) co-founder Paul Farmer has argued that what has always been needed in West Africa is “the capacity to safely deliver excellent supportive care.” Since surviving Ebola means having adequate care—requiring the replacement of the roughly 10 liters of liquid a day that is lost during infection—the West African epidemic has shone a bright light on West Africa’s lack of adequate health systems.

Similarly, Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) recently released a damning report on the slow global response to contain the epidemic. In the face of failing organizational and health infrastructure, MSF (who was the first on the scene of the unfolding epidemic) was forced to make compromises about which kinds of approaches it could undertake “between the competing priorities of patient care, surveillance, safe burials, and outreach activities.” Ebola has broken the already lacking health infrastructures in these three countries, and “restoring healthcare systems to pre-Ebola levels without addressing the underlying flaws and weaknesses is not enough.” As one MSF worker stated: “For the Ebola outbreak to spiral this far out of control required many institutions to fail. And they did, with tragic and avoidable consequences.”

Professor Ferme is in agreement with these critiques. In an era of global health development that focuses ever more on isolated interventions and “21st-century, tech-driven solutions,” the process by which the West African Ebola epidemic has unfolded shows how important it still is to pursue “20th-century public health interventions.” The West African Ebola outbreak represents strong evidence that basic health infrastructure should be a primary goal of international health development: as the local health infrastructure was overcome by the fight against Ebola, many populations avoided clinics for any other treatment, such as for malaria (which has many of the same symptoms as Ebola) or even to give birth, both out of fear of catching Ebola and also because they were turned away by health systems devoted solely to combatting one disease. As cases of infection and death decline in West Africa, but have not disappeared altogether, questions remain about what is to be done next, and how to move forward responsibly.

Top Photo Credit: European Commission DG Echo

Research Highlights

Liz Carlisle: “Lentils to the Rescue”

Published May 7, 2015

Can lentils save American farms from drought? As California struggles with a water crisis, a UC Berkeley fellow shows how legumes can reduce dependence on irrigation.

Lentils are hardly a staple of the American diet. Long dismissed as “humble peasant food,” these legumes are produced in far smaller quantities than wheat and corn, says UC Berkeley geographer Liz Carlisle. Yet lentils are leading a “revolution” in the nation’s conservative grain belt, Carlisle argues, and they offer potentially vital lessons for drought-stricken California.

Carlisle, who completed her Ph.D. and is now a fellow at Berkeley’s Center for Diversified Farming Systems, recently published a book entitled Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America, which chronicles how a group of Montana farmers’ switch to lentils became “the keystone for a transition to organic agriculture” in the state.

Lentils are among the world’s oldest domesticated crops, first cultivated 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent. A cheap, healthy source of protein, they are rich in fiber, folate, vitamin B, and amino acids. Just as importantly, they are drought tolerant, adapting their growth cycle to the amount of available water, and they can be grown without chemicals.

Most crops in the U.S. are farmed with synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which generates 300 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, making it the largest culprit in the American food system in generating greenhouse gas emissions. Run-off from chemical fertilizer into the Mississippi River has created a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico and is polluting the U.S. water supply.

As a legume, though, lentils make their own fertilizer, using bacteria in the soil to convert nitrogen from the air into plant-available forms. This nourishes the lentils, and also leaves residual fertilizer in the soil for the next crop. By incorporating lentils into a diversified crop rotation, Carlisle says, Montana farmers have been enriching the soil and keeping weeds at bay, all without using chemicals.

A native of Missoula, Montana, Carlisle first learned about farming from her grandmother, who grew up on a farm during the Dust Bowl. “The genesis of my interest in sustainable agriculture,” she says, “was being a tiny kid and Grandma telling me about all of the soil blowing away, because her dad didn’t know any better about how to take care of it.”

After graduating from Harvard, she had a brief career as a country singer, opening for LeAnn Rimes and other major acts. While touring in the Midwest, she heard from farmers who were struggling to survive in corporate agriculture. “I realized how massive the problems where, but I also wanted to tell a story about the solutions,” she says.

She went to work as a legislative aide for Jon Tester, an organic lentil farmer from Eastern Montana who had just been elected to the U.S. Senate. After hearing from other lentil farmers in her home state, she left Washington to study diversified farming issues at UC Berkeley, with intermittent stints conducting fieldwork on Montana farms.

In the 1970s, the U.S. government heavily promoted industrial farming, rewarding farmers for growing massive amounts of corn, soy, and wheat. At that time, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz urged farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow.” The “zero tillage” policy encouraged farmers to abandon plowing in favor of weed-killing chemicals.

David Oien, the hero farmer of Lentil Underground, tried a different tactic. In the mid-70s, Oien, then 27, dropped out of graduate school to return to his family’s 280-acre farm and pursue organic farming methods. After beginning with a solar power retrofit, Oien became the first farmer in Conrad, Montana to grow lentils, opening his company, Timeless Seeds, in 1987. Initially selling 50-lb. bags to locals, Oien gradually partnered with other local farmers (including Tester) to create a retail line supplying major grocery store chains, including Whole Foods.

Rather than maximizing their yield in ideal conditions, lentil farmers like Oien have sought to build a system capable of weathering hard times. It seems to be working: in 2012, a historic drought year, Timeless Seeds experienced zero losses, thanks to crop rotations that have built up organic matter and moisture in the soil.

On the U.S. Drought Monitor Map, most of California is now colored scarlet, for “exceptional drought.” In April, Governor Jerry Brown ordered a 25 percent cut in water consumption for residents and businesses. But while public discussion centers on long showers and lawn watering, the heart of the issue is farming: agriculture accounts for 80 percent of the state’s water consumption.

More than a third of the country’s vegetables, and two-thirds of its fruit and nuts, are grown in California. Some crops are exported heavily overseas: for example, the state provides 82% of the world’s almonds. The Central Valley, which is home to the bulk of the state’s farms, relies heavily on irrigation. To compensate for falling state and federal water subsidies, farmers have dug ever-deeper wells, putting the state’s groundwater—which accounts for the majority of the water used for agriculture during drought years—at risk.

So in the fight to reduce water consumption, should California farmers turn to lentils? Not exactly, Carlisle says: the state is largely too hot for this particular legume, which fares poorly in temperatures above 85 degrees. Cool-season legumes such as winter peas and crimson clover, however, could perform a similar role to that of lentils in enriching the soil.

For California, lentils’ main value lies in demonstrating that “you don’t need a whole lot of water to farm,” Carlisle says. Industrial farming practices contribute to drought conditions by reducing soil’s water holding capacity over time, but dry farming could help reverse the tide. Even almonds, which have earned notoriety for their high water consumption, used to be grown without irrigation. “I think it would be possible to have a much more environmentally benign agriculture in California, if we were really planning for it that way,” she says.

Some California farmers have already stopped irrigating. Dry-farmed tomatoes have become a favorite among chefs thanks to their superior flavor, as tomatoes containing less water have a stronger taste. Other farms are growing crops like broccoli, squash, potatoes, and garlic without irrigation. There are also dry-farmed grapes, as at Condor’s Hope Vineyard.

Such farming requires a careful cycle of planting and tilling to retain soil moisture, as well as more space between plants, which develop deeper roots to find water. Timing is critical: if ground moisture from winter rainfall evaporates too quickly, there is no external water source to fall back on.

As a solution for addressing California’s water crisis, dry farming’s higher risks and lower yields make it less popular than other options, such as more efficient irrigation methods. Still, Carlisle says that organic farming can serve as “the foundation of our entire food system, not just a niche product.”

“It’s been just a short period of time that we’ve been experimenting with a chemically based agriculture rather than a biologically based one—about 70 years out of 10,000,” she says. “I think we’ll look back and see that as an anomaly.”

The outlook for lentils isn’t entirely rosy. According to Oien, the average consumption of lentils per year in the US is around 10 ounces per person, compared to 175 pounds of wheat (though when Timeless Seeds started, Americans averaged only 3 ounces). According to the most recent USDA statistics, in 2014 there were 259,000 acres of lentils harvested in the U.S., compared to over 46 million acres of wheat and 83.1 million acres of corn for grain.

Timeless Seeds now grows a variety of lentils, including petite crimson and caviar-like black beluga. But the company only contracts with 20 farmers. As of now, there simply is not enough consumption to justify many more farms incorporating lentils into crop rotation.

Ironically, the “locavore” movement has made the situation worse. As affluent Americans pledge to eat food that only comes from within a 100-mile radius, organic farmers in the Midwest find themselves with a sagging market for their crops. The emphasis on eating local is misplaced, Carlisle has noted, as transportation to sellers accounts for only four percent of greenhouse gas emissions associated with the American food system. Instead, she advocates domestic fair-trade partnerships to help connect urban consumers and low-income rural growers who farm without nitrogen.

On the bright side, Carlisle says, lentils are rising in popularity among chefs and home cooks, and are now being served in public school cafeterias (including in Montana) as part of the Farm to School movement. “For cash-strapped rural food districts, it’s a total godsend,” she says.

For her part, Carlisle says she has eaten her fair share of lentils, particularly on the Lentil Underground book tour this spring, which included a variety of cooking events. Her favorite recipe is the Ethiopian dish mesir wat, a spicy stew containing onions, lentils, and spices.

To avoid digestive issues, Carlisle recommends increasing lentil intake gradually, and soaking the legumes in water before cooking. Using traditional spice-based recipes is also a good idea. “We tend to think of spices as just for flavor and optional, sort of the icing on the cake, but they’re an important part of how we digest things,” she says.

Click here to see the official website for Lentil Underground.

Research Highlights

Center on the Politics of Development

Published May 5, 2015

A UC Berkeley research center advances mixed-methods research on development, envisions public policy solutions, and advocates for sustainable changes to the governance of developing communities.

How can leading thinkers in politics and economics effectively work together to promote development? What is required to implement and sustain effective policies in developing societies? What dilemmas do we face for creating and supporting new policies, and how can they be addressed through collaboration?

The UC Berkeley Center on the Politics of Development (CPD) gathers diverse scholars—both faculty and graduate students—who are grappling with pressing issues facing developing societies, largely focused on elections, governance, and related issues. “One of our main goals for the CPD is to further interdisciplinary collaborations around topics related to politics and governance in developing countries, and to create new initiatives that connect scholars working on these topics across the Berkeley campus and beyond,” explains Thad Dunning, Director of CPD, and Robson Professor of Political Science, whose research spans comparative politics, political economy, and research methods.

On the UC Berkeley campus, CPD (a Matrix-affiliated center) provides services and resources to assist faculty affiliates and research associates who are applying for funding opportunities, including research grants, dissertation awards, and fellowships. CPD partners with the Center for Effective Global Action, the Berkeley Center on Political Economy, and the Institute of International Studies to advance the study of politics and governance in lower-income societies, and also funds programmatic initiatives, hosts visiting speakers and conferences, and sponsors campus visits by leading scholars.

In addition, CPD is engaged in the Berkeley/Stanford Political Economy working group, a collaboration with Ken Scheve (Professor of Political Science at Stanford) that involves research presentations by advanced graduate students in both departments. “We would like to forge stronger ties across two great universities, Berkeley and Stanford, especially among scholars working on the political economy of development and related topics,” Dunning says. In recent years, CPD has launched initiatives in diverse areas, as profiled below.

Health and Governance Collaborative

The Health and Governance Collaborative is rooted in the idea that innovations in basic and clinical research in the health sciences often fail to reach many real-world populations in need. The Collaborative brings together researchers from political science, biostatistics, and medicine to focus on experiments in governance and global health delivery. Part of the purpose is to “scale up” to achieve desired health outcomes, based on understanding the behavior of governments, organizations, individual health workers, communities and individual patients in the context of health.

Co-housed at the CPD and the UCSF Division of HIV/AIDS, Infectious Disease, and Global Medicine, this initiative seeks to marry recent advances in implementation science (the study of methods to promote the integration of research into healthcare policy and practice), as well as methods of impact evaluation, to parallel social-science research on improving the quality of governance of healthcare in the developing world.

“Our motivation in launching this collaborative is to leverage insights from both biomedical and social sciences to advance delivery of global health, as well as improve the evidence informing care,” says Dunning. “We believe that both the health and social sciences can benefit from a cross-fertilization of ideas.”

In March 2015, the Collaborative hosted a Social Science Matrix prospecting seminar that included panel discussions on health sector reform and governance, and brought together researchers not just from UC Berkeley, but also UCLA and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine; researchers such as UCLA’s Daniel Posner, who spoke on “Community Monitoring and Health Outcomes in Uganda and Zambia,” and UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Bussell, who spoke on “Citizen Feedback Models and Health Center Reform in Telengana, India”.(Click here to see the full agenda.)

Experiments in Governance and Politics (EGAP)

The Center on the Politics of Development is also playing a central role in the Experiments in Governance and Politics Network (EGAP), which awards grants to innovative experimental research projects that seek to assess the role of information in fostering political accountability in developing countries. “Many scholars think improvements in the quality and nature of information that citizens hold about politicians and political processes can foster greater accountability,” says Dunning. “While there are several studies that test this proposition, results are mixed, and some of the difficulty in interpreting and summarizing past studies stems from core differences in the nature of the studies.”

As part of this work, the CPD is awarding grants for Metaketas (a word derived frrom “integrated research for knowledge accumulation”), projects that bring together teams of researchers who work on parallel projects around the world to develop generalizable answers to major questions of scholarly and policy importance. EGAP awarded seven grants last year, all for research projects focused on information and political accountability; the CPD received a $1.8 million grant. “Our goal in launching this initiative,” explains Jaclyn Leaver, CPD’s Program Director, “is to improve collaboration and coordination across research teams, while producing research that hews to the best standards of transparent social-science research.” (See here for further information about this initiative.)

Clientelism

Another important focus of the CPD is rooted in clientelism, the exchange of goods and services for political support. The Center has established a task force on political clientelism, focused on improving comparative understanding of clientelism, as well as developing innovative designs to assess causes and consequences. The CPD recently hosted a conference at Social Science Matrix called Brokering Votes: Clientelism in Comparative Perspective, which brought together emerging scholars working on clientelism and vote brokerage in different countries and contexts. The purpose, Dunning explains, was “to promote comparative understanding of clientelism and, especially, to highlight new research that assesses its causes and consequences.” Attendees included faculty and graduate students from UC Berkeley and other academic institutions.

Clientelism has long been a personal focus of Dunning’s; his book, Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2013), examined the phenomenon of clientelism based upon evidence from Argentina, Venezuela, India, and Mexico. The book won the 2014 Luebbert Prize for best book in comparative politics and the Best Book Award of APSA’s Comparative Democratization Section. “I am building on my work on both political clientelism and ethnic politics to better understand the nature of transitions away from ‘vote brokerage,’ in particular, how policy interventions and decisions of political elites may shape the power of local brokers,” he says.

Electoral Violence

The CPD has recently launched an intiative focused on electoral violence, and organized a Social Science Matrix prospecting seminar that brought together researchers to explore the relationship between violence and democratic elections in developing countries. In addition to Dunning, participants in this initiative include UC Berkeley’s Leonardo Arriola, Associate Professor of Political Science; Aila Matanock, Assistant Professor of Political Science; and Manuela Travaglianti, Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies.

As the Center’s website explains, this initiative “seeks different means for measuring electoral violence and assessing whether violence complements or substitutes for non-violent electoral malpractices like fraud or vote-buying and whether these dynamics are different in post-conflict contexts compared to other contexts. It also considers interventions, by domestic and international actors, that attempt to change these dynamics.”

The collective impact of these initiatives will be not only to promote collaboration among researchers working in different domains, but also to promote greater understanding around the complex—and sometimes messy—processes that shape democracy, elections, and governance, and ultimately promote reforms and policies that could have a major impact in developing nations for decades to come.

Research Highlights

Emmanuel Letouzé: “Data for Development”

Published April 23, 2015

A UC Berkeley demographer (and cartoonist) seeks to reduce the gap in statistical data available about populations in developing nations.

Poverty and underdevelopment often go hand-in-hand with a lack of data, as regions lacking infrastructure or mired in violent conflict are often unable to conduct surveys and compile statistics about populations. In Afghanistan or the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, a census has not been conducted in decades. And while in the U.S., fitness trackers and Google Maps track people’s most incremental movements, in Africa, many births go unrecorded, and online maps show only major cities and streets. As a result, vital information about developing nations—such as poverty, health, and unemployment levels—often can only be estimated. Even initiatives such as the UN’s Millenium Development Goals, which focuses on child poverty, health, and education, have struggled to accurately measure whether targets have been met.

In recent years, however, researchers have begun using digital information to gather information about inflation, poverty, migration, disease, and other factors in developing nations, particularly as mobile phones and other technology have gained adoption. In West Africa, for example, researchers drew on call detail records (or CDRs, which show a call’s time and duration, as well as the location of the cell tower that routed it) to estimate population movement during the Ebola outbreak. In another case, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) hosts “mapathons” to identify streets and buildings from satellite images of the Central African Republic and other countries, with the aim of improving development projects and disaster response.

Of course, as useful as these resources are, the aggregation of this information also carries risks to privacy, as well as the possibility of creating a new “digital divide” between those who can gather and study the new data and those who cannot. This divide is exactly what Emmanuel Letouzé, a PhD candidate in demography at UC Berkeley, is working to prevent. “I don’t believe in technocratic solutions,” Letouzé says. “It has to be deeply political, as much about the why as the how.”

In addition to writing a dissertation on big data and demography, Letouzé serves as director and cofounder of Data Pop Alliance, a think tank created by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, MIT’s Media Lab, and Overseas Development Institute. Based in New York, Data Pop Alliance advises developing countries on working with large data sets, supports research projects, educates the public, and assists with conferences, such as a recent Big Data Bootcamp held by the United Nations Population Fund.

“It’s about training people, giving the ability and the willingness to understand this new world of data and how it’s used,” Letouzé says.

“Big data” refers in part to the traces of activity that humans leave behind on digital devices. This includes CDRs, credit card transactions, subway records, and other structured data, as well as unstructured data, such as blog posts, tweets, videos, and other social media, that is less quantifiable and harder to analyze. A broad array of other types of information, including data from satellites and electric meters, weather information, and digitized books, also fall under the “big data” umbrella. Since 2012, the world has produced 1.2 zettabytes (or 1.3 trillion gigabytes) of digital data every year.

However, such mind-boggling numbers can be misleading, Letouzé says. “One thing I really try to advocate is that “Big Data” is not just [large data sets],” he says, noting that the term is better understood as a “complex ecosystem,” comprising not only data, but also powerful new computers and the people and institutions who use them.

It’s about training people, giving the ability and the willingness to understand this new world of data and how it’s used.

Letouzé—who holds degrees from Sciences Po and Columbia University—helped launch Data Pop in 2014 after becoming frustrated with his work as a technical consultant for other organizations, including the OECD and the United Nations’ Global Pulse project, which works on big data and development. “I decided that I wanted to build something of my own,” Letouzé says. He partnered with Patrick Vinck, the director of Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Program for Vulnerable Populations, and the prominent MIT data scientist Alex “Sandy” Pentland, who serves as Data Pop’s academic director.

Letouzé is currently leading a project to assist Colombia’s National Statistical Office (DANE) on using big data to measure poverty and crime in Bogotá. By combining CDRs, bus traffic data, and official crime reports, Letouzé and other researchers are building a predictive model of where crime is likeliest to occur in Colombia’s capital; they are examining whether buses’ location and frequency—and the number of passengers getting on and off—has an impact on crimes, such as homicide and sexual assault. Based on the results, they will work with the government to create policy suggestions, such as altering bus schedules.

Another project affiliated with Data Pop uses the Google Earth Engine to estimate communities’ vulnerability to flooding. A separate joint effort with the Qatar Research Institute studies millions of tweets to gather information about poverty and inflation patterns in Egypt.

Letouzé notes that data-based social-science research faces a variety of issues, including selection bias (some people are more likely to own cellphones than others) as well as privacy concerns. In a recent paper on the ethics of using CDRs, Letouzé advocates some alternate approaches, such as using phone records together with other types of data, and keeping an “expiration date” on individuals’ information. The Bogotá study seeks to correct sample basis by incorporating surveys and traditional statistics, uses aggregated data sets to obscure individuals’ identities, and looks for ways to provide local access to information.

Although mobile phones are driving the Internet’s expansion in low-income countries, offering new possibilities of gathering information in areas where official statistics are lacking, Letouzé stresses that public debate is essential to making sure data empowers people, rather than creating new disparities. He explains that Data Pop is focusing on emerging legal questions, such as “getting people the right to their data” by helping craft laws and guidelines about how and when it can be used. For example, while non-anonymized data might be deemed essential in crisis situations to help reunite families or locate remains, regulations could require that data can only be shared in aggregated sets to protect privacy. Data Pop is also working to promote data literacy, by leading training programs in data and development for journalists, official statisticians, and NGO staffers, and supporting trainings in Rwanda and other countries.

Letouzé points out that the new world of data research is deeply interdisciplinary; most of his papers are joint ventures with scholars in different fields. “You can have someone with training in anthropology, econometrics, and computer science,” he says. “There are very few people who can do everything themselves with big data.”

In addition to his work as a demographer, Letouzé is also an accomplished cartoonist who draws under the name “manu.” He often uses cartoons to explain data and development. “I’ve been drawing since I was kid, but unlike most people I never stopped,” he says. One of his recent cartoons depicts a Mexico City study in which cell phone data was used to predict socioeconomic levels, with a squiggly character in a blue shirt going through the creation of a predictive model step by step. Another satirical drawing depicts big data as “the new oil”: a voice hovering beneath looming black oil barrels asks nervously, “This is a good thing, right?” (Click here to see a gallery of Letouzé’s cartoons satirizing the use of big data.)

“There are no moments when I think in terms of research and social sciences, and then think, ‘Now I’m gonna relax and do some doodling,’” Letouzé says. “I’m always using the same parts [of my brain].”

Research Highlights

Paul K. Piff: “Are the Wealthy More Narcissistic?”

Published April 1, 2015

Psychologist Paul Piff studies the link between wealth and social behavior, and shows how economic inequality shapes—and is shaped by—the mind.

Noël_Hallé_-_the_education_of_the_rich_people

In a study published in the January 2014 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, psychologist Paul K. Piff, who earned his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and now is an Assistant Professor of Psychology & Social Behavior at UC Irvine, demonstrates that upper class individuals tend to be more narcissistic and feel more entitled than their lower class peers. The study is significant in establishing a direct link between social class and deep-seated aspects of personality, and suggests that the study of the mind has an underappreciated role to play in examinations of the growing disparity between the rich and poor.

Piff’s findings build on years of research that he and his colleagues conducted on the effects of wealth on social behavior. This work has shown, for example, that people of high social class are more likely to behave unethically and less likely to donate to charities. “The more money you have, the higher in status you are, the less threatening the world is to you,” Piff explains. “You can pay rent or own a home, you can be late to work without losing your month’s income, and your neighborhood’s safer.”

Having all of these things means that you can rely far less on other people, which ultimately leads to a reduced feeling that you owe anyone anything. At least, that was the theory. “A missing piece was [direct evidence of] how wealth shaped a person’s sense of deservingness and their basic personality,” he explains.

Piff investigated this link between wealth and self-regard through a series of five experiments testing more than 500 undergraduates and 300 other adults on a variety of measures of socioeconomic class, entitlement, and narcissism. The participants filled out multiple well-established self-reporting measures for each of these three attributes. They also reported their family income and their parents’ levels of educational attainment, answered questions about their perceived financial security and what they could afford growing up, ranked how they see themselves relative to other people, how much they value their appearance, and more. Piff even measured how much time participants spent looking at themselves in the mirror when given the option, a behavioral signal of narcissism.

In almost all respects, social class was linked to both narcissism and entitlement.

The finding that people of high socioeconomic standing are more narcissistic and entitled has profound political implications. It may explain why the wealthy are more economically conservative, favoring lower marginal tax rates and reduced public spending. Do the wealthy favor such policies merely because they appear to be to their economic advantage?

Class differences in narcissism are not fixed but rather sensitive to changes in social values

In fact, Piff says his ongoing research suggests that the economic conservatism of the upper class is actually moderated by how much their perceived wealth causes an increase in their sense of deservingness. The effect is such that “poor people that are made to feel wealthy [relative to others] become more fiscally conservative” in accordance with increases in entitlement. Similarly, wealthy people who are made to feel poor experience less entitlement and less fiscal conservatism.

Perhaps this explains why the past 30 years have seen a dramatic increase both in inequality and in narcissism among college students, who tend to come from wealthier families.

These psychological factors may have the dangerous effect of compounding the growth of economic inequality. The rate at which economic inequality accelerates over time depends deeply on the very institutions and policies over which the upper class has a disproportionate level of control. Thus, if increasing economic inequality gives rise to an upper class with an even greater sense of entitlement, leading them, as Piff’s research would suggest, to support policies that favor the growth of economic inequality, this may exacerbate a vicious cycle of stratification.

As dismal as this may seem, Piff’s research also suggests a solution. In a separate study reported alongside the other narcissism studies, he demonstrated that when people of high social class simply list three benefits of treating others as equals, it temporarily lowers their levels of entitlement to nearly approach those of the lower class. “Importantly, these results also suggest that class differences in narcissism are not fixed but rather sensitive to changes in social values,” he reports.

In other words, building connections among people can help reduce the wealth-narcissism effect. As Piff reasons, “If wealth, both socially and psychologically, creates an island that leaves people removed from others, then contributing inroads to that island—by thinking of others as equals, going to public schools, taking the bus, or living in diverse neighborhoods—will trigger these basic empathic processes that would otherwise not be engaged.”

For further reading, Piff recommends The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. You can also find Piff’s publications on his website. You can also see Piff speak in a TED Talk.

Photo Credit.

Research Highlights

Kerwin Klein: “Mountain Views”

Published March 30, 2015

Mountains have played an important and changing role in European history over the past few centuries, according to a UC Berkeley historian.

In the Middle Ages, the highest peak in the Alps was known as Mont Maudit: the cursed mountain. Today, this same peak is known as Mont Blanc, the “white mountain,” and is the adored subject of alpine postcards and calendar shots.

Behind this transformation in name lies a shift in worldview, according to Kerwin Klein, a professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of History. “Today we think about mountains as beautiful places where we achieve spiritual uplift,” Klein says. “But in the past, mountains were seen as dangerous, unpredictable places. They were landscapes so devilish they killed people.”

In his new book, Steep: A Cultural and Environmental History of Mountaineering (currently in preparation for publication by Oxford University Press), Klein is tracing how the popular perception of mountains went from horrible to serene, a research venture that has taken him across the world, into obscure libraries, and through unexpected detours into other disciplines.

Although he was trained in U.S. history with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries, Klein traces the roots of modern mountaineering to the European Alps in the late eighteenth century, when mountains were still seen as fearsome, and when scientists were among the first to venture to the highest heights.

In 1787, for example, the naturalist and early earth scientist Horace Bénédicte de Saussure climbed Mont Blanc, an expedition that became a model for applying the scientific method in the field. “Saussure measured everything,” Klein says, noting that the Frenchman published exhaustive lists of barometric pressure, temperature, and even the color of the sky.

Scientists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century followed in Saussure’s footsteps, and collectively came to new realizations about the age of the earth and the role of ice in its history. Climbing mountains and writing about rocks and ice intertwined sport with science, and reinforced the growing awareness that the mountains were created by physical forces and laws, and not divine influence. “Mountains were a place where people discovered universal history,” Klein says.

As Klein describes this transition on his blog, “In little more than a century, English travelers forsook descriptions of mountains as warts, pimples, and tumors for rapturous odes to alpine grandeur.”

As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, mountains became more accessible. Rail lines and roads turned the Alps and other ranges into sites of middle-class recreation, with only the higher peaks left to glamorous adventurers. Alpine clubs formed in Britain, Germany, Austria, and Italy. These clubs were initially diverse, with Jewish members and socialist branches. But over time, climbing became less about science—the theory of ice ages had become accepted fact, and the study of glaciers had moved to the arctic—and became more “bound up with nationalism, as Alpine clubs became politically powerful,” Klein explains.

In little more than a century, English travelers forsook descriptions of mountains as warts, pimples, and tumors for rapturous odes to alpine grandeur.

By the late nineteenth century, British and German alpinists faced off over challenging climbs around the world, and planting flags at the summits of unclimbed peaks in Africa and Asia played into imperial rivalries. In this era, mountaineers still saw themselves as part of an international elite of sporting, masculine gentlemen. By the 1920s, however, alpine sport increasingly became a nationalistic enterprise, particularly in Germany. By the time the German and Austrian clubs merged in the 1920s, mountaineering in that region had “a base for political anti-Semitism even before the Nazis came to power,” Klein says. In subsequent years, mountaineering films were the westerns of Nazi Germany, and the Alps themselves became deeply political symbols.

Klein’s project traces how, after the war, committed alpinists like Heinrich Harrer (best known as the author of Seven Years in Tibet) rehabilitated the image of German and Austrian climbers, as mountains came to be seen as spiritual places above the human fray. In the decades following World War II, a new generation of enthusiasts came to the mountains because they seemed free from the cares of the world. The mountains were no longer explored to find scientific truth, but to escape it.

“Harrer’s memoir is about climbing as a place without politics,” Klein says. “Instead, the mountains are places that make brotherhood. They’re spiritual escapes…. The Alps have become sacred again, and now the technology [of climbing] has become an instrument for self-actualization. Ice axes, Gore Tex, all this high-tech stuff is about getting to a spiritual place.”

This history of reversals in the view of mountains—from awful to beautiful, from secular to sacred, from political to above politics—took Klein far away from his appointment in modern U.S. history at UC Berkeley, where he delivers lectures and seminars on environmental and intellectual history (including a very popular graduate course on theory and history). His previous publications have focused on how Europeans narrated their encounters with Native Americans, and he wrote an intellectual history of academic vocabularies in the twentieth century.

While alpine history is thus a departure from Klein’s earlier work, it is close to his personal interests. A climber for more than thirty years, the historian’s own passion about mountains and why we climb them came from the practices and community of his fellow mountaineers. “I wanted to write a book my buddies would read,” he says.

For his research, Klein had to learn Italian and Ladin, a language indigenous to the Ladin valley in the Alps, in addition to German and French. With these skills, he could work in the many small libraries that hold old letters, alpine journals, aged dissertations on climbing, and other texts. “Some of the research was very random,” Klein says.

At times, his research went back as far as the late Middle Ages, to the religious traditions of peasants living in the Alps. To understand the meaning of their intricate artwork and its relationship to more modern conceptions of the mountains, Klein pored over tomes on medieval art history. He recollects an encounter with a librarian in Fontainebleau, France. “She was a trained archivist,” he says, “and had this huge collection. I was set up at this 17th-century oak table, looking out at the palace grounds.”

The research has taken most of a decade, and he says that many of the small mountain-town archives he used have been shuttered with Europe’s budget crunch. “I couldn’t write this book now,” he notes. An ironic turn for a book that, in part, uncovers how our understanding of history itself has come down from the mountains.

Image credit

Research Highlights

Bearing Witness

Published December 29, 2014

UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center has taken a lead role in assessing the International Criminal Court’s groundbreaking witness program.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague is one of the modern era’s oldest ideas and newest institutions of global governance. Since its founding in July 2002, the Court has promised an end to impunity for crimes that “shock the conscience of humanity” and deny justice for their victims. Since then, the court has generated significant controversy, but little empirically grounded social-scientific research has examined the court’s operations. Indeed, few empirical studies have been able to evaluate the Court’s performance, especially regarding its groundbreaking victims regime, which enables victims to participate directly in the process and become eligible for reparations.

Thanks in large part to UC Berkeley researchers, however, there is today a growing body of data to fill this gap. In June 2014, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center (HRC) published the latest in a line of reports intended to evaluate the Court against its lofty expectations and, ultimately, help it deliver justice to those in need.

Unlike its predecessors (such as the United Nations-backed international tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda), the ICC was intended to be a “victim-friendly court”, with procedures for victims’ participation and reparation written into its founding document, the Rome Statute. Little was known, however, about how these procedures would actually affect the victims and communities in whose name they were established. Observers wondered how victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide would react to a foreign court intervening on their behalf. And many critics worried that victims from some of the most war-torn countries in the world could further endanger themselves by testifying against powerful leaders and warlords from their communities.

The victims who testify at The Hague—whether in-person or via video link—often come from circumstances of extreme vulnerability, where the roots of violence can persist long after fighting has ended. Some have lost their entire families. Many have never been outside their country, let alone flown on a plane.

In 2004, researchers at the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center began to deploy teams of data collectors to the countries where the ICC was conducting its first investigations. Their goal was to employ rigorous data collection to help the Court and its observers learn more about the people who lived there—in places like northern Uganda, home to Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, and eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, home to the world’s deadliest conflict since the Second World War. These surveys provided rich, multidimensional data that helped the Court better understand victims’ needs and priorities. They also complicated the ICC’s picture, revealing that after mass atrocity, individuals and communities demand basic needs like security, food, and shelter, along with – and sometimes over – justice.

I want to fight against impunity. I want justice to be done.

Last year, the HRC launched a new program in continuation of this broader tradition, under the direction of Stephen Smith Cody, who holds a JD and PhD in sociology from Berkeley. The Atrocity Response Program works to bring advances in science and technology to bear on international criminal investigations and protect the victims and witnesses of the worst human rights crimes. As Smith writes, “Witnesses who testify at the International Criminal Court (ICC) against accused war criminals often take great risks to do so. Yet, until now, their voices have been missing from discussions about how the ICC is fulfilling its responsibility to prepare and protect those who testify.”

In response, Smith and his team worked with the ICC’s Victims and Witnesses Unit (VWU)—the unit responsible for meeting witnesses’ needs—to design and implement a three-stage survey of witnesses from two of the Court’s first cases. Using a standardized set of questions designed by the HRC, VWU staff interviewed witnesses about their experiences (1) before, (2) immediately after and (3) around six months after testifying. In the first report to be published from this research, “Bearing Witness at the International Criminal Court,” the HRC has highlighted again that the label “victims” entails a far more complicated and heterogeneous reality than it suggests.

Witnesses testify for different reasons—some for justice, others out of a sense of duty. “I felt like I was letting go of something I’d been holding on to,” said one witness. Another explained, “I want to fight against impunity. I want justice to be done.” Overall, Cody and his team found that those who testify at the Court have largely positive experiences. In the immediate post-testimony interviews, most said that they had personally benefited from testifying and felt good about the services provided them by VWU. Said one witness, “All the information, preparation, and advice I received helped me a lot. This made it easier for me during my testimony period.”

This is a significant result, especially given the recent revelation that one VWU staff member had in fact sexually assaulted four victims the unit was supposed to have been protecting.

Still, HRC found important nuances, such as differences between men and women. For instance, female witnesses were less likely than male witnesses to report that their testimony helped achieve justice: 60 percent of women thought their testimony would help establish the truth or achieve justice, compared with just under 80 percent of men. Moreover, the study was limited by the security situation and remoteness of the witnesses’ homes, making the six-month follow-up interview difficult to administer. Whereas, for instance, 109 witnesses responded to the first two surveys, fewer than half responded to the third because VWU staff were unable to reach them. This is significant, Cody notes, since much of the criticism of the ICC’s victims regime stems from questions about its ability to truly protect witnesses once they have returned home. Indeed, three witnesses from the ICC’s trials against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo requested asylum in the Netherlands after testifying for fear of reprisals back home.

In the HRC study, moreover, one witness reported: “I was worried about my security, [and] that the protective measures were not enough.” Another explained, “I am afraid that the accused knows me, even though he could not see me. Therefore, the security of me and my family cannot be guaranteed.”

The lack of data on such long-term risk is thus a significant limitation and also raises questions about the ways that international organizations like the ICC can effectively govern those in whose name they act, especially when they are no longer needed by the organization (in this case, to testify). This, however, is where social scientists can help. Indeed, the Atrocity Response Program is ongoing and will continue to send researchers to the field. The next report will focus on victims who participate in trials, not necessarily as witnesses but as civil parties. As such, UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center will continue to produce empirically grounded reports to help close the gap between the work of international justice institutions and our understanding of their work in practice.

Research Highlights

Bee Killers

Published December 27, 2014

What does the U.S. military have to do with the mysterious collapse of the bee population? A UC Berkeley geography professor looks into it.

Two hundred billion dollars is the current estimated worth of Facebook. It is the amount of money Russia is believed to have spent invading Crimea. It is also the annual value of the global crop production made possible by one important actor: the honeybee.

Alarmingly, honeybees are dying in droves, a crisis that has allied erstwhile enemies like bee enthusiasts, entomologists, environmental activists, and the agricultural industry. What is killing the honeybee, and what is in store for the crops that depend on it?

Hundreds of researchers in academia, government, and agriculture have launched research projects focusing on specific diseases, toxins, or habitat changes that might be endangering the bee. But one bee-keeper, Jake Kosek, Assistant Professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, approached the problem from a different angle.

Kosek has kept bees for years as respite from his academic work, which mostly centers on the relationships between race, nation, and the natural environment (he has written two books and was recently awarded tenure). Yet after his own bees began to die, the barrier between Kosek’s academic life and his bee-keeping hobby quickly eroded. “As I taught histories of chemical warfare, the politics of military drones, and the industrialization of the airscape… the apian elements…kept distracting me,” Kosek explained in a talk for the Shaping San Francisco public lecture series in May 2014.

Kosek soon initiated his own pathbreaking examination of the long history of the bee and its recent decline. Through his students, he came to know biologists and bee specialists working on campus, such as Clare Kremen, Miguel Altieri, and Gordon Frankie. Microbial biologist Ignacio Chapela and Kosek became friends and interlocuters as Kosek reconciled his expertise in political geography and entomology. “They push me really hard, more than anything else, and it has made for a deeply interdisciplinary project,” he explained in an interview.

The university and department soon provided support for Kosek to create his own entomological laboratory on the rooftop of his offices at Berkeley. As Kosek grew increasingly immersed in the debates over whether pesticides, diseases, or loss of habitat had endangered the bees, he began to wonder: how did the bee become so vulnerable in the first place?

Killer Bees

A surprising lead emerged while Kosek was wading through various theories on colony collapse disorder. Some biological and agricultural scientists researching colony collapse had argued that toxins were the culprit. They reasoned that bees instinctively collect and deposit pollen in their hive, a mechanism that poisons colonies when the pollen contains traces of toxins. While entomologists and environmentalists had researched means to mitigate this threat, Kosek found that one group of scientists had set out to exploit this particular bee behavior: U.S. military researchers.

Through ethnographic and archival research at military bases like Los Alamos, Kosek found that military scientists had begun experimentally using bees to overcome the difficulty of conducting reconnaissance to discover chemical weapons. If bees collected chemical toxins from their surroundings and brought them back to their hive, they figured, could they be taught to retrieve chemicals used in weapons development?

Some military scientists believed so, and turned bees into a miniature intelligence force. Raising bees in individual cells, the researchers built a militant bee that would smell, salivate, and send messages to other bees upon detecting a chemical of interest. Computers could read and translate this interspecies signal into a remote alarm, turning a swarm of bees into a chemical weapons detector.

Modern military science thus began to transform the bee. Kosek explained in his lecture that the military went so far as to try to “train bees to… make them eat nothing but chemical sources.” Bees have since been used for “everything from plastic explosives, to the tritium used in nuclear weapons development, to land mines,” according to an essay Kosek wrote in 2010.

The U.S. military has deployed 400 hives around military zones around the world since 2006. Stealth, sensitive, and largely unnoticed by the public, the bee served as a model instrument of surveillance to deploy against the nontraditional and incoherent enemy of the War on Terror. Kosek interviewed an agent with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, who confirmed that the agency was “deploying bees as effective and efficient homeland security detective devices.”

At the same time, Kosek notes, war strategists have applied entomological research to design new deployment techniques. Previously, U.S. military operations had prioritized hierarchy and centrality, but strategists inspired by bees have recently revolutionized human warfare by introducing the concept of “swarming,” valuing mobility, autonomy, and synchronized and continuous communication. Kosek says that “algorithims…derived from the study of insect behavior are actually the algorithims that are used to coordinate drones in warfare. You can trace the history of entomology into the hardware of drones.” In a curious way, bees have transferred knowledge to humans – allowing strategists to “coordinate strikes without people.”

As “bees become militarized,” Kosek explained in his lecture, “militarized humans become apiary.”

The Human Impact

The military usage is just one example of how the bee has undergone significant change in the past century as it became a critical labor force for the global agricultural industry. Kosek insists that “this remaking is not just symbolic. The bee has experienced transformations to its exoskeleton, its nervous system, its digestive tract, and its collective social behavior.”

You need to understand the deep history and the politics of the making of the modern bee to understand how it has been made vulnerable over time.

As humans designed bees to be pollinators that could be observed, trained, and transported, their hibernation cycle shifted, their color changed, and their lifespan shortened. “We have the idea that we’re capturing them in the wild, but in fact they are deeply industrialized,” Kosek explained.

Years of entomogolical and archival research has convinced Kosek that one cannot understand colony collapse apart from its political, economic, and social context. “We often put this problem in the realm of scientists, entomologists, and biologists….dealing with particular diseases,” he explained. “The premise of my research is that those things, although very important, aren’t going to even begin to come to terms with what’s going on with the bees. You need to understand the deep history and the politics of the making of the modern bee to understand how it has been made vulnerable over time. I want ordinary people to think about the politics of the bees, and that’s going to require more than gardening and starting a neighborhood beehive to address it.”

Kosek implores bee-enthusiasts and environmentalists to avoid “greenwashing” the bee controversy by ignoring the human social dimensions. He explains that if we are to understand the death of the bee, we must first understand how human politics and economic interests have reshaped the insects’ biology and environment. As Kosek put it, “To say ‘I’m an environmentalist, that I’m not interested in these social or political issues, [is] basically impossible.”

Research Highlights

Brain Exercise and Alzheimer’s

Published December 20, 2014

In a recent publication in The Journal of Neuroscience, a team of researchers led by Miranka Wirth, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, investigated whether a lifetime of cognitive exercise could mitigate the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The results suggest that for people who are susceptible to the disease, challenging yourself intellectually could be a vital preventative measure.

Wirth and colleagues measured the concentration of beta-amyloid deposits—a kind of “brain plaque” that is a strong indicator of Alzheimer’s disease severity — in the brains of 118 cognitively normal older individuals. They also asked the participants to fill out a survey indicating how much cognitive activity they had engaged in both recently and throughout their lives (at years 6, 12, 18, 40, and at their current age). Such activities include “reading books, newspapers, and magazines, writing letters, going to the library, and playing games.”

Then they genetically tested the participants for a gene called ApoE-ε4. The ApoE-ε4 gene has been found in 40-65% of Alzheimer’s disease patients and only around 10% of the general population; having this gene does not guarantee Alzheimer’s, but it does substantially increase the risk. Importantly, those with ApoE-ε4 have consistently been found to have greater deposits of beta-amyloid.

The results: in ApoE-ε4 carriers who reported a lifetime of intellectual stimulation, average beta-amyloid deposition was comparable to those who didn’t even have the gene.

This finding has a few limitations. For example, the link the researchers found doesn’t necessarily mean that cognitive exercise itself reduces beta amyloid deposition (although it is hard to imagine a credible alternative). Even if it did, this still would not strictly imply that cognitive exercise prevents Alzheimer’s, because nobody knows for sure whether beta-amyloid deposits cause or are merely associated with the disease.

Get intellectually active if you want to keep your brain healthy, especially if you have a family history of Alzheimer’s disease.

Still, it does support the idea that cognitive exercise is essential to a healthy lifestyle. Wirth explains that it adds to a host of “epidemiological research suggesting that [both cognitive and physical exercise] are important health behaviors that correlate with decreased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline. It’s probably even more important to have a healthy lifestyle and minimize cardiovascular risk factors if there is a family history of Alzheimer’s disease.”

While one might consider getting genetically tested for the ApoE-ε4 variant, as companies now offer genome testing for as little as a hundred dollars, Wirth is hesitant to support genetic testing. (Experts are generally reluctant to advocate genetic testing for risk of a disease that has no proven treatment, as this could cause the patient unnecessary anxiety.) “Whether or not [knowing you have the ApoE-ε4 variant] increases [compliance with a regimen of cognitive and physical exercise] is not clear, and I think research is not advanced enough to support this idea,” she says. Such research would likely entail a massive clinical trial directly testing both the benefits and the risks.

In the meantime, it’s safe to say that you should get intellectually active if you want to keep your brain healthy, especially if you have a family history of Alzheimer’s disease. “In the future,” Wirth says, “maybe genetic information could be used to construct special intervention programs that are most suitable to counteract genetic risk.”

Research Highlights

Africa’s AIDS Industry

Published December 17, 2014

Fighting stigma, helping orphans, and empowering women are popular areas of funding for AIDS-prevention efforts in Africa, but not because they are the most effective strategies.

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In an article entitled “Working Misunderstandings: Donors, Brokers, and Villagers in Africa’s AIDS Industry,” published by the Population Council in the Population and Development Review, UC Berkeley sociology professor Ann Swidler and her colleague, University of Pennsylvania sociology professor Susan Cotts Watkins, describe how certain HIV/AIDS-prevention approaches are repeatedly implemented in the course of development aid projects in Africa, even though they are largely ineffective.

This piece was written as a part of Swidler’s larger project, run in collaboration with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, to understand the nature of HIV/AIDS programs in Africa and why they often fail, in order to create a model of development projects that function with “institutional vitality and societal competence.”

In their article, Swidler and Watkins focus on the case study of HIV prevention programs, primarily in Malawi and South Africa, to illustrate how different actors frequently come to rely upon certain tropes because they are deemed to be acceptable to donors and locals alike.

“HIV prevention projects generate complex misunderstandings and conflicting motives among the critical actors in the AIDS enterprise: the deep-pocketed altruists who fund the programs, the local brokers who implement them, and the villagers who are the programs’ ultimate targets,” they write. “The donors, large and small, have fantasies about what poor villagers need; the villagers too have their own fantasies and, like the brokers, their own aspirations…. Our account of the roles of local actors can be viewed as a narrative of seduction—and sometimes, of heartache and betrayal—characterizing the fraught embrace between altruists who come from afar and their significant others, the locals.”

“Fighting Stigma” and Other Tropes

As an example of the ineffectual “tropes” they say have come to characterize AIDS-reduction efforts, Swidler and Watkins note that many HIV prevention programs focus on eliminating the “stigma” associated with the disease, which they call the “mom-and-apple-pie of AIDS interventions”.

“We have found no rigorously designed studies that demonstrate empirically that reducing stigma reduces HIV transmission,” they write. “Moreover, if the goal of HIV prevention is behavior change, then persuading people not to condemn behaviors that lead to HIV transmission could be counterproductive.”

Despite the lack of benefits, they argue that the central theme of “fighting stigma” continues to be deployed as it appeals to the sentiments of donors and is also suitable to the existing customs for caring for the ill that exist in local villages. “Stigma…looms large in the imagined arsenal of AIDS prevention interventions because it sounds good to all and offends no one: everyone, from donors and their sponsors, to brokers, to churches and villagers, can get on board,” they explain. “But even though donors, brokers, and villagers have all signed on to the same program, they ‘misunderstand’ each other in the sense that the fight against stigma means something quite different to each group….”

Another focus frequently repeated in AIDS efforts is an emphasis on caring for orphans and vulnerable children, which they say often leads to misallocated support for children who are not the neediest; another is an emphasis on empowering women. “[Local agents] who sit in a meeting making AIDS policies and implementing programs do not speak of women in miniskirts seducing men,” they write. “Rather, they echo the language of the international community in attributing women’s and girls’ vulnerability to HIV to poverty. But in our experience, when they leave the room where formal policy is being deliberated, they spontaneously talk of predatory sex workers and schoolgirl temptresses. From one room to another, the images of women shift shape.”

The authors also call out NGOs and governments for delivering trainings that tend to be both predictable and pointless. “Just as a Catholic mass would not be a mass without wine and wafers, a training is not a ‘training’ without allowances for attending the training, flip charts, and magic markers, a ‘bun’ and a ‘Fanta,’ at mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks, and an ample lunch,” they write. “Village chiefs and other participants of higher status, such as a schoolteacher or a pastor, are budgeted for a larger per diem and a more expensive lunch than ordinary villagers, and are served first.”

Yet trainings have become an integral part of nearly every initiative, Swidler and Watkins say, as they are easy to execute and allow organizations to tick off a check box that donors can relate to. “For donors, the trainings of village volunteers to teach others are the only practical way that they can imagine transforming the billions of poor people into participating, self-actualizing, empowered individuals,” they note. “The number of people trained provides an easy measure of success to report to funders, at least as long as donors and their funders have faith in the power of training to transform the identities and behaviors of poor villagers.”

New Realities On the Ground

Swidler and Watkins acknowledge that, while these approaches may not have been as successful as they might have been in preventing AIDS, they may have unexpected benefits. “Combating stigma may not be an effective way to reduce HIV transmission; focusing on orphans and vulnerable children may not target the parentless children the altruists imagine; efforts to empower vulnerable women may be foiled by Africans’ views that women are more perpetrators than victims of the AIDS threat,” they write. “But these focal points of the AIDS enterprise have nonetheless created new realities on the ground in Africa.”

For example, they note that the concepts related to “gender” have found their way into discourse at the local level, and they note that the networks that have been set up to carry out the AIDS-prevention programs have the potential to be employed for other purposes, such as political mobilization. Most ironically, they note, the inflow of development money may finally motivate poor parents to come to value education for their children and limit how many children they have, in part because academic credentials play a role in who earns the highest pay through working with development organizations.

“As the AIDS enterprise, and the NGO presence more generally, have opened up career paths that appear to depend on educational credentials,” they write,” even poor parents may start to see focusing their resources on fewer children as crucial for their own futures and those of their children.”

Photo Credit: UNESCO Africa

Research Highlights

A New World of Mapping

Published December 9, 2014

Whether detailing the locations of taco trucks, old gas tanks, or the migration patterns of tuna fish, a UC Berkeley cartographer is exploring novel ways to illuminate the world around us through maps.

Darin Jensen’s office is lined with representations of San Francisco’s Mission District. One shows where different sounds originate on a Saturday night. Others show locations of old, leaky gas tanks. Another delineates the overlapping worlds of gang violence and that ultimate signal of gentrification, the cupcake shop.

“A collection of maps can show so many facets of place that an interpretation can emerge,” says Jensen, the in-house cartographer in Berkeley’s Department of Geography, who developed the maps with students as part of a project called Mission: Possible. “The Mission is not just one thing or another—gangs or hipsters, high-tech employees or second generation immigrants—it’s all these things.”

Jensen’s teaching of cartography emphasizes how the graphic design of maps can communicate and enhance our understanding of our environment from multiple perspectives. Using a syntax based in color, shape, informative text, and data, the maps illuminate themes ranging from environmental protection and social justice to where to find the most expensive cup of coffee. “Maps don’t have a first word,” Jensen says, “so you can step into the narrative anywhere.”

The narratives Jensen tells with maps are as diverse as his research methods. A 2012 project entitled Food: An Atlas was conceived as a crowd-sourced exercise in mapping the spaces our food inhabits, from production to consumption. After Jensen sent out a call for maps to universities, food policy networks, and professionals across the United States, more than eighty maps came rolling in, from academics and people who were “just interested in the spatial distribution of things,” Jensen says. The maps detailed food-related subjects such as the pathways of migrating tuna, the origins of the ingredients in beer, the geography of agricultural subsidies, and even Oakland’s taco trucks.

Collaborating with an interdisciplinary team from around the country—including a professor of geographic information system (GIS), a journalist, and a professor of education—Jensen edited the entries down to seventy maps, and provided some graphic design guidance. But it was important, Jensen says “to hold up the cartographer’s aesthetic. Each page is a whole new visual system.”

What emerged from this exercise in crowd-sourced, interdisciplinary scholarship is a visually arresting tour of how what we eat interacts with space. The maps range from a global scale—for example, a chart of where chili peppers are grown, or an unofficial map of national dishes of different countries—to the regional, such as a map of bird-friendly coffee plantations in Central America. From there, the perspective goes even more local, with one map detailing potential rooftop gardens in New York City. Some are historical, some are clearly oriented toward policy, and some have a touch of whimsy: one is entitled “Fungus AmongUS: Mushroom Farms in the U.S.A.”

Jensen and his team call their approach “guerrilla cartography,” in part because they involve people from diverse backgrounds in a way that is “cooperative and collaborative.”

To publish the collection, Jensen and his team ran a Kickstarter campaign that raised $30,000 in three weeks, enough to print the curated maps into a sleek published book. The process from the original call for maps to the final book publication took only six months, and today, the volume is being used in college classrooms across the country. He still receives orders, two years after the first print run. “Maps become historical artifacts the moment they’re printed,” Jensen says.

More recently, Jensen has been working with his cartography students to create a map of Oakland. The project, called “Intra-International Boulevard,” traces the iconic East-Bay street through the various dimensions of its demographics, history, culture, economics, built environment, and any other perspective that can be represented graphically “to create a holistic portrait of place,” as Jensen puts it.

“One powerful thing we are learning is that neighborhoods are defined by people, not a city’s neighborhood map,” Jensen says. “Based on work we’re doing documenting the language of business signage, it is clear that ‘Hispanic Oakland’ is not confined to what the Oakland calls the Fruitvale. We are seeing that Oakland truly is as diverse as those of us that live there believe, even if we’ve never had a matrix to know how or why. A map of all the places of religious worship along the International Boulevard corridor reveals no fewer than eighteen discrete denominations or religions.”

At the same time, the group behind Guerrilla Cartography is planning to compile a crowd-sourced compendium of maps focused on water around the world. Jensen admits that this is a huge and timely topic, but he seems undaunted; he aspires to get maps from more international contributors. As the project takes shape, Jensen continues to teach, and he works with professors across Berkeley’s campus to create original cartography for their work. “Geography is the ultimate interdisciplinary discipline,” he says, “from the human side—looking at development—or from the physical side, looking at climate change.”

Tips for New Cartographers from Darin Jensen (as told to Ryan Whitacre)

It is rare for a cartographer to be able to visit the place they map. But if they can, they will gain, through the experience, insights on space and place that can inform the map product. The colors, sounds, and smells—the energy of the place—will create an empathetic cartographer.
Go to the place and just be in it without trying to find data or even seek a sense of it. Go there and drink coffee or beer or browse the bookstores. Just be in the place first.
After the initial experience, go back and collect data. If time affords, go back again and again for data and fresh insights.
Avoid becoming part of the place. Cartographers should try to remain impartial and unbiased. Experiential cartography is a form of reportage.

Research Highlights

From Oil to Soil

Published December 8, 2014

Research by UC Berkeley geographer Adam Romero exposes how the toxic byproducts of petroleum have transformed agricultural production in California and around the world.

Most people associate vegetables with the virtues of small farms: local production, green leafy plants, and delicious food. But the reality of farm production looks very different close up, says Adam Romero, an advanced PhD candidate in UC Berkeley’s Department of Geography.

“People have a vision of agriculture that is totally foreign to what actually happens,” Romero says. “If you actually go where the food is grown, you see these people in space suits. They’re half human, half machine, out there totally decimating a field of cabbage or lettuce [to prepare the fields].”

Romero’s research led him to investigate how California’s fields came to be filled with these people in “space suits.” He traces the answer back to the 1920s, when major petroleum producers began looking for something to do with the waste products from oil refining. “We don’t think about waste,” Romero says, “but the United States produces more waste than commodities. Many industries are only profitable if they can get rid of some of that byproduct.”

Refining petroleum makes a great deal of waste, much of it highly poisonous. For growers seeking to rid their fields of pests, it is exactly “industrial waste’s toxicity that gives it potential use value in industrial agricultural production,” Romero writes in a forthcoming article in Agricultural History. “Industrial waste is often both very toxic and very abundant, making it a potentially useful raw material for industrial agriculture. In this transfer of toxic chemicals from the wastebaskets to the coffers of industry, industrial agriculture has functioned as a profitable sink for the producers of petro-chemical waste.”

The discovery of the potential symbiosis between toxic petrochemicals and the salad on your plate began, Romero discovered, in the 1920s, when the necessary physical and intellectual infrastructure developed in California, and chemical engineers learned how coax use—and profit—from toxic leftovers from the state’s oil plants.

Researchers found that oil byproducts could kill fungus or nematode worms in the soil, or act as pesticides, without killing plants. Growers, already using chemical fertilizers, figured out how to replace previous agricultural techniques, like crop rotation, with synthetic nutrients and soils sterilized by industrial waste. Trains moved these products from place to place. “This set the stage for the huge takeoff in industrial agriculture after WWII,” Romero says.

Unmistakable Killing Power

Romero’s history details a trajectory that began in the 1920s, when “technologists” at Royal Dutch/Shell began to explore the use of ammonium sulfate fertilizer in California. By the mid-1930s the company was delivering these chemicals into the fields through “nitrogation,” mixing ammonia directly into irrigation water. Seeking methods of injecting the fertilizers deeper into the soil, they borrowed techniques used to lay telephone cables to pipe ammonia gas deep beneath agricultural soils.

Shell later pioneered the use of another petro-byproduct, olefins, including 1,3-dichlororopropene and 1,2-dichloropropane, or “DD,” a dark chlorinated liquid that experimenters in Hawaii found achieved dramatic results in revitalizing a pineapple field infested with nematodes. “[DD] spread through the soil like a lump of sugar,” he notes. “Fumes shot out in a circle, killing every worm they reached…. It was almost as if the chemicals actively sought out the microscopic worms.”

Combining the two petro-waste products—DD and anhydrous ammonia—proved even more powerful, as was seen in the turnaround of diseased lettuce fields in California’s Central Valley. “Within months the evidence of DD’s subterranean killing power was unmistakable,” Romero writes. “Not only was DD incredibly effective, as a waste product of the synthesis of glycerol from propylene, it was also commercially affordable.”

That this revolution began in California was not by accident, Romero argues, as the state was uniquely primed for the takeoff of this marriage between toxic industrial chemicals and food production. California, Romero notes, had an extremely limited tradition of small-holder agriculture, since federal land policy created large farms rather than small plots. “By the first few decades of the 20th century, California’s agrarian complex attained a degree of intensity, standardization, and specialization that existed nowhere else on earth,” he writes.

Unlike the midwest or other agricultural regions, most of California’s farmland was generally controlled by a handful of large companies. As a result, large growers made decisions that affected huge acreages. As a result, California’s agriculture had less variation between small plots owned by individuals with differing opinions about how to farm. Instead, farms in the state were maximalist, devoted to intensive production. “We don’t have farmers,” he says, “we have growers. That makes a huge difference.”

Of course, while the introduction of these new pesticides was a boon for farmers, it was hardly without its own byproducts. First, farmers found they were suddenly dependent on these chemicals for survival: “Chemical salvation was not a one off,” Romero writes. “Its acceptance was a Faustian bargain that meant that growers had to buy and apply chemicals every year to maintain commercial homeostasis.”

More disturbingly, the introduction of chemical toxins into the soil led to environmental impacts that cannot be undone. “While the propagation of petrochemicals within agriculture since WWII has led to astonishing yields, it has also resulted in pollution and contamination on such an immense scale that it will continue to stalk humanity for so long that we might as well as think of it as forever,” Romero writes. “A child born today, no matter rich or poor, even before they take their first breath, has hundreds of industrially made chemicals flowing through their blood. And yet although bodily contamination is now a prerequisite of modern life, certain groups face greater burdens by sacrificing their bodies upon the altar of agricultural employment; or by living near the industries that make modern agriculture possible, in turn, subsidizing our cheap food through their bodily internalization of industrial agriculture’s externalities.”

A Search for the “Why?”

To investigate how petrochemicals were used to remove pests from farm land and crops, Romero worked in fourteen different archives across the United States, from the U.S. Patent Office and the Food and Drug Administration to the records of oil companies. “I had one day at Shell’s archive before the lawyers figured out what I was writing about, and invited me to leave,” he recalls. The reason, he says, is that the pollutants he studies, some of them laid down almost a century ago, are still subject to lawsuits today, as traces of cyanide and arsenic linger in soils and can often be traced back to different plants and companies.

Indeed, it was the toxic trail that drew Romero into researching California’s agricultural history in the first place. After college, he worked as a toxicologist in the Salinas Valley. “I thought I would change the world by measuring pollution,” he says. “But at some point I stopped wondering how pollution happened—I could measure that in streams—and started thinking about why.”

A background in chemistry enabled Romero to understand the technical patents and industry reports. The challenge, he says, is to take this hard science and “make the chemistry legible to people who don’t automatically understand it.” To help make hard science into an historical narrative, Romero works with a diverse group of Berkeley scholars, including the geographer Nathan Sayre, historian Robin Einhorn, and Gary Sposito, who teaches environmental studies.

Einhorn, who is a member of Romero’s dissertation committee, notes that “Adam brings true scientific expertise and a wonderful sense of historical irony to economic and environmental history,” and notes that his background in toxicology enables “him to show us how a motley crew of chemists, farmers, bureaucrats, industrialists, and entrepreneurs in other fields came together to discover that the toxicity of industrial waste created value and, in the process, to ‘chemicalize’ agriculture and our world more generally.”

The chemical-soaked story of agriculture in California is ultimately, for Romero, a story about people. “My family comes from immigrant labor,” he says. In the fields where he measured chemical runoff as a toxicologist, he says, he saw “me a generation ago,” spraying and fumigating fields. He developed this history to clarify what agriculture really is—a place where “a strawberry field becomes a raspberry field in a day” through the labor of agricultural workers and the application of chemicals.

For both the people and the land, but especially the laborers who are so often lost in our concerns about what we eat, Romero says his “goal is to make it less bad.”