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Africa Book Club 2011 Books of the Year
December 12, 2011 By Daniel Musiitwa 1 Comment
Africa Book Club presents its selection of 2011's best books about Africa, or written by African authors – the second year that we are compiling such a list. This year's selection reflects the best of African storytelling across genres. The best books, in our opinion, are those that entertain, make us think, bring new perspectives to bear, provoke debate, and even lead us to question our own beliefs and assumptions. Our top selections managed to do just that.
So how did we choose the 23 books on the list? To compile our 2011 Books of the Year list, we asked our reviewers to select the books that impressed them the most. We also looked across the continent and elsewhere in the world for African authors and books about Africa that won literary awards, made the bestseller lists, generated buzz, and got our readers talking.
Lists like this almost always run the risk of leaving out excellent books and authors, for no reason other than because the compilers did not know about them. No doubt, this list is neither comprehensive nor objective.
As we celebrate yet another year of African literary success, let's remember to support the hundreds of authors and publishers across the continent, who are doing their bit to keep African literature alive. So as you plan your holiday gift giving, consider buying a book about Africa or written by an African author.
Below are the Africa Book Club 2011 Books of the Year, presented in no particular ranking.
Nelson Mandela – By Himself: The Authorized Book of Quotations
Released in July 2011 by Pan Macmillan/PQ Blackwell, Nelson Mandela – By Himself is a compilation of some of Mandela's most memorable quotations, drawn from his speeches, writings and private conversations over the years.
Despite having retired from politics over a decade ago, Mandela's brand is as strong as ever, and not surprisingly, the book is one of our top picks of the year. Nelson Mandela – By Himself provides a first-hand peek into the mind of a man, admired and respected by millions around the world.
One Day I Will Write About This Place (by Binyavanga Wainaina)
A long-time advocate and promoter of African writing, Binyavanga Wainaina, won the 2002 Caine Prize for African Writing for his short story Discovering Home. His debut novel, One Day I Will Write About This Place is an interesting, honest, and immensely readable short memoir. The book documents Binyavanga Wainaina's life from childhood through to how he eventually became an author, going on to win the Caine Prize. The memoir gives us a window not only into the Wainaina's life, but into the Kenya he grew up in.
The Jack Bank – A Memoir of a South African Childhood (by Glen Retief)
Aside from the revolutions in North Africa and the ouster of ex-President Ggabgo in Cote d'Ivoire, few issues have generated as much debate on the continent during 2011 as the topic of gay rights. Against this backdrop, Glen Retief's The Jack Bank – A Memoir of a South African Childhood, is notable for its courage and honesty. Retief writes about growing up as a young white South African during the final years of Apartheid, and realizing that he was unlike other boys. And while his story is at its core a memoir, what makes it even more interesting are the insights into South Africa's gay community, and the revealing portrayal of how thousands of white South Africans were conscripted to serve the Apartheid system.
Other Non-Fiction
How The West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly–and the Stark Choices Ahead (by Dambisa Moyo)
After making waves back in 2007 with her last book, Dead Aid, New York Times bestselling author, Dambisa Moyo was back in the spotlight in January 2011, this time with her latest book,How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly — and the Stark Choices Ahead.
Moyo provides a bold and detailed analysis of the West's decline, and how the balance of economic power has gradually shifted away from America and Europe to emerging markets. She argues that America is not just in economic decline, but on course to become the biggest welfare state in the history of the West, and that what ails the country most is short-sighted policy making. She sets out a path for how America and other Western economies might regain their competitiveness.
Defeating Dictators (by George N. Ayittey)
Not known to mince his words when speaking about Africa's plight, George Ayittey points his guns squarely on Africa's dictators in his latest book. In Defeating Dictators, released on November 8, 2011, and published by Palgrave McMillan, Ayittey analyses the root causes of dictatorship on the continent and sets out proposals to, "help oppressed people elsewhere in the world battling dictators and struggling to bring democratic change to their countries peacefully – without violence, without firing a shot, and without Western help or intervention.
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (by Jason Stearns)
Published in March 2011 by Public Affairs, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters takes a detailed look at the wars that have plagued the Democratic Republic of Congo since 1996. The author, Jason Stearns, has worked in the Congo for over ten years, first as a humanitarian worker, and later as a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group. Along the way, he has met an impressive number of people – from generals to jungle warriors, foremost and behind-the-scene politicians to simple victims – which allows him to speak about the war from a geopolitical perspective and a "real", more human point of view.
In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters , Stearns masterfully explores a complicated, much forgotten conflict that has had formidable repercussions on the entire equilibrium of the African continent. In light of the tensions unfolding after the recent Congolese presidential election, the book is definitely a must-read.
The Memory of Love (by Aminatta Forna)
Deservingly selected as overall winner of the 2011 Commonwealth Best Book Prize, Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love tackles the difficult subject of war and its damaging psychological impact.
Forna's latest book, published in January 2011 by Bloomsbury, is set in Sierra Leone, a country that has just emerged from a decade of civil war. It is a moving portrayal of love and hope and the undying human spirit.
Patchwork (by Ellen Banda-Aaku)
Banda-Aaku's Patchwork, which won the 2010 Penguin Prize for African Writing, was published by Penguin in June 2011. The book, Banda's first for an adult audience, is set in her native Zambia, and centers around the life of Pumpkin, who we first meet as a nine year old growing up with her mother, Totela in Tudu Court, an apartment complex in Zambia's capital, Lusaka.
Pumpkin's father is a rich businessman, whose political ambitions are threatened by his womanizing ways, when one of his girlfriends reveals a dark secret.
Little Liberia – An African Odyssey in New York (by Jonny Steinberg)
Steinberg's latest book, released in January 2011 and published by Jonathan Cape, centers around Park Hill Avenue in New York City, where almost everyone is Liberian. Most people know one another; if not by name, then by face. And yet neighbours do not ask one another what they did in Liberia, for the question is considered an accusation. In this story, about a Liberian community divided by a conflict that links back to the war in their home country, Steinberg takes up the tale of a fractured African nation and its Diaspora to remarkable effect.
As our reviewer Don Makatile observes, "this is a serious piece of writing that took Steinberg all of two years – yet he manages to deliver it to the reader like it was a light work of fiction. It is an easy read, highly enjoyable."
Mr. Fox (by Helen Oyeyemi)
Selected by the New York Times and Amazon.com among their top fiction titles of the year, Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox was published in June 2011 by Picador, and centers around Mr. St. John Fox, as the main character, his wife Daphne and his muse, Mary. Fox, a writer, cannot help killing off the heroines of his stories. Things take an unexpected turn when Mary challenges Mr. Fox to join her in stories of their own devising; and in different times and places, the two of them seek each other, find each other, thwart each other, and try to stay together, even when the roles they inhabit seem to forbid it. Meanwhile, Daphne becomes convinced that her husband is having an affair, and finds her way into Mary and Mr. Fox's game.
Open City (by Teju Cole)
Another New York Times selection for 2011 Notable Books of the Year, Teju Cole's Open City , released in January 2011 by Random House, is about a young man's reflections on his life and the world around him. Julius, the man at the center of this story, is a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency in New York. He has recently broken up with his girl friend, and to fill the void, he wanders aimlessly along the streets of New York. His walks give him the opportunity to reflect on his relationships, his past, his present.
Using up what is left of his vacation time, Julius leaves New York, heading out to Europe, and then on to Nigeria, before returning to New York. Throughout his travels, he encounters many people, and makes new friends.
Half-Blood Blues (by Esi Edugyan)
Born in Canada to Ghanaian immigrant parents, Esi Edugyan was a 2011 Man Booker Prize finalist and won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada's biggest literary prize, beating a formidable shortlist that included Michael Ondaatje. Her award winning book, Half-Blood Blues is narrated by Sid Griffiths, an African-American jazz musician, who travels to Germany in 1952 to attend the premiere of a documentary about Hieronymus Falk, a black trumpet player and jazz legend, forbidden to play by the Nazis. Arrested by the Nazis, Falk is never heard from again. Griffiths finds himself confronting the memories, mixed emotions and trauma of being a black musician in Hitler's Germany.
Memoirs of a Porcupine (by Alain Mabanckou)
Alain Mabanckou's Memoirs of a Porcupine was originally written in French back in 2006 and only translated into English this year. The English translation, published in May 2011 by Serpent's Tail, is a hilarious novel depicting Mabanckou at his best.
Mabanckou brilliantly wraps the vibrant rhythm of the African oral tradition in a corrosive and sarcastic style. His pulsating, hard-headed writing – the book does not count a single full stop – mixed with a plot worthy of the best crime fiction, results in a true "beat" that leaves its reader breathless and dazzled.
"Mabanckou writes with an originality that makes you smell Africa in almost every line," observes Hadrien Diez, who reviewed Memoirs of a Porcupine for the Africa Book Club.
The Civilized World (by Susi Wyss)
As a child, Susi Wyss spent three years in Africa living in the Ivory Coast with her parents. Years later, she returned to the continent as a health worker, visiting and working in more than a dozen African countries over a 16 year period. Now back in the US, Wyss has written a book whose portrayal of Africa is a culmination of her experiences.
What comes across in The Civilized World, is a thoughtful portrayal of Africa, where the characters, African and non-African, each have a perspective on Africa to share and a story to tell about their world. Her book is in many respects a call to look beyond traditional portrayals of the continent.
Blackbird (by Jude Dibia)
Published by Jalaa Writers' Collective a Nigerian author-owned publishing group, Blackbird takes a look at Nigerian society, drawing out its contradictions.
Nduesoh, who is obsessed with her ugliness, succeeds in gaining the attention of Edward, a rich white man, who becomes her husband. However, she is only respected as Mrs Wood, not as an African. On the other hand, Maya, the beautiful one, gets married to Omoniyi, a poor Yoruba man with prospects (that life kills). Maya is literarily the crayfish bent by her hapless condition. However, in spite of their class, colour and race, they all meet on the plane of love, lust, self-protection, revenge, jealousy and betrayal.
What the Day Owes the Night (by Yasmina Khadra)
In What the Day Owes the Night, Yasmina Khadra has written a majestic novel about Algeria, and his is an amazing story that highlights the terrible rift between lovers, family and friends that are loyal to the same country. Younes, the narrator, is, despite his conflicting character, both interesting and likeable. Notwithstanding, many readers will find themselves by turn frustrated at some of the poor decisions he makes.
Anatomy of a Disappearance (by Hisham Matar)
In Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance (published by The Dial Press in August 2011), we meet Nuri, a young boy who has lost his mother. It seems that nothing will fill the emptiness that her strange death leaves behind in the Cairo apartment he shares with his father. Until they meet Mona, sitting in her yellow swimsuit by the pool of the Magda Marina hotel. As soon as Nuri sees her, the rest of the world vanishes. But it is Nuri's father with whom Mona falls in love and whom she eventually marries. And their happiness consumes Nuri to the point where he wishes his father would disappear.
However, when his father, long a dissident in exile from his homeland, is taken under mysterious circumstances, the world that Nuri and his stepmother share is shattered by events beyond their control, they begin to realize how little they knew about the man they both loved.
Oil on Water (by Helon Habila)
Published in May 2011 by W. W. Norton & Company, Helon Habila's new novel, Oil on Water, writes our reviewer, Friederike Knabe, "is a confidently crafted and absorbing, in parts totally gripping, chronicle of human ambitions, tragedies and failures, but also of love, friendship and perseverance of the human spirit."
Evoking the rich and beautiful yet fragile environment of the Delta, that is slowly being devastated by the greed for oil and money, Habila perceptively guides his different narrative strands into a poignant story that is profoundly personal even where he raises broader political and societal concerns
Happiness is a Four Letter Word (Cynthia Jele)
South African author, Cynthia Jele's, Happiness is a Four-Letter Word won the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Africa region in the "Best First Book" category.
Her book is a story celebrating female friendships. The four main characters – Nandi, Zaza, Tumi and Princess – are friends living in today's Johannesburg. Like any other metropolis, the pace of life is fast and the social expectations high. But the four friends have each other.
Dust Devils (Roger Smith)
For true fans of crime fiction, Roger Smith needs no introduction. And if you read his last book, Wake Up Dead, writes Don Makatile, "you'd most likely have been sufficiently moved to await his next book."
Dust Devils, released in September 2011 by Serpent's Tail, indeed, contends for space with the other offerings for the best book of 2011. Smith serves a tale of blood and more as political heavyweights in the KwaZulu/Natal province fight a turf war. The lead character Inja Moses Mazibuko is as blood-thirsty as the pages of a book can allow.
Short Story Collections
The Granta Book of the African Short Story (edited by Helon Habila)
Collected and introduced by award winning Nigerian author, Helon Habila, this new anthology, released in November 2011, is an outstanding and wide-ranging rich smorgasbord of stories by twenty six writers from nineteen countries all across Africa. The stories are written in English or translated from French, Portuguese or Arabic. Contributing authors include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Patrick Nganang, and Binyavanga Wainaina.
African Pens 2011
African Pens 2011: New Writing from Southern Africa is an anthology of 22 short stories picked by the inimitable JM Coetzee, a nobel literature prize winner, and author of the 1999 Man Booker prize winning novel, Disgrace.
The collection published by Jacana Media, brings together the winning stories and finalists from the 2011 PEN/Studzinski Literary Awards, which were announced in May 2011.
African Delights (by Siphiwo Mahala)
Anthologies like African Delights remind us that the short story form is far from dead. Siphiwo Mahala, who says he's been writing in this form since his two short stories were published in the Rhodes University journal Aerial in 2001, is no doubt an emerging master at this craft. Mahala has a knack for weaving an idea into a number of tributaries feeding from one another. In this four part collection of stories, published in September 2011 by Jacana Media, Mahala takes us across time and space in modern day South Africa.
And that ladies and gentlemen is our 2011 Africa Books of the Year list. Do let us know what you think, and, if you know of a book that should have made the cut, tell us in the comment section below.
Special thanks to our team of reviewers who contributed to this post – Dianah Ninsiima, Friederike Knabe, Oriyomi Adebare, Sarah Norman, Hadrien Diez, Don Makatile, and Alan Mwesiga.
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Filed Under: Editor's Picks Tagged With: Africa Book Club 2011 Books of the Year
About Daniel Musiitwa
Daniel Musiitwa has lived and worked in numerous African countries. An avid reader, he maintains a keen interest in Africa, and started the Africa Book Club blog as a space to promote interest in African writing.
Hi Daniel
Highly recommend the memoir "No One's Son" by Tewodros Fekadu for consideration on your 2012 Book of the Year list. There are reviews on Amazon and his Facebook page is: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tewodros-Fekadu/154709086819?ref=tn_tnmn. His website is http://www.noonesson.com. Heart warming and inspirational story. Worth a look.


What follows is an edited transcript of my conversation with Sam Hammond.
Petersen: My guest today is Sam Hammond. He's a policy analyst at the Niskanen Center. Sam, welcome to Economics Detective Radio.
Petersen: Our topic today is supersonic air travel.
Sam has written an article titled "Make America Boom Again" along with co-author Eli Dourado which revisits the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's ban on supersonic flight over the United States. So Sam let's start at the very start. Let's start by talking about the history of flight. How do we get from the Wright brothers to supersonic flight?
Hammond: Well I think the most notable thing about the early history of aviation is how quickly and how rapidly we innovated. So the Wright brothers flew their initial voyage, their milestone flight in 1903 at seven miles per hour and within forty years we were already breaking the speed of sound. And actually very shortly after that not only were we breaking the speed of sound within military jets but we were on the cusp of commercializing it through the Concorde.
So, what characterizes the early history of aviation is really rapid innovation. Part of that was driven by obviously two world wars but also that trickled out and percolated into the commercial space. That brings us to today. So in the progress that we made in air speeds in the first say 40 to 50 years of manned flight, we've actually regressed since then.
Petersen: Okay, so the Concorde starts flying in I believe it's 1969 and the subject of your paper---the ban brought in by the F.A.A. on supersonic travel over the United States---comes in just four years later in 1973. So what happened in that four-year period? How did we go from rapidly advancing to banning what was at the time the latest technology?
Hammond: It really began in the 60's. Everyone was seeing the progress that was being made in supersonic aircraft. And it was widely appreciated that it was only a matter of time before it would be commercialized. And there was actually a bit of a race going on between European countries and America of who would develop the first and the best supersonic jet. Because at the time, you know, this is way before Reagan deregulated the airlines. So these were the national projects almost akin to the space race.
So in the 60's the F.A.A. and NASA began investigating whether supersonic airplanes could fly overland, because obviously they had them already in the form of military jets. And so they conducted a number of tests. One of the most important and famous tests was the test over Oklahoma City. So in 1964 the F.A.A. began a test over Oklahoma City where supersonic jets---military jets---would fly over the city eight times per day for six months continuously. And these were just regular old military jets, nothing about them was designed to mitigate the sonic boom. So eight times a day people in Oklahoma were hearing the sonic boom. It was rattling their windows. And at the end of it---at the end of the six-month period---even though about 75% of the people they asked said that they could tolerate the booms indefinitely, there were tens of thousands of complaints. And that's when the F.A.A. examined the complaints and rejected the vast majority of them as spurious. And that led to this huge public backlash.
And so that was picked up by a guy named Richard Wiggs who founded the Anti-Concorde project. So the Concorde was being developed in the 60's by a partnership between France and Britain and it sort of represented the frontier of technology---not just aviation technology but technology in total---and Richard Wiggs had this view of the environment and technology as being in conflict. So he believed that as technology advances, we lose touch with our natural environment. And he was actually one of the most innovative, maverick early environmental activists. They're commonplace today but he was actually a pioneer.
And so he took the complaints that occurred in Oklahoma City and his philosophy of environment and technology in conflict and began one of the most successful environmental NIMBY campaigns in history. He organized academics, he organized the residential associations near airports. He took out full-page ads in The New York Times. He got people to call their congress people. And so even though this was all becoming organized even before the Concorde was in use in 1973, it persuaded the F.A.A. and Congress to institute a ban on supersonic flying overland. So there is no jurisdiction over the ocean of course, so when the Concorde eventually came out it was able to fly over the ocean. This was their attempt to handicap the Concorde's success.
Hammond: This was a different time.
Petersen: Yes, so 1960s! To just experiment on an entire city against their will and just see what happens.
Hammond: Yeah, I mean, any student of US history knows that our toleration for human experimentation has gone down quite a bit from the 60's and 70's. And if anything, flying a supersonic plane over a city was probably one of the least egregious things that was going on at the time.
Petersen: Yeah well, tell me about sonic booms. I'm not a physicist so use small words.
Hammond: Okay. So, if you've ever seen a speedboat drive through the water, it creates a wake in its path. And the same thing happens with planes only it's air. And air is in three dimensions so there's a cone, a wave that goes past an airplane as it flies through the air displacing the air in front of it, pushing it aside. But of course the speed of sound---and we get the concept of the speed of sound because sound is moving through air and so sound can only move as fast as air can move---and so when you approach the speed of sound you're pushing the air in front of the plane. You're pushing it, basically compressing against the air that's already there and so you reach this thing called the sound barrier where upon crossing the sound barrier you produce a shock wave where the air is becoming compacted and compacted and compacted and basically it's like the waves are on top of each other. And that creates a shockwave which radiates around the airplane and will reach the ground as this loud booming noise.
Petersen: So it's not only loud---I've noticed in your paper---some people said it could break windows or damage buildings.
Hammond: Right. So a lot of this goes back to---again---the Oklahoma City experiments where the fighter jets were flown over the city eight times a day. Sonic booms are shockwaves. There is no limit to how powerful a shockwave can be. So in principle sonic booms can break windows. In practice, they are about two pounds per square foot.
This is this what the Concorde was approximately. And two pounds per square foot of air pressure is pretty weak. There were studies done in the 70's when the Concorde became active. And they found that it could do damage to old Civil War architecture and stuff like that and if you already had a window that had damage it could crack that window. But for practical purposes, buildings can withstand up to 11 pounds per square foot pressure before experiencing damage---Nasa's tested that extensively.
So nonetheless the myth propagated in part because there were people in Oklahoma who claimed that their plaster cracked or that their windows broke. And so when the F.A.A. investigated it and basically threw out most of the claims as not being credible, that caused a big backlash and also caused a huge public relations disaster for the F.A.A. and for supersonic overland more generally and created this myth that it's very easy for a sonic boom to break their window. It's just not.
Petersen: So the ban applies just over the United States. How do we know that that is what has stopped the progress of supersonic flight? After all, you'd think that there's the whole rest of the world and maybe transatlantic or transpacific flights could sustain a supersonic aviation industry?
Hammond: So, there's a lot of variables going on. First of all---as I mentioned earlier---all the supersonic projects up to this point---except the Concorde---were abject failures. The US had one called the Boeing 2707. It just never got off the ground, in fact, in the industry aerospace engineers have a term for this. It's called a "boomdoggle"---a play on boondoggle---because countries that tried to produce a supersonic jet just ended up pouring literally billions of dollars down the drain.
And you can't blame that on supersonic per se. That's a failure of central planning. I would say the same thing with the Concorde. The Concorde flew for 27 years. And at times it made money but you have to remember it was never designed with any commercial intent. It was designed to be a commercial airplane but it had no market testing. It was mostly a piece of a diplomatic or political gambit that Britain was using to try to get into the European Common Market.
And so when Kennedy proposed the 2707 as a competitor, he also didn't do market tests or see what the demand was, he looked at the Concorde which sat about 100 passengers and said we need to do better than France so let's make it 300 passengers. And instead of flying at Mach two---twice the speed of sound---let's fly at Mach three---three times the speed of sound---so it was just the one-upmanship of nations, had nothing to do with whether it was market viable.
And so the case I make is that, if you had a private sector in airplanes---which at the time we didn't really, at least in supersonic, it was all government driven---the first entry point, the natural entry point would be some kind of smaller business-jet. Because frankly if you don't know which routes are going to demand the most passengers you want to start small. You don't want to jump right to a 300-seat passenger jet. The Concorde was only 100 seats, as I said, and it routinely had trouble filling its cabin.
But the thing with business jets---and there have been about half a dozen rigorous market analyses done in the last ten years that have found there is a demand for supersonic business jets---the thing about business jets though is they fly overland about 75% of the time. You're going from regional airports to regional airports.
And so if the natural entry point to sort of begin on the supersonic learning curve, learning which routes have the most to manned is a smaller business jet, you're going to have to begin by flying overland. And then once you discover which routes will bear more people you can expand the capacity of the airplane and ultimately I think a private sector would work its way up to having a 100- to 300-seat passenger jet once it had established that the demand existed. And also big part of that is driving down costs, of course. The Concorde was the Concorde it never iterated it. The first model was the last model.
In commercial aviation more generally in subsonic aviation we've learned over time how to reduce costs. Even though we fly a slower today than we did 50 years ago, subsonic commercial airplanes are vastly more efficient and we've achieved that efficiency because we've learned over time.
Petersen: Okay, so the natural entry point is maybe carrying businessmen between New York and L.A. say, but that's illegal. And so the industry isn't able to sort of clear that hurdle. Is that basically what you're saying?
Hammond: Yeah, I mean if you have a 12-person business jet. First of all, it's difficult to get a jet that small to have the range to even go across the ocean. You know you wouldn't necessarily being going from coast to coast in a small business jet right away. You might be going from New York to Houston, or something like that. The point is that you don't know. You don't know which routes are going to bear fruit, a priori.
The Concorde flew between France and Britain and the U.S., but It also had roots into the Caribbean and lot of those routes have ended up being canceled in the 80's in part because they just kept losing money, but it was because they had tried to plan it all out a priori, as if they could just deduce which routes would make money.
I don't trust that model. I think you have to begin by building something small that you know will meet demand and then expanding from that. And the most important part about this is there's open a confluence of technology in just the last 20 years. I have no illusions that supersonic business jets would have been a thing, say, in 1990. I think a lot of this is a recent phenomenon that's why supersonic overland is an idea whose time has come. There's just been such a breakthrough in technology, in reducing the intensity of sonic booms. And that has been really the biggest hurdle is getting the intensity of sonic booms to a level where people will tolerate it.
Petersen: Right. So it seems like the F.A.A., when they banned supersonic flight, the concern was noise but they banned speed as sort of a proxy for noise. But what you're saying is that's a bad proxy you can have the speed without the noise.
Hammond: Exactly. So it was an overreaction. What we advocate in our paper and at supersonicmyths.com is to replace the ban with a reasonable noise standard. Subsonic airplanes already adhere to a variety of noise standards, noise rules. If the issue is really noise---and we believe the issue is basically noise---the F.A.A. should just set a noise standard, say, 80 decibels, something like that, that would be like a lawnmower going by your house. And then let the market try to get below that line. The F.A.A. stance right now is that it will set a noise rule once it sees a supersonic airplane demonstrate that it can go below the noise that it finds acceptable. But it has never stated what it will find acceptable. So it's a sort of reverse order of operations where the F.A.A. wants to hear something that is quiet enough before telling us what is quiet enough.
Petersen: And if you're Boeing and you're going to invest millions of dollars building an aircraft that does 80 decibels and the F.A.A. says 'not quiet enough' you're out millions of dollars.
Hammond: That's right. And so today the biggest and really only large quiet supersonic project is still within NASA. NASA has been working on quiet supersonic technology pretty much continuously since the mid 80's under a variety of different project titles. And they're the only ones who are able to do it because it's federal money. They have no skin in the game. They do use contracts with, say, Lockheed. But those are still federal contracts. We would like to see more competition in this space.
NASA is firm in its belief that a quiet supersonic jet is possible as early as 2020. How much sooner would we have gotten to that if we had the private sector involved?
Petersen: Almost certainly much sooner. If we look at private space companies like Space X, they're an order of magnitude cheaper than NASA. They're much more efficient and able to launch rockets into space for a fraction of the cost that NASA has. So, maybe if we use that as our model, then however much NASA has spent on developing supersonic, divide that by ten and maybe that's what the private sector might cost.
Hammond: Could very well be. The other thing is that, even today, NASA's effort is directed at the big passenger jets. And part of that is out of this democratic aspiration. They're the government, so they're trying to build something that the everyman could ride. But it's pretty common in new technologies for the early additions or for the early adopters to be of a sort of luxury class.
You can think about Tesla's business model where they begin with a roadster and a luxury car---which is really only affordable to millionaires and the very wealthy---with the game plan that they're going to have a low volume high profit or high revenue car and reinvest those profits back into developing cheaper and cheaper versions until they get to a mass market version.
We argue that that's exactly how the supersonic learning curve probably works as well. You want to begin with business jets which will of course be a luxury flying supersonic getting from New York to L.A. in two hours instead of five or six. It is worth it to some people. But those early models will of course be expensive. It will be expensive to ride not just because it's new technology and we haven't figured out how to drive down costs, but because a lower capacity means you're dividing the cost by fewer people. But over time those companies can reinvest, build bigger designs and drive down costs until you get to the point where virtually anyone can afford it.
The company Boom, which is developing a supersonic jet for over the ocean, is projecting to drive their costs down to about $5,000 a ticket to go across the Atlantic, which is on par with business-class and first-class tickets. So they're projecting that for their own costs. It could very well be the case that that technology and that those cost estimates are probably similar for first models in the over-land market as well. And that's a far cry from the Concorde which cost about $20,000 per flight. So going from $20,000 a ticket to $5,000, that's what this one company is projecting and it's only their first model.
Petersen: Right. So if something like Tesla cars or cell phones had to get permission through the political process when they were being developed, then maybe someone in the 90's would have said "Why should we allow cell phones if only rich people are going to use them?" And in the 90's they might have been right. But of course now we all have cell phones, and I guess what you're saying is in the 2020s or the 2030s we might all be flying at supersonic speeds when we go on our vacation.
Hammond: I believe that. Elon Musk, in his Hyperloop paper, discusses the most efficient way of getting from point A to point B. And he argues in that paper---it's sort of an offhand comment he makes---but he suspects that for any city pair that's over 900 miles apart the most efficient way of getting from that city to the other city is supersonic.
Petersen: So that's most pairs of big cities.
Hammond: Not just most pairs of big cities but the average flight distance, not from where the passenger is starting to where he's going, but the average takeoff to landing for a passenger plane is about 900 miles. So that suggests that if that is an efficient distance for supersonic, the average flight could be flown efficiently at supersonic.
Petersen: One issue that your paper goes into is that some people have alleged that supersonic aircraft---because they fly very high---might damage the ozone layer. Is there anything to that?
Hammond: I won't say there's nothing to it, but it's been vastly overstated. I'll put it that way. This goes back again to the Concorde and the early environmental movement's objections to it. At the time the understanding of atmospheric science was very very poor compared to today and there were concerns that because the emissions from an aircraft include nitrogen oxides---which are a class of molecules that will bind with oxygen in the atmosphere to destroy ozone---that because the Concorde flew so close to the stratosphere---which is where the ozone layer begins---that these emissions could lead to the depletion of ozone.
That's been rejected. The most alarmist versions of it were rejected. In the 70's people were claiming that if the Concorde or a fleet of Concordes were permitted to fly that we'd see catastrophic ozone collapse. That did not come to fruition obviously, the Concorde flew for 27 years. More recent studies now that we have large models of the atmosphere, simulated models of the atmosphere, have determined that a supersonic aircraft flying within 50 to 60,000 feet should in theory be ozone neutral. The reason is because there's actually this countervailing effect where a little bit lower in the atmosphere the nitrogen oxides actually produce ozone, and a little bit above in the stratosphere it depletes ozone. And if you're flying right on that line they roughly cancel out.
Petersen: Okay. There were some fears in the 80's and 90's of other things we're doing seriously damaging the ozone layer. But was that a much larger threat than supersonic flight?
Hammond: Well it was just a different sort of threat. There are different emissions in aerosols and so forth, CFCs. But out of the concern for the ozone in the 90's we got the Montreal Protocol and the Montreal Protocol is an international agreement to control the emissions of things that will deplete ozone and as supersonic makes its comeback, they will have to be fully compliant with those protocols.
I still recommend that going forward there should be more research into this. Even since the Concorde retired, we have better models of the atmosphere and I'm sure there's actually teams that NASA and MIT that are studying this right now.
Petersen: It can't hurt to look into it. But it seems like once something is banned or, you know, once the government sort of gets its hands on it and says "we're not so sure about this" we become incredibly risk-averse, we look at every possible downside and ignore the huge upside of just having a whole other industry and all that consumer surplus that you get from having an entire market that wasn't there before.
Hammond: What I would say is the state of knowledge right now with respect to supersonic and ozone is well established enough to not worry. The catastrophic versions of the concerns have been utterly rejected. Even the more modest versions of it are called into question by the fact that, there seems to be this band around the around 60,000 to 50,000 feet where supersonic emissions are ozone neutral. There, of course, should be more study but we don't have to wait for those studies. The studies we already have are sufficient to suggest that we shouldn't be waiting for more data. We already have enough data to begin today.
Petersen: It seems like there are two models of innovation. At one extreme end is the development of new drugs, where we have years upon years of vetting and studies and you have to comply with many requirements before you can get your new drug on the market and it costs billions of dollars. Adds a lot to the price of developing new medicine. And then there's the other model where somebody just makes something and we start using it. And maybe we worry about the implications, but by the time anyone thinks that "hey maybe this is a bad idea" it's already been universally adopted.
So something like Facebook, where we were all already on Facebook before people started complaining "Hey what if this is ruining our social interactions or something?"
Hammond: Or maybe all the fake news sites. Destroying democracy.
Petersen: Yeah that's topical right? Facebook is now worried about its role as one of the main places young people get their news, or a lot of people get their news, and some things go viral that are not true or and might be misleading and might affect, say, the outcome of elections.
Hammond: Apropos of Facebook and that topic, myths and misconceptions and viral falsehoods and urban legends, those are not new phenomena. That's why I had to create supersonicmyths.com. Because around supersonic, there's just a lot of misconception because there are a lot of people who think they're experts on the Concorde and think that the Concorde proves that supersonic is not economically viable. But they don't really understand that well.
Petersen: Right and you could use the same sort of logic to say, "Look how costly the moon landing was. It's clearly impossible at that cost for any kind of space tourism or space commerce to be economically viable." But the issue is that the moon landing was very very expensive, but it was run by the U.S. government which tends to make all its activities very expensive. A future space tourism company might be much much cheaper and we just don't know until we see it, how much cheaper.
Hammond: So I guess I should just comment a little bit on what the new technologies are that have made supersonic overland viable. And they really break down to three: first engines---jet engines---have become a way more powerful, way more efficient. They're way more capable in every way. So, the Concorde used an afterburner on its engine, which means upon takeoff it basically dumped kerosene and lit it on fire and that's why if you watch old videos of the Concorde taking off you see this trail of black smoke coming up behind it. That's the afterburner. Incredibly fuel inefficient, you're just burning fuel. This is what it needed at the time to get the extra boost, to get into the air, because it had to climb to 60,000 feet---which takes quite a bit of energy.
Today we have vastly superior engines. In fact, most subsonic aircraft, most passenger planes that you would fly in any consumer flight are capable of going supersonic. They have a top speed which is subsonic but if you put them in overdrive you can go supersonic and in fact, the company I mentioned earlier---Boom---is using off-the-shelf engines to reach its max speed.
Second is carbon fiber. So, the shape and the aerodynamics of shape matter a whole lot to supersonic and supersonic overland. The way we reduce booms is by affecting or altering the airfoil around the airplane. So, essentially you can use the shape of the airplane to modify the waves and smooth the waves out. So you don't have this like sudden shock and sudden dip. Instead, you have sort of this gradual rise and fall. And mostly when the human ear detects loudness what it's detecting is suddenness. So you can dramatically reduce the perception of loudness by modifying that airwave and you do that by modifying shape. Most planes are constructed of aluminum, which you can shape reasonably, but not nearly as much as carbon fiber and carbon fiber has become basically a commodity in recent years. It means basically any shape you want is incredibly cheap and incredibly strong.
if you want to design and test a prototype for a supersonic aircraft you would have to literally build a model and rent a wind tunnel, and then you'd have to have instruments try to imperfectly measure how the wind is moving around the aircraft. That is incredibly costly. So, computer simulation has really democratized. Some of the researchers who've done work on this are just grad students. They have software engineering expertise and they construct algorithms that will search through the space of all possible aircraft designs and try to find the one shape that reduces the sonic boom the best. And then because we have carbon fiber we can go and pour that shape and have the exact shape we want.
Petersen: So it used to be, not only did you need the air tunnel but you had to---if you wanted to test 100 wing shapes---you had to physically build 100 wings. Now you tell a computer "here's 100 wing shapes," hit compile, come back the next morning and you have your simulated sound profiles?
Hammond: It's actually even cooler than that. Instead you tell the program what you're looking for, and what you're looking for is a shape that will reduce the sonic boom to whatever level you're aiming for. Basically you give it an objective and then instead of trying to design 100 designs and let it test 100 designs, you give it an objective and then it searches through literally hundreds of thousands of designs that it evolves on its own. Some of these algorithms are genetic in nature, so they evolve like biology evolves and they try to go down paths and try to find exactly what shape reduces or hits the objective. And you can have multiple objectives. You can even include the objective of low sonic boom, but you can also have that tempered by the objective of efficiency---fuel efficiency.
Shape and size obviously you'd want to put into the objective function. We don't want this airplane to be ten miles long. It happened to be the case that the longer, more slender aircraft cut through the air better but a computer doesn't know on its own that a ten-mile long airplane is not feasible. So you basically give it multiple objectives and you hit play and you let the algorithm do its work. And it can literally iterate through hundreds and hundreds of thousands of designs.
Petersen: And this is achievable by grad students just with software that is available, or you can get on a grad student budget?
Hammond: Well, I imagine these are big research projects. They have university backing and industry does that too. But it's a single fixed cost instead of a repeated variable cost of having to rent a wind tunnel every single time you want to test.
Petersen: So it sounds like despite the fact that there's been a supersonic ban and despite the fact that there is no supersonic industry, or no supersonic commercial flights going on in the world today, we still had advancement, but it's been mostly on the technology side, on the theoretical side. What we haven't seen is actual supersonic flights and testing the water, testing the market. I saw in your paper that you go through some estimates of the potential size of the supersonic market. Do you want to talk through some of those?
Hammond: Sure. There has been by my count seven market analyses. Most of them from the mid-2000s till today. The estimates range from 180 supersonic business jets to over 600. So, these are companies like Gulfstream Aerospace, which is a leading business-jet manufacturer. They've done actually two or three of these market analyses. And they foresee up to 350 units for just themselves. So 350 business jets that they could produce over ten years. That is quite a demand.
Petersen: And they're looking at things like whose opportunity cost of their time is high enough that they would pay maybe a few thousand extra dollars, maybe several thousand in order to save a few hours. And right now there are C.E.O.s, there are wealthy people who maybe live in the United Arab Emirates but want to commute to New York and right now that means sitting on a plane for---gosh I don't even know---it would be like 15 hours or something. If it could be six hours, for most of us, we might prefer to sit on a plane longer and pay significantly less. But if your time's really valuable, if you run a multi-million-dollar company, it really can be worth it to save some of your time, even at a high cost.
Hammond: Of course it's possible if you had supersonic overland to leave New York and go to London and then come back to New York on the same day. There are people who would love to do that. I think what gets missed in this it's not just about going faster for its own sake. This makes the world smaller, it makes you rethink travel. So in addition to these American analyses, there have also been some surveys. One survey did a survey of business jet operators and importantly they asked them to basically state an estimate from zero to 100 what the likelihood is that they would buy a supersonic business jet if they could. When they asked that under the condition that there is still an overland ban the number was zero, so zero percent of people. The average person said that there was zero chance they'd buy a supersonic business jet if they can't fly overland but in the case that the ban is lifted, that number jumps to 50%. So half of the businesses that were surveyed would see a chance.
Petersen: That's further evidence that it's not just that supersonic is unviable, it's that this legal restriction is in a very important market which is flying over the United States. That's what's killing the supersonic industry.
One other the thing I saw on your website was, you talk about the tradeoff between noise and fuel efficiency in the context of airport noise restrictions. Could you tell me, how does that tradeoff work?
Hammond: I think that one of the biggest barriers to the F.A.A. is the issue of airport noise. The F.A.A. has worked with I.K.O. and I.K.O is the UN's body who deals with aviation standards. They've worked for literally decades to try to ramp up the stringency of noise around airports and they're pretty proud of what they've accomplished. If you live near an airport today it's a much quieter experience than it would have been 20, 30, even 40 years ago.
But this comes with a tradeoff. The way aircraft reduce noise is they have a bypass ratio. So at the extreme, you have a turbo-jet, which means all the air passes through the jet and then you have jets which bypass air around the jet. So, you have the jet in the center and that's what's pushing, propelling the plane forward. But then you also bypass air around the jet to basically insulate the noise. But that comes with a tradeoff. So the more air you bypass, the quieter it will be, but also the more fuel and the less thrust you get. And it happens with supersonic because you're going from sea level to 60,000 feet potentially, you actually have to really take off at a steep angle and you have to push up. You have to really get up high, basically, and so you could make the argument that we should tolerate slightly lower airport noise standards for supersonic at first, so they can use lower bypass ratio engines and therefore less fuel when they're making their incline.
Petersen: So there's another paper from Mercatus, also written by your co-author Eli Dourado, and that one talks about the number of airport noise complaints that come from a really small concentrated number of households. I found that very funny.
Just how concentrated are the airline airport noise complaints?
Hammond: Let me say first that what we recommend for airport noise standards is stage three noise standards, which are what we currently use. So, currently if you live near an airport and you see a plane taking off and you can hear it slightly, that's the stage three noise standard. We're advocating that supersonic abide by that noise standard. That noise standard is being phased out for stage four and later stage five, which will be even stricter. So we're not saying anything like "Oh we should let planes be super noisy," we're saying "let supersonic planes be as noisy as the ones that we currently have taking off, and just give them a bit of a window before they're phased into these newer, more stringent noise standards that are coming down the pipeline."
Eli's work with Raymond Russell, they found an amazing data set that includes records of who is making noise complaints, airport noise complaints. And they have them by airport and the astonishing thing they find is that these airports are getting sometimes tens of thousands of noise complaints every year but when they drill down into the data, it is just a handful of people making all the complaints.
So a few examples. I live near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and in 2015 they had 8,760 noise complaints. Two individuals at one D.C. residents accounted for 6,852 of those complaints. So, two people in one building accounted for 78% of the complaints. They have a report called "Airport Noise NIMBYism: An Empirical Investigation" where they go through all the airports that have this data and they find evidence of the sort of concentration of complainers at every single airport. So, it's a pretty surprising thing and I think it's important to get this information out there because as we know from when the Concorde was banned overland, residents' associations are a pretty powerful group to mobilize in opposition to something like this, and Congress people have the perception that---like San Francisco in 2015 had almost 900,000 those complaints to San Francisco International Airport. These are constituents, we want to reduce noise this is obviously something they care about. But in fact, in San Francisco's case, only 53 individuals accounted for 25,000 of the complaints. And those 25,000 were all during a single month---the month of October---which meant that the average person was making 477 calls per person. So, 30 days in a month, that's a lot of calls every single day. And this is San Francisco so wouldn't surprise me if there were some enterprising software developers who figured out a way to make complaints automatically.
Petersen: So robot calls. It might be crazy people calling in a complaint every single time they hear an airplane, or it might be clever people robotically calling in a complaint every time there's an airplane. Except that I guess they didn't anticipate that someone would notice that all these calls were coming from the same location which kind of undermines their objective which would be to reduce noise in those areas.
Of course, if you bought your house after the airport was already there making noise then economics says that that noise should already be priced into the value of the house. The person who loses is the person whose house is next to an empty lot and then the government announces "Hey we're going to build an airport here." You'd expect the change in home prices to happen immediately when that's announced and then every following owner has already accepted that cost and they've had cheaper real estate prices as a result. So, if you buy a house next to the airport and then try to pressure the airport to make less noise you're sort of trying to boost your property value when you already paid a discounted rate. You are already compensated for accepting that noise.
Hammond: And not only that. But when people have done rigorous cost-benefit analyses of U.S. aviation noise standards and they consistently find that the costs of making airplanes less efficient on takeoff is greater than alternatives which include creative land use policies, like building in barriers that block sound near communities and stuff like that. So, if you have a community living very close to an airport, one alternative is to set global standards which say airplanes are to fly less efficiently and make less noise, or you build a wall. You build up a barrier or some insulation to protect the community from the noise. But the main point of this study that Eli and Raymond did---which by the way, if I remember this correct, is Mercatus's most downloaded paper in history---the main point is that we shouldn't be basing innovation policy, particularly something that can have very high impact, on a few crazy people and enterprising robot callers.
Petersen: People who are affected by having less efficient aircraft, having slower aircraft, more expensive air travel just so outnumber the small number of people who live near airports. And you could get them all double-ply windows and help make their houses more soundproof. Probably much cheaper than hamstringing the entire airline industry.
Hammond: Absolutely. I just want to recapitulate some things. Supersonic overland is today feasible. It can be economical, there are companies chomping at the bit to try to develop something that will be quiet and affordable. The only thing standing in their way is the F.A.A. and a public perception that the Concorde proved that supersonic is not viable. The F.A.A. could act today, it could issue a noise standard and allow developers to shoot for that standard. Even if a bill is passed today, what the F.A.A. wants to do is coordinate internationally with I.K.O. and I.K.O. is the UN body that---it's not a regulator---sets standards.
The F.A.A. has a prominent role in guiding us towards standards, but it's an incredibly slow process. I.K.O meets every three years. If the F.A.A. were told to remove the ban tomorrow and they wanted to coordinate internationally, would mean we have to wait about three years. I.K.O. is meeting this year, obviously they're not going to talk about it this year---the agenda is all set. So they're going to be talking about it three years from now and then they'll be finalizing those rules three years from then. And then the F.A.A. will take those rules, propagate them globally and then we will have another two or three year regulating period where there's a notice and comment and everything else.
So we're talking about ten years just to change this stupid ban that is obsolete and I think that speaks to a more fundamental problem in U.S. policy and regulation, which is, we create these massive bottlenecks. And it's no surprise that it happens to an idea that is such a no-brainer, like creating a noise rule for supersonic instead of a ban. You can find other examples in every other industry of every other emerging technology, where there are these obsolete rules that are getting in the way of better, more efficient, more affordable, faster technology. And even if they can be rolled out tomorrow, have to go through at times a decadal process of approval. So, I think it's no wonder that productivity innovation seems to be at a historical low.
Petersen: My guest today has been Sam Hammond. Sam, thanks for being part of Economics Detective Radio.


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text:
A Promising Direction for G8 Leadership
Rose Gottemoeller
Summary: At the close of the Gleneagles Summit this week, Russia will take over leadership of the Group of Eight, the "super club" of countries that in theory are driving the world economy and political system.
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At the close of the Gleneagles Summit this week, Russia will take over leadership of the Group of Eight, the "super club" of countries that in theory are driving the world economy and political system. Even prior to Moscow's ascension, that notion had been coming in for increasing derision. What about India and China? commentators have been asking. And why should Canada, hardly an international powerhouse, get a seat at the table?
These critical comments have only grown louder at the fact that Moscow will be in the lead for 2006. Russia has been sliding backward in economic reform and democratic development. Its president is consolidating power, its security services are in the ascendant, and its own businessmen are afraid to invest in its future. How can Russia, in these circumstances, lead the G8 through a successful year? Is it not even possible that Russia's leadership of the group will undermine the G8 so that its future will be doomed?
Russia, it must be noted, is not responsible for all of the G8's problems. Trans-Atlantic tension was the serious disease two years ago, and today quarrels among European Union leaders over their abortive attempts to adopt a constitution and a budget are causing the biggest problems. Under these circumstances, the G8 will unlikely have the necessary cohesion and leadership to change. But that is no reason to shut down the group or to forget about its original goal: to provide top-level, focused and committed leadership to resolve issues that threaten the world's progress and security.
So, given Russia's own serious limitations, what can the Kremlin do in the coming year to ensure that the G8 agenda is advanced? We can forget about economic and democratic progress. Russia simply has neither the authority and legitimacy to lead in these areas, nor the international experience, nor the desire. Security is another matter, however, particularly in the urgent fight against nuclear terrorism.
Since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has confronted the threat that the vast Soviet nuclear arsenal -- tens of thousands of warheads and over 1,000 tons of fissile material -- would fall prey to terrorists or rogue leaders intent on acquiring the illicit means to attack countries that they consider to be their enemies. The G8 recognized this threat in 2002 when it formed the Global Partnership Against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction. Russia was its first focus and, at the same time, a founding member.
Over the past three years, Russia has opened its doors to the Global Partnership, making it possible to accelerate the destruction of nuclear attack submarines, speed up the protection of nuclear warheads and materials, and ensure that the vast Soviet stockpiles of chemical weapons are at last being destroyed. Russia is a leader in this effort, despite the fact that it is also an aid recipient. It is working to ensure better management of the projects and to put its own resources on the table.
Beyond the Global Partnership, Russia has taken a surprising international lead on several issues of nuclear security and nonproliferation. For example, the fuel deal that the Federal Atomic Energy Agency has worked out with Iran's Atomic Energy Agency is a first step toward efforts to develop an international system of guaranteed nuclear fuel services. U.S. President George W. Bush argued in an important speech in February 2004 that most countries developing nuclear power should depend on internationally guaranteed supplies of fuel rather than developing their own means to produce fuel and reprocess it.
This is precisely the concern that the international community has had about Iran's efforts to develop fuel enrichment facilities, which has led to serious disagreement with the Tehran government and to threats to refer it to the UN Security Council. Amid this controversy, Russia had established a fuel services deal with Iran, essentially a pilot project for the very international system that Bush proposed.
Another example is the return of highly enriched uranium to safekeeping. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and United States competed to establish research reactors in countries around the world, supplying them with highly enriched uranium fuel, or HEU, that could be used in experiments or to produce medical isotopes -- at the time, very worthy peaceful uses of the atom. In the ensuing years, however, many of these research reactors have become isolated in unstable states or, in some cases, have ended up in conflict zones, where their HEU -- the most convenient material for an amateur bomb-maker -- could fall into the hands of a nuclear terrorist.
Russia and the United States have begun in recent years to redress this dangerous Cold War legacy. Over the past few years, Russia was instrumental in removing nuclear material from the Vinca reactor site in the former Yugoslavia, and from Latvia and Romania. Moscow is currently working with Uzbekistan, the site of recent unrest, to remove HEU from the research reactor in Tashkent.
In each of these cases, Russia has been an important international leader. And so it could be for the G8. If Russia chooses to use its G8 leadership to advance the fight against nuclear terrorism and proliferation, then some important progress can be achieved in the coming year. For one thing, Russia should be able to clear away some of the bureaucratic brushwork that continues to plague implementation of the programs. More importantly, however, it will be able to set the pace and direction of the programs for years to come. Some important goals should be accelerating the pace of HEU "clean-out" from research reactors in vulnerable sites throughout the world. The current 10-year deadline could be cut to four if the Russians pushed for it. This would speed the efforts to keep easy bomb-making material out of the hands of terrorists. Next, it is crucial to establish a model for an international fuel-services program, drawing on the experience of Russia's "pilot project" with Iran. This should include mechanisms for incorporating other international fuel providers into the equation, as well as providing critical assurances, in the form of transparency and other safeguards, to the international community. Finally, the G8 members could develop a clear agenda for action if the six-party talks ever "get to yes" with North Korea. Russia was involved in the early stages of the North Korean program and trained North Korean scientists. Thus it is well-positioned to think in advance about how to work with North Korea on shutting down its nuclear program, decommissioning its sites and engaging its nuclear scientists.
The G8 has many problems to deal with, including questions about its membership and legitimacy at a time when the world is a much different place than when it was created. The G8's problems, however, do not doom Russia to a failed leadership year any more than do Russia's failings as a modern state. If the Kremlin adopts an agenda of critical interest to the whole international community -- nuclear security and the fight against nuclear terrorism --it has a strong potential to succeed.
Rose Gottemoeller is a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 1999-2000, she was the U.S. deputy undersecretary of energy responsible for nonproliferation cooperation with Russia. She contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.
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Colors are an integral part of life as they infuse richness, brightness and meaning to it. The world around is just full of natural hues which makes us appreciate the beauty around us. Colors have a psychological impact on the minds of human being. Although one has no control over the nature colors but they can definitely alter the colors of the house they reside in. Therefore it is of prime importance that people choose the right color for the right room.
Preference of colors majorly depends on personal choice but it should be understood that colors play a major role in conditioning of moods. Home is where one likes to relax and therefore would prefer to create soothing ambience. Although there are no hard and fast rules for choosing colors for destined room but there are certain guidelines which when followed can ensure a perfect living experience.
Earthy shades like hues of red and orange are regarded to be stimulating. They are also considered responsible for increasing a person's appetite hence make the perfect choice for dining rooms. They convey a feeling of warmth hence said to have soothing effect on family relationships. Their versatile nature also makes them a favorite among many. Dining areas blue is considered a no-no color as it is believed that the color tends to suppress the appetite.
The kitchen is a very vital aspect of any household as it the supplier of energy for the family. It is important to have a well built kitchen to ensure safety and comfort to the cook which in return ensures good dishes for the family. Since the kitchen is exposed to various stains therefore light shades shouldn't be preferred. The earthly tones are perfect even for kitchen as it is also majorly about food. Popular kitchen colors are brown, peach and yellow. Even strong and dark colors like brick red, dark hunter green and blue can be used along with neutral shades.
Finally the bedroom which is the room of relaxation and retiring should have colors that reflect peace and tranquility. Therefore the best colors for bedrooms are suppose to be blues, greens and light earth tones. Intense colors such as red, bright yellow should be avoided. Lighter shades of burgundy, peach, coral or pink are also known to create romantic look.
The living space is a vital corner as the whole family comes together to share their tales of the day. Some people like to give it a cozy feel and therefore should opt for dark colors. On the other hand if they want to have the feel of a larger room then lighter shades are quintessential. The most dominating factors while choosing the colors for the living room are the overall size and lighting of the room.
Colors like beige, cream or shades of yellow add a warm and inviting look. For more formal appearance one can opt for cooler colors such as gray. One should avoid intense colors in the living area as they don't reflect well upon the interiors of the house.
Colors for the bathroom are considered relatively easier to choose. Colors such as light blue, sea foam green and light earthy shades have known to create a relaxing spa feeling. People can also opt for darker shades provided they use it in a dramatic way. Usage of only dark colors can result in smaller looking bathroom.
Apart from the design and structure, colors also play a vital role in house building. They bring out the life of the solid cement structure therefore they need careful pondering.


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Leaving school to face life as a working, productive member of society can be a scary and difficult process. To help ease the transition and give school leavers the best chances of success, it's wise to remember that when applying for a role, an applicant instantly provides prospective employers with a first critical glimpse into themselves as a potential employee, via their written ability.
As the written form of an interview suit, a CV sits proudly in its best professional black and white, instantaneously creating an all-important first impression. But much like that suit, as a first encounter with a company, appearance is everything. And just as stains on a jacket, sloppy attire and untidy trainers can harm an applicant's chances in an interview, so a poorly written application full of grammar, syntax and spelling mistakes could have a huge and immediately detrimental impact.
Avoiding this by taking a business writing training course however, could help school leavers' to make that all-important positive first impression – vital in today's economic climate where poor written abilities signify a lack of productivity, regardless of qualification – though unfortunately they won't help with the equally important (and often concerning) issue of interview fashion!
When considering business writing, though a school leaver may previously have only written for study purposes, they should keep in mind that companies are entirely dependent on their customers, clients and business partners; and usually communicate via one form of writing or another (letters, emails etc). As such a company will be constantly striving to provide its own good written impressions to gain and maintain further business; much the same as an applicant's CV.
Because of this and in a world of text speak, slang and autocorrect; having flawless, professional written language is increasingly important, yet worryingly rarer than ever, as it reflects attitudes, capability and skills.
While it's arguably true that in today's society proper spelling and grammar are becoming less important due to word processors, spell checkers and automatic translation programmes, they cannot always account for all errors and mistakes – something businesses will be looking out for prospective employees to know and improve upon.
Despite being incredibly useful tools to assist and improve written work, more often than not spell checkers are no substitute for a strong foundation of human written ability, as only writers themselves can judge exactly what's suitable to say, and in what context.
When putting together a business letter for example, consistency, meaning and eloquence are crucial, and though a spell checker can help correct occasional mistakes, it cannot always detect errors in grammar or tone – if you wrote 'affect' rather than 'effect' say. Equally, though it's easy to translate, copy and paste a foreign language text from a translation programme into written work, despite receiving a correct word-by-word translation, crucial syntax and grammar would be incorrect, resulting in not only a loss of meaning, but a gained impression of incompetence in the eyes of a client!
Aside from instantly bettering the initial appearance of any CV and providing many of the skills necessary for a professional career, listing a business writing course at the top of an 'abilities/achievements' section can say mountains about a candidate's employment potential without them having to write a sentence more.
Providing linguistic skills such as basic spelling, grammar and syntax, a writing course can also include tuition on the basic rules of business letter or email composition, alongside instruction on keeping things short and concise yet interesting, and can help course students know exactly which words to use and when.
Include all this, and not only will a school leaver have impeccable CV's fit to grace any desk or inbox, but may even have improved their chances of showcasing those skills and their interview suit in person – fully completing that crucial first impression!


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Consumer and Community Engagement /
Useful links / Consumer Information
Eastern Health consumer information for inpatients - In response to consumer and staff feedback about the number and variety of brochures and education materials distributed to patients on admission, Eastern Health has produced a single patient booklet called Partners in care – helping us to care for you during your hospital stay. A Booklet Working Group including members form all areas of the organisation and consumers was established to develop it. A talented cartoonist, Taehoon Gwag who is also a Box Hill Hospital Patient Support Assistant worked with the Centre for Patient Experience staff and consumers to develop the illustrations.
The Partners in care – helping us to care for you during your hospital stay booklet is also available in Burmese, Cantonese, Vietnamese and Greek.
Better Health Channel Provides health and medical information to improve the health and wellbeing of people and the communities they live in. This information is: quality-assured and reliable, up-to-date, locally relevant and easy to understand. The information on this site aims to help people understand and manage their health and medical conditions. It does not replace care provided by medical practitioners and other qualified health professionals.
The "A Common Path" - is a suite of cancer support and advice videos which have been developed by North Eastern Melbourne Integrated Health Services (NEMICS) for people who have been newly diagnosed with cancer. It provides people with an opportunity to learn from others who had already experienced a cancer diagnosis and treatment, highlighting how they made decisions, the things they learned along the way, the things that helped, and the things they wish they had known or done better.
Health Translations - Department of Health and Human Services – enables health practitioners and those working with culturally and linguistically diverse communities to easily find translated health information. The Health Translations Directory provides direct links to reliable translated health resources produced in Australia
Department of Health - Consumer, carer and community information - the Victorian Governments policy on consumer, carer and community participation in the Victorian healthcare system.
Consumer's health forum is the national peak body representing the interests of Australian healthcare consumers. CHF works to achieve safe, quality, timely healthcare for all Australians, supported by accessible health information and systems.
Health issues centre - supports and informs health services to involve and learn from their consumers. It contributes to policy and debate to encourage a more equitable and partnership-based health system.
Centre for Health Communication and Participation - was established in April 2009, springing from the work of the Cochrane Consumers and Communication Review Group (CCCRG). Our mission is to improve health communication with and participation by consumers and carers through evidence-informed policy and decision making
Turning Point provides a wide range of specialist treatment and support services to people affected by alcohol and drug use. Wellington House is Turning Point's residential detox service based in Box Hill Victoria. This video provides an introduction for people preparing for admission to the service https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c41EMhDxcMU
Clinical Excellence Commission: Receiving Antibiotics In Hospital:
Available in English, Arabic, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Greek, Italian, Vietnamese
NPS MedicineWise: Antibiotics don't work for all infections
Available in Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese
Health Translations: Infections (multiple topics listed here)


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The following are summaries of final fiscal 1999 budgets for schools and highlights of education-related action during legislative sessions. Budget totals for K-12 education include money for state education administration, but do not include federal, flow-through dollars.
Governor:
Benjamin J. Cayetano (D)
FY 1999 state budget:
FY 1999 K-12 budget:
Percent change K-12 budget:
+3.2 percent
Estimated enrollment:
Fiscal 1999 is second year of two-year Hawaii budget that was passed last year. In subsequent budget negotiations this year, however, legislators proposed cutting the fiscal 1999 K-12 budget. Ultimately, they and Gov. Cayetano agreed not to make cutbacks, but instead to add school funding.
K-12 budget total includes $28 million from state health department to cover special education and other services and $20 million from accounting and general services department for school busing.
In addition to regular appropriation, Gov. Cayetano announced that state will give $11 million in emergency funding to education department in fiscal 1999. Department had requested $30 million to pay for operating new schools and to meet court order for improving special education.
Mel Carnahan (D)
$15.44 billion
Lawmakers approved plan to distribute $163 million in anticipated savings from pending settlement of St. Louis school desegregation case to schools across Missouri. Package also would establish Missouri's first charter schools, in St. Louis and Kansas City, and calls for changing the way the St. Louis district is governed. The plan is contingent on settlement of the case, which is expected next year.
Fiscal 1999 budget includes $54.6 million in state funding aimed at boosting spending equity among Missouri's 525 districts.
Budget also includes $16 million to pay for student transportation, as well as programs for students in special education and gifted programs.
State will foot the bill for 5,460 students expected to take Advanced Placement exams in coming school year, or offer to pay for up to three credit hours at a nearby college or university for some high school students.
George V. Voinovich (R)
+7 percent
State now in second year of biennial budget passed last year.
Budget totals include $714 million in lottery proceeds applied to education spending.
Under overhaul of state education finance system in February, 75 percent of Ohio students will attend districts that receive budget increase of 6 percent or greater in fiscal 1999. No districts will lose money. Ohio's long-term school funding outlook remains cloudy, however, thanks to state voters' rejection this year of plan to pay for school spending increases through sales-tax hike.
David Beasley (R)
+6.9 increase
Budget includes $20 million to reduce class size to 15-1 student-teacher ratio in disadvantaged schools.
In fiscal 1999, state will spend $1 million for teacher professional development and hiring of principal-mentors and master-teachers in disadvantaged districts.
State will spend $11.5 million to upgrade state academic standards and test students in all grade levels in fiscal year that began July 1.
Vol. 17, Issue 42, Page 23
Published in Print: July 8, 1998, as Legislative Update


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Q: Android - How to hide softkeyboard if EditText is empty on key press? I'm working on a project to make calculations. So, I have my EditText box working, and I want to hide the softkeyboard if the user clicks the DONE (or any other kind of button, GO, NEXT, etc.) and the EditText box is empty
Like so:
EditText is empty -> user clicks button -> softkeyboard hides
I have this piece of code that I manage to write using tutorials and guides over the internet
I do know it is to manage the listener of the button in the softkeyboard
TextView.OnEditorActionListener mEditor = new TextView.OnEditorActionListener()
{
    @Override
    public boolean onEditorAction(TextView v, int actionId, KeyEvent event)
    {
        if (actionId == EditorInfo.IME_ACTION_DONE)
        {
            //Calculations method
        }

        return false;
    }
};

So, my question is: How can I manage the listener when the EditText is empty and not get errors?

A: you can use, for example:
TextView.OnEditorActionListener mEditor = new TextView.OnEditorActionListener()
{
    @Override
    public boolean onEditorAction(TextView v, int actionId, KeyEvent event)
    {
        if (actionId == EditorInfo.IME_ACTION_DONE)
        {
            if (!TextUtils.isEmpty(v.getText().toString())){
                // you calculations method
            } else {
                InputMethodManager imm = (InputMethodManager) getActivity().getSystemService(
                Context.INPUT_METHOD_SERVICE);
        imm.hideSoftInputFromWindow(v.getApplicationWindowToken(),
                InputMethodManager.HIDE_NOT_ALWAYS);
            }
        }

        return false;
    }
};

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
J.H. Lucas
Jill Biden
JM Barrie
Margaret Wise Brown
Marion Howard
Mark Helprin
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Paula Brackston
Periods & Movements
Peter S. Beagle
Ralph Ellison
Robert Munsch
Saarein te Brake
Sarah Grimke
Sue Monk Kidd
Tanith Lee
Tanya Lee
The Wolf in the Rain
Thomas Malory
Thornton Wilder
Veronica Schanoes
WEB DuBois
Willa Cather
WP Kinsella
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Don't Just Mentor Women and People of Color. Sponsor Them.
Use your influence to amplify, boost, connect, and defend your colleagues.
Rosalind Chow
Understanding the difference between sponsorship and mentorship is key to ensuring that women and members of historically marginalized communities (HMCs) are fully supported in their careers. Mentorship involves direct support of a protégé, while sponsorship focuses on others' impressions of that person. The author presents a four-step framework for being intentional in identifying opportunities for sponsorship and using social connections to lift up those who might otherwise go unnoticed. Sponsorship alone isn't enough to address the deep-seated challenges associated with systemic racism, but it is a personal action that all of us can take to help make the world a more equitable place.
Mike Smith, president and COO of Stitch Fix, has long been committed to recruiting and developing a diverse workforce. His impetus for doing so came from his mentor, Ken Coleman, chairman of EIS Group, Inc. and a Silicon Valley veteran, who told him, "Be successful, hire, mentor, and sponsor those people of color that come behind you."
Although Coleman's words of advice, given from one Black executive to another, were offered pre-pandemic, they've taken on a new urgency in the wake of a national reckoning over racial inequity following George Floyd's and countless others' murders. One of the most common recommendations on how to be a better ally to members of historically marginalized communities (HMCs) is to sponsor them.
But what is sponsorship, exactly? Many define it as spending one's social capital or using one's influence to advocate for a protégé. This definition seems intuitive at first glance, but if you ask people to unpack what that actually means in terms of concrete behaviors, most struggle to do so. Many leaders believe that they're sponsoring someone when, in fact, they're providing mentorship. Mentoring is important, too. But the confusion between sponsorship and mentorship is dangerous — an inability to differentiate between the two makes it more likely that leaders will believe they're supporting their HMC workers to their fullest extent when they're actually only giving one form of support.
To clarify what sponsorship is and how it's different from mentorship, I zero in on a key word: influence.
Sponsorship vs. mentorship
Sponsorship can be understood as a form of intermediated impression management, where sponsors act as brand managers and publicists for their protégés. This work involves the management of others' views on the sponsored employee. Thus, the relationship at the heart of sponsorship is not between protégés and sponsors, as is often thought, but between sponsors and an audience — the people they mean to sway to the side of their protégés.
Whereas mentorship focuses on help that a mentor can provide directly, such as guidance, advice, feedback on skills, and coaching, sponsorship entails externally facing support, such as advocacy, visibility, promotion, and connections. Seeing sponsorship as a three-way relationship between sponsors, protégés, and an audience clarifies the difference between it and mentorship.
The ABCDs of sponsorship
Understanding sponsorship in this way, we can identify specific, concrete behaviors for sponsors to use to lift up others. Here, I take tactics that are typically studied as forms of impression management and translate them into their sponsorship equivalents.
Amplifying. Amplifying is the sponsorship equivalent of self-promotion. When sponsors amplify, they share protégés' accomplishments with others in a bid to create or increase an audience's positive impressions of them.
Consider the story of Sal Khan, the founder of the education site Khan Academy. Khan Academy was struggling to make ends meet until Bill Gates used an interview to declare that it had the potential to change the world. After this unsolicited endorsement, Khan was inundated with funding offers from Google and Microsoft, among others. Note that sponsorship doesn't require a close relationship with the protégé. Bill Gates didn't know Sal Khan personally, but he believed in his product.
To advance in our careers, we need others to know about our achievements and accomplishments. But most people don't like braggarts. When a sponsor trumpets a protégés' achievements, they sidestep the self-promotion and its potential downsides. This is particularly important for women since female stereotypes dictate that they be self-effacing and humble.
Boosting. Boosting is the sponsorship equivalent of self-assurance. When people put themselves forward for consideration for a position or opportunity, they're in effect making promises about their future performance. But most of us know that people are motivated to make themselves look good in these situations and may not present an accurate view of their own capabilities. These claims, then, may not hold as much weight as when they're made by a third party who presumably has a more objective opinion on how the protégé will actually perform. Here's where boosting comes into play: When sponsors boost their protégés, they stake some portion of their own reputation on an implicit guarantee about the protégé's future success. They underwrite it.
If you've received a letter of recommendation from a teacher or benefited from a referral made by a friend, you've experienced boosting. Boosting is a particularly important form of sponsorship for women and members of HMCs. Due to biases in how quality is evaluated, many of them receive lower performance ratings and are given lower-quality feedback, making it even more difficult for them to improve and advance. Given their relative lack of representation in many white and male-dominated industries, they are especially in need of sponsors who can lend them the legitimacy they need to be seen as worthy of investment.
Connecting. Connecting is the sponsorship equivalent of impression management through association — that is, claiming a relationship with a highly regarded individual or group so that some of the positive feeling others have toward them is transferred to the person claiming the association. This is often referred to as a "halo effect."
When a high-status sponsor connects, they claim the association with the protégé, rather than the other way around. This enhances others' impression of the protégé because the sponsor has already been "vetted" by the community. Likewise, the protégé has passed the sponsor's standard for inclusion into their network. Connecting can also involve actively facilitating new relationships for protégés, giving them access to people that they wouldn't otherwise be able to meet.
For example, a sponsor might invite a protégé to an exclusive event or meeting in order to increase their visibility to important individuals who might prove instrumental to a future career. For example, when Annie Young-Scrivner, now the CEO of Godiva, worked at PepsiCo, she benefitted from the sponsorship of Indra Nooyi, then CEO, who would invite her to attend meetings in China that proved to be valuable learning and exposure experiences.
Connecting in combination with boosting is an even more formidable form of sponsorship. Take ClassPass's former CEO, Payal Kadakia, who met David Tisch through their mutual participation in TechStars, a startup accelerator in New York City. Tisch recognized that, as a young woman, Kadakia might have difficulties raising money through the traditional venture capital processs. He therefore personally introduced her to angel investors, many of whom went on to seed her company with several million dollars.
Defending. Defending is the sponsorship equivalent of justifying or making personal excuses in an attempt to change others' perceptions of them from negative to positive. In the same way, when a sponsor defends, they address an audience who dislikes or dismisses the protégé and works to persuade them to change their opinion. Defending is quite possibly one of the most effective sponsorship tactics.
Indeed, it is critical for women and members of HMCs, again because of the often biased ways in which they're reviewed. As an example, Jerry MacCleary, the former CEO of Covestro LLC, found himself consistently defending female employees and employees of color in evaluation meetings because he saw that white male managers were often criticizing their interpersonal styles as too outspoken or confrontational. MacCleary countered with personal examples that directly contradicted the other managers' claims. In this way, under his guidance, Covestro dramatically increased the diversity in its leadership ranks; at the time of his retirement, five of 11 top positions were held by women and people of color.
Of the various forms of sponsorship, defending is the most costly for sponsors. Because it necessitates challenging the attitudes and beliefs of others, it can create conflicts between the sponsor and the audience, sometimes with material costs. For example, Kenneth Frazier, the retiring CEO of Merck, tells a story from when he was working for a law firm in Philadelphia. One of the firm's clients asked that he be removed from a case due to his race. But Frazier's senior partner took a stand to support him, telling the client, "You may take your business elsewhere, but we believe in him and we're not going to replace him."
Using sponsorship for social equity
Most people have benefited from sponsorship in some form or another to advance in their professional lives. The recognition of its power leads many of us to focus on ensuring that we have sponsors who will amplify, boost, connect, or defend us. But if we're truly committed to social equity, we need to start thinking not only about how we can benefit from sponsorship but also how we can help others who need it. To do that, we must first contend with deciding whom to sponsor. Ask yourself: What are my criteria for sponsoring someone? Are they accurate measures of performance and talent, or am I using a potentially problematic proxy for quality? Am I applying my criteria equitably across all the people I could sponsor? Are there people I see as high-performing who seem to be consistently flying under the radar?
Once you identify a protégé, you should then be attuned to opportunities for enacting sponsorship. If a protégé has an achievement to celebrate, amplify it to people who might be interested. Bragging on behalf of others is often seen as a positive social skill. If a boosting opportunity presents itself, name the protégé and advocate for them. Enhance the protégé's exposure by inviting them to a meeting or connecting them with important people. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if others are inappropriately impugning a protégé, stand up and defend them.
Mapping the ABCDs of Sponsorship to Specific Behaviors and Goals
Examples of behaviors that fall under each sponsorship category and the intended goal of the sponsorship tactic.
Sponsorship tactic Example behavior(s) Intended goal
Amplify Being aware of and talking up a protégé's accomplishments Create or increase perceivers' positive impressions of the protégé
Boost Formally nominating a protégé for specific opportunities; writing letters of recommendation, attesting to the protégé's future potential Increase others' expectations of the protégé's potential and readiness for advancement
Connect Introducing a protégé to high-status individuals; inviting a protégé to exclusive events or meetings Create or enhance perceivers' positive impressions of the protégé;
increase the protégé's visibility
Defend Challenging others' negative perceptions of a protégé; providing an alternative explanation for poor performance; protecting a protégé from harmful exposure Reverse or neutralize others' uncertainty or negative perceptions of the protégé
© HBR.org
Understanding the difference between sponsorship and mentorship is key to ensuring that women and members of HMCs are fully supported in their careers. Allies need to not only offer the emotional support of mentoring but also be intentional about identifying opportunities for sponsorship and using our social capital to lift up those who might otherwise go unnoticed. Sponsorship alone isn't enough to address the deep-seated challenges associated with systemic racism, but it is a personal action that all of us can take to help make the world a more equitable place.
Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Course
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How to build a better, more just workplace.
Read more on Diversity and inclusion or related topics Leadership, Marginalized groups, Professional networks and Mentoring
Rosalind Chow is an associate professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University, where she studies the power of social hierarchy and its impact on diversity and inclusion. She has a particular interest in how those at the top of social hierarchies understand their dominant position, and how they can use their position to advance the outcomes of those who have historically been disempowered.