Hasta La Gadget!

When I started working in emerging markets – or “least developed countries” as they were less politely known in 1990 – aid and investment were regarded as two starkly separate approaches to supporting development. Developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America attracted some investment capital, but most of the money flowing to them was in the form of aid– grants. That has changed dramatically in recent years as cross-border investment by business has expanded dramatically and is becoming an ever more powerful force for good in the developing world.

Decades ago, private capital flowing into developing countries was a small fraction of aid dollars. Since then, that private capital investment has grown roughly 100-fold and the ratio of aid to investment has flipped. Today, every $1 in aid to developing nations is dwarfed by nearly $7 in private investment. This means much more economic development in poorer countries can be accomplished with private capital instead of with taxpayer money; like building affordable housing or power plants, for example. Of course, aid will always be needed to address the most intractable problems – things private capital cannot do on its own. And that grant aid can often be deployed in smart ways that can catalyze much larger amounts of private capital. But the overall shift to leveraging the private sector for development is profound and irreversible. And it is absolutely necessary, as no amount of public or philanthropic money can address all the world’s challenges.

From the late 1940s through the 1960s, public funding for infrastructure and the “green revolution” in agriculture were the centerpieces of international development. By the 1980s, the “Washington consensus” revolved around “conditionality” and “structural adjustment” — shorthand for fewer subsidies and better fiscal discipline, and a focus on economic growth. The 1990s brought a backlash, with civil society groups pushing debt relief and a focus on the poorest populations. This has been transformative, yet no transformation has been more profound than the shift from pure grants to the leveraging of private capital for development.

In the 1970s, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) was carved out of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to create an agency specifically dedicated to financing U.S. business investment in developing countries – to catalyze those private capital flows to serve economic development in those countries

American businesses and investors today understand that markets are indeed global and that, if risks can be mitigated, emerging markets are full of opportunity. These investors have witnessed how investments that boost economic development create jobs, introduce advanced technologies, and have a sustained positive impact on the way people live and work. Development finance institutions (DFIs) such as OPIC can provide loans or risk insurance that make investments in these less developed markets feasible. As new markets have opened up and grown, demand from businesses for financing has grown in parallel, creating an imperative for DFIs to grow apace; and they have.

At the time of its founding, OPIC was one of the world’s first DFIs. Today 20 industrialized countries, including China and Japan, have DFIs that are actively investing in places throughout Latin America to the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia – often competing with U.S. companies for resources and market share. In the past decade, the aggregate portfolios of all DFIs grew four-fold, from $10 billion to over $40 billion – and that growth is accelerating.

These private sector development solutions that DFIs support bring much-needed long-term economic growth. The money invested in sustainable economic development by U.S. businesses might be small in comparison to government budgets, but these investors are nimble and focused. Investments might be dispersed, but their collective impact on upward economic mobility is powerful. While governments need to build consensus for business climate reforms, companies are capable of rapid trial-and-error that yields leap-frogging solutions. These investments are helping to build power plants and water purification facilities, improve healthcare and agriculture yields and increase lending to small businesses. And they come with the added benefit of not costing the taxpayer. OPIC has returned money to the Federal government for 37 consecutive years – it is a model of development that pays for itself.

Of course, private, commercial investment cannot solve all the world’s development challenges. Grants will always play a vital role in addressing certain humanitarian needs and in jump starting the initial development that can help pave the way for investors. It is also clear that some large, high-profile investors have not always been model citizens. Extractive industries and low-end textile manufacturers have too often earned the ire they attract over environmental and labor issues. But DFIs like OPIC that uphold strict environmental and social standards can be a model for other investors and have powerful, positive impacts.

For example, OPIC finance and insurance projects committed in the last year alone are expected to support nearly 10,000 local jobs. In several countries surrounding Syria, Iraq, and the areas now controlled by ISIS, the jobs we support have given young people an alternative to radicalization.

We have also supported major solar utilities in Chile, a geothermal power plant in Kenya, and a small startup from Seattle that is introducing affordable home solar kits in rural parts of India. Families who are accustomed to seeing the lights go out when the sun goes down will be able to buy just enough electricity at just the right time to allow their children to read textbooks for school. In an astonishingly short span of time, a technological innovation in one part of the world can improve lives thousands of miles away.

These are just some of the things that investments in development can accomplish. In a world facing multiple major challenges from malnutrition to energy poverty, insufficient healthcare and infrastructure, it’s important that we use our money wisely. FDI is one of the critical tools we have for channeling capital in an efficient and effective manner. In a nutshell, it’s bang for the buck in places that need it most.

Books are a powerful force for change. They can inspire and spur large and important social movements and government action. Recent examples include Michael Harrington’s “The Other America” (1962) which ignited the War on Poverty; Ralph Nader’s “Safe at Any Speed” (1965) which brought auto-safety to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness; and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” which gave birth to the environmental movement. Much earlier, of course, we had “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a work of fiction which impacted greatly on the conscience of a nation on the subject of slavery-validated by her visit to the White House in 1862 and the comment by President Lincoln,” So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”

Books also inform the human intelligence and speak to us individually in quite a different way. They speak less to topical issues but to those universal in nature, providing a perspective on our life, how we live it, and our relationship to the larger culture.

What follows is one such example which might have applicability today both in the classroom and elsewhere.

Return with us to 1968, a time when American cities and campuses were rife with protest, racial rioting, and civil disorder. Simultaneously, a small group of educators were working to create a living laboratory in the problems and promise of the American democracy.

It was called the Yale Summer High School. Created as part of the War on Poverty with a mandate to address issues of social and economic injustice, the school brought underprivileged kids from across the nation to the Yale campus during the 1960’s.

Many of our students were alienated from schooling and academic subject matter. They were adolescents, and their focus was less on abstract subject matter and more about personal identity. Many felt academics and intellectual discussion had little to do with where they were at…and with good reason.

As Kenneth Benne, the educational philosopher, once observed, “A person deeply involved in working on the problems of his identity will hardly be able to focus his energies on acquiring the tools, skills, and disciplines of intelligence which intellectual liberation requires.” The mission we chose was to turn this around.

A number of the faculty had been teaching in the civil rights movement and had been using what are considered the “Great Books.” We thought, “Why not begin there?”

We believed the classics played an important part in the educational process. The primary reason others did not share our enthusiasm had less to do with the works themselves, but the poor manner in which they were often taught — as interesting relics of sorts, received by students as antiquated pieces of history, divorced from their most basic concerns.

Our job as educators was to make the classics, and the questions they posed, relevant to the times and to the lives of our students. We had faith in our students– many of them from the inner city– to take on such an intellectual challenge. The language in which the classics were written often made them difficult to read, but that being the case, students simply had to be schooled in how to read them — which is why we have teachers.

Creating a relevant curriculum meant developing a coherent framework of study which might aid our students in their struggle for identity. It would have to speak to them and to the times in which we lived, for the alienation of our young simply mirrored the deepening crisis in the country as a whole: the increasing estrangement of its citizenry from each other and from the entity to which they pledged allegiance. It was a crisis not dissimilar to the one facing our nation today.

In 1968, the crisis found expression in the increased tension over race; the continuation of poverty; polarization over the war in Vietnam; the deterioration of our cities; and the widespread use of drugs to “drop out.” Like the young, our nation, as a whole, was wracked in pain and actively striving to forge a new self definition.

We believed that any “school” worthy of that designation had to address these questions. Few, however, had chosen to do so. We felt it to be our duty. The times and our students demanded nothing less.

We then asked: “What should be at the center of our curriculum– its core?” We decided it would be race.

Race had become an issue of increasing concern to society at large. Both the U.S. Riot Commission and the advocates of Black Power saw the root causes of the major schism in our nation resulting not only from the poverty, social inequality and injustice, but from the racism which informed and created those conditions. Our nation, in short, had simply failed to live up to its professed ideals.

We also knew from our experience as teachers that race was very much on the minds of young people. We realized, however, that it interested them not simply as a theoretical issue of sociology and moral philosophy, nor even as a practical matter relating to poverty. It concerned them most deeply because of what it implied about the possibility and/or the desirability of their using contemporary American ideals as grounds for their own identity.

Because the issues surrounding race posed simultaneously and in an immediately apprehensible way all of the value questions relevant to the problem of identity, it was apparent that it would constitute the ideal focus for a core curriculum and facilitate discussion of the contemporary American crisis in the most concrete terms possible.

It was further our conviction that the humanities, rather than any specialized discipline or collection of disciplines, had a unique contribution to make in the investigation and clarification of this issue.

No course in Black History or abstract exhortations to brotherhood and equality could by itself clarify the complex interplay of ideals and actuality, of individual aspiration and social reality, which characterize the contemporary situation. A close and critical reading of humanistic texts might however, help the student to become aware that there existed a plurality of approaches to human problems and that the dogmatic affirmation of abstractions and ideologies could only distort one’s perceptions of concrete realities.

And so we read. From Sophocles’ Antigone to Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Faulkner’s Light in August, to Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and several stops betwixt and between, searching together for that which eluded the nation–a working definition of “community”–the shared values that ground people and bind them together.

Through the classes and the daily interactions of one with another, the program generated an authentic conversation on race, as students of different backgrounds came to respect and learn from one another.

I don’t know of any other occasion where something as conservative as the “Great Books” approach to education was so effectively applied to something as radical as the Civil Rights movement, the Anti-war movement, and to the personal lives of students.

End of story.

The program was discontinued by Yale, our host university. The University further refused to provide the necessary support for submission of a proposed grant to the National Council on the Humanities to develop a national core curriculum based on our work.

All that visibly remains of the program is a film made 40 + years later, called “Walk Right In” (www.walkrightinthemovie.com) which catalogued that summer’s events, followed the students to where they are today, captured their memories of that summer, and recorded its continuing impact on their lives. It has never been screened at Yale, and the work from that summer, for the most part, remains unknown.

So here we are– almost five decades later. Educators are still talking about a core curriculum, but nothing about its core. A few isolated voices call out for a “national conversation about race,” but, for the most part, it goes unheeded. “The true purpose of the University?” has never become a legitimate subject of study in our schools of higher learning. These were all powerful queries when posed in 1968. They remain so today.

A reminder in the words of some of our students in 1968:

To really feel like you’re educated you have to have exposure to the humanities. They allow you to actualize yourself as a person.

—- Sam Sutton

Yale taught us that education indeed could be a subversive force. It could be a force of transformation. It could be power. It could open new vistas.

—- Irma McClaurin

Call it brainwashing; call it what you will, I’ll call it rewarding and one of the most important experiences in my life. I guess one of the most, or the most significant aspect of the summer was the core course. I really grooved on Hegel, Marx, Plato, and all those other eggheads. No, I really learned an awful lot more from that course, most important of all it made me think, which for me comes next to breathing in importance…

—–Floyd Ballesteros

The YSHS took academic subjects such as literature – it took critical thinking – it took analysis – it took logic – it took philosophy – it took history – and made it relevant to me and to the other kids that were there. I think that’s what academics should be.

—– Algeo Casul

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Larry Paros is a former high-school math and social-studies teacher. He was at the forefront of educational reform in the 1960s and ’70s, during which time he directed a unique project for talented underprivileged students at Yale and created and directed two urban experimental schools, cited by the U.S. Office of Education as “exemplary” and later replicated at more than 125 sites nationwide.

More from Larry Paros on education:

• walkrightinthemovie.com
• Classroom version of Walk Right In
• UW interview on film
• facebook.com/walkrightin
• insomanywords.net

The pork shoulder may be the world’s simplest cut of meat to cook. Simpler than steak. Simpler than brisket. Simpler than ribs. But simple doesn’t mean simple-minded. You’ll need to know about some essential gear and techniques to get it right.

In a nutshell, you season the hell out of it and cook it at a low to moderate heat for 3 to 6 hours (2-1/2 to 3 hours at 350 degrees; 5 to 6 hours at 250 degrees.) What emerges from your smoker or grill gives you a bodacious blend of crisp crust, luscious fat, and meltingly tender meat.

Thanks to its generous marbling, pork shoulder lends itself to a variety of live fire cooking methods, including indirect grilling, smoking, and spit-roasting. The advantage of these methods is that you get both a crisp crust and moist, tender meat.

Roast it right:

• Smoking, aka, barbecuing: This is the preferred method of the American South, using a low heat and a long cooking time (in other words, “low and slow”), and always done with wood smoke. You can achieve this in several ways: firing your pit with logs, or tossing soaked hardwood chunks or chips on a charcoal fire. Keep the cooking temperature in the 225 to 275 degree range. Look for a dark “bark” (crusty exterior) and reddish smoke ring just under the surface.
• Indirect grilling: As the name suggests, the food is cooked next to, not directly over, the fire in a covered grill working at a moderate (325 to 350 degree) heat. This speeds up the cooking time and gives you a super crusty exterior and unlike smoking, you can do it on a gas grill. Yes, you can toss soaked wood chips on the coals (or in a gas grill’s smoker box) to produce a smoke flavor.
• Spit-roasting: Few sights on Planet Barbecue are more inviting–or hunger-inducing–than a pork shoulder rotating slowly on a turnspit next to the fire. The meat browns, crisps, and best of all, bastes itself. But don’t take my word for it: spit-roasting is the preferred method for cooking pork shoulder in Puerto Rico, Tuscany, Bali, and just about everywhere in between. Spit-roasting is usually done at higher heat than indirect grilling or smoking–350 to 400 degrees. Time is shorter, too. Recommended for Spiessbraten, Balinese Roast Pork Shoulder, and other dishes that don’t traditionally require a smoke flavor.

For plenty more pork shoulder tips, techniques, and recipes, visit BarbecueBible.com.

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Steven Raichlen is the author of the Barbecue! Bible cookbook series and the host of Primal Grill on PBS. His web site is BarbecueBible.com.

“Cats are not humans and humans are not cats and it is important that we humans, as the servants of cats, be aware of this difference.”

That’s Dr. Charles Snowdon, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s been on a quirky mission to–yes, you’re reading this right–create music for cats.

You can listen to some of his “meow-sic” here.

“We were motivated to make music for cats for two reasons,” he told The Huffington Post in an email. “First, many pet owners told us that they play radio music for their pets while they are at work and we wondered if this had any value. Second, we have developed a theory that suggests that species other than humans can enjoy music but that the music has to be in the frequency range that the species uses to communicate and with tempos that they would normally use.”

To create the cat music, Snowdon and his colleagues tried to mimic natural cat sounds, using sliding notes and high pitches–cat calls tend to be an octave or more above human voices. The researchers based the tempo of the songs on purring and suckling sounds.

Then came the moment of truth: the researchers tested their compositions on 47 male and female domestic cats in their homes. The kitties heard “Cozmo’s Air” and “Rusty’s Ballad,” along with two human music pieces for comparison: Gabriel Fauré’s “Elegie” and Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Air on a G String.”

What happened? When the cat music was playing, the felines were significantly more likely to orient their heads toward it, walk toward it, and even rub up against the speaker.

“We interpret this as indicating that the cats showed a preference,” Snowdon said in the email.

Now that the researchers have found music cats seem to like, they think it may have some important applications, like soothing stressed-out shelter cats.

“We think of cats as highly independent of their human servants, but there is some research showing that cats experience separation anxiety, which is greater in human-raised cats than in feral cats,” he told Discovery News.

An article describing the research has been accepted for publication in the journal Applied Animal Behavioral Science.

The world of comics has long been known as an affirmative landscape for queer characters. And now, another iconic character is joining the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender family.

In issue #39 of DC Comics’ “Catwoman” series, Selina Kyle, who, as Vanity Fair notes, “first surfaced in a 1940s Batman issue, and has had many a romantic encounter with the caped crusader,” is confirmed to be bisexual.

Kyle, who currently spends her days as a mob boss, no longer wears the ferocious feline’s suit. That honor now belongs to Eiko Hasigawa — the woman Kyle is seen kissing in the latest installment of the comic book.

“Catwoman” writer Genevieve Valentine took to her blog today to discuss the news, saying, “When I was first plotting out what I expected to be a six-issue arc, there were a few emotional beats I considered indispensable… and one was establishing Selina as canon bisexual.”

Valentine goes on to note that “[Kyle has] flirted around it –- often quite literally -– for years now” and therefore “this wasn’t a revelation so much as a confirmation.” What’s more, the writer wants fans to know that “Selina’s longstanding connection to Batman has not been forgotten; that is not how bisexuality (or humanity) works” but at the same time, “this also isn’t a throwaway.”

Kyle isn’t the first queer Catwoman. Holly Robinson, a character who, according to ComicVine.com, played a “supporting role” when included in a “Catwoman” series that launched in 2002, was a lesbian. The series was awarded a GLAAD Media Award for the inclusion of Robinson and in 2006 the character was promoted from a “spy of sorts” to Catwoman.

DC Comics also won kudos in 2013 when Batwoman proposed to her girlfriend, thereby taking part in the first lesbian engagement to be included in a mainstream comic. Later that year the company debuted what many called the first openly transgender mainstream comic book character, Alysia Yeoh, the roommate of Batgirl.