The refugee crisis - Payback time?

F S Aijazuddin in The Dawn


IMMIGRATION can be a messy business. It leaves stains.

It is a subtle challenge to the notion that the world is a global village. The recent exodus by refugees fleeing insecure poverty in southern Europe to the stable affluence of its north puts this misconception to the test. Without warning, a human horde has swept across the continent of Europe. This phalanx of disturbed humanity has floated across seas, swum through rivers, trudged over mountains, permeated through city streets, and barged blithely through border check-posts in search of a German Paradise.

Countries in their way like Hungary have been subjected to pressures they have not had time to anticipate. Consequently, their resources are being strained, their public services overburdened, and their patience stretched. Nations that had cocooned themselves comfortably within the European Union are now questioning the very fundamentals of the EU, in particular its egalitarian commitment to free movement across invisible borders.

The combustible unrest in Syria alone does not explain this sudden surge. There have been other wars in the region — in Lebanon, for example, which its harried citizens quit in Mercedes overladen with monogrammed suitcases. Or Iraq, from which its nationals — bombarded and har­ried by the US-led coalition forces — fled to neighbouring countries. This latest influx of migrants though is different. It is determined. It is coordinated. And it seems to have foreknowledge which countries should be targeted, and where their vulnerabilities lie.

Such information does not come off the internet, nor can it be bought in the grey market. How and where did these displaced persons obtain this crash course in gate-crashing?

Euro-cynics contend that this could be a covert attempt by inimical powers to desta­bilise the complacency of European societies, using desperate civilian families in lieu of trained military forces. Euro-optimists are convinced that this flood will recede, as tsunamis do. Whenever it does, it will leave behind a detritus of disorder and discontent for host governments to manage.

No political bleach has yet been invented that can remove these lasting stains. They will remain. Recall: West Germany reunified with East Germany in 1990, but a united Germany has yet to absorb its Turkish guests. France quit its Muslim colony Algeria in 1962, yet it still has difficulties with non-designer headscarves. The United Kingdom has done more than most to accommodate West Indians, East Africans, South Asians, and now Russian oligarchs. But even Great Britain has geographical limitations.

Shakespeare described his island home as a “precious stone set in the silver sea,/ Which serves it in the office of a wall/ Or as a moat defensive to a house,/ Against the envy of less happier lands”. Shakespeare had not foreseen the Chunnel. Envious refugees at Calais peer into it, attracted like moths by the light at the British end — alluring, irresistible, and maddeningly within reach.

The vast Atlantic Ocean once separated the continents of Europe and America, but even that expanse of seawater could not prevent tenacious migrants navigating across it, landing on its eastern shores, and then cloning New England, New York, New Prague, New Vienna, New Orleans.

“Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore...” beckons the Statue of Liberty. Shoals of immigration have now forced the United States to reconsider this open invitation. In 1847, it tried to reverse the flow. It created Liberia in West Africa for its Afri­can and Carib­bean freed slaves. Not all of them wanted to return. None agreed with Liberia’s national motto: “The love of liberty brought us here”.

Today’s Ameri­cans are hyphena­ted with every nationality in the world. This ethnic diversity contributes to its superpower strength; yet, in that mix lies its weakness, its Kryptonite. By 2050, the US population will exceed 430 million. Whites will reduce from 67pc (2005) to 47pc (2050). Blacks will remain static at 13pc of the total. Asians will creep up from 5pc to a projected 9pc (blame it on Muslim fundamentalists). Hispanics, how­ever, will increase dramatically from 14pc in 2005 to almost 30pc by 2050, to be­come United States’ largest ethnic community.

That explains why President Obama felt the need to restore ties with Cuba. It was not an act of belated condescension by a super­power to a villain with a Spanish accent. It was a farsighted admission by the US of its geographic, ethnic, linguistic affinity with Hispanic countries in South America.

Future historians will interpret the unfurling of the US flag in Havana as a defining moment in its history, when the US — not in war, not in retaliation, not out of folie de grandeur, but voluntarily — shifted its worldview from a West-East axis to a North-South one, from military interventions to neighbourly cooperation.

Want to be happy? Be grateful

David Steindl-Rast





The person you really need to marry:

Tracy Mcmillan


How to know the purpose of your life in five minutes

Adam Leipzig

Life as a batsman

Simon Barnes in Cricinfo

Batting is about death. And life of course. It's all about how useful - how good - a life you lead before you die. You are surrounded by pitfalls and bayed about by enemies, but the good person will come through adversity to triumph. And the less good person won't.

That life-and-death metaphor gives cricket its USP: its own particular force and vividness. Cricket - red-ball cricket in particular - is all about the little death of dismissal. Every great innings takes place in the shadow of fallibility. That, in the end, is what cricket means.

Batsmen, writes Simon Hughes, "are walking the tightrope between success and failure. One minuscule error and they're toast. Terminé. Caput."

Hughes has always brought an original mind to the interpretation of cricket. He invented the concept of The Analyst for Channel Four in Britain, and now he tries to analyse batsmanship in his latest, highly enjoyable book, Who Wants to be a Batsman? He calls on his experience of more than 200 first-class innings, and his career-long struggle to add a decent batting CV to the deceptively fast arm he possessed as a bowler.

He returns to the infinitely fragile nature of every batsman's experience. "In tennis, if you lose 6-0 6-0 and haven't returned a single ball, you will have still served a few yourself. You have contributed something to the match. In football, unless you score an own goal with the last kick of the game, you have got time to atone for any mistake you might have made. Hell, even if you have shanked every drive into the bushes on the golf course, there is always hope that you will nail one down the middle on the eighteenth…

"But nought in cricket. What has that achieved?"

Cricketers cherish the notion that a bowler can bowl a bad ball that's whacked for six and get a wicket next ball, but one error - one tiny, measly error - from the batsman and he's gone.

A batsman needs to combine rampant egomania with the selflessness of a Zen monk, and to hold the two things in perfect balance

But it's not necessarily true. And even if it were, it wouldn't be unique in sport. Batsmen make mistakes and survive. Very few batsmen reach three figures without a play-and-miss or a false shot. Perhaps every century is a demonstration of how much the batsman has got away with.

Joe Root made a major error in the first Test of the recent Ashes series. He should have been out for nought and gone back to the pavilion asking himself what he had achieved. But Brad Haddin dropped the chance, Root made a century, England won and Root was the hero.

In other words, and contrary to standard wisdom, there is a margin for error in batting. The top players are better at coping with it, and above all, better at cashing in when matters beyond their control happen to work in their favour.

The routine humiliation of dismissal is not unique to cricket. There are quite a few sports in which your participation can be over before the finish - and long before you're ready to give up. Sonny Liston failed to complete either of his two fights against Muhammad Ali: quitting on his stool in the first and knocked out in the second.

In all jumping competitions in the horsey world your participation can end prematurely with an involuntary dismount. I have watched the Grand National favourite fall at the first fence. I have experienced a public crash-landing or two myself, as it happens, and believe me, it hurts more than being clean bowled - about which, too, I know in more detail than I would wish.

In sports more dangerous than cricket every competitor knows that participation could end with the assistance of a stretcher. In some sports real deaths happen more often than they do in cricket. Let's have a moment of silence for Phillip Hughes at this point - but we should also recall that in 1999 five people were killed in the equestrian sport of eventing.

Back to the pavilion before facing a ball: Usain Bolt is disqualified in the final of the World Athletics Championships © AFP

In track and field, errors are savagely punished, and sometimes it's worse than getting out first ball. It's like being sent back to the pavvy for taking guard wrong. You're out without running a single stride of the race. Terminé. Caput. It happened to Usain Bolt in the final of the World Championships in 2011.

So I dispute the self-pitying notion of all batsmen (and ex-batsmen in the commentary box) who tell us that batting is a uniquely fragile sporting discipline. It just feels like that when you're out there.

That doesn't mean that a batsman is not in a unique position, and that it's not fraught with psychological problems of all kinds. It's just that cricketers - tied up in the intricacies of a single sport - tend not to identify the uniquely troubling aspect of batsmanship. It's the twin load of responsibility. When you fail as a batsman you have not one but two reasons to feel bad. You have lost a contest against another individual - and you have also let down your colleagues. You have failed yourself andyou have failed your team.

That's a hefty burden to bear. Of course there's an essence of that in all team sports - it's rather the point of them. But in most team sports you are operating with others. A goalkeeper in football is not as isolated as he looks: he's in constant dialogue with his central defenders, and his distribution of the ball is a core skill.

A batsman is as lonely as a golfer or a tennis player - but he's also working for other people. In some competitions they make tennis players and golfers shoulder a batsman's twin responsibilities: the Ryder Cup, Solheim Cup, Davis Cup and Fed Cup. Often you see great players unable to cope with a secondary responsibility: Tiger Woods never got the hang of it.

A great batsman must be like a top Ryder Cup golfer, not once every two years but in every single innings. He must - like Colin Montgomerie - find inspiration in this double responsibility. Woods goes straight back to strokeplay golf; for a batsman there is no other game.

If you fail as a batsman, you must deal with your personal inadequacies. Graham Gooch began his Test career with a pair. Repeated failure will cost you your place in the team. Your career will suffer. So will your sense of self-worth. But failure will also cost your team. You will fail to contribute. You will stop feeling like a part of the whole. You will lose matches and even if no one says anything, you know what you've done and what you haven't done.

Every great innings takes place in the shadow of fallibility. That, in the end, is what cricket means

It's the double whammy that's unique to batsmanship. That extends to cricket's bastard sister, baseball; the difference here is that baseball is weighted towards the pitcher and a dismissal is a relatively trivial matter; it's a run that's a big deal. All the same, the batter and the batsman share a double burden .

It follows, then, that again and again Simon Hughes goes back to the mental side of things. He offers "Ten Wanna Be Batsman Rules": of these, eight are mental. One is semi-facetious (this is "Yozzer" writing after all) and rule eight is "play at the Oval." The only physical tip is "Keep the head still."

It's almost as if every batsman had the same amount of physical ability, and that the only difference between good and great was mental posture. That's clearly not true: David Gower, Brian Lara and Kevin Pietersen clearly had something extra. But they also had mental ability: they could put errors behind them, didn't get sucked into the wrong sort of confrontation, knew how to pace an innings, understood when to stick and when to twist.

In cricket you often see a player of (comparatively) limited physical ability playing any number of match-winning innings because of a great mental attitude. Alastair Cook is a classic example of this type.

A player with a lesser degree of pure talent never takes success for granted. He is naturally disposed to make the most of every let-off. Thus you can turn an apparent disadvantage into an advantage. That's one of the most fascinating things about sport - and it's very cricket.

Batting is about shame and guilt: the shame of personal failure and the guilt at playing a part in team failure. It's also about escaping from - or being inspired by - these two things to find individual and corporate glory. You must sink yourself into the common cause without losing your sense of individuality.

A batsman needs to combine rampant egomania with the selflessness of a Zen monk, and to hold the two things in perfect balance. Unsurprising, then, that excellence is a rare thing - and that we value it so highly when we find it.

Psychology experiments are failing the replication test – for good reason

John Ioannidis in The Guardian

‘The replication failure rate of psychology seems to be in the same ballpark as those rates in observational epidemiology, cancer drug targets and preclinical research, and animal experiments.’ Photograph: Sebastian Kaulitzki/Alamy


Science is the best thing that has happened to humankind because its results can be questioned, retested, and demonstrated to be wrong. Science is not about proving at all cost some preconceived dogma. Conversely religious devotees, politicians, soccer fans, and pseudo-science quacks won’t allow their doctrines, promises, football clubs or bizarre claims to be proven illogical, exaggerated, second-rate or just absurd.

Despite this clear superiority of the scientific method, we researchers are still fallible humans. This week, an impressive collaboration of 270 investigators working for five years published in Science the results of their efforts to replicate 100 important results that had been previously published in three top psychology journals. The replicators worked closely with the original authors to make the repeat experiments close replicas of the originals. The results were bleak: 64% of the experiments could not be replicated.
We often feel uneasy about having our results probed for possible debunking. We don’t always exactly celebrate when we are proven wrong. For example, retracting published papers can take many years and many editors, lawyers, and whistleblowers – and most debunked published papers are never retracted. Moreover, with fierce competition for limited research funds and with millions of researchers struggling to make a living (publish, get grants, get promoted), we are under immense pressure to make “significant”, “innovative” discoveries. Many scientific fields are thus being flooded with claimed discoveries that nobody ever retests. Retesting (called replication) is discouraged. In most fields, no funding is given for what is pooh-poohed as me-too efforts. We are forced to hasten from one “significant” paper to the next without ever reassessing our previously claimed successes.

Multiple lines of evidence suggest this is a recipe for disaster, leading to a scientific literature littered with long chains of irreproducible results. Irreproducibility is rarely an issue of fraud. Simply having millions of hardworking scientists searching fervently and creatively in billions of analyses for something statistically significant can lead to very high rates of false-positives (red-herring claims about things that don’t exist) or inflated results.

This is more likely to happen in fields that chase subtle, complex phenomena, in those that have more noise in measurement, and where there is more room for subjective choices to be introduced in designing and running experiments and crunching the data. Ten years ago I tried to model these factors. These models predicted that in most scientific fields and settings the majority of published research, findings may be false. They also anticipated that the false rates could vary greatly (from almost 0% to almost 100%), depending on the features of a scientific discipline and how scientists run their work.

Probably the failure rate in the Science data would have been higher for work published in journals of lesser quality. There are tens of thousands of journals in the scientific-publishing market, and most will publish almost anything submitted to them. The failure rate may also be higher for studies that are so complex that none of the collaborating replicators offered to attempt a replication. This group accounted for one-third of the studies published in the three top journals. So the replication failure rate for psychology at large may be 80% or more overall.

This performance is even worse than I would have predicted. In 2012 my anticipation of a 53% replication failure rate for psychology at large was published. Compared with other empirical studies, the failure rate of psychology seems to be in the same ballpark as replication failure rates in observational epidemiology, cancer drug targets and preclinical research, and animal experiments.

However, I think it is important to focus on the positive side. The Science paper shows that large-scale replication efforts of high quality are doable even in fields like psychology where there was no strong replication culture until recently. Hopefully this successful, highly informative paradigm will help improve research practices in this field. Many other scientific fields without strong replication cultures may also be prompted now to embrace replications and reproducible research practices. Thus these seemingly disappointing results offer a great opportunity to strengthen scientific investigation. I look forward to celebrate one day when my claim that most published research findings are false is thoroughly refuted across most, if not all, scientific fields.