The activities of the United Nations are necessarily of interest to us at UWC — so I thought you might like to know two ways to keep up-to-date with their news.
1) Subscribe to the daily e-mail update from UN Wire
2) Read their blog — UN Dispatch: Posts on the UN – which you can subscribe to — either sign-up to receive updates via e-mail or use their RSS feed to receive updates via an RSS reader (e.g., GoogleReader or Bloglines).
This is one of the news items that landed in my in-box last week, thanks to UN Wire:
UNAIDS to adjust worldwide HIV/AIDS numbers
The United Nations’ AIDS agency released a report Tuesday stating it has systematically overestimated the number of HIV/AIDS cases worldwide since the 1990s. Methodology used to conduct surveys and compile data caused the discrepancy, which will see UNAIDS drop its estimate of the number of cases worldwide from 39.5 million to 33.2 million. Read UNAIDS’ press release and view the report. The New York Times (11/20)
There’s a TED talk (see my previous posting on some of my favorites) which deals with this very issue — which might be of interest to anyone teaching economics or working with AIDS as a global concern. It’s a wonderful example of how research (information plus critical thinking) can help us decide — as a society, as activists, as policy makers — how best to address problems such as AIDS.
TED Talk: Emily Oster — What do we really know about the spread of AIDS?
Here’s her biographical blurb off the TED website (it’s pretty impressive for someone 26 years old):
Her Harvard doctoral thesis took on famed economist Amartya Sen and his claim that 100 million women were statistically missing from the developing world. He blamed misogynist medical care and outright sex-selective abortion for the gap, but Oster pointed to data indicating that in countries where Hepetitis B infections were higher, more boys were born. Through her unorthodox analysis of medical data, she accounted for 50% of the missing girls.
She’s also investigated the role of bad weather in the rise in witchcraft trials in Medieval Europe and what drives people to play the Powerball lottery. Her latest target: busting assumptions on HIV in Africa.
I’m sure some of our students will end up as TED speakers some day.
Did you know the latest Man Booker Prize winner is a UWC graduate? (Pearson College) And one of Anne Enright’s former Pearson classmates wrote an article in The Telegraph (Calcutta, India) about how one English teacher from those long ago days might be responsible in part for Enright’s success…
