International Relations

A recent post comments on the value of biography as a source of insight into history and thought. Currently I am reading Andrew Hodges'  Alan Turing: The Enigma  (1983), which I am finding fascinating both for its portrayal of the evolution of a brilliant and unconventional mathematician as well as the honest efforts Hodges makes to describe Turing's sexual evolution and the tragedy in which it eventuated. Hodges makes a serious effort to give the reader some understanding of Turing's important contributions, including his enormously important "computable numbers" paper. (Here is a nice discussion of computability in the  Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ;  link .) The book also offers a reasonably technical account of the Enigma code-breaking process. Hilbert's mathematical imagination plays an important role in Turing's development. Hilbert's speculation that all mathematical statements would turn out to be derivable or disprovable turned out to b...

I have always found biographies a particularly interesting source of learning and stimulation. A recent example is a biography and celebration of Muthuvel Kalaignar Karunanidhi published in a recent issue of the Indian semi-weekly Frontline . Karunanidhi was an enormously important social and political leader in India for over sixty years in the Dravidian movement in southern India and Tamil Nadu, and his passing earlier this month was the occasion for a special issue of Frontline. Karunanidhi was president of the Dravidian political party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) for more than fifty years. And he is an individual I had never heard of before opening up Frontline. In his early life he was a script writer and film maker who was able to use his artistic gifts to create characters who inspired political activism among young Tamil men and women. And in the bulk of his career he was an activist, orator, and official who had great influence on politics and social movements in ...

Andrew Hopkins is a much-published expert on industrial safety who has an important set of insights into the causes of industrial accidents. Much of his career has focused on the oil and gas industry, but he has written on other sectors as well. Particularly interesting are several books:  Failure to Learn: The BP Texas City Refinery Disaster ; Disastrous Decisions: The Human and Organisational Causes of the Gulf of Mexico Blowout ; and  Lessons from Longford: The ESSO Gas Plant Explosion . He also provides a number of interesting working papers here . One of his interesting working papers is on the topic of safety culture in the drilling industry, "Why safety cultures don't work" ( link ). Companies that set out to create a �safety culture� often expend huge amounts of resource trying to change the way operatives, foremen and supervisory staff think and feel about safety. The results are often disappointing.  (1) Changing the way people think is nigh impossible, but sett...