<div dir="ltr">Dear Cecil:<br><br>Thank you so much for the compliment. I am a "globalizer" too but I am deeply skeptical of "global public health" methods from whatever I have seen of it - GBD is one example, use of "Granger causality" in other contexts is also a nuisance. <br><br>But yes, abuse of statistics and statistical categories -- even simply "households" independent of neighborhood geography and community institutions -- is intellectual corruption. <br><br>The pretense of a lot of theories all around - economics included - is, "Have datasets, apply methods and tools, hit the computer clicks, and voila! we have knowledge!"<br><br>Over the past generation - with children who had pre-programmed computers and readymade datasets that they never had to examine one cell or row and column at a time - this pretense has become so deeply embedded, children do not even know hat what they are doing is simply pretend and strengthen groupthink. <div><br></div><div>You ask, "<span style="color:rgb(31,73,125);font-family:Calibri,"Slate Pro",sans-serif,sans-serif;font-size:medium">whose interests are being served and advanced by the abstract indicator we buy into an use to assess stove performance"</span><br><br>Who else -- bureaucrats (USEPA, DfID, German and Dutch governments), other donors and middlemen (Gates Foundation, Clinton Foundation), academics, and consultants including you and me.<br><br>What I call the ABCD Complex. Inevitable quartet of the knowledge industry. We have become our own victims, forget the poor in whose name we claim to toil. Knowledge? Hah. $1,000 a page, peer-reviewed. </div><div><br></div><div>Nikhil<br><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div style="font-size:12.8px"><font face="georgia, serif">------------------------</font></div><div style="font-size:12.8px"><font face="georgia, serif">Nikhil Desai</font></div><div style="font-size:12.8px"><font face="georgia, serif">(India +91)909 995 2080<br><i>Skype: nikhildesai888</i></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 6:27 PM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cec1863@gmail.com" target="_blank">cec1863@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div lang="en-US" style="background-color:rgb(255,255,255);line-height:initial"> <div style="width:100%;font-size:initial;font-family:Calibri,"Slate Pro",sans-serif,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125);text-align:initial;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Nikhil you sound more and more like the late Ivan Illich in his last book - Rivers North of the Future - where he once again ridicules what he refers to as the reduction of humans in communities to iatrogenic abstractions to be played with by globalizing professionals whose expertise and power to command the big battalions of world civilization depends on such inappropriate fragmentation and disempowerment of whole human beings living in vital face to face communities all over the planet! </div><div style="width:100%;font-size:initial;font-family:Calibri,"Slate Pro",sans-serif,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125);text-align:initial;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br></div><div style="width:100%;font-size:initial;font-family:Calibri,"Slate Pro",sans-serif,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125);text-align:initial;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">The question to be asked and answered here is whose interests are being served and advanced by the abstract indicator we buy into an use to assess stove performance and to enable the folks at the BOP to choose the best of all paths going forward. I tend to agree with your separation between the functional requirements of cooking and space heating stoves.</div><div style="width:100%;font-size:initial;font-family:Calibri,"Slate Pro",sans-serif,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125);text-align:initial;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br></div><div style="width:100%;font-size:initial;font-family:Calibri,"Slate Pro",sans-serif,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125);text-align:initial;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Cecil the Cook</div> <div style="width:100%;font-size:initial;font-family:Calibri,"Slate Pro",sans-serif,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125);text-align:initial;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"><br style="display:initial"></div> <div style="font-size:initial;font-family:Calibri,"Slate Pro",sans-serif,sans-serif;color:rgb(31,73,125);text-align:initial;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)">Sent from my BlackBerry 10 <wbr>smartphone.</div> <table width="100%" style="background-color:white"> <tbody><tr><td colspan="2" style="font-size:initial;text-align:initial;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"> <div style="border-style:solid none none;border-top-color:rgb(181,196,223);border-top-width:1pt;padding:3pt 0in 0in;font-family:Tahoma,"BB Alpha Sans","Slate Pro";font-size:10pt"> <div><b>From: </b>Nikhil Desai</div><div><b>Sent: </b>Wednesday, June 7, 2017 2:46 AM</div><span class="gmail-"><div><b>To: </b>Discussion of biomass cooking stoves</div></span><div><b>Reply To: </b><a href="mailto:ndesai@alum.mit.edu" target="_blank">ndesai@alum.mit.edu</a></div><span class="gmail-"><div><b>Subject: </b>Re: [Stoves] PM emissions from engines</div></span></div></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="border-style:solid none none;border-top-color:rgb(186,188,209);border-top-width:1pt;font-size:initial;text-align:initial;background-color:rgb(255,255,255)"></div><br><div><div class="gmail-h5"><div id="gmail-m_1034870698924084193_originalContent"><div dir="ltr">Crispin: <br><br><div>I take a different view on your comparison of Kyrgyzstan v. Malawi studies. From what I can tell of the Kyrgyz study - I haven't yet read full report on methodology and results - it is qualitatively different from the Malawi study in various respects, the main one being that the former is for the same households before and after an intervention whereas the latter had a different fuel/stove combination altogether. <br><br>Also, I maintain heating and cooking are different functionalities, so to call these two studies "functionally the same" is mistaken. That "<span style="font-size:12.8px">changing the stove improves health in specific ways" is not - repeat, NOT - obvious and categorical for all cookstoves. <br></span><br>Besides, the "neighborhood" effect may not be insignificant. In Kyrgyzstan, the intervention stoves may have emissions too low to have made any effect outdoors, which was probably not the case in Malawi. <br><br>In short, I do not give much weight to household emissions and exposure testing. Your Kyrgyz project needs to be implemented at scale to show an overall "modernization" impact that I expect of it - better comfort, insulated homes, better windows, what not. <br><br>Too much money is being made off talking about poor people's lungs. People are more than oxidation machines. <br><br>And cookstoves are also more than oxidation machines. <br><br>Nikhil<br><br><br><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br clear="all"><div><div class="gmail-m_1034870698924084193gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><font face="georgia, serif">------------------------------<wbr>------------------------------<wbr>------------<br>Nikhil Desai</font></div><div><font face="georgia, serif">(India <a href="tel:+91%2090999%2052080" value="+919099952080" target="_blank">+91) 909 995 2080</a><br><i>Skype: nikhildesai888</i><br></font><br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 5:15 PM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:crispinpigott@outlook.com" target="_blank">crispinpigott@outlook.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Andrew sez:<br>
<br>
"Okay, so far part of a good answer: so are you actually saying that indoor air pollution is not a quantifiable cause of bad health, yet we know respiring particulates is?"<br>
<br>
Exactly. We can claim that indoor air pollution has a negative, if unquantified, impact on health. Quantifying that impact is expensive. <br>
<br>
The Malawi study and the Kyrgyzstan study are functionally the same: observe the health of HH members one by one in homes with and without the stoves claimed to be improved. The Kyrgyzstan investigation also measured the exposure to which individuals were subjected which is about as good as it gets. <br>
<br>
The results were quite different. In Malawi the background PM overwhelmed any impact / reduction in exposure caused by the stove, at least on a macro-impact level. Child respiratory infections did not change in a statistically significant way. In Kyrgyzstan the needle moved to zero which is very significant. <br>
<br>
Was the disease in the unimproved stove homes caused by smoke? Low room temperature throughout the day? Cold at night? Gases not considered measurable PM?<br>
<br>
It is clear the effect was produced by the stove system. In house after house the effect was seen, not just taken together and shown 'statistically'.<br>
<br>
So we can take that as 'obvious and categorical evidence' that changing the stove improves health in specific ways. To claim that PM causes bronchitis is a stretch, however. PM is not a disease agent any more than a stove is a pill. Removing all PM from a chronically under-heated home might have no effect at all. <br>
<br>
For all the noise usually made about how women do all the cooking and young children hang around them getting exposed, the Kyrgyzstan project showed that men are more exposed to PM2.5 than everyone else. Put that in your corn-cobbie and smoke it!<br>
<br>
In the Naryn region, Dr Sooronbaev says 100% of adults over 40 have COPD. That is probably caused directly by exposure to stove smoke indoors. <br>
<span class="gmail-m_1034870698924084193HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
Crispin<br>
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