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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>An important new Consensus Study Report was released this week (in preliminary form) by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, called "Branches of the Same Tree". <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=24988">http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=24988</a> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>This report, two years in the making, was based on scholarly input from an unusually large committee of 22 academics from a wide span covering the sciences, technology, engineering, math, medicine, the arts and humanities. The Chair of the committee was David Skorton, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Participants included Norman Augustine and many other illustrious leaders; truly a blue-ribbon panel. The report is large -- over 250 pages. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Very briefly, the charge of the committee was to find out if there is evidence to indicate that integrating these diverse fields leads, or could lead to significant benefits for society. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>It was very interesting to discover, on page 50 of this report, an example "box" highlighting a problem that we all know about: increasing social acceptance of improved cookstoves. The box suggests that engineers have succeeded in the easy part -- designing new cookstoves -- but continue to fail at the hard part -- increasing adoption and impact. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Here is the quote from the report:<br>-------<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>"BOX 2-2<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Cook Stoves and the Need for Integration<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The world’s poor have experienced a long-standing need for better cook<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>stoves. Smoke from cooking and heating kills 4 million people a year and contributes<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>to pollution and deforestation. Yet despite years of effort and a plethora<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>of creative designs, engineers have not yet produced a technology that meets<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>existing needs.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The failure, according to former United Nations deputy high commissioner<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>for refugees T. Alexander Aleinikoff, lies in the disconnect between designers’<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>imaginations of what makes for a good technology and the actual conditions—<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>physical, social, and cultural—in which they will be used (Parthasarathy, 2016).<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>“We’re in the situation where everybody and his brother has invented a cookstove<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>and none of them have really worked well for us” (Confino and Paddison, 2014).<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>This failure traces, at least in part, to the segregation of the disciplines. The designer<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>may see only the material and technical parameters of a technology and<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>not the dimensions of lived experience and social reality that are the focus of the<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>cultural anthropologist. This is an unsurprising outcome of an educational system<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>that discourages rather than encourages engineers to see stoves as culturally<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>embedded artifacts—that is, to attend to the human dimensions and context of<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>an apparently technical problem."<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>-------<br><br><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>We in the improved cookstove community know that cooking practices impact many fields, including child and maternal health, women's rights, nutrition, safety, economic development, deforestation, refugees, disaster relief and climate change. At least it is nice to know that these senior experts in a wide range of disciplines recognize the need to collaborate to achieve an important goal. Anthropology -- currently one of the least popular college curricula -- turns out to be crucial in guiding development in this and many other humanitarian efforts. Researchers need to greatly increase our knowledge of the daily routines of women all over the world -- work that is generally taken for granted and not considered a worthwhile subject of research. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>This report and its message ought to be leveraged by those of us who are in a position to influence potential sponsors and donors to support research on what I call the "cooking facts" of the world. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><b><i><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Paul Arveson<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></p><p class=MsoNormal>Director of Research<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Solar Household Energy, Inc.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><a href="http://www.she-inc.org/">www.she-inc.org</a> <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>301-523-4540<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div></body></html>