Ethnographic Sorcery, by Harry West

Econometrics as Sorcery

The paper deals with the problem of identifying the internal dependencies and similarities among a large number of random processes. Linear models are considered to describe the relations among the time series and the energy associated to the corresponding modeling error is the criterion adopted to quantify their similarities. Such an approach is interpreted in terms of graph theory suggesting ...

‘Most people still believe that kuru is caused by sorcery’

Community Liaison Officer. I am also the community leader of Waisa Village. In our kuru studies, I work closely with Jerome Whitfield and Michael Alpers. In the early 1960s, when I first saw Michael Alpers in Waisa, I was 7 years old. Michael has always been a good friend of our family. The kuru research work went ahead successfully. Later Michael became the Director of the Papua New Guinea Ins...

Ethnographic demography: the use of ethnographic texts by demographers

Problems in Characterizing Barrier Performance by Harry

The Dirty Harry Problem

Policing constantly places its practitioners in situations in which good ends can be achieved by dirty means. When the ends to be achieved are urgent and unquestionably good and only a dirty means will work to achieve them, the policeman faces a genuine moral dilemma. A genuine moral dilemma is a situation from which one cannot emerge innocent no matter what one does-employ a dirty means, emplo...