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The National Institute on Aging (NIA) has had a long-standing interest in supporting both mainstream and cutting-edge research in the field of cognitive aging. This chapter outlines the NIA’s perspective on future directions in this continually evolving field. It begins by describing the overall mission of the NIA, the two extramural programs at the Institute that fund cognitive aging research, and the domains of study under this broad rubric. Next, it presents several cognitive aging initiatives recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. This is followed by a discussion of the rationale underlying the use of workshops as one of the means of developing scientific road maps for future research directions. Pursuing this approach in more detail, the chapter provides summaries of several recently held, NIA-sponsored workshops that covered various domains of cognitive aging and present some of the suggestions and recommendations that emerged from these meetings. Finally, it outlines several future directions for research.

This chapter adds certain moderate adjustments to the body of work promulgated by the National Academy of Science, and also the work of David Mowery, that deals with the notion of modern computing being the product of massive public investment and government funding. The goal of the chapter, however, is to suggest that private enterprise and private capital—and not just government funding—played certain roles in influencing computing. IBM, in particular, is given more focus here to determine how the firm has contributed to the emergence and refinement of the storage capacity of the computer from the end of World War II until the development of the System/360. The conclusion arrived at is that while certain activities of the government may have benefited IBM, the government also drew IBM away from various opportunities that might have allowed them to blossom without the required intervention from the public sector.

The chapters in this volume approach the issue of improving the measurement of consumption expenditures from many different perspectives. There are also connections between the various chapters and the National Academy of Science (NAS) report on the proposed Consumer Expenditure (CE) survey redesign, which was published around the same time that these CRIW conference presentations were prepared for final publication in this volume. This introductory chapter provides an overview of the premise and goals for the CRIW conference, and summarizes the contributions in the sixteen individual CRIW conference contributions, with a particular focus on how each chapter relates to the proposed CE redesign and NAS report. The first chapter in the volume provides a review of the current state of knowledge about household expenditure surveys. The next four chapters are focused on why governments collect expenditure data, and how those objectives should guide the redesign process. Chapters five through ten focus on specific measurement problems in existing surveys, in the US, and in other countries. Finally, the last five chapters discuss the pros and cons of possible alternative approaches for collecting expenditure data.

“Any water-related stress you can imagine, we have. Abundance, shortage, pollution. We have them all,” a young woman named Afifa Raihana told me on my first trip to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Afifa was working for the World Bank at that time, coordinating environmental initiatives, having earlier worked as a journalist. The list of water-related problems in Bangladesh is long and sometimes contradictory: waterlogging as well as desertification, floods along with shortages. Bangladesh sees frequent cyclones and storm surges; it copes with salinity and sedimentation of riverbeds. Industrial chemicals, agricultural runoff, and urban sewage pollute the nation’s ponds and rivers. The problems sometimes stem from the sheer abundance of water in this nearliquid land. In the monsoon, a quarter of the land is regularly inundated. When rivers flood, two-thirds of the land may be covered by water—drowning people and their animals, displacing families, destroying crops. This is the bottom of the Ganges watershed; any water and sediment that has not been held back upstream comes to rest here or washes into the Bay of Bengal. On occasion the abundance is a curse, but usually it is a blessing. Maniruzzaman Miah told me that drought is a far greater threat here than floods, which are essential for growing rice and jute and for keeping the water table high. “Rain and the need for rain. That is what Bangladesh is all about. Floods are part of the ecosystem.” The oddly shaped country that is now Bangladesh was once part of a prosperous realm stretching from Bihar to the Bay of Bengal. Bengal, which was partitioned in 1948—half to India, half to Pakistan—was known as the best-educated, most literate, most cultured part of India. It was a grain basket, a seat of Buddhist learning in ancient times, and later had a well-developed textile industry until England’s East India Company strangled it to promote English-made textiles. Britain essentially launched control of the subcontinent from the east. Calcutta was the seat of British power until 1911, when the capital was moved to Delhi.