I wish I was good at remembering names so I could give credit where it’s due, but anyways… Being the incredible and supportive friend that I am, I was checking out a friend’s art piece on display today (pretty good commentary on control, image, and the bar scene - not the focus here but something I’ll surely return to) and witnessed some pretty interesting human behaviour. One of the other artists had printed an image of typical African poverty (little kids with distended stomachs, amputees covered in flies, etc) on a 3′x4′ pane of glass, which she displayed (and discreetly filmed) in the middle of a Guelph shopping mall. The vast majority of people who viewed this display of human misery paid it no mind and continued on with their business. Those few who responded did so with comments such as “my, what a pretty painting”, “absolutely gorgeous”, “thats a beautiful image”, and so on. Not one comment referred to the content of the image. Later, as part of the exhibition, the artist dropped and shattered the glass in the middle of the mall. Many passers-by rushed over and began asking the artist if she was okay, if she needed any help, if she was hurt. Someone who probably viewed the entire scene from a completely different perspective offered her 25 cents to walk away from the mess.

What does this mean? Are people simply so overwhelmed by African poverty that they choose to turn the other way, but are willing to respond to smaller concerns? Or do people simply just not care about that which they cannot see? Are we experiencing societal burnout? Desensitization? Apathy? Some, all or none of those? Am I looking too deep, or not deeply enough? I don’t really know, but people sure are good at missing the point.

Not that I’d be mistaken for one anyway, but I’m definitely not an authority on what I’m writing about here. I’m just here as a dude you probably know, giving my own little editorial spin on topics that interest me (and hopefully you, too). The moral of this little post, however, is that we have a (very limited as of now) Resources page that has a few useful links and books, but is badly in need of expanding. That’s where you should be looking if you want some more credible info, and if anyone’s already done some good digging on a relevant topic, send us an e-mail or just post it in this comments section, and I’ll post it up.

I read about an interesting debate happening at the University of Waterloo over the implementation of a $50 non-refundable universal bus pass for all students. I was a little bit surprised at how heated the discussion was, and I got to thinking. I’m not familiar with Waterloo’s geography, so I’m coming at this from a Toronto perspective and will generalize it even further, but frankly, I haven’t got a whole lot of sympathy for any naysayers. You can correct me if I’m wrong.

If you can afford a car to get around, good for you. If you can walk or bike everywhere, even better. In either case, however, a healthy public transit system does a lot to benefit you, because it benefits everyone. I’ve heard some silly discussions about the environmental detriments that a universal bus pass would produce - i.e. that no one who drives would give up the convenience, and that it would encourage walkers to take the bus instead (ultimately irrelevant, since the bus would be running anyway, I suppose). Maybe I’m just pragmatic, but looking at depreciation, gas, maintenance, and insurance, there’s a huge chunk of change to be saved for leaving behind the car, especially if I’m paying for a bus pass as part of my tuition. If even a few drivers give up their car for the bus, not only does it take the emissions from those cars off the road, but it means less traffic and congestion for those who still drive. Both parties benefit. As the Onion notes, 98 Percent of U.S. Commuters Favour Public Transportation For Others.

Environmentalism aside, however, a strong public transit system is at the heart of any healthy urban community. The ability for everybody, not just the privileged (monetarily and physically - it’s hard to walk or bike if you’re elderly or disabled), to get around a city is crucial. I know in particular, living in the poor West end, the Toronto transit system is invaluable for a lot of people around here. Without effective public transit, you cut off entire communities from the rest of the city - downtown culture, job options, and everything else that comes with mobility. Great if you want to sweep the problem under the rug, but not if you want a healthy, diverse, engaging community. A reliable lump-sum source of income from thousands of university students represents a serious cash infusion for a small transit system, and seriously benefits the public as a result. Students may not like to think so, but you are a part of the community, too.

Getting to school aside, a bus pass is also great for getting somewhere in a pinch. Like home from the bar. You can argue they aren’t academic expenses, but being a student is about way more than just going to school. $50 a term is a pretty paltry amount of money in the long run, and a little bit of negative reinforcement might just work wonders in making more people think about the bigger ramifications for social good.

Speaking from a little bit of experience, as I am the brother who went to “Teach in Uganda” (didn’t do a WHOLE lot of good, I don’t think, but I learned a lot), I have a few things to say about condom use in Africa.

For one thing, it’s difficult - condoms cost money. They are extremely cheap in Africa - government subsidized - and I believe there are places that you can get some for free, but that is a small stumbling block. As Andrew mentioned, the overwhelming majority of problems behind condom use are caused by ignorance and misconceptions about condoms and HIV AIDS.

The few groups of high school kids that I had the opportunity to talk to about AIDS (or, in some cases, that I had the opportunity to witness someone else talk at in Luganda about AIDS) were very receptive. There was very little moral opposition from what I could see, but there were a lot of misconceptions (AIDS only exists in Africa, condoms have HIV in them, as well as some that I didn’t personally witness: you can cure AIDS through sex with a virgin, or by taking a shower, as a high-ranking South African politician publically announced about a year ago). I’ve even heard of cases where someone’s idea of “using a condom” was to put it on a banana before sex, as is often shown in demonstrations…

Uganda is considered by a lot of the international community to be fairly “ahead” when it comes to the AIDS game. That is, they have been pushing the “ABC” (Abstinence/Be Faithful/Condomise) campaign for decades, now. Uganda is a pretty Christian country, too. However, every Ugandan I’ve spoken to about AIDS knows that it needs to be stopped in any way possible. Most are very receptive to condom education. And those who educate are not naive enough to think that kids aren’t going to screw at the first chance they get.

The shitty thing is that by many accounts we’re already too late. A huge portion of Africa (and, indeed, much of the developing world) is already infected with AIDS, and a massive swath of the productive population has already been wiped out by the disease. This means that thousands of children have been orphaned, none of whom can afford school fees (let alone decent food). Even if they manage to avoid AIDS themselves, the lack of education (even around the home - such as in cooking or farming techniques) is just as damaging. It’s pretty dire.

No sense to give up hope - if anything, the urgency means that efforts need to be continually ramped up. And not fucked up by the President and his Wife, who have decided to reduce/refuse aid for countries that decide to mention condoms on their anti-AIDS ads… Bleh.

Note: This post was snagged from the comments of this post, for those of you who haven’t read the discussion.

The weather has been great in Guelph lately, and on Friday I spent a few hours exploring the Arboretum in a shroom-like state of mind.

Yet another study, this one by the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, has come out that pegs both alcohol and tobacco as more dangerous than weed and several other illegal drugs. Surprise, surprise.

Drugs were studied on the basis of physical harm, chemical dependence, and social harms. The full study is here, and the article link from Gizmag is here.

If you haven’t heard of it already, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project was founded with the intent of bringing a fully-functional laptop to children in the developing world as an educational aid at a price point of just $100 USD. The price point has crept up a bit since then, now $140 or so, with the inclusion of more features (the list is shockingly long), but it’s a truly impressive piece of design, at any price. Each laptop is a wireless router, connecting to each other, and the internet. And it can be manually recharged by hand, pedal, or pull-cord - don’t you wish your laptop had that?

But design aside, the question becomes, is it really what people in the developing world need? On the one hand, it does have real value as an educational system - one laptop can essentially replace all textbooks (depending, of course, on the emergence of a cohesive, affordable open-source educational commons to keep costs down), and keep them up to date without reprinting new editions. More importantly, it gives children in the developing world a chance to learn about what’s out there, and better yet, a chance for us to learn about them, and actually communicate personally. The Internet is a hell of a resource.

On the other hand, the values of computing represent a decidedly Western sense of priorities. Our condescending attitude to the developing world rears its ugly head again, even with the best intentions - “computers work for us, clearly you need them to succeed, too!” $140 dollars USD per child (purchased by the governments of said nations) sounds like quite a luxury for a computer, considering the lack of fundamental infrastructure like access to clean drinking water, food and basic medical care. Compared to buying all those laptops, with an equivalent injection of funds for traditional education (more schools, teachers, textbooks, and supplies), who knows what the balance would look like.

Its a real conundrum. Do you try address the symptoms of the problem, which are often life and death matters? Or do you try and provide people with an opportunity to become more globally connected and competitive in the longterm, so that they’ll be better able address those problems themselves?

My cynical friend Pavel suggested I write something about how we can offset thirst in the global south by shipping in Gatorade (or possibly Mountain Dew). After all, extreme poverty requires eXtreme refreshment! While his tongue may need to be surgically removed from his cheek one of these days, he does make a good ironic point about some of the stupid arrangements for global aid we have.

Often the things that we offer represent a fundamental misunderstanding of the conditions and needs of the people we’re trying to help. Expensive equipment, generators, vehicles, and any other complex systems that work so well in the West just don’t have the infrastructure to support them. Computers don’t tend to work so well when you don’t have consistent electricity from any source, on or off the grid. A generator doesn’t work when you don’t have easy access to fuel, or maintenance items to support it. When one little part breaks, you often render the entire thing useless because there’s no way to replace it. When my brother went to teach in Uganda, he made a point of limiting the amount of school equipment (simple stuff like paper and pencils that you take for granted) he took with him because you set up a dependence that isn’t sustainable - it’ll be gone shortly after he is, and they’ll be back to square one.

What we need to send isn’t stuff, it’s processes. Instead of sending a refrigerator, we should tell people how to make a pot-in-pot refrigerator themselves. Instead of a complicated UV-sterilization system that requires electricity, put some pop bottles on a black roof and use nature’s UV rays. AIDS drugs are one thing, but widespread education about condoms helps nip the problem in the bud. There’s an awful lot of stuff that can be done simply and cheaply that doesn’t require our traditional ideas of infrastructure. It just requires a different way of looking at it - instead of being the great white saviours from the west, we’re helping providing the means for them to bring about change themselves.

EDIT: This post has lost a little bit of its poignancy since I fixed the Internet Explorer issue. Meh.

I use Firefox. It’s an open source browser, meaning that anyone who wants to can download the source code, tweak it and make improvements, and submit it back to the online community to evolve the software. This is excellent. Software development is now the domain of a huge number of individuals each with their own ideas, and the software is unhampered by the need to protect intellectual property. This means things happen quickly - Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice, and others have all sprung up incredibly quickly as secure, robust, versatile applications rivaling those put out by Microsoft, despite the latter’s absolutely immense R&D and manpower budget. And they’re free. This last point has huge ramifications for the developing world, since current copyrighted software is prohibitively expensive, often more than the price of the computers they’d be running it on (anyone seen the price of MS Office?). With open source alternatives, more people have access to technology.

And software isn’t it. There’s been a concerted effort to democratize other parts of society through open source developments. Imagine open-source pharmaceuticals, research, scientific journals, journalism, elections, and more. The future is open source, and businesses that fail to recognize this are going to get left behind.

Open source is also why our web site looks like shit. I never bothered to look at it in IE while we were designing it. Oops.

Maybe I’ll try to fix it, but really, you should just download Firefox.

A public service announcement from Andy: Most people have probably heard about the invading Asian Longhorn Beetle in North America by now, but not nearly enough of them know what it looks like. Here you go:

Posted in Images | 1 Comment »