Here’s a cool video of an undercover operation in Goma to arrest a gorilla trafficker and some of the subsequent efforts to nurse the baby gorilla back to health.
I was curious about the high production quality of the piece. It was produced by Virunga National Park’s rangers, who have their own website. It’s sophisticated and very well designed, with ongoing media production and tools for distributed fundraising. Clearly, this is a well-funded project.
I’m surprised to see them have such a slick public presence, but hopefully this is a good sign. Preservation of the park is in direct competition with its other, more destructive economic value: charcoal production. The charcoal producers and park rangers have been in conflict for many years, now (The gorilla murders that took place a few years ago were a direct result.) Hopefully, with enough outside funding, preservation and ecotourism will become the more valuable product of the region.
This short biopic essay discusses a trend linking India and its diaspora that would be great to see to this extent in Vietnam. Snippet:
Our parents’ generation helped India from afar. They sent money, advised charities, guided hedge-fund dollars into the Bombay Stock Exchange. But most were too implicated in India to return. Our generation, unscathed by it, was freer to embrace it.
Countries like India once fretted about a “brain drain.†We are learning now that “brain circulation,†as some call it, may be more apt.
India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.
HASA (Harvard Alumni for Social Action) was started by a bunch of ‘81 alums to advocate the use of the university’s enormous endowment (estimated to go from $35 to $100 billion in the next ten years) for social good. From the site:
Harvard Alumni for Social Action (HASA) is an independent organization open to all Harvard alumni who seek to encourage the University to use donations for social good. HASA members believe that Harvard’s prominence and wealth make it uniquely able to support educational and research institutions in developing countries. HASA therefore works to fund scholarships for African graduate students at Harvard and also to fund infrastructure improvements at needy African universities.
At the moment, the mission sounds like it’s limited to educational grants. I hope they think bigger as more people take interest in the idea and join the org (I just did.) Harvard is a university which presumably has a huge number of innovative ideas around development. Example: the Kennedy School alone probably has half a dozen graduate students thinking about how unhealthy political structures cause the “resource curse” in developing countries (see this TED talk for an interesting discussion on that topic.) Now, imagine if there were huge grants for those graduate students to do research abroad. “Business plan” competitions for social ventures. New departments, even.
I hope HASA expands into a general-use fund directed globally at fixing the social problems that current markets can’t fix on their own. If such things already exist at Harvard and at other schools, I hope HASA finds ways to support them. This is a topic of such enormous interest (academically, politically, and meathook-future realistically.) If they aim higher, perhaps they can draw many orders of magnitude of funding more than they’re currently raising.
Pangea Day looks amazing. Trailers for it have been playing after every TED talk for months, now, and I finally clicked over to check it out.
Starting at 18:00 GMT [Note: 11AM on the US west coast] on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire program will be broadcast – in seven languages – to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.
Here’s a provocative example:
There will be public and private viewings all over the world, including about twenty in San Francisco:
A great article in the NYT. Long, but worth it. Excerpt:
The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.
2.009 Product Engineering Processes - MIT's undergraduate competition for reuse, recycling, and development yielded some interesting entries, including a solar-powered bottle sorter, shea nut grinder, and insulation panels made from PET bottles. (posted by nagutron on 2008-01-03T19:19:10Z))
NodeBox | Home - Generate 2D visuals using Python. Beautiful stuff. Check out the Andren illuminated scripts and Evolution. From Watson. (posted by nagutron on 2007-12-11T06:59:50Z))
Ponoko - Ponoko is an interesting site: Rapid fabrication, user-contributed. Kind of like a CafePress for furniture and toys. This links to a nice-looking side table. (posted by nagutron on 2007-11-29T02:12:05Z))
