While the US watches another CNN story on rape, Latin America has been watching CNN Espanol where the Ambassador of Venezuela to the Organization of American States (OAS), has just delivered a phenomenally detailed, articulate, and persuasive denunciation of the US and its regional allies, particularly Colombia.
Hugo Chavez has then come out, breaking relations with Colombia (with great sadness), while offering Guyana the oil it needs, and calling again for a regional organization, the only thing “missing” in t he Bolivarian reconstitution. He anticipates that the incoming government of Colombia will restore rational and reasonable relations.
Off to the side, Cuba is re-presenting its proposal for an OAS without the US and Canada–a regional organization that goes beyond UNASUR (Union of South American Nations) to include the Carribean and Central America.
What one notices from the South is that nothing has changed in the US between the Bush and Obama Administrations. The Ambassadors are the same, the policies (if they can be called policies) are the same, the military mumblings about Hugo Chavez are the same.
The U.S. Geological Survey is using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to support a student who’s investigating social Internet technologies as a way to quickly gather information about recent earthquakes.
In this exploratory effort, the USGS is developing a system that gathers real-time, earthquake-related messages from the social networking site Twitter and applies place, time, and key word filtering to gather geo-located accounts of shaking. This approach provides rapid first-impression narratives and, potentially, photos from people at the hazard’s location. The potential for earthquake detection in populated but sparsely seismicly-instrumented regions is also being investigated.
Social Internet technologies are providing the general public with anecdotal earthquake hazard information before scientific information has been published from authoritative sources. People local to an event are able to publish information via these technologies within seconds of their occurrence. In contrast, depending on the location of the earthquake, scientific alerts can take between 2 to 20 minutes. By adopting and embracing these new technologies, the USGS potentially can augment its earthquake response products and the delivery of hazard information.
“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.” —Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises
Imagine connecting item & service-requests to those lacking basic needs into a global online and mobile market forum like a Craigslist.org merged with Kiva+ SMS/txt message capabilities, something like Ushahidi, Wikimapia, as well as GoogleEarth-like & SecondLife-like 3D map to post photos and messages of requests and successful transactions without a centralized “middle-man” who manages everything.
Example: An African farmer needs a part for 1950’s Romanian pump. An aid worker posts need via UNICEF Rapid SMS. A Romanian engineer volunteers to make the part; a German pays for FedEx from Romania to Nigeria; a tourist commits to personally delivering it and posting a photograph of the farmer and repaired engine online to close out need.
It would be designed so that anyone could add “affordable” items (that meet a particular criteria) to the list. Please email earthintelnet |at| gmail.com if you have suggestions. For more info on the concept, see page 7 of the Earth Intelligence Network overview draft and this global range of nano-needs graphic. On 7/21/10 Craig Newmark of Craigslist.org sent this email: “..a number of people say they're working on similar efforts,” but he did not specify. Another great example is Practical Action's “Practical Presents” store where a goat, fish cage, farm tools, and many more products can be purchased for donation.
Global Range of Needs Index/Map/Forum could include the following items:
+ Cheap colloidal silver-treated water filters: see Potters Without Borders & Potters for Peace
+ Lifestraw, the one person water filter that can be worn around the neck
The International Development Design Summit is an intense, hands-on design experience that brings together people from all over the world and all walks of life to create technologies and enterprises that improve the lives of people living in poverty. Unlike most academic conferences, we emphasize the development of prototypes, not papers and proceedings. In moving the technologies on the path from idea to implementation to impact we aim to create real ventures, not just business plans. IDDS is part of the revolution in design that aims to encourage, promote, and build more research and development resources that focus on the needs of the world’s poor. We draw inspiration from several current models of innovation, design and community empowerment: co-creation, cross-disciplinary collaborations and crowd sourcing.
IDDS is a diverse group of people. We come from more than 20 countries around the world—from Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America, and Central America. We are students and teachers, professors and pastors, economists and engineers, masons and mechanics, doctors, welders, farmers, and community organizers. One of the things that makes IDDS a special conference is this richness of backgrounds. It is a conference about innovation, and we believe that innovation thrives in the intersections of disciplines that come from bringing together such an eclectic group.
We believe very strongly in the idea of co-creation: the concept that it is better to provide communities with the skills and tools to become innovators and develop new technologies themselves rather than to simply providing the technologies. We believe that developing the capacity for innovation and creativity is critical for long-term sustainable improvements in the quality of life in a community. It is our goal to demonstrate a model where a user-based community of active, creative designers can invent, innovate and inspire each other to create new technologies.
But not all of our participants are from communities in the developing world. Nearly half of the our participants are students, and we hope to inspire them with the opportunity to interact with field practitioners and to see that inventiveness is not restricted to those with formal education. IDDS also provides a forum where they can meet with like-minded people who are driven by the same desire to make an impact in the world. It is our hope that by creating a diverse global network we can empower individuals and their communities to tackle the tough problems that reside in the developing world.
For this year’s event, the focus has shifted from the creation of technologies to their dissemination. Co-sponsors MIT, Franklin W. Olin College, and Cooper Perkins will be joined by the 2010 host institution, Colorado State University, in developing and implementing the curriculum. IDDS 2010 aims to guide project teams through the process of becoming viable ventures. Curriculum includes key principles from the Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise program at CSU, the D-Lab program at MIT and the Design Stream at Olin College.
The attached very important report is by Jonathan Cook, a freelance resporter based in Nazareth in the occupied West Bank and one of the most intrepid reporters covering the Israel's occupation policies, is — or should be — a long overdue wakeup call to the US people, the US media, and the US government, but don't count on it.
NAZARETH // There is one video Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, must be praying never gets posted on YouTube with English subtitles. To date, the 10-minute segment has been broadcast only in Hebrew on Israel’s Channel 10.
Its contents, however, threaten to gravely embarrass not only Mr Netanyahu but also the US administration of Barack Obama.
The film was shot, apparently without Mr Netanyahu’s knowledge, nine years ago, when the government of Ariel Sharon had started reinvading the main cities of the West Bank to crush Palestinian resistance in the early stages of the second intifada.
At the time Mr Netanyahu had taken a short break from politics but was soon to join Mr Sharon’s government as finance minister.
On a visit to a home in the settlement of Ofra in the West Bank to pay condolences to the family of a man killed in a Palestinian shooting attack, he makes a series of unguarded admissions about his first period as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999.
Seated on a sofa in the house, he tells the family that he deceived the US president of the time, Bill Clinton, into believing he was helping implement the Oslo accords, the US-sponsored peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, by making minor withdrawals from the West Bank while actually entrenching the occupation. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.
He dismisses the US as “easily moved to the right direction” and calls high levels of popular American support for Israel “absurd”.
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer Pete Yost, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 13 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The 73-year-old great grandson of Alexander Graham Bell was sentenced Friday to life in prison without parole for quietly spying for Cuba for nearly a third of a century from inside the State Department. His wife was sentenced to 5 1/2 years.
Retired intelligence analyst Kendall Myers said he meant his country no harm and stole secrets only to help Cuba's people who “have good reason to feel threatened” by U.S. intentions of ousting the communist Castro government.
“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.” —Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises
Imagine connecting item & service-requests to those lacking basic needs into a global online and mobile market forum like a Craigslist.org merged with Kiva+ SMS/txt message capabilities, something like Ushahidi, Wikimapia, as well as GoogleEarth-like & SecondLife-like 3D map to post photos and messages of requests and successful transactions without a centralized “middle-man” who manages everything.
Example: An African farmer needs a part for 1950’s Romanian pump. An aid worker posts need via UNICEF Rapid SMS. A Romanian engineer volunteers to make the part; a German pays for FedEx from Romania to Nigeria; a tourist commits to personally delivering it and posting a photograph of the farmer and repaired engine online to close out need.
It would be designed so that anyone could add “affordable” items (that meet a particular criteria) to the list. Please email earthintelnet |at| gmail.com if you have suggestions. For more info on the concept, see page 7 of the Earth Intelligence Network overview draft and this global range of nano-needs graphic. On 7/21/10 Craig Newmark of Craigslist.org sent this email: “..a number of people say they're working on similar efforts,” but he did not specify. Another great example is Practical Action's “Practical Presents” store where a goat, fish cage, farm tools, and many more products can be purchased for donation.
Global Range of Needs Index/Map/Forum could include the following items:
+ Cheap colloidal silver-treated water filters: see Potters Without Borders & Potters for Peace
+ Lifestraw, the one person water filter that can be worn around the neck
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