The bloggosphere is full of ideas on aid and SMS today
February 5, 2010From: Irene Guijt
Peparing for a mobile phone uprising in Africa
http://www.guardian.co.uk/katine/katine-chronicles-blog/2010/feb/02/mobile-phone-sms-uprising
From: Bll Easterly
Take seriously the power of networks (or just look at some COOL maps)
http://aidwatchers.com/2010/01/take-seriously-the-power-of-networks-or-just-look-at-some-cool-maps/
America – Allen Ginsberg – early drafts
February 5, 2010Many have heard the timeless Musical rendition of Allen Ginsberg’s poem America – which features some great lines such as:
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
It continues…
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
But YouTube also features Allen Ginsberg reading an early draft of this poem of a crowd.
Notice how much longer, less focused, and generally less evocative this draft is. I found it useful to compare. It is a relief to realize that even a great poem began with twice as much crap as it ended up with. You can hear where lines were dropped, other ones shortened. Maybe it will give me the gumption to do likewise with my own writing. Maybe, I’ll take one of my novel manuscripts and try to snip it away until a novella remains.
How international NGOs killed civil society in developing countries
February 2, 2010Re-post from humanitarian.info
It’s five years after the end of the war, with five years of focused attention from the international community, and five years with an increasing presence of international organisations looking for partners. Yet everybody agrees – particularly the local NGOs themselves – that capacity is as low as ever, and there is still no coherent approach to building that capacity in the near term.
- International NGOs present the only visible models for nationals who want to form an organisation,
- Conspicuous wealth of international NGOs creates a strong incentive to emulate them.
- The presence of international NGOs forces national governments to adopt legislative frameworks that are far more about controlling NGOs than regulating them
- International NGOs present themselves as non-profit service providers rather than as the organised expression of a collective will.
- System incentivizes the registration of local NGOs – frequently as income generation schemes for sole traders – rather than fostering organisations that meet the needs of local people.
- International NGOs frequently either deny or co-opt faith groups, the most viable non-NGO civil society groups.
In summary: the presence of international NGOs undermines the development of civil society as we unwittingly remake it in our own image, enabled both by national governments and international donors. We need to break this cycle by recognising the diversity of collective action, revising our engagement strategies to reflect that, and reversing legal and economic frameworks that perpetuate the cycle of NGO creation that leads to bloated and ineffective local NGO communities.
The Secret Paper Passing Network in Science and Beyond
February 2, 2010
I can’t believe one tidbit from graduate school lore is largely missing in the world outside of science.
I am referring to the “How to succeed in grad school” letter from an MIT engineering student in the mid 1990s. Here is the secret paper passing network explained:
“Once you start working on a research project, it’s a good idea to get into the habit of writing an informal paper to explain what you are up to and what you’ve learned every few months. Start with the contents of your research notebook. Take two days to write it. If it takes longer, you are being perfectionistic. Stop and start over with your eyes closed.
This update isn’t something you are judged on; it’s to share with your friends. Write DRAFT-NOT FOR CITATION on the cover. Make a dozen copies and give them to people who are likely to be interested (including your advisor!). This practice has most of the benefits of writing a formal paper (comments, clarity of thought, writing practice, and so forth), but on a smaller scale, and with much less work invested. Often, if your work goes well, these informal papers can be used later as the backbone of a more formal paper, from an Working Paper to a journal article.”
I’d add that I’ve learned you can build a career on working papers outside of science. If your field lacks a commitment to rigorous evidence based interventions (e.g. International development and macroeconomics) then peer reviewed, refereed articles, are not the best use of your time. The average science paper gets submitted 5 times, because we do care about rigor.
“Once you become part of the Secret Paper Passing Network, you’ll find that people give you copies of draft papers that they want comments on. Getting comments on your papers is extremely valuable. Reciprocate! You get people to take the time to write comments on yours by writing comments on theirs.
How to critique, write, and generally not make a fool of yourself after school:
Writing useful comments on a paper is an art. Learning to critique other people’s papers will help your own writing. To write really useful comments, you need to read the paper twice, once to get the ideas, and the second time to mark up the presentation.
If someone is making the same mistake over and over, don’t just mark it over and over. Try to figure out what the pattern is, why the person is doing it, and what they can do about it. Then explain this explicitly at length on the front page and/or in person.
The author, when incorporating your comments, will follow the line of least resistance, fixing only one word if possible, or if not then one phrase, or if not then one sentence. If some clumsiness in their text means that they have to back up to the paragraph level, or that they have to rethink the central theme of a whole section, or that the overall organization of the paper is wrong, say this in big letters so they can’t ignore it.
Don’t write destructive criticism like “garbage” on a paper. This contributes nothing to the author. Take the time to provide constructive suggestions. It’s useful to think about how you would react to criticism of your own paper when providing it for others.
There are a variety of sorts of comments. There are comments on presentation and comments on content. Comments on presentation vary in scope. Copy-edits correct typos, punctuation, misspellings, missing words, and so forth. Learn the standard copy-editing symbols. You can also correct grammar, diction, verbosity, and muddied or unclear passages. Usually people who make grammatical mistakes do so consistently, using comma splices for example; take the time to explain the problem explicitly. Next there are organizational comments: ideas out of order at various scales from clauses through sentences and paragraphs to sections and chapters; redundancy; irrelevant content; missing arguments.
Comments on content are harder to characterize. You may suggest extensions to the author’s ideas, things to think about, errors, potential problems, expressions of admiration. “You ought to read X because Y” is always a useful comment.
In requesting comments on a paper, you may wish to specify which sorts are most useful. For an early draft, you want mostly comments on content and organization; for a final draft, you want mostly comments on details of presentation. Be sure as a matter of courtesy to to run the paper through a spelling corrector before asking for comments.
You don’t have to take all the suggestions you get, but you should take them seriously. Cutting usually improves it.
Getting your papers published counts. This can be easier than it seems. Basically what reviewers for publications look for is a paper that (a) has something new to say and (b) is not broken in some way. Standards are often lower than you think. This is exacerbated by the inherent randomness of the reviewing process. So one heuristic for getting published is to keep trying. Here are some more:
Make sure it is readable. Papers are rejected because they are incomprehensible or ill-organized as often as because they don’t have anything to say.
Circulate drafts for a while before sending it in to the journal. Get and incorporate comments. Resist the temptation to hurry a result into publication; there isn’t much competition in AI, and publication delays will outweigh draft-commenting delays anyway.
Read some back issues of the journal or conference you are submitting to to make sure that the style and content of your paper are appropriate to it.
Most publications have an “information for authors,” a one page summary of what they want. Read it.
Most of academic and research success is just doing your homework. Only, when you grow up, the first assignment for each homework project is figuring out what your homework assigns ought to be. Your PhD will help you. Reading directions and reading others in your field is often the extent of being a competent professional X.
Papers get rejected - don’t get dejected.
Failure is the key to success. If you’re struggling in the middle of something, what you are doing is not innovation.
Like all else in research, paper writing always takes a lot longer than you expect. Papers for publication have a particularly insidious form of this disease, however. After you finally finish a paper, you send it in for publication. Many months later it comes back with comments, and you have to revise it. Then months after that the proofs come back for correction. If you publish several forms of the paper, like a short conference version and a long journal version, this may go through several rounds. The result is that you are still working on a paper years after you thought you were through with it and after the whole topic has become utterly boring. This suggests a heuristic: Don’t do some piece of research you don’t care for passionately on the grounds that it won’t be hard to get a publication out of it: the pain will be worse than you expect.
A marshmallow of success
February 1, 2010
Forty years ago researchers tested children’s ability to delay gratification. The assistant would bring the child into a room full of tasty treats and invite him/her to pick out any desert she/he wanted. However, once the child had his hands (and mind) wrapped around the treat - such as a marshmallow - a deal was posed:
“If you can wait 15 minutes, I’ll come back and give you two treats instead of one.”
It turns out there were dramatic differences in kids’ abilities to wait for the treat, and that these differences correlated very well with later success in life as adults.
I showed this article to my wife Heather. She asked, “won’t you cuddle with me?”
“Sure, after you read this.”
She started reading. A few minutes later came the outburst, “Six pages! I hate internet articles like this!”
I’m sure Heather and I both belong to the “high delayer” group. We both have PhDs, lead a healthy lifestyle, and come from families with none of the behavioral problems associated with the kids who were unable to sit on their hands for 15 minutes to earn that marshmallow of success.
“I have to read all six pages?” she asked again after the 2nd page of the web article.
But I also worry that people like us who grew up as your typical “high-delayers” are now turning into low delayers. Our society provides too much constant stimulation. Everything is free now (as the Gillian Welch song goes). I’d bet that today’s “high delayers” would no longer wait 15 minutes, since everything in life is delivered in 7 minute chunks, divided by commercial breaks.
Although it was a great read, neither of us finished reading the article. I’m already writing about it on my blog. Heather is “sick of looking at the computer” even though she’d spent a half-hour on facebook unaware of this sickness until I asked her to do something that felt like “work.” Reading the New Yorker, that is. She’ll probably burn through a hundred pages of her book, Born to Run later without a problem. I won’t. I’m too interested in playing computer strategy games from the early ‘90s on my PC. Tonight my brother and sister are probably playing a fancy new massively multiplayer online game (MMOG).
There’s a relevant TED talk by David Perry about the way society is being transformed by a different social norm for attention span. But it still makes me wonder if we’re paying attention to what’s happening to us.
Maybe we lack the attention to really notice that we lack attention.
Maybe I didn’t even notice my last two sentences are redundant. It brings to mind a statement from one of my favorite games, Nethack:
My letter about Haiti and the Worthy Dozen
January 20, 2010
Happy New Year! Heather and I just got back from two weeks in Thailand so my message is a little late. We’ve both been looking for new jobs abroad, preferably in the developing world. For the last ten years I held a dream of getting my PhD and then joining Peace Corps again to teach science at the university level in some exotic place. Unfortunately, Peace Corps doesn’t roll like that anymore, even though my mother did this, and several of my fellow volunteers did this ten years ago when I served in the Gambia. Alas, I am on my own to find connections at a university in Africa or Asia that needs a good science teacher.
My reasons for wanting to teach outside of the US and Europe will become clear in a moment. First, I wanted to give you some relevant insights into the Haiti earthquake to which I am privy because of my position at GlobalGiving.org. As you know, Haiti was devastated by a 7.1 earthquake a week ago and all the homes collapsed. Over 30,000 were killed instantly, and a confluence of developing country factors (corruption and a lack of infrastructure, security, and local expertise) are threatening to take that death toll to 100,000 now. Similar earthquakes have struck elsewhere (i.e. Indonesia) but with a much lower death toll – because the infrastructure and the response are better in rich countries. See http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/world_deaths.php if you’re curious about trends.
Yesterday I was sitting in a meeting, my first day back at GlobalGiving, and was struck at what an amazing job everyone had done for Haiti. In one week, they had found ten new local partners who are helping with disaster relief and strengthened ties with our existing ones. Paul Farmer (of Mountains Beyond Mountains fame) is one of these, but we now have a dozen others just as good whom didn’t get 60-minutes coverage. Another of the “Paul Farmer” heroes is Todd Shea, a struggling rock star who left his career in 2005 after the Pakistan earthquake and ran to help, setting up his own Comprehensive Disaster Relief Services (CDRS) NGO and remaining in the region to this day. Within 24 hours of the Haiti Earthquake, Todd had picked up again and gotten his own medical team to a country he’s never been to. What these Worthy Dozen organizations are doing right now is even more amazing when you compare it to the official aid channels. I don’t know if the news has picked this story up yet, but over the weekend Red Cross raised $22 million via mobile phone giving (with constant promotion by the NFL). That’s wonderful, but because of a quagmire of cell phone carrier contracts and bureaucracy not one cent of that $22 million will reach haiti until Februrary. It’s sad and ironic that instant giving will be the slowest way to get money there, but that’s just a fact of life. In any other situation three weeks wouldn’t make a difference, but we take calls from our partners on a daily basis who urge us to get the money there now.
So we did. Because GlobalGiving was created to be more flexible and faster moving than the industry, we’re getting money to our Worthy Dozen on a weekly basis. Today each of the 13 organizations will got at least $30,000 a piece from the Haiti Disaster Relief Fund http://www.globalgiving.org/haiti-earthquake/. We sent out a total of $630,000 raised last week. We’re also able to get money to people like Todd Shea, who last week didn’t have anything in place there, and will take another six months to complete his formal 501(c)3 paperwork for Haiti relief. We can’t send millions like national governments or fly in military jets to drop off emergency supplies, but dollar for dollar I think we’re the most efficient. I was sad to hear Paul Farmer’s team on 60 minutes lament that they were hacking off limbs with rusty saws when literally tons of real medical supplies were at the airport, tied up in red tape http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6108550n. They were down to three bottles of rubbing alcohol and one fifth of vodka to stelize their civil-war-era equipment. And down the road, I have much more confidence in our vetting process for where the money went and what it accomplished than I do in anyone else. We’re working with people whom we already know well and who have a demonstrated track record. I put Haiti among the top five most corrupt countries and would never send a check to any organization there without an audit trail. Right now, millions of aid dollars are likely getting siphoned off into private bank accounts by corrupt Haitian government officials. That mountain of medical supplies will probably stay “tied up” at the airport until a proper bribe amount can be negotiated. But rather than put up our hands and send nothing, we’re doing all we can to get money directly to people on the ground, circumventing official channels where money can be embezzled, limiting the power of bureaucrats for extortion.
Last week in Thailand I spoke to one of our partner organizations there who helped Burmese migrant workers during the tsunami. Max, an American four-year volunteer, noted that immediately after the tsunami, dozens of unregistered organizations popped up to accept relief money. Five years later most of these orgs have disappeared again, with little trail as to where the money went. That’s why he was proud to work with GHRS, which remains there to this day and who just joined GlobalGiving in 2009. This is the face of the world today. Good guys compete for money among a field with some bad players, and it is up to us to know who is who and which is which. That’s why GlobalGiving hired me. I have been working for nearly two years to find ways for local people to provide feedback on the work that local organizations are doing to serve them (or not). Local people are the experts, and technology – like cell phones integrated into the web – can extract that knowledge and put it into the hands of donors on the website.
I’ve also been helping design a global reputation system for NGOs, much the way that Ebay rates sellers, but nothing like that. Because unlike ebay, neither buyers nor sellers are experts on whether the product was any good. It’s up to a third party – the beneficiaries – to rate the product, the buyer, and the seller. These have all been exciting projects to work on, but after two years, I am really ready to back to teaching science, and not just teaching science anywhere.
I’ve lived in enough places to realize that opportunities are not spread equally around the world. In The Gambia I trained computer teachers in schools and gave youth the tools to enter society with good technical jobs. Some of my pupils did get much better jobs than would have been possible without my teaching. I know, because when I arrived the five schools had no computer teachers and just a few second-hand computers in boxes. They needed to be set up, and that required canibalizing some to make others work. They needed software, and I found that. And when I left, over 200 students were getting regular computer classes.
But I am most proud of the handful of people who became the teachers. Kemo Jatta – a out of school guy who works at the ISP, Absulai Sesay – a teacher who started his own computer teacher school, after school programs, and awards to promote computer literacy, and Abiye Romeo Tonye – who like all of these would have made a great scientist if he had been born elsewhere.
Recently there was a book released about a boy who learned to build wind generators out of trash with just a photograph. He couldn’t read, but his mind obviously held great potential. In my experience there are thousands of Einstein quality minds out there, and the difference is opportunity. I want to be there – to give that opportunity as a great teacher.
Now I know many of you can rightly show that many in America need that opportunity too. And I agree. I’ll return some day and help them. But for now, I’m looking for an opportunity to teach abroad and help the next Einsteins become scientists, or at least the next computer teacher become Bill Gates. I need your help with this. I’ve written to various schools but if you don’t know a soul on the staff, none of them write back. Could you please take a moment to examine your rolodex and introduce me to anyone you know at a university in Africa or Asia? I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.
P.S. – PLEASE forward this message to your friends on my behalf. Maybe one of them has a connection, and everyone should know about Haiti.
Marc Maxson
