Friends in New York City tell me that they never visit the tourist attractions - the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building - until they’re hosting guests from out of town. I’m not a Cambridge resident, nor am I ever really resident at Harvard, but I had the same experience yesterday when my friend Nate came to visit me at the Berkman Center. He dragged me across the street to visit the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology and the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

In a sense, he also dragged me back about a hundred years in time. These museums, in a sense, are a museum of museums, a memory of museums past. They remind us of when museums were places for collectors to store their objects and experts to study them, not tools to educate or entertain the public.

The central attraction of the Museum of Natural History is a collection of glass models of plants and flowers, created by Bohemian glassmakers Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka in the late 19th and early 20th century. They were comissioned by a Harvard botany professor and paid for by one of his students, and ended up becoming the life’s work for Leopold and his son. The models were used to teach botany to Harvard students - the fragile models now are art objects, more than scientific curiosities.

One of the Blaschka flowers in the Harvard collection.

Leopold Blaschka began his work making glass eyes for taxidermists. His incredible skill with lampwork - heating small sticks of glass over lamp flames to fuse together into fine, colorful models - was first displayed when he began making models of exotic flowers he saw in natural history books. A local aristocrat commissioned him to produce replicas of his orchid collection, and Blaschka discovered that the fascination with the natural sciences that was sweeping the academic community made his work extremely timely and popular.

It’s hard for me to imagine a time at which fused glass was the best material to build model plants for scholarly study. Then again, Blaschka’s work was likely a vast improvement on the work done by Louis Auzoux, making plaster and paper-mache models of the natural world. The glass models make a bit more sense to me when looking at the Blaschka models of marine life. It’s very hard to represent a jellyfish without showing transparent structures, something that glass is uncommonly well suited as a material to portray.

I like to imagine Rudolph Blaschka, in youthful rebellion against his father Leopold, throwing down his glass rod and tongs and declaring, “Father, I cannot bear to make a single stamen more. I’m going to make a sea slug!” Of course, there can be no greater example of filial devotion than spending a career perfecting your father’s craft.

A Blaschka model of maple leaves. Not a sea slug.

Or perhaps Rudolph rebelled later in life, when he made a set of models of diseased trees, colloquially known as the “rotten fruit” series. As the glass decays with the ravages of time, it’s harder to determine whether the rot on the models is what Rudolph meant to depict, or simply the ageing of the materials. There’s an amazing conservation challenge associated with these pieces, as the Blaschka’s made their own, unique formulations of glass to achieve colors and textures not available in conventional glass.

Walking through the museum, I got lost in another story of fathers and sons. The Museum of National History is filled with endless cases of stuffed, mounted animals. A peacock backs into a Bengal tiger, now dusty and threadbare. Beetles are arranged in mandalas, mounted on pins in glass cases. (Apocryphal: “What has the study of biology taught you about the Creator, Dr. Haldane?” “I’m not sure, but He seems to be inordinately fond of beetles.”) A hundred birds, tacked to their perches, all facing west. Just as Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz had planned it.

Photo by davidgalestudios.

Agassiz was one of the first great American scientists. An emigree from Switzerland and an ichthyologist and paleobiologist by inclination, he declared an intention as a young man to build a great museum of natural science. This strange, dusty, beautiful museum is one of his legacies. But Agassiz is remembered more for his theoretical work.

He was perhaps the first scientist to propose the theory of an Ice Age, based on observations of glaciers in the Alps. Not all of his theories stand up as well to history - he was a fierce critic of Darwin and argued, to his death, that species were introduced into the stream of life at different times at the whim of the Creator. He’s also closely associated with the theory of polygenism, a form of “scientific racism” that taught that different races had different intellectual capacities.

There’s another Agassiz represented in the museums, especially in the fourth floor balcony of the Peabody Museum, which houses art and artifacts from the Pacific Islands. I think it may be my favorite space on the Harvard campus: a vast, lonely, light-filled space where you can spend an hour contemplating bark cloth or shark-tooth knives without encountering another soul. The labels in this section are poetically cryptic. It would be wonderful to know who made this cloth, what they made it of, what it was used for. Instead, the label says, “Cloth. Tonga. Collected by A. Agassiz 1899, Donated by A. Agassiz 1902.”

Again, my fantasties of rebellion led me to wonder if Louis Agassiz’s son rejected the natural sciences and became an Indiana Jones-style swashbuckling anthropologist. Alas, it’s another story of a dutiful son following his father’s footsteps. Alexander Agassiz followed his father to the US as a teenager, studied the sciences at Harvard and became, like his father, an ichthyologist. The artifacts from the South Pacific were collected while he was studying fish around the Great Barrier Reef.

Unlike his father, Alexander had a successful business career as well, as an adventurous investor in copper mines in northern Michigan. His business success gave him a vast fortune, which allowed him to give $500,000 to Harvard University to found a zoological museum… the museum that houses his father’s collection.

What’s making me see rebellion in this building, a veritable temple to visionary fathers and dutiful sons? Is it that I’m playing hooky from Harvard Law School, losing myself in a museum, one of my father’s favorite pursuits?

• Change.org
  A new service that combines blogposts on important international issues, connecting the stories to organizations trying to alleviate these problems. Very interesting - trying to tie news to taking action, which is a fascinating strategy.
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• Political Streams
  Microsoft's very pretty new tool for monitoring breaking news and buzz in professional and social media
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Forgive my silence this week. There’s a plague heading through the Berkman Center, evidently, a headcold that’s been knocking many of us out of commission, and I’ve been working at roughly 30% capacity the past few days. I managed to scrape myself together and give a talk at the MIT Museum last night, as part of the Soapbox series, a set of four lectures on technology and social change, with a focus on civic media.

The Soapbox series is a very cool format - it’s open to the public and heavily focused on dialog and participation. Speakers talk for 15-20 minutes, broaching a topic and opening questions, and then the audience breaks into small groups to discuss the questions. Each group has a tablet PC and can place questions on a projection screen, visible to the audience and speaker. The museum director, John Durant, runs a question and answer session in a salon format, inviting the speaker to address questions posted on the screen or in the audience.

I took advantage of the format to ask three of the questions I’m working on right now in thinking about media and the ways we encounter the world. How do we build serendipity into the tools we use to find news? How do we break out of homophily traps that often characterize online media? How do we cultivate the sorts of bridge figures that can help introduce us to media we’d never otherwise encounter?

I got very good feedback from the audience, including lots of pushback on my basic premise: that it’s important for people in one country to get news, information and opinions from other countries. I’m pretty confident that my core argument - that in an interconnected world, we need to be aware of issues in other places, for our economic, social, political and security welfare - is right… but it’s a good challenge to figure out how to express that to an audience. One audience member had the great insight that web users may be moving from a news-seeking behavior to a surfing behavior where they’re often looking for entertainment, not challenge. This is an interesting problem for those of us trying to “sell” international news - do we need to be relentlessly positive? Or connect this sort of news to other types of information likely to be surfed onto - sports, music, celebrity?

Joost Bonsen offered a very generous description of the talk on his blog, Maximizing Progress. You can see for yourself by watching the video from the event - would love your thoughts and feedback if you do.

For folks in Cambridge - you should catch some of the upcoming events in the Soapbox series. Henry Jenkins, master of fanfiction and participatory culture, is speaking next, and Ellen Hume, who is managing MIT’s vast and ambitious Center for Future Civic Media project is someone you should also make a point of hearing.

• BBC NEWS | Africa | Guineans mark '50 years of poverty'
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You know how some people don’t mince words?

Chaz Maviyane-Davies doesn’t mince images. The Zimbabwean graphic designer has created some of the most striking images that comment on politics in his native country, and around the world.

In 2000, Davies created a set of images leading up to the Zimbabwean parlimentary elections, the first election in which Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party faced sustained and stiff resistance. They weren’t all easy to look at, but they were powerful, profound and memorable.

This year, Davies and friends are focused on a different election, the US presidential election. At a site called 30reasons.org, they’re offering a poster a day for the month leading up to the election with reasons to vote for Obama. Today’s poster is a hopeful one - a ladder leading from a dark hole into the green lawn of a future after election day. Davies’s poster, reproduced above, started the series and is, well, less hopeful. The good news, I suspect, is that most of us no longer have another foot to shoot.

Polymeme, my favorite source for news that’s not all Palin, all the time, led me to a fascinating set of photos this morning. They’re from Ilakaka, Madagascar, a town that’s grown from little more than a truck stop into a wild west mining town in about a decade. Ilakaka is currently the source of roughly 50% of the world’s sapphire, and it’s a fascinating case study in what happens when something very valuable can be pulled out of the ground without much capital investment - you get a gold rush.

The main street of Ilakaka, October 2008. Photo by Roberto Schmidt, AFP

What I appreciated about the Globe story - and, as it turns out, several other stories I found on Ilakaka, is that most of the authors avoided, “this is terrible, something must be done” narrative that characterises so much northern reporting about Africa. Ilakaka is clearly a tough place - Jonny Hogg writing for the BBC focuses his narrative primarily on the dangers of the town - but Schmidt’s photos are much less predetermined. He’s got shots of kids working the mines, which are hard to see, but also shots of kids playing, a reminder that mining in these towns is likely far more lucrative than other forms of employment in Madagascar, which helps explain why families are drawn to Ilakaka. I appreciate the ambiguity of the photos and of the frame Alan Taylor puts them in for the Globe.

And then there are the gem blogs. Having almost no interest in precious stones, I hadn’t realized that there were gem bloggers. The answer may be that there’s Vincent Pardieu and people who travel with him. Pardieu and Richard Wise offer a thorough sapphire and ruby tour of Madagascar, touring the forest ruby camp of Moramang as well as the desert around Ilakaka. Richard Hughes, with Pardieu and Dana Schorr, offers the excellent “Sorcerors & Sapphires“, a comprehensive look at corundum in Madagascar.

My favorite observation in this latter piece is the observation that it makes perfect geological sense that Madagascar is blessed with sapphires and rubies. So are Tanzania, Sri Lanka and parts of southern India. And if we go far enough back in geologic time, these countries are close neighbors. (Looking at this map, I’m tempted to research the possibility of gem mining on the Indian Ocean coast of Antartica.)

Perdieu also has an excellent solo article on gems in Madagascar complete with videos of mining sites and photo sets. In all three articles, there’s a good sense of humor about the difficult travel and living conditions associated with these mines - I take this as a reflection on the fact that most mining towns aren’t easy places to work, and that while Ilakaka may be a tough place, it’s got more than a little in common with northeastern Burma or parts of Afghanistan.

How do we get stories from places like Ilakaka, remote locations in Africa with no permanent press presence? Historically, we’d have to wait for something bad to happen - a mining disaster, an outbreak of disease. I see the photos in the Globe as evidence of what might be a healthier form of storytelling - a picture of a place that’s fascinating, whether or not it’s especially “newsworthy” today. The gembloggers are an interesting complement to this sort of reporting. In some corners of the world, the majority of citizen media comes not from locals, but from missionaries and aid workers living and working in these communities. Some, like Sleepless in Sudan, become important spokespeople for these communities.

The hope, of course, is that we start getting reports and perspectives from people who live and work in these communities. Our friends at FOKO Club are working with Rising Voices to help Malagasy youth report on their communities via blogs. I don’t know if it’s realistic for FOKO to work in Ilakaka, but it’s pretty exciting to think about the possibility.

Want to get a Texas high school football team pumped up?

Try the haka. It works for New Zealand’s legendary All Blacks rugby squad. And it’s doing pretty well for the Trojans of Trinity High School in Euless, TX, ranked by Rivals.com as the top high school football team in the nation.

Performing the haka - a Maori chant and dance - in north Texas isn’t an act of random cultural appropriation. The offensive and defensive lines of the Trojans are filled with Tongan players, representing the 4,000 people of Tongan descent who live in this town of 52,900. The size, speed and skill of these players has a lot to do with the emergence of Trinity as a football powerhouse - in a recent NPR piece on the team, one coach of the team remarked that his offensive line currently outweighed that of the NFL’s Washington Redskins.

What are 4,000 Tongans doing living in suburban Dallas? Working at DFW airport, for the most part. A Tongan employee of American Airlines told family and friends about a Texas community with a low cost of living and lots of airport-associated jobs, and helped start a migration from Tonga to Texas. The community has been well-received, perhaps because Tongan culture is heavily family focused, which aligned neatly with local community values.

And, of course, it doesn’t hurt when some of the Tongan seventeen-year olds are 6′2″, 280# and can pass block.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with rugby has seen New Zealand’s national side perform the haka before matches. It’s intimidating - huge guys, yelling and slapping their bodies in unison. I’d assumed it was a way to resolve cultural tensions in New Zealand between English immigrants and a subjugated Maori population, the sort of multiculturalist healing that I’d assumed emerged sometime in the 1970s. Nope. The haka was introduced to the wider world when a team of “native” New Zealanders - primarily Maori, but four players of British descent born in New Zealand - played matches in Britian in 1888-9. I’d also assumed that it was a war dance, and that there was a single melody and lyrics. Neither is true - the haka can refers to a set of posture dances with shouted accompaniments, and can be peformed in welcome, to commemorate events or to intimidate the hell out of sporting opponents. The All Blacks have used different hakas through the years, sometimes with lyrics specific to the match (referring to a New Zealand invasion of Australia, for instance.)

The haka’s worked pretty well for the All Blacks, and thus it’s been picked up by other New Zealand sports teams, including the basketball side (the Tall Blacks. Yes, that’s really what they call themselves) and the wheelchair rugby side. In the future, all New Zealand national teams may have their own custom hakas. But it’s generated some controversy when people from other countries have adopted the tradition. Football players at the University of Hawaii began using a controversial haka written for the All Blacks, but later changed to an original Hawaiian dance, the Ha’a.

So should the Tongan population in Euless be performing a Tongan dance instead of a New Zealand one? That’s what a commenter on the Euless Voice of Tonga website suggests:

Congratz for having an awesome team…..BUT!!! why are’nt you all doing the Sipi Tau…..instead of a Maori Haka. If you still insist on doing the Haka ….please learn to do it right….the way its being done now is an insult to the Maori ppl. Thankyou.

The Sipi Tau is the dance and chant the Tongan national rugby team performs before their matches. The dance is a version of the Kailao, a Tongan war dance, and the lyrics are pretty damned intimidating:

Let the foreigner and sojourner beware
Today, destroyer of souls, I am everywhere
To the halfback and backs
Gone has my humanness.

Which is pretty much how every defensive tackle I know wants to feel before taking the field.

What’s fascinating to me is the way in which the Haka made it into Euless. It wasn’t through elders communicating a dance tradition to their children. Instead, some of the players watched the New Zealand rugby team perform the haka on YouTube and began learning the moves in a local park. With the permission and blessing of the local Tongan community, they began performing the dance at community events. It later worked its way onto the football field, where it’s become a critical part of Trinity football culture.

At this point, the ritual - whether the culturally appropriate one or not - is a sign of the acceptance of the Tongan community in Euless. This is, after all, a community where the school’s principal - originally from West Texas - routinely comes to work wearing a lava-lava. A Tongan community leader, talking about the reception the dance has received, said,”I had two older men with tears in their eyes tell me afterward, ‘After seeing that, we know that our future generations will be accepted here.’”

• The Somali Pirates and Their Troublesome Treasure - TIME
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Last summer, Center for Disease Control officials quarrantined a man who’d flown from Atlanta to Prague via Paris, despite being ordered not to travel. CDC officials knew - though the man did not - that he was infected with XDR-TB - extensively drug resistant tuberculosis. For the first time in over forty years, the CDC used their authority to pull the man from a plane and put him into isolation in an Atlanta hospital.

The story gained a flurry of media attention - including interviews with airline passengers furious that they’d been exposed to the disease. But it didn’t do very much to raise the profile of XDR-TB in the United States.

James Nachtwey would like to change that. A celebrated war photographer honored in 2007 with a $100,000 TED Prize, Nachtwey has spent much of the past year photographing patients with XDR-TB in locations around the world. His work helps put a face on a dangerous, frightening, poorly-understood and fully preventable disease… and many possibly help stop XDR-TB from turning into a global pandemic.

Tuberculosis is an extremely common bacterial disease - it spreads through the air and it’s quite pervasive. One third of the world’s population is infected with the TB bacillus, though only 5-10% of those people will develop the disease. (People with weakened immune systems, including AIDS sufferers, are at much higher risk to develop TB.) These cases of TB are usually treatable with drugs like rifampicin and isoniazid. If these drugs aren’t properly administered - if too little is used, or treatment is stopped too soon - the TB bacillus can become resistant to these drugs. It’s then known as multiply drug resistant TB and can then usually be treated with quinolone, kanamycin, capreomycin, or amikacin. If these drugs aren’t administered well, the disease can develop resistance to some of these drugs, too - it’s then known as XDR-TB, and it’s a very expensive and difficult disease to treat at that point.

XDR-TB came to the attention of global health professionals in 2006 with an epidemic in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In one rural hospital, out of 544 TB patients, 221 had multiply drug resistant TB, and 53 of these patients had XDR-TB. (All were HIV positive). Within a few weeks, 52 of 53 had died, including those on antiretroviral drugs. The few treatments that can cure XDR-TB are expensive, difficult to administer and have painful and dangerous side effects. The lessons learned from the XDR-TB epidemic in KZN largely have to do with limiting the spread of the disease from infected patients to highly vulnerable populations, like HIV+ people. (The good news in the KZN epidemic is that the spread appears most serious within hospital environments, where patients are close together for long periods of time - the spread of MDR-TB to people in the community who’d visited patients or interacted with them was roughly 1%.)

It’s not clear how widespread the problem of XDR-TB has become. There have been cases reported in 49 countries, including South Africa, India, Russia and the United States. It’s a very difficult disease to diagnose - while TB can be diagnosed within a day, diagnosing XDR-TB involves culturing baccili and testing their drug resistance, which can take weeks or months. In 2004, the World Health Organization estimated up to half a million cases of MDR-TB. Recent studies suggest that 15 to 20% of those cases might be XDR-TB.

Nachtwey’s photographs have examined the impact of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa, one of the epicentres of XDR-TB infection, and his network of collaborators in the medical community were able to alert him to the importance and possible impact of XDR-TB before it entered most people’s awareness. With the 2007 TED Prize, Nachtwey had the opportunity to use the money and influence of the TED community to cover the story and disseminate the images. The challenge is that Nachtwey realized that he would have far less access as a photographer if governments were aware that he was documenting XDR-TB. So his work has been clandestine, and the subject of his work supported by the TED Prize was only revealed today. Photos of patients in South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, India, Sibera and other locations will be unveiled in New York City tonight, and will be published in this week’s issue of Time Magazine in an article called The Forgotten Plague.

“Forgotten” may be the right word to describe TB, a disease that gets much less attention than HIV or even malaria, despite its enormous global impact. But XDR-TB is too new to be forgotten - it’s simply not well known or understood outside healthcare circles. Nachtwey’s intervention is a timely one - the ways to prevent XDR-TB from becoming a pervasive global threat have to do with strengthening healthcare systems in vulnerable nations. If hospitals and community health organizations can diagnose TB early and ensure compliance with treatment, the disease shouldn’t progress to multiple drug resistance.

But improving developing world hospitals is a difficult and expensive task. Eliminating pharmaceutical fakes may be even more difficult. Fake precription drugs are extremely common in developing nations, and a TB patient who is religiously taking rifampicin may only be getting the drug half the time… a prescription for creating MDR-TB. As Nachtwey raises awareness about XDR-TB, I hope that people will pay attention to innovative efforts like mPedigree, designed to combat pharma fakes using information technology and mobile phones.

Nachtwey’s campaign launches today at XDRTB.org. Here’s hoping his photographs will help draw attention not just to a treatable disease, but to the need to fix many aspects of the global healthcare system, including strengthening community hospitals and fighting drug piracy.

• MamaMikes.com: Shop and Send gifts vouchers, shopping vouchers, airtime, school fees, electronics & lots more to Kenya
  For Eid al Fitr, give the gift your friends in Nairobi are waiting for - halal goat, delivered to their house live or pre-slaughtered.
  (tags: africa kenya commerce food islam remittance)