I’m at Harvard’s Weblogs, Journalism and Credibility conference today and tomorrow. It’s an odd conference – the conference blog was very rowdy before the conference, then the morning of the conference was pretty slow. Now, in the PM, we’re starting to liven things up a bit.

Andy Carvin has done a great job of linking together a couple of tools to allow folks to audioblog the conference. I interviewed him over my phone a couple of minutes ago and posted the results to his joint audioblog – feel free to check it out. (It’s also enclosed within this post, which may mean it can show up in your aggregator…)

If this technology gets better – and more pervasive – I can imagine it being a really big deal in the developing world. For the price of a phonecall, I’m able to post voice to an arbitrary blog. If I could set up a server to do this in Ghana, I bet things would get very interesting very quickly…

I’ve been working on an idea for a Global Voices project – an wiki-resident index of bridgebloggers around the world. For each country, we’d list some key bridgebloggers and provide some context for the issues and events they’re talking about. I’ve been working on a sample page for the Global Voices wiki on Ghana, figuring that it’s a country I know well enough to get a wiki page up quickly.

Turns out it’s pretty difficult to find Ghanaian blogs out there. I’m a regular reader of Cunninglinguistics and DotFAF, and I found Odobea through their sites. And I quickly found Lali’s excellent NGO – Nothing Going On?, with a number of perceptive entries about running an NGO in Ghana (a subject I am all too familiar with.)

But I found it pretty difficult to find a large group of Ghanaian weblogs, like the Kenyan blogging community. So I ended up searching Technorati for the keyword “Ghana”. The results were pretty wonderful.

A Togolese kid living in Mt. Vernon, Virginia – “i sit with the africans at lunch but they mostly speak tswi so i dont get waht they talkin about , cause most of them from ghana and i dont speak tswi. but i feel like they my people. they a clique or gang or whatever. NBA NOthing But Africans. i mostlyhang out with them cause my best friend Kwado hangs out with them and got me to.”

John Halfz visits the Ghana Cafe in Washington, DC:

“Sure enough, when we arrived at Ghana, the owner was dressed almost exactly like Henri was in his glam shot. The restaurant was slightly more crowded than usual, and all seats at the bar were already taken, so the owner had gone to take his dinner on the second floor balcony. Here was something odd: he ate with his hands despite the fact that his food appeared to have the approximate consistency of tomato sauce. When he saw me, he smiled, and beckoned us over. After wiping his hands, he received my records.”

Ruby Arthur’s first blogpost:

I decided to write about snow because I am not an American, and where I come from it does not snow there. I am from Ghana, It’s in West Africa. Seeing the snow for the first time in my life, I thought was very beautiful. I was indoors when I first saw the snow falling and I was so suprised. I loved the look of it and I thought it was wonderful. But I got out and I then relised how cold it was. This made me have a different perception about it. Visually, when watch the snow falling it looks very nice and pretty. Looking closely at it tells me how wounderful God is and how beautiful nature can be. But it also make the weather very cold, driving becomes more risky and many other things you can think of. So now even though I did love the snow the first time I saw it, I do not love to hear that it’s going to snow because of the cold weather that comes with it.

Why you should spend your next vacation in Ghana:

I guess there’s not been any blog that gives a good judgement of what it’s like to holiday in Ghana West Africa[ comment if am wrong].It’s best to tell your own story.so I decided why not start one, right now, and whip I’ve done it. I hope you’d enjoy reading and comment any time you find me straying.I would be giving best bargains on hotel’s /apartments and other tourist attractions.I’d be sharing with you tips on living in Ghana(being here for in Ghana for strictly 23+ years ).

It’s moments like these when I truly, madly, deeply love the Internet.

(PS: Got a Ghana-focused blog? Let me know.)

Technorati tags – ghana

Andrew Ackerman has a piece in the December 29th issue of “The Nation”, titled “Tim Spicer’s World”. My three readers may remember that I posted about Spicer – a notorious international mercenary – six months ago, when his new firm – Aegis – was being considered for a major Department of Defense contract.

Well, Aegis got the contract – $293 million to protect US diplomats in Iraq – despite a formal protest by five Democratic senators, led by Ted Kennedy. Despite Spicer’s involvement running small arms to Sierra Leone, violating UN mandates and UK law, and the notorious “Sandline Affair”, where Spicer was hired to put down an indigenous rebellion in Papua New Guinea, the DoD seems to have no problem awarding Spicer’s firm a contract where his firm has coordinating authority over private security forces in Iraq:

“It is significant that the British Ministry of Defense was apprised of our intention…and did not object or advise against the action. Moreover, neither Aegis nor Mr. Spicer are on the…list of parties excluded from Federal contracting,” wrote Sandra Sieber, director of the Army Contracting Agency. “We therefore had no legal basis to deny the award to Aegis, which won the competition fairly based on the rules and criteria established by our solicitation.”

The decision to award the contract to Spicer has inspired a great deal of anger in some sectors of the Irish and Irish American community. In 1992, Spicer was in command of a unit of the Scots Guards in Belfast when soldiers in his unit fatally shot unarmed teenager Peter McBride in the back and head. Spicer allowed the soliders who shot McBride to return to duty, counter to all Scots Guard procedures. The Pat Finucane Center for Human Rights sent an open letter to the Comptroller General of the US Government Accountability Office, protesting the award of the contract to Aegis on the grounds that Spicer could not be considered a “responsible bidder”. The general counsel to the US GAO responded, not by addressing the substance of the complaints against Spicer, but by arguing that the protest lodged wasn’t admissible within DoD contracting procedures.

When I posted about this story last year, I ended with the question, “What were they [the Bush administration] thinking?” Now there’s more good reasons to raise that question.

According to The Guardian, CACI International and Titan, two contractors accused of substantial human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib have been awarded new, large DoD contacts. CACI International’s contract was renewed for $16 million; Titan was awarded a new contract for $164m. (I assume that Titan has taken Adel Nakhla – accused of raping an Iraqi boy while he was under custody – off their staff.) And, as I noted in a post late last year, DoD supported – through a subcontract through from KBR – two firms run by notorious Russian arms smuggler Viktor Bout.

What is the Bush administration thinking? They’re thinking that we don’t know and we don’t care. And they’re probably right.

Commuting to and from Berkman yesterday, I got the chance to catch up on my back episodes of This American Life, accumulating on my iPod since before Christmas. The best of the lot I listened to yesterday was called “The Middle of Nowhere” and featured an essay by Jack Hitt on the mysterious and strange island of Nauru.

I take some pride in my knowledge of obscure geographical facts, but I am forced to admit that, prior to hearing Hitt’s essay, I knew only the following about Nauru:

- it was really small

- it was somewhere in the South Pacific.

Thanks to Hitt’s radio report, I now know enough about Nauru that I plan to keep an eye open for it – and other Pacific micronations – in the future. A Nauru history in a nutshell:

- Nauru is a tiny (26 square kilometer) island about 1000km east of Papua New Guinea. A coral atoll, it was once covered with a thick layer of phosphate, beneath a tropical rainforest.

- In the late 19th century, phosphate was discovered on the island. This led to massive mining efforts by the Germans, the Japanese, the British, and, after independence from Britain in 1968, by an Australian/Nauruian consortium.

- Phosphate mining briefly made Nauru one of the wealthiest developing nations in the world. It also devestated over 90% of the surface of the island, turning it into bare, windswept, uninhabitable rock. The 10,000 residents of Nauru live on the outskirts of the island. As ocean levels rise due to global warming, they are likely to be forced to leave the island altogether.

- Looking for new post-phosphate ways to make money, Nauru became a center for international money laundering in the 1990s. Much of the money pillaged from post-Communist Russia filtered through shell banks in Nauru. (Hitt’s article “The Billion Dollar Shack” is a great introduction to this chapter of Nauruan history.)

- Realizing that one of its remaining “natural assets” was its soverignity, Nauru began selling passports, several of which turned up in the possession of suspected terrorists.

- Under substantial international pressure to end money laundering and identity brokering, Nauru developed a new speciality – detentions. A key player in John Howard’s “Pacific Solution”, Nauru became a prison for hundreds of Afghan, Iraqi and Sri Lankan refugees who Australia refused to accept. Technically termed an “immigration processing center”, many refugees spent years on Nauru, living in camps, waiting for eventual asylum to Australia. Conditions became so bad in the camps that dozens of asylum seekers went on an extended hunger strike, some of them sewing up their mouths to prevent themselves from being forcefed.

This particular business opportunity closed off another possible opportunity to Nauru: tourism. The island has excellent sport fish and scuba diving… but the Australian government was buying secrecy, in part, when it paid Nauru substantial sums to “process” the refugees. As a result, Nauru has stopped issuing tourist visas. This may be all for the best – Nauru Airlines has had its one jet seized (again) by creditors, cutting off the most practical route of reaching the island.

- The country has gone through several changes of government in the past two years. It owes hundreds of millions of dollars to GE Capital, which bankrolled the nation’s property deals for years, has explored a possible bailout by an Indian financial firm, and now has its finances managed by the Australian government.

One of the stories told by Hitt in his radio piece is an extraordinary tale about US intelligence officials, who allegedly promised Nauru an extensive aid package in exchange for ending money laundering and the sale of passports – as well as opening an embassy in China, which the US hoped to use to provide asylum for senior North Korean diplomats, a project called “Operation Weasel”.

Hitt relies on a series of articles written by the Weekend Australian. Unfortunately, those articles appear to have been removed from the Australian’s site. (This might be poor archiving on the paper’s part, or might be because Rupert Murdoch, the paper’s owner, didn’t want the Austalian hosting articles that so strongly implicate the Bush administration…) The best article I’ve been able to find that mentions “Operation Weasel” is in the sidebar of an article by Joshua Brown in the left-wing online paper, the Albion Monitor.

Nauru strikes me as the quintessential 21st century rogue state. It’s not dangerous because it has a big army, nuclear ambitions or plans to invade a neighboring state. It’s dangerous because it chooses not to play by the rules agreed to by most of the world, and because it’s so distant from media eyes that it’s very hard to know what’s going on there. You can imagine a plausible future in which Nauru grows increasingly dangerous as a sovereign rogue even as its population migrates from an unliveable island to more habitable locales – perhaps over time, a real nation will change into a virtual one, like Sealand.

(Hey folks – there’s a better formatted version of this post, which includes the flash movies on a Harvard server – feel free to check that out and see the pretty version. I wasn’t sure how my currently ailing blog would deal with embedded flash files…)

Intelliseek’s Matthew Hurst, friend and collaborator, emailed me a couple of days ago with an intriguing idea – if we animated some of the media attention data I routinely collect from Matthew’s site, Blogpulse, would we see a clear pattern of bloggers writing about the tsunami and aftereffects? For the past year or so, I’ve been collecting data from Blogpulse (and about a dozen other sites) by looking for mentions of country names (”France”, “Guinea-Bissau”) in news stories or blog posts and mapping the results directly, and in relation to a number of statistical models.

So what do we get from putting this data into animations? Well, the results are more complicated than one might hope they would be…

Blogpulse data, two week period, percentage of total hits, 12.15.2004 – 1.10.2005

Here’s an animation of data from Blogpulse for roughly four weeks bracketing the tsunami. Shades of red on the map represent areas that have high attention within the blogosphere – nations in the deepest shade of red are responsible for 3.2% or more of all the mentions of a nation my scripts are finding in the blogosphere. Nations in blue are receiving very little attention, fractions of a percent.

We’d expect to see the area around the tsunami light up around the 26th of December. And we do – sort of. Because the data we’re looking at here reflects a two week period (i.e., everything posted 2 weeks before the date on the map), the effect is somewhat delayed, and somewhat muted, though certainly visible.

Google news data, two week period, percentage of total hits, 12.15.2004 – 1.10.2005

Here’s Google News data for a similar period. The same problems exist with the animation – we’re watching a phenomenon that’s happening moment by moment in two week slices. Again, though, you can see the attention cluster in Southeast Asia a few days after the tsunami.

Blogpulse data, one day period, percentage of total hits, 12.15.2004 – 1.10.2005

I also grab data from Blogpulse on a day by day basis, allowing me to look at who’s mentioned what country on a given day. The data is tricky to use because it’s so variable – it’s very hard to draw conclusions about whether a nation is high attention or not based on a single day’s data – but it gives an animation that helps us see the tsunami’s attention effect a bit more clearly. (Sorry there are no dates on this map or the next few – I autogenerate the map frames then manually add the dates and sliders, and haven’t yet added the niceties to the next few animations… I promise to fix this ASAP)

One strategy for seeing the impact of the event over time is to calculate the differences between results from one day to the next. For instance, while there might be 30 stories on Google News on 12/25 about India, there are likely to be 300 on 12/26 because of the tsunami’s impact – if we track that change, by making positive changes red and negative changes blue, we can see how the tsunami’s impact affects attention in the media and blogospheres.

Google data, two week period, interday deltas, 12.15.2004 – 1.10.2005

Again, we’ve got a slightly confusing effect – the difference between two day’s sets shows us the effects of the new day… but also of the day two weeks ago we dropped from the data set.

And here’s the blogpulse daily data, tracking intraday changes.

Blogpulse data, one day period, interday deltas, 12.15.2004 – 1.10.2005

It’s going to take me a good bit more of staring at these animations before I can make some definitive statements about how attention in one area affects attention elsewhere. You’re welcome to stare with me – post something in the comments here if you’ve got some observations to share.

(Big thanks to Matthew Hurst and his team at Intelliseek, and to Nate Kurz, for their help with ideas and tools…)

The last 24 hours have been Ethan versus Manilla, and Manilla is winning, even though I’ve got a great set of allies. Comments should work again – thanks to Wendy and Jesse, to whom I owe many, many thanks. I understand that the site is wholly broken on IE and Safari – on my Firefox, the front page looks pretty good and the rest looks pretty bad. Trying to finish an actual piece of research – will wrestle with templates again tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who’s written in with comments, sympathies or bug reports. It is much appreciated, and I hope all will be back to normal shortly.

My three readers have probably noticed that the design of this blog has changed – indeed, more than once in the past 48 hours. I had decided to formally change the blog title to “…My Heart is In Accra” and decided I’d go a step further and change the colors a bit.

What I failed to realize is that on Radio, Themes cover more than just a blog’s appearance – they affect functionality as well. So I inadvertantly deleted my blogroll, my bio, a few other things… and according to Owukori, have managed to turn off the ability for folks to comment. Grr.

I’m talking with folks at Berkman about rolling back the blog to previous settings. If that’s not possible, I’ll try to rebuild functionality within this design. And I think I may have figured out the comment problem – if you are so inclined, feel free to see if you can add a comment to this post and, if you can’t, drop me a line at blogmisery AT ethanzuckerman.com

Ory Okolloh – Kenyan Pundit – is one of the people I’m happiest to have met through blogging. She’s a brilliant law student at Harvard Law and a passionate and critical observer of news and politics in her native Kenya.

A few months ago, I asked Ory to help me understand why she was so upset with Kibaki, Kenya’s 3rd president, in power since late 2002. Like many westerners who know a little, though not a lot, about Kenyan politics, I took many of Kibaki’s statements about ending corruption at face value. (After all, he must be an improvement over the notoriously bad Arap Moi, who he replaced, right?)

Ory’s done a great job of clearing up my confusion with an excellent set of posts during her time home in Nairobi for the holidays, where she is working for the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. From her reports, it sounds like Kenya’s getting better, but it’s doing so very slowly, and far too slowly for a generation of young Kenyans who want to see the country take a leadership position on the continent. Some observations from recent blog posts:

December 28, 2004:

The weather in Nairobi is lovely and things have generally been festive over the holiday season. Kenyans have an innate ability to “kula happy” or enjoy life even during the worst of times. There is, however, a palpable sense of frustration with the country’s direction. Everyone I’ve talked to is disappointed and based on the stories I’ve been hearing it seems as if corruption is back in full force across all sectors. The one bright spot, apparently, is the judiciary…informed sources tell me that they are determined to reassert their independence after the infamous purge.

January 3, 2005:

I also linked to the story on the growing frustration that Kenyan parents who have kids in public school are experiencing, because it points to the glaring/growing crisis of income inequality in Kenya…I don’t think I’ve ever seen it this bad, there are clearly two worlds in this country…at some point something is going to have to give. How can kids who go to schools where there are upto 80 (yes 80 students in one class) compete with kids in the so-callled private schools? The free primary education system was obviously poorly thought out, it’s time the government starts making moves to address the growing pains and do things like increase the number of teachers available. One of the local radio stations had a call-in session on this issue. Everybody who called in expressed their frustration, one teacher spoke about how impossible it was to even attempt to cater to 80 students let alone know them individually. The Minister of Education, however, claims that the standards in public schools haven’t deteriorated since the free education policy was initiated…what BS.

January 10, 2005:

Random observations for the day:

* Did you know that staff members of the Weekly Review were not allowed to accept gifts from anyone – no calendars, pens, even crates of sodas (Coca-Cola sent every journalist a crate of Fanta Passion during its launch and this newbie journalist at the Review was almost fired on the spot for accepting the sodas).

Ory’s not the only one who wants change to happen more quickly in Kenya. The Economist, in their Christmas issue, ran a story on Kenya entitled “Where graft is merely rampant: If only the president were more vigorous”. It reads, in part:

In the first few months after Mr Kibaki took over, officials did indeed behave more honestly. Whereas in 2002, Kenyan policemen demanded bribes during 96.9% of encounters with the public, last year the figure was only 82.1%, according to a survey by Transparency International (TI), a Berlin-based anti-corruption watchdog. And immigration officials improved their score from 94.3% to 89.6%.

The answer is that “rampant” is still not quite good enough…”

Ory, thanks for the view of what’s going on in Nairobi, and safe travels back to Cambridge.

I’ve been raising the concern, here and in posts on WorldChanging.com, that statistics on deaths in Burma from the tsunami may be underreported by the military government of Myanmar. Central to that argument were reports from UN agencies working in Burma that speculated that death tolls could be significantly higher than the Myanmar government was reporting.

Thomas Crampton, writing in the New York Times, reports that the UN has now revised its estimates downwards, putting them in line with Myanmar government estimates. Crampton also cites a Pacific Tsunami Warning Center expert, who says the tsunami’s impacts were more severe on west-facing coastlines, than on east-facing coastlines.

I still find it difficult to believe that the Coco Islands and some parts of Southwestern Burma had as little damage as reported, but it’s hard for me to ignore these definitive statements. The fact that the study is from the UN, and reported in the NYT has less weight for me than the fact that the article is written by Tom Crampton, who is a good friend, and who I know to be extremely knowledgeable and concerned about Burma – I don’t think Tom would have written this piece if he believed Burma had not been spared the brunt of the tsunami.

Peter Ford, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, has an interesting article on the politics of foreign aid in response to the tsunami. He focuses on the question, “Why would a nation refuse foreign aid?”, as India, Thailand and Burma have.

The answers make some sense for India and Thailand. (The article doesn’t mention Burma.) While India was heavily impacted by the tsunami, the Indian government is reasonably flush with cash and feels able to finance its own disaster relief efforts. Rather than asking for aid, India is providing significant aid, including airlifting supplies, to Sri Lanka. As a result, India, like China, positions itself as a regional power, capable of surviving its own disaster and lending a hand, like the other major world powers.

Thailand, profoundly affected in southern coastal areas, is refusing certain types of aid from France and Germany – it’s refusing offers to forgive some government debt. Why? Thailand is concerned that its credit rating – currently A/BBB+, according to Standard and Poor’s – would be adversely affected by failing to make the payments.

Neither explanation helps us understand why the Myanmar government continues to refuse assistance beyond a token amount from the Chinese government.