The Russian blogosphere has been in turmoil for the last week with the news that LiveJournal, the site used most frequently by Russian-language bloggers, was partnering with Russian internet company Sup. Sup is owned by Aleksandr Mamut, a well-connected oligarch and political insider. While there’s no indication from Sup or SixApart, which owns LiveJournal, that the partnership will give Russian authorities access to the personal data of LiveJournal users – indeed, GV’s Veronica Kholkhova reports that SixApart has assured users this won’t happen – many bloggers are moving their writing off the LiveJournal servers or taking other steps to ensure that their content won’t be monitored by Sup’s “abuse team”.

Evgeny Morozov, a journalist who is one of the key bloggers behind Transitions Online’s fascinating Belarussian group blog, wrote in the International Herald Tribune today to explain why the move looks so sinister to Russian-speaking bloggers:

All ingredients are in order. The oligarch (Aleksandr Mamut, one of the few oligarchs who made a smooth transition between the regimes, owns Sup); the upcoming 2007 and 2008 elections; the independent media asset with tremendous popularity; and the controversial figure in charge (Sup’s chief blogging officer is Anton Nossik, the father of the Russian Internet and, among other things, a former associate of Gleb Pavlovsky, the Kremlin’s spindoctor).

Sup already announced the creation of an “abuse team.” Typically, abuse teams monitor, warn and suspend blogs that post inappropriate content; prior to the deal, this function was performed by LiveJournal’s American abuse team.

Given Sup’s roots and potential ideology, one can hardly expect that the scope of discussions allowed on the Russian Internet will increase.

If history is anything to judge by, the days of the Russian blogosphere buzzing with criticial opinions are numbered. Unfortunately, a simple solution of migrating to another blog service would only disrupt the existing communication networks that have made LiveJournal so popular.

Evgeny suggests that many bloggers chose LiveJournal because they didn’t trust their personal information to a Russian company. While bloggers can leave and move to any number of other services which will be less clearly tied to Russian entrepreneurs, they’ll lose some of the community features that make LiveJournal such a unique online space. The Russian blogosphere is so closely tied to LiveJournal, Veronica tells us, that the blogosphere is informally referred to as ZheZhe, short for “ZhivoyZhurnal”, or LiveJournal.

I hope the folks at SixApart will realize that, even if their intentions are good, the perception that the Russian blogosphere will be monitored by entities closely tied to the Putin government is surely going to chase away some bloggers. The assassination of reformist reporter Anna Politkovskaya – and Putin’s shameful failure to speak about her death of two days, followed by comments dismissing her importance – has called attention to the deteriorating space for free speech in Russia. (Reporters without Borders ranks Russia 147th of 168 in press freedom, just above Tunisia and several spots below Zimbabwe.)

SixApart has told its Russian-speaking community that they’ll be able to opt out of the new Russian “features”, which may assuage some fears. Perhaps this will help prevent the collapse of the Russian LiveJournal community that Morozov predicts. But don’t count on it.

Several of my posts from Pop!Tech appeared on Worldchanging.com, which means they’ve generated a wealth of comments. One of the most helpful came from “JessicaR”, who tracked down a theatre review of “Jet Lag”, a piece that Marianne Weems of The Builder’s Assocation directed about a woman who died of jetlag.

The woman was Sarah Krassnoff, the grandmother of a 14-year old boy, who’d gotten into a battle for custody with the boy’s father and decided to evade the father by flying back and forth between New York and Amsterdam, over and over again. In 1971, they flew back and forth 167 times, never leaving the airport, until the 80-year old grandmother collapsed. It’s not hard to see how Weems would be excited by Hasan Elahi’s decision to “hide” from the FBI by flying to Singapore and never leaving the airport, while faithfully documenting every meal and toilet visit via photograph.

What really caught my attention was the fact that “Jet Lag” superimposes the story of Krassnoff and her grandson with the even weirder story of Donald Crowhurst. Crowhurst was a British businessman and amateur sailor who competed in a round-the-world solo yacht race, hoping to use his participation to drum up sales for his invention, “the Navicator”, which communicated with marine and aviation beacons.

His race began badly and at some point, while still in the starting phases of the race, he began falsifying his position and reporting progress he hadn’t made. He planned to drift in the South Atlantic until it was time to follow the race leader home and take second prize. Unfortunately for him, the race leader wrecked his boat, leaving Crowhurst with an impossible dillema – if he were to sail back to England, he’d be the “winner” of the race, and his logbooks would be carefully examined, displaying his fraud. Journals found on Crowhurst’s abandoned boat, the Teignmouth Electron showed his descent into madness, which evidently consumated itself with Crowhurst jumping off his ship and leaving it adrift.

I’ve had the definitive story of Crowhurst’s odd trip, “The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst“, by my bedside for the past year or so – this coincidence may finally inspire me to read it. I encountered the Crowhurst story for the first time by seeing “Ravenshead“, an opera by the utterly remarkable Rinde Eckert, my favorite contemporary composer. In a one-man show, Rinde follows Crowhurst – tranformed into “Richard Ravenshead” – from the talks he gives in Britain to raise funds for his voyage, to his setting sail, through his descent into fraud, madness and breakdown. (If you’re lucky enough to be a Rinde Eckert fan, you’ll recognize Crowhurst as a classic Rinde archetype – a fascinating figure who gradually proves himself to be utterly mad in a way that’s extremely human and approachable to an audience.)

Eckert and Weems aren’t the only artists to take on the Crowhurst story – according to the Wikipedia entry on Crowhurst, the story has featured in two films, a video work, a novel and a pop song. Some stories are simply too evocative for artists to ignore….

• the Painting Journalist
  Beautiful and remarkable new blog which engages in citizen media by painting press conferences, live events, etc. Great way of questioning what the role of citizen journalism actually is
  (tags: blogs globalvoices)
• Global Voices Online � Blog Archive � Russia: The Second Blog War
  The Russian blogosphere – the ZheZhe – goes nuts as LiveJournal licenses its software and brand to a company with connections to the Putin government
  (tags: russia globalvoices freespeech blogs)
• Somalia’s Islamic leader dares Ethiopia to attack amid fears of regional conflict – iht,africa,Somalia – Africa & Middle East – International Herald Tribune
  Somali “government” troops withdraw from Bur Haqaba, UIC leaders urge Ethiopians to rise up against Zenawi
  (tags: somalia ethiopia africa)
• Doodle: Scheduling meetings
  Clever little tool for group scheduling, voting, polling
  (tags: community calendar globalvoices)

Deutsche Welle’s annual blog awards – “The Best of the Blogs” – is open for voting again, and some of my favorite everyday reads are featured as nominees. Zeng Jinyan, who has blogged about her husband Hu Jia’s detention in China, is up for a Blogwurst award – I have no idea what goes into a Blogwurst, but figure it’s best not to ask. Sami Ben Gharbia’s “Fikra” – his blog about life as a political refugee in the Netherlands – is nominated in for the Reporters Without Borders award. And Sokari Ekine’s perpetually excellent Black Looks is up for an award in the Best English blog category, facing stiff competition from excellent blogs like Treehugger and the Huffington Post. (Sokari was the founding Africa editor for Global Voices, and Sami is a frequent contributor on Tunisia for us.) Take a moment to weigh in with your vote and support some of the great global blogs featured there.

It’s one thing to enjoy a conference when you go to only one a year and could really use the chance to listen to smart people talk for a few days. It’s another when you speak at several dozen a year and have been in eight cities at the midpoint of a month. At that point, it’s very hard for anyone to create a conference that’s more compelling than sitting on your sofa at home and watching football.

But Pop!Tech is that conference. Ten years in, the logistics of the conference have been brilliantly thought out, and there’s a huge community of attendees, organizers and former speakers who come to the conference every year. The conference is well structured so that you get a good blend of time to see these old friends and to force you to meet new people as well, like lunches that assign people to random restaurants, forcing cliques apart.

I’m glad that Andew Zolli and crew continue to innovate. Stealing one of the best ideas from the TED conference – the simulcast room – was a great step forward. The dungeon – as we took to calling it – was a room filled with comfy chairs, lots of powerstrips, three huge monitors, and lots of bloggers. It was empty the first morning, then was overful from then on, a clear sign of an idea with legs. (Speaking of legs, mine just don’t fit in the seats in the Opera House. I really hope I have the option to blog from the basement again next year.)

Less successful were the three-minute talks, also borrowed from TED. At TED, these talks are scripted and prepared, roughly in the same way the “major” talks are. At Pop!Tech, the 3 minute talks were presented at a bar with a bad sound system, competing with the Mets/Cardinals game, which was being watched by enthusiastic and drunken fans. It was, as they say, a tough room. Jamais Cascio gave a funny talk about “pink goo” – nanotech spam; Andy Jagoe gave a good pitch for 3jam, his
one-to-many text messaging project; I enjoyed two talks about 3 dimensional lighting design and about student activism, but I have no notes as I was in a bar, it was loud, and I was a little drunk. Maybe next year, we can find a way to move some of these speakers to the main stage. Or try an evening event somewhere slightly quieter… and soberer.

After the drive home and the requisite couch-lying and football-watching (Go Pack!), here are a few ideas sticking in my mind:

- Juan Enriquez’s reminder that the US is in danger of creating a resentful, angry Latino underclass similar to the French speaking Quebecois of two generations ago. He urges us to look at a license plate like “Je me souviens” and to ensure that folks like Lou Dobbs don’t lead us to a future where license plates read “Yo me recuerdo.”

- Tom Barnett’s observation that the British were smart enough to realize their power was on the wane and to focus on coaching the up and coming US, “punching above their weight” for decades. It’s interesting to wonder whether the US will be able to do something similarly clever with China. (Listening to “State of Denial” as I drove home, I was reminded of just how powerful Tom’s “sysadmin force” idea is and how badly we needed it in Iraq.)

- The message from Dr. Serena Koenig and Zinhle Thabethe that it’s not okay to accept deaths in the developing world that we wouldn’t accept in the developed world. If we can expect people to live for 40 years on antiretroviral drugs, we need to expect the same in Africa and Haiti. (It would be great to get a speaker like Jamie Love to address the legal and practical aspects of making ARVs universally accessible.)

- A general reminder that, for me, the best speakers are passionate about what they’re doing, even if what they’re passionate about is strange words or strange food.

- Eno’s reminder about simplicitly and complexity. I’m listening to Steve Reich’s “Early Works” for the first time in a decade – available via iTunes, featuring the remarkable “It’s Gonna Rain”. As I think back, “Clapping Music”, on the same album, is the piece that let me fall in love with polyrhythms… which led me to study West African music in college… which led me to West Africa… which led me to, well, basically everything else. You should download this album immediately and see where it leads you. (Better yet, you should buy it on vinyl, dust off your turntable and listen to it that way.)

I’m enjoying catching up on everyone else’s favorite moments of the conference today, including Katherine Walter, Jamais, Randy Moss and Jason Kottke. Thanks to everyone with kind words about my blogging of the conference – the sad truth is this: my brain is a sieve and unless I blog these things, I’m not able to remember the words and phrases that changed my mind or make me think.

Thank you to everyone who spoke, attended and organized Pop!Tech, and thanks for letting me be part of it again.

Imagine Willy Wonka making expensive food for adults with a sense of humor. That’s Homaro Cantu.

Andrew Zolli introduces him by giving us the recipe for a Cantu signature cocktail:

Ingredients:
1 vanilla bean
6 oz red wine

Directions:
Clamp vanilla bean below an inverted wine glass
Heat bean with class four laser until it glazes the glass with caramelized vanilla smoke
Fill glass with wine, swirl and serve

Before Cantu takes us on a tour of his kitchen, he explains that he spent three years of his childhood homeless, with his mother and sister. His main collaborator, Ben Roach, was raised in a regimented military family. He believes that these backgrounds have helped shape them into innovators who both make high end food, but who invent new techniques and tools to make foods possible. They’re now experimenting with building a Star Trek type replicator, which they believe could revolutionize relief efforts… but for now, they’re offering diners a 5, 10 or 20 course tasting menu at Moto Restaurant in Chicago.

(Actually, Cantu runs the “idea factory” for the restaurant, creating new techniques and tastes to offer to diners. And printing things on cotton candy.)

Our tasting menu stars with an edible menu, tasting of curry, served with dal, cured lemon, and a shot of cucumber and yogurt which has been spun in a centrifuge.

The next course is hot and sour soup – hot vietnamese soup broth mixed with eggs, seasoned with sesame and herbs, frozen in liquid nitrogen. The result is “one body of liquid with multiple temperatures and textures.”

The next dish features “fizzy fruit”, fruit that’s been infused with carbonation in a “fizolator”. Fizzy watermelon, pineapple and onion are served with scallop tempura and celery root puree.

And then there’s a champagne cocktail. Two syringes of grape juice, mixed in a glass, which fizz and turn into synthetic champage.

The next is a pile of snow – goat cheese broth, frozen in liquid nitrogen, served with a squeeze of vinegar.

Then a seafood dish – mixed greens, fried shallot, hamachi – with a fizzy half of a blood orange. “Sometimes the customers think we’re really messing with them when we serve them half an orange at $160 a head.”

Cantu’s really excited about a superinsulated polymer oven. You heat it in a conventional oven for ten minutes and it can cook on a table top for hours. It’s cool on the outside, hot on the inside, and a clear plastic version might be able to cook via solar power. He uses it to cook a piece of fish, keeping the vapor and nutrients in it, serving it with shaved mushrooms.

Now a plate, painted with butter popcorn syrup, basil syrup, buttered king crab and frozen coconut powder, topped with a vegan, zero-carb extruded noodle made from pasion fruit.

Frozen peas and carrots, made from dense, flavored puree, cooled in liquid nitrogen, and served with extract of peas and carrots on top. “They taste more like peas and carrots than peas and carrots.”

Milk jam – reduced milk with sodium bicarbonate – wood grilled mushrooms, duck confit, poached tuna with sea salt, powdered duck confit oil, grilled, carbonized oranges… which are somehow added to an edible substrate, printed with an MC Escher-like image of ducks turning into tuna. (I think. There’s a lot in that dish.)

A metal platem with white bean puree, white, red and sea beans and a chunk of bison, homemade rice crispies, chorizo powder, served with silverware that contains fresh herbs in the handle of the fork. Cantu theorizes that we’ll soon be able to serve whole meals within the utensils…

Amaranth, with jalapeno sorbet, avocado, and warm lemon myrtle cream.

Cantu announces, “Now we’re going to show you some dangerous shit.” The diners are led into the kitchen, past a sign that has a Salvador Dali quote: “There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.” They enter the kitchen, where the laser technician is heating the vanilla beans. The cocktail is served with a plate of kielbassa puree, cabbage with mustard and bacon, and wood grilled beef. “These are very manly flavors – laser, mustard.”

Ben Roche takes over for the desserts: Macaroni made of lychee fruit with golden beets, triple cream cheese blended with chocolate and rice paper that tastes like lychee.

Lemon merangue pie made from lemon curd, mint cream and a noodle of pie crust.

Cotton candy, transmogrified into a printeable material – we’re each given samples to eat. The desert includes fried cotton candy, and an image of cotton candy that tastes like cotton candy. (And you wonder why I invoked Willy Wonka.)

A metal plate, frozen with liquid nitrogen to negative 280 farenheight. Pancake batter is poured on and allowed to freeze, then flipped. A frozen pancake, liquid in the middle, served on a spoonful of maple syrup.

A shmear of milk cream (his term), a sphere of grape pectin filled with liquid peanut butter, which gushes out when you poke it. A mote of sweetened bread – a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a glass of milk.

Donut soup – donut espresso, actually, the concentrate essence of donut – with a donut pancake.

A banana split, of banana puree, shredded fried banana and a pink triangle of frozen cherry.

A bowl of nachos, made from crystalized candy corn chips, kiwi in mint juice which looks like green salsa, and frozen mango puree.

And, so you don’t feel cheated, a balloon filled with cherry extract, frozen in liquid nitrogen. As it sublimates, the balloon grows, and the scent escapes through a pinhole in the balloon, filling the room with aroma.

These guys are clearly the craziest to take the stage so far, and they’re some of my favorites.

And that’s it for me, kids. I’m ducking out a bit early to dine with a friend in Portsmouth. Looking forward to seeing what everyone else thought and wrote, as it’s pretty hard to read the other blogs when you’re writing like this. Thanks to everyone for reading, linking and commenting and thanks to Andrew Zolli and the whole crew for another wonderful Pop!Tech.

Clifford Ross is an artist who has found himself becoming an inventor. His talk, “Finding the Latitude – The Art of Invention, the Invention of Art”, begins with the history of the naval chronometer. Ross tells us his hero was John Harrison, who won the 20,000 pound ($20 million in current dollars) prize offered by King Charles the II in the 1714 Longitude Act. A chronometer was a critical ingredient in accurately determining longitude – if you’re in a ship and have a clock running on London time, you can check the time at high noon – the difference between the time on the clock and noon will tell you how far east or west of London you are.

Harrison was an uneducated carpenter who lived ourside of London. He built a grandfather clock entirely our of wood – for fun – in 1718, and took on the challege of the shipboard chronometer in 1730, completing his first clock – commonly called H1 – in 1735. It was an immense technical challenge – a clock that could keep time accurately on a moving ship, through extremes of temperature and humidity.

H1 was followed by three new designs – H2 took five years, and Harrison realized midway through that it wouldn’t be good enough. H3 was under development from 1740 – 1759, and made radical steps forward. But H4 was the miracle – a handheld chronometer which looks like an overgrown pocket watch. All contemporary watches follow this basic mechanical model. Ross offers that Harrison changed time and space on the planet.

Ross believes the neccesary ingredients for invention and art are:
- curiosity
- persistence
- readiness to embrace the unexpected
- collaboration

He walks us through some inventions in the history of art – the progression from stylized greek Kouros from 590BC, to lifelike sculptures in 390BC. Jan Van Eyck invented oil paint – with many collaborators – with the intent of making flesh tones more lifelike in paintings likeThe Arnolfini Wedding. He shows us Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko, both working in the same year in the same style (abstract expressionism) with very different tools and results.

The quick tour through art history is a way of thinking about tools that help us make art. Ross fell in love with a mountain in Colorado and has spent much of the past decade trying to figure out how to capture it. The first attempt was a huge, high-resolution bellows camera, which shoots on 100 foot long rolls of film, making 9×18 inch negatives. He’s taken only 13 images with the camera, and the negatives took over a year to turn into prints, as no enlarger exists in the world to print 9×18 negatives.

Ross began working with Danny Hillis and the other folks associated with the Long Now Foundation. He shows us the Clock of the Long Now, quoting Stewart Brand, who termed it, “The world’s largest Fabergé egg”. Plans are underway to place a 60-foot tall version of the clock inside a mountain in the Nevada desert, and Ross wanted to photograph a panorama from the very top.

Panoramas have a long history in the art world. Eadweard Muybridge – a man so weird he changed the spelling of his name five times as he “evolved” – shot a beautiful panorama of San Francisco in 1878. Other panoramas were installed in Cycloramas, immersive theatres where viewers are encouraged to move around the image, looking at it in detail and chatting with other viewers.

Working with the Long Now folks and Danny Hillis’s Applied Minds group, Ross is trying to create new video panoramas that can be viewed in a cyclorama. In the process, he’s built – with the collaboration of a brilliant machinist – a new camera: R2. It’s got eight high resolution video camers and microphones and looks a bit like a Dalek from Dr. Who. It records at 9 gigabytes per minute, and requires 1.5 tons of gear to operate.

Logically enough, he decided to try it out in Brazil. And he thought he’d hang it from a balloon while he was at it.

The results are, in my opinion, somewhat mixed. We see a set of videos that have perspectives from multiple cameras. They look very rich and detailed, but it’s hard to tell from the back of the opera house. We see a hot air balloon floating over a green plane, and men or horseback cantering towards the camera. (This is a homage toward Muybridge’s motion capture experiments…) It looks a lot like an IMAX film – perhaps there would be a very different effect if we could see the film as presented in the round.

Ross notes that “finding the Longitude” became a catchphrase for the pursuits of fools and lunatics. Perhaps we’re meant to see his pursuits in this light.

Zinhle Thabethe is an AIDS activist from Durban, South Africa. She was diagnosed with HIV five years ago and told she needed to get treatment immediately. She lost her job, as her employer tried to decide whether she was “an asset or a liability” as a person with HIV. But she managed to get anti-retroviral therapy, which allowed her to survive a long struggle with opportunistic infections: TB, pneumonia, meningitis.

She’s one of the very lucky ones – her brother and sister both have HIV, and her brother has already died. 10% of South Africans are receiving anti-retroviral drugs – it’s an even smaller percentage across sub-Saharan Africa. She notes “we are not the same”, speculating that despite the fact that we all bleed, all cry, we get treated very differently depending on where we live and where we come from. She quotes Andrew Natsios, who was explaining why USAID wasn’t funding ARV drugs for Africa while he was the USAID administrator:

“Africans do not know what western time is. Many people in Africa have never seena clock or a watch their entire lives.” Because ARV medication has to be taken at careful intervals, Natsios suggested this shouldn’t be a priority for the continent. Thabethe points out that she’s somehow managed to watch the clock carefully enough to survive for five years…

Despite the fact that 50% of adults in some South African communities have HIV, despite the fact that 60% of pregnant women in clinics in KwaZulu Natal have HIV, despite the fact that 80-90% of hospital beds are filled with HIV patients, there’s a terrible stigma against AIDS in South Africa. Patients are sometimes dropped off at the hospital, and left to die – families don’t return to claim the body and to bury their dead. “HIV prunes people of humanity, dignity, and the South Africa culture of caring for your loved one through death.”

The most personal part of Thabethe’s story is when she talks about her brother, who “delayed testing, as most in South Africa want to do”. He was diagnosed with HIV and TB in 2003, ended up taking 6 drugs and was able to survive. But he got reinfected and died. She watched, knowing the ARV drugs she was taking would have let him survive… but there was no way to afford the drugs for him as well. Of the seven adults in her family, three were HIV possible, two negative, and two have not been tested. Four have TB.

Tuberculosis is a new battleground in South Africa. In inner-city communities in the US,
6 of 100,000 people have TB. In KwaZulu Natal, the rate is 1700 per 100,000. Increasingly, doctors are seeing multiple drug resistant TB and “XDR” – extremely drug resistant TB – this means that treatment success rates are less than 50%. Because treatments aren’t completed, resistance rises, and new, killer strains of TB are emerging.

She tells the story of touring in the US and feeling ill and weak in Boston – she was treated with the best of drugs and technology at Mass General Hospital. At the same time, her mother visited a clinic in South Africa, coughing blood, and was sent home, told she had a common cold. She’s now been diagnosed with TB. Her message – the idea that we’re all the same is a dangerous idea – we need to move to a future where we’re all treated the same as we face this deadly, but treatable, diseases.

Zinhle sings with the Sinikithemba choir, a touring choir of South Africans who are living with HIV. The members met while attending the same clinic, and ended up forming a support group as well as a performance troupe. They close the session with a performance which includes traditional music as well as songs designed to raise HIV awareness, including one with a chorus, “If you are infected, we are also affected.”

Neema Mgana came to Pop!Tech last year as part of the African fellows program, a program that Global Voices helped organize with Sun Microsystems and the UN. She’s the leader of a remarkable AIDS treatment program in Tanzania, and was the youngest nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

She heard Cameron Sinclair speak about Architecture for Humanity and was inspired to ask the question of what AfH might be able to do in a rural Tanzanian village, Ipuli. Ipuli is a nine hour journey from Dar Es Salaam, involving a bus to Dodoma, a train to Singuida and then travel by land.

While about 100,000 people live in Ipuli – 15,000 of them children under 5 – there’s no accessible local healthcare. The nearest hospital is 80 kilometers away, a journey that involves crossing a river that can flood dangerously. Patients sometimes arrive strapped to the back of a bicycle, or carried in a wheelbarrow. To get a referral to major hospitals, like Muhimbili hospital in Dar, patients need to visit one of these smaller clinics and get a letter of referral.

Cameron helped Neema find a pair of French architects who were willing to come and work in Ipuli. They have designed a pair of facilities – a mother/child clinic and a health training facility, which includes offices, classrooms and labs. The buildings are designed using local materials and craftsmen – wooden louvers, metal gates – and have sharply slanted roofs to collect 20,000 liters of rainwater for the center. The construction of the facility is helping train workers in the community, and is supervised by community elders, who donated 10 acres of land to the project.

The project is also being supported by a Boston-based engineering firm, Haley and Aldrich, and another Boston solar firm, Tamarack Energy, which are funding the project in part, and providing technical assistance, to allow the facility to have power and water. The generation system uses solar and wind energy – the water system pumps water into 2 10,000 liter tanks.

There’s an amazing web of partners that make this project possible. Once the project is built in Ipuli, future projects are planned for South Africa, Rwanda, Ghana, Uganda – they’ll be joined electronically to share health information and best practices across the continent. It’s an inspiring example of what Pop!Tech connections can make happen.

Dr. Serena Koenig starts her talk with a quote from Martin Luther King: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most injust and inhumane…”

She works in Haiti on a project called Partners in Health, which tries to address this injustice and inhumanity. She notes that Bill and Melinda Gates have said “we cannot turn our backs” on the millions of people who have AIDS. She points out that there are other diseases killing people in the developing world, like malnutrition, malaria and TB – all preventable diseases that are claiming millions of lives.

She tells us the story of Coralie Roger, an only child living with her mother in Haiti. In late august, she showed up at a hospital with pneumonia and severe anemia. She was diagnosed with acute myoblastic leukemia. There’s no treatment for the disease in Haiti. Coralie’s mother ended up putting an ad in Haiti’s newspaper, asking for help. Her aunt, in Canada, called a hospital and was told not to come in unless she had $100,000.

Koenig met Coralie and her mother and intervened, asking her colleages at Mass General to put the case in from of their Free Care committee. The committee approved, managed to wrangle a visa for Coralie and her mother, and the girl is now in treatment in Boston, with every chance of surviving.

She asks, “Is this really cost effective? Is this how you should spend your time?” She points out that Partners in Health treating 1.5 million patients in Haiti, and has only sent ten to the United States. But the ability to send the most critical cases to the US “brings dignity to a very dark place.”

Partners in Health has been working on fighting HIV and TB in Haiti since shortly after the virus was discovered. By treating TB by feeding patients and giving them transport vouchers to get to the clinic, they’ve had an almost 100% success rate. They’ve gone after HIV and TB using the same techniques as have been used in the US, attacking multiply drug resistant TB with off patent medicines.

The struggle Koenig faces is that most public health and pharma people believe that some death is going to be unavoidable in very poor nations. She disagrees, and argues that by using the treatments we know how to use, even places like Haiti can have AIDS survival rates comparable to those in the US. By leveraging funding from the Global Fund, “we’ve now got universal treatment for HIV/AIDS both in rural Haiti and Port au Prince.” They leverage AIDS treatment as a way to address any medical problems a patient comes in with. She ends with an amazing set of photos: emaciated patients who recover from TB and HIV over the course of six months, turning from near skeletons to healthy people.

She gets a long, long round of applause when she sits down…