Ethan Zuckerman's musings on Africa, international development
and hacking the media.
I love airline route maps. I’ve fallen asleep staring at the tangle of possible journeys so often that I sometimes confuse the capilaries I see with my eyes closed with the red paths of Northwest flights hubbed out of Detroit and Minneapolis. I love the questions the maps raise: why is there a direct flight on Air Canada from Halifax to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta? (Lots of Nova workers in the oil sands, I suspect, but I never would have asked the question without the map.) Why is Chengdu such an important Chinese air hub? Why does MIAT (Mongolia’s airline, affectionately known as “maybe I’ll arrive tomorrow” by regular customers) fly to Berlin, and no other western European cities? Does a direct Air Madagascar flight to Milan imply a strong Italian-Malagasy connection, or was Malpensa just one of the few airports where they could buy a landing slot?
These maps are deceptive in a way. They let you know what’s possible, but not what actually happens. The Northwest map will show you flights from Detroit to both Albany and Bozeman. While it’s good to know that it’s possible to get between those cities by flying Northwest, it doesn’t tell you how easy or difficult it might be to make that trip, how often those flights run, or how many people choose to make that trip. That’s okay - the job of maps is to tell a traveler where she can go, not where other travelers choose to go. But trying to extrapolate too much from a map of infrastructure may be a mistake - is the Ulaanbataar/Berlin link the sign of close governmental and trade ties between Mongolia and Berlin? Or an accident of history, airport capacity or other factors?
This lovely video gives a different picture from the route maps. It’s a simulation of global air traffic from the fine folks at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. The map uses data from Flightstats.com, and overlays their position on a Miller cylindrical projection. Compared to some of the other flight data porn the folks at ZHAW have churned out - like their amazing Radar mashup of flights over Zurich, using live transponder data from aircraft - this was a pretty simple hack.
I’ve watched the video half a dozen times today, getting different insights each time. Popular routes become apparent - the arc of travel from the Northeastern US to London, Paris and Amsterdam runs west to east as night falls, and reverses as morning breaks. The popularity of that ocean crossing vastly outpaces traffic across the Pacific, connecting Tokyo, Manila and Beijing to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. There’s more traffic from Brazil to western Europe than I would have guessed, and virtually no traffic across the southern Atlantic or Pacific. Domestic traffic in the US, India and China, and intra-EU travel is vastly more common than trans-oceanic travel. As the US is covered with yellow dots representing airplanes, international travel looks like a rounding error in comparison to domestic flights.
It’s not a map you’d want to use in planning your vacation, perhaps, but it would be a useful one to turn to if you were tracking the spread of an epidemic, for instance. If you’re studying SARS, it’s useful to know that you can, theoretically, get from Guangdong to Johannesburg - it’s lots more useful to know that most of those travellers are heading to Hong Kong, Toronto and New York City.
It’s a map of flow, not of infrastructure. It reveals infrastructure - the location of airports, the preferred air routes followed - because they appear as bright spots, places where lots of flow originates. A map of infrastructure - a map of potentials - shows every airport as co-equal; a map of flow shows you which airports are heavily used, which are pivotal nodes in a network. If you’re an executive at a fast food company, an infrastructure map of highways is moderately helpful - it’s obviously wise to place your stores in places where drivers could theoretically reach them, rather than in the middle of a desert. (No one told Pacific Bell this, obviously, before they erected the legendary Mojave Phone Booth.) But a map of flow is what you really need, showing where drivers are likely to go, and where they’re likely to come purchase your grease-laden wares.
It’s hard to map flow. Infrastructure tends to stay put. But people, cars, and shipping containers move all the time. To build accurate maps, you can’t simply plot the location of an airport once - you’ve got to map each plane that flies during some period of time. Things that don’t stay put aren’t always happy about being mapped. In simplest terms, maps of flow are a form of surveillance. Mapping your personal “flow” - in the way that the BBC is tracking a shipping container around the world - would likely be a gross violation of your privacy, as it would probably reveal more about you than you’re strictly comfortable sharing.
My friends Sandy Pentland and Nathan Eagle have been experimenting with something Pentland is calling “reality mining“, using surveillance of individuals via their mobile phones to extrapolate information about social networks, individual health and events in the news. Eagle tells me that the system was so effective, it could determine which of the anonymous participants were dating, and was able to correlate behavior to events like the Red Sox World Series victory, during which cellphone users clustered in bars and crossed the river to celebrate near Fenway. Unsurprisingly, a lot of sponsors are interested in this research, including mobile phone companies and advertisers - it’s not unrealistic to believe that mobile phone companies might, at some point, offer you free basic phone service in exchange for your behavioral data (collected by tracking your phone) and the opportunity to target ads to you based on your location. (See Blyk, a free mobile phone service in the UK, targetted to young people and ad sponsored…)
The maps Pentland and others are making tend to make us the most nervous when we place ourselves in them as individuals. We wonder what a map of our actions will tell others. We’re generally more comfortable with them in aggregate. Leaving the Berkman Center, I look at Google Maps to see whether the traffic heading west on Route 2 or I-90 is lighter. This is a useful thing and I’m very glad that someone is monitoring road conditions and letting me make intelligent decisions about which way to drive. On some level, I realize that my beat-up black truck is part of the overall picture represented as a green, yellow or red line. But that map generally doesn’t make me uneasy in the way that a map that allowed you to click on it and see “1999 Toyota Tacoma, 27 mph, heading west on Massachusetts Ave, MA license plate 345 GDF”. The former reads to me as mapping of flow, the latter as surveillance, but it’s not entirely clear to me where the line should be drawn between the two ideas.
The map above is called “In Transit” and is part of the Cabspotting program run by the Exploratorium, using data from Yellow Cab and visualisations by the folks at Stamen Design. All yellow cabs in San Francisco are equipped with GPS and report their location to dispatchers, automatically, once a minute - they’re being surveilled so that dispatchers can respond to requests for cabs or deploy cabs to another part of town. In this visualization, those minute-by-minute accretion of data points are blurred into lines, showing the paths that cabs take. And these paths can reveal some interesting things about how people flow through the city of San Francisco.
Those who know San Francisco will immediately pick out the major highways - 101, 280 and 80 - and the paths across the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate. It’s not hard to intuit where downtown is, to get a sense for the comparative popularity of various routes in and out of the city. The blank spots, on the other hand, are a little confusing. The area near #5 on the map is the Presidio, a former military base that’s now a park… which helps explain why there’s not much cab traffic through it. The areas just south of #4 and #7 aren’t parks - they’re Potrero Hill and Dogpatch, neighborhoods that are better known for industry and low-income housing than for tourist attractions or dot.com startups. To their southeast is a large blank patch on the map: Bayview and Hunter’s Point, a predominantly African-American neighborhood that surrounds a former naval shipyard. In other words, some areas are blank because there’s no good way to drive a taxi there. In other cases, they’re the neighborhoods where few people call for a taxi… or where the taxi drivers aren’t willing to go. The street map helps you figure out how to get from 3rd Street and Evans Avenue to Union Square, while the flow map makes it clear that you probably shouldn’t count on hailing a taxi to make the trip.
Maps of infrastructure visualize what it’s possible for people to do. Maps of flow show what they actually do. The two may diverge sharply.
A few years ago, if you wanted to send an email to a friend across the street in Accra, there’s a good chance the message would travel through the US or the UK on the way. Ghana had several competing internet service providers, and each provider bought internet connectivity from a different vendor. The vendors’ networks connected, just not in Ghana. So sending email across town meant sending a message on one ISP, to the US, transferring over to the other ISP, and back to Ghana, a journey that involved two satellite hops to cross the Atlantic. This is called “trombone routing”, and it’s generally something to be avoided.
If you mapped the network traffic of Ghanaian internet users - the flow - it sure looked like they were sending a lot of bits to and from the US. This might have been a result of trombone routing of emails between Ghanaians. Or it might have been because many websites are hosted in the US, and Ghanaian users wanted to read cnn.com, espn.com, etc. Knowing which it was mattered - if lots of traffic was local, it would make sense to construct an Internet Exchange Point (IXP), a crossing point for local ISPs to exchange traffic. If it was mostly requests to US webservers, the IXP wouldn’t save much money and probably shouldn’t be built. An infrastructure map would be no help - almost all traffic needed to go through the US, even if the intent was to communicate locally. To build a map of flow, Ghanaian ISPs would need to monitor their traffic, distinguish between domestic and foreign requests, share this information with fellow ISPs and make a decision regarding the utility of an IXP.
Ghanaian ISPs made the decision to build the Ghana Internet Exchange not based on understanding their own flow, but by looking at the behavior of other African exchange points. When ISPs in Johannesburg started exchanging traffic directly, they discovered that roughly 50% of their traffic was local to South Africa. The administrators who set up an exchange point in Nairobi saw roughly 25-30% local traffic. The disparity? There’s a lot more web servers hosted in South Africa than in Kenya, and hence more local traffic. To make the decision to build an IXP on a rational basis, you need to know not just the flow of internet traffic, but the flow the traffic would take if it were routed via an IXP. You need to know not just what users are doing, but what their intention is. This is a tough enough mapping challenge that you end up guessing, not analyzing.
The distinction between maps of infrastructure and maps of flow matters to me because I think it can help explain certain misconceptions and misunderstandings about our connected world. My contention - with very little to support it, frankly - is that we tend to assume more connections than actually exist. We see a map of infrastructure that shows it’s possible to fly from Antananarivo to Albania and assume, on an unconcious level, that the connection is routine, frequent, common. We look at maps of the internet - a near-worldwide tangle of undersea cables - and assume that data flows everywhere, connecting every one of us.
A map of flow would help us understand a more complicated reality. You can fly from Antananarivo to Albania, but you might be the only person this year to make the trip. Traffic flows between Ghana and the US via the Internet. We can see a cable - SAT-3 - that connects West Africa to the global internet through Europe and India. A map of flow could tell us whether that connection is symmetric, whether Americans are looking for information from Ghanaweb as often as Ghanaians are looking at ESPN or CNN. If we could see flow, we might detect the dark spots, the places reached by infrastructure but disconnected - through language, economics, or force of habit - from global flows.
My friend and colleague Hal Roberts is taking on one of the hardest research questions in the space of internet and society - the surveillance of the internet. If surveillance is done in certain ways, it should be invisible to users - a government might be able to read all email by tapping into internet service providers, and this behavior could be entirely invisible. (We’d know about it only through a whistleblower - see Mark Klein and the information he shared about US government wiretaps at AT&T.)
In absence of the sort of information we might obtain from whistleblowers, studying surveillance means studying what it’s possible for someone to watch, not what watching actually takes place. Colleagues of ours have looked closely at internet architectures to determine what’s possible in terms of surveilling the internet. Where are the points where a government or corporation could monitor large amounts of data? How much data can we monitor using current technology? Is it technically feasible to monitor every packet of data coming into a country like China?
For Hal’s talk at Berkman yesterday, the focus was on less speculative surveillance, and more on a more familiar entity: Google. Hal points out that Google owns two advertising systems - Adwords and DoubleClick - which each account for roughly 35% of the online ad market. In visiting 70% of the websites with ads on them - possibly as much as 50% of all web traffic - the vast majority of users are in situations where Google is able to watch their behavior. The question behind Hal’s talk: “Should you care about this?”
When we consider surveillance, Hal tells us we’re usually thinking about Orwellian Big Brother scenarios, shadowy entities like the NSA, the boss reading our work email, or our insurance companies watching how we drive or whether we’re clandestine smokers. These are entites that have power over you, which can control aspects of your life, ranging from your physical liberty to your employment or finances. Google can’t shoot you, fire you or take away your health insurance - why should we care that they’re watching us?
Hal offers two straightforward reasons, and one much more subtle, complicated one:
- Google could lose our data. Credit card companies, government bureaus and other organizations that should know better have lost large amounts of personal data - what if Google’s data protection policies aren’t up to snuff, or someone simply makes a mistake and releases data that should have been kept under lock and key?
- Governments could access the data Google is storing via subpoenas, national security letters or other mechanisms. Hal points out that Viacom was able to access data from Google regarding YouTube videos -
But Hal’s interests focus on a more complex way of considering Google, surveillance and watching. He points out that, in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother’s Ministry of Love watched you while you watched it, through screens located in every home and office. This, Hal suggests, is an especially sinister vision of a network public sphere, a space where you and your neighbors are all watching each other. This form of surveillance helps explain how slavery persisted in the US - neighbors watched each other to make sure that no one was assisting escaped slaves and receiving rewards for returning stolen “property”.
An even more sophisticated model is the panopticon, as concieved by Jeremy Bentham and memorably analyzed by Michel Fouault. Bentham proposed building a prison where prisoners could be watched at all times by guards. Foucault observed that when you place individuals in a position where they can constantly be watched, people will enforce their own behavior, acting as if they’re under observation at all times. This means that surveillance can exert a force over society without direct violence or physical impact. Hal wonders what surveillance via CCTV is doing to social in Great Britain, where CCTV cameras in public spaces are very common. And he wonders what it means that Google watches what we do online.
Referencing Canadian sociologist David Lyon, Hal talks about social sorting, the ways in which dataspheres change to present different people with different opporunities. If someone managing a datasphere is aware that you have good credit, you might be presented with more opportunities to obtain a credit card or a mortgage. Lyon refers to the profiles that exist in dataspheres as “data doubles” - data dopplegangers which may or may not accurately resemble you, and which govern what opportunities are made available to you. Google, Hal argues, is in an especially powerful position to construct data doubles, and shouldn’t be sharing this data with banks or other entities.
A particular worry with these data doubles is the possibility of the loss of context. For social relationships to flourish, we need context for individual relationships so that one fact doesn’t dominate our understanding of a person. Hal references an email sent by Larry Lessig to an executive at Netscape which Microsoft used to try to demonstrate that he was unfairly biased against the company and could not serve as a special master in the DOJ’s case against Microsoft. It’s not under dispute that Lessig sent the email, but it’s unfair to build a picture of Lessig’s opinions regarding Microsoft from than single fact. Our concerns about privacy and bureacracy center, at least in part, on the idea that facts about our actions end up separated from context by systems that analyze individual points of data, not the picture of a whole, complete, complicated human being.
In Foucault’s understanding of the panopticon, a situation where everyone is surveilling themselves presents an interesting challenge to the prison warden - there’s the ability to control more people, but a loss of control over the mechanism of surveillance. With Google, we face a complicated system where three entities - content publishers, advertisers, search engine users and Google itself, are watching each other, all attempting certain degrees of control and all involved in a complex dance of watching, controlling and reacting. It’s a mistake to conclude that Google is fully in control of the situation - in fact, Google works so well because control has devolved to such a large group of people. These relationships might be surveillance, might be other forms of watching, but bear consideration as we try to understand how these systems work.
Hal talks about the Google Brain - a close integration of Google with everyday activities which enables real-time feedback loops. Searching on Google is fundamentally different from searching in a card catalog, he contends. The rapid iteration and shaping of our search behavior based on feedback from Google turns online search into a difffent activity. At the same time, Google is watching a user search and giving results back based in part on the links the user follows or ignores. Google changes how we search, and we change how Google indexes and presents information through what Hal calls, “the mysterious mechanization of meaning in the google brain.”
We shape how Google organizes information not just by following and not following links Google presents as search results. We also shape information as content providers. The basic logic of Page Rank - the algorithm Sergey Brin and Larry Page pioneered as graduate students at Stanford - is that a search engine should extrapolate from links on webpages to construct a model of user behavior. If lots of users link to the Sumotalk website with links named “sumo”, the search engine should extrapolate that users looking for sumo want to find this page. Google works (in part) by watching how we structure the content of the internet.
But we watch how Google works as well, and sometimes we’re able to take advantage of this behavior in interesting ways. For roughly two years, a search for “miserable failure” would return George W. Bush’s biography. This was the result of a “google bomb”, a coordinated attempt to associate a page with a particular phrase. Knowing that Google looks for phrases linked to a specific page, bloggers made a point of linking “miserable failure” to the destination page. Google was aware of the technique and could have tweaked their results to eliminate the result - instead, they allowed the results to stand for many months, until a change in their “model” meant that other pages ranked higher for a search for the phrase.
(Here’s something I suggested in conversation with Hal afterwards: To the extent that Google’s model is transparent, it gives us some confidence that we understand - at least in general terms - why we’re given one result and not another. But transparent means that it can be gamed, through something like googlebombing. In their ad server, there’s a great incentive to game - anyone who purchases an ad on Google would really like that ad to be the first one a user sees. Google has an incentive to be transparent, as it makes people more likely to use their system; at the same time, a truly transparent system is so easily gamed, it’s not useful. Google has a tough balancing act to play here…)
There’s another complex feedback loop involved with Google’s ad engine. Ads are placed via multiple criteria. Advertisers participate in a community auction for terms - if you’re willing to pay $2 for a click on your ad for the term “sumo”, your ad will get priority over mine. But better ads - as determined by what users click on - rise to the top. Google watches user behavior and re-ranks ads based on their success or failure, so money alone isn’t enough to dominate the ad sweepstakes, a simple feedback system. Hal points out that there’s a third criteria - compliance with Google’s guidelines. These guidelines are so strict, requiring advertisers to be short, simple and, more or less, honest, that Hal contends they’re changing the way advertising works. A perfume ad would generally try to associate perfume with beauty or sex. That doesn’t work on Google - perfume ads focus on facts, offering perfumes at 60% discount from retail, for instance. The marketing function moves from the ad to the content. He’s particularly fascinated that Google tries hard to convince people to follow these guidelines voluntarily, arguing that ad results will be better if the users play by the rules.
Hal’s analysis, as presented yesterday, focuses on watching and control. He’s fascinated by Google in part because so many parties share control. Even in a system like Ad Words, where Google has very strict control over content standards, advertisers have more control than they do in traditional print advertising. They’re invited to watch Google’s performance via a constant stream of data, which lets them evaluate the performance of their ads and the utility of their spending at a much finer grain of control than with virtually any other form of advertising.
The discussion that followed (interrupted?) the talk focused in no small part on the word “surveillance”. Hal uses the term to explain systems like Google because it allows him access to a set of insights from Foucault and others regarding the alienation individuals feel confronted by systems that watch them, control them and aren’t entirely understandable. I find that the term “surveillance” brings me directly to ideas about direct physical control - the ruling party’s police watching you vote and taking you out for a beating if you vote the wrong way. A term that includes everything from tapping the lines of human rights activists to arrest them for treason through watching whether I click result two or three when searching for “sumo” seems like a badly overloaded term.
Harry Lewis has a helpful response to this complaint - he posits a form of watching that would be surveillance if governments did it. This includes some pretty simple commercial behaviors - grocery stores track what we purchase and offer us coupons and promotions based on our behaviors. But when the FBI gets the clever idea of tracking potential terrorists by looking at the sale of falafel and hummus, we get concerned… shortly after we stop laughing. We might choose to worry about Google watching us because it’s easy to posit situations in which Google would be forced to give that information to the US or other governments. You might respond to this by putting up very high legal walls to prevent this information from leaking, or forbid businesses from keeping this data.
But there’s a cost to the latter strategy - this data is what allows corporations to learn and to provide better information. If I can’t monitor the weblogs on Global Voices, I don’t know what stories are driving people to the website. I’m reluctant to fly blind without this information - which might help me produce a better product - because there’s the possibility I could be subpoenda’d for my records.
The problem with surveillance as an intersection of watching and control in the digital age is that you can argue that Google has control over so many aspects of online life that it’s hard to feel comfortable about situations in which they’re simply watching and responding to feedback. In discussions after the talk, Hal expands his criteria and explains that he sees surveillance as a particular intersection of watching with control, consent and context - I look forward to hearing more about these other two axes.
Hal’s still thinking through his work on the topic - as someone giving a lot of talks about a set of issues I haven’t entirely worked through my thinking on, I have great respect for the willingness to put ideas out there and get the (sometimes fierce) feedback offered from Berkfolk. Looking forward to seeing where Hal’s thinking goes on this interesting and important topic.
It’s hard to look forward to something as difficult and sad as Medicine Sans Frontieres top ten list of global humanitarian crises. I noted last year that this appears to be the season for top ten lists, and that these lists range from the positive to the extremely disconcerting. MSF’s list is certainly discomfiting, but it’s also a very helpful reminder of what stories we should be paying attention to.
Two of MSF’s top ten focus on Somalia and the ethnically Somali portion of Ethiopia. MSF reports a massive refugee crisis in Somalia, connected to ongoing instability and violence. Unfortunately, MSF is able to provide little help within Somalia - the situation is simply too dangerous for their staff. Three staff were killed by a roadside bomb in Kisamayo, and MSF pulled its international staff out of the country in early 2008 - their local staff continues to work despite a high degree of risk.
Eastern Ethiopia, a region that’s majority Somali-speaking, is facing a severe food crisis. Many of the people who live in this region are pastoralists. An ongoing conflict between the Ethiopian government and rebels have made much of the region inaccessible, which is preventing herds from reaching water and food. Here MSF is constrained from acting not so much by violence, but by an uncooperative Ethiopian government, which has put major hurdles in front of the organization and which forced an MSF project to close in the region.
(While I’ve complained in the past about how little attention is paid to Somalia, the rising threat of piracy has helped attract some attention to that country’s problems. But news from the Somali region of Ethiopia is almost nonexistent - try a search for “Jijiga”, the regional capital, on Google News, or within the New York Times, where most results are from the second World War. A paper from Dr. Abdi Aden Mohamed - whose views are clearly anti-Ethiopian and pro-independence for the region - gives a sense for how isolated this region is: “… 3. There is no electricity any where in the region and most of the people in the region have never seen a Television or Cinemas. 4. No communications like postal services, and most of the people have not seen or used up to now telephones, faxes etc., because there aren’t any in the region. 5. There are no roads in the region except dirty dusty ones and trails created by the nomads and their herds.”
The difficulty MSF is having in reaching Somalia and the Somali region aren’t just coincidental - the disconnection of these areas helps explain why they are in such dire straits. Political and military strategist Dr. Tom Barnett offers the maxim “disconnection defines danger”. Countries that are tightly integrated into global communication, financial, trade and military systems tend not to fail catastrophically in meeting the needs of their people. The idea is not unrelated to Dr. Amartya Sen’s assertion than functioning democracies don’t experience famines - they’re able to access markets and seek help from other nations to avert this sort of catastrophe. (If you’re as disconnected as North Korea, you’ll find your neighbors using food aid as a carrot to try to coax better behavior from you.) This helps explain why Burma, still recovering from Cyclone Nargis, makes MSF’s list. It’s not a surprise that MSF hasn’t been able to send international staff into Burma - the military government has refused to issue visas, leaving the task of providing critically needed medical care to local staff.
I’d always assumed that MSF’s purpose in publishing this list was to fundraise. Oddly, there’s no link to giving information on their site - if you’re in the US and want to support their important work, you can find a link on the Doctors Without Borders site. The idea of disconnection suggests another reason - MSF can’t work in many of the places on their top ten list without better security for their doctors, or international support in obtaining visas. Without more “connectivity” - in Barnett’s sense - these are largely crises they have to watch from afar and help with only indirectly. Top ten lists, whatever else they’re good for, are a way of directing attention, and attention is a necessary precursor to connection.
Some of the most insightful and moving writing about Africa comes from correspondents just as they’re leaving the continent. Africa correspondents are generally absurdly overworked. Your “beat” is a continent that’s larger than the US, China and Western Europe combined. Travel is difficult and time-consuming, and stories tend to emerge in locations that are hard to get to, uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous. It makes sense that correspondents don’t get a chance to give a larger view, a perspective on what they’ve seen and done, until they’re heading home or onto other assignments.
But it’s frustrating, as I often find myself discovering interesting voices just as they’re shifting their attention from Africa to other assignments. I haven’t read much by Stephanie Nolen during the years she’s covered the continent for the Globe and Mail, but her musings on her time based in Johannesburg make me wish I’d paid more attention.
Her recollections are a mix of the sad and hopeful. She offers a poignant take on the multicultural hope for South Africa, and the sometimes violently xenophobic present. She’s shocked and saddened by the violence in Kenya earlier this year, unshocked and saddened by economic and political stagnation in Swaziland. In what may be a surprise to people who don’t follow African news closely, she’s most hopeful about AIDS, noting that a disease that looked impossible to address in the face of severe poverty has become managable for hundreds of thousands of peope through low-cost anti-retroviral drugs and an approach to the disease that focuses on making it routine, survivable and a chronic condition, not a death sentence. Not everyone has access to these drugs, but the success that some communities have had is inspiring and helps turn what sounded impossible into a reality.
As I read her story about a friend whose ARV treatments and doctors appointments are now “so normal, so calm and well-managed, that it took my breath away,” I found myself thinking of other African health miracles that we fail to discuss. Understandably, we tend to spend a lot of time talking about persistent problems like malaria and TB - it’s worth spending a bit of time recognizing progress we’ve made on other fronts.
A friend at the Carter Center sent me a couple of encouraging links regarding guinea worm. This parasitic disease - dracunculiasis, more commonly called guinea worm disease - is something you tend to hear of only if you’ve lived in sub-Saharan Africa… though once you’ve heard of it, the descriptions tend to stay with you. If you drink contaminated water in a country where dracunculiasis is endemic, it’s possible to swallow a small flea - a copepods. Your stomach acid will digest the adult, but the larvae survive, and they burrow through your body and breed. The male dies after mating, while the female burrows further into the body, usually into an arm or a leg. After growing to full size - as big as a meter long - she attempts to leave the body, creating a blister in the skin, which causes a painful burning sensation. The natural impulse is to put this blister into water to cool it - when the guinea worm senses contact of the blister with water, she releases thousands of larvae, contaminating that water supply.
(I find the life cycle of this parasite so weird and surreal, I had to check several sources to ensure that I wasn’t transcribing the plot of the film Alien by accident. This really is how this critter lives. God, evolution or both have an evil sense of humor sometimes.)
Eliminating guinea worm means providing clean water to these communities - something that allows communities to avoid cholera, schistosomiasis, onchocerciasis and numerous other diseases - and ensuring that people with guinea worm don’t contaminate these new water supplies. Because there’s no vaccine - or even effective medicine - to attack guinea worm, this involves gently pulling the adult worms from the patient’s body, a painful process that can take over a month.
Here’s what’s amazing - in 1986, there were 3.5 million cases of the disease a year in 20 countries. Now there are roughly 5,000 a year, concentrated in the Sahel (Ghana, Mali, Sudan, Ethiopia, Niger and Nigeria.) The Carter Center, which has led the charge in eliminating the disease, believes that the disease may be completely eradicated in the next few years. That’s absolutely amazing, given that eradication efforts require working in communities that are extremely rural and hard to reach.
Sometimes, especially on a dark and snowy day, it’s a good idea to reflect on the battles we’re winning, and on the groups of people fighting them.
More on the Carter Center’s efforts on guinea worm and other diseases here. A slideshow about a young girl fighting guinea worm in northern Ghana. A Time photogallery of community efforts to combat guinea worm in Wantugu, Ghana.
There’s lots of business and economics news to be angry about, if you choose to be angry. But one story in particular has my attention, and my ire: the news that Siemens paid over $1.4b in bribes to foreign officials to win government contracts. Bribery was a regular part of business practice at Siemens - employees brought suitcases to a cash desk, where they could be filled with up to a million euros to bribe officials. Until 1999, Siemens claimed tax deductions for these bribes, listing them as business expenditures. At least 4,283 bribes were paid, according to the SEC.
Siemens has pled guilty to accounting offenses, though not bribery in US and German courts, agreeing to pay $1.6 billion in fines. Had Siemens been found guilty of offering bribes, they’d have been blacklisted by the US government, which would have cost them billions of dollars in business. Now, reassured by Siemens executives that they’ve put the “black period” of corruption behind them, they continue to be eligible for lucrative contracts.
Many of the payments made occurred in developing nations like Bangladesh, where Siemens admits “it spent more than 5.3 million dollars to win a 40.8-million-dollar mobile phone infrastructure development project.” Needless to say, Bangladeshi authorities are now trying to figure out who received these bribes. It would be a good thing to see that government crack some heads - Bangladesh ranks as one of the most corrupt nations in terms of perception by the global business community.
My friend Fernando Rodrigues argues that indexes like the Transparency International corruption perception index, cited above, miss the point and punish nations where corruption is openly discussed and combatted - he’s got a good point, but perceptions matter as well as companies choose where and how to do business. In countries widely perceived to be corrupt, businesses are more likely to offer a bribe when doing business.
But it’s way too easy to let companies off the hook by arguing that this is simply how business is done in developing nations. Yes, officials in some nations ask for bribes in considering contracts. But Siemens’ behavior reveals that some companies approach contracting with the assumption that they will pay bribes and well-established systems for doing so. It takes two to tango.
For the past decade or so, international aid from the US has focused heavily on “governance”, which includes effort to root out government corruption. Nations that show progress in eliminating corruption are eligible for money via pools of funds like the Millenium Challenge Account - those who don’t are not. This is a worthwhile policy. Corruption damages poor people in multiple ways. When contractors are overpaid to build infrastructure or government systems, ultimately taxpayers pay for those systems. Government officials who take bribes from international contractors ask for bribes from citizens as well, including those least able to pay. Local firms, which already have a tough time competing against international firms, can face insurmountable odds when the foreign firm has access to a million-dollar cash desk… and when local firms don’t get contracts, they don’t employ local employees.
But governance issues need to focus on combatting corruption from international contractors as well. Transparency International maintains a well-known corruption perceptions index… and a much less well-known index: the Bribe Payers Index. Germany registers as the 5th least corrupt on this index, suggesting that Indian, Mexican, Chinese and Russian corporations may be throwing around even more cash in seeking contracts. (Again, this is a perceptions index, and there are all sorts of methodological reasons to be cautious about reading too much into these numbers.) The BPI is a good move towards ensuring that countries and their corporations take some responsibility for their role in corruption in developing nations. So are transparency efforts, like this one at the World Bank where bribe payers are named, shamed and banned on a public webpage.
Daniel Kauffman, a scholar of governance at the World Bank and the Brookings Institution, argues that we’ll only see the elimination of corruption when penalties and incentives line up. “What truly raises the cost of bribing will matter, in contrast with PR-friendly measures that are useless in raising the cost of corruption.” He suggests that successful prosecutions of a firm like Siemens are worth many times more than all the codes of ethical corporate behavior multinational firms have signed. I’d suggest that making sure stories like this are well discussed, and don’t fall off the news radar, is key as well.
I realize that, at the end of a year when nearly everyone has faced economic hard times, all sorts of worthy organizations are asking for your help. Well, we are too. Global Voices is launching an online giving campaign today. We’re asking folks to lend their support to all our activities - the grants we give to blogging groups in developing nations through Rising Voices, the work we do on free speech advocacy, the translation and reporting we do everyday, on breaking stories like the Mumbai attacks or less serious issues, like Shoegate.
Like public radio in the US, we’re supported by a combination of support from foundations, corporations and individual donors. We know that 2009 is going to be a very hard year for media organizations and foundations, and we’re hoping our readers can lend a hand. Like independent media organizations around the world, we’re supported by a great deal of volunteer labor, but we do have costs associated with server space, our editorial staff and administration of a project that involves more than 200 people around the world - we’re hoping you can help us support and draw attention to work bloggers around the world are doing and keep the world talking.
Global Voices is a Stichting, a non-profit foundation, under Dutch law. For US donors, we’re accepting donations through the Media Development Loan Fund, a US nonprofit that supports an amazing range of independent media projects - your donation will be to MDLF, who will pass the funds on to our Dutch organization. If you don’t care about tax deductions, you can give to us via PayPal or check through our website.
Did I mention that we’ve got cute badges? We’ve got cute badges.
Thanks for listening. I’ll keep folks posted on the campaign here and on Twitter.
The last two major projects I’ve worked on - Geekcorps and Global Voices - share an interesting trait. Both ended up becoming research projects for academics studying the changing nature of organizations in a digital age. Dr. Leo Hsu of New York University wrote an excellent dissertation, “Hacking Development” about Geekcorps’s novel approach to skill training. My friend and colleague Lokman Tsui is looking closely at Global Voices and community values, like tolerance, listening and hospitality. As a make-believe academic (i.e., someone who hangs out in academic contexts, writes the occasional paper but tries to avoid all that scholarly rigor stuff), I find that the scrutiny brought to bear by these friends often reveals truths that are difficult for me to see, either because I’m too close to the projects or because I lack the frame for the insights.
So it’s not a surprise that Chris Salzberg, a researcher at the University of Tokyo and Japanese Language Editor for Global Voices, was able to tell me a great deal that I didn’t know about a project I’d helped found. While Chris works on bridging between the Japanese-language blogosphere and our English-speaking readers, his recent research has focused on Lingua, our project which makes Global Voices content available in over a dozen languages. Presenting his research at Berkman this week, Chris has good evidence that Lingua is taking over Global Voices, with more volunteers now focused on translating our content than on creating it.
In a recent paper for the Translation Journal, Chris describes Lingua as one of the world’s largest translation communities. He admits that this may not be true - it’s hard to know what projects should be described as “translation communities”, as translation is usually a solitary activity. Projects like Cucumis, dotsub and Worldwide Lexicon are trying to take advantage of the distributed, participatory nature of the Internet to help turn translation into a team sport.
Looking closely at Lingua, Chris sees a number of patterns for group translation emerging. Our Chinese translation team uses wikis to break apart translation tasks. Most don’t - most use simple mailing lists and an editor and volunteer system that allows translators to agree to work on pieces and submit their work for review by an editor. A few communities allow seasoned translators to post content to the sites without review. The flexibility of structure appears to be helping Lingua grow - Chris shows a graph of community growth, that shows Lingua growing larger than the GV editorial community in roughly half the lifespan.
This makes good sense, in that the Lingua teams are producing more than a dozen different sites, while the GV team works primarily on one. But it’s also an interesting example of a blind spot Rebecca and I had when founding the project. We believed - perhaps unconsciously - that Global Voices would focus on bridge bloggers, and that these bridge figures would use English to reach wider audiences. The rise of the polyglot internet rapidly proved us wrong, and while Rebecca and I were both surprised at the passion for creating GV sites in local languages, we’ve realized our mistake and encouraged the growth.
The challenges of translation continue to be surprising. As Jillian York - GV’s Morocco author, and a talented Arabic/English translator - explains in her post about Chris’s talk:
Chris points to “lost context” as the biggest challenge of the project, meaning, when original articles are translated into a foreign language, translators are often stumped on how to translate phrases, concepts or terms. For example, in an article on “genital excision” (also known as female genital mutilation), a Malagasy translator had difficulty translating the foreign concept. She finally settled on “circumcision of young girls.” This is a common occurrence; as a Global Voices author, I’ve had translators contact me on a number of occasions to clarify terms I’ve used in articles on Morocco; terms which are clear in English but may not be in, for example, Korean.
Chris’s analysis of Global Voices and group translation is focused, in part, on finding a place within academic discourse to study this new form of translation. He sees the field as related to the study of journalism, the sort of internet and society studies we do at Berkman and to the small, but growing, field of translation studies. This search feels, to me, like a demand for legitimacy for the field. It’s understandable, given how little attention translation receives in the technical community. Discussing Chris’s work, Doc Searls pointed out that translation in an open source context often tends to be treated as “a box to check.” In the same way that projects need specialized talent to ensure that the right device drivers are written, someone needs to translate the interface into Spanish and Swahili, but that’s certainly not considered the central or sexy part of the project.
I continue to wonder whether Americans are especially insensitive to the importance of translation. We translate very little in comparison to our European bretheren (there’s roughly 15% as much German to English translation as English to German, according to this back of the envelope analysis I did some years back on Index Translationum.)
As the internet becomes more multilingual, these asymmetries become more apparent. For those who want to keep up with the Chinese internet, a few sites like Roland Soong’s indispensible EastSouthWestNorth exist. But there’s an explosion of Chinese translations of English content. See Solidot for a Chinese version of Slashdot, for instance, or TEDtoChina, a site that translates and discusses videos from the TED conference. I’m having a hard time imagining a similar site doing peer translation of top Chinese lectures so that they were available to English-speaking audiences… though this is something we badly need. The translations we do at Global Voices are a start, but the wealth of information available in a connected, polyglot world points to the need for much more work.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Powered by WordPress