Random Stuff that Matters

Site moved...

2005-04-24T14:38:00.000-04:00

This blog has moved to http://houshuang.org/blog. I make no promises as to how much/how long I will keep blogging at that site, but things are more likely to happen there than here. Oh, and I migrated most of my old postings.

Stian

Continue?

2005-04-19T20:52:00.000-04:00

I've gone through a fair amount of blogs in my life, and web pages (Google), which is in a way natural. As life progresses, situations, interests and technical solutions change. I liked writing for this blog, because I felt that in my random readings, lectures attended and webpages visited (therefore the name) I came across a lot of neat stuff that I wanted to share with others. It ended mostly because I felt that I needed to update it regularly (at least twice a week), and this took too much time - especially since I did not have my own computer, and school work piled up.

Since then, I have read so many good books, talked to so many great individuals, and attended so many interesting talks which I would love to share. Especially attending the conference on Innovative Teaching and Technology, at one of my favorite libraries listening to some great talks and talking to some interesting individuals made me think about waking this blog back up. However, I will be in Mexico for three months this summer, working with (and learning from!) Healthwright's and PROJIMO, during which time I might not be able to keep a blog. So, most likely I'll think about it over the summer and report back in fall. Or maybe I'll decide to start writing this summer. Either way, I don't suppose I have any repeat visitors that are still around, so it would be building it all up from scratch (not assuming that I had a whole bunch of them earlier either). And I need to figure this whole trackback-thing out.

Stay posted.

Stian

Suspend to RAM

2004-11-11T01:13:00.000-05:00

Friends, I've decided to prioritize input over output for a little while. That might change later on.

Take care,
Stian

2004-11-05T16:24:00.000-05:00

The conference in Ottawa was all about the Millenium Development Goals - but what are those? According to statistics, less then 10% of Canadians have ever heard about them (and I can't say I really knew, before I began my studies), so let's do a little introduction. According to Stephen Lewis, special UN envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa (amazing guy, even has his own foundation); the MDGs are in a way a natural consequence of the big summits of the 90s (population, water issues, poverty reduction etc. Even Kyoto.) where big goals were set, but seldom followed up on. The MDGs were unanimously accepted by the UN member states in 2000, and list 8 goals that with clear and measurable targets, that are to be achieved by 2015.

The goals are as follows:

Goal 1 Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Goal 2 Achieve universal primary education
Goal 3 Promote gender equality and empower women
Goal 4 Reduce child mortality
Goal 5 Improve maternal health
Goal 6 Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases
Goal 7 Ensure environmental sustainability
Goal 8 Develop a global partnership for development

Most of the goals focus on what the developing countries are to do (hopefully with the help and guidance of the developed countries), where as goal 8 focuses entirely on how richer countries can contribute (and so was extensively discussed at the CIDA conference).

Stian

Live from Ottawa

2004-11-01T17:54:00.000-05:00

I'm coming to you live from the Ottawa Congress Center, where I am participating in the International Cooperation Days 2004, organized by CIDA. Today I've heard lectures about the UN Millenium Development Goals, which is the main focus of the conference, both in general, and focused on education and international health.

In education, WUSC presented an interesting project in Ghana, where they first developed and funded a project to increase participation of girls in primary education. The project, funded by CIDA, proved very successful, and but because of a change of priorities at CIDA, the project lost funding. WUSC subsequently tried to get the government of Ghana interested in taking over the project, and had at first received a very positive response, although run into a lot of practical difficulties, from which the speaker drew some "lessons" presented to us. However, I found the concept of going to a third world country, starting a project, and then having it integrated into the state sector, with the government paying for it, was a very interesting case of first world (NGO) influence on third world policy.

It reminds me of the Rockefeller Foundation's work in Mexico, and other countries, where they would only finance 10-20% of a programme's cost, but still remain in control of the policy - thus gaining strong leverage on a developing country's agenda, with a relatively small financial outlay. (See Anne Emanuelle-Birn, The Rockefeller Foundation: Public Health or Public Menace. Abstract.) (I am not at all critizing WUSC's project, I want to read more about it, but it sounds very interesting - however, I find it an interesting and important topic to be aware of.)

(I will probably write about other interesting points from the conference later.)

Stian

A career at the UN?

2004-10-20T21:32:00.000-04:00

In my endless search for internships, I spent a while last night looking at different UN sub-organizations, and read up a bit on the topic of how to get a job there. I thought others might be interested, so here are the major pathways into the UN system, as far as I can ascertain (this information is provided "as is").

Internships: Most of the UN organizations provide internships, although most of them are available to MA students only. Usually they are not remunerated, and you will have to find your own funding. Some organizations search for specific interns, whereas at others, you must fill out an online form for a database, from which interns matching certain criteria will be selected.

JPO programme: The Junior Professional Officer programme is aimed at graduates with a bachelor or master degree. It does not require extensive work experience, and is designed to familiarize the applicant with the UN system. Application is through the home government of a participating nation, and the programme is financed by the home country. The applicant is either placed in a field-mission, or less often at the central office, for a duration of two to three years. Depending on outcome, a second placement of two to three years is possible. At the end, only very exceptional participants gain final employment with the UN - the programme is also designed to train people to cooperate with the UN in international NGOs or home governments.

Competitive exams: UN personell at levels P-2 and P-3 are mainly recruited through competitive exams, which are held once a year in selected countries (depending on which nationalities are currently needed to achieve a balance in the system). Examinees must have a relevant bachelor or masters degree (students with a degree in International Development Studies are eligible to take the exam for Social Affairs. See a sample exam.). Select candidates are then invited for an interview. (Interestingly, this system reminds me quite a lot of the imperial exam system in dynastic China.)

Direct entry: Some positions at the P-3 level, and all at levels above, are filled either by external search, or internal promotion. Anyone can apply for these positions, but usually a relevant university degree plus at least six years of working experience is required.

Good luck! :~)

Stian

Media and Democracy Day

2004-10-16T19:11:00.000-04:00

This Thursday I was at the Bloor St. Cinema (an excellent independent cinema) to see "The War and Peace Trilogy" (a very impressive documentary put together by Indymedia) and listen to a speech by Amy Goodman. Amy works at DemocracyNow, a radio show based in NYC and broadcast around the USA.

Saturday I went to Ryerson University to attend the third annual Media and Democracy Day in Canada, also featuring Amy Goodman, and I saw a slew of documentaries. The event was well organized and interesting, but two things came to my mind:

Narrow focus: I, and I am sure a lot of people who care about politics, have seen an amazing range of books, films, webpages and documentaries chronicling the botched US elections in 2000, the war against Afghanistan and Iraq, and the media's role in supporting the White House. This is certainly very important - and understandably draws a lot of interest, especially in the run up to the 2004 presidential elections. However, there is a lot more going on in the world then this - we cannot simply follow CNN's lead and focus only on where the US is directly and overtly involved! What about the war in Chechnya, which Russia seems completely unable to extricate itself from, and where massive human rights abuses are legion. What about the crisis in Sudan? (Certainly, we have seen some television clips, but who understands the background, the history?) What about Haiti (once again, we get news blimps, but very little real analytical information)? And so on, and so on.

Lack of emphasis on positive trends: Certainly, there are huge problems in the media concentration today, but there are a lot of really positive examples to inspire us, from the big (Indymedia was mentioned frequently) to the more unknown. In Germany, they have several "open channels" including Offener Kanal Berlin (Open Channel Berlin) where anyone can air their own programmes. There is a studio and personell available for free, and they air programmes made by youth, community groups, immigrant groups and live transmissions of important conferences and meetings. In Italy, long known for their Centri Sociali and community activism, there is a wave of television activism, involving cheap TV transmitters (Italian) that can reach everyone living within a few blocks - really community TV.

Stian

Political virii in China

2004-10-14T23:03:00.000-04:00

A Survey of Chinese Peasants is a book that was released while I was in China, and created a huge stir. Originally it was meant to be banned, but somehow the book, which is hugely critical of the communist party - but mostly the power-abusive local cadres in rural villages - made it out in the book stands. Probably it was local maneuvring by progressive factions of the communist party which managed to get it published, and thereby secure some leverage (the CCP is highly factionalized and interesting things can come out of this fact). However, as Peking Duck and the Age points out, it was later banned again, before the Party Congress.

I actually did a paper on this book, which was my final project for Chinese at Lund University, where I discussed whether the book was an attack on the communist party in itself, or just "rotten" corrupt parts of it (and came to the conclusion that it was mostly the latter). Anyhow, the book has become quite well known in China, the full text is available in China from a number of bulletin boards (like here). Finally - East South West North is reporting that there is a computer virus circulating that spreads the web address of the book, with messages such as:

"We're meeting tonight at a newly opened pub. There is a review at http://www.xx78p.com. Don't forget to call me."

"The list of the ten countries that are most threatening to China as listed at http://www.xx78p.com."

Interesting way of spreading political propaganda!

Stian

Libraries in the Tech Age (ListenIllinois)

2004-10-11T15:29:00.000-04:00

I love libraries, and I practically grew up in one. Whenever my mother didn't know where I was, she would call the kind librarians at Hamar Public Library (the white building), and they'd usually found me in a comfortable couch reading a book. I knew them all by name, and I still drop by once in a while, when I'm back home, and they all remember me. Whenever I travel, I love visiting libraries - some of my favourite ones include the Oslo University Library (picture) , Helsinki City Library (picture) and Malmoe City Library (picture). The Robart's Library at the University of Toronto (picture) is not all bad either.

I recently came across the blog of the Shifted Librarian, a modern tech-savvy librarian who amongst others led me to read about ListenIllinois, which is a totally rad project. It basically works like this: you browse a selection of digital audiobooks online, choose a few that you'd like to listen to, and take the list to the librarian. He/she quickly downloads the files to an mp3-player, and hands it to you. Bike home, mow the lawn, cook - all while listening to your audiobook. Within minutes of your "handing them in" at your library, they become available to users at other participating libraries (yes, only one user can check out the same book simultaneously). They are appearantly working on making it work with patrons' own mp3-players.

It'll be exciting to see what other ideas and projects can come out of libraries as they meet the dual threats/opportunities of emerging techonology - will libraries be reduced to mere internet cafes for the masses (already an important project to increase access), or will they add new and exciting services that we haven't even started to think up? Check out Negroponte's words on the future of books, the group blog the Handheld Librarians and another librarian's blog walking paper.

Stian

Election problems in Afghanistan

2004-10-09T11:34:00.000-04:00

So, the much heralded elections are underway - with problems galore. Apart from the obvious logistical problems of organization in a country with no infrastructure and mostly illiterate voters, and the fact that Taliban has threatened "global jihad" there seems to have been widespread and blatant fraud, leading to all of the other fifteen candidates withdrawing from the race

Jonathan Steeles with the Guardian writes in an interesting article that the election that Bush takes credit for is a mistake, and will obstruct peace and development in Afghanistan.

If they [elections] take place too early, they can be counterproductive and delay a society's transition to a culture of genuine debate and competition. That was the lesson of the Balkans in the 1990s, in particular in Bosnia, where the rush to vote (pressed mainly by the Clinton administration) entrenched hardline nationalists in power. Last week's local elections in Bosnia confirmed how hard it is to loosen the grip they acquired then.

[...]

It is a high-stakes game in which the US is working hard to prevent a government emerging that would ask it to go home. One early result is to expose how phoney the bombs-or-ballots alternative really is. Iraqis are going to get a lot of the former, whatever happens with the latter.

Stian

Crazy stats

2004-10-08T15:01:00.000-04:00

I am currently reading the Ingenuity Gap by Homer Dixon (who is teaching at the University of Toronto). So far, his book is entertaining, but hasn't really given me that much new insights - however it did provide me with a few new stats that I found very interesting.

1) The biggest human structure in the world is now the Staten Island Fresh Kills landfill site. It's a hundred meters tall and one square kilometer big! (Incidentally, it's also the finally resting place for the debris from the World Trade Centre). It was closed by Rudy Giuliani in 2001.

2) In highly industrialized countries, production of goods and services require over 80 metric tonnes of natural resources per person per year! (Includes things we often don't think about, like soil erosion as a result of intensive farming, and road/infrastructure-building. (Homer Dixon's reference is: Adriannse, et al. Resource flows, 23. He doesn't provide a literature list with more details.)

3) If you took all the people in the world, and spread them evenly on the non-ice covered habitable surface on the globe, each person would be within a hundred meters of everybody else! (To me, this was the most surprising one - perhaps not if you think rationally about it, and I guess it's only about dividing two publicly known figures with each other (dry land and population), but it somehow never struck me.

To me, the last fact is also telling me that although dreams of humans "going back to nature", everyone living on their own little farm, producing enough to support themselves and trading with the neighbours with neccessary, is not a viable ecological solution to the world's malaise - we would simply take over all the land in the world! I would actually much rather have a bunch of people in a skyscraper in downtown Toronto, and large areas of "untouched" nature, rather then a 100m2 plot for each of us.

Stian

Kazakhstan: Father and Daughter face-off

2004-10-05T23:57:00.000-04:00

The elections are over in Kazakhstan, in fact they were about two weeks ago, but never too late to write a few words. Politics in Central Asia is, though usually very interesting and sometimes quite incestous, rarely reported in big headlines. The four countries that I've been to and know a bit about, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan all gained their independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and all of them have the same heads of state as they did then.

So in the current elections, the incumbent Nazarbayev ran against a party controlled by his daughter Dariga Nazarbayeva, who is a graduate of a Moscow university, and has worked in charity and media. Dariga's party is newly formed from a social movement, and says it includes mostly young people who would like to work for liberal values and a more equitable distribution. However, her father won (among cries of foul from the opposition). Mr Nazarbayev has his work cut out for him - he has made a thirty year plan, and his vision is that by the year 2030, Kazakhstan will become - not the tiger, but the Snow Leopard of Central Asia. As unlikely as that seems, Kazakhstan is a land to follow, because it has oil. Add this to all the other mineral resources, and according to Asia Times, it is the richest country in the world. Doesn't seem so for the Kazakh farmers though.

Stian
PS: A good overview on Kazakh economy at Asia Times.

Regulations for starting an internet cafe in China

2004-10-01T22:34:00.000-04:00

Have you ever wanted to start an internet cafe (or internet bar, wangba, as they call it)? Were you put off by all the red-tape -- in Chinese? Fear not, here is the complete regulations concerning starting and operating internet cafes in China, translated (and heavily abridged) by me. (I actually did this as part of a project on internet censorship at the Citizenlab).

While I was living in Hangzhou, I started a site called In The Middle, where I would take pictures of informational/propaganda posters, and translate the contents - partly for my own learning experience, partly for everyone's interest (they are actually quite interesting - both the political ones, and all the others: telling you what to do if you're son is overweight, etc.).

(The translations at In The Middle should be quite good, although often it is hard to translate what is very idiomatic and "sloganistic" speech. The translation of the internet regulations are more a summary then a word-for-word translation, although I think I got most of the details.)

There are other sites of Chinese propaganda on the net, but most of them feature older and more revolutionary posters, like The Chairman Smiles, Picturing Power and the biggest collection: Stefan Landsberger's Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages, and they are also more focused on the "revolutionary art", than the messages.

Stian

Inequalities are unhealthy

2004-09-30T20:21:00.000-04:00

A common discussion when studying economics and development studies is the question of poverty - what is it? Can someone in Bramford who cannot afford to send their kids to summer camp really be compared to a struggling family in Ethiopia, barely surviving off subsistence farming? Of course not - but if there is something my travels have taught me, it is that you cannot judge the quality of life just from the hard cash that someone has access to. Certainly there are some basic priorities - food, clothes, shelter and clean water... if you are struggling for survival every day, then things become very absolute.

However, once you are over that extreme minimume, a lot depends on the conditions around you (I have seldom seen so happy people as the Laotians - they would be singing on the bus as we drove along potholed unpaved roads, kids in the villages running after our pickup smiling and shouting Saybadee - yet Laos is one of the poorest countries in the world in real income.) According to Vicente Navarro's article in the Monthly Review "Inequalities are unhealthy", one of the most important health factors are in fact relative poverty and inequality. He drives the point home with the example that a poor person in the US (making $12,000 in a year) would have a shorter life expectancy than a rich person in Ghana (making only $9000 in a year). (He doesn't mention whether the figures have been adjusted for PPP).

"The answer is that inequality is in itself bad, i.e., the distance among social groups and individuals and the lack of social cohesion that this distance creates is bad for people’s health and quality of life. Studies performed among civil servants in Great Britain have shown, for example, that life expectancy (the years that people can expect to live) among the top civil servants, grade 32, is longer than the life expectancy of civil servants of grade 31, who have longer life expectancy than civil servants of grade 30, and so on, reaching the lowest life expectancy at grade 1. There is no poverty among British civil servants, but there are significant differences in their life expectancies."

"The difference between the two poles [in Spain]—the corporate class and the chronically unemployed—is ten years. This average distance in the European Union is seven years. In the United States, it is 14 years."

He cites different reasons for this disparity - stress, frustration, lack of representation (in for example TV programmes) , and then goes on to show how countries with strong labour unions and lower levels of inequalities have better general health indicators, mentions how the most significant increases in life-expectancy in the UK were achieved during the Second World War (everybody standing together, fighting against a common enemy), and how both Thatcher's and Bush sr.'s impact can be felt in the statistics.

Good reading,
Stian

Books by SMS

2004-09-28T08:57:00.000-04:00

By way of the Crackpot Chronicles and textually.org, Chinese author Qian Fuqiang has written a novel that is designed to be read on your mobile phone. The rights were bought for USD $22.000, and the novel will be distributed as 70 short messages, with 60 characters in each. The name of the novel is "Outside the Fortress Besieged" (which according to mobile9 means "a title that originates from one of China’s best-known novels, describes marriage as a fortress besieged - those who are outside want to get in and those who are inside want to get out." According to the BBC, it comes from a French proverb). In addition, a Taiwanese company has bought the rights to the novel, and will produce a series of small movie snippets that can be downloaded and displayed on mobile phones (by Engadget).

I can't really imagine anyone wanting to read a book on their mobile phones, and hopefully the arrival of electronic paper and real eBooks (like the librie, so far only launched in Japan) is not far away, so I don't think this will become a long lasting genre... who knows though.

Stian

Conservative America

2004-09-28T01:04:00.000-04:00

By way of The Longbow Papers, a very good article that explains why the US is so much more conservative than similar countries in Europe.

Extracts: "At the start of the 20th century, the U.S. looked progressive compared with Europe's empires. The big difference between the U.S. and Europe is that the U.S. kept its 18th century Constitution, while most European countries discarded theirs." ... "By contrast, the U.S. has not lost a war on its home soil and thus has never faced the internal disruptions caused by such a collapse." ... "The nation's racial heterogeneity also partly explains its conservatism. U.S. heterogeneity sharply contrasts with the much greater homogeneity in Canada, Britain and continental Europe. People are much less likely to support income redistribution to people who are members of different racial or ethnic groups."

Stian

Sharing knowledge with developing countries

2004-09-27T23:24:00.000-04:00

While playing with the University of Toronto's library pages, I did some random searches and came across an article about "Participation in the global knowledge commons" by Leslie Chan and Sely Costa. First of all, this is an example of how digitalizing academic publishing, and making it accessible for free-text searches makes knowledge more available (quite obvious, this piece has not even been published, but even if it had, in say Third World Quarterly, it is not likely that I would have come over it.

Most peer-reviewed journal articles are now archived online in huge database repositories, which typically cost a lot to access (if you are at a university, you'll never even notice this, because your university library probably has a site-wide license - however, they pay large amounts for this privilege). This article discusses some attempts by the UN (WHO) and the Soros Foundation to enable libraries and non-profit organizations in poor countries to access these databases. It argues that while these attempts are certainly laudable, the ideal solution would be twofold. Firstly, moving towards public author archiving of all published articles, making them available for no fee at all, and secondly improving communications and information sharing between third world nations (studies done in similar contexts, let's say of poor countries coping with AIDS epidemics, might be more useful then say studies of expensive drug treatments that are unavailable in third world countries).

It also cites the Public Library of Science, a newly started organization that publishes open peer-reviewed journals in both biology and medicine (more to come?), and which excited me a lot when I heard about it. It probably differs a lot from field to field, and journal to journal, but when working at PRIO, I learnt that for the Journal of Peace Research, nobody except the publishers really made any money off it (the editor, the peer-reviewers etc are all paid by their respective institutions), so it would seem to make a lot of sense to make it available publically?

Stian

Statement of purpose (welcome)

2004-09-27T22:54:00.000-04:00

I've had a few blogs throughout the times, most of them haven't lasted very long - it remains to be seen how long this will last. That is why I won't advertise it until I've posted for at least a little while. I first had a Chinese handwritten blog, but that didn't last long, just because it took me so long to write in Chinese (although it was very good practice - I have now given up on handwriting Chinese), then I had another blog in Chinese, which actually worked for quite a while, and had a small regular crowd of visitors. It was fun, but I got tired of writing about my boring life, and even more so of every guest commenting on my "amazing Chinese" without ever giving me feedback on the contents of my posts.

I read a lot, books, magazines, blogs and webpages. Some of my interests are listed under the header, but they are really quite varied. This is intended to be a blog where I can drop good links and short comments on a variety of topics, from the elections in Kazakhstan to Chomsky's linguistical theories. I'd also like to find more stuff about international development on the web - I am currently doing a specialist in IDS, and one of the reasons for starting this blog is that I can find a thousand blogs dealing with Linux, but none (so far, I'm sure they're out there) about international development.

I don't really know who the intended audience is, but I'll just consider it an interesting experiment. Feel free to participate.

Stian