Prina Koole – 1915 – 2011

Sunday night I ran to my shipping container turned hotel room, to avoid the downpour just beginning. The coolness of the outdoors brought about by the wind before the storm had not impacted my container and thus I was hit by a wall of heat and humidity upon opening the door reminding me that yes, I still was in Juba where the heat can be punishing at times. I switched on the a/c and prepared for bed.

I woke a few hours later, the wind still blowing, the rain knocking on my container, but I woke because I was soaked – not due to malaria or some dream, but because the ceiling had split open a little and water was dripping down. Given the lateness of the hour, I knew there was little I could do, so I pulled the bed away from the dripping and placed a clothe bag on the floor to deaden the dripping sound. Crawling back into bed, I discovered I had a twelve-inch strip on the mattress still dry. Lying rigid on the dry, I eventually fell back asleep.

A couple of hours later, the ringing of my phone woke me – my brother, Jim. But I missed it and figured he had forgotten about the time zone differences. But then there was a text – voice mail, I thought. Then another, then another – ok, this is not good. He said to call as it was important.

I thought of Grandma immediately, but found it strange as even though I knew she had just gone to the hospital, I had heard she was doing well – at 96 opting for surgery rather than a wheelchair seemed like a good sign to me. I thought of Mom, but no that didn’t make sense either. I checked my email and saw the top one from my other brother, Paul, entitled Grandma and I jolted uptight in disbelief – Grandma dead? What? Huh? How? Why?

I tried Jim on Skype, but the internet was too poor so we resorted to regular phone. He confirmed the news, Grandma was dead – died while eating, with my aunt at her side.

Then I knew the storm – the wind, the rain – were angels crying out, were angels weeping, was God weeping at the death of another beloved. My mattress wet with their tears and I, I wept – full body heaving – my tears mixing with the angels’.

Grandma – the woman who seemed like she would go on forever – perhaps the energizer bunny was modelled after her. The one who endured a world war, fled from floods, created new life in a new country, saw cars, planes, computers change the world – she loved me deeply, gave me raisins as a child for a treat, distributed chocolate letters on her birthday to all, and who knew what it was to be thankful. Her body gave out, it had been well used, but her spirit and she lives on in us, in me.

Top killer of children in Asia

What do you think it is? Malaria? Malnutrition? Traffic accidents? Conflict? Surprisingly, it is none of those, but rather drowning. Yes, you read that correctly – drowning! I find it rather shocking as I have never heard about it being such an issue before, but after reading the paper entitled “Child Injury Working Papers” I have begun to understand why. Most of the information I hear about comes from UNICEF, WHO, Ministry of Health, etc. statistics, which are compiled using official data collected at hospitals, health clinics, etc. who record the cause of injury and death of all people. However, in many communities where children drown, the child is either never found or the death or injury is not reported to the hospital or clinic and thus does not appear in the official statistics.

The above mentioned study compared the difference between the statistics reported at the hospital and clinics, to the statistics discovered through discussions with the local communities. It has always been known that the data from hospitals etc. would be slightly biased and would not be a completely accurate reflection of reality, but it was assumed to be quite reliable and the best data existing to work with. The study found that the differences between what is reported and what is not to be astonishing. For as the report states:
“In Bangladesh, drownings were virtually never reported to a hospital or alternative institution for inclusion in the health information system. This single cause of death from injury accounts for about half of all child deaths from injury in the 1–17 year age group, and the lack of reporting is the fundamental reason for the relative invisibility of drowning within the national health systems in the countries surveyed. For the countries surveyed, injury surveillance systems relying on hospital reporting or other health service delivery points for the health information systems greatly underestimate drownings, and consequently the total of all child deaths from injuries.” (emphasis added)

Wow drowning accounts for over 50% of all child deaths! Shocking. Reading stats like this make me begin to wondering how many of our development or humanitarian programmes even consider drowning as an issue to address. How simple it would be to establish swimming lessons for children in various communities and quite frankly what a big impact it could have. As the Swimsafe website says,

“The magnitude of drowning is such that prevention initiatives must be implemented as soon as possible. The social costs for the families and the communities that suddenly lose children are enormous. The financial costs of inaction are also substantial: nine out of 10 children who drowned in Bangladesh were fully vaccinated. From a purely financial view, money for vaccines, school and other health investments are wasted every time a child drowns.

Child health programs are not complete unless they address the leading cause of child death: injury as a whole but, more specifically, drowning.”

More and more I think it is the little things that we overlook, which can have the biggest impact. Teaching children to swim is not rocket science, but can enable life to continue – such a simple but wonderful thought.

Mass market Artificial Intelligence = SIRI

In my last post I talked about how an app has been created using the iPad and iPhone technology to assist communication ability between those with certain types of disabilities. Today, I’m talking about Apple and disabilities again – and it’s not just because I tend love Apple products, but because of the barriers they are helping to bring down for people with disabilities.

The recent launch of the iPhone 4S with the new operating system was rather low-key and, to some extent, more about the fact that Steve Jobs wasn’t launching it than it was about the iPhone 4S. Yet, with its launch, the world has changed yet again in ways that we will only discover in the next few years. The iPhone 4S comes with a little something called SIRI. SIRI is artificial intelligence gone mainstream to the mass market in an incredible way.

At its basic, SIRI is a voice recognition system that allows you to dictate notes, emails, messages, etc. But it is so much more than just voice recognition for not only does it translate audible sounds into text, but it understands your basic commands and questions. You can tell it to set a reminder for you, but more exciting than that, you can ask your phone what the weather is going to be and it will tell you, you can ask it to tell what the traffic is like around your current location and it will tell you, you can ask it to find good restaurants nearby and it will tell you…and the list goes on. Thus it is more than voice recognition, it is intelligent. And in true Apple form, it is brilliant.

As Alexis Madrigal says in the Atlantic Monthly,
The genius of Siri is to combine the new type of information bot with the old type of human-helper bot. Instead of patterning Siri on a humanoid body, Apple used a human archetype — the secretary or assistant. To do so, Apple gave Siri a voice and a set of skills that seem designed to make everyone feel like Don Draper. Siri listens to you and does what you say. “Take this down, Siri… Remind me to buy Helena flowers!” And if early reviews are any indication, the disembodied robot could be the next big thing in how we interact with our computers.
To me, it sounds amazing and the idea of a personal assistance for the mass market must have some people incredibly excited and others worried as they realise the need for their skills might possibly disappear in the near future. Just think how quickly other iPad or iPhone-like devices came out after their release. SIRI will be no different and other companies will likely improve on the technology and the market penetration will only grow. So at that point, why have a travel agent? Why have a PA?

But regardless of all that, I find the most interesting aspect of SIRI to be the impact it could have on the lives of those with disabilities. Watch the video on the Apple website about SIRI and notice how near the end, one of the examples of its use is for a blind woman as she receives an SMS while she is reading braille. SIRI reads out the message and she tells SIRI to reply with an SMS – wow! Genius I think. On the Mashable Tech website there are even more features highlighted regarding the iPhone and people who are hearing or sight impaired.

So I am excited about what is to come and how technology like this can improve the lives of those with disabilities. To me, this is something to celebrate! The world has change again and the potential for good is endless for perhaps this too is another example of a thin place, where heaven touches earth and good, no great, things happen.

(BTW – check out Able Times for more interesting things happen with people who have disabilities)

MyChoicePad helping those with disabilities communicate!

Sometimes innovations in technology or other parts of life can seem like its innovation for innovation’s sake with no real purpose, yet sometimes innovations that we label in this way are taken by others and fabulous things are created with them. So I’ll admit, I don’t see much point in the iPad or other tablets – I don’t see how they help my current life,- even though I knew when they first came out that they would spawn some massive changes in the world.

And well, I came across a small little social enterprise called MyChoicePad – strange name, I know, but check out what they are doing with the iPad. Basically they have created an app that assists with communication – taking sign language and making it audible; helping to children practice sign language to build their vocabulary; improving speech and pronunciation; helping to build children’s vocabulary, etc. The possibilities for how this could grow are endless and the impact on the lives of individuals, families, and on education is massive. This is so exciting and such an amazing use of the iPad technology.

And the stories, well, they are fabulous – check out the website or following them on twitter or Facebook.

Water Canary

Most of us will have heard that canaries used to be used in coal mines as an early warning system to alert miners that the level of toxic fumes and carbon monoxide was dangerous. The toxins would kill the canaries, who would usually sing in the mine, thus alerting the miners there was a problem.

Water-borne diseases kill thousands of people each year, in fact, according to the World Health Organisation, 3.5 million people die annually due to water-borne diseases. 3.5 million!

Water Canary has brought together the idea of crowd-sourcing, information sharing, and technology to improve our ability to understand what water sources are contaminated. The idea behind Water Canary is to crowd-source water quality information and bring together the data in a way that can help monitor/predict different disease outbreaks like cholera. By collecting real-time data, the outbreaks should be able to be managed more effectively as there is higher quality information available to decision makers.

Of course, there will always be an element of judgment required on the decision maker’s part, but with better information, hopefully we have better results. As the Water Canary website states:
“By placing real-time water quality information within reach, the devices make it possible to quickly identify invisible threats so that appropriate actions can be taken to protect people and ecosystems and prevent hazards from erupting into full-scale emergencies.”

Using “waste” in better ways

What would happen if we were responsible for the reuse of the waste we create? What would we do differently? How would we live and go about creating our products differently? In a previous post, I wrote about the Cradle to Cradle movement, which is mostly around manufacturing and how it can help us ask a different set of questions and also to challenge ourselves in different ways. In essence, Cradle to Cradle is about creating a product with its next use in mind. So what happens when we take a moment to think about how the “waste” we create could be used in positive ways?

In the recent UK version of the Wired magazine, there is a great little snippet about this. The servers that keep the internet up and running create a significant amount of heat and often are put in temperature controlled rooms (read air-conditioned!) which eat significant amounts of energy in the process of maintaining a set temperature.

In the Netherlands, there is the idea to rethink this process and put the servers in the basements or crypts of old churches. The crypts are usually quite cool themselves and the churches are a huge challenge to heat given their cathedral ceilings, so for the majority of the year, the buildings are quite cool and virtually impossible to heat. The idea is to put servers in the crypts and use the heat generated from them to heat (or perhaps warm is a more realistic term) the great buildings. The cool air from the churches can be pumped back to the servers to cool them – like a cold air return in a house furnace setup. The “waste” from the servers (heat) becomes useable rather than waste as does the cool air in the cathedrals.

Sounds quite simple doesn’t it? Indeed, so how could you do something similar in your house? Community?

The Wired article is in the 11:11 edition of the magazine and is called “Holy warming and data cooling”.

Pay-as-you-go Solar Energy

A company based in Cambridge, called Eight19, has announced it is launching a pay-as-you-go solar power. According to their website, 1.6 billion people lack access to electricity. Their system is called IndiGo, which is a personal pay-as-you-go electricity system for the developing world. It is a great thing to be rolling out and I am excited to see it developments. It reminds me of the work of ToughStuff, who have been implementing something very similar, however instead of pay-as-you-go, it is a low-cost solar panel and light at the cost people living on a dollar or two a day can afford. Eight19 is working with SolarAid on this project, which is great to hear that collaboration is happening.

I am excited to hear of solutions that are considering how we can help communities who are currently off the grid to have access to energy, but without the need for the same type of infrastructure. It reminds me of what continues to happen with mobile phones and how many places in Africa have become “connected” to the telephone and internet world, but without the need to build the same landline infrastructure. It is these types of solutions that will breakdown the barriers, for if we wait for governments to build the infrastructure, we will wait forever.

It will be interesting to watch how the launch goes and the lessons learned in the process. It reminds me of the work Water.org is doing in their work to address the access to water problem, but trying to combine it with microfinance in a non-traditional approach.

Now at the same time, I think the notion of paying for basic services raises lots of political issues, especially if it is the poor who are paying. Yet, I know the communities I work with tend to be willing to pay small amounts if it gives them access they didn’t have before. I sense this is the future…

What’s your Future Quotient?

First it was IQ, then EQ, Eco-Q, DQ, and now FQ. If that sentence was greek to you, well IQ is to measure your intellectual ability, (it should be noted its only one form of intelligence with a massive bias to maths and sciences, for more see here), EQ is thanks to Daniel Goleman and is about measuring your emotional awareness and ability, while Eco-Q is about your Ecological Quotient (there is also HQ – Hazard Quotient – is this area), then there is beginnings of DQ – not Dairy Queen, but rather your Design Quotient, and now the future has arrived with FQ – Future Quotient.

Wednesday night, found me at the launch of The Future Quotient: Seriously Long-Term Innovation, a joint piece of research by Volans and JWT. The research began after a survey by Accenture of CEOs found that 81% of them said that have already embedded sustainability into their companies. This has sparked some controversy for if 81% of the companies have already embedded sustainability into their companies, then why do so few actually seem to think beyond the next quarter? The research then looked at what CEOs and companies meant by sustainability and how many of them are engaged in long-term thinking and acting. Note – long-term does not mean 3-5 year cycles, but rather at least beyond 10, but more often 20, 30, 40 years out or in the case of the Long Now Foundation – 10,000 years out!

The report is full of all kinds of interesting findings and short examples of individuals, companies, organisations, countries, with a high FQ. It raises more questions than answers and invites a community into a discussion around the future, which is very well-timed for this period of uncertainty that we are going through and which people think will end, but more and more people are thinking will continue and become more uncertain for many many years to come. The report highlights how in times of uncertainty “most leaders, decision-makers and policy-makers…are stressed by the protracted downturn…they are hunkering down, lowering their ambitions, and shrinking their timescales.” However, the report argues that the opposite is actually needed, hence the need for a FQ measurement.

I found the notion of time difference in cultures to be fascinating. I have often heard of cultural differences being talked about in terms of different values, different sense of community, but when time has been time about it often has been about the relational aspect of time – that “being present” with someone now is more important than being “on time” for your next appointment. The report talks about the difference in “time-horizons” between cultures, which can have significant impact in how people and organisations relate with each other or even within mixed-culture teams. When I stop to think about it, I can see how this makes sense as the report finds that cultures from South Korea, Japan, China have a long-term time-horizon while places like US & Canada have shorter time-horizons. I assume this is also linked to the incredibly long histories that China, Korea, Japan have as nations in comparison to the relatively young nations of Canada and the US. In reality, it is not something I have thought much about before (perhaps hinting at a low-FQ?)

The report has some great comments about mindsets and paradigms and how individual thought (mindsets) are embedded in individual action (behaviours) which are embedded in collective action (cultures), which in turn are embedded in collective thought (paradigms). So changing one’s individual thought patterns may not result in much actual change! Taking this further, they partnered with Mindtime Technologies which helped to create a tool to begin to measure the different dimensions of FQ leadership: Change (moving from Incremental to Systemic change), Scope (Moving from Narrower to Wider horizons), Analysis (Moving from Shallower to Deeper understanding), Ambition (moving from lower to Higher Ambition), Timescale (moving from shorter to Longer timescales).

And there is so much more in the report – I suggest taking a look at it yourself, it can be found here. There are lots of examples to read through, although I wish there was more descriptions of what the people, organisations, companies, countries are doing. There are tiny snippets and I am left wanting more. In fact, I find that about the whole report – it is a snippet of an idea with huge amounts of thought and conversations sitting behind it, which as a reader we I am privy to, but I want to sit in that room to eavesdrop, to learn, to be stretch, and perhaps to contribute where I can as in these times of uncertainty we need groups of people talking, challenging, sharing as doing things the same way we always have will get us nowhere. There is a convergence of change occurring all around us, but most of us, most organisations, most governments are desperately trying to hold on past glory or things that work in the past, but we don’t realise the world has changed immensely and as the convergence continues to happen in a greater and greater extent, we need big visions and much courage to engage rather than retreat. Join the conversation!

Forgetting how to talk

Well, it’s been a number of days now that RIM can’t seem to get its act together and fix its Blackberry server problems. I have to wonder how long its users will put up with it. RIM taking its eye off the ball yet again. I have found the news around it interesting as many users are complaining about the loss of Blackberry Messenger and email. I laughed when I read an old friend’s facebook status that read:

“Seriously, blackberry users, make use of the talk time that’s attached to your wireless plan. That’s how we’re communicated before texting and email.”

So true. I have marveled at how as a society we use our phones much more for texting or BBM or email than for actually talking. To some extent, it almost seems like we have an aversion to talking on the phone. I arrange meeting with friends, give directions, check in with folk – not by calling, but by sending a text (I left the RIM world a while ago!). No longer do we call to say hello, check in, or give directions – nope, it’s all without voice. I wonder why? I wonder what is lost in communicating this way? What is gained?

For all the Blackberry users out there, I feel your pain, but there are other options out there that seem to work

Home Security…

Recently I found myself reading the Financial Times, which had a section on homes. No, I have not won the lottery, I just find houses of any size fascinating, especially the use of space and colours. Anyways, the article was about the new developments in home security and how the amount of money being spent on security is on the rise in London. First, some trends that remind us that “keeping up withe Jones’ is still alive and well:

“The trend for more muscular security has created a snowballing effect on the local market, be it London, New York or Hong Kong. If the new neighbours build a 10ft-high fence and yours is only nine, the thieves will target you, so you go and buy an 11ft one.”

Second, some of the new developments according to the FT:

“Coded water, which sprays the intruder, leaving them stained and traceable, mobile phone jammers and fibre optic motion sensors are all on the market.
“Some gadgets, such as the Smoke Cloak, were originally designed to protect high-value commercial premises, such as bullion storage facilities, and have been modified for the residential market. Described by its manufacturer as a leader in “fog solutions”, each unit costs a little over £2,000 to install and emits clouds of white smoke when triggered. A strobe light is then set off, battering the criminal’s sensory perceptions and leaving them choked, confused and disinclined to forge on.
“Other homeowners lean towards systems that keep them safe, rather than attack the intruder. Quintessentially, the upmarket concierge service, recently helped a customer construct a Batman-style cave in his basement, complete with a secret passage leading to his library. The door was bullet-proofed and he has supplies to last a month as well as a satellite phone.”

I have to say, there is a some innovation and creativity at work here, but some of it, I find a bit bizarre. The trend that I notice is a society growing in fear of each other, where spending £1 million on security for your home is not unheard of. Yes, ok, that is 5% of that particular home’s value (£18 million), but still it seems a bit absurd. Yes, safety and security of one’s assets and one’s family is important and should be a high priority, but building bigger walls to keep everyone out creates a world where we don’t talk to each other and leaves no space to engage and discover that our fears and self-generated for the most part and communities are more important than walls.