Let’s talk about the Porcelain Throne…

As my dear Doctor friend has said, “It is the greatest public health intervention that has saved millions of life and improved life expectancy. Yet 40% of the world population don’t use improved sanitation facilities, 1.2 billion people with no facility at all.” And according to Water.org, more people have mobile phones than have access to a toilet! But let’s face it, it’s not overly sexy to talk about toilets and sanitation.

Water is easy to talk about, but not sanitation, so let’s cut the crap and get into it. Billions on the planet don’t have one, billions don’t have access to one, and a few of us flush an absurd amount of water by using ours. Saturday (19 November) is World Toilet Day – it’s time to celebrate the crapper! Perhaps we should start a poo-campaign or hold a shit-a-thon or join in on all the chatter on the web or get our hands dirty with fundraising, building toilets, or inventing a waterless toilet (see my previous post).

As the World Toilet Day website states, no access to sanitation facilities disproportionately affects women and girls:

“Fecal matter is the leading cause of illness in the world and its impact is preventable with access to toilets. Where no sanitation facilities are available, open defecation is common despite people are ashamed of doing it. While adult women suffer chronic diarrhea and survive, hundreds of thousands of young girls die each year because of it.”

Just think of your daughter, your sister, you, having to drop out of school because there is not a proper place to go to the toilet. Absurd. Two UK-based charities have done creatively put together a way you can “twin” your toilet or toilets with one in a developing country. You even get a plaque and the GPS coordinates of your “twinned” toilet! So what’s holding you back – twin away! It will give your guests something interesting to talk about!

There are some great organisations involved: Water.org, ToiletTwinning.org, World Toilet Organisation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and so on.

Copenhagen Wheel

I thought I’d share an “old” invention that you might not be aware about – the Copenhagen Wheel. In one sense, it’s a bicycle with a fat red thing on its back wheel, however the fat red thing is quite the little device. Not only does it help you pedal (little extra pedal power especially going uphill is a welcome benefit), but it also collects all kinds of various bits of data – temperature, humidity, noise levels, pollution, etc. All the data is then shared and collated in an environmental database from various users and then can help policy makers and others to come up with solutions to reduce the harmful aspects of cities. So a little extra pedal power, plus data capture = brilliant.

Take a minute to watch this little video about it:

Oh and did I mention, you don’t need to buy the whole bike, you can just by the wheel and retrofit it into your already existing bicycle. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help you with dusting off your bicycle or finding it in the midst of all of the other things you have in storage, but perhaps it can be a little motivation for you to get off the couch and back on the bike!

As the Copenhagen Wheel Project website states:

“You can also make a bigger contribution through your daily commute. And share your data, anonymously, with your city. When many cyclists donate the information their wheel is collecting, your city gains access to a new scale of fine-grained environmental information. Through this, your city can: Cross analyze different types of environmental data on a scale that has never before been achieved before. Build a more detailed understanding of the impact of transportation, on a city infrastructure Or study dynamic phenomena like urban heat islands. Ultimately, this type of crowd sourcing can influence how your city allocates its resources, how it responds to environmental conditions in real-time or how it structures and implements environmental and transportation policies.”

Check out some of the pics the data begins to create:

Let’s get outside!

Where does your money go?

Publish What You Fund – a UK-based lobby group – is wanting governments to be more transparent with what they fund using their Aid budgets. Overseas Development Aid (ODA) is a tiny amount of the annual budgets of donor countries (for almost all donor countries it is less than 0.5% of the annual budget), but the funds are likely to be used for all kinds of interesting and wacky things that the majority of us would not really consider development aid. Together these little bits of money from donor government do add up to around $150 billion USD (see BBC article) – a big pot to an individual’s eyes, but peanuts in the grand scheme of things.

Publish What You Fund says that we, as taxpayers, and the citizens of recipient countries to whom the money exists to help (at least theoretically) should have more information about where the money is going. I think it is a great idea and ask you to consider signing the petition calling on governments to be more transparent. Join me here!

Rethinking Education

To some education will save the world. For most, education is the ticket out of a lower economic class status and into a higher one. For most, education requires significant costs that individuals and families end up paying for over many years.

Education costs are rising and a lot of what we see in the press is about students (and other add-ons) protesting the costs, especially here in the UK where not too long ago university education was provided free of charge. I have to admit I am surprised by the protests and more surprised by the coverage in the press of them. It all seems rather one-sided to me – anger at the rise of fees for education, but nothing about how students could make better use of the funds they already have. There was a great posting on Facebook written by a student – see below.

I love this statement as I think it brings back into the conversation the issue of responsibility. I wish this discussion would be more prevalent in the media. But then again, education and finances doesn’t seem to be about responsibility. When I applied for financial aid to help pay for my undergraduate degree, I was asked all about my parents financial situation even though they were not paying for it. I was also asked how much money I had, which then counted AGAINST me, not for me. This meant that the person who had not saved any money before going to university received MORE financial aid than I who had saved money. Ridiculous. But finances are one thing and it is not likely to change anytime soon.

Funnily enough, the change in education is coming, but not because of the financing of it, nor because of student protests, but because of people like Sal Khan and MIT. MIT for the last number of years has put all of its courses online, accessible to the public, for free. Yes, for free. This is a huge challenge to others as MIT is saying that the fees you pay to go there are worth it because their professors and the school experience adds enough value to the course material that they can offer the course material for free to everyone. Fabulous. Check it out at MIT opencourseware. And there is Sal Khan and the Khan Academy which is completely changing how education is being taught and made available. It’s online, it’s creative, and it’s full of depth. Recently, it raised $5 million to continue its disruptive approach to education and I look forward to where it might take us.

Our approach to education must change. No longer should undergraduates pay fees that cover the costs of professors research work. No longer should lectures be the main form of education. Perhaps in the next 10 years we’ll see some of the work Howard Gardner did on multiple intelligences come to bear on education and see better approaches surface. Education needs to be about exploring, about getting children and adults to think for themselves, rather than simply be told what to think.

Remembrance Day

November 11 @ 1100 is always an interesting experience, especially if you happen to be in a country or city that observes the time of silence. In Canada, it is one minute, here in the UK its two. Two minutes of silence, two minutes where almost everyone stops, stands or sits still. I sat today in the British Library to observe it. I was amazed at the power and the depth of the silence – one rarely heard in London. I was impressed that everyone stopped moving, speaking, and many even stopped reading and this rich silence descended on the building.

Two minutes to remember those who have died. I wonder who people think about. Soldiers? Friends? Brothers? Sisters? Parents? Do people think of images of war from movies? from first-hand experience? Do we think about community members who are in the wrong place at the wrong time? Killed in the crossfire? Raped and left for dead? Or is remembrance about some strange concrete or metal statue where wreathes get laid? Is it about these strange poppies that old people wear?

I wonder how long societies will keep doing this act. Previously, the famous red London buses used to stop during this act of remembering, but no longer so. Perhaps one day, the one or two minutes of silence will also end? I don’t know, but I for one, hope not. One or two minutes out of a year is not too much to ask to help us remember the horrors of war and the sacrifices made and continue to be made in them. I’m not a big fan of war, I’ve seen enough horror in my life and heard enough horror stories of the aftermath of war. Not that I have been a soldier or on the frontlines of any war, but I have seen and heard enough as a humanitarian worker trying to do something to assist communities and families that have been ripped apart by war.

What do you remember today?