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.

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!

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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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)

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-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.”