A few months ago I heard a US radio programme – The Connection – about the newly-constructed Chad to Cameroon pipeline.

Terry Lynn Karl explained in her book The Paradox of Plenty (and on the radio show) how oil revenues have actually made the plight of the poor worse in several countries around the world.

This month, as you might expect, a Washington Post reporter found “prostitutes are some of the only locals doing well”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54448-2004Mar12.html from the $100m a year that will come to Chad’s government because of the pipeline.

Note: the “Internet Centre for Corruption Research”:http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~uwvw/ found Cameroon among the countries with the “highest levels of perceived corruption”:http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~uwvw/corruption.cpi_2003_data.html in 2003.

I just found the website of journalist Andy Raskin who chronicled (often in a humorous fashion) the rise and fall of the dotcom era through a number of publications. In fact, two of the stories he has highlighted side by side are, “What’s a Nice Systems Engineer Like You Doing in a Place Like This?”:http://www.inc.com/magazine/20020501/24172.html Speed dating meets job hunting in the land of the laid off Inc., May 2002 and “Take My Job Offer, Please. Pretty Please?”:http://www.inc.com/magazine/20000301/17273.html Begging and other strategies for hiring during the dot-com boom. Inc., Mar 2000.

But for my money the real gems on his site are two lightweight stories from Japan he did for NPR – “Ramen Jiro”:http://www.andyraskin.com/RamenJiro.ram about a rite of passage at a noodle restaurant and “Tokyo All Aboard Melodies”:http://www.andyraskin.com/TokyoTrainMelodies.ram [both in RealAudio format].

Watch and laugh at “The Man Behind The Motion”:http://www.ryantown.com/manbehindthemotion/ from Ryan McFaul. An interest in computer gaming is not required…

The TrueMajority Oreo video is to my mind a very well-crafted political ad (done as a Flash animation). It shows dramatically just how much money goes towards US national defence and how much goes to – say – renewable energy programmes or food aid.

It gets around what I see as the biggest problem there is in trying to tackle macroeconomic issues seriously – nobody outside of a few policy wonks can juggle government programs costing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars and keep them all in proportion.

“TrueMajority.org”:http://www.truemajority.org was founded by Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s fame and is a broad-based liberal lobbying organization based around getting people to respond to monthly action alerts and send faxes to their political representatives by filling out web forms. I suspect fax deluges are getting to be a discredited tactic as they are relatively cost-free for the participants – I hope that truemajority will take the “Dean Road” instead and start getting these people to organize themselves.

The concept – man falls in love with virtual woman – is not that original any more – but Flicka – a 12 minute Dutch film from “AtomFilms”:http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/, is genuinely touching. It is one of the films currently showing through their new free “Hi-Def”:http://atomfilms.shockwave.com/af/spotlight/collections/hidef/ service which downloads films in the background so you can see them at close to full-screen resolution (why don’t more sites offer this instead of streaming?). Most of the films have been frankly pretty poor (you don’t get to choose what you are sent) but Flicka was for me a genuine discovery.

The way HiDef works the films are recycled every two weeks so if you want to see it, download now. (note: the download and movie playing software is PC-only).

Prof “Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/ gave another barnstorming performance in a visit to a small, packed room full of LSE media and regulation students. I had heard much of his presentation before last year at a presentation he made in Oxford but there were some interesting new factoids in the latest version – notably:

* The average time a book remains in print is about one year.
* There are 100k titles “alive” in Amazon but 26m titles that have been printed and are available in the Library of Congress.
* Products from one part of a big corporation tend to get used in movies and other programmes made by that company not necessarily because of straightforward plugging but simply because the process of copyright clearance is easier with products from inside those corporations than outside.
* Before the 1976 copyright act in the US, copyright holders had to re-assert their copyright periodically. Only 10-20% of them did so.
* Whoever managed the ebook distribution of his book “The Future of Ideas”:http://the-future-of-ideas.com/ set the DRM flag in Acrobat not to allow anyone to copy text from, print or even have the book read aloud. Talk about an own goal!

The “Bush in 30 Seconds”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org campaign sponsored by “moveon.org”:moveon.org has bought broadcast slots around the State of the Union address for an anti-Bush ad created by and to be chosen by visitors to the site. The final 15 have been selected for voting – which one do you like?
Myself I probably liked Wake up America “[hi bandwidth]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/09_large.shtml or “[lo bandwidth]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/09_small.shtml the best but I also quite like ‘Desktop’ [hi] “[lo]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/10_small.shtml and “Hood Robbin’ [hi]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/13_large.shtml or “[lo]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/13_large.shtml as well. “Billionaires for Bush [hi]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/14_large.shtml or “[lo]”:http://www.bushin30seconds.org/view/14_small.shtml only hits one issue in little detail but is well-made and punchy.

What these ads showed me above all is just how difficult it is to put across any kind of meaningful message in 30 seconds. Hopefully when they run they will excite editorial comment around the country which will in turn give Americans who haven’t been paying attention the chance to find out more details about what is being said. I was also very impressed at the technical skill shown in the finalists’ ads – I suspect that several of them have been done by moonlighting professionals.

“Legal Affairs”:http://www.legalaffairs.org – an American magazine ‘at the intersection of law and life’ has produced an interesting piece about “mail order brides”:http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2004/story_labi_janfeb04.html which follows a few around – concentrating on Russian ones coming to America. According to the article there are at least 200 matchmaking agencies in the United States that broker marriages between American men and foreign women, arranging up to 6,000 unions a year (actually I am surprised the number isn’t larger). It’s broadly positive though it mentions a couple of disastrous unions and briefly discusses some of the legal protections that have been proposed to help protect the women. An interview (broadcast on “Thinking Allowed”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed_20030910.shtml) with “Nicole Constable”:http://www.pitt.edu/~pittanth/fac.html – a sociologist who studied the phenomenon in “Romance on a Global Stage”:http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9922.html – is also surprisingly up-beat (she covers Chinese and Filipina women’s experiences).

“Here”:http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/p1/src/sing/default.asp?key=w4hXB8a6 is a treat for you (if your computer has speakers). Some genius in “Sveriges Radio”:http://www.sr.se ‘radio for art, culture and ideas’ has dreamed up Let them sing it for you. It’s harder to explain than it is to experience so try it yourself and send the results to a friend!

From the BBC World Service. This series – The Giving Game looks critically at how NGOs, business and local governments of developing countries interact. Some of those he interviewed suggested that NGOs – which are generally not formally accountable to anyone, particularly anyone in the developing countries they minister to – are getting to be more powerful than some governments in those countries. It is suggested that this undermines the role of democratically-elected governments (where the governments *are* democratically elected). A lot of the criticism of NGO power comes from “Michael Edwards”:http://www.futurepositive.org/Edwards.html, an ex-manager of Oxfam and Save the Children. “Clare Short”:http://politics.guardian.co.uk/profiles/story/0,9396,-4749,00.html (now no longer Britain’s Secretary
of State for International Development) is also an advocate of trying to build governing capacity in less developed countries rather than doing an ‘end run’ around them by giving money to NGOs.

I can see their points of course, but it’s hard to justify giving money to a corrupt or just ineffective government when you could give it to an unaccountable but dedicated NGO in a country.

Another of the interesting points that comes out of the series is just how small the amount of money is that NGOs have to spend compared even to the inadequate amount of government-directed aid. It does suggest that they might be more useful in trying to guide aid policy than actually doing work on the ground themselves (though they argue that it is only by being ‘on the ground’ that they can understand the needs of the people they claim to be speaking for).