“Bob Hughes”:http://www.dustormagic.net/ wrote an opinion piece about the sweatshop labour and environmental harm involved in making computers and in disposing of them. On a similar note, see this “new report from CAFOD”:http://www.cafod.org.uk/news_and_events/news/computer_factory_sweatshops_20040126?PHPSESSID=4b0151f1c256c83acdd6dafeeda118c1 on conditions for workers making high-tech components which has encouraged the BBC to “follow up the findings”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3452373.stm with computer makers.

I note that Bob hasn’t given up using computers yet, and I’m not likely to either. But it’s worth bearing in mind the unseen costs of anything we buy or consume and trying to reduce them as much as possible by buying only when we need to or campaigning for better corporate behaviour.

A professor of African Studies, Gavin Kitching, wrote a contentious piece back in 2000 explaining why left studying Africa to study SE Asians instead – he “found African Studies too depressing”:http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1600gk.html.

(From the mid-70s onward) …the African ship of state was ploughing through heavy international seas, yes. But that only strengthened the need for an excellent captain and navigator at the helm and a well disciplined crew. But as it was, the captain and all his officers seemed to be drunk or absent from the bridge and the crew engaged in various forms of mutiny. No wonder the ship had run aground.

Three years later, African Studies Quarterly published a series of responses. Another author – Timothy Burke – “added”:http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v7/v7i2a12.htm,

The moral outrage, which suffused most Africanist historical and anthropological writing about the apartheid state, is largely absent when it comes to postcolonial African misrule. The genocide in Rwanda passed without anything even remotely resembling that outrage: it was left to a journalist, Philip Gourevitch, to write a clear (and intellectually satisfying) indictment. Africanists have followed Gourevitch either by redirecting the force of causal explanation back to the colonial era or by insisting that the genocide was irremediably complex in ways that Gourevitch failed to appreciate.

Similarly, the disasters of high modernist state socialism in postcolonial Africa have fallen to a non-Africanist, James Scott, to explicate and condemn: there are few Africanist works that echo Scott’s clarity about the follies of ujaama villages and similar high modernist and statist blunders.

Several other authors wrote in the “same issue”:http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/ and Kitchin penned an interesting “response”:http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v7/v7i2a17.htm to those responses and other critics.

It has been noted before that search engines’s algorithms don’t magically provide the ‘best’ results for any query – they only provide the best matches using a given algorithm, and that algorithm can be biased. The latest issue of “First Monday”:http://firstmonday.org/ – an excellent e-journal – includes a detailed examination of one key aspect. Dr “Susan L Gerhart”:http://pr.erau.edu/~gerharts/ has attempted to determine whether the problems with such algorithms tend to conceal controversies and while her results (done on a small scale) don’t seem to show consistent failures she nonetheless suggests that search engines may indeed suppress controversy and adduces some interesting arguments why this might be the case alongside recommendations for search engine programmers of how to produce more representative results.

“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).

Isabel Vincent at Canada’s National Post has gone to Kosovo four years after the war and finds it a mess, with ethnic cleansing continuing (of Serbs by Muslim extremists) and drug and people smuggling:

“More than 80% of Western Europe’s heroin comes through Kosovo, where several drug laboratories have been set up, Interpol officials say.”

The sources are more than a little one-sided – anonymous Interpol officials and a lot of data provided by a Serb diplomat (as well as an ex-Canadian ambassador) but it’s certainly not encouraging.

Let’s not forget about the former Yugoslavia while we try to take care of things in Iraq and Afghanistan (and numerous other countries around the world…)

A report in the Guardian says little new support was offered by the developing world to close the digital divide and suggests governments and NGOs didn’t really interact. Tellingly:

While the government leaders made their speeches in main auditorium, other people and organizations showcased their projects in a separate hall on the floor below… There was relatively little interaction, with government officials using their own entrances, restaurants, lounges and even toilets.

I read once before about this and could hardly believe it but apparently it is true – c. $100m found by the US military in Saddam’s palaces has been looted and redistributed to a ‘Commanders’ Emergency Response Program’ which amounted to a slush fund for US military commanders to use effectively “at their discretion”:http://usembassy.state.gov/mumbai/wwwhwashnews999.html. Fred Kaplan at “Slate”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2091857/ suggests this was an excellent idea.

Call me old-fashioned but doesn’t that money belong to the Iraqi people and shouldn’t the money have gone into some kind of fund that they could draw upon once an independent Iraqi government is once again established? Kaplan suggests now that that source of funds has been spent the US government should put some of its own money into a similar fund.

“Might such discretion create the potential for corruption? Yes. But no reports of abuse surfaced during the first round. And if some miscreant officer does skim a few bucks off the top, the loss would be trivial compared with the price-gouging that Pentagon-approved contractors have routinely practiced in the course of rebuilding Iraq.”

If you want to do an end run around administrative bureaucracy in approving rebuilding projects why not give the money directly to NGOs and protect them as they do their work? But then the Iraqi people would not be forced into a cosy relationship with the occupying forces…

According to Dexter Filkins at the “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/international/middleeast/07TACT.html?ex=1386133200&en=b502ae4c549da2f4&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND :

As the guerrilla war against Iraqi insurgents intensifies, American soldiers have begun wrapping entire villages in barbed wire.

In selective cases, American soldiers are demolishing buildings thought to be used by Iraqi attackers. They have begun imprisoning the relatives of suspected guerrillas, in hopes of pressing the insurgents to turn themselves in.

All of these tactics have apparently been used in Israel, and, ‘writing in the July issue of Army magazine, an American brigadier general said American officers had recently traveled to Israel to hear about lessons learned from recent fighting there.’ Colonel Sassaman (the man who surrounded a village with wire) is quoted in the article saying, ‘with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.’

This is frightening stuff. Fred Kaplan at “Slate”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2092178/ (who pointed to the NYT piece) suggests – correctly in my view – that this kind of approach only breeds more terrorists, whether in Iraq, Israel or (historically) Vietnam and the Philippines.

It appears that the Marines “don’t intend”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/12/international/middleeast/12MARI.html?ei=5007&en=1a1a29c3bded603f&ex=1386565200&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=print&position= to behave the same way, but it will be interesting to see if those good intentions remain once they start getting fired on.

The iGeneration includes some guest opinion pieces about the “World Summit on the Information Society”:http://www.itu.int/wsis/ , some basic facts and figures and some (generally rather upbeat, uncritical) case studies of ICT use in the developing world.

To take one example of their treatment of the significance of ICT use in the developing world, the BBC profiles a “Brazilian telecentre using Linux”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3250876.stm in a poor area of Sao Paulo with the stated aim of improving employability. Well:
1) users only get an hour a day – not much time to learn
2) I wonder how many of the users are using the connections to learn skills and how many are simply recreationally surfing or emailing
3) I wonder whether programming or software-using skills based on Linux are transferable to the commercial market in Brazil (possibly more so than elsewhere since the Brazilian government appears increasingly interested in promoting Linux use, but still a concern)
4) As “Steve Buckley”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3251024.stm hints at, I wonder whether the money spent on the telecentre might have better been spent on, say, a conventional literacy programme or some other intervention.

More money to close the digital divide would of course be welcome but not if it comes at the expense of other programmes…

Mark Davies, the founder of BusyInternet, Ghana’s biggest cybercafe, told the BBC World Service’s latest “Go Digital”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/progs/03/go_digital/24nov.ram programme that Yahoo had threatened to block all purchases to “Yahoo-hosted stores”:http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/index.php from Ghanaian or Nigerian addresses because of the widespread fraudulent use of credit cards from his cafe. To try to head off this problem, he simply blocked all shopping. It’s extraordinary that a major portal like Yahoo could consider redlining entire nations, and that the “solution” should be for a cybercafe to block all ecommerce – particularly in a country where cybercafes may represent the only accessible Internet connection with the outside world.

A search turned up an article in “Balancing Act”:http://www.balancingact-africa.com/news/back/balancing-act_158.html from May this year with much more detail. According to the Yahoo security consultant:

The point is, 99.999% of purchases from Ghana are fraud. At least 99% of Yahoo stores don’t ship internationally anyway. Our fraud orders are up literally about 1000 percent over last year, almost all from Ghana. The cost to us in time and effort has reached the breaking point.

While it is certainly understandable why the move was threatened, imagine the furore if Yahoo had unilaterally threatened to block, say, all ecommerce from Portugal. This reveals how much unaccountable power these organizations have.