Changing the world through leaks?

I just watched the TEDtalk of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, a website which releases confidential information from governments and corporations.  While I feel a little uneasy about leaking top secret information and was initially against the site on principle, Assange convinced me that his brand of exploitive journalism actually has much potential to incite positive change.  He cited his 2007 release of the Kroll report, which exposed looting from the Kenyan purse during former president Daniel Moi’s regime.  This report was released just after Moi endorsed the President Kibaki for reelection, and it is likely that the report directly led to Kibaki, favorite of Moi, losing the election.

While I still plan to focus my energies toward changing the world through health care innovation and improvements, this TEDtalk made me think that investigative journalism is an underutilized vehicle for eliminating political and corporate systems which increase suffering and inhibit positive change.  I just hope Assange and the gang at WikiLeaks are extremely judicial about what they leak.  They are gambling with huge stakes.

Watch the talk! Assange is creepy, intelligent, and articulate.

Read more about the release of the Kroll report here.

Portable Ultrasounds

Portable Ultrasounds

I saw something about new portable ultrasounds on a TV today, so I did some googling and found this article from MIT.  Apparently the first prototype was developed 2 years ago at Washington U.  It includes a handheld probe and display, and they will sell several models each operating at a different frequency.  They also link via smart phone to wifi and can transmit images to hospitals, I’m assuming so EMS can take a quick ultrasound and send the image ahead to a hospital so doctors know what to expect when the ambulance arrives.

The devices will start at $5,000-$10,000 and probably become half that much within three years (typical ultrasound machines are around $50,000).  This seems like a technology that could be of great use in poor areas without big ultrasound machines.  Also they could be used by surgeons on medical mission trips like ones my dad serves on every few years.  I think this is an exciting development that has a lot of potential to increase access to medical care in the poor world.

Everyone needs a few enemies

At the beginning of this semester I received a text message from an unknown number saying, "To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it."  I did not reply.  The next day I got a message from the same number which said, "The art of being a slave is to rule one's master." I decided to save this number in my phone as "God" since I figured He was as likely a source of the thought-provoking texts as anyone.  I later found out that they were generated by my friend's dad.

Anyway, This morning's message was a quote by Charles Cleb Colton, a British writer.  It said, "Constant success shows us but one side of the world. For, as it surrounds us with friends who will tell us only our merits, so it silences those enemies from whom alone we can learn our defects."  This immediately made me think of Petroski's success through failure argument.  Perhaps yet another reason why failing is a key to success is that it helps create enemies, who are often our best critics.  I am reminded of our political system and how our two parties often better each other through criticism.

Would Petroski Coach Little League?

I have a friend Matt who is brilliant and individualistic.  The other night at dinner he told me that he doesn't like having coaches involved with his exercise.  He said, "I taught myself to run. If something hurt or didn't feel right, I changed it until it felt better, and then when I saw the runners on the Olympics I noticed that their form was comparable to mine."  Or something like that. While I appreciate that I had coaches to expedite the learning process during my swimming career, I thought Matt's method may have a unique merit in that it makes one comfortable with a Petroskian success-through-failure style of innovation.

Petroski defines a successful technology as one which corrects the perceived failure of the one which it is intending to replace.  If you consider running form a technology, Matt was doing just that: Identifying a failure with his form (current failed technology), changing his form, and, if the failure was corrected, endorsing the new technology as successful by implementing it.  Perhaps it would be healthy for all of us to learn something this way.  It would certainly take longer, but it may teach us something as engineers.

TB in India

I actually already posted this in my personal blog (outsidetheark.tumblr.com), but figured it was relevant for this blog as well, so why not do a little copy/paste.  That's why it's longer than usual.

One of my teachers emailed me an article the other day about TB in India. The situation, as you could probably guess, is pretty terrible.  Apparently you can get a TB test from a sketchy private medical clinic which may or may not be accurate.  The people start taking TB antibiotics which is great if you have TB.  If not, your making it so the antibiotics will probably not be effected when you actually do get TB in the future.

The author of the article and I are obviously like-minded, although he is a great deal more knowledgeable and articulate than I.  He shows that with TB, as with medicine in general, research is not focused on the poor nations, even though health problems are most rampant there.  Since TB has been pretty much eradicated in the wealthy world, medical research rarely focuses on the disease- even though it’s one of the three biggest killers.  A quote:

“With India’s urban population expected to double in the next thirty years, to seven hundred million, its cities will remain fertile ground for an infectious epidemic. Yet—no doubt owing to the fact that rich people in the West rarely get the disease—tuberculosis receives fewer resources, fewer research dollars, and less attention from the global health community than either AIDS or malaria—the two other most deadly infectious diseases. TB activists don’t march on Washington or chain themselves to the gates of pharmaceutical firms to demand better treatment.”


A technology called GeneXpert has been developed which can accurately and quickly predict TB.  It’s expensive, but much cheaper than the costs misdiagnoses are currently inflicting on India’s economy.  However, just because it’s a logical choice doesn’t mean this piece of technology is going to be implemented.  One hospital in Darbhanga has had similar technology on the shelf for three years, never used.  Why?  Because the doctors in the hospital aren’t paid much, and so they work at their private practices in the afternoons where they make a lot more money.  The doctors at the hospitals aren’t using this lifesaving technology because if the hospital works efficiently, they’ll lose private business.  The result: people die unnecessarily and the problem of TB gets worse.

The article is very interesting, and talks about other things like how AIDS medicine became more accessible in the poor world and how something like that could be done for TB, the conflict between public and private medicine in India, and why TB is not a problem in wealthy nations.  If you want to read it, it’s here:

World Challenge

BBC is currently having a World Challenge competition, where 12 grassroots innovations or small businesses for the public good operating in poor areas are identified , voted on, and the winner awarded.  One innovation that particularly interests me is the ram pump being implemented in the Philippines to pump water uphill up to 1,000 feet using only the energy from the water flowing downstream.

The BBC website says, "It's baffling how some inventions fail to achieve a tipping point. The hydraulic ram pump - which has been around for a couple of centuries. falls into this category."  I wonder how Edgerton would explain the failure of hydraulic pumps to be put to use in poor areas.  He might say that the Western world chose technologies able to transport greater quantities of water at the cost of traditional energy sources, so people have been trying to implement the same technologies in the poor world and finding them infeasible.  Perhaps the problem is that we view the 'developing' world as needing to catch up to the developed and so we try and implement developed-world technologies when really we should be finding creative ones tailored to the environment in which they are implemented.

Source: http://www.theworldchallenge.co.uk/2010-finalists-project08.php

Edgerton on how the rich view the poor

The section in the first reading from Shock of the Old which interested me most was the section starting on p. 39 titled "Not Alphaville but bidonville: technology and poor magacity".  Here Edgerton talks about how western thought on the poor wold is that they're just not technologically advanced enough, or they need to catch up to the "developed world".  However, Edgerton points out that the idea that the "developing world" just needs to catch up with our technology stems from the belief in a sequential history of technology, with each step better than the previous.  In truth, according to Edgerton, the best technology in any situation could be some of the oldest and most basic.


We shouldn't view poor areas as places where the technology needs to catch up to the rest of us.  We should view poor areas who need technology that helps them achieve improved standards of living.  Whether not the best technology to achieve this end is the same as that in existence in the Western world depends on a case by case basis.  In many situations the best technical solutions to poverty have looked a lot different than technologies employed in the developed world.

Propaganda and Democracy

If knowledge is power, as the world's knowledge expands, the net power is continually increasing.  Does this increased available power pose a threat to individual freedoms?  According to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1938) and Brave New World Revisited (1958), the answer is yes.  Huxley argues that we are increasingly loosing our freedom due to the development of various technologies, and as overpopulation creates stresses on our social structure, a tend toward over-organization and decreased individuality is likely.

I would encourage all to read Brave New World Revisited as it is a very concise and articulate explanation of what one of the most brilliant literary and scientific minds of the past century perceives as the greatest threats to our freedom.  Perhaps the greatest threats mentioned is that authoritarian practices will likely be resorted to if we do not check overpopulation.  However, I would like to discus the most immediate and relevant threat we face today, as articulated in the chapter on Propaganda in a Democratic Society.

Huxley dichotomizes propaganda into rational propaganda ("in favor of action that is consonant with the enlightened self-interest of those who make it and those to whom it is addressed") and nonrational propaganda ("not consonant with anybody's enlightened self-interest, but is dictated by, and appeals to, passion").  Nonrational propaganda often "offers false, garbled, or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument, and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals[.]" 

I couldn't help but think that our political system runs on non-rational propaganda.  Rational propaganda techniques are implemented only while appealing to a minority group consisting of the intellectual, academic, and political elite.  The majority of the population is victim of nonrational propaganda characterized by meaningless catchphrases ("Hope You Can Believe In"), garbled or incomplete evidence, and furious denunciation of opposing party members. 

Luckily, in order for a candidate to be in a position to appeal to the masses he must first attain the endorsement of many who are not victim to nonrational propaganda.  However, once campaigns are geared toward the public, does it not appear as though it is a contest in who can best master nonrational propaganda techniques?  I wonder what our elected officials would look like if these techniques were forbidden and every voter heard the candidates' true stances.  I doubt many politicians who are in power today would be if this situation was a reality.