ictdchick

I’m here at in Keystone, Colorado to present on a panel with Elizabeth Basha, Revi Sterling, and Ruth Anderson about how to get involved with information technology and international development. Given the oh-so-appropo theme, I’m wondering if there’s anyone else that I know that’s here?

I’ve just been going over the sessions, and it’s totally action packed. Here’s the schedule of the ICTD-themed sessions I’m hoping to attend:

• Thursday, October 2
  • 11.20-12.20: Enabling Nonprofits to Accomplish Their Missions through Technology (Torreys Peak III)
  • 2.45-3.45: Social Impact of Advanced Technologies and Telemedicine in the Developing World (Crestone Peak II - IV)
• Friday, October 3
  • 10.00-11.00 Building a Better World: Using Anthropology to Ensure Success in Your Project (Crestone Peak I) (actually this one is interesting but I’ll probably be at the next one…)
  • 10.00-11.00 Experiences with OLPC Technology in Ghana, West Africa and Build a Better Future with Creating an ACM-W Chapter in the United Arab Emirates to Help the Peace in the Persian Gulf (Torreys Peak IV)
  • 11.20-12.20 Engaging Students in the Free Open Source Movement Through Civic Engagement (Quandary Peak III)
  • 1.30-2.30 Having Global Impact as a Technical Woman: Information Technology Applied to the Developing World (Torreys Peak I-II) (I’m speaking at this one)
  • 2.50-3.50 Women Working in International Development to Build a Better World (Creston Peak II-IV)
  • 4.00-5.00 Change Agent Awards Panel (Quandary Peak III)

Come find me (I have no idea who will actually read this). And maybe we can go explore the rockies a bit on Thursday afternoon!

Check out http://borninseptember.org

Basically some guy decided that instead of getting birthday presents one year, he was going to ask people to donate $31/person so he could invest in wells in a bunch of villages in Africa.

The OBA project coordinator in the Mbarara office showed me this link (ostensibly to illustrate to me the power of multimedia video presentations so I could make one about the HealthyBaby project) and suddenly I felt like a card for not being more generous with my birthday.

Anyways, even though I’m not a September baby, feel free to divert any birthday attention for me towards this project instead.

Alternatively, I’ll accept future donation pledges for my up-and-coming newly founded nonprofit organization: http://tiergroup.org

Basically, we’re taking our research group, and starting an independent organization - to support the university research, and to spin out new products and services based on our various projects. =)

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I’m pretty gadget heavy on this trip. In terms of power stuff I have:

1 solar flexible-panel charger (retail $99-ish) for 4 AA batteries
2 solio solar chargers, for mobile phones and usb devices
(can be charged via solar or grid power. I only have one adapter
for grid power) (retail about $80 each)
1 inverter (retail about $40)
1 potenco pull cord charger for charging car batteries (on loan)

plus lots of portable cell phone chargers (that can double as flashlights, $25ish) using AA batteries, and a few $5 LED book lights with hard-to-replace batteries. I also have two sidewinders (retail $25) which are wind-up flashlights+cellphone chargers. They aren’t
particularly useful for charging cell phones, but they are better than nothing in a pinch.

the potenco pull cord charger is also a lot of work to charge a car battery - you wouldn’t want to use it unless you could hire some kids to pull at it on a regular basis for cheaper than you could pay for the equivalent work’s worth of fuel. It’s a great device tho, and
could easily be hooked up to a bike or a windmill (not too fast of a windmill tho). To charge a car battery, basically you bolt the charger to a wall, grab the two ends of a rope, and then you swing your arms like you are on a nordic track. Some lights come on and the
battery starts charging.

I haven’t tried it yet because I don’t have a car battery yet. I’ll try it next week when I go to Rubindi and I’m staying in the rural health clinic overnight. By some miracle I haven’t experienced a single power cut yet.

It’s also been raining, so the solio chargers and the AA batterycharger don’t seem to have charged fully yet, although maybe they would if I put them outside directly instead of just in my window..  I suspect the AA battery charger’s 4 hour claim for 2 batteries only works for the standard AA rechargeables and not my super-high capacity 2700 mAH batteries, because they only every charged up halfway.   In the end they really just work well as capacitors for grid power. =P

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Since I’m about to do this to my VMware installation of windows I thought it would be a good time to write a quick blog post on how to prevent your Windows computer from being infected by cds, dvds, and usb drives.

Of course this means that when you pop in a cd/dvd, it will no longer automatically launch some nice little installer application for you - you’ll have to go to "My Computer" and explicitly do that yourself.  But you’re better off doing things that way anyways. Trust me!

Last time I was in Uganda (November 2007) I managed to infect my usb drive, and then subsequently infect several laptops and PCs with my drive, when I tried to copy some files from a school computer. Basically some virus copied itself onto my drive, and then when I inserted it into a new computer, the computer automatically ran a special file called "autorun.inf", which launched the virus.  There were a couple of variants, including a funny one that made all of my folders hidden, and created a bunch of executable files with the same names as my folders, that had icons that looked like folders.  I mistakenly double-clicked on the "folders", and voila - another infection.  Insidious little trojan horses…  To make a long story short, I ended up spending a lot of time downloading AVG Free Anti-virus and installing it everywhere, since that was the only freely available anti-virus software that was up-to-date enough to remove these worms and viruses.. =)

Now we could have avoided all of these problems, if only execution of autorun.inf were disabled!

There’s a few sets of instructions on the web for how to do that.  Most of them just tell you how to do it for cd roms, a few give instructions that will disable it for both cdroms and usb drives:

http://www.tildemark.com/tips/disable-autorun-on-cdrom-or-usb-drives.html
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/disable-autoplay-of-audio-cds-and-usb-drives/

The general gist of both sets of instructions is as follows:

1. Run the Group Policy Editor by typing "gpedit.msc" in the run box ("Start->Run")
2. Navigate to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Template-> System
3. Double-clinic "Turn Off Autoplay"
4. Select Enabled, and specify that you want to turn off autoplan for "All drives"
5. Click OK, Close the Group Policy Editor.

Do it!  Do it now!

The other thing you should do, is that anytime you are not actually copying files to your usb drive, and you are just giving files to someone else, make sure to make your usb drive read only (if possible), so if their computer is infected, they can’t infect your usb drive.

I’ve also thought about carrying around a copy of anti-virus software, but I’m feeling dis-enchanted with AVG-Free (it’s bloated, they have started running nagware for their paid services, and it’s not that straightforward to update if you don’t have a direct internet connection).  I’ve also OSX-ified myself, so have since stopped paying as much attention to Windows…. But if anyone has recommendations for good, solid, affordable anti-virus software I can give out to people in Africa, I’d be happy to check them out!

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Elizabeth Basha, Ruth Anderson, Revi Sterling, and I are presenting an ICTD panel at the Grace Hopper Celebration in Colorado on October 4-5, 2008.  For those of you interested in pre-conference participation, we just set up a blog/resource website so everyone can talk about what we directions we might want to take during the panel and how we might want to use the time.

Come join the conversation!

Panel Info:
http://gracehopper.org/2008/conference/program-schedule/friday-october-3-session-7

Our Portal:
http://gracehoppper.ictdchick.com

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So last year, our co-winners in the Bears Breaking Boundaries IT for Society contest was a group of students working on attachments for cell phone cameras that could be used for microscopy diagnosis of diseases like malaria. Since then both of our projects have been taken up by the Blum Center for Developing Economies, and the Telemicroscopy for Disease Diagnosis project has been written up in the news by a number of media organizations, including a recent issue of the Economist.

It’s part of an interesting new direction for technology research - instead of just building faster, more high-resolution (and more expensive) devices, people are working on ways to build low cost devices that are more robust, can be mass produced, and can provide good enough information for primary triage.

On another note, these devices (as the economist article posits) could be well deployed with a good mobile-phone-based data collection system - collecting not just text and numbers, but images as well.

As part of the evaluation for the Uganda OBA project, Ben Bellows and his collaborators at Makarere University are conducting a household survey in the coverage area of the project and in a similar control area. As part of this survey they have to also do sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing, trying to determine the actual prevalence of STIs and not just an estimate based on who comes in for diagnosis and treatment. Can you imagine how much easier and verifiable these surveys would be if 1) the data collection could be done electronically, and 2) digital media for the testing could be integrated into the data collection records? Not that all diagnoses could be done with cell-phone microscopy, and you still need careful sample and slide preparation. But it’s still something to think about…

This is a bit belated (I’m something like 6 months behind on blog posts) but my group got an honorable mention at this year’s Bear’s Breaking Boundaries IT for Society competition. Our project, led by Laura Stachel (MD, studying for a DrPH in the School of Public Health) proposes to provide sufficient reliable power for lighting, diagnostic equipment, and communications to support emergency obstetric care for a rural hospital in Zaria, Northern Nigeria. It’s a really cool proposal - basically coming up with a series (aka "menu") of solar lighting and power packages for different climates. Lighting is provided through led flood-lamps, power is intended for diagnostic equipment, and charging of communications equipment, with everything completely independent of the main power system of the hospital (minimizing exposure to power spikes and unwanted drainages). I think the other good thing about this proposal is that it targets emergency care - an oft-neglected and sorely critical aspect of healthcare in developing regions. For more info, there’s a flyer here and you can contact us at wheretheresnolight at googlegroups dot com.

My friend Neema pointed out AfriGadget, a blog showcasing African ingenuity. The posts currently on the front page feature everything from biodiesel and renewable energy to simpsons toys to mobile phones made from recycled parts.

– forwarded from my advisor –

TPRC is an annual conference on communication, information, and internet policy that convenes international and interdisciplinary practitioners and researchers from academia, industry, government, and nonprofit organizations together with policy makers. The 2008 conference will be held September 26 - September 28, 2008 at The National Center for Technology & Law, George Mason University School of Law, Arlington, VA.

TPRC is now soliciting abstracts of papers, student papers, panel proposals, and student posters for presentation at the 2008 conference. Proposals should be based on current theoretical or empirical research relevant to communication and information policy, and may be from any disciplinary perspective. TPRC seeks submissions of disciplinary, comparative, multi-disciplinary or interdisciplinary excellence.

Subject areas of particular interest include, but are not limited to the following (for more detailed descriptions see http://tprcweb.com):

• Network Competition, Policy and Management
• Next Generation and all-IP Networks: Policy, Regulatory, Architectural and Societal Issues
• Spectrum Management and Wireless Futures: Anywhere, Anytime Communications and its Implications
• Societal Issues: Universality and Affordable Access; ICTs for Development and Growth
• The Transformation and Future of Media in an Age of User- and Community-Produced Creativity
• The Transformation and Future of Intellectual Property and Digital Rights
• Privacy, Security, Identity and Trust
• Internet Governance and Institutional Strategies for Information Policy
• Other Emerging Topics

Submissions are due by May 2, 2008. Please see the guidelines for authors for additional information.

With best regards,

Johannes M. Bauer

Johannes M. Bauer
Professor, Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media
Co-Director, Quello Center for Telecommunication Management & Law
Michigan State University
409 Communication Arts and Sciences
East Lansing, Michigan 48824-1212
Fixed +1.517.432.8003, mobile +1.517.944.4154, Fax +1.517.432.8065
Web http://www.msu.edu/~bauerj and http://quello.msu.edu

So with all the recent news on Kenya’s elections and subsequent (concurrent?) riots, it crosses my mind that there is a great need for transparent+verifiable, reliable, and low-cost voting systems in developing countries. I know that a lot of people at UC Berkeley and other universities are working on e-voting, both on the implementation/computer science side, and on the policy side. But of course much of this work is targeted towards federal United States voting requirements, which entail all sorts of things like audit trails, voter anonymity (both to protect individuals, and to prevent them from selling votes), as well as probably lots more esoteric accessibility requirements, not to mention our weird electoral system and lots of absentee ballots.
Imagine if Diebold or Pitney-Bowes came up with a low cost electronic voting system that could not be compromised (okay, given, that’s still a hard problem) and could be used by governments of developing countries to hold reliable elections. Read the rest of this entry »