ictdchick

As many of you know, Goma, DRC is the site of much mineral wealth - as well as much conflict, both over this wealth, and ethnic conflicts, including remnants of the Hutu/Tutsi hatred that resulted in the Rwandan genocide.

Just as diamonds are mined to finance these conflicts - coltan (used in the Sony PS2 and mobile phone chips) is another scarce resource that can be traded for weapons or other supplies.

Senate Bill 3058 endeavors to do what we’ve already done with diamonds - to enforce restrictions to make sure that we don’t end up with conflict coltan in our mobile phones. Kerry Gough from my church has drafted a letter that you can use to urge your senator to sponsor this bill.  You can download word documents for Senator Feinstein or Senator Boxer (California) here, or you can just copy the text from below and use it for your own senator.
Letter to Senator Boxer
Letter to Senator Feinstein

Honorable Diane Feinstein
331 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

Re: Rape & Exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Dear Senator Feinstein:

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the worst places in the world to be a girl or woman. Everyday women as old as 87 and babies as young as 10 months are raped by militiamen, soldiers, policemen and civilians. There are hundreds of thousands of victims—2000 RAPES were reported in June, 2008, in just one Province (North Kivu) of the DRC. There is a pervasive atmosphere of impunity that encourages rape at will.

Although the recently passed House Resolution 1227 condemns the ongoing epidemic of sexual violence in the Congo, such resolutions carry no sanctions and are ignored by the governmental powers in the DRC. Legislation with some teeth in it is necessary, such as the Conflict Coltan and Cassiterite Act of 2008 (SB 3058). Similar to the legislation banning importation of blood diamonds, SB 3058 will require that coltan be certified as conflict free before being imported. Coltan is a necessary ingredient for the manufacture of cell phones, computer games, monitors and numerous other high tech instruments. Restrictions on its import would compel not only Congolese government to take action to eliminate coltan related conflict, but also would put pressure upon the U.S. manufacturers of technological instruments to ensure that their products are conflict-free.

The Congolese live in dire life threatening and life ending conditions because DRC is entangled in 10 years of war which has contributed to the death of over 5.4 million people to date. This conflict is not just an internal African implosion but rather it is a battle for coltan, diamonds, cassiterite and gold, destined for sale in London, New York and Paris - the metals that make our technological society vibrate and ring and bling. In addition to high death rates, the war has lead to the use of child soldiers, child slavery in mines, the mass displacement of peoples, and the widespread use of rape as a weapon of war and the transmission of HIV infection by rape. Shockingly, notwithstanding the epidemic of HIV in the DRC, of the $45 billion dollars authorized by Congress to fight HIV (PEPFAR) only $15 million is allocated for the DRC.

I urge you to join as a co-sponsor of SB 3058, legislation that is essential to put meaningful sanctions behind well-meaning resolutions.

Let me know if you have any questions and I’d be happy to point you to some people that can tell you more about the bill!

Melissa

I’m posting this here mostly for my own future reference:

I’ve been using tri-band antennas from Wilson Antennas, but unfortunately they don’t actually work in the places where you need the antennas because, well they’re made for the US-based frequencies (e.g. 1900, rather than 1800)

Jeff Wishnie from Inveneo points out this antenna for boosting signal strength:

This high gain, wide band, directional antenna covers the GSM900 and GSM1800 / UMTS bands. The kit contains the antenna with 7 m cable and the Universal Cellphone Adapter packaged into a sturdy box with detail instructions on installation and use. This antenna covers the 900 and 1800 MHz band which is used in built up areas.

Features:

* Broadband
* Covers various international cellular bands.
* Robust and weatherproof.

This antenna can be bought with the applicable cables for the different cards. Versions are available for:

* Vodacom OPTION Card
* Vodacom NOVATEL Card
* Vodacom HUAWEI Card
* MTN Sierra Wireless Card
* MTN HUAWEI Card
* Cell C NOVATEL Card

Powered by Qumana

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…

Hi all,

I gave a presentation at the Blum Student Symposium last Thursday.

For anyone that’s interested, the slides (65MB) are downloadable here:

http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/~melissa/blum-symposium-oct-04-07.ppt

The talk was about current health information practices in rural health clinics in Uganda, how PDAs have been integrated into a particular district, and our projections for what we’re working on now.

The future symposiums look really interesting (See Blum Event Calendar for times and locations):

Legal Aid Organizations and the Rule of Law in Sudan
Presentation by Mark Massoud, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program Graduate Student
Thursday, November 1st

Media and Development in Zambia
Presentation by Laura Hubbard, Visiting Faculty, Anthropology
Thursday, November 15

Reducing Rape and Mutilation in Darfur with Fuel Efficient Stoves
Presentation by Susan Amrose, Graduate Student, Energy & Resources Group
Thursday, November 29th

So as part of this ongoing drama of making sure that network traffic originating in Ghana actually stays here instead of wandering off to Europe and coming back (sorry for the jargon: if this doesn’t make sense to you, the rest probably won’t either), I’ve been trying to set up ping and traceroute and various other network analysis tools on my smartphones (running Windows Mobile 5) so I can figure out what routes the GPRS operators are using. The following is a rundown of what I found.

Network Tools 1.0 (free)
This includes traceroute and ping, and works pretty well if you can get it working on your phone. I had mixed luck. On the HTCs710 (wm6) it actually got into some state where I ended up having to reset the phone, and I couldn’t actually enter anything. But it worked perfectly well on the HTCP3600.

PocketPuTTY (free)
Most people are familiar with PuTTY, the free and extremely lightweight ssh program. This is the PocketPC port and works pretty well! Things like this make me very happy! The one problem is that it doesn’t include an installer, so I still haven’t figured out how to make a program shortcut for it - I just run it from file explorer.

Windows Mobile Network Analyzer Power Toy (free)
From the horse’s mouth, a ping and ipconfig utility, but alas no traceroute.

Merlin Tracert and Ping Utility v1.0.0.0 ($2.99, free trial)
I tried the trial version… it doesn’t handle screen orientation (horiz/vert) very well, and I couldn’t get it to work on the non-touchscreen phone (HTCs710) because it wouldn’t let me navigate between fields.

Kalian Pocket Ping 1.4 (free)
A free ping! As things should be. I don’t think I tested it though…

Ping for Pocket PC 1.05 ($3.00, free demo)
Ultimately this wasn’t useful because I needed traceroute.. And I think it’s atrocious to have to pay for a ping utility. Really!

IPer 5.0 ($15.95 shareware, 14 day free trial)
Okay, I’m cheap and I didn’t actually even try this one, but it looks pretty comprehensive, and once I need to do real network analysis, it might even be useful.

QoS Scanner 0.1 (free)
This wasn’t particularly useful for my purposes, but looked potentially interesting. It’s sort of a NetStumbler for mobile phones.