Week of Jul 6, 2003

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Ayole's Water and Technology As a Catalyst for Change

charity, society & sociology, systems

July 11, 2003, 10:50 PM

First off, a quick apology for the recent slowdown in posting frequency. I've taken on way too many projects this summer and thus haven't had as much time to update this journal as I'd like.

Today I partially taught a lesson in the TCinC class I'm co-teaching with Matt. Matt has put together the lesson plans for most of the sessions we're redoing for Joe's class, and today he had us show a video to the students called The Water of Ayole.

The Water of Ayole is a video used by the Peace Corps to communicate the important concept that technology must be introduced into organizations along with the skills and systems necessary to maintain and develop that technology. The video itself is about a program to introduce water pumps into many third-world african villages. The basic problem this program is trying to solve is that many villages are reliant on water sources that are unsanitary, disease-ridden, far from the village (and thus take a lot of time and effort to collect), etc. This lack of potable water is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Africans every hour. To solve this problem, the program funded the construction of water pumps that are capable of drawing water from deep underground that is pure, potable, and close to the village (and thus much easier to gather).

Unfortunately, although the intentions of these programs are good, the execution was flawed. Here's what generally happened:

1. The government came in and funded the construction of the water pump. The villagers were overjoyed.
2. A couple of years pass. The pump breaks.
3. The villagers complain to the government, but the government doesn't have the money to maintain the pumps for free.
4. The villagers attempt to raise money to fix the pumps, but they are poorly organized. The money is never collected and used appropriately.
5. The women of the village go back to the time-consuming task of gathering the unsanitary water they drank before. Disease and death returns.

The exception to this rule is the village of Ayole. When the interventionists brought the pump to Ayole, they didn't simply build the pump and leave. Instead, they helped teach a mechanic who lived in the village how to repair the pump. The villagers themselves formed committees who were responsible for discovering problems with the pump and raising money for repairs. They even engaged in communal farming to help raise money for pump maintenance as a common good for the village.

Clearly, this video demonstrates the importance of organizational change when incorporating new technology. But I took another message away from it as well. I've always believed that true, lasting change can only occur if it happens in the hearts and minds of the people, and thus technology cannot, by itself, create change. However, technology can be a catalyst for change. The villagers in Ayole remarked that their community had grown stronger as a result of the pump, that the presence of the common good brought them together, even in ways that were not related to pump maintenance. They now took a greater interest in each others' affairs, and were more willing to help fellow villagers in need. Of course, this change did not come from the pump per se; it was the result of the organizational change that swept through the village as a response to the need to maintain the pump. But the pump undoubtedly spurred this change. Introducing a new technology can, when other conditions are right, tip the scales in favor of a new, better social order. And I think that's pretty exciting, especially for a budding technologist who hopes to do some good in this world.

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Photographing Miss Bodine

aesthetics, people, personal

July 08, 2003, 12:42 AM

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But Is It Art?

aesthetics, philosophy

July 07, 2003, 09:29 PM

This week in Communication Design Fundamentals we got a new instructor, Charlee Brodsky, who is going to give us a crash course in photography (which I feel very lucky for getting; apparently last year CDF was almost entirely focused on typography and the students didn't work with images hardly at all). In class, Charlee brought in several photography books as an introduction to the medium; one of these, a book called Shopping, sparked some controversy as well as an interesting philosophical discussion on the definition of art.

Shopping is a series of photos taken from inside a number of department stores in a shopping mall, including several of partially or fully nude women in dressing rooms. The controversial bit is that the photographer took these pictures from a hidden camera in her purse. As far as we could discern, she did not get anyone's permission to take these pictures or to publish them. The faces of the subjects are not hidden in any fashion.

Charlee's position was that, although this was objectionable, it was less of an invasion of privacy than the "reality tv" shows that are so popular nowadays. Kerry took issue with this statement (being a fan of reality tv herself), and pressed Charlee's claim that Shopping was "high art" intended for an elite group of social critics whereas reality tv was "low entertainment" intended for popular consumption (my paraphrase, not her exact words).

This lead to an interesting digression into what makes art "art". Here's a few of the points my fellow classmates made:

• Shopping was created as a piece of social criticism; the photographer was depicting her disgust with the crass commercialism of modern shopping malls (or something similar; I don't want to get hung up on the subtleties of art criticism). Reality tv only exists to get ratings. But Matt pointed out that many reality tv show producers claim they are "examining the beast" and that their shows are a form of popularized social criticism. Hard to believe, I know, but it raises the interesting point that it isn't always easy to make distinctions based purely on intention; different people will see the same work different ways. Maybe there are people who gain some sort of deeper social understanding through watching reality television...
• Katie proposed that the distinguishing feature is that reality television is "staged". The producers deliberately seek out participants who will put on a good show, whereas Shopping's author recorded the world as it really was. But others pointed out that much of fine art photography is similarly "staged" since the participants pose for the pictures, but this makes it no less a form of art.
• There is no significant difference between reality tv and Shopping, except that one is more high-falutin' than the other. In fact, Shopping is more objectionable on a moral level because the subjects did not consent to participate; at least with reality tv the participants go into the show willingly (if not always fully informed, perhaps...).

All this reminded me of the course in philosophical aesthetics I took back at Virginia Tech. In that class, we examined questions such as "What makes an artwork an artwork?". The most plausable theory we examined in my not-so-humble opinion was George Dickie's institutional theory of art, or the "Art World" theory. Dickie argues that art is defined purely socially, and an object becomes an artwork when a member of the "Art World" calls it an artwork. I was never entirely clear on the qualifications for membership in this Art World, but as near as I could tell pretty much anyone interested in art could qualify as a member of the Art World. Thus, although my left shoe is just a shoe right now and not a work of art, if I were to call it a work of art and got it into the Museum of Modern Art with a nice little placard and everything, then suddenly it would become an artwork, and not just a shoe.

If you buy Dickie's theory, then in essence Charlee's original argument is correct, although she couched it in unnecessarily biased language: Shopping is art because a certain group of people who consider themselves to be in the business of creating and criticizing art have decided to call it art and treat it the same as all the other art they create and criticize. Reality TV is not art because no one has treated it in this manner. But this is the primary relevant difference; no intrinsic characteristics of either work directly matter in determining its artistic or non-artistic nature.

On a side note, after the discussion ended Charlee asked us to give a "thumbs up or thumbs down" for Shopping (intermediate angles of thumbage were also acceptable). I gave it an in-the-middle-thumb, up from the thumbs down I would have given it purely because it served to launch an interesting philosophical discussion. It's been awhile since I've come across any work of art I could say that about :).

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The Agony of Getting Started

personal, software development

July 07, 2003, 12:23 AM

Whenever I start a largish programming project, I always fall into the same trap. As with any complex undertaking, I always find there are many, many things the project requires me to understand that I don't; there are many uncertainties or "risks" as the software engineering people like to call them. This freaks me out. I hate uncertainties; as a (mostly) INTJ, I prefer to work in areas where I know what's going on, where I feel that my knowledge and competence will carry me through with few difficulties. And so I wind up following an algorithm similar to the following:

1. Procrastinate starting for as long as possible by basically pretending the problem doesn't exist. The more uncertainty, the harder I find it to get started, since that would mean facing the uncertainty.
2. Try learning everything at once by madly flipping through books, searching the web, etc. to try to get some information that might help clear up the uncertainties. Give up when I realize there's no way I'll ever read and retain all the information I need.
3. Think through the whole system to try to address every problem up front. I tend to go through a lot of dry erase marker and loose sheets of paper in this stage. Give up when I realize I'm never going to get it perfect on the first shot.
4. Sit down and start writing some code, breaking up the problem into smaller bits and solving each bit one at a time. Learn what I need to when I need it. Fix mistakes as I come across them. Find that this really isn't such a tough problem after all.

This algorithm works, but I'm afraid it's not very efficient. Steps 1 through 3 could easily be cut out, saving me possibly days worth of time and immeasurable amounts of sanity. Yet no matter how hard I resolve to follow this wiser course "next time", I always realize after several days of agonizing that I just slogged through steps 1 through 3 once more. I'm wondering how many times I'm going to put my hand in the fire before I learn that orange-flashy-stuff-no-touch.

In short: yes, Newsable is coming along just fine.

If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, just remember that no amount of forethought can replace the experience of actually writing and testing code! This isn't to say that a bit of up-front design isn't helpful, as long as it's done in moderation. Just don't get carried away and forget that you aren't really getting anything done until you're down in the trenches mixing it up with the compiler and its nefarious code libraries.

On a completely unrelated note, according to Movable Type this is my 100th post to roBlog. I kinda feel guilty that it didn't turn out more insightful than this...

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