Relax, you’ve got M-PESA

One of the most interesting videos I’ve seen in a while is a commercial. It’s an ad for M-PESA, the service offered by mobile phone company Safaricom in Kenya that enables people to deposit, withdraw, and transfer money to other people using their mobile phones. It’s a simple concept, but it’s been revolutionary: 68% of the adult population uses it, and the amount transferred through it represents 25% of Kenya’s GDP.

Why has it been so successful? Well, that’s why I find the video so interesting – it demonstrates the very specific gaps unique to a developing economy that M-PESA fills:

Margaret Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher, the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom, died at the Ritz Hotel in London following a stroke. “She was probably the number-one person in our history,” said a Falkland Islander. “She will be remembered as a leader who gave nothing positive to the human kind,” said a veteran of the Falklands War. “She didn’t think it was her job to find middle ground,” said former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

The most succinct and to-the-point summary of Margaret Thatcher’s political career that I’ve seen so far. From Harper’s Weekly Review.

The Fading Away of the Private Car

The Atlantic has a great article about technology transitions and the decline of the private car (hat tip: Per Square Mile):

Sitting in the present, automobiles are so embedded in society that it’s hard to envision any future without them. But no technology – no matter how essential it seems in its own era – is ever permanent. Consider (…) the sailboat, the steamship, the canal system, the carriage, and the streetcar.

All of those technologies rose, became ubiquitous, and were eventually replaced. (…)

“There’s not going to be a cataclysmic moment,” Cohen says of what’s coming for the car. “Like any other technology that outlives its usefulness, it just sort of disappears into the background and we slowly forget about it.” The landline telephone is undergoing that process right now. Your grandmother probably still has one. But did you even bother to call the phone company the last time you moved into a new home? “It’s not as if we all wake up one morning and decide we’re going to get rid of our landlines,” Cohen says, “but they just kind of decay away.

“I think cars will kind of disappear in much the same way.”

Pope Watch 2013

Saint Peter

Saint Peter probably would have thought it quite miraculous that the vote for his 266th successor would be viewable live around the world. Meanwhile, on Twitter, “Pope” and “Sistine Chapel” are trending worldwide. CBC News is keeping track of Twitter and Instagram activity around the papal conclave on their pretty “pilgrim’s eye view” page (which, I just found out, was created by my good friend Adam Hooper).

Some people are having fun trying to predict the outcome of the vote. AJ at Dataparadigms has built a cute app called Next Pope that shows the odds of the most popular candidates being elected pope, according to an online bookie (his post about the app is here). Use the slider at the bottom to show more or fewer candidates on the chart. Until it was abruptly and strangely shut down the other day, Intrade had a prediction market going. And most hilariously, Religion News Service was holding a tournament called “Pope Madness: Sweet Sistine” – Cardinal John Onaiyekan of Nigeria squeaked by as the winner, beating out Canada’s Cardinal Marc Ouellet (HT Raphael Bouskila).

How women are using the internet to combat sexual violence

The internet offers the potential to give voice to the voiceless. And in many places around the world, few voices are stifled more than those of women, especially when they are the victims of sexual violence.

HarassMap is one shining example of an internet application that is trying to combat this. It’s an online tool that allows victims and witnesses to sexual violence in Cairo to report instances of abuse – and unfortunately, abuse in this city is endemic. The reports are sent in via SMS, or text message, using mobile phones. They are then categorized as anything from catcalls to sexual invites to rape, and then they’re placed on a map of Cairo. HarassMap is built on the wonderful Ushahidi platform, developed in Kenya.

I’m going back to school

In October 2013, I’m heading back to school. I’ll be doing an MSc in Social Science of the Internet, at the University of Oxford. I’ve found over the past few months that when I tell people this, a confused look usually ensues. It’s true that it’s not a very traditional subject to study, so allow me to explain. The degree is offered by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), a research centre that was founded in 2001 with the goal of studying the impact of the internet on society.

The research questions the OII seeks to answer are incredibly diverse and multi-disciplinary. Here are a few examples:

Tag some British paintings

The BBC has an online database called Your Paintings with images of the UK’s publicly owned oil paintings – all 200,000 of them. Right now, each painting is associated with basic information (or “meta-data”): the painting’s title, the name of the artist, the date it was painted, etc. But what if you wanted to search for a painting of a woman holding a cat, or Venice in the spring, or a ship at sea?

To make it possible to do this, the database would have to associate terms – or “tags” – like “Venice,” “cat,” and “ship” with each painting. But correctly tagging paintings with these terms requires a human to look at the painting and make those associations. In a wonderful example of crowdsourcing, the Public Catalogue Foundation has come up with an ingenious website that allows the public to do just that: Your Paintings Tagger .

Garbage bags full of burgers (or, Why it’s important to actually talk to aid recipients)

People in New York are unhappy about the Red Cross dropping off a garbage bag full of warm, broken hamburgers, apparently as part of their relief effort following Hurricane Sandy.

Besides the fact that the food was of questionable quality and cleanliness, it was not needed — “we already have hot food, why are they just arbitrarily dropping off hot food?” It was also donated to a small volunteer-run organisation in an inconvenient way and at a bad time — “I would have rather them contacted us to say, ‘We want to donate food, what is the best way to do that?’”

Women and the US Election

Women played an outstanding role in last week’s US election. Here’s some of my favourite coverage of this story.

Gender bias in rating applicants for science-related jobs

Sociological Images points to a study showing a bias among science professors against hiring female undergraduates for a lab job – even when the person doing the hiring is female. The professors were asked to evaluate mock job applications. The applications were identical, but the gender of the applicant was randomised – half were named “John,” and half, “Jennifer.” As Sociological Images puts it,

Just thinking an applicant was female seems to have touched off an unconscious bias that led [the professors] to see female candidates negatively and to be less willing to spend time mentoring them.

The study also found that the professors were biased in favour of thinking warmly of the female candidates – they thought they were really nice. They just didn’t want to hire them.

Here are some of the results from the study: