Culture

While I was at the Caribbean Internet Forum, the focus was on innovation - and one younger man brought up to innovate, funding needs to be provided. Due to the context of the conversation, it was implicit that someone had to provide the funding. I responded, saying that if you're looking for funding then you're not innovating. Two broad brushes met and disagreed, but for brevity I didn't really explain my position.

A fellow came up to me afterward - from one of the telecommunication regulation agencies - and told me he understood what I meant. In Cuba, to get something laminated, he'd seen people use two steam irons and some plastic. Innovation. Using what you have to do things that need to get done. And this is where funding agencies and philanthropists fail and, in my opinion, will continue to fail. My problem has been that I haven't explained the inductive kick that got me to my theory on failures of funding agencies and philanthropists. Watching Thomas Friedman talk about bubbles on Jon Stewart while doing some PR for his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America¹, got me thinking about how to explain this all.

Since my experience with funding agencies and so forth is in the Caribbean, my examples will focus there. I've seen Caribbean initiatives die lingering deaths after funding was cut because there was no 'exit strategy' of worth - or the 'exit strategy' was not implemented. { Read more }

Ahoy there Trinidad Express - it appears that you''e taken some booty from a fellow blogger. That's called piracy in some parts o' the world. How can you use a picture from the Internet without at least attributin' the source? Who is the Captain o' the Trinidad Express, and why ha'en't they had someone walk the plank?

Perhaps because they're pirates? Aye, me parrot concurs.

Aye, so will the Copyright Office o' Trinidad and Tobago say somethin'? Perhaps the Media Association o' Trinidad and Tobago? Or will it be lawyers at 20 paces, then?

A pence for an old man o'de sea?

Aye, translation via Talk Like A Pirate Day Garrr...

I've waited for the last posting on this issue for the reason that I had no clue as to what was actually said. Nicholas Laughlin cleared this up for me in dropping a link to me on Facebook - the transcript of what was said can be found here.

After writing the Prime Minister an Open Letter on the topic, then following up, I'm almost done with this issue. To keep it nice and clean, we'll do this in point form: { Read more }

• While I am not a fan of commentary during newscasts, as is (was?) apparently available on 94.1 FM, I recognize that no broadcast of news is the same and that there is an option for people to change the channel or turn the radio off. More than likely, people who were listening to the broadcast enjoy that sort of commentary. Judging the people who provide the commentary during the newscast is also judging the people who enjoy the commentary. Thus, the suspension of the involved employees of 94.1 FM after a visit by the Prime Minister is a strong signal to listeners of 94.1 FM. You can't have it anymore. Squelched.
• The visit by the Prime Minister, as the 'spirit moved him', to a radio station is not appropriate for a person who holds an office that can (and apparently does) be used to intimidate the media.
• Management at 94.1 FM seem derelict in their responsibilities if the people suspended never received punitive measures before. If I were suspended by the management there and I had a clean record, you can bet your bottom CNG container that I would be seeking legal counsel. I've never owned a radio station before. That could be fun.

Update: A National Geographic employee offered us the secret sauce for entry in the comment below, reaffirming all that is awesome about National Geographic. I'll be playing with Expedition as soon as I get some free time...

Earlier this week, I got a press release on National Geographic's launching of an online adventure game. So, being me and a fan of National Geographic's work, I went to take a look at it at http://www.natgeotv.com/expedition - but since I'm in Trinidad and Tobago, I get re-routed to... http://www.natgeo.tv/la/. The Latin America site. Which, of course, is in Spanish despite the fact that not everyone in the Latin America/Caribbean area speaks Spanish. And there's no way to switch languages or sites!

In essence, National Geographic's web presence seems to have a big gaping hole when it comes to their demonstrable understanding of the linguistic and technogeographical understanding of the region.

And that is inexcusable for any magazine, channel or website that claims the reputation National Geographic does.

Sending an email - immediately - explaining the issue gained me no response. And that tells me that National Geographic doesn't really care. Shame on you, National Geographic.

For purposes of being thorough, here's the press release:

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CHANNEL LAUNCHES ONLINE ADVENTURE GAME IN CONJUNCTION WITH FIRST ANNUAL EXPEDITION WEEK

Developed in partnership with Arkadium, Game Available at natgeotv.com/expedition beginning Monday, Nov. 3 { Read more }

If there's a person on this planet who does not know about President Elect Barack Obama's success - the American people's success - I would be surprised. Over the last years, being outside of the United States, I have paid attention to the views outside of the United States as someone who could vote. I did not watch television. I rarely listened to the radio. But I paid attention on the Internet, and the people around me.

Last week, at the lunch break at the Caribbean Internet Forum, I was playing videos on my laptop and was surprised that simply hearing Barack Obama's voice drew a crowd from surrounding tables and started political discussion. As my friend Raul noted, I was not the only supporter of Barack Obama - but I was the only one who had a say. Still, I was in awe. There was so much interest in Barack Obama that I seriously wondered at the role of the Internet itself in his success - not in the media blitzes that were focused on the American people, but through discussion using the Internet.

After all, discussion is the true core of democracy. Voting is simply a rough metric, a decision between more than one choice made available yet a decision which ,almost by necessity, does not cover all the choices. When people vote, they spend little time considering how the question of what they are voting on came to be. { Read more }

When I was a teenager who put technology on a pedestal for reasons best described as self-preservation, Byte Magazine was a thick hobbyist magazine that had all manner of interesting articles for a curious young mind - things that stretched the mental blocks of what was possible. One of these articles described Apple's Hypertext, something that beckoned my inner autodidact in ways that cannot be described as anything other than an odd mixture of hope, relief, and anticipation. The thought of being able to click a word and find a tangent of information was very appealing. I often read my father's engineering texts much to his consternation, and spent more time trying to find things in the Appendices than actually moving forward.

So the hypertext idea was very appealing. A click, and I could find out what the heck the word meant. Who wouldn't like that? About 10 years after the article - maybe 15 - the Internet came along, and this whole HTML thing came with it. And it was 'Oh-So-Very-Close-But-Not-Quite'. When the Internet first started off, it seemed that one could get lost in tendrils of hyperlinks. Then came the frames in HTML, but frames were and continue to be remarkably less than genius. Search Engines came along and indexed all the monstrous amounts of information and misinformation available, with Google leading the charge on how important pages are based on an algorithm described as 'Page Rank'. People tried pop up windows for a while, but the minority of spammers destroyed the majority of usefulness in what, in terms of geology, could be best described as the amount of time a Tyrannosaurus Rex took to chew it's food. { Read more }

I almost always avoid politics because of many things. The first is that people tend to classify others based on who they support and what they support with no thought as to the reasons that there is support for a particular candidate. Contrary to present political systems and what people expect of them, voting is not the core of democracy - informed discussion is.

I'm not buying into the cool-kids-say-Obama-is-cool mystique. I had and continue to have Obamitis because of the way Obama's name is punted about the blogosphere and Facebook. Frankly, I'm a bit sick of it - but I do believe that Obama is the right person for the terrible job left to do after the Bush Administration. There is a need for addressing the United States' image around the world. Electing Senator McCain simply won't handle that issue, as qualified as he may be.

John Cleese outlines, in the very beginning of the video, one of the very core reasons why Barack Obama must win the election. Sure, Colin Powell recently endorsed Obama - and while some are making that about race, Powell's statements demonstrate that he's endorsing Obama because change is needed. Outside of the United States - where I have been spending the majority of my life during George W. Bush's reign - the tone is incredibly different than that which seems to be portrayed in the United States media. { Read more }

What would you do if you only had $25 and a knapsack of belongings to start off with, no place to stay and no job to speak of? And where would you be in a year?

These are some of the questions that author Adam Shepard set out to answer and write about. And that's ground zero of Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream - the other side of life that so many live yet so few know about.

Taking a train ride from his hometown to a random location, the author made his own scratch beginning and somehow managed not to fall through the cracks of society. Instead, he harnessed his resources - a lesson that, given the current global economic situation, seems a lesson worth repeating. From a homeless shelter to a dwarven habitat built in an attic, from temporary work toward permanent work, the book documents one man's path through a scenic route of life of the invisible of the United States. The characters walk, saunter and even march (to the beat of their own drums, of course) off the pages even as successes and setbacks punctuate their progress - and the author's progress. The book is almost impossible to put down.

While the author may have originally set out to write a rebuttal to Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, it doesn't come across that way. There are too many differences between the authors to make it a rebuttal - instead, it helps to form a bit more of the picture of what low income America looks like. In the case of Scratch Beginnings, I find that the same spirit which sent the author on his journey is the same spirit that brought him back with a book. While the privileged go to Europe or other places to obtain 'culture', the author went into America's relatively undiscovered socioeconomic back yard - which for some is as separate a country as one whose name they cannot pronounce.

There are many ways to look at this book. Maybe it's social commentary, maybe it's gonzo journalism, maybe it's even a bit of anthropology. Ultimately, the reader decides - but what it is remains constant: a wonderful book with a positive theme. The profanity of some characters is balanced with an unquenchable thirst for success - for moving up the socioeconomic ladder toward stability. The author writes, simply, that it can be done - but that it is not easy and that it requires qualities that, perhaps, are not as apparent in society today as they were 50 years ago. This is not to say that those in unfortunate circumstance are there by choice; this is to say that there is hope. { Read more }