From Not To

[fromnotto]

Open SIM Kit, is an open source toolkit designed to allow users to modify the contents of SIM cards to disseminate information and circumvent network providers. Turning the world's 4 billion feature phones into a read/write platform! Especially in scenarios where the provider becomes compromised.

http://opensimkit.com/  

Open SIM Kit is the first installment of the Abayima Project.

Abayima was launched to help protect vulnerable citizen voices when mobile communication networks are compromised by malicious parties or oppressive governments. Abayima is a non-profit organization that provides technology solutions for protecting human rights and free speech around the globe.  http://abayima.com/

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Africa For Norway (Radi-Aid

Radi-Aid—Africans unite to save Norwegians from dying of frostbite. You too can donate your radiator and spread some warmth! http://www.africafornorway.no/

FROM NPR: The video is humorous, but there is a serious message. The point is that images of helpless Africans are just as inaccurate as the idea of helpless freezing Norwegians. A lot of Africans cannot relate to the patronizing videos and development initiatives.

The organization says it has certain goals with the video. Among them, that fundraising "should not be based on exploiting stereotypes" and that media should have more respect in portraying suffering children.

"We want to see more nuances," it writes on its website. "We want to know about positive developments in Africa and developing countries, not only about crises, poverty and AIDS. We need more attention on how western countries have a negative impact on developing countries."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/11/28/166095383/africa-for-norway-viral-video-pokes-fun-at-stereotypes-in-aid-efforts

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Life Straw (or access to what? or define clean?)

"To be fair, as an emergency relief, LifeStraws might come in handy. The portable water purifier removes bacteria and viruses that cause common diarrhoeal diseases – major killers in the developing world – and simply requires the user to dip the 31 centimetre-long plastic tube into a water source and suck. They are cheaper and more portable than filtered water and so could be a more effective short-term solution in extreme situations, for instance when people have been displaced by conflict or an environmental disaster or where the local water source has been contaminated.

Yet that is no excuse for celebrating the LifeStraw as a major breakthrough. Vestergaard Frandsen, which also sells insecticide-impregnated mosquito nets and plastic sheeting, promotes LifeStraw as a life-saving solution. However, while the filter, at best, reduces infection rates, it also sends a message that we in the West should help the poor to accommodate to living in filth."

Spike Online...

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The-Emancipated-Spectator, Jacques Ranciere

excerpt -

"Being a spectator means looking at a spectacle. And looking is a bad thing , for two reasons .Firstly looking is put as the opposite of knowing. It means being in front of an appearancewithout knowing the conditions of production of that appearance or the reality which isbehind it. Secondly, looking is put as the opposite of acting. He or she who looks at thespectacle remains motionless on his or her seat, without any power of intervention.Being a spectator means being passive. The spectator is separated from the capacity ofknowing in the same way as he is separated from the possibility of acting.From that diagnosis it is possible to draw two opposing conclusions. The first one isthat theatre in general is a bad thing, that is the stage of illusion and passivity which hasto be dismissed in favour of what it forbids : knowledge and action : the action ofknowing and the action led by knowledge . This conclusion has been drawn long agoby Plato: the theatre is the place where ignorant people are invited to see sufferingpeople. What takes place on the stage is a pathos, the manifestation of a disease, thedisease of desire and pain, which is nothing but the self-division of the subject causedby the lack of knowledge. The “action “of theatre is nothing but the transmission of thatdisease through another disease, the disease of the empirical vision which looks atshadows. Theatre is the transmission of the ignorance which makes people ill throughthe medium of ignorance which is optical illusion. Therefore a good community is acommunity which does not allow the mediation of the theatre, a community whosecollective virtues are directly incorporated in the living attitudes of his participants."

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Against the Romance of Community, Miranda Joseph

excerpt - introduction

"Community is almost always invoked as an unequivocal good, an indicator of a high quality of life, a life of human understanding, caring, selflessness, belonging.... [It] has connoted cherished ideals of cooperation, equality, and communion" (xxxiii). As Joseph also observes, however, the discourse of identity politics of the 1980s and 1990s critiqued the underpinnings of national and other incarnations of community; it lay bare the real racism, sexism, and violence that were simultaneously perpetuated and obscured by affirmative attitudes about various communities and their peculiar manifestations. Yet, as she notes, in spite of the critical trajectory that denounced the "romance" enveloping notions of community, "a celebratory discourse" around it "relentlessly returns" (viii). In attempting to address the logic of its persistence, she suggests that capitalism is often complicit:

Capitalism and, more generally, modernity depend on and generate the discourse of community to legitimate social hierarchies. [...] While identity is often named as the bond among community members, it is a false name in that communal participants are not identical and many of those to whom an identity is attributed do not participate in communal activities. I argue that communal subjectivity is constituted not by identity but rather through practices of production and consumption. (viii)"

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A Small Place, ‪Jamaica Kincaid‬

excerpt - Ch 1

"The road on which you are travelling is a very bad road, very much in need of repair. You are feeling wonderful, so you say, "Oh, what a marvellous change these bad roads are from the splendid highways I am used to in North America." (Or, worse, Europe.) Your driver is reckless; he is a dangerous man who drives in the middle of the road when he thinks no other cars are coming in the opposite direction, passes other cars on blind curves that run uphill, drives at sixty miles an hour on narrow, curving roads when the road sign, a rusting, beat-up thing left over from colonial days, says 40 MPH. This might frighten you (you are on your holiday; you are a tourist); this might excite you (you are on your holiday; you are a tourist), though if you are from New York and take taxis you are used to this style of driving: most of the taxi drivers in New York are from places in the world like this."

hmmm....

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Rofi Facemask and Rofi Armadillo Vest (or De-mining Equipment for Civilians or how to make safer cheap equipment or make everyday work for some people less physically exhausting and dangerous) 

How Product Design Can Improve Manual De-mining? The Design without Borders (DwB) programme was initiated and is led by Norsk Form, the Norwegian Centre for Design and Architecture. It aims to use designers’ creative and analytical skills to create solutions for developing countries and areas of emergency. DwB aims to create meeting points between problem owners and professional problem solvers, and to be a catalyst for cooperation and development of new products and services. Our demining work is carried out in close collaboration with Norwegian Peoples Aid (NPA).

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Sneakers (or Shoes for the Travels of Undocumented Southern Boarder Immigrants)

Artist Judi Werthein has created a special "crossing trainer" she has designed to help illegal immigrants negotiate the sometimes deadly terrain they encounter when crossing the border from Mexico to the US.

Migrants waiting for dark to hop the border fence from Tijuana into San Diego start calling out their shoe sizes when they see the boxes in Werthein's arms.

They call the act of crossing the "brinco" - literally "jump" in Spanish. And that is the inspiration for Werthein's crossing shoes, called Brincos.

The trainers are adorned with unusual items.

"The shoe includes a compass, a flashlight because people cross at night, and inside is included also some Tylenol painkillers because many people get injured during crossing," Werthein says.

The artist was commissioned by a cross-border arts exhibition called inSite to develop a project that "intervened" in some aspect of border life.

While researching her project, the Argentine native became fascinated by illegal immigrants' primary mode of transportation - their feet.

"If they go through the sierra, they walk eight hours. Their feet get hurt. There's a lot of stones and there are snakes, tarantulas. So that's why it is a little boot," she says.

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The PlayPump: What went wrong (or why didn't we know right away?)

Trevor Field, a retired South African advertising executive, had done well in life and wanted to give back to his community. He noticed that in many rural villages around the eastern Cape, the burden of collecting water fell mainly to the women and girls of the household. Each morning, he'd see them set off to the nearest borehole to collect water. They used leaky and often contaminated hand-pumps to collect the water, then they carried it back through the bush in buckets weighing 40 pounds. It was exhausting and time-consuming work.

"The amount of time these women are burning up collecting water, they could be at home looking after their kids, teaching their kids, being loving mothers," Field tells Costello. He knew there had to be a better solution.

Field then teamed up with an inventor and came up with the "play pump"

To cover maintenance costs, he proposed selling ads on the sides of the water tower. He said the PlayPump model would be a big improvement over the hand pumps that Africans have struggled with for years. 

“Once the pump breaks, and it takes more than three months to repair, people in these communities no longer trust the PlayPump because they are demoralized,” he tells her. 

Field had made his career in advertising, but when he heard about this new device, he formed a company and started making PlayPumps himself. 

To cover maintenance costs, he proposed selling ads on the sides of the water tower. He said the PlayPump model would be a big improvement over the hand pumps that Africans have struggled with for years. 

A report commissioned by the Mozambique government on the PlayPump that was never released, cited similar problems with the pumps that Costello was seeing – women finding it difficult to operate; pumps out of commission for up to 17 months; children not playing as expected on the merry-go-rounds, and maintenance, "a real disaster," the report said. Field was reluctant to speak about the problems. But in Mozambique's capital, Costello meets with John Grabowski. His group, Save the Children, worked with Field to install dozens of pumps in Mozambique just before Grabowski became the group's country director. “In December of 2007, all of the pumps were operational,” he said. “Right now there are only 13.”  Save the Children was reluctant to say that the problems with their PlayPumps were, in part, their own doing, since it turns out they'd chosen poor or unsuitable sites for installation. They were then slow to resolve complaints from the field.  The Mozambique government report in part blamed Save the Children itself for not properly testing sites and the quality of water at those sites, before they installed PlayPumps. The agency was receiving complaints about the PlayPumps “pretty much right after installation,” Grabowski tells Costello.

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/southernafrica904/video_index.html

NOTE

Field got the idea when he saw a model developed by Ronnie Styver in 1989 in an agricultural fair in Pretoria. In 1989 Ronnie Styver of Delmas in Mpumalanga adapted a children’s merry-go-round to pump water in rural areas. The revolutionary pump design converts rotational movement into reciprocating linear movement using a driving mechanism that consists of only two working parts. This makes the pump highly effective, easy to operate and very economical. PlayPumps are designed to solve one of the most pressing problems in semi-urban and rural areas of Africa 

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Single-Use Syringe or is it a Difficult to Reuse (DTR)(or depends on what side of the tick you're on)

Harm Reduction Coalitions 2007 study: - DTR (Difficult to Reuse) Syringes disempower and demonize a population... - Relies on perpetuating myths around needle-stick injuries...  - Exaggerates dangers to Public Safety... - Cost 3 times that of a regular syringe...

LINK: http://harmreduction.org/syringe-access/syringe-access-tools/single-use-syringes/

History In 1984, Marc Koska read a newspaper article predicting the spread of HIV through medical syringes. He decided to take action and spent the next ten years researching the spread of diseases through the use of dirty syringes. 

His studies found that there were 23,000 HIV infections due to unsafe injections each year, as well as one million of hepatitis C and 21 million of hepatitis B. This results in about 1.3 million deaths per year. The World Heath Organisation states that more than half of all injections in the developing world are carried out with re-used or unsterile equipment.  Koska’s solution is a syringe that can only be used once. The AD (Auto Disable) syringe, or K1, is designed so that once the plunger has been pushed in, it cannot be pulled out without snapping. Importantly, the syringe can be manufactured on machines used for standard syringe production and Koska adds that he has targeted developing world manufacturers "to ensure wide availability and global affordability". More than a billion of the K1 syringes had been made by May last year. However, Kosta has also created a charity called Safepoint, which sets out to educate people about the dangers of re-using syringes. In India, the team reached over half a billion people with a TV, radio, newspaper and cinema advertising campaign which included the video below. Following this, Koska approached the Indian Federal Minister of Health to mandate the use of AD syringes in all public hospitals and clinics. This came into force in April this year. The charity had a similar success in Pakistan. The Safepoint team is now planning to target Africa.

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Anti-Rape Female Condom

Invented by Sonnet Ehlers, a South African woman. Ehlers was motivated to create it while working as a blood technician with the South African Blood Transfusion Service, during which time she met many rape victims. Ehler mentioned that she was inspired to create RAPEX (later renamed to Rape-aXe) when a patient who had been raped stated, "If only I had teeth down there," suggesting the myth of the vagina dentata. 

The Rape-aXe is a latex sheath embedded with shafts of sharp, inward-facing barbs that would be worn by a woman like a female condom. If an attacker were to attempt vaginal rape, his penis would enter the latex sheath and be snagged by the barbs, causing the attacker excruciating pain during withdrawal and giving the victim time to escape. The condom would remain attached to the attacker's body when he withdrew and could only be removed surgically, which would alert hospital staff and police. Like most condoms, Rape-aXe also usually prevents pregnancy and the transmission of HIV and sexually transmitted Infections.

Critics have objected to Ehlers' invention as "vengeful, horrible, and disgusting" and oppose its planned sale in drugstores.

It is like we are going back to the days where women were forced to wear chastity belts. It is a terrifying thought that women are being made to adapt to rape by wearing these devices ... Women would have to wear this every minute of their lives on the off-chance that they would be raped.

—Lisa Vetten (Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, South Africa)

This is a medieval instrument, based on male-hating notions and fundamentally misunderstands the nature of rape and violence against women in this society.

—Charlene Smith[7]

Ehler response to criticism "As with everything in life there will be negative attitudes and I can't be responsible for people who refuse to educate men and feel the device is medieval," and responds by calling the Rape-aXe "a medieval device for a medieval deed."

Other critics fear that use of the device could possibly enrage an attacker and further jeopardize the victim. Ehlers responded:

"Sadly, many women have been killed over time, as nobody can guarantee the outcome of any rape. However, the huge plus-factor is that the discomfort and pain is such that the rapist would be disabled temporarily, giving you time to get away and get help."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-rape_device