(h/t Amanda Glassman)

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For the last two bog posts there has been a glitch with my website software which sent up to ten copies of the same blog post to some unlucky subscribers.  (One of them emailed me to say: “the content is great, but once is enough”.  Quite so.)

I spent some hours last night reading through pages of code, and I think the spamming problem is now fixed.  I certainly hope so.  (The problem, if you are interested, was a hyperactive WordPress Cron function.)

Please let me know if you have any problems with the email list.  If you want to stop getting the emails, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email.

The foot of a person suffering from podoconiosis

I bet you are thinking: podo-what?

Podoconiosis is a disease of people who work barefoot, particularly on red clay soil in the neighborhood of volcanoes, especially at altitude. Tiny micro particles of silica from the volcanic soil penetrate the skin and inflame the lymphatic system. (As a layperson, I think of podoconiosis being to feet what asbestosis is to lungs.)

This disease affects millions of people around the world, including in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea,  Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, northwest India, and Sri Lanka.

It is a disease of poverty: it can be completely prevented by wearing shoes, and by providing basic information to the people who are at risk from it.

We could eradicate this disease altogether. It would not be very expensive, and it doesn’t require new medical technologies.  So why don’t we? The problem seems to be that the people who suffer from this disease are poor and marginalised.  There are powerful AIDS lobbies in industrialised countries ensuring that we spend billions of dollars on antiretroviral therapy for people with HIV.  But almost nobody is working to highlight the plight of people suffering from podoconiosis and ensuring that we put in the modest resources needed to bring it to an end.

A British academic, Gail Davey, now working in Brighton but formerly living here in Ethiopia, is an exception to this.  She is working to get the disease recognised, as step towards getting the disease tackled and eventually eradicated.  You can read more about podoconiosis, and the work that Gail does,  in a recent article on Humanosphere. Humanosphere is an interesting new blog by Tom Paulson, a journalist based in Seattle, about global health and poverty, and it is well worth including in your regular reading.

I can think of a couple of organisations which have embraced social media exactly like this:

New aidinfo website

In work-related geek news, my team has a brilliant new website: http://www.aidinfo.org. (I can call it brilliant without immodesty because I had almost no part in it.)

The internet in Ethiopia

If you live in Ethiopia, you’ll have noticed that the internet got a lot faster from the second week of July this year.  I wondered at first if this was for the same reason that the Addis roads are relatively clear of white 4x4s at this time of year: all the ferenjis go on an extended holiday to avoid the rainy season.  But I now know that there is a better, and more long-lasting reason: there is now a fibre-optic cable to Djibouti, connecting Ethiopia to the Seacom submarine fibre optic cable for the internet. This has completely transformed internet speeds in Ethiopia (I can now stream BBC Radio 4 on our home broadband connection).

Shared items

If you read things on the internet via an RSS feed reader (if you don’t, see here for an explanation of what you are missing) then you may be interested to know about shared items feeds.   These are RSS feeds containing items that someone has tagged as interesting (that is, not articles that the person has written, but articles that they are recommending).

My shared items feed is here.  Chris Blattman’s shared items feed is here.

Guardian Development Pages

Let me be the thousand and first person to point you towards the new development section of the Guardian online.  I admire the Guardian for putting so much effort into this, and giving it so much prominence.  But so far it feels a lot like white middle class people, mainly men, talking about development. I’d like to hear more from the citizens of developing countries.

For those who can’t play the video, he says that monetary incentives work for simple, straightforward tasks, but they don’t work at all well for tasks that require conceptual and creative thinking.  According to him, what motivates people is autonomy, mastery and purpose.

One conclusion I draw from this is that there are probably a lot more people than you might think who would be willing to spend a lot of time and effort helping to make the world a better place by reducing poverty, if we did a better job of enabling them to give their time and abilities.  According to Pink, what will motivate them is the challenge, the opportunity to develop mastery, and the knowledge that they are making a contribution to a purpose they believe in.  Those of us who work in development need to do some more thinking about how we can provide more platforms on which those contributions can be made, rather than just asking people to pay money in taxes or in donations.

In a more satirical vein, if you work in the aid business I think you’ll enjoy the “Hand Relief International” blog. Here’s the latest post, on innovation in development:

Speaking about thinking – I have been thinking about “innovation” a lot lately, as I noticed the word is all the rage these days. The challenge in our sector is how to “integrate innovation” in our language without changing much about the way things work.  … Passing innovation in a world dominated by career professionals with many years in the business and certain ways of doing things is a pretty tall order but then donor’s don’t really want to see much rocking of the boat happening either – that would force them to change their ways, which always makes them uncomfortable – they want to see the word used a lot, and they want to hear the occasional 300-words story about it, that can be put in a neat textbox in a report.

(Thanks to @AIDSPolicyProj for the link to the Dan Pink video)

It isn’t surprising that people prefer to have blog posts come to them, rather than to have to make the effort to visit every blog they want to read.  This is especially true if you have low bandwidth or if internet access is expensive, as is often the case in developing countries. I guess that’s why some people like the email option.  But most blogs do not offer email subscriptions; and if you follow several blogs you might find it a bit of a pain to have your email clogged up with this stuff.

So you don’t to want to visit each blog individually, and you can’t or don’t want to get them all by email.   Not everyone knows that there are some good solutions to this problem, especially if they are not all that interested in technology. So here’s a quick guide to how to read blogs and other websites easily.

I read over 250 blogs regularly, because I find them informative, entertaining and interesting.  I get more diversity of opinion and ideas from those 250 blogs than from reading one or two newspapers; and often you get the chance to learn from real experts in their fields, without the casual mistakes, prejudices and dumbing down that you get when those views are intermediated by lazy journalists.

But I don’t want to visit 250 websites each morning. Nor do I want all that stuff arriving in my email each day.  I don’t want to read everything that they all write: I want to skip through the headlines, or a brief summary of each article, so that I can see which ones I want to read properly.

Fortunately there is a wonderful behind-the-scenes feature of almost every blog – and many other websites – called RSS.  I’ll spare you the technical details, but this stands for “Real Simple Syndication” and it means that you can pull the contents of a blog or website to another place.  And that in turn means you can get all the blogs you want to read in one place.

The simplest and most widely-used solution is Google Reader.   This is a website which lets you read blogs, rather like Hotmail or GMail lets you read your mail. You tell Google Reader the addresses of all the blogs you want to read, and it pulls all the posts to one place.   It looks a bit like an email programme: you can easily see what’s new, and skip through the headings until you find something that looks interesting.  When a blog post is new and unread it shows up in bold.

As well as blogs, you can subscribe to the feeds of other websites, such as the BBC Africa News or DFID Press Releases.   You can even set up a Google Alert for a specialist subject – such as your own name! – and have that appear among your feeds.  You can have all your friends’ Facebook statuses in a feed.  This means that you can decide what you are interested in, all over the net, and bring it all together in one place.

You can put the blogs in folders – mine are grouped into “Africa”, “Development”, “Technology” and so on.  Some people put their “must read” feeds into one folder, which they look at each day,  and their occasional reading in another folder for when they want to do some browsing.

However, Google Reader is an online website, and that may not be ideal for you if your internet connection is slow, or if you are on a plane.  One solution to this is Google Gears, which is a way to access Google services like Google Mail and Google Reader if you are not online.  I have found Gears a bit unreliable in the past, so it is not my preferred solution.

There are many other ways to have your computer fetch the information from these feeds when you are online.  (These programmes are technically called aggregators or feed readers.) Some of them can be set to download the content to your computer so that you can read it later offline, like you can with your email.

If you have Outlook 2007, then you have a feed reader right in front of you.  You can tell Outlook which RSS feeds you want to read and they will appear in a separate folder underneath your Inbox.  To use this, you can go to the Tools menu, choose Account settings, then RSS feeds.  Paste in the address from the blog or website you want to subscribe to.  (Use Ctrl+V to paste into the box).  Apparently you can also add feeds to Outlook automatically from Internet Explorer.

I prefer not to use Outlook for reading blogs, however.  I use FeedDemon instead, which is a free download. This is very easy to use, and it has the neat feature that it synchronises with Google Reader. So if I add a new subscription to Google Reader, it is automatically added to FeedDemon.  If I have read something in FeedDemon, it is marked as read in Google Reader.

There are other feed readers, such as SharpReader.  (I use FeedDemon because of its synchronisation with Google Reader.)

If your office does not let you install new software, you may be stuck with Outlook (if you have Outlook 2007) or an online service like Google Reader.

Which blogs should you be reading?  If you are in to development you may be interested in my list of the best development blogs – look at the suggestions in the comments, which include some important omissions from my original post.  There is a longer list of what I am reading down the right hand side of my blog page.

How do you get started? Adding subscriptions manually is a bit of a bore at first.  Fortunately there is a way to share subscription lists.  To get you started, here are twenty two key development-related blogs in the form of an OPML file.  Right click the link and download this file to your computer, and save it to your desktop. Then in Google Reader or Feed Demon you can import this  file and it will automatically add these blogs to your subscriptions. (You can always unsubscribe if you don’t like them or if you find this too much).  I can’t see a way to import an OPML file into Outlook, unfortunately. ** UPDATE: See the comments for how do to this in Outlook. **

The key point of all this is that there is a way to subscribe to blogs and websites, so that all the information you are interested in comes to you in one place, whether from blogs, newspapers, website, facebook or even search.  This makes it really easy for you to see what is happening all over the world as you drink your morning coffee.

And if all that sounds terribly complicated, don’t forget you can get this blog by email by putting your address into the box on the top right of the page – or, if you must, send me an email and I’ll add you manually.

Happy reading …

Development blogs you should be reading

To make this pleasingly controversial, I’ve also put them roughly in order, from “must read” at the top to “probably should read”.  I’m not going in for that “in no particular order” fence-sitting stuff.

• Chris Blattman
• Duncan Green
• Bill Easterly (and colleagues)
• Aid Thoughts
• Karen Grepin
• Blood and Milk and everything else by Alana Shaikh
• Texas in Africa
• Global Dashboard
• Wronging Rights
• Tales from the Hood
• Transitionland
• White African
• Good Intentions Are Not Enough
• Hand Relief International (spoof)
• Wandering Thoughts
• Rethinking Development Economics
• Aid on the Edge of Chaos
• last and least, me: Owen Abroad

If you want an email whenever this blog is updated, please put your email address in the box top right.

Development organisations and think-tanks

Here are some blogs from development organisations and think tanks – some of them can err on the wrong side of the blog/flog boundary from time to time.  Again, best ones are first.

• Center for Global Development(disclosure: I work here)
• Shanta Devarajan at the World Bank
• Global Economic Governance group at Oxford
• Aidinfo (disclosure: I work here)
• Development Initiatives (disclosure: I work here)
• Publish What You Fund
• Danny Kaufmann at Brookings
• UK Department for International Development bloggers
• Ideas 4 development
• Overseas Development Institute (ODI) Blog

Development podcasts

Here are some development-related podcasts. (I’m about to start a new series of Development Drums, by the way).

• Development Drums (self publicity alert!)
• The Center for Global Development Prosperity Wonkcast
• Think Before You Give
• BBC Africa Today
• Peterson Perspectives
• PRI: Global Health and Development
• The World Bank Podcasts
• Philanthropy This Week
• PRI: The Changing World

Bubbling up: newer development blogs

Here are some more you might want check out – they are too new (to me, at least) or slightly off-topic to be included in my “must read” list, but they look promising:

• Access to Action
• Do No Harm – by folks at the London School of Economics
• Waylaid Dialectic
• Lindsay Morgan’s Despatches
• Wait  … What?

And of course there are more also-rans and off-topic blogs on the right of the screen.

On Twitter

If you are a Twitter user, you might be interested to add these to your list of people you follow:

• A list of Center for Global Development Fellows on Twitter
• Jim Cashel’s list of global development types on Twitter
• Mike Gechter’s list

Who are we missing?

I’m looking forward to being introduced to new blogs, and being reminded of blogs I’ve forgotten, in the comments.

So in response to a few requests, I’ve added a “subscribe by email” box on the top right of the my blog. If you want an automatic email every time a new blog post appears here, please put your email address into the box and press the subscribe button. You’ll get an email asking you to click a link to confirm that you really do want to receive updates. Once you’ve pressed OK on that, you’ll get every new article by email.

Please let me know if you experience any problems making this work.

You can also follow me on twitter (@owenbarder).

(For the technically minded, I’m using the Subscribe2 WordPress plugin.)

In this first episode, host Lawrence Macdonald talks to Todd Moss about his new paper, Saving Ghana from Its Oil: The Case for Direct Cash Distribution.  Todd proposes ways for the citizens to have more oversight of Ghana’s oil revenue, and to contain oil-induced patronage, by distributing the benefits of oil directly to the citizens.

The podcast lasts about 20 minutes, and you cou listen directly on line or subscribe on iTunes.

As you would expect from CGD, this first episode sugests that the wonkcasts will be essential listening.  CGD has a knack of addressing important developing issues in interesting and innovative ways, and basing its ideas on thorough research and evidence.

And if CGD’s wonkcast doesn’t satisfy your entire appetite for podcasts on development, there is always Development Drums.

He gives a bunch of reasons – to paraphrase, they are: (a) it is way to have influence; (b) it is probably a good career more; (c) it forces the author to think more carefully about the issues and to think about the big picture; (d) it acts as a an academic memory or diary; and (e) it subjects the author’s thinking and arguments to the wisdom of crowds.

These are all good reasons.

I started to blog because I wanted to stand up and be counted on the things I think are important.  Because I work at home on my own most of the time, blogging lets me get things off my chest without bothering my long-suffering partner about every issue.

I am very glad that Chris has decided to continue to blog.  I learn a lot from what he writes, and I can hear his voice in every post.

Fall classes have started again so my time on the DC metro has increased greatly. The commuting has meant that I’ve been blowing through podcasts at an alarming rate, and I’ve come across a few that are worth sharing. These links are to the webpages of the podcasts, but all of them can be found in iTunes as well.

Develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government

But I’m quite glad not to be eligible. Here are some phrases from the job description that should give pause for thought to anyone with experience of Government:

… You will manage a small team, directly, but will have to manage relationships with a wide group of senior officials across Government. This will require developing working arrangements in which departmental officials feel they are accountable to the Head of Digital Engagement without the benefit of a formal line management arrangement…..

… you will have to develop these relationships from scratch in a pressured environment in which Ministerial expectations of delivery are high.

… You will have a small budget

… Within two years the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government

Or, in plain English, the post will have no staff, no budget, no power, and yet Ministers expect you to see to it that within two years the UK Government will make world class use of digital engagement.

Good luck to whoever gets this job!

I’ve been scouting around for a new challenge in Whitehall for a long time now but the truth is that beyond building and managing corporate websites, those roles don’t exist. There’s been a lot of talk over the last four years of how more senior strategic web roles are inevitable, but in that time its been just talk. So there was no next move for me.

It isn’t a good sign that people leave the civil service partly because it is so frustrating to be an advocate of change.  On the positive side, things are starting to change – mainly in local government rather than central government – but the UK Government is miles behind where we could be.  Jeremy also describes the way that he was discouraged from blogging, which is worrying.

Dave and Simon both highlight the significance of Jeremy’s departure.

How the Civil Service Code applies to online participation

The Civil Service Code applies to your participation online as a civil servant or when discussing government business. You should participate in the same way as you would with other media or public forums such as speaking at conferences.

Disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as a potential threat to personal security. Never give out personal details like home address and phone numbers.

Always remember that participation online results in your comments being permanently available and open to being republished in other media. Stay within the legal framework and be aware that libel, defamation, copyright and data protection laws apply. This means that you should not disclose information, make commitments or engage in activities on behalf of Government unless you are authorised to do so. This authority may already be delegated or may be explicitly granted depending on your organisation.

Also be aware that this may attract media interest in you as an individual, so proceed with care whether you are participating in an official or a personal capacity. If you have any doubts, take advice from your line manager.

Good luck to civil servants as they try to implement this. I had rather a torrid time when the Mail on Sunday chose to attack me for my previous blog.

Simon Dickson has more.

Because the aid they receive is such a capricious, volatile commodity, governments dare not make full use of it. They could hire legions of extra teachers, clinicians and civil servants, but only if they are prepared to fire them when the aid spigot is closed. They could put AIDS-sufferers on anti-retroviral therapies, but only if they are willing to discontinue treatment once the money stops.

The article explains why the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is such an important step towards reducing the costs of aid to beneficiaries and donors alike, and so greatly improving the effectiveness with which aid is used.

It is a rare pleasure to read this well-informed comment about the need for donors to align their aid with the systems they are trying to support, to make aid more predictable, less likely to undermined domestic accountability and to duplicate each other less.

As president, John Edwards will fundamentally transform America’s approach to the world. As part of his $5 billion initiative, he will bring high-level attention to help people in three priority areas: primary education, preventive health, and greater economic and political opportunity.

He proposes a Cabinet level post to tackle global poverty (which the UK introduced in 1997) and promises a new Global Development Act to consolidate and simplify the US foreign assistance system.

Comment: It would be good news for development if this becomes an issue in the US Presidential elections.

More at CGD.

The result, say DFID officials in Africa, is that they are able to direct large amounts of money to areas of greatest need, including putting millions of pounds directly into government budgets. Speaking on a visit to Malawi, Mr Benn added that routing aid through African governments makes them more accountable to those it is supposed to benefit.

Tim Worstall agrees in part.  He likes the direct payment to the poor, but dislikes paymens through government budgets:

Given my views on governments, this doesn't strike me as all that good an idea. Most especially given my view that most poor countires are in fact poor because they have grasping, venal and incompetent governments, this really doesn't strike me as a good idea. But I'm aware that there are those who hold different opinions on this matter. 

There are indeed those who hold a different opinion on this.   The main reasons that we give money in the form of Budget support are:

• all countries, rich and poor, need governments that are accountable, capable and responsive to their people.  If services such as education and health are provided directly by other agencies – such as international donors – then there is no accountability of the providers to the intended beneficiaries; the results will be weak and marginalized governments, and unresponsive services;
• though there are short-term needs to get essential services to people, the only long run, sustainable solution for these countries is to run the services themselves; if we set up parallel systems that hire the trained people away from government, we delay, rather than accelerate, the day when these countries can build sufficiently strong and effective systems for themselves;
• the services can only be delivered cost-effectively as part of a joined-up system; you don't want an AIDS clinic separate from a vaccination centre in the same town: you want a single health centre; if you are building schools then you need to train teachers or procure text books.  So a bunch of separate initiatives to provide specific services in particular places will be very inefficient compared to building an effective, joined up service.
• in the past, we have ignored and bypassed poor financial management (or even corruption) in governments in poor countries because we can work around them; we cannot do that if we are going to put British taxpayers' money into those systems, so giving budget support forces us – and everyone else – to tackle one of the long-term causes of poor government.

My view is not just speculation or ideology.   Here is an independent, international review of Budget Support.  There is a lot of evidence gathered there.  The summary says:

when a developing country’s government has the political will to reduce poverty, budget support can be an effective way for donors to deliver aid. Overall, it has helped to strengthen the relationship between donors and developing country governments, and encouraged better coordination between different donors. It has helped to strengthen planning and budget systems, making them more transparent and therefore accountable. It has also helped to prioritise areas of expenditure that target the poor like health and education.The team of evaluators found no clear evidence that budget support funds were, in practice, more affected by corruption than other forms of aid.

In my view, getting these issues right is at least as important as aid for providing the circumstance in which poor countries can lift themselves out of poverty.

DFID will be publishing its first annual report to Parliament on policy coherence, following Tom Watson's Tom Clarke's Private Members Bill (International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Bill).  This should help to build awareness across Government of the importance of these issues for promoting international development, which is in all our interests in the long run.

[Thanks to Richard for spotting that I had the wrong Tom] 

The paper finds that this change in trade policy was worth approximately $12 billion a year to American consumers.

That is in addition to the benefits to many people in China, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, who are now better able to earn a living producing and exporting goods to to the United States. (The paper does not seek to quantify these benefits).

Via Trade Diversion 

Sadly, for too many farmers in poor countries today, they are trapped in not terribly voluntary co-operatives. Out in rural Kenya last week, I found that there was some scepticism towards the traditional view the co-operatives are always forces for good. In fact, in Kenya, the coffee co-operatives have suffered from significant mismanagement, with individual farmers often exploited by the leaders of the co-operatives. In fairness, Kenya has been trying to help rebalance the situation, for example introducing six year term limits on co-operative leaders. I do worry that spokespeople for the Fairtrade movement suffer from a myopic romantic vision of the coffee farmer in a co-operative, which the truth such an existence is backbreaking and mired in exploitation.

It would be a cruel irony if the fairtrade movement itself became a new form of expoitation.  The principle of fair trade – that people should be able to spend more buying products that they know to have been produced without exploitation – is a good one.  But the recent articles in the FT and Alex's report from Kenya suggest that more needs to be done to ensure that the fair trade certificate means what it says.

See also today's FT leader. 

Update: the Fair Trade Foundation replies here. 

HT: Curious. 

I don't know much about how party discipline works in the US, but in the UK running against an official party candidate would lead to automatic expulsion from the party.

As far as I know, Senator Lieberman is currently the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security committee, and he sits on the Armed Services, Small Business, and Environment Committees.  According to the BBC:

Meanwhile Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Sen Chuck Schumer of New York – the chairman of the party's Senate campaign committee – have pledged their full support for Mr Lamont.

I wonder if Senator Reid's support for Mr Lamont includes removing Senator Lieberman from his committee posts?

Not all economics bloggers toil entirely for nothing. Mr Mankiw frequently plugs his textbook. Brad Setser, of Roubini Global Economics, an economic-analysis website, is paid to spend two to three hours or so each day blogging as a part of his job. His blog, rgemonitor.com/blog/setser, often concentrates on macroeconomic topics, notably China. Each week, 3,000 people read it—more than bought his last book. “I certainly have not found a comparable way to get my ideas out. It allows me to have a voice I would not otherwise get,” Mr Setser says. Blogs have enabled economists to turn their microphones into megaphones. In this model, the value of influence is priceless.

Not up to the usual high standard of The Economist.

Economists blog because most of us believe that information and knowledge are more valuable shared than kept secret. As knowledge workers, we are valued by the information we share, not the secrets we keep.  Blogging is a hugely efficient way of sharing some kinds of information.

Reports reaching this press indicate that the consultant at the Ministry of Agriculture is a "square peg in a round whole" and yet still he is there, receiving thousands of dollars while our brothers and sisters who are more qualified are earn less than a million leones per month.

The objectives of technical assistance are noble; the execution is dismal.  Even before Elliot Berg's landmark report in 1993 we have known that the expert-counterpart model of long term ex-patriate  technical assistance is generally neither effective nor good value for money.  In no other walk of life do we try to train people by parachuting in an expert to do their job for a couple of years. You do not learn skills by watching over someone's shoulder: you learn through a combination of on-the-job training, coaching, mentoring, and formal structured training courses.  So why is that not the way we should provide technical assistance?

A fifth of all aid – some $20 billion a year – is currently spent on technical cooperation of various kinds (though much of it may not be spent on this sort of technical assistance).  About 40% of US aid is spent this way.  Some – perhaps a lot – of this money is wasted.  We know that this approach to technical assistance is not generally effective, and yet we go on doing it, presumably because the development-industrial complex is too powerful for us stop. 

The transfer and sharing of knowledge and skills is a very high priority for development.  Technical cooperation has an important role to play.  But we need to do it much better.

Full disclosure: I myself was an ex-pat technical adviser in an African country for two years.  I know of what I speak. 

You may not have heard of service oriented architecture yet; and if you have have, you may think it is just a lot of hype.

But if you believe in SOA, you will have noticed that it could be the foundation of a solution to the UK Government's woes in the use of information technology.  I have written before here about the potential for a service-oriented architecture to enable government to deliver the benefits of integrated information systems while limiting the civil liberties risks of a large identity database.  And in a chapter in a new IBM book about transformation of government services, Capability, Capacity and Reform, I argue that instead of the government's vision of  data processing warehouses, the way to create more efficient and customer-oriented public services is to build smaller and more flexible shared service modules based on a common, cross-government IT architecture.

So I was interested to see that Accenture has bet $450 million of its own money over the next three years in developing new service-oriented architecture functionality.  That suggests that Accenture agrees that this is more than just hype.

Hat tip: Enterprise Web 2.0

</geek> 

At first, livestock owners were required to be in a county officially suffering a drought to collect the money. But ranchers who weren't eligible complained to their representatives in Washington, and in 2003 Congress dropped that requirement. Ranchers could then get payments for any type of federally declared "disaster." In some cases, USDA administrators prodded employees in the agency's county offices to find qualifying disasters, even if they were two years old or had nothing to do with ranching or farming.

If this were happening in an African country, there would be all kinds of complaints about corruption and poor governance.  There would be demands that we cut off aid until this kind of corruption be ended.

Contrary to popular belief, agricultural subsidies in OECD countries are not the most damaging part of the rigged international market for agriculture – that honour goes to import tariffs.  But they are a colossal waste of taxpayer money, and they contribute to the difficulties faced by agricultural producers in poor countries to make a living.  It is hard to understand why voters in developed countries put up with it.

I thought that I was pretty well informed about climate change, and frankly expected to be a bit bored. I did not really see how a film of somebody giving a powerpoint presentation was going to be all that interesting.   Boy, was that wrong. I found the film informative, gripping, even entertaining in places. I learned a lot, and the film increased my (inexpert) opinion that climate change is one of the most serious challenges facing the planet.

The film is more than just a presentation of charts and figures.  It cleverly weaves in Al Gore's personal narrative: the journey he made, as a student, as a Congressman, a Senator, as Vice President and as a Presidential candidate.  He comes across as smart, funny, likeable and utterly sincere. His story, and his insights into how public opinion gradually understands serious social challenges of this sort, give the film a liveliness, pace and emotion, instead of just a worthy-but-dull recital of the science.

The film finishes with an upbeat message: there is much that we can and should do to address global warming but we are fast running out of time.

Even if you think you know all about climate change, and are already committed to doing something about it, please go to see this film. Take a friend. You will enjoy it much more than you expect, and you will learn something. 

Human Rights Watch

“For the third year in a row, Darfur will be on the agenda at the G8 meeting,” said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “This year, the G8 must make a decisive public statement. As the killings continue, G8 leaders need to tell Khartoum that it has no alternative but to accept the deployment of a U.N. force in Darfur.”

Take a look at this BBC photoset to see what life is like in a camp in Darfur.

Syd Barrett

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd's first album, must rank as one of the finest debut albums of all time, and it is a testament to Barrett's genius.

As Barrett became more unreliable, possibly because of his use of drugs, the group hired Dave Gilmour so that there would be somebody playing the guitar when Barrett stopped.

When Barrett left the band (they simply decided not to pick him up in the tour bus on the way to a gig in Southampton), he had a wholly unsuccessful solo career, and ended up a recluse, living with his mother in Cambridge.

Shine On You Crazy Diamond was recorded by Pink Floyd in 1975, on the album Wish You Were Here, as a tribute to their lost friend, Syd Barrett.   

Remember when you were young
You shone like the sun
Shine on you crazy diamond
Now there's a look in your eyes
Like black holes in the sky
Shine on you crazy diamond
You were caught on the crossfire of childhood and stardom
blown on the steel breeze
Come you target for faraway laughter
Come on you stranger, you legend, you martyr, and shine!

Coincidentally Barrett made an unannounced appearance at the recording studio while the band was recording this track. They didn't even recognise him. 

With my sister Virginia visiting from Brighton, England, we have been touring the California wine region, which is an hour north of here.

Here is a photo of me and my sister drinking champagne at the Korbel cellars at 10am in the morning, at the start of a hard day’s tasting. Grethe made the ultimate sacrifice of being the designated driver.

The Cato Institute – a right-wing libertarian think-tank in Washington – has published an analysis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act:

The DMCA is anti-competitive. It gives copyright holders—and the technology companies that distribute their content—the legal power to create closed technology platforms and exclude competitors from interoperating with them. Worst of all, DRM technologies are clumsy and ineffective; they inconvenience legitimate users but do little to stop pirates.

Most papers from the Cato Institute are either obvious, or wrong, or (usually) both.  This paper is neither – full of interesting insights into why digital rights management is in the interests of neither the companies nor consumers.  It explains how digital rights management undermines the very characteristics we need for progress: interoperable products, consumer choice and competition.

As well as sharing these general concerns about digital rights management, I have a particular concern, which the paper touches on but does not discuss in detail.  I mainly use open source software: I am writing this using Firefox on a computer running Linux, with no proprietary or closed-source software.  Open source computing already provides much of the infrastructure of the internet (from email systems to the majority of web-servers) and is likely to play an increasingly important role for consumers over the coming years. But there is a fundamental inconsistency between using digital rights management to restrict what you can do with media files and open source applications.  With open source software, any user can change the line that says "do not allow file to be copied" to "allow file to be copied" – so DRM relies on the existence and widespread use of proprietary software.  And that is not acceptable to me.

I intended this as a spoof,
on November 3rd last year,
not as a recommendation!
 

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Truman Capote, a writer (author of Breakfast at Tiffanys and writer for the New Yorker) who becomes obsessed with the murder of a family in Kansas, and forms a bond with one of the men accused of the murder, Perry Smith (top row of photos).  Through his friendship with Smith, Capote researches material for his book, In Cold Blood, which is published to critical acclaim.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is astonishing as Capote – capturing not only the mannerisms and speech of Capote, but also manages to convey some of the turmoil and contradictions of the man who both sympathises (perhaps even loves) the accused men, and yet exploits their predicament.  Hoffman must be a candidate for Best Actor.

Definitely recommended.