(Not my fault, really. Joi Ito was kind enough to invite several Global Voices folks to join him at WITNESS’s benefit gala. We spent much of the time trying to figure out what a Global Voices gala would look like - it probably wouldn’t be hosted by Peter Gabriel and Angelique Kidjo, for one thing… not that we’d complain if they wanted to help us fundraise…)

Darius Cuplinskas, head of OSI’s Information Program, framed the discussion by outlining three stories we tell ourselves about online media and their effect on society:

- A picture of sunny optimism, articulated by writers like Don Tapscott, who see the opportunity to contribute and collaborate online as creating a generation of citizens who are more involved and creative than a previous generation of passive media consumers

- A dystopian vision advanced by folks like Andrew Keen, suggesting that the unedited blather of user-generated content will cause us to devalue and neglect expert content and may decrease meaningful participation

- A nuanced view, advanced by thinkers like Cass Sunstein (perhaps more in “Infotopia” than in Republic.com 2.0″) that suggests that new media likely enhanced democracy, but entails new risks, like the isolation and polarization that might come from ideological echo chambers.

These theories, Darius argues, are largely based on research in open societies, especially on the US. But there’s lots less work on the effects of new media in other parts of the world, especially in closed societies, and much of the work that’s done is incomplete and sometimes inaccurate.

John Kelly has been advocating some interesting new methods to explore the blogospheres of open and closed societies - he’s best known for his work visualizing clusters of blogs in the Iranian blogosphere. His method creates fascinating maps of the connections of blogs, clustering blogs together when they link to the same media sources. (If you and I both link to the Christian Science Monitor on a regular basis, we’ll appear close to each other in his maps.) John’s PhD research at Columbia focused on the English-language blogosphere, where he was able to cluster blogs into four major “haystacks” - left and right-leaning political blogospheres, a tech blogosphere, and a UK cluster. (The blogs considered were the 8,000 top blogs as ranked in terms of incoming links, so the patterns displaed are likely very different than from a random sample of blogs.) Smaller clusters exist around science, environmentalism, law, international security and parenting.

One of the major insights Kelly was able to offer in the Iranian blogosphere was the idea that there were lots of blogs that didn’t feature the voices of pro-Western reformers. In fact, the reformers celebrated in Western media were a small cluster, significantly smaller than a pop culture community, a community focused on Perisna poetry, and a number of conservative clusters. One conservative cluster included political bloggers strongly supportive of the Iranian state, but often highly critical of Ahmedinejad. Kelly refers to another conservative cluster as “the 12ers”, adherents to a branch of Shia theology which is awaiting messianic appearance of the 12th imam. It makes sense that western media focused on the liberals, as they’re a group that frequently wrote in English and engaged with Western media, but we’ve got an inaccurate picture of the Iranian blogosphere if we concentrate on that sector.

A new generation of Kelly’s maps overlaws data from the Open Net Initiative, showing which blogs get blocked by Iranian authorities. While lots of liberal blogs are blocked, there’s a decent number of conservative and poetry blogs that get blocked as well - Kelly explains that some of the love ghazals get pretty passionate, and that fervent support of the institution of “temporary marriage” occasionally gets some conservative religious bloggers into trouble.

The maps can “pivot” around a term - it’s possible to see which blogs refer to a term like “America”: religious blogs drop out and political ones will stay. Certain terms - “the 12th imam” - show up only in certain blog communities and are essentially invisible in others. It’s also possible to use the maps to show who’s linking to what - there’s far more linkage to international media like the BBC’s Persian service from pop culture and left-wing blogs than from the right blogs, for instance.

Each language community Kelly has studied shows different patterns and clustering. Arabic blogs appear to cluster geographically, with large, identifiable Saudi, Egyptian and Kuwaiti communities, and some small “trading zones” where there’s lots of cross-linking between globs from different nations. Other blogospheres are harder to explain in terms of clustering - a map of the Russian blogosphere looks incredibly isolated and separated - this is likely a result of the fact that most Russian bloggers use LiveJournal, and the service makes it easy for communities to have small, closely linked circles of friends, which lead to different graphs than blogospheres that evolve on traditional blogging tools.

Kelly is cognizant of a possible critique of his work - these maps are pretty and fascinating, but so what? He suggests that the maps help show the conditions necessary for a healthy online public sphere. We need bloggers, memetrackers and search engines, but we also need rewards within the community to participate. These rewards are generally social capital - attention from other bloggers. High-profile bloggers in the US are motivated by the network of peers they’re relating to online. It’s likely that these motivations are constant across blogospheres and that mapping can help show how social capital flows in different online spaces.

I’m fascinated by John’s work, but I always wonder how to resolve his data-based generalizations with the sorts of observations I make based on our work with Global Voices, looking at a comparatively smaller number of blogs in some detail. I talked briefly about:

- the Ethiopian blogosphere, and how a government-led crackdown on online speech turned off a critical part of the blog ecosystem - the attention bloggers were able to get from readers. With no readers, bloggers gave up, even if they were able to edit their blogs through proxy servers.

- the tolerance for opposition speech in the Zimbabwean blogosphere (indeed, the near absence of speech supporting the current government), which might reflect a commitment to public debate, an inability to effectively filter the web, or the belief that online speech isn’t going to reach beyond an elite audience that’s already unlikely to support the ruling government.

- Michael Anti’s concern that widespread surveillance and pervasive censorship in the Chinese online world is sending activists away from Web2.0 tools and towards an earlier generation of tools which are less powerful, but harder to control.

- the encouraging examples of Kenyan bloggers ability to become an alternative to traditional journalism systems during political crisis, where bloggers who rarely addressed political issues previously became engaged in reporting the news. It’s possible that healthy, thriving blogospheres like Kenya’s are resources that can be activated for social and political purposes when social conditions dictate.

Porochista Khakpour, an Iranian-American journalist and novelist based in NYC, offered a reaction to Kelly’s talk as a regular reader of Iranian blogs and social media. She points out that the book sharing site Goodreads has become a huge social space for Iranians - roughly 20% of the site’s users are Iranian. The site’s managed to stay off the radar of Iranian authorities because it’s not explicitly political, though it’s now starting to be blocked by some Internet service providers.

Khakpour’s traces her personal fascination with the Internet to her conservative upbringing. “I wasn’t allowed to sleep over at other kid’s houses or go to school dances. So I got obsessed with chat rooms” as a space in which she could socialize online, even if she couldn’t be social offline. She’s been obsessed in the past with Friendster and with blogs, and now with Goodreads, and is preparing to check herself into a residential facility for internet addiction… but only because she thinks it will make a good magazine article.

She tells us that the Iranian obsession with the Internet is a recent manifestation of a general fascination with communication technology. During the 1979 revolution, modern technologies - cassette tapes and fax machines - brought the Islamist government into power. Now the Internet has provided spaces not available in modern Iranian society. When a crackdown on the independent press put 1500 reporters out of work in 2001, it helped spark Iranian interest in blogs as an alternative space for reporting and political discussion. Now services like Yahoo 360 - enormously popular in Iran - are serving as a public space for youth who have no spaces where they can congregate. (This resonates with danah boyd’s observations about the internet as an alternative public space for American teens.)

One of the blogs Khakpour is most fascinated by is Life Goes on in Tehran, a photoblog put together by an Iranian determined to challenge stereotypes about his nation and people. Shooting primarily with a cameraphone, the author - “A” - is able to document spaces like house parties where contemporary Tehranis carve out social spaces in what can be a very constrained society.

“The internet is a tool for combatting cultural isolation,” she suggests, explaining that Iran now has higher internet penetration than any other nation in the region, including Israel. She points out the irony that Iran is 9th in the world in terms of blogs hosted, but is also on the list of 15 enemies of the Internet. The truth is that the Internet is perfect for an Iran “taken hostage by fundamentalists” - the anonymity of the medium “is good for passive aggression… or just aggression. And it reflects Iran’s obsession with safety, which precedes the events of 1979.

I’d love to hear Khakpour speak at more length at some point - she drops an amazing wealth of details in her talk. Two that struck me in particular - “Tehran is filled with grafitti that includes URLs - it’s probably the nerdiest grafitti ever.” But it’s important to remember that cultural values in Iran can be very different than in the US. She tells us that an intern with Goodreads started receiving a flood of complaints about the profiles of women with Persian names. Over time, the intern figured out that the complaints were coming from Iranian men - the women in the profiles were photographed without scarves over their hair. Goodreads concluded that this didn’t constitute an inappropriate profile by their rules and left the profiles in place.

Evgeny Morozov, whose wide-ranging interests center on the transformative power of the internet - suggests that in observing communications in closed societies we need to consider government use of technologies as well as activist uses. Referencing the “50 cent party” in China, he suggests that governments are finding ways to use the same tools as activists to support government ideology, creating astroturf campaigns and clogging spaces for dialog with propoganda.

He suggests that, just as Goodreads has emerged as a social space in Iran due to the fact that it’s not obviously political or social, we can expect much of what’s interesting in closed societies to be hidden from easy view or analysis. This is a possible shortcoming in Kelly’s analysis - it’s easy to study blogs, but in countries where blogs are regularly censored or blocked, the interesting conversations are going to be carefully hidden and may defy easy analysis.

Governments, Morozov warns, are developing more subtle and sophisticated ways of discouraging people from blogging than the ham-handed Ethiopian approach I described. The most credible voice in the Ossetian war, he tells us, was a Georgian blogger who’d fled Abkhazia for Russia. His LiveJournal account was highly critical both of Moscow and of Sakashvili, and was widely read in the Russian blogosphere. But a flurry of denial of service attacks, launched by a set of zombie computers likely controlled by Russian hackers, disabled LiveJournal for an hour, and forced the owners of LiveJournal to ask the blogger to leave the service so that future attacks wouldn’t take down the platform. He moved to Wordpress, but had the same experience. If governments are able to unleash attacks that can disable whole platforms, it’s likely that they’ll successfully silence many online voices.

Darius summarizes a lively discussion and question and answer period with the observation of two major themes in our discussion:

- Alongside the emergence of explicitly political and activist behavior online, there’s a much larger set of banal, “hedonistic” form of online behavior, which might serve as “dark matter”, capable of becoming political or journalistic if there’s a demand for such behavior

- State responses to social media are getting increasingly subtle, moving beyond simple censorship and blogger intimidation to more nuanced responses, like targetted DDoS attacks. Truly sophisticated approaches are trying to marginalize political speech and suggest that the appropriate use for online tools are these more banal uses, making dissidence socially deviant and less desirable online.

While I admire the clean technicality of Hakuho’s sumo, and am glad that he’s getting the love and respect of the Japanese sumo community, he just doesn’t excite and surprise me when he’s inside the straw ridge. Ama, on the other hand, continues to light up my sumo life. No longer the sub-120kg flyweight of his youth, he’s still one of the smallest men in sumo at 129kg - you can tell who he is in footage of any match, as he’s the little guy who’s blazingly fast.

I can’t find video footage of today’s victory yet, but I offer the above video for a clinic in how little guys can defeat extremely talented, significantly larger rikishi. (Above, Ama defeats Hakuho in the May basho.) There’s a reason Hakuho trains as often as he can with Ama - it’s not just that the Mongolians enjoy hanging out together, but that Ama is the hardest working, craftiest, most patient performer in sumo today.

When Ama entered sumo, it was assumed that he’d never be a candidate for Yokozuna. He’s just too small, and early in his career, he’s been inconsistent. But sumo fans have been watching Kyushu closely, because Ama is making a very serious run at Ozeki, the second-highest rank in sumo. To become Ozeki, it’s generally assumed that a rikishi needs to win 33 matches in three tournaments - an average of 11 matches per tournament. Ama comes in with 22 victories in the last two tournaments, but just winning 11 probably won’t do it here. Since Asashoryu is out and since the Ozeki ranks are, frankly, pretty pathetic (Kaio has withdrawn with a leg injury. Kotooshu is 6-6, Chiyotaikai 7-5 - only Kotomitsuke is guaranteed a winning record (kachi-koshi) at 9-3…), Ama’s going to need to do something special to win promotion.

Beating a Yokozuna is always something special. One critical detail sumo fans will be watching for: how do these new cushions fly? It’s traditional for the fans in the good seats to throw their cushions in the air when a yokozuna is defeated. Always looking for ways to make their sport less exciting and accessible, Nihon Sumo Kyokai has now banned cushion throwing and introduced new, heavier cushions which are harder to throw. I’m willing to bet that didn’t prevent some zabuton from taking flight earlier today. I know I would have had mine in the air, even if it meant being thrown out of the stadium. (The yokozuna match is always last, so it would be an excellent time to be escorted out…)

Will Ama beat Hakuho and win this tournament? That’s really hard to predict - when Hakuho is wrestling well, Ama and Asashoryu are the only rikishi I expect to give him trouble. One’s on the sidelines, and he just lost to the other. But if Hakuho stumbles and Ama plows through the remaining three opponents, it’s hard to imagine the JSA denying him the Ozeki rank. Right? (I’m trying to convince myself here - I’m so baffled by how these decisions get made that very little would surprise me.)

There’s skepticism within the Global Voices community about Hossein’s arrest. Our Persian-language editor, Hamid Tehrani, has expressed concern about the credibility of the newspaper reporting Hossein’s arrest. Sami Ben Gharbia, in posting about the arrest on the Global Voices Advocacy site, put “arrest” in quotation marks. Both Hamid and Sami are reading Persian-language sources, trying to get a better sense for what’s actually going on. It doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense to me that a blogger who’s become a major supporter of the Iranian government would be arrested for previous travels and writings, but as I mentioned, we’re all trying to get more details and understand what’s going on.

If Hossein is being detained based on his trip to Israel and on absurd allegations of spying, this is a major injustice, not to mention a phenomenally stupid action by Iranian authorities. I hope we will get news shortly that Hossein was questioned and released, or that the report was inaccurate, but I know that bloggers - including those who vehemently disagree with his recent writing - will rally to his support.

The Times of London offers a backgrounder on Hossein, but isn’t able to confirm his arrest beyond the Jahan News report, which it describes as “a conservative website reputedly close to Tehran’s intelligence community”.

From the ICC’s Live Piracy Map 2008 - attacks and encounters with pirates in the Gulf of Aden

I listened to stories on Somali piracy on NPR and the BBC World Service while driving into Boston yesterday, and I was surprised that coverage of the events on these excellent broadcasters was so superficial. The story appeared twice and hour, and included updates on the position of the ship, but didn’t ever drill into the circumstances in Somalia that have made southern Somalia such a basketcase. The BBC story referenced Siad Barre and the last two decades of chaos, but didn’t dip into the recent history - the rise of the Union of Islamic Courts, the alliance between the transitional federal government and Ethiopia (with US intelligence support), the increasing inability of the TFG to govern effectively, the rise of the al-Shabab.

The Associated Press commissioned an interesting report (which I’ve summarized here) on youth consumption of news media. One of their most interesting findings was the discovery that young people refresh news continually out of boredom, but feel like they never get depth or resolution to the stories they’re following. This story strikes me as a perfect example of an opportunity to add depth. Instead of updating the position of the tanker off the coast of Eyl, why not take five minutes and explain the failure of the transitional government to control Mogadishu and its complete lack of influence over Puntland? You’ve caught our attention with piracy - why not tell a slightly more complex story about one of the more important conflicts in Africa today?

Al Jazeera has been offering better coverage than many other news agencies, in part because they’ve got several Somali reporters. They offered an interesting perspective about a month ago, examining claims by the pirates who’d seized the transport ship carrying Ukranian tanks (Remember that story? How’d that one end?) that ransoms were being demanded to provide funds to clean up toxic waste off the Somali coast. It’s certainly true that large amounts of toxic waste are being dumped on the coast of Somalia, and likely that some European firms are involved with selling illegal “disposal” services for radioactive and medical waste on the Somali coast, though it’s probably a stretch to consider the pirates a coast guard trying to prevent illegal dumping.

I don’t know whether Martin Fletcher, writing in the Times of London, was motivated by the piracy stories to offer his thoughts on Somali governance and the Bush administration’s failures. He argues that the Bush administration’s support for the Transitional Federal Government and for a war fought with Ethiopian troops and American intelligence “helped to destroy that wretched country’s best chance of peace in a generation, left more than a million Somalis dead, homeless or starving, and achieved the precise opposite of its original goal.” Before the offensive, the UIC had managed to bring some semblance of stability to Somalia - markets were reopening in Mogadishu, the qat trade had quieted, and as Fletcher reports, “For the first time that most Somalis could remember, they were walking around their shattered capital in safety, even at night.”

The UIC, as my friend Abdurahman Warsame has explained, was an umbrella of groups, including moderate islamists largely interested in stability and extremists. US policy focused on the extremists, and backed their ouster by Ethiopian troops, installing a trasitional government that has very little local power or authority and has failed, utterly, at maintaining peace after Ethiopian troops pulled out. (Lots and lots more about the TFG, Ethiopia and the US role here, linking to a pile of earlier blog posts on the topic.) UIC splinter groups, including al-Shabab, have engaged in an insurgency that may have claimed 10,000 lives and forced more than a million people from their homes. Fletcher argues - persuasively, in my opinion - that UIC might have continued to centralize control and rule Somalia with a moderate hand, while there’s virtually no doubt that al-Shabab will enforce extremely strict sharia law, will likely seek to eliminate other UIC factions and will undoubtably provide sanctuary and shelter for Al Qaeda.

BBC’s stories yesterday morning didn’t focus on terrorism or fragile states, but on the way in which the pirate port of Eyl has become a boomtown. (This isn’t a knock on the author, Mary Harper, who’s written excellent pieces of analysis regarding Somalia, just surprise at this bit of focus.) My favorite detail in the piece - many of the crew members on hijacked ships don’t like Somali food, so “special restaurants have even been set up to prepare food for the crews of the hijacked ships.”

For a sense of how weird it must be for Eyl to be a boomtown, I recommend the video above. It’s a piece of travelogue from YouTube shot by “Sool“, who lives in Canada but hails from Hargeisa, Somaliland. In this video, posted in 2006, he describes Eyl: “this place is a lost town where only 2 cars a in 2 weeks come it’s so nice a cool place to chill”. Perhaps it’s a bit more lively these days.

My friends at Foreign Policy Passport highlighted the International Chamber of Commerce’s “live piracy map“, which is tracking this year’s rash of piracy attacks in the Gulf of Aden and around the world. They note that West Africa and Indonesia also have serious problems with piracy. I spent a while clicking around the map today and was interested to discover that many of the West African “pirate attacks” look more like breaking and entering than terror on the high seas. The attacks in the Ghanaian port of Tema appear to be men climbing onto the ships from the docks and attempting to open hatches on deck to steal stuff. Bad, yes, but hardly the high-seas drama we’re seeing across the continent.

It is interesting to note the small concentration of attacks - including a hijacking - near Port Harcourt, in the troubled Niger Delta. Given the instability and ongoing violence targetting oil facilities, I would have expected more reported attacks. I wonder if the detailed coverage of the east African attacks might lead to copycat techniques in other parts of the world that are already experiencing sustained conflict and fragile government.

The gridlock economy explains the current fiscal crisis, Heller tells us, if we focus on the ownership of mortgages. Historically, lenders and borrowers knew each other. Banks didn’t like forclosing - they lose money on forclosures - so they were willing to re-negotiate bad loans. But loans aren’t owned by a single bank now, but by thousands of people, as they’ve been securitized and subdivided. As a result, it’s almost impossible to renegotiate these agreements, and foreclosures have become widespread.

He offers other examples, from biotech, telecoms and urban planning. A major pharma company wanted to bring an Altzheimber’s drug to market, but knew they’d experience patent challenges from small companies that own patents on individual neurotransmitter pathway. This company found itself negotiating with a table filled with patent-holders, each of which was convinced it held the key patent in making a functional drug. The company ended up shelving the drug rather than completing the negotiations for fear that such a complex deal was impossible.

There’s been a massive increase in patents on DNA - more than 40,000 patents awarded in recent years. This is the result of massive investment and patenting in this area. This investment hasn’t led to new classes of drugs - instead, we’ve seen a stagnation in pharma innovation.

The most underused natural resource in America, Heller claims, is electromagnetic spectrum. We’re stuck with a licensing policy put into place under Calvin Coolidge, which doesn’t recognize any of the technological innovation that’s happened between then and now. The system is geographically fragmented and non-transferrable, and leads to a system where the US is falling behind other advanced nations in broadband penetration. Spectrum gridlock prevents the emergence of high-speed wireless services, he argues.

Why do we get stuck in airports? Because we’re massively underserved by airports. With twenty new runways, we’d end routine air delays in the US. But there’s been only one new airport built since 1978 - Denver. Real estate gridlock has made it possible for any community near an airport to stop expansion by refusing to sell land. We’re finally seeing this unlock with Dulles, Chicago and Seattle airports all building new runways, but Heller believes it’s a major problem.

Real-estate gridlock can help explain the slow growth of wind power as well. It’s possible to generate massive power in the center of the US, by building huge farms in places like the Dakotas. But the demand for green power is on the coasts, and it would require infrastructure buildout to create transmission lines.

In a different field, gridlock has changed the arts. Early rappers rhymed over a complex wealth of samples (think Paul’s Boutique) - now rappers license a single sample and build songs around it to avoid copyright conflict.

Heller believes that a common thread in all of these cases is the disappearance of a tight linkage between ownershpi and use. In the past, there was little distance between the patent and the product, the land ownership and the property development. But innovation these days is about assembing resources. You need multiple pieces of protected property to achieve innovation in semiconductors, drug discovery, software or telecoms. It’s true in the arts as well, with the rise of the maship, and illustrated by the difficulty of releasing documentary films. (See the difficulties regarding the docmentary Eyes on the Prize, due to copyright issues.)

To describe this situation, Heller has coined the phrase, “The Tragedy of the Anticommons”. This is in contrast to the tragedy of the commons: when anyone can use a resource, it’s likely to get overused. With too few owners, overuse is a common outcome, because rational individuals will prioritize their needs over collective goods. This was a critical insight for environmentalists in the 1960s, helping unite a large number of environmental problems into a common phenomenon. Private property was often prescribed as a solution to tragedy of the commons solutions, assuming that a property owner would consider long-term implications of development for her property rather than permitting overuse.

Heller argues that, in many cases, we’ve skated right past private property and into anti-commons, characterized by underuse. If we’ve got too many owners, there can be too little use of a resource. We don’t see the anti-commons tragedy as clearly, as it’s characterized by the absence of innovation. “Where do you go to protest that a drug didn’t come to market or to complain that your cellphone is so poor?” With this new concept, Heller hopes to rope together a set of disparate problems with a similar set of ownership structures.

There are solutions to the problem, Heller promises, though his talk stops short of exploring those in detail. He hints that the discussions need to center on reforming patent laws invented for an age before DNA patents, or telecom patents and spectrum allocations appropriate to an earlier technological age.

Around the Berkman table there’s some skepticism about the idea of anticommons. Pushed on research in the field, Heller admits (and is clear in his book) that research on pharma companies reveals that they don’t feel they’re blocked by patent gridlock. Heller argues that it’s hard to ask practicioners about innovations they’re not making - asking early airplane builders about passenger aircraft would have revealed skepticism about the whole proposition, not the problem of land use and public airports.

Yochai Benkler, who’s written at length about the economics of commons production, pushes Heller for details, embracing the idea of the anticommons, but looking for specific ways out: do we need more commons? lower transaction costs? spot markets that make it easier to transact around property? Heller (correctly?) summarizes his question, “Very nice, but so what?” He offers a possible way out: in cases of scarcity, private property makes sense, while in situations with no scarcity, a commons model makes more sense. If it’s possible to use telecoms whitespace in a non-rivalrous fashion, spectrum should be a commons; if not, perhaps we need a more intelligent form of private property.

Heller worries that people aren’t taking suggestions for solving these problems seriously enough. He’s offered a solution for “eminent-domain abuse”, where the state can seize private property with compensation but not the owner’s consent. He argues that eminent domain is never fair to the property owner and always underprices - if the price was truly the price the owner wanted for the land, she’d be willing to sell. Heller authored a paper for the Harvard Law Review focused on “land-assembly districts”, a way in which communities could cooperate to assemble and sell their land and avoid expropriation. He’s concerned that the article, now out half a year, hasn’t received a single comment, which makes him wonder about the value of articles versus books.

Benkler ultimately sees the problem about a mis-definition of the boundaries of property, suggesting that the gridlock scenario is a specific manifestation of poor definitions of property and a poor transactional system. Clearly, that’s the beginning of a much longer conversation, and one I’m unqualified to act as scribe for.

Other accounts of the event from friends David Weinberger and Lokman Tsui.

(The US has been unwilling to sign the Ottawa treaty agreed to by 154 countries banning anti-personnel mines. The Bush administration has offered an “alternative” policy that’s gained little international traction. One of the sticking points is a possible exception for the Korean DMZ, where the US relies heavily on mines to maintain a large land border.)

Mine removal is a topic that’s generated a great deal of innovative thinking in the engineering and social change communities. One of the favorite projects of green innovation folks like my friends at Worldchanging.com has been the Arsena project to genetically engineer a flowering weed that can detect landmines. The plant - a modified thales cress - turns red in the presence of nitrogen dioxide, a product of the degredation of the explosives in landmines.

Unfortunately, the thales cress project never really achieved its goals - the flower was too sensitive, leading to a large number of false positives. In March, the Arsena team transfered the genes from the thales cress to tobacco, looking for a hardier organism. Now they’ve given up on the project entirely, focusing instead on investment in mined land, rather than on new detection technologies and, unintentionally I’m sure, robbing the green engineering community of one of their (our?) favorite examples.

Fortunately, Bart Weetjens is here to help, and he’s got lots of backup: cages filled with African giant pouched rats. The rats have an amazing sense of smell, and Weetjens has trained rats to detect landmines by scent. The rats are too light to trigger the mines (though they look roughly as large as my cat), but they stand on the mine and dig until a handler picks them up, rewards them with food and removes the ordnance. The rats have already cleared 416,500 square meters of minefield, and can detect more mines in an hour than a professional human deminer can in a day.

I met Weetjens in Dubai at an absurdly lavish banquet put on by an Emirati real estate firm for WEF attendees. More to the point, since the banquet was far off in the desert, I met him on the 90 minute bus ride, when a group of us in the back of the bus started talking about Africa-focused projects. My first question to Weetjens: “So you’re a bioengineer?” “Nope. I’m a mechanical engineer who really likes rats.” According to his biography on the Ashoka website, Weetjens was fascinated both by weaponry and rodents as a child, so his current interest seem perfectly logical given his history. He now runs a social venture called Apopo that tries to harness rats’ talents for the benefit of humanity.

Why rats? He was hoping you’d ask. The Apopo site features a wonderful section called “Hero Rats“, which outlines the abilities of the robust rodents. As well as being light, and blessed with an amazing sense of smell, rats are easy to breed, relatively easy to train, easier to house and feed than dogs, willing to work with different handlers (a problem for dogs, evidently), and surprisingly cute. (You’ll be unsurprised to discover that you can adopt a rat for 5€ a month. And yes, you can send them email and they’ll mail you back. Or their handlers will. I’m not really sure.)

So here’s the truly amazing thing - Apopo is now looking at other applications for rodent-based sensing. Weetjens and crew are training rats to smell tuberculosis in sputum samples. Early tests suggest that rats can perform this task far more efficiently than lab technicians - rats evaluate several hundred samples in the time a human technician with a microscope can evaluate twenty samples. Weetjens admitted to me that he and his team don’t know what the rats are smelling - they’re now doing gas chromatography to compare samples and see if they can figure out the chemical mechanism for TB detection.

What would be truly amazing is if rats are able to detect between TB strains. One of the most serious problems associated with XDR TB is the difficulty of culturing the bacteria and distinguishing between “ordinary”, drug resistant, multiply drug-resistant and extremely drug resistant TB - I have no idea whether the strains are sufficiently different to make rat-based testing realistic, but it would be a fascinating research project…

My favorite thing about Apopo is not the rats… though I would confess to having falled in love with Kim, pictured above with her handler, Saidi. It’s the location of the project - Morogoro, Tanzania, based at the Sokoine University of Agriculture. (Morogoro is roughly halfway between Dar and Dodoma, for those of you who know Tanzania.) It would be possible to do his research in his native Belgium, but Weetjens is trying to bring research opportunities and jobs to this community as well as developing an innovative new strategy. I think that’s phenomenally cool, and wonder what Apopo will figure out what to teach rats next.

Now Ghana faces an election between perennial contender, Dr. John Atta Mills and Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, former foreign minister for Kufuor. Early polling showed a very tight race, though a more recent poll shows strong support for Akufo-Addo.

Akufo-Addo is seen as a successor to Kufuor, who remains quite popular nationally and internationally. Professor Atta Mills served as vice-president to Jerry Rawlings, who took power in Ghana for the first time in 1979 and stepped down in 2000. There’s some fear that Rawlings would be controlling an Atta Mills presidency - a fear Rawlings recently addressed while lambasting the ruling New Patriotic Party. Of course, Rawlings also insists that the 2004 election - widely viewed as free and fair - was rigged, suggesting that just a little bit of partisanship might affect the ageing leader’s view of the world. And some of his statements do seem like he’s do better just to shut up: “It is foolish talk that the NPP is going round propagating that I will control Mills and kill him if Ghanaians vote for Mills, and give power to my wife.”

Because Ghana is blessed with a stable democracy and a free press, elections can be a pretty colorful affair. Joy Online reports that candy-sellers are doing a brisk business in sweets wrapped in partisan wrappers, the umbrella of the NDC and the elephant of the NPP. The other political parties, likely to get less than 2% of the vote, haven’t merited their own sweets, and the sweet sellers explain that they’re non-partisan, simply trying to make a buck… sorry, make a cedi. But this can get tricky: “‘The selling of these has become political. An NPP faithful will not take kindly to it if you give them an NDC candy,’ Maame Akua, a toffee seller at the Kwame Nkrumah Circle intimated.”

Feeling the need to distinguish their candidate with something other than toffees, the NDC has begun an interesting electoral strategy. Instead of promoting a ticket of Professor Atta Mills and vice-presidential candidate John Mahama, the NDC has launched a new campaign with banners showing Atta Mills and US president-elect Barack Obama. According to reporters at the two major radio stations in Accra, NDC has also changed its election slogan to cement an Obama connection:

“The party has as well adopted a new slogan: ‘Obama Nie, Atta Mills Nie’, which translates ‘This is Obama: This is Atta Mills’ and printed it on its new campaign materials.”

The connection isn’t completely baseless, argues Isaac Yeboah of JoyFM - NDC is loosely associated with the Democratic Party in the US and the NPP with the Republicans, even sharing their elephant. But implying an Obama endorsement for the NDC is probably a bridge too far, and may reflect NDC panic at current polling numbers.

I’d call the Obama transition team and ask for their comment, but I somehow suspect they’re a little busy…