How to: Get around slow walkers

Bicycle bells are surprisingly effective. Caveat: this was tested in Japan. Will it work in the USA?

Bringing the Power of the Internet to the Poorest

Here's an interesting question: how do you bring the power of information from the internet to communities that lack access to the internet? Obstructions include infrastructure: power availability may fluctuate, and there are no internet service providers in the area. Affordability may be an issue. People may not be computer-literate – or even literate.

One nonprofit, Open Mind, led by Rose Shuman, is experimenting with bridging this information gap through the Question Box Project. A Question Box is a telephone intercom located in a common accessible area, like in the center of a village next to the shop. Pressing the green button on the intercom connects a person with an operator who knows English and the local language. Equipped with an internet connection, the operator can answer questions such as "cricket scores, paddy farming advice, codes to download songs on their mobiles, homework questions, University exam results, train schedules, commodity prices, and where to get a personal loan". Solar-powered Question Boxes can operate in the poorer places where power lines don't run.

As of January, 2009, 2 question boxes were in operation in greater Pune, India. There is also a pilot project in Uganda, where instead of a physical box people can call in via ubiquitous cell phones and ask operators questions.

Other coverage:
From BoingBoing, by Cory Doctorow, 2008.03.04 Tue
From ABC News, by Ned Potter, 2008.03.05 Wed
From The Telegraph, by Peter Lyle, 2008.03.30 Sun
From Indian Express, by Devjani Roy, 2009.01.05 Mon
From Doomsday Labs, 2009.01.28 Wed

Online Social Networking: Health and Wellness Benefits for Seniors

Online, 'a Reason to Keep on Going'
By Stephanie Clifford, New York Times, 2009.06.02 Tue

There seems to be a growing consensus online that connections to friends and social networks are the key to happiness and longevity. In the past, as people became older, their personal connections tended to decay as friends physcially moved, died or became incapacitated. But online social networks have the ability to reverse that trend, so that older people can meet new people and connect to their peers.

Recognizing a need, Chris McWade co-founded MyWay Village, which runs a social network targeted specifically for older people. Members can upload photos, send messages, play games, and post stories with family members and other members. But seniors are also on more traditional social networking sites. One senior woman, Mollie Bourne, stays connected with her grandchildren through Facebook.

Cash for Good Behavior: A New Welfare Model

New York Times Magazine: A Payoff Out of Poverty?
By Tina Rosenberg, Published 2008-12-21 Sunday

Instead of the welfare state, which does not incentivize the poor to improve their position, Oportunidades, the "de facto welfare system in Mexico", gives the poor money in exchange for a wide variety of good behaviors, including going to a clinic, children's school attendance, and attending educational workshops. They publish all the data they collect, and it is working by nearly every standard: malnutrition is on the decrease, less people are in poverty, illness frequencies have dropped and more children are staying in school. In personal interviews, Tina Rosenberg says that Oportunidades has also changed the culture of alcoholism, victimhood, machismo and thinking only in the present that promotes poverty.

The fancy name for the program is "conditional cash transfers", supported both by the World Bank and the Inter-American development bank.

At least 30 countries have now adopted Oportunidades, most of them in Latin America, but not all: countries now using or experimenting with some form of conditional payments include Turkey, Cambodia and Bangladesh. Last year, officials from Indonesia, South Africa, Ethiopia and China contacted or visited Mexico to investigate. Perhaps the most startling iteration is in New York City. Opportunity NYC, a pilot program begun last year after Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited Mexico, will test whether the Oportunidades model can help the New York neighborhoods where poverty is passed down from parent to child. Britain has been successfully using a form of conditional cash transfers to keep teenagers in school and is now running pilots to broaden the program to other areas.

In addition to the results, some of the ideas here are also interesting in terms of what people think about the causes of poverty and whether it can be solved.

Liberals have largely abandoned entitlements — the so-called nanny state — that took care of people with welfare and other payments while demanding little or nothing on their part. And most conservatives now acknowledge that government must play a role in fighting poverty. But that role is taking a new form. Lawrence M. Mead, a political-science professor at New York University and a former Republican Congressional staff member, calls it “the new paternalism.” The nanny state offered unconditional love; the new paternalism is tough love, directly aimed at smashing the culture of poverty. Paul Starobin, a staff correspondent for The National Journal, has coined the term “daddy state” — government as lifestyle supervisor and enforcer of civic responsibilities...

Conditional-cash-transfer programs, part of the new paternalism, defy the traditional poverty wisdom on both left and right. But intriguingly, they are postideological in another sense too. Do the poor fall into the culture of poverty for structural reasons, or behavioral ones? Oportunidades and Opportunity NYC have a novel answer to that question: maybe it doesn’t matter.