Em.'s In & Outs

When I go to Québec city I'm so happy to see my science friends! Be it for the annual Spring Break reunion or for taking lenghtly walks at night, they're so cool! Just one example : Doom Leclerc! Doom surprises me enough by letting me know about a homeless friend he has that once was a show case journalist on national TV, before showing me this huge aquarium he keeps in his room. This last innovation of his is an example of aqua-culture; on top of the water lays alleys of plants, which can be lettuce, carrots, whatever, and in the water, there are fish. From my understanding, the big fish feed from smaller fish, whereas the plants grow from the nutrient-rich ''fish manure'' which is produced. It is done in a large scale in certain parts of the world, and it is almost what one could call a close system.


Another example of Doom's passion for sustainable science is his project of reuniting some of Beauce's most polluting farmers and convince them to become more independent energy-wise. What inspired him on that one is the case of a German Village who is totally autarcic by using bio-gas. The process is simple : the manure of cattle is recuperated and it is placed in a big opening with an overlaying dôme. In the absence of oxygen, the manure ferments, producing methane, a fossil fuel that can then be gathered and used instead of petroleum to operate farm machinery. The idea would also be applicable to individual households, which would then recycle their sewage to drag down their electricity bill! How cool is that?

Even coolest is that Oxfam Hong Kong (one of the biggest NGO in Hong Kong) already uses bio-gas as a way of curing a disease named fluorosis in South-Western China. The disease is caused by a certain type of coal, which is the most widely form of energy used by people to cook and heat their houses. With biogas, the population can become more healthy, a first step for getting out of poverty...

Is the uncomfortable feeling one gets when thinking emotions are in fact due to chemical releases of our brains into the blood stream comparable to the uneasiness of the human being to accept any new scientific break of the status quo? Could it be possible that the faculty of the human being to control his or her own addiction to certain emotions be related to its capacity of exercising his or her power of decision upon the likely position of an negative electric field around a positive kernel? What the Bleep do we Know is an enlightening movie showing how one's internal state of being impacts on, literally, the way one sees the world. I would recommend this movie for any long bus ride... I say long so you can watch it twice.

When one thinks about the ''Art of Conversation'', there seems to have a cliché of a young woman with her umbrella entertaining her gentleman callers with the newest gossips of the neighbourhood. But what if it was more about asking challenging questions?

The idea of the World Cafe emerged in order to canalize human creativity through the elaboration of an open space for businesses, NGOs or friends to collectively brainstorm in an efficient way. For people that sometimes loose their focus in group discussions (i.e. yours truly), this is a resource which is, without being completly revolutionary, kind of pleasant!

I’m just thinking considering I might be bored at some point during my year-and-a-half abroad, has anybody read a good book lately? :) Fiction if possible, as I think we’ll all be head over feet with administrative and academic literature!

My family is pretty proud, and they understand why I spend 300$ in books and not a penny on clothes. :)

I’ve been watching way more movies than reading books recently, but I still try to make a top 5.

1) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
2) The Prophet, Kahlil Gibran
3) Anything by Eduardo Galeano and George Sand (Chopin's mistress! wow!)
4) The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
5) Cien Anos de Soledad, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

There are three books I'm extremely looking forwards to read:

1) Vers le Sud, Daniel Lafferière
(On sex tourism. The other way around. Not rich executives going to South-East Asia, but on rich women going to Haiti to sleep with Black guys.

2) Jacques le Fataliste, Denis Diderot
(I read part of it in CÉGEP, the author is great at interpelling the reader. He is said to have invented a new type of narration).

3) Un dimanche à la Piscine de Kigali, Gil Courtemanche
(No explanation for that one. Apperently it's just divine)

My friend Corinne made a statement the other day that came across to me a little bit strangely. She said she didn't necessarily agree with the idea that Education is a Human Rights.

After a little bit of thought, it makes sense. It seems like as in many Human Rights issues, the answer given as to what is one's right depends on one's standpoint. People make their own hierarchy of rights; some people clearly would not identify with my thinking that the right to agency should be placed higher than than other rights.

In the realm of social economics, there is controversy around the elaboration of income-generating activities for children. Some people would prefer to see them in school. But what if the child's parents are bed-ridden and they are the only one to be healthy enough to gain money to pay for rent, food, medicine? But what if they themselves engage in unsafe trades and become sick at their turn? What do they want?

My friend Gilles-Philippe was doing research in El Salvador about child work in the sugar cane industry. He came up with the same sort of idea. There was a ban against Coca-Cola's use of child labor. Without their paid labor, the parents still did not have enough savings to send their kids to school, and the government promised series of technical training series to ''recycle'' the youth into productive activities, but they never occured. The problem here is that there is not always a viable alternative to child labor. Then... What's next?

I've been learning putonghua (mandarin Chinese) for three weeks today. Before I started learning it, I thought languages were easy to speak, ok to read and hard to write. Now I changed my mind! Mandarin is hard to speak, read and write! But it surprised me to also see that it was not as eccletic as I thought.

One character in mandarin corresponds to one syllab. Its writing is structured with a finite amount of type of strikes, and works with three alphabets. One is conceptual (for example, a roof on top of a woman is used to mean ''peacefulness''), one is hieroglyph-like (what you see if what you get) and one that is based on system of keys that come back in each word of a given category (for example, all insects will have a certain key in front of the character).


The prononciation is the funniest part. For me who's learning with a book, it's very hard to know if I do it right. Fortunately, there is the pinyin, the phonetic alphabet that translates the pictograms into latin letters. Even then though, there are four types of intonations. One in which your voice stays still, one in which it goes down on a letter, one in which it goes up, and another one on which it goes down and then up on the same letter. And making mistakes can bring up funny stuff! For example, saying ''ni'' with the wrong tone can make people think one said ''fat'' instead of ''you'' !!! Ah, ah :)

For good tricks on learning chinese online, check out Stian's blog.

Writing an Logical Framework Analysis (LFA) for a Project Management class was for me as much an opportunity to master my spreadsheet skills (in order to squeeze everything into one page!) than to actually do something relevant to my profession. I was told monitoring and evaluation is one of the core sector of NGO work in which economists are useful. Instead of being thought of as a mere administrative requirement, good M&E cements donor relationships and ensures a project doesn't screw up all along without anybody noticing it. I think that's a pretty noble task.

Now... How do I do this? I found a good website that, after eldis.org, is probably the most useful site in development field work I've ever seen. It comprises a toolkit of actual practical stuff people have to do in such a position. In three languages.

I heard the Lonely Planet now has a book about people's blogs to help you travel! If anybody has it, you let me know how it is hey... I myself found the most valuable information about my work placement in Bobo-Dioulasso by looking at people's personal pages. Check out this one : Emmanuel's page.

I also found someone really cool, who's in the same town working with the same partner organization than I will! Her insights put me back into track. Thanks Nathalie if you ever read this.

It is often said that AIDS is a disease of poverty, and that poverty is a situation in which people do not have options. An illustration of the dilemma of HIV positive mothers as to wheter they should breastfeed or not. The disease being transmissible between mother and child by breastfeeding, choosing not to breasfeed stands as a forced disclosure of women's status. Whereas there still is the debate whereas a widespread openess about the AIDS situation could be good by contributing to break myths about it, it seems to me that mothers choosing not to breastfeed may not always realize the consequences of using infant formulas, which are costly, not as nutritive and entails several other health risks. One just has to remember the Nestlé's Baby Bottle Scandal, an instance where women were manipulated and misinformed to generate profits for a multinational company.

This is yet another example of how, even if consumption patterns are relocated towards basic needs, the AIDS pandemic does increase the dependence of developing nations upon industrial goods produced outside their boundaries.

The other day I was looking to polish up my Portuguese (I still haven't ordered Harry Potter 6 in that language, oh my!) when I bumped into the movie Carandiru at Queen's Video.

The story takes place in Sao Paulo and relates the past life of prisoners in what used to be Latin-America's biggest jail. Based on a real story, the final scene tells about the 1992 massacre, in which the Brazilian police (which, I witness, is scary and beats up homeless kids in the streets of Sampa) killed over 100 prisonners over a riot that explosed over a banal disagreement. Interestingly enough, prisonners were trying to literally use their HIV positive status as a biological weapon to try to save their lives. Basically, it tells the story of a double, even a triple, a quadruple stigma : that of HIV AIDS, Injectable Drug Users, Prisonners and Homosexuality.


It also made me think of another movie my mother and I watched the other day, Brokeback Mountain. I wonder how the story would have changed if the AIDS pandemic was going on in the 1960s; would the protagonist still have been killed or would people have been too scared to even approach gay men from the fear of becoming infected? It seems like the whole cowboy, and usually conservative mentality in Texas would have been more likely to suggest total abstinence than anything else to prevent the spread of HIV AIDS... There would probably be so much more cases here in North America if the outbreak started earlier in time, when the then stronger religious ''tradition'' resulted in people not wanting to be tested because of the resulting stigma...

AIDS was now by the U.S. declared an issue of National Security. I wonder if that's all it takes for them to start taking action to curb it...

The idea of Appropriate Technology (AT) is strange. It comes in handy when making a case for open-source software in developing nations! My prof of political economy was saying that since labor is the abundant factor in developing countries (in opposition to capital), then AT should be labor-intensive. I never really questioned this assertion before now. What if the population is affected by a high HIV prevalence rate? Then... Shouldn't it be labor-saving? This is yet another instance in which I found myself using academic words that I don't fully understand.

Thanks to ECMB06 - Intermediate MacroEconomics, now I recognize the HIV AIDS pandemic is silimar to an adverse IS curve shock in the Mundell-Fleming model. Which means : it is the exact same kind of phenomenom as the Great Depression. The dire fall in global ouput has (and probably will again because of the structural adjustement programs) been aggravated by a cut in government spending. This is disturbing; economists want to let people think that there will not be anything like the Great Depression again. I think it's just taking another form.

If you're interested in the economics of HIV AIDS, there is an amazing scholar named Joan Parker (thanks to Al for letting me know about her!) that writes about it. You can find two pieces of her work here : the overall issues paper and a paper on microfinance and HIV.

May 3rd was the official date of the presidential elections in Chad, Central Africa. Still carrying the lingers of April 13th rebel attacks on the capital city and enduring the bitterness of the boycot of all major opposition parties in the country, Idriss Déby is likely to continue is 16 year reign over the cradle of humanity. Earlier this week, the UN was building refugee camps in neighbouring Cameroon to prepare for what it thought would be an inflow of refugees from N'Djemena as the rebels (or mercenaries, depending on one's view point) were thought to invade the city. So far, so good, though... My friends in N'Djamena went out for a beer after the April 13th rebel attacks, and many expats in Canada decided not to cast a ballot, for the results of the election is known in advance.

While the results of the elections are not expected until May 14th, it seems like the polling itself went quite smootly, which can of course be associated with the high presence of French troops in the country. Even after having seen half the military fly to Darfur to plot a coup against his government last December, Déby is convinced in his own and his kinsmen's capacities of setting the rules of the game in Chad. He has indeed recently settled a dispute with the World Bank about the way oil revenues are used; he seem to have won his case in arguing the big money should serve for paying weapons to defend the country against Sudan, with which the civil war clearly is not as ''over'' as the Tripoli Agreements would like us to believe. One thing is that for sure the descendents of the Sao, a tribe famous for the exceptional height of its members, will need all their courage to go through this.

I will be working on an independent research contract for the beginning of the summer, looking into developing a live CD for teaching the use of open-source software to non-for-profit assocations for their media project.

I was reading the Economist Survey last week, which happened to be on New Media (April 22nd, Vol.379, Iss. 8474). The Survey was telling about an network named Second Life, whose members literally create their online avatar and start socializing, working, buying ventures and living in this frontier environment. People actually pay big money to buy pieces of land so they can create their virtual empire.


That day, I was thinking about how a Chadian friend was telling me about superstitions in his country, about how people gathered around a dead rebel to steal part of his clothing so that it would protect them against fire arms. And I was thinking that here in Canada we're not much better; how far can people really go when they want to ''start all over again''?

I just spend a whole week running around town (and canoeing across the lake!) to try to get a student visa for taking summer courses on the huge campus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I must admit I hardly ever had to do such a complicated administrative undertaking! I had to go dig all the way into my high school transcripts and ask the Caisse Desjardins in my home town for a bank draft in Hong Kong Dollars, which was an operation that is slightly less common over there than on Spadina street in Toronto where I usually do banking! The worst part is that before I got my offer of admission I was relaxing in the idea that I only needed a passport to enter the island (the Canadian government's website says students do not need a visa for studies under three months - I'm going 2 1/2 months).

Apparently Germany is more demanding than Hong Kong even and it is asking for applicants to furnish a proof of solvancy for 3000 CDN. I wonder how could Cuba be? Or mainland China?

Moral of the story : always double check with the partner institution before going on thinking you don't need a VISA :)