This is a really interesting article:
Critical GIS: Making Judgements Under Uncertainty
Read it and tell me whether you actually got the right answer to the Vietnam example the first time. I certainly didn't.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Here's a cool new toy to play with! The quality of the data will have to increase for it to be really used as a research tool. I do have one question, though. How did these companies get the images in the first place? Was there some big truck with a bunch of cameras on it rolling down the streets of New York and other cities? That would have made a lot of privacy campaigners really happy.
By Sewell Chan
May 31, 2007, 12:23 pm
The competition to digitally map New York City is heating up.
This week, both Google and Microsoft started new Web features that allow readers to get a bird’s-eye, street-level view of many streets and intersections in Manhattan and in parts of the other boroughs.
On Monday, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Live Search Maps now contained “three-dimensional, photo-realistic views of New York City buildings and landscapes, with perspectives that few people — apart from Superman — have ever seen.” The views of the city’s “iconic locations” are accompanied by local listings, ratings and reviews, along with driving directions and ways to share information to others on the Web. The Microsoft project will include Austin, Texas; Cape Coral, Fla.; Cincinnati; Indianapolis; Northampton, England; Ottawa; Savannah, Ga., and Tampa, Fla.
On Tuesday, Google announced the unveiling of Street View, a new feature on Google Maps that allows users to scan a 360-degree views from a given location. Users can zoom in on a bus-stop or street sign, for example. “By clicking on the ‘Street View’ button in Google Maps, users can navigate street level, panoramic imagery,” Google said in its announcement. “With Street View users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans.” The Street View project also covers the San Francisco Bay area, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami.
Jack Eichenbaum, an urban geographer and an adjunct professor at Hunter College and Queens College, said the new digital tools were natural outgrowths of the proliferation in geographic information system (GIS) technologies. How useful the tools will be remains to be seen, he said.
“For this to be more than an informative toy, it will all depend on how easy the data is to use,” Dr. Eichenbaum said in a phone interview. “If you get good data, people will be able to do research on their desktops. Otherwise, it will be primarily useful for navigation, seeing the city in 3-D.” He noted that while visual data for the city is available from commercial vendors, “the best data on New York City comes from the flyovers commissioned by the city government.” Those images are rarely released to the public, and “a lot of data is not easy to obtain, particularly after 9/11 with the security restrictions,” Dr. Eichenbaum said.
Are these maps useful for research or more of an “informative toy”? Perhaps both.
The Race of the Digital Cartographers
By Sewell Chan
May 31, 2007, 12:23 pm
The competition to digitally map New York City is heating up.
This week, both Google and Microsoft started new Web features that allow readers to get a bird’s-eye, street-level view of many streets and intersections in Manhattan and in parts of the other boroughs.
On Monday, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Live Search Maps now contained “three-dimensional, photo-realistic views of New York City buildings and landscapes, with perspectives that few people — apart from Superman — have ever seen.” The views of the city’s “iconic locations” are accompanied by local listings, ratings and reviews, along with driving directions and ways to share information to others on the Web. The Microsoft project will include Austin, Texas; Cape Coral, Fla.; Cincinnati; Indianapolis; Northampton, England; Ottawa; Savannah, Ga., and Tampa, Fla.
On Tuesday, Google announced the unveiling of Street View, a new feature on Google Maps that allows users to scan a 360-degree views from a given location. Users can zoom in on a bus-stop or street sign, for example. “By clicking on the ‘Street View’ button in Google Maps, users can navigate street level, panoramic imagery,” Google said in its announcement. “With Street View users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans.” The Street View project also covers the San Francisco Bay area, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami.
Jack Eichenbaum, an urban geographer and an adjunct professor at Hunter College and Queens College, said the new digital tools were natural outgrowths of the proliferation in geographic information system (GIS) technologies. How useful the tools will be remains to be seen, he said.
“For this to be more than an informative toy, it will all depend on how easy the data is to use,” Dr. Eichenbaum said in a phone interview. “If you get good data, people will be able to do research on their desktops. Otherwise, it will be primarily useful for navigation, seeing the city in 3-D.” He noted that while visual data for the city is available from commercial vendors, “the best data on New York City comes from the flyovers commissioned by the city government.” Those images are rarely released to the public, and “a lot of data is not easy to obtain, particularly after 9/11 with the security restrictions,” Dr. Eichenbaum said.
Are these maps useful for research or more of an “informative toy”? Perhaps both.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen much grassroots organization in colleges and universities in the West to help with the problems this article describes in African universities. It seems a natural outlet for collective action on the part of concerned college/graduate students to raise money even for small things like chairs and study supplies. If you're reading this, I challenge you to take some steps to realize the potential here.
Africa's Storied Colleges, Jammed and Crumbling
By LYDIA POLGREEN; ELIZABETH DICKINSON CONTRIBUTED REPORTING.
Published: May 20, 2007
Thiany Dior usually rises before dawn, tiptoeing carefully among thin foam mats laid out on the floor as she leaves the cramped dormitory room she shares with half a dozen other women. It was built for two.
In the vast auditorium at the law school at Cheikh Anta Diop University, she secures a seat two rows from the front, two hours before class. If she sat too far back, she would not hear the professor's lecture over the two tinny speakers, and would be more likely to join the 70 percent who fail their first- or second-year exams at the university.
Those who arrive later perch on cinderblocks in the aisles, or strain to hear from the gallery above. By the time class starts, 2,000 young bodies crowd the room in a muffled din of shuffling paper, throat clearing and jostling. Outside, dozens of students, early arrivals for the next class, mill about noisily.
''I cannot say really we are all learning, but we are trying,'' said Ms. Dior. ''We are too many students.''
Africa's best universities, the grand institutions that educated a revolutionary generation of nation builders and statesmen, doctors and engineers, writers and intellectuals, are collapsing. It is partly a self-inflicted crisis of mismanagement and neglect, but it is also a result of international development policies that for decades have favored basic education over higher learning even as a population explosion propels more young people than ever toward the already strained institutions.
The decrepitude is forcing the best and brightest from countries across Africa to seek their education and fortunes abroad and depriving dozens of nations of the homegrown expertise that could lift millions out of poverty.
The Commission for Africa, a British government research organization, said in a 2005 report that African universities were in a ''state of crisis'' and were failing to produce the professionals desperately needed to develop the poorest continent. Far from being a tool of social mobility, the repository of a nation's hopes for the future, Africa's universities have instead become warehouses for a generation of young people for whom society has little use and who can expect to be just as poor as their uneducated parents.
''Without universities there is no hope of progress, but they have been allowed to crumble,'' said Penda Mbow, a historian and labor activist at Cheikh Anta Diop who has struggled to improve conditions for students and professors. ''We are throwing away a whole generation.''
As a result, universities across Africa have become hotbeds of discontent, occupying a dangerous place at the intersection of politics and crime. In Ivory Coast, student union leaders played a large role in stirring up xenophobia that led to civil war. In Nigeria, elite schools have been overrun by violent criminal gangs. Those gangs have hired themselves out to politicians, contributing to the deterioration of the electoral process there.
In Senegal, the university has been racked repeatedly by sometimes violent strikes by students seeking improvements in their living conditions and increases in the tiny stipends for living expenses. Students have refused to attend classes and set up burning barricades on a central avenue that runs past the university.
In the early days, postcolonial Africa had few institutions as venerable and fully developed as its universities. The University of Ibadan in southwest Nigeria, the intellectual home of the Nobel Prize-winning writer Wole Soyinka, was regarded in 1960 as one of the best universities in the British Commonwealth. Makerere University in Uganda was considered the Harvard of Africa, and it trained a whole generation of postcolonial leaders, including Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.
And in Senegal, Cheikh Anta Diop, then known as the University of Dakar, drew students from across francophone Africa and transformed them into doctors, engineers and lawyers whose credentials were considered equal to those of their French counterparts.
The experience of students like Ms. Dior could not be further from that of men like Ousmane Camara, a former president of Senegal's highest court, who attended the same law school in the late 1950s. A cracked, yellowing photograph from 1957 shows the entire law school student body in a single frame, fewer than 100 students.
''We lived in spacious rooms, with more than enough for each to have its own,'' Mr. Camara said. ''We had a minibus that drove us to and from class.''
The young men in the photo went on to do great things: Mr. Camara's classmate Abdou Diouf became Senegal's second president. Others became top government officials and businessmen, shaping the nation's fortunes after it won independence from France in 1960.
Today, nearly 60,000 students are crammed on a campus with just 5,000 dormitory beds. Renting a room in Dakar is so expensive that students pack themselves into tiny rooms by the half dozen.
Firmin Manga, a third-year English student from the southern region of Casamance, was lucky enough to be assigned a cramped, airless single room. But six of his friends were not so fortunate, so he invited them to share. In a space barely wide enough for two twin beds, the young men have squeezed four foam mattresses, which serve as beds, desks, dining tables and couches. Their clothes were neatly packed into a single closet, a dozen pairs of shoes carefully balanced on a ledge above the doorway.
''We have to live like this,'' Mr. Manga said, perched on his bed late one night.
''Two will sleep here,'' he said, placing his palm on a ratty scrap of foam. ''Two over there, and two over there. Then one more mattress is underneath my bed.''
Once the last mattress is laid out there is no floor space left. Mr. Manga works on his thesis, a treatise comparing the grammar of his native Dioula language with English, early in the morning, before any else wakes up.
''That is my quiet time alone,'' he said.
The graffiti-scarred dormitories, crisscrossed by clotheslines, look more like housing projects for the poor than rooms for the country's brightest youths. A $12 million renovation of the library modernized what had been a musty, crowded outpost on campus into a modern building with Internet access. But technology does not help with its most basic problem: it still only has 1,700 chairs. Students study in stairwells and sprawled in corners.
In a chemistry lab in the science department, students take turns carrying out basic experiments with broken beakers and pipettes.
Equally frustrated are the professors, many of whom could pursue careers abroad but choose to remain in Senegal. Alphonse Tiné, a professor of chemistry, said he struggled to balance his research with the demands of teaching thousands of students.
''If I went abroad maybe I would have more salary, better equipment, fewer students,'' Mr. Tiné said. ''I studied on a government scholarship abroad, so I felt I owed my country to stay. But it is very hard.''
Mr. Tiné, 58, plans to stay in Senegal for the rest of his career. But many educated Africans will not. The International Organization for Migration estimates that Africa has lost 20,000 educated professionals every year since 1990. Those who can afford it send their children abroad for college. Some of those who cannot push their sons and even their daughters to migrate, often illegally.
The disarray of Africa's universities did not happen by chance. In the 1960s, universities were seen as the incubator of the vanguard that would drive development in the young nations of newly liberated Africa, and postcolonial governments spent lavishly on campuses, research facilities, scholarships and salaries for academics.
But corruption and mismanagement led to the economic collapses that swept much of Africa in the 1970s, and universities were among the first institutions to suffer. As idealistic postcolonial governments gave way to more cynical and authoritarian ones, universities, with their academic freedoms, democratic tendencies and elitist airs, became a nuisance.
When the World Bank and International Monetary Fund came to bail out African governments with their economic reforms -- a bitter cocktail that included currency devaluation, opening of markets and privatization -- higher education was usually low on the list of priorities. Fighting poverty required basic skills and literacy, not doctoral students. In the mid-1980s nearly a fifth of World Bank's education spending worldwide went to higher education. A decade later, it had dwindled to just 7 percent.
Meanwhile, welcome money flooded into primary and secondary education. But it set up a time bomb: as more young people got a basic education, more wanted to go to college. In 1984, just half of Senegal's children went to primary school, but 20 years later more than 90 percent do.
And more of those children have gone on to high school: Africa has the world's highest growth rate of high school attendance. Abdou Salam Sall, rector of the Cheikh Anta Diop, said 9,000 students earned a baccalaureate in Senegal in 2000, entitling them to university admission. By 2006 there were more than twice that. The university cannot handle the influx. Its budget is $32 million, less than $600 per student. That money must also maintain a 430-acre campus, pay salaries and finance research.
Even those lucky enough to graduate will have difficulty finding a job in their struggling economies. As few as one third of African university graduates find work, according to the Association of African Universities.
Governments and donors in some countries are starting to spend more on higher education. The World Bank chipped in for Cheikh Anta Diop's library renovation, and a coalition of foundations called the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa has pledged $200 million to help African universities over the next five years.
Fatou Kiné Camara, a law professor and the daughter of Mr. Camara, the former judge, said she felt the frustration of her students as she struggled to teach a class of thousands. When the students cannot hear her over the loudspeaker, they hurl vulgar insults, a taboo in a society that prides itself on decorum and respect for elders.
''They are angry, and I cannot blame them,'' she said. ''The country has nothing to offer them, and their education is worthless. It doesn't prepare them for anything.''
Attempts to reduce the student population by admitting fewer students are seen as political suicide -- student unions play a big role in elections, and the country's leaders are fearful of widespread discontent among the educated youth. Senegal has created new universities in provincial capitals like Saint Louis and Ziguinchor, but few students want to attend them because they are new and untested, and the government has not forced the issue.
''They fear us because we are the young, and the future belongs to us,'' said Babacar Sohkna, a student union leader. ''But where is our future? We are just waiting here for poverty.''
Correction: May 21, 2007, Monday A front-page picture caption yesterday with an article about the crisis faced by Africa's finest universities because of mismanagement, neglect and policies that favor basic education referred incorrectly in some copies to the broken piece of equipment being used by a chemistry student. It is a graduated cylinder, not a test tube.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
I thought this article was interesting-- especially the sweet reason the B612 Foundation is named what it is.
NASA TRIES, FAILS TO WITHHOLD PLANETARY DEFENSE REPORT
By Steven Aftergood, an article in his "SECRECY NEWS"
from the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2007, Issue No. 51
May 15, 2007
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration earlier this year attempted to block public access to a comprehensive report on planetary defense against asteroids, but the document found its way into the public domain anyway.
NASA undertook the study in response to a 2005 Congressional mandate "to provide an analysis of alternatives to detect, track, catalogue, and characterize" potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs) and to submit "an analysis of possible alternatives that NASA could employ to divert an object on a likely collision course with Earth."
An abbreviated version (28 pages) of the resulting report, which generally recommended against initiation of a new planetary defense program, was provided to Congress and the public in March 2007.
Near Earth Orbit Survey and Deflection Analysis of Alternatives: (NASA) Report to Congress
Strangely, however, NASA sought to prevent public disclosure of the full 272-page report that provided the underlying analysis for NASA's conclusions.
To prevent uncontrolled dissemination, NASA did not distribute a soft copy version of the report. And altogether, no more than around 100 copies of the hard copy document were published.
Public requests for the document were denied, though it is unclassified.
"The document you requested was distributed in hard copy as a 'thank you' to [NASA working group] team members and is not an official, distributable NASA publication," Marcus Shaw, a contractor at the NASA Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, told Secrecy News.
"Copies beyond those for the study team are not available. An electronic copy will not be distributed or posted by NASA," he wrote in a March 13 email from NASA headquarters.
In fact, however, the report is clearly marked as a NASA product and is presumptively subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
A legal challenge proved unnecessary, however, as the report soon leaked out through unauthorized channels.
It was obtained by the private B612 Foundation, an organization that advocates a more pro-active planetary defense program. ("Our goal is to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015.")
The full document (in a large 23 MB PDF file) was posted this month, along with the organization's technical critique of NASA's analysis, here:
B612 Foundation Press Page
B612 is the asteroid home of Saint-Exupery's Little Prince.
By Steven Aftergood, an article in his "SECRECY NEWS"
from the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2007, Issue No. 51
May 15, 2007
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration earlier this year attempted to block public access to a comprehensive report on planetary defense against asteroids, but the document found its way into the public domain anyway.
NASA undertook the study in response to a 2005 Congressional mandate "to provide an analysis of alternatives to detect, track, catalogue, and characterize" potentially hazardous near-Earth objects (NEOs) and to submit "an analysis of possible alternatives that NASA could employ to divert an object on a likely collision course with Earth."
An abbreviated version (28 pages) of the resulting report, which generally recommended against initiation of a new planetary defense program, was provided to Congress and the public in March 2007.
Near Earth Orbit Survey and Deflection Analysis of Alternatives: (NASA) Report to Congress
Strangely, however, NASA sought to prevent public disclosure of the full 272-page report that provided the underlying analysis for NASA's conclusions.
To prevent uncontrolled dissemination, NASA did not distribute a soft copy version of the report. And altogether, no more than around 100 copies of the hard copy document were published.
Public requests for the document were denied, though it is unclassified.
"The document you requested was distributed in hard copy as a 'thank you' to [NASA working group] team members and is not an official, distributable NASA publication," Marcus Shaw, a contractor at the NASA Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, told Secrecy News.
"Copies beyond those for the study team are not available. An electronic copy will not be distributed or posted by NASA," he wrote in a March 13 email from NASA headquarters.
In fact, however, the report is clearly marked as a NASA product and is presumptively subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.
A legal challenge proved unnecessary, however, as the report soon leaked out through unauthorized channels.
It was obtained by the private B612 Foundation, an organization that advocates a more pro-active planetary defense program. ("Our goal is to significantly alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015.")
The full document (in a large 23 MB PDF file) was posted this month, along with the organization's technical critique of NASA's analysis, here:
B612 Foundation Press Page
B612 is the asteroid home of Saint-Exupery's Little Prince.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Whew! I'm finally done with my exams!
One of the things I did for a particularly good class was write a 27-page paper on the events leading up to the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Doing research on the subject, I found the following website that people might be interested in:
Poznan-Budapest 1956: Common Roads to Freedom
One of the things I did for a particularly good class was write a 27-page paper on the events leading up to the 1956 Hungarian uprising. Doing research on the subject, I found the following website that people might be interested in:
Poznan-Budapest 1956: Common Roads to Freedom
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Having joined the ranks of Wikipedia writers, the first article I updated was about my grandfather, Victor Lange. Most of the content, however, was written by my grandmother, who saw the previous article and decided that it was woefully inadequate. Take a look at it here and let me know what you think!
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
This is really interesting:
In Monrovia, the first women-only UN peacekeepers join the 15,000-strong force, inspiring local women to become police.
The Christian Science Monitor
from the March 21, 2007 edition
By Tristan McConnell
MONROVIA, LIBERIA
Behind rows of razor wire, a machine gun peeking over the sandbags is trained on the road below. This is just one of many fortified compounds in the Congo Town suburb of Liberia's war-ravaged capital, Monrovia. But this compound is different, because everyone inside – from the armed guards to the cooks responsible for the inviting scent of curry that wafts around at lunchtime – is female.
The 103 Indian women who have called this compound home since January make up the United Nations' first-ever all-female peacekeeping unit. The women have quickly become part of Monrovia's urban landscape in their distinctive blue camouflage fatigues and flak jackets. They guard the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, patrol the streets day and night, control crowds at rallies and soccer games, and respond to calls for armed back-up from the national police who, unlike the Indian unit, do not carry weapons.
Liberian and UN officials hope their presence will help inspire Liberian women to join a fledgling police force struggling to recruit female officers. The all-female unit also signifies a revolution in UN peacekeeping, which has been rocked by rape and abuse scandals in recent years, notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti. Analysts say an increase in female peacekeepers will help limit abuses perpetrated by the very people sent to safeguard the rights of those already traumatized by conflict.
"You get [these abuses] not just with peacekeepers but with soldiers in general, and it gets worse the further they are from home and the more destitute the local population," says Richard Reeve, research fellow at the Chatham House, a London-based think tank. "The UN will never get rid of the problem, but they are really dealing with it and putting changes into practice."
In the past three years, 319 peacekeepers worldwide have been investigated for abuse; of those, 179 were repatriated or dismissed. Yet the UN cannot prosecute troops. That must be done by the contributing country.
Force may deter attacks on women
Commander Seema Dhundia says that her unit is there primarily to support the embryonic Liberia National Police (LNP), but she recognizes that the presence of her officers will also help raise awareness of and respect for women in Liberia, and in peacekeeping. "Seeing women in strong positions, I hope, will reduce the violence against women," she says.
Earlier this month UNMIL stated that in 2006 there were 30 reported cases of rape by UN personnel, who number more than 15,000 in Liberia, down from 45 in 2005.
Alan Doss, head of the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), says the UN is committed to tackling the issue. "What we're talking about is very much the exception to the rule, but if the presence of [the Indian unit of] women helps to make the point that this is not acceptable behavior, then, quite frankly, anything we can do beyond what we're doing now is welcome."
The women-only unit will also help redress the acknowledged gender imbalance in peacekeeping missions: At the end of 2006 only 4 percent of UN police deployed worldwide were female officers. Trailblazing has its challenges, and, Ms. Dhundia admits, there can be some prejudice when her unit arrives on the scene. "Initially there might be some apprehension as to the professional competency of the females," she says, "but when the troops prove their worth, then they are accepted, and there are not any problems."
But many women remain vulnerable
In 2005, Liberia elected Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's first female president. Women head the justice system, the department of home affairs, and the domestic police force. With the UN's first-ever female-only peacekeeping unit, Liberia should be a leader in women's rights and sexual equality. But this is not the case: rape and sexual violence are pervasive.
A report published this month by the South Africa-based development agency ActionAid says that, "in the post-conflict context, rape is on the increase and indeed rape is currently the most reported serious crime in Liberia." In 2006, there were more than 350 reported rapes, but the real figure is likely to be far higher, because many attacks go unreported or are dismissed by village elders or police, according to the report. Refugees International estimates that up to 40 percent of Liberian women were raped during the 14-year civil war that ended in 2003.
The presence of the all-female Indian unit, it is hoped, will also help encourage Liberian women to join the police force. "Women see us out on the streets every day putting on uniforms, carrying heavy [weapons], and performing our duties," says Dhundia, "It will definitely get them inspired and motivated to come forward."
Recruiting females can be difficult
Although all-female units are nothing new in Dhundia's native India, where they have existed since 1986, in Liberia the LNP is struggling to recruit women. More than 2,000 new police officers have so far been trained. The target is for 20 percent of the force to be women, but today only 5 percent are.
Encouraging women to join is difficult, as it challenges prevailing stereotypes. More to the point, female candidates often lack the necessary higher education. "The tradition is that, if there is not enough money, you educate the boys, not the girls," explains UN Police spokesman Gabriel Tibayungwa.
To combat this, a program of accelerated learning started in recent weeks for 150 Liberian women. One of the new participants is Wachten Beh, a slim 31-year-old with a mop of short dreadlocks. Ms. Beh is glad for the opportunity to complete her higher education and looks forward to serving in the police force. "I believe that everybody has a right – a woman has a right – to be what she wants to be," she says.
All-female unit keeps peace in Liberia
In Monrovia, the first women-only UN peacekeepers join the 15,000-strong force, inspiring local women to become police.
The Christian Science Monitor
from the March 21, 2007 edition
By Tristan McConnell
MONROVIA, LIBERIA
Behind rows of razor wire, a machine gun peeking over the sandbags is trained on the road below. This is just one of many fortified compounds in the Congo Town suburb of Liberia's war-ravaged capital, Monrovia. But this compound is different, because everyone inside – from the armed guards to the cooks responsible for the inviting scent of curry that wafts around at lunchtime – is female.
The 103 Indian women who have called this compound home since January make up the United Nations' first-ever all-female peacekeeping unit. The women have quickly become part of Monrovia's urban landscape in their distinctive blue camouflage fatigues and flak jackets. They guard the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, patrol the streets day and night, control crowds at rallies and soccer games, and respond to calls for armed back-up from the national police who, unlike the Indian unit, do not carry weapons.
Liberian and UN officials hope their presence will help inspire Liberian women to join a fledgling police force struggling to recruit female officers. The all-female unit also signifies a revolution in UN peacekeeping, which has been rocked by rape and abuse scandals in recent years, notably in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Haiti. Analysts say an increase in female peacekeepers will help limit abuses perpetrated by the very people sent to safeguard the rights of those already traumatized by conflict.
"You get [these abuses] not just with peacekeepers but with soldiers in general, and it gets worse the further they are from home and the more destitute the local population," says Richard Reeve, research fellow at the Chatham House, a London-based think tank. "The UN will never get rid of the problem, but they are really dealing with it and putting changes into practice."
In the past three years, 319 peacekeepers worldwide have been investigated for abuse; of those, 179 were repatriated or dismissed. Yet the UN cannot prosecute troops. That must be done by the contributing country.
Force may deter attacks on women
Commander Seema Dhundia says that her unit is there primarily to support the embryonic Liberia National Police (LNP), but she recognizes that the presence of her officers will also help raise awareness of and respect for women in Liberia, and in peacekeeping. "Seeing women in strong positions, I hope, will reduce the violence against women," she says.
Earlier this month UNMIL stated that in 2006 there were 30 reported cases of rape by UN personnel, who number more than 15,000 in Liberia, down from 45 in 2005.
Alan Doss, head of the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), says the UN is committed to tackling the issue. "What we're talking about is very much the exception to the rule, but if the presence of [the Indian unit of] women helps to make the point that this is not acceptable behavior, then, quite frankly, anything we can do beyond what we're doing now is welcome."
The women-only unit will also help redress the acknowledged gender imbalance in peacekeeping missions: At the end of 2006 only 4 percent of UN police deployed worldwide were female officers. Trailblazing has its challenges, and, Ms. Dhundia admits, there can be some prejudice when her unit arrives on the scene. "Initially there might be some apprehension as to the professional competency of the females," she says, "but when the troops prove their worth, then they are accepted, and there are not any problems."
But many women remain vulnerable
In 2005, Liberia elected Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's first female president. Women head the justice system, the department of home affairs, and the domestic police force. With the UN's first-ever female-only peacekeeping unit, Liberia should be a leader in women's rights and sexual equality. But this is not the case: rape and sexual violence are pervasive.
A report published this month by the South Africa-based development agency ActionAid says that, "in the post-conflict context, rape is on the increase and indeed rape is currently the most reported serious crime in Liberia." In 2006, there were more than 350 reported rapes, but the real figure is likely to be far higher, because many attacks go unreported or are dismissed by village elders or police, according to the report. Refugees International estimates that up to 40 percent of Liberian women were raped during the 14-year civil war that ended in 2003.
The presence of the all-female Indian unit, it is hoped, will also help encourage Liberian women to join the police force. "Women see us out on the streets every day putting on uniforms, carrying heavy [weapons], and performing our duties," says Dhundia, "It will definitely get them inspired and motivated to come forward."
Recruiting females can be difficult
Although all-female units are nothing new in Dhundia's native India, where they have existed since 1986, in Liberia the LNP is struggling to recruit women. More than 2,000 new police officers have so far been trained. The target is for 20 percent of the force to be women, but today only 5 percent are.
Encouraging women to join is difficult, as it challenges prevailing stereotypes. More to the point, female candidates often lack the necessary higher education. "The tradition is that, if there is not enough money, you educate the boys, not the girls," explains UN Police spokesman Gabriel Tibayungwa.
To combat this, a program of accelerated learning started in recent weeks for 150 Liberian women. One of the new participants is Wachten Beh, a slim 31-year-old with a mop of short dreadlocks. Ms. Beh is glad for the opportunity to complete her higher education and looks forward to serving in the police force. "I believe that everybody has a right – a woman has a right – to be what she wants to be," she says.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
This is an interesting approach to this kind of problem, even if I don't necessarily agree with the conclusions they draw in this case.
Knowledge Is Power Only if You Know How to Use It
The New York Times
March 11, 2007
By DENISE CARUSO
“IF we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we ...?” has been a familiar, fill-in-your-pet-peeve lament about the state of the world since Neil Armstrong’s historic giant leap in 1969. It is a question that continues to engage innovators and scholars.
The question is less plaintive and more pragmatic for Daniel Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University.
“Why can we — people or society — do some of the things that we set out to accomplish, and not others?” asked Professor Sarewitz, who examines the relationship between scientific research and public benefit. Recently he has been studying effectiveness in human action, working with Richard R. Nelson, an emeritus professor at Columbia University and a pioneer in evolutionary economics and the economics of innovation.
“Many years ago, I got interested in what people were then calling ‘the moon and the ghetto’ problem,” said Professor Nelson, who published a book by that name in 1977. “This was the commentary in the late 1960s: ‘If you can land a man on the moon, why can’t you solve the social problems of the ghetto?’ ”
In work funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the professors theorize that the answer to this question may lie within the deceptively simple concept of human know-how.
Know-how is more than knowledge. It puts knowledge to work in the real world. It is how scientific discoveries become routine medical treatments, and how inventions — like the iPod or the Internet — become the products and services that change how we work and play.
As the moon-and-ghetto disparity demonstrates, know-how is unevenly distributed. But why? To find out, the professors looked for a real-world comparison that would not carry too much of a political or emotional charge. In a yet-unpublished essay, they contrast the know-how behind vaccinating children for measles and the know-how behind teaching first graders to read.
In the 17th century, they note that reading know-how was such a known quantity that the colony of Massachusetts had a law requiring it to be taught in the home. But a century later, when Cotton Mather championed a new and effective smallpox inoculation in Boston, most of the physicians in town rejected the treatment because it was not supported by the accepted know-how of the time.
Today the situation is reversed. “While almost every child vaccinated against measles is safe from the disease,” the professors write, “an alarming number of children who are ‘taught’ to read in school never really learn to read at a level necessary to perform well in today’s society.”
One criticism of their approach is that these two examples are not comparable — that the effectiveness of teaching a child to read is contingent on a variety of factors, from nutrition to peer-group reinforcement to adequate school funding, while the effectiveness of a vaccine is virtually automatic.
But “that’s precisely the point,” Professor Sarewitz said. “We want to compare the state of know-how, not knowledge.” In that case, today’s know-how on vaccination is far more robust than that on teaching a child to read.
When know-how is robust, it has a quality that the two men have called the “go” — or a core of reliable action. In their theory, any technology, object or practice that can be reliably standardized and improved over time, like vaccines or software or automobile emissions, has a “go.”
The relationship between a strong, technology-enabled “go” like a vaccine and the problem it solves may seem obvious — even redundant. After all, at its core, technology is about know-how — about the tools we develop to help us act and think better.
But the “go” enables more than just the right tool for the job. It can provide a vital convergence point for stakeholders with very diverse agendas. Once they find common cause in a reliable technological solution, they have something to rally around so that all their interests can be advanced.
“Reading creates conflict because there’s such variability in the predictability of results,” Professor Sarewitz said. “But think about the networks of people that have to cooperate in order for vaccines to work in society, and how incredibly different their agendas and worldviews are. They are no more or less diverse than the people who are in a state of pitched battle around reading.”
As another example, he cites the passage of the Montreal Protocol in the late 1980s. Meant to phase out production of chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons that were believed responsible for ozone depletion, it is considered one of the most successful international agreements ever.
At the time, the chemicals were used widely as refrigerants and solvents for semiconductors. But no one ended up going without refrigerators or computers.
“Companies came up with substitutes,” Professor Sarewitz said. “And when they did, interests that were previously completely at each other’s throats — chemical companies resistant to regulation, environmentalists, leaders of developing countries, diplomats — they all converged around the alternative.”
So how might a better understanding of robust human know-how help us think more strategically about problems like reading, improving health care or reversing climate change? Can the “go” teach us something about those problems where there is “no go?” After all, the fact remains that “it’s really hard to make progress where you don’t have a ‘go’ or a technology” to solve the problem at hand, Professor Sarewitz said.
THE professors stress that their work is still in progress. But they hope that their work may reframe how we think about our “no go” problems and help us find new ways to deploy human know-how and effectiveness beyond the comparatively low-hanging fruit that technological solutions provide. This ability would signal an important change in how societies approach and address their most pressing issues.
“One of the things we need to get away from is the notion that science and technology know-how is a general-purpose magic bullet that will solve all problems,” Professor Nelson said.
If they can study enough examples of effective human know-how, they might be able to identify new ways to make progress when no technological fix exists. “We’re looking for a ‘go’ where there might not be an obvious one,” Professor Sarewitz said.
Whether or not the search yields results, it will at least help us to better understand why we can put a man on the moon, but we cannot manage to improve literacy rates, or shape workable policies on climate change, or reduce global poverty.
Knowing the mechanics that drive the “go” may help us to separate what is practically effective from our value judgments, and come up with a process that spurs solutions to problems as predictably as technological know-how does today.
Denise Caruso is executive director of the Hybrid Vigor Institute, which studies collaborative problem-solving. E-mail: dcaruso@nytimes.com.
Knowledge Is Power Only if You Know How to Use It
The New York Times
March 11, 2007
By DENISE CARUSO
“IF we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we ...?” has been a familiar, fill-in-your-pet-peeve lament about the state of the world since Neil Armstrong’s historic giant leap in 1969. It is a question that continues to engage innovators and scholars.
The question is less plaintive and more pragmatic for Daniel Sarewitz, director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University.
“Why can we — people or society — do some of the things that we set out to accomplish, and not others?” asked Professor Sarewitz, who examines the relationship between scientific research and public benefit. Recently he has been studying effectiveness in human action, working with Richard R. Nelson, an emeritus professor at Columbia University and a pioneer in evolutionary economics and the economics of innovation.
“Many years ago, I got interested in what people were then calling ‘the moon and the ghetto’ problem,” said Professor Nelson, who published a book by that name in 1977. “This was the commentary in the late 1960s: ‘If you can land a man on the moon, why can’t you solve the social problems of the ghetto?’ ”
In work funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the professors theorize that the answer to this question may lie within the deceptively simple concept of human know-how.
Know-how is more than knowledge. It puts knowledge to work in the real world. It is how scientific discoveries become routine medical treatments, and how inventions — like the iPod or the Internet — become the products and services that change how we work and play.
As the moon-and-ghetto disparity demonstrates, know-how is unevenly distributed. But why? To find out, the professors looked for a real-world comparison that would not carry too much of a political or emotional charge. In a yet-unpublished essay, they contrast the know-how behind vaccinating children for measles and the know-how behind teaching first graders to read.
In the 17th century, they note that reading know-how was such a known quantity that the colony of Massachusetts had a law requiring it to be taught in the home. But a century later, when Cotton Mather championed a new and effective smallpox inoculation in Boston, most of the physicians in town rejected the treatment because it was not supported by the accepted know-how of the time.
Today the situation is reversed. “While almost every child vaccinated against measles is safe from the disease,” the professors write, “an alarming number of children who are ‘taught’ to read in school never really learn to read at a level necessary to perform well in today’s society.”
One criticism of their approach is that these two examples are not comparable — that the effectiveness of teaching a child to read is contingent on a variety of factors, from nutrition to peer-group reinforcement to adequate school funding, while the effectiveness of a vaccine is virtually automatic.
But “that’s precisely the point,” Professor Sarewitz said. “We want to compare the state of know-how, not knowledge.” In that case, today’s know-how on vaccination is far more robust than that on teaching a child to read.
When know-how is robust, it has a quality that the two men have called the “go” — or a core of reliable action. In their theory, any technology, object or practice that can be reliably standardized and improved over time, like vaccines or software or automobile emissions, has a “go.”
The relationship between a strong, technology-enabled “go” like a vaccine and the problem it solves may seem obvious — even redundant. After all, at its core, technology is about know-how — about the tools we develop to help us act and think better.
But the “go” enables more than just the right tool for the job. It can provide a vital convergence point for stakeholders with very diverse agendas. Once they find common cause in a reliable technological solution, they have something to rally around so that all their interests can be advanced.
“Reading creates conflict because there’s such variability in the predictability of results,” Professor Sarewitz said. “But think about the networks of people that have to cooperate in order for vaccines to work in society, and how incredibly different their agendas and worldviews are. They are no more or less diverse than the people who are in a state of pitched battle around reading.”
As another example, he cites the passage of the Montreal Protocol in the late 1980s. Meant to phase out production of chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons that were believed responsible for ozone depletion, it is considered one of the most successful international agreements ever.
At the time, the chemicals were used widely as refrigerants and solvents for semiconductors. But no one ended up going without refrigerators or computers.
“Companies came up with substitutes,” Professor Sarewitz said. “And when they did, interests that were previously completely at each other’s throats — chemical companies resistant to regulation, environmentalists, leaders of developing countries, diplomats — they all converged around the alternative.”
So how might a better understanding of robust human know-how help us think more strategically about problems like reading, improving health care or reversing climate change? Can the “go” teach us something about those problems where there is “no go?” After all, the fact remains that “it’s really hard to make progress where you don’t have a ‘go’ or a technology” to solve the problem at hand, Professor Sarewitz said.
THE professors stress that their work is still in progress. But they hope that their work may reframe how we think about our “no go” problems and help us find new ways to deploy human know-how and effectiveness beyond the comparatively low-hanging fruit that technological solutions provide. This ability would signal an important change in how societies approach and address their most pressing issues.
“One of the things we need to get away from is the notion that science and technology know-how is a general-purpose magic bullet that will solve all problems,” Professor Nelson said.
If they can study enough examples of effective human know-how, they might be able to identify new ways to make progress when no technological fix exists. “We’re looking for a ‘go’ where there might not be an obvious one,” Professor Sarewitz said.
Whether or not the search yields results, it will at least help us to better understand why we can put a man on the moon, but we cannot manage to improve literacy rates, or shape workable policies on climate change, or reduce global poverty.
Knowing the mechanics that drive the “go” may help us to separate what is practically effective from our value judgments, and come up with a process that spurs solutions to problems as predictably as technological know-how does today.
Denise Caruso is executive director of the Hybrid Vigor Institute, which studies collaborative problem-solving. E-mail: dcaruso@nytimes.com.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Your friendly neighborhood plasma engineer at work!
The Prophet of Garbage
in Popular Science, March 2007
by Michael Behar
It sounds as if someone just dropped a tricycle into a meat grinder. I’m sitting inside a narrow conference room at a research facility in Bristol, Connecticut, chatting with Joseph Longo, the founder and CEO of Startech Environmental Corporation. As we munch on takeout Subway sandwiches, a plate-glass window is the only thing separating us from the adjacent lab, which contains a glowing caldera of “plasma” three times as hot as the surface of the sun. Every few minutes there’s a horrific clanking noise—grinding followed by a thunderous voomp, like the sound a gas barbecue makes when it first ignites.
“Is it supposed to do that?” I ask Longo nervously. “Yup,” he says. “That’s normal.”
Despite his 74 years, Longo bears an unnerving resemblance to the longtime cover boy of Mad magazine, Alfred E. Neuman, who shrugs off nuclear Armageddon with the glib catchphrase “What, me worry?” Both share red hair, a smattering of freckles and a toothy grin. When such a man tells me I’m perfectly safe from a 30,000˚F arc of man-made lightning heating a vat of plasma that his employees are “controlling” in the next room—well, I’m not completely reassured.
To put me at ease, Longo calls in David Lynch, who manages the demonstration facility. “There’s no flame or fire inside. It’s just electricity,” Lynch assures me of the multimillion-dollar system that took Longo almost two decades to design and build. Then the two usher me into the lab, where the gleaming 15-foot-tall machine they’ve named the Plasma Converter stands in the center of the room. The entire thing takes up about as much space as a two-car garage, surprisingly compact for a machine that can consume nearly any type of waste—from dirty diapers to chemical weapons—by annihilating toxic materials in a process as old as the universe itself. Called plasma gasification, it works a little like the big bang, only backward (you get nothing from something). Inside a sealed vessel made of stainless steel and filled with a stable gas—either pure nitrogen or, as in this case, ordinary air—a 650-volt current passing between two electrodes rips electrons from the air, converting the gas into plasma. Current flows continuously through this newly formed plasma, creating a field of extremely intense energy very much like lightning. The radiant energy of the plasma arc is so powerful, it disintegrates trash into its constituent elements by tearing apart molecular bonds. The system is capable of breaking down pretty much anything except nuclear waste, the isotopes of which are indestructible. The only by-products are an obsidian-like glass used as a raw material for numerous applications, including bathroom tiles and high-strength asphalt, and a synthesis gas, or “syngas”—a mixture of primarily hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be converted into a variety of marketable fuels, including ethanol, natural gas and hydrogen.
Perhaps the most amazing part of the process is that it’s self-sustaining. Just like your toaster, Startech’s Plasma Converter draws its power from the electrical grid to get started. The initial voltage is about equal to the zap from a police stun gun. But once the cycle is under way, the 2,200˚F syngas is fed into a cooling system, generating steam that drives turbines to produce electricity. About two thirds of the power is siphoned off to run the converter; the rest can be used on-site for heating or electricity, or sold back to the utility grid. “Even a blackout would not stop the operation of the facility,” Longo says.
It all sounds far too good to be true. But the technology works. Over the past decade, half a dozen companies have been developing plasma technology to turn garbage into energy. “The best renewable energy is the one we complain about the most: municipal solid waste,” says Louis Circeo, the director of plasma research at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It will prove cheaper to take garbage to a plasma plant than it is to dump it on a landfill.” A Startech machine that costs roughly $250 million could handle 2,000 tons of waste daily, approximately what a city of a million people amasses in that time span. Large municipalities typically haul their trash to landfills, where the operator charges a “tipping fee” to dump the waste. The national average is $35 a ton, although the cost can be more than twice that in the Northeast (where land is scarce, tipping fees are higher). And the tipping fee a city pays doesn’t include the price of trucking the garbage often hundreds of miles to a landfill or the cost of capturing leaky methane—a greenhouse gas—from the decomposing waste. In a city with an average tipping fee, a $250-million converter could pay for itself in about 10 years, and that’s without factoring in the money made from selling the excess electricity and syngas. After that break-even point, it’s pure profit.
Someday very soon, cities might actually make money from garbage.
Talking Trash
It was a rainy morning when I pulled up to Startech R&D to see Longo waiting for me in the parking lot. Wearing a bright yellow oxford shirt, a striped tie and blue pinstriped pants, he dashed across the blacktop to greet me as I stepped from my rental car. A street-smart Brooklyn native, Longo was an only child raised by parents who worked long hours at a local factory that made baseballs and footballs. He volunteered to fight in Korea as a paratrooper after a friend was killed in action. He’s fond of antiquated slang like “attaboy” and “shills” (as in “those shills stole my patents”) and is old-school enough to have only recently abandoned the protractors, pencils and drafting tables that he used to design his original Plasma Converter in favor of computers.
Today, Longo is meeting with investors from U.S. Energy, a trio of veteran waste-disposal executives who recently formed a partnership to build the first plasma-gasification plant on Long Island, New York. They own a transfer station (where garbage goes for sorting en route to landfills) and are in the process of buying six Startech converters to handle 3,000 tons of construction debris a day trucked from sites around the state. “It’s mostly old tile, wood, nails, glass, metal and wire all mixed together,” one of the project’s partners, Troy Caruso, tells me. For the demonstration, Longo prepares a sampling of typical garbage—bottles of leftover prescription drugs, bits of fiberglass insulation, a half-empty can of Slim-Fast. A conveyer belt feeds the trash into an auger, which shreds and crushes it into pea-size morsels (that explains the deafening grinding sound) before stuffing it into the plasma-reactor chamber. The room is warm and humid, and a dull hum emanates from the machinery.
Caruso and his partners, Paul Marazzo and Michael Nuzzi, are silent at first. They’ve seen the demo before. But as more trash vanishes into the converter, they become increasingly animated, spouting off facts and figures about how the machine will revolutionize their business. “This technology eliminates the landfill, which is 80 percent of our costs,” Nuzzi says. “And we can use it to generate fuel at the back end,” adds Marazzo, who then asks Lynch if the converter can handle chunks of concrete (answer: yes). “The bottom line is that nobody wants a landfill in their backyard,” Nuzzi tells me. New York City is already paying an astronomical $90 a ton to get rid of its trash. According to Startech, a few 2,000-ton-per-day plasma-gasification plants could do it for $36. Sell the syngas and surplus electricity, and you’d actually net $15 a ton. “Gasification is not just environmentally friendly,” Nuzzi says. “It’s a good business decision.”
The converter we’re watching vaporize Slim-Fast is a mini version of Startech’s technology, capable of consuming five tons a day of solid waste, or about what 2,200 Americans toss in the trash every 24 hours. Fueled with garbage from the local dump, the converter is fired up whenever Longo pitches visiting clients.
Longo has been talking with the National Science Foundation about installing a system at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The Vietnamese government is considering buying one to get rid of stockpiles of Agent Orange that the U.S. military left behind after the war. Investors from China, Poland, Japan, Romania, Italy, Russia, Brazil, Venezuela, the U.K., Mexico and Canada have all entered contract negotiations with Startech after making the pilgrimage to Bristol to see Longo’s dog-and-pony show.
Startech isn’t the only company using plasma to turn waste into a source of clean energy. A handful of start-ups—Geoplasma, Recovered Energy, PyroGenesis, EnviroArc and Plasco Energy, among others—have entered the market in the past decade. But Longo, who has worked in the garbage business for four decades, is perhaps the industry’s most passionate founding father. “What’s so devilishly wonderful about plasma gasification is that it’s completely circular,” he says. “It takes everything back to its fundamental components in a way that’s beautiful.” Although all plasma gasification systems recapture syngas to turn into fuel, Startech’s “Starcell” system seems to be ahead of the pack in its ability to economically convert the substance into eco-friendly and competitively priced fuels. “A lot of other gasification technologies require multiple steps. This is a one-step process,” says Patrick Davis of the U.S. Department of Energy’s office of hydrogen production and delivery, which has awarded Longo’s company almost $1 million in research grants. “You put the waste in the reactor and you get out the syngas. That’s it.”
The Garbage Man
After his tour of duty in Korea, Longo put himself through night school at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. In 1959, engineering degree in hand, he got a job at American Machine & Foundry (AMF)—the same company that today runs the world’s largest chain of bowling alleys—designing hardened silos for nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as Titan and Minuteman. “There was never a time I can remember when I didn’t want to be an engineer,” he says.
For years, Longo tried to convince his bosses at AMF to go into the garbage business (as manager of new product development, he was charged with investigating growth areas). “I knew a lot about the industry, how backward it was,” he says. The costs to collect and transport waste were climbing. He was sure there had to be a better way.In 1967 Longo quit his job at AMF to start his own business, called International Dynetics. The name might not be familiar, but its product should: Longo designed and built the world’s first industrial-size trash compactors. “If you live in a high-rise or apartment building and dump your trash down a chute,” he says, “it’s probably going into one of our compactors.”
When Longo started his company, it was still easier and cheaper to just haul the loose trash to the dump. But gas prices climbed, inflation increased, and soon, business boomed. In a few years, there were thousands of International Dynetics compactors operating around the world. The machines could crush the equivalent of five 30-gallon cans crammed with trash into a cube that was about the size of a small television. “Our purpose was to condense it so it would be easier and cost less to bring to a landfill,” he says.
Then, in 1972, Longo read a paper in a science journal about fusion reactors. “The authors speculated that plasma might be used to destroy waste to the elemental level someday in the future,” he recalls. “That was like a spear in the heart, because we had just got our patents out for our trash compactors, and these guys were already saying there’s a prettier girl coming to town,” he says. “It would make obsolete everything we were doing. I resisted looking at the technology for 10 years. But by 1984, it became obvious that plasma could do some serious work.”
By then, the principal component of today’s plasma gasification systems, the plasma torch, had become widespread in the metal-fabrication industry, where it is used as a cutting knife for slicing through slabs of steel. Most engineers at the time were focused on ways to improve plasma torches for manipulating metals. But Longo had trash on the brain—whole landfills of trash. He was intent on developing a system that used plasma to convert waste into energy on a large scale. So he jumped ship again. In 1988 Longo sold International Dynetics and founded Startech.
Plasma to the People
“People kept asking me, ‘If this is so good, Longo, then why isn’t everyone already using one?’ ” he says, referring to himself in the third person, a device he relies on frequently to emphasize his point. “We had the technical capability, but we didn’t have a product yet. Just because we could do the trick didn’t mean it was worth doing.” Trucking garbage to dumps and landfills was still cheap. Environmental concerns weren’t on the public radar the way they are today, and landfills and incinerators weren’t yet widely seen as public menaces. “We outsourced the parts to build our first converter,” Longo says. “When we told the manufacturers we were working with plasma, some of them thought it had something to do with blood and AIDS.”
Longo describes the development curve as “relentless.” He teamed up with another engineer who had experience in the waste industry and an interest in plasma technology. “We didn’t have computers. We did everything on drafting boards. But I was aggressive. And the more we did, the more it compelled us to continue.” It took almost a decade of R&D until they had a working prototype.
“I felt like St. Peter bringing the message out,” Longo says of his first sales calls. In 1997 the U.S. Army became Startech’s inaugural customer, buying a converter to dispose of chemical weapons at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. A second reactor went to Japan for processing polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, an industrial coolant and lubricant banned in the U.S since 1977 (“really nasty stuff,” Longo says).
Longo realized early on that what would make plasma gasification marketable was a machine that could handle anything. Some of the most noxious chemicals, he knew from his decades in the garbage industry, are found in the most mundane places, like household solid waste. Startech has an edge over some of its competitors because its converter doesn’t have to be reconfigured for different materials, which means operators don’t have to presort waste, a costly and time-consuming process. To achieve this adaptability, Startech converters crank the plasma arc up to an extremely high operating temperature: 30,000˚F. Getting that temperature just right was one of Longo’s key developmental challenges. “You can’t rely on the customer to tell you what they put in,” Longo says. “Sometimes they don’t know, sometimes they lie, and sometimes they’ve thrown in live shotgun shells from a hunting trip. That’s why it’s imperative that the Plasma Converter can take in anything.”
A video camera mounted near the top of the converter at the Bristol plant gives me a glimpse of the plasma arc doing its dirty work. At a computer station near the converter, Lynch taps a few commands into a keyboard, and a loud hiss fills the room, the sound of steam being released from behind a pressurized valve. “You can use that steam to heat your facility and neighboring buildings,” he says proudly. Next to him is an LCD monitor with a live video feed from inside the reactor. A vivid magenta glow fills the screen as I watch the plasma torch vaporize a bucket of cellphones and soda cans. A hopper at the top of the vessel dumps another load into the plasma reactor, and seconds later, it vanishes too. “The idea,” Lynch says, “is that regardless of what you put in the front end, what comes out will be clean and ready to use for whatever you want.” I’ve watched him operate the converter for nearly an hour, and I’m still stunned to see no smoke, no flames, no ash, no pollution of any kind—all that’s left is syngas, the fuel source, and the molten obsidian-like material.
Catching the Litter Bug
Low transportation costs, cheap land, weak environmental regulations—these factors help explain why it took plasma until now to catch on as an economically sensible strategy to dispose of waste. “The steep increase in energy prices over the past two years is what has made this technology viable,” says Hilburn Hillestad, president of Geoplasma. His company, which touts the slogan “waste destruction at the speed of lightning with energy to share,” is negotiating a deal with St. Lucie County, Florida, to erect a $425-million plasma gasification system near a local landfill. The plant in St. Lucie County will be large enough to devour all 2,000 tons of daily trash generated by the county and polish off an additional 1,000 tons a day from the old landfill. Of course, the technology, still unproven on a large scale, has its skeptics. “That obsidian-like slag contains toxic heavy metals and breaks down when exposed to water,” claims Brad Van Guilder, a scientist at the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which advocates for clean air and water. “Dump it in a landfill, and it could one day contaminate local groundwater.” Others wonder about the cleanliness of the syngas. “In the cool-down phases, the components in the syngas could re-form into toxins,” warns Monica Wilson, the international coordinator for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, in Berkeley, California. None of this seems to worry St. Lucie County’s solid-waste director, Leo Cordeiro. “We’ll get all our garbage to disappear, and our landfill will be gone in 20 years,” he tells me. The best part: Geoplasma is footing the entire bill. “We’ll generate 160 megawatts a day from the garbage,” Hillestad says, “but we’ll consume only 40 megawatts to run the plant. We’ll sell the net energy to the local power grid.” Sales from excess electricity might allow Geoplasma to break even in 20 years.
In New York, Carmen Cognetta, an attorney with the city council’s infrastructure division, is evaluating how plasma gasification could help offset some of the city’s exorbitant waste costs. “All the landfalls around New York have closed, incinerators are banned, and we are trucking our trash to Virginia and Pennsylvania,” he explains. “That is costing the city $400 million a year. We could put seven or eight of these converters in the city, and that would be enough.” The syngas from the converters, Cognetta says, could be tapped for hydrogen gas to power buses or police cars. But the decision-making bureaucracy can be slow, and it is hamstrung by the politically well-connected waste-disposal industry. “Many landfill operators are used to getting a million dollars a month out of debris,” says U.S. Energy’s Paul Marazzo. “They don’t want a converter to happen because they’ll lose their revenue.”
Meanwhile, Victor Sziky, the president of Sicmar International, an investment firm based in Panama, is working with the Panamanian government to set up at least 10 Startech systems there. “The garbage problem here is exploding in conjunction with growth,” says Sziky, who lives in Panama City. “We have obsolete incinerators, and landfills that are polluting groundwater and drinking water. We’ve had outbreaks of cholera and hepatitis A and B directly attributed to the waste in landfills. There are a lot of people in a small country, and there’s no infrastructure to deal with it.” The project will be capable of destroying 200 tons of trash a day at each location, enough to handle all the garbage for the municipalities involved—and, says Sziky, to produce up to 40 percent of their electrical demand.
Panama’s syngas will probably be converted to hydrogen and sold to industrial suppliers. The current market for hydrogen is at least $50 billion worldwide, a figure that is expected to grow by 5 to 10 percent annually, according to the National Hydrogen Association, an industry and research consortium. Analysts at Fuji-Keizai USA, a market-research firm for emerging technologies, predict that the domestic market will hit $1.6 billion by 2010, up from $800 million in 2005. The Department of Energy’s Patrick Davis says that when the long-awaited hydrogen-powered vehicles finally arrive, the demand for hydrogen will soar. But he also notes that to have an effect on global warming, it’s critical that hydrogen come from clean sources.
That’s one more idea that’s old news to Longo, who, as usual, is 10 steps ahead of the game, already embedded in a future where fossil fuels are artifacts of a bygone era. For the past several years, he has been developing the Starcell, a filtration mechanism that slaps onto the back end of his converter and quickly refines syngas into hydrogen. As he says, “We are the disruptive technology.” Longo has been working in garbage for 40 years, making his fortune by literally scraping the bottom of the barrel. Which is, it turns out, the perfect vantage point for finding new ways to turn what to most of us is just garbage into arguably the most valuable thing in the world: clean energy.
The Prophet of Garbage
in Popular Science, March 2007
by Michael Behar
It sounds as if someone just dropped a tricycle into a meat grinder. I’m sitting inside a narrow conference room at a research facility in Bristol, Connecticut, chatting with Joseph Longo, the founder and CEO of Startech Environmental Corporation. As we munch on takeout Subway sandwiches, a plate-glass window is the only thing separating us from the adjacent lab, which contains a glowing caldera of “plasma” three times as hot as the surface of the sun. Every few minutes there’s a horrific clanking noise—grinding followed by a thunderous voomp, like the sound a gas barbecue makes when it first ignites.
“Is it supposed to do that?” I ask Longo nervously. “Yup,” he says. “That’s normal.”
Despite his 74 years, Longo bears an unnerving resemblance to the longtime cover boy of Mad magazine, Alfred E. Neuman, who shrugs off nuclear Armageddon with the glib catchphrase “What, me worry?” Both share red hair, a smattering of freckles and a toothy grin. When such a man tells me I’m perfectly safe from a 30,000˚F arc of man-made lightning heating a vat of plasma that his employees are “controlling” in the next room—well, I’m not completely reassured.
To put me at ease, Longo calls in David Lynch, who manages the demonstration facility. “There’s no flame or fire inside. It’s just electricity,” Lynch assures me of the multimillion-dollar system that took Longo almost two decades to design and build. Then the two usher me into the lab, where the gleaming 15-foot-tall machine they’ve named the Plasma Converter stands in the center of the room. The entire thing takes up about as much space as a two-car garage, surprisingly compact for a machine that can consume nearly any type of waste—from dirty diapers to chemical weapons—by annihilating toxic materials in a process as old as the universe itself. Called plasma gasification, it works a little like the big bang, only backward (you get nothing from something). Inside a sealed vessel made of stainless steel and filled with a stable gas—either pure nitrogen or, as in this case, ordinary air—a 650-volt current passing between two electrodes rips electrons from the air, converting the gas into plasma. Current flows continuously through this newly formed plasma, creating a field of extremely intense energy very much like lightning. The radiant energy of the plasma arc is so powerful, it disintegrates trash into its constituent elements by tearing apart molecular bonds. The system is capable of breaking down pretty much anything except nuclear waste, the isotopes of which are indestructible. The only by-products are an obsidian-like glass used as a raw material for numerous applications, including bathroom tiles and high-strength asphalt, and a synthesis gas, or “syngas”—a mixture of primarily hydrogen and carbon monoxide that can be converted into a variety of marketable fuels, including ethanol, natural gas and hydrogen.
Perhaps the most amazing part of the process is that it’s self-sustaining. Just like your toaster, Startech’s Plasma Converter draws its power from the electrical grid to get started. The initial voltage is about equal to the zap from a police stun gun. But once the cycle is under way, the 2,200˚F syngas is fed into a cooling system, generating steam that drives turbines to produce electricity. About two thirds of the power is siphoned off to run the converter; the rest can be used on-site for heating or electricity, or sold back to the utility grid. “Even a blackout would not stop the operation of the facility,” Longo says.
It all sounds far too good to be true. But the technology works. Over the past decade, half a dozen companies have been developing plasma technology to turn garbage into energy. “The best renewable energy is the one we complain about the most: municipal solid waste,” says Louis Circeo, the director of plasma research at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It will prove cheaper to take garbage to a plasma plant than it is to dump it on a landfill.” A Startech machine that costs roughly $250 million could handle 2,000 tons of waste daily, approximately what a city of a million people amasses in that time span. Large municipalities typically haul their trash to landfills, where the operator charges a “tipping fee” to dump the waste. The national average is $35 a ton, although the cost can be more than twice that in the Northeast (where land is scarce, tipping fees are higher). And the tipping fee a city pays doesn’t include the price of trucking the garbage often hundreds of miles to a landfill or the cost of capturing leaky methane—a greenhouse gas—from the decomposing waste. In a city with an average tipping fee, a $250-million converter could pay for itself in about 10 years, and that’s without factoring in the money made from selling the excess electricity and syngas. After that break-even point, it’s pure profit.
Someday very soon, cities might actually make money from garbage.
Talking Trash
It was a rainy morning when I pulled up to Startech R&D to see Longo waiting for me in the parking lot. Wearing a bright yellow oxford shirt, a striped tie and blue pinstriped pants, he dashed across the blacktop to greet me as I stepped from my rental car. A street-smart Brooklyn native, Longo was an only child raised by parents who worked long hours at a local factory that made baseballs and footballs. He volunteered to fight in Korea as a paratrooper after a friend was killed in action. He’s fond of antiquated slang like “attaboy” and “shills” (as in “those shills stole my patents”) and is old-school enough to have only recently abandoned the protractors, pencils and drafting tables that he used to design his original Plasma Converter in favor of computers.
Today, Longo is meeting with investors from U.S. Energy, a trio of veteran waste-disposal executives who recently formed a partnership to build the first plasma-gasification plant on Long Island, New York. They own a transfer station (where garbage goes for sorting en route to landfills) and are in the process of buying six Startech converters to handle 3,000 tons of construction debris a day trucked from sites around the state. “It’s mostly old tile, wood, nails, glass, metal and wire all mixed together,” one of the project’s partners, Troy Caruso, tells me. For the demonstration, Longo prepares a sampling of typical garbage—bottles of leftover prescription drugs, bits of fiberglass insulation, a half-empty can of Slim-Fast. A conveyer belt feeds the trash into an auger, which shreds and crushes it into pea-size morsels (that explains the deafening grinding sound) before stuffing it into the plasma-reactor chamber. The room is warm and humid, and a dull hum emanates from the machinery.
Caruso and his partners, Paul Marazzo and Michael Nuzzi, are silent at first. They’ve seen the demo before. But as more trash vanishes into the converter, they become increasingly animated, spouting off facts and figures about how the machine will revolutionize their business. “This technology eliminates the landfill, which is 80 percent of our costs,” Nuzzi says. “And we can use it to generate fuel at the back end,” adds Marazzo, who then asks Lynch if the converter can handle chunks of concrete (answer: yes). “The bottom line is that nobody wants a landfill in their backyard,” Nuzzi tells me. New York City is already paying an astronomical $90 a ton to get rid of its trash. According to Startech, a few 2,000-ton-per-day plasma-gasification plants could do it for $36. Sell the syngas and surplus electricity, and you’d actually net $15 a ton. “Gasification is not just environmentally friendly,” Nuzzi says. “It’s a good business decision.”
The converter we’re watching vaporize Slim-Fast is a mini version of Startech’s technology, capable of consuming five tons a day of solid waste, or about what 2,200 Americans toss in the trash every 24 hours. Fueled with garbage from the local dump, the converter is fired up whenever Longo pitches visiting clients.
Longo has been talking with the National Science Foundation about installing a system at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. The Vietnamese government is considering buying one to get rid of stockpiles of Agent Orange that the U.S. military left behind after the war. Investors from China, Poland, Japan, Romania, Italy, Russia, Brazil, Venezuela, the U.K., Mexico and Canada have all entered contract negotiations with Startech after making the pilgrimage to Bristol to see Longo’s dog-and-pony show.
Startech isn’t the only company using plasma to turn waste into a source of clean energy. A handful of start-ups—Geoplasma, Recovered Energy, PyroGenesis, EnviroArc and Plasco Energy, among others—have entered the market in the past decade. But Longo, who has worked in the garbage business for four decades, is perhaps the industry’s most passionate founding father. “What’s so devilishly wonderful about plasma gasification is that it’s completely circular,” he says. “It takes everything back to its fundamental components in a way that’s beautiful.” Although all plasma gasification systems recapture syngas to turn into fuel, Startech’s “Starcell” system seems to be ahead of the pack in its ability to economically convert the substance into eco-friendly and competitively priced fuels. “A lot of other gasification technologies require multiple steps. This is a one-step process,” says Patrick Davis of the U.S. Department of Energy’s office of hydrogen production and delivery, which has awarded Longo’s company almost $1 million in research grants. “You put the waste in the reactor and you get out the syngas. That’s it.”
The Garbage Man
After his tour of duty in Korea, Longo put himself through night school at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. In 1959, engineering degree in hand, he got a job at American Machine & Foundry (AMF)—the same company that today runs the world’s largest chain of bowling alleys—designing hardened silos for nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as Titan and Minuteman. “There was never a time I can remember when I didn’t want to be an engineer,” he says.
For years, Longo tried to convince his bosses at AMF to go into the garbage business (as manager of new product development, he was charged with investigating growth areas). “I knew a lot about the industry, how backward it was,” he says. The costs to collect and transport waste were climbing. He was sure there had to be a better way.In 1967 Longo quit his job at AMF to start his own business, called International Dynetics. The name might not be familiar, but its product should: Longo designed and built the world’s first industrial-size trash compactors. “If you live in a high-rise or apartment building and dump your trash down a chute,” he says, “it’s probably going into one of our compactors.”
When Longo started his company, it was still easier and cheaper to just haul the loose trash to the dump. But gas prices climbed, inflation increased, and soon, business boomed. In a few years, there were thousands of International Dynetics compactors operating around the world. The machines could crush the equivalent of five 30-gallon cans crammed with trash into a cube that was about the size of a small television. “Our purpose was to condense it so it would be easier and cost less to bring to a landfill,” he says.
Then, in 1972, Longo read a paper in a science journal about fusion reactors. “The authors speculated that plasma might be used to destroy waste to the elemental level someday in the future,” he recalls. “That was like a spear in the heart, because we had just got our patents out for our trash compactors, and these guys were already saying there’s a prettier girl coming to town,” he says. “It would make obsolete everything we were doing. I resisted looking at the technology for 10 years. But by 1984, it became obvious that plasma could do some serious work.”
By then, the principal component of today’s plasma gasification systems, the plasma torch, had become widespread in the metal-fabrication industry, where it is used as a cutting knife for slicing through slabs of steel. Most engineers at the time were focused on ways to improve plasma torches for manipulating metals. But Longo had trash on the brain—whole landfills of trash. He was intent on developing a system that used plasma to convert waste into energy on a large scale. So he jumped ship again. In 1988 Longo sold International Dynetics and founded Startech.
Plasma to the People
“People kept asking me, ‘If this is so good, Longo, then why isn’t everyone already using one?’ ” he says, referring to himself in the third person, a device he relies on frequently to emphasize his point. “We had the technical capability, but we didn’t have a product yet. Just because we could do the trick didn’t mean it was worth doing.” Trucking garbage to dumps and landfills was still cheap. Environmental concerns weren’t on the public radar the way they are today, and landfills and incinerators weren’t yet widely seen as public menaces. “We outsourced the parts to build our first converter,” Longo says. “When we told the manufacturers we were working with plasma, some of them thought it had something to do with blood and AIDS.”
Longo describes the development curve as “relentless.” He teamed up with another engineer who had experience in the waste industry and an interest in plasma technology. “We didn’t have computers. We did everything on drafting boards. But I was aggressive. And the more we did, the more it compelled us to continue.” It took almost a decade of R&D until they had a working prototype.
“I felt like St. Peter bringing the message out,” Longo says of his first sales calls. In 1997 the U.S. Army became Startech’s inaugural customer, buying a converter to dispose of chemical weapons at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. A second reactor went to Japan for processing polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, an industrial coolant and lubricant banned in the U.S since 1977 (“really nasty stuff,” Longo says).
Longo realized early on that what would make plasma gasification marketable was a machine that could handle anything. Some of the most noxious chemicals, he knew from his decades in the garbage industry, are found in the most mundane places, like household solid waste. Startech has an edge over some of its competitors because its converter doesn’t have to be reconfigured for different materials, which means operators don’t have to presort waste, a costly and time-consuming process. To achieve this adaptability, Startech converters crank the plasma arc up to an extremely high operating temperature: 30,000˚F. Getting that temperature just right was one of Longo’s key developmental challenges. “You can’t rely on the customer to tell you what they put in,” Longo says. “Sometimes they don’t know, sometimes they lie, and sometimes they’ve thrown in live shotgun shells from a hunting trip. That’s why it’s imperative that the Plasma Converter can take in anything.”
A video camera mounted near the top of the converter at the Bristol plant gives me a glimpse of the plasma arc doing its dirty work. At a computer station near the converter, Lynch taps a few commands into a keyboard, and a loud hiss fills the room, the sound of steam being released from behind a pressurized valve. “You can use that steam to heat your facility and neighboring buildings,” he says proudly. Next to him is an LCD monitor with a live video feed from inside the reactor. A vivid magenta glow fills the screen as I watch the plasma torch vaporize a bucket of cellphones and soda cans. A hopper at the top of the vessel dumps another load into the plasma reactor, and seconds later, it vanishes too. “The idea,” Lynch says, “is that regardless of what you put in the front end, what comes out will be clean and ready to use for whatever you want.” I’ve watched him operate the converter for nearly an hour, and I’m still stunned to see no smoke, no flames, no ash, no pollution of any kind—all that’s left is syngas, the fuel source, and the molten obsidian-like material.
Catching the Litter Bug
Low transportation costs, cheap land, weak environmental regulations—these factors help explain why it took plasma until now to catch on as an economically sensible strategy to dispose of waste. “The steep increase in energy prices over the past two years is what has made this technology viable,” says Hilburn Hillestad, president of Geoplasma. His company, which touts the slogan “waste destruction at the speed of lightning with energy to share,” is negotiating a deal with St. Lucie County, Florida, to erect a $425-million plasma gasification system near a local landfill. The plant in St. Lucie County will be large enough to devour all 2,000 tons of daily trash generated by the county and polish off an additional 1,000 tons a day from the old landfill. Of course, the technology, still unproven on a large scale, has its skeptics. “That obsidian-like slag contains toxic heavy metals and breaks down when exposed to water,” claims Brad Van Guilder, a scientist at the Ecology Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which advocates for clean air and water. “Dump it in a landfill, and it could one day contaminate local groundwater.” Others wonder about the cleanliness of the syngas. “In the cool-down phases, the components in the syngas could re-form into toxins,” warns Monica Wilson, the international coordinator for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, in Berkeley, California. None of this seems to worry St. Lucie County’s solid-waste director, Leo Cordeiro. “We’ll get all our garbage to disappear, and our landfill will be gone in 20 years,” he tells me. The best part: Geoplasma is footing the entire bill. “We’ll generate 160 megawatts a day from the garbage,” Hillestad says, “but we’ll consume only 40 megawatts to run the plant. We’ll sell the net energy to the local power grid.” Sales from excess electricity might allow Geoplasma to break even in 20 years.
In New York, Carmen Cognetta, an attorney with the city council’s infrastructure division, is evaluating how plasma gasification could help offset some of the city’s exorbitant waste costs. “All the landfalls around New York have closed, incinerators are banned, and we are trucking our trash to Virginia and Pennsylvania,” he explains. “That is costing the city $400 million a year. We could put seven or eight of these converters in the city, and that would be enough.” The syngas from the converters, Cognetta says, could be tapped for hydrogen gas to power buses or police cars. But the decision-making bureaucracy can be slow, and it is hamstrung by the politically well-connected waste-disposal industry. “Many landfill operators are used to getting a million dollars a month out of debris,” says U.S. Energy’s Paul Marazzo. “They don’t want a converter to happen because they’ll lose their revenue.”
Meanwhile, Victor Sziky, the president of Sicmar International, an investment firm based in Panama, is working with the Panamanian government to set up at least 10 Startech systems there. “The garbage problem here is exploding in conjunction with growth,” says Sziky, who lives in Panama City. “We have obsolete incinerators, and landfills that are polluting groundwater and drinking water. We’ve had outbreaks of cholera and hepatitis A and B directly attributed to the waste in landfills. There are a lot of people in a small country, and there’s no infrastructure to deal with it.” The project will be capable of destroying 200 tons of trash a day at each location, enough to handle all the garbage for the municipalities involved—and, says Sziky, to produce up to 40 percent of their electrical demand.
Panama’s syngas will probably be converted to hydrogen and sold to industrial suppliers. The current market for hydrogen is at least $50 billion worldwide, a figure that is expected to grow by 5 to 10 percent annually, according to the National Hydrogen Association, an industry and research consortium. Analysts at Fuji-Keizai USA, a market-research firm for emerging technologies, predict that the domestic market will hit $1.6 billion by 2010, up from $800 million in 2005. The Department of Energy’s Patrick Davis says that when the long-awaited hydrogen-powered vehicles finally arrive, the demand for hydrogen will soar. But he also notes that to have an effect on global warming, it’s critical that hydrogen come from clean sources.
That’s one more idea that’s old news to Longo, who, as usual, is 10 steps ahead of the game, already embedded in a future where fossil fuels are artifacts of a bygone era. For the past several years, he has been developing the Starcell, a filtration mechanism that slaps onto the back end of his converter and quickly refines syngas into hydrogen. As he says, “We are the disruptive technology.” Longo has been working in garbage for 40 years, making his fortune by literally scraping the bottom of the barrel. Which is, it turns out, the perfect vantage point for finding new ways to turn what to most of us is just garbage into arguably the most valuable thing in the world: clean energy.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Many of you know that Symi and I went to a taping of the Colbert Report not too long ago but I didn't see this coming:
from Yahoo News (February 14, 2007)
NEW YORK - Stephen Colbert may have no taste for the truth, but he does have a sweet tooth. Ben & Jerry's has named a new ice cream in honor of the comedian: "Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream."
It's vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and caramel.
Announcing the new flavor Wednesday, Ben & Jerry's called it: "The sweet taste of liberty in your mouth."
The Vermont-based ice-cream maker is known for naming its flavors after people such as Jerry Garcia, Wavy Gravy and the band Phish — which Colbert sees as a political bias.
"I'm not afraid to say it. Dessert has a well-known liberal agenda," Colbert said in a statement. "What I hope to do with this ice cream is bring some balance back to the freezer case."
Colbert, who spoofs flag-waving conservative pundits on his Comedy Central show, "The Colbert Report," is donating his proceeds to charity through the new Stephen Colbert Americone Dream Fund, which will distribute the money to various causes.
I wonder what kind of causes those would be.... Sounds like the makings of a great segment....
New Ice Cream Named for Stephen Colbert
from Yahoo News (February 14, 2007)
NEW YORK - Stephen Colbert may have no taste for the truth, but he does have a sweet tooth. Ben & Jerry's has named a new ice cream in honor of the comedian: "Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream."
It's vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and caramel.
Announcing the new flavor Wednesday, Ben & Jerry's called it: "The sweet taste of liberty in your mouth."
The Vermont-based ice-cream maker is known for naming its flavors after people such as Jerry Garcia, Wavy Gravy and the band Phish — which Colbert sees as a political bias.
"I'm not afraid to say it. Dessert has a well-known liberal agenda," Colbert said in a statement. "What I hope to do with this ice cream is bring some balance back to the freezer case."
Colbert, who spoofs flag-waving conservative pundits on his Comedy Central show, "The Colbert Report," is donating his proceeds to charity through the new Stephen Colbert Americone Dream Fund, which will distribute the money to various causes.
I wonder what kind of causes those would be.... Sounds like the makings of a great segment....
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Here's a great applied statistics paper-- researchers at Columbia and UC Berkeley correlated national corruption indices with unpaid parking tickets for UN diplomats. There's a pretty strong correlation, it seems, but what struck me was the dramatic number of parking tickets some countries rack up.
I've excerpted the top ten from their research:
Average Unpaid Annual New York City Parking Violations per Diplomat,
11/1997 to 11/2002
KUWAIT 246.2 Violations per diplomat (9 UN Diplomats in 1998)
EGYPT 139.6 Violations per diplomat (24 UN Diplomats in 1998)
CHAD 124.3 Violations per diplomat (2 UN Diplomats in 1998)
SUDAN 119.1 Violations per diplomat (7 UN Diplomats in 1998)
BULGARIA 117.5 Violations per diplomat (6 UN Diplomats in 1998)
MOZAMBIQUE 110.7 Violations per diplomat (5 UN Diplomats in 1998)
ALBANIA 84.5 Violations per diplomat (3 UN Diplomats in 1998)
ANGOLA 81.7 Violations per diplomat (9 UN Diplomats in 1998)
SENEGAL 79.2 Violations per diplomat (11 UN Diplomats in 1998)
PAKISTAN 69.4 Violations per diplomat (13 UN Diplomats in 1998)
(from pg. 19)
Here's the abstract: Cultures of Corruption: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets
I've excerpted the top ten from their research:
Average Unpaid Annual New York City Parking Violations per Diplomat,
11/1997 to 11/2002
KUWAIT 246.2 Violations per diplomat (9 UN Diplomats in 1998)
EGYPT 139.6 Violations per diplomat (24 UN Diplomats in 1998)
CHAD 124.3 Violations per diplomat (2 UN Diplomats in 1998)
SUDAN 119.1 Violations per diplomat (7 UN Diplomats in 1998)
BULGARIA 117.5 Violations per diplomat (6 UN Diplomats in 1998)
MOZAMBIQUE 110.7 Violations per diplomat (5 UN Diplomats in 1998)
ALBANIA 84.5 Violations per diplomat (3 UN Diplomats in 1998)
ANGOLA 81.7 Violations per diplomat (9 UN Diplomats in 1998)
SENEGAL 79.2 Violations per diplomat (11 UN Diplomats in 1998)
PAKISTAN 69.4 Violations per diplomat (13 UN Diplomats in 1998)
(from pg. 19)
Here's the abstract: Cultures of Corruption: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Map-reading postie finds address
A postman turned map reader to deliver a letter which was marked only with a name and a drawing. A map on the envelope had a dot drawn in north Cornwall and an arrow saying "Somewhere Here".
BBC News
Postal workers in Bude, north Cornwall managed to pinpoint the right address and deliver the letter.
The letter to Peter O'Leary, was from a long-lost work colleague who failed to enclose his own address so Mr O'Leary cannot write back.
Bude's delivery office manager Andrew Lake said post workers worked out from the map the intended address was in Bude and then asked each other if anyone recognised the name Peter O'Leary.
Postman Eric Seymour realised Mr O'Leary lived on his round and said the customer was astounded when he handed over the letter.
"The customer was very impressed indeed and we were delighted to be able to deliver the item," said Mr Lake.
"I have come across vague addresses on letters such as the house two doors down from the church, but never a map."
A postman turned map reader to deliver a letter which was marked only with a name and a drawing. A map on the envelope had a dot drawn in north Cornwall and an arrow saying "Somewhere Here".
BBC News
Postal workers in Bude, north Cornwall managed to pinpoint the right address and deliver the letter.
The letter to Peter O'Leary, was from a long-lost work colleague who failed to enclose his own address so Mr O'Leary cannot write back.
Bude's delivery office manager Andrew Lake said post workers worked out from the map the intended address was in Bude and then asked each other if anyone recognised the name Peter O'Leary.
Postman Eric Seymour realised Mr O'Leary lived on his round and said the customer was astounded when he handed over the letter.
"The customer was very impressed indeed and we were delighted to be able to deliver the item," said Mr Lake.
"I have come across vague addresses on letters such as the house two doors down from the church, but never a map."
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Here's an interesting article....
Politics, Economics and Time Bury Memories of the Kazakh Gulag
New York Times
By ILAN GREENBERG
Published: December 31, 2006
Maria Sadina hunched over fading pictures of her parents, ethnic Germans who were deported in 1941 from the Volga region in Russia to one of Karaganda's many gulag camps.
Ms. Sadina's father was imprisoned for praising the quality of a German-made tractor, and for a decade he worked as a slave laborer in the nearby coal mines. Her mother was sent to the Karaganda gulag simply for her German heritage.
They had married and reared their daughter, Ms. Sadina, in a two-room brick house so low to the ground that visitors must bend over to avoid hitting the ceiling. Ms. Sadina, now a grandmother, continues to live in the same house, the walls now appearing to crumble, tending the same garden her parents once harvested to survive.
She pointed to the neighbors' homes through her kitchen window. ''These people are all children of the gulag,'' she said. ''Nobody talks about it anymore. Nobody even wants to look at their pictures anymore.''
The gulags once spread over the Kazakhstan steppe like a thick wreath. Eleven sprawling camps with names like Alzhir, a Russian acronym for the Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Motherland, housed hundreds of thousands of prisoners and their families. The camps, built shortly after the creation of the Soviet Union, were partly emptied to provide soldiers and workers during World War II and were eventually closed, although not dismantled, after Stalin died in 1953.
In Kazakhstan today, a large percentage of people have parents or grandparents whose life trajectories were savagely rewired by deportation and imprisonment in the camps. But memories of the gulags are dying, fading like Ms. Sadina's photos.
''For younger generations the gulag is uninteresting,'' said Arest Savchak, a 61-year-old teacher whose parents and grandparents were exiled to Karaganda as political prisoners for the crime of supporting Ukrainian nationalism. ''After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when we entered market economy, the values and the views of people have changed. Unless the gulag can be linked to the present time, it is meaningless.''
For many Karaganda youngsters, the oppression the gulags stand for does not register. ''This was just a village for miners,'' said Sasha Talabaev, 12, who was riding a bicycle through the heart of what was one of the gulags. Some of the reasons for a quick and collective forgetting are obvious. The memories, after all, are painful. And since the fall of the Soviet Union and Kazakhstan's independence in 1991, there are more pleasant things to focus on.
Growing affluence is one of them. The economy is growing at about 10 percent a year, and with the aid of oil, the country has developed a sophisticated middle class and has nurtured to maturation a regional banking center. Its once dour towns have metastasized into modern cities.
But there are political aspects to a sidestepping of Kazakhstan's recent history, too, often born out of the government's determination to stay friendly with Russia.
To sustain support for a pro-Russia foreign policy, ''the Kazakhstan state has gone to great lengths to construct an ideology for its nation-state that glosses over its colonial and neo-colonial history with Russia,'' Sean R. Roberts, a researcher in Central Asia affairs at Georgetown University, wrote on Dec. 19 in his Web log about the region.
Although those efforts have not added up to a blanket ban on public remembrances of the gulags, the government has instead chosen to ignore the issue. And it has used its control of the education system to keep texts from dwelling on the topic.
In a more pointed example of control, the government forbade large-scale remembrances of a violent uprising in Almaty, the capital, that took place in December 1986. As many as 40,000 ethnic Kazakhs poured into Almaty's central square then to protest Mikhail S. Gorbachev's firing of the chief of the Kazakh Soviet state. Soviet security forces are estimated to have killed at least 200 protesters on the square.
The rebellion was a watershed for Kazakh identity. It resonated too strongly for the government to ignore this year, so in October, President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev quietly dedicated a statue to commemorate the event. But the gesture received little coverage in the Kazakh press, which is closely monitored and controlled by the government.
Opposition leaders and several thousand nationalists hoped to use the statue as a gathering point for an antigovernment rally on the anniversary, but the government moved swiftly to crush preparations for it.
With Kazakh nationalism having become mostly the purview of the anti-Russia opposition here, the government has had to use other avenues to promote a coherent national identity. That is no small challenge in this country of 17 million people who span 80 different ethnicities and nearly as many religions -- a direct legacy of the Soviet Union's use of Kazakhstan as a holding pen for prisoners, dissidents and people who did not fit in the Russian mainstream.
Popular culture has been one tool of choice, especially through the government-financed movie studio KazakhFilm, which has a near monopoly on the country's film industry. This year the studio released its biggest hit yet, a historical piece called ''Nomad'' that delved into distant history, telling the little-known story of an ancient battle to give an uplifting view of Kazakh identity. The film, a $34.5 million production, broke box-office records in Kazakhstan, grossing more than $1 million here and also doing well in Russia.
Despite the huge expense of such historical movies, KazakhFilm plans more. But the company's chief executive, Talgat Temenov, says that none will be set in the 20th century.
''The Kazakh people have a tragic history, but with a movie like 'Nomad,' people can feel a sense of pride,'' he said. ''Film is an art and should not be a political tool, but at the same time we need to respect what history can do to people's psychology.''
Steven A. Barnes, an assistant professor of history at George Mason University who has studied the gulags in Karaganda, insists that history's relevance to society is exactly why remembering Kazakhstan's painful gulag past is so important.
''In the post-Soviet space, the trip from remembering to forgetting has been remarkably swift,'' he said. ''Perhaps such public forgetting would seem less problematic if not for the fact that it enables strong, authoritarian rule that clamps down on basic human rights like freedom of speech and the right of assembly.''
New York Times
By ILAN GREENBERG
Published: December 31, 2006
Maria Sadina hunched over fading pictures of her parents, ethnic Germans who were deported in 1941 from the Volga region in Russia to one of Karaganda's many gulag camps.
Ms. Sadina's father was imprisoned for praising the quality of a German-made tractor, and for a decade he worked as a slave laborer in the nearby coal mines. Her mother was sent to the Karaganda gulag simply for her German heritage.
They had married and reared their daughter, Ms. Sadina, in a two-room brick house so low to the ground that visitors must bend over to avoid hitting the ceiling. Ms. Sadina, now a grandmother, continues to live in the same house, the walls now appearing to crumble, tending the same garden her parents once harvested to survive.
She pointed to the neighbors' homes through her kitchen window. ''These people are all children of the gulag,'' she said. ''Nobody talks about it anymore. Nobody even wants to look at their pictures anymore.''
The gulags once spread over the Kazakhstan steppe like a thick wreath. Eleven sprawling camps with names like Alzhir, a Russian acronym for the Akmolinsk Camp for Wives of Traitors of the Motherland, housed hundreds of thousands of prisoners and their families. The camps, built shortly after the creation of the Soviet Union, were partly emptied to provide soldiers and workers during World War II and were eventually closed, although not dismantled, after Stalin died in 1953.
In Kazakhstan today, a large percentage of people have parents or grandparents whose life trajectories were savagely rewired by deportation and imprisonment in the camps. But memories of the gulags are dying, fading like Ms. Sadina's photos.
''For younger generations the gulag is uninteresting,'' said Arest Savchak, a 61-year-old teacher whose parents and grandparents were exiled to Karaganda as political prisoners for the crime of supporting Ukrainian nationalism. ''After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when we entered market economy, the values and the views of people have changed. Unless the gulag can be linked to the present time, it is meaningless.''
For many Karaganda youngsters, the oppression the gulags stand for does not register. ''This was just a village for miners,'' said Sasha Talabaev, 12, who was riding a bicycle through the heart of what was one of the gulags. Some of the reasons for a quick and collective forgetting are obvious. The memories, after all, are painful. And since the fall of the Soviet Union and Kazakhstan's independence in 1991, there are more pleasant things to focus on.
Growing affluence is one of them. The economy is growing at about 10 percent a year, and with the aid of oil, the country has developed a sophisticated middle class and has nurtured to maturation a regional banking center. Its once dour towns have metastasized into modern cities.
But there are political aspects to a sidestepping of Kazakhstan's recent history, too, often born out of the government's determination to stay friendly with Russia.
To sustain support for a pro-Russia foreign policy, ''the Kazakhstan state has gone to great lengths to construct an ideology for its nation-state that glosses over its colonial and neo-colonial history with Russia,'' Sean R. Roberts, a researcher in Central Asia affairs at Georgetown University, wrote on Dec. 19 in his Web log about the region.
Although those efforts have not added up to a blanket ban on public remembrances of the gulags, the government has instead chosen to ignore the issue. And it has used its control of the education system to keep texts from dwelling on the topic.
In a more pointed example of control, the government forbade large-scale remembrances of a violent uprising in Almaty, the capital, that took place in December 1986. As many as 40,000 ethnic Kazakhs poured into Almaty's central square then to protest Mikhail S. Gorbachev's firing of the chief of the Kazakh Soviet state. Soviet security forces are estimated to have killed at least 200 protesters on the square.
The rebellion was a watershed for Kazakh identity. It resonated too strongly for the government to ignore this year, so in October, President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev quietly dedicated a statue to commemorate the event. But the gesture received little coverage in the Kazakh press, which is closely monitored and controlled by the government.
Opposition leaders and several thousand nationalists hoped to use the statue as a gathering point for an antigovernment rally on the anniversary, but the government moved swiftly to crush preparations for it.
With Kazakh nationalism having become mostly the purview of the anti-Russia opposition here, the government has had to use other avenues to promote a coherent national identity. That is no small challenge in this country of 17 million people who span 80 different ethnicities and nearly as many religions -- a direct legacy of the Soviet Union's use of Kazakhstan as a holding pen for prisoners, dissidents and people who did not fit in the Russian mainstream.
Popular culture has been one tool of choice, especially through the government-financed movie studio KazakhFilm, which has a near monopoly on the country's film industry. This year the studio released its biggest hit yet, a historical piece called ''Nomad'' that delved into distant history, telling the little-known story of an ancient battle to give an uplifting view of Kazakh identity. The film, a $34.5 million production, broke box-office records in Kazakhstan, grossing more than $1 million here and also doing well in Russia.
Despite the huge expense of such historical movies, KazakhFilm plans more. But the company's chief executive, Talgat Temenov, says that none will be set in the 20th century.
''The Kazakh people have a tragic history, but with a movie like 'Nomad,' people can feel a sense of pride,'' he said. ''Film is an art and should not be a political tool, but at the same time we need to respect what history can do to people's psychology.''
Steven A. Barnes, an assistant professor of history at George Mason University who has studied the gulags in Karaganda, insists that history's relevance to society is exactly why remembering Kazakhstan's painful gulag past is so important.
''In the post-Soviet space, the trip from remembering to forgetting has been remarkably swift,'' he said. ''Perhaps such public forgetting would seem less problematic if not for the fact that it enables strong, authoritarian rule that clamps down on basic human rights like freedom of speech and the right of assembly.''
Friday, January 12, 2007
This is a great spoof and I thought people might enjoy this. I hope to read Absurdistan soon.
By Gary Shteyngart
October 1, 2006
New York Times Book Review
DAY 1: At 11 in the morning, while I am still savoring the last moments of a fruitful sleep, a messenger brings to my doorstep a new translation of “Oblomov,” the famous 19th-century slacker novel by Ivan Goncharov, whose eponymous hero, a member of Russia’s lazy landed gentry, spends most of his time luxuriating in bed. “Looks like I came at the wrong time,” the courier says with a wink, mistaking my usual dishabille for interrupted coitus. I return to my bed and gaze unhappily at the thick tome in my hands. Right away I’m feeling sleepy.
DAY 2: “I asked for mayo on the side,” I scream at the woman who takes my phone orders from the local diner. “I have cholesterol issues. You want me to die.” The half-eaten turkey sandwich rolls off the bed, leaving me with my trusty, sweet-smelling comforter and the very thick volume of “Oblomov,” the famous 19th-century Russian slacker novel by Ivan Goncharov, newly translated by Stephen Pearl and published by Bunim & Bannigan. I leaf through it while looking at the ceiling. That reminds me, the light bulb in the bedroom needs to be changed. Maybe tomorrow. “Oblomov” consists of 443 pages of small type plus another xxiii pages taken up by the foreword and introduction. I sit up and cross myself several times. How in the name of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov did I get myself into this mess?
DAY 3: Overslept. One p.m. But not to worry. Today the earth will shake! Today I will tackle “Oblomov,” the famous 19th-century Russian slacker novel written by Ivan Goncharov. And then I will write the most insightful essay ever written on the subject — a short, funny, but oddly moving meditation (“This short and funny meditation oddly moved me,” important people will say over breakfast) on Russian laziness that will somehow tie in with the Internet-addicted, short-attention. ... To the devil with this apartment! And now the light bulb in the hallway is out as well!
DAY 4: I’m not making any promises to myself, but today might be the day. The day I change the light bulb. And read “Oblomov,” the famous book by you-know-who. The delivery boy brings a proper turkey sandwich, mayo on the side, and a monumental cup of black coffee. I fluff up the comforter to support my gentle behind, prop up my pillows in such a way that they won’t leave a red imprint upon my neck, and open the book. “There is something deeply Russian in the character of Oblomov,” Tatyana Tolstaya writes in the book’s foreword, something that “lies in the seductive appeal of laziness and of good-natured idleness.”
DAY 5: What time is it? My laptop has been purring urgently, distracting me from that famous Russian slacker novel by Ivan Goncharov, which seems to have gotten lost somewhere within the folds of my elephantine comforter. What’s this on my screen? Breaking news over the A.P. wire: “Boy George Reports for N.Y.C. Trash Duty.” The 1980’s pop legend has been nailed on drug charges and is being forced to collect garbage just a few blocks away from me on the Lower East Side. “You think you’re better than me?” the octogenarian-looking singer is shouting at members of the media. “Go home. Let me do my community service.” I should crawl out of bed this very instant and lend my support to Mr. George. As a young Russian immigrant, I learned a great deal of English by listening to his happy bisexual crooning (“Karma, karma, karma, karma ...,” I would stutter along). If only all that damned “Oblomov”-reading hadn’t made me so sleepy.
DAY 6: I wake up in a state of agitation and throw on my dressing gown. There’s no time for coffee or the Internet. I grab “Oblomov” and start to feverishly highlight all the relevant passages. Only 400 pages to go! And when I finish with this essay, I will screw in new light bulbs. And I will clean the windows, which are as dirty as my soul. I will forswear the turkey sandwich from the diner. I will buy a house in the countryside upstate like I’ve always wanted. I will learn how to drive. Yes, I will drive up to my little country home in a leased Prius and there I will raise serfs and radishes and real fresh turkeys to put between my rye bread. My whole being is on fire! I sit up in bed and start to breathe heavily. Then I fall asleep.
DAY 7: I dream I am urgently rowing a boat to a house that appears to be drowning in the middle of the Gulf of Finland, a faded mansion in the Russian rococo style. I clamber up the waterlogged stairs, and on the top floor, recumbent upon his divan, I find Oblomov. He looks just as the book has described him, “flabby beyond his years,” with “small pudgy hands, and soft shoulders.” His equally indolent servant Zakhar is asleep on top of the stove, snoring rhythmically.
“Ilya Ilyich,” I say to Oblomov. “We must get out of this house before we drown. The water is gaining the stairs and soon we will be done for.”
Oblomov shrugs, but looks at me good-naturedly. “Take me as I am and love what is good in me!” he says, per the book.
“Don’t you see, good sir!” I say. “We are blessed to live in fascinating places in momentous times. You in 19th-century St. Petersburg, and I in early-21st-century New York. We should bestir from our beds and take heed of what surrounds us. In your day there are great thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; in my day William Bennett and Condoleezza Rice.”
“I hardly ever read,” Oblomov says, much as he does on Page 19 of Goncharov’s novel. “What is there for me to be curious about? You know why they write that stuff — it’s just for self-gratification. ...”
DAY 8: According to the Internet, Boy George is collecting trash under the Williamsburg Bridge, less than 200 yards away from me. Perhaps I should telephone A., who occasionally contributes to S— Magazine, or D., who does something or other media-related, and we can form a little investigatory posse. I picture A. and D. and R. and T. and all the rest of us soft-spoken, liberal-college-educated youngish people lying in our queen-size beds, the glow of our all-forgiving laptops lighting up our disheveled bedrooms. Scattered about us are torn underwear, the stubs of plane tickets issued three years ago, half-eaten turkey sandwiches, spent light bulbs, ironic “vacuum tube” radios from the 1950’s, and books. Not the books that used to sustain us when we first fell in love with words but piles of freshly minted ones that demand to be read and loved and blurbed and reviewed. Where do they all come from, these books? Why do so many people need to jot down their imaginings in bursts of sophisticated English? Why all these new translations of long-forgotten texts? Why can’t I finish this essay, put on some real clothes and walk out into the summer sunlight where Boy George and the rest of our civilization await me?
DAY 9: Maybe if I clean the windows there will be a great deal of natural light and I won’t have to bother with the light bulbs. The real estate broker had told me the windows in my building “pop right out for easy maintenance” but what if they “pop right out” and kill a passing pedestrian? I fall into a deep melancholic trance. The diner completely screwed up the order. The turkey sandwich turned out to be ham. The mayo is hardly on the side. Oblomov has lost the love of his life, Olga, to his best friend, the industrious half-German Stoltz. Rapscallions have taken advantage of his good nature and robbed him of his last kopeck. He has died in his own bed of a stroke.
DAY 10: “What is it that’s doomed you?” Olga asks her beloved Oblomov before she leaves him for good. “Oblomovshchina,” he tells her — the state of being Oblomov, a term that in Russia may as well connote the state of the entire country. Some, like Tatyana Tolstaya, believe Oblomov’s immobility is rooted in the influence of Eastern philosophy upon Russia and proclaims him “one of nature’s Buddhists.” Others point the finger at Oblomov’s overprotective mother, or at a quiet, indolent, utterly thought-free childhood spent at a Russian country estate. My analyst claims his passivity is most likely rooted in depression. Who knows? One thing is certain. All this thinking takes up precious time, and the late summer sun is no longer trying to break into my bedroom and grab me by the collar. The alarm clock glows deep red in the dark. Midnight. As the members of Oblomov’s household would say: “Well, that’s another day over, praise God!”
Gary Shteyngart’s most recent novel is Absurdistan.
Ten Days With Oblomov
By Gary Shteyngart
October 1, 2006
New York Times Book Review
DAY 1: At 11 in the morning, while I am still savoring the last moments of a fruitful sleep, a messenger brings to my doorstep a new translation of “Oblomov,” the famous 19th-century slacker novel by Ivan Goncharov, whose eponymous hero, a member of Russia’s lazy landed gentry, spends most of his time luxuriating in bed. “Looks like I came at the wrong time,” the courier says with a wink, mistaking my usual dishabille for interrupted coitus. I return to my bed and gaze unhappily at the thick tome in my hands. Right away I’m feeling sleepy.
DAY 2: “I asked for mayo on the side,” I scream at the woman who takes my phone orders from the local diner. “I have cholesterol issues. You want me to die.” The half-eaten turkey sandwich rolls off the bed, leaving me with my trusty, sweet-smelling comforter and the very thick volume of “Oblomov,” the famous 19th-century Russian slacker novel by Ivan Goncharov, newly translated by Stephen Pearl and published by Bunim & Bannigan. I leaf through it while looking at the ceiling. That reminds me, the light bulb in the bedroom needs to be changed. Maybe tomorrow. “Oblomov” consists of 443 pages of small type plus another xxiii pages taken up by the foreword and introduction. I sit up and cross myself several times. How in the name of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov did I get myself into this mess?
DAY 3: Overslept. One p.m. But not to worry. Today the earth will shake! Today I will tackle “Oblomov,” the famous 19th-century Russian slacker novel written by Ivan Goncharov. And then I will write the most insightful essay ever written on the subject — a short, funny, but oddly moving meditation (“This short and funny meditation oddly moved me,” important people will say over breakfast) on Russian laziness that will somehow tie in with the Internet-addicted, short-attention. ... To the devil with this apartment! And now the light bulb in the hallway is out as well!
DAY 4: I’m not making any promises to myself, but today might be the day. The day I change the light bulb. And read “Oblomov,” the famous book by you-know-who. The delivery boy brings a proper turkey sandwich, mayo on the side, and a monumental cup of black coffee. I fluff up the comforter to support my gentle behind, prop up my pillows in such a way that they won’t leave a red imprint upon my neck, and open the book. “There is something deeply Russian in the character of Oblomov,” Tatyana Tolstaya writes in the book’s foreword, something that “lies in the seductive appeal of laziness and of good-natured idleness.”
DAY 5: What time is it? My laptop has been purring urgently, distracting me from that famous Russian slacker novel by Ivan Goncharov, which seems to have gotten lost somewhere within the folds of my elephantine comforter. What’s this on my screen? Breaking news over the A.P. wire: “Boy George Reports for N.Y.C. Trash Duty.” The 1980’s pop legend has been nailed on drug charges and is being forced to collect garbage just a few blocks away from me on the Lower East Side. “You think you’re better than me?” the octogenarian-looking singer is shouting at members of the media. “Go home. Let me do my community service.” I should crawl out of bed this very instant and lend my support to Mr. George. As a young Russian immigrant, I learned a great deal of English by listening to his happy bisexual crooning (“Karma, karma, karma, karma ...,” I would stutter along). If only all that damned “Oblomov”-reading hadn’t made me so sleepy.
DAY 6: I wake up in a state of agitation and throw on my dressing gown. There’s no time for coffee or the Internet. I grab “Oblomov” and start to feverishly highlight all the relevant passages. Only 400 pages to go! And when I finish with this essay, I will screw in new light bulbs. And I will clean the windows, which are as dirty as my soul. I will forswear the turkey sandwich from the diner. I will buy a house in the countryside upstate like I’ve always wanted. I will learn how to drive. Yes, I will drive up to my little country home in a leased Prius and there I will raise serfs and radishes and real fresh turkeys to put between my rye bread. My whole being is on fire! I sit up in bed and start to breathe heavily. Then I fall asleep.
DAY 7: I dream I am urgently rowing a boat to a house that appears to be drowning in the middle of the Gulf of Finland, a faded mansion in the Russian rococo style. I clamber up the waterlogged stairs, and on the top floor, recumbent upon his divan, I find Oblomov. He looks just as the book has described him, “flabby beyond his years,” with “small pudgy hands, and soft shoulders.” His equally indolent servant Zakhar is asleep on top of the stove, snoring rhythmically.
“Ilya Ilyich,” I say to Oblomov. “We must get out of this house before we drown. The water is gaining the stairs and soon we will be done for.”
Oblomov shrugs, but looks at me good-naturedly. “Take me as I am and love what is good in me!” he says, per the book.
“Don’t you see, good sir!” I say. “We are blessed to live in fascinating places in momentous times. You in 19th-century St. Petersburg, and I in early-21st-century New York. We should bestir from our beds and take heed of what surrounds us. In your day there are great thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoyevsky; in my day William Bennett and Condoleezza Rice.”
“I hardly ever read,” Oblomov says, much as he does on Page 19 of Goncharov’s novel. “What is there for me to be curious about? You know why they write that stuff — it’s just for self-gratification. ...”
DAY 8: According to the Internet, Boy George is collecting trash under the Williamsburg Bridge, less than 200 yards away from me. Perhaps I should telephone A., who occasionally contributes to S— Magazine, or D., who does something or other media-related, and we can form a little investigatory posse. I picture A. and D. and R. and T. and all the rest of us soft-spoken, liberal-college-educated youngish people lying in our queen-size beds, the glow of our all-forgiving laptops lighting up our disheveled bedrooms. Scattered about us are torn underwear, the stubs of plane tickets issued three years ago, half-eaten turkey sandwiches, spent light bulbs, ironic “vacuum tube” radios from the 1950’s, and books. Not the books that used to sustain us when we first fell in love with words but piles of freshly minted ones that demand to be read and loved and blurbed and reviewed. Where do they all come from, these books? Why do so many people need to jot down their imaginings in bursts of sophisticated English? Why all these new translations of long-forgotten texts? Why can’t I finish this essay, put on some real clothes and walk out into the summer sunlight where Boy George and the rest of our civilization await me?
DAY 9: Maybe if I clean the windows there will be a great deal of natural light and I won’t have to bother with the light bulbs. The real estate broker had told me the windows in my building “pop right out for easy maintenance” but what if they “pop right out” and kill a passing pedestrian? I fall into a deep melancholic trance. The diner completely screwed up the order. The turkey sandwich turned out to be ham. The mayo is hardly on the side. Oblomov has lost the love of his life, Olga, to his best friend, the industrious half-German Stoltz. Rapscallions have taken advantage of his good nature and robbed him of his last kopeck. He has died in his own bed of a stroke.
DAY 10: “What is it that’s doomed you?” Olga asks her beloved Oblomov before she leaves him for good. “Oblomovshchina,” he tells her — the state of being Oblomov, a term that in Russia may as well connote the state of the entire country. Some, like Tatyana Tolstaya, believe Oblomov’s immobility is rooted in the influence of Eastern philosophy upon Russia and proclaims him “one of nature’s Buddhists.” Others point the finger at Oblomov’s overprotective mother, or at a quiet, indolent, utterly thought-free childhood spent at a Russian country estate. My analyst claims his passivity is most likely rooted in depression. Who knows? One thing is certain. All this thinking takes up precious time, and the late summer sun is no longer trying to break into my bedroom and grab me by the collar. The alarm clock glows deep red in the dark. Midnight. As the members of Oblomov’s household would say: “Well, that’s another day over, praise God!”
Gary Shteyngart’s most recent novel is Absurdistan.
Friday, January 05, 2007
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