In 20 seconds, actually, and reduces heavy metals too.
... but the Lifesaver uses microscopic pores a mere 15 nanometers across — about one-hundredth the width of a spider’s silk — narrow enough to stop the tiniest threats. That means virtually nothing — not even bacteria and viruses — can get through.
One-fifth of the world's gold from such labor.
Many are girls who begin as apprentice panners as young as 4 and become full-time workers by age 10. Teenage boys work the shafts, descending with flashlights tied around their necks to hack ore from the rock. Lancei Conde, the regional administrator of Kankan, said children work at all the bush mines in Guinea.
Separate article with graph and link to a six-parter here.
Evidently,
There are already more Chinese living in Nigeria than there were Britons during the height of the empire.
The simplest technology on display in Compone creates the biggest stir. It's a thick, tapered plastic ring, lined with ridges, that [Amy] Smith picked up in Zambia. She gathers the villagers around a colorful wool blanket piled high with dried corn on the cob. Women here spend many hours painfully prying kernels off cobs with their fingers. Smith inserts an unshelled ear into the ring and twists. The ridges in the ring dig into the cob, popping dozens of kernels with every motion. Faces brighten, and a few women unconsciously rub the joints of their thumbs...
"A small improvement like that can make a huge difference in people's lives," Smith tells me. "It might mean they can plant three extra rows of corn because they have more time, or maybe their kids don't work as much, and instead they go to school."
Baghdad was a wonder of the world in the year 800 while London was an economic backwater. By 1800, London was the largest city in the world while Arab cities languished. Recent research attributes this ‘trading places’ to institutional differences: Arab cities were tied to the fate of the state while European cities were independent growth poles.
Let's say the new water prices were so high as to capture all the benefits that buyers would receive from the new supply of water. We can expect much lower rates of diarrhea and other diseases, if only because the water supplier can charge more for cleaner and safer water. The resulting decline in disease means that children will die less frequently and adults will be healthier and more energetic. Those long-term social benefits are of enormous help to poor communities, even if high prices take away many of the initial, upfront benefits of the new water supply. In other words, we should consider radical privatization precisely because water is a public good and because clean water is so important for long-run economic growth.
Links to analysts' status reports. Not all confident, but...
Ken Banks: "African entrepreneurs are discovering that the current technological environment enables them to remove those shackles for themselves. They need not rely on a donor agency or international trade agreement to hand them the key."
Summary of methodology at Population Media Center.
Donation pitch for toilets for low-caste girls studying at the Pardada Pardadi School, Uttar Pradesh, India.
In 2006, the neighboring Dominican Republic notched more than four times more homicides per capita than those registered in Haiti: 23.6 per 100,000, according to the Central American Observatory on Violence. Even the United States would appear to have a higher homicide rate: 5.7 per 100,000 in 2006, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
Intel has announced plans to sell a specialized Wi-Fi platform later this year that can send data from a city to outlying rural areas tens of miles away, connecting sparsely populated villages to the Internet. The wireless technology, called the rural connectivity platform (RCP), will be helpful to computer-equipped students in poor countries, says Jeff Galinovsky, a senior platform manager at Intel. And the data rates are high enough--up to about 6.5 megabits per second--that the connection could be used for video conferencing and telemedicine, he says.Most links will be less than 30 miles away from each other. Less expensive than the proposed WiMAX blanket for now, I suppose?
... [RCP] rewrites the communication rules of Wi-Fi radios... the software creates specific time slots in which each of the two radios listens and talks, so there's no extra data being sent confirming transmissions. "We're not taking up all the bandwidth waiting for acknowledgments," he says.
Why, when I run a survey in rural Uganda, do youth with the same education and experience expect a wage three to four times higher than the youth I worked with in India? I don't begrudge anyone anywhere a living wage. It's the relative differential that puzzles me, and that could be keeping Africa from doing business globally.Evidently, possibly local government and NGOs are not paying attention to local markets.
Bang for the buck thing. Their first choice is Population Services International (mostly condoms and insecticide-treated bednets).
GiveWell's story here.
Economic realities:
Oxfam once reported on a situation in Bangladesh where international outrage forced factories to lay off 30,000 child workers. Many of those kids starved to death; many became prostitutes. A 1995 Unicef study described how an international boycott of carpets made in Nepal using child labour led to between 5,000 and 7,000 Nepali girls turning to prostitution because a better option was now denied to them.
But in low tech, affordable ways.
Social marketing -- with the theory that the poor see more value in brand-name goods they pay for than handouts they get free, and that the trade creates small entrepreneurs -- for mosquito nets does not work as well as straight handouts:
... 3.4 million free nets in two weeks. Coverage rose to 67 percent, and distribution became more equitable. Under social marketing, Dr. Olumese said, the “richest of the poor” had 38 percent coverage, while the “poorest of the poor” — like Maendeleo’s rice farmers — had only 15 percent. After the handouts, they were about equal.
Deaths of children dropped 44 percent.
Small quantities, but interesting tech:Frayne’s device, which he calls a Windbelt, is a taut membrane fitted with a pair of magnets that oscillate between metal coils. Prototypes have generated 40 milliwatts in 10-mph slivers of wind, making his device 10 to 30 times as efficient as the best microturbines. Frayne envisions the Windbelt costing a few dollars and replacing kerosene lamps in Haitian homes.
