bluerasberry

meeting Pradeep’s family

By bluerasberry on 2011-01-31

Pradeep and I were supposed to go to Humsafar and a museum after that but it was in the afternoon and kind of hot and his house was nearby so he suggested we stop for a half hour and then go. As it turned out I was interested in talking with his family and I just stayed the evening there.

His father Lagaadeji’s manner of speech seemed to me like that of a Dickensian gentlemen. He was a government employee for the railway for 33 years, now retired and working as an inspector for local schools. As he explained things, there are about 100 government-employed teachers in his area for kids below college level. He drops in unnannounced and sits in on their classes, then grades them. If there is a problem then he refers them to a committee. He told me some things about Maharastran history and on hearing my name he referred me to an American author named James Lane who wrote a biography on Shivaji. After building rapport he told me about his family.

In the way that Indians trained in British oration do, he told me he had three sons. He told that his eldest, Anand, was married, worked at some place, had a child, and that he lived at home and that I could meet him later. He told me that his second, whose name I forgot because I did not meet him, was married, worked at some place, had a child, and that he lived some distance from Mumbai. Then he said his third son, Pradeep, is married, works at clinics as you know, has a child, and is currently homeless. He told me that his child is 100 times more beautiful than Pradeep and said something to indicate that there is family tension. As I listened to him I got the impression that he knew quite well that Pradeep was with me and I with him because we intended to suck dick together. He then segued into telling me that he had a daughter, and that she was married and had two children, and that I should go meet them.

Pradeep took me to his sister’s home and on the walk there he apologized for not telling me that he was married and that he had a child. He she was in good spirits. She invited me to stay at her place that night as Pradeep had also been staying there. In the course of the evening she introduced me to her son who works in a call center and her daughter who is in school, and she introduced me to her husband. We talked for a while and they asked me how the Gay Pride rally was and what it was like to be gay in America. I enjoyed their company. They then said that we should go meet Pradeep’s wife, child, and in-laws.

On the walk over there Pradeep told me that he had not seen his wife for a couple of months. I asked him if he was sure he wanted to meet her now and he said yes, but only for a few minutes. We ended up staying there for about an hour. Everyone was very friendly to me. Upon arriving they had me hold his child, which felt very weird to me. They told me everyone’s name and what they did. I was sitting in a chair and I thought I was near a wall but at some point I looked back and realized that the wall was some distance behind me and I felt disoriented. Also I suddenly noticed that there was a rabbit on a shelf at my eye level. I looked at the rabbit and Pradeep’s mother-in-law noticed my interest and decided to get the rabbit for me to hold. She had been speaking Hindi throughout the evening so I was shocked when she said “Maharastra way of holding rabbit” and picked it up by its ears and handed it to me. I did not like seeing the rabbit held by its ears but it seemed calm enough and resigned to its fate of living on a shelf and being carried by its ears. I held the rabbit, and then Pradeep’s father-in-law arrived home from work. He told jokes and explained Hindu philosophy and had a lot of energy for someone who just got off work. I then had my photo taken with everyone.

After this Pradeep and I returned to his sister’s place. On the walk home I asked him if everyone knew the relationship between us. He told me that his sister’s family did but no one else did. I doubted his assessment but on the other hand the behavior of everyone else I had met that night seemed strange regardless of whether they knew or not. We chilled for a while with his sister’s family and we all slept in the same room. I always wondered how this works, but apparently the protocol is to wait for everyone to go to sleep then be quiet while being frisky.

The next day I said goodbye to everyone and told them I would return before leaving Mumbai. I did not think that my schedule was full but as things turned out I was unable to return. I wanted Nandan and Pradeep to meet each other again and have time to talk; it seemed to me that Pradeep was someone with whom I might want to either persue a relationship or work, but I feel that I should defer to native advice in these matters. After discovering that I would not meet Pradeep again I started talking with him by phone about every other day.

Posted in animal, gay stuff, India | Leave a response

date with Pradeep and FPA office visit

By bluerasberry on 2011-01-31

I went on a date with Pradeep the next day. He had named some museums and said that we could go to Humsafar Trust. When I met up with him he asked me if I wanted to go to a clinic with him as he was due to get his third and last Hep B vaccine. I told him I did want to go. We went by train and Mumbai trains are sometimes so packed that people hang out the doors. Nandan tells me that every day newspapers show pictures of the faces of the dead who fell out of the train and died, and now need identification. Pradeep planned the trip for the slow part of the day and still the trains were so packed between certain stations that there was no room to move or even turn around. Pradeep and I were still being goofy and flirty and he would stand close to me and smile as he got pressed close to or against my face. We were against a wall in the aisle of the center of the train and I felt that even though we were entirely surrounded by people who were even hanging outside the train holding on for life, we were also alone because no one could turn their bodies to look at us. I started stroking his leg with one finger with my messenger bag in front of him and then just progressed over the thirty minute ride to stroking his dick through his pants while he kept a straight face. When we got off the train we could not stop laughing because we felt like we shared a secret.

Just outside the train stop we went to the FPA clinic. It was a large place which served many client populations and Pradeep had understated its importance in his description so I was pleasantly surprised. He told me that he used to work there as an outreach counselor and it was apparent that he was well-known and well-liked there. This made me more interested in him because it meant that he had good connections to Humsafar and this place, and probably also he knows other places. The FPA clinic’s mission is to do HIV education to anyone who comes there; Humsafar is only for MSMs. Pradeep was showing me around the place and it seemed to be equipped as well as any counseling clinic I have seen in America, with one big difference in that it also had a room with lots of single beds. Pradeep said it was for women to get abortions, but I am not clear on whether abortions were actually performed at this place.

I suddenly felt underdressed as I was wearing jeans and a collared t-shirt, and Pradeep introduced me to a male and female manager of the place. They both spoke Western counseling and public health jargon and I became aware that Pradeep also can talk this way, which surprised me somewhat as his English is good but not so good that I expected him to be more familiar with the lexicon of civic planners than the outreach workers in Seattle typically are. I was belted with lots of information I wanted and when I asked questions they were easily able to anticipate why I had asked the question and they told me what I wanted to know in addition to only answering my question. Throughout this they told me about their funding streams and oversight processes and that if I wanted access to the data which they collected then I should both contact their parent organization to request clearance to receive answers to questions and contact researchers to get their previously published interpretations of the numbers. The manager made a trusting gesture by telling me trivial bits of information which were not private but were beyond the purview of what they were supposed to tell strangers who come into their clinic and start poking around, and I took this as a hint that he would be willing to get me whatever I wanted if I made the request to his supervisor that I wanted his help.

After the talk I got some papers including an 2008 annual report. It is a beautiful document and I am eager to consume it and adapt it for Wikipedia. He apologized that it was outdated and told me there was better information for me.

Then Pradeep got his shot and we left.

Posted in gay stuff, health, HIV | Leave a response

Juhu Beach visit

By bluerasberry on 2011-01-30

The day after pride Mantu and Nandan wanted to chill but that night we went to Juhu Beach. Chowpatty Beach was contained in a neighborhood in Mumbai; I am sure it connected to the rest of the shoreline somehow but it seemed like one area to me. Juhu Beach went on for miles. When we went there I stood on the shoreline and saw the stars off in the darkness toward the ocean. I do not remember the last time I saw all the stars.

Children and older boys were playing on the beach. It seemed to me that small groups of friends would come together and then start interacting with other groups by frenquently exchanging members. It is a social system that is unknown to me – I am sure I have never been to any social event in Western culture were people mingle as freely or as intimately as people do in India. The people seemed very happy and I think it is likely that the people I saw visit the beach or some series of such places every day and have a lot of fun just running and playing with different people continually.

We had fresh pineapple juice and it was terrific. I have never had this before and it was a lot better than anything canned.

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Welcome to India, your problems begin now!

By bluerasberry on 2011-01-27

Mumbai is huge and full of people. This is my first time visiting.

There was a snowstorm in DC and this led to me missing connecting flights and getting redirected through multiple carriers to finally arrive in Mumbai. I was compelled to go to Delhi and from there to Mumbai in order to arrive in time for pride. I had trouble getting a boarding pass there and called Nandan to let him know what was up. The first thing he told me was “Welcome to India! Your problems begin now!”

While waiting in Delhi I met some other people who had also left from DC into Doha and were now in the same situation as me, where Qatar had given them papers which were not being accepted for an onward flight. We were gathered near an information desk waiting area and when an airline rep arrived I thought it was strange that the scheduler would tell me and four other people to sit together for the same issue but not tell us about each other. I had not seen these people before and they had not seen me, but when the representative asked who had the issue with Qatar Airways we all spoke up and recognized the situation. The solution was to wait another hour then suddenly he returned, took us to a counter, and had the agent print us boarding passes for our onward flights. Anywhere else in the world I would say that the representative spent the hour arranging for our business, but when he told the agent to print our tickets I am almost sure that he just did this on his personal authority with the agent knowing nothing more, and I wondered if he could have done that in the beginning. Also, my bag did not follow me through this and I had to collect it from the airport the day after I arrived. The rebooking and baggage collection was all smooth and no time was lost in getting to my destination because of all this, but the process of the rebooking and the fact that in claiming one checked bag I had to show my passport to ten people and sign my name for half of them just reminded me very well of what it means to be in India.

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2010 Green Lake Gobble

By bluerasberry on 2010-11-22

washed hands in the air

I participated in the Mashed-potato Munch Off at the Green Lake Gobble again this year. I ate 75 ounces of mashed potatoes (4.7 pounds, 2.1 kilograms) in four minutes. The woman to my right was second place. I was intimidated because I had expected them to leave my finished bowls in front of me, but instead they had taken two of mine and refilled them. Each bowl was weighed to be 10 ounces, and I thought the woman to my right was almost at my consumption because she had the same number of bowls as me.

potatoes fear me

The Seattle Times has a write-up about this, and the Seattle Weekly has some pictures of me in a slideshow; advance the slideshow to see them.

After the show I went to Starbucks to vomit, but that had more to do with expressing my feelings about their coffee and service than anything to do with the contest.

Posted in art, Seattle | Tagged competitive eating, contest | Leave a response

Head Start, four times, one week

By bluerasberry on 2010-10-22

Four times in one week I have heard the same story in different contexts. I am struck by the profundity of this problem, it being that there exists evidence that funding social wellness programs for children is both the simplest and most effective way to improve individual and societal health, and yet in America and elsewhere our child development programs are below capacity in both design and enrollment. The program which I heard referenced so much is Head Start.

For lots of reasons, children who enroll in pre-kindergarten tend to have better lives than children who do not. Some of the benefits which appear as trends in large populations of adults whose parents put them at age 4 into preliminary school include good health, better education, more social skills, better jobs, and other desirable things; these things are less common among populations whose parents did not put them into pre-k. There are lots of ways this could be considered; perhaps parents who put their children into pre-k are more engaged in their children’s development, or perhaps the act of enrolling them in pre-k when it is optional encourages them to be engaged throughout the child’s life when perhaps otherwise they might not have been. The way I think about this is to think that the act of committing to an arbitrary program for child improvement at least connects parents to social resources and makes them think about using community resources when perhaps they had not before and might not have otherwise.

On Friday October 15 I helped Ian manage the SPARX banquet. SPARX is the University of Washington service learning project for medical students interested in rural health. One might say that there are parallels between so-called “global health” and so-called “rural health”: global health refers to programs which push interventions to improve the health of societies in foreign and usually developing countries, whereas rural health refers to programs which push interventions to underserved populations in one’s own country. Both global health and rural health are relatively new ideas and becoming trendy as of the past few years; I just know that UW has begun funding these programs multiplicatively more lately but I do not have numbers. Other schools worldwide are also taking this interest.

Ian is the director of this program at the UW. One of the programs he supports is Headstart, which is a program to encourage parents to send their kids to pre-school, so that is the headline story in that context. But the banquet was logistically interesting, and since I have been to so many non-profit events which bombed I want to describe this very effective one so that everyone can know of this one way to make things work.

Ian got a ton of awesome catered food and had free cheap alcohol. This got people to attend, made them happy, and put them in a talkative mood. I am a strong supporter of using food to direct people’s behaviors. He arranged the banquet room so that table seated 12 persons. People gave short presentations, then Ian initiated an leadership action which stabbed every attendee right in the chest. This is what killed them – he had program directors for a lot of non-profit organizations ready to give short pitches about their orgs and an appeal for the students to join them. The program directors where themselves usually students engaged with the organization, so they were peers to those to whom they were targeting. With the students fed, with spirits high, with everyone at small tables, with a peer recruiter coming to them, with the programs being relevant to the students’ interests, with information about the programs being pushed at them in a favorable setting, and with the huge promise of favorable social and personal benefits to joining the programs, I am sure that all able recruiters got a good response from their request for people to join their organizations. But the clever part about this is that no one got to finish their conversations – there were lots of presenters there, and they went to each table for 10 minutes, then Ian rung a bell, and presenters changed tables.

The banquet was loud. It would never be possible to have this kind of intercourse at a typical conference where people meet in discussion rooms or at a fair where attendees approach people in booths or even at a typical banquet where a few speakers take the podium and invite an entire room at once. The physical proximity of the organization recruiters was a brutal tactic; I even expect that many people left that banquet thinking that it was their own idea to do rural health service learning when in fact I am sure only the slightest fraction would have signed up had they not been asked in this effective way.

I want to list the names of the organizations recruiting so that I will have a record of what was hot in Seattle at this time and place:

Alliance for Equal Representation in Medicine
Al Shifa
American Medical Student Association
Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association
CHAP Community Health Advancement Program

dermatology
foot care
orion health
interagency tutoring
perinatal care
bilingual education
adolescent sports medicine

family medicine
health equity circle
IHI open school ??
Latino Medical Student Association
medicine wheel society
Q Med
rotaract club
SITC students in the community – aloha inn wellness clinic
education transforming community health
SPARX

Latina Health fair
one night count of homeless
teen feed breakfasts at roots
medical respite for homeless youth
student national medical association
student physicians for social responsibility

On Tuesday October 19 I went to the food lecture by Marion Nestle and I already blogged that. She also talked about Head Start but it did not strike me at that time.

On Wednesday October 20 I went to a lecture on Obama’s new healthcare law advertising Scott Armstrong, the CEO of Group Health, as the speaker. UW’s lectures always have a lot of people in attendance and this one had at least 120, but Scott pointed out that not every city can host a lecture like this and expect a full crowd. As it turned out Scott did not speak much at all, but instead turned things over to Bob Kocher who directs a think tank called the McKinsey Center.

Bob Kocher is the shorter; with Scott Armstrong

The story was that Kocher’s think tank was hired to help draft the Obama healthcare reform laws. Kocher says his personal contribution was putting in the tanning tax, which, while very cool and totally necessary, seems like a quirky contribution and a strange thing for someone to be proud of when obviously they have the skills and status to take credit for almost any kind of addition. The process he described for writing laws was all about human nature and less about any kind of discussion about law. He said that when the laws sort of wrote themselves by having enough representatives show up at the House at 6am and leave at 3am while “constitutional lawyers droned all day.” He said that Angela Braly, a head of a major insurance company opposing these laws, submitted some complaint which included a minor mathematical error and this led to her having to testify in front of congress where she was grilled mercilessly. Kocher described the situation as if the error was something which dozens of her obscenely paid staff should have caught but overlooked because of math illiteracy, and that her testifying was a result of this error being present. The questions he remembered his peers writing for her were as follows – “How much money do you make?” “What kind of plane do you fly?” “Are you trying to hurt pregnant women, children, or the poor?” and he said similar questions went on for hours and she had to entertain them. Then he said that he intends to send her flowers every year for Christmas forever. He dropped a lot of religious references throughout.

I took a lot of notes on this guy. Something else really cool that he did was have everyone write their questions on cards for him to answer. He answered about thirty cards, which is a huge amount for any lecturer to field. I was entirely impressed. I took pictures of him and Scott and I think they came out just like I remember him.

Obama and Murray at the University of Washington in October 2010

Posted in health, legal, presentation, religion, Seattle | Tagged politician, weapon | Leave a response

food lecture series…

By bluerasberry on 2010-10-20

The University of Washington Alumni Association does these environmental lectures every year. The series is on Tuesday nights for eight weeks. Last year the talks were about coffee and I went to all of them and they were great. This year it is about top-level economic policy on food production, and the series is called “Food: Eating your Environment.” I just went to the third one last night.

The first one was a talk by Gebisa Ejeta, who is an Ethiopian geneticist who won a food production prize. I am sure he does good work but he deadpanned through an entirely scripted presentation and read the extensive text within his own slideshow to us. I appreciate when developing countries are able to produce researchers who can contribute to the extant body of scientific knowledge and really think that academic collaboration between universities in the developed and developing world is key to solving all world problems, but I am continually baffled at how this always seems to play out by the brightest people from poor countries seeming to have shucked the personalities from their souls and giving the most boring and least inviting presentations possible. If I ever had any say in coordinating these things I would try to coach the speakers to do something, anything, to prove their humanity and invite people to connect to them if they have interest in the matter in which the speaker presents. Rarely have I ever seen a chart of numbers and written to the author on that account; less often still have I sought someone who reads such charts to crowds without any context. I feel bad for situations like this because I know that a lot of starving people are depending on this guy to change their region for the better and attract attention, and the need would have been better served by having a trained presenter act as proxy to do lectures like this while perhaps having the actual invited guest just field the questions or something.

The next week it was a Stanford person named Roz Naylor talking about biofuels. Various nations try to grow crops to produce biofuel; the US does corn, Brazil does sugarcane, the EU does rape, and Indonesia does palm oil. 35% of the US’s corn goes to ethanol. For lots of reasons, many countries want to buy farmland for food production in other countries, and the countries which sell or lease their land to foreign powers for this purpose are Cambodia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Sudan.

Last night it was NYU’s Marion Nestle talking about how public policy affects nutritional health. She said that in the 1970s in America the policy went from farmers being paid to grow non-food crops to farmers having food crops subsidized, so that resulted in more food being available. With more food available, commercial entities had some market pressure to encourage people to eat more, and thus advertising which encouraged obesity came to be. She talked about a rule in Obama’s recent healthcare reform thing that will require fast food places nationwide to post the calories contained in their food along with a notice that adults typically should not eat more than 2000 calories a day. This already happens in NYC, and I am happy for this. There are lots of things which the government could do to promote health and I want to see more of them happen.

Posted in health, presentation, Seattle | Tagged lecture | Leave a response

database problems…

By bluerasberry on 2010-10-07

For a long time I have been wondering about the problem of providing software solutions to fix the problems I am having with data collection. I am not sure what the final solution will be, but here are some options which people have presented to me and which I have not fully explored.

The problem is that I have lots of data to sort. I need a problem wherein trained people can manage this data but untrained people ought to be able to access the same database and be able to have limited privileges to either read or write data. More specifically, I need a library in a box where a librarian can keep a catalog of books and users can read the catalog, create profiles, and check out book. Also I need health software where medical providers can keep electronic health records and patients can access them. Finally I need general survey software for social or market research. It is my thought that there ought to be some survey program where people can create survey files. When a survey file is loaded into the program, then the surveyor can conduct the survey and the respondent’s answers go into the associated repository. But if it becomes necessary to quickly do a different survey, then the surveyor ought to be able to quickly load a new survey.

I am not necessarily imagining online versions of any of these, and in any case, I do need them to work without internet access even if they can be synced to a network online. I need all of this for research in the developing world done by local people, so ultimately I need the software to be totally free because I cannot secure funding for licensing for all potential users. I would like the software to have a community base so that I can talk about it on forums. I really do not have time to develop any software, so I need it to work now also. I do not think I am asking to much when I suppose that these applications ought to already exist, but frankly, it disgusts me to think that almost every library in America, almost every doctors office, and almost every surveying project in every university use proprietary software modified uniquely to their own projects. The disconnect which this shows between current management and reality is staggering, as I see no notable benefit to the current system. I think it comes about by computer-ignorant senior management being preyed upon by devious computer designers. The way things ought to be is that there should be at least one free open source well-developed program for all these applications, and it ought to be funded either by the government and professional and business organizations.

Anyway – here are some starts. For library programs there are Bento and Koha. UNESCO has a library which totally sucks and is really shameful considering their mission; it is called CDS ISIS.

For health software the big free ones are Microsoft’s HealthVault, Google Health, and Dossia. Dossia is open source. GE Healthcare – that’s General Electric – is the largest provider of healthcare IT for hospitals, but what they do is commercial. Their program is called Centricity.

For social research I am not sure what to say. The United States government shares some parts of its census software, CSPro. The large database software suites are SAS, SPSS, and STATA.

Where to begin? It is really intimidating for me when I have no work support to research any of this and just want to get to work. And if I have problems, how can this stuff be of any use to more casual users or people in developing countries? I see the greed in software development and the lack of available software support as one of the greatest shames of the developed world. Everyone needs good software, the problem that it does not exist is never going to go away, and there is not good conversation on how we are going to develop these things and use them to promote global health.

Posted in computer, education, research | Leave a response

Infocamp, Seattle 2010…

By bluerasberry on 2010-10-06

I went to Infocamp at Seattle University on Saturday and Sunday October 2-3. I saw a sign or something about this conference – I am not sure what I saw, but I had never heard of it. It was $50 for two days and the website seemed to have a lot of community input on it, so I thought I would check it out. It turned out to be one of the best conferences I have ever attended in terms of organization, attendee involvement, and speaker presentation skills.

People who work in software and information science have the best slideshow presentation skills I have seen among any demographic I can name. Years ago I found this advice for making good presentations (10 slides, 20 minutes, 30pt or larger font) and it seemed that almost all of the speakers at this conference naturally followed this. The format of the event sounds bizarre when compared to typical conferences – there is no preset speaker schedule except for the keynote speakers. The day started with lots of snacks, then a keynote speaker, then a call for people to come to the stage and make a proposal to the crowd for 45 minute breakout session. There was space for 9 breakout sessions, and in two days, there were seven of these sessions. I think in total about 55 sessions were offered, and almost all of them interested me a lot. It was difficult to choose the right one. Between every session the snacks and drinks were freshened, which is absolutely necessary to keep up energy levels. I hate attending conferences with lousy food or not enough drinks or speakers who go on for too long with no breaks! In an all-day conference it is not fair to have anyone other than the main speaker keep people in their chairs for more than an hour!

Some of the speakers prepared in advance and others just organized sessions spontaneously. The rules were that no one could be promoting a commercial interest. The theme for Infocamp is information sharing, usability, collaboration, and general community building. There were lots of Microsoft and Google guys here and they were great, but still most of the world’s work gets done by small companies whose names are not known and hearing their best and brightest was an opportunity I could only enjoy at a conference like this.

The first big speaker was Aaron Schmidt of walkingpaper.org. He is a librarian for city libraries and has interest in the strategies which various libraries around the world are using to promote themselves as community centers. He absolutely understands the big problems in modernizing libraries to take advantage of new technological resources, and said “I want libraries to be the number one pick-up spot.” I agree that the library is a natural place for people to fulfill their information needs and it would be a natural place for people with similar interests to be able to meet each other. He supports the nonprofit organization Geek the Library, and said that he supported acts of civil disobedience like some libraries’ usage of services like Netflix to provide video content to patrons who otherwise would not have access to media until better media distribution infrastructure is developed.

I went to a session on QR codes put on by a librarian. She was doing the things one might expect, but she said she got into using the codes because of Ethical Bean coffee. She said that Ethical Bean gets coffee from many different growers, and in order to give credit to the growers, they track their beans to the consumer level by putting QR codes on the bag so that coffee drinkers can read about all parts of the production process. It struck me that this would be a good way to track any kind of product with individual variability.

I went to a session by a podcast promoter, and she just said what I have heard before – that podcasting is great for anyone who wants to do it and can get an audience. I am already assured of an audience, and I really want to start making audio products with Nandan.

I went to a session with an advertising algorithm designer. This was a guy who contributed to the development of pricing models for online advertising. He said what I already knew but it clarified the process to me – ads art queued based on the bid, click through rate, and quality of linked content. Google and others have a process for judging the quality of page content, and better sites pay less for advertising. Ads which users click more also pay less. And of course, bidding more can override the other two.

I went to a lecture by this Google guy named Ario. He was one of the designers of Priority inbox, which just came out a few weeks before this conference. He talked about how it worked and how Google teams do this stuff and it how Google does a lot right, but I already knew that.

The other keynote speaker was a Samantha Starmer from REI (a major outdoor recreation equipment manufacturer which happens to be in Seattle), who was a user interface designer who had a lot of the programming team with her. Mostly they talked about how what they were doing amounted to groundbreaking fundamental research, and made believers of the whole audience regarding the difficulty in sorting a large commercial website’s products in such a way that customers can find what they want to buy. Also they talked about the need for standards so that the work they were doing does not have to be done everywhere repeatedly forever, so API and RDF, which are terms I know but do not intuitively understand. They also described how they use scrum to do all their work, and they described how demanding software developer rights both got them deserved recognition and kept inept management away from them. She also recommended http://uxmag.com/.

David Sherwin is an employee for Frog Design, a multinational design company which develops protocol infrastructure and software solutions for the developing world. They have an office in Seattle. Frog was a contributor to project masilukeke, which is an effort to encourage HIV testing. The way the project worked was that they set up a phone counseling system in a rural African location where there were not many medical or social services but where people had access to cell phones. They also prepared HIV home testing kits with pictorial instructions which could be understood by illiterate people. After this was prepared, they used a partnership with Nokia (the local cell carrier) to send an unsolicited ad for free anonymous home HIV testing to anyone who called a number. Persons who called the number got the kits, then could mail them back and call in to get results. Frog designed this process, so they directed the other partners to donate their resources according to a certain protocol. To develop this protocol, Frog collected data, sorted it into four categories (user behavior, competitors, cultural trends, and tools), then wrote a process, then proposed it to the partners, then tracked its efficacy for every step (call backs, kits requested, kits sent back, number of follow up results calls). David Sherwin told me that the protocol for this is available for use by other efforts.

Rupa Patel is a UW PhD student in biomedical and health informations. She gave a presentation about some current proposed mobile software solutions for health problems. She said that a big problem with mobile software solutions are that they are a manifestation of an in-person service, and often managers direct software developers to copy the service even when the service is flawed. What should happen, she said, is that developers should get managerial and legal support for using software to make the best service, not a copy of an existing service. She then mentioned some specific applications: Erik Arsand at UW designed FewTouch, a smartphone app for managing blood glucose. SIMpill is a pillbox which sends SMS reminders if it is not opened at certain times. Sweet Talk is a text messaging system which reminds young teenagers with diabetes to take certain action. Ubifit is a project where a person wears a physical device which tracks physical activity; this device sends info to the person’s cellphone and changes the background image of the phone’s screen in response. In the example given, the phone’s screen was an empty garden, and when the device detected the person did a workout, a flower would grow. If a person does exercise daily, they had a garden; if they skipped exercise, they would see a dead garden every time they looked at their phone.

I met some other people. Julie Ratner of Iterative Design who works at Big Fish wanted to talk with me about casual gaming as a method of behavior modification therapy. Ahsan Kabir of orgastronomy.com wanted to hear what I had to say about software needs in India. Sameer Halai was Bombay guy interested in the gay Indian scene and the magazine Bombay Dost. Brian Rowe of Jigsaw Renaissance said he knew someone who did book photography for archiving content, and also does other freedom of information things.

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Consortium of Universities for Global Health conference…

By bluerasberry on 2010-09-23

I went to the Consortium of Universities for Global Health meeting Monday and Tuesday September 20-21. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the role of the university in promoting global health. I had been talking with Nandan for some years now about doing things to attract enough students to merit the establishment of some formal relationship between some NGO we set up in Varanasi and some university in America, so this conference was especially interesting to me.

Attending the conference was $300, which I did not have. A note said that there were press passes available so I wrote them with the pitch that I would photograph the attendees and put the pictures on Wikipedia as public domain content. I got no reply, so I showed up a little late for the usual plan. The girl watching the door told me to go to the registration desk but I told her I was late and wanted to go to the in-progress welcoming lecture, and she let me in. I did take pictures of more than 10 speakers in the conference who already had Wikipedia articles without accompanying photos.

It was a nice surprise to see Joe Torres there. He used to have Gail Broder’s HVTN job and now works with the Gates’ Foundation’s Grand Challenges project. It seems like a sweet job but it he is appropriate for it; he does review of the project proposals and most of these have an emphasis on using new technology to promote global health. He is multilingual, speaking French, Portuguese, and Spanish (the colonial languages…) and anyone who was older than he was would not have the native understanding of computer applications, so I cannot imagine how a job like this could be done without a person like him. He was formerly a Fred Hutch IRB person also.

Louis Fazen is a Yale guy who works with Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM), which is a multi-university student organization which promotes the sharing of medical research knowledge instead of locking it behind IP protection laws as most universities default to doing. They do this by raising ownership awareness and providing legal document templates for universities to use to free their property. One of their programs is the “Access Metrics Initiative” which provides website communication tools. He told a fantastic story about Bristol-Myers Squibb making a drug through Yale with NIH funding, then there were protests in 2000 in Africa about the drug not being available. Somehow I did not note the drug…

James Blanchard from the University of Manitoba worked in Karnataka from 2001-08 in an HIV program. He complained that there is little consensus about efficacy for even trivial interventions, such as what indicators to use to recommend the start of antiviral drug therapy.

Karen Wannerstrom at UW’s Department of Global Health worked in India for some time as an educator. She invited me to come to departmental meetings.

William “Phil” Nicholson is the “Assistant Attorney General” for the University of Washington. He talked about the process of registering the UW to do work in other countries. The problem was that other countries use an NGO system instead of a non-profit system, so since American universities are government-affiliated, sometimes this disqualifies them from registering as foreign NGOs to operate in some other country. Kate Riley of UW’s “Global Support Project” talked about this same problem, and the USD $50k problem – apparently many foreign banks did not like the UW keeping more than $50,000 in a local bank account, and yet it was impractical for the UW to operate with less than that. She told bizarre stories about researchers who had to carry thousands of dollars in cash into the country because they could identify no legal way to have the money pass from UW to the researcher otherwise. Anne Bax at Duke is Riley’s supervisor, I think. This Global Operations Support website seems to be their page because Phil Nicholson’s and Kate Riley’s names are here. Somehow these people knew Connie Celum (who I know as an HVTN researcher) and of her work in Kenya. Donna Gallagher of the University of Massachusetts Medical School recommended their website to contact people to talk about the logistics of overseas research. Particular problems which she discussed were buying cars and cashing checks in other countries, and also she talked about forcing encrypted data storage on personal laptops for students who are accustomed to having total control over their personal laptops.

Susanna Holmes is a lawyer for Johns Hopkins and she talked about the difficulty of negotiating research with other countries. She said that a team from her school wanted to do research in Pakistan, and they had to seek permission from the government. The Pakistani government made an offer in writing that in exchange for their permission, the university would promise not to hire any Indians or Israelis for this project. When large organizations seek permission for things from foreign governments, there are some guidelines from our own federal government. One of them is to report racist requests to our Department of the Treasury, who in turn keep records of who asks these things and when and in what context. Surely the Pakistani government knows that these things are noticed, right? In the end, she said, they removed the request and allowed the project without that rule.

Richard Wilkinson works with I-Tech, which is a collaboration between the UW and UCSF to provide procedure design for medical processes in developing countries. They do this by codifying treatments into steps and then making software to document these steps and train people to do them. He used the words “replicable, adaptable, scalable, practical, and balanced” to describe what they want. The problem is said he was currently researching was how to pay foreign researchers; it was neither quite fair to pay them by US standards or by local standards, plus non-monetary compensation is especially troublesome but must not be ignored.

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