Cool idea for agriculture in developing countries: bring in your sick plants, get diagnosis and prescription. I believe we've emailed photos of maize to experts in the past.

A work in progress.

• Sierra Brasserie in Nairobi (both a restaurant and Kenya's only microbrewery)
• Lamu
• Zanzibar
• Kampala
• Maasai Mara
• That Chinese restaurant in Eldoret

• Is increased fertilizer what Africa needs?
• Drip irrigation in Pakistan

I know it's a little hard on the eyes, with all the @s and #s and RTs and URLs, but if you haven't spent five minutes watching Twitter's #iranelection ... coverage? then you're missing out.

Update: It doesn't have the same firehose-sipping vigor as the raw feed, but check out Andrew Sullivan's blog for a lightly-edited version of the best stuff.

Last year I visited Kashgar, on the western edge of China. It's home to the Uighur people, a Central Asian ethnic group whose culture is as interesting as a thousand years on the Silk Road would tempt you to imagine. As you read this, for some reason, Chinese bulldozers are razing Kashgar's old city.

One from Atul Gawande, recommendations on how to be a "positive deviant."

1. Ask an unscripted question.
2. Don't complain.
3. Count something.
4. Write something.
5. Change.

And another: my first four distinct thoughts on disembarking at LaGuardia a few days ago.

1. It's dirty here.
2. Wow, she's pretty.
3. That's expensive.
4. What's that smell?

I <3 New York.

Quotes from the Qu'ran are often taken out of context to prove various things, so I'm skeptical of this, but it's so lovely I can't resist:

Sura (Chapter) 5 of the Koran says that God sent mankind the Torah, the Gospel and the Koran. “For every one of you, We have appointed a path and a way ... So compete with one another in good works.”

from the New York Times letters section

e.g.:

• Write A Critical Letter To the Editor Against The Machine
• Bone-Hugs-n-Harmony
• Tolerating Pumpkins
• Neil Young & Eccentric Horse
• The Affection Pistols
• Atart Teenage Sit-In
• Primal Inside Voice
• Spandau Community Dance Project
• Earth, Wind & Warmness
• Slayer (But Only When Negotiation Has Ceased To Be A Tenable Option)

Jake is brewing espresso in the kitchen. I'm wrapping up some projects - our motorcycle taxi program, and sourcing 15 tons of bean seed for our short rains planting - to hand off to other people. Tomorrow: up at 5, drive to Kisumu, fly to Nairobi. Two days in Nairobi, hopefully including an on-site inspection of a potential bean supplier.

Monday: fly to Dubai. Get on a plane to New York. Get on a plane to San Francisco. Take the BART to Millbrae and then get a cab to Paul's. Pick up a car. Drive to San Francisco. Crash at Ruth's (we're at early Wednesday morning by now.)

Next few days: what to wear to Stephen and Mary's wedding? Where to eat brunch?

Kenya's capital gets a bad rap. True, you need to be careful, and no, it's not New York or Cape Town. But it's got energy, a pleasing mix of peoples, even vibe if you catch the right place at the right time. It also has the best Indian food I've ever had*, which you wouldn't know from this list that otherwise looks very helpful.

*Haandi, in The Mall in Westlands

Update:

• a chowhound user recommends restaurants in Nairobi
• an even better chowhound thread

The most common tool used by (corporate and government) decision-makers to show structured arguments is, of course, PowerPoint. And because no single "argument template" is appropriate, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better one.

see also Ninja Tools for Meetings

BarCamp Kenya!!!

• Concentration vs. distractibility
• Attention Must Be Paid - But How?

You'd think that moving thousands of miles away would reduce distractions; unfortunately as long as my laptop is turned on I have the potential to spiral off into the Merely Interesting. Field work is a good antidote.

One of the links references a book called Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life which seems dedicated to showing that "we have much more control over our focus than we think". Not a viewpoint I've seen in the literature, so I'm curious.

We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demon- strate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their orig- inal are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, re- flecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.

- Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis

My first mix in ... six years? Lie down and be counted. download mp3

1. David Bowie - Moss Garden b/w KLF - Justified and Ancient
2. Tim Hecker - Brownwedding
3. Secede - Born In A Tropical Swamp
4. Legion of Green Men - Stars Above Stars Below
5. Kate Bush - Joanni
6. Move D & Benjamin Brunn - Mothercorn
7. Gas - untitled
8. Claude Debussy - Nocturnes (Nuages)
9. Seefeel - Industrious
10. David Sylvian - Darshana (FSOL remix)
11. Zodiac Youth - Fast Forward the Future (The Orb's Bucket & Bong mix)

Intermittent updates to my Twitter feed are sucking up the energy that would go to blog posts. And energy reserves are not generally high, as I'm going through an exhausting learning process.

My management experience prior to joining One Acre was as a case team leader at Monitor Group. It was a little like playing traffic cop: everything was moving along fine on its own, I just had to make sure it was pointed in the right direction. A lot of young associates came in with some consulting experience already, and (although we never thought about this) everyone came from the same cultural background, making communication a cinch.

Our staff here are also bright and hard-working, but they have much less in common with me. So I've learned things like:

• Avoiding abbreviated, idiomatic English
• Delivering tools, training and feedback that are crystal clear
• Ensuring timely data collection to get a birds-eye view of our progress
• Getting plenty of time in the field, before and after rollout, to make sure I actually understand what's going on. Rolling out a new field initiative without testing it with a field officer first and getting their feedback is just asking for trouble.

Given the opportunities for miscommunication and the impressive things our staff are capable of, it's tempting to think that execution problems can just be put down to poor communication - but sometimes it just takes energy and drive to get staff to assign the proper importance to tasks. Either way, whether communication or motivation is the problem, it seems like the name of the game is management by persistence.

The part that relates to the title, if not the rest of the post
Oh, right. Scylla and Charbydis. Being dumb, it was only recently that I thought about that image as a narrative version of the Greek ideal of moderation. Clever chaps, the Greeks. Way to work that pattern into our thought. But also: where is this myth misleading? where does moderation fail, as an ideal?

As a Minnesotan, of course I'm not surprised the Midwest is ahead of the curve on this. Just wish it had been my state.

Past and future in Iowa law

"In 1839, the Iowa Supreme Court rejected slavery in a decision that found that a slave named Ralph became free when he stepped on Iowa soil, 26 years before the end of the Civil War decided the issue.

"In 1868, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that racially segregated “separate but equal” schools had no place in Iowa, 85 years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same decision.

"In 1873, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled against racial discrimination in public accommodations, 91 years before the U.S. Supreme Court reached the same decision.

"In 1869, Iowa became the first state in the union to admit women to the practice of law."

And in 2009 ...

This is sort of like the part in the kung fu movie where the humble baker busts out and flattens some bad guys; then you find out he used to be in the imperial guard.

Here's hoping we see some of this soon. Our farmers could really use some rain.

For about six months we've been running a survey on spending, income and food consumption. Thirty-two farmers around Bungoma, Kenya are using daily logbooks to record food spending and consumption in the household; a survey agent visits weekly to conduct an interview about non-food income and expenditure, and to swap out the old logbook for a new one.

We now have enough data to start asking interesting questions. I'm not a scientist and our numbers aren't statistically significant, but I'm comfortable asserting that these numbers are representative of the average family in our program. All averages of the data from the thirty-two families in the survey.

• Household size: 6
• Daily food spending: $1.10
• Weekly income: $18.38 (biggest component: general handyman work, $5.86 a week)
• Weekly non-food spending: $9.08

In terms of cash, the average member of these households is living on about forty-two cents a day. However, while our farmers have a surprisingly diverse set of income streams, their single biggest source of "income" is from the food they produce themselves. We've been running a food price survey in parallel with the expenditure log, so we can use the farmers' self-reported data on amount of food consumed from personal food stocks to calculate in-kind income (income from food sold shows up in the "weekly income" number above.)

• Weekly in-kind income: $14.46
• Weekly income, cash and in-kind: $32.84

So including in-kind income, people are living on about $.78 a day.

Some caveats: we expect large seasonal effects in income and expenditure, so these numbers will change as we get more data. (Big deal: we don't yet have income data from sale of farmers' maize harvests.) The first three months of the survey included only five farmers as we refined the survey format and the interview process.

Next up: some ugly Excel charts.

• A List Apart: Fluid Grids: this place could use some freshening up, don't you think?
• Streamlined, Vol. 1: psherburne mix
• 'Moving Out of Poverty': outstanding new mega-study from the World Bank
• Musicophilia: amazing music blog by one of the world's most accomplished music geeks, with an outstanding knowledge of post-punk. Many, many mixes.
• Ushahidi: African-born FOSS crisis info crowdsourcing tool

ball droppings
Didn't work under Safari 4 for me; Firefox ok.

Just expropriated a large number of Fabric mixes, going to go through them from the beginning with a friend of mine who's newer to the scene. Here are the reviews I'm sending him.

Fabric 1, Craig Richards (2001): a straight-up tech-house mix, from before minimal really got going. Very good, bassy and dubby. Workmanlike, lacks that sense a lot of Fabric mixes have of being an _event_, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

• Tomorrow: my second consecutive 8am meeting about motorcycle repairs. (Don't worry, mom, I'm running a mototaxi program for our field managers, not driving one myself.) These things are either prone to breakage, heavily used/abused, or our drivers are trying to skim off the top. So I'm going to start checking out bikes they're bringing in for repair myself.
• Next week: I give a talk on a year-long income and expenditure survey we're conducting with over thirty of our farmers. We're having them record what they eat every day, and once a week a survey agent records what they earned and spent in different categories. Jake designed the survey before I took over the project, so I can't take credit for it. Or maybe I can try. Anyway, I'll post some of the summary results here.
• Yesterday: an Ultimate game that no one was really satisfied with. The season of long rains (hopefully) started today, so future Ultimate games will probably be even sloppier.

McKinsey put together this cost-benefit chart of greenhouse gas abatement methods. The width of each box is the estimated impact in reducing greenhouse gases, the height is the estimated cost. So everything below the line saves money as well as reducing greenhouse gases. I assume this takes initial capital investment into account. Here's the text of the study.

There are usually hidden costs to technology changes, and political dimensions that make purely technocratic analysis like this less than a slam-dunk. Framing the discussion around relative cost-benefit data is a good place to start, though. There are a zillion initiatives that might make sense individually, but that shouldn't be near the top of the list of priorities. These initiatives will appear as congressional earmarks - the green economy will be a political economy. We need people in the discussion nudging us back to the highest carbon ROI investments.

I'm re-reading The Adventures of Augie March, and I just got to one of my favorite passages.

Nor did she see what I strayed into town for in the morning, or why I took pleasure in sitting in the still green bake of the Civil War courthouse square after my thick breakfast of griddle cakes and eggs and coffee. But I did, and warmed my belly and shins while the little locust trolley clinked and crept to the harbor and over the trestles of the bog-spanning bridge where the green beasts and bulrush-rocking birds kept up their hot, small-time uproar. I brought along a book, but there was too much brown stain on the pages from the sun. The benches were white iron, roomy enough for three or four old gaffers to snooze on in the swamp-tasting sweet warmth that made the redwing blackbirds fierce and quick, and the flowers frill, but other living things slow and lazy-blooded. I soaked in the heavy nourishing air and this befriending atmosphere like a rich life-cake, the kind that encourages love and brings a mild pain of emotions. A state that lets you rest in your own specific gravity, and where you are not subject matter but sit in your own nature, tasting original tastes as good as the first man, and are outside of the busy human tamper, left free even of your own habits. Which only lie on you illusory in the sunshine, in the usual relation of your feet or fingers or the knot of your shoestrings and are without power. No more than the comb or shadow of your hair has power on your brain.

I've already mentioned FrontlineSMS, but FrontlineForms is exciting enough that I'm going to look into what it would cost to outfit all of our field officers (or potentially just our field managers) with phones capable of doing this. Getting real-time data from the field would be tremendous.

Our data requirements are a little different than most MFIs. The kind of data that we're tracking changes depending on the time of year, and often week to week. (Depending on whether it's time for enrollment, land preparation, planting, etc.) So we might have a lot of different forms. We'd need a good auditing process - probably have field officers continue to record on paper forms as well, and compare the two. And the biggest hurdle: I'll have to convince our fearless leader that this would improve core program outcomes, and not just be a distraction.

But if there were ever a time to think boldly, it's now. Now let's see if I can get somewhere with this.

I'm following: @skinnermike (aka The Streets: real, updates a lot), @brian_eno (probably fake, updates reasonably often), and @davidbowie (probably real, never updates.)

• Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore ("...a 1999 videowork that weaves together and processes found footage of Northern Soulies, Eighties casuals, and ravers, along with an astonishing hauntonuumological audio track...")
• ardcore arkive ("...yet another motherlode of 'old skool'...")
• Terre Thaemlitz: a complete musical archive
• phil sherburne's best of '08
• mnml ssgs favourite sets from 2008

"There's another one."
"What?"
"See that floating plastic bottle? That's a crocodile. They catch them when they're young and tie those on to mark them."

...

[hooting, hollering, "get down!"]

...

"I think Katya and Pringle are a cute couple."
"What?"
"The Russian kayaker and the videographer. They're a couple."

...

[sunburn, barbecue, no thanks on the $45 DVD record of the day]

From New York's School of Visual Arts. Don't have any of these books, but want them all. (That's right: I don't own a single Tufte book.)

Not that I totally understand it ... I don't really understand what a "leftist Kikuyu apologist" is (even though I know the Kikuyu tribe.)

• 100 best blogs for learning about Africa
• Global Voices Online - top ranked blogs in Africa

Reading Kenyan blogs (like Bankelele and Sukuma Kenya) is helping get me up to speed on how a certain, educated segment of Kenyan society sees current events. Depending on how optimistic I'm feeling, they either demonstrate the uselessness of the intellectual class in all cultures, or they're part of an emerging national consciousness that might bring needed progress.

also: 30 Great African Tech Blogs

We just shipped a ton (literally) of soil samples to Nairobi to be be analyzed, covering about 150 of our farmers. I'm looking forward to seeing the results, which should tell us something about how to use fertilizer most effectively, as well as a bunch of other potential interventions. Soil fertility is a major issue around here. Most farmers don't have enough land to leave part of it fallow, so the land is gradually being leached of its nutrients, while the repeated use of chemical fertilizer tends to increase the acidity of the soil.

The challenge is how to intervene in a way that increases farmer income while also increasing sustainability. And the solution needs to be simple enough that we can quickly scale to serve thousands of people. It's the last part that's the most difficult: really customized solutions can work wonders, but at the cost of reducing the number of people you reach.

Energy is the defining issue of our time.

Addressing the environment is the major reason Chu took on this job.

These problems provide a tremendous opportunity for the DOE, but it comes with a burden: we can not fail.

...

We can’t be completely overwhelmed by the short term economic woes; we need to still find a path to solve our long term problems. The DOE has to invent transformative technologies that will allow us to get to the next level of energy independence.

I've got your hope right @#$$ing here.

Claims to be talking about "the state of electronic music" (stagnant, apparently) but barely escapes the house/techno box. I love house. Love minimal. And if some vital motive force has really disappeared from a scene that's been astoundingly inventive for over twenty (!!!) years, I will mourn. But man, get out of Berlin once in a while, it's a big world.

Related: Slow Listening Movement. Those guys sound burned out. Step back, take a breath. (Of course, those of us without record stores call this "making a virtue out of necessity.")

"When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer ... what one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry - in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

On the way to visit a couple of farmers using the the drip irrigators (one had all his vegetables eaten by his chickens, despite field officer warnings to keep the chickens cooped up; the other hasn't actually needed to irrigate since his plot is near a stream.) Took a matatu (minibus) to get there. The matatu I took, like most, had a legal capacity of fourteen people. You rarely see them with fewer than twenty; I've seen as many as twenty-four.

We stopped at one point and the conductor pulled a woman out and put her on a boda-boda (bicycle taxi.) Thirty seconds later we stopped at a police checkpoint. I realized what the police checkpoint was for when we stopped again, a little further down the road, and waited for the boda-boda so the woman could jam herself back into the matatu. On we went.

I used to talk about how I wished I could get a fortune-teller to read my palm and tell me what career I should pursue, "rather than some long torturous journey of self-discovery." Never happened. The journey's been good, anyway. A couple of things I've read have, explicitly or implicitly, triggered the self-discovery theme again.

Dani Rodrik on "self-discovery in practice" in Ethiopia: "...entrepreneurship in a developing country consists of discovering the underlying cost structure--what can and cannot be produced profitably. Initial investors in a new line of economic activity face a great amount of uncertainty, since foreign technology always needs some local adaptation. Plus, their cost discovery soon becomes public knowledge--everyone can observe whether their projects are successful or not--so the social value they generate exceeds their private costs."

Random internet commentors on Kenya's new media bill: this bill has received a lot of negative media attention in Kenya, due to increased government censorship powers in the bill. The comments section of this post has attracted a lot of smart, well-informed Kenyans. Interestingly, they don't seem to trust the media much more than they trust the government (see comments about the media's "hate propagation" during the post-election violence.) Anyway, no specific key phrases here, it's just fascinating to watch democracy evolve through debate and power struggle. And the debate is as much about Kenyan identity as about any abstract principles of democracy, because if those principles had no purchase on people's values, they'd never take root.

Sitting at a cafe in the Dubai airport right now, waiting to board a flight to Nairobi. The eerie feeling of occupying a 3D rendering, from the ribbed arch overhead to the identical rows of red chairs.

• People are anxious about the downturn, but some, I think, are a little gleeful. It's like having school called off for the day. People used to work 60 hours a week just to keep up, to chase this huge and ever-growing carrot. Now things have slowed down and expectations are lower, and no one has to feel bad for not getting rich quick. They can direct their energies to everything they've neglected. The underground life is seeping through the concrete.

• Just spent three weeks in the US reconnecting with a bunch of people. It was good to remind myself of how much I'm linked in to. Now the opposite - it'll be another six months or so before I leave Africa again. I'm looking to narrow my field of vision.

• New Year's, for once, wasn't disappointing. Lesson: get a good group, start small, leave plenty of options. Come to think of it, not a bad strategy for 2009.

This book looks interesting.

You feel sorry for Rose, first of all, because not only is Gates smarter, but Rose is in over his head on the technical stuff. He has one good probing question in each area, and then he's done. He has no chance to pin Gates on anything.

(Example: Rose is asking Gates about web-based applications. Gates defines the perfect "web-based app" as basically a desktop app that downloads updates. That's it. And Rose lets that fly. You have to feel sorry for Ray Ozzie, if this is how well Gates understands what he's trying to do.)

But the bigger reason this is a crappy interview is because Gates has no interest in it apart from as a PR exercise. He has no concept of it as a conversation, something that might teach him something or help him reflect. To him it's entirely a one-way exercise, and he's going to use it as a channel to push his goals. His goals are mostly noble, you can't accuse him of being a sociopath, but if you want to see Microsoft's culture problems in miniature, look no further.

I wonder if we could use this to let our field officers submit data from the field?

I'm making a list and checking it twice. Oh, and my name is the first one on it.

Useful online Swahili dictionary.