technology and the developing world

i am interested in this

brought to mind by: goole's reference to afghanistan as "non-modern"

i am not being hand-wringy about it, btw, but i do feel like terminology like that is getting more and more complicated by the inroads that, say, cell phones have made in countries otherwise lacking in 'modern' infrastructure

http://recycle4acause.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/e-waste-throwingstuff.jpg

http://apptechdesign.org/

I don't know if it's still the same group, but I did volunteer design work for solar deep-well pumps for a group of the same name back in the day.

and file this under posts v much in character, but:

surveying the application of various tech in uganda was just totally fascinating.

everyone had a cell phone, it was crazy. there was coverage even in deeply rural areas, and in towns w/o electricity. ppl would charge their phones at little stalls w/generators.

Jaq, that group looks pretty cool! Although Paul Farmer would shake his damn head at "appropriate technology"

ie - "what is INappropriate about installing high-tech CTs/labs in developing world hospitals? why shouldn't they enjoy the same std of care that someone would rightly expect in a western hospital?" etc.

basically sayin the phrase itself is problematic because of how it gets leveraged by some NGOs into meaning "second-rate tech is good enough for developing nations"

3rd world forcefield

thread needs Ed, imo

Agreed about "appropriate" having loaded connotations. I think it has to be thought of as appropriate to the existing local infrastructure. i.e. it would be wonderful to have top level high tech care available, but if there's no local electric grid to supply the massive comparable needs of the equipment, it's not much good to put in an MRI machine.

A related read -- DJ /rupture's latest essay. Unsurprisingly thoughtful and well-argued.

This is definitely something that interests me, however I am I am in my last week of the semester so I'm going to have to split out my brain dump over several posts/days.

There are two trends in third world technology, especially on the local/consumer scale the Appropriate and the leapfrogging. The philosophy behind appropriate is that you only supply what the local infrastructure can support, a diesel generator built from a 20 year old truck may well be more "appropriate" than the latest greatest model because the local mechanic will be able to fix it.

Leapfrogging says you should skip to modern technology because it requires less infrastructure than the next step in some development curve. Mobile phones are the most cited examples of this, developing countries have more or less skipped fixed line communications. No one really doubts the utility of instant, long distance communications to almost any society.

In the generator case above lots of people are looking at opportunities to leapfrog with electric power but more on that later.

fwiw, i think farmer's critique of "appropriate tech" is largely limited to healthcare. mostly because arguments against the implementation of more advanced medical tech almost always imply that the status quo (poor people dying) is fine as it is. whereas other stuff (electricity, phones, etc.) "only" makes people's lives easier/different. so, sticking with a diesel generator because the local guy can wrench on it is OK, sticking with outdated medical regimes/treatments is not.

but that's a tangent, and not really what this thread is about! because this thread is TOTALLY about 20 year old diesel generators and what ppl are doing with them!

also, i don't want this to be a lolzy ppl be carryin crazy amounts of shit on bikes in china/wherever, but man they really just do

mostly right now my dream project would be working on designing the ultimate, minimalist clinic. like how portable/energy efficient/clean (both in terms of pollution and in clinical care)/cheap can you make a field hospital

what are hospital or institutional technologies that could be untethered from the actual, physical plant? how sterile does an operating theater really need to be? how are mortality rates affected if you do an appendectomy on a table with a plastic sheet vs in a bigtime hospital? (i suspect anasthesia is the real crux here)

etc

and, actually, that drives me right back towards the apptech issue, ha: at what point---if any!---does a slight uptick in pt mortality for a given procedure become outweighed by a massive increase in availability (due to cost, access, etc)?

the cell phone thing reminds me about the whole "we need to build $100 laptops for the developing world" from years back and in a very short time that notion has been kind of turned on its head b/c of smartphones

ha, yeah, you know i never actually put those two together, but it seems right

hey gbx my mom is in the process of applying for a position w/an ngo where shed be helping to get a neuro clinic set up in subsaharan africa - one of the qns that she was asked in her intvw "was what sort of resources do u think would be appropriate"

dont know that much abt it - kinda tune my mom out :/ - but its an interesting qn - u have really limited resources how much money is spent on palliative vs. preventative esp in things like spina bifida and other neurodev stuff lots of current research/knowledge/tech can be leveraged to decrease the % of babies born w/ntd but maybe cutting edge surgeries arent on the table also i think opportunities for using in place systems for care delivery in medicine theres probably more "workarounds" then w/something like energy infrastructure?

huh, that's pretty cool! esp since i think of neuro as being one of those specialties that rarely gets out much (cf the infectious disease ppl and surgeons doin cleft palate clinics or w/e)

and yeah, it's the workarounds that interest me (in medicine, at least), esp since they're so contentious! we're strapped with this (laudable) ideal that medicine should always be full-throttle and top-notch all the time, and that if you can't provide that, then you are doing a disservice. but then it's like perfect is the enemy of good and some things can be worked around w/o bad outcomes and some can't and which things are which etc

I've been reading up on bio-char lately, hot term that has been popping up in green energy. It's a sexy new name for charcoal, and a process that is milleniums old. One of the big 1st world ideas currently is to get 3rd world countries to make charcoal from their (or our exported) garbage, bury it, and rack up carbon sequestration credits. Which can then be traded in the global market for $$ to 1st world entities that want to "reduce" their carbon footprint. The idea squicks me; I'm still working out why though.

http://www.worldchanging.com/search/?blog_id=&keyword=leapfrogging&category=8&author=&month=&search.x=39&search.y=4&search=Find+It
check some of these categories like sustainable design, emerging tech, green building etc

thx seb!

and yeah, i've read a little bit about biochar, but not much. didn't know about the market angle, for instance! i just wonder how much of our trash is actually able to be charcoaled.

also, fake dissertation topic: how much 3rd world tech actually IS trash? like not just literally but culturally/etc. what technologies have we largely disposed of that are now being taken up or innovated by developing nations? bikes lol are of particular interest to me, but i'd be interested to hear what other kinds of things/practices have been abandoned in the march of western industry and salvaged by the rest of the world

wonder how much of our trash is actually able to be charcoaled

Anything that's carbon based (including plastics) can be charcoaled. I don't have numbers but would bet it's > 60% by volume. There are problems in managing the off-gas from mixed load/wet burning - you want to capture all of it and use as much as possible to offset the primary fuel, to make a sort of self-sustaining loop and reduce emissions, but the variable nature of the load makes it all really unpredictable. So then, you want a nice automated control system to monitor and adjust as need be, but that takes electricity and maintenance etc etc etc.

because that's a whole problematic area: some things we don't do anymore because they're actually bad, others because of weirdo politicoindustrial reasons (why do we have cars and highways in america instead of awesome trains?). some tech is willfully introduced to (or imposed upon) developing nations, some just kinda happens, and most of it is the result of what people have been doing there the whole time

Biggest tech in the developing world is the fucking AK47.

well its certainly a strong brand

cassettes&glass bottles!

I was reading about how cell phones are being used, not for chatting, but in unexpected ways to fill in gaps in those countries' infrastructure. Particularly in banking and money transfer, where the institutions just don't exist locally for a lot of people. That's an amazing thing - not what I'd've thought of certainly; it might've been what our governments were thinking of with the $100 laptop thing but I rather doubt it. More likely it's just a local idea to meet a local need that caught on.

Anything that's carbon based (including plastics) can be charcoaled. I don't have numbers but would bet it's > 60% by volume. There are problems in managing the off-gas from mixed load/wet burning - you want to capture all of it and use as much as possible to offset the primary fuel, to make a sort of self-sustaining loop and reduce emissions, but the variable nature of the load makes it all really unpredictable. So then, you want a nice automated control system to monitor and adjust as need be, but that takes electricity and maintenance etc etc etc.

― Jaq, Tuesday, 1 December 2009 17:18 (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

It's super easy to burn plastics effectively in very low tech ways. Doing something useful with the heat is the thing because you get an awful lot of it, too much to use for cooking.

On the medical devices thing. I've been thinking about that and with no basis in knowledge. Wouldn't diagnostic imaging potentially be quite useful in the third world. OK, its no good if you find a tumour that requires expensive Chemo, but surgery is relatively low technology and pretty cheap if you have a surgeon so there must be some things that could be improved in the developing world access to medical imaging. I'm not sure if it counts as leapfrogging as mist technologies that leapfrogs are one where the tech you jump to requires less rather than more infrastructure.

you get an awful lot of it, too much to use for cooking

The most efficient charcoal kilns use it for regen.

and/or cogen.

On the subject of appropriateness we saw a presentation by someone from UMich who had been working on something similar. She had watched a waste powered stirling engine go to pot and the genset that it came up with get hooked up to a truck engine because no one had bothered to teach anyone how to maintain the stirling engine.

have you seen this wsj article, gbx? it's not really technology, but more trying to get economies of scale to make good quality surgeries as cheap as possible for people in india. doing stuff in a big indian city is way different than trying to serve people in some sort of field hospital, but still kind of interesting.