digitalcommons

Agricultural entrepreneur

Pedro Mastrángelo, CEO of SIS Frost Protection, Montevideo, Uruguay, spoke at the Center for Science, Technology and Society on January 29, 2007. He arrived in the state as one of the worst frosts was affecting fruit crops around the state. His firm had won a Tech Museum award in 2004 in the environmental category. Here is a short video showing the field installation

He presented the technology of his system which makes use of vertical fans housed in round metal or concrete chambers and placed in the lower colder areas of an orchard or vineyard. He showed how this was a much more economical method of frost protection compared to the other main methods: burning smudge pots, using sprinklers and water, or the wind machines that are an older and more costly technology. He showed a chart with the different clients in New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and a vineyard in Napa valley (where land prices are in the stratosphere as are premium grape prices.) The last client does not have to spend that much money to have an immediate savings because his commodity is expensive, but the apple coop in South Africa has less income and so the payback period on their investment in this technology is longer. I wondered what led the South Africans to buy his product, given this factor and the distance between buyer and seller.  SIS is a very small firm with not a great income but a good product. Mastrángelo showed how they might grow over the years with and without venture capital.

While he discussed the intellectual property (patents) and what one audience member termed defensible assets, he also said that he was able to do more business in America because of the freely available GIS info (as well as other geodata) compared to other countries without a tradition of making this primary material available to researchers and entrepreneurs.

The assembled faculty from business and engineering as well as GSBI mentors asked some questions and suggested other ways his firm might scale up. I gave him a couple of reports on geo-spatial developments and an article on Intel's Place Lab where they have worked on sensors placed in cool weather vineyards.

Tech Awards 2005: Health

The Tech Awards 2005: Health

This category was sponsored by Agilent Technologies, and from the public comments the judges had a very hard time deciding which deserved the $50,000 cash prize. During this week the laureates from each category have been making presentations to different audiences around Silicon Valley. Yesterday both the education group and three of the five health laureates presented at different parts of the Santa Clara University campus.

I attended the health meeting, partly to give each one a CD with an unpublished manuscript by William Muraskin, a medical historian who has written extensively about public private partnerships in health. His book is about the Gates Foundation and GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunization.

The winner of the health category was the HibVaccine Team in Cuba and Canada. Dr. Vicente Verez-Bencomo led the massive Cuban initiative which began fifteen years ago, just before their economy collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of the support and markets in the Communist bloc. The Cubans were spending $2 million a year on imported vaccine (which was new) and decided to make it from scratch on their own to save money and because Castro was very interested in bio-technology. Dr. René Roy, a chemist from the University of Montreal met Vicente-Bencomo and they decided to collaborate. Most of the investment came from the Cuban government which was confident this project would be a success and might even result in an exportable product.

Roy commented about the extraordinary health system in Cuba "the best in the world" and said that the education level of the average person was very high.  "You can have a conversation about molecular biology with your bartender or talk about engineering with your cab driver."  He mentioned that Verez-Bencomo earned $16 a month which means things have not changed much since I was in Havana in 1994.  A lot of professionals were working in the tourist sector where they had access to dollars or Euros and not the Cuban peso--which is how the doctor is paid.

The synthetic vaccine which they developed is cheaper ($1.50 a dose versus $5 for the competition) and the number of "adverse events" in children taking the vaccine dropped from about 80 per 100,000 to 40 per 100,000. They hope to get the cost down as they scale up production and expand their markets. Venezuela is probably a logical choice consider the resources Chavez is providing to Cuba and the presence of so many Cubans in Venezuela.

The U.S. State Department did not provide the Cuban doctor with a visa to attend the awards, even though he had received one early this year for a professional meeting in California. It really works against this country's best interests to hinder this kind of exchange. I spoke with a Belgian doctor who had just attended a professional conference in Athens, Greece. Traditionally it was held in the U.S. but so many doctors from around the world felt hassled when coming to the U.S. or were unhappy with U.S. actions outside our borders that it was switched to Europe. What does that say about the future of scientific exchanges?

Project Impact, Berkeley, California

This was the best presentation of the day, partly because David Green had so many interesting revelations to make about cost of medical devices and how to serve several tiers of patients: those who can't pay, those who can pay something, and those who can pay more than the cost of the service. His  background is in public health and he had worked with the Seva Foundation (to which I donated small amounts in the 1980's) which was said to be the only charity that caught Steve Jobs' attention. They performed eye operations in Nepal, but "after the donations dried up" Green embarked on other projects including inter-ocular lenses for cataract patients in India and a low cost hearing aid (Impact 1) their most recent project. . 

He uses what he calls 'forensic cost accounting' to work out the details of the true cost of medical equipment (a lens or hearing aid or needle or suture) and has found that most do not cost very much. For instance, the lenses are being produced for $5 at Aurolab in India whereas U.S. companies charge $100. He showed a pie chart of the Indian customers where about 35% pay more than the cost, and this subsidizes the 47% who pay nothing and the 18% who pay part of the cost. Yet the venture still turns a modest profit.  The network of eye hospitals in India are doing more than 600,000 operations a year, and this sustainable model has spread to Egypt and many other countries around the world.

Though I am skeptical about the rhetoric associated with 'selling to the bottom of the pyramid' i.e. the poor who are often excluded from marketing plans, or with Coke's marketing of sugar water or the infamous Nestle's baby formula campaign in Africe,  Green's examples and track record show that it does work in some cases. Coming from his lips the phrase "compassionate capitalism" does not seem to be an oxymoron. 

Dr. Joshua Silver, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

He had to return home and did not present, but his AdSpecs are certainly worth mentioning. These are adjustable spectacles where the user can pump fluid into the flexible lenses and adjust the glasses himself. It is evident that professional care is welcome but it is rare in so many locales, and a user-configurable device makes the remedies available in many more places and at low cost, currently $10 a unit (made in China, of course).   

Partners in Health, Boston, MA

Hamish Fraser has developed a medical records system using open standards and interfaces that are easy for people with minimum training. They found when working in the slums of Lima that good record keeping was critical in both treating stubborn cases of TB , so-called multi-drug resistant, and AIDS.  Much of their current work is in Haiti which Fraser considers perhaps the poorest in the world.

He showed pictures of what passed for a road in rural Haiti near the hospital that was built for their project. It is a comment on the state of Haitian infrastructure that it is the best full-service in the country and is many miles from Port au Prince, the capital.    He said that good records did not just satisfy the bureaucratic necessities of a complex operation or for reporting back to donor but that it made a critical difference in the cost of treatment and in the health of the patients. One man was photographed at the time he started treatment. I thought he was about 40 Kg (~90 lbs) and in his 60's, but after treatment for six months the photo revealed a smiling and fit young man in his early 30's.

Fraser also made the comment that VSAT access had been crucial for this hospital. At $4000 for equipment and connection for a year, that's a huge amount of money for a school or telecenter, but for a hospital it can be more easily justified. His testimony confirms my theory that ICT investments in health are more useful because they do not eat up as much of a total budget as it might in an organization that runs on less income. 

"Sharing Nicely..."

Yale law professor Yochai Benkler describes the economics of social sharing systems which are greatly augmented by technology in "Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production." Drawing on literature of carpools, water resources, and even lobster fishermen, he describes the way renewable resources such as bandwidth, computer cycles, and wireless networks are instrumental in helping to make sharing a type of production. In particular see the section V. B. "information, knowledge and cultural production policy" for a discussion of file-sharing services like KaZaa or other 'sharing-based distribution systems. It was written before the Supreme Court judgments against such file-sharing systems. He has some interesting observations about Skype before it was purchased by eBay.

The Elusive Quest for Growth

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics, by William Easterly. MIT Press, 2001.

Though this is not a new book, I have found it moderately useful as I write an essay for the Incommunicado workshop in June. I am not an economist, and he uses accessible language as he interprets economic models and assumptions used since World War II to foster growth which he says is a necessity to reduce poverty. Interspersed between chapters laden with statistics are short tales and testimonies of people in dire straits in developing countries. He wants us to keep these in mind as we consider the theories and the evidence he presents.

In the mid-60's Walt Rostow predicted the country receiving aid would naturally increase its savings as development took off (to use an airplane metaphor), so that after "ten or fifteen years" the donors could anticipate that aid would be discontinued. Now, after $1 trillion (1950-1995) we are still waiting. The ratio of the wealthiest nation to the poorest has gone from 3:1 in 1820 (earliest stats. available) to 30:1 at present (U.S. and Bangladesh, at the time of publication).

He looks at a variety of "elixirs" (HP and Cisco would call them "solutions") to increase growth and discusses how most have failed for the most part: aid, investment, education, controlling population, loans, and debt relief. I found the criticism of the fruitless investment in education to be the most surprising, and he admits it is very controversial. He then discusses the role of technology going back to weaving and iron making and just a bit on ICT--my own interest. However, he does point out the role of knowledge leakage (diffusion) and what makes it effective in some places and not others. There's an interesting chapter on luck, both good (high prices for a resource whose pricing is out of the hands of the country) and bad (tsunamis, wars, weather). Another is about polarized peoples (race, religion, wealth, language). Corruption which plays a huge role in some countries is the final chapter before his conclusions. His basic premise is that people respond to incentives, and it's usually financial. Of course we can consider other social and spiritual incentives: friendship, being part of a team, patriotism, and even salvation.

The question he implies and one that I have had about the kinds of technology projects I have seen developed, funded, implemented, and then disappear is why do people keep repeating the same methods when available evidence indicates that procedures need to change drastically and that the money might be spent in more useful ways.

Panel Three

Legal & Economic Frameworks for Global Knowledge.
Which is easier to solve: the technical issues or the ones related to finance, asks Professor Pedro Hernandez-Ramos in his introduction.

The stage is set with a coffee table, two side tables with flowers and water glasses, and four very comfortable armchairs.

Paul David. Building instittutional infrastructures for e-science (a British term): a multi-disciplinary challenge. He came to this topic through his research in the economics of networks, esp. computer mediated networks and their potential role in promoting creative production in geo-distributed communities. He did studies as an economic historian where open science as a social practice started in the 17th century.

"The potential of e-science will have a new generation of info/com infratructures. It's about global collaboration in key areas of sicence and the next generation of infrastrucute that iwll enable it." to fulfill this dream you will need more ingenious hardware and software and a more sophisticated system design of new tools, and appropriate institutional contexts. The GRID is one such example which might be developed as a P2P architecture, but they are not the same.  There is a comparfative interoperability project that has three projects: GEON, LTER, Ocean Informatics. also a description of eDiaMoND, a diagnotic digital mammography project.

He said that the lawyers slowed down the project because they considered all the possible harm and losses associated with the property and privacy issues of this project.  Can we foster a mode through which this soft part of collaboration can be solved. 

Frank Tansey, IMS Global Learning Consortium. It was part of the national learning infrastructure initiative. Systems were proprietary and content could not be shared. Global issues were not addressed: the lack of good (or any) connections, learning styles. He hopes the next system will help him realize the sweet dream he had six or seven years ago.

Roberto Verzola: Towards Global Knowledge-Sharing.  Intellectual property rights are becoming a liability to sharing science. Pr. David's arguments apply to other fields. Current IPR regimes tilt too much toward the producers (less IPR).  Many are monopolistic and we need no IPR. this is the 'information wants to be free' arguement.   Under the TRIPS agreement under WTO the owners have been favored.  Users are spread out in many countries and have little voice in decision-making.  Moving and storing info is approaching near-zero cost. this should increase sharing but can also yield very high profits. This might be the core conflict in the information economy.  He calls these rent-seekers the "landlords of cyberspace" or cyberlords.

for low cost deployment if development countries: FLOSS, low power radio, video CD player than can access html, work out systems of community ownership. However, the ICTs have built-in biases: English, automation (replacing people with machines), technofix, and globalization (local subsidy for the global players). The new jobs created will be temporary and may be replaced by automation.

It is argued that without IPRs there will be stagnation. However, there are other ways of rewarding the creator without giving a absolute right to the person.

Bowker: even if you make info available you still have a package of attitudes, cultures, etc. that must travel with the information. How do we move that around together? That's what consultants say they can do!

Verzola said that cumpulsory licensing was weakened by the WTO but that it offered a non-monopolistic way of compensating creators.

Who Pays for the Information Society?

Bread for All (BFA) is a Swiss Protestant organization involved in raising money for overseas development and missionary work. They have a series of publications dealing with global development. This January 2005 publication responds to the report on the Task Force on Financing Mechanisms (TFFM) for the Digital Solidarity Fund which was set up at the end of the first WSIS conference in Geneva. The person usually associated with this fund is President Wade of Senegal, and it drew very little support from wealthy nations or the few companies present at WSIS. The task force was charged with looking at existing methods--mainly market-based--of financing the action plan of WSIS. Their report came out in December 2004.

The publication clearly supports alternative methods of raising money (global taxes on domain name registration and public resources such as spectrum) and on more decentralized ways of building and managing infrastructure: community networks and coops, for example.

The essays include:
Financing Paradigms in the WSIS Process

Telecommunications Regulation
From the Omnipotent State to the Market Model

Official Development Aid: Illusions about Existing Resources and
Opportunities Provided by Global Taxation

Multilateral Funds. World Digital Solidarity Fund: Between Great Ambitions and Niche Strategies

ICT access and (de)regulation

Several years ago USAID formed an alliance of nonprofits and contractors working on a variety of projects in the area of governance, education, and public access in developing countries. The dot-com alliance has issued a series of short papers on various ICT-related topics.  Several discuss regulations and wireless networks. "Free market competiton and licensing: methods to improve ICT access" provides an introduction to licensing, why it's important and some issues to consider. "Spectrum management: the key to wireless technology" is very basic and while it devotes some space to what are euphemistically called challenges it does not delve into the battles or serious problems like "amp wars" that are taking place in many areas where wireless has been deployed. Excess power can seriously impede others from providing a service or connecting to a wireless network.  This pamphet does include more extensive web-based documents on wireless.  Disclaimer: I'm on the technical advisory board for this alliance.

Shaking up the faithful

In 2003, Harvard Business Review published an article by Nicholas Carr, "Does IT matter?"  He argued that PC and information systems were becoming a commodity and did not offer a competitive advantage--if they ever did. This caused a huge furor, especially among the hardward manufacturers and writers feeding at that trough. Carr is still heavily booked for speeches and debates (nothing like controversy to feed book sales!), and he has a newsletter called "Digital Renderings" of which the latest posting is "Rethinking the PC" which he argues is a "ridiculous device" in its present form.

This year the Economist had a lead article that is upsetting ICT for development advocates. In "The Real Digital Divide" the author argues that the cell phone is the right instrument to address this problem.  It is causing a great deal of furor (as did the Carr article) with responses from NGOs whose main efforts have been in computer networking and spreading access to ICT.

Trade agreements and Intellectual Property

Grain.org is a site devoted to promoting " the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people's control over genetic resources and local knowledge." One feature is a "jargon buster" (see the sidebar on the site). It has an interesting rant on the word knowledge.

One of the authors on Grain is Aziz Choudry, an activist from New Zealand involved in global ecology/trade issues. His essay, Corporate conquest, global geopolitics: Intellectual property rights and bilateral investment treaties , is worth a look for his views on IPR. "The privatisation of information – including genetic information – through intellectual property regimes is crucial to capitalism today. And the US and EU share a common agenda to globalise intellectual property protection through both bilateral and multilateral means."

Pr. Paul David

Pr. Paul David will be the lead speaker on the panel “legal and economic frameworks for global knowledge”  Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research has a large archive of papers relevant to issues surrounding open source software, scientific collaboration, and the effects of stronger copyrights laws which are being harmonized in international bodies. Many of these are by Pr. David. Attendees may wish to review the following documents suggested by him:
“The Economic Logic of Open Science’ and the Balance between Private Property Rights and the Public Domain in Scientific Data and Information: A Primer,”
and  “Can Open Science be Protected from the Evolving Regime of Intellectual Property Rights Protections,”