7/25: Reflections

Some things that I've learned:

There's no practical reason for electrical outlets to be different from place to place.  In Cambodia, they have universal outlets.  You can plug anything into them (the only exception: some of their outlets are universal non-grounded outlets, so they only have two prongs).  The reason that the sockets are different country by country is economic.  Exporters can easily price discriminate between countries if a consumer can't import a product from another country because they use different electrical outlets.  Yet another way for corporations to dodge the invisible hand.

Jewish vegetarian engineers in Cambodia are apparently fairly common: there are at least two of us.  I stumbled upon the blog adamincambodia.blogspot.com.  I think that he is already back in Canada, though.  And he knew Khmer much better than me.

Health:

In the month that I have been in Cambodia, I have been nearly unscathed.  I haven't had any diarrhea or other stomach problems, I haven't gotten a fever, I haven't gotten any fungus, and overall, I have been completely healthy.

The one exception: early on, I ate some American potato chips, and one of them stabbed the inside of my mouth, giving me a sore for about a week. 

Events:

I haven't been doing a ton of stuff aside from the touristy things already mentioned.

I got a traditional Khmer massage. 

There are some pretty cool events at the China House.  They had a Spanish movie playing a few weeks ago (I think the movie thing is a weekly occurrence).  They had a jazz band playing.  The events are all free.  They also have a pretty good restaurant upstairs. 

I went to dinner with one of the people from the office.  A lot of socializing seems to happen around meal times.  In Cambodia, meal times seem much more relaxed than America.  Less rushed. 

I've been to the markets and some nonprofit stores.

I've spent a lot of my time keeping up on my commitments back home like debate coaching and directing Hackathon. 

Culture:

When I first came to Cambodia, I expected that there would be cultural differences that I would have to adjust to.  Instead, I only found differences in mannerisms.  That is, people do things differently, but I wouldn't find it strange if people in the US acted similarly, and the culture wouldn't have to change much if there was mass adoption of the mannerism.

For instance, in the markets, you can barter.  Some westerners react to this as "they're trying to rip you off -- and they will if you let them!"  I think that lonely planet put it well: "Remember back home, we pay astronomical sums for items, especially clothes, that have been made in poorer countries for next to nothing, and we don't even get the chance to bargain for them, just the opportunity to contribute to a corporate director's retirement fund."  Something similar to bartering is necessary, and in the US, we have supposedly replaced it with the free market and 'competition,' which means that instead of bartering, we throw everyone to the wolves, leaving half of the people get ripped off and half of the businesses to go bankrupt (of course, in the case of undifferentiated commodities, it works pretty well.  It only works less well when corporations can dodge the invisible hand through things like advertisements, the network effect, and monopolistic practices -- like most noncommodity industries -- that it works imperfectly).  Each way has its merits.  They can and do coexist.  Once you get used to either, it's not too weird.

Or food.  It's a little bit more difficult being vegetarian in Cambodia than in the US, but in the cities, most places have some vegetarian option.  The primary difference between here and the states is that I don't speak Khmer whereas I do speak English.  In the US, I can say "I don't eat meat," explain that that includes fish, pigs, birds, and anything other animals that they can think of, and ask if they can make one of their dishes with tofu (though such an explanation isn't necessary in vegetarian friendly places like Eugene or the Bay Area).  Even though many travelers complain that there aren't any vegetarian options, whenever I'm eating with a local, they can get me a great vegetarian dish (albeit, it might not be on the menu). 

The people are pretty much the same.  As the narrator in "Seasons of Migration to the North" said to his village of people in the Sudan about the people in the UK, "just like us they are born and die, and in the journey from the cradle to the grave they dream dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated; that they fear the unknown, search for love and seek contentment in wife and child; that some are strong and some are weak; that some have been given more than they deserve by life, while others have been deprived by it, but that the differences are narrowing and most of the weak are no longer weak" (3).  In addition, just like people in the US, Cambodians have cell phones and are bad with technology; they have corrupt people throughout the government, corporations, and nonprofits; they have people working to make a living; they have people in every sector working with pure hearts to make the world a better place; they have elections which may be contested, but are accepted enough to have a stable state and rule of law; they need better public transportation, public infrastructure, public education, and public healthcare; they suffer for ridiculous standards of beauty; they have patriarchal gender norms; they don't always get along with their neighboring countries; they are a service economy; they have traffic accidents and diseases; they have works of art; they tend to get up earlier than I, a college student, would like to; and the similarities go on.  While each of these qualities may differ in degree, the society overall isn't too different.

There are some differences.  Thanks to the Khmer Rouge and the US (we had a secret bombing campaign there during the war in Vietnam, remember?), they are war torn, which means that they have things like unexploded land mines (FYI - the US still hasn't signed the landmine ban) that leave civilians without limbs; the people are poorer and less educated; English is their second language rather than their first; they are Buddhist rather than Christian; much of their business and economic growth comes from foreigners rather than locals; labor is cheap, and capital is expensive. 

Part of this is because of globalization.  Now, anyone with a bank and a thin piece of plastic can get money in any city in the world.  Anyone with money can get a cell phone, internet, and all of the comforts that they are used to at home.  People wear the same clothes and buy the same trinkets made by the same companies.  People eat the same species of genetically modified corn (the yellow one with little nutritional value that can't grow outside of greenhouses.  Check out Winona LaDuke's website at honorearth.org for more about this).

I'm not opposed to any of that on principle.  If western culture makes people happy, then that's good.  I'm concerned, though, because the west has been digging the world into a lot of holes that might be hard to get out of.  I guess that I used to have the idea that there were other ways of living where people thought differently and that one of those different paradigms would have a way out of some of our problems.  I had the idea that we could fix the world's problems by changing the culture, that diversity is a good thing and a diverse set of cultures would leave room for one that could fix our mess.

Instead, I am realizing that the same forces that have been incrementally reforming western culture are the ones in which we must put our hopes, dreams, and endeavors.  This is it; now let's make the best of it.

7/11-18: Pillows for Peace

From 7/11 to 7/18, I took a vacation with Pillows for Peace.  With them, I

-saw Tuol Sleng (a genocide museum) and the killing fields

-went to Battambang and Koh Kralor to build 10 houses for people who saved money through the Tabitha program

-did temple hopping at Siem Reap

Tabitha, the nonprofit, helps people save money.  It starts out with $0.25 per week.  After 10 weeks, they have enough to buy chicks.  When a chick grows up to a chicken, they can sell it for more than 10 times the price of the chick because there's a rising trend of rich Cambodians wanting organic free range chickens.  After that, they can get things like seeds, fertilizer, a well, or a house. 

Tabitha also makes some silk crafts, hiring women with HIV.  That's one of their main sources of income.  They use that to pay interest on the people's savings (they pay 10% every 10 weeks, and they keep the money in safes rather than putting it in a bank, so the interest that they pay out has to come from external sources). 

Most of the people on the trip were Mormon.  I think that I identify more with the Khmer people that I have interacted with than them.  It's true that the Pillows for Peace group's backgrounds were fairly similar to mine -- similar socioeconomic status and education -- but with the people in my office, I only see differences in mannerisms; with the Pillows for Peace group, I could really see a different culture.

There were, of course, differences within the group.  There was an older couple that had a background in physics and architecture (the husband was a Fulbright scholar), was familiar with computers and programming (they did some programming back in the old days with vacuum tubes!), believed in science, and had similar political beliefs to me.  I didn't feel a cultural difference with them.  Similarly, the experiences that I will outline don't apply to the entire group.

The only negative was the heterosexism.  I heard some "that's so gay."  One person also told a joke in the form of: "whenever <innocent thing happens>, <bad thing happens>": "whenever there's an awkward silence, a gay baby is born."  It was hard to speak out.  Normally, I only have to interject against the way that people speak, but I felt like in these instances, I would have to tackle a deep seeded cultural issue.

There were some practices that were just different.  There was one couple that wasn't much older than me but that was already married, and I think that they hadn't even met each other a few months before they got married.  Most people, if they hadn't already gone on a mission, had someone in their family on a mission.  Whenever anyone got sick, the first thing that they would do would be to gather around to give a very formal blessing (about half of the group got sick at some time in the week long trip.  Thankfully, I have been completely healthy in the month that I've been here). 

It's not necessarily worse, but they come from a different culture than me. 

The house building was rewarding, but I feel like it was more for us than them.  They were much better than us at making houses (or all of us that I saw), and I think that they might end up repairing our bent nails later on.  Many of them couldn't speak English, so we didn't get to talk with them.  On the other hand, three of the people on the trip were Khmer but raised in the US, and it was their first time seeing their grandparents. 

The people who went on the house building trip fundraised $960 for each of the houses.  Since I knew almost nothing about the program before volunteering, I didn't know that most people fundraised, and I just donated out of pocket.  We also got our name on a plaque outside of the house.  Mine reads "In Memory of Nadja Kuller."

The Lonely Planet guide for Cambodia says, "Marijuana is not legal" but "is traditionally used in some Khmer food, so it will be around."  However, I had never actually seen any.  On the trip, we went to a restaurant called "The Smokin' Pot" that had "Happy Chicken Soup," the soup "which is cooked with happy herbs or Mariwana." 

One of the things that has surprised me during my stay in Cambodia is that I am much more culinarily cosmopolitan than many other people.  I'm vegetarian, but compared to many other people, I will eat anything, and I have eaten a lot.  For instance, it seemed like most of the people in the group had never seen a Thai Iced Tea before.  It's weird because in the US, I always feel so uncultured. 

Siem Reap was ok.  On the plus side, the temples were good to see, and our tour guide for the temples was very cool.  However, it was also very tourist centered, expensive, and it felt less like a city than Phnom Penh.  In cities, there is an air of stuff happening.  I think I'm a city boy. 

Temples: the highlights were Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm, and Bayon.  We also went to Banteay Srei and one or two others. 

On the way to Angkor Wat, Siya, the tour guide showed us some natural features.  There was a plant that has spread out leaves but, when touched, the leaves hide away.  One of the people in our group referred to it as a 'touch me not'.  I don't remember the name that Siya gave to them.  He also showed us a millipede.  When disturbed, they curl up into a big ball.  On the way to Ta Prohm, he showed us that the large mounds of dirt were termite nests. 

When we got to Angkor Wat, we went to the very top (Siya had us enter through the back so that we didn't have to wait in a long line to go up top).  They had just opened it a few months ago.  The steps to get up were fairly narrow.  Outside one of the windows, you could see a big yellow baloon.  Apparently, you can get a hot air balloon ride.  When we left later that night, I saw the massive balloon when it was parked.  The view of the trees from the top was very nice. 

One of the most significant features of Angkor Wat is all of the headless statues.  After the temple was rediscovered, people would cut the heads off of statues to sell for thousands of dollars.  There was also graffiti on some of the walls.  Eventually, UNESCO stepped in and put a stop to it.

Some of the cultural features: there is a large wall with the Ramayana story on it, there are Apsara Dancers on the walls (they can bend their hands backwards), and there is some Ancient Sanskrit writing. 

The engineering was amazing.  They had a human-made moat.  They had a drainage system throughout the entire temple so that in the heavy rains it wouldn't flood.  I guess you don't make the biggest temple in the world without being pretty smart.  This goes on today: once I get my pictures up, you'll see big green tents around some parts of Angkor Wat that are currently being restored. 

In the past, it was used by monks, and you could always hear one group or another chanting.  Historically, there was also a big library with different levels to go on depending on the level of understanding of the monk.  Now, the monks have a small, modern building outside Angkor Wat, and Angkor Wat is purely a cultural site.

When we left (through the front), we saw the stereotypical Angkor Wat sight with the reflection of the temple in the moat.  It was pretty nice.  The clouds were nice too.  Siya also showed us a bullet hole in a stone column near the entrance. 

Two mornings later, we came back for the sunrise over Angkor Wat.  Unfortunately, the clouds disagreed with our plans, so we didn't see too much sun until it was already bright out.  I did see lots of annoying tourists, though.

Ta Prohm is the temple featured in Tomb Raider.  Siya always hears people calling it the Angelina Jolie temple.  He only speaks English and Khmer (I think), but when tourists of other languages come to the temple, he can still pick up the words "Angelina Jolie."  If I were religious, I would think of that as western culture desecrating a holy place.  Since I'm not, I just think of it as sad.

The best feature of Ta Prohm was the trees.  Banyan trees can grow anywhere.  A seed might fall on one of the temple's walls, and a tree would start growing there.  It would grow slowly because it couldn't dig its roots into earth to get water.  But the roots would grow downwards and, eventually, they would reach the ground and the tree would start growing very quickly.  One member of my group commented: "it's a temple to Shiva, the destroyer, and the trees are destroying the temple!"  That tree is Tetrameles nudiflora (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrameles_nudiflora).  There are also banyans (strangler figs) which grow around other trees, strangling them. 

The Bayon temple was discovered by a couple in love that got lost and separated in the forest.  Then, they found each other at the temple, which is full of smiling faces.  Siya knew all of the cool photo ops -- where to stand so that it would look like you were kissing or rubbing noses with one of the faces, where to stand for a group photo, where the face would be framed or in a line, etc.  He was really good with a camera (he immediately knew how to use each person in the group's camera.  It took me a few minutes to figure out where my zoom was.), and he was eager to take pictures. 

Banteay Srei was the favorite temple of some of the veterans in the group.  Apparently, when she first started coming to Cambodia, when the Khmer Rouge were still active, they used the temples as a camp site.  The agreement was that they got it during the night and the tourism industry got it during the day.  In the early morning, you could see warm fire pits where they had made breakfast. 

The temple is made with pink/red stone, and the designs are intricate (and 3d), so people think that it was made by women.  I'm not sure if there's more to that theory or not. 

Since my dad told me to ride an elephant, I also went on an elephant ride.  It was an interesting experience to have, but it probably wasn't worth supporting an institution where elephants are held in captivity for the sake of tourists.

Rant on Photos: what is the point of taking picturesque photos?  I can understand the desire to take photos with yourself in them to send to family and friends or to remember that you went some place.  But why take 'perfect' photos of the sights?  If people want to capture the moment, then they would include the power lines, the construction, the balloons, and the other tourists.  If people want something pretty, then there are better photos (taken by more qualified photographers with more expensive cameras) of the same exact sites easily available online (unless it's an obscure or unique site or you're a good photographer).  In other words, many of my photos are just wasted space.

I guess I don't really understand the whole 'tourism' thing.  It seems like the model for tourism is going to a place for a few days, seeing the sites (which, beautiful as they may be, won't take my breath away) and eating the food (which isn't too different from food in the US), and leaving.  What is left out is getting to know the culture, the people, and the daily lifestyle (most locals who aren't tour guides don't go temple hopping every day).  I would rather know people than sites.  A relationship is more important than a photo. 

In other words, getting to know Siya was more important than seeing some pretty sculptures.  He moved to Siem Reap from the countryside and taught himself English using YouTube.  Now, he volunteers by teaching English at high schools.  He's good at English, too -- he knew enough to make clever jokes (someone in the group asked him "are there any monkeys here?" and he responded "they live with the monks"), to make fun of our mannerisms, and to tell the difference between the many different dialects of English.  He's trying to get the money to bring his mother to the city, so he has been working as a tour guide basically every day for the past three years.  He has a Facebook.  He's teaching himself web programming so that, later, he can start his own business (I gave him my email in case he needs help).  I'm glad that I met him.

That's why I'm glad that I'm staying for a few months.  I have the chance to get to know the people in my office and get to know the city.  Learning a culture isn't about unique experiences; it's about repetition.  Trying a style of food once won't make you appreciate it as much as eating it for a month.  The same goes for the heat, the rains, the smells, the traffic, and the lifestyle in general.  The model for cultural understanding should be walking a mile in someone else's shoes, not a few steps.  The alternative is summed up in Fight Club: when you're a tourist, everything is single serving, like on an airplane.  Single serving food; single serving drinks; single serving friends. 

I also think that the long term model is less likely to produce the 'Ugly American' as the single serving model.  I think that an 'Ugly American' is someone who sees a different mannerism (that is, an insignificant difference) in another culture and thinks that that difference is worse.  For instance, many westerners are off put by Cambodia because people aggressively try to sell things to westerners, so when a westerner walks down the street, they are asked if they want a tuk tuk ride by someone on every block.  In the US, we only have people trying to sell us stuff by advertising on TV, in magazines, in the paper, on the internet, on the clothes that we wear, on billboards, on radio, in stores, and on our doorsteps, so it seems weird that someone would advertise their own services that we might need in a location where we might need them.  Given more time, it's easier to see the similarities and to see that it's just a bunch of people trying to make a living by doing something that works (advertising themselves).

Vietnam

Ary, one of my coworkers from Argentina, was going to Vietnam for the weekend (7/2-7/4) and invited me to come along. A friend that he met at the ICT (it seems like noone knows exactly what it stands for, but it has something to do with information technology) camp in Thailand was going to show him around, and she said that he could bring a friend.

On Friday afternoon, we left by bus. We wanted to leave in the evening, but apparently, there aren't any busses that go between Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh city after 3pm (that also put a kink in our plans for Sunday, since we needed to leave to get back to work on Monday).

It started raining exactly as we headed out the door. Even though it was only about a block before we found a tuk tuk, we were soaked. Thankfully, I brought extra footwear, and my amazing backpack appears immune to water. Being wet made the bus ride cold, though, because it was air conditioned rather than being as warm as outside.

The bus ride was about 7 hours. I did some reading. Ary and I talked some. Ary also recently got an Android phone, so we messed around with it briefly. He had an NES, SNES, and Sega Genesis emulator on it, so we shared some games from our childhoods.

Two annoying things about the bus ride. First, the bus driver honked the horn at least once per minute both on the way there and on the way back. Second, I'm not sure that the bus driver understands speed bumps in the same way that I do. I came to this realization when I was suspended in the air a few inches above my seat for about a second.

I was surprised when I discovered that the bus goes over a ferry. We stopped to wait for the ferry, but noone told me that's what we were doing, so I just assumed that it was a lunch break (I was hungry). Then I saw the water.\

Going across the border was easy. Before the trip, I had to get a rushed visa (meaning $60 rather than $40) because I didn't know that I was going until about a day before I left, but when we crossed the border, we just showed them our passports and put our bags through an airport-like conveyer belt. On the way back to Cambodia, it was even easier. I gave them money for the visa when I got on the bus, and they pretty much took care of everything.

Ho Chi Minh was very different from Phnom Penh.

The food is much cheaper. I got a good meal on the streets for 25 cents (though, unlike in Phnom Penh, they don't accept US currency) for a meal, and in a fairly good restaurant, we had entrees, two rounds of drinks, and desert for less than $5 each. I was also pleased to discover cinnamon ice cream! People have ridiculed me for saying that cinnamon on ice cream would be good, but now I have seen proof that I am not the only one who appreciates cinnamon in all things.

There is also more begging and more poverty. I commented that in Phnom Penh, I think that the kids are in school during the day and that there wasn't much more begging than in the US because everyone is working in the streets. In Ho Chi Minh, there were hungry kids on every block. When I would buy a meal for one, 5 more would show up. Thankfully, it the food prices are cheap. That really put things into perspective: one Jamba Juice is $5, which could feed 20 hungry kids. It's a different feeling from donating to a nonprofit. I can say with complete certainty that my money was not spent on administrative fees or fundraising and that there are now kids with food in their stomachs. While it may be less emphatic than personally donating food, most of the good nonprofits (ie, ones verified by external agencies) have similar success, with less than 10% spent on administrative fees and all of the rest going to high impact initiatives. In other words, it's good to see where my money is going.

The city felt more western than Phnom Penh. Most of Vietnam is rural, but Ho Chi Minh looks like any other city that I've been to. In other words, next to the hungry kids are fancy stores and new shopping malls. The one difference that it has from US cities is that motorcycle is the primary means of transportation rather than car. The traffic flows the same as it does in the US, though -- it's very ordered and fast rather than organic and slow like in Cambodia. Also unlike Phnom Penh, everything has a price tag, even in the markets. There wasn't much room for bartering.

Ary's friend read my palm. Apparently:

-I have a long lifeline. I'll be at least 80 years old.

-I'll be weak when I get older. I thought I was weak now?

-I'll have a good mind forever

-I have no enemies, and I have many supporters in everything that I do

-I will be happily married with two kids and a good sex life

-I'm very bad with money. It will slip through my fingers. I'm not frugal at all.

Touristy Things:

I saw the War Remnants Museum. It had stuff from Vietnam's war with the US. It was eye opening. I knew that the US did horrible things, but in school, I always learned the "war is hell" point of view from a US perspective. It's very different from seeing a room full of pictures of kids that grow up, to this day, with birth defects because of the toxins that we used, to see families burned by napalm, and to see some the instruments of torture that the US used on the Vietnamese. One example was Tiger Cages, small rooms with no ceiling so that US soldiers could pour boiling water on the prisoners. Another was tiny barbed wire cages that would have prisoners crammed into them. That's in addition to the means of torture that you might imagine -- stuff with hammers, nails, putting saltc in the wounds, canes...

I visited the royal palace. The basement had a bomb shelter. The top floors had a room for gambling and the roof had a dance floor.

I went to a pagoda. The monks there dressed in brown rather than orange (like in Phnom Penh). There were stands with sand to put burning incense in and to make a sort of wish. The temple inside had the pictures of people who wanted to have their ashes reside there. There was a group of school children playing some games outside. It was a nice place. I also learned that, despite the Buddhist presence, most people in the country are atheist.

When we went to the mall to get some snacks for the bus ride back, we ran into a father and some young kids who knew magic tricks. They were pretty good.

Our last stop on the way out was the water puppet show, a traditional Vietnamese performance. The only show that we could make was the 2pm one and our bus was at 3, so we only saw the first half of it, but it was fun. They had a bunch of funny scenes with animals coming out from nowhere. I hear that you can check it out on youtube, also.

Pics

http://picasaweb.google.com/meviin/2010SummerInCambodia#

Playing Tourist

On Saturday, 6/26, I went to the National Museum and the Royal Palace.

The museum was very cool. Most of it was Buddhist and Hindu stonework. There was also some more recent historical artifacts from the French colonial period. One of the differences between the national museum and museums that I had seen before was that there was a lot more repetition. Rather than seeing 100 different paintings, no two of which look alike, I would enter a room with 100 different Buddhas. Perhaps it reflects different cultural values: in the west, everyone wants to be unique, so we value distinct pieces of art, whereas here there is more acceptance of the community's values, so the focus is on deeply understanding and perfecting those values.

The tour guide also refreshed some concepts about Buddhism and Hinduism that I hadn't thought much about since taking Values and Beliefs in my sophomore year of high school.

The Royal Palace was less interesting. Much of it was fenced off. The focus was more on larger structures rather than small crafts and statues. The structures themselves were very interesting. There was still a theme of repetition -- there was one structure that was at each corner of the main compound.

One prominent sight was the temple of the Jade Buddha. This part of the Royal Palace was similar to the National Museum. There were a lot of artifacts, and at the center of the room was a large jade Buddha. It's interesting to think that a leader valued for a rejection of the material world and extravagancies would have a jade statue made in his figure (not to mention the gold and silver figures all surrounding the jade).

Interestingly enough, this was the first day that I experienced Cambodia's monsoons. As soon as we entered the palace and got under cover, it started raining. As an Oregonian, I always make fun of Californians when they say that it's raining, but this was real rain. After a few seconds in it, there would not be any dry spots on you.

Unlike in Oregon or California, when you are soaking wet, you still feel warm. Thus, it's not too annoying to get soaking wet, as long as your shoes can take it.

Work

Work:

Most people arrive between 8 and 10 and leave between 4 and 7. I arrive at 9ish and leave a little after 6.

We usually take long lunches at a local eatery.

The environment is very relaxed and social. I think that that is the biggest difference in my work habits between Stanford and here. At Stanford, I'm always overwhelmed with the number of things that I have to finish by the next day, so when I work, I am very focused, efficient, and fast. Last term, I finished most of my CS110 assignments in one ten-hour sitting, with one or two half-hour meal breaks. When doing those assignments, I would have little contact with the outside world, but I would get done two weeks of work. At the InSTEDD office, I work with others rather than alone, and we share our experiences. It's a job, but it's also a cultural exchange and a learning experience, and it's a job where I help others and others help me.

Before I started working, I was asked to estimate how long it would take to finish the first part of my project. My estimate was a few days, and my boss said that he thought the estimate was off. Based on my experience in the first week, I think that if programming were the only thing that I did, it wouldn't have been too hard to finish in a few days, but since there's more to working than just programming, I'll finish in the coming week.

I still feel slow, but the people I'm working with say that I'm coming along very quickly.

The content of my work is making a machine learning (artificial intelligence) service in Ruby on Rails. The cause for the service is so that InSTEDD's other projects can have easy access to machine learning without having to reinvent the wheel every time. For instance, SeenTags, which 'tags' text messages based on previous examples (for instance, if I give Seen Tags the text message "cases:10, disease:malaria " followed by the text message "5 cholera", it will tag it as "cases:8, disease:cholera") had to make its own machine learning solution rather than just getting its data in the correct format and sending it off to another machine learning service.

Rather than writing all of the machine learning algorithms myself, I'm making the service plug in to external services (ie, Google Prediction, Open Calais, Tag This). The brunt of my work is figuring out how to accept data in a range of formats (so that the client service that wants machine learning doesn't have to do any conversion) and get everything in the correct format for the external services while making sure that my code is modular enough that it can easily be extended as new external machine learning services become available.

Ruby on Rails is a web programming language that is currently all the rage. Ruby is the language itself, and Rails automates some common tasks and makes everything work in a standard format. It was harder for me to get the hang of than other languages that I have tried. I think that part of it is that, in an effort to automate and standardize everything, it hides the underlying architecture from the programmer, and the way that I understand things best is by looking at the underlying architecture (which is why I like lower level languages like C and C++ a lot -- everything is exposed). I do think that, once I understand it a little better, it will make web programming tasks very quick and collaboration very easy.

InSTEDD:

InSTEDD (InSTEDD.org; it used to stand for International System for Total Early Disease Detection, but now it stands for Innovative Support To Emergencies, Diseases, and Disasters) solves the information problems of the public health world.

One challenge is identifying disease outbreaks. In the US, we're used to every hospital having an internet connection and quickly reporting any outbreaks to the CDC. Globally, that isn't the case. There may not be one central agency to take in reports, and there might not be an infrastructure for the people on the front lines to report to an agency if one exists.

Riff is a technology that tries to identify disease outbreaks without any central agency. It was inspired by GPHIN (Global Public Health Information Network), the technology that caught SARS and helped prevent it from becoming a pandemic. It scrapes news articles online to figure out where the outbreaks are and what disease they are.

When nonprofits are working somewhere without a stable telecommunications infrastructure, GeoChat steps in. Some areas lack the infrastructure because they are underdeveloped; some areas are conflict ridden, so nonprofits can't freely use the infrastructure; some areas had the infrastructure recently destroyed by a disaster. GeoChat lets people working for public health communicate to each other by any means available. If SMS is the only thing that works, you can send a text to one number and it will be relayed to your whole organization. If you have access to the internet, you can visualize everyone's location and see their messages coming in.

One thing that they're working on now is how to get reports from people who probably don't speak English, who don't have computers, and who don't live somewhere with a very good telecommunications infrastructure -- InSTEDD makes the work that Google does seem easy. In other words, public health agencies need data in computers, but it's hard to get the data from the people into the computers. Their latest technological solution to this problem is a wheel. No, not the millennia-old version: a reporting wheel. There will be a front cover with instructions in their native language; they turn the wheel until it displays the desired word (ie, "malaria" or "5 cases"); they call a phone number; they input the numbers that the wheel displays. They make it easy to design a wheel of your own and print it out, and after you print it out, everything is analog. Thus, it's easy for any nonprofit in the world to use it to help with their reports, and it can be used practically anywhere in the world.

Because InSTEDD is one of the leaders in solving the information problems associated with disease and disaster response, they often work with the UN or in international projects like the Haiti earthquake response. In short, they're a very cool group of people, and it's an honor to work with them.