Some time ago, Anne Galloway posted an excerpt from a talk by designer and HCI theorist Brenda Laurel on her concept of culture work which caught my interest. Laurel’s main concern is design which focuses on the bottomline, the way that most of the products we buy are designing with buying and consumption in mind, [...]
Just found this cool little Flash program which compares life expectancy and Income per Capita for all of the World’s nations over the past 25 years. It is quite cleverly done, and there are some quite astounding details that you notice on such a timeline: How China has sprinted up the income ladder, how Rwanda’s [...]
In a Slashdot discussion on Open Source Software in the developing countries, the following comment was made by the self-consciously monikered FlyingPig: At the moment software is frequently a tax that poor countries pay to rich countries to be allowed to participate. Poor countries often have weak currencies, but the local cost of goods and [...]
You probably have to read the Economist to understand all of it.
Last night, I went to attend a debate at the Department of Anthropology on the much-discussed Mohammed-cartoons. It focused on the anthropological perspective of the reactions and counter-reactions to the drawings and how anthropological theories can help win broader understanding in the current situation. Now this is a rare thing. In all my time at [...]
Thanks to Front Bumper for providing a good selection of reactions from the Syrian blogosphere. They go a far to show how the Mohammed drawings are being used in the internal politics of Syria.
“The greatest gift that God has given us is the ability to figure things out for ourselves.” – Averroes
In the past week, a small local issue in Denmark regarding some caricature drawings of the prophet Mohammed printed in the Danish daily Jyllands-posten has exploded in the global news. Demonstrators in Beirut and Damascus have burned down the Danish embassies and seem to be generally unappeasable. Meanwhile, both the Danish government and the newspaper [...]