BLOG

I received an email in my gmail account, saying that a person has added me to their (google+)circle. The subject is “XYZ dded you on Google+”.Here XYZ stands for the name. Now I go into my mental database and think of all the people with that name. The email next says that I can add him to my circle as well. Then as an afterthought it tells me that I don’t have to. It also gives me this link, which tells me further about what a circle is and how it can make my life better.

Now where can I go and see who this person is? I don’t see his name as a link anywhere. Later I realized that the image is a link to that person’s profile. They are so involved with their own devised feature (the circle) that they forgot to add a proper link to that person’s profile. Also their seems to be an assumption that I would not be inclined to add that person into my circle if I did not know him beforehand. At the very least the name (XYZ) in this line “Follow and share with XYZ by adding him to a circle” should have been a link.

What would you do when you see one of your friend’s pic in your gtalk list with the head section cropped off? Most of you I would guess might want to see the full picture. That is how the profile pic interaction works across the internet. In fact at some places that small aspect is also used to push people to signup. Case in point being twitter, where only signed up users can view full profile pictures. When you click on a thumbnail of a profile picture you expect a full size picture.

But google thinks most people want to change the picture. In fact they have thought about this feature so much that it has two parts. For friends who have not added any picture, I can add pictures as well. So it clearly is not a lack of thought. I think it is a very individualistic view of seeing things. Being social is not changing another person’s profile pic for our own view, but to maybe suggest the person to change the picture. Which is what happens elsewhere, “change the bloody picture, it has been there since ages”. Ever seen that?

The good point about this is, you can stop getting scared of google taking over the world :D.

Everyone wants to help the poor. The needy. Sometimes the ‘want to help’ is so large that the needy are helped regardless of them.  Let us not get into the discussion of whether some NGO’s are in this just to make loads of Tax-free money.

Merry go around pumps or Roundabout playpumps, are pumps which use the energy of children playing on a merry go around. This is the conjecture: Children love to play, hence use the energy generated to pump water. Children are happy playing, and the community gets its water. The idea seemed so great the company got lots of funding (even from the US govt.) and lots of playpumps where installed.

miling, playing children, solving Africa’s water problems. It is an appealing image and one that has attracted millions of dollars in American government aid, backing from the likes of the Co-op and high-profile celebrity endorsements. The only problem is it has also been criticised by one of the world’s leading water charities as being far too expensive, too complex for local maintenance, over-reliant on child labour and based on flawed water demand calculations. So, are we just buying into yet another feel-good marketing gimmick? And what does this say about the current state of the aid industry? Read more here

The details are there in the guardian article, out of which I will list the main problems here:
1. The playpumps are too expensive ($14000 excluding drilling)
2. The maintenance is difficult and spare parts are not easily found.
3. It ‘Needs’ the kids to play to do something which is a necessity. So in a way it is child labor.

Why did nobody see such obvious points earlier? One big reason could be the pictures of smiling children.

Who doesn’t want children to be happy, and also solve a big problem, that of water. Researchers have known that their presence necessarily changes the outcome of the observation (hiesenberg’s principle at play ? :P). But I guess in this case they did not realize the extent. A researcher pointed out that as soon as he reached the pump site, children used to rush towards him. Seeing a white guy, seemed to excite the kids and they always started to play. Questioning locals, he found out that this is a more common scenario: a lone woman pushing the playpump to pump water.

As the guardian article remarks,

They can keep quiet and watch money wasted in massive quantities, or expose the waste and risk damaging charitable giving to the sector as a whole.

Now lets take an example which is closer to my country India.

Sethu Sethunarayanan, founder and director of the Center for the Development of Disadvantaged People (CDDP), an organization dedicated to aiding the Irulas, enlisted the help of a mechanical engineer to make a rat trap that is effective 95 percent of the time compared to the old method which was successful only 40 percent of the time. read more

The difference in both these examples is the way of Intervention. In the first case the intervention is being implemented by another body (someone other than the people), and hence has limitations. The third party may not want to accept failure, after having come so far. Even if they do, it will send a negative message to contributors, who might be turned off contributing to that sector at all. The fact that the rat traps are being made by the Irula’s themselves, makes the second plan foolproof. If the Irulas later find that the rat trap is indeed not useful, or not worth the effort they can just stop making them. What this implies is that it is not sufficient to solve social problems by design, even the implementation has to be well thought out.