Dell Global Recycling Video by Von Wong, Theory of God

While I would love to sit down with Von Wong and correct some of his statistics about ewaste (to put a more heroic face on the overseas Tech Sector, described as "landfills across the globe" in the intro), I have to hand it to him, the artwork is great.



Can't resist sharing this.  Thanks to my pal in Malaysia, Nancy Poh, for sharing it.

But this is a two part blog. The next is about my theory of knowledge, and knowledge of God.

(Digression - Why Would What "e-Waste" Gets Exported Evolve?)

In March 2015, a group of Ghana customs agents, Ghana Tech Sector importers, and three USA journalists accompanied WR3A from the scorched waterside where copper and aluminum wires - wires from cars, appliances, and computers - were being torched in tires.  We'd walked about the fires, dodging the black smoke, as WR3A's Dagbani translator (and Tech Sector Geek, first introduced on this blog (May 2011) translated for a group of young men led by Muhammed Awal.

(Note: I've kind of deliberately avoided really nice photos here, just to kind of capture the ordinariness of it all)

The photographers (myself included) had all snapped some great and alarming shots of young men, dirt, poverty, pollution, and smoke.  The ENGO's halloween language would be hard to resist.  But we now moved the the larger Agbogbloshie yard, where by hammer and screwdriver and axe, metals were being separated from each other and from the plastic skins and wire nerves that bound their bodies.

The first electronic or "e-Waste" device we photographed was a VHS or VCR player.  It was, no doubt, originally imported used.  The Italian photographers got their lenses up close, accepting the premise that this represented and "obsolete"  import.

Joe Benson's container exports were itemized, not just by count of appliance, but by brand and model.  In 100 pages of documents I reviewed, there was no VCR.  Wahab, the Ghana Tech who made our tour possible, would never have imported one.

But back in the day, when I lived in West Africa in the 1980s, VCRs were a hot commodity.  An entire industry of "duplicate" movies existed in Nigeria.  Knock off copies of "Rocky" and "Rambo" and "Bob Marley Concerts" were in every marketplace, from Yaounde to Ngaoundal.  Cameroon was still in the business of erecting TV towers, but the "critical mass of users" who made those investments promising had obtained used CRT televisions - every one of which demanded a VHS player as much as it did electricity.

When I looked down and saw the young men pounding, I saw a flashback of scrap appliance from Africa's past decades.  I wondered, did the young Italian documentary makers (in their 20s) have any idea what a VHS player was, and could they imagine a Joe Benson or Wahab buying one from an "e-waste" collector and paying thousands of dollars to ship it here?

Game Theory 5: Yankee Ingenuity changes to Soukous Ingenuity

Time to tweek the English Vocabulary.


This post is about "aid" or "nurture" versus strategy for growth and self-sustaining economies.  It's not the proverb "teach a man to fish".  It's "Dudes!  Don't even you see this guy is fishing successfully?  Give him back his dang fishing pole.  Like, primum non nocere already!"

for some reason this depicts strategy by wiki

"Yankee Ingenuity" was a term recognized virtually worldwide after World War II, though it harkened back the a period much earlier, when New England's industrialization began making "good enough" product  in competition with English and European manufacturing.   Paper mills, weavers, cotton gins, and printing presses (like the used one purchased by teenaged Ben Franklin from London prior to the Revolutionary War) were often erected with "tinkered" parts.   Reuse, repair, and upgrade were recognized as a talent associated with poverty and a "can do" attitude.

My generation of schoolchildren in the 1960s saw "yankee ingenuity" in our history textbooks, it was so promoted that Wikipedia's editor is within h/h rights to label it a "stereotype".  

But what we really need is a term that African and Asian and South American Tinkerers can be proud of.  The "tinkerer's blessing", as I've dubbed it refers to can-do/make-do in contrast to the "Resource Curse".   But 'blessing' is a description of an effect, whereas "Yankee Ingenuity" gave respect to the people performing the repairs and upgrades.   Tinkerer's Blessing refers to the effects the Geeks of Color have on their own emerging city or country.   What do we label the drive within the African, the Joe Benson, the Hamdy Moussa?  How do we regionalize Acer's Simon Lin or Terry Gou's adaptation of "semi-knockdown" and "elective upgrade" in a way that signifies a "tip of the hat?"

E-Waste Tragedy 4: The Perils Of Guidelines Drafted from False Perception (Ipsos MORI blog)

Ipsos MORI meets South Park's Satan...

This is the fourth part of a series of blogs following the documentary "The E-Waste Tragedy".  Emceed by Jim Puckett, premiered at the E-Scrap Conference 2014 in Orlando, the film by Cosima Dannonitzer purported to show junk electronics, dumped in Ghana.   They "followed the trail" back to the electronics origins in England.   I viewed the film with Emmanuel Eric Prempeh Nyaletey, who grew up a few blocks from Agbogbloshie, Accra's scrapyard.  He was carrying a petition to #FreeJoeBenson, the Nigerian expat sitting in prison in the UK for "violating e-waste export guidelines", and no one at the conference wanted to sign it.

Ipsos MORI is one of the UK's leading research organizations.   The website describes Ipsos MORI's 16,000 research staff in 84 countries.  Like Q-method, the organization relies on face-to-face interviews.   They get the real data for IMF, World Bank, and UN factbooks.   Last Month, Ipsos MORI published research titled "Perceptions are Not Reality:  Things the World Gets Wrong".

The Perceptions are Not Reality publication focuses on the "top ten" things which the majority of people in a society (14) perceive wrongly about themselves, about their own, local and national, civilization.  The web page starts with statistics, perceived and real, about facts on the ground in Great Britain:

"In Great Britain we get a lot of things very wrong…"

1. Teenage pregnancy: the British think one in six (16%) of all teenage girls aged 15-19 give birth each year, when the actual figure is only 3%.
2. Muslims: we hugely over-estimate the proportion of Muslims in Britain – we think one in five British people are Muslims (21%) when the actual figure is 5% (one in twenty).
3. Christians: in contrast, we underestimate the proportion of Christians - we think 39% of the country identify themselves as Christian compared with the actual figure of 59%.
4. Immigration: we think 24% of the population are immigrants – which is nearly twice the real figure of 13%.
5. Ageing population: we think the British population is much older than it actually is – the average estimate is that 37% of the population are 65+, when it is in fact only 17%.
6. Voting: we underestimate the proportion of the electorate that voted in the last general election - the average guess is 49% when the official turnout was much higher at 66%.
7. Unemployment: we think nearly 24% of the working age population are unemployed when the actual figure is much lower at 7%.
8. Life expectancy: we overestimate our life expectancy by three years, thinking the average for a child born in 2014 will be 83 years, when the actual estimate is 80 years.
9. Murder rates: we are however one of the best informed countries on the murder rate: 49% saying it is falling (which is correct), and only 25% think it is rising

Perils of Perception - Global from Ipsos MORI

Unfortunately if not surprisingly, the USA perceptions aren't even as accurate as the UKs.

The perceptions of risks, and how those (mis-)perceptions are monetized when they go viral, has long been a theme of this blog.   But mis-perception and misconception, by itself, is not a tragedy.

Knowledge of the world around us is increasing, societies are becoming more aware of one another, and if Ipsos MORI continues to survey people over time, I hope they find that the trend in the perceptions will become more accurate.  We are more frightened by ebola than we should be, but 50 years ago, would we have known about ebola at all?

Misperception of facts do not make a "tragedy" unless we gear up to act on those "faux facts".   And what motivates society?

GREED and FEAR.

Got misperception?   Use it to motivate and market to regulators.

Game Theory 1: What Would [Massively Intelligent Persona] Do?

WWJD, or "What Would Jesus Do?" was a welcome Christian riff about 15 years ago.  I looked it up in part because of the upsetting crisis of Boko Haram near the eastern Nigerian border, very close to the part of Cameroon I taught school in the 1980s.

The phrase "What would Jesus do?" (often abbreviated to WWJD) became popular in the United States in the 1990s and as a personal motto for adherents of Evangelical Christianity who used the phrase as a reminder of their belief in a moral imperative to act in a manner that would demonstrate the love of Jesus through the actions of the adherents.

What would Jesus do, or Muhammed do, about lunatic fringes in religions established in their names?

"Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy" - Aristotle

Boko is a Hausa word, and Hausa is a society which was massively splintered by Western lines-drawn-on-maps in Africa.  England and France drew Vertical lines (Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Benin, Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon west-east borders), whereas the African societies tended to follow latitudes associated with climates.   The band of Sahel and Sahara stretches longitudinally north of the forests and mountains to the south, and it's a big "Bantu-v-Islam" historical and geographical context ignored by historical cartographers. Of course, with no lines at all, the ports and trade would still have drawn economic maps and boundaries, and either way, north is the loser.

"Dead Reckoning": Cross Cultural Risk Part III

Cross Cultural Risk Comparison, Assessment:  Part III "Dead Reckoning"

"Let's take working PC displays away from African hospitals, grind them to dust, and apply it as wind cover in USA cities." - USA E-Waste Policy Expert

Part 1 went to the philosophical morality of risk, as defined by our ability to care about wider and wider circles, in geography and in time, etc.  From selfishly caring about oneself, to caring what one's mother thinks, to caring about decades later, and about people on other continents, and on to the spiritual and supernatural...  The highest risk, for environmentalists, is extinction. Things people do here on in a lifetime on earth that leave a mark, until the next supernova.  We need to value genomes, genes, more than we value carbon, and more than we value individual human lives.

Shark attack child

Part 2 zoomed inward.  Individual human lives, individual acts, small risks.  Thanksgivings past and present.   The blog analyzed the risks of "wasting food", and liabilities for serving "risky" food, from the perspective of my own geography (Ozarks) separated by generations and time.  The perception of risk relates to actual risk.  What is risky in a rich nation - serving blinky food - is risky not to do in a poor nation.

In the third and final part, we turn to risks of leaded glass and childbirth.

Lead is dangerous.  Banning leaded gasoline was the best environmental law the USA ever passed.  Childbirth is also dangerous.  The number one cause of death in Africa is from blood loss during childbirth.

But is the risk of a pound of lead in a working computer monitor at a hospital in Africa the same as a pound of lead ground up in a USA landfill?  The perception of risk, by a USA or EU regulator vs. by a young African mother, is altered through the cross-cultural lens.

Over the holiday I skimmed an article in a journal called Risk Analysis: Vol. 24, No. 3, 2004  "Dead Reckoning: Demographic Determinants of the Accuracy of Mortality Risk Perceptions" (Jahn Karl Hakes1 and W. Kip Viscusi).  From the Conclusion

"One theory for the high degree of observed risk aversion in public policy decisions is based upon public overestimation of small risks and underestimation of large risks, as argued in Viscusi.(20) According to this theory, the public’s difficulty in distinguishing between differing magnitudes of risks leads to similar amounts of spending for reducing each risk. As a result, the resulting regulatory costs per statistical life saved are much higher for low probability risks, whereas the greatest gains in lifesaving will be from reducing very large risks.

"Improved policy treatment of risks, assisted particularly by improved communication of risks, holds the potential to increase the cost effectiveness of public policy."

The paper tries to correlate opinions of risk to actual risks, and how the outliers lead to inefficient regulation and public policy.  This is really germane to the Good Point Ideas Blog  (see "Cognitive Risk: E-Waste Cell Phone Cancer").  How do Africans, North Americans, Asians, Europeans, Oceanians, and South Americans weigh the risk of "e-waste"?   If we broaden the geography of the risks being debated, and the cultural geography beyond USA, does "improved communication of risks" remain associated with "educational attainment"?  Or can the well-educated get something wrong?  We all have our ju-jus, our gri-gris.

"Dead Reckoning": Cross Cultural Risk Part I

3 holiday blogs on Cross Cultural Risk Comparison, Assessment.  


Risk Comparison and Assessment.  Sometimes society gets it right.  Sometimes, though, we miscalculate risk, and misdiagnose.  Environmental regulations are the response to environmental risks, which may or may not be a direct risk to human health.  If our subjective responses to direct risk to our own lives vary, by demographic, how good is our derivative judgement of the more indirect risk to the environment?  And to the indirect risk to an environment physically distant?

Our opinions on world risk are like an army of rubber bands.  When enough of them are used together, they can create energy, a movement, or an obstacle.

"Risk" generates aversion, and aversion is energy to be harvested, either by capitalists, or by command-and-control economies.  Risk aversion, and the externalized risk aversion (which arises genetically from the impulse to nurture), are winds we can direct towards or away from our windmills and sails by conjure.   The force which conjures these winds is journalism, or wiki-editing, or other social media.

Now that I've lost nearly everybody (a Thanksgiving long-bomb hail Mary blog tradition), let's use e-waste policy, again, as a lens to measure how media plays on society's cognitive risk (personal threat avoidance, or nurture to protect "others", or true ecosystem challenges) to stir policies worth billions of dollars.


In our families, our religions, our work, and our lives we must weigh different derivatives of risk and benefit.  But our actions and decisions and votes seem like rubberbands.  They are capable of holding small things together, or inflicting a snap of pain.  But the rubber band cannot hold back a landslide.  We direct the energy and elasticity we have to the things we can cognitively manage.   That image is a way of introducing my theory of how we care about the pictures of little kids in Africa and Asia.