Free PDA Databases for Medical Personnel

This one is pretty conservative. You might even expect it to exist right now, but it doesn't. Medical personnel must wrestle with the greatest amount of information of any profession, so they are a natural to be the first to get aggressive distributed database help. We aren't talking about free laptops (already given to some students and employees) or even free PDAs (even more commonly provided in the corporate world). No, we are simply starting here with free databases. Once made (and perhaps updated only every three years or so) these bitpackets can be easily downloaded, duplicated, and demonstrated for ten minutes in a medical school, nursing school, and internship classroom, to facilitate their near-universal adoption, on the PDA of your choice.

Handango.com is just one of the leading sites offering useful software for PDAs today, and there are several medical specialty sites as well. This kind of distributed workforce intelligence improvement takes maximum advantage of accelerating hardware trends, which improve fastest in their storage capacity, second fastest in their processing capacity, and least fast in their wireless bandwidth. Consider the following possibilities for getting more "distributed computation" into our health care workforce:

1. Medical databases. Today, there is no reason that all our health care personnel can't hear a word, see a drug, or watch a procedure and not be able to pull a concise general description for it off their wrist, belt, or out of their pocket. To do this right, that would mean some organization with the ability to distribute databases to multiple health care sources, like the California Medical Association, would ideally adopt the project. This kind of distribution potential would lead to competition between Mosby's, Stedmans, and all the hungry smaller publishers for either the low cost development (medical students love to make these databases) or for the licensing of various existing general medical databases (e.g., glossaries, procedure guides, Drug guides, treatment guides, etc.).

2. Telephone and office directories. Furthermore, now that PDA's have enough memory to store hospital staff directories and local telephone books (white and yellow pages), health care staff can graduate from using hospital operators and 411, as they can have all that info in their pocket. Or soon, even on their wrist (e.g., Fossil's PDA, left). I'd bet the cost savings alone in hospital operators and average 411 bills to the institutions would make the development of the directory databases an efficient move. At the same time, it makes medical personnel a lot more autonomously productive, which is always good.

3. Annual calendars. For a third example, you can give out a free annual calendaring program that automatically lists local social and official medical events for the year. That would be humanizing to all the overworked and undersocialized health care personnel.

Any takers? Thanks to Jack Lewin, CEO of CMA, who inspired the idea.

Shareware Cost: Freely Given. Contributor: John Smart.

Intelligent PVR-DVD Player

As of Jan 2003, 40 million U.S. households now have DVD players, with 25 million players sold in 2002. Given this, is it still too much to ask for a DVD player that doesn't skip? Or assuming you have always had scratch-free DVDs to view (lucky you), how about one that doesn't steal your precious time by forcing you to watch ridiculous intros, ads, and warning messages? Panasonic has a new DVD player with "1.3X" playback, presumably to allow you to speed through those particularly slow sitcoms and nature documentaries. But we are quite ready for even more intelligence in these systems.

How do we get beyond skips? There may already exist a professional model with multiple lasers, data caches, and read-head redundancy that can piece together bad areas on the fly, interpolating whenever scratches occur. If any readers know of a non-skipping DVD player, here in 2003, please let us know 1) how it works and 2) the affordable models that have it (mail{at}accelerating.org). Such players should be the minimum standard. Until we have them, we have the curious situation where VHS remains better when viewing a movie with friends (at least for my money), because catastrophic disc failures halfway into a movie are simply unacceptable.

How do we get beyond disc-locked sections? This one is tougher, but may yet happen. Any manufacturer with a little courage could build a player with an internal hard disk with no output ports (e.g., a TiVo-type Personal Video Recorder, or PVR), so no reasonable claim could be made by content providers that the player aids copying or sharing DVDs. The player could copy the DVD to hard disk on loading, at 30-50X the normal playing time. Why would you wait three to five minutes to watch your movie? Here are a three reasons, the last being the most compelling: 1) you'd be sure to have data integrity throughout the movie, 2) you could skip around as desired, with no locked sections, and 3) you would have an amazingly fast ability to navigate through and sample various sections of the disk, and leave permanent cue marks (stored in your file on the hard disk) on any clips you want to view again later.

What will our next generation PVR/Intelligent DVD player's interface look like? Here's one obvious suggestion: upload all the video sections as thumbnails onto a touch screen, backlit Tablet PC that replaces your DVD remote. That would allow you to immediately see all the available sections, and to play or speed navigate through any of them with a few simple taps and flicks of your finger on the screen.

What could be more intuitive? Furthermore, since the whole DVD would be on the hard disk (years later, in flash RAM), not only would you have a reasonably-paced fast forward and rewind, you'd eliminate those annoying lags when skipping between sections.

You've got to have a minimum set of standards for how your technology respects your time, and frankly, as Bruce Sterling ("Ten Technologies that Deserve to Die") and others have noted, DVD doesn't yet deliver a respectful viewing experience. It should rightfully be considered only a first-generation implementation.

Is anyone up to this humanizing challenge?

Shareware Cost: Freely Given. Contributor: John Smart.

Next Generation Solar Still (NGSS) for Developing Countries

Solar stills are a simple but very effective technology for creating fresh water in undeveloped places that have access only to ocean water or to brackish or contaminated water.

Surprisingly, 4 L/day of distilled water, one person's daily drinking needs, can be generated from a typical 1 cubic meter solar still, which is basically a vapor-sealed "greenhouse" that contains seawater on the floor and condenses fresh water on the inside of the roof so that it runs off to the sides.

Some of these stills can get pretty large. According to "The ABCs of Desalting" (an excellent overview of desalination technologies), Haiti has had a 300 square meter (10x30m) solar still operating since 1967. At the above efficiencies it would put out 1,200 L/day in summer, and 600 L/day in winter. This is enough for the daily drinking water needs of 150 to 300 people, or a village. This is also plenty large enough for a subsistence farm for one family, or for several families if a few irrigation efficiencies are added to the mix.

Here's a nice larger-sized still in Hawaii. It claims 140 liters a day, enough for 35 people. Stills like this could be shipped preassembled, made from PVC, stacked up on a truck like palettes. Solar stills work wherever land and labor are very cheap. To work next to the ocean they can be placed inland just a few hundred yards, away from the expensive beachfront property, or on land that is rocky, swampy, or otherwise poor for habitation or farming. To be successful, they require a local commitment, and at least a low level of training.

The efficiency of these systems can be increased greatly by a number of schemes, and the simpler they are the better.

One simple solution would involve increasing the temperature difference between the transparent roof (the "condenser") and the black pan of seawater (the "evaporator"). This could be done with human power by periodically pumping cold water (from an insulated saltwater storage tank, or directly from the ocean) across the top of the roof during the day, then pumping out the condensate into a freshwater storage tank immediately afterward. Picture someone stomping a foot pump next to the still, watering down the glass every half hour and then immediately "wringing out" the fresh water, like a sponge. A good design might even allow a mild vacuum to develop in the "wringing" phase of each cycle, which would also increase vaporization from the seawater. The saltwater coolant could be pumped back into the storage tank the next morning at sunrise, when it was coldest. Human powered water pumps (first seen in Medieval times, much more efficient today) would also be used to get the untreated water up from the sea to the still, to flush the brine out of the pans back to the sea, and to get the fresh water up into a gravity-driven storage system, if local water pressure were desired.

Another innovation would involve adding positionable mirrors to both sides of each greenhouse, to greatly increase the temperature, even on cloudy days. Yet another would be recyclable black plastic pans, to minimize the hassle of periodic cleaning.

The Next Generation Solar Still would be something modular, with parts that are cheap, durable, lightweight, and easy to replace. PVC is one possibility for materials. The manufactured vs. today's inefficient home-built approach would allow a new micro-industry to emerge, backed by micro-loans, both from the manufacturer and from NGOs like Grameen Bank. A manufacturer-driven approach would allow a roving sales and support staff to service multiple locations in a developing country, creating further efficiencies. Rooftop stills might eventually emerge, but village-level groundfloor systems are the low hanging fruit in this space, as there is both a lot more construction hassle (consider the weight, for example) and a much smaller scale to a rooftop system.

There is room in today's poorest and driest countries for new kind of entrepreneur: someone who specializes in making clean water for a village (drinking) or for a single family farm (irrigation), at a very affordable cost. Solving a problem, creating some capital, speeding up and humanizing the world in these final years of non-intelligent machines.

There are lots of simple build-it-yourself stills available for use in developing countries, but I've seen nothing yet like what I've described here. A few student groups have done some basic efficiency studies, but the sustained innovation needed to create the Next Generation Solar Still hasn't yet materialized. A Netherlands company called Zonnewater has an interesting NGSS, but it looks far too complicated for emerging nations and they are more concerned about having their IP copied than bringing a useful product to market, which is the real challenge. called There certainly seems to be a reasonable amount of grant money available for anyone who might want to take on the project.

Developing an NGSS would be a very satisfying project for bringing human-powered water to a very poor community. ApproTEC, that ultra-cool creator of the awesome, unbeatable "SuperMoneyMaker" foot-powered irrigation pumps and other amazing technologies for African small business, might be an ideal company to take this on. Or DEKA Research. Or perhaps one of the innovative academic groups in this field, like the Brace Center for Water Resources Management at McGill University. If anyone wants to supply any of these groups with a grant for creating the NGSS, would like to shop this worthy idea around, or would like to actually build a prototype, let me know!

Shareware Cost: Freely Given. Contributor: John Smart.

Subsidized Cell Phones in Post-War Nations (Iraq, Afghanistan): A Strategic Defensive Asset

Now that our country is committed to stabilizing Iraq and bringing in new businesses (see the U.S. Reconstruction Task Force site), we need to get smart about it. Cell phone service can do that like nothing else. Cell phones give us the ability to communicate with loved ones and business associates. This greatly accelerates our sense of collective identity (vs. individual anonymity, a problem in any city), and can significantly increase individual productivity, as developmental studies have shown.

Cell phones also extend reach of social accountability. Law-abiding citizens in every culture use them to report scofflaws, when they see the violations occuring, in real time. That can only be good for social order and business. Alleged offenders can even be called on their own phones, if visually ID'd by security personnel, to get their own account of events, by phone or in person. Now that's efficiency and transparency. Cell phones allow authorities to track the holder's position, both with and without GPS. When this is also public knowledge, and used in high profile prosecutions, the sense of public accountability will further increase. They can be given usage curfews during periods of instability, with the phones of security personnel getting precedence. Individual use privileges can be electronically revoked and instantly reinstated, creating powerful incentives for citizens to work within the system. Every conversation, or at least significant samples, can be electronically monitored for criminal speech, and voiceprint identified when necessary. Most phones will soon even have cameras, bringing unprecedented video accountability to society. This is truly David Brin's "panopticon" (see Transparent Society, 1998).

Contrast this vision to the current U.S. administration's short-sighted policy on cell phones in Iraq. The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) awarded initial licenses for cell phone service October 6, 2003. Three Arab consortiums won (over several U.S. bidders). There will be no Iraqi ownership or oversight of the consortia (ouch). The winners can take as long as twelve months to set up their territories (ouch again). Worst of all, this this is intended as a profit making venture from the start, ensuring that most Iraqis won't be able to afford the service.

This approach is fundamentally wrong. Cell phone communication is a strategic asset, with intrinsically defensive, stabilizing, self-balancing features. In times of military unrest, I would argue that control over these airwaves belongs in military hands, not civilian. Furthermore, we can make the closely related case that the buildout of cellular communications among the citizenry is one of the highest priorities we could have for the further development of the social and economic strucutre of Iraq. And socioeconomic development will, in turn, accelerate national security.

Broad experience in leapfrogging development in telecom in India, China, Malaysia, Myanmar, and other developing countries has demonstrated that cell phones are a cost-effective, rapidly deployable, and resilient technology. A 2001 study (Telecompetition, Inc.) noted that cell phone market penetration will triple in the Third World by 2007, while it will peak by 2004 in the First World. In a time where roughly 1 billion homes (2/3 of planetary households) still don't have phones, cellular communications represent a major priority for infrastructure development. The report states that the much more rapid initial growth rates we see in the Third World are not simply due to less current market saturation, but rather because third world adoption is "driven by a fundamental need for basic communication services, while that need isn't as urgent in developed countries."

The advantages of cellular systems over fixed land lines are many: A cellular system is far easier and cheaper to create in rugged country. They have much greater practical utility than landlines for a highly mobile populace. If one base station is bombed in an unstable province, the system doesn't fail but undergoes "graceful degradation:" others pick up the slack. In unstable environments, a multitude of decoy stations can be deployed at a fraction of the cost of real ones. If this is a military-controlled operation, both real base stations and the decoys can be legally booby-trapped, turning the tables and blowing up the saboteurs. Video surveillance, again partly decoy, can also be deployed ubiquitously to protect the infrastructure, with a small percentage of circulating real cameras that take high-resolution video of perpetrators, posted to the evening news. Eventually this can occur immediately, on the little picture phones that everyone will be carrying in the not-too-distant future. Cell phones, in short, allow a much more fine-grained electronic interaction between the governing authorities (whoever they may be) and the average Iraqi citizen. Most interestingly, they can leverage daily progress in the accelerating electronic ecologies (databases, software, digital content, etc.) in which they are embedded. The day when all of us can speak to, control, and learn from a panoply of semi-intelligent computers through our cellphones (the conversational user interface) may now be less than two decades away, and rapidly counting down. The face of warfare, and what it means to "occupy" a country has forever changed in our electronic age, and it is time we realized that.

Besides cellphones, there are many other examples of communications infrastructure that we should promote to stabilize information-poor countries like Iraq. I've written elsewhere on the profound value of proliferating public access radio stations and public access low power television stations in third world communities, and the value of subsidized distribution of such network appliances as portable radios, home televisions, and inexpensive newspapers that have radio and TV schedules printed in them. All of these technologies push strongly in the same direction, toward social cohesion, subgroup identities (sports and religious programming will predominate) and individual empowerment, even as the level of chaos may rise somewhat, particularly in the early implementation of the system.

For the purpose of brevity, let us assume we are already following such a multi-pronged approach to information liberation in Iraq (and if we are not, it is high time to do so), and consider our cell phone policy in more detail. Experience shows that a "fine-grained" response to violence is particularly important for justice and fairness to be percieved. Revoking cell phone privileges in entire cities (e.g., Tikrit) after brief flareups, as tempting as that sounds, would likely be seen by the local populace as a Big Brother move, far too heavy handed to build trust. But revoking privileges of those suspected of civil disobedience, and giving them the easy ability to get them back by coming down to the station for "drivers ed" classes on civic duty, would be a far more balanced, "Little Brother" action, the type of graduated response only made practical by the new digital infrastructure. A light hand would demonstrate a basic trust in the populace to use the new technology in positive ways. If possible, freedoms in these areas would be constitionally garanteed, but with very different standards in peacetime and wartime. One foundational ideal is that the citizenry understands that what it does on a daily basis matters to the quality of social life.

Couldn't cell phones also empower the grass roots resistance now emerging in Iraq? In other words, is it possible that we might cause a net negative effect with this technology? I'd say network theory and evolutionary psychology argue strongly that groups seek security as a fundamental need. Iraqis might be willing to tolerate some low level of bombing-as-social-protest, but using networks to overthrow the provisional regime would only work if we allowed gross misuse of the system. Consider that the inherent accountabilities of these electronic communications technologies ensures that they are intrinsically defensive, not offensive assets. Iraq would be an excellent test for those hawkish naysayers who think we'd be throwing gasoline on the fire by opening up the information floodgates. Let's do the test and see. The world's oppressed masses, waiting patiently for help in every remaining dictatorial regime on the planet, deserve it.

What would this cost in Iraq? There are 22 million people in Iraq, 80% of them in urban settings. Basic cell phones can be purchased wholesale in China for $30. Hand crank chargers, like the one pictured at left, can be bought for $7.50. Worldwise reports that there are an estimated 30 million unused, older, recyclable phones sitting around American homes and businesses (now there's a donation opportunity). Let's assume (in the worst case) that 8 million Iraqis (e.g., almost 100% of adults) would qualify for and want free phones in their first year of deployment. If we were to purchase new rather than refurbished handsets, this would cost $300 million, or exactly 1% of the $30 billion, 5 year redevelopment budget, not including military spending, that Dick Lugar estimates will be needed to stabilize Iraq. That's probably the best discretionary 1% we could ever spend, after basic military security measures. Add another $300M ($15M per city) to build out base stations in 20 key cities, and you've still barely affected the redevelopment budget. There are also annual costs for network administration and maintenance, some fraction of the development outlay. Yet once a society has acheived market saturation those costs stabilize, while the social value of the network keeps growing proportionate to use.

We should learn our lesson from Afghanistan. Afghan Wireless, a joint venture of a privately held U.S. firm and the Afghan Ministry of Communications, had spent $60 million building out a mobile phone network in five cities by October 2002, or roughly $12 million per city. That is spare change in a national security budget. But the venture is private, and is thus expected by stockholders to be profitable. They rolled the operation out with only top end Nokia and Motorola phones available, at $300 apiece. Not even counting the cost of service, and this strategy ensures that the technology will be minimally valuable to the people at large for years to come.

If this system was military controlled and aggressively deployed, national security forces would learn a lot of practical information about guarding base stations from sabotage. Presently, Afghan Wireless hires 24 hour guards for each station. I can't imagine a rent-a-cop being a credible threat against a committed saboteur. Hand this over to the military, and let them get private industry bids for tank proofing them. Critical assets deserve professional defense.

All security personnel, Iraqi and Afghan army, police, and their families would ideally get free use of these initially subsidized systems, 24/7. Most other members of the populace should also be given free use of the system, either at specific times during the day, or for specific numbers of minutes, so that everyone in the country would directly experience the benefits of the new technology. That's how real behavior change and buy-in to the idea of civic development can begin to occur.

For how long should we subsidize and nationalize? Can we propose a clear standard, to minimize abuse of this policy? I'd say military should have control of national communications for as long as military, and not civilian force is what holds together any nation. As R.J. Rummel notes, all democracies historically seek to move to civilian control, the rule of law, and extensive civil liberties, but that takes time, and we need to recognize that reality, not ignore it. It would be good for us to develop and propose a set of tests that tell us when its time for the military to step into the background again. The clearer and simpler those tests are to the populace, the more they can work toward fulfilling them. (One that comes immediately to mind: annual violent loss of life being below some percentile.)

An interesting side note: this test, if we chose to adapt it to the U.S., might lead us to see the value in giving subsidized cellular rates to our most downtrodden inner city populations, and free cell phone service to all the deputy police (five times the size of our paid police force) in our most violent cities. That could be a very valuable extension of the "broken windows" policies that have made headway in recent years.

All this new communication will also make the Iraqi and Afghani markets far faster and more efficient in local and world markets. The UN Development Program noted that Bangladeshi farmers who use cell phones to check crop prices and weather earn 10% more for their crops, on average, than their unwired colleagues.

In conclusion, Iraq is still several years away from being a market that can support broad cell phone penetration as a profit making enterprise. Afghanistan may be further along, but it also deserves subsidy and military control of this strategic asset, until more stability exists in the region. These countries should be aggressively helped to develo these communications/defense systems today, to minimize the unrest and bloodshed that will continue until the vast majority of the citizenry believe that working with, not against the provisional government is a win-win proposition.

Either the military brass don't yet realize just how important a defensive military technology the civilian-deployed cell phone is, or their strategic security plans are being afforded less political clout than the desires of powerful business lobbies. Given historical trends, I'd expect the latter.

Whatever the case, the cell phone subsidization policy seems to be a major overlooked opportunity to bring stability to the region. Let's hope our political leaders see some light on this issue, and begin some aggressive policy change in this area.

It seems to me that we should temporarily nationalize the control (not the ownership) of this defensive military asset and at the same time aggressively expand its deployment in these countries, immediately. Private companies can compete to do the buildout and to manage the networks, ideally a number of companies, each with tight deadlines and some local ownership interests. Not following this course misses a major new opportunity to improve sociotechnological immunity in these countries, an immunity that will arise inevitably regardless of our political foresight, but unfortunately much, much later, if left to develop on its own.

Thanks to Amara Angelica, Andrew Breese, Lee Corbin, John K. Davis, James Douma, Steve Farrington, Jessica Richman, Chris Phoenix, and Robert Wright for helpful critique.

Shareware Cost: Freely Given. Contributor: John Smart.

Three Priorities for Post-War Iraq: Technology Policy for Complex Immunity
"We move here with no problem." This is a quote of Abu Ali, the pen name of an Iraqi resistance fighter, from a revealing article in Time 12.15.03. The article describes the routine of Ali and his friends: getting together for dinner in their urban apartments and then planning and executing intricate night raids against American troops. Carting along their homemade rocket launchers, setting up perimeter surveillance, and then fading undetected back into their day jobs. Or rather, their lack of jobs, as 30-60% of the country remains either un- or underemployed. The way Ali describes this process, it sounds like a challenging game that a disgruntled kid could almost find to be fun.

I think this vignette exposes the heart of our present problem, and the remainder of this article will consider its solution, from a technology-centric perspective.

As I've written elsewhere, since the advent of mass production in the 1920's technology has been the most important driver of change on the planet, clearly superceding economics, which itself superceded politics beginning with the American Revolution (a response to state-controlled Mercantilism that unleashed free enterprise) at the end of the 18th century. So today, politics is only the third most effective system for engineering meaningful change. Countries like Singapore have made it plain just far one can go with a powerful technology policy and a reasonably open trade policy, even while dragging the ball and chain of nondemocratic, authoritarian values. If you agree with Francis Fukuyama and his ilk (and I do), modern political regimes are all on an inevitable course to pluralistic democracy, liberalization, and open markets, but as Singapore and China show, political change must occur on its own glacial, generational timetable.

As corporate strategist Elaine Baran reminds me, Fareed Zakaria (The Future of Freedom, 2003) pointed out that "Liberty came to the West centuries before democracy. Liberty led to democracy and not the other way around." In The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, 2000, Michael Novak also discusses how capitalism as an economic system moves consistently farther and faster than the political and moral (cultural, social) systems in which it is embedded. In Iraq it seems that we are often taking a backwards approach, working first with the political system, then with the economic and finally, seeking to promote liberty. But technology, through the freedom it gives us from Abraham Maslow's lowest levels of need, has been the greatest catalyst to liberty that we have seen in the past millenium. So to develop a nation, we must lead by developing their most empowering technologies. In the present climate, what might these be?

There many ways we can address the ongoing violence against U.S. and international troops in Post-War Iraq. To understand the context of the war from the military perspective, I strongly suggest reading the Gap Shrinking model of Naval War College strategist Thomas Barnett (start with the Esquire article of March 2003, "The Pentagon's New Map"). With regard to Iraq, I'm going to outline three technology priorities — in the domains of jobs, benevolence, and distributed security — that I consider particularly important for development policy at the present time. Each can be used to create more powerful social and technological immune systems, in ways that I hope are apparent to the reader.

1. Jobs. We need much more attention to making reconstruction jobs available for all Iraqis who want them, and they need to be cleverly marketed everywhere in an enticing manner. Every time I see video on Tikrit, Baghdad, or Samara, I ask myself: where are the billboards advertising the latest job projects? It's time for public works programs that employ far greater numbers of the public, programs that leverage mass communication technologies of all types.

Now that the U.S. military and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) have entered the nation-building phase in Iraq, there does seem to be opportunity for some improvement in the job-building process. It is no secret that the DoD can be unilateral and top-down in its politics. This doesn't suggest a need for DoD reform, as unilateralism can be very valuable when life and death decisions are needed. But it does suggest the need for more pluralism of authority now that we are many months into a stage of postwar development. This July 2003 Associated Press article notes that the DoD ignored the State Department leaders who did a comprehensive eight-month, 17-agency Future of Iraq planning effort, and simply cut the CIA and other agencies out of the planning loop when they privately argued that the Pentagon did not appear to have an adequate postwar transition plan. That is the DoD's perogative, but we need a more inclusive approach at this stage, one that enlists a lot of decentralized charity, business, and brainpower for the aid of the Iraqi people.

As part of this, the CPA needs more flexibility in its administrative approach. As one example, recall the arrest of the leaders of self-declared "job agencies" that were charging Iraqis to fill out applications for non-existent jobs. We could have simply policed the applications fees (many were only twelve cents, a trivial sum to most urban Iraqis), and the "promises" the agencies were making to job applicants. We could have treated their emergence as a legitimate bottom up, self-organizing force, feeding them some of our jobs as they became available, and accelerating the transition to recovery, rather than axing them because they weren't official. As another, Batelco, a self-organizing cellular communications enterprise, was shut down by the CPA in June, and then nothing has been put in its place for the last half a year. Is it any wonder Iraqis are growing frustrated? Cheap, subsidized cellular communications would massively increase the efficiency of job creation.

Some smart people have begun to write on using technology for job creation strategies during reconstruction, and this is a complex topic, so I suggest you peruse their insights for further ideas at the present time. But the second and third strategies discussed below remain seriously underdeveloped, to my knowledge. For this reason, I'd like to give them attention for the remainder of this article.

2. Technological Benevolence. It is still not clear to a substantial fraction of Iraqis today that cooperation with us will be beneficial in the long run. How do we counter this problem? The theory of technological benevolence advocates that we should be rolling out surprisingly powerful, useful, and culturally-appropriate technologies at irresistible prices, subsidized as much as possible with our development dollars, and distributed in the commissaries and marketplaces each month, making it compellingly obvious that participation with the West is a strongly non-zero sum game.

This solution is surprisingly simple, yet it is one that will be the hardest for the U.S. administration to see, as by nature it views the world through a politics-first filter. Why are we trying to make major political changes in our first attempt at postwar reconstruction? Because politics is what any administration sees as most important, when it should be seen as most inertial. The policy of politics-first is why the U.S. Department of Defense is now investigating the cellphone licenses in Iraq for secret political ties. This will continue to delay the time before the country gets reliable, expensive, and unsubsidized communications, and further alienate the general populace. As Carol Williams recently noted in the L.A. Times (12.19.03), this is a country that has been nine months without the ability to make a telephone call. Yes, the landlines are still being sabotaged, but cellular service is a lot more robust, and could have been made available many months ago. Again, the block is political, not technological. Williams states: "A Bahraini company, Batelco, briefly extended coverage to Iraq in June, proving, as has MCI, that service is physically and technically possible. But U.S. authorities ran it out of the country for jumping ahead of the competition without a licence."

These are avoidable mistakes. We live in a world where technology is providing us with a cornucopia of technical advances, many of these ideal for use in developing nations. As Buckminster Fuller reminded us in his concept of Technological Benevolence (TB), we continually see the emergence of certain technologies that are so inexpensive, or useful, or both, that they penetrate into all societies, regardless of what the politicians, ideologues, and business leaders want. Electricity, fossil fuels, vaccines, radio, digital watches, water pumps, television, VCRs, satellite dishes, cellphones, the list is endless, and ubiquitous to all cultures. If we are to apply this principle, we should be finding the best that technology has to cheaply offer today, and pumping it into the Iraqi economy as fast as humanly possible, through the conduit of all the Iraqi businessman with who want to participate in global trade and technology transfer while employing Wal-Mart style business efficiencies.

The disgruntled Iraqi citizen needs tangible daily examples of the power of cooperation with the West. They need to be able to cite a long list of personal benefits, recently recieved, to justify cooperation with a foreign power whose values they don't, and can't, deeply share at present.

Here are just a few examples of what a technology-first development policy would look like. These are only crudely illustrative: many more could be provided. U.S. shoppers experience the magic of portable CD players for $9.99 at Target. Why can't Iraqis get them for $5, and have access to hundreds of music CDs, popularizing the rich variety of Islamic music that has already been recorded, for fifty cents apiece? This would involve less than $50 million in subsidies, and with good diplomacy, we'd see a consortium of developed countries providing the subsidy. In the developed world, most music is played not by original instruments but by machines, making it a truly mass experience. That development has barely begun in Iraq and many other third world countries. With it, a major portion of the interest of the typical inqusitive youth becomes songs, not sabotage. Kids are obsessive about any tangibly complex, interesting things (e.g., music, movies, video games), and if they don't have those things in their environment, they will find other obsessions. There are 25 million Iraqis, and arguably millions today who would pay their own hard-earned money to gain the "transformative experience" of recorded music. This would positively impact the country in a matter of months, not years.

Hand crank flashlights, like those shown to the right, can also be mass produced for less than $10 apiece. Why aren't we blowing these out at $2 apiece as the December loss leader in all Iraqi markets? Have you ever been without adequate lighting at night, when you have something important to accomplish? Do you remember how dehumanizing that is? That is the standard state of affairs today in Iraq. There are hundreds of such products that could be ambassadors for the psychology of development right now, if they were in the hands of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citzenry. What about better footwear, better bicycles and pedi-carts, smarter food storage systems? I have just discoverd that in China you can buy mosquito zappers for $2 apiece. They plug into any outlet and create an infrared heat signature that vacuums the bloodsuckers right out of your room while you sleep. Does any city in Iraq have a mosquito problem? And what about broadcast technologies? Portable radios and televisions cost very little these days. So where are all the low power television and radio stations in Iraq, and the cheap newspapers that list the schedule for all the daily programming?

Or how about energy? Why hasn't Iraq's gasoline distribution problem been solved, and where are the work projects to create local gas depots everywhere in this country? Where are the cheap and quiet generators for each family to make use of this plentiful local resource? Think of the profusion of local industries that could be catalyzed if we equipped some of those ubiquitous Iraqi donkey carts with strategically subsidized 30 pound, 1000 Watt generators like the handheld Honda one to the left.

Rapid deployments of the best and most appropriate of these technologies would make it patently obvious that technology is turning magical right in front of our eyes. That's the real story of the 21st century, the one we in the West have long known is true, but in the developed world, such knowledge is tempered by fear and resignation that such benefits will always remain inaccessible, mythical, and unimportant to daily reality. If we are all connected by only six degrees of separation, it seems reasonable that if you know someone three or less links away who has just received some wonderful new tool, you will realize you can eventually get it for yourself. The Iraqi perception of the value of cooperation for technological development, not for better political or ideological values, is what we can most quickly, easily, and profoundly change in their hearts and minds. So let's make that our top priority.

We can't expect a society that has been stably based for centuries on clans and nepotism among cousins to adopt our impersonally impartial democratic political structures and institutions overnight. Law professor Alec Whalen notes that federalism (providing strong state power in the post-war constitution) would be a particularly valuable form of democracy given Iraq's varied interest groups, and yet particularly difficult, given the temptation for nationalism along ethnic lines. Political and social change often needs to be agonizingly slow, to minimize confusion and anger. Economic change is powerful, but even that ends up being heavily regulated in half the world (just look at Europe vs. the U.S.) due to the dissatisfaction of some cultures with its disruptive cycles of creative destruction. The most universal lever is technology, it always moves the fastest, it always has the greatest effect. We just need to open our eyes to that reality.

3. Digital Ecologies. As an advocate of accelerating change, I would argue that digital ecologies (systems for communication, sensors and effectors, databases, computation, etc.) are presently the most useful tools to leverage the public goods (security, justice, jobs, and information flow) that any regime can provide to its citizens. We'll focus here on security, the most fundamental public good by broad consensus, and even that we will only skim for illustrative purposes, to show the power and promise of technologically mediated immunity.

Mr. Ali, the resistance fighter in our opening paragraph, has probably never heard of camera traps and mesh networks, but as a Westerner, embedded in a much more developed digital ecology, I thought of them immediately, as soon as I read his alarming story. They are a compelling technological solution to his current anonymity, and his currently low self-perceived personal risk as he engages in nighttime insurgency operations.

If you don't know what a camera trap is, they are used worldwide to document the passage of wild animals in remote areas, day or night. Humans squirming around out in the wild, away from the prying eyes of other citizens need careful counting too. At left is a WoodsWatcher camera trap, chained to a tree for safekeeping, a bit of U.S. innovation available to anyone for $285.

There are two obvious uses for these, in wilderness and urban settings. If placed broadly throughout the wilderness in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, they provide tremendous information about the habitual movements occurring in various areas. I've heard that the U.S. military is beginning to use some of these, but not yet on a scale that would be broadly effective.

Then there are the urban applications, which are even more potentially powerful in a country like Iraq, where 80% of the population is already urbanized. I'd love to see some international NGO place an order for a few million camera traps in China, get the unit cost down to about $25, and then start handing them out in a decentralized manner in Iraqi cities for the guarding of personal property, with the consent but perhaps not even the aid of the Coalition Provisional Authority, immediately jumpstarting the development process. I challenge anyone who would really like to improve accountability and transparency in Iraqi society to do just that. How many thieves would be caught on camera, and later prosecuted by local tribunals? How much would this help improve the general conduct in the country? And while we're on the subject, when are going to see these in Wal-Mart for urban use in the U.S.? We already purchase $200 surveillance camera systems here en masse: I think it's high time for $25 camera traps.

With digital technology, traps can record what has transpired in a location for the last few days, at 20 second intervals, continually overwriting the older images. If our property gets stolen or vandalized, we at least have the satisfaction of being able to hook up the trap to a USB port and finding and emailing the pictures to our local law enforcement agency. In turn, the agency can post the choicer selections to Trap TV, so we can at least entertain ourselves as the cheater detection modules in all our brains motivate us to try to identify those involved. The picture quality on these units will dramatically improve as well, as soon as the market begins to emerge. Motion sensors, zoom, and audio will become inexpensive additions. We'd like our traps to take high resolution, full video clips with motion tracking and auto zoom whenever a human infrared signature moves into a certain area.

Here's a picture of a pretty cat, caught in the flash as she walks by the infrared detector. You can make your traps cheap and obvious, relying on the multiplicity of cameras as a local deterrent, or expensive and virtually undetectable (night vision, no flash), whichever way you want to go. Most traps today are isolated affairs, storing the data on film or digitally for manual retrieval by human teams. But it is clear that they are soon going to be a lot more interesting due to another rapidly developing technology: mesh networks.

Mesh networks are decentralized peer-to-peer networks that hand off the data, daisy chain style to its ultimate destination, robustly routing around any individually destroyed nodes in the network. (Destroyed nodes of course relay their telemetry in the process, increasing the risk of such sabotage the more sophisticated the trap). Mesh networks have been moving steadily from theory to application. MunicipalWireless.com reports that next month, the city of Cerritos, CA, spurned by DSL and cable for broadband installation, will allow Tropos Networks to deploy a 802.11b Wi-Fi mesh network around the 9 square mile city. The hope is that the network will provide cheap, scalable broadband for the city, as useful at the desktop as on the road.

While such networks may never outcompete fixed line for continuous, high bandwidth applications, they are already well suited for intermittent, low bandwidth traffic. If used for mostly one way rather than two way communication (e.g., relaying audio and video snapshots) they can be optimized for very inexpensive and stable deployment. The cheapness is perhaps their greatest benefit.

Like the surveillance cams in Manhattan, which are 95% citizen owned, ideally these traps and networks would be 95% deployed by individuals and private security firms initially under government contracts, allowing lowered insurance premiums, extra development funds, and other benefits for any sufficiently trapped and meshed private and public spaces.

Certainly there are challenges here. It will be a significant developmental challenge to rapidly shrink the present cost of traps by more than a factor of two, much less an order of magnitude, and no doubt there will be countless integration hurdles that we haven't thought out. But we can make an aggressive start. Ideally, this effort would be U.S. subsidized but mostly home grown in ownership and employment, run by Iraqi businesses, in the same way that the very successful South African video surveillance systems are almost all locally developed. The networks can be used to relay what they see to a range of human eyes, again ideally Iraqis gainfully employed by myriad independent private and public security firms.

At the same time we also need subsidized digital communications ecologies (e.g., radio, TV, and cellphone) so that as networks are being installed, they are discussed, argued, and publicized in the media every night. Such coverage would maximize internalization of an implicit lesson for 21st century humanity: technology is becoming stronger and smarter than any of us, and its accelerating advance is ultimately far less resistable than any political ideology.

There is major strategic value to aggressive deployment of digital ecologies as well. If we can distract the Iraqi resistance into tilting at the windmill of the new technologies rather than at us, we will win the battle even faster, for fighting accelerating digital-computational change is a truly futile endeavor. All of our machines, from billboards to breadmakers, from CD players to camera traps, are today's primitive, affordable robots: they will come faster and cheaper every year for the rest of our lives. The humans installing them, on the other hand, remain fragile and are increasingly priceless with each passing year.

Abu Ali runs unemployed, unbenefited, and dangerously anonymous today, but not forever. The sooner we promote job creation, technological benevolence, and digital ecologies in Iraq, the sooner he'll come to understand the accelerating trends of intelligence, interdependence, and transparent immunity that characterize the modern world.

Thanks to Elaine Baran, Michael Hartl, Chris Phoenix, John E. Smart, and Wayne Radinsky for helpful critique.

Shareware Cost: Freely Given. Contributor: John Smart.