jackfruit of the week (09.25.08)

These gigantic jackfruits are... gigantic. Hat tip: Jillian York.

I've been reading a lot about ethnic conflict this week to prepare for two presentations I'm giving next month, but rather than quote something, I'd like to point you to two related links that came my way today:

Never Again in Sri Lanka is a set of video clips in English, Sinhala and Tamil that commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 1983 anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka. The videos were originally broadcast on Sri Lankan television and have been collected and preserved online as part of the effort to document the Sri Lankan civil war, one of the longest-running ethnic conflicts in the world. (Original link from GV: Sri Lanka: Anti-Tamil riot videos.)

Resolve Uganda is hosting a petition to President Bush, thanking him for meeting with President Museveni this week at the UN and asking him to continue to work for peace and justice in northern Uganda. The meeting and the petition are in response to a recent spate of LRA attacks in the Democratic Republic of Congo that have caused at least 75,000 people to flee. UNICEF is estimating that 90 children were abducted.

jackfruit of the week (09.17.08)

Baby jackfruit via Don Fulano

This week I was offered a spot on the editorial staff The Morningside Post, Columbia University's international affairs blog. I'll be working a lot with outreach and video, as well as helping to roll out a shiny new design that will better showcase the variety of our content. I'll also be blogging about media, technology and development (and maybe a celebrity or two). Meanwhile, I urge you to check out the wealth of archived posts on everything from climate change to Cambodia.

Jon Gosier wonders why Barcamp Uganda focused on selling, rather than discussing, new technology: "Barcamp Kampala was organized by myself (an American), a Dutch person, a Brit and a New Zealander with help from three Ugandan students. Thus it definitely had tons of Western influences. Alternatively, Barcamp Uganda was organized for and by Ugandans. Maybe the idea of Barcamp is a western thing that isn’t relevant to Ugandans?"

And lastly, another zinger from Vijay Prashad's Darker Nations, which I mentioned last week: "The darker world contributed greatly to the development of Europe, and based on this evidence it is clear that the invisible hand is white."

jackfruit of the week (09.10.08)

Over the past two years I've experimented with a feature on this blog called "Jackfruit of the week," most recently last November. It's usually a picture of (what else?) a jackfruit accompanied by some of the most intriguing things I've read or seen that week, similar to Chris Blattman's Links I liked posts.

For the next two years, I'm going to try to make JOTW a regular occurrence by basing it on things I'm reading or watching for class. My degree is in Economic and Political Development with a focus in (new) media, so most of the things I share here will be vaguely related to things like Internet and political development, but there might be the occasional piece of statistics humor. Without further ado:

This week's jackfruit comes from my friend and colleague Jillian York. It was spotted, believe it or not, in Canada.

The Machine is Us/ing Us, a video by Kansas State University professor Mike Wesch, explores the implications of Web 2.0 in our world. Wesch has spent significant time in Papua New Guinea, observing the introduction of new media to a society and how technology impacts culture.

Vijay Prashad's Darker Nations explores post-colonial countries and traces the rise and (he claims) fall of the Third World. The first sentence of the introduction claims, "The Third World was not a place. It was a project."