A great clip from BloggingHeads:

by William Easterly

We’ve complained a lot about celebrity aid campaigns here on Aid Watch, but somebody must like them since they keep happening over and over. Who is the target audience?

The celebrity aid campaign of the past few years has exactly three components:

1. Angelina Jolie

2. Music by U2

3. Picture of African mother and baby

Tim, I think we may be approaching the time when eBooks will compete with paper on cost. We are not there yet but it is a matter of itme. A lot depends upon one's goals. If scaling quickly to all school-aged children is a priority then we cannot simply wait for the technology to reach the price point that virtually everyone can have access to it. Thus paper and pencil are important transition technologies for many for the next several years. The challenge is more than simply cost, however. We have a lot to learn about how to bring teachers to the point that they are effective with technology and there are huge gaps in content that is effrective.

But worry not, UN peacekeepers were there:
The United Nations peacekeeping mission in Lebanon today wrapped up a two-day large-scale disaster response exercise, responding to a fictitious earthquake in the south of the country.
The dry run, which the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) conducted with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), tested the forces’ combined reaction to an earthquake with a magnitude of six on the Richter scale.

...the International Crisis Group warns that something is rotten in the state semi-autonomous region of Puntland.
If its government does not enact meaningful reforms and reach out to all clans, Puntland may break up violently, adding to the chaos in Somalia.

Kenyan adventure, Day 1 (Sorry I’m skipping the last of Uganda, but it’s nowhere near as interesting. I’ll finish it later)

Let me preface these next few posts by saying that this trip was not planned at all. We realized how hard we’d been working the last couple months, with a lot of it being quite frustrating, and we wanted a vacation, so Marie and I decided to go to Kenya. All we had really worked out was that we wanted to see the wildabeest migration in Massai Mara and go to the coast near Mombasa. We did maybe 2-3 hours of internet research before going.

There was a tinge of urgency in the Secretary General's remarks to the Global Environment Forum in his native Korea yesterday.  

There are several trade-offs involved here: ** One is the trade-off between filtered and unlimited access to the resources of the Web, educational and otherwise. I tend towards the unlimited end of the scale but fully acknowledge the need for some degree of filtering, especially for younger children. ** The second trade-off is one of cost, scale and scope. Paper textbooks and good for cost, OK for scale but poor for scope; E-Books are OK for cost, OK for scale and OK for scope; PCs are poor for cost, OK for scale but great for scope.

vvkatievv has added a photo to the pool: