Friday caption competition
Mapping the internet
‘Any attempt to map the internet is bound to fall frustratingly short of its true complexity, or to be so complex as to be illegible’. True – but by using the Tokyo subway map as a template the internet can be better understood.
Frank Furedi’s apocalypse now
Frank Furedi on Spiked earlier this year:
From global warming to obesity, bird flu to terrorism: 2007 was the year when the threat of an apocalypse became an everyday, even banal public issue. It was a year of ceaseless alarmist warnings about an ever-expanding number of calamities facing the planet…
One consequence of Western societies’ obsessive preoccupation with the apocalypse-to-come is that less and less creative energy is devoted to confronting the all too important problems that exist in the here and now. Take the global credit crunch unleashed by the sub-prime home loan crisis this year for instance.
Oh, give us a break. You just know that if this article were being written in December 2006 rather than December 2007, the first paragraph would probably have read: “From global warming to obesity, bird flu to looming financial meltdown…”.
Contagious memes
From Edge, via Mapping Strategy:
It is customary to think about fashions in things like clothes or music as spreading in a social network. But it turns out that all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow through social networks, and this process obeys certain rules we are seeking to discover. We’ve been investigating the spread of obesity through a network, the spread of smoking cessation through a network, the spread of happiness through a network, the spread of loneliness through a network, the spread of altruism through a network. And we have been thinking about these kinds of things while also keeping an eye on the fact that networks do not just arise from nothing or for nothing. Very interesting rules determine their structure.
Half a billion dollars’ worth of system coherence, please
As Charlie noted earlier this week, the World Food Programme has again called for half a billion extra dollars to cope with higher food and transport costs. (The FT just doesn’t seem to tire of running this story: it first appeared on July 16 last year, and made the front page then as well.)
While no-one’s disputing the figure at this stage, it’s interesting that various voices in the aid system are wondering just where the $500 million figure comes from, and how it breaks down. How much of this would be spent on direct food aid, how much on the food vouchers that WFP says it wants to move to, and how much on cash transfers to poor people? And in which countries? (Apparently WFP will be setting out a fuller breakdown in April.)
WFP haven’t always taken care to make many friends in the aid system. Being the big boy on the block (and the US’s favourite humanitarian agency), they’ve always been at liberty to tell other agencies where to shove it when the delicate question of harmonised approaches to humanitarian aid arise. This was especially true during the process of the UN High Level Panel on System-wide Coherence, when WFP ruthlessly opposed calls for a greater leadership role for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance at global level, more co-ordination by Humanitarian Co-ordinators at country level, and more pooled funding through instruments like the CERF.
Now, though, there’s a window of opportunity for WFP’s funders to extract more cooperation from the agency – not least as the relatively importance of US funding to WFP looks set to decline. Clearly it’s essential that people receiving WFP food aid shouldn’t lose out because of rising costs, and WFP’s funders will need to move quickly to make sure that this doesn’t happen. But it might also be a good moment to renew the push for a more co-ordinated approach to UN humanitarian relief…