Kampuchea Crossings

Bump to baby on the beaten expat track

the ice truck

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Check this out. This is how ice is transported around Cambodia. Blocks of it are stacked on the back of a truck, then covered by rice husks and a tarp. The truck drives a set route and small sections are sawed off as each vendor flags down this truck to buy ice from them. One big block is about 7000 Riel or $1.75. It lasts the whole day for a small vendor like the ones selling sugar cane juice. More photos on Keith Kelly’s flickr.

This is ice being transported within the city. The horses are tiny, even for someone short like me!

squid ink pasta in wine sauce

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Our Italian neighbor left the country for a few months and left us his basil plant (poor thing is almost dead) and a couple of interesting Italian pantry staples. Keith made this pasta with it the other day. It’s a squid ink pasta with wine sauce (garlic, chili, cream, fish, squid). It was interesting, and I’d love to try it again with some caramelised leek in that sauce.

data. lots of it. making it practical.

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The organisation I last worked for didn’t have much interest in maintaining a robust information system to inform its policies. Since data reliability and security were pretty low on their list of concerns, not only was information fragmented among different advisors (who did not know what the others had), but each one also had different versions, subsets– or even names!– for the same dataset. The lack of a proper server meant that these files did not communicate with each other. The dynamic nature of information updating instead was a logistical time suck and coordination nightmare, especially when indicators needed to be reported on. How do you enable your organisational vision when this core technical competency is limited?

Naturally, now that I’ve gone and am reviewing other organisations’ information systems have my appreciation for its critical role increased.

With so much information out there, how do organisations make sure they’re managing and leveraging their intelligence? Here’s Edward Tufte, the data visualisation rock star, in an interview on how organisations ought to approach data:

Companies today have more data than ever. How do you think they should make use of it and make it intuitively visible?

First ask: What is the analysis problem? Don’t begin by searching through application solutions. Ask what you want to learn. Get your key content analysis people two high-res monitors, and let them play with your data for six months and think about the content questions.

Begin with a problem. Have your content experts look at the data and think “gee, if we could only see this and that at the same time, if we could only combine these two data sets … ” The software that you apply to the problem later should only be a by-product of your high-resolution displays and your high-resolution thinking.Another tip: Don’t add any new features until six months after the system is operational. It would be a miracle if, in the last six months, there were a new technology that would save your company. Companies become like cancer patients, looking for a new drug that will save their life.

Those tips help you avoid the money pit that the FAA, IRS, FBI have all fallen into, the enormous software products they’ve adopted and had to abandon. They began by refereeing among software products. Instead you should begin from the surface, listen to your data guys and what they need, and work from the outside in, not the inside out.

I’m a pretty big fan and glad to see his appointment by Obama to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, tasked with tracking the distribution of the $787 billion economic stimulus package Congress passed in 2009. He has to track hundreds of individual stimulus packages around the country, and he has to make it all readable and easily accessible to the public.

will the oilspill finally generate a viable energy plan?

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Rather than protesting further offshore drilling, isn’t it better to channel activism towards a long-term sustainable energy strategy in national policy? Practically speaking, America’s current need for domestic oil outweighs the potential for disaster. As an oil junkie nation that’s spent the past five decades building an entire infrastructure around oil, there are frightening few options.

From Wikipedia:

The US is the largest energy consumer, ranking seventh in energy consumption per capita in the world in 2005. The majority of this energy is derived from fossil fuels: in 2005, it was estimated that 40% of the nation’s energy came from petroleum, 23% from coal, and 23% from natural gas. Nuclear power supplied 8.4% and renewable energy supplied 7.3%, which was mainly from hydroelectric dams although other renewables are included such as wind power, geothermal and solar energy.

From gravmag.com:

55-60% of US consumption is imported at a cost of $50 billion+ per year, amounting to the largest single element of our trade deficit. In 1994, US oil imports exceeded 50% of consumption for the first time. In 1999, US imports were about 11 million barrels per day, compared to our domestic production of 6 million barrels per day.

Again, I can’t agree enough with Chris Nelder on his take on US energy strategy. His piece, Another Wake-Up Call for the World’s Biggest Oil Junkie, is a must-read in its entirety, an excerpt of which is below. And if you haven’t read it yet, here is his letter to Congress on how the energy policy should look.

The eager search for a scapegoat in the wake of the Horizon disaster is a clear sign that America simply doesn’t get it.

After highly visible disasters like the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, the Exxon Valdez spill, and now the Horizon spill, the public understands the risk of offshore oil production. What it doesn’t understand– at all– are the choices we now have to make.

Those calling for an end to offshore oil production in the U.S. apparently don’t understand that it accounts for over 30 percent of our domestic supply. They don’t understand that making offshore oil off-limits would be a double-whammy to our pocketbooks, both restricting our income and forcing us to import even more oil at ever-higher prices. They have an inkling that ethanol production is pressuring food supply, but have no concept that the non-food alternatives, like fuel from algae and cellulosic ethanol, are still puny, and a long way from being ready to scale up and replace oil.

Instead of having a rational discussion about how we’re going to manage our remaining offshore oil resources, we look to technology… as if deepwater drillships and blowout preventers and acoustic shutoff switches were the problem, rather than miraculous solutions only a dedicated junkie could love. These technologies don’t fall from the sky. Every safety measure ever invented came as the result of a lesson learned the hard way.

Instead of discussing how we’re going to break our addiction to oil, we turn to politics…as if yelling “Drill, Baby, Drill” or “Spill, Baby, Spill” even louder, or changing tack on our energy policy every four years, could amount to a solution.

All of our politically-driven energy approaches–carbon caps and trading schemes, offshore leases and moratoriums, short-term incentives for renewables, and so on–
are woefully incapable of addressing our long term problem.

It’s easy to vilify oil and its producers, and it’s politically popular to call for an end to drilling, but replacing oil is far more difficult and expensive than anyone seems to understand.

Do ‘Family Values’ Weaken Red State Families?

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This is a vastly interesting piece by Jonathan Rauch, about the values divide between Red and Blue states, and is worth reading in its entirety. Here’s an excerpt:

Cultural conservatives revel in condemning the loose moral values and louche lifestyles of “San Francisco liberals.” But if you want to find two-parent families with stable marriages and coddled kids, your best bet is to bypass Sarah Palin country and go to Nancy Pelosi territory: the liberal, bicoastal, predominantly Democratic places that cultural conservatives love to hate.

The country’s lowest divorce rate belongs to none other than Massachusetts, the original home of same-sex marriage. Palinites might wish that Massachusetts’s enviable marital stability were an anomaly, but it is not. The pattern is robust. States that voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in both 2004 and 2008 boast lower average rates of divorce and teenage childbirth than do states that voted for the Republican in both elections. (That is using family data for 2006 and 2007, the latest available.)

Six of the seven states with the lowest divorce rates in 2007, and all seven with the lowest teen birthrates in 2006, voted blue in both elections. Six of the seven states with the highest divorce rates in 2007, and five of the seven with the highest teen birthrates, voted red. It’s as if family strictures undermine family structures.

Naomi Cahn and June Carbone — family law professors at George Washington University and the University of Missouri (Kansas City), respectively — suggest that the apparent paradox is no paradox at all. Rather, it is the natural consequence of a cultural divide that has opened wide over the past few decades and shows no sign of closing. To define the divide in a sentence: In red America, families form adults; in blue America, adults form families.

[…]

A further twist makes the story more interesting, and more sobering. Cahn and Carbone find an asymmetry. Blue norms are well adapted to the Information Age. They encourage late family formation and advanced education. They produce prosperous parents with graduate degrees, low divorce rates, and one or two over-protected children.

Red norms, on the other hand, create a quandary. They shun abortion (which is blue America’s ultimate weapon against premature parenthood) and emphasize abstinence over contraception. But deferring sex in today’s cultural environment, with its wide acceptance of premarital sex, is hard. Deferring sex and marriage until you get a college or graduate degree — until age 23 or 25 or beyond — is harder still. “Even the most devout overwhelmingly do not abstain until marriage,” Cahn and Carbone write.

H/T to FrumForum.