Since coming to Pop!Tech in 2005 as a Sun Microsystems Fellow, Neema Mgana has been developing the first project of her Rural Center of Excellence – a hospital, a medical training center, and a secondary school in Ipuli, Tanzania. The project was born out of a collaboration that began at Pop!Tech when Neema was introduced to Cameron Sinclair, co-founder of Architecture for Humanity, and to Larry Smith of Haley & Aldrich.

Sponsored by Haley & Aldrich. Beth Cohen and Michele Bowman from Pop!Tech, Vikki Ott from Haley & Aldrich, and cameraman Bill Megalos recently traveled to visit the project. (Watch the longer version of the video update in our Pop!Cast archive, here.)

Ipuli is a small, rural village in the east Rift Valley of Tanzania, a stunning landscape filled with endless hills and soil that is a deep, rich red. Home to the Wanyiramna tribe for generations, life in Ipuli is simple but challenging: the village has no electricity or running water. A regional school draws students from neighboring villages, but there are no books and only a handful of classrooms have chairs for the nearly 500 students. Medical care is almost non-existent here; the village has no hospital and no doctors.

Photo by Vikki Ott, Haley & Aldrich

Just getting to Ipuli is difficult. The main road there is broken and dusty. By the time we arrived after a two-day journey from Dar es Salaam, we had red dust on our faces and cameras lenses, and our cameraman had something akin to whiplash.

Neema’s parents, Charles and Helena, grew up in Ipuli and the family became committed to this project after hearing the story from a young medical assistant: mothers and fathers were pooling months and months of salary to take sick children to the nearest hospital over 80 km away, sometimes making excruciating decisions as to who would be treated and who would not; pregnant women in labor were being carried over the broken road often by oxcart and bicycle to reach the nearest doctor.

In this region, the major health problem is malaria, followed closely by acute respiratory infection, pneumonia, eye infections and diarrhea. Infant and maternal mortality rates are high, and life expectancy continues to decrease due to HIV/AIDS.

Photo by Vikki Ott, Haley & Aldrich

To build the hospital, men draw water from the pond, and shovel sand from the river, mixing them with cement and then hand-cranking concrete blocks. The bricks then take a day or more to dry in the sun, a process that grinds to a halt during the rainy season. So far the men have made 6500 bricks, and the foundation for this future hospital is slowly becoming a reality.

Neema at Goat Ceremony, Photo by Vikki Ott, Haley & Aldrich

In a small ceremony, the village elders gave Neema two goats, gifts of gratitude and honor. Last week we received an email from Charles who wrote that one of these elders had fallen very sick and was diagnosed with severe malaria and typhoid. Charles found him lying ill at home after he had been released from the local clinic, and so gently tucked him into his car, and drove the 80 kilometers to get him the health care that may keep him alive. Thanks to Haley & Aldrich, Architecture for Humanity, Neema Mgana and other supporters, when the Rural Center of Excellence opens its doors this spring, medical help will no longer be a long and arduous journey, but will be a part of the community and its future.

The Rural Center of Excellence still needs support. If you would like more information on the project, or if you would like to find out how you can help, please email Neema Mgana at nmgana@yahoo.com.

Four Ipuli boys and their future clinic, Photo by Vikki Ott, Haley & Aldrich

Beth Cohen,
Michele Bowman

For this July 4th release, we have selected three amazing Pop!Casts that are celebrations of the human spirit, and feats of exploration, independence and civil rights.

First up, Ben Saunders will amaze you with tales and images of his expedition in the Arctic. He was the first person in the world to cross, solo and unsupported, the Arctic Ocean - that’s a 1,240 mile journey across one of the most challenging climates on the earth. After crossing areas of unprecedented thinning ice and open water - experiencing the effects of global climate change first hand - Ben has begun to raise international awareness on the changes. How does he do it? His answer is an inspiring one: “don’t underestimate what ‘man’ is capable of when we have a strong belief system about our goals and destiny.”

Next, political activist Ivan Marovic was one of the founders of the Serb student-resistance group Otpor, which helped remove former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from power. Ivan continues to champion political and human rights with a video game he helped to create that teaches users the tactics of nonviolent resistance. Players control characters, groups and movements - building them into coalitions, sending them to carry out tactics, and dealing with government responses. Ivan walks us through a graffiti campaign, street rallies and a benefit rock concert that finally brings down the game government.

We finish this week’s Pop!Casts with a stirring presentation by orator Eloma Simpson Barnes. Eloma delivers a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. in what seems like a direct channeling of the great civil rights leader. Her transcendent performance will move you.

In October of 2005 Claire Nouvian, journalist, producer, and film director, took the trip of a lifetime traveling aboard a research submersible to the depths of the ocean.

“That was the most amazing, the most incredible moment of my life; as if I had been offered a trip to the moon … I thought of nothing else for months before it happened. Afterwards, for weeks I couldn’t talk about it without crying. I’m still not entirely over it … It was so beautiful and so intense, it changed me forever.”

Nouvian, whose interest in the deep sea was originally inspired by a visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) directed by Pop!Tech 2005 speaker Marcia McNutt, has created a stunning new photo-book, The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Deep , recently published by Chicago University Press, with the hope of bringing the vastness of the deep oceans and their creatures to a wider audience.

Think you’ve seen images like these before? Think again.

You can purchase the hardcover, 256 page book at Amazon for $26.

Zivanai Masango, who shared his unique sound at the conference back in 2005, has just released a new album titled DUTU-STORM. Zivanai is a guitarist, performer, and teacher of Zimbabwean music and culture. His style is a lively mix of traditional South African sounds with Funk, Rock to R & B, Reggae, Soul and Jazz. Of the album, Zivanai writes, “DUTU-STORM is a result of my being a ‘world-citizen’, and not forgetting that I am Zimbabwean at my very core!”

The album is currently available for purchased as a hard copy or as downloads from his website www.zivimusic.com.

Preview tracks at Zivanai’s myspace page www.myspace.com/zivanai.

This weekend, Pop!Tech Balladeer Jonathan Coulton was featured in the New York Times Magazine article “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog” . The article describes how the internet and social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, Friendster) have changed the relationship between musician and fan. Rock stars need MySpace pages, blog entries, and they need to respond to fan-emails because–they need the fans. Today fans are expecting all these things. No wonder Jonathan has become a poster-boy for this New Music Paradigm. Besides being an extremely approachable human being, he is also a decidedly accessible rock star as well. In fact, his accessibility has become something of a vocation for him.

He says: “People always think that when you’re a musician you’re sitting around strumming your guitar, and that’s your job,” he said. “But this” - he clicked his keyboard theatrically - “this is my job.”

Jonathan’s a kind of Internet Superstar. While standard means of sales and distribution such as retail CD sales, top 20 radio play or MTV appearances still prevail, the Internet has spurned a whole new channel for reaching audiences and has also created a new metric for determining popularity. Jonathan currently has 5,359 MySpace Friends alone - writing notes to him, emailing with him and, more often than not, getting a response back from him. Not too shabby!

Right now, “Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog” is the #2 most-emailed article on the newspaper’s site, which translates to a spike in traffic to
Coulton’s blog at www.jonathancoulton.com

The article is also chock full o’ links to videos of Coulton’s songs and a great NY Times exclusive “Decoding Code Monkey“.

Check out Jonathan’s Pop!Tech Pop!Cast of his perfomance at the conference last year.

Earlier this year, Pop!Tech 2005 speaker Cameron Sinclair of Architecture for Humanity (AFH) met up with Natalie Chanin, founder of “Alabama Chanin” - a line of limited-edition jewelry, clothing, home furnishings and textiles that are rendered by hand using recycled materials and local talent. The two discussed AFH’s work to help displaced families and individuals who lost their homes after Katrina.

Chanin was inspired by Cameron’s work on the Gulf coast and decided to support AFH’s rebuilding projects by designing a reverse applique (a
traditional quilting technique) shirt called “Alabama Builds“.

This very special organic couture t-shirt is $75 from Alabama Chanin and 100% of the proceeds are go to benefit AFH’s Gulf Coast Project .

As Cameron said himself, these shirts are for “Eco-warriors, hipsters and all round nice folk”. Check ‘em out.

Last month, at the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town, South Africa, there seemed to be a veritable Pop!Tech reunion. Brian Eno was one of the speakers at the design conference and had personally invited Reggie Watts to perform at the closing of the conference.

Watch Reggie try his hand at some traditional African dancing and some “not-so-traditional” moves.

Brian Eno Enjoys South Africa on Vimeo

Reggie recently sent over a video clip of his gallivanting about town with Eno (who is holding up a video camera and in yet another sharp suit) and in the background you can see Alex Steffen and Cameron Sinclair, other Pop!Tech alums.

Watching this clip never fails to make me smile.

And don’t forget to check out Reggie’s Pop!Cast of his amazing performance at Pop!Tech 2006 and a bevy of other Pop!Tech presentations from 2006 and 2005..

AND don’t for get to check out the recording, ANTIBABEL, that Reggie Watts and Yungchen Lhamo made exclusively for Pop!Tech and to promote sustainability in rural Tibet via the Machik organization. You can purchase the CD HERE.

Everyone here at Pop!Tech is excited to let you know that today we released our first twenty-two Pop!Casts, freely available online video and audio presentations available in both streaming and downloadable formats, on our newly refreshed website.

Available at www.poptech.org/popcasts, the Pop!Casts feature some of the very best presentations from the 2006, 2005 (and eventually 2004) conferences, and we’ll be releasing new ones ever two weeks throughout the rest of the year.

The first set includes fabulous recent presentations by:

Thomas Friedman — Pulitzer Prize winning author and New York Times Columnist.
Serena Koenig — Global health leader and Director of Haiti Programs for Partners in Health
Richard Dawkins — World renowned biologist and evolutionary theorist
Zinhle Thabethe — Renowned AIDS activist from South Africa
Sinikithemba Choir Performance — South African Choir of Zulu men and women who provide support to persons with HIV/AIDS
Bunker Roy — Founder of the Barefoot College in Tilonia, India
Carolyn Porco — Chief Imaging Scientist on the Cassini Mission to Saturn
Erin McKean —Editor-in-chief of U.S. Dictionaries for Oxford University Press and self-proclaimed “word geek”
Juan Enriquez — Leading futurist and bestselling writer on the future of nations
Neil Gershenfeld — Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms
Jonathan Coulton — Singer/Songwriter and the official Pop!Tech Balladeer
Thomas Barnett — Strategist and expert on national security and best-selling author
Jesse Sullivan and Todd Kuiken —Jesse Sullivan and his doctor, Todd Kuiken, work together to make Jesse the world’s first bionic man
Martin Marty — One of the most prominent interpreters of religion and culture
Chris Anderson — Editor in Chief of Wired magazine and author of “The Long Tail”
Theo Jansen — Dutch “kinetic sculptor” who creates wind-powered robotic “animals”
Marcia McNutt — Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute director
Reggie Watts - Human Beat-Box Polymath Musician and Comedian
Marianne Weems — Artistic director of the new media theater ensemble The Builders Association
Homaro Cantu —Inventor, entrepreneur and molecular gastronomist
Lester Brown — Preeminent environmentalist and head of the Earth Policy Institute
Kent Nichols — Co-Creator of the wildly popular website and podcast AskaNinja.com

The Pop!Casts are being made available to the public with the help of our friends at Lexus with production support from Yahoo! To encourage their distribution, we’re releasing all of these as open-source, non-commercial Creative Commons licensed content.

You can also subscribe to Pop!Casts within iTunes. With one click you can get them delivered to your iPod automatically!

VERY SPECIAL THANKS to Jakob Trollback for designing the Pop!Cast opening titles, Betsy Henning and AHA! for their beautiful written descriptions, Hamilton Hughes Design for their as-always elegant design work and visual refresh of our website.

Tell your friends, neighbors, colleagues — these are truly worth sharing with anyone who appreciates the innovative ideas and people that change the world.

Mathematics, finance and foresight guru, and Pop!Tech 2005 speaker Nassim Nicholas Taleb is interviewed in this month’s Wired Magazine by James Surowiecki on the limits, biases and flaws in humanity’s ability to see the future. Nicholas’ latest book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (a follow-up to his also terrific 2005 cult hit, Fooled by Randomness) will be released on April 17th. Nicholas has an incredibly wide-reaching conceptual palette, and his insights are applicable to every human domain, from industry to homeland security, where human beings try to see what’s next. The Black Swan should be considered a 2007 must-read.

Architecture for Humanity has announced that they have selected a winning logo from their online design competition. They gathered 65 jurors from across the globe to select finalists from more than 800 entries. The coolest part of it all…the whole competition was conducted on Flickr. You can see the work of all the finalists online. And it’s really interesting to read visitors’ comments on each logo.

The winning entry was made by Oregon based designer Michael DiTullo with his simple design featuring a nice dimensional measurement reference.

Here were the criteria established by AFH:

Criteria

We are looking for a logo that will reflect both the mission and spirit of the organization. A good fit for us would include the following:

1. The logo should be able to be understood globally and inoffensive to all cultures.

2. A logo that is not overly representational as our work overlaps so many aspects of design i.e. Definitely no houses, no people, no people in houses and no houses in people.

3. Neither the mark nor the logotype would use the abbreviation “AFH.” there are too many organizations with abbreviations in the development and reconstruction world you end up getting lost in alphabet soup. Please use our full name, ‘Architecture for Humanity’ in the logotype.

4. The logo must be replicable for all Architecture for Humanity chapters. Therefore the logotype must accommodate everything from ‘Architecture for Humanity Roma’ to ‘Architecture for Humanity San Francisco.’ It is also suggested that entrants also explore chapter logos using both the local dialect and English. (ie. Architecture for Humanity Tokyo should be able to be read in Japanese and English)

5. The design should be able to be reversible and use both light on dark and dark on light.

6. The logo will be used for a myriad of print and online applications. It must be readable from use on silkscreened T-Shirts to dodgy fax machines in far off countries.

AFH following a growing trend in using sites like Flickr and YouTube to generate content such as Davos’ recent call for submissions. The competition, as it opens its doors to the outside design world, is wonderfully in line with its open-source architectural mission.