Do doped-up maniacs really go a-maiming in order to increase their country’s appeal in the eyes of international aid donors? Does the modern humanitarian-aid industry help create the kind of misery it is supposed to redress? That is the central contention of Polman’s new book, “The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?” Metropolitan; $24, translated by the excellent Liz Waters. Three years after Polman’s visit to Makeni, the international Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone published testimony that described a meeting in the late nineteen-nineties at which rebels and government soldiers discussed their shared need for international attention. Amputations, they agreed, drew more press coverage than any other feature of the war. “When we started cutting hands, hardly a day BBC would not talk about us,” a T.R.C. witness said. The authors of the T.R.C. report remarked that “this seems to be a deranged way of addressing problems,” but at the same time they allowed that under the circumstances “it might be a plausible way of thinking.” Polman puts it more provocatively. Sowing horror to reap aid, and reaping aid to sow horror, she argues, is “the logic of the humanitarian era.” Consider how Christian aid groups that set up “redemption” programs to buy the freedom of slaves in Sudan drove up the market incentives for slavers to take more captives. Consider how, in Ethiopia and Somalia during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, politically instigated, localized famines attracted the food aid that allowed governments to feed their own armies while they further destroyed and displaced targeted population groups. Consider how, in the early eighties, aid fortified fugitive Khmer Rouge killers in camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, enabling them to visit another ten years of war, terror, and misery upon Cambodians; and how, in the mid-nineties, fugitive Rwandan génocidaires were succored in the same way by international humanitarians in border camps in eastern Congo, so that they have been able to continue their campaigns of extermination and rape to this day.

via Humanitarian aid and catering conflicts : The New Yorker.

It came to them that day: they would make the first pole-to-pole journey fueled entirely by manpower and natural power. More precisely, they would travel between the geomagnetic poles. They thought it would be a far bigger undertaking than Everest, an expedition called “180° Pole-to-Pole.” On April 8, 2007, off they went on the big adventure. They skied and sledded through Greenland, then sailed 3,000 miles to New York. They cycled to Texas, accompanied at various points by Hutchins, relatives, and assistants they hired along the way, while Atkinson raised funds back in England. They pedaled through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. They sailed to Ecuador and then cycled the rest of the way through South America. From there they continued on to the magnetic South Pole—a 9,000-mile hell ride highlighted by hurricane-force winds and 80-foot waves. By the time the expedition ended, in Australia, they had traveled 26,000 miles in 396 days.

via Higher, Colder, Deadlier | Culture | Vanity Fair.

This is surely one of the most remarkable infographics we've ever posted. Created by social scientist Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán, it documents the organizational structure and almost limitless influence of Mexico's Michoacan drug family. And it teaches you a great deal about why, exactly, the family is so hard to combat -- and why its power seems so pervasive. The infographic itself details various wings of the Michoacan cartel -- or La Familia as it's better known -- alongside various government agencies. (The short hand for the acronyms: Anything starting with "FUN" is a Michoacan drug cell; those starting with "NAR" are government drug agencies.) The arrows show links between each one, meaning they're sharing information. But what's most interesting is that the size of the bubbles shows how much information each cell of the organization is able to share...

We're not quite sure how accurate the information is or how it was gathered, but what strikes you is that the group is far from centralized. Instead, it's extraordinarily diffuse, much like Al Qaeda, for example. And that in turn surely contributes to the fear the organization sows -- it's power must seem limitless in Mexico precisely because its influence, even when small, is always very close at hand, due to the prevalence of tiny, semi-autonomous cells everywhere you look.

via Co.Design.

Click on the link to see the infographic.

Tom Friedman:

Having traveled to both China and India in the last few weeks, here’s a scary thought I have: What if — for all the hype about China, India and globalization — they’re actually underhyped? What if these sleeping giants are just finishing a 20-year process of getting the basic technological and educational infrastructure in place to become innovation hubs and that we haven’t seen anything yet?

via NYTimes.com.

From John Allen Paulos:

Consider the two boys problem in probability. Given that a family has two children and that at least one of them is a boy, what is the probability that both children are boys? The most common solution notes that there are four equally likely possibilities — BB, BG, GB, GG, the order of the letters indicating birth order. Since we’re told that the family has at least one boy, the GG possibility is eliminated and only one of the remaining three equally likely possibilities is a family with two boys. Thus the probability of two boys in the family is 1/3. But how do we come to think that, learn that, believe that the family has at least one boy? What if instead of being told that the family has at least one boy, we meet the parents who introduce us to their son? Then there are only two equally like possibilities — the other child is a girl or the other child is a boy, and so the probability of two boys is 1/2.

Many probability problems and statistical surveys are sensitive to their intensional contexts (the phrasing and ordering of questions, for example). Consider this relatively new variant of the two boys problem. A couple has two children and we’re told that at least one of them is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability the couple has two boys? Believe it or not, the Tuesday is important, and the answer is 13/27. If we discover the Tuesday birth in slightly different intensional contexts, however, the answer could be 1/3 or 1/2.

via NYTimes.com.

Spent the evening with Jake & Billy from Nuru. absolutely wonderful guys with a vision, strategy, and execution wrapped up in a God-centered humility that moved my heart and set my mind racing. i don't often say this, but these guys are the real thing - and i want to follow them as they follow Jesus...

Nuru International is a social venture dedicated to fighting the greatest humanitarian crisis of our generation: extreme poverty.Our mission is to eradicate extreme poverty by holistically empowering rural communities to achieve self-sufficiency and inspiring the developed world to confront the crisis of extreme poverty.

via Nuru International - Ending Extreme Poverty.