Before you invest, you’ll need to think about how your favorite neighborhood will change in 20 years. Will there be a new shopping mall next door? Do you think the local shops will close because of a nearby superstore? Is crime getting better? Are the schools getting better? What about jobs? Have you thought about where your tenants are going to work? Why do you think the quality of life there is likely to improve? You don’t need to find them a job, but if there are no jobs nearby, they aren’t likely to sign a long-term lease.

Example

This is a picture of the racial makeup of the neighborhood in Charlotte where I grew up as it changed from 2000 to 2010:

The darker the shade of blue, the more white the part of the neighborhood it is. The darkest shade is over 90% white according to the census. Little sugar creek forms a natural boundary down the middle of both maps, denoted by the solid white or blue line.

From 2000 to 2010, the whole map grew more racially diverse. But if you zoom in and study the map block by block, each block grew more racially homogenous.

In 2000, this was pretty much a white neighborhood on both sides of the creek. By 2010, blacks and Latinos made up nearly half of the neighborhoods on the left side of the creek, but the right side was still homogenous. It had gotten 10% more diverse on the right to 50% more diverse on the left side of the creek.

In 2015, home prices for the left and right sides of the creek differed by about $250,000. Crime was a much bigger problem on the left side. Schools were poorer on the left side. Economically speaking, the left side was the “wrong side of the tracks”, or creek, on every measure.

In my previous post, I explain that the current social science research finds that neighborhoods with more racial and economic diversity also have better growth prospects. Property values rise faster when communities are health.

So why did the increased diversity fail to yield an increase in property values?

There is no common ground or social meeting space in the middle of either neighborhood in the Charlotte map. Compare with this map of Northwest Washington, DC – where you find Columbia Heights, Adams Morgan, Mount Pleasant, and Shaw:

There are no highways, train tracks, rivers, creeks, or parks dividing these DC neighborhoods. And so racial makeup becomes more diverse and property values have increased. The people buying homes in the Charlotte case had a different attitude towards race. And they did precisely because those attitudes were never challenged by crossing paths with “the other” as would happen in a city with dense quarters, like Washington, DC. The “white flight” to the suburbs in Southern American cities served to calcify attitudes about the other.

What researchers found to be the case nationally – that diversity is associated with growing property values – played out in opposite directions in both the Charlotte and Washington examples. Where communities remain isolated, you find a neighborhood doesn’t blossom. Where they integrate around common meeting places, prosperity follow. For this reason, I would never invest in the area where I grew up in Charlotte today.

I would love to buy property in Northwest DC. In the middle of this DC map you find my church – All Souls Church. They fought for equal rights in the 1960s, set up fair housing enclaves in the 1970s and 1980s, and were the place where the DC mayor signed a marriage equality bill in 2013. Of course this church is not solely responsible for these communities coming together, but its presence is associated with many factors that make a community healthy. It is a proxy indicator of prosperous neighborhoods. The absence of common meeting grounds creates neighborhoods that are nothing more than ethnic cloisters.

The absence of a any facility or social institution that both communities share on the Charlotte map means it it likely that home prices will remain flat on both sides of the creek. People looking to move into a community with a healthy vibe will look elsewhere.

This is one example of the kinds of lessons I highlight in my book. How do you spot future prosperous neighborhoods that are “up and coming?” Study demographics and city plans and understand Gentrification’s effects on cities.

See also: Gentrification: solve for X

Homes usually don’t appreciate in real value, at least on average. Home prices rise and fall in cycles. Specific houses  and neighborhoods can become more attractive, but the average of all homes hasn’t increased. The exceptions to this rule (1980, 1987, 2007, 2013) are housing bubbles.

I explain how you can learn to predict which homes will increase in my book, Before You Buy Rental Property: The ethical investor’s guide to buying a rental home.

Investing in rental property is about growing equity and earning a monthly income once the house is paid off. You needn’t require the home to appreciate in value to succeed.

Thinking of property as an Investment

• rental property income is a monthly dividend for owning a “stock”
• the “stock” is the actual house, and a “stock portfolio” is a collection of properties.
• “stock price” is the potential sale price of that home.
• renters paying a mortgage into equity is like an investor acquiring more shares of a stock each month.

How do property dividends compare with stock dividends? Look at the average quarterly dividend  for stocks since 1980 as a percent of return on investment:

Every dollar invested in stock in 2010 yielded 2 cents back each quarter of the year. Rental income tends to yield a similar percent to the owner after expenses. The yield is rarely better than stocks, but tends to be more reliable.

Stocks vs real estate: this isn’t a perfect apples to apples comparison. With stocks the amount of dividend cash you get depends on how many shares you own and how much per share the company pays out – typically in the $0.25 to $4.00 range quarterly. And stock prices range from $20 to $200 per share. But after all the math, property income yields a similar return.

So if houses are worth about as much as they were a century ago, after adjusting for inflation, what’s the advantage of buying property?

Equity. 

That’s the value of the property itself. Your house is a vault that your renter fills up each month by paying rent. And any improvements to the house are deductible “business expenses!”

It isn’t just homes – both income and property values have been pretty flat for decades. Did you know that if you earn under $50,000 per year, your real household income has been flat since the 1967?[i]

Paying a mortgage is really no different than putting your money into a non-interest bearing bank account, except that you get to deduct what you pay in interest from your tax bill. And there’s the benefit of putting that money into an account in the first place. If you rent, you’re putting that money into someone else’s bank account.

That wiggly red line at the bottom of the chart is the inflation adjusted value of the average American home from 1967 to 2015. It never rises more than 20 percent. Likewise, income for the bottom 50 percent of Americans has increased 20 percent at most.

How does real estate compare with stocks and mutual funds? It’s not as lucrative, but it is more reliable. Investments in the stock market have been quite a roller coaster:

Side by side, the stock market has grown 200% over the same time frame that homes grew 20%. Most of this growth really started in the 1990s when companies abandoned pensions in favor of 401k plans (which forces all employees to buy stocks), so it may not be sustainable indefinitely.

[i] Source: http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/adjusting-median-household-income-for-inflation-1967-chain.gif

See also: Gentrification: Solve for X

Historical Diversity

The United States is one of the more ethnically diverse populations, globally speaking. Here is the breakdown based on 2013 statistics:

These proportions are even closer than they first appear. 15.1% of whites also identify themselves as Hispanics, leaving a mere 62.6% of the population in the “white European” category[ii]. Compare this with France, one of the more diverse countries in Europe:

You can see why America is called the melting pot. But in spite of our diversity, most neighborhoods are homogenous. Each group sticks to it’s own ethnic enclave and forms a dominant group within a few square blocks, while still remaining a minority group overall. This is New York City’s map of little Italys and little Bangladeshes:

New York City trends aside, most cities in the US have become less segregated since the 1970s. Sociologists use a “dissimilarity index” to measure how over- or underrepresented one ethnic group is in a neighborhood, compared to its proportion in the local population. When every neighborhood’s ethnic makeup matches that of the city as a whole, there is zero dissimilarity. All of the nation’s most segregated cities have become 12 to 40 percent less segregated in the last half century[iii]:

Both of these trends are happening simultaneously. Neighborhoods are getting more diverse as dissimilar groups choose to co-exist, and neighborhoods are continuing to remain “enclaves,” because similar ethnic or economic groups so often choose to live near people like themselves. The balance of these forces in each neighborhood determines whether diversity grows or recedes.

The best illustration of how personal choices transform whole neighborhoods comes from Mathmusician Vi Hart[iv] and “playables” programmer Nicky Case[v]. They published the “parable of the polygons” to illustrate the network effect of one harmless preference. Let’s say you have a neighborhood full of squares and triangles. Each person says, “I wanna move if less than a third of my neighbors are like me.” See what happens:

Play: http://ncase.me/polygons/

Every time you restart the scenario with a random assortment of polygons, playing this rule out (making every triangle or square happy) leads to a city of self-segregated, totally isolated square and triangle communities.

The lesson is that we cannot form community if we harbor rigid ideas about who our neighbors ought to be. We must meet and greet our neighbors and learn to feel more comfortable walking down a street with strangers of all colors, rich and poor, immigrant and native. In cities, young people with less money and fewer options are often the trailblazers integrating a community. They fill the “gaps” in the polygon map above.

Gentrification has as much to do with shifting economic classes as it does with ethnic groups.

Adding just a few non-white residents to an all-white neighborhood doesn’t make it “diverse” in practical terms. The psychological effects seen in the polygons game affect the first minority residents to move in. They’ll feel out of place until enough people move in to change the overall vibe.

So how do you define “enough” and “vibe?” This is the fuzziness that epitomizes the clash of perspectives on race and wealth in America. I define them based on the census makeup of that city. When a single dominant group (whites of European descent in the American case) is less than 70 percent, the other groups feel less “out of place” and start to do all sorts of good long-term investing in that place’s future. They join the PTA, vote in local elections, plant trees, start businesses, volunteer at the food bank, and pick up trash lying in the gutter. They plant roots. When it doesn’t feel like home, they engage less.[vi] The neighborhood doesn’t grow, and fails to evolve into a community.

The tricky problem is that whites see a few minorities move in and call that “progress.” And from their perspective, they are right. In 1960, a fifth of all census tracts had exactly ZERO black residents.[vii] Today, all tracts are somewhat integrated. But to the people moving in, this is just the beginning of progress. For them, a neighborhood with 90 percent white people is still a “white neighborhood.” It isn’t diverse until that fraction drops to around 70 percent. Counting from the other direction, a “black neighborhood” or “Hispanic neighborhood” is one with over 50 percent black or Latinos, respectively. Different groups have different comfort levels for co-existence with “the other,” making this difficult to nail down with a one-size-fits-all definition.

Gentrification is really the absence of a community

The real question is not who lives beside whom, but whether people from different backgrounds are forming a community. Triangles and squares have only one defining characteristic – race – and therefore is unsolvable. Real people have many facets to their identity. Similar income, culture, careers, tastes, and aspirations can give the problem sufficient dimensions to be solvable. Individuals form communities, rather than factions, when they make a conscious effort to be a part of everyone’s lives, not just the neighbors that look like them.

This is what I mean by “solve for X.” If we think about ourselves as more than just a racial or economic status, we can and should create communities. Every community we build will have a different solution to the equation, but they will all be healthier and wealthier.

Ethnic diversity is now correlated with faster home value appreciation. Neighborhoods with higher ethnic diversity — including Latinos, Asians, African Americans and others — experienced higher housing appreciation over the past decade[ix].

When gentrification is evil

If corporate developers focus exclusively on high income when they re-engineer a city neighborhood, tearing down public housing to put up expensive condos, they destroy community. They leave no poor people behind. Even people who live nearby the projects are forced to move, as the higher property values can double or triple their property tax burden overnight. This is evil.

Take this example of a demolished public housing project in Southeast Washington, DC called Barry Farm. This account comes from Truth-Out:[x]

One person pointed to boarded-up windows and doors of units that were no longer inhabited. “The government is purposely making these units uninhabitable,” she said. “It’s another tactic they’re using to move people off the property.”

Another resident said, “there’s been nothing effectively implemented in our communities to uplift people. We’ve got a lot of liquor stores and fast food places that are bad for our health. But we don’t have services that would help people in public housing maybe form a small business and hire people in the neighborhood. We have a lot of social service programs, which do help, but nothing that’s going to effectively deal with the issue of crime.”

After one resident moved in, she was recruited to join the city’s six-person planning development team – made up of two Barry Farm residents, two members of the DCHA and two people from the deputy mayor’s office. She ultimately quit after concluding they weren’t interested at all in her input and only wanted residents on the team to give the appearance of resident approval for development plans. She said, “In one instance, DCHA offered to pay residents $25 to fill out a survey with questions that, depending on the answer, could instantly disqualify people from public housing.”

“The government has divested in these places for so long that some of the people who live there actually start to believe that it needs to be shut down,” another said. Dominic Moulden, an organizer with the grass-roots organization One DC, agrees. “If anything is wrong with Barry Farms, it’s because the government didn’t take care of it.”

One economist found that stories of city governments divesting in poor, black neighborhoods like Barry Farm are the norm. Statistically, they are “representative” of trends across the country:

 In cities with a higher share of the population who have moved locally within the urban area in the last 5 years, there are significantly fewer community improvement organizations per capita. The organizations present spend less. This is true even after adjusting for differences between cities in the level of affluence, ability to pay (as measured by the average household income), the structure of the local housing market (as measured by the share of renters), and the level of local need (as measured by the poverty rate). There are only two variables that are statistically significant in every specification of the model: average household income and the measures for risk of displacement.

This underscores a central point: diversity is not the problem, but rather, community instability.

Conflating this trend in income with trends in diversity leads to misleading headlines. A recent Slate article claimed that “gentrification is just a myth:”

 “[The claim] that gentrification displaces poor people of color by well-off white people is so common that most people accept it as a fact of urban life. It’s not. Gentrification of this sort is actually rare…. In fact, so-called gentrifying neighborhoods appear to experience less displacement than non-gentrifying neighborhoods.”[xiii]

This statement does not conflict with the other findings. It affirms that forces which diversify communities also strengthen them, while others show that American cities are threatened when forces transform all the property in a neighborhood into homogenous units for similar-income dwellers. Plowing over and erecting seas of condos equals income segregation. And rising city-wide income does not benefit all peoples equally. In recent decades, among the American cities that grew the most, the economic benefits almost exclusively went to white populations. Black income grew little if at all.[xiv]

This book is not a how-to guide for “redevelopment.” I don’t advise “flipping a neighborhood,” but rather, “investing in a community.” The difference is aiming for continuity, so that ten or twenty years from now, the neighborhood is still diverse, and declassified, and growing in value. It is the only reliable way to achieve sustained growth of your investment.

Next: Why your home was probably worth more a hundred years ago.

[i] Note: If the 77.7 percent of Americans who self-identify as white, 15.1 percent of these are also Hispanic. For this reason and similar overlapping groups, the totals for this chart exceed 100%.

[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States

[iv] http://vihart.com/

[v] https://www.patreon.com/ncase

[vi] Economists have taken this phenomenon seriously as the core problem with gentrification. http://web.williams.edu/Economics/ArtsEcon/library/pdfs/WhyIsGentrificationAProbREFORM.pdf

[vii] http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_66.htm

[ix] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/ethnic-diversity-home-value_n_1579123.html

[x] http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21563-poorest-residents-fight-displacement-by-gentrification

[xiii] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/the_gentrification_myth_it_s_rare_and_not_as_bad_for_the_poor_as_people.html

[xiv] http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/municipal/legacy-cities-challenges-opportunities-urban-regeneration

Quick recap: In the podcast three things happened between 2009 and 2013 that changed the solar market:

1. China flooded the market with cheap solar panels, because they oversubsidized production and to many companies jumped in. This caused legacy companies in USA, Japan, Germany, and Korea to be forced to cut costs and offer their products at competitive rates, or get out of the market. Most found they could sell a panel for $200 that used to cost $1000 without needing to fold. So the price resettled at $200 per panel.
2. Financing changed: Companies like SolarCity will convert your home to solar for $110 a month if you sign a 20-year contract. They make money at this price point, and the homeowner saves 30-60% off their existing power bill. Now banks are “owning” solar panels and collateralized debt obligations on panel installations to finance this long-term savings.
3. Marketing changed: Out is “this is the right thing to do for the environment!” and in is “this will save you money.” Also, they’re no longer talking about the long term return on investment. They’re provided immediate savings on day one, through financing.

What didn’t change: The Technology

I shared this with my team at KeystoneAccountability as an allegory for the feedback business. We are wrestling with the pressure to deliver community feedback to Ebola actors in Sierra Leone and Nepal earthquake recovery actors at lower cost. There’s a tendency to focus on better technology as the answer. I suspect it is more about financing, marketing, and process enhancements around existing technology.

One of them commented, “they [Planet Money] left out that panels have also became a lot more efficient in the last few years.” To this, I replied with some charts:

The efficiency of solar panels has increased every year, but no dramatic improvements have happened since 1996, and they are not projecting any breakthroughs this decade.

For comparison, this 20% increase in solar cell efficiency in the last half century is pretty small compared to the 10,000,000-fold increase in processor power: (note the logarithmic scale).

Solar has a theoretical maximum efficiency of 95% on Earth, and we’re hovering around 25% in 2015. But it turns out that we didn’t need to get much more efficient to make solar a viable alternative energy source. The cost of solar energy per Watt decreased dramatically starting in 2009 – when the Chinese flooded the market with cheap panels.

Thus, economics and not better technology has caused the price to plummet. This has the effect of making solar look like a more efficient technology, but the energy conversion efficiency hasn’t changed.

Only the way that people think about it and pay for it has changed!

Lessons for citizen listening projects:

• Let’s stop focusing entirely on the technology. It’s there. It’s sufficient. Even paper surveys can support feedback loops, if needed.
• Let’s focus more on “flooding the market” with the feedback equivalent of solar panels. This comes in many forms when the goal is to help citizens change their governments. You have the Arab Spring approach, or the Facebook Zero effect (free internet on phones for the poor enables more social change), or maybe some kind of citizen-advised-experts talking to governments (the GroundTruth model), or something else.
• Market reliable and accurate citizen voice sources: If good, reliable information was coming in from many places and we can show that listening to citizens solves the problem, people will use it.
• Different financing models: Right now these listening experiments happen slowly and rely on grants for funding, if they are funded at all. More often they’re volunteer led out of necessity, or use tons of micro-payments like Storytelling did in Kenya. What would a 20-year contract on citizen feedback look like for a government agency? Could we cost out the long term savings and deliver those benefits to the payer up front and recoup this cost over the life of a loan? The possibilities intrigue me.

MP3

Listen to that podcast!

Postscript

Despite these impressive declines, the United States still has the highest prices where data is available for residential and commercial solar. US installed PV prices are more than double German prices for systems under 100 kW, and much higher than prices in the UK, Italy and France.

Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers decided to post an anti-Obama graphic on Facebook marking the five year anniversary of this “debacle:”

This backfired, as hundreds commented in protest and told their personal stories about how Obamacare has improved their lives. These are their stories:

• 1,274 people like this. 2,122 shares

Erika Dennis My whole family now has coverage. The ACA is the cause for this, I work in health care, I have seen the increase in covered patients first hand. The next step is universal coverage, this will truly lower costs and provide the best care. Cathy, you barely work, spend most of your time catering to special interests so you can be re-elected.. All while receiving a large wage and the best health insurance and care. Stop telling us how it doesn’t work while enjoying your tax payer funded care and life.

Unlike · Reply · 5,178 · March 23 at 10:00pm

• 77 Replies · 49 mins

Allan Massie Thanks to the ACA, my cousin was able to get affordable insurance despite her preexisting condition. So grateful.

Like · Reply · 2,573 · March 23 at 9:56pm

• 6 Replies · 4 hrs

Bink Olney It’s working fine – you and your Republican cohorts aren’t.

Unlike · Reply · 2,787 · March 23 at 9:32pm

• 13 Replies · 41 mins

Denise Foster Lockamy And now my daughter, diagnosed with MS at age 22, can have insurance. What do you plan to do with her?

Unlike · Reply · 2,533 · March 23 at 9:17pm

• 56 Replies · 3 hrs

Shar Van Winkle Obama Care saved us when my husband was unemployed and we couldn’t afford coverage. We might have been ruined without it. My husband could not have had the eye surgery needed after an accident. So grateful.

Unlike · Reply · 321 · March 23 at 10:53pm

Janice Grounds With the ACA my partner is able to FINALLY get health insurance. She has severe arthitis….you know the kind that the wealthy golfer talks about helping with the magic of humera…only this medication is $$$$. She has lived with, worked with severe pain for years. Once she got the insurance, an MRI showed a huge tear in her hip….yep, this tear would catch and be so intensely painful she fell several times-twice breaking her wrist (which cost several thousand out of pocket). She was pulled overby our dog two weeks ago fracturing several ribs, ambulance, er, w nights in trauma ward…..imagining what this would have done without insurance??????? You sit on your high horse talking platitudes and right wing talking points. You and all the other flaming GOP “faith and family” hypocrites make me sick. If you truly believe this crap, you’re even worse. Thank yoy President Obama and Democrats for the Affordable Care Act .

Unlike · Reply · 301 · March 24 at 12:11am

• 10 Replies · 43 mins

Steve Verhey My sister, a breast cancer survivor, couldn’t get health insurance, and now she has it. Thanks, Obama!

Like · Reply · 259 · March 23 at 11:37pm

Justin Jensen It needs some tweaking, but is headed in the right direction… The affordable health care has allowed me and my son to have affordable insurance that we would not have been able to afford otherwise.

Like · Reply · 261 · March 23 at 10:07pm

• 1 Reply

Jennifer Holden My biggest problem with Obamacare: My partner and I no longer have health benefits from an employer, and the ACA has made health insurance more accessible and less expensive for us.Oh wait, that isn’t a problem!

Unlike · Reply · 238 · March 24 at 9:37am

Carla Carnegie I and my husband now have really truly affordable insurance. In the past 20 years, as small business owners, whatever any insurance company offered us as ‘affordable’ was not affordable in the least, and had pretty high deductibles. I have had nothing but praise for what we have now, and I am sure it could be made a little better with some tweaking, but compared to where we were without—there is no comparison.

Like · Reply · 246 · March 24 at 12:51am

• 2 Replies · 1 hr

Earl Roney My wife is disabled and she could not leave her current plan that sucked, $40 Dr copays and no limit out of pocket and because of preexisting conditions couldn’t leave. Obama care gave us a plan through BC/BS $120.00 per month cheaper 3 times better, …See More

Like · Reply · 465 · March 23 at 10:55pm

• 24 Replies · 1 hr

Melissa Kelly 5 years of not waking up in the middle of the might panicked that my child won’t ever be able to get health insurance thanks to a brain tumor at the age of 2. Thank God for Obamacare. Anyone who ever fought an insurance company for pediatric neurosurgery coverage knows there was NEVER a hassle-free system in place and Obamacare is light years better than what we had.

Like · Reply · 207 · March 24 at 10:28am

• 10 Replies · 24 mins

Ryan Boddy My premiums have risen in the same amount as they had previous to the ACA and my coverage is better. Thanks Obama:)

Like · Reply · 475 · March 23 at 9:39pm

• 9 Replies · 3 hrs

Katy Killilea With Obamacare, my child with Type 1 diabetes can not be denied insurance.

Like · Reply · 158 · March 24 at 7:43pm

• 5 Replies · 1 hr

Dale Lindekugel Having looked through these comments it appears that the jury is in. I trust you’ll be changing your position in the face of the evidence.

Like · Reply · 172 · March 24 at 12:01pm

• 18 Replies · 1 hr

Gary Downing When someone asks you what good is Obama Care.. Tell them.. give them the numbers.. 16 Million Americans have health care… 76 Million now have preventive care.. and 129 MILLION AMERICANS WHO NEVER COULD GET HEALTH CARE NOW CAN.. On top of this …See More

Like · Reply · 452 · March 23 at 9:43pm

• 22 Replies · 1 hr

Linda McHenry Why do you only want to hear the bad news? Tryjng to resurect another Bette?

Like · Reply · 143 · March 23 at 9:02pm

• 1 Reply

Justin Konrad My small business has been greatly benefited by the ACA; we’re able to offer our partners and staff less expensive and more comprehensive plans. Shame on you for lying and fearmongering about this for political gain.

Like · Reply · 139 · March 24 at 11:35am

• 1 Reply

John M Moros I got insurance, I got a job, I have some dreams taking root…..I can honestly point to the failed republican horrendous, 1 percenter policies for the things that I have lost….I am a working man, not wealthy, and feel that we need another democrat in office if we are ever going to have a decent middle class again

Like · Reply · 316 · March 24 at 1:01am

• 8 Replies · 53 mins

Benjamin Calvert I had to quit my job to take care of my father after he had a massive stroke. After my work insurance had to drop me, I applied and got health insurance in 15 minutes… Full coverage, no questions, and with all the stress I’m under now knowing that I have no co-pays and everything covered is the biggest relief. Explain yourself madam.

Like · Reply · 126 · Yesterday at 1:57am

• 2 Replies · 2 hrs

Shana Cuddy  I work in a bone marrow transplant unit at one of the top rated hospitals in the country. Although the ACA has had its problems, I have seen numerous patients get life saving transplants when previously they did not have insurance coverage, or they had sub par coverage that would not cover this service. I think it is wonderful that the ACA has allowed people not only to get this life saving procedure, but allowed them to get it at a top notch hospital where they will receive the best care possible.Our hospital, like many other health care organization, lobbied in favor of the ACA, and we are very happy that it has been implemented and allows us to save even more lives.

Like · Reply · 126 · March 24 at 7:10am ·Edited

Karen Hawkins I have 3 cousins I am immediately aware of that can now buy insurance whereas they previously couldn’t. At my company, we have seen a very low increase of 4% per year in premiums per employee for the last 3 years, where the prior increased premiums ran 8-20% per year. No one has had to change plans or doctors. It’s all good.

Like · Reply · 374 · March 23 at 9:49pm

• 2 Replies · 5 hrs

Cathy Scott As the president of the board of directors for a local nonprofit childcare facility, we were spending upwards of $40k to insure 5 of our full time teachers (a benefit choice of range of options). We recently elected to get rid of this policy in order to free up those individuals to shop for their own healthcare plan on the exchanges. We now have more teachers covered than ever before and are able to reinvest that money into add’l salary and benefits for our employees. Win-win!!

Like · Reply · 120 · March 24 at 9:49am

• 5 Replies · 2 hrs

Edina Meiners 5 years later I am finally getting treated for multiple sclerosis and no longer have nightmares about hospital bills! Thank you Obamacare!

Like · Reply · 113 · March 24 at 12:49am

Mark Griffin  I spent $60,000 dollars in five years on medical insurance and was looking at another $60,000 before I was eligible for medicare. That is more than I spent to own my house. I now pay $200 a month instead of $1,200 for exactly the same policy from the same company. I have recommended Obama care to over 30 friends and family who thank me every time they see me for taking the pressure off and giving them hope if somethimng went wrong. I just had a retinal surgery that would have cost $5,000 out of pocket…under Obamacare it was $50. Why don’t you Senators and Congress people who get Medical for life …even if you quit your job…want anyone else to have it?

Like · Reply · 107 · March 24 at 12:59pm ·Edited

Dawn Smith Health care is a human right. In my community I have seen people who could not go to a doctor or dentist for 10 years now able to go and get some treatment. If I had to pay a few dollars more myself it is worth it to be part of a country that doesn’t only have access to medical care for the wealthier people.

Like · Reply · 88 · March 24 at 1:53pm

• 2 Replies

Al Petterson I’m doing fine, I’ve got a good job I enjoy, I had insurance before the ACA, I still have insurance today; it hasn’t particularly helped nor hurt me. But millions of my fellow citizens didn’t have insurance, and now do. Only a sociopath would be angry about that.If the ACA had been in place fifteen years ago, I might well have been an entrepreneur – I’m well-educated and ambitious, I had ideas I was willing to pursue, I was willing to work hard and take chances. But I never even considered self-employment, because for my family, with mild to moderate health issues, covering insurance myself would have been prohibitively expensive. I made the right choice for my family given the circumstances, but if health insurance hadn’t been the factor it was, things might have gone quite differently. I might even have made a difference, in a significant industry. Or not – but I didn’t consider taking the chance, because of the pre-ACA state of health insurance in this country.

Someone in my position but fifteen years younger is now more likely to start his own business than I was. That’s *good news*, Congresswoman.

Like · Reply · 85 · 22 hrs · Edited

• 3 Replies · 4 hrs

Chris Jacobson Your questions on the web page is set up to receive negative input. I’m a conservative, but this has been a god send for millions of people. Fix the problems and move on. Tell your republican boss (Mitch McConnell) to move on. And by the way, everything I read about his state is how much of a success ACA is!!

Like · Reply · 82 · March 24 at 3:15pm

• 1 Reply

Bart King My wife and I are both self-employed. Three years ago, we had extraordinarily expensive and substandard health insurance. With the ACA, we’ve enjoyed quality coverage at a reasonable price for the last two years. (And no, we don’t receive subsidies.)So Obamacare has been a complete success for our household.

Like · Reply · 81 · March 24 at 7:35pm

• 1 Reply

Rosie Lineham “Obamacare” saved my daughters life. She was in critical care for 4 days, and is a single mother of a 6 year old daughter. Now, she will never be denied insurance for a pre-existing condition thanks to The Affordable Care Act. We were born and raised in Washington State, and honestly, you are Washington’s Sarah Palin.

Like · Reply · 80 · March 24 at 2:34am

• 6 Replies · 43 mins

Peter Rothbart My premiums went up, but if that’s what it takes to bring healthcare to millions of Americans who would otherwise be without coverage, then so be it.

Like · Reply · 76 · 11 hrs

• 3 Replies · 29 mins

Peggy Munson Please stop saying you are proud to represent this district and the people. You do not have our best interest in mind. Anyone that is only interested in collecting fabricated horror stories and has shown no interest in improving the situation to help people is evil!

Like · Reply · 171 · March 23 at 9:07pm

And now… disclosing Cathy’s handlers:

Is this a coincidence? Cathy McMorris Rodgers top campaign funding source are health care professionals. Data provided via the Chrome Greenhouse plugin, written by a teenager: http://allaregreen.us/

This must have been on my mind when last last night, in a dream, I found this vending machine on the street. Inside were all sorts of useful items. There were LED lanterns on the bottom shelf, microwave dinners on the next, bottles of pills on the next, voucher cards further up, and on the top shelf were crisp twenty dollar bills.

“Hrmph!” I said. “Who would buy a twenty dollar bill from a vending machine!”

Then a man walked up, inserted his photo ID. The machine said, “Welcome!” and changed the pricing on everything. The twenty dollar bill was now selling for $15.00.

The man fumbled with bills and change for a while. He looked like a panhandler. He found $15 and put it in the machine and took out $20. At the same time, the machine dropped a bottle of pills for him to take. They looked like vitamins, but they could have been medication for a mental illness. He walked away content.

Subsidizing people, not things

I woke up amazed at the possibility of a subsidy vending machine. It is microfinance in a box, complete with a way to track each user’s behavior and provide different incentives to each person who walks up. The machine probably matched the photo ID to their tax records to see whether they qualified. I could imagine this being used to incentivize parolees to check in regularly – because they get a rebate or discount on an item.

The subsidy vending machine teaches people how to save money and plan for the future.

That’s the secret to fighting poverty. International development aid fails when it just hands out twenty dollar bills indiscriminately, and fails even more when the World Bank takes all the money in the machine and hands it to the richest person, relying on this “leader” to build its own vending machine for the rest. Throughout history, rich people have exploited poor people. That’s why their great grandchildren are rich. We forget this because the American experience is an exception to the rule. But in Feudal Europe, Russia, Asia, colonial South America, and Africa, rich people in power exploited poor people without power. Many are still doing it today. They deserve nothing from the subsidy machine.

Giving subsidies to the richest corporations in the world is no better. Most of the top ten most profitable corporations are oil companies. They are also among the most heavily subsidized companies. They exploit tax payers when they lobby for support that comes from citizens. If the US wanted to keep gas prices low, they should instead give consumers a subsidy.

On the opposite end, our greatest successes in aid have come from matching $10 saved with $10 from elsewhere, or investing in a community when a community invests in itself. This literal vending machine idea would make a wonderful kickstarter, because as simple as it is, its flaws are fewer than other approaches.

This little girl and her brother and sister lost their parents. The auntie is asking me to help her by taking the kids. I asked her, “If someone helped you support and empower her, would you could feel happy raising your sister’s children?”

“Of course!” She said.

Rebecca tells me she has symptoms and is scared. I took my gloves off and let my hair down because I was leaving for the day. I wasn’t scared, because she looked strong. We are bringing her meds and will keep a close eye on her. Obviously this is agonizing but we are doing all we can. Please pray for Rebecca with me.

I talked to local medical staff about serving West Point. Everyone I met was really lovely. There were 20 or 30 body bags with deceased people inside. I was scared but also at peace. This place has things under control.

Community leaders made the rounds in West Point and found 45 sick people in the areas they were able to check. Unfortunately, all of the clinics are at capacity and not able to receive people.

These are stories of people trying to be resilient in the absence of any real government help. These slum dwellers had only two options if they wanted to survive: wait for the Powers to come save them, or become self-reliant. Resilience won, because they were used to being ignored. And while the medicine, supplies, and training were delivered by non-governmental groups like MoreThanMe, the people running the ambulances, screening citizens, and handing out the food were community members. The community saved itself. It illustrates a larger truism that we keep denying: Only the Poor can end poverty. Allow me to explain why.

First, a little more of my backstory. My job for the past few years was figuring out how to give Voice to the Poor. I ran an East African storytelling project with GlobalGiving from 2010 to 2013. It showed that the Poor clearly were the “experts” on what they needed, and knew how their governments could solve big problems. But my straightforward approach – collect their first-hand testimony and present it to those in power – wasn’t enough. Why? Because governments and international agencies are not built for listening. They have no effective mechanisms to redress complaints. They don’t give local leaders and local solutions a fair hearing.

Most people are eager to speak up at first, but experience teaches them that Power doesn’t care about the Poor. If they complain about a program, the donors too-often go elsewhere and start over, leaving those people with nothing. Spurned and punished for their participation, they don’t speak out.

It is not just organizations. Governments and business have also taught the Poor to merely accept what is offered. Business offers the Poor jobs that sacrifice wages or safety through the unregulated markets of Globalization. Governments are “representative democracies” at best, not direct democracies. Few representatives really listen to the Poor. Power listens to Power. The Poor survive on what they get, and only take to the streets and assert their rights when hardship becomes unbearable.

But sometimes a community does come together and builds something. Ebola’s demise in 2015 is the story of local leaders rising out of the chaos and helping neighbors choose resilience over fatalistic resignation, as I profile in my book.

Their stories are often untold, because telling their story to outsiders doesn’t help them along the path of self-reliance or survival. A reporter swooping in to get the story gives the storyteller fresh hope that someone will save him. There are millions of international do-gooders in the world spending their lives in an effort to help the Poor. We live among the Poor. We listen to them. We share their stories with a broader audience. Sometime we raise awareness about an issue. Occasionally we inspire the Poor. But mostly we offer a twisted hope that keeps them off the path of self-reliance. We cannot end poverty for the Poor, only enable to Poor to lift themselves up.

In a famous letter from a law professor to his student, Bill Quigley writes:

“Many come to law school because they want to help the elderly, children, people with disabilities, victims of genocide, victims of racism, economic injustice, or religious persecution. Unfortunately, the experience of law school and the legal profession often dilute that commitment.”

It is a harsh lesson I keep learning over and over. Regardless of my tactic, Peace Corps, science, banking, or medicine, the end result only moves the Poor a few feet from where they once stood. No mix of skills or tools or toys may ever work if I am the one holding the chalk, the shovel, or the smart phone.

Singing “No one is coming to save us!”

Katie Meyler once said that things started getting better when the people of West Point slum starting singing “No one is coming to save us!” It was a turning point. They understood that local leaders were their best hope for survival. The people were finally taking charge of their own future. The narrative changed from being about the failure of outsiders to the success of the community. And when West Point slum’s death toll fell far short of projections in the months that followed, locals could look at each other and say with pride, “We did this ourselves!”

This isn’t about outsiders abandoning the Poor, but about truly Serving the Poor.

But in our world, when stories like these are told by outsiders, the people who supply the materials take the credit. The bags of rice are stamped ‘US AID from the American People’.

The medicines and the trucks and the soldiers all have branding. But the people remain anonymous because they are the community being helped. It is a false narrative to separate the helpers from the helped. Serving the Poor means being in the community, without identity.

Instead, the locals are given supporting roles, first in the narrative, and later in the power restructuring following success (during the elusive “project replication” phase that funders seek). The meeting rooms usually look like this (a bunch of acronyms working together):

Newsmakers and storytellers and politicians must unlearn bad habits. Every success story is, at its core, about people helping themselves. We outsiders are mere bystanders. But with hard work we can become true servants.

Take another example, this time from the 1960s US Civil Rights movement. One witness tells the story of the political parade that was the funeral for Rev. James Reeb, who was brutally murdered in Selma in 1965:

From the balcony I saw a sea of dignitaries clearly unrelated to the events in Selma. Many faiths had come to pay tribute in this memorial to James Reeb. Until Dr. Martin Luther King himself spoke, it is hard to imagine a more jumbled collection of prepared prayers and speeches rattled off in a patronizing way. It was ecclesiasticism at its worst. James Reeb’s death was described as the most monstrous example of brutality, when in fact it was one more instance in a long series. Men who had not taken the time to meet any young people praised them for their courage. The men and women who had come “thousands of miles” for the memorial were extolled. I thought that it was not too difficult to come and go in 24 hours and have the vicarious experience of heroism through singing a few freedom songs.

When King began to speak, however, it suddenly seemed right that we should all be there. Everyone moved a bit in his or her seat when King asked rhetorically,

“Who killed Jim Reeb?”

He answered: A few ignorant men. He then asked,

“What killed Jim Reeb?”

and answered: An irrelevant church, an indifferent clergy, an irresponsible political system, a corrupt law enforcement hierarchy, a timid federal government, and an uncommitted Negro population. He exhorted us to storm the bastions of segregation and see to it that the work Jim Reeb had started be continued so that the white South might come to terms with its conscience.

This account captures the movement as well as a pan-out to illustrate the circus around the movement. Power lives a circus life. I too had that experience and blogged about it.

So if local efforts do succeed, outsiders swoop in and take all the credit, and the Poor are pushed out of the limelight. Outsiders get promotions and the Poor find themselves only a few feet from where they began. Though nothing is won entirely without cooperation – and everything is at least partly enabled by those in Power – the distortion of who deserves credit is so large in the International Aid world that we’ve forgotten why it ever works at all. Everything starts because a community buys-in, and ultimately survives because a community takes ownership. We are just drifters and gamblers in their story.

Only the Poor can end poverty. But the rest of us can make that journey lighter. 

One way is by emulating organizations like MoreThenMe.

It was no accident we find them in the slum at the center of a strong network of relationships. Katie spent 9 years there working for the community as a humble servant. Then in December of 2014, Time Magazine anointed her “Person of the year.” Now she’s brunching with billionaires instead of begging for books. But it is the same Katie, doing the same work. Serving Pearlina and Rebecca and other girls who deserve to go to school. She is part of the community. She was amazing and unknown before; now she amazes a bigger audience with grace:

They did not invent the process of community-building. It has been known for thousands of years. It is explained in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War:

“Come among the people.

Live among them.

Work with that they have.

Build on what they know.

And when the work is finished, they will say,

‘we have done this ourselves!'”

There has never been a better credo for fighting poverty, nor a better description of resilience. There are many technical ways to stop Ebola, but underneath every successful strategy is an appetite to empower resilient communities in precisely the way that Katie has. She didn’t know much about Ebola, but she knew a whole lot about inspiring people and organizing groups.

This is the most important lesson in my Ebola book for how we deal with the next crisis. Local leaders exist in every community, but too often our international systems co-opt their power and authority, replacing them in a state of emergency instead of empowering them. The sooner we can get a community singing, “No one is coming to save us,” the sooner that community can come together to save itself. Only then – and only through pre-existing local relationships – can international help be effective. No one from the Red Cross, WHO, CDC, and US army can live Sun Tzu’s credo in every town that might face a disaster in the future, and so these institutions need thousands of local allies. Only local voices can sing the melody in the resilience song.

A pro-Poor environment

If we want to hear the Poor speaking up, we must give them space to lead. We can create mechanisms to connect local voices with better performance in foundations and government (Keystone Accountability’s mission). We can reign in our proxy-democracy and make it more direct through functional citizen feedback loops (FeedbackLabs’s mission). We can listen to the Poor and let them speak in their own words (GlobalGiving’s Storytelling Project). These are all steps on the path to prosperity, but they are not the whole path.

I offer a deeper dive into these issues in my book, Ebola: Local Voices, hard facts on Amazon.

Amazon Kindle is quite flexible. But my Ebola book had 82 images, and I wasn’t about to re-import each one using the [ Menu | Picture | Insert | From File… ] command that Amazon publishing requires. Instead, I converted it to a “web page” in HTML format and used a free editor called Notepad++ to hack all the images at once. It works everytime.

The 5 minute word doc hack for Kindle

Note: I tested this on Word 2000.

Save a copy of your ebook manuscript in HTML format.

Don’t throw away the old version – you’ll want to use the word doc to make edits in the future. The HTML version the copy for Amazon, but disposable afterwards.

Move the HTML file to the folder of the same name.

If your book was called “Cooking with Martha” then you’ll find a sub-folder wherever you saved it called, “Cooking with Martha” with all of your images.

Use notepad to remove the paths to your images in the HTML file.

Notepad++ is my favorite choice but Windows default ‘notepad’ editor will also work. Open your file. Search (Ctrl-F) for ‘src=”‘ and file the path to your images. It will be something like “./cooking with martha/image001.png”.

Next, press Ctrl-H to bulk-replace every instance of that path with nothing. It will look like this:

Note that spaces in your title are replaced with %20s. That means ‘space’ in HTML. Remove everything between the src=” and the image01.gif” part of the code. This is what causes your images to break when you upload a word document to Amazon. You’re almost done.

Add all the files in your sub-folder to a ZIP file and upload to Amazon.

Be sure to preview your book and confirm that the images are showing up. IF you get a box with an X in the middle, Amazon did not find the image. It should find the image if it was included in your zip file and the name matches what was in the html file exactly.

The next hack I recommend is making your table of contents link to the chapters in your book. The short version is that you can use Word’s built-in [ Insert | Table of Contents ] so long as the chapter titles are “heading 1″ elements, and not just paragraphs with larger fonts. Instructions on that here.

One of the most significant Science papers on cancer came out this month (Jan 2015). It shows that regardless of all future discovery about the nature of cancer, 65 percent of all people who develop cancer do so simply because we age.

Cell division is imperfect. That’s part of life. It if were perfect, evolution could not occur, and we wouldn’t be here trying to cure cancer. It is an unfortunate side effect of the process that created us, and it cannot be “cured.”

The argument

Vogelstein and Cristian Tomasetti used a mathematical formula to explain the genesis of cancer. Here’s how it works: Take the number of cells in an organ, identify what percentage of them are long-lived stem cells, and determine how many times the stem cells divide. With every division, there’s a risk of a cancer-causing mutation in a daughter cell. Thus, Tomasetti and Vogelstein reasoned, the tissues that host the greatest number of stem cell divisions are those most vulnerable to cancer. When Tomasetti crunched the numbers and compared them with actual cancer statistics, they fell along a straight line on the chart.

The statistics

There was a good linear correlation with strength r=0.81. The square of the correlation (r²) is the amount of Y predicted by X . In this case, Y is the risk of getting cancer and X is the number of cell divisions of this tissue in your lifetime. This, they concluded that this theory explained two-thirds (65%) of all cancers:

There is a linear pearson correlation of r=0.81 with an r-squared of 0.65, meaning variation in this chart explains two-thirds of cancer risk.

There’s more to that collection of dots than just a trend line. Look again:

Some types of cancer appear to occur more often than expected due to our environment. The red lines show how elevated each type is, presumably by our habits and environment. For example, smokers and non-smokers both get lung cancer, but smokers are much more likely to get lung cancer by the length of the red line connecting the two dots. The non-smokers’ lung cancer risk falls along the trend line, as expected.

The green lines are a little less intuitive. Cancers that fall below the trend line appear less often than expected because some body process is working to remove tumors in these tissues as they appear. The intestine, duodenum, and colon constantly slough off tissue as food passes through the digestive tract, so maybe any fledgling cancers leave the body this way. Likewise, AML and CLL are types of leukemia – white blood cell cancers. And something about blood cells in fluid make this type of cancer less frequent than expected.

All the cancers with ‘osteo’ with them are huddled in the lower left – low risk and low cell division – because bone cells rarely divide.

All of these deviations from the trend line represent logical explanations and strategies for preventing cancer. They only add up to 35% of the total explanation. But they’ll account for 99% of all the TV news headlines about cancer. That’s the sad part. Headlines focus on all the small deviations from the trend line, and ignore the existing of this trend line all together.

The message

The good news is that you can reduce your lifetime risk of getting cancer by up to 35% by eating well, exercising, avoiding smoking and drugs, and having a positive attitude about life and death. But we are never going to prevent cancer the way we ended small pox and (until recently) measles. That would require reversing the ageing process entirely, which is generally a bad thing.

My buddy Nick started a year-long blog to accompany his reading of the book Godel, Escher, Bach – an eternal braid – by Douglas Hofstadter.

In his effort to explore Bach’s fugues… he explains recursion and performed a Fugue.

Here is my attempt.

To get my head wrapped around Bach’s Fugues, I made a Fugue version of some Sufjan Stevens songs. This artist writes really interesting, melodic music with some sparse parts, making it easier to fugue.

The song: We are Night Zombies!! has a perfectly Fugueable opening line, it turns out. It even follows the rule, as the first four notes are the theme for the fugue.

Here is a link to the original song, along with my fugue version:

Play original version of They are Night Zombies!!

The Fugue of They are Night Zombies!!

The Fugue is a style of music composition with strict mathematical rules. I learned that these rules make creating harmonies easier. When I tried to write something in totally free form, it usually was harder to do.

Most of my efforts were failures. Banjo music with chords is very hard to Fugue, but one song with a clear opening melody did work.

Writing a piece with more than two “voices” in Fugue form was exceedingly difficult. Now I understand how amazing Bach was to write a fugue with six voices.

Only certain instruments were good for Fugue. Guitars and Banjos are harder because they use chords. You also need a musical theme that has some emptiness in it in order to leave space for more voices.

In this song I used all of these allowed transformations of the original musical theme:

• Pitch shift (playing the same piece up a 5th of an octave)
• Time shift (playing the same piece time-shifted against itself)
• Tempo shift (slowing down or speeding up the theme against the original voice — both kinds of shift appear in it)

I could not manage to fit an inversion of the Fugue theme in here, though that is also allowed.

It was interesting that I could make reasonable chords with a pitch shift and change the song’s key.

The only tools I had available were copying pieces of the music using the Audacity MP3 editor.

I also remixed one of Sufjan Steven’s longer musical pieces (All Delighted People, 2010) into a shorter one that combines the best of both his published versions:

Play All Delighted People (hybrid remix)

The Sochi Olympics happened

Kids get to buy pink Ouija boards 

Human rights campaign becomes the meme of the year, as marriage equality wins over homophobia.

Looking for synonyms for… tuberculosis?

I started a second blog, ebolastories.wordpress.com to help others hear from ebola survivors in West Africa over the media noise.

Meanwhile, filmmakers in Nigeria release the worse ebola movie imaginable, and spread fear and misinformation while trying to make a buck.

In September 2014, America suddenly freaks out about Ebola. (Twitter activity below)

… and indicts all of Africa.

Africa is huge.

The media does its customary sloppy job of reporting and applauds itself for saying anything about Africa at all. Newspapers continue to count revenue as the only measure of “good journalism.”

NGOs step up when the WHO fails. More than Me in Liberia gives people in West Point Slum, Monrovia hope and respect.

I write a book about ebola, from the local perspective.

Violent extremism rises in Iraq in Syria as ISIS / ISIL becomes a country. And a girl in Pakistan gets the Nobel peace prize for fighting extremism by getting more girls into school

Electric cars finally get respect. Tesla motors gives away hundreds of its patents in order to grow the market of competitors (thereby making e-cars cooler than e-cigarettes)

E-cigs arrive, giving a whole new generation the chance to build their own personal brand of douchebaggery.

Yeah, sure. Let’s start smoking again.

In 2014 millions finally get healthcare because of Obamacare. And a few states successfully deny their citizens access to healthcare (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Virginia, and Colorado see no gains despite millions of uninsured, while most of New England sees no change because everyone is already insured.)

But 1 in 5 in the South and most of Red State America remains uninsured in 2015.

While wealth inequality remains, some prosperity comes to the Midwest and Northeast but is denied to the South

The Reverend William Barber starts his Moral Mondays movement.

No long after, in another part of America, Black Lives Matter becomes the mantra.

Google image search for “iconic image” in 2014 reveals this mix:

The Internet is almost 20 years old now, and one browser remains timeless.

Serial becomes a podcast phenomenon.

Memes propagate.

My family prepares for its first child.

Happy 2015!

See 2013’s memes and images

See 2012’s memes and images

(Now available in print or as a kindle ebook!)

Chris writes…

I came across the work of Marc Maxmeister some years ago while he was collecting stories in East Africa for Global Giving. As an action researcher I have been involved with a number of initiatives designed to highlight and emphasise the very powerful role that communities play in negotiating challenges such as HIV/AIDS in South Africa. I found this book to be a dynamic read because — all too often — the actions of the people directly affected by crisis are often erased, while the voices of the international experts are shouted out from the roof-tops. Maxmeister reminds us that both are relevant and that — in a perfect world — improved alignment between community and international efforts could have impacts that we have yet to imagine.

Ebola: Real Voices, Hard Facts takes us on a harrowing journey into the transformed realities of communities affected by Ebola in West Africa. Stories of resilience, suffering and the human spirit vividly illustrate the way in which communities respond at a time of crisis, regardless of the resources they have to hand. The detailed account of how real people navigate emotional trauma, health service provision and personal survival with good humour, tears and dedication to caring for their neighbours is a timely reminder of the role individuals, families and communities play in humanitarian disasters. Equally timely, is the reminder that all too often these voices are under-represented — if not marginalized — in decision making processes that directly affect their lived environment.

Maxmeister frames these firsthand accounts with a snap-shot overview of the ‘bigger picture’ beyond the world of the community which is both insightful and accessible for the reader.

The message these vivid accounts leave behind is the way in which the Ebola crisis has transformed lives and the way in which communities have responded, thus transforming the epidemic within diverse communities. It is not so much a story of crisis — it is more a number of stories, with different messages about transformation and the relevance of every voice in that process.

UN Global Pulse is charged with the task of managing data for all of these agencies, getting them to share data with each other, and ensuring that data supports decision-making.

UN Global Pulse recently released a report, A World That Counts: Mobilizing the data revolution for global development. It outlines their vision for how to solve the data problem within the UN and the development world.

How UN Global Pulse intends to fix the data problem:

1. Develop a global consensus on principles and standards.
2. Share technology and innovations for the common good: We propose to create a global “Network of Data Innovation Networks”, to bring together the organisations and experts in the field.
3. New resources for capacity development: A new funding stream to support the data revolution for sustainable
   development should be endorsed at the “Third International Conference on Financing for Development”, in Addis Ababa in July 2015.
4. Leadership for coordination and mobilisation: Start a “World Forum on Sustainable Development Data” and A “Global Users Forum for Data for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” and Brokering key global public-private partnerships for data sharing.
5. Exploit some quick wins on SDG data: Establishing a “SDGs data lab” to support the development of a first wave of SDG indicators, developing an SDG analysis and visualisation platform using the most advanced tools and features for exploring data, and building a dashboard from diverse data sources on ”the state of  the world”.

I think their plan is folly. Agreeing on a set of standards doesn’t actually lead to standardized content. More groups and meetings won’t necessarily lead to more coordination. And their description of a “quick win” under item #5 sounds like one of the more complex tasks the UN has ever undertaken. Fixing the measurement, analysis, and visualization problem is not a “quick win,” but rather – it’s the whole ball game.

Consider the Internet

The Internet is truly global, and we have both “common standards” and it’s antithesis – BeautifulSoup – to thank. HTML standards are set by W3C – world wide web consortium (w3.org), but they are not enforced, and often get ignored. Browsers and the programmers who must make web content understandable to billions of people decide what parts of the W3C standards matter. Microsoft’s IE browser interprets the same HTML pages somewhat differently from the rest (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox). As a result, their share of the browser market shrinks every year. People don’t like the way IE interprets the Internet, so they switch browsers. The standards are suggestions, but heuristic codes (living inside browsers) define what the Internet actually looks like.

If the Internet is to be a model for international development, then the lesson is that smarter code, and not smarter standards, is the solution.

The people who define the rules are rarely the people who must fit the messy real-world content into software and websites for people to use. The gatekeepers are people like me, modest programmers with an immediate problem to solve and disdain for standards that slow down the work. I am aware of the current standard data format for international aid work, called IATI, but I generally ignore it. Practically none of the data *I NEED* is already in that format, and the format makes it harder to navigate the data than many other non-standard formats I use instead, such as JSON.

The Beautiful Soup approach

BeautifulSoup is a python module built for people like me. It parses non-standard HTML and even broken code with about a 98 percent success rate. This example reads the HTML of this blog post into a machine readable format:

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
import requests
html = requests.get('http://wp.me/plX0C-1qp') #this blog post!
soup = BeautifulSoup(html.text)
soup.findAll('p') #text of every paragraph of this blog in a list

Where standards have failed, BeautifulSoup prevails. Where people have been “doing their own thing” all over the Internet, BeautifulSoup is the Rosetta Stone for reading all HTML pages in every language, no exceptions. I suspect that all web browsers have a section of code that works the way BeautifulSoup does. Its philosophy is “try this, then if it fails, try the next thing, and so on.” It even contains a section called “UnicodeDammit” that exists because yet another standards-setting body failed to get uniform adoption of its rules. Unicode is the way that non-English characters are saved in documents and not lost. It can be a headache for programmers to read, and errors in encoding can lead to permanent data loss (unrecoverable gibberish). BeautifulSoup can sometimes read this gibberish using heuristics and a working knowledge of the most common errors that lead to gibberish in the first place.

I believe in BeautifulSoup. It works. I’m doubtful a UN agency can beat this approach. So if UN Global Pulse wants to make headway, they can write standards for data, but they will also need to invest in Beautiful Soup style solutions to the problem. These solutions include heuristic functions, genetic algorithms, and web-content or legacy document restructuring. These approaches move us closer to the pythonic way of improving the lives of people around the world.

The future is quasi-unstructured data and the path looks Beautiful (Soup).

I was thinking of telling you about an event we are hosting tomorrow – The Miss Mrembo Beauty Pageant / Football Tournament. This year we thought of taking it to another level with our Nitakomesha event. As my former Swahili student, you should translate this Marc.

(Nitakomesha means “to put an end to.”)

Nitakomesha

We are calling the whole community to put an end to defilement among adolescent girls.

We have invited 16 teams to participate in the procession which will mark the end of 16 days of activism against gender based violence. And as you know, December 10th is also world human rights day. 

Today we are giving out manila papers for participants to write their pledge in the fight against girls defilement. I am just about to write mine.

Parents too will be involved. We will stop at the local chief, who will address the participants. He will pledge on behalf of his office to also “komesha” (put an end) by ensuring defilers suspects are arrested.

The procession will end by both girls and boys playing football without a referee. We want them to learn how to work out differences with each other, and this approach leads to more discussion. VAP uses football to increase gender equality, social inclusion, build peace, and grow youth leaders. We can see the difference it makes.

Rape stories are still streaming in from our storytelling project. As an organization I feel we are obliged to do much more. We cannot read the stories again this year and afford to do less!

What Nancy doesn’t share often enough are the extreme measures she will go to in order to help people. She doesn’t seem to sleep. Recently, she sent us another 100 or so local stories (as images) to be transcribed into GlobalGiving’s storytelling collection. This collection has over 60,000 stories from 6 countries around the globe, and anyone can search for stories about anything at www.storylearning.org. Barbara our transcriber caught one alarming story and immediately forwarded it to Nancy:

Barbara:

URGENT: please call and intervene!

See the first link in Nancy’s latest batch, story number 46

Actively talking about committing suicide.  14 yo male

[storyteller’s phone number]

Wow I missed on this one. Oh my, I have tried the whole day calling the number and it is out of order. The boy comes from [neighborhood]. From the story form it seems this happened in [his town]. I assume the boy has some relatives in Majengo and when he visited them that is when the whole story took place.

This means a lot to me as an individual and as an organization. I want to talk to him. My basic counseling education may be handy. I shared the story to our staff and we felt helpless. We want to reach out to the boy but his number is out of order and the schools are closed.

Barbara thank you for reading our stories and alerting us on this.

Regards

Nancy

Thank you for trying so hard.

 It is our obligation to serve the community. Together, it is no longer a drop in the ocean.

Nancy I am impressed with the swiftness this was acted on.  From the suburbs of Salt Lake City, to our nation’s capitol, to Kenya, three people worked quickly to attempt to help a little boy who needed a hand.   Thank you both for your speed in action.  I’m proud to be called a colleague.  :0)

Barb

Nancy:

I will keep on trying to call the number in the hope I might find him. I could try tracing his exact location or his name by the assistance of the police and safaricom (our mobile phone company) but then I would have to disclose the reason for the trace. The explanation would lead to disclosing his HIV status (his reason for contemplating suicide) – which is unethical.

It is little stories like these of trying to help one person that keep me from leaving the nonprofit world. I’m sure there are other greener pastures where I could have a bigger influence, do more good, work more efficiently, or make more money, but I’ll never find people with bigger hearts and a tireless dedication to giving back.

These are my nominees for GlobalGiving “employee of the year.” They embody the credo on our wall:

Always on.

Listen, Act, Learn. Repeat.

Committed to WOW.

Never settle.

After introducing our story-centered learning concept to hundreds of others, Nancy’s organization is the only one that has kept doing it year after year. She could do less, but something pushes her to go the extra mile. And Barbara has transcribed thousands of stories in 2014 practically for free. She helps because these stories are peoples’ voices, and she wants to ensure that every voice is heard by people who can help. When dozens of other organizations found it tedious to convert a story on paper into a story in a database (where shared learning can occur), Barbara stepped in and made it happen.

Mrembo’s girls’ football club take gold at local tournament

 

First 40 book covers on Amazon when searching for “ebola” books

The first result (top left) is the only one of this bunch that seems to be a non-fiction book I would read, with real research and an aversion to fear-based marketing. Half are fiction and the other half are end-of-the-world guides targetting the “prepper” community. The author of the top book, David Quammen, pulled a 120 page excerpt out of his much larger, older book on the emergence of new diseases, dressed it up, and republished it. It’s a clever trick – and clearly he’s selling a lot more copies this way.

In the same vein, I wanted my book to stand apart with a book cover that illustrates what it alone offers (among these ebooks) – people, voices, authentic perspectives, and an actual discourse on the disease with a non-apocalyptic tone.

My first iteration was inspired by an artist I found on eboladeeply.com while researching my book. I contacted the artist and incorporated one frame from her comic strip about ebola:

But it didn’t quite capture the feeling. The spacing was awkward. The title didn’t stand out. The cartoon made it feel, well, cartoonish. I loved this as art, but it wasn’t working on a cover. It didn’t send the message I wanted to send to my prospective reader. So I started over.

My next draft aimed to incorporate actual faces of the people in the book, or face like those described in the book:

One good thing about this is that the faces emphasize this is non-fiction, with real life sources. The light yellow/cream color burst really helped this look like a book with an image and words connected, and not some piece of junk (I tried white background before). I thought I’d nailed it and went to bed.

The next morning I still wasn’t satisfied. I looked at the revised book cover and it was too symmetrical. My wife thought the font wasn’t professional enough. And there is just too much border junk and unimportant words around the edges. I’m not well known as an author, so my name should be tiny. It was too busy. I started over a third time.

I read a blog on creating your ebook cover and this section gave me an AHA! moment:

Layout: Don’t Be Afraid of white space

On the design below, the right design is the final design design, but a designer worried about not using all the space might do something similar to the left or middle. I’ll let you make up you mind which has the most style and sets the best mood for a short story.

I spent hours on google image search looking for a picture that fit my title. Two images stood out as possibilities:

This is Pearlina (featured in the book) from Katie Meyler’s blog about MoreThanMe’s work in Libera at racingheartblog.tumblr.com.

And this one captures the reality – this is both a medical crisis and a family crisis.

I wanted something simpler, more personal. A single face:

I faded Pearlina’s face into a silhouette because I didn’t want her to be singled out as the poster child for ebola. She never got the disease, but was put in isolation. For the other image, I could never get it quite right. Looked like a photoshop job.

So I combined this with my previous iteration of faces, and I’m sticking with this for now. Combining pearlina with the vertical spread of photos sends a clear message that this is personal, authentic storytelling from the place where Ebola is actually affecting lives:

If you are trying to create your own book cover for Amazon kindle, I suggest these steps:

1. Search Amazon for other books that will appear beside your own book. Study them. Be sure not to copy them, but think of what your book has that other books don’t. Emphasize that aspect in the cover and the summary. You only need to beat out the books that are similar to your book to get a sale.
2. Keep your cover simple. Make a mock up in PAINT – a free built-in program on windows machines – and stare at your version. If you use cover art, use something that fits your title. You can use an image but it may work better modify the image to obscure and iconify it.
3. Be sure you have permission or check that it is a public domain / creative commons image. I contacted the artist for my first cover about reprinting, and I contacted the blog owner who posted the images I used in the second draft. Google images are not always well sourced, but try your best. Some photo licenses allow you to reuse a photo if you drastically modify it to where it doesn’t look like the original.
4. Don’t be afraid to start over. Move things around. Change colors, fonts, sizes. Try making your text very small except for one or two words you want to draw the reader to. In my case, the one word is obviously “ebola” in every draft.
5. Use Pixlr.com if you don’t have a fancy graphics editor. It does the job. You can upload your images, turn them into layers (like photoshop) and apply filters to transform your images. These were all made on pixlr, after I found a good starting image online.
6. Amazon has a free online book cover editor, but it is pretty limited and turns out covers that look like all the other ebook covers on amazon. I think it is better to make your own elsewhere just to stand out.
7. Don’t center everything. Use the edge of the image to intrigue your viewer. Show half a face, or half a word.
8. Make sure any face on your cover has strong direct eye contact. Research shows this makes a difference if you want to make an emotional connection.
9. Another more complicated design I tried on a previous book used Pixlr to fade three images into one cover (like your typical suspense novel) — an old man, a child soldier, and fire in a village:

It’s not awarding winning work, but it does fit the genre better than anything I could create with Amazon’s cover making tool. I spent a while looking for the right old man face, and here I’d like to look further – even asking one old man I knew from Gambia to send me a photo to use. With the fading, you can obscure people until they are pretty much anonymous.

Last – give a new artist a chance. I worked with a teenager who wanted to try making covers for a while on this project. It took 6 weeks to write 140 pages, but she didn’t come through with a cover that would work. I wasn’t able to advise her on what to draw. Still, I’m hopeful I can use her art on my next book cover.

But before the bandwagon leaves, I think it is important to point out that for all this talk, stories and narratives are still quite rare. It makes me wonder what people are really saying in words, and whether we know how to tell stories like we think we do.

The evidence

This week I wrote an algorithm that scans huge amounts of text for actual narratives buried within – the story under the headlines. The rules about what defines a “narrative” from other writing aren’t super sophisticated. It needs to have a consistent story point of view, such as first-person-singular. It needs to be mostly letters and not symbols, and must be long enough. And it needs to contains at least some words that narratives often contain. Some mix of emotional words, time-space relationship chronology words, reflection words and so forth is enough to trigger a match for my algorithm.

By just imposing these basic restrictions (and allowing a little fuzziness in the ‘consistent point of view’ rule) to my test collections reveals that true narratives are very rare in the nonprofit world. Despite all this talk about ‘story’ being a great marketing tactic, 99 and a 1/2 percent of reports don’t pass the test. And when citizens get to talk about their needs in a story, over 99 percent focus on telling people what they need without showing others the why through stories.

Results of the filter:

• Only 13 of first 10,000 stories in the http://storylearning.org/search/ collection qualify as strict narratives (0.13%).
• Only 3 of the 641 GlobalGiving project reports from 2014 that received donations qualify (0.46%).
• Only 144 of all 29,908 project reports qualify (0.48%).

So it seems that this kind of narrative is not only rare, but also has not measurable effect on whether people donate money after reading it. The percent of reports that have a narrative within it are the same for both the group that raised money and the group that didn’t (0.46% vs 048%).

What I really want to use this for is to find case studies that exist on the web, pull them down, and build a new body of knowledge about what nonprofits have talked about over the years. The filter allows me to change this form an ‘opt-in’ process to an automatic one. In the future, if you wrote a report and published it anywhere, regardless of whether you promoted it, my computer will find it and add it to the collection.

Examples of what the filter found:

From a project report: (POV: third person singular)

“Due to her socio- economic Minaz had to quit studies but due to her interest in computer she joined the course her family was not happy with her decision, her father told her that doing a computer course wont give you a job then what is the use of learning it? But she was determined to learn the course. One day she went to a nearby balghar(preschool) where she met  women development coordinator Zaheeda Shaikh , she asked her about her education and family background. Looking at her enthusiasm and determination Zaheeda offered her a computer teacher’s post at her center.”

From storytelling collection: (POV: first person plural)

“In March last year a woman told us from Bomi county how she was forcibly initiated into FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) and had come to us seeking redress in this case involving two women who got her forcibly initiated into. We (West Point Women for Health and Development Organization) embraced her and decided we will help her by taking up the case of this sister because this was first of a kind in Liberia where a woman was willing to speak out on FGM. The WPW took the woman to hospital along with her twins who are a boy and a girl, when the woman came to us along with her children we make sure they seek medical attention because at the time, we found them to be in a deplorable condition and needed immediate medical attention. We also make sure we got a medical document indicating that she indeed underwent the process of FGM.”

Project report with donations: (POV: first person plural)

“The meals at the soup kitchen are still being prepared by our kind and caring Mongolian lady cook and the meals that she serves makes that statement and in the voiced opinion of our beneficiaries as well. We have had five major medical outreach programs with a team of doctors and nurses seeing 35-40 patients from amongst our beneficiaries and doing very thorough detailed checkups for them. We have also gone through the heavy expense of digging up our pipes from the well to kitchen, as our water pipes froze during the winter months and we had carry our water from the well to the kitchen during the winter freeze.”

The Reverend William Barber and his Moral Mondays movement inspired me to spend the weekend fighting voter discrimination. Reverend Barber is a passionate and impassioned pulpiteer with a sharp understanding of the battle between the few and the many, the strong and the week, of what makes evil Evil and good Good. Few alive today can fire up a congregation to go out and march for Justice like he can. In recent months over a thousand went to jail in protest against the new laws. In October the North Carolina state attorney general threw out the indictments as being unconstitutional.

Public Protests got people organized and moving, but internally we argued over what the next tactic should be for a broader, more geographically diverse coalition. As a scientist impassioned about civil rights and not about politics, I felt like an outsider. The lawyers and activists wanted to replace leaders through voting to achieve justice. Looking at things, I didn’t think we had the leverage to do that, and moreover, new leaders in a broken system would not ensure a plural democracy, no matter how good their intentions were.

In his sermon that weekend, Barber said he drew his inspiration from Father James Groppi – an Italian priest in 1960s Milwauki that organized African Americans to march every night for 200 nights for fair housing laws. And later, he led a thousand welfare mothers in a twelve-hour sit-in of the Wisconsin state house. Their arrests were later thrown out by a judge who said, “You can’t arrest people for sitting in their own house!” Protests led by those most affected forced those in power to change.

The Reverend Barber is the spiritual leader of the movement, but he doesn’t control the process. This coalition of church groups is dominated by shrewd political advisors who practice the party machine politics that propagate the part-time-representation problem that plagues American democracy more than any other in the rich world. Here more than in Australia, Japan, Germany, UK, or even India, elections are an exercise and subtraction, not addition:

The United States has the lowest election turnout rate of any modern democracy.

Only half the people vote in US midterm elections, so parties discount what the other half cares about and pander to the few. Politicians choose their constituents and run get-out-the-vote campaigns for their chosen people, rather than people choosing their politicians. This is what the “party machine” does, and it is antithetical to true democracy.

The people who DO vote have historically had more privilege and power than those who don’t, and this is still true today.
What you notice is that striking down the laws that bar people from voting does not actually increase the percent of the people who vote. Citizen engagement is stuck at 40-60 percent in America because, even with legal protection, the party machine shapes who is encouraged to vote. And at least in my lifetime, both political parties (and their machines) have pandered to a different quarter of the population and ignored the rest. A lawyer dreams of a country where laws are enforced to allow everyone an equal opportunity to vote. But to a scientist, no calculus of success can be defined by “access” alone. Everyone’s views must influence the country in an ‘opt-out’ system in order for 21st century democracy to work.

Democracy should be an ‘opt-out’ system, like in Australia and 10 other countries. Australia fines citizens up to $170 for NOT voting and has a 92% participation rate. US democracy has always been a ‘opt-in’ system, giving rights to those with the most power – originally land-owning Christian men over age 18, and no one else. If voting was created today, it would be based on all the preferences you express daily while using the internet and your ballot would be cast automatically unless you intervened to change it. Cameras and computers track every aspect of our lives already. They know what we do and will soon infer how we feel and what we believe. Better to have a government that represents the plurality of life’s emotions than the paucity of one single page of paper every two years. Last week when I voted I found that most people on the ballot had no website and left little trace of their views on the Internet – so I was voting blind for some of them. Facebook and LinkedIn’s algorithms would have better match me with candidates that reflect my values. But for the immediate future, we have to fight to fix the system we’re stuck with, and that fight requires an honest appraisal of whether our efforts were successful.

The coalition was tasked with finding work for the hundreds of volunteers that Reverend Barber and our local Minister Rob Hardies inspired. In February our church sent three bus loads of people (over 200 in all) to attend a weekend of protest, spiritual gatherings, and strategy discussion in NC. I believed we needed to be send people door to door in poor areas and talk directly with those most affected by the new laws. First we gather stories, then we use their accounts to design approaches for getting them valid IDs.

I know that getting a photo ID is not easy when you have only 10 vacation days a year, live paycheck to paycheck, and have an employer that would fire you for missing a day. The process took three visits for me and seven visits for my wife, and we already had a valid birth certificate and social security card. All told we wasted parts of 12 working days over six months to complete a name change and get new drivers licenses. Spending those 12 working days in government offices is a luxury poor people cannot afford. If you’re poor, you’re more likely to spend your precious few days off taking care of sick children or elderly parents or fighting for food stamps and healthcare, not a voter card. If, on the other hand, we ran an opt-out voting system like we run the census, the government would issue you a new, valid photo ID and verify you received it – free of charge – before imposing any new restrictions on voting.

Instead, the church groups opted for phone banking and a modest amount of door-to-door engagement. Houses and phone numbers were a ‘convenience sample’ pulled from inconsistent voters in Charlotte, NC. No one who was actually excluded from the system was part of the effort or on the list.

During a summer church meeting about the campaign many of the volunteers wanted to talk about their feeling that phone banking wasn’t reaching the right people. “I think I might have made 50 calls and only talked to 3 people,” one said. He wasn’t exaggerating. A recent PEW survey found that the number of people who respond to phone calls has been steadily dropping. It was around 36% in the mid 1990s, 18% in the 2000s, and is around 6% today. The trend is a straight line down based on PEW sampling every three years. So whereas cold calling lists of people to get out the vote worked 15 years ago, it has no leverage in 2014. 19 out of every 20 people will hang up on you or not answer, and those that do hear your voice are probably not going to listen.

Face to face meetings were also ineffective. Last month I knocked on 133 houses over 8 hours in one Charlotte neighborhood. I talked with dozens of people and got about 30 of them to fill out a pledge card to vote. We only signed 5 people up to vote, and 3 of these were people already signed up to vote but weren’t sure if their address was correct. Voters with a mismatch between their voter information and their photo ID will not be allowed to vote in 2016. Therefore we only definitively facilitated two people voting in the 2014 election. And even worse, I don’t believe we encountered a single person who would have been denied a vote for the reasons the Reverend Barber was preaching about. Nevertheless, the church leadership put on a good face and touted its success using vanity metrics, holding up a stack of 150 voter cards as success. This is faux success if none of those cards came from the people we aimed to serve.

To counter voter suppression, we need to find the oppressed and really listen to their stories. Martin Luther King Junior and Gandhi both understood that social change begins with good documentation. Take this example:

In 1916 synthetic indigo made local indigo farms unprofitable, so the European planters extracted money from the Indian peasants. The English landlords,who had permanent leases on the land, offered the Indian peasants an out from the tinkathia system, but only if they paid higher rent. When they refused, the planters beat the peasants, placed them in prisons, stole cattle, looted houses, and prevented the peasants from entering and leaving their homes. The planters also imposed numerous illegal taxes on marriage, homes, oil-mills, or even collecting special taxes when the planter wanted extra money for personal uses.

In December 1916, Rajkumar Shukla, a Champaran farmer no longer able to stand the oppression, went to see Mahatma Gandhi at an Indian National Congress meeting. Shukla insisted that Gandhi move a resolution condemning the situation and treatment of Champaran tenant farmers. Gandhi declined by saying he could not give any opinion without having seen the condition with his own eyes. Instead, Gandhi promised to spend a day or two in Champaran during his tour of India.

After seeing the conditions himself, Gandhi concluded that courts would be slow and impractical. He led a very detailed study of the 2,841 villages in Champaran, an investigation of the conditions of the peasants. The European Commissioner advised Gandhi to leave the district, because governmental inquiries were being made already. Five days later, they arrested him, but the surveying went on. As members of his team were arrested, other outsiders took their place, continuing to interview peasants and document their grievances against the landlords.

Aggravated by Gandhi’s popularity and the way he stirred up the peasants, the European planters began a “poisonous agitation” against Gandhi, where they spread false reports and rumors about Gandhi and his co-workers. Gandhi sent information to the newspapers, but they were never published.

By June Gandhi’s team had recorded over 8,000 statements. They filed a petition, held meetings with between 10,000 and 30,000 people attending, and by October, the Government accepted their recommendations. By March 1918 the government enacted new Laws against the corrupt landowners.

They were accused of being outside agitators because their volunteers went where they were not wanted, took testimony, and broadcast to a global audience. The people whose rights were denied, whether in India or the Deep South, were not welcoming at first – nobody likes going into a fight – but joined and later led the movement by gathering stories from the affected. Storytelling – inclusive data gathering – launches a successful campaign.

When I tried to make my case about this to the leadership, I was cautioned that as an outsider I could only follow what the local leaders wanted. They would be in charge of the tactics, and they had told our church that they wanted people to make phone calls and go door to door. Here I disagree. As insiders or as outsiders, those of us lucky enough not to worry about securing our own voting rights have the power to listen and tell the stories of others, giving their words an audience. Instead, the 2014 election came and the people who will be sent away from the polls in 2016 remain faceless, voiceless.

After the election the leaders sent out an epilogue email to the group, excerpted here:

I want to thank you for your astonishing commitment… over 8000 calls… registered 186 new voters… But I know it is hard to feel good about that when the news stories suggest our work was in vain. Turnout sunk to dismal levels, particularly among the groups we reached out to who are most affected by voter suppression…

I can offer a few glimmers of hope…. In Mecklenburg County, more people voted in 2014 than in 2010. Another bright spot is the astonishing levels of participation in the Reeb Project…

That last part concerns me the most. When over 200 volunteers pool their resources to do thousands of hours of work and yield less than 200 new voters (60% of whom are not “new” in my case), we aren’t on a trajectory to change a system. And change will elude us until the people being suppressed have names and faces. We need to return to the drawing board and focus on storytelling, if we want to sustain this effort.

A scientist looks at data and measures against the end goal. A scientist wants more data, embracing storytelling as a means. A lawyer, on the other hand, wants to see large numbers of people involved in the fight, because numbers give them the greatest bargaining power in back room legislation. Our democracy has been dominated by this kind of lawmaking for too long, and it is time for scientists to step up and teach activists about data. Getting thousands of people to show up to a protest or make phone calls or knock on doors is not success. Getting people to vote who would have otherwise been denied is success. Converting our opt-in democracy to an opt-out democracy would be even greater success.

Along the way I realized I am passionate about protecting others’ right to vote, but am turned off by politics. Putting the “right” people in power will not fix things – not without a tested means of ensuring everyone’s opinion shapes future law whether they actively participate or not. Abroad I work on these systems to fix international aid by letting those affected give feedback. We need the same thing at home. I’ve lost faith in a pure political strategy because it still keeps the lawmaking behind closed doors, under control of yet more lawyers. The only solution is flipping the system to be ‘opt-out’ for all voters, so that the political process is about changing voters feelings and values, rather than convincing them to (not) show up to the pools.

If we don’t change, we’ll be no different from the demographic politics of Kenya. In 2010 I heard Kikuyu leaders telling their tribal supporters to have more children so “we can be more people and win elections.” If the only way you can grow is to grow more people like yourself, your ideas have no merit, and you deserve to lose elections. It is an observed fact that opt-in elections put more extremists in power, and it gives all leaders the power to do whatever they please without any real threat of being thrown out. An opt-out voting system driven by algorithms that mine what people really think and feel every day would sooner elect a good third party candidate than give your vote to whomever has the most money. At least that’s how this scientist sees it.

• Cash control group: Instead of the program, give them the equivalent cash it would cost.

• Decision control group: Let the people decide what intervention they want to join, and compare to the choices experts make for another group of people. For example, do food stamps recipients make smarter decisions and get better value with cash than with vouchers that are limited to only what the experts think they should buy?

• Effort matched control group: Split the recipients into smaller groups (like micro-lending does) and require each group of say, a dozen people, to match the aid money with some effort of their own. For example, in exchange for getting a bio-waste energy tank, a group could be required to clean trash in the neighborhood regularly – to be verified by satellite imaging. This commitment and verification would prioritize allocations to groups that are most committed to “working” for them. And it lets them “earn” aid instead of simply passively receiving aid.

Story-centered Learning Designs

Here I introduce different ways to design a storytelling project with one goal in mind: Systematically listening to people and benchmarking narrative patterns against some control group. It dovetails with the previous post because program design dictates which listening design will work best.

If the goal is a needs assessment, do community mapping

Focus on the location and the people that live there. Ask an open-ended question like,

“Talk about a time when a person or organization tried to help someone or change something in your community. What happened?”

From 2010-2012 we collected nearly 60,000 responses to this question, searchable online.

All stories in a collection will be connected by their proximity in space and time, and often this alone is able to reveal patterns that should inform project design. For example, the Kenyan NGO VAP interviewed girls in their program and learned that rape was a major life issue. Too many girls were bringing it up in generic “community mapping” stories – more than a third – to ignore. So they changed the program to address this immediate need. The following year they used this process to hone in on aspects of youth crime that were amenable to after-school lessons.

Blogs on VAP forming a “case study”:

Mrembo Program

Comparing two rape-prevention programs – this one illustrates how a nearby outside organization can be a good benchmark for your program.

In 2012 our GlobalGiving storytelling project was based in many parts of East Africa. We collected and published community maps for each community:

Kibera meeting and Kibera follow-up. Map Kibera project

Kakamega and Western Kenya

Kisumu

Kampala

In the past creating these maps was a manual process, but soon they will be automatically visualized from the stories and their meta data. “Meta data” are the little bits of related data around stories, such as who scribed them and where the story took place. It is safe to assume that stories with overlapping people and places and dates are important signals for program managers, and that visualizing it can help them make smarter decisions (or even make them smarter decision-makers).

If goal is measuring a program’s impact, these designs will help…

Impact is a messy, vague, ambiguous loaded word. It gets tossed around casually by board members and funders and served on a silver platter to rich people who want to try their hand at being a development agency. This is my attempt to disambiguate Impact into different approaches to measuring them, and tying these back to the best way to gather signals from people.

Customize the story prompting question to map the root causes of a problem

Some past storytelling questions give you a sense for how to map the problem, or issue, that comes to mind in association with a topic:

Please tell a story about a time when you had to choose between protecting the environment and maintaining a livelihood. Include if/how individuals or organizations were involved in the conflict.

אנא ספר סיפור על זמן שבו אדם או ארגון ניסה לעזור למישהו או לשנות משהו בקהילה שלך.

Please tell a story about a time when you tried to get a job. What helped you get a job?

Please tell a story on a most significant change that you have observed based on your experience as a participant in our program(s).

Please talk about a specific time that you felt more visible in your community. What happened and how did it expose some hidden need or issue? What would you like to do to help address it?

In the space provided, please tell us about a childhood experience when you did something you believed you never could have done.

And these illustrate how GlobalGiving used it in our own network:

Talk about your experience approaching a grantmaking or funding organization that either did or did not grant you funding. What was your relationship like? Did you receive support from them?

Please tell a story about a time when when a nonprofit listened, acted, and learned to become more effective at fundraising on GlobalGiving. Did they became more effective in real life?

As a past global giver, why did you give to GlobalGiving or to this project in particular?

Good story prompting questions undergo design evolution based on early testing:

Version 1: Please tell a story about a time when you had to work with someone different from yourself.

Version 2: Please tell a story about a time when a conflict arose because you had to work with someone from a different background (religious, cultural, ethnic etc.) to yourself.

Version 3: Please tell a story about a time when a person changed someone else’s perception of them or challenged a prejudice or misunderstanding.

Some prompts are too specific to be comparable to any other stories:

Please tell a story about a time when YaLa Africa tried to help and empower you or your community through micro-gardening and nutrition training.

You’ll notice that these questions are still much more open-ended than program evaluations use. We don’t ask them to describe the impact directly – we ask them to describe specific events and categorize experiences, so that impact can emerge from the collect as a whole in an organic (less biased) way.

Add survey questions

Certain follow-up questions will extend these narratives in ways that allow for specific quantitative comparisons:

Hierarchy of needs

Freedom |  Fun

Knowledge | Respect |  Creativity | Self-esteem |

Food and shelter|  Security|  Family and friends|  Physical needs

Root causes

Money | Change to government and institutions | Individual behavior change | Change to society’s attitudes

The events in this story…

Choose a point on the line.

Happen often exactly as I told it

Has a different ending from what usually happens

What else would have made a difference in your story?

Power relationships and social hierarchy

Who would you go to if you wanted to solve the problem in this story?

Choose only one.

Chief or local authority | Family member | Religious leader | Vendor or business leader| Friend, neighbor, or community member | Teacher, health, or government worker | Somebody else (none of these)

The events in your story happened mainly because of…

Choose all that apply.

The circumstances people found themselves in | The resources people had available to them  |

The actions people took | The way people felt

Ask beneficiaries two stories

Sometimes it makes no sense to interview neighbors of the people you serve. In that case, each program participant can serve as his or her own control if you invite them to share two stories. The first story can be “How does organization X help you?” and the second one, “how has some other organization helped you?” With variations on this within-subjects control design you can make many comparisons.

What else do the people you serve care about or need?

What other organizations are having an impact on the lives of the people you serve?

How do people feel about various life issues that intersect with the problems your program claims to address?

Is there one demographic group that you are reaching more (or failing to reach)?

Trigger conflict narratives

Good writers know that narratives require conflict to be interesting. There are as many different kinds of conflicts in fiction as there are in program design. Conflicts can be internal and external. They involve human against nature or against each other. Family conflicts differ from community ones. And all of this needs to fit inside 150 words for good storytelling. Frequently, our stories are boring. The authors are reluctant to describe the conflict because it is not their own self-interest, or because their culture forbids it (Lookin at you Japan!):

As a result, evaluations are often conflict-free, or at least the conflicts are severely dampened and couched in euphemisms. We’re trying to change that. We’ve giving organizations to probe for conflict, and training scribes to give citizens permission to give feedback in a safe space.

In the example where the person was asked to tell a story about having to choose between protecting the environment and securing a livelihood, we are mapping out an internal values conflict. Other conflict stories can be about working with “other” (see above) or understanding corruption. Impact is not the absence of conflict or measured by how many people make the “right” choice (e.g. choosing the environment over one’s livelihood is not success), but rather comes from understanding the issue on a deeper level and building bridges or designing projects that allow people to have more prosperity and face fewer tough trade-off decisions.

Measure change with a before, during, after program listening design

Impact is positive change over time. The number one reason Impact is hard to measure is that the people with the money and the power don’t want to wait for time to pass – they want to know immediately. But if you don’t ask people to describe life before an intervention, you will find it hard to measure change. Mathematically, it is impossible, though people often use weak data from elsewhere as a proxy for the baseline.

To be able to look at how a collection of narratives is changing over time, you need (at a minimum) to ask people before and after the program. If programs are ongoing, then you can ask periodically. Very strict researchers would ask the same people at regular intervals, but in the real world getting an organization to just ask two times (before and after) would be a huge improvement over what they have done in the past.

Journaling – if you have volunteers working for weeks or months, have them keep a journal. After, scan and datify the content as stories. So instead of two stories (pre and post), you would have a dozen or more stories from the same person about an issue. Growth is easy to see with journaling.

Focus groups – Informal discussions can be augmented by during a transcript of stories shared into data. Leave a tape recorder running, or use an app like dictadroid to convert it to MP3 and email for transcription immediately after.

Use our 60,000 story repository to build a reference collection for comparison

The best data is the kind that already exists. All you need to do is add your unique part and use our comparison tools to look at how peoples’ experiences differ. This isn’t as powerful as some of the other techniques, but it can be done for free, and sometimes done even when the project is being designed, before there are any “beneficiaries” yet.

Example: Two rape prevention programs or Planning to fight stigma after the ebola epidemic

These tools live on storylearning.org.

What next?

This is Part II of a blog series on story-centered learning and hypothesis-based international development. Read more!

Part I: Null hypotheses in international development

Ten years ago Eli and I were housemates. I moved away from State College, PA but she knew I still knew people there. That is this week why she tagged me and 100 of her closest Facebook friends with this message:

Elizabeth Anne Bragg

October 9 at 1:05pm ·

State College/Centre County friends, past and present- I seriously need your help! Today, I was the victim of a hit and run accident. I was outside of my vehicle, and the woman came within a foot of hitting me. She hit the car door that I was right inside of as I was buckling my toddler into her carseat. She did not apologize or ask if I was OK. She asked if I wanted to exchange insurance info, and I told her that I was going to call the police so they could take a report. I reached into my vehicle to get my phone, and when I next looked up she was gone. The police called an ambulance to check my vitals because I am due in less than two weeks and I was shaking and my heart was racing from the shock of the incident. Thankfully I am OK, but this woman came within inches of killing me and/or my unborn child.

Unfortunately, the police say that it is unlikely that they will find this woman because I was unable to give them much information. It all happened within a few minutes. I never imagined that she would take off. If I had, I would have taken a picture of her plate and vehicle.

Please help me find this cold hearted woman by looking out for her as you drive around! Or if you no longer live in the area, please tag anyone you know who still does. She needs to be caught. She was a white woman in her 70s or early 80s. She had white hair and wire rimmed glasses. She was driving a sporty compact vehicle that was FIRE ENGINE RED. Her passenger side view mirror was knocked off during the accident. The accident occurred near the corner of Burrowes and Fairmont Ave in State College.

If you see a vehicle fitting this description, please take the license plate information and message me immediately. Also please share this status with anyone you know who lives in this area. I have made it visible to all.

Like — with 46 others.

 

4 people like this. 235 shares

Many programs don’t improve lives that much on the whole. But there are several simple ways to quantify exactly how much benefit they have, compared to something else. The “something else” can be quite simple, as you will see.

1 – For every intervention, the control group gets cash instead.

GiveDirectly takes money and gives unconditional $1000 cash to poor people, then tracks what they do with it and how well they live afterward. Chris Blattman believes this should be the null hypothesis for all foundations: What do people do with money themselves, given unconditional cash?

#2 – Citizens allocate the dough. Compare with foundation experts.

Another example is what I call “Pay it Backwards” where we take the thousands of do-gooder citizens that people have already written a story about in our storytelling project and give them $100 to do something good for someone else with. Afterwards, we ask the do-gooder, the inidivual donor (who put up $100), and the beneficiary what happened and were they happy with it? Here it is not GiveDirectly choosing the people, but rather, good citizens whom we empower to act and little micro charities. And the question is, “are people happier when individual helps than when foundations help them? What do they do well? And what do they do poorly (compared to charities)?

#3 – Pay the actors cash not to do something you think is important.

A third model of rethinking the null hypothesis is to split the pool of qualified organizations (that you would normally give a grant to) into two groups. To one group you deny them the grant for a year in exchange for a little cash now and their commitment to give you data about what they are doing. Then you can compare the data with data you collect on your grantees. You should expect that your grantees are doing better work, if you data system is worth anything. Otherwise none of your data is reliable and it’s possible that your grantees would be better off being given nothing but grants. We at globalgiving have considered this. It shows what drastic extremes we in the nonprofit world must go to. For in order to “prove” that our products have value, we have to take some of our customers and pay them not to buy our products, so we can show the product works.

#4 – How much much you pay someone not to doing something?

A variation on idea #3 is to find out how much a person needs to be bribed to try something new. If a foundation isn’t collecting feedback from the people they serve, how much could you pay them to do it? And if they are already listening to a community (because experts at foundations encouraged them to do it), how much would you need to pay them to leave it out of a proposal? If they truly believe that the information is valuable, you would need to pay them to omit it, and how much you need to pay is a measure of what perceived value it has.

The same applies to microloans. If training with a loan is really valuable, could you ask people to give back 10% of their loan to pay for the training? That would be a strong bit of evidence that the training has value.

#5 – All projects must have at least a 25% local matching effort to proceed.

I am a huge fan of the Peace Corps Small Project Assistance (SPA) program. When I was a PCV in Gambia 99-01, I never used SPA myself, but many other PCVs did so successfully. The design of a small budget with minimum 25% community effort match should be the design that all other projects are benchmarked against. If a community is unable or unwilling to quarter-match a project, then the budget is too large or the money going to the wrong thing.

Conclusion: There’s too much talk about impact from people who aren’t able to measure it.

If you’re thinking, “I don’t need to know whether we are better than something else” because your grant funding is restricted to exactly the one thing, you should give up talking about impact. You cannot prove you had a big impact on anyone if you are unable to offer more than one kind of aid to a person. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

If your next grant proposal is all about implementing one idea without comparing it to anything else, then don’t try to claim you’ll know what its impact will be. Instead, rewrite your grant so that you can at least say that it was better/worse than cash, or use one of these other approaches to demonstrate there is demand for it.

The ‘null hypothesis’ in any experiment doesn’t need to ask, “is this new thing is better than some old thing?” Instead, show that the intervention is more effective than cash. Cash is the equivalent of placebo for international development.

If you want to say something like “X foundation is 25% more effective than the rest,” you’ll need a better baseline to compare against. That means you need benchmark data and a null hypothesis to test against.

 

And for the first time, organizations that strive to be better get credit and recognition for learning:

Formula: Demonstrated effectiveness => Visibility => Funds raised

These are the existing criteria, which omit points for good behaviors such as attending webinars, using SWOT analysis, community listening, and sharing knowledge with others.

https://surveyglobalgiving.wufoo.com/forms/learning-how-your-organization-learns/

Help us learn how you work.

Learning Organizations

 A learning organization is one that transforms continuously based on evidence and helps its staff grow. We believe that learning organizations are going to drive change in the world in the future. But no two learning organizations look the same, or need the same things. This is your chance to help us learn what you need, so we can provide it. And if you are already doing something that makes you effective, we want to hear about it so that we can award more credit for doing what matters.

Changing the world

Dennis and Mari started GlobalGiving in 2002 because they believed most of the money was not making it to organizations that were doing great work. And in the decade ever since, we’ve moved over 100 million dollars to thousands of these great organizations. But that is not enough. We also need to demonstrate how and why these “other” organizations are a better investment, so that bigger deeper pockets will open and join us. That begins by tracking behavior and using market mechanisms to get more organizations doing more of what matters. We’ve explained our world view in this infographic:

This epidemic is growing because the standard approach – quarantining the area – doesn’t work where corruption is high (powerful people don’t obey the quarantine if they believe they can get better treatment by fleeing) and the ability to isolated infected people is low.

More importantly – if the public sees that 90% of the people who go into a hospital come out in a body bag they are not going to visit hospitals anymore.

Under these circumstances, some other approach may work where quarantines and hospital triage cannot. Last week Sierra Leone tried a three-day lockdown. This may be a test-run at a permanent curfew to prevent people touching each other.

But whatever the solution may be, I know it won’t be apparent without some people listening to citizens, gathering feedback and opinions, and aggregating it into data mining tools – exactly what we at GlobalGiving have done elsewhere.

I wrote to some friends who know people in Liberia and Sierra Leone. I have a dozen prospective volunteers to start a “Ebola Listening Brigade.” This is a Public Facebook Group For people in Liberia who are willing to interview a citizen for a “day in my life” story during the ebola epidemic. Life is changing rapidly there. These stories will help others understand the need and nature of the crisis beyond the narrow lense of the media.

Ebola Listening Brigade

Five minutes of listening a day

The goal is to keep the commitment low – 5 minutes a day – and simple, using technology. Here’s how stories will get aggregated and disseminated as they come in:

Step 1 – a listener approaches some person they know in Liberia and asks a question like, “What was your yesterday like? how did the ebola outbreak affect you?”

That person talks for at most 3 minutes. Their response is saved in a simple android app. Dictadroid seems to be simple and free. iTalk recorder for iPhone seems to work too.

Using a smart phone with the dictadroid app and internet access, they email it to me.

Step 2 – I take the WAV file they emailed and get it transcribed. Then the text appears at ebolastories.wordpress.com and becomes part of the storylearning.org story archive.

Step 3 – We keep collecting and sharing this so that others can use it as they think about the next approach to containment. If we can predict that what works for hundreds of patients doesn’t scale to a million, now is the time to explore plan B.

I’m happy to say that we already have a few people interested in contributing. The technology isn’t the barrier – it’s finding the time and keeping the process simple, while at the same time unleashing the power of narratives to reveal something deeper.

Narratives may seem unstructured, but they are quite structured. They are time-bound bits of information, pre-organized into a series chronological events. They include emotional perceptions and point of view markers in the pattern of pronouns. And they encode first-hand accounts with more that can reveal than a summary. So that’s why I’m trying to get more of them.

Nightly I scanned every wordpress blog on the net tagged #ebola and found that less than one in ten had even so much as a quote from a person in the affected area. The other 91% was just opining by outsiders. These opinions cannot reveal a solution, only first-hand accounts can.

Eleven years ago I wrote a novel called The Devil’s Right Hand. In it two men go into the jungles of Sierra Leone on a manhunt to bring down a warlord who betrayed his people and helped Charles Taylor, enslaving child soldiers and lording over the maiming of a generation. Writing this fictional book helped me understand the nature of war and warlords, and the nuances behind taking sides. It also surprised me as Timboki (the warlord) turned out to be a lot more resourceful and wise than the men who sought him, and understood “magic” on a psycho-social level.

Much of this novel was lifted from headlines of the 1990s and from researching the Kamajors – a secret society of hunter mystics who believe they can turn bulletproof and invisible as they charge into battle. The Kamajors are not a fringe group, but more the heart of how half of Africa thinks. But Americans are no different. Half the world accepts science with one foot planted in superstition.

Enter Ebola.

When faced with the ebola epidemic, it is natural for so many people to respond with superstitious cures or quack remedies. And these examples of rampant fears from The Guardian article illustrate the reaction I’d expect any society to have when half of the population doesn’t fully embrace science:

A Cameroonian friend shares a conversation between two of his fellow nationals in an airport. One of them remarks that he is not feeling too well. The immediate, and hysterical, reaction of the other is that he must have Ebola.

“Maybe you’ve been infected with Ebola from those Lagos passengers at the arrival hall,” my friends recounts one of them saying.

On Twitter, a Kenyan user notes that passengers on flights from Entebbe to Nairobi are not being screened for Ebola. The checks are inconsistent, he notes, implying that the disease could be brought in to the nation via Uganda.

Last week, a hoax did the rounds on Whatsapp as Zimbabweans shared a Photoshopped version of a local newspaper with a headline claiming that the country had confirmed its first Ebola patients.

Their mistake it to explain it as an African problem. It is not. Their interpretation:

Over the last few years, meticulous work has gone into crafting the ‘Africa rising’ narrative; a narrative founded upon the continent’s rising economies (like South Africa and Nigeria), the emergence of tech and innovation (think Kenya) and the growth of a middle class that we might call ‘post-African’; savvy, urban, cosmopolitan with no flies to swat off their faces and no begging bowls in their manicured hands.

In a May editorial, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote about ‘The Real Africa’ in which he cited various economic measures – trade and mobile phone growth among others – to show why Africa has become “the test case of 21st-century modernity”.

The problem I have always had with this narrative is that while the statistics do point to a truth, another truth still prevails.

What’s missing from this two sided debate (is Africa rising or is it just a hopeful myth?) is the nuance that economic prosperity is happening despite another reality remaining entirely unchanged: Ever since the 1960s there has been a small group of African elites that hoard power and money and live above the law. This is the kleptocracy culture Nigeria is famous for. Recently the masses have gotten a larger share of the prosperity than they did before (good!), but without these elites having to let go of their privileges.

When the rule of law doesn’t apply to you as en elite, why should a quarantine? The ebola epidemic is spreading because in case after case, of one these elites break quarantine, leave the country and hide from the health system. In the process they infect 60 others. Ebola will continue to get a foothold wherever the masses have low mobility and limited power and elite doctors and government officials can breaks the rules with impunity.

This is the pattern. Ghana is entirely ebola free and Nigeria is not. Sierra Leone and Liberia spiral out of control while Guinea and Senegal doesn’t. Check the corruption indexes on these places and you’ll find it fits my narrative. And so in the rewrite of my novel The Devil’s Right Hand,the ebola epidemic continues to spread wherever elitism is rampant, making Nigeria ungovernable six months after the outbreak there and leaving Ghana unaffected.

So the question of Africa Rising misses the point. The debate should be about where in Africa is elitism and a two-class society entrenched and where is it going the way of Apartheid and segregation? Prosperity will follow wherever citizen masses wake up and realize that corruption (and the culture it creates) are disarming the quarantine meant to protect them all. Quarantines cannot work amidst corruption.

What took me 11 years of mulling on this novel was on how to tell a story about the crumbling of society under war without trivializing the people into caricatures of Africa. Here are some parts of telling the story that helped to avoid caricatures:

• One of the foreigners in the novel plays the ugly American, using “African” and Sierra Leonian interchangably (as newspapers do, sadly).
• In this mystery-suspense thriller, the African characters and the foreigners seem equally witty, devious, and resourceful.
• The ebola quarantine story provides a perfect foil to show how power held by anyone – white or black – can endanger all of society when abused. It becomes a story about the destructive nature of people against nature, set in Africa, instead of being about the destructive nature of Africans against each other (the usual way conflicts are framed by news media). Understanding Africa as a “man vs (human) nature” conflict is richer and more accurate than seeing events as a “man vs man” conflict.
• Part of the novel was already about the nature of magic in modern society. Juxtaposing it with a battle of modern medicine against nature provides a stronger contrast to sharpen the insights between the lines of dialogue here.

I’ll be kindle publishing my novel at the end of this month, with a new parallel narrative of how the ebola outbreak foments a new warlord rising as the rule of law disappears from rural areas. Page 1 now describes the chaos that ensures when the WHO imposes a quarantine around Sierra Leone, Liberia, and southern Guinea (a bad idea, but great fiction).

A crux of our approach is to get organizations to embed people in communities and teach them how to listen. A “listening project” can be focused on any issue, so long as the question is open-ended, and it is the storyteller deciding what to share, not us. All of these stories are fed into a global collection where patterns emerge out of the sheer volume.

This is the best of both worlds: Humans engaging with each other yields deeper insights, while computers mining the narratives yields the hidden patterns that matter, and statically speaking, are the real story. Stories are anecdotes, but collections of anecdotes yield “meta stories” about peoples, incidents, issues, and conflicts.

The story behind Ebola headlines

Take the current ebola epidemic. I’ve been mining blogs for the past two weeks in search of the rare authentic first hand report from West Africa, and reposting them at ebolastories.wordpress.com. It’s quite clear that for ebola survivors, social stigma is the number one issue they care about:

“The Lagos State government sent health professionals to check on me regularly to know how I was doing or if I had the signs of the virus manifesting. The officials created scenes with their visits. I was embarrassed and I was stigmatized…. It got to a point vendors stopped selling things to me, because of stigma.” – Dennis Akagha

And…

Outside the hospital, they continue to face stigma. Some of Ms. Sellu’s staff spoke of husbands abandoning them and neighbors shunning them. One nurse told of returning home to find her belongings in suitcases on the sidewalk, and her spouse warning her to stay away. Another nurse, seeking lodgings, lied to the landlord, telling him she was a student.

“If you meet with them, they will balance this way and that not to touch you,” said Veronica Tucker, a nurse who survived an Ebola infection, doing a little jig to demonstrate her experience on the streets of Kenema.

But I only have three stories mentioning stigma so far (out of a dozen blog posts), so how would I make quantitative predictions and design a good social-stigma fighting programme? Let’s face it folks, this the 21st century. If you’re not working with quantitative predictions, you’re not innovating; you’re a dinosaur.

Using our current collection of 60,000 stories as a benchmark, the storytelling method and tools returns 120 stories that mention “HIV” and “stigma” – a pretty good proxy group for designing a solution to the impending problem of “ebola survivor” and “stigma.” The meta-narrative comes in many forms. Visually, I prefer to read a wordtree map of these stories before digging into specifics:

There are many aspects to the problem in that chart. So I reran it (storylearning.org/compare) with all stories split into blue or red, depending on whether the outcome of the story was positive or negative, respectively:

Here some themes emerge. A submovement called “living positively” seems to be yielding some positive stories about people living with HIV. Also, counseling and taking care of people helps. In Dennis’s ebola story, the worst thing the Nigerian government did (or failed to do) that augmented his stigma was, in his words:

“It took them two straight weeks to visit my home and to disinfect it.” – Dennis Akagha

With just a few minutes of searching, I have a ton of useful leads and at least one behavior change framework to research (“living positively” movement). But I’m not done. This is a form of “iterative learning.” I reinserted my assumptions back into the story search (storylearning.org/search) and compared hiv stigma stories with those that also meantion counseling, or talk or listening. To my surprise, stories with these elements are successful for men but not for women, and they are not associated with this “living positively” approach:

Understanding “stigma” is an issue that keeps coming up. Maybe it’s time for funders to mine stories to understand what they ought to be prioritizing?

Getting our partner organizations to try this more potent but very different approach has been a journey. One of them has shared her own insights about it on a blog:

Over the past three years storytelling has become central to most of what I do. I never paid too much attention to it before, but since first coming to Bosnia I have begun to purposely acknowledge how both myself and others around me used it. I had positive experiences: listening to inspirational stories that in one way or another changed my life and the path I followed, and negative (but constructive) experiences: witnessing hopelessness, trauma, anxiety, anger, disillusionment.

Basically Globalgiving does not only provide you with the basic tools that any other fundraising website would, they also put a lot of time into training community based organisations. A new, easy to use analysis tool was developed and all the stories now make up a huge database. Organisations can input their stories, analyse and improve their programmes according to findings from the analysis. This led to a new model to be adopted by globalgiving: listen, act, learn.

Last night I got a tip from a globalgiving staff member, used it, and got a great reaction from a volunteer I trained, which was very rewarding. I met some volunteers from another local organisation which has a soup kitchen and a hostel for people in need of food and shelter. Once I witnessed a violent scene with a homeless person who was very drunk. I asked people what was happening and they said he was an alcoholic who lost his whole family during the war, developed an alcohol addiction and lost everything. The locals I was with said that no one pays attention to him, and ignore him completely. It is a memory that really stuck with me. As a peacebuilding organisation that focuses mostly on youth, we don’t usually have access to people in such situations, and I think it would be good for us to document their stories. So we did.

It was heart-breaking when people who are some of the most disadvantaged in the community had their houses completely destroyed, and now, once again they are left with nothing. First their families were killed in the war, and now, just when they managed to rebuild their homes and move on, the catastrophic floods occurred, and they lost everything again. There were many organisations people mentioned helped them. One person in particular really moved us by saying how grateful he was to us personally and to CIM for recording their stories and telling the world what conditions they have to live in. Indirectly, the lack of services, the poor economy, and most of these problems that people face are a direct result of the conflict, and poor political decision-making and cooperation at the national level. Whilst we try to overcome these obstacles and do our best to have programmes that address the issue of national and grassroots reconciliation, I am also thankful to Fenix and all other organisations in the local community who deal with the consequences of the political and economic situation in Bosnia.

Adelina’s story captures both the promises and the woes of embracing the complexity of really listening. We may find that we are small against problems so big, but at least we can feel the edges of the monster and work together to overcome it – the way charity work has to be done going forward.

I’ve been scanning the Internet nightly for any reputable eyewitness accounts on the ebola epidemic. Sadly, nearly everything appears to be repostings of the same soundbytes recycled in the 24/7 news echo chamber. These are the noteworthy exceptions – first hand accounts and important developments about the ebola epidemic:

School

Today: Nigerian government postponed the resumption of primary and secondary schools across the country a month, until October 22nd, instead of September 22nd. This announcement came just hours before claiming that officially, ebola is contained and exactly one patient has it in the whole country.

Vectors: Are Bats Spreading Ebola Across Sub-Saharan Africa?

“We have no idea how it’s moved from Central Africa to Guinea,” says primatologist Christophe Boesch of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. A leading suspect is fruit bats. In Central African rainforests, several species have shown evidence of infection with Ebola without getting sick. And at least one of the species, the little collared fruit bat, Myonycteris torquata, has a range that stretches as far west as Guinea. “We’ve always been very suspicious of bats,” says William Karesh of EcoHealth Alliance in New York City, who studies the interactions among humans, animals, and infectious diseases.

Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6180/140.summary

Conflicting info:

There has never been an Ebola outbreak in West Africa before.

The EBOV strain from Guinea has evolved in parallel with the strains from the Democratic Republic of Congo. It came from a recent ancestor and has not been introduced from the latter countries into Guinea.

Ebola first appeared in 1976 in two simultaneous outbreaks, one in a village near the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the other in a remote area of Sudan.

It would seem that even though outbreaks are rare, they happen in multiple parts of the world simultaneously. This suggests to me a migratory vector – like locusts that swarm once every 30 years with imperfect precision. (I’m not saying “locusts” but something that carries the disease and has the same chaotic rise and fall).

Source: bush meat:

The rise of this epidemic comes from a tradition of buying “bush”meat, specifically monkey meat in Liberia back in January of 2014.

EBOLA: Ghana To Place Blanket Ban On Buying & Selling Of Bushmeat

NIGERIA: The women under the aegis of Bushmeat Sellers Association protested that since the announcement that the deadly disease could be caused by eating bush meat, spell had been cast on their sales.

Senegal and Gambia – August 12, 2014

Right now I just returned from Dakar, as I was visiting my brother who came from the USA with his colleagues from Purdue to implement a grain storage set up in Senegal, on flying out all officers where in gloves immigration to customs etc, flying in you arrive at the terminal, you have a sanitiser at the entrance to watch your hand prior to going straight to medical clearance where you get your passport checked by the medical officer to see country of departure and if you stay in Gambia when you left, after thast you get a sensor temperature meter pointed at your eyes to get your temperature if its good, you cleared to go to immigration, this also applies at all Gambia border post.

West Point slum in Monrovia Liberia

The policy implications of this next item are what started me researching everything Ebola-related as fodder for a fiction novel:

The army has moved in and surrounded a slum of over 50,000 Liberians with orders of “shoot to kill” in order to contain the possible spread of Ebola. This act is in effect isolates a 99.99% healthy population inside a zone with known Ebola carriers. …

Liberia said a ban on travel to the region imposed by neighboring countries was complicating the fight against Ebola and leading to shortages of basic goods.

“Isolating Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea is not in any way contributing to the fight against this disease,” Information Minister Lewis Brown said. “How do we get in the kinds of supplies that we need? How do we get experts to come to our country? Is that African solidarity?”

At least 1,427 people have died and 2,615 have been infected since the disease was detected deep in the forests of southeastern Guinea in March. A separate outbreak was confirmed in Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday.

***

The characters in this next story are fictional, but the events occurred on Saturday, 8/16/14, and are tragically true…

Charles Smith had been afraid when he first heard of Ebola. Rumors had been swirling for weeks, but he had not believed them until men from the government rode through West Point with loudspeakers telling them that Ebola was in West Point. They warned to watch for people with fevers and vomiting.

That was also when his doubts about Ebola began. Fever, vomiting? Malaria causes those symptoms too. After 14 years of civil war, he had been lied to by the government before and this did not ring true. His doubts were increased when “health workers” came to West Point wearing suits that we all white and covered them head to toe. He had seen things like this in American films.

West Point, a peninsula in Western Monrovia, was known for its poverty and squalid conditions. 50,000 people share two groups of public toilets (that most can’t afford). The beaches are littered with human waste waiting for the tides to come in and wash it away.

When he heard from friends that even doctors were saying there was no such thing as Ebola, he knew this was a coverup for something else. Something evil. Rumors were spreading that white men were eating people in the white tents and at the ELWA hospital. The posting of signs throughout Monrovia did not impress Charles. Like 75% of Liberians, he couldn’t read them, but signs told more lies that truths in his mind.

Charles took comfort that the Ebola liars were mostly on the other side of Monrovia. The JFK Hospital is uncomfortably close, but still far enough away. West Point had its problems, but the Ebola liars were not one of them.

He was awakened Sunday morning by his friend Thomas. The Ebola liars had come to West Point. A clinic had been opened in West Point itself!

“How can this happen? How can we let them eat our own children,” asked Charle
He went to visit several friends to discuss this new clinic. Many could die if they don’t act quickly. The small crowd around him swelled to about ten as he discussed fervently how they must stop the clinic. Joseph, an old friend ran up.

“Charles, they have taken Jimmy into the clinic.”

Jimmy, one of Charles’ nephews, had been sick for a few days with Malaria. Now they had brought him into that death trap.

“Come with me friend. Come, let’s stop this madness” cried Charles. The crowd of ten swelling to over one hundred within minutes. Fueled by a smoldering anger at the lies about Ebola, burst into an angry trot.

The clinic was a converted school which was now going to hold patients who had been identified as having Ebola. The plan was for these patients to then go to a hospital when a bed became available.

The shanty gates to the clinic were easily ripped off their posts. The small clinic compound was quickly filled with several hundred people.

“The President says you have Ebola. You don’t have Ebola, you have malaria” Charles yelled, “Get up and get out.”

Many of the patients in the clinic left, including several children. Charles was quite relieved when he saw Jimmy. He had not been sent away to those hospitals to be eaten. Jimmy, clearly weak but able to walk, stood gingerly. Charles walked over and grabbed him under the arm and assisted him out of the compound. Jimmy was safe.

The others did not have such charitable motives. The mass of humanity quickly stripped the clinic bare of all food, mattresses, sheets, and gloves. Charles was indignant with the mob. He was here to save his nephew, not to steal from the clinic. He knew right from wrong and this was wrong.

With his nephew in tow, Charles was in no position to stop the mass looting. Within minutes, it was done. There was nothing left in the clinic except about ten patients who refused to leave and some desperate nurses who wondered what to do next.

Charles took Jimmy back to his small home. Jimmy was feverish and clearly needed Charles’ care. He brought him food and water. Jimmy was shivering despite his fever. Charles laid next to him on the mattress and pulled him close to warm him. As they both fell asleep, Charles took great comfort that those he loved were close.

They were safe.

***

(Another first hand account from West Point slum via local newspaper)

 http://thegistpartner.com/2014/08/20/liberias-effort-to-contain-ebola-turns-violent-as-people-try-to-escape-quarantine/

Youths angrily threw stones and tried to tear down the the barb wired barricades created to prevent the people from leaving the area which was written off by Government. soldiers were used to control the rebellious crowd, driving hundreds of young men back into the neighbourhood, a slum of tens of thousands in Monrovia known as West Point.

“This is messed up, They injured one of my police officers. That’s not cool. It’s a group of criminals that did this. Look at this child. God in heaven help us.”

John Moore / Getty Images / Published by The New York Times

Notes

Ebola has definitely changed the way we do things…and this will probably have to keep evolving until we kick this bug. The catholic churches have suspended ‘offering each other the sign of peace’ which involved handshakes with people all around you. In the same way, I see people becoming more orderly as they try to reduce body contact with other people in the market and outside of the market.

Procedure

(This post was writer’s gold for actual details on the medical side.)

From http://ebolastories.wordpress.com/2014/08/28/ebola-accounts-sierra-leone/

I have been here for 7 weeks, working as a nurse and emergency coordinator for the Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) Ebola response. Today we’re lucky: it’s raining, so we won’t be too hot in the personal protective equipment (PPE) we must wear. We control who goes into the isolation area, how often, and for how long. No one should wear the PPE for longer than 40 minutes; it’s unbearable for any longer than that, but it’s easy to lose track of time, so we have to monitor our colleagues. The process starts in the dressing room, where getting into the PPE takes about 5 minutes. We have a designated dresser, responsible solely for making sure that we are wearing our equipment properly and that not a square millimeter of skin is exposed. In case one layer is accidently perforated, we wear two pairs of gloves, two masks, and a heavy apron on top of the full-body overalls. When we exit the isolation area, we are sprayed down with chlorine solution and peel off the PPE layer by layer. Some of the equipment — goggles, apron, boots, thick gloves — can be sterilized and used again. Everything else — overalls, masks, headcover — is burned.

In the suspected-case tents most patients look well, but the probable-case area is a different story. Patients here have fever, pain, anorexia — but these symptoms could indicate malaria. A polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) test determines if a patient has Ebola. When results comes in, the patient is either moved to the confirmed-case tents or discharged. Knowing what it means to be moved to these tents, patients are understandably frightened. We have a psychologist, a counselor, and health promoters to help and support patients, but there are just too many of them.

Standard treatment for Ebola is limited to supportive therapy: hydrating patients, maintaining their oxygen status and blood pressure, providing high-quality nutrition, and treating any complicating infections with antibiotics. Supportive treatment can help patients survive longer, and that extra time may be what their immune system needs to start fighting the virus.

There’s also a tent for the most severely ill patients. I try to spend more time there than in the other tents, if only to hold patients’ hands, give them painkillers, and sit on the edge of their beds so that they know they’re not alone. But spending time is always difficult — there are so many patients waiting for help.

Evading the quarantine

A doctor, who secretly treated a diplomat who had contact with the index case, Liberian-American Patrick Sawyer, has died of Ebola in Nigeria.

The doctor, who has yet to be named, died on Friday. His wife has also taken ill and has been quarantined in Port Harcourt. Interestingly, the diplomat the doctor treated is still alive.

The diplomat, who was part of the team who met with Patrick Sawyer in Lagos, flew to Port Harcourt, Rivers State for treatment, evading Nigerian federal government surveillance for the disease. The late doctor then took him to a hotel for treatment.

As a result of this, 70 people have been quarantined. The doctor’s hospital, Good Heart Hospital in Rivers State, has been shut down. The unnamed hotel, where the secret treatment took place, has also been shut down.

History and ebola facts

Ebola first appeared in 1976 in 2 simultaneous outbreaks, in Nzara, Sudan, and in Yambuku, Democratic Republic of Congo. The latter was in a village situated near the Ebola River, from which the disease takes its name.

Genus Ebolavirus comprises 5 distinct species:

Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BDBV)
Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV)
Reston ebolavirus (RESTV)
Sudan ebolavirus (SUDV)
Taï Forest ebolavirus (TAFV).

Burial ceremonies in which mourners have direct contact with the body of the deceased person can also play a role in the transmission of Ebola. Men who have recovered from the disease can still transmit the virus through their semen for up to 7 weeks after recovery from illness.

Signs and symptoms

EVD is a severe acute viral illness often characterized by the sudden onset of fever, intense weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. This is followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, rash, impaired kidney and liver function, and in some cases, both internal and external bleeding. Laboratory findings include low white blood cell and platelet counts and elevated liver enzymes.

People are infectious as long as their blood and secretions contain the virus. Ebola virus was isolated from semen 61 days after onset of illness in a man who was infected in a laboratory.

The incubation period, that is, the time interval from infection with the virus to onset of symptoms, is 2 to 21 days.

***

An Ebola treatment clinic in Monrovia was attacked by a group of youngsters claiming that the disease was made up by the West. In the process, many sick patients have just disappeared into thin air. The marauders looted the clinic (how smart is that?) and made off with mattresses and other items that were soiled by the body fluids of the sick. It’s worth mentioning that the virus is spread by contact with body fluids of those showing symptoms of being sick. In other words, those idiots just screwed themselves and anyone else that came in contact with the items from the clinic.

At the same time, there are sick people crossing from Liberia into Guinea, even though the Guinea border was supposedly closed around two weeks ago. It seems as though many people there don’t believe this stuff is real. I can’t grasp that given that there are reports that the government is very slow about picking up the dead bodies. It seems that leaving the bodies around will lead to the spread of this instead of trying to limit the exposure by picking up and placing the bodies in quarantine as quickly as possible.

There’s also the thinking that the current counts are underrepresented of the true number of cases. That may have some validity since patient zero was determined to have gotten sick in December of 2013. That’s eight months plus of this virus being spread around. I’m amazed that it didn’t jump the borders of the three original countries until Patrick Sawyer landed in Nigeria.

 

Introducing my other blog: ebolastories.wordpress.com

This blog aggregates anything worthwhile from google alerts, two google groups, globalgiving updates, wordpress ‘ebola’ or ‘liberia’ tagged stories, and other useful sources, since none of these feeds is more than 10% wheat to 90% chaff.

Here is a wordtree built from the full text of these four articles:

Reston ebolavirus in humans and animals in the Philippines: a review. Miranda ME, Miranda NL.

Ebola and Marburg hemorrhagic fevers: neglected tropical diseases? MacNeil A, Rollin PE.

Assessment of the risk of Ebola virus transmission from bodily fluids and fomites. Bausch DG, Towner JS, Dowell SF, Kaducu F, Lukwiya M, Sanchez A, Nichol ST, Ksiazek TG, Rollin PE.

Management of accidental exposure to Ebola virus in the biosafety level 4 laboratory, Hamburg, Germany. Günther S, Feldmann H, Geisbert TW, Hensley LE, Rollin PE, Nichol ST, Ströher U, Artsob H, Peters CJ, Ksiazek TG, Becker S, ter Meulen J, Olschläger S, Schmidt-Chanasit J, Sudeck H, Burchard GD, Schmiedel S.

There are many topics that spring out of the map. Here is the area I was interested in, because it pertained to the risks:

EBOV – abbreviation for the ebola virus – is transmitted via direct contact with bodily fluids. You do not need to worry about Ebola in the United States, unless you work in a hospital. The biggest problem in Africa has been that people who died of Ebola can infect others as their bodies are prepared for burial. It is uncommon for diseasses to be viable after the host is dead. Ebola is a rare exception. Given the difficulty in educating the public in rural Africa, it was no surprise that outbreaks happened. Nobody told the undertakers to take care.

The maps are probably not terribly informative. But I wanted to see what sense the algorithm would make of academic papers.

Other key phrases it pulled out were “breast milk”, “medical equipment”, “animal handlers”, and “day 4″.

The algorithm highlighted this sentence as a representative summary of the whole: “We found EBOV to be shed in a wide variety of bodily fluids during the acute phase of illness, including saliva, breast milk, stool, and tears.”

The function word patterns for medical journal text shows an absence of just about everything that makes language compelling to humans:

Function Word Patterns
(How much more or less often do they appear than expected?)

Relationships words appear 97% less often
Exclusives words appear 20% less often
Black White words appear 65% less often
Tentative words appear 23% less often
Positive Emotion words appear 83% less often
Question words appear 21% more often
Discrepancy words appear 31% more often
Gratitude words appear 67% less often
Analytical words appear 79% less often
Cause Effect words appear 73% less often
Negative Words words appear 60% less often
Organization words appear 80% less often
Aspirational Words words appear 88% less often
Negative Emotion words appear 91% less often
Cognitive words appear 71% less often

There were 271,710 public comments on the net neutrality ruling as of today. You can read them one at a time with this link, but the website was incompetently designed so as to make any bulk exporting of comments impossible – or cleverly designed – if you think the FCC never wanted us to understand what EVERYONE was saying.

Impossible is a relative barrier. With brute force (and Amazon’s mechanical turk) I was able to get the most recent 511 comments out and run them through my instant word analysis tool, found at djotjog.com/report.

Here is a taste of what everybody is saying about net neutrality:

The first thing it tells me – by the shape of the overall wordtree – is that there are several very different issues being discussed. In a sense, people are talking past each other, because none of their words overlap in comments.

The second thing to zoom in on are those desnse clusters of words. Dense clusters are where many people are talking about the same thing in slightly different ways – just what you’d expect when a particularly contentious issue is at hand.

Third – net neutrality is at the heart of the map. Connected to it are four main branches of ideas:

1. The principle of the Internet
2. Business use of the Internet
3. Internet is about Open and free speech
4. Net neutrality is about access, and possibly destroying access, to the Internet

A fifth and totally separate branch of these comments are about the two corporations that essentially control all public bandwidth in the United States: Comcast and Time Warner.

The public seems to single out Time Warner and Comcast in their comments and narratives, mentioning some “trick they pulled” or “this time that Comcast…” did something. The public doesn’t trust these two companies in particular.

Computer written summary of all comments

Djotjog chose these sentences to represent the sentiment of everybody:

While the system of accessing the internet via subscriptions to service providers such as Comcast may give the appearance of a luxury service defined by a free market which we are welcome to avoid should we so choose, this view is, at best, anachronistic and out of touch with the role the internet plays in today’s world. What we all need to understand is this: Internet service providers already charge a premium to content providers in that the more popular a website is, the more they have to pay for bandwidth and traffic from their servers – to the network of computer servers that represents the structure for what we call -the internet- – in other words, the -on-ramp- to the internet. Were we in a country with true competition among internet service providers then the market would be able to respond by choosing the providers who refused to engage in this practice.

When ISPs can slow your site and destroy your business at will, how can any startup attract investors? For Internet service providers, I am lucky to have a choice of two companies. If big, powerful companies can do things like that to WikiLeaks I am sure Internet service providers can and will do the same thing to any organization that rubs them the wrong way, if they are ever allowed to treat some customers less favorably than others. My friends, family, and I use the Internet for conversation and fun, but also for work and business.

As you know, without guaranteed Net Neutrality, internet service providers such as Time Warner and Comcast can provide better service to preferred web sites. When you let ISPs mess with our Internet experience, you are attacking our social lives, our entertainment, and our economic well being. I ask that you treat Internet service providers as utility providers and make sure that all, rich and poor alike have adequate access.

Word usage patterns

Mouse over each word category for examples of such words.

Compared to other writing samples, this group wrote…

Relationships words appear 96% less often
Exclusives words appear 42% more often
Tentative words appear 93% more often
Positive Emotion words appear 40% more often
Question words appear 3X more often
Discrepancy words appear 4X more often
Gratitude words appear 46% more often
Analytical words appear 79% less often
Negative Words words appear 31% less often
Organization words appear 93% less often
Aspirational Words words appear 16% less often
Space Time words appear 51% less often
Negative Emotion words appear 52% more often
Cognitive words appear 41% more often

Pronoun usage

Overall, 5.9 percent of the words in your text were pronouns. Typical reports have 5.6% pronouns and stories have 7 to 9% pronouns. How many times does each type of pronoun appear?

first singular:2386
first plural:1192
second:1100
third plural:1005
third singular:67
fourth:35

Note: “I” = first singular, “you” = second, “we” = first plural, “he/she” = third singular, “they” = third plural, and various words organizations used to decribe themselves are “fourth” person point of view.

NPR reports on a larger sample of FCC comments (August 13, 2014):

Source: Quid (commissioned by the Knight Foundation) analyzed of a sample of 250,000 public comments submitted to the FCC about net neutrality. Templated responses were collapsed into a single node. (About 30 percent of the sampled responses used “copy pasta” templated language.)

Download 511 FCC comments (August 1-4th, 2014)

700_comments.txt

You can also find a curated article on what people are saying about net neutrality on Singlehop.

Function Word Patterns

How much more or less often do they appear than expected?

Relationships words appear 81% less often
Exclusives words appear 87% more often
Black White words appear 3X more often
Tentative words appear 4X more often
Positive Emotion words appear 22% more often
Question words appear 7X more often
Discrepancy words appear 2X more often
Analytical words appear 75% less often
Negative Words words appear 35% less often
Organization words appear 87% less often
Aspirational Words words appear 3X more often
Negative Emotion words appear 3X more often
Cognitive words appear 17% less often

Computer rewritten synopsis

– We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist.

– I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

– But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust.

Pronoun usage (point of view)

Overall, 6.9 percent of the words in your text were pronouns. Typical reports have 5.6% pronouns and stories have 7 to 9% pronouns.

The point of view mostly shifts between “I” and “WE.”

Note: “I” = first singular, “you” = second, “we” = first plural, “he/she” = third singular, “they” = third plural, and various words organizations used to decribe themselves are “fourth” person point of view.

How many times does each type of pronoun appear?
first singular:169
first plural:111
second:85
third plural:73
third singular:40
fourth:3

Full text

16 April 1963
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in.” I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham’s economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants–for example, to remove the stores’ humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?” We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham’s mayoral election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: “Why didn’t you give the new city administration time to act?” The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state’s segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country’s antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn’t this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: “All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth.” Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of “somebodiness” that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad’s Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro’s frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies–a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . .” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime–the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some -such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle–have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as “dirty nigger-lovers.” Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful “action” antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: “Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother.” In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful–in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent–and often even vocal–sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping “order” and “preventing violence.” I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather “nonviolently” in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, Martin Luther King, Jr.
Published in:
King, Martin Luther Jr.

By analogy, I am publishing a dictionary that allows us to understand what people on the receiving end of international aid really mean when they are given a chance to tell stories about how organizations have affected their lives. It works because the GlobalGiving Storytelling Project collected such a large sample of beneficiary feedback about every sort of community effort that we can reverse engineer what people mean in other contexts.

Building the word-tone dictionary

1. Starting with the over 60,000 stories we’ve already collected from Kenyans and Ugandans about NGO work, I pulled a dictionary of 100,000 English words and queried the collection for stories that contained each word.
2. Each story is associated with a series of mapping questions about what happened. Was it positive or negative? These outcome mapping questions allow me to associate specific words with specific outcomes on a range from positive to negative. For example, if everybody who tells a story about “measles” assigns the outcome to negative (the person wasn’t cured), the word “measles” would generally be a negative word in other NGO contexts.
3. There are many kinds of positive and negative outcomes in the data already. We asked, “Who Benefited?” nobody? the wrong people? or the right people? Or “who did you feel about your story?” So even with just 100 stories that use a word, we often have several hundred data points averaged. As you would expect, most words are not strongly positive or negative.
4. I then filtered out any word that wasn’t used in at least 100 stories, so that the remaining 1944 words (of 100,000) are pretty reliable as a reference dictionary. I will probably publish a larger dictionary with the remaining words if people ask for it in comments below.
5. I then normalized the scores on a range from roughly -500 to +500, centered around zero by “turning up the gain” on the negative feedback. (Ask me how in comments in comments if you care). This step allows the data set to be used in other contexts, such as the import your own text analysis tool, where we don’t know whether stories had happy or sad ending.

This reference dictionary allows anyone to take a quick glance at the overall sentiment in any unstructured language from people who are affected by international development, based on how tens of thousands of people have used the same word previously.

Download your free word-tone dictionary

Click to download the 1944 word dictionary either as a CSV or a python pickled dictionary.

(Rename the files afterwards)

Results

If you plot all the words in excel and their sentiment scores, they look like this:

If you turn that plot on its side, it will become a normal distribution, like this:

The corrected plot is centered around zero. That’s good. It means that these words are a good mix of positive and negative sentiments. I chose to adjust the raw positive-negative scores because there is such a huge positive-bias in all NGO feedback that it becomes ridiculous just how skewed the stories are, compared to how much peoples lives are really affected by these efforts.

If people really benefited as much as they say they are, we would have no poor people left.

Case in point: What word is outlier at the top of the chart?

Give up? This word has a positivity score of 10,125 after I corrected the data. The score of +10,125  is a measure of how consistently that word appears in positive success stories versus negative failure stories. A word with a score of zero is neutral, or used in stories with mixed positive-negative outcomes. And because only words used in at least 100 stories are used, these dots are not like to switch sides (or signs) if we repeated this experiment a different story collection from the aid world.

Still don’t know the mystery word?

Here is the answer:

The outlier is the word ‘organization.’ People are very eager to tell positive stories about organizations. Literally thousands of times more likely to be positive in stories with the word ‘organization’ than in stories that contain the words that fall along the zero line of the chart.

Previously, my other means of measuring positive bias in stories concluded that people tell 10 to 30 positive stories for every negative story, across all 60,000 stories. By this measure, the positive sentiment in stories that include the word ‘organization’ is even higher still. Positive bias is a real problem. But using the word dictionary I’ve published, you can find the negative sentiments within a sea of rosy feedback.

My interpretations:

• The most negative words were “came” and “time.” As in, “one time these people came to our village…” That meta pattern is quite alarming. I just finished reading Bill Easterly’s “The Tyranny of Experts” yesterday, which is all about getting the outsiders to leave people alone and instead focus on advocating for the rights of poor people. This pattern is consistent with the failure of outsiders to come into a place on a “one time” basis and make any sort of lasting positive change.The implications of these outlier words should be a wake up call to the aid sector.
• People are more honest in Kibera and Uganda. Slum life in Kibera is poor, and people are ready to honestly talk about it. But across Uganda, people are almost as positive about everything as are people who talk about an “organization.”
• Narratives are positively biased in the development world, but there is no reason to believe that numbers are somehow free of this bias. In any kind of survey, when some asks the citizen, “how much money do you make?” or “how many kids do you have?” they get back wrong answers, and always wrong in the direction of what a person knows the organization wants to hear. There are documented examples of women under-reporting the number of kids they have to Millennium Development Goals surveyors in Uganda because they knew the “smaller families” was the outcome measure outsiders were looking for. Likewise, people lie about income and say they are poorer when money might have handed out, or overestimate their income in surveys from micro-loan foundations that use this “success metric” as the basis for granting them larger loans.
• You could throw up your hands and blame other people for lying, but I prefer to treat this as a symptom of the larger disease: Our programs are generally not making life better, and the only way to make life better is to play the game to get as much immediate aid as possible. No one has ever proven that putting money in a person’s pocket makes them poorer in the short-term. Yes, in the long term, they could become poorer, but poverty has a tendency to focus people on short term gains.
• The difficulty is that there are two kinds of positive stories – the ones where things really turned out great, and the ones where they are saying good things but they’re still not happy about the outcomes. This one method alone doesn’t do enough to tease out these two kinds of positive, but when combined with other lines of evidence, other structural aspects in the narratives, it is possible to tell the difference between authentic praise and manufactured praise. For example, check out my first attempt at this.

Quick scan of the most positive / most negative words

Most negative words

Most positive words

GlobalGiving has got a new crop of partner organizations trying out our storytelling method and adopting it to their local context. In every case, they try to get two stories from each person, and one of these stories can be on a narrower subject. The second story is very opened ended, about some community effort they know about. Here are examples of how each organization is adopting the storytelling method to their needs.

Not being able to prepare in advance was a blessing. It helped me emphasize that we’ve come a long way in our quest to build simple, instant, intuitive tools for analyzing narratives and their meta data. These images are screen shots of the tools I’ve described previously at djotjog.com/search and djotjog.com/report.

What can you do with noisy, minimalist, or totally unstructured narratives?

A demonstration with stories about street children 

First, it provides a top level visual summary

You don’t even need to know much English. Just look at the pictures and you’ll get an overall idea. Everybody talks about street children, but kids talk about it a bit more than the rest.

Analyze the point of view:  “Actor in the story” versus “Affected by events”

When people tell their own stories, they turn out more negative. But young boys are more positive and young girls are more negative.

A story’s point of view affects the depth, nuance, detail, and likely “data” that can be extracted:

Street children stories have more “I” stories that we would expect, pulling stories from our collection of 60,000+ at random, so the “I” is bigger.

A Wordtree is an unsupervised algorithm that works with any text

Djotjog.com/search generates these for ANY search result in seconds. Here are branches from hundreds of street children stories.

Zooming in you can see how words and phrases connect to form ideas: An old man frequently interacting with a young girl, with money being part of that sentence in the story.

Food and life also form two branches of the story.

We can look at how stories intersect with mentions of specific organizations.

Contrasting stories with different endings can yield more program-level design insights. (Using stories about success or failure we map outcomes)

This is the most interesting snapshot of them all. Failure stories are more complex than success stories. Wordtrees look for associated words within sentences. Success stories have branches that fan outward because the concepts are simpler, less interwoven. Failure stories are a chaotic birdsnest of interwoven social issues.

In failure stories, each storyteller tends to describe the events using similar words but in a different order so the map is simply more complex, more interesting.

As organizations, too often we focus on learning from the success stories – but it is the failure stories that offer us the keys to understanding the problem.

Compare two story collections

Side by side: Stories from Pennsylvania (N= approx 60) and East Africa about street children / run aways are remarkably similar in the issues they address.

And here is a map of about 50 blogs posts about street girls in Cairo form Nelly Ali’s blog:

You can do this yourself. Go to djotjog.com/search and type

"street children" or "street kids" or "run away" or "ran away"

in the search box, then hit “fetch stories.”

Note: you can export the narratives and meta data as a CSV file, for further exploration in a tool such as SAS, SPSS, or BigML.com.

Postscript: What MORE can you do with narratives? Try BigML.com

I imported hundreds of stories that mention ‘child abuse,’ ‘child labor,’ or ‘child protection’ into BigML.com and used their version of a text-mining function to build trees that map outcomes in stories. The types of outcomes are how people felt about the story they told, such as ‘inspired’, ‘horrible’, or ‘happy:

Horrible stories

Inspiring stories

Have mixed outcomes, and don’t mention your aunt. But more importantly, they are not from people who were “affected” by the events in the stories they share.

Important stories

Are commonly organization-centric narratives.

Happy stories

Have a very long pattern of words in them. This example begins to demonstrate the true scope and nuance of “success” that lies in narratives, and which cannot be captured with a simple “did the right people benefit” question.

While I am not there yet, I am making progress. Using the wisdom of James Pennebaker from The Secret Life of Pronouns I was able to write a story point of view detector that seems to finally work. Not only does it tell what the story’s point of view is, it can also assign a confidence score to its prediction, as well as reliably detect stories that lack a dominant point of view (result is “none”),  or share two alternating points of view (result is “mixed”).

That’s what goes into any good algorithm. If asked to decide between A or B (the simplest choice), there are actually four possible answers: A, B,  Both, or Neither.

Storytelling: Seven Points of View

After many rounds of testing, I discovered 7 points of view:

This may come as a surprise to anyone who was taught about only three point’s of view (POV). Based on the evidence that people respond differently to these different points of view, they are distinct.

Emotionally Compelling: Mixed or “I” stories

The most powerful point of view if you want to tell an emotionally compelling story, according to The Secret Life of Pronouns is the “mixed” perspective, followed by first person singular (“I”) stories. “Mixed” perspectives alternate between two points of view. And after you realize this, it’s obvious. If you want people to connect with you, and find your point of view credible, you need to spend a little bit of time telling the story from their point of view.

What 98,447 stories can teach us

Below is a chart showing what fraction of stories are told from each of these perspectives for three large bodies of narratives. GlobalGiving requires that every project leader report back to donors four times a year for every project. The report is supposed to be informal, conversational, emotionally engaging blog-type writing. And since 2010 we’ve been collecting stories in East Africa written by regular citizens about some specific community effort they witnessed — the Storytelling Project.

Lastly, for the last two years I’ve been getting a “story of the day” by email from a project of my favorite Artist, Jonathan Harris of “I want you to want me” fame. His storytelling site, Cowbird.com, manually curates good stories from the thousands of submissions. Their 812 stories are a positive control group in this experiment, answering the question:

“From what point of view should an emotionally compelling story be told?”

It stands to reason that all of the 812 cowbird stories are good, and their point-of-view (pov) patterns are reflective of what makes for good storytelling as a rule. Let’s compare these three groups:

As you can see from the table, there are dramatic differences. A graph of this makes the differences clearer:

How POV affects story quality: Three major conclusions

First, 51% of Cowbird stories are first person singular (I, me, my, mine), compared to 4.6% of GG project reports and 7.8% of East African stories. If you want to reach people emotionally, only your own story will work. Instead of you telling his story, have him tell his own story with “I” pronouns.

Second, Not enough (only 1 in 300) GlobalGiving project reports are told from a mixed point view. About 4.9% of East African stories and 2.8% of Cowbird SotDs have a more complex, mixed, alternating point of view. Had these reports been written to better reflect the beneficiary’s viewpoint, they could have raised 50% more money from donors (see below).

Third, too many GlobalGiving project leaders have a “fourth person” pov perspective. “Fourth person” is my name for stories that lack any pronouns at all, or contain a lot of definite articles (a, an, the). They tend to focus on objects over people and relationships. Fourth person (in my algorithm) also uses more organization only jaron (such as the words “ngo”,”cbo”, and “foundation”) than pronouns. All of these make for reports that read like cold blooded reports and not warm, personal, emotionally compelling stories. And if you read on, you’ll see these report raise 30% less money.

Since the point of communication is to affect each other’s lives, we should drop the old style reports in favor or just telling the truth and being authentic. But changing your pronouns won’t make your story better, if it was never your story to begin with. You need to actually help people tell their own stories, and be a steward of their words. For too long we’ve let organizations harvest the words of others to further their (organizational) objectives, and this algorithm will finally allow me to out the worst of the bunch and force them to shape up.

Your English teacher mistaught you; get over it.

When we want to inspire, engage, comfort, challenge and connect with each other, we use short, personal, evocative writing, with a good deal of “I” words. Yet from an early age we are exposed to bad writing, reflecting outdated “beliefs” about what makes writing good. The evidence here shows that good writing is less “professional.”

Which world do you want to build today?  “Professionalized” language gave us global poverty, a financial crisis, and broken politics?

Creative and informal language gave us The Muppets, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and Doctor Who.

Follow-up conclusions:

Changing your point of view really DOES affect your ability to raise money with a project report

I took those project reports from thousands of GlobalGiving partner organizations and compared the dominant point of view in each report with the amount of donations that came from people clicking on the GIVE BUTTON in those reports. The results were striking:

Notes: N = 25,337 published reports. Data includes cases where nobody gave any money after reading reports (23% of total). While reports don’t generate a ton of revenue (50% of reports raised less than $100) $1,077,000 was raised between 2007 and 2014 in precisely this way. This data represents the best example of giving tied directly to feedback loops in international development that I know of.

The results show that the best POV ‘mixed’ is more than twice as effective as the most common POV ‘fourth':

Project reports with a “mixed” perspective raise 111% more money and get 160% more donations than reports with “fourth” org-centric point of view.

Some caveats: These are not true “controlled” experiments. Nobody forced these organizations to adopt a first or third person perspective. Nor did we randomize what donors saw, as a true researcher might do. It could be that people who are naturally better at raising money tend to choose to use pronouns differently from those who don’t. And it turns out that women write these reports 2:1 over men. And what people talk about has a big influence over how much money one can raise. Here’s an estimate of how project theme affects donor giving after they read a fresh report:

The smartest way to fix your point of view is to talk to others and share their stories, instead of only writing from your perspective. And Globalgiving has for years been helping organizations listen, act, learn better. In fact we’re giving away money to encourage organizations to do this.

The Gap

There is a huge gap between how most organizations speak and what donors respond to. The green line near the center shows what fraction of stories have each of 6 points of view. The blue and red lines represent more donations and more money raised from a “you”, “I” and “you and I” mixed perspective.

(2) Humans are not very good at determining a story’s point of view

In order to validate the accuracy of this algorithm, I ran 406 of the 813 Cowbird stories through an experiment on Crowdflower. Crowdflower is a distributed tasking site where you pay people a few pennies to do a bunch of simple tasks.

In my task, the person would read two Cowbird stories, select the point of view for each, and then choose which story was the more “emotionally compelling” one. The secret life of pronouns predicts that “mixed” perspectives and “I” stories are more compelling to readers than “you” | “we” | “he” | “they” stories. So I tested our data set and had three people do the test for each comparison. Inter-subject agreement is an important part of seeing whether this task is easy or hard for humans.

Now I know from reading Cowbird that most of the stories actually are “I” stories, and my algorithm predicted 51% of these stories to be first person singular as I expected to see. The “mixed” perspective was much lower – only about 2%. But these are very short stories, and switching perspective isn’t as easy in 100 words, so 2% sounded reasonable.

The results from 406 human story comparisons:

Q: Select the story’s point of view (POV) from these 6 choices:

“I” –FS 118 0.29 vs algorithm: 0.514
“we” –FP 100 0.25 vs algorithm: 0.07
“he” –TS 64 0.16 vs algorithm: 0.112
“they” –TP 79 0.19 vs algorithm: 0.033
“the org” or “it”–4th 35 0.09 vs algorithm: 0.108
“mixed” –mixed 10 0.02 vs algorithm: 0.028

• The humans were 40% LESS likely to choose first person singular than the algorithm, and three times MORE likely to assign first person plural to stories.
• Both humans and the algorithm agreed when assigning “mixed” and 4th person perspectives.
• Humans tended to want to assign stories to each POV more equally than a computer. (If given 6  choices, we seem to think that the stories SHOULD match up with categories equally. Same bias is seen on standardized tests.)
• These humans were not very reliable, because the humans only agreed with each other 11 out of 406 times. 2 out of 3 agreed 50% of the time on what the perspective was.

Q: Of these two, which story was more compelling?

Same result. They agreed with each other 36% of the time. If choosing randomly, they would agree with each other 33% of the time, so that confirms that these Crowdflower humans are really very random and not worth the $16 I paid to test this data set on them. Had I asked 5 interns to do this, I would have gotten more agreement, because they care about agreeing with each other more than the $0.05 I was paying these folks to do a simple (though enjoyable) task.

It also confirms that seeing a story’s point of view is not so easy. If it was trivial, they would have agreed with each other more. Agreeing on which of two stories is more emotionally compelling is much harder, and likely impossible for any algorithm well at predicting what humans like. Even “human algorithms” are terrible at doing it.

A good story is more a matter of taste than of process, but people DO give to projects more often when stories are told from the right point of view – the beneficiary’s.

BigML cluster analysis

Afterwards, I tried the new cluster analysis tool from BigML (who as of today allow you to analyze data sets below 16MB for free) These are the patterns that they found:

Click to enlarge

The largest cluster was reports written by men about education projects in Asia with a first person plural “we” perspective. The keywords in these reports are shown here:

Try it yourself!

I created a simple tool for anyone to use. Paste your text into the box and it will analyze your point of view.

At djotjog.com/c/report/.

Practicing what I preach

Old habits die hard. I ran my own algorithm against this blog post and it predicted that I am writing from a “fourth person” perspective with an 80 percent confidence rating.

OUCH! I soooo suck as a writer. Or so my computer tells me.

So I went back into this and changed some of my “you” and “we” statements to “I” statements and ran it again.

The Result: “fourth person”, 92% sure, 108 pronouns,  6.3% of text is pronouns

Pronoun counts by POV type:
[(‘fourth’, 40), (‘first singular’, 31), (‘second’, 17), (‘first plural’, 10), (‘third plural’, 7), (‘third singular’, 3)]

The reason why I failed? I used too many “its” and “these” and “those” and not enough “I”s in it.

Oh well. [I’m] Hitting the publishing button now.

:)

(Lower is better. i.e. Face = 2 and Google = 1)

That list is a little different than the typical who’s who lists for international development organizations. You won’t find BRAC or CHEMONICS or a whole host of UN agencies, or basically any organization that depends primarily on government support. This is a who’s who list of organizations that depend on the public for support.

The whole Holy Quran as a wordle

The Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of John

All sayings attributed to Jesus in Paul’s Letters

The Gospel of Mark

A while back I wrote a simple python script that would perform differential wordles (like I used in these two rape-prevention programs) but I lost it. If I rewrite it, you would be able to see an adjusted view of what these different stories emphasize about God, Allah, Jesus, etc.

Source: http://www.utoronto.ca/religion/synopsis/meta-6gv.htm

Or you can read my series on how the Passion Narrative relates to international development:

One: Empire – and the hierarchy of aid power

In the last half-century thousands of scientists have rigorously studied the causes and risk factors in heart disease, but a single longitudinal experiment has revealed more about this disease than any other approach.

In 1948, researchers began tracking health records from all participants in the town of Framingham, Massachusetts. This was an observational study; they did not formulate causal theories or test specific hypotheses, but simply let nature take its course and observed what happened.

In 1960, they found a link between smoking and heart disease. In 1961, they found a link with cholesterol. And in the coming decades, they also found correlations with obesity, exercise, high blood pressure, hypertension, stroke, diabetes—virtually everything that now matters to clinical treatment.

So why aren’t we in the philanthropy world copying this approach—observing what’s out there and looking for patterns over time?

As a neuroscientist, I have a confession to make. My type have been responsible for propagating a lie they still teach in schools, that scientists always devise a hypothesis and test it in controlled experiments. This is simply not true. The human genome project mapped 3 billion base pairs before understanding what variation in the genetic code meant. 

The drugs you take were “discovered” in massive drug discovery libraries using a screening process that quickly conducts millions of tests, rather than hypothesizing. 

My point is that complex problems cannot be understood from a pre-defined framework; what matters emerges most efficiently from open-ended data collection that is later organised and then studied.

We already create more information every two days than existed in the first two millennia of human civilization, and this pace is accelerating. However, the rate with which we convert all this “information” into useful “knowledge” is slowing down.

It was with this problem in mind that we started the GlobalGiving Storytelling project. We needed to dissociate two requirements: to collect rich information about development in a flexible, easily re-structurable way, and to turn these stories into data so we can interpret and contextualize what we see. We’ve come up with a survey design tool which you can use to do a custom evaluation and compare your results to stories told by others, with the overall aim of helping everyone share knowledge and improve project design. The  approach will save you time but it will also enable you to get more back than you could ever put in.

So why do we use storytelling, you wonder? It turns out that managing this process with metrics, indicators, spreadsheets, and a numbers-only mindset is far more difficult and time-consuming. Narratives and a few survey questions are sufficient to see common patterns emerge from many perspectives.

Continue reading on ThinkNPC…

Marc Maxson is an innovation consultant with Globalgiving, where he manages their global storytelling project. Previously, he worked as a PhD Neuroscientist and did Fulbright research on the impact of the internet on rural education in West Africa. He writes about evolution and international development at chewychunks.wordpress.com

They are on a mission:

Only 13% of engineers are women and they believe that women innovators are our greatest untapped resource. 

They have a theory of change:

We inspire girls during a critical period, between age 6 and 13, and allow them to realize for themselves that building, creating, and owning their own ideas is what it means to be a girl.

Their latest ad campaign continues their message more thoughtfully:

(Note that begins as a parody of a 1980s anti-drug commercial, and so their ads are also targeting parents)

How is GoldieBlox “for” girls? (From their website)

Our founder, Debbie, spent a year researching gender differences to develop a construction toy that went deeper than just “making it pink” to appeal to girls. She read countless articles on the female brain, cognitive development and children’s play patterns. She interviewed parents, educators, neuroscientists and STEM experts. Most importantly, she played with hundreds of kids. Her big “aha”? Girls have strong verbal skills. They love stories and characters. They aren’t as interested in building for the sake of building; they want to know why. GoldieBlox stories replace the 1-2-3 instruction manual and provide narrative-based building, centered around a role model character who solves problems by building machines. Goldie’s stories relate to girls’ lives, have a sense of humor and make engineering fun.

That was an “aha!” statement for me. “Finally, something I can sink my teeth into!” I thought. So building blocks can be thought of as a storytelling tool, like the magic cards I made earlier. I know about character driven stories, and putting conflict into scenes to move it along and draw in the audience.

And in a way, GoldieBlox is using a conflict narrative to draw in their audience – girls. What a brilliant way to get girls on board, by reminding them from age 6 onwards that playing with these toys is an act of defiance against gender stereotypes.

And another company, play-i, offers a complementary approach to the same goal, for a younger audience:

https://www.play-i.com/

I just wished they had similar toys for the teenage crowd? What will these Goldie girls do when they outgrow their blocks? Perhaps this?

http://python4kids.wordpress.com/

A list of websites that receive information from weather.com are shown on the left. About half are red and crossed out because collusion (this chrome plugin) blocked their access.

As you browse, collusion creates a network map showing how the different sites you visit talk to each other. You can hover over any node in the network to see a site’s connections and automatically block the transmission of data to known tracking sites like Google ad services, Doubleclick.net, etc. As you sift through your browsing’s connections, it quickly becomes clear that not all sites are created equal when it comes to tracking your metadata.

Our insight was that this tool could serve another purpose. You see, Nick and I are responsible for building up GlobalGiving’s database on organizational behavior and curiousity. This is used to measure each organization’s performance in a real-time, comprehensive way. If we could sort all organizations in the world into “good” and “bad” groups based on their habits, such as being responsive to the community they serve, demonstrating a tendency to learn from mistakes and remember what they’ve tried before (knowledge management), or their making effective use of free performance tools in their daily work (agility), we could help more money reach better NGOs, and ultimately improve more lives with the same amount of resources.

This is the same as saying “we’re going to make the whole aid world more efficient,” but when we say it, we mean it – because we have a way to do what we say. In the “big data” era, information will be used to make thousands of little evidence-based decisions that will improve the system overall.

But on to specifics. What do organizations’ websites reveal about their agility? A lot.

Look at these organization websites:

Each of these have hundred-million-dollar budgets. So how much effort to they make to optimize learning about visitors to their homepages?

I see a correlation between how much the organization focuses on public donations (versus government or private support) and whether they use free analysis software, such as google analytics. Of the ten organizations shown above (which are close to a top ten list of worldwide organizations by size) only Save the Children, Care, and World Vision made a serious effort to learn from their website traffic. Five our of ten at least have some kind of basic (free) analytics (google-analytics and/or google tag manager).

For the other half that do not, it is telling. These organizations don’t really need public support to survive, and are also (in my opinion) less accountable to community feedback because they are “too big to fail” in the aid world:

• World Bank
• BRAC
• MSF
• United Way
• Heifer International

Types of 3rd party data collection sites

Analysis (curiosity)

• google-analytics.com
• GoogleTagManager
• kissmetrics
• vmmpxl – quantcast web traffic demographics
• mxpnl — mixpanel is like google analytics, but you pay for it and it offers more features

Visualization or dissemination

• mapbox
• uservoice.com
• chartbeat.com
• openlayers

Marketing

• anything in red (advertising)
• youtube

Faster web loading and cloud data 

• amazonws
• visualwebsiteoptimizer
• rackcdn — rackspace cloud storage

Social Media Plugins

• twimg — twitter
• facebook

Design iteration and testing (curiosity)

• optimizely
• omniture

For comparison, I took snapshots of GlobalGiving and various other online giving marketplaces or organizations we partner with:

Clearly, all of these organizations take their web traffic seriously. Each of GlobalGiving, DonorsChoose, Kiva, BetterPlace, and Razoo uses at least one analytics tool, one cloud hosting tool to speed up website load times, and many use an iterative design and testing tool like optimizely.

The surprise here is that GiveDirectly (the recent darling of the aid world and the media world) does nothing to learn about their traffic. It makes me question how much of a learning focus their organization has internally.

And that is what this is all about. I believe that organizations stamp an imprint of their internal learning on their external websites.

Curious, learning, experimenting organizations use web-based tools that help them achieve their goals (and leave a trace for us to track).

Large bureaucratic “stick-in-the-mud” organizations do not use any of these tools, leave no trace of their learning, and thus are probably not focused on learning.

Web footprints for a few randomly chosen GlobalGiving partner orgs

These organizations are much smaller than the ones listed above, but they still use more learning tools than even the world bank or BRAC uses, ergo they are probably learning more with fewer resources in my assessment:

Five out of seven local GlobalGiving partner organizations use google analytics. 

That’s a small sample, but a larger fraction of the group are still using more tools to learn about web traffic than the million dollar orgs.

These are just screen shots to show that there is useful data out there. Once you realize that the tools exist to ask old questions in a new (and more efficient) way, you simply need to write a little code to gather all the information. This will be my take home message at the Georgetown University master’s program class I’m teaching this week:

Graduate School should help you learn how to ask better questions and to recognize when the status quo of information is insufficient to fix the problem.

We live in a world that clings to the “myth of evidence”‘: We think our leaders make decisions based on weighing evidence, but they do not. They never have. Throughout history they have made instead made experience-based decisions, limited by their own wisdom and prior failures. This is about to change.

Decisions used to be made using tiny scraps of information, because that is all that was available. But this decade is the turning point when evidence becomes cheaper to aggregate and interpret than the cost of making decisions without it. Some giants will fall and others will rise to take their places, all because they understand the new calculus of “big data.”

And when the dust clears, a new kind of democracy will be possible* where in the past is was merely theoretical: policy decisions will reflect all peoples’ opinions where choices are a matter of preference, or based on sound science and observing human behavior on a macro scale (like Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory idea) where policy depends on truth rather than preference.

(though this kind of democracy will be made possible, it will almost certainly be tried somewhere outside of North America or Europe first. My guess: somewhere in the middle east where people want real democracy)

couchsurfing marc bike large

It needed a new lower bracket, which costs $10 (and several hours) to replace. So I decided to buy a new version of the same bike. Huffy.com referred me to Target.com as the only place that would sell the same one, and after realizing that a new bike would only cost $148 (including taxes and free shipping to my door, worth $70), it took no time to decide.

Surveys waste our time

After taking just 1 minute to complete the  e-commerce I volunteered to waste 10 more minutes on a 50-question customer satisfaction survey. It was 95% a waste of time because they didn’t ask the right questions. They used traditional survey techniques to codify buyer patterns and reduce the online buying experience into a set of variables with 3 to 5 possible answers. They asked such things as, “was the site layout helpful?” and “were you able to use our search feature to reduce the choices?” and “did you buy something that was only available in our stores?” and “how likely are you to shop online at target.com again?”

The one question they should have asked but didn’t was:

What was the main reason you bought the product?

And this should have been open text. I would have written the whole story very briefly:

I wanted a bike that only target sells.  I followed a linked from Huffy, the manufacturer. You offered free shipping and a reasonable price.

And if there was a second question, it would have captured even more of the story without the 50 questions:

Q: We noticed your order has a special discount of $70. How much did this offer affect your purchasing decision?

A: A lot. That was a 40% discount, and I get the bike delivered to my door in two days.

Like a lot of complex data “systems” – people focus on the wrong questions and discount the emormous value of meta data.

• Target’s tech department already knew that I came from Huffy.com.
• Their tech team also knew how much of a discount they offered me (on my receipt).
• But the marketing department didn’t get this information. They didn’t use it. They didn’t ask what impact my being referred from Huffy and offering the discount had on my behavior. Instead they played 50 questions.

The real story was lost in the cracks in between two departments inside Target corporation. They wasted my time and missed the story.

Big data is all about making connections among the data you already have. I am spending this year on a storytelling project in the hopes that do-gooder organizations can act smarter than Target by starting with the obvious open-ended questions, mashing in existing knowledge, and learning more, faster.

Read an older story about “the bike“.

Case #1

Share an experience where you had to work with someone different from yourself. 

Talk about a time when a person or organization tried to help someone or change something in your community.

Case #2

Case #3

th…

You might answer therapist, but you’re more likely to answer

“the”

That is a very common word, and easily predictable. Hence, the “the” in this post doesn’t carry much information. Certainly a lot less than the word “Theroux” – who might mean a specific person, like Novelist Paul Theroux.

The most information dense communication would be  string of random characters. You cannot predict the next character from the previous one. But practically speaking, a bunch of random letters are meaningless.

One reason why the storytelling project can better inform the world is because it allows more information to flow from communities, and provides a better way to filter out the noise and help people find the knowledge in all that information. Instead of this:

It allows this:

Normally, too much information is a problem. Evaluators design narrow, specific surveys with tightly defined questions because they want the most knowledge to come out of the least information entered in. They seek to achieve a 1:1 information:knowledge conversion. The top diagram represents the way evaluators collect information with community surveys.

But if you have better filtering tools, you can instead maximize the information flow and rely on better filters to control what pieces of this information is meaningful. You can tolerate noise. You can fetch only the knowledge you need from a ton of information. But the next person with a different need can also retrieve the knowledge he needs. Google search does for the web, and the framingham heart study did this for medical risk factors. So why hasn’t anyone succeeded in doing this for poverty and social problems?

This would allow us to learn without starting over each time. Suddenly one set of information has two uses, and eventually hundreds of users – all because the information “firehose” was opened and the filtering was good.

This is smarter design. Maximum information input plus reasonably good filtering yields more knowledge to more people.

I encourage you to go back and read examples I posted on the knowledge we’ve been able to extract from stories with good relevance filtering.

How does it work?

People tell a lot of stories, and the words they use are correlated with the topics they choose. So if the correlation is strong enough, a computer algorithm can correctly “guess” the topic the person would have chosen. The guess is based on (1) generating a dictionary of words and their frequency of use in stories a human has assigned to one of ten topics then (2) scoring a test story by adding up the relevance of each word in that story to the topic, based on that topic dictionary.

The rigorous way to do this is set aside 10-20% of the data to test the algorithm and use the rest to “train” it, then run the algorithm on the test set to estimate how likely it will be to choose the correct topic from among these 10 choices:

I was surprised to see that the reliability of this approach depends on which topic you mean:

Fetched 19343 records, 1 fields, with 8010659 characters. Conn: Closed food
Fetched 15743 records, 1 fields, with 6517898 characters. Conn: Closed sec
Fetched 22009 records, 1 fields, with 9192587 characters. Conn: Closed fam
Fetched 19246 records, 1 fields, with 8186335 characters. Conn: Closed fre
Fetched 24335 records, 1 fields, with 10342187 characters. Conn: Closed phy
Fetched 30365 records, 1 fields, with 12079326 characters. Conn: Closed know
Fetched 16717 records, 1 fields, with 6985293 characters. Conn: Closed self
Fetched 8678 records, 1 fields, with 3274556 characters. Conn: Closed resp
Fetched 14378 records, 1 fields, with 5838550 characters. Conn: Closed cre
Fetched 5633 records, 1 fields, with 2050559 characters. Conn: Closed fun

Accuracy rates (percent match between the algorithm and what people choose)
{'kno': 95.7, 
'fre': 6.2, 
'res': 67.5, 
'cre': 16.8, 
'phy': 85.5, 
'sec': 2.8, 
'fam': 47.2,
'fun': 67.2, 
'slf': 0.4, 
'foo': 6.1}

That means that I can accurately predict stories about “knowledge” 96% of the time, but only 2.8% correct for “security” stories. Correlation with number of stories tagged with a topic is low. Fun is a seldom used topic, but matches with 67% accuracy;  self-esteem is 0nly 0.4% accurate, but tagged in 3X the number of stories that fun was.

Next I thought, “maybe the most common words in each reference dictionary are too similar among all 10 topics.” I noticed the top words are similar in many of the 10 topics. Words like ‘school’, ‘organization’, and ‘community’ are present in all stories, and so offer no differentiating ability. I should remove them.

creativity [(‘organization’, 5200.40795559667), (‘school’, 3543.777062566668), (‘community’,
3248.152150989258), (‘child’, 2862.176422375521), (‘day’, 1558.2406172604306), (‘helped’,
1528.985994397759), (‘village’, 1518.7758112094393), (‘area’, 1459.6429306441655), (‘organisation’,
1431.8204927035933), (‘aid’, 1339.7938144329896),…]

security [(‘organisation’, 1797.8478738427743), (‘helped’, 839.5979011322839), (‘hiv’,
758.4263051629651), (‘pupil’, 757.4545341769011), (‘school’, 749.9667855960569), (‘month’,
731.5803097814555), (‘provides’, 578.9633375474084), (“i’am”, 544.4925373134329), (‘child’,
522.5630079912575), (‘business’, 519.3864168618267), (‘standard’, 480.0096525096525), (‘money’,
464.8109119558795), (‘aid’, 460.0247422680413), (‘just’, 455.86785009861933), (‘happy’,
422.7314842729374), (‘mzesa’, 405.6), (‘thanks’, 402.25015556938394), (‘gulu’, 395.3125763125763), …]

knowledge [(‘child’, 36082.86353391162), (‘school’, 33818.189588161),
(‘community’, 32907.04868545692), (‘helped’, 32814.49078786444),
(‘organisation’, 32659.84693237094), (‘group’, 18383.11439114391), (‘life’, 16962.78238448316), (‘woman’, 14369.672232361278), (‘money’, 14049.368721686034),
(‘good’,13293.343451864701), (‘youth’, 13202.397977609246), (‘food’, 12707.99451382372), (‘living’,
12395.504079003864), (‘poor’, 12331.987821235045), (‘parent’, 11596.92557475659),
(‘education’, 11534.22393346681), (‘aid’, 11186.01649484536), …]

When you exclude all words that are in the 60th percentile of frequency or above, you get the opposite pattern for accuracy:

{'kno': 0.8,
'fre': 51.8,
'res': 2.6,
'cre': 24.4,
'phy': 0.8,
'sec': 79.8,
'fam': 2.9,
'fun': 3.3,
'slf': 97.3,
'foo': 59.1}

Well that won’t do either. So I decided I needed to get serious. Oddly in python, that means writing a whopping five more lines of code instead of just the usual single line of code to do something amazing like “take all the words in all dictionaries and drop the words that are present at the 60th percentile or greater.”

Python code typically looks like this:

    def inall(key,topic_dicts):
        # returns True/False if a key is present in all the dicts of topic_dicts
        in_all = 0
        for k,v in topic_dicts.items():
            if key in v:
                in_all += 1
        if len(topic_dicts) == in_all: #if every dictionary has the word, these will match.
            return True
        else:
            return False
        alt_topic_dicts[k] = {x:y for x,y in v.items() if inall(x,topic_dicts) == False}

On my third try, I decided to exclude any words that are present in all 10 topics from each of the 10 respective topic (word:frequency) dictionaries. It took 75 seconds to rerun all the analysis, and the accuracy was much better:

{'kno': 86.7,
'fre': 83.8,
'res': 73.1,
'cre': 57.3,
'phy': 64.8,
'sec': 58.9,
'fam': 62.4,
'fun': 43.2,
'slf': 61.1,
'foo': 60.8}


So with the exception of stories with the topic “fun,” I can use this simple algorithm to predict the topic of a story (from a list of ten topics representing the hierarchy of human needs) correctly over 50% of the time.  The probability of randomly picking the right topic would be one in ten — 10% success — so I’m quite happy with this result.

But is 65% accuracy (on average) “good”?

In 2009 we ran this experiment with humans. This what what storytellers chose:

And this is what human “experts” predicted:

When we asked 65 aid experts to pick the top 6 out of 12 topics in that survey question, and rank-order them, only one of out 65 got #1 correct! And later, he admitted in email that he just guessed. Overall, people performed worse than chance (8%) at this task, because they were biased by what they thought the main topics would be for everyone.

So in that context, this algorithm does surprisingly well, and much better than humans for this specific task.

By another measure, in the sense of Shannon Information Theory, it provides 3X to 6X more information than we would have about the story had we not included this new “meta data.” The exact number is tricky to calculate (at 3am) because storytellers were asked to choose 3 of 10 topics on the form and if the algorithm’s #1 choice is in the top 3, then I count that as a hit. A rigorous result would only count cases where all three topics matched the human’s choice as correct. That’s a bit more involved that what I care about. This does bring up an interesting point about surveys. Most questions only allow for one right answer on forms, and we required 3 of 10 answers. It makes it easier for the algorithm to “learn” how to be mostly right because each story has multiple topics that overlap. Good to think about doing this on more surveys in the future Big Data Era.

The Big Idea Behind Big Data

This topic prediction approach works because of some very simple math and a huge, rather complete amount of empirical data (57,000 stories about the types of things people talk about when they describe community efforts in East Africa). International Development suffers from having the smallest and most disconnected data systems on Earth. This is a rather large training data set, where poverty is concerned. But once you have this, you can do a lot more with it – such as categorize future narratives along a hierarchy of needs with about 65% accuracy – without having to collect more data and waste more peoples’ time.

Learning can happen faster.

People can take action quicker.

It’s not a replacement for listening, but it can aid our understanding.

And importantly, this approach can work with other questions that we included in our survey.

Read more: The future of big data is quasi-unstructured

Which was quoted in this wired blog: The growing importance of natural language processing

This is the kind of thing described in the book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns.”

Postscript

Predicting GlobalGiving Project Report Topics

I extended this test by applying the ten topic dictionaries to a totally new set of narratives: 24,392 project reports on GlobalGiving from 2006-2013. All of these are about real project work, though the words people use are different. According to these topic dictionaries, the breakdown of topics among the GlobalGiving project reports is as follows:

Sum of top three assign topics:

{'knowledge': 24045,
'freedom': 33,
'respect': 19467,
'creativity': 181,
'physical needs': 18675,
'security': 24,
'family': 1035,
'fun': 9689,
'self-esteem': 10,
'food & shelter': 17}

Clearly, this method does not assign topics to updates in the same proportion that people assigned these topics to their stories. This could be because the narrative words are quite different for the subjects that are underrepresented. These scores are both a measure of how similar the language (words) are between reports and stories on a topic, as well as a measure of how many report contain these topics.

Organizations probably use very different language to describe security, freedom, self-esteem, and food-shelter projects on GlobalGiving from the way people talk about them in stories.

Knowledge (education) and physical needs are described similarly in both places.

Respect is overrepresented in project-speak. There is no corresponding project theme on GlobalGiving, although “women” and “children” projects are the largest category on the site.

Food & shelter is described in terms of disaster relief on GlobalGiving, but appears more in the context of poverty in stories.

Freedom in stories maps to human rights and democracy projects on GlobalGiving.

Coherence between story role and predicted story point of view based on pronoun use

In general, people use “I” and “me” in stories where they were affected or played an active part. And they use less personal pronouns in observer stories:

Fetched 39714 records, 1 fields, with 15281132 characters.
'Saw it happen','Heard about it happening'
third plural 39.1%
first plural 20.4%
third singular 17.5%
fourth 17.1%
first singular 5.9%
Fetched 13346 records, 1 fields, with 6136291 characters.
'Was affected by what happened'
first singular 29.3%
first plural 24.1%
third plural 22.9%
third singular 12.5%
fourth 11.2%
Fetched 7756 records, 1 fields, with 3468508 characters.
'Helped make it happen'
third plural 26.4%
first plural 23.7%
first singular 18.8%
third singular 17.3%
fourth 13.8%

“Fourth POV” is my short hand for when stories contain more organization words than pronouns. They are impersonal and lacking in details. More like press releases. But luckily, not too common overall.

This analysis continues elsewhere: It turns out, teller a story from a different point of view can make a project report more compelling, leading to more donations.

My hope is that by making it easy to explore the rich data we already have, we encourage project leaders, community activists, entrepreneurs, researchers, and other curious globally-minded people to think about our world, and continuously refine their ideas:

This behavior is the essence of a knowledge feedback loop; you learn things that help you, so you keep trying to learn more. As the diagram also shows, the tool requires your own curiosity, ideas, and sweat to work.

As a tool builder, I can help by creating a simpler interface and the means to manage knowledge. I have started baking in controls that hide data when the quality is poor, so that you can trust what you see. Future upgrades will allow users to import any data set from a spreadsheet (CSV), google spreadsheet, or RSS. And more advanced statistics are coming. The system is already extensible, for those who are thoughtful and creative in how they filter stories.

But this tool will only change projects — and improve lives — when the people who use it are free to work within their organizations in a true idea-experiment-cycle:

As of today, I’m am happy to announce that everything one needs for the analysis and experiment parts of the loop is available online, for free, and has been extensively tested:

We’re just looking for the missing ingredients – thoughtfulness and curiosity – that only you can provide. If you work for an organization, you should sign up for a training program that will not only help you “jump tracks” onto the innovation-cycle one shown here, but might also help you win more funding grants:

 Apply to the storytelling-grantwriting programme

Owen Barder recently wrote an essay which underscores the importance of putting more tools like these into the hands of those who will change the world, because “solutions” cannot be directly copied. They must be reinvented for each local context:

Where it is not possible to replicate success directly, it may be possible to support systems to enable them evolve more rapidly and more surely towards the desired goals. – Owen Barder

“Evolve” is precisely the right word, as I’ve explained previously. If you’re looking for ways to boost the rate that your organization learns, you may find these next illustrations inspiring.

This approach is about applying simple rules to semi-structured content, with complex consequences. The compare tool allows you to search for two collections of stories. You “build” a collection by choosing which answers to questions matter to you, and which words in stories people share are relevant to your idea.

Compare

Example: Female Circumcision vs Female Genital Mutilation FGM

There is an organization in Kisii, Kenya that rescues girls from families and gives them a home in a boarding school, so that they can escape female genital mutilation (FGM). The language they use is very different from the language that Kisii tribe members use to describe the same thing.

On the left: stories about “female circumcision” excluding the word “hiv.”(male circumcision has been shown to reduce HIV infection rates, so I’ve excluded those stories)

On the right: “genital mutilation” or FGM:

The size of the people represent the proportion of stories that come from those demographic groups. The color (red-yellow-green) represents how negative or positive stories were compared to what we expected (based on all stories collected). This is how you read it:

The teenage boy icon is larger because they are more likely to talk about “female circumcision”; the teen woman icon is smaller because they are less likely. No girl icon appears on the left because no girls used those words at all. Some girls did talk about FGM, and these icons are red because these stories are associated with negative emotions. (We asked them how they felt about the story they told and they checked the box for a negative emotion):

Upon merging (dividing left by the right), you see that women and men have very different perspectives on the issue.

Men are very positive about “circumcision” whereas women are negative. The women icon is smaller, because women are more likely to talk about FGM and not “cicumcision.” And looking back at the demographics that were merged, men were less likely to talk about this than some other topic. It seems to be unimportant to older men and women, and more important to younger people.

How is this useful? If you are Kakenya’s Dream, you could use this in a grant to underscore just how divided the community is about FGM. It would also be fair to include narratives from those who vehemently oppose your work, so you can talk about your efforts to reconcile “tradition” with the rights of women.

While I’m at it, why don’t we just broaden our search and see how people talk about those two ideas? I’ve searched for two new collections. On the top, stories with  (women and rights) or (FGM or mutilation). And on the bottom: (tribal tradition ethnic kisii) and “practice”:

Explore narratives with bubble plots

The bubble plot tool puts all the words that get used “enough” into bubbles and sorts them up or down, depending on how often they tend to appear in either the top or the bottom collection. Words more likely to appear in the overall 57,220 stories are excluded. Common two-word phrases (“human rights”) also appear and gobble up the individual words (“human” and “rights”).

Bubbles are more like the tea leaves of understanding people and cultures. Sometimes the patterns are meaningless, and sometimes they offer deep insights. It is up to the reader to decide what to focus on, but the basic computer filtering ensures that anything you see appeared in a good portion of the stories. When you understand what you are looking at with the basic bubble plots, click the [CUSTOMIZE] button next to the bubble button and change how it calculates and displays patterns. Like with the compare tool, I tried to hide the full barrage of options. This is a new way to interact with data, and it may take an hour of playing iteratively before you can really get the most out of it.

So what do these bubble say about women’s rights vs traditional, tribal practices? Well for starters, women’s rights are human rights (to those who talk about it) and female circumcision is NOT a part of it. Also – the other side is very concerned about HIV/AIDS, and stories about “practices” include specific mention of “old men,” “early marriages,” and “young girls.” So I would venture to say that any successful program needs to deal with the practice of old men marrying young girls under the guise of “tradition” head on to be effective. Rescuing girls from homes may not do much to improve their lives if they later return to the village and are forced into marriage to old men.

Example: What is “food security,” really?

By comparing stories with the NGO speak “food security” against a much larger collection of farm-grow-plant stories, we see who talks about it, and what words they use:

Adult women talk are more likely to about food security. The topics generally are more positive than the typical stories. Below: words above the dividing line are more likely to appear in stories about “food security” than other stories about farming, growing, or planting.

What do girls dream about, hope for, or want?

By searching the texts for phrases “I dream” “I hope” or “I want” and then splitting left/right by female-male, you can see…

Girls are much more likely to frame their aspirations in a “if I work had… then…” mindset than are males. (Words above the line are more often in female-narratives; below = male centric words). Boys talked about World Vision much more. And both sexes talked about education and starting a business equally (bubbles on the line).

Taking a broader step, you can see cognitive patterns change in women throughout life in rather interesting ways:

In stories where women talk about “hope” and use at least one thinking word, they tend to be more negative than women who hope for things without thinking much about it. As women get older, stories of hope are more likely to be negative, but especially so if they have also thought and written about examining it.

The author of the book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, finds a similar pattern as we see here – critical thinkers are more negative about the events:

But the other trend is something unique to our international development storytelling: People become less likely to describe a story with introspection as they age. I’ve speculated this is because government and civil society don’t listen.

Returning to the “hope, dream, want” collection – after you merge both collections, divinding patterns on the left by those on the right –  fun, freedom, and respect are the talked about more by women than men. And whereas women are more positive in their stories tagged with fun and freedom than men, respect is neutral. From the two stand-alone data sets (upper left and upper right) it is clear that these aspirational stories tend to be more negative than the typical East African story collected.

School Uniforms in Busia

Innovations for poverty action ran a randomized controlled trial in Busia a decade ago, proving that providing school uniforms improves school outcomes and is more cost effective than school fees. Looking only at stories from Busia and comparing “uniforms” stories to “school” stories (it will automatically remove overlapping stories from the benchmark for you), we see:

Teen women talk about uniforms positively, but younger girls are slightly negative, compared to stories from them about school. Adult women are also negative, and men 17-30 do not talk about uniforms at all. The topic analysis shows that uniform stories are much more about security, and less about knowledge (the books are smaller). Looking at Busia, then Kenya, then East Africa – I find that uniforms are a much less talked about problem than school fees.

Point of view: When ” I ” go to school

Words above the line come from stories that mention “school” and include first person words, such as “I” or “my”. Below: a random selection of school stories. Note how the top is about who the person has to thank for education (mother, father, god, family) and include a lot of positive words. Below, impersonal groups appear (orphans, students, village, pupils, schools, youth, teachers, needy, girls). “I” stories are much richer (higher quality data) because they can teach us more from specific anecdotes than the generalized observations of the stories below the line.

Analyzing Tip: search for ” I ” instead of just “I” so that djotjog.com/compare/ finds the space before and after the “I”. Otherwise, all stories containing a word with an “i” in them would be included.

When you look across two of these examples (people who are thoughtful and introspective in their stories vs those who tell a school story from their own perspective, we achieve nearly opposite patterns in what is positive and negative:

Children (especially boys) are more likely to ask “why” in a story about anything, and these stories are always more negative. Telling a story about school and putting yourself in the story is typical neutral. But when it comes to stories about the topic of respect, both groups are more positive than the rest.

Program-specific benchmarking

The next four examples use stories about specific organizations or projects and compare them to their respective issues.

• The Mrembo project was designed to train adolescent girls about life skills and avoid teen pregnancy and early marriage. It eventually focused on preventing sexual assault and rape because of the storytelling project.
• Tysa is a youth-sports organization. Looking at stories about them compare to their benchmark (youth sports stories), they do a lot more to pay school fees, target young girls more, and work with parents more.
• Retrak is an organization that works with street children in Kampala, Uganda. These stories show that family problems are a major influence in why kids run away.
• Comparing the “Street children” stories to a random sample, we see what is least related in all of development: water, health, HIVAIDS, development, business, and women. All these other issues come up more often in stories NOT about street children.

Extensibility

Extensibility is the degree to which an existing system can accommodate new features with a minimum of changes. It’s a word that never escapes the lips of monitoring and evaluation experts, because evaluations rarely boast this feature (By rarely I mean, never, period. Until now). Not that that they couldn’t, mind you – it just requires reworking the way we gather evidence and rethinking the way we organize it.

I made these tools extremely flexible, both in how data gets in and how we pull insights out because it is much easier to innovate by changing your own world than to wait for others to change theirs. But enough philosophizing. Here are examples of new, meaningful ways to interpret story data that are as powerful as if we’d asked users more survey questions. In every case, you can simply cut and paste the “how to ask it” text into the story text search box, and it is as if you are filtering by answers to the question in the “question” column. You can combine them with specific topics (i.e. (“thank you” “to thank” ) and school):

My “Claimer” (e.g. the opposite of a disclaimer)

If this kind of analysis seems too abstract to be useful in international development, I’d caution you to try using community feedback to think about the root causes of the problem before jumping to the conclusion that by measuring the countable goods and services delivered better (the “outcomes”), we solve the problem. Today you can study the root causes much easier than ever before, and our understanding of the problem is ultimately going to be the less complex part of the problem to “fix.” As Anais Nin says,

We don’t see things as they are…

…we see things as WE are.

Outcomes vs monitoring: While the logistics of every intervention requires a quantitative measurement and real-time tracking approach, this is not that. USPS, UPS, and FedEx are masters of logistics, but they can’t tell you what to buy your mother for Christmas. This is a tool to understand your mother.

Impact evaluations answer the question, “what would have happened if we did nothing?” and  “What tangible improvements with we make?” This also, is not that. It doesn’t want to be that. Take education, for example. If educators applied the “impact question” they would ask, “how will this lesson plan change a student’s income 25 years from now? How will it make them more likely to vote, to volunteer, to avoid breaking the law, or cheat on their taxes?” This is a performance monitoring system, with aspirations to be a real-time feedback loop system between citizens and civil society/government/corporations/media. I take my lessons from educators who learned long ago that the “impact question” cannot be answered quick enough to provide course-correction (pun intended). Instead, they ask, “what are students retaining from this lesson plan?” and “can they apply what they learned today to real world problems tomorrow?”

Yeah, we’re doing that too. This is part of a larger program GlobalGiving is launching next month to provide all of our partner organizations with real-time feedback on their performance. Specifically, how well they listen, act, and learn in cycles as they do the work they are already doing. By interacting with a website (globalgiving.org) for a few years, they generate a behavioral profile that they can learn from, especially when benchmarked against similar organizations.

If the aggregate-filter-contexualize-benchmark-visualize features of that system resemble this system, it’s because I helped to create both. I think these may become the future steps of all big data learning feedback systems, but what do I know? We in the aid world are still talking about samples in the hundreds when corporations are talking about the coming brontobyte era – where we archive more data each day than we created in past 2000 years. Data, mind you, is not knowledge. You need to aggregate-filter-contextualize-benchmark-visualize it before you can listen, act, and learn from it.

Better narratives are simply better data: The problems in international development are going be an order of magnitude easier to solve if we have richer data. To get it, simply (1) Ask people, on a large scale, what they want. (2) Demand that they get involved in the process if they want it. Many will volunteer to improve their own lives. (3) Work with them to make sense of their own world, and fix the work being done “to them” and not “for them.” (4) When get it, you’ll “get it.”

This iterative approach requires more aggregation and less structure in the data itself. My next batch of tools released will support that need exactly.

Quality control: When working with narratives, “quality control” is not as hard as you think – but you need to follow the rules.

1. Collect enough: Minimum viable sample size seems to be around 100 stories (when all answer the same prompting question). Collections of stories can be used to build a meta-narrative (and are viable for statistical significance testing), whereas individual stories can only be trusted as anecdotal evidence to support an idea.
2. Calculate statistical power: Power is the chance of seeing a difference, if there is a difference there to see, and nobody pays attention to it enough. Power is related to sample diversity. Did you get enough independent sources? If you think this is “staff work” and not “community work” then you will fail. There are no experts you can outsource the evaluation to. You must engage your community for it to work. Future tool upgrades will auto-calculate the “statistical power” of collections for you. When you survey both the community and your organization’s beneficiaries you will have more power to detect patterns.
3. Diversity makes it a meta analysis: The tool tells you how many scribes, storytellers, organizations, and locations are represented in each story collection you build with djotjog.com/compare/. Future versions will have the power to calculate meta analyses, with the power to provide results as rigorous as randomized controlled trials, if you have the power in your sample to detect differences, but without depriving people of what they deserve. In the school classroom example, to truly measure the impact of education, you would need to randomize the classroom and deny half the class an education, just to prove that it matters. We can’t do that. Instead, we have to aggregate real world data and look for natural experiments, such as comparing the thousands of narratives of people already denied an education to those who got the opportunity. It’s not as rigorous, but it will reveal the same answer. The way we “control for other factors” is to have a colossal sample of narratives so that these other factors are in the story but differences in them cancel out. This is the future. And the greater the diversity of sources, the more likely any differences are to be real, robust, valid predictors on a vast scale.
4. “Ahem, they can see your raw data”: Because the data is public, we can check claims people make against their data in minutes. Wildly speculative claims will be easy to refute. And smart advocates will make more public use of the data in their arguments and reasoning to lend credibility to their claims in a trackable way. It’s like “open-sourcing” the evidence-based-decision-making of the aid world (not that I actually think they make evidence-based decisions, but now they can stop pretending and start attending to the needs, opinions, and insights of citizens.)

Why this is better:

1. Easier to manage than “quantitative” indicators: Collections are extensible, aggregatable, and comparable.
2. We can detect and correct bias with narratives, as explained in The Secret Life of Pronouns (James Pennebaker).
3. Meta analyses with statistical “power” (Frank L Schmidt).
4. Emergence: narratives and brief surveys provide “enough”.
5. Focused on listening and collecting multiple perspectives.

http://www.how-matters.org/2014/02/21/using-storytelling-to-discover-why-aid-projects-so-often-fail/

I highly recommend you leave my blog and visit how-matters to read it :)

– Marc

This will blow your mind: As people get older, they become less introspective in the stories they tell, asking “why” less and less.

Build your own storytelling project

The curious aid worker

On Sunday I didn’t try. On Monday I kept it simple: Cabbage, apple, and a slice of pizza for lunch, and homemade burritos for dinner. I costed out the pizza slice at $0.88 (as part of an extra large) and believed I could afford it. In spite of keeping to just $2.38 for the day, I still couldn’t make the processed/restaurant food work on this budget. As tasty as it was, it didn’t fill me up, and I found myself hungry before bed, and I ate at least another dollar’s worth of food after my planned meals for the day were done.

My failure to maintain a $2.83 per day diet is mostly a lack of willpower, because a carb-heavy diet of grains works for billions around the world. The particular context in which I am trying this diet also makes it difficult. If I was living where there was no option for pizza, McDonalds, or General Tso’s Chicken, I wouldn’t crave and cave.

For comparison, Heather provided me with a record of her meals for the past week. Her diet is typical Kenyan cuisine and well within the USA food stamps budget:

Kenyan Diet (for two people)

Dinner day 1: Rice and yellow lentils

 

So except for the Valentine’s Day feast, her family eats for about $0.67 per person per meal, or $2.00 a day. This is less than what Americans get for food stamps! And it makes you wonder… why must things cost more in America than the identical foods elsewhere?

The Economic Illusion of Prosperity

This is what my week-long experiment has been leading up to. No matter what I do, I cannot make the meager food allowance of $2.83 work in America, and all attempts lead to a sudden and dramatic decrease in the quality of my life.

If you ask economists why things cost more here, they will tell you that the relative cost of goods is higher in America because it costs more to produce here. They will defend this reality, saying that we pay our workers more, and so they have more purchasing power.

In my experience, the poorest have less here than elsewhere. We pay our workers more in absolute dollars, but not enough for their relative buying power to be higher. When you earn below a certain amount, you will actually feel poorer here than elsewhere. The economists are wrong because they don’t factor in community resilience, nor do they account for the difference in what one must buy in America versus the Tropics; the poor must buy everything at consumer prices here, but the poor (aka the largest class) in Kenya trade with each other in a non-cash economy at a discounted rate that gives them all somewhat more purchasing power.

Prosperity calculations should compare the cost of living against our assets and income. Instead, economists add up all the goods produced and divide by the population to get the gross domestic product (GDP). But GDP has nothing to do with prosperity. Quality life is built on more than what’s for sale, and more than just what we consume; a quality life is built on relationships, joy, meaningful work, a sense of possibility and opportunity, and love. It is foolish to read this chart and assume that the lines that go “up and to the right” are the best places to live:

China and USA are on the same wrong track. Leaders in both countries overwork their workforces to drive the economy and grow GDP, but for the masses, the fruits of that labor increasingly remain out of reach. This chart hides that reality.

Robert Kenedy said, “GDP measures everything that can be counted, except what really counts.” And I am beginning to feel the importance of that statement. Our leadership needs to undergo this experiment and see for themselves what kind of nation they are building through pure analytic decision-making without lived experience.

Day 0: The Menu

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3: Trade offs

Day 4: Community

Day 5: Love

When a work colleague gave her a bag of trail mix, she saved it to share with me. And when a colleague of mine gave me vitamin-C drink mix, I shared it with her. We encouraged each other, cooked together, and shared our feelings about food and hunger daily. Christy said that if we ever had to live on very little, she knew we would make it work.

Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day was a worry of ours as soon as we realized it would during our experiment week.

“What are we going to do?” she asked.

“We’ll make do,” I said. “Poor people are still celebrate Valentine’s Day somehow.”

Throughout the week we had been looking for ways to cut corners on our $2.83 daily food budgets, so that we could share a Valentine’s Day feast.

But on Day 1 we used up every last penny. Christy even wandered around the apartment looking for something tasty she could “buy” for $0.02 at the end of that night.

On Day 2 we actually went over a little bit, because we were still hungry at 11pm.

On Day 3 I did manage to save about 10 cents, and on Day 4 I saved 35 cents. But 45 cents wouldn’t buy much.

On Valentine’s Day, I skipped breafast in order to save more. By 6pm I’d only eaten PB&J and an apple for $1.08, leaving $1.75 for the night and saved $2.20 in all. Earlier that week Christy had noticed that McDonalds was offering a $1.00 happy meal special, and so we headed over to McD’s on the way to E-street Cinema to watch all the Oscar-nominated animated short films.

To pull this Valentine’s Day feast in real life, we would have needed to buy the happy meals the day before (it was only a Tue-Wed-Thursday offer) and eat them reheated a day later. But we decided that every experiment has limits, and we weren’t going “all oliver twist” on it. We bought the happy meals at regular price and enjoyed them without a shred of guilt.

It was the best McDonald’s I’ve had in a while – the kind of foodgasm I would get with my first fast food after living a year in The Gambia during Peace Corps.

It was also the first meat I could have legitimately enjoyed on a food stamps budget all week. McDonalds serves the poor with really cheap food that tastes good, I have to concede – but they are also the number one beneficiary of the food stamps program. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics 42 percent of McDonalds employees are over 25 and have some college – and therefore are trying to living on the wage whether it is a “living wage” or not. Government SNAP benefits subsidize those that don’t earn a living wage, which is nearly all McDonalds employees.

But I didn’t start this journey in order to blame a system for failing. I took the leap in order to understand how living on so little affects the way a person sees the world – for better or for worse. And when I am hungry, getting angry at the system only makes me feel worse. If instead, I look at the situation as would a Zen Buddhist or someone on a spiritual fast, I feel immediately better, stronger, more grounded – even more resilient.

It reminds me of the parable of the monk who is being chased by a tiger.

The tiger corners him at a precipice overlooking a deep chasm. With no choice, the man climbs down the ledge and hangs on to the roots of an old tree, his feet dangling over vast emptiness.

While trying to climb down, he cuts himself.

The blood on his hands attracts a rat, that begins to gnaw on his hands. Slowly, he is losing his grip. Above the tiger growls, daring him to climb back up to certain death.

He cannot hang on much longer.

Out of the corner of his eye, he notices a ripe strawberry growing out of the side of the cliff. He reaches and plucks it. Carefully he bites into it, savoring the juice.

Nothing in life had ever tasted so sweet!

Love is what holds families together, and food sustains us most when we live in daily gratitude for the bounty that life gives us. Whether large or small, anything can be enough where we are surrounded by people that make us feel important, special, valued.

I imagine the hardest part of living on $2.83 a day is the process of arriving at that number and getting a couple to agree to that budget. The system makes it very difficult to know exactly what your monthly benefits will be, exactly, so how can anyone really plan for it? Getting to square one means knowing what your means are and accepting what your daily bread budget will be. If food stamps were at the end of a long, slow decline for a middle class family, it would be that much harder to get the most out of them.

And even when it is just an “experiment” we still found it hard to continue it for the full 7 days, as tomorrow’s post will explain.

Day 0: Menu

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3: Trade offs

Day 4: Community

Christy will likely correct me when reads this; technically, she and our neighbors made the snowman. I just showed up during a break from working remotely to be in the picture.

Today’s theme is community. Christy and I depend on each other for planning, cooking, and moral support. Christy spent hours planning her meals and preparing a precise, well-researched shopping list. And we often do save money by preparing meals for two. Even though I could get more SNAP money if I were living alone, it would cost me more. Let me explain.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to even imagine living on $2.83 a day by myself.

The SNAP law has complex calculations do define people as part of “households” and adjust benefits accordingly. The legalese differs from the African communal understanding of society and welfare because it aims to define a formula for who is most deserving of what, rather than just calculate what a body needs to be healthy and give everyone the same benefit.

Roomers and boarders are not considered as part of a household if they pay a reasonable compensation for their room and board (ref), but moving in with one’s parents does end the benefit – because related people are part of a household. However, if one rents a room in a house (as I’ve often done) and shares meals/cooking with the landlord/roommate, these people are the same household.

The rules around income are quite messy too. Monthly net income limits for SNAP in DC is $958 for one person or $1,293 for two. For comparison, the rent for the last five places I have lived was $1600/3 people, $1200/2 people, $700, $975, and $600 — yielding an average of $681 in monthly rent. If I were on food stamps and making the maximum allowable salary, rent would be 71% of my total take home pay; clearly, few recipients earn exactly the maximum allowable monthly income. Working 35 hours a week and earning minimum wage yields $1155 a month, making one ineligible for food stamps, yet too poor to afford anything but rent ($681) and $474 for food, transportation, healthcare, and egads – entertainment.

That’s why many poor people will work 20 hours a week – earning $660 a month – and collect $170 more in food stamps for a total of $840/month in earnings. It allows them to spend the the other 20 hours of “free time” swapping child care services with other poor people. I did not factor in the $188-$253 per week they would need in childcare in the US, according to the United Way, but they must. There simply is no way to survive without community; Healthcare  ($122/month) and “professional” childcare ($800/month) are simply out of reach.

My rent is higher because I save a lot of time and money biking to the higher-paying jobs that exist in downtown DC, so moving farther away would not dramatically increase my savings when you factor in the extra hours I can work and the reduced cost of transportation. The poor must live together to survive, and they must live near their workplaces. This gives landlords immense power over the poor.

Today for breakfast I had oatmeal, banana, then after snow walking, blueberry pancakes (which are surprisingly affordable). Three pancakes cost $0.66 compared to a PB&J sandwich ($0.62).

For dinner, mac-n-cheese ($0.45), an apple ($0.42), and steamed cabbage ($0.33). The cabbage was so good, Christy wanted me to cook another pot of it.

My daily total was $2.48! I actually saved 35 cents towards Valentine’s day tomorrow!

Christy was feeling sick. She splurged on some get-well staples, including medication and chicken soup. Yesterday we posted a picture of our $11.50 in groceries. What we didn’t post was another $50 in non-food-stamp items we needed to keep the house running:

There is no “emergency” fund in the food stamps budget. In fact, a household with more than $2000 in savings (not counting a house) is immediately ineligible. As these non-food supplies were 5 times more expensive than the regular food budget (medicine is expensive), the system reinforces the need for people to rely on neighbors, friends and community in order to survive.

This revelation came as a surprise to me. I thought the government was responsible for the “social safety net” but that is simply not the case. What would I do for the 30 days it took to get on the program? What would I do for the 5 days if I qualified for emergency benefits? (You must have less than $150 in wealth to qualify)

Christy struggled to keep up this self-imposed austerity experiment, but she was with it in spirit, spending only $4.58 on a day when she was sick and wanted to end it.

“So you’d rather take medicine to maintain your addiction?” I retorted when she told me later.

Day 3 of our experiment to live on $2.83 per person per day has been about trade offs. I skipped breakfast again and then gorged on a big whopping plate of beans and rice over a lunch meeting. That kept me filled for the whole day, which explains why 2 billion people eat rice every day.

At dinner I had plenty to spend. We each had a yummy homemade burrito, but the other staples were getting monotonous. I looked around the house for something besides popcorn, rice, bread, or pasta, before deciding to finish eating the pot o beans and bake a $0.17 potato with butter and salt.

After dinner I was up to $1.40 for the day, and I was too full to finish the potato. My stomach was tired of it I guess.

Christy only ate half her burrito too. Same thing.

So we went shopping in advance of the DC blizzard, and bought $11.50 more of groceries:

Here you can see that we’ve got a mix of healthy foods to make us feel normal and totally-carb foods to make us feel full. The mac-n-cheese was only 50 cents and contains over 1000 calories! Woo hoo! As a bonus, the disclaimer says “it may contain milk.” I’m hoping there are traces of milk; I need the dairy.

But in general, I’m trading better nutrition for the feeling of a full stomach.

Having lived around the world and fasted, hunger-struck, and Peace Corps dieted in the past, I thought it would be helpful to compare what can you eat in Africa or America for similar prices:

Benachin (chebuchin), Senegalese/Gambian staple dish ($0.40)Ramen noodles ($0.20)

Mukimo (mashed potatoes & maize & collards), Kenyan staple ($0.30)

Steamed Cabbage ($0.50)

Sukuma wiki & ugali (collard greens and pounded maize), Kenyan Staple ($0.50)

Baked Potato & butter, ($0.25)

Tubers, peas, french beans, rice & carrots — The standard Ugandan lunch ($0.90)

Spaghetti and red sauce ($0.40)

In most cases, I prefer the African food to the American one. They’re getting more nutritious food and more of it for the same price (my cost estimates are restaurant prices, not home-baked ones).

This drives home an important point: Going hungry in America means depriving oneself of more calories and nutrition than those living on a meager income in Africa do.

Few Americans would believe that. How can food stamps recipients possibly be worse off than Africans living on $2 a day?

Economists define “prosperity” – the yardstick that we use to parse better off from worse off – too narrowly. Poverty should not be calculated by taking what you lack and dividing it by what you earn. It should be corrected for strong/weak community support, because resilient communities sustain their poorest. Membership in a group counts for something in Africa, and in America, the poor must look to non-government support networks to survive. That’s why the poor flock to churches or maintain strong ethnic ties to their heritage groups. Otherwise, they’d be starving alone.

If I were an economist, I’d calculate “social prosperity” – the kind of well-being that comes at a discount when communities work together. Trying to survive alone on $2.83 a day is unrealistic. And when people actually do factor more than just needs and wealth into poverty calculations – Costa Rica comes up as the country whose citizens enjoy the highest quality of life (and happiness) on Earth.

And when socio-ecological-efficiency is factored into the prosperity measurement, the United States of America ranks 105 out of 151 countries. Over 100 countries provide their citizens with more using fewer resources!

Day 0: Menu

Day 1

Day 2