This week's edition of The Economist magazine includes an article about Haiti entitled "Island in the sun", which begins by saying that:

It might seem callous in the aftermath of 230,000 deaths in January’s earthquake to talk about the opportunity offered by the rebuilding of Haiti. But merely restoring the most benighted country in the Americas to its previous misery would be culpable. Among the opportunities is to improve Haiti’s energy infrastructure.

Even the online version of the Economist's statistics on global economic activity don't include Haiti, so we need to look somewhere else to try and find out what they mean by the term "benighted country". The Thompson Reuters Foundation AlertNet site gives us an idea of how "benighted" Haiti actually is. It uses Gross National Income per capita as a measure of standard of living, and this is what it reveals. The standard of living in Haiti is so low you can barely make it out on the chart. For 2006, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, the numbers are as follows:

1. United States – GNI per capita $44,830
2. United Kingdom – GNI per capita $40,660
3. France – GNI per capita $36,710
4. Haiti – GNI per capita $490

More on Rebuild Haiti With Solar Power, Not Firewood?

In February 2005  I went on a surfing trip to the Caribbean. Since I speak English rather than French I went to Barbados rather than Haiti, and made a pilgrimage to Bathsheba on the east coast. According to Kelly Slater, the "Tiger Woods" of surfing, and 9 times world champion:

I’ve been going for over 20 years, and I’d put Soup Bowl as one of the top three waves in the world.

I didn't discover this until later, but I arrived just after Kelly had left, and as luck would have it Soup Bowl was still firing on all cylinders. According to photographer Dustin Humphrey (usually abbreviated to D. Hump), quoted in an interview in Transworld Surf magazine about his  Sipping Jetstreams project:

In the Caribbean, we shot Kelly's all-time best sessions ever.

Whilst in Barbados I read some local papers and visited an art gallery or two, but I didn't go to the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies. The Principal there is Sir Hilary Beckles, who in 1980 received a PhD in Economic History from Hull University here in the UK. Sir Hilary recently wrote an article in the Barbados Nation News about the history of Haiti and the devastating earthquake that took place there on January 12th. He entitled it "The Hate and The Quake". According to Sir Hilary:

For too long there has been a popular perception that somehow the Haitian nation-building project, launched on January 1, 1804, has failed on account of mismanagement, ineptitude, corruption.

The Haitians fought for their freedom and won, as did the Americans fifty years earlier. The Americans declared their independence and crafted an extraordinary constitution that set out a clear message about the value of humanity and the right to freedom, justice, and liberty.

In the midst of this brilliant discourse, they chose to retain slavery as the basis of the new nation state. The founding fathers therefore could not see beyond race, as the free state was built on a slavery foundation.

The water was poisoned in the well; the Americans went back to the battlefield a century later to resolve the fact that slavery and freedom could not comfortably co-exist in the same place.

The French, also, declared freedom, fraternity and equality as the new philosophies of their national transformation and gave the modern world a tremendous progressive boost by so doing.

They abolished slavery, but Napoleon Bonaparte could not imagine the republic without slavery and targeted the Haitians for a new, more intense regime of slavery. The British agreed, as did the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese.

All were linked in communion over the 500 000 Blacks in Haiti, the most populous and prosperous Caribbean colony.

As the jewel of the Caribbean, they all wanted to get their hands on it. With a massive slave base, the English, French and Dutch salivated over owning it – and the people.

The people won a ten-year war, the bloodiest in modern history, and declared their independence. Every other country in the Americas was based on slavery.

Haiti was freedom, and proceeded to place in its 1805 Independence Constitution that any person of African descent who arrived on its shores would be declared free, and a citizen of the republic.

For the first time since slavery had commenced, Blacks were the subjects of mass freedom and citizenship in a nation.

I urge you to read Sir Hilary's article in full, as well as the long list (currently 147) of comments it has attracted, if you would like to better understand how Haiti came to be in it's present predicament. As another eminent scholar Robert Farris Thompson, Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, once put it:

We might very well be speaking French in the United States had not the Haitian slaves been successful.

The chart below shows month to month variations in the climate at Port au Prince, the capital of earthquake stricken Haiti.  Look carefully at the dark green "precipitation" graph:

Port-Au-Prince, Haiti Climate graph contributed by climatetemp.info

The month of January when the earthquake hit is the driest of the year. By the time May arrives average rainfall is seven times as much.

An early foretaste of the rainy season to come happened last Thursday. According to Reuters:

The overnight downpour and a noisy, early morning protest by several hundred Haitians at the U.N. mission headquarters brought into sharp focus simmering anger over the dire need for shelter in the poorest country in the Americas.

Haiti is in a race against time to move survivors from the rudimentary homes they have fashioned out of plastic tarps, bedsheets and panels of corrugated zinc.

"They've been collecting money for Haiti around the world. Many millions have been collected. But we are still in misery," Jean-Max Seraphin, 25, said as he stood near the sodden cotton bedsheets that serve as his home in downtown Port-au-Prince.

"If millions have been collected, why don't they buy tents? Our children will be sick. We will be sick. And more people are going to die."

Here's the problem. If the hundreds of thousands of homeless people in Haiti don't get decent shelter before the tropical rainy season arrives in a few short weeks they will find themselves paddling in other peoples excrement. The rainy season is then followed by the Caribbean hurricane season.

Sanitation in the nearly 500 spontaneous encampments that have grown up around teeming, chaotic Port-au-Prince is woeful and health officials say they are seeing increasing cases of tetanus, dengue and other ailments.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said this week the government has "no clear vision" of how to move 1 million people into better temporary shelters, and said it could be a decade before Haiti can build 250,000 homes to replace those destroyed.

If you would like to do what you can to help then please take a look at our suggestions for how to help Haiti.

This weeks edition of the Economist contains a long article on the suddenly hot topic of "Open Data". The subhead sums up the issue like this:

In several countries more official data are being issued in raw form so that anybody can use them. This forces bureaucrats and creative types to interact in new ways.

and the article points out that:

The governments of America, Britain, Australia and New Zealand have all produced collections of machine-readable data.

In several countries political leaders now talk the same language as campaigners for transparent government. On his first full day in office, Barack Obama signed an open-government directive. David Cameron, the leader of Britain’s Conservatives, wants to increase his country’s transparency to tame the over-mighty state, for which he blames the present Labour government. In Australia Kevin Rudd’s Labor Party also took power with a strong commitment to open government.

It seems that Mr. Cameron neglected to point out that the UK's present Labour government has in fact just taken a huge step in his desired direction. Last month a website cryptically entitled data.gov.uk entered public beta testing.  As the Economist points out the US equivalent site, strangely enough called data.gov, has been around for a while longer. Open Government initiatives, including Open Data, are taking the world by storm!  According to the Economist:

All these exercises seek to merge two cultures: the risk-averse ethos of the civil service, and the free-wheeling spirit of open-source developers, who seek continuous incremental change and see failure as a step to improvement. In a way that would baffle most old-time bureaucrats, independent developers like to collaborate over long distances and make their exchanges public.

In the US the "young technocrats" in the Obama administration responsible for trying to merge these two apparently incompatible cultures are chief information officer Vivek Kundra and chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra, whom the Economist dub "America's First Geeks".  The Economist article mentions one of Britain's First Geeks also, the talismanic Sir Tim Berners-Lee. So talismanic in fact, that in the original version of the article the Economist credited Sir Tim with being "inventor of the internet", rather than "merely" inventor of the world wide web. For some unaccountable reason the Economist neglects to mention Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Britain's other first geek and colleague of Sir Tim's in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, where coincidentally I spent as long as I possibly could in my younger days.

Here at econnexus.org.uk we are as excited as Gordon Brown by the prospect of vast quantities of open data becoming available for analysis by anyone who so chooses. In fact we've already come up with an exciting new project of our own to help us in making that often difficult decision about whether it's worth going surfing or not.

We'll keep you posted on how things develop, for all the Open Data initiatives as well as our own experiments in mining something useful from this newly available mountain of extremely raw information.

Way back in May 2009 the Guardian reported that:

The Obama administration took on the powerful farming interests in America's heartland today, making clear it does not see corn-based ethanol as part of the long-term solution to climate change.

The new proposals on the biofuel – in the face of intense pressure from agricultural companies and members of Congress from corn-growing states – were seen as the first test of Barack Obama's promise to put science above politics in deciding America's energy future.

A couple of weeks ago the Guardian reported that:

The Obama administration faces a challenge in Congress that could strip it of its powers to cut greenhouse gas emissions, barely a month after committing to action at the Copenhagen climate change summit.

An Alaska Republican, Senator Lisa Murkowski, is expected to put forward a proposal for a vote as early as tomorrow that would seek to prevent the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Now according to the Los Angeles Times:

The Obama administration gave a boost to the corn and coal industries Wednesday, announcing a series of moves to accelerate biofuel use and deploy so-called clean-coal technology on power plants.

Unveiling the actions in a meeting with energy-state governors at the White House, President Obama said the steps would create jobs in rural areas, reduce foreign energy dependence and curb the emissions that scientists blame for global warming.

Unfortunately it now looks likely that the new political realities in the United States following the loss of the previously safe Democratic Senate seat of  Massachusetts will involve President Obama in further U-turns over the coming months.

Today we've added two new sections to our website.  The first contains our current suggestions about how best to help get relief to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti.  According to Haitian President René Préval the most urgent need is shelter for 800,000 homeless people before the rainy season starts in about a month's time, so we focus on that problem to start with.

In addition Peter Gabriel's record company Real World have generously given us permission to quote the lyrics from one of Peter's songs, which we feel is particularly relevant to the relief effort in Haiti. If you're the sort of person who prefers to read rather than watch videos please take a look at our new "Songs" section.

Our apologies to recent visitors to the econnexus website. At some point over the weekend we were hacked, and you may have seen warnings similar to the following if you tried to access this site recently:

Avast complained about: JS: Small-C [Trj]

AVG complained about: JS/Downloader.Agent

We have fixed the problem, and we have also taken the "opportunity" to transfer the site to a new hosting provider and upgrade to version 2.9.1 of WordPress and a new theme. Please contact us if you discover any parts of the site that still do not appear to be working correctly.

For any geeks amongst you the hackers managed to insert a JavaScript trojan into our theme's header.php file. The problem is now fixed, but it does lead one to question the morality of those who are no doubt able, but also willing, to disrupt the activities of others attempting to assist the victims of the enormous natural disaster that has occurred in Haiti.

Today econnexus.org.uk announces the launch of our latest project, the econnexus Music Making Machines.  This project is intimately interconnected with our "Water Connects Us" downloadable album, which aims to raise money for Haiti earthquake victims.

This project intends to contribute at least one track to "Water Connects Us" recorded in a very low cost "bedroom studio". It will also demonstrate how that track, and indeed the whole album, can then be marketed without the traditional "music industry" soaking up the majority of the profits that the artists have themselves created.  In conjunction with "Water Connects Us" it will also demonstrate how to get aid to the people who need it, without the traditional "aid industry" siphoning off a significant proportion of the contributions of the concerned citizens of this planet.

To get this project started we visited a couple of Exeter music shops on Wednesday.  We received lots of useful advice from Mike and Phil at Project Music, and Jay and Chris at Mansons Guitar Shop. We ended up buying a Line 6 POD Studio UX2. We'll let you know how we get on with it in future posts.

Update 11:35 GMT on January 20th 2010

Haiti just endured another aftershock. This one was apparently 5.9 on the moment magnitude scale.

Synchronicity struck at the opening of the Art, Ecology and the Economy exhibition at CCANW. Several musicians from South West England have now donated a track to our forthcoming "Water Connects Us" album in aid of Haiti:

De Larje giving their first ever concert

Kasia Turajczyk of econnexus.org.uk has produced this video poem in response to the disaster in Haiti:

Peter Gabriel has produced this music video in response to the disaster in Haiti. It is a moving reworking of David Bowie's classic "Heroes":

The Road to Fondwa team are donating proceeds from sales of their documentary movie to the relief effort:

On January 12th 2010 a large number of Haitians lost their homes or their lives following a powerful earthquake.

This is raw footage of the aftermath of that earthquake:

At the beginning of September 2008 a large number of Haitians lost their homes or their lives following Hurricane Hanna.

This is raw footage of the aftermath of that hurricane:

If you would like to help please take a look at our current suggestions about how best to help Haiti.

Hurricane Bill, the first of the 2009 Atlantic season, has already got surfers in the eastern United States excited.  Over here in South West England we're eagerly watching the current predictions:

Whilst we're waiting to see if these predictions turn into an excellent swell on this side of the Atlantic too, we're thankful that so far Bill has not caused death and destruction on the scale of some of last season's storms.