Anirvan Chatterjee

LGBT identity & climate change at Bengali conference

2009-07-13T06:19:22Z

I helped organize two sessions at the North American Bengali Conference (NABC), held over the 4th of July weekend in San Jose.

One was on LGBT Bengali identity, the other on global warming in South Asia; both issues are really close to my heart. We just put audio and video for the talks online:

LGBT Bengalis: From Calcutta to the Castro
Listen to the MP3, or watch the video

Global warming and the future of Bengal
Listen to the MP3, or watch the video

Rising sea levels design competition

2009-06-16T15:58:10Z

I just ran across the Rising Tides design competition, "an open international design competition for ideas responding to sea level rise in San Francisco Bay and beyond" sponsored by San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. Submissions are due by June 29.

Per their website:

"Nearly every day, we learn more about sea level rise - one of the most critical impacts of global warming. Individually and collectively, people are seeking solutions to this climate challenge. The issue of sea level rise is clearly of global importance, and both simple and complex design interventions will be needed to sustain quality of life, preserve the environment and ensure continued economic vitality of shoreline communities throughout the world. Challenges include:
Rethinking how to build new communities in areas susceptible to future inundation
Retrofitting valuable public shoreline infrastructure
Protecting existing communities from flooding
Protecting wetlands
Anticipating changing shoreline configurations
At the intersection of rising seas and our coastal human settlements, your ideas are needed. The Rising Tides ideas competition is open to everyone. All are encouraged to bring forward their vision of a future estuarine shoreline that is applicable to San Francisco Bay and beyond."

Five recently read books

2009-06-16T07:00:00Z

Read 2009/6/16:
The Incredible Double (2009)
by Owen Hill
Rating: 4 of 5
(Bay Area, Berkeley, Fiction, Mystery)

Read 2009/6/15:
Rogue Economics (2008)
by Loretta Napoleoni
Rating: 2 of 5
(Economics, Politics)

Read 2009/6/9:
The End of the Jews (2008)
by Adam Mansbach
Rating: 5 of 5 (highly recommended)
(Fiction)

Read 2009/6/5:
Osama Van Halen (2009)
by Michael Muhammad Knight
Rating: 4 of 5
(Fiction, Romance, South Asian Diaspora)

Read 2009/6/3:
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (2008)
by Jessica Livingston
Rating: 5 of 5 (highly recommended)
(Business, Technology)

Climate change, greentech IP, and the future of the planet

2009-06-13T17:50:21Z

There's a raging debate around climate change and intellectual property, and the planet's fate may be linked to the way we think about patent protectionism.

G77 countries at the Bonn climate conference were been demanding access to green technology intellectual property, as a requirement for moving ahead. Industrialized countries have been stonewalling, arguing that greentech IP is private, and can't be shared. G77 countries have come back with a proposal where developed nations would pay into a pool that would buy access to greentech IP, to be shared with developing nations, which has been worrying US politicians advocating for stronger IP rights. This is one of several important threads involved in international climate negotiations, but has been substantially underreported on in the American IP reform community.

I'm particularly interested by India's comparison of greentech IP to essential HIV/AIDS drugs, framing their current demands in light of a widely understood battle over patent protection vs. humanitarian access. I'm hoping to see more folks pick up on this angle, and see where the comparison works, and where it doesn't.

Climate change and the Berkeley shoreline

2009-06-11T07:18:14Z

Depressing news from the Daily Californian:

"An April 7 draft report released by the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission predicted that the sea level in the Bay Area will rise 16 inches by mid-century and 55 inches by 2100, flooding areas of the Berkeley Marina and a few blocks of West Berkeley." (read more...)

For more details, look at the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (SFBCDC) climate change planning site.

Five recently read books

2009-05-27T07:00:00Z

Read 2009/5/27:
The Prayer Room (2008)
by Shanthi Sekaran
Rating: 3 of 5
(Fiction, South Asia, South Asian Diaspora)

Read 2009/5/19:
Missing: Youth, Citizenship, And Empire After 9/11 (2009)
by Sunaina Marr Maira
Rating: 3 of 5
(Culture, Politics, South Asian Diaspora)

Read 2009/5/17:
Travel as a Political Act (2009)
by Rick Steves
Rating: 3 of 5
(Politics, Travel)

Read 2009/5/17:
Free Culture (2004)
by Larry Lessig
Rating: 4 of 5
(Culture, Law, Politics)

Read 2009/5/7:
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2001)
by Edward R. Tufte
Rating: 4 of 5
(Design)

The insider's guide to managing Congress

2009-05-04T05:44:48Z

Boy. The new May 11, 2009 issue of Fortune has a feature called The Business Guide to Congress, featuring tips and tactics for business leaders trying to understand how to manage relations with the legislative branch in the current economic climate. It reads somewhere between The Onion and The Wall Street Journal, in a disconcerting ha-ha-only-serious kind of way.

It features five rules to follow:

Remember populist symbolism (e.g. "If you're in a time bind to get to DC, fly your jet to Philly and take Amtrak from there")
Find an ally who's popular (e.g. "credit unions and community banks are still as popular as apple pie, so they've become useful frontmen for big-bank agendas")
Prepare your story before you're scrutinized (e.g. "'Business leaders create jobs. That's a story that needs to be told.'")
If called to testify, be boring (e.g. "stick to a script religiously (think Obama at a press conference), avoid making news, and be humble and excruciatingly dull")
Rely on Senate centrists (e.g. "it pays to get to know Republicans like Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, Arlen Specter and Charles Graessley; and Democrats like Mary Landrieu, Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, Tom Johnson, and Evan Bayh")

And if you were curious on how to narrow the scope of financial regulation, or which Senator may crack down on offshore tax havens, the article has answers to those as well. A print-only sidebar discusses bothersome restrictions on lobbying.

Unfortunately, the online version's missing a lovely full-page Venn diagram of 25 legislators that are powerful, business-friendly, and/or willing to listen. Among those profiled, only three fall within every category: Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Sen. Arlen Specter (then-R-PA), and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn). You'll have to plunk down $4.99 to get the lobby-ability infographic, but it's a beaut, and totally recommended.

Fortune magazine--news you can use.

Five recently read books

2009-05-02T07:00:00Z

Read 2009/5/2:
Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (2008)
by Luke Wroblewski
Rating: 4 of 5
(Design, Technology)

Read 2009/5/1:
JavaScript: The Good Parts (2008)
by Douglas Crockford
Rating: 4 of 5
(Technology)

Read 2009/5/1:
Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure (2004)
by Alastair Gordon
Rating: 3 of 5
(Architecture)

Read 2009/4/29:
Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity, and Class in India (2009)
by Raka Ray, Seemin Qayum
Rating: 3 of 5
(Bengali, Culture, Labor)

Read 2009/4/22:
Lost Cosmonaut (2006)
by Daniel Kalder
Rating: 3 of 5
(Travel)

Airports, bananas, and imperialism

2009-04-30T06:27:23Z

I'm reading Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure by Alastair Gordon. As Gordon discusses about the expansion of early American aviation businesses into Latin America, he quotes early Pan Am exec Sanford Kauffman on his experiences working in Honduras:

"Kauffman had been at his post for only a few weeks when a revolution broke out in Honduras. Rebels were flying old biplanes and dropping bombs onto his airfield. Kauffman telegraphed Miami headquarters and informed his superiors that PAA [Pan America Airways] planes should not attempt to land but should fly directly on to San Salvador. When the local manager of the United Fruit Company inquired why the mail plane hadn't arrived that day, Kauffman told him about the aerial bombardment. The manager replied: 'Why didn't you come in and let me know? We're controlling the revolution, and I'll simply tell them to stop bombing you.' United Fruit had put the president into power in the first place, but when the president hiked the tax on bananas, the company thought it best to have him replaced. 'There's a general who would love to be president,' explain the agent, 'so we're supplying him with funds to buy ammunition and equipment, [and] he'll be the next one.' Kauffman got the message and reopened the airport the next day."

There's more discussion of this fun little corporate imperial anecdote in Kauffman's book, Pan Am Pioneer, in the "Stationed In Honduras" chapter.

Immigration and epidemic disease

2009-04-28T16:38:08Z

Image via Wikipedia

Apparently, some conservative commentators are worried that swine flu may have made its way to the US due to movement by undocumented Mexican immigrants. For once, they're right.

Well, maybe not strictly right, in this specific case, given that a significant number of cases in the US involve vacationing presumably-documented Americans.

But our nativists certainly have the right historical instincts, recalling as they do how undocumented immigrants accidentally brought epidemic disease to the Americas, causing the deaths of millions of previously-unexposed non-resistant indigenous people.

And when out nativists put forth the theory that swine flu is being secretly spread by Al Qaeda, they're remembering the stories of deliberate infection of Native Americans. (Which, it turns out, was a very limited cause, if at all, compared to the larger story. But who knows--maybe the baddies are responsible this time.)

Who says we've lost our sense of historical memory?

Yahoo's geography APIs

2009-04-17T05:36:37Z

l've been enjoying playing with GeoPlanet, a free RESTful geography data API provided by Yahoo's Geo Technologies group. GeoPlanet issues WOEIDs ("Where on Earth IDs"), unique identifiers for place, ranging from plazas, up to to neighborhoods, districts, cities, counties, states, and nations. WOEIDs are intelligently linked up, so you can programmatically navigate between parent, child, and adjoining places. It deals well with ambiguity, and it's really nicely internationalized, both in terms of input and output. You can feed it free text (e.g. "Berkeley, California") and get back a ranked series of best-matches, along with latitude/longitude, bounding box, parent areas, and human-readable names.

There's a great interview with one of GeoPlanet's developers at O'Reilly Radar:

"[U]sually...geography is handled as a purely spatial problem. What I mean by that is that things are handled in longitude and latitudes. And traditionally, if you have a place such as a city or town which is polygonal on the map, it's usually boiled down to a centroid, which again is a coordinate pair. And then all of the questions relate to the coordinate pair...instead of taking a spatially-based approach to location, we take a place-based approach...It could be a park. It could be a region like the Pacific Northwest. It could be a continent and even the earth is a named place....we take all of these different names places and all of these different granularities and we give them unique identifiers called Where On Earth ids or WOE ids for short...
So coming back to the point about really open location, one of the goals that we want here is that we want to be able to ensure that we can all...refer unambiguously to the same place no matter how it's called. So the United States is the United States or it's USA. Or it's Les Etats Unis. All of the different labels are assigned with the same Where On Earth identifier. And it's really exposing that identifier out is we think the prime benefit...We won't tell you everything about them or their census statistics or the population. It's really, "Here's the identifier. This is where it can be found. And this is how this identifier relates to other identifiers." (more...)

Yahoo's work around developing interesting open platforms is totally underhyped. I'm ready to consider locking myself into Yahoo's WOEID system in my own apps; it's rich and open enough for my needs.

Five recently read books

2009-04-16T07:00:00Z

Read 2009/4/16:
Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (2009)
by Minal Hajratwala
Rating: 4 of 5
(Biography, South Asia, South Asian Diaspora)

Read 2009/4/13:
Cyberabad Days: Return to the India of 2047 (2009)
by Ian McDonald
Rating: 4 of 5
(Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories, South Asia)

Read 2009/4/10:
Richistan: A Journey Throught the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich (2007)
by Robert Frank
Rating: 3 of 5
(Culture, Economics)

Read 2009/4/7:
Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam (2005)
by Asra Nomani
Rating: 4 of 5
(Biography, Culture, Religion, South Asian Diaspora)

Read 2009/4/5:
Captain Confederacy 2 (2007)
by Will Shetterly, Vince Stone
Rating: 3 of 5
(Comics, Fiction)

Introducing DesiFilter

2009-04-12T19:54:01Z

I recently launched a new web tool called DesiFilter.

Like a lot of folks from immigrant communities, I tend to be hyper-aware of names from my culture. If I'm watching a movie, part of my brain goes "hey, wow!" when I see that the gaffer's backup caterer is named Banerjee or Patel or Khan.

South Asian American community journalists and bloggers will regularly do the same--scanning long lists of names to find community members involved in larger news stories. So I built a tool to help out, based on a list of over 26,000 uniquely South Asian first and last names I collected and hand-edited. (The word "Desi" is often used interchangeably with South Asian in diaspora.)

You just give DesiFIlter a URL or a bunch of text, and it'll find and highlight possible South Asian names. Commercial name ethnicity matching tools have been around for a while, and are used for things like targeted marketing and political campaigning. I believe this is the first such tool that handles South Asian names that's freely available to the public.

It wasn't particularly hard to build; the tech side (powered by Perl's Regexp::Assemble) was a breeze compared to the difficult task of collecting and refining name lists. South Asian names come from all over, so I ended up making a lot of awkward decisions to maximize usability in majority-Anglo countries, including throwing out most Anglo and many Portuguese names common in South Asia to minimize false positives. This means, for example, that it'll fail to identify John Abraham as a South Asian name. Short of a hard-to-build-and-visualize system of weights, I can't think of a much better solution.

DesiFilter got some big love on Sepia Mutiny. I'm currently working on some features to make it more useful to the folks over at the South Asian Journalists Association.

Foreign workers, by country and occupation

2009-04-12T16:40:36Z

I've been enjoying playing with "Immigration and Jobs: Where U.S. Workers Come From," an interactive feature in The New York Times, based on the Census Bureau's American Community Survey. It lets you select countries of birth and see the most common occupations for those immigrants, or choose occupations, and see which country's immigrants have the highest numbers in that sector.

I was particularly interested in seeing what professions are overwhelmingly and uniquely linked to certain national origins--a function of immigration trends, labor markets, geography, and chance. These included:

Mexico: sales-related professions; clerical and administrative staff; policemen and other protective workers; most hospitality, maintenance, and personal service professions; all construction, manufacturing, and other labor
Philippines: nurses
India: computer software developers, doctors
Vietnam: hairdressers

Some breakdowns by occupation...

Top origins of foreign-born managers and administrators

Mexico
India
Britain
Canada
Germany

Top origins of foreign-born accountants and other financial specialists

Philippines
China
India
Mexico
North and South Korea

Top origins of foreign-born hairdressers and other grooming services

Vietnam
Mexico
North and South Korea
Dominican Republic
China

And some breakdowns by country of birth...

Top 5 occupations for those born in India

Computer software developers
Managers and administrators
Scientists and quantitative analysts
Sales-related occupations
Engineers and architects

Top 5 occupations for those born in Germany

Clerical and administrative staff
Managers and administrators
Sales-related occupations
Teachers
Mechanics and equipment repairers

Top 5 occupations for those born in Mexico

Skilled construction workers
Industrial equipment operators
Cooks and other food preparers
Construction laborers
Clerical and administrative staff

More at The New York Times interactive tool.

(via Partha S. Banerjee)

Desi takeover of Amnesty USA?

2009-04-10T15:24:27Z

I was looking at my ballot for the 2009 election for members of the board of Amnesty International USA, and was surprised to see that 5 of the 12 candidates had South Asian names:

Anil Raj (AIUSA's Myanmar country director)
Rafia Zakaria (international feminist law background)
Aniket Shah (current board member),
Shankar Mukherji (MIT/Harvard student)
Nikhil Aziz (ED of Grassroots International)

There's still a large enough disconnect between mainstream South Asian communities and mainstream social justice movements that stuff like this brings a smile to my face.

Exposing Berkeley's secret graffiti wars

2009-04-03T17:24:33Z

The East Bay Express ran a great story on Berkeley's graffiti wars last week, exposing a secret conflict over public space that's been going on under our noses.

We know Berkeley's home to graffiti, stickers, and tags. But the Express outed a fascinatingly weird new figure in the mix: Jim Sharp, a.k.a SIlver Buff, a 62 year old man who goes around spraying silver paint over unwanted graffiti, stickers, and tags--increasing the amount of vandalized property, and spurring on counter-attacks. Sharp is an active member of the Berkeley community, and appears to be involved with a variety of local preservationist / anti-development causes. Suddenly, the presence of all that crazy silver paint I've been seeing around town makes sense.

Sharp's identity was discovered by Nathan Wollman and Max Good, the makers of Vigilante Vigilante, an upcoming PBS documentary on Berkeley's graffiti wars, in a tremendous piece of local detective work reported on in the article.

I have complicated feelings about graffiti and stickering. I love discovering unexpected underground art around town. It makes me pause and reflect, and helps me connect to what folks around town and thinking and feeling. The downside, of course, is the unauthorized takeover of public and private space. And for that matter, ugly graffiti or graffiti that's particularly disrespectful of others just pisses me off (most tagging falls in this category for me). I don't know that I can easily reconcile these two tendencies, but I won't apologize for appreciating good street art.

Life is easier when, like Jim Sharp, you can turn those grays into stark black and white. I don't know that I have an answer to urban visual pollution, but I'm pretty sure anti-graffiti vigilante vandalism isn't part of it.

Back from the SF International Asian American Film Festival

2009-03-18T06:57:37Z

B and I spent the weekend at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival, watching about 12 hours of movies. We're big SFIAAFF junkies, and look forward to spending days shuttling back and forth between the Castro and the Kabuki.

Half Life was by far my favorite movie at the festival. It's a dark dreamy Bay Area drama about a suburban Northern California family dealing with personal crises, against the backdrop of near-future global warming scenario.

The Love of Siam, a Thai gay teen romance, wasn't what I expected. I expected it to focus primarily on angsty young men discovering their sexuality, but it turned out to be a family drama with a wide range of sub-plots: a missing family member, an alcoholic parent, boy band troubles, children's friendships, straight teen voyeurism and crushes, and a woman on the edge trying to protect her family. (And yes, some aww-inducing Thai gay teen romance holding it all together.) This was the first Thai film I've seen, and it was fun to watch.

Heaven on Earth, about a woman from India who joins a working-class Indo-Canadian Sikh household as a new arranged bride, was painful to watch and gut-punchingly good. Of all the movies we watched, this spurred on the longest conversations, days after we watched it. There's a lot here, and I'd love to see a prequel, a la Wicked, telling the story from the point of view of one of the other characters.

Ocean of Pearls was pretty much the exact opposite--a sweet, somewhat predictable, feelgood movie about a bright Indo-Canadian Sikh doctor grappling with identity issues and medical ethics. I liked the fact that the Q&A afterwards touched every angle, from a medical professional discussing the medical dilemmas raised in the movie, to a man asking about Sikh representation on film.

The Mosque in Morgantown is a tight documentary about Wall Street Journal writer Asra Nomani's battle to bring gender equality and moderate politics to her hometown mosque in West Virginia. The documentary's strongly biased toward Nomani's struggle, but you see glimmers of the complicated undercurrents of community opinion. It left me thinking about the role of insider-outsider strategies, and the importance of standing up to take on awkward issues in our community spaces.

The 3rd I South Asian International Shorts program was mixed. I enjoyed Andheri, about an eventful day in the life of a Mumbai household worker, and Midnight Lost and Found, a love story between a nighttime drugstore clerk and a prostitute, played out over the course of nightly condom buying runs.

Festival season's not over yet. This Friday, we have tickets to go Fruit Fly, which is supposed to be in the same vein as the awesomely fabulous Colma: The Musical.

Fremont A's deal possibly dead

2009-02-22T19:34:23Z

I'm delighted that the planned move of the Oakland A's to Fremont looks pretty dead.

Stadium deals are pretty uniformly bad deals for the affected communities, which often end up paying huge subsidies to private businesses, while dealing with unwanted environmental, traffic, and economic impacts.

The Fremont A's stadium proposal isn't all that different. In the midst of an incredibly rancorous and one-sided debate, local activists seem to have been able to do a reasonable job of getting their message heard, giving context, rebutting A's statements, and organizing neighbors, one person at a time.

Work in the transparency industrial complex

2009-02-13T05:13:09Z

Wow. There are enough jobs in the U.S. government/public transparency sector that the Sunlight Foundation has a whole website for jobs in the transparency field. Who knew?

Among these, at least two of the jobs are in Berkeley--Research Associate and Program Assistant positions at MAPLight.org.

MAPLight.org's a great resource on bills, issues, and politicians. Here's Barbara Lee, my representative, and Loni Hancock, my state assemblyperson. (They both get love from unions and lawyers. Go figure.) I also love the interests view; while nobody always gets what they want, some do better than others, e.g. animal rights campaigners vs. international trade associations.

Know transparency-minded campaigners and hackers? Pass this along.