Shares of social network giant Facebook were officially floated on the NASDAQ on 18 May with an estimated value of $100 billion. The company’s IPO is priced at $38 per share, turning it into the largest tech IPO in history. The social networking website has a 900-million strong user base – a significant portion of whom reside in Africa.

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Elections in Kenya are the most expensive in the world thanks to a high voter registration cost, administrative inefficiencies and outright theft of funds.

Estimates for the upcoming election presented by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) placing the cost at Sh36 billion translates to a cost per registered voter of Sh2,000 ($25), higher than any other on record.

The IEBC, which initially sought Sh41.5 billion, has been pressing its case for the reduced funding all week before the Parliamentary Committee on Justice and Legal Affairs.

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Indian-origin councillor Abdul Razak Osman has become the first Lord Mayor of the Islamic faith to hold the high office in the multi-cultural town of Leicester, which has a large minority of Indian origin people.

Osman was born in Kenya and arrived in the UK in 1971. His late father Yousuf Razak worked on the East African Railway, and worked for a local engineering firm after moving to Leicester.

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If you are  involved in the tech space then you just have to sit back and admire what Mark Zuckerberg and Co. have done with  Facebook over the last 8 years. They have completely changed the face of human interaction and how people communicate with each other. In  the process creating a completely new industry loaded with new ways of doing things. But today Mark Zuckerberg opened the bell remotely from the company’s Menlo Park Headquarters to mark the first day of  Facebook going public, trading on NASDAQ. Mark even updated his Facebook status at the same time

“Mark Zuckerberg listed a company on NASDAQ. — with Chris Cox and 4 others,”

It came…and yeah the biggest tech IPO took off at a high note trading  82Million shares in the first 30 seconds. Facebook share opened trading at 42.05 from the initial public offering price of $38 . The online social network raised as much as $18.4 billion  making the biggest  initial public offerings in U.S. history.

We say congrats

Avalanches are a serious problem for mountaineers during their tours in the wilderness but lately they are increasingly happening much more also as natural phenomena due to uncommon snowfalls. More often they are being triggered in the neighbourhood of ski-areas by off-piste venture causing deaths and damages. Here we present a crowdsourcing initiative, based on the social mapping tool Ushahidi, aiming at improving avalanche awareness by capturing incidents from the practitioners and making such data freely reusable for a variety of large-scale applications.

http://geoavalanche.org/incident/

In recent decades back country tourism in the mountain area, during the winter, have led to a significant increase in the number of practitioners who tackle snowy paths or land prone to avalanche slide. This, often, is not commensurate with a quite equally preparedness in the evaluation of meteorological conditions and snowpack’s stability to deal with, which is the fundamental step towards a safe trip.

Despite exposure to avalanches is a variable dependent by many factors, including some unpredictable, often the lack of the necessary experience combined with a poor consideration of avalanche bulletins, makes snowy terrain potentially subject to such phenomena. In addition, the unpredictability of some events related to the stratification of the soil results that even in situations where you keep all the most safe conducts and although the risk may be at a level significantly low in the danger’s scale (5 –VERY HIGH, 4 – HIGH, 3 – CONSIDERABLE, 2 – MODERATE, 1 – LOW), the detachment of an avalanche is a phenomenon, which can continuously still happen. Especially while there always might be some discrepancy between local situations and areas of interest of an avalanche bulletin.

Fig. 1: Danger Level for an avalanche bulletin in a geographic area

Currently the most recent practices from professional rescue shows how self-rescue procedures are the sole proficient way to save lives when an avalanche buries some people, since the struggle is strongly time-dependent in order to being effectively decisive in. This can exclusively happen when practitioners have at their disposal the necessary equipment to find and dig someone out of an avalanche: ARTVA, shovel and probe. Nowadays, with the improvements reached on the new generation of beacons, rescue operations become quicker but often this is not easily enough. The knowledge of procedures and training on how to self-rescue has to be addressed in the community as much largely as possible to raise successful results when a such crisis happens.

Any incident is subjected to a further inspection when the professional rescue is claimed to an avalanche scene and the information related to are treated respectfully in a manner that follows regulations and operative procedures of reference. As a result all those details are captured as expected by the national Avalanche Warning Services, which collect incidents worldwide for driving avalanche awareness and prevention in each country. This scenario figures out the need of an innovative spatially aware tool for mapping such information which could be used for statistical purposes and mitigation measures and much more important to handle also avalanche incidents that are still remaining hidden.

Therefore, from a geographical perspective, the process of data capturing has to be addressed in a way that meets the spatial context of an avalanche incident. The power of Ushahidi is to make easily this job in order to meet how stakeholders are structuring this information and potentially to make democratized and valuable those data coming from crowdsourcing participation.
Avalanche incidents data were analyzed in order to being structured as well as compared with standards in use by Avalanche Warning Service worldwide. The benefits of using Ushahidi go beyond to developing an historical and extended database of avalanche incidents happened during years publicly available in the form of thematic maps and also as API RESTful mechanism for accessing data by citizens, stakeholders and governments.

This general explanation above figures out how the problem has been issued and why the initiative of Geoavalanche – a project born from the collaborative efforts by Geobeyond with mountain’s passion in mind – would leverage the awareness of risk using new forms of sustainable democratization over the Web 2.0. Geoavalanche aims at supporting the safety across mountains through the development of tools to better sharing avalanche information and data over the Internet. Maps are an approach to highlight new phenomena and display results in an easily understandable way. The idea behind this initiative is to harness the benefits of crowdsourcing information around avalanche incidents (making use of a large group of people being able to report on a story) and smoothly assist the sharing of knowledge in an environment where rumors and uncertainty were predominant.

Geoavalanche site uses Ushahidi platform for reporting incidents originated by an avalanche that may have been originated by a natural or human behavior. People can basically perform the following operations:

• Viewing all reports of incidents happened and verified in a map since the launch of the website;
• Selecting reports by categories identified as the different levels of avalanche danger’s scale at which each incident occurred;
• Reporting a new incident by providing a minimal set of information;
• Subscribing for being alerted by e-mail or SMS on new incidents occurred nearby a chosen area;
• Browsing the map at different scales for geographically clustered incidents over larger areas (National, Continental detail);
• Viewing statistically chart of incidents by years, zones, etc.

Reports from mountaineers, journalists, geeks can be filled through the completion of a number of fields that represent the framework of minimal information to describe, in a comprehensive and standard manner, an avalanche accident. A full story can be reported either in a totally anonymous circumstance or be accompanied by the optional contact information for a further review by administrators.

The location of where the accident occurred is one of the key elements and can be provided in an easily way through the addition of geographical coordinates (if available by GPS device) or being approximately calculated by looking for a place – performed through geocoding feature – typically of the mountain where the fact occurred.

We are aware how potential users are spread over a large extent of technical and non-technical subjects and thus the developed database includes both those mandatory fields expected by avalanche warning services and others optional which could be filled once more information will have been captured on those stories reported yet. A feature of Ushahidi, which we do really like is the ability to supporting a role based access control by controlling different kind of users and privileges over the data. We would just Among the obligatory set of information easily designed we have:

• The category of each single report which corresponds to the current hazard level (totally complaint with the level and color of the international danger’s standard scale) emitted with the bulletin by the national Avalanche Warning System for a certain area of interest;
• The activities that mountaineers were doing when the incident happened (Skitouring, snowshoeing, skiing off-piste, snowmobiling, etc);
• The mountain where each incident happened;
• The aspect where the avalanche has been triggered;
• The number of buried, injured and fatalities caused by such avalanche;
• Some possible links to news and images related to the specific incident.

As optional information each single report can be further refined later since its submission and trusted with a subset of information provided only from granted users on these additional more technically fields below:

• The slope of the terrain where it happened;
• The avalanche path taken in meters by the front from the slab point;
• What kind of safety gears the team was equipped (optional also for base users);
• The cause of the detachment.

This social work is basically an experiment that would outcome effects as much possible as extended in a world where spatial information is not still diffused. Geoavalanche would expect to improve the educational use of such spatially enable data and help organizations and governments to better understand how the involvement of citizenship can be crucial for leveraging a real problem.

In fact, basically, there were two different promising approaches, which have been worthwhile to issue:

1. The emerge of hidden incidents that usually are going to geographically disappear;
2. The valuable combination of being able to report such information with a more socialize manner (with mobility in mind) as much as this would fit with many young people who are going in the wilderness.

Ushahidi currently supports different manners to send a message for a report by:

• Submitting the reports on a mobile application, available both for iOS and Android users;
• Tweeting with special hashtag inserted in the body of a post on Twitter (#geoavalanche – #avalreport – #avalevent);
• Emailing with the description of the story;
• Filling the forms on the submitting page.

A story is not immediately sent to being published and made available on the public map. In any case, all reports have the opportunity to be commented on to further prove the credibility and the details of the story.

The project was carried on with a deep focus on openness and sustainability to meet the educational goals identified for this sort of application mapping. Geoavalanche itself is an Open Source project and therefore Ushahidi was a natural choice as tool for crowdsourcing and OpenStreetMap the underlying proper base layer for mapping. Furthermore Geoavalanche decided to make the data collected fully available to the public by adopting the Creative-Commons CC-BY-3.0 license that allows free use and possible reuse through the native RESTful API endpoints for fetching avalanche incidents data.

Since this kind of information is similar worldwide, indeed, such crisis mapping use case is transferable as a best practice to a large extent in order to make mitigation measures more reliable and statistically more robust for stakeholders.

There's sun, sand and sex in Cannes Film Festival entry "Paradise: Love" — and they add up to a grim and unsettling holiday movie.

Austrian director Ulrich Seidl's film depicts middle-aged European women at a Kenyan holiday resort seeking romance with young local men.

Margarethe Tiesel plays a 50-year-old Austrian whose search for love turns increasingly predatory. But the actress says she does not judge her character's behavior. She says the movie is about female loneliness and how "people who are exploited at home travel abroad and become exploiters in turn."

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Multi-Choice network has today announced that the value-added services previously available to subscribers watching Big Brother StarGame will resume today, Friday May 18, 2012.

Through their decoders, subscribers can access the Big Brother StarGame data service by pressing ‘OK’ on their DStv remote from 14:00 CAT today (15pm East African Time – EAT). This data service includes updated news, Housemate profiles and voting information.

Multi-Choice has also announced a second live  Big Brother Africa video channel which is now available on DStv Channel 197, also starting today at 3pm EAT. Previously, Big Brother was available 24/7 on Channel 198 only. The opening of the Big Brother on channel 197 means that Upville and Downville houses will be shown simultaneously on air.

Multi-Choice network has today announced that the value-added services previously available to subscribers watching Big Brother StarGame will resume today, Friday May 18, 2012.

Through their decoders, subscribers can access the Big Brother StarGame data service by pressing ‘OK’ on their DStv remote from 14:00 CAT today (15pm East African Time – EAT). This data service includes updated news, Housemate profiles and voting information.

Multi-Choice has also announced a second live  Big Brother Africa video channel which is now available on DStv Channel 197, also starting today at 3pm EAT. Previously, Big Brother was available 24/7 on Channel 198 only. The opening of the Big Brother on channel 197 means that Upville and Downville houses will be shown simultaneously on air.

Dr. Muthoni Kimemia, a professor at Southern Illinois University- Carbondale, is conducting a study to investigate Kenyans' attitudes towards seeking mental health services. The study also seeks to investigate participants' perception of the social support available to them in times of need.

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In the slums of the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, visiting the bathroom usually means one of two things; a trip to the local pit latrine or the ‘flying toilet’.

The former entails letting nature take its course in a rickety outhouse perched atop a hole in the ground — a facility also used by hundreds of other people in the neighborhood.

The latter meanwhile consists of relieving oneself in a plastic bag before throwing the offending item away in the street.

A 2011 report by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation found that these arrangements led to environmental contamination and the spread of diseases such as typhoid and tuberculosis.

But within this primitive sewage system recent MIT graduate, David Auerbach, has spied an opportunity he believes could one day be worth millions of dollars.

Alongside a group of fellow MIT alumni and local Kenyan partners, Auerbach has helped found Sanergy — a start-up that aims to make a business out of cleaning up Nairobi’s sanitary mess.

It plans to collect human waste in a series of custom-built toilets before transforming it into compost and fertilizer products that can be sold to the local agriculture industry.

“In Kenya alone there are 10 million people who live in the slums and 8 million of them don’t have access to a clean toilet,” says Auerbach.

“By providing this service we believe there is tremendous potential to operate a for-profit social business. In terms of agriculture, Mckinsey puts (fertilizer manufactured from human waste) at a half trillion dollar business in East Africa alone,” he adds.

The Sanergy model works by first installing a network of low cost sanitation centers, which provide access to clean toilets, at various locations in the slums.

These premises — that trap the waste in air tight containers — are then franchised out to local entrepreneurs at a cost of 45,000 shillings (roughly $500) a year.

Franchisees are funded primarily by micro-finance loans, explains Auerbach. They charge residents a small fee, usually 5 Kenyan Shillings ($0.06) to use their facilities in order to make their money back.

The waste is processed and broken down to be transformed into a variety of organic fertilizer products that are then sold on to commercial farms.

“Currently we have 25 facilities up and running… we’re collecting about three metric tons of waste per week which can all be converted into fertilizer,” says Auerbach.

“By the end of this year we want to have 250 franchises. We think by the end of the following year we can safely be at 1,000 toilets,” he adds.

Creating employment opportunities for local residents can also be a benefit of the project and important to its greater success.

“Success of the business model like Sanergy depends on creating viable franchise opportunities for local entrepreneurs and attractive services for slum residents,” says Austin Beebe of African Medical and Research Foundation.

“Projects such as these should hire locally and this is more than a good development principle. It makes business sense too.”

As it stands, Sanergy employs 42 people — in facility design, waste collection, plant operation and management positions — of which 34 are Kenyan.

By the end of 2013 Auerbach says Sanergy plans to collect enough waste to power a bio-generator that can sell electricity back into the Kenyan national grid.

“The waste of 100,000 people generates about 1 gigawatt of power. So right now when we have 1,200 users every day we’re not at a point where we can produce sufficient amounts of electricity,” says Auerbach.

“This is something we’ll be looking to do later this year or next year,” he adds. “But we’re not quite there yet.”

Source: CNN

A possible source of the so-called “birther” issue–or at least a potential cause of the rumors that have dogged President Barack Obama–has been identified.

Obama’s former literary agency misidentified his birthplace as Kenya while trying to promote the then-Harvard Law grad as an author in 1991.

According to a promotional booklet produced by the agency, Acton & Dystel, to showcase its roster of writers, Obama was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

Miriam Goderich edited the text of the bio; she is now a partner at the         Dystel & Goderich agency, which lists Obama as one of its current clients.

“This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me–an agency  assistant at the time,” Goderich wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo  News. “There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of  his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he  was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your  readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more.”

A copy of the booklet was         published on Breitbart.com, under the headline: “         Obama’s Literary Agent in 1991 Booklet: ‘Born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’ It was part of the “vetting” of the president the site’s late founder, Andrew Breitbart, had promised.

Here’s Obama’s full bio from the 1991 brochure:

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Breitbart.com published a lengthy disclaimer with the brochure, saying it does not believe Obama was born outside of the United States:

Andrew Breitbart was never a “Birther,” and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of “Birtherism.” In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.

Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama’s ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him.

It is for that reason that we launched “The Vetting,” an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other presidential candidates)–not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.

It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below–one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review.

It is evidence–not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.

Despite that rationale, the publication will no doubt fuel “birthers” who refuse to believe Obama was born in the United States.

In         a follow-up post, Breitbart.com noted that Obama was listed as being born in Kenya on the Dyster & Goderich website until April 2007, “just two months after then-Senator Obama declared his campaign for the presidency.”

Source: ABC

Now just in-case you have not been convinced of why there is so much buzz around this super-phone made for Homo-Sapiens, here is the TV commercial to have you going about the features. I actually like it and the way you can get to understand what the device can do to you. Mostly that part where the device sleeps as soon as you doze off in bed in case you were watching a movie.

What do you think, worth the hype?

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There are several blogs competing for first place in their respective categories and they include:

Business, agriculture, sports, general, photography, business, fashion, food, new, creative writing, politics, technology and corporate blog categories.

An average of four blogs were nominated for the various categories including The Openbook Blog, which was nominated for the Best General Blog in Kenya. Winners for each category are going to be determined by the number of votes each manages to generate. The voting mechanism was powered by The Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE). Voting began on the 18^th of April and closed on 3^rd May 2012.

Safaricom, being one of the leading corporate in the country, in terms of sponsoring local initiatives is the title sponsor for the awards. Other sponsors include Samsung, Microsoft, Google Plus, Virtual City, Serena Hotels, Access Kenya Group and Capital FM.

So far, only BAKE members, nominees, sponsors and the media have been invited in the invite- only ceremony that will take place today at Serena Hotel in Nairobi. There is no official communication yet as to what kind of awards will be given to winners but the event has been billed as the biggest event ever to bring together bloggers and media personalities from within the country.

The BAKE Blog Awards rewards bloggers that post on a regular basis, have great and useful content, are creative and innovative.

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So it’s getting really hott in the Big Brother house. After their altercation, DKB and Prezzo have been joined at the hip, literally! Big Brother punished them for their childish misdemeanor by ordering the two warring personalities to wear a jump suit that is conjoined at the hip. Guess that will teach them who is the real gangsta in the house!

Meanwhile this joining at the hip has not stopped the bubbling love affair between Prez and First Lady Goldie. The two are still massively flirting with each other and it seems only a matter of time before they do it like rabbits. Prez sang to Goldie his hit song “for sho for shizzo” as Goldie lapped up the attention. This is bound to be one sizzlin’ Naija-Kenya collabo. This couple has TMS- Too Much Swag!

Needless to mention there was one girl with a melon-sized kiwaru in the house and that is none other than Barbz. The attention seeking diva was clearly not happy with Goldie getting all the attention. She is doing her best to hide it but everyone can see that she does not like the status quo, she wants to be the top female in the house! She is really playing out that woiye card.

Upville housemates Prezzo and DKB were joined at the hip by Big Brother yesterday after a nasty altercation on Wednesday night.

Biggie meted out the punishment after breaking a verbal fight between the boys before it got ugly.

A visibly inebriated Prezzo tore at DKB, accusing him of causing a rift between him and romantic interest Goldie.

“You told her something and now she won’t talk to me,” he quipped. It got ugly after Prezzo dared the Ghanaian to hit him. DKB then got angry and called Prezzo an alcoholic and a retard, telling him to get help.

DKB however told Biggie that that was not the case, instead heaping blame on fellow celeb-mate Mampi.

This is the second argument Prezzo has been involved in, the first being a tongue-lashing against South African Barbz.

Calling her lazy, he told her to change her attitude, before apologizing to her later.

Is Prezzo ruffling feathers to be strategic or is he just being himself?

Meanwhile, in Downville, Alex sneaked in a quick kiss on Liberia’s Yadel, who is up for eviction this weekend.

Meanwhile, evictees Teclar, Julio and Hilda were interviewed by Capital FM’s Jam Presenter Maqbul.

They spoke of disappointment at hardly being in the house.

“I wish I could have stayed longer because the game had just begun,” Teclar complained, adding that she was happy though to have been part of the fun.

Hilda was however sad that her confidence in the East Africa vote did not come to fruition.

“I was telling those guys that I have East Africa behind me, apparently my boyfriend is from Uganda and we really connected with the boys from Kenya Malonza and Alex! But at the same time, it is a game of chance, and it was all left to chance, so there is nobody to blame. At least we left Swahili words in the house!” she said in her usual bubbly attitude.

Julio said he made sure he made as many friends as possible, and said he left Malonza the mantle to represent East Africa in the #StarGame nice and strong.

Pledging support for Kenya, he also intimated that the only thing he would do different if he had a chance to go back was to be himself rather than trying to study the other housemates so much.

Second-year students at the Makerere University College of Computing and Information Technology (CIT), in Uganda, have invented a hand-held pregnancy scan-like machine called WinSenga. The machine, which consists of a funnel-like pinnard horn similar to the one used by midwives, can be used to scan a pregnant woman’s womb or detect problems such as ectopic pregnancy or abnormal foetal heart beats. “We called it WinSenga to relate to traditional birth attendants,” the team said. The students- Aaron Tushabe, Joshua Okello and Josiah Kavuma, said the project was carried out under the tutelage of Dr. Davis Musinguzi

The device allows the examiner to determine the age, weight, position and breathing pattern of the foetus. This will give the examiner a clue on what treatment to give. With this device, you can know how old the foetus is, whether it is underweight, its position and breathing pattern. Then decide on what precaution to take or the treatment to give,” said Tushabe. “You can access the information anytime you log on because once you are done with diagnosis, it records automatically,” he added.

“At $3,000 (sh7.3m) it is cheaper and affordable compared to the ultrasound scan.”

Planning the trip took a few months as we had to identify a good tour company, save up for the trip, shop for Mountain climbing gear and make sure we were physically fit. Mt. Longonot was our training ground while others took it further and participated in marathons all in the name of fitness. So when the day came, we were mentally and physically prepared and reading loads of literature on Mt. Kenya helped a lot.

Fifteen members of the Friends of Longonot made it for this expedition and we headed to Mt, Kenya. Excitement reigned and laughter filled the air on our drive there. We used the Nanyuki way as our choice route was the Sirimon described as the easiest to get to point Lenana. The route ascends the mountain from the west. Beautiful wooden bandas resplendent in the popular KWS colours stood out as we drove into the Mt. Kenya gate. Kenya Wildlife Service has done amazing work with the place and their guides are very welcoming. The porters had already arrived and we each got one to assist us carry our luggage, We had to change into our walking gear as we had to embark on a 9km trek to the Old Moses Camp. After a quick picnic lunch, the journey began. We set out together but about a kilometre into it, it was to each his own. The potters had carried very heavy luggage including the cooking utensils that was to be used in the four days of the trip. They were clearly used to this and walked faster than us who only had snacks in our day bags. Numerous stops were made, lots of water consumed and conversations had. The scenery to Old Moses was not very captivating apart from the montane forest and at one point we had to stop and stare at a dead tree. It stood out like a sore thumb as a constant reminder of a fire that had gutted it together with acres of forest two years ago. What was even sadder is the fresh memories of the Country recovering from a fire weeks ago that had consumed 10% of the forest.

We finally got to the Old Moses Camp which is 3300M above sea level and it was quite a relief putting down our bags and having some tea and snacks. Bunk beds were what we got and we were fortunate enough that we were the only ones in the camp so no sharing. The cold was slowly creeping in and we had to dress warm with gloves, scarves, fleece jackets and two pairs of socks as we waited for dinner. When dinner was ready, we all sat down at the dining area as some of the porters served us and we had a sumptuous well balanced meal. We knew we had to sleep early because we were to wake up at the crack of dawn but never ending humorous conversations and battle of the sex tête-à-tête shortened the night.
By 6am we were up and packing. Breakfast was served and you would think we were in a five star restaurant. The porters doubled up as very good cooks too. We had a 16km journey ahead of us and we knew it was not a joke judging from the previous day 9km walk.

We began our hike uphill through moorland and rocks till we got to Mackinders valley. The scenery here is to behold. We marveled at God’s creation to a point we forgot how tired we were. It was so beautiful. The contouring of the ranges, the unique plants some shaped like human beings standing on one leg, the caves that we used as our rest spots when we had lunch. It was almost surreal. It started raining and we had to quickly put on our rain gear. Unfortunately, some of what we bought thinking was water proof was not. Most of us got soaked and the walk seemed longer.

When we spotted Shiptons camp at a distance, tears of joy streaked down some of our faces already covered in rain water. It seemed so close and yet so far but we knew we were almost there. The sight of the green hut gave us so much energy and every step we took was to some hot tea and change of clothes. It was quite a celebration when we walked through the doors into our dormitories. Those who had arrived earlier welcomed the rest heartily as we all knew how challenging it was to get there. Shiptons camp is at 4,200M and the view of the peak of the mountain is much more visible and the surroundings breath taking. It was truly quite a site to behold. Shipton’s is extremely cold at night and we were fortunate enough to have a jiko to keep us warm. Most of us hanged the clothes that had been rained on in the kitchen, the unoccupied bunk beds and the dining area. Others used the jiko that we were using to keep warm to dry the clothes and shoes they would wear the next day. Every corner was resplendent in different colours reminding us of how far we had come and how great it felt. We had our dinner which was delicious and one by one we went to sleep.

At 2am we were up and ready to embark on the climb up to Lenana point. We had tea and biscuits and assembled outside as we got strict instructions from our guide. The climb up is no easy feat and we had to do as instructed. Walking fast was out of the question and we had to walk as a single file as we took short timed stop overs. For most of us it was the first time to see snow and we were ecstatic. The scree proved to be a problem to walk on and we had to avoid stepping on lose pebbles as it could prove to be fatal. Step by step we walked up steep paths and the higher we went the colder it became. Mountain sickness was experienced by most of the members and natural gas emission became the norm. There were times when some of us asked ourselves, “Did I have to do this?” but the eagerness to get to Point Lenana and see the famous Munyao flag kept us going.

Screams and jubilations lent the air as we got to Point Lenana at exactly 6.09am. No amount of words can describe the feeling we had when we made it to the top 4985M above sea level. We even forgot we were to stay up there for only ten minutes. It was no longer cold to us as we were busy celebrating and taking photos and videos to remember this big moment that we had looked forward to for a long time. It was no mean achievement and we knew many had given up and others had passed away trying to get to where we were.

Endurance, commitment, hardwork and team spirit got us up there. The best moment was to see Ian Mutahi, an 11 year old make it to the top. He will grow up knowing anything is possible and you can conquer whatever thing you set your heart out to do. We had done it! No one would and will ever take that away from us.
Sadly, we had to come down as we are not allowed to stay at point Lenana for too long as we can freeze up there plus there were those experiencing altitude sickness. Going down was easier and we took less time as we slid on the snow and ‘skied’ on the scree and loose gravel. A different route was revealed to us which was shorter and more steep but since we were going down it was ok. We finally got back to Shiptons camp and had a heavy breakfast, packed and set out on our journey back to Old Moses Camp. Barely had we covered 3km than it started raining. Hailstorms became our company for the next 7km and the ground everywhere was covered in ice. We were soaked and walked like zombies with no one talking to the other. Along the way we came across three groups who were headed to Shipton and all we could do was wish them luck and few words of motivation. When the hailstorms stopped it got even colder but we soldiered on and got to camp. We changed to warm clothing and enjoyed our dinner while waiting for morning so start our journey back to Nairobi. It was a fun filled, very challenging and eye opening Easter holiday. We are now preparing for Mt. Kilimanjaro next year. The sky is the limit…yes it is.

(BY EUNICE CHEGE)

For decades, researchers and health experts have pursued the connection between happiness and health.  Emerging research has begun to validate what many wise communities have intuitively known – that having a sense of happiness, peace, fulfillment, and purpose leads to a healthier, more balanced, and ultimately a longer life.

The Business Week magazine ranked the tiny Asian country Bhutan as one of the happiest nations in the world, the happiest country in Asia and the 8^th happiest nation in the world, despite relatively low-life expectancy, a literacy rate of only 47% and a low Gross Domestic Product per capita.

Kenya didn’t even make the top 20.

Bhutan’s recipe for happiness

Bhutan’s fourth Dragon King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, first coined the term Gross National Happiness (GNH) in 1972.  In an attempt to define and measure the quality of life of Bhutan’s citizens in a more holistic manner other than solely on economic performance; GNH promotes sustainable development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.  As the Dragon King would say, “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product.”

Unlike certain concepts of happiness in western literature, happiness according to the Bhutanese is itself multidimensional – the pursuit of happiness is collective, not defined by only one’s economic performance.  Well their Asian counterparts, China, sure has a lot to learn from them.

Despite becoming wealthier, the Chinese are less happy

According to a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, China’s incredible economic growth in the last 20 years has been met with declining happiness.

In 1990, 68 per cent of those in the wealthiest income bracket inChinaand 65 per cent of those in the poorest reported high levels of satisfaction.  The latter figure has now fallen more than 23 percentage points.

The study also applauded the Chinese government for taking steps in the last few years to “repair the social safety net” and recognizing that job and income security, together with a social safety net, are of critical importance to being happy and generally healthier.

How happy are Kenyans?

With an economy that is growing as rapid as some of the world’s most promising emerging economies, Kenya is set to reap in the economic rewards like success stories such as China.  But, if your citizens’ “happiness” decreases, is it really a success story?

According to World Bank, Kenya mirrors Africa’s population growth.   The population has doubled over the last 25 years, is projected to grow by approximately 1 million per year over the next 40 years and will reach about 85 million by 2050 – that’s a lot more people to take care of and keep happy.

If Kenya had a GNH index, how happy would our nation be?  How strong is Kenya’s social safety net?  Would the social safety net be able to take care of all of us, including the projected boom in Kenya’s population?  With a higher GDP than the tiny Asian nation of Bhutan, do you think Kenya would rate higher on happiness?

Source: AFP, World Bank, Business Week

Cheki was launched in Kenya in September 2010 and has rapidly grown to become the favourite car classifieds website in Kenya with over 21,000 cars listed from the majority of Kenyan used cars and Japanese car dealers in all of Kenya’s major cities. The classifieds site has a Nigeria version which ranks in the Top 20 Nigerian content websites.

Checki Africa Managing Director Carey Eaton said

“Offering East African car buyers an easy way to connect to sellers in our local language is an important step in building towards our goal of making it easier for car buyers and sellers to connect with each other.”

Cheki first released a test version of its Kiswahili mobile and web browser sites in the Tanzanian market where the local language version is now the default language rather than English. Having tested the site in the smaller market in Tanzania, the company updated some of the language and usability features there before rolling the update first to its Kenya mobile website and finally the main website in Kenya.

The expansion of Cheki’s language capability also involved an update to the core architecture of Cheki’s technology platform to enable multiple local language capabilities for other markets including its market-leading operations in Nigeria and potential expansion to Francophone Africa.

Cheki Africa has relied on original content generated from actual dealers instead of scrapping it from competitors. Most classifieds sites are still not doing the actual collection of data but rely on data on other classifieds sites to fill their pages. Driving around Nairobi, you would see Cheki billboards and Cheki branded cars which are a great way of recruiting advertisers.

Cheki is among the  Top 10 Kenya-content websites in late 2011 and has won the confidence of the majority of the Kenyan car dealers and private seller markets. Cheki hopes to be the among the most popular Swahili websites with the release of the Swahili classified website version.

Cheki has also released and integrated Swahili versions of its Android and Nokia Ovi mobile applications as part of the update.

So you are a girl and you are not into fancy skirts and trendy dresses and cute tie neck blouses. Those things do absolutely nothing for you and anytime you had to wear a dress as a little girl you would wish you’d just keel over and die! You would have the worst time ever!
Your ideal outfits would consist of baggy distressed jeans, tees, caps, wife beaters and boyfriend jackets! And given the chance you’d wear jeans on your wedding day.
Anytime you think of heels you almost suffer a heart attack! In fact you think anyone who wears heels doesn’t like herself as that is the most torturous thing ever.

A tom boy is a girl who dresses and sometimes behaves like a boy and is often into masculine stuff.
There are those who have made tom boy look ever so chic. First we saw it with Aaliyah with her sagged jeans and designer boy boxers peeping at the low waistline of the jeans, a checked shirt unbuttoned all the way layered over a tee tank exposing a flat stomach,cute boots and well done hair and make up. Raggedy rough tom boy on the edges with a touch of feminine bits.

Of course tom boy has been upgraded and has now been made chic but this suits the younger ladies more… like the rapper Lil’ mama. She wears it well and owns her look.

What you need for your tom boy chic wardrobe:
*Trendy baggy tops
*Wife beaters
*Suspenders
*Sneakers or brogues
*Boots
*Baggy girl pants
*Trendy Shirts for tucking in or for layering
*Tees
*Tie
*Hoodies
*Shorts
*Boyfriend blazers/ jean jackets
*Belts and even bandannas

The secrets to pulling off the tom boy chic is adding a pop of color to your look at all time. Include bright trendy colors (keep with the times and get the colors that are in vogue). Do stock up on the pinks, purples, mustards, reds etc. In short keep it bright and stylish.

“Girlify” your look a bit by wearing some make-up à la Lil’ mama and because you are a girl , ensure that your hair looks good and is styled properly (your hair gives your female identity).
Just because you are a tom boy, doesn’t mean you have to look all frumpy and like you grew up as the only girl among 5 brothers. You can look chic too

So TEAMS should be repaired before the end of today according to press release from Orange Kenya. Orange stepped in to accelerate repair work of TEAMS cable. The East African Marine System (TEAMS) has experienced two significant cuts in a span of less than 2 months along the Indian Ocean coastline. But now there is some good news as Orange expect the repair work to be done before the end of today Friday.

According to the CEO of Telkom Kenya – Orange, Mickael Ghossein

France Telecom Marine sent one of its ships that had docked in Madagascar to Mombasa last week. This has significantly reduced the repair time of the cable by half as opposed to the four weeks that an alternate repair ship would have taken to come and repair the cable. The France Telecom Marine ship docked in Mombasa on the afternoon of May 12 and proceeded to the repair site after inward clearance. France Telecom Marine should complete the repairs on the cable by Friday, May 18 thereby bringing  TEAMS operations back to normal

The TEAMS’ cable, which is a 5,000-kilometre fibre optic system, links the Kenyan coastal town of Mombasa with Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and also connects other east African countries to international communications networks.

According to the Standard “last month Parliament approved a new responsibility allowance for key MPs this allowance is to be back dated to January 2006, and if the motion to amend Statute Law (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill, a bill that allows government to make changes to various laws succeeds the responsibility allowance will be back dated July 2003.”

Responsibility allowance was previously paid only to the House Speaker and Leader of Government Business. However if the amendment is passed the Speaker, the Deputy Speaker, and four members of the Chairman’s Panel will each receive 2.4 million shillings for every year served from 2006. And the 9 members of the Parliamentary Service Commission will also receive 1.2 million shillings for every year served since 2006. Other amendments will entitle the Speaker to Kshs. 20,000 for each time he presides over parliamentary business. The Deputy Speaker and four temporary speakers will be entitled to Kshs. 15, 000 and Kshs. 12,500 respectively for every time they fill-in for the House Speaker. Considering that parliament sits three times a week, for several weeks in the year, and the payments are to be backdated from either 2006 or 2003 the amount really adds up. It is estimated that the government will pay at least 200 million shillings in responsibility allowances to dozens of current and former MPs if the amendments are passed.

I’m not sure what the exact definition of responsibility allowance is, particularly since those entitled to it already receive a salary to carry out their responsibilities. What I am sure of is, a year and a bit since the promulgation of the new constitution it would seem that members of parliament have either forgotten, or wilfully refused to heed to Chapter 6 of the constitution which calls all state officers, MPs included, to provide selfless service based solely on the public interest; accountability to the public for decisions and actions, as well as discipline and commitment in service to the people.

(THITU KARIBA) – Last night,  I was on radio talking about how to deal with sexual urges and this girl calls in saying that she is a great relationship and willingly gave herelf to her man sexually, and does not get why we ought to abstain until marriage, or not give into our sexual desires.

I asked her a bit about her relationship and the one thing I picked up was that she had been dating this guy for a while, which I was not at all surprised.  I mean, “Why buy the cow when you are getting the milk and steaks for free?” When we indulge in our sexual desires before marriage, you prolong marriage or keep it from ever coming up all together.

Sex is a gift from God, its wonderful, but it needs to be had in a lifetime not long-term commitment or relationship, called marriage. Really how long is too long before he asks you to marry him and why should he get all the perks without having to pay?

If you are in a non-sexual relationship, well good for you, the road to marriage just got shorter. Even still there is time that needs to be taken to know each other. I say a year is good enough, get to know each other in all seasons and times of the month and year. Get to meet his or her people, and find out what you are getting into. I would say after a year if there are no issues to be worked through and all is well, then go for it. But after months, I would say you are pushing it.  You will either find yourself falling into temptation or into a cycle of excuses.

If you are set to marry at some point, then give yourselves a time line to work with. If we want an excuse we will find it. The one excuse I find many times coming up is that, they cannot afford the wedding. In this case down size it, get married later, work and save – for that wedding that you’ve always wanted. I say this because some folks have been at it for years with the whole affordable wedding thing.

I know that  everyone is different and that we all have our own views and opinions, so I’ll ask …

How long is too long  to wait before you say I do?

Follow the author on Facebook Thitu Kariba ( Coach) and Twitter @Thitu_k

The East African Marine System (TEAMS) consortium has entered into an MOU with France Telecom Marine to carry out the repair on the cable system. The cable which has suffered 2 cuts in less than 2 months will be restored in a record 4 days after the agreement.

France Telecom Marine, a division of France Telecom – Orange, specialises in the laying and maintenance of sub-marine cables globally and owns 15 per cent of cable ship fleet worldwide and has operations across the world, as well more than 40,000 kilometres of submarine cable, making it one of the largest players globally.

According to the CEO of Telkom Kenya – Orange, Mickael Ghossein, France Telecom Marine is currently undertaking repair work to restore the operations of the cable and is expected to complete these repairs in 4 days.

“France Telecom Marine sent one of its ships that had docked in Madagascar to Mombasa last week. This has significantly reduced the repair time of the cable by half as opposed to the four weeks that an alternate repair ship would have taken to come and repair the cable. The France Telecom Marine ship docked in Mombasa on the afternoon of May 12 and proceeded to the repair site after inward clearance.”

France Telecom Marine should complete the repairs on the cable by today (Friday, May 18) thereby bringing TEAMS operations back to normal.

Apart from repair and maintenance work, France Telecom Marine is also involved in other areas of fibre optic cable deployment, including the study (survey) and shore ends. The firm’s recent projects in the continent include the laying and maintenance of cables in West Africa in Senegal, Cameroon, Benin, Angola, Nigeria and South Africa, as well as in East Africa, Reunion Island, Madagascar and Mauritius among other countries. FT Marine was also involved in the deployment of the recently-completed Lion2 cable system that is now set for commercial use in the region.

France Telecom Marine is repairing the TEAMS cable, using the LION II’s spare sub-marine cables by replacing a full section at each repair section.

The TEAMS’ cable, which is a 5,000-kilometre fibre optic system, links the Kenyan coastal town of Mombasa with Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and also connects other east African countries to international communications networks.

The TEAMS cable, in which Telkom Kenya – Orange is a significant shareholder, is a joint venture by a consortium consisting of the Kenya government and other telecoms operators – who hold 85 percent – and UAE-based mobile operator, Etisalat with 15 percent.

The Kenyan government invested KSh 8.6 billion in the TEAMS project with the Dubai-based consortium putting in an additional KSh. 1.5 billion.

Shares allocated to each local operator represent a pro-rata cost of the construction of the cable. Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks (ASN) laid the cable, sponsored by the Kenyan government and private telecom companies.

Congratulation you little prick. You’ve got the attention you wanted.  Your attention seeking skills have sunk to a new low … you’re FAMOUS!

Let me first of all re-cap what George has done. George shat this piece for actors.co.ke and since he wanted to grab our attention, he did it the ONLY way he thinks will work, BY ‘KILLING’ someone.

The headline ‘KENYAN ACTRESS NICE GITHINJI DIES IN A CAR CRASH’ a headline that grabbed me and my heart skipped a beat. But Nice is NOT dead, it’s just George trying to get attention to his batshit writing.

He also took time to share his wet dreams about Nice Githinji!!! WTF?!

Enough of this garbage, his issue is that we’re not exploding in excitement or creaming our pants every time we see actors walking around in town, because  of this he is the reason can’t sleep at night! YOU NEED TO KNOW people! How shit is your life that you are SAD when people don’t stop you and take photos with you just cause you’re a KYM on a third rate tv show???

George, you need to slip into something comfortable, like a strait jacket cause your crazy cannot be allowed to roam the earth like this, why the fuck would you think TRIBE has anything to do with people not recognizing you??? Next time, you want to share your brain fart, please walk to Turkana and release it there.

You want us to recognize you? At least work on some kick ass show or at least, at least have an ounce of talent in that barrel of fat.

George

You’re famous? Oh btw, it seems you somehow subtly suggested you don’t get laid na wewe ni celeb, I have an answer for you, get a SALAD.

Edit — Article edited for grammar issues

The 25 Pivot East 2012 finalists, on 10th May 2012, attended their first mentorship and coaching training at the iHub, Nairobi. The coaching session was on Effective Pitching .The finalist who will have to pitch to Investors, Venture Capitalists, judges, government officials and other delegates during the pitching competition conference are using these sessions in preparation for the competition.

The first session was facilitated by Matia Mandela of m :Lab  and Peter Karimi of Nokia . Matia, talked about Good Pitching Skills, advising the attendees that Story telling serves as one of the best ways to make a good pitch to investors. This is because it humanizes the pitch and gives it an emotional appeal touch.

Peter Karimi from Nokia addressing the Finalists

To have a good pitch:
1. Target the pitch
2.  Be on time
3.  Know your audience
4. Get to the point…Fast!
5. Answer what problem you are solving
6. Use bold ideas to convey new content
7. Have small PowerPoint presentations.
8. Don’t read slides, TELL YOUR STORY!
9. Admit what you don’t know, don’t lie to the audience.
10. Know your competition
11. Control the meeting by taking charge.

The second session attended by the finalists ensued on 14th May at the iHub,Nairobi. The training was on Business Resource Planning  with a focus Customer Development facilitated by Courtney Mills of Sinapis Group.  This session was particularly important to the finalists because as startups the companies need to know how to have good customer relations and maintaining customers.

Courtney Mills, Co-Founder & Executive Director Sinapis Group

Courtney noted that most companies fail because there is no market for their product not because their product doesn’t work. She advised that before one decides to roll out as a company, they should test the prototype in the market to make sure that the product has a market before the company is up and running.

To get a market for a product it is important to analyze the market by Defining the problem you’re solving, Establishing source of Problem, Measure the impact of the Problem. “Before you test prototype, understand what users want so not to render your prototype useless and to save valuable time iterating” She Said.
The greatest risk of failure in not the development of the new product but in the development of customers and markets, this means that it is important for any company to understand who their customers are. It is very vital to have a clear customer profile for your product, because it helps in identifying their needs and how they adopt your product.

Types of customers for your startup
1. End users- day to day users of the product or service.
2. Influencers- Parties who think they have stake in whether your product or service is purchased
3. Recommenders: Parties whose opinion counts in getting an order e.g media, analysts
4. Economic buyer- Person with budget to buy your product/service
5. Final Decision Maker: The parties with the ultimate say in whether to buy your product/service.
6. Saboteurs- Parties comfortable with the status quo, and will try to sabotage your sale.

To maintain customers, use earlyvangelist when you start off, because they will push for your product. It is very important to understand that Customers need to feel that their purchase was “worth it” and that they go a “Good Deal”. This will ensure that the customers become ambassadors of the product as well as.

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Originally posted here:
Cheki Releases Swahili Version of its Auto Classifieds Website

Already making waves around the world. A number of tech blogs are reporting that Samsung Galaxy S III has already been preordered by over 9 million people worldwide. The total includes devices sold by more than 290 carriers in 145 countries.

Source theverge

Grammy-winning disco legend Donna Summer, who topped the charts repeatedly in the 1970s and 80s with raunchy hits like “Love to Love You Baby” and “Hot Stuff,” died Thursday aged 63.

Known as the Queen of Disco, the singer whose hits also included “I Feel Love” and “She Works Hard for the Money,” died in Florida from lung cancer, the TMZ celebrity news website said.

“Early this morning, we lost Donna Summer Sudano, a woman of many gifts,” said a family statement. “While we grieve her passing, we are at peace celebrating her extraordinary life and her continued legacy.

Tributes poured in within hours of her death, led by President Barack Obama who said: “Donna truly was the ‘Queen of Disco.’ Her voice was unforgettable, and the music industry has lost a legend far too soon.”

“Truly that will be her legacy, she was the Disco Queen,” soul legend Aretha Franklin told CNN.

Barbra Streisand, with whom Summer duetted on 1979′s “No More Tears (Enough is Enough)”, said she was “shocked” at the news.

“She was so vital the last time I saw her a few months ago. I loved doing the duet with her. She had an amazing voice and was so talented. .. It’s so sad,” she said in a statement.

In Hollywood, flowers were placed on her sidewalk star on the storied Hollywood Walk of Fame, across the street from the world-famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

Summer, who also became something of an icon in the gay community, shot to fame during the disco era of the 1970s with hits like “MacArthur Park,” “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls.”

The orgasmic-sounding “Love to Love You Baby,” released in 1975, was one of the first disco songs to be released in extended form, giving full vent to Summer’s erotic moans and groans.

In the 1980s her hits included “She Works Hard for the Money” and “State of Independence.”

The disco diva was born LaDonna Adrian Gaines into a large devoutly Christian family in Boston and started singing in the local church, before performing in a number of Motown-influenced groups in her teens.

Summer took her stage name after marrying Austrian actor Helmuth Sommer in 1972, anglicizing her name after divorcing him. She spoke fluent German and the couple had a daughter, Mimi Sommer.

The singer won five Grammy awards during her spectacular career, including in 1980 for best rock female vocalist for the 1979 “Hot Stuff,” but also as recently as 1997 for best dance recording for “Carry On.”

She holds the record for most consecutive double albums to top the Billboard charts — three — and first female with four #1 singles in a 12-month period, three solo and one with Barbra Streisand, according to the IMDb website.

“Hot Stuff” also got a boost from being used in the 1997 hit movie “The Full Monty,” as the track to which a group of unemployed British steel workers performed a striptease act.

TMZ reported that she had kept her illness quiet, and didn’t appear too sick only a couple of weeks ago, citing sources as saying she was focused on trying to finish a new album she had been working on.

It cited sources as saying Summer believed she developed lung cancer after inhaling toxic particles following the September 11, 2001 Al Qaeda attacks in New York.

Harry Casey, lead singer and “KC” of fellow disco greats KC and the Sunshine Band, said he was stunned.

“I saw her several months ago at a performance, she looked great, she sang great, her performance was amazing. We got together backstage and had some good laughs and walked down memory lane.

“I’m just in shock. I had no idea anything was wrong.”

1.The source <original version of the article and its author> of the page can play a significant role: Wikipedia policy indicates that characteristics of the book, author and publishers of an article’s citations all affect reliability. But the 2011 Egyptian Revolution article showed how influential the Wikipedia editor who edits the first version of the page can be. Making Wikipedia editors’ reputation, edit histories etc more easily readable is a critical component to understanding points of view while editing and reading rapidly evolving Wikipedia articles.

2. Primary sources are gradually replaced by secondary sources: In the first hours/days of an event, primary sources (on-site journalists reporting from the field) are generally the only sources available since analysis of the events in context can only happen later. And so primary sources (including raw video footage from YouTube, references to live television footage etc) are used despite common assumption that Wikipedia does not allow primary sources (actually the policy states that primary sources are allowed but the majority of sources should be secondary sources). In the absence of secondary sources, editors must do the work of summarizing and highlighting the most important aspects of the events, something Wikipedians usually leave up to secondary sources.

3. The cite is not always the same as the source: For numerous reasons (including the fact that some editors feel that others are biased against more local sources, or because of the bias against social media sources etc) the citation that editors use to back up a particular phrase are not always the same as the source from which they receive their information. Editors might find their information from one source (for example, from Twitter or television) and then find another (what they perceive is a more acceptable) source for citation in the article.

4. The blurring of boundaries along traditional “reliable sources” lines: The evolution of this article shows how blogs (for example those by the BBC and Al Jazeerah) can host reliable secondary source authors, that YouTube can host reliably edited footage and that Twitter can provide access to authentic primary sources as a reference for how individuals reacted. Although there are cases of misinformation hosted on social media sources, the “social media” category does not necessarily relay reliability information. Because Wikipedia policy doesn’t directly address the multiple contexts in which “social media sources”  can host reliable information, a number of questions are still prevalent, which is probably why social media source queries dominate the Wikipedia Reliable Sources Noticeboard.

My design recommendations include the design of source management systems around the kind of collaboration that is already working on Wikipedia: where editors collaborate around specific news stories, checking to see whether the source actually reflects the information in the article, whether the source is accurately contextualized, whether other media verify the facts in the article and whether there is any accompanying multimedia.

Below you’ll find my slides. A video of the presentation is available on Vimeo. The full report will be available in a few weeks but I look forward to your responses in the meantime!

Wikipedia sources: On the books and on the ground

Featured image by xkcd licensed under a CC-NC-BY-2.5 license.

“Internet security remains of paramount importance and for us as the market leader in Internet Services, protecting our customers using practical solutions remains our core business,” said AccessKenya Managing Director Mr. Kris Senanu.“Email hacking and phishing are a global problem and the deployment of this technology protects our clients and other users on our network,” Mr. Senanu added.

Increased cyber attacks and hacking are ‘a real threat’ to national security and therefore service providers have the responsibility of protecting clients as well as collaborating with authorities to curb the menace, which has been on the rise since the arrival of the undersea fiber optic cable.

AccessKenya Systems Engineer Mr. Sam Oduor said the SMTP AUTH system guarantees email security thence enabling clients to safeguard their information on through the AccessKenya network.

“Communication on this authentication system comes through a secure socket layer. This improves customer privacy since conversations cannot be intercepted,” said Mr. Oduor. Clients using this service on through the AccessKenya  network will be provided with unique and secure username and passwords with which they will access servers using this authentication system. According to Mr. Oduor, the service also allows clients to send emails on through AccessKenya

network while abroad. “This is primarily targeted at customers who are not using AccessKenya network both locally

abroad,”

The deployment will also see the company save costs on overheads associated with support services for traveling clients.

The authentication comes a few months after the company adopted the Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) with a view of enhancing security on the network. Kenya has in the recent months experienced a myriad of cyber attacks with over 100 government websites hacked.

Experts have blamed poor internet standards for the rampant hacking incidents.

Img Credits: fulcrumtech.net

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Cameroonian international footballer Samuel Eto'o will be visiting Kenya on May 22, 2012. Eto's, a 4-time African Player of the Year and a former star striker for Barcelona FC, will be in Kenya to attend the Laikipia Unity and Beyond Cup.

Eto'o is one of the ambassadors of The Laikipia Unity and Beyond Cup, whose aim is "promoting peace, fostering towards environmental sustainability and better health care.” 

Eto'o currently plays for the Russian team Anzhi Makhachkala.

read more

The drama unraveled a few minutes after the end of the mother’s day service and 5 year anniversary last Sunday at the rapture Harvest Mission International, a Kenyan community church based in Boston.

According to multiple eye witness accounts, the pastor’s wife confronted a young woman at the end of the service demanding to know why she had attended the church despite being warned against it.

Reliable sources who swamped the AjabuAfrica.com news room and other social media with concerns about the bizarre development indicated that the pastor’s wife asked the young woman to leave immediately as she was unwanted in the church due to her “suspicious” multiple phone conversations with the church pastor of undisclosed nature to the wife.

The unusually frequent telephone conversations, it was reported, occur even late in the nights, and had been going on for a long time, despite objections by the wife.

Incensed that the young woman had ignored her instructions not to attend the church any longer without a full disclosure of the telephone conversations, the wife decided enough was enough and vowed to fight for her man.

She then approached the young woman menacingly saying, “What are you doing here and I told you never to come here again? This is not a club where you go to snatch other women’s husbands,” a reliable source told AjabuAfrica.com.

As a war of words ensued, a different female parishioner injected herself right into the confrontation, pushing the pastor’s wife away, telling her to back off and stop asking her friend not to attend the church.

Reports indicate that the female friend, also a mother, and her own mother who was close by, yelled at the pastor’s wife loudly accusing her of a “bad trend” harassing other female church goers for a long time and that they are now fed up with her antics.

They accused the pastor’s wife of being overly suspicious every time the pastor talks to a female parishioner.

Sensing trouble, several other female church officials tried to calm down the pastor’s wife, separating her from the rowdy mothers and escorting her outside to her car.

Sources say that the pastors wife was driven her home located a few miles away in to cool off.

The drama unfolded as the church pastor, was in his office with guests who had attended the service that also marked several years

A phone call and voice message to the pastor for comments on the bizarre incident has yet been returned.

Close and reliable sources indicate that the church has been experiencing similar turmoil for a long time, causing an exodus of some disillusioned members.

The sources also said that a recent public gaffe by the church pastor regarding expression of affection between male pastors and female parishioners that were deemed offensive by many in the close knit community has not helped matters get any better at the troubles church.

According to different media reports, the “fight for men of God” in some Kenyan community churches had been on the rise lately, mainly at the churches back home, and now in the Diaspora.

Other pastors have also been blamed of lowering their moral standards so much that parishioners bring the standards notch lower while still attending church.

A recent article by a leading Kenyan newspaper in the motherland, the standard detailed the increasing open fight for men in the Kenyan churches back in the motherland where many young females were competing for church pastors, drawing the ire of many pastor’s wives looking to defend their husbands from total takeover.

As a result of the increasing chaos at churches, another article by the same reliable and very reputable newspaper last month reported the resolution by many of the leading churches in Kenya who have now asked the government to step in and help them develop mechanisms for self regulation.

This was in an attempt to as a way of dealing with rapidly declining moral and ethical standards at the churches.

From the drama that developed at the Kenyan church in Boston, it appears like the fight for men has finally reached some of the Kenyan Diaspora churches.

A Kenyan man who has been on the run in Indianapolis after failing to show up in court for sentencing on charges of theft and intimidation has been arrested in Indiana. He had been charged with intimidating an employee of a healthcare agency he owned in Indianapolis.

read more

Houses worth over Sh46 billion were completed last year, representing a 22 per cent growth for the sector, which was beset by a sharp increase in costs of building materials and bank lending rates.

The housing sector was driven mainly by a rush among private developers to plug the widening deficit of formal settlements against a growing demand.

“Demand for housing coupled with availability of credit from commercial banks and mortgage institutions provided the necessary support to the industry,” said the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics in the 2012 Economic Survey released on Tuesday.

Over 94 per cent of the completed buildings were developed by investors in the private sector, showing the diminishing role played by the State in the supply of new housing.

State-owned buildings worth Sh2.6 billion were completed in the year, nearly a three-fold increase over the Sh1 billion-worth done in 2010, as the government increased its allocation to the development of housing for civil servants.

The growth in the sector was, however, much slower compared to the over 100 per cent jump reported previously when the value of completed buildings rose from Sh17.5 billion to Sh37.7 billion.

The findings confirm earlier projections from several real estate experts who estimated a slower growth owing to the effect of high volatility in commodity prices and a sharp increase in lending rates.

Samuel Rono, the property portfolio manager at Regent Management— a real estate firm, attributed the slowdown in development to the high interest rates environment, which discouraged both borrowers and developers from accessing credit from banks.

“The high interest rates have discouraged borrowing, we expect a further slowing down this year,” said Mr Rono, adding that some of his clients had suspended building due to the high cost of funds.

Executives at KCB and Housing Finance—the leading mortgage loan providers—have said that the credit appetite from the private sector has been ‘significantly dampened’ since the second half of last year, when the cost of capital shot up by about 10 per cent.

HassConsult, another real estate firm that manages residential estates in the top end segment projected in its quarterly report released last month that activity in the housing market had shrunk. The firm also reported a near disappearance of mortgage buyers from the market, meaning less inflow for developers especially in the middle income sector where most buyers would rely on loans.

mmichira@ke.nationmedia.com

Source: Business DAILY

One of US mobile operators, Sprint, said Wednesday that it was delaying the launch of the HTC EVO 4G LTE smartphone after the devices were blocked by US customs.

The US authorities appear to be enforcing the win by Apple on trade compliance by Android devices. Apple claimed that Android devices infringed on its one-tap screen commands.

Sprint confirmed this in a statement and stated that “HTC is working to resolve this issue.” HTC is reported to be in the process of tweaking its future phones to comply by the new requirement. Sprint further said , “We can’t provide specific timing for product availability at this time.”

Sprint confirmed that it received a statement from HTC saying two phones being imported into the US were “delayed due to a standard US Customs review.”

Through the US International Trade Commission, Apple was handed a “limited exclusion order” directing that HTC stop bringing offending smartphones into the United States effective on April 19.

Apple has accused HTC and other Android smartphone makers of infringing on its patents. A separate but similar case is pending against Samsung.

Part of this piece originally appeared on the UpNairobi. And since it is the day when we are celebrating World Telecommunication & Information Society Day with  the 2012 theme being “Women and Girls in ICT” , i think it is appropriate to hear from one of the leading women in tech in Kenya

Here is my full chat with Ms. Kaburo Kobia of Kenya ICT Board

Kachwanya:  For those who don’t know you, like me, tell us  what you do?
Kobia: I work for the Kenya ICT Board, a government agency under the Ministry of Information and Communications tasked to promote ICT in Kenya. I am the Project Manage for Local Digital Content.

Kachwanya: How did you get there?
Kobia: I was always fascinated about computers, but my original love was for art and design. I studied Fine Arts at university and was fortunate to be exposed to computer generated art. In the late 1990s I started designing websites and that lead to a career in digital media and communications.

Kachwanya: Your thoughts on Kenyan women in tech?
Kobia: Women are underrepresented in the tech industry in Kenya. In our programs at the Kenya ICT Board, we find that only about 15% of our participants are women. If, as a country, we are to reach the goals outlined in vision 2030, then we must get more women to work in the ICT industry.

Interventions to address the low numbers of women choosing a career in ICT must come from all angles. I’d like to share two perspectives.

1. Target girls and young women: we need more programs designed to demystify technology and expose girls and young women to the exciting side of technology.

The University of Nairobi’s FabLab Outreach program already does this. They use these colorful blocks and tools from Picoblock and GogoBoard Kits to teach kids the basics of science, engineering and robotics. Programs like this and other home-grown programs must get the support they need to reach schools across the country.

2. Target media to raise the profile of women in tech. Having strong and visible role models can go a long way in growing the industry. Role models allow women, especially young women, to see their aspirations reflected in public spaces.

The Kenyan women in tech are awesome. We’ve got software developers and entrepreneurs, engineers and inventors, bloggers and designers… you’ll find women across the ICT spectrum working hard and achieving great things. Their role and their voices need to be amplified.

How I’d like to see this happen is by having an open database or public list of women in tech that the media and event organizers can consult. If there’s a need for a tech perspective in a news story or a conference on tech, Kenya’s tech women must be easy to find to fulfill the needed role. Such a list will help eliminate the excuse “We could not find any woman to interview or speak”.

Kachwanya. What are some of the mistakes you have made in the course of your work or life?

Kobia : I made a big mistake early on in my career. I was still in university and the desire to create websites got the better of me. I had just completed designing a five page brochure for the Theater and Dance Department at my university. The brochure looked great. I used this success and my design portfolio to land a web design job with the Sociology  Department. The head of the department was looking to expand their online presence by creating a mini website off the main school’s website.

I knew how to create beautiful designs, but I had no clue how to publish them online. I asked a friend who was studying computer science to teach me about ‘servers’, but by the end of the semester and the end of my contract, I still had no clue.

Meanwhile I focused on repackaging the sociology department content for web, built a very functional and easy to understand content flow and site map. This did help me understand the importance of information architecture and in later years, i focused my career on information design. But, by the end of the semester, the department did not have a website.

The head of the department was very disappointed and had to hire another student to complete my work. I felt awful. I had overestimated my ability to learn a new skill that was crucial for the job I had undertaken. My ‘fake it ’till you make it’ attitude failed. I learnt that an honest approach is crucial. Ask for help, be honest about your ability. I still challenge myself by taking on projects that will stretch my ability, but I’m more forth-rite in asking for help. Besides, search engines have vastly improved since the mid 90s… making it a lot easier to learn new skills on the job.

The Cabinet has approved stiff penalties for drivers who cause death through reckless driving or those who drive under the influence of alcohol.

Also put on notice are hit and run drivers or those who drive beyond the stipulated speed limits.

A statement from the Presidential Press Service (PPS) said the cabinet approved the Traffic (Amendment) Act, which proposes lengthy jail terms and heavy fines for reckless drivers.

The amendments propose to increase tenfold traffic offences fines including a Sh100,000 fine or a two year jail sentence or both for drivers found guilty of reckless driving.

Driving ban

The penalty will be heavier for second offenders who will have to part with a Sh300,000 fine or be disqualified from driving for two years.

“The proposed amendments are geared towards dealing with traffic offenses which account for one quarter of the accidents in the country,” the statement noted.

The amendments seek to review the registration and licensing of motor vehicles and the issuance of driving licenses besides dealing with the failure of a driver to produce a driving license.

The proposed amendments will also deal with the issue of unroadworthy vehicles, punishment for hit and run drivers and the fraudulent issuance of motor vehicle documents, the statement stated.

The amendments are aimed at restoring sanity on Kenyan roads. They propose that all Public Service Vehicle (PSV) license holders undergo a mandatory retesting after every two years.

Stamp out corruption

The meeting, which was chaired by President Kibaki, directed Internal Security minister Prof George Saitoti to stamp out corruption on Kenyan roads. It also ordered that the number of road blocks be reduced in conformity to new rules set by the East Africa Community.

It recommended that weigh bridge regulations be enforced as agreed under the EAC Protocol.

“Steps will also be taken to ensure the security and safety of passengers especially in regard to Probox vehicles and boda bodas,” the statement added.

The meeting also approved the National Social Protection Policy which proposes measures to protect the most vulnerable members of society through introduction of safety nets.

The proposals include: cash transfers, food and price subsidies, school-based feeding programmes, social health insurance, and public works including work for food or work for cash. Also to be included are maternal cases for women who cannot afford to pay hospital bills.

The policy also proposes the introduction of new retirement schemes, pension schemes and health retirement schemes for the most vulnerable members of society. A National Social Protection Committee will be established while there will be county social protection committees in the 47 counties, the cabinet resolved.

“The scheme will be funded both by the Government and through self-contributions. A Sessional Paper will be presented to Parliament for debate,” read the statement.

The meeting further approved the National Industrial Training and Attachment Policy. The Policy aims at strengthening the partnership between the public and private sectors to smoothen the national training and attachment programmes.

It proposes the creation of strong linkages between industry and research institutions. The aim is to ensure that industrial training and attachment becomes part of the national work culture.

Source: DAILY NATION

The next Community Developer call is May 28 – 29, 2012. We alternate timezones for the monthly call. Times: 13:00 EDT, 10:00 PST, 20:00 EAT, 18:00 BST, 02:00 AM KST, 03:00AM EST. Your local time: http://bit.ly/J0xMtR

The community developer call is open to anyone deploying Ushahidi or Crowdmap with technical questions. We also provide Swift River updates. Let us know which topics you’d like us to focus on.

We have a community mailing list for general deployment conversations. What is the best method of verification, how can corruption mappers mentor each other? Help vote on deployment of the week. And more.

Deployment of the Week: Conflict in Burma. See all the Deployments of the Week

Congrats to the Kosovo Camp team for winning 1st place with their Ushahidi prototype (The main site is now offline):

Harrnoje (kosovo)

Jorge Luis Sierra and Irma Rodriguez of the Mi Panama Transparente team

Brad Anthony has been a fixture on the Ushahidi community dev chat and community calls for months. He has been learning and sharing as they planned and executed their project. Congratulations to the Global Animal Welfare team for their launch.

The Mi Panama Transparente team hosted me to talk about their corruption mapping strategic plans and user needs.

The Ushahidi website will have a brief maintenance window today (May 17, 2012 at 16:00 EDT). We are doing some back-end changes.

There was a change by Google Maps base layers that affects both Crowdmaps and Ushahidi deployments. You will get a pop-up on your map. We’ve contacted Google to investigate. As a workaround, we suggest switching to OpenStreetMap:

• Click Settings, then Map
• Select an alternate map
• We will provide updates via twitter, mailing lists and the Ushahidi dev chat

The Crowdmap team changes including playing with Apigee,an api gateway and Tilemill. It has also been transitioned to a new hosting provider to help with uptime and scalability.

The Ushahidi core team is Angie investigating CSV report uploads/downloads issues and updating custom forms. A Ushahidi core code release is scheduled for May 29th. We will be doing community testing this week. (This will be mainly a bug fix release.)
Swift River has a new UI update which we are testing internally. The beta launch is pending, but we are getting closer. We are also testing an update to the Android (APK.)

Random Hacks of Kindness is June 1- 3, 2012. There are often hacks involving Ushahidi. If you are doing one or would like to, let me know so that can help support it. Generally, we like to support prototypes and projects that can be reproduced in other areas of the world and that are not duplicate work done by others.

Have a great week!

heather

Donna Summer – the Queen of Disco — died this morning after a battle with cancer … TMZ has learned.

We’re told Summer was in Florida at the time of her death. She was 63 years old.

Sources close to Summer tell us … the singer was trying to keep the extent of her illness under wraps. We spoke to someone who was with Summer a couple of weeks ago … who says she didn’t seem too bad.

In fact, we’re told she was focused on trying to finish up an album she had been working on.

Summer was a 5-time Grammy winner who shot to superstardom in the ’70s with iconic hits like “Last Dance,” “Hot Stuff” and “Bad Girls.”

She continued her dominance in the ’80s with “She Works Hard for the Money” and “This Time I Know It’s for Real.”

Summer and her producer Giorgio Moroder defined the dance music era of the ’70s and influenced acts like Duran Duran and David Bowie to enter the genre.

Summer married Brooklyn Dreams singer Bruce Sudano back in 1980. They had two daughters together.

Source: TMZ

Houses worth over Sh46 billion were completed last year, representing a 22 per cent growth for the sector, which was beset by a sharp increase in costs of building materials and bank lending rates.

The housing sector was driven mainly by a rush among private developers to plug the widening deficit of formal settlements against a growing demand.

read more

When I think of Google, the first thing in my mind is “the know it all”, the giant that gets you what you want from the internet. Then somehow sometime back it started to go a stray with things which I still believe best left for those who are good at them. But I am happy to find out that Google is going to what it does best, get you things you don’t know but  you want . Already rolling in US and later on to the other parts of the World ..  the English Language  Knowledge Graph.

According to  readwriteweb.com

Search now looks at the words of your query and identifies the things in it. You’re not just searching the Web anymore. You’re searching the world.

Most of Google users’ queries are ambiguous. In the old Google, when you searched for “kings,” Google didn’t know whether you meant actual monarchs, the hockey team, the basketball team or the TV series, so it did its best to show you Web results for all of them.

In the new Google, with the Knowledge Graph online, a new box will come up. You’ll still get the Google results you’re used to, including the box scores for the team Google thinks you’re looking for, but on the right side, a box called “See results about” will show brief descriptions for the Los Angeles Kings, the Sacramento Kings, and the TV series, Kings. If you need to clarify, click the one you’re looking for, and Google will refine your search query for you.

With phone Virtual Assistant like Siri coming up with more exciting option for search, Google just have to do something to stay as the search industry leader. And even that could just be for the moment, the switch button is at the corner..

Dr. Githua Kariuki & Family are extremely pleased to announce the Graduation of their son, Kariuki Githua, who has successfully completed a program of study leading to a Bachelor Degree in Electrical Engineering at Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland.

Kariuki, 23, is currently working with MET Laboratories, Inc., as a Test Engineer.

The graduation Ceremony will take place on Saturday, May 19, 2012 at W. A. C. Hughes Memorial Stadium of Morgan State University, starting at 10.00 am.

All are welcome.

“My dear girl, the day you see I’m getting old, I ask you to please be patient, but most of all, try to understand what I’m going through.

If when we talk, I repeat the same thing a thousand times, don’t interrupt to say: “You said the same thing a minute ago”… Just listen, please. Try to remember the times when you were little and I would read the same story night after night until you would fall asleep.

When I don’t want to take a bath, don’t be mad and don’t embarrass me. Remember when I had to run after you making excuses and trying to get you to take a shower when you were just a girl?

When you see how ignorant I am when it comes to new technology, give me the time to learn and don’t look at me that way… remember, honey, I patiently taught you how to do many things like eating appropriately, getting dressed, combing your hair and dealing with life’s issues every day… the day you see I’m getting old, I ask you to please be patient, but most of all, try to understand what I’m going through.

If I occasionally lose track of what we’re talking about, give me the time to remember, and if I can’t, don’t be nervous, impatient or arrogant. Just know in your heart that the most important thing for me is to be with you.

And when my old, tired legs don’t let me move as quickly as before, give me your hand the same way that I offered mine to you when you first walked.

When those days come, don’t feel sad… just be with me, and understand me while I get to the end of my life with love. I’ll cherish and thank you for the gift of time and joy we shared. With a big smile and the huge love I’ve always had for you, I just want to say, I love you… my darling daughter. “Hmmm

Residents of a village in Gucha are in shock after a man went berserk and hacked his 30-year-old son to death claiming he was not his biological offspring.

he suspect identified as Augustine Kerochi, 53, was having lunch with his children at their Kineni sub-location home when he suddenly picked a quarrel with the deceased in the 1pm incident.

According to the deceased’s younger brother, they had sat down to have lunch when his father started a quarrel and in the ensuing exchange of words, he picked a panga and hacked the deceased on the neck and right leg injuring him seriously.

Their mother raised alarm attracting the attention of villagers who rushed to the homestead to find the deceased, Benson Monari Kerochi, 30, lying unconscious in a pool of blood.

The suspect brandishing the bloodstained panga chased his family members and neighbours before fleeing to an unknown destination.

He was rushed to Gucha Level Four Hospital in Ogembo town where he was pronounced dead on arrival. A crowd milled at the hospital to witness the bizarre turn of events.

Gucha OCPD Richard Ng’etich said police had launched a manhunt for the suspect who is at large.

He said the suspect will be arraigned in court charged and with murder once arrested. The body was moved to Kisii Level Five Hospital mortuary.

Villagers who spoke to The Standard said the suspect had a protracted conflict with the deceased over family responsibility which boiled over during the lunchtime quarrel.

The Standard

Msambweni Member of Parliament Omar Zonga was on Thursday arrested by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC) over fraud-related charges and released on a Sh500, 000 personal bond.

Zonga is accused together with Principal Lands Officer Jotham Chea and Lands Registrar Mary Kai among others of having conspired with the co-accused to defraud Dignified Holdings Limited its parcel of land in Kwale/Diani beach.

read more

KENTWOOD, Mich. (WZZM) – When it comes to saying and spelling words like “Hoomalimali” or “Monotonous”, West Michigan will be well-represented at this year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee.

13-year-old Mwangi Wa Maina, an 8th grader at Crestwood Middle School in Kentwood, has been trying to get to the National Bee for four years. This is the last year he can compete. He’s been studying the official list two hours per day with only Saturdays off.

“I get to know different words and get to know different languages,” says Maina.

So far, the hard work has paid off. Mwangi won the spelling bee at his school, went on to win the regionals, then the finals.

“I’m happy,” said Maina. “I’m very grateful to God for letting me go through this experience and go to DC.”

Esther Yff-Prins was invited by the organizers to observe the national bee. The former English teacher has been a pronouncer for the Grand Rapids bees for 34 years.

Source:WZZA.COM

A pedestrian died on the spot after being hit by a Mercedes Benz reportedly driven by Kilome MP Harun Mwau on Thursday morning.

The accident occurred near the Serena Hotel in Nairobi at 7am.

"The middle aged man died on the spot," said Nairobi deputy police Chief Moses Nyakwama.

"Mwau's vehicle has been towed to Kilimani police station as we investigate the accident."

read more

There is a client who runs a certain business that generates a lot of text files (about 10,000 a week). These are small and simple text files but they are important hence they need to be backed up and also uploaded to a website online. How do you reliably automate this?

Apparently the solution he was looking for was a program that he could buy that does this. Nothing wrong with that, right? Yes. But this is not the first time I have come across such a relatively simple problem that computing can solve. All of them follow the same basic pattern: a company needs a way to automate one of their internal processes, usually to reduce some costs and they give their usual “IT person” the task to find a solution for them. Said IT person then finds some software to do the job or one that comes close. Almost always, the end result is a compromise because little software out there really ever does exactly what your company’s peculiar processes need.

The thing that nags me about all this is that most of these problems can be solved by a good programmer in little time. And the best part… the resulting solution will not be a compromise, the programmer can build a solution that exactly matches the needs. We’re not talking about huge programs like Ms Word or even Notepad or Ms Paint, most of these solutions can be done by a tiny little ‘script’.

So this begs the questions: are there no programmers who can come up with these little scripts? Why is the default solution always to look for some software “out there”?

Where do all the programmers go after they graduate from the seemingly millions of computer colleges in town?Similar Posts:

• The Power of Understanding and Solving Problems
• How To Increase Revenue By Decreasing Effort
• Convert Photos to Text
• MedAfrica
• Reaching for the Cloud with OpenGoo

WASHINGTON — After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.

Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration.

While over all, whites will remain a majority for some time, the fact that a younger generation is being born in which minorities are the majority has broad implications for the country’s economy, its political life and its identity. “This is an important tipping point,” said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, describing the shift as a “transformation from a mostly white baby boomer culture to the more globalized multiethnic country that we are becoming.”

Signs that the country is evolving this way start with the Oval Office, and have swept hundreds of counties in recent years, with 348 in which whites are no longer in the majority. That number doubles when it comes to the toddler population, Mr. Frey said. Whites are no longer the majority in four states and the District of Columbia, and have slipped below half in many major metro areas, including New York, Las Vegas and Memphis.

A more diverse young population forms the basis of a generational divide with the country’s elderly, a group that is largely white and grew up in a world that was too.

The contrast raises important policy questions. The United States has a spotty record educating minority youth; will older Americans balk at paying to educate a younger generation that looks less like themselves? And while the increasingly diverse young population is a potential engine of growth, will it become a burden if it is not properly educated?

“The question is, how do we reimagine the social contract when the generations don’t look like one another?” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of Immigration studies at New York University.

The trend toward greater minority births has been building for years, the result of the large wave of immigration here over the past three decades. Hispanics make up the majority of immigrants, and they tend to be younger — and to have more children — than non-Hispanic whites. (Of the total births in the year that ended last July, about 26 percent were Hispanic, about 15 percent black, and about 4 percent Asian.)

Whites still represent the single largest share of all births, at 49.6 percent, and are an overwhelming majority in the population as a whole, at 63.4 percent. But they are aging, causing a tectonic shift in American demographics. The median age for non-Hispanic whites is 42 — meaning the bulk of women are moving out of their prime childbearing years.

Latinos, on the other hand, are squarely within their peak fertility, with a median age of 27, said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Between 2000 and 2010, there were more Hispanic births in the United States than there were arriving Hispanic immigrants, he said.

The result is striking: Minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010, Mr. Frey calculated, a surge that has created a very different looking America from the one of the 1950s, when the TV characters Ozzie and Harriet were a national archetype.

The change is playing out across states with large differences in ethnic and racial makeup between the elderly and the young. Some of the largest gaps are in Arizona, Nevada, Texas and California, states that have had flare-ups over immigration, school textbooks and priorities in spending. The nonrural county with the largest gap is Yuma County, Ariz., where just 18 percent of people under 20 are white, compared with 73 percent of people over 65, Mr. Frey said.

Perhaps the most urgent aspect of the change is education. A college degree has become the most important building block of success in today’s economy, but blacks and Latinos lag far behind whites in getting one. According to Mr. Frey, just 13 percent of Hispanics and 18 percent of blacks have a college degree, compared with 31 percent of whites.

Those stark statistics are made more troubling by the fact that young Americans will soon be faced with caring for the bulging population of baby boomers as they age into retirement, said William O’Hare, a senior consultant to the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, on top of inheriting trillions of dollars of government debt.

“The forces coming together here are very clear, but I don’t see our political leaders putting them together in any coherent way,” he said, adding that educating young minorities was of critical importance to the future of the country and the economy.

Immigrants took several generations to assimilate through education in the last large wave of immigration at the turn of the 20th century, Mr. Suarez-Orozco said, but mobility was less dependent on education then, and Americans today cannot afford to wait, as they struggle to compete with countries like China.

“This is a polite knock on the door to tell us to get ready,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “We do a pretty lousy job of educating the younger generation of minorities. Basically, we are not ready for this.”

But there are bright spots. Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, said the immigration debate of recent years has raised the political consciousness of young Latinos and he is hopeful that more will become politically active as a result. Only half of eligible Latino voters cast ballots in 2008, he said, compared with 65 percent of eligible non-Hispanic voters. “We have an opportunity here with this current generation,” Mr. Vargas said. About 50,000 Latinos turn 18 every month, he said.

And the fact that the country is getting a burst of births from nonwhites is a huge advantage, argues Dowell Myers, professor of policy, planning and demography at the University of Southern California. European societies with low levels of immigration now have young populations that are too small to support larger aging ones, exacerbating problems with the economy.

“If the U.S. depended on white births alone, we’d be dead,” Mr. Myers said. “Without the contributions from all these other groups, we would become too top-heavy with old people.”

Source: NEW YOR TIMES

The sponsorship that starts with this year’s festival in July will run every year until 2022 in form of an annual grant of Sh8.4m to support ZIFF’s film and festival promotion, as well as its marketing program.

Wananchi Group CEO, Richard Bell, said the agreement would see Zuku become headline sponsor for ZIFF.

“Of course, as the festival grows and develops we may both see different needs and opportunities – but this should give us a solid footing to start on”, he said.

“We do not, however, mean to lock out other sponsors/contributors and collaborators. On the contrary, we would hope that our long term involvement would help attract greater consistency from other partners.”

Wananchi Group Chairman, Ali Mufuruki added: “It is with pride that we enter into this association with ZIFF, which has for the last 15 years been instrumental in celebrating and enabling film making from the region and around the world.”

Speaking of partnership from Geneva, the ZIFF Chairman, Mahmoud Thabit Kombo said that ZIFF is a huge part of African culture and as a proud Zanzibari organization, they were pleased to extend their relationship.

Zuku’s initial ten-year agreement concludes at the end of the 2022 season and The ZIFF chair said the partnership would by then have evolved into a strong business and community relationship. “While we like seeing the Zuku logo side by side with ZIFF, our partnership goes well beyond branding,” he said. “As ZUKU spreads its wings to capture the pay TV market in East and Central Africa, ZIFF will work closely together with Zuku to develop the film and media entertainment industry”.

Zuku is currently available in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda with plans to roll out to neighboring countries. It has announced plans to show more local content this year, from cooking shows to Parliamentary proceedings and Swahili movies from East Africa.

ZIFF will take place between July 7 and 15.

Finance minister Njeru Githae’s son has committed suicide at the family home in Runda, Nairobi.

Police have launched an investigation to establish the circumstances surrounding the death of the university student.

The deceased, Brian Njeru Karanga, was a fourth year computer engineering student at the University of Nairobi’s Chiromo campus.

“This is shocking news,” said family spokesman Dr Peter Githae, who declined to comment further saying the family will wait for results of a post-mortem due later Thursday.

He appealed to the media to respect the family’s privacy at this time of grief.

Mr Karanga’s body was removed to the Lee Funeral Home.