Amazon has been doing some really interesting things with technology in the last 5 years.  Some part of still me thinks of them as an online book store, but many of their own technology products have been consistently innovative and unique.  Until the kindle, most of those like the EC2 (virtual servers on an hourly rate) and S3 (pay by use data storage) were only things a geek could love.  I was stunned recently to find out about their cloud player which lets you upload music to the web and stream it to any device with a network connection and Adobe Air support.  While it currently only works in the US, if it survives legal challenges, it could turn out to be pretty significant.  The recently announced appstore for android might seem like that not a big of an issue since there are other options for getting Android apps.  However there is one very significant issue which as ramifications in the international context.  The Google market is tied to providers while the amazon appstore is tied to customer accounts.  If I swap SIM cards in my mobile phone, I see different applications available in the Google market.  On the other hand, the appstore seems to be tied to my credit card.  In Bangladesh, paid apps don’t show up in the mobile version of the market, but they do show up in the app store.  Net net that means I can actually buy applications here.

One way I sometimes pass the time in Bangladesh is watching talks from TED. One that I enjoyed was when Rory Sutherland spoke about the strange disproportionality of work in human problem solving, especially when it involves human psychology. He says that we generally think big important problems need big important and expensive solutions, however as he says, “It is the tendency of organization or institution to deploy as much force as possible, where it is the tendency of the person to be influenced almost in absolute reverse to the amount of force being applied.”

He claims that when we can graph stuff that costs a lot of money against stuff that has a big effect. Stuff that is very expensive and very effective is strategy. Things that are neither are trivia and he also observes rather tongue in cheek that consultancy is both expensive and not very effective. The final category he claims doesn’t have a name and is where details are key and have an effect out of proportion with the effort involved. Personally, I think that last category is tactics.

I’ve been thinking about how that applies to Bangladesh. If you look at it’s problems the first thought I have is that what seems to be lacking is strategy. A recent study showed that cost of traffic congestion in Dhaka last year was about 3 billion $US. It would seem this is the result of poor logistical planning. However, there is a plan. From what I understand it’s not even a bad plan. The problem is that it isn’t followed; buildings get built in designated free space, bridges are built too narrow and the materials saving pocketed, etc. etc.

My knee jerk reaction is regulation, but thats not exactly the problem either. Bangladesh bureaucracy is legendary, but it is mostly just a barrier to entry. From what I can tell the missing piece is enforcement: between corruption and culture, enforcement and penalties are for all intents and purposes absent. The biggest problem with corruption is not that it siphons off money, but that it actively sabotages much needed improvements. pukur churi koreche – they stole the pond…

The expression ” stealing the pond” needs some explanation. The village pond or pukur is the center of rural life so it refers to a really terrible sort of theft and is probably appropriate in this context.

It’s starting to get hot and as a result power outages are getting more frequent.  Last year with more than 12hour daily power outages and only 3 or 4 during daylight hours it was hard to get any work done.  This year however, we got a solar system setup and I hope that makes things go smoother.  There are still some quirks to work out, but we seem to have a system that is giving us consistent power through the day.  We have 960W array and a 48V 400ah battery pack.  The interesting bit is the charge controller, a Su-kam PCU 2k48.  I haven’t seen anything quite like it and it seems like a fairly ideal system for our situation.  There’s no net metering policy in Bangladesh, and even if there was, the grid power is so inconsistant that you would need some sort of battery backup anyway.   This unit ties together PV, grid and a batteries.  I haven’t tested inverter efficiency yet, but the design seems like about the most sane way to do it.  The documentation is fairly confusing, but there are two paths though it. There’s the PV -> Charge controller/Battery->  Inverter path which it prefers, but in the event that it can’t supply enough from that source, it fails over to the other path which is Grid power, also there is a battery charger which can charge your pack at the same time.