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Here are some interesting photos from Yemen.And here are the least interesting photos ever taken in......

The International Rice Research Institute has uploaded several thousand images to Flickr - the photo sharing site.The photos are grouped into collections and sets - 'rice is food', 'rice insects', 'IRRI staff', 'rice in the lab', and so on. It's possible to see some of the photos on a world map.All the photos are licensed using the Creative Commons "Attribution Only" license.Photo: Raymond Panaligan – Part of the image collection of the International Rice Research InstituteTags: agricultural information rice...

It was Standing Room Only at our most recent Sept 10th SVMN meeting, with over 120 microfinance groupies attending (in a room designed for 100!). Pictures & presentations by Kiva.org & Prosper.com are included below: Kiva presentation by Premal Shah: Prosper presentation by Chris Larsen: (fyi: the quality on the podcast recording was a little rough… if anyone can help do some soundfile editing, please let me know......

Istanbul is a very industrious city. Walk around the neighborhoods and on every block there are small workshops and stands where all manner of things are sold, made or fixed. Some jobs aren't that hard Some guys get to play with carpets on the roof of the Grand Bazaar all day! Some guys get to play easter bunny Some guys breathe in metal fibers all day in a shop that makes lamp fixtures. This is one of about half a dozen metal workshops on one street near the Galata Tower that is full of lamp stores. He is strapped to his machine, btw. This workplace could not withstand the American tort system. Some guys haul torsos uphill all day. Some guys leave their shop door wide open when they go to lunch so I can't ask them what they heck...

Wish I'd lived near this shop back when I had to be the rat master. Aspirin. You can have this poster for a Lira. We have all kinds of doner here -- dark and light! Trust in pharmaceuticals, but make sure someone's got your back Infinite baklava Simits want to be free This is a famous local pickle shop. If you want to try watermelon pickled in 1963, this is the place to come. The window says "Excellent pickles and health juice (pickle juice is considered very healthy). Sold by the glass."......

So they DO do other things besides wear diapers. It turns out that they take cool pictures from space too! Yay astronuts!                                              This, according to its wikipedia entry, is photo of the Bosporus from the north (Black Sea) to the south (Sea of Marmara) taken from the International Space Station on April 16, 2004, with a Kodak DCS760 digital camera equipped with an 200-mm lens. The Islands in the lower right are the Princes Islands, where I went last weekend (yawn). You can see Ataturk airport in the lower left. The snake of water going up to the left in the center is the Golden Horn. You can get in...

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I really dig the photos on English Russia, whose motto is "because something cool happens daily on 1/6th of the earth's surface." I especially dig it now that I get to enjoy all those cool things from a safe distance, rather than living them. Today's post is exceptional. Russian photographer Sergei Produkin-Gorskii traveled throughout the empire at the beginning of the 20th century shooting a series of monochrome shots through different colored filters, then painstakingly combined the color prints into one shot. He created what is, in effect, the first color photography. The process was flawed, of course, because the subjects had to be immobile during several shots, and of course, the light changed. But now, the prints can combined digitally and the results are spectacular....

Yesterday morning a group of intrepid explorers set off from Gunung Sitoli to the community of Sisarahili to the north. The day unfolded with new friends, a picnic, beautiful views, fishing, and snorkeling. A couple of snaps can be found...

I've posted about photog Chris Herwig here before and the damn fine time we had travelling with him through Turkmenistan. He's got two new photobooks of his work in Central Asia, and as always, they kick ass. Go look and......

Last night we attended a performance of Sandglass and Sovanna Phum (Here too)- the culmination of these two artists working together from different cultures, puppetry traditions, and language.  What they produced was gorgeous, brilliant, and exceptional.  It was a fusion of khmer/American artistry like I haven't seen.  We took Mongkol - and after a quick dinner at Whole Foods, we had a fabulous evening.  My camera really sucks at taking indoor photos (probably something stupid about the settings I'm not doing) or maybe it is me.  Mongkol, the expert photographer he is, has some beautiful ones here.  I used them to create the slide show above. Mongkol did a great write up here.  He points out our meeting with a blog reader who recognized us!...

Tha Khek, like Savannakhet, sits astride the Mekong and faces Thailand across the water.Tha KhekAnother collection of old and new buildings arranged haphazardly along wide avenues, Tha Khek is a reasonably quiet township, despite the obvious and ever-increasing signs of international trade.It seemed that every possible consumer good was on sale at the local market - phones, TVs, DVDs and players, western clothes, gardening equipment, auto parts and tools - rather than the usual local produce, groceries and small wares. And on nearly every second shop front along the main road leading into town I saw the words 'Import Export Co' in either Lao, Chinese or Vietnamese lettering.The main drag leading into town. A bit dark. Sorry. Yep, they're rain clouds.The riverfrontThere was a string of...

I have mentioned before the very flexible nature of people's job descriptions in Laos.This grinning character, hanging on to the back of the sawng thaew (a truck with a couple of bench seats in the back), was the baggage handler, ticket collector, drink passer-arounder-er, interpreter, and tour guide on my trip from Savannakhet to Tha Khek.He was also a spruiker. His key duty seemed to be to drum up more business while we were in transit, as though there were not enough people in the truck already. So he would lean out and shout, "Tha Khek! Tha Khek!", every time we passed a street corner or shop or school or bloody well anything.Monsieur Tha Khek, enjoying the air conditioningfrom his very safe perch on the back of the truck.It was a seriously great trip. I was seated inside at first,...

The streets of Savannakhet are wide and clean, with clusters of delapidated colonial buildings and many shophouses lining the main thoroughfares.These shophouses - simply old homes on the roadfront with space for both a shop and a living area - intrigued me. Walking down the main street, I could see right through the open doorways into people's homes: usually a large mat on the floor in the front room (where meals would be shared), maybe a TV on the floor in the corner, a couple of chairs, perhaps a bookshelf with a few pictures on it, sometimes posters on the walls. Often there were young kids inside, and always a dog or two. I didn't take any photos, but felt priveleged anyway to get a glimpse of these lives. Again and again, as in Dang's home in Pakse, I was impressed and charmed by...

Behind the fold are a few hand-selected and painfully-uploaded photos that should give a feel for the events of the past week or so.1. A shot of the path that wound its way around Kho Pan, the island near Kompong Cham in Cambodia. A beautiful place. In retrospect, I can see it one day becoming a bungalow strip. I should have suggested it to Richie Rich.2. The streets of Stung Treng, dusty fontier town. I saw that many pigs, cows, ducks, geese... I thought I was on a bloody farm.3. The frontier. The two fellas at the left are Frenchman who have turned up here in Savannkhet with me. One is currently missing - hired a motorbike a few hours ago and has not been seen since. Bit of a worry. Hopefully he'll be at the guesthouse when I get there, beer in hand.4. Bungalows along the sunrise strip...

Someone mentioned walkabout, kiss your job goodbyeJust to see the country shimmer through the windscreen...Colour documentary from a beanbag on the floorNever shows as much as it conceals...Okay, so Redgum was talking about the Aussie bush, but the sentiment remains equally valid when talking about Cambodia: you will learn more about the country and it's people by cruising the back roads and visiting villages than you will anywhere else.Judging by what I read before I arrived in Cambodia and the accounts of expats I have met, the national highway system has undergone a period of great improvement in the last few years. All but a handful of the major roads are now asphalt, and there are signs of further upgrades all about the place. Remote provinces, especially in the north east of the...

thanks to Scott Mattoon for the following SVMN meeting recap: The Silicon Valley Microfinance Network (SVMN) hosted an event Monday, January 9th featuring Janine Firpo, a technologist with direct experience in implementing a technological approach to microfinancing. Her talk focused on a series of market trials in Uganda for a system called Remote Transaction System, orignally developed at HP, which enabled an agent and borrower to administer a small loan remote from the bank. The market being explored by HP, and a central interest of SVMN, is the 80% of working people in the world who do not put their money in banks. One of Janine’s goals is to reach these workers - 1.7 billion of them - with technology, and enable them to participate directly in the world of commerce, extending...