A piece in Logic on the Glia project.
snip
...
Are people on board with that? Inoculating Gaza to capitalism by building up the culture around open source and open access? Or do they get on board because you’re a Canadian doctor?
Palestine, like most post-colonial places — let’s call it post-colonial although it’s more complicated than that because it’s still actively being colonized — has an inferiority complex. And we use this inferiority complex against them.
Your doctor’s stethoscope at the doctor’s office costs $200. People see these and associate them with quality because they’ve been around for so long and they’re shiny. And then we show up in Gaza with a 3D-printed stethoscope. It’s plastic. Usually, it’s one color. The first thing they say to me is, “That’s shit. Just look at it. It looks fucking homemade.” I say to them, “Oh really? Because we use it in Canada in the emergency department.” And they’re like, “Gimme that.”
So we’ve leveraged people’s inferiority complex against them. We also flip the development model. The development model, traditionally, is that you go into the Third World, you test on poor people who are defenseless against you, and then you go to the First World to sell your product there.
What we are doing is exactly the inverse. We’re doing all of our development in the First World, and then deploying it in the Third World — the idea being that mistakes are very expensive in the Third World and very cheap in Canada. For example, right now we’re doing a study for a 3D-printed pulse oximeter. That’s the device that goes on your finger and says how much oxygen you have. To test it — even in 2019, if you can believe it — you actually have to suffocate people. You literally put a mask on them and you bring their oxygen down to 70% while you’re draining off blood to test it. If something were to happen, we’re in Canada. I can give these patients the best care in the world. If I were testing it in Gaza and something were to happen, it would be bad news.
The only device we haven’t done that with is the 3D-printed tourniquet. That’s because it was an emergency situation and we needed to deploy them before we could test them. We were testing them on people who were dying. It was awful and totally the wrong way to do it.
...
new or merely unfrozen
While unfrozen is ok, good could be wonderful ... time will tell
a tip of the hat to Anne-Helen
10:27 in Art, General Commentary, humor, just cool | Permalink | Comments (0)