Christian Caryl
If you've been following the
story of Bob Fu, the Chinese human rights activist and evangelical who describes
his mission in a piece for FP this week, you might have noticed an odd
geographical detail. It turns out that Fu runs his campaign
for religious freedom in the People's Republic of China out of the town
where he and his family have been living for the past eight years. That would
be Midland, Texas, population 100,000.
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Jackee Budesta Batanda
Makerere University's College of Computing and Informatics Technology is
trying to get its students to create solutions to real-life problems. On its
website, the department praised one team, Cipher 256, for winning the Microsoft
Imagine Cup (in the East and South Africa Region). Aaron Tushabe, Joshua
Okello, and Josiah Kavuma make up the winning team. In July, they will travel
to compete at the world cup finals in Sydney, Australia. Their college has won
this honor for its students five times in a row.
The winning concept is a mobile phone
device that can detect ectopic pregnancies in women and monitor the movements
of the fetus inside the mother. The application can be used at home, since the
user only needs a mobile phone to carry out the scan. Uganda has over 14
million mobile phone users; today, people have phones even in remote villages.
The group took its inspiration from the UN Millennium Development Goals for cutting
maternal mortality.
I'm excited about this innovation
because it can potentially do a lot to detect complications during the early stages
of pregnancy. By picking up on these sorts of problems early, mothers will have
the time to contact a medical professional who can offer therapy. Maternal
mortality rates in most African countries are still far too high, of course,
and an innovation like this seems like a great way to reduce them. The
application, which is called WinSenga, can be found on both facebook and
twitter. Read More »
If you've been following the
story of Bob Fu, the Chinese human rights activist and evangelical who 
