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News hole: Microsoft man takes over Mali and hardly anybody cares

Wikipedia

As some of you more astute international news observers may have noted, the usually stable West African nation of Mali recently experienced a military coup with arrests of politicians continuing.

And as Columbia University’s Gregory Mann has noted, hardly anybody in the news media is reporting on this. So Mann did his own report and analysis. In fairness, Voice of America has done a good job covering what’s going on in Mali (only available to Americans on the web, by law….) and the mainstream media did note today the former President has arrived in Senegal.

Cheick Modibo Diarra

What few media have covered is what interests me most — the fact that the former head of Microsoft Africa and genuine rocket scientist Cheick Modibo Diarra is now acting Prime Minister.

Britain’s Independent has done a brief profile of him and his ‘daunting challenge,’ but that’s all I’ve seen. The paper says of Diarra:

Inside the tech giant the job was widely dubbed “Microsoft’s ambassador to Africa” but colleagues credit the astrophysicist with turning that around to become Africa’s ambassador to Microsoft.

Women’s issues dominate at the UW’s Global Social Enterprise Competition

Team Ruby Cup

Every year, the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business holds its Global Social Enterprise Competition aimed at inspiring young entrepreneurs to find business solutions for the problems of poor countries.

Last year’s winners were focused on finding a better toilet, an MIT business venture called Sanergy that has since taken off in a big way — mostly in the slums of Kenya.

This year, women’s issues dominated.

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Microsoft wants to engineer bugs to become disease fighting nanobots

Flickr, by midorisyu

Todd Bishop at TechFlash has discovered that Microsoft is into global health, in a weird way.

As Todd reports, Microsoft has applied for a patent for “Adapting Parasites to Combat Disease.”

The patent application has this goofy stickman drawing (below) that, so far as I can tell, doesn’t really explain exactly what the idea is here.

But the gist of it appears to be that scientists would engineer a parasite to make it into a programmable nanobot that could be used to combat disease in the human body. Todd quotes from the application:

By modifying or making a parasitic organism that can be programmatically controlled by a stimulus external to the altered parasitic organism, the parasitic organism can be a powerful tool in delivering therapeutic compounds. …

Okay then. Hope it works better than Windows movie maker. Here’s the drawing that went with the patent application:

TechFlash