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Karamo Susso, the talented young kora player from The Gambia, is putting on a free show at 19 Broadway in Fairfax (Marin County) on Thursday August 5, from 8 pm to 2 am.

I believe there will be djembé and other percussion and a few guest appearances. This should be a fun show.

If that’s not enough, some of the best ice cream in the Bay Area is right around the corner at the Fairfax Scoop. Highly recommended.

For more African music listings, visit the San Francisco Bay Area African Music Calendar.

Update: I originally posted that this show was on Friday, not Thursday. Hope this didn’t cause too much confusion.

Not all electricity is created equal. If you live in Vermont or Idaho, most of the power you use comes from hydropower and emits few pollutants. If you’re a resident of Washington, DC, your power comes completely from burning coal, which is much dirtier.

How does your electricity compare? You can get the answer from EPA’s Power Profiler website. It says it takes 5 minutes, but it only took me about 5 seconds. All you do is enter your website, and choose your power company.

The electric power I buy is less polluting than average:

That’s because more of my power comes from renewables (like wind and solar), hydro, and natural gas (which emits fewer conventional pollutants like nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide than coal, but still releases a lot of CO₂, which causes global warming).

The website is part of a recent update to the agency’s eGRID program, which I’ve used a bit in projects examining the emissions related to water use. Most people don’t think about it, but water use accounts for a great deal of energy use. More about that later.

A series of photos from the Boston Globe’s always-compelling online photo series, the “Big Picture”, showing the oil disaster in Dalian, China. The photo below shows the rescue of a cleanup worker who fell into oil-covered water while attempting to repair a pump. Truly heartbreaking. If estimates by the Chinese government are to be believed, the spill is less than 1% the size of the BP spill in the Gulf. (See this list of oil spills and their estimated volumes on Wikipedia.)

From the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program: a new database detailing over 60 different “enabling technologies” for handwashing. I really could have used this when I was a Peace Corps Water and Sanitation Extension Agent in West Africa a decade ago.

An enabling technology is an external or environmental factor that influences an individual’s opportunity to perform a behavior, regardless of their ability and motivation to act. Often overlooked in the design of handwashing initiatives, enabling technologies have been shown to facilitate handwashing behavior in several studies.

The World Bank-administered Water and Sanitation Program (WSP) developed a database to provide practitioners with information on the various types of enabling technologies, including purpose, benefits, key product features and specifications, pictures or illustrations, and contacts for further information

Washing hands with soap at critical times – after contact with feces and before handling food – could reduce diarrheal rates by up to 47 percent (Curtis and Cairncross, 2003). However, rates of handwashing with soap remain low throughout the developing world and large-scale promotion of handwashing behavior change is a challenge

For more information on enabling technologies, click here, contact Jacqueline Devine, wsp@worldbank.org , or visit www.wsp.org/scalinguphandwashing.