Last week's big viral image on the web was this astonishing photograph of what is known in Chinese as a "nail house"—defined by China blogger Lyn Jeffery as "the residences of urbanites whose neighborhoods have been 'moved' 动迁 and who are the last hold-outs--they stick out like nails in an otherwise modernized environment."

Now we know the story behind the photo. The woman owner of the house wouldn't budge until she was given an equally-spacious flat in the new apartment complex going up on the site. Notes Jeffery:

According to Chongqing law, says the [China Legal Daily] article, there are three possible ways to compensate owners in this type of situation: 1) provide housing on the same spot; 2) provide housing in another spot; 3) provide a sum of money. The city is only willing to provide Ms. Wu, the resident, with the third option, but she is not willing to accept a sum of money.

Even in quasi Communist China, you see, there are limited protections for land owners. But not many: China ranks 45th in the world in terms of strongest safeguarding of property rights, according to the latest International Property Rights Index (pdf) put out by the Property Rights Alliance, a lobbying group in Washington. (Thanks to Cato for the link.)

The top ten countries are:

• Norway at #1
• The Netherlands at #2
• Denmark, Sweden, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia tied for third
• Switzerland and Austria tied for ninth

The United States shares 14th place with Canada and Ireland. Last on the list of 70 countries? Lowly, land-stealing Bangladesh.

lunchoverip.com

Last week, I blogged about how the lack of robust power grids in the rural areas of developing countries spurred some cell providers to experiment with solar, wind and biofuels to independently power individual cell phone towers.

Of course, this solves the problem of power for the cellular network, but—as Passport reader Bradley Loomis asked via email—if there isn't an electrical grid to power the cell towers, how do cell phone users in these areas charge their cell phones?

The answer lies in a business model that is quickly emerging across the globe, from China to Uganda: charging the cell phone batteries of rural customers in bigger cities for a fee. Check out LunchOverIP’s report on how Chinese businessmen are transforming their charge-for-a-fee service into a potentially charge-for-free ad-supported model (kind of like Google but without the whole Internet part). Jan Chipchase also has a great piece on the subject and some good photos of charging stations in Uganda.

Bradley, thanks for the question! More good comments on Slashdot.

Looking for a way to kill 10 minutes at work before 5 o'clock strikes?  Check out http://andys.org.uk/countryquiz/ for a fun game. A timer will count down 10 minutes, while you type in as many of the 192 member states of the United Nations as you can. 

The site's not perfect, so I'll give you a hint. For the most part, countries are listed as they are commonly known, as opposed to their official names. For example, North Korea is listed as "North Korea," and not as "Democratic People's Republic of Korea." It's a lot harder than it sounds. I got 120, then saw which ones I missed and slapped myself silly upside the head. Remember ... no cheating! 

(Hat tip: Kottke)

The race for wired global geriatric supremacy is ON! Over the last few months, the media speculated that 93-year-old Don Crowdis of Ontario, Canada was the world's oldest blogger. Then it was supposedly 94-year-old Allan Lööf of Finspång, Sweden. Then came news that Spain's 95-year-old Maria Amelia was given a blog for her birthday by her "stingy" grandson. But now there's someone who's beat them all, and who's likely not to get beat herself.

Olive Riley, who lives north of Sydney, Australia and was born in 1899, just started her blog this month. The 107-year-old great-great-grandmother was born in the British Colony of New South Wales under the rule of Queen Victoria, two years before Australia became a nation. She loves to drink shandy. The latest:

Good afternoon everyone. This is Olive here. First, I want to thank all of you who visited my blob. Gerard says there’ve been 192,000 visits but that can’t be right.

Mike

It’s a blog, Ollie. Not a blob.

Olive

Oh, really?

(Hat tip: my brother Ted)

Meet Prince Pickles, the new face of Japan's increasingly active military, known as the Self-Defense Forces for constitutional reasons.

The cute, manga-like cartoon character is intended to construct a non-threatening image of Japan's military. For the past few years, the Japanese military has been seeking a more assertive global role, and will be the platform from which Japan can become a "normal" country in the wake of its strict postwar pacifism.

Prince Pickles is our image character because he's very endearing, which is what Japan's military stands for," said Defense Ministry official Shotaro Yanagi. "He's our mascot and appears in our pamphlets and stationery."

Not surprisingly, the military's efforts to adopt innocuous-looking symbols has raised suspicions that Japan is cloaking darker ambitions, but the government insists that such imaging serves to create cultural understanding and help Japan's efforts in the military theater. In Japan's Iraq mission (where it deployed 600 noncombatant troops in its first military mission since the Second World War), water trucks were decorated with Japan's globally popular cartoon characters, and "everybody loved it," according to Foreign Ministry official Aki Tsuda. Not a single truck was attacked in the two and half year mission, which Japanese officials attribute to the cartoons rather than the fact that the deployment area was largely free of violence.

This cheeky British book—a ripoff of the famous Where's Waldo? series—hit U.S. bookstores in September and was a hit at Borders Books for Christmas, though it has yet to catch fire online:

Where exactly is Bin Laden? No one seems to know! Set in exotic locations around the world the readers' mission in this book is to find Bin Laden in each setting, as well as his accomplices, CIA agents, weapons of (not) mass destruction and many other local characters and things specific to each location. In this tongue-in-cheek picture book there are hours of fun scouring the delightful colour illustrations to find all of the various characters and objects, checking them off as you find them. Good luck with your mission should you accept it.

The boundaries between the real and virtual worlds are fast blurring. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rapid corporate colonization of Second Life. No self-respecting CEO went to Davos without an "avatar" or online alter-ego, a sure sign that Second Life has entered the mainstream. The likes of Reuters, Nissan and Adidas are buying up virtual real-estate and setting up store fronts. Alan Court at the Financial Times reports that IBM has 1,000 of its employees spending time in Second Life. American Apparel hires cyber sales clerks to test new merchandise before it hits stores in the real world. And there's even a conference coming up next month for Fortune 500 companies who need helping devising a virtual worlds strategy.

Why the rush to a place that isn't even real? It's a chance to test new products and strategies (Starwood runs a virtual hotel), get marketing buzz, even find new talent. Fortune reports that people have already found real life work based on their performance in Second Life. The virtual "Linden Dollars" can also be converted to real cash, so the chance to make money is already there. Above all, this represents a fast growing market and a young demographic. There are already nearly 2 million users in Second Life, and while the virtual world is still way behind more traditional social networking sites like MySpace (see FP's related piece on YouTube, Second Life, and other hot Web 2.0 properties), that number is rising fast.

Most coverage of Second Life has focused on Western brands, but it cannot be long before firms from India or China join them. Like with any emerging market, there will be rising competition and new risks.

And firms won't be immune from criticism for their actions on Second Life (such as running virtual sweatshops). How long before there are calls for codes of conduct for virtual activities? Some firms are jumping ahead and aligning cyber ventures with a responsible image, which is why you can visit Mokitown, where every kid learns to cross the road safely—thanks to the good folks at Daimler Chrysler.

Michael Jarvis is a corporate responsibility specialist for the Business, Competitiveness & Development Program at the World Bank Institute. He is a regular contributor to the Private Sector Development Blog. Writers from the PSDBlog contribute a regular series of posts for Passport entitled "Fighting Poverty With Markets."

For the latest news about Second Life, visit Reuters' virtual bureau. 

Check out Google before it became the behemoth it is today. It's hard to believe that this harmless little page became a verb and changed the world. Be sure not to miss the killer effects on Sergey Brin's old bio page.

(Hat tip: Freakonomics)

Take that, Mom!

SINGAPORE, Feb 7 (Reuters Life!) - Video game addicts, rejoice: U.S. researchers have found that playing is actually good for your eyes, and despite all those dire warnings from your parents, it won't make you blind.

A study by the University of Rochester showed that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved their vision by about 20 percent.

Unfortunately, I don't think it applies to blogging. 

Globalization is all the rage on American movie screens this awards season. Blood Diamond, Babel, The Queen and The Last King of Scotland all tried to bring Hollywood's touch to the far-flung corners of the world and look at the different ways that cultures can interact and collide. Clint Eastwood examined a pivotal conflict for Americans through the eyes of their adversaries in Letters from Iwo Jima. And, of course, Borat showed Americans what their own society looks like from the perspective of a Kazakh. Sort of.

DONALD WEBER/AFP/Getty Images

While the interest in the outside world is a healthy change of pace, as film critic Manohla Dargis points out in the New York Times this weekend, something is still lost when looking at a culture or country from the outside, rather than through its own eyes. Fortunately, the rest of the world is getting better at depicting itself on the silver screen. Europe has always had its own movie industry, and India's Bollywood is legendary for its prolific production of interminable song-and-dance extravaganzas. But until recently, most other countries have had little in the way of truly popular domestic film industries. In this week's List, FP takes a look at countries whose movie businesses, each in their own unique way, are coming into their own. Check it out.

What's Global Cool, you ask? It happens to be the latest, splashiest, star-studded global do-gooder campaign. It aims to persuade one billion people around the world to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions every year for the next ten years in order to combat global warming.

And this really is a campaign for the kids. They've enlisted some of the "biggest names in entertainment," like Sienna Miller, Orlando Bloom, and the Scissor Sisters. (Note: If that last sentence confuses you at all, I'm afraid Global Cool might not resonate.) Global Cool is taking the Live 8 route, planning five simultaneous concerts this summer to raise awareness and inspire the kids to really, you know, care about global warming, especially since Live 8 did so much to eradicate global poverty in 2005.

They do have plenty of useful (albeit recycled) suggestions on how to reduce one's personal carbon dioxide emissions: Turn out the lights, turn the heating down, put the computer on standby (good one)—all things that require little effort, but can have a huge impact when done by millions.

The campaign is a bit corny, but Global Cool is trying hard to make sure that they're taken seriously as an environmental player, and not just seen as padding for some starlet's resume. They're aware that a skeptical public might just tune them out, and they recognize how "tiresome a bunch of rock stars and movie actors can appear when trying to tell the public how to run their lives." And so far, it doesn't appear the campaign has gotten quite the media splash it was designed to receive. I have to say, as much as Global Cool hopes to be a influence leader on global warming, I'm just not sure any strategy involving, as theirs does, the use of the term "ecosexual" is one that is going to get a lot of traction.

GERARD CERLES/AFP

In yet another example of the unexpected consequences of technology, the text message may be evolving into a literary form. Finland, land of Nokia and reindeer, has just produced the world's first novel written exclusively in text messages.

The move should not be a surprise, however, as the nation's leaders have been exploring the emotive force of the medium for some time. Last month, Finnish Prime Minister Matti VanHanen broke up with his girlfriend by text message. The jilted lover was able to exact her revenge through more traditional media—by spilling to a tabloid.

The break-up made big news in the frosty land of over 5 million people. VanHanen had once been dubbed Finland's sexiest man by that great European arbiter of taste, Jacques Chirac. At the time, moreover, the PM was taking his turn as EU President. So, while the text of the message itself has not yet been made public, some bespectacled academic poring through archives in Brussels decades hence may yet stumble upon the PM's thoughts about the exchange in a journal Van Hanen kept at the time, "out of a sense of duty toward historical research."

STR/AFP/Getty Images

HWACHEON, REPUBLIC OF KOREA: Thousands of South Korean anglers cast lines through holes of the frozen river in Hwacheon, 120 kilometers (72 miles) northeast of Seoul, during a contest to catch salmon trout. The contest is part of an ice festival which has attracted nearly one million visitors.

Last week, the world lost a giant in Bradford Washburn, who died of heart disease at the age of 96. Washburn wasn't well-known outside the insular world of mountaineering, but he was an amazing human being. Sections of his Washington Post obituary read like a real-life version of the Chuck Norris facts website:

In a long and adventurous life, Bradford Washburn ascended mountain peaks, drew complex and complete maps, shot stunning aerial photographs and rebuilt a science museum. He tried to persuade aviator Amelia Earhart to take better radios on her final, fatal flight in 1937. He directed a 1999 effort that revised the official elevation of Mount Everest. [...]

He was the first person to climb seven North American peaks, and he discovered the West Buttress ascent on Alaska's Mount McKinley that has become the most popular route. Several of his maps, some drawn decades ago, remain the best available. His breathtaking, large-format aerial photographs are so detailed that at least one climber said he thinks they saved his life.

The above is a scan of Washburn's Everest map, which he supervised at the ripe old age of 89 (!):

Just seven years ago, he was part of another team of sherpas and scientists who determined, using global positioning system measurements, that Everest's height is 29,035 feet, seven feet taller than previously thought.

For a more personal look at Washburn, read this piece by David Arnold of the Boston Globe.