Summary: a Harvard student working on her master's thesis talked with some Maasai herders whose livestock was being devastated by Hoof and Mouth Disease. She did some internet searches and found that Big Pharma had attempted but failed to isolate the active ingredient in a traditional native treatment. They tried the traditional native treatment and it worked; now the Maasai herders have a profitable business selling the traditional treatment. The Harvard student is very sexy but will soon be too old to attract a man. One of the Maasai doesn't beat his wives much and she finds him very manly. They are expecting their first child.

I'm sorry, but while the first part is an interesting if unsurprising anecdote, I found the later part downright offensive.

Just went back to re-read the story, and it has been updated. The Mills and Boon chapter have been edited out! Where is the dramatic ending!!! OK, I can tone down my sarcasm now..

The part at the end of the article about Sheri took a strange turn.

That was really, really weird and ruined the entire article for me.

The dreadful stock photo at the top ruined it for me.

If dreadful stock photos were a game over for every article I'd ignore half the internet.

This stock photo contains two men with white feathers around their arms. It's not clear why. The whole page looks like spam to me.

It's like the writer suddenly decided halfway through, "fuck writing tech stories for a living, I'd rather write novels for Mills and Boon".

It is certainly strange. I guess it adds some human element to the story. Personally, the end part is a bit of a filler for the article. I would have much prefer to read more about how the Sheri was able to explain the ins and outs of an internet business in Africa etc. To each their own, I guess.

Yeah, when I got to that part I had to read it twice and check the URL. It suddenly turned into some kind of smutty story talking about her cleavage and beautiful dark blonde hair.

Some more details on how they setup the business and deliver the goods to customers would be helpful.

The headline and the contents strongly led me to believe that there would be a paragraph at the end cheerfully informing me that I, too, could make $7000 a month online with no work at all, just enter your credit card number here!

A quick search for Jasper Kuria (the author and submitter) on LinkedIn explains the slobbering over Bing -- he was a software engineer at Microsoft.

What a pile of hoof-and-mouth cowpies.

The website afritech.org looks like a ripoff of hacker news as well.

I asked Paul Graham if I could use the Hacker News stack and he said it was okay since it is open source.

Oh, I did not know that either. Do you know where one may find the source ?

Ah, I see, I had no idea it was open source! Thank you for the information.

The big take-away here is normal Internet searches yielded nothing, but she had access to academic journals. In an esoteric journal, she found the cure. This is exactly why I hate paywalls on publicly funded scientific research. Information should be free.

Something seems wrong about this. I can't seem to find any other references to Sheri Goldberg. Plus it's the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, not "international studies."

Also calling shenanigans. The sentence 'As a graduate student at Harvard she had become familiar with the Bing search engine's advanced capabilities' reeks of marketing.

Please tell me this is some trolling by the Onion.

this smells a bit fishy, the istock photo and the lame part about liking men who "don't spare the rod" is suspicious

The article is also very poorly written and rife with spelling and grammar mistakes.