Something wonderful is happening in the third world

[fearfaoin]

Some of the softare looks pretty cool. There's a Distance program that
measures the distance between two laptops by sending an audio burst
from each, and measuring the time it takes to pick the sound up on the
laptops' microphones.

The sound/music processing stuff looks pretty nice, too.

[sbfluter]

I guess my problem with giving a laptop to every kid on the planet is this:

Is this really a gift of education or a way to deliver more advertising to more people? Is this a humanitarian thing or a marketing thing? Is it really helping people or big corporations?

As one who feels completely bombarded and overwhelmed by corporate influence in every aspect of my life sometimes I think of dropping off the grid. The idea of spreading the grid to every place on the planet is kind of like taking away any last refuge from it I may be able to seek.

[jim stone]

Well, the computers are going to impoverished children
in Afghanistan, Mongolia, haiti, etc. Impoverished
children haven't much disposable capital.
Wrong population for a covert marketing
scheme. What are they going to sell them?
What will they buy it with? A bit like
targeting the homeless.

The software shows what the laptops do.
Looks like what it says it is. Also you might
read about the projects origins and its sponsors,
like Kofi Annan in the UN.

[hyldemoer]

The idea of spreading the grid to every place on the planet is kind of like taking away any last refuge from it I may be able to seek.

I've got a couple friends who carve the drums they use for chatting with their Gods using tools they make themself. They also grow the gourds and collect the shells they use to make shaking instruments for chatting with their Gods.
One is going to hunt down an animal, say prayers to its spirit and after killing it, save me its hide for a banjo head
in exchange for some herbal tinctures I sent him.

We chat to each other by e-mail.
Most of them work in IT.

Refuge isn't a place. Its a state of mind.

[jim stone]

Also, much of the planet isn't anything like here.
Hundreds of millions of people suffer from chronic
hunger. I remember whole villages of people
who were only five feet tall because they
didn't eat enough.

We have a standard of living most people can
hardly imagine. We have enough to eat, our children
aren't dying like flies, we have shelter and heat
from the cold, education, clean water, access
to medical care, warm clothes...

So now someone proposes to throw a life line to these
folks--here, take this: your children will be educated,
they will have marketable skills and you will have
the information you need to address many of
your problems.

And we say, no, no, we mustn't do it,
because then these people
may be subjected to ADVERTISING!

[I.D.10-t]

Is this really a gift of education or a way to deliver more advertising to more people? Is this a humanitarian thing or a marketing thing? Is it really helping people or big corporations?

As one who feels completely bombarded and overwhelmed by corporate influence in every aspect of my life sometimes I think of dropping off the grid. The idea of spreading the grid to every place on the planet is kind of like taking away any last refuge from it I may be able to seek.

The OS is based off of Fedora 7 (Red hat) and is open source. If there is any questionable content, the users can modify and remove the unwanted parts. Using the X windowing system, it would feel a lot like windows 98. They must have trimmed the program back a bit to get it all to fit onto a one gig hard drive. (Although DSL and other Linux distributions have been packed into much smaller space).

If you want to check out the OS and software packages yourself, there is a way to emulate it on your computer.

It seems that it is targeted more towards education than advertisements.

[missy]

I didn't mean that I was against bringing education to any people - if you know me, you'll know that one of my biggest gripes is the lack of education of all people, no matter where they are.

My point was that some of these areas (not the one in the OP necessarily) do not have potable water or dependable food. In order to be educated and use that education, one has to live through childhood. While I'd love to see all of this provided, if resources are scarce - the food and water get my vote over education.

[Walden]

An Internet connection does not an education make.

The kids won't keep them... other family members will take them... even in Alabama.

They'll get used and abused, and quit functioning relatively quickly.

It won't solve the world's problems.

[jim stone]

The program appears to be working well in the places
where it is already up and running. The news
article talks about this;also the cite for the program.
Every indication that it's practical.

You might wish to read more about it.

[jim stone]

I didn't mean that I was against bringing education to any people - if you know me, you'll know that one of my biggest gripes is the lack of education of all people, no matter where they are.

My point was that some of these areas (not the one in the OP necessarily) do not have potable water or dependable food. In order to be educated and use that education, one has to live through childhood. While I'd love to see all of this provided, if resources are scarce - the food and water get my vote over education.

If you are for educating these children, what's the problem
with giving them these computers? I don't understand
your post. We're not talking about giving computers
to kids in the midst of a famine; they're in school.
Why not give them computers?

You say, if resources are scarce, food and water 'get your vote'
over education. What do you mean?

If a medical team is going in to address various medical
problems, but more people are in danger of dying due to malnutrition,
subsistence farming not always producing enough,
is the idea that the medical team shouldn't go?

As I wrote earlier, getting people info they need to produce
more food and clean up their water seems a sensible measure.
Educated people under these circumstances are likely
to do a lot better.

You seem to be seeing some
sort of competition here that I don't see.
Is the idea that in selling the Afghan government these
computers very cheap, which it distributes to the children,
we're depriving the kids of food?

[sbfluter]

Even better than these computers I saw on TV last night a guy who makes water pumps that pump the ground water, which is usually much cleaner than whatever other water supply they already have or don't have. And to pump the water? A merry-go-round! So as children play they create fresh water. That sounds really happy.

I think the one-laptop-per-child idea is really great, but part of me can't help but be suspicious about the true purpose. Is this really to educate or is it to open up new markets. And what about all the e-waste?

[tuaz]

Some helpful links below.

The first has pics of the XO's yo-yo power-cord charger thingy and other stuff, plus other links to explore from there.

The other link is an article/commentary written by a journalist addressing the not-uncommon argument raised by critics about "why a computer and not food or other aid?". It's useful because he actually seems to know what he is talking about, having been following the XO's development for 3 years, and having actually spoken to the project's chief tech officer in 2005 about the XO's perceived role.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7115348.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7138061.stm

I think whatever the critics say abt its implementation or the usefulness and quality of the endproduct, the reasons for initiating this project in the first place seem to have been altruistic. I saw some videos on YouTube about tech people with other paying jobs giving their free time to come together to brain storm and develop the project from scratch. They realised there were various practical issues and problems:

1. XO must have low energy consumption;
2. LCD screen being clear and visible in bright sunlight
3. easy ways to recharge the batteries in rural locations
4. how to get internet connections in rural areas when there's perhaps at most one phone/satellite point shared in one remote location.
5. how to make sure the kids' XO don't become a target for theft for sale in the black market.

They thought up clever ways to address all these issues, some of which has led to truly innovative tech. The XO itself is not a stand alone laptop; it is specially designed to interact and easily communicate with other XOs (and in the process of linking and networking, the internet connection is spread to and shared with those XOs closest to it).

[tuaz]

[double post]

[fearfaoin]

An Internet connection does not an education make.

That's very short-sighted. A computer is so much more than an Internet
connection. (Hard to believe, but computers were around longer than the
Internet!) There are many useful tools on these machines, including
programming tools for children to create their own. It's really amazing
what a child who grows up with a computer can do, esp. compared to a
person who doesn't encounter computers until adulthood. Besides, these
were never meant to replace schools, just to augment them.

The kids won't keep them... other family members will take them... even in Alabama.
They'll get used and abused, and quit functioning relatively quickly.

This was a huge hurdle for the designers. They were determined to make
the machine look so childish that adults wouldn't want to steal them. It
remains to be seen if this was successful. They are also incredibly rugged.
There's no harddrive, which is the part that most often fails first in a
computer, so it can be dropped and kicked around quite a bit and still work.

It won't solve the world's problems.

Nor does it purport to... the point is to help the world solve its own problems.

My point was that some of these areas (not the one in the OP
necessarily) do not have potable water or dependable food. In order to be educated and use that education, one has to live through childhood. While I'd love to see all of this provided, if resources are scarce - the food and water get my vote over education.

Give a culture a fish and they'll eat for a month. Teach a culture to fish and
they'll eat until they've overfished their waters. Bill and Malinda Gates are
doing a great thing by building infrastructure (roads, sewers, etc.) in the third
world, but if we create a few engineers in those countries, they can build their
own infrastructure. This is not money poorly spent, in my opinion.

There are other projects that strive to generate knowledge that the third
world could use to improve its lot:

One such project is a DIY multimachine. Once a person builds the multi-
machine, she has a machine shop and the skills to use the tools in that shop.
This could give a third world resident a useful skill, a way to help her
community, and a source of income. If only that person could get to the
information...

There was an article in Make magazine recently about a Junkyard Wars-type
contest whose purpose was to get people to design useful machines out of
junk that could be found in most Nigerian junkyards. Most of the inventions
moved water or generated some other useful function from human power.
The winning designs were sent to Nigerian engineers to teach to the locals,
so that they could build their own machines to improve their lives. Imagine
if (non-Western-educated) Africans could start designing their own
machines.

[fearfaoin]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7115348.stm

Interesting article. I like this part:

[School teacher Miss Manzo] added: "But it is not only in
the school they make use of the laptop. They use it at home
and even help to teach their parents."

I've worked with a few Engineers who came here from Nigeria. They work in
the US largely because there are few computer-related career paths in Nigeria
that don't involve pretending to be Barrister Michael Umbwe, trustee of a
$43M account that YOU can share... So at least this project might open up
some real jobs for people and help end 419 scams.