What with Amazon S3 and now Google’s App Engine readily available? The Google service is currently free (premium accounts coming later) but even a free account can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views a month.
Monthly Archives: April 2008
Una Laptop por Niño
There’s a serious OLPC deployment in Peru. David Talbot’s informative Tech Review report says that:
Peru is poised to deliver 486,500 laptops to its poorest children under the One Laptop per Child program–a figure that could swell to 676,500 if the Cuzco region buys in. It is the largest such OLPC purchase in the world (see “OLPC Scales Back”). I asked Becerra whether children in Lima’s slums would receive the green-and-white machines. “No,” he said. “They are not poor enough.” At first I thought he was making a hard-hearted joke. But he went on to explain that Lima residents generally have electricity and (in theory) access to city services, even Internet cafés. The laptops are headed to 9,000 tiny schools in remote regions such as Huancavelica, in the Andes, an arduous 12-hour bus ride over rocky roads southeast of Lima, and villages such as Tutumberos, in the Amazon region, days away. By the standards of children in those areas, the girl on the traffic island enjoyed enviable opportunity.
What Becerra told me drove home the true scope of what OLPC is trying to do in a country that, according to a survey by the World Economic Forum, ranks 130th out of 131 countries in math and science education, and 131st in the quality of its primary schools. “There is a long-term social cleavage in Peru that has been around forever,” says Henry Dietz, a political scientist and expert on Peru at the University of Texas at Austin, describing the country’s income inequality and rural poverty. “You get out of those provincial capitals, a half-hour in any direction, and you are in rural Peru, and things are pretty primitive. Electricity is a sometimes thing, and the quality of education–the school is four walls and a roof and some benches, and that is about it. There is very little there to work with.” In some cases, the laptop deployment will tie in to an existing program to bring Internet access to certain schools. But for the most part, the machines are entering an educational vacuum…
One of the things that has struck me most forcibly about my OLPC is how useful it would be as an eBook reader: the screen is highly readable in sunlight, so it’s interesting to see that in the Peru deployment each machine comes pre-loaded with 115 books. Hooray!
Tweet, tweet, and, er publish
Interesting story
Twitter user Orli Yakuel, with 650 followers, had a nasty surprise this morning – her direct messages (private messages between two Twitter users) showed up in her normal Twitter stream (and were subsequently published to her FriendFeed account). Friends messaged her to tell her about the embarrassing issue.
In a subsequent update, the culprit was identified:
It looks like this is a problem caused by GroupTweet, a newish third party Twitter application that allows users to direct message a lot of people at once. Orli says that she tested the application earlier today, and a number of commenters are pointing out that it may be the problem. GroupTweet requires you to create a new Twitter account to use with the service, and tell it the credentials for the account. But if you accidentally enter your primary account credentials instead, it will expose your direct messages to the public. This is not a Twitter API issue as far as I can tell, it’s a problem with the fact that GroupTweet is confusing and if you make a mistake, your direct messages are made public. This is particularly an issue for non-native English users when using it. I could have very easily made this mistake when testing the application.
TechCrunch claims that the guy who wrote GroupTweet has disabled sign-ups for the time being, but I can find no mention of that on the site.
The top 100 Web 2.0 apps
The Earth Will Be Just Fine, Thank You
Nice mini-essay by Jamais Cascio…
The grand myth of environmentalism is that it’s all about saving the Earth.
It’s not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves.
That may seem a bit counter-intuitive; after all, the Earth is certainly central to the rhetoric, the memetics of environmentalism. Most environmental discussions focus on ecological dynamics, with references to human beings typically limited to enumerations of the various insults we’ve visited upon the planet. Given the degree of culpability we bear for the current state of the planet, this is entirely appropriate.
But the rhetorical focus of environmentalism on the planet obscures the fact that what human beings have done to the Earth pales in comparison to past disasters hitting our world, from massive asteroid strikes to super-volcano eruptions killing off 90 % of the Earth’s species. In fact, over the course of our planet’s lifespan it’s experienced every form of (non-human-engineered) apocalypse on the Eschatological Taxonomy up to Class IV — in comparison, humans have yet to unleash even a Class 0 Apocalypse. And in every case, the Earth has recovered, and life has once again flourished.
We sometimes make the conceptual mistake of thinking that the way the Earth’s ecosystem is today is the way it will forever be, that we’ve somehow reached an ecological end-state. But even in an eco-conscious world, or one devoid of humans entirely, natural processes from evolution to geophysical and solar cycles would continue. The Earth’s been at this for a long time, literally billions of years; from a planetary perspective, a quadrupling of atmospheric carbon lasting 10,000 years (for example) is little more than a passing blip. The fact of the matter is that, no matter how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere or how many toxins we dump into the soil and oceans, given enough time the Earth will recover.
But human civilization is far more fragile.
Yep.
Trouble at OLPC?
Walter Bender has left OLPC following some, er, restructuring. Here’s the PC World story…
Drastic internal restructuring at the One Laptop Per Child Project has led to the resignation of one of the nonprofit’s top executives from the effort.
Walter Bender, the former president of software and content at OLPC, has left the organization to pursue “new activities,” an OLPC spokesman, George Snell, said on Monday.
Bender’s original position as a president was eliminated during OLPC’s restructuring process, and he resigned as a director of deployment, Snell said. “There is no position remaining known as [president of] software and content, so Bender will not be replaced,” Snell said.
“OLPC recently restructured into four areas — development, technology, deployment and learning — and Walter’s responsibilities will be absorbed by those teams,” Snell said.
Bender, the former executive director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, played a key role in the development and deployment of open-source software for the organization’s low-cost XO laptop, aimed as a learning tool for children in developing countries.
“Walter Bender was the workhouse for OLPC. While [OLPC Founder Nicholas] Negroponte met with presidents, it was Bender’s day-to-day management that built the organization,” said Wayan Vota, who follows OLPC and originally reported the news on his Web site, OLPC News.
Bender promoted the use of open-source software for the XO laptop in the face of repeated efforts to load Windows XP, which has gained him a big following in the open-source community, Vota said. The loss of Bender and other key personnel over the past few months could be a sign that OLPC is focusing more on the technology than the educational aspects of its mission, Vota said.
Seminar thoughts
Randal Picker, of the University of Chicago Law School, runs a Tech Policy Seminar in which he evidently encourages students to post to his Tech Policy blog. This semester the topic was Nick Carr’s book, The Big Switch. Many of the student comments are thoughtful, a few are original, but the best (and most detached IMHO) is this one by Max Schleusener. It’s nice when one has students as good as these.
The class has also discussed Jean-Noel Jeanneney’s critique of Google’s Library Project — Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge.
Still life with academics
A moment frozen in time, captured at a recent symposium in Cambridge.
How to find John Kelly
John Kelly has been studying the search engine queries that bring people to his (excellent) blog…
The majority of keyword searches involve some variation on “John Kelly blog”, but they’re not the ones that remind us how the fetishes, pathologies and strange obsessions of humankind are catalogued every day on the world wide web.
For example, after writing about my family’s trip to Prague – a trip that I feel moved to point out was 100% prostitute-free – someone from the United Arab Emirates found my blog by Googling “hooker sex apartments near wenceslas square”. I just love that construction: “hooker sex apartments”. It sounds like something an estate agent would put on a brochure: “The property is located in a desirable area, close to schools, shopping and hooker sex apartments.”
If you blog about the British tabloid press, as I sometimes do, you will have occasion to use the words “penis” and “breast”. And that will guarantee more than a few searches along the lines of “penis grab off” (some kind of martial arts move, evidently) and “how to grab a woman’s breast without getting in trouble”…
Testosterone and politics
If you do nothing else this weekend, Read Catherine Bennett’s wicked essay on the gender gap in politics. She begins with the strange tendency of the mass media to examine the physical attributes of female politicians while remaining strangely uninterested in the legs, breasts, complexions and hair of their male counterparts. And ends with this lovely blast:
Even in Spain, however, discrimination does not fall mainly upon the plain. Female members of Zapatero’s cabinet have already been depicted, by one of many critics, as a ‘battalion of inexperienced seamstresses’. Experienced or not, the impact on Spain’s identity of so many seamstresses, one of whom is both pregnant and defence minister, is all the more fascinating in the light of a new report on the effect of testosterone on male behaviour. Researchers concluded that City traders are martyrs to their hormones, powered to take risks by testosterone spikes to which they then become addicted, creating yet more testosterone; then plunged, after the effects of too much recklessness, into the state of ‘learned helplessness’ that is brought on by a rush of cortisol.
Since women are less vulnerable to both testosterone and episodes of over-excitement than young men, the authors of this study proposed that banks may want to employ more women and older men on their trading floors.
Given that we still live with the consequences of the risks taken by the gang of hopeless testosterone addicts who constituted Blair’s sofa cabinet, it is plain that Gordon Brown, once he has recovered from his current cortisol high, must nip this problem in the bud. In the interests of their country, his more hormonally active male ministers, from Ed Balls to James Purnell and Andy Burnham, the much advertised ‘young ones’ of the last reshuffle, would surely respond to a request that they undergo castration, once they have completed their families. And if that seems a lot to ask, one can only point out that they would certainly find the only other option for cabinet testosterone control even more painful. Involving, as it inevitably would, the introduction of senior women.