I realize now that I've been delinquent in recommending Dan Hill's truly excellent speculative essay The Street as Platform, which explores a cross-section of all the ways that urban environments have become suffused with data. It's one of maybe 25 things I read this year that actually changed the way I see things in daily life:
We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the...
Economist Jeffrey Sachs signed on August 21 2008 an article at — The digital war on poverty — in which, summing up, he explains that [t]Thanks to market forces, even the world’s poorest people are beginning to benefit from the flow of digital information. Not that I do not agree, in general, with what is explained in his article, but there are some clarifications I’d like to make.
Over all, the tone of the article is optimistic. I am too optimistic about the ends, but not on the actual estate of the situation nowadays. Besides, I’m becoming more sceptic about leapfrogging, which is one of the strong points made by Sachs. Don’t get me wrong: I do believe ICTs are a revolution and will provide renewed energies for those who will be capable of benefiting from...
I’ve got a hip-high pile of books by my bedside, including several manuscripts written by good friends. But after Paul Collier’s talk at TED, his book moved to the top of the pile, and I spent a rainy Saturday diving into his new book, “The Bottom Billion”. It was time well spent.
Collier has dedicated the last thirty years of his life to the study of African economics, as director of the development research group of the World Bank and now as Director of the Center for the Study of African Economics. While he’s got a wealth of technical papers, “The Bottom Billion” is his first consumer book - at TED, Collier explained that he hoped to write an economics book that could be read on the beach. That might be a stretch, but it’s a good,...
Here's a cute little bit of solutions porn: Free Energy
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Leapfrogging at 9:36 AM)...
by Nancy Scola
The stories coming out of Kenya since last month's disputed presidential election have been upsetting ones, pitting the young and ignored against both an aging political class and an establishment press that kowtows to the urban elite. One bright spot? In the midst of the turmoil, Kenya's media activists are using cutting-edge mobile technologies to give voice to the voiceless. They're aiming to prove to their compatriots that an "alternative press" can challenge the politics that insists upon keeping many Kenyans unheard.
John Bwakali is both the director of Kenya IndyMedia and a friend of a friend. Using email and IM, John and I have been chewing over the new ways that Kenyans are consuming and creating news. First, the context. Just after post-election violence...
By Sanjay Khanna
The launch on January 10, 2008, of the US$2,500.00 Tata Nano “People’s Car” is a watershed moment in Indian industrial achievement, no less significant from India’s perspective than the 2004 launch of the EDUSAT educational services satellite.
It is the culmination of the efforts of India’s most powerful industrialists to compete for market opportunities on their home turf, opportunities that Western multinationals rushed to take advantage of as soon as India’s economy was forced open towards the end of the Clinton presidency—after a decade or more of steady and severe pressure from U.S. trade representatives.
Western companies have worked in concert with Indian trade and commerce regulations via joint ventures and, more recently, by building...
On June 15, the city of Rizhao, China, received a 2007 World Clean Energy Award (WCEA) in the category of “Policy and Lawmaking” for its popularization of clean energy. The award’s presenters noted that in a nation known for its heavy dependence on coal, Rizhao represents an inspiring example of the mainstreaming of renewable energy sources. Large-scale solar power and marsh gas applications in the city directly benefit more than 1.5 million residents, dramatically reducing their yearly energy costs while providing other environmental and health benefits. Policy and lawmaking by Rizhao’s local administration have been instrumental in bringing about the city’s energy revolution. Since his appointment in 2001, Mayor Lizhaoqian and the Rizhao Municipal Government have adopted...
Worldchanging book contributor Ory Okolloh has posted a short, casual but informative interview with Mama Mike's founder Segeni Ng’ethe. It's really worth a read: There’s been an interesting debate going on in the Kenyan blogosphere about the dearth of investment opportunities in Kenya (esp. for Diaspora-based Kenyans aka KT’s) beyond the overdone real estate market and the stock exchange - what’s your view on this? Where else could guys be putting their money? I can’t comment on this properly, because most of what I own is tied up in MamaMikes. I have not invested in real estate or in the stock market. So I lack the experience to offer ‘tried and tested’ answers. Also, I have an issue with how the question is phrased, why call investments in real estate and the stock...
'Tis the season for giving, so Inveneo's giving us a way to offer up something useful to people in need. If you have some old dusty USB thumb drives lying around in drawers, dig them out. Inveneo is a non-profit we've written about quite a few times, which helps bring communication technology to remote and rural areas in the developing world. Recently, they provided some schools in rural Uganda with computers, and now they are looking to provide a means of transferring and storing data by drumming up a collection of USB thumb drives.
Perhaps you've got a few memory sticks lying around your desk, cabinets, and in between your sofa cushions. Why not donate them for a tax deduction and help out some African computer labs?
[image: Oooms Twig USB]
(Posted by Micki Krimmel in...
What do cows and cell phones have in common? Until the advent of microfinance, the answer was not much. Over the past twenty or so years, small loans have enabled thousands of low-income clients to purchase a cow – a story we've all heard before. The client sells milk, making money to re-pay the loan and maintain a steady income. In recent years, microfinance clients in Bangladesh, Rwanda, Uganda, and the Philippines have used their loans to purchase cell phones and service through a project called Grameen (now Village) Phone. These entrepreneurs then re-sell minutes on their phone at a slight mark-up to fellow villagers – just like their predecessors sold (and still sell) milk to generate money.Grameen/Village Phone – combining innovative technology with microfinance and...
the cute, kid-sized and rugged laptop designed to revolutionize access to educational resources in the Global South.
We've published several sneak peeks at earlier models, but now you can see the real thing. Last week, the first of the new machines arrived at the OLPC offices. Here you can view some fun unboxing pix
It may well prove that other approaches to creating cheap laptops and providing distant places with connectivity will prove more effective than the OLPC campaign, or that a mobile phone-based approach would prove wiser. And we've written a lot before about both the controversy around OLPC's approach, and the difficulties of leapfrogging daily life.
But for now, let us just congratulate the OLPC for their success. If nothing else (and I personally expect we'll see a lot...
We talk frequently at Worldchanging about the importance of access to information and communication technology in remote areas of the developing world. We've focused in particular on the leapfrogging power of cell phones and the tremendous potential of internet access to empower and educate kids, as with the One Laptop Per Child program.
Now WC contributor, Ethan Zuckerman, points us towards a new project emerging from the Mali Geekcorps crew that brings broadcast television to remote regions of the country, where access to information is sorely limited but internet and mobile phone communications are still a long way off due to distance, illiteracy, and other factors.
CanTV is a truly remarkable little tool - a Wifi cantenna that includes an inexpensive AV receiver which allows...
We covered last year's Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy. This year's winners are just as inspirational:
Tanzania's Mwanza Rural Housing Programme, which has invented a way to fire bricks using rice husks, cotton waste and coffee husks instead of wood, turning agricultural wastes into a resource and helping to provide housing.
India's International Development Enterprises which has distributed over half a million treadle pumps (which use human power to move water, rather like the Super Money Maker) to farmers in the plains of Uttar Pradesh.
Bangladesh's Grameen Shakti and Rahimafrooz Batteries Ltd, which have used microcredit and new, simply designed systems to create what Ashden says has become the world's most successful program for bringing solar power to the rural poor....