| Saturday, November 19, 2005 |  |
| World's first working $100 laptop | 0 comments |
 19 Nov 2005 @ 00:24Okay, well some of the considerations I have are piles of e-waste. Just because it can be built does it need to be. Are they using all recycled or vegetable fiber in the casing and other parts, is there no led in it anywhere etc. This smells of somewhat of a throwaway environmental disaster. --------------------------------------------------- World's first working $100 laptop Tech evangelist Nicholas Negroponte wants to outfit the world's children to improve education. November 16, 2005: 5:23 PM EST By David Kirkpatrick, FORTUNE senior editor The laptop, powered with a crank, is intended for students. NEW YORK (FORTUNE) - Nick Negroponte would like to sell you a $100 laptop, especially if you're head of state in a large developing country. That's why he is at the World Summit on the Information Society, the giant UN-sponsored gathering that starts Wednesday in Tunis. Negroponte plans to show for the first time a working prototype of his new device, intended for hundreds of millions of mostly-poor students worldwide. The techies and government ministers in Tunis are his ideal target market. At the Media Lab at MIT, which Negroponte founded 20 years ago, researchers are working not only on the engineering to make such an inexpensive product possible, but on computer interfaces to enable kids to learn without teachers, and on a curriculum to teach them every sort of subject. Negroponte's message has a seductive simplicity. As he puts it in an interview: "One laptop per child: Children are your most precious resource, and they can do a lot of self-learning and peer-to-peer teaching. Bingo. End of story." He's seeking orders in lots of a million. So far, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva has agreed to buy a million, Negroponte says, and Chile, Argentina and Thailand are lining up. Negroponte hopes to start production next year, ramping up to tens of millions in 2007. The device is a stripped-down affair, with an electricity-generating crank and a swiveling seven-inch screen, for basic word-processing, Internet and communications. It has no hard drive, instead using flash memory like that in a digital camera. The processor, from AMD, runs at a pokey 500 megahertz. Each laptop will include a Wi-Fi radio transmitter designed to knit machines into a wireless "mesh" so they can share a Net connection, passing it from one computer to the next. Though there is a power cord, that cool crank can provide roughly ten minutes of juice for each minute of turning. The key to chopping the price to $100: reducing the cost of the screen. Negroponte's chief technology officer Mary Lou Jepsen, who used to work at Intel, has invented a display she thinks could be built for $35 or less (compared with the typical $100 or more). Negroponte's nonprofit One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which will distribute the device, has raised a total of $10 million, with more on the way. Says Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. contributed $2 million: "Nick's endeavor has the prospect of potentially transforming the lives of millions of children in the developing world." Google also chipped in $2 million. Even tech titans like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell are talking to Negroponte about his plans. Jobs initially dismissed the laptop as a "science project" but is now contributing ideas. Dell had his staff vet the cost of the device's components. And Gates would like Negroponte to use Microsoft software rather than the free open-source alternatives that Negroponte currently favors. The impediments, needless to say, are numerous and daunting. "Most schools in the developing world don't even have textbooks," says Allen Hammond of the World Resources Institute. "How the heck are they going to pay for Internet access?" Even Hector Ruiz, CEO of AMD, which gave $2 million to OLPC, says success will require "developing larger ecosystems around ... tech support, application development, training and business models for the Internet service providers." Those elements aren't close to being in place, and Ruiz thinks the laptop's price won't drop to $100 for two to three years. Yet even skeptics are loath to pooh-pooh Negroponte's activism: "If he can pull it off," Hammond says, "my hat's off to him." Negroponte is currently talking to hardware companies about marketing a pricier version that will subsidize the nonprofit model. His stop in Tunis is just one on a long mission he seems unlikely to give up. "What if we fail?" he asks. "Failure means it's $142.07 and six months late. Failure doesn't mean it doesn't happen or it's a bad idea." |
| Bay Area Filipino-American authors give voice to their unique culture | 15 comments |
| 19 Nov 2005 @ 00:03 Bay Area Filipino-American authors give voice to their unique culture By Jonathan Jones, STAFF WRITER Inside Bay Area FREMONT — As Teresita Bautista sees it, before Iraq, there was Vietnam. More importantly, before Vietnam, there was the Philippines. Bautista was referring to the war between the United States and the Philippines from 1899 through 1913, once known in the U.S. as the "Philippine Insurrection," now more accurately known as the Philippine-American War. Sadly, few details from that war have made their way into American history, an issue predicted as early as the 1900s by the Chicago Chronicle, when it published a political cartoon called, "The Forbidden Book," showing U.S. President William McKinley refusing to give Uncle Sam the key to a padlocked book entitled, "True History of the War in the Philippines." The cartoon, now reprinted in "The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons," is a haunting reminder that history has often been written by colonizers, who, in this case, sought to portray Filipinos in the late 19th century as savages unable to rule themselves who needed to be civilized and Christianized. "We were the white man's burden," Bautista said. "We were were to be bathed in Christianity." Today, Bautista said a war that saw the deployment of 127,000 U.S. troops to the Philippines and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos between 1899 and 1902 is barely mentioned in American history textbooks, if at all. Fortunately, over the last three decades, Bautista, along with other Filipino-Americans, have worked to tell the full history. Bautista, a member of the Filipino-American Historical National Society, was one of roughly a dozen Filipino-American writers who shared their work and told stories about their families and their history at the Filipino-American Cultural Arts Festival on Saturday at Fremont Main Library. Fremont resident Victoria Santos, a Filipino-American writer and one of the organizers of the event, said the event seeks to highlight second- and third-generation Filipino-American authors who can serve as role models for a younger generation of Filipino-Americans. Santos, who was born in the U.S., said the quest for identity as a Filipino-American is an on-going journey that never seems to stop for the 400,000 Filipinos living in the Bay Area. "When I was growing up in Chicago, we read Hemingway and James Joyce," Santos said. "I never had Filipino-American authors to read. Now we have a choice of Filipino-American authors, which is essential for young people. Now they have role models who speak to their issues." Saturday's events also included San Leandro resident Oscar Penaranda, author of "Seasons by the Bay." When asked to talk about Filipino culture, Penaranda said three values came to mind: "loob," "kapwa," and "paninindigan." Penaranda, who teaches Filipino to students at Logan High School, explained that "loob" means "it's what inside that counts," "kapwa" stresses the importance of shared human experiences, while "paninindigan," emphasizes the importance of personal conviction. Other works included a vignette from "Seven Card Stud with Seven Manags Wild: An Anthology Filipino-American Writings," read by Fremont resident Gloria Bacharach, who told the story of growing up in Merced and coming to terms with her heritage through her mother. More than 50 people attended the festival, which also included a showing of Eli Africa's, "Selling Songs in Leyte," winner of the best short-video documentary at the New York International Film Festival, as well as poetry readings by students from Logan High School. Jonathan Jones covers religious, ethnic and cultural issues for The Argus. He can be reached at (510) 353-7005, or jjones@angnewspapers.com. More > |