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| Author: |
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Doc Searls |
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| Posted: |
7/20/2001; 11:29:42 AM |
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864 (top msg in thread) |
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Cover charges 
| | I confess to not reading everything I like to read, including the peerless Salon. But somehow I just found my way from Camile Paglia (who ceaselessly makes sense, even when she's disagreeable) to the Sex section, which seems to be a big tease. Most of the stories I clicked on were appetizers for Salon Premium. "Want to read more?" they say. "This article is Salon Premium content and only available to Premium subscribers." Anybody know how that's going? |
Earth to Larry::::
| | I was reading the item below again, thinking... What better way to leapfrog Bill Gates' top-down philantropy program for education than by funding a bottom-up approach to busting the digital divide to smithereens — all over the world? Let the poorest kids educate themselves, and each other. Lend a few helping links, and the box they come in. |
| | The idea, specifically, is to proliferate Dr. Mitra's kiosks all over the world, using Larry's NIC boxes, which he plans to donate by the school-load anyway. These things are cheap, easy to set up, and run on Linux rather than Windows. This means low cost and easy remote administration, among other good things. |
| | In addition to bypassing the entire educational system, which is a massive fund-sink as well as a bureaucratic nightmarke, the move would be awesome PR for Larry, Oracle, the U.S. and the Net itself — which clearly needs it. |
| | Gina Smith runs the company, and she's a good egg. So consider this bloglet an open letter to both she and Larry. |
Think of the Net as a black monolith, just standing there
| | Dylan Tweney, whose blog keeps getting better, points to a Financial Times piece about how a Johnny Webseed named Dr. Sugarta Mitra began installing Net-connected computers in kiosks throughout New Delhi as part of an experiment in (literally) public education. The free systems allowed street urchins not only to educate themselves, but to discredit the vast industrial contraption that compulsory education has become. One excerpt: |
| | The children who gathered round the machines showed how potent this kind of unstructured learning can be. Perhaps the greatest feat came from the group at one kiosk who discovered and disabled the piece of software that Dr Mitra had installed on the machine so as to monitor their activity and relay it back to him. They sent him a message (in Hindi) that read: "We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." |
| | Dr Mitra thinks this has implications for teaching. "There is a global shortage of teachers. For developing countries, it is very important to increase the productivity of the teachers that we have," he explains. The current method of education, in which a teacher stands at the top of a classroom and instructs a group of pupils, has been the norm since the days of Plato, he says. But with new technology, it need not be so. |
| | "I would guess that children could have acquired up to 30 per cent of the curriculum on their own if they were motivated to do so," Dr Mitra contends. He calls his ideas "minimally invasive education". Perhaps, if communities in developing nations were given computers and internet connections, they might be left to cultivate computer literacy for themselves. Having acquired these skills, they could look for a way to use them to emerge from poverty. |
Like we're surprised
| | The mainstream press, which shares with China a belief that the Internet is about distributing information rather than sharing it, reports that Internet usage continues to climb in spite of the collapse of an entire "economy" based on the illusion that the Net is yet another medium with an "audience." |
WTO suicide plan uncovered
| | Here's Deanna Swift of AlterNet on the WTO's plan to rebrand itself the old fashioned way. Thanks to RageBoy for the link. |
| | And as long as we're at AlterNet, here's a friendly question: If you're an on-line news service — an "alternative" one, no less — with no "we write for print" excuse for not hyperlinking at least some proper nouns in your text, why the fuck not do it? Come on. |
A grayer shade of gray
| | With kind remarks about my current Linux Journal editorial, a reader points to Bruce Schneier's piece in InternetWeek about the mooshing together of phone services and business apps, which will, he suggests, have the effect of making telephony a lot less private than it used to be. |
| | This may be more bizarre than the takeover of the bazzar. |
| | Let me explain. The traditional telephone system in the U.S. provides it's users with the privigeles of the fourth amendment. This is because these lines are private. |
| | The internet is a shared computer network with no implied privacy. (This fact goes without notice to most of it's users.) |
| | www.parlay.org is working on a standard to mix these networks, in the name of progress. No discussion about U.S. Pirvacy via. the fourth amendment. |
| | So, when these two networks are mixed, there are all of the dangers that Bruce discussed in his article plus the biggest of all. All U.S. citizens will lose their fourth amendment rights on the telephone. |
| | When you mix white paint with grey paint, you get grey paint. |
DeLecterble
Is BorgBlog taken? Just wondering.
The Undead
| | Check out Ghost Sites (with thanks to Chris Macrae for the link). It's kind of a pergatory for sites that are headed toward death rather than already there. I even spy a weblog. |
Coasting
| | We're home in Santa Barbara. The trip wasn't bad, as long days go. The drive from Oak Island to Raleigh-Durham airport was 184 miles, which we made in a flat three hours, including a pit stop. I wasn't sleepy even though we left at 2am and I had slept almost none of the three hours I lay in bed watching the clock before we left, afraid that the alarm wouldn't go off. The drive was made easy by the Joey Reynolds Show on WOR/710 in New York, which came in quite well. I was a big Joey fan when he was on WKBW/1520 in Buffalo during the early 60s. He was one of the zanier Top 40 jocks of the day, and had a loyal following over the whole Northeast, which 'KB blanketed at night. Legend has it that when Joey left 'KB he nailed his shoes to the door with a note that said "Fill these." The show isn't bad. Kinds of a rambling nostalgic thing with lots of geriatric callers. I was almost tempted to call him myself. Figured my membership in his Royal Order of the Night People — a goofy association of loyal 'KB listeners I joined in 1963 or so — might still be active. |
| | Anyway, flying from L.A. through Chicago wasn't bad. Jeffrey slept most of the way. I even slept a little, which I rarely do in airplanes no matter how wasted I am. Taking the time to visit the kiddie museum at O'Hare (see below) was a great idea. The only glitch was the expected one: sitting in traffic on the 405 after we left LAX. The old Subaru still has busted A.C., so we had to creep through the Sepulveda Pass sweating in our seats while listening to diesel trucks grind their gears. |
| | We finally pulled into our West Beach apartment in Santa Barbara at 4:45pm (7:45 eastern). Now I've got one day to wrap neglected work before heading off to the O'Reilly Open Source thing (and the Burton Group Catalyst thing across the street from it) in San Diego. Since there's no time to fix the A.C., I'll be taking the train. |
Kidding around
| | So i'm sitting in this kiddie pen at O'Hare run by Chicago's Children's Museum in Terminal 2. We were sent here by the folks at United's Red Carpet Club in Concourse C, which our plane for Los Angeles will depart in an hour and a half. "It's only about a five minute walk from Concourse B," they said. "And it's really great for your little guy. They have a big Lego setup and lots of other really great stuff for kids." I was a bit reluctant, since we had arrived from Raleigh twenty minutes earlier at Concourse B and had already made the trek to Consourse C through this surreal tunnel where the moving sidewalks slide under rippling neon lights between luminous walls of backlit pastel panels while tinkly robotic improvisations on Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue compete with safety announcements from overhead speakers. The tunnel is one of the most familiar on Earth to frequent flyers, whose goal is always to go through this gauntlet one time and in one direction, as if it were some kind of valve. To go back and do it again is like going to the counter and asking for a middle seat. You don't do that. |
| | But I needed the exercize, and Jeffrey needed to burn off energy so he might sleep on the flight to L.A. So back we went, and then on to Terminal B, which was way more than five minutes beyond Concourse B. With no sleep, a full backpack, my overloaded laptop bag and Jeffrey's travel bag, plus Jeffrey himself, it felt like I was in Basic Training. It wouldn't have seemed to inconguous to fall and crawl through swamp under barbed wire while a hail of bullets passed overhead. |
| | When we got to the Kid Zone, the Lego half of the place was circled by police tape and filled with moving forklifts and half-open crates. It looked like set-up day at a trade show. It turned out this was the only day since the place opened six years ago that the really fun part of the zone was closed. |
| | Jeffrey scoped out the remaining section — the usual mock-ups of airplane cockpits equipped with instruments and gear good for nothing more than make-believe aviation, and said, "Papa, this is for little kids." As if, at four and a half, he was already in fifth grade. |
| | "Too bad," I replied. "I'm sitting here on the bench. You go play." So he did, while I broke out the laptop and started writing all the above. |
| | And he's having a great time being the Big Boy here. Right now he's explaining aviation to a two-year old he just finished showing how to leap down a flight of stairs, while the kid's tolerant but worried mother looked on. |
| | Now Jeffrey is showing another little guy — one who can barely walk — how to operate one of the cockpit's fake telephone headsets. Woops: the toddler's father just removed that kid from Jeffrey's control. Now Jeffrey's back to jumping from altitude. Another half hour of this and we start the long march back to Gate 15 at Concourse C. |
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