Stranger than virtual

In Oman, TV channel hopping, we land on the Qatar channel. Camels are racing in one long straight course. Alongside them, on either side of the roped-off course, are 2-3 wide columns of cars, 4×4s. The camels are galloping, with an occassional one or two trotting – very fast. For a moment I’m confused. It looks like they have no riders. Then our eyes catch the strange-looking contraptions tied on the camels back. Believe it or not, the contraptions are little robots. The one function we see them perform is occassionally whipping the behind of the camel, as a camel jockey would. We’re transported into a futuristic world – I could imagine seeing this in Second Life, but instead these are the sands of Qatar, a hop skip and jump from our physical location in Muscat.

But the robots feel doubly strange, like something somewhat familiar, with a twist that throws one completely off. And then it sinks in. The robots are short and squat. In fact they look like children. The robots are in fact a replacement of the terrible practice of roping in children, sometimes forcibly, as camel jockeys.

Here’s a piece in the National Geographic about the shift in Qatari camel-racing practices. They also have a clean shot of the robot.

Smashcast hits Jetset Show

Just watch it – make sure you’re plugged in and/or wait for the show to download once. I’m very sorry for some of the girls comments on ‘why such few girls in Smashcast’. We’ll see if we can’t prepare a podcast on this at our next session. But cheers all in all. Just that moment with Vincent talking about downloading audacity, open source software etc. takes us miles ahead in breaking those dastardely stereotypes. Cameo by Moi. I had said ‘no’ to their videotaping me at the conference, figured it should be all about the Smashcasters. The cameo’s from some clever interjection of still photographs into the video. Permalink to show.

An example to follow

A friend read the recent businessweek article on Dan Gillmor and Bayosphere in which I’m quoted (accurately) and said “guess who got the negative quote”. I hope he was kidding, but it forced me to think about the quote, and any future quotes. What’s the difference between a negative quote and a critical quote? There are rare cases where I feel the former is justified, whereas the latter is probably the norm for me. But to the readers eye, perhaps the line is blurred. If you have a tip to help differentiate one from the other, I’m all ears.

Bad School

Synablog, new entrant on my blogroll, reminds us about how crazy life can be when he tries to log onto smashcast at school. Read More.

Businessweek on Smashcast

Heather Green from business week captures the spirit of smashcast.org in her most recent blog entry.

Secret killer: School transfers

Smashcast.org goes live tomorrow (Preview here; Brainbytes preview here).

This week’s post, and next week’s post are going to veer away from talking directly about science and technology, but instead bring up environmental and contextual issues that impact whether smashcasters have the peace of mind to allow them to focus on their academics. This week’s post, “Top High Shcool Acceptance“, describes the travails of a top student who has to move to Kentucky and wants to get into a good public school. The school has its own rules about who gets in, how and when. None of these seem flexible enough to accomodate families that need to move to deal with financial hardship. When these families move, the timing isn’t perfect, and rarely aligns with expected application dates. So if you don’t move proactively and control your moving time to school application deadlines, sounds like there are not many options for your child …

In related news, from a recent series of articles in the LATimes – “Why Does High School Fail So Many?” (thanks Jessica):

The more students transferred, the less likely they were to graduate; an ominous development in a district in which one-quarter of the students change schools annually. Of 18 students who attended three or more schools, only one graduated.

Relevance of Visual Design: Zero

Blue & black, dry as ice. Bookfinder’s web-site seems to have stayed the way it is forever. And that hasn’t done a damned thing to it’s runaway success, which I’m defining as the passion and loyalty it inspires in it’s customers, and the number of back-handed compliments from critics.

A Day in the Life

Ishmael Reed and Esther Dyson co-star in Bay Area afternoon.

An African American produces a play that provides a lens into the internal dynamics of a modern-day Pakistani-American family. The play is directed by the producer’s Jewish wife. A talk about the future stars a tech doyen – a woman. She is accompanied at the talk by another woman – her mother, Verena – a mathematician who has to work to ensure we don’t forget the boy in the family, who, by the way is an accomplished historian and writer. Ishmael Reed and Esther Dyson starred in my Saturday afternoon, casually defying expectations and stereotypes. I did not construct the afternoon – it just happened as it does, in the Bayosphere. Read the rest on my bayosphere blog.

Cracking up all by myself, Part I

From Dan Gillmor, one of the funnier blog titles.

STORIES I STOPPED READING NEAR THE TOP

ZDNet: Cheaper to patch–Windows or open source?. Microsoft has sparked heated debate by claiming that Windows software is cheaper to patch than open-source alternatives. A Microsoft-commissioned study–conducted by its business partner Wipro–outlined the main areas of so-called “cost savings” by using Windows.

I’m still laughing.

Garages in Silicon Valley; Inventors in Laos

Recently organized a talk by the founders of Inveneo at my real-life job. There were several stand-out moments.

First, met Bob Marsh and learned about the Homebrew Computer Club during the hey-day of “garage-days in silicon valley” (coming to a theater near you). He was a little prickly at first, and I’m imagining it was because he hadn’t as yet recognized the inner (and really ‘outer’ if you look hard enough) geek in me behind the carefully selected formal robes I had on for just this event. I’d like to think that the few moments crawling under tables, ferragamo sandels notwithstanding, to hook up laptops and projectors brought us onto the same wavelength.

Second, I learned about pedal-powered PCs (no kidding, its a bycycle hooked up to a computer) and their invention in Laos by Laotians (as Bob candidly described -and I must say, with the joy of a geek recognizing the talent of a fellow geek). Inveneo, btw, provides really cheap, durable, replicable infrastructure for basic communication and information needs of villagers in remote areas of developing countries. Currently they’re testing their stuff in Uganda. And any company that has a Chief Geek who’s Okay can’t be all that bad. (Scroll down on the linked page to get this very bad joke)

The folks from Inveneo felt like good people, enthusiastic and with a love for their work and its potential. I do hope they advertise that inventions and innovations are not the sole purview of those of us explicitly named in the West. After all, the politics of who’s named and who isn’t will by default relegate the inventors of the pedal-powered PCs to ‘the people in Laos’, or ‘people’, or ‘Laotians’, not Inveneo or Your Name Here.

I did come into the talk with real skepticism for anything that might sound like ‘the tech panacea for poverty’ (a la ‘the tech panacea for education in the U.S.’) but I left feeling at least like there was some humility around the problem – and the relative contribution of their solutions to peoples lives.

I remain conflicted about how these (tech/science) approaches, with great intentions, and indeed positive short-term impact, by their very preponderance compared with (the much harder) systemic approaches addressing core issues such as poverty and its real causes, can shift the discourse and therefore the possibility of truly sustainable and effective long-term change. In the meanwhile, 3 cheers for Inveneo.