I am … unhindered by talent

I doubt this will be news to many, but it’s a really cool idea and worth the plug. The One Laptop Per Child program is making that crucial leap from great concept to spiffy, shipping technology. These are designed to be used by groups of kids in the developing world, but the project’s viziers had the clever idea of allowing folks in the U.S. and Canada to buy one of these first units under their Give One Get One program. You pay $400, and $200 goes to sending you a wondrous new XO laptop, while the other $200 is a tax deductible donation that puts one of these gems in the hand of a child in the developing world. This is only for a limited time, however: November 12 and November 26

As Michael Tiemann points out, however, if you’re gonna get one, you really should consider getting two. These things are designed to form little ad hoc wireless networks whenever they’re near other XO laptops, and lots of the software assumes the existence of other XO laptops more than it assumes access to the full force of the internet (which so much traditional software now assumes). So you, your kids, and whoever you’re showing off your new toy to will be much more impressed if you have two of them to play with.

I’ve had some people ask if we were planning to buy one. Unfortunately (a) we can’t buy one from the UK in a straight-forward way and (b) we’re pretty tight for cash with partial salary and the damn exchange rate. So the answer is no, for now, but not for lack of wanting to. My guess, however, is that this short window of opportunity is a nice marketing scheme to bring in some cash fast, and that down the road they’ll open things up more broadly on a similar scheme. And why not? It raises their profile, and the “Give one, get one” scheme puts more in the hands of the target group of kids.

Cleverly, KK has proposed that UMM’s CSci discipline buy four of them for students and faculty to do projects on. I think that’s a great idea for a lot of reasons, only one of which is that there will be some waiting for me to play with when we get home :-).

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I just discovered The Gapminder, a very cool visualization tool created by Hans Rosling and others. It gives you the ability to visualize changes in a variety of socio-economic indicators across both space and time, with particularly effective use of simple animations across the time dimension.

It’s really cool to play with, and there are a lot of things you can change that aren’t immediately obvious (I found the short demo in the on-line help quite helpful). You can certainly learn a lot by goofing around with it (as well as generate a lot of meaningless visual noise). The screenshot above is from a plot of life expectancy vs. per capita income over time (the default plot you get when you start it up). I had to watch it a few times to sift out some trends, but after getting past the obvious “generally, more money means longer life” I realized that lots of blue bubbles (i.e., African countries) were “falling” out of the cloud at the end like particulates settling out of a liquid. This indicates that their life expectancy has plummeted in the last few years, which is obviously not the right direction. Why? Almost certainly the continuing AIDS crisis in large parts of Africa, and visualizations like this make it painfully (literally) obvious that this must be cause for serious concern.

In the graph above, I’ve highlighted Botswana,which shows a particularly depressing case. Both their life expectancy and per capita incomes were moving in a happy direction until the early 90’s when, despite continued gains in per capita income (which I’d like to know more about), their life expectancy flew the wrong direction.

Take a second to think about the enormous human suffering a change like that implies.

Thanks to John Hawks for the pointer. Hawks points out that the use of circles of different areas probably isn’t a great way to visualize quantitative differences (a general point Tufte raised years ago), but Rosling’s going for quick impact rather than quantitative precision:

So far, we have had a major hit with two target groups: children under 12 and heads of state. What they have in common is that you have only 5 to 10 seconds to impress them.

(You just have to love the reality that you need the same tools to communicate with little kids and world leaders. Maybe we should just put the little kids in charge? They might have more empathy.)

One thing that really annoyed me when I wrote this post was the fact that you can’t easily embed these graphs in a web page. I don’t think I’d really appreciated how used I’d grown to being able to embed images, video, maps, slideshows, and the like in blog posts. I think embedding has become absolutely key to the success and mass propagation on the web, and people designing new tools (or updating existing ones) better keep that in mind.

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Or, more on how the world is changing wildly while we’re busy making other plans:

This is a wonderfully simple and provocative video. You can quibble about some of the details, but don’t. Step back and soak in the big picture. And then think about how we educate our kids and ourselves. (I’m sure that teaching children that the earth is 6,000 years old must be a win. Really. Just must be.)

The folks at The OpenHouse Project get credit for both the pointer, and for relating this to the Lessig video.

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I was pottering in the kitchen (probably making tea or some such) while WeatherGirl was listening to a comedy program on the radio in the sitting room. I’m half hearing the words as they gently waft my direction, when a woman on the program says “shit” quite clearly and plainly. Matter of fact, no big deal, middle of the sentence.

“Shit”

But it popped out at me like a glowing ember and smacked that neural structure from 1974 that said “Hey - people aren’t supposed to say things like that on radio!” Which was a little odd, since I’m typically not very good at noticing such things (which is sometimes a problem when reviewing CDs for the radio station). Yet there it was, and it certainly caught my attention this time.

I suspect that in 1974 the BBC never would have never aired such language, except perhaps in the wee hours, or with bleeping. Times change, however, as the recent UK re-rating of Christopher Lee’s 1958 Dracula from X to 12A (!) makes clear.

In a larger sense, however, it seems like we’ve turned a huge collective corner and, short of some catastrophic change, aren’t likely to come back. It’s clear that people swear, are quite fascinated by sex, and enjoy the occasional fart joke. Various folks like the Victorians and the FCC might have attempted to deny these basic facts, but it didn’t make them any less true, it just drove them underground.

The web, however, is rapidly washing away any such pretense. Without any sort of centralized control over content (and none on the horizon), we end up with the great unwashed, and almost entirely unedited, rambling burps of the world. And we can no longer pretend that it’s not out there, that people don’t say these things. All these past forms of mass censorship have been based on the flimsy notion that we were protecting someone from something. Now, short of an off-grid survivalist camp in Montana (where I’m sure no one swears, talks about sex, or tells fart jokes), you just can’t pretend it’s not out there. Mulder would be proud.

As a result, we’ll just have to grow up and take some responsibility, for ourselves and our children, and not assume that someone else will handle it for us. We’ll no doubt run across some things that aren’t to our liking (American Idol anyone?). Assuming they’re not illegal or harming others, we’ll need to just look away and hit the back button. Kids are gonna run into things that lead to awkward questions. But heaven knows they talked some crazy shit in the playground when I was in elementary school, so I suspect all that’s really changed is our ability to pretend it wasn’t happening.

This is one of those moments where something huge has changed, incrementally but fairly quickly, and will not likely change back in many-a-lifetime. And that little “shit” was just one of the hinge creaks as the door opened on this new world.

Credit to Neil101 for the great image.

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A total hoot!

Yeah, I remember those glacial dot matrix printers and the screech of 18.8 modems. They were the bomb in their day, though, and I’m sure that most of what we’re all trendy about today will look equally dated in 10 or 15 years.

Heaven help us all if national security were to depend on finding a payphone these days!

Thanks to TechCrunch for the pointer.

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