Objectives: Create an annual flagship event and news hub to build and maintain the identity of the international Open Science Movement. Organize the various sub-communities into an effective, global, socio-technological force for rapid change in science/innovation policy. An attempt to gather all stakeholders who want to liberate our scientific and technological commons and enable a new era of decentralized, distributed innovation to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. Continue reading “Event: 29-31 July 2010, Berkeley CA, Open Science Summit”
This is an audio presentation by David Harvey accompanied by an animation that shows an interesting series of recent historical and geographical connections in the global financial system. The speaker admits to not having any solutions, but only providing the overview of what has happened.
I was on MSNBC talking about the schism among Democrats regarding Arizona’s new immigration law and the Justice Department’s response. Obama is worried about his plummeting poll numbers among Hispanics (down 12 points this year), while Arizona Congressional Democrats are worried about being voted out of office. But nobody is talking about pot.
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When asked about it by Dylan Ratigan, I said that everyone discussing the “immigration problem” was ignoring the elephant in the middle of the room: marijuana prohibition. It’s channeling millions in drug money into the Mexican cartels, and represents 60% of all cartel profits. That money gets used to finance violence not only at the border but in over 200 cities across the United States where they currently have a presence — up from 100 cities three years earlier.
The Rosetta Project is pleased to announce the Parallel Speech Corpus Project, a year-long volunteer-based effort to collect parallel recordings in languages representing at least 95% of the world’s speakers. The resulting corpus will include audio recordings in hundreds of languages of the same set of texts, each accompanied by a transcription. This will provide a platform for creating new educational and preservation-oriented tools as well as technologies that may one day allow artificial systems to comprehend, translate, and generate them.
Play becomes work with playpump + eventually no water, no maintenance, and elder women can't use it. See synopsis and watch the Frontline video here
(clips from the synopsis about the Frontline video documentary)
Five years ago, Amy Costello reported a story for FRONTLINE/World. It was about the challenges of getting water in Africa, and a promising new technology called the PlayPump.
After years of covering “bad news” in Africa, she was happy to report a story that seemed to offer something to cheer about. Her story showed how simple it might be for children to pump fresh water just by playing. Behind it all, a South African entrepreneur named Trevor Field.
“A report commissioned by the Mozambique government on the PlayPump that was never released, cited problems with the pumps – women finding it difficult to operate; pumps out of commission for up to 17 months; children not playing as expected on the merry-go-rounds, and maintenance, “a real disaster,” the report said. “
Field had made his career in advertising, but when he heard about this new device, he formed a company and started making PlayPumps himself.
To cover maintenance costs, he proposed selling ads on the sides of the water tower. He said the PlayPump model would be a big improvement over the hand pumps that Africans have struggled with for years.
