The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Right now the Categories include, in this order: Video Games, Television, Commercials, Current Events, Sports, Movies, Music.
Phi Beta Iota: Now imagine this in all languages, available on the cell phone, as an educational tool that also harnesses the cognitive surplus–the distributed intelligence–of the Whole Earth. Our view of YouTube is now such that we consider it more important than Google.
Also see YouTube.com/leanback (use search at top of leanback page)
September 9, 2010
By Frederik Balfour and Tim Culpan
Foxconn founder Terry Gou might be regarded as Henry Ford reincarnated if only a dozen of his workers hadn't killed themselves this year. An exclusive look inside a postmodern industrial empire. On a crushingly hot mid-August day at Foxconn's Longhua factory campus in Shenzhen—where a dutiful army of 300,000 employees eats, sleeps, and churns out iPhones, Sony PlayStations, and Dell computers—workers indulged in a rare moment of celebration. First, there was a parade, an Alice in Wonderland spectacle of floats, blaring vuvuzelas, and workers dressed up as Victorian ladies, geishas, cheerleaders, and Spider-Men. This was followed by a two-hour rally inside a vast sports stadium featuring acrobats, musical performances, fireworks, and life-affirming testimonials punctuated by chants of “treasure your life” and “care for each other to build a wonderful future.”
By Frederik Balfour
Foxconn Gives Bloomberg Businessweek Unprecedented Access
Foxconn, the secretive Taiwanese company that produces Apple's iPhone and iPad, the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo Wii, and Dell computers, was forced into the limelight in May 2010 after a dozen employees committed suicide, most by jumping from company dormitories. As part of a much needed public relations effort, Foxconn granted Bloomberg Businessweek unprecedented access to the company's factory floors, worker dorms, suicide helpline operators, and the company's charismatic chairman and founder, 59-year-old Terry Gou. Here are some images of its sprawling facility in Longhua, a suburb of Shenzhen, China, where more than 300,000 migrant laborers work.
“Hacker News” has a welcome page and guidelines page offering an overview of what the organizers expect from those planning on posting comments and why it's good overall for the community. I (Jason Liszkiewicz) was impressed with this. Hacker News has a solid number of participants and provides a simple and mature format for exploring and contributing thoughtful feedback, insight and resources.
It has a jobs link (mainly for engineers and programmers) and the “Ask Hacker News” link which enables the community to share information and reply to what is shared. Such a model (deemed an “experiment”) that provides mature and thoughtful information-sharing is something we need more of. Communities inter-linking with communities (or at least over-lapping) to spill over each others insights can be invaluable and potentially priceless.
Example: Ask HN: What do you perceive as worth spending money on?
This simple and useful model is something I hoped would emerge + converge from the SMS/text messaging developers at ChaCha.com (humans online responding to text messaged questions) or somewhere else. Converging multi-community info-sharing online, offline, and through the mobile world on a global scale is an exciting possibility.
The next level to all of this exists in the form of ideas or fragmented applications but it seems not beyond that, yet.
Email earthintelnet|at|gmail.com or post something at this new forum to discuss these ideas. Or, provide some mature and thoughtful feedback at the Hacker News community.
Three Stand-Out Organizations for Bicycle-use in the Developing World
Hosted by The Long Now Foundation
This is a provoking and entertaining presentation.
After the short video called “Pixels” prior to the presentation, Jesse Schell starts off with what if life becomes, not Orwellian, but Huxleyan (Brave New World) where pleasure achieved through technology grips the whole lives of citizens. Imagine sensors attached to commercial products from toothbrush to television (and electric tattoos linked to Facebook) collecting data + wi-fi connections uploading behavior data to the Web. People can earn “points” like in a gaming environment depending on their behavior and habits and these points can be used for coupons, deals, and other corporate profit-pursuing conceptions.
Soon the presentation gets into prediction and if the more one practices at predicting the future, the better one can become. Other parts of the presentation:
FrontlineSMS is an open-source software that enables two-way text messaging between cheap mobile phones and laptops over cellular (GSM) networks.
FrontlineSMS: Credit
FrontlineSMS:Credit aims to make every formal financial service available to the entrepreneurial poor in 160 characters or less. By meshing the functionality of FrontlineSMS with local mobile payment systems, implementing institutions will be able to provide a full range of customizable services, from savings and credit to insurance and payroll.
FrontlineSMS: Learn (not finished yet)
FrontlineSMS:Learn leverages ubiquitous mobile technology—SMS or “text messaging”—to support and strengthen education and training initiatives and human capacity development and make learning opportunities available anytime and anywhere. Using the application knowledge and higher-order reasoning and decision-making skills can be developed, reinforced and assessed leading to improved transfer of learning, increased knowledge retention, long-term changes in behavior and, ultimately, improvements in service delivery.
FrontlineSMS: Legal (new)
These low-cost systems enable remote coordination between informal dispute resolution workers and the formal legal system, improving service delivery, range, and cost efficiency.
In addition to this core platform, FrontlineSMS:Legal is developing additional plug-ins that will add value to local organizations working to provide legal services. FrontlineSMS:Legal products offer several key functionalities:
Continue reading “Open Source Mobile Tech (SMS) Platforms for Credit, Education, Legal, and Medical”
Energy in the developing world
Technology and development: A growing number of initiatives are promoting bottom-up ways to deliver energy to the world’s poor (Sep 2nd 2010)
AROUND 1.5 billion people, or more than a fifth of the world’s population, have no access to electricity, and a billion more have only an unreliable and intermittent supply. Of the people without electricity, 85% live in rural areas or on the fringes of cities. Extending energy grids into these areas is expensive: the United Nations estimates that an average of $35 billion-40 billion a year needs to be invested until 2030 so everyone on the planet can cook, heat and light their premises, and have energy for productive uses such as schooling. On current trends, however, the number of “energy poor” people will barely budge, and 16% of the world’s population will still have no electricity by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency.
But why wait for top-down solutions? Providing energy in a bottom-up way instead has a lot to recommend it. There is no need to wait for politicians or utilities to act. The technology in question, from solar panels to low-energy light-emitting diodes (LEDs), is rapidly falling in price. Local, bottom-up systems may be more sustainable and produce fewer carbon emissions than centralised schemes. In the rich world, in fact, the trend is towards a more flexible system of distributed, sustainable power sources. The developing world has an opportunity to leapfrog the centralised model, just as it leapfrogged fixed-line telecoms and went straight to mobile phones.
Continue reading “Bottom-Up Energy: Wait Not/Rely Not on Government & Industry”
