Are Tablets the New Teachers?

Meet Nicholas Negroponte, founder of One Laptop Per Child, who believes that “If [children] can learn to read, then they can read to learn.”  He bases this claim on experiments run with first grade age children in two remote Ethiopian villages.

One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Great Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.

Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different.  We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”

There are about 100 million kids worldwide who don't go to school.  Tablets plus some adult encouragement may be the way they can learn.  

Technology at a wedding

One of my daughters was married last September (coincidentally on Ludwig von Mises' birthday).  The groom's mother lives in Bulgaria and couldn't attend in person, but an iPhone and Skype brought her to the ceremony nonetheless.

How to unravel governments

Silent Circle is a family of applications that can transmit encrypted data between mobile devices.  Right now the apps are only available for iPhone and iPad, but support for other mobile devices is in the works.  From Slate's Ryan Gallagher:

The encryption is peer to peer, which means that Silent Circle doesn’t centrally hold a key that can be used to decrypt people’s messages or phone calls. Each phone generates a unique key every time a call is made, then deletes it straight after the call finishes. When sending text messages or images, there is even a “burn” function, which allows you to set a time limit on anything you send to another Silent Circle user—a bit like how “this tape will self destruct” goes down in Mission: Impossible, but without the smoke or fire. [Oct. 16, 2012]

In a Feb. 4, 2013 article Gallagher says

Until now, sending encrypted documents has been frustratingly difficult for anyone who isn’t a sophisticated technology user, requiring knowledge of how to use and install various kinds of specialist software. What Silent Circle has done is to remove these hurdles, essentially democratizing encryption. It’s a game-changer that will almost certainly make life easier and safer for journalists, dissidents, diplomats, and companies trying to evade state surveillance or corporate espionage.

Love msg from Israeli paratrooper

Thanks to Facebook this is becoming a big movement.  Imagine, Israelis and Iranians actually liking one another.  Of course, it's done in defiance of their respective governments.  Best viewed in full screen.  Please share.  NOTE: For some reason this won't run under Safari.  If you're a Mac user, view it with Firefox or something other than Safari.

GDP Has Built-in Bias

And the bias doesn't favor the market.  Government pumps money into the economy by way of inflation, taxes, or borrowing, and GDP grows.  Should we conclude then that government spending helps the economy?

Veronique de Rugy writes in the June, 2011 issue of Reason:

When the federal government pumps trillions of dollars into the economy, it looks as if GDP is growing. When government cuts spending—even cuts within the most inefficient programs—aggregate GDP shrinks.  

But that’s misleading. If Washington spends $1 a year on a bureaucrat’s salary, for example, GDP numbers will register growth of exactly $1, whether or not the employee has produced any value for that money. By contrast, if a firm pays an engineer $1, that $1 only shows up in the GDP if the engineer produces $1 worth of stuff to sell. This distinction biases GDP numbers—and the policies based on them—toward ever-increasing government spending.

The Heroic Bradley Manning

A case can be made that to be a patriotic American in today's world is to defend the U.S. Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. If that's true, what can be said about Bradley Manning? After allegedly releasing a video to Wikileaks that showed U.S. troops murdering unarmed foreigners, including two small children, Manning was held incommunicado illegally for 900 days by the U.S. government. Do most Americans care? No. Does the lapdog media protest? Of course not.

Paul Craig Roberts writes:

On November 29 Bradley Manning testified in federal court about his illegal confinement and torture by the U.S. government.  Manning's testimony was not covered by the US media.  The New York Times, in Chris Floyd's words, "contented itself with a brief bit of wire copy from AP, tucked away on page 3."

In contrast, the British Guardian covered Manning's testimony in detail in two stories 68 paragraphs long.

Given that most Americans regard the American military as the unflagging and courageous defenders of our "liberties," about our only possible salvation is the financial collapse of the government. When the day comes when it can no longer borrow money to pay the interest on money previously borrowed, a more humane society could emerge.

For more information about Manning's case, see www.bradleymanning.org.

Stop Googling and Duck!

There's a new kid on the search engine block: DuckDuckGo.com. 

Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo doesn't track you. 

The proprietor of the search engine is Gabriel Weinberg, who is 33. A few years ago, when Weinberg told his wife about his new business idea — pitting him against more established outfits such as Google and Bing — he admits that she briefly thought he was nuts.

“She was like, ‘What are you doing?’ ” Weinberg said. “She thought the idea was crazy.”

Her theory was hard to dispute. A start-up taking on Google in search is much like a raft taking on a cruise ship as a vacation option. But Weinberg is not delusional. With money lining his pockets from selling a start-up for $10 million, Weinberg bet there was a place in the market for a product capitalizing on users’ emerging annoyances with Google — its search results gamed by marketers; its pages cluttered with ads; every query tracked, logged and personalized to the point of creepiness.

 Read the full article here.