Negroponte and the World's Most Expensive Lightbulb

News on the wires yesterday was that Nicholas Negroponte and the other pointy heads at MIT’s media lab have decided to release details of a $100 laptop so that kids in the Global South can own their own computer, and finally straddle the digital divide.

It’s a bad idea.

Or rather, it’s a bad idea to build $100 laptops from the ground up when you start more seriously to consider the alternatives. Like recycled computers.

Negroponte runs through some of the FAQs, and has this to say about recycled computers.

regarding recyled machines: if we estimate 100 million available used desktops, and each one requires only one hour of human attention to refurbish, reload, and handle, that is forty-five thousand work years.

And he’s right. If one person were tasked with upgrading them all, it’d take a while. But if we assume a 40 hour working week, and a year to fix as many machines as you can, you end up paying 50,000 people to refurbish 100 million machines. The advantage of this is that refurbishers could be in the same places where the computers are destined to run. So, not the suburbs of Hyderabad, Taipei or Seoul. In rural areas, in favelas. And by the same token, these newly trained hackers will be needed for tech support – each one responsible for 2000 machines to cover them all. And, there’s nothing to say that these new gods of tech support couldn’t and shouldn’t teach others how to keep the machines on the road.

There are, after all, a couple of questions that Negroponte doesn’t consider. The first is – what happens when (not if) the computers break? A decentralised network of fixers with access to skills and equipment is going to be much more helpful than a three year return-to-base warranty in a place without roads. Granted, having a range of different machines, with different components inside, is a headache to plan for. I was hoping to make the analogy that it’s much harder to get a Porsche fixed in India than the local variant of the Morris Minor, the Ambassador. But I’ll admit that the comparison falls apart since recycled computers aren’t generic, and the hassle of getting appropriate components is one to think through. This doesn’t, however, strike me as any kind of killer objection.

The second, and more interesting, question that Negroponte doesn’t ask is this: where’s the power going to come from?

Don’t get me wrong. It’s smart to have a power-source built into the machine – it’s a disruptive technology, it’s a way to be free of an unreliable and fickle regional power grid. But “where’s the electricity?” is not a question that features in Negroponte’s FAQ. Perhaps he envisages that every day for half an hour, classes of kids will work on their wrists by cranking enough juice into the laptop to get through the morning’s lessons. Which would be fine, except that the machine is designed to run thin-client software. Where’s the power for the server going to come from?

The constraints that I saw most kids studying under over the past few months were that
1. they don’t have books
2. they don’t have school rooms
3. they don’t have teachers
4. they don’t have enough money to afford to be able to go to school
5. there’s no light to be able to read after hours.
This last problem is solved with the laptop if, every night, people wind the thing up, turn it on, open it up, and hang it from the ceiling. Which, apparently, they have.

Bringing the laptop home engages the family. In one Cambodian village where we have been working, there is no electricity, thus the laptop is, among other things, the brightest light source in the home.

At which point, it stops being the world’s cheapest laptop, and becomes the world’s most expensive lightbulb.

What irks me most about Negroponte’s rather immodest proposal, though, is the assumption that education is, ultimately, an individual process, and that the technology to support it must therefore be geared towards single students. This assumption pokes through in moments such as

there are many reasons it is important for a child to "own" something—like a football, doll, or book—not the least of which being that these belongings will be well-maintained through love and care.

Even if we discount the “laptop as Chihuahua” thinking here, the problem remains that education happens in classrooms, outside of which are families and communities in which the children and their computers have to live, even if Negroponte doesn't. If you’re planning an intervention like this, why marginalise them?

Going the route of recycled computers is cheaper. And the cash (not to mention pollution and energy) you’d save on manufacturing might be better deployed in providing sustainable power to the village, perhaps by building a school building to put the photovoltaic cells on, and the kids in. And while you're at it, why not a teacher or two? That way, you might be able to do things like run a clinic, have lighting, and maybe even energy for a communal kitchen. Of course, a big whack of cash would be required not just for harvesting the energy, but storing it and maintaining the local grid. Fuel cells are currently too expensive, but that’s because they’ve not had serious amounts of coin thrown at them at the IT industry has. Recycled computers for families, training for people to maintain them, investment in education infrastructure and creating power for a village – that would be disruptive technology. It wouldn’t all come in one box – it just means thinking outside of one.

And a word of caution. When the Indian government invented the Simputer, a similar bridging of the digital divide was presaged. Today, the thousands of unsold versions of the Simputer have found a new home – as a handset through which Bangalore police can issue on-the-spot parking tickets. Beyond the fact that Simputers are now incredibly cheap, the most important reason that they’re being used is because they can issue the tickets in Kannada.

Time for forced evictions

The American Civil Liberties Union have recently persuaded a New York judge to release a further set of pictures from Abu Ghraib despite the embarrassment it might cause the present White House incumbent. But the ACLU also tell us that

the Supreme Court has ruled that a public housing tenant, who has committed no wrongdoing, can be evicted because a family member "engaged in drug related activities" off the premises.

Until the legislation is struck off, here are some thoughts to consider:

1. Alcohol is a drug.
2. Jenna Bush has been convicted of underage drinking.
3. The White House is public property...

Yeah, I know. Fat chance.

Logo lovechild

Kanye West isn't a man of humble means. But when his contract is dropped by Pepsico for summarising the White House's race relations policy in the aftermath of Katrina as "Bush doesn't care about black people", I feel perhaps that I ought to boycott Pepsi's products even more than I do now. So I followed the link in an email about Cde West, to the Pepsi website: http://www.pepsico.com/company/brands.shtml Seems the page doesn't exist anymore, or has been in some way removed. But check this.

If you breed the austerity and thinly varnished designs for world domination behind the World Bank's logo

with the dynamism of the World Trade Organization

you'll end up with the global brand logo for the Pepsi Cola Company.

Magic.

Lionel Richie does not come from Cape Town

Occasionally, living in South Africa, I pick up snippets of what the cultural life under apartheid was like, and the affirming myths that circulated in Durban. Like the one that Commodores' front man Lionel Richie was a coloured man born in Cape Town who made it out, and made it big. Alas, Richie's from Tuskegee, but the fact that he's not from Cape Town (unlike Jonathan Butler) isn't half as interesting as the fact that so many people wanted to believe that he might have been.

Catalytic converts

More suicide fun today, with the discovery of RE Kendall's proposition in The Lancet (1998; 352:1525) that the advent of catalytic converters on cars has reduced the incidence of suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. In response, PA Toseland (1999; 353:244) suggests

we should remember that when town gas was converted to carbon monoxide-free gas, the number of people who jumped in the canal, went up.

Bush Braces As Cindy Sheehan's Other Son Drowns In New Orleans

The Onion's recent article on Tyler Sheehan's death, and Bush's unhappiness with the consequences, just got funnier and/or irrelevant. Cindy Sheehan was arrested yesterday in front of the White House.

We have both kinds of music here, country and western

Writing about farmer suicides is fairly glum work, rendered yet more depressing by the array of factors volunteered to explain it which turn out, on closer examination, to boil down to the fact that farmers were generally unhappy. But the claim that people in the teeth of the US farm crisis were, in fact, killing themselves because they were listening to Country and Western music has brightened up my day a little. Chris did a fine literature review last year, when it was announced that the study that originally advanced this claim had topped the Ig Nobel awards. Jim Gundlach, one of the co-authors of the original article, suggested that the results may no longer hold true because "country music today is peppier". Whee.

No Longer Newsworthy

This just in from Alabama, where Katrina (pictured) has gone to die.

Via IB, SB and Retort.

Update: While reading Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, I came across a mention of this Rilke poem, a portion of which reads

Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören.

and which I think translates best as:

For beauty is nothing
but the start of a terror we can hardly bear,
and it amazes us so, because it serenely declines
to destroy us.

Representing Iraq

Check this graph. The dotted lines could be done a little more elegantly, but the authors have managed to squeeze onto a line-graph more information about Iraq and its representation than you'd think possible. Clever.

Mars is from Venus

Today at the Nutrition Congress in Durban, Class Worrier's blinding clairvoyant skills were again proved: a nice man from Mars, Inc told the world about how they're helping make the world a better place through the Initiative for African Cocoa Communities. The language is of Increase "farm family incomes" and "Improve the health, safety and well-being of cocoa farmers and their families". The substance of the programme is that farmers are told how, when cocoa prices are in long term decline, to squeeze more out of their land so that Mars can buy more of it from them. This was a job formerly undertaken by the state, which has recently collapsed in Cote d'Ivoire, thus preventing it from servicing Mars, Inc's needs. Bravely, when there is no one else to pick up the tab, the company marches in, and makes good PR out of agricultural extension service necessity. Anyone who believes that this is anything other than naked self-interest is obviously from another planet. Or possibly works for Oxfam.

Neither Animal Nor Mineral

The splendid Bob and Jenna Torres have written a book! It's guaranteed to be funny, erudite, and enlightening. And, judging by the title, it's guaranteed to involve veganism in some way. Check out Vegan Freak: Being Vegan In Non-Vegan World, and send in your vegan-related problems (there's a section in the book on sex-toys) to the cucumber-equipped team Torres here.

Mince of the Penguins

The New York Times reports that March of the Penguins is getting lots of favourable coverage from the Christian Right in the US because

"Some of the circumstances they experienced seemed to parallel those of Christians," said [Ben Hunt, a minister at the 153 House Churches Network] of the penguins. "The penguin is falling behind, is like some Christians falling behind. The path changes every year, yet they find their way, is like the Holy Spirit."

In which case, Wendell and Cass, the two gay penguins at New York Zoo should expect to burn in hell.

We're all going to die #6

This week saw the International Association for Suicide Prevention World Congress in Durban entitled, in a mix of the sombre and the uplifting, "Scaling the Summit: Suicidal Behaviour in Diverse Cultures". One look at the programme, and I knew it wasn't worth going. It's not that suicide isn't a serious issue. It is. But the mind boggles at the banality of what passes for suicide prevention strategy. The core of the symposium was dedicated to various kinds of low level governmental intervention, and different ways of persuading individuals that they probably oughtn't to kill themselves. Rarely was it suggested, even in the title of a talk, that there may be other forces at work, beyond individual pathology. The logic of this approach is to suggest that large parts of the world are fucked up, and it's all their own fault. China, for example, has an estimated 2 million suicide attempts per year. That's a lot of fucked up people. But it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the Chinese government, along with pretty much every other government, has abandoned its commitment to people living in rural areas. When I was in India two weeks ago, in the hot zone of farmer suicides, the pattern was clear. Farmers who had embarked on a neoliberal route, shifting towards cash crops dictated by the world market, were the ones who ended up giving themselves. When they died, they were invariably in debt, and saw no other way out. If this is pathology, it is pathology on a mass scale. We have a word for this. It's "politics". Meanwhile, the suicidologists, do what they can. Avenues of inquiry such as "Conceptualising a strain theory of suicide " or "Psychosocial characteristics of suicide victims in central Slovenia " give the measure of thinking in the world of suicide prevention. In short, it was a congress of people doing everything they could about suicide, except confront the reasons why people do it. Because, if you want to keep the epidemological cash flowing, suggesting that there are political forces at work is suicidal.

And its conference season in Durban. Next week it's the turn of the 18th International Nutrition Congress, (click here to find out about its Nutrition Safari - We're In Africa!which will be punctuated by the Kellogg's Special K and Run Walk for Life, and which features interventions such as "Cocoa, Flavanols and Cardiovascular Health: Translating Fundamental Science Into Nutrition Action" no doubt sponsored by Cadbury's. With corporate partners such as these, surely it is only a matter of weeks before hunger in the Third World is eradicated, and we can watch television programmes in which grinning African children, mouths smeared with chocolate, grin at us in gratitude, hearts bursting with health.

Once more, with feeling

Once again, the good folk at Kennedy Road, together with a widening group of supporters, took to the streets to tell their corpulent councillor quite what they thought of him. They did this by mourning his death. Among the wails, his passing was grieved with cries of "No one abused us like he did" and "No one gave us biryani at election time like Baig". Baig, unrepentently alive, didn't see the funny side, and hid inside an armoured personnel carrier for the duration, emerging only to accept a memorandum. The little shit.

Best moment involved some dodgy looking Afrikaans speaking teenagers. They came with signs demanding toilets. People asked what they were doing there. They said that they were from an orphanage in Pretoria, and were on a camping holiday. One of the people who cleans their toilet block lives in Kennedy Road, and had told them of the march. So they'd come down to support him. Good people.

Anyway, some snaps up online here, hosted at the excellent SouthAfrica.Indymedia.org.

Loot, addendum

White Foragers Report Threat Of Black Looters

Right, I'm on my way back to Durban after marathon tour. I'll be writing up this book, videoblogging, and otherwise finding excuses not to apply for jobs that I won't get. So expect plenty of posts. And links. Including this, from the Onion...

NEW ORLEANS—Throughout the Gulf Coast, Caucasian suburbanites attempting to gather food and drink in the shattered wreckage of shopping districts have reported seeing African­Americans "looting snacks and beer from damaged businesses." "I was in the abandoned Wal-Mart gathering an air mattress so I could float out the potato chips, beef jerky, and Budweiser I'd managed to find," said white survivor Lars Wrightson, who had carefully selected foodstuffs whose salt and alcohol content provide protection against contamination. "Then I look up, and I see a whole family of [African-Americans] going straight for the booze. Hell, you could see they had already looted a fortune in diapers." Radio stations still in operation are advising store owners and white people in the affected areas to locate firearms in sporting-goods stores in order to protect themselves against marauding blacks looting gun shops.