Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Audio scan of NYC FM band the night John Lennon was shot. Cory Doctorow: This is an MP3 of a scan of the the NYC FM band the night that John Lennon died, courtesy of the masters of audio oddities, WMFU. Link (Thanks, Nemo!) [Boing Boing] 6:50:49 AM    comment []

More dialogue with TMTTLT: Push back on my take: Gates…. Push back on my take: Gates…: [quoting me snipped] it isn't a mistake to design the hardware… but it might be. it depends on many factors, what is the political economy behind the model here? is it that each child will benefit? how? and what will ensure that? would it be better to take the same money and say, pay for a generation of teachers, that would then teach another generation of teachers? is the design of a technology always a good decision in the contexts in which it serves? When i look at the laptop, i try to think of it as something that dropped from the sky that i have no access to beyond say a 20 minute class. think of it as alien technology, you have no cultural access to it. is the laptop what you would design? does it make sense? what about the builders honest evaluation that they need to have two or three design break throughs before it becomes a reality, in short… we can't build a $100 laptop now…? so is it a mistake to invest in this development? when resources are perhaps better spent on something that would build and sustain a people's capacity? perhaps. I see this laptop as a cultured object, it makes sense to the west and people educated in the west. Every bit of research that I've seen though indicates that this development model does not work. Should kids have access to technology? the data that I've seen is inconclusive on this subject. that data is primarily in the developed world where students are immersed in educational institutions. so i don't know. access to technology is not a universal good in my book. technology is but one of many ways of gaining elements of a good life, but it doesn't provide for a good life and it doesn't guarantee anything. I dont think that there is any real reason to suspect that that anyone would necessarily be in a better position after the $100 laptop, but… since there is no tracking studies, there is no way to know. I'm much happier say with the ideas behind Atoms and Bits http://fab.cba.mit.edu/ where you teach kids how to build things with advanced manufacturing technology, so they could build what they need, than i am with the 'give them a laptop' idea. as for a place on the net… i think that the net should be opt in. if there becomes a point in your life where you need the net, then yes you should be able to use it. but there are probably many people in the world that will never need or use it. the net or net access isn't a necessary good either, many people assume it is, that is a popular ideological position, but alas, the net could go away and be replaced with other technologies with different purposes, perhaps more focused and less generalized. it is not that i do not think they should have access, it is that i think that access to the net comes somewhere after you teach someone to read in its current stage. I do not really see what's wrong with the latter two positions that you state above. do you give a man a fish and feed him for a day, or do you teach the man to fish? do you give a person a laptop that is already outdated and hard to use, or do you teach them how to make their own things. the political economy that i see driving this is economic dependence and thus paternalism. we think we know what is right for someone and thus we are going to give them that thing, but that thing is not necessarily what they need, nor is it even necessarily valued. what happens if the people do not place value in the $100 laptop? what happens if they do not see it as a good or productive device? the counter argument is if the laptop reaches the next einstein that would be a great thing right? to what end, to give that einstein the cultural tools to participate in whose culture? ours, so the laptop is cultural imperialism? or isn't it? is this thing a way of training and detecting the best and the brightest so that the MIT's of the world then have access to them, braindrain wise? like i said,i like the fab central idea much more, teach them how to build their own laptops and give them the capacity to do that. in short, build capacities in the world, don't build things. [Too many topics, too little time.] We seem to be more in agreement than not. I'll resist the slide from "computing devices" to "technology," but probably nothing turns on that anyway. The laptops are valuable at least as much for their interactive, networking potential as for their other computing possibilities, maybe more. Plenty of people in the developed world benefit from Net access, and not because they're becoming better prospects to attend MIT. That brain-drain argument seems to be a red herring. Do you give fish or teach to fish? Of course, you teach to fish given the live option, but not while at the same time denying your students fishing tools. What's wrong with those other two positions is that they deliberately exclude the developing world. And is $100-laptop the only thing one might productively offer the developing world? Of course not. Teaching fabrication and passing out fab plants could be dynamite. (It turns out that the fab plants will require someone running them, though, so there's a major difference in the sort of empowerment you could be facilitating with laptops + education versus with fabtops + education. It's not a way out of economic dependence -- less so than the laptops project. There's at least enough paternalism to go around.) Providing meaningful education would be another. Eradicating diseases: also good. Everyone's welcome to do their own thing to help kids around the world. I'll check out Atoms and Bits, which sounds intriguing. 6:50:42 AM    comment []

Dream Baby Dream. Kids learn by playing, and videogames are transforming the way kids play. It's just possible that they'll see the world as a place for creation not consumption. By Will Wright, guest editor of this month's Wired magazine. [Wired News: Top Stories] 6:32:39 AM    comment []

Are kids too plugged in?. Time Magazine's cover story this week is on kids' multitasking skills and what all that digital juggling is doing to their brains and family life. ... There is no doubt that the phenomenon has reached a kind of warp speed in the era of Web-enabled computers, when it has become routine to conduct six IM conversations, watch American Idol on TV and Google the names of last season's finalists all at once. ... Although multitasking kids may be better prepared in some ways for today's frenzied workplace, many cognitive scientists are positively alarmed by the trend. "Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren't going to do well in the long run," says Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. On the positive side, Gen M students tend to be extraordinarily good at finding and manipulating information. And presumably because modern childhood tilts toward visual rather than print media, they are especially skilled at analyzing visual data and images, observes Claudia Koonz, professor of history at Duke University. [Smart Mobs] 6:31:58 AM    comment []

JoniM collaborating on ballet (Can-no-pix) .... JoniM collaborating on ballet (Can-no-pix) [robot wisdom weblog] 6:31:34 AM    comment []

Cory points at: Goths grow up to be dentists and PR people. This Guardian article, written by a former goth, makes the case that goths disproportionately grow up to be high-earning professionals -- and includes a 10-point quiz to help you figure out if your boss is a closet/reformed goth. Visitors to the Archangel dental surgery in west London are confronted by a goth dentist, Didier Goalard, who says: "I've got goth friends who are doing quite well. There's a dentist in Lyon, a couple of solicitors, a Church of England priest." "Goths are like masons," I have been told. "They're everywhere." But rather than blaming some sinister conspiracy, let us look at the reasons people become goths in the first place. According to Choque Hosein, formerly of goth band Salvation but now running a record label, "Goths tend to be the weirdo intellectual kids who have started to view the world differently." Cathi Unsworth is now a successful author, but she remembers that her own dark gothic past gave her an outlet for alienation. "I loved the bands, especially Siouxsie and the Banshees, but it wasn't a pose - I felt authentically depressed," she says. Unsworth was a teenager in Great Yarmouth, where she felt that "people didn't like me. It got to a point where I wanted to stop fighting against being different and embrace it." Link [Boing Boing] 6:31:29 AM    comment []