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Slashback: Ghana, Graphics, Tumors
The few, the proud, the advententurous, the dorky. Elvis Maximus writes: "Geekcorps has been mentioned here before and met with some interest. Their first batch of volunteers are winding up their tours in Ghana, and the Industry Standard has run a nice piece on their experiences. This is an interesting effort that deserves some attention."
Congratulations (and admiration) to those who participated in this. GeekCorps is good stuff.
Remember, saliva causes stomach cancer ... ByteHog points to this AP story about the alleged connection between cell phone use and cancer, writing: "Kinda interesting, but I'm still going to be wearing tinfoil around my head whenever I make a call ..."
This issue has been raised for years, with no clear winner. The upshot from this study is a data point for the null hypothesis, but inevitably this will drag on, and the next study to become famous will probably be one that contradicts this. Don your tin-foil, kneepads and breathing masks, until fatality is cured.
Resistance is futile, for now. Fervent writes: "Gamecenter has an interesting article on why 3DFX collapsed. Among the reason cited: the proprietary API Glide, not allowing OEM's to sell Voodoo hardware, and NVidia's agressive product cycle." This makes an intersting followup to the recent announcement of the absorption of 3dfx by NVidia.
Play, play, play, and be gone with ye! Greyfox writes: "According to USA Today Etoys is putting itself up for sale. It's the standard dot com failure story. It'd be delicious irony if the folks running the Etoy domain they sued a while back bought their domain name." DarkKnight points to this link at CNETas well.
Ghana is a country with an average wage of only $160 per year. Out of a total population of 20 million, some 20 thousand are online. Why are we creating charities to get such nations online? Isn't that like forming a charity to send them Beluga Caviar? We should surely be concentrating on building their infrastructure in the proper way, and try to bring them through the industrial revolution first.
Your post reminds me of the posts in response to stories about 100" monitors that ask "what Quake player has the money?" when the product isn't even intended for retail.
This project isn't about turning the average Ghanaian into a happy websurfer. It's about giving the average Ghanaian a chance at a decent job, or his business a chance at success.
Don't discount third-world countries just because they haven't developed, say, an automobile industry: the time for that is past. That strategy was tried by the World Bank in 2nd tier countries like Brazil and India in the 1960s with disastrous results. Unregulated manufacturers polluted, the products were inferior to other markets, and the only people who made money were the bankers.
India has gotten smart. They never caught up industrially with the West. Jumping from agrarian to industrial proved expensive and futile. Instead, they've concentrated on the Second Industrial Revolution, building technical schools that turn out skilled programmers by the metric ton. These knowledge workers find work in outsourcing firms, or travel to the West for high-paying jobs. The resource that India is wisely exploiting here is its people.
It worries me to see that companies such as Shell and BT are contributing funds to send IT technicians there, when what we should be doing is sending agricultural experts and trying to attract magnates of industry
Another poorly considered policy of the latter half of Century Twenty was building Third World countries into agricultural exporters. Many of those countries could not feed their own people, and did not have the infrastructure or resources to support an exporting food industry. Once again, the bankers made money. The people often ended up poorer and hungrier. The grain available from traditional heartlands like the US and Russia was of higher quality and easily shipped. (Actually this fiasco largely predated the industrialization fiasco.)
Don't underestimate the ingenuity and inventiveness found in "third world" countries. Some of them are building out their telecommunications by skipping the 19th (copper) and 20th (fiber) century and jumping straight to the 21st (wireless). They don't have any installed base to protect. Innovations like "texting" (SMS messaging) and wacky computer virii have sprung from the Phillippines.
Dooming third world countries to another century of building up their economies "the hard way" is typical exclusivist Western thinking.
As the west moves towards an increasingly service based economy, there are opportunities for countries such as Ghana to grab onto our coattails and provide our manufacturing capabilty, before moving up to join us.
Perhaps. But they'd have to compete with already-cheap industrial powers like Mexico and China. Meanwhile, they have few resources, no industrial infrastructure, and it's enormously expensive to build.
Why, again, do they HAVE to have an industrial 20th century economy before they can move into the 21st? What does that gain them? What does it gain us? So in whose interest is it for them to build an old-style manufacturing base? Yep.
You'd make a great IMF banker a generation ago.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Rodent studies are essentially useless. The human skull is much thicker than that of a rat, and so the amount of radiation transmitted is different. Also, rats don't live nearly as long as humans. Brain tumours that take 10 - 15 years to develop in humans are obviously going to behave differently (if they happen at all) in rodents. You could try to correct for all this, but then you're really getting onto thin ice...
Besides, what causes cancer in rats doesn't necessarily cause cancer in humans. I remember hearing about a study of 226 known rodent carcinogens. Each substance was tested on both rats and mice. Something like 96 were carcinogenic in mice but not in rats, and 50-odd were carcinogenic in rats but not mice. Kinda makes you wonder if rodent studies have any relevancy to humans.
You could also strap phones to monkey heads, but you'd probably run into a lot of trouble there, and it would still take 10 - 15 years. You can't increase power levels to "speed up" the tests or "amplify" the effect because, at some threshold, you start running into significant heating effects that simply aren't an issue at lower levels.
It's worth pointing out that, while sometimes the company outlives its cash, the stockholders almost never do. There are a number of ways a cash-short company can stave off bankruptcy, but from a stockholder perspective, they all suck. More on this at Downside if you're interested.
Etoys stock is at 1/4 today, down from a high of 40. If you had invested $1000 in Etoys stock at the high, you would now have $6.25.
The average number of years of cellphone use among participants is only 3 years.
The study covers analog phones, not the newer digital models, which may produce different effects.
It looks only at people who are already diagnosed with brain tumors, and not those who may be potentially developing them or whose tumors go undiagnosed.
The news is good for those of us who are using cellphones regardless of their possible consequences, but it's disappointing that better studies aren't being conducted. We need a study that looks at longer-term use (say 6 years) and which keeps up to date with the latest devices the same way the general population is doing. Unfortunately, such proper studies are years off.
Read the rest of this comment...
I'm an international development professional currently working in Egypt on a girls' education project. At other phases of my career I have worked on microcredit and small business development, all fairly "traditional" development interventions.
So do I think bringing IT to developing countries a waste of resources? Absolutely not. In fact, in my judgement, it is the single most important unmet need in international development today. Why? Because IT poses both a significant danger and a wonderful opportunity for the economies of these countries.
The developing world does not need an industrial revolution in the sense that we experienced it in the West. The world no longer works that way. Someone mentioned the automobile industry, and this is actually a great example of what I am talking about.
Go to a local new car dealer and pick a car -- any car, of any make or model. Take it apart and organize the parts by country of origin. You will have a great many piles of parts, and I will be very surprised if you find that more than 40% of them are from any one country. Certainly you will not find that most of the parts in that car came from the car's country of "manufacture." On top of that, many of the parts will be composed of raw materials from another country entirely.
Take apart the same make and model that came off the production line six months earlier, and I expect you will find many of the parts are from different countries than they were in the first car you took apart. You will also have a really pissed-off car lot owner.
This is basically just comparative advantage taken to extreme. We can take it to these extremes because we have transportation and communication technology that makes it feasible for a producer of a big ticket item like a car to get bids from all over the world for parts that meet its specifications and transport them quickly and reliably to the place of manufacture. This ability in turn creates pressure on the car manufacturer to do just that, because if it is not searching far and wide to save money on components, its competitors will.
As we've seen from the recent B2B boom on the Internet, the same resources are now becoming available and affordable to manufacturers of less complex, less expensive goods.
So does it make sense to start a Ghanaian car industry? Probably not. But it might make sense to produce particular components of cars, computers, and other goods that Ghanaian manufacturers are well-positioned to produce.
But without access to the kinds of technologies that would allow (in this example) Ghanaian producers to communicate directly with potential customers and competitors to determine specifications and market prices, and to make sales, such an industry is impossible. And Ghanaian producers could not hope to match the efficiencies of, say, Taiwanese producers, without access to IT.
On the other hand, with access to what are now relatively inexpensive information technologies, producers in developing countries have an unprecedented opportunity to compete with the big boys without having their huge capital investment. You've seen the IBM commercial where the Japanese company gets a bid from a small producer in Texas? Well, that producer could just as well be in Accra, or Cairo, or Almaty. If the technology is available in those places.
The same is true even for unprocessed agricultural commodities. These are traditionally exported through middlemen based in the developed world. But with modern communication technologies, developing-country producers can access those markets and make contacts directly, improving the prices it can get for those commodities. The flip side to this is that without those technologies, the need for middlemen either will price the commodity out of the market or will provide the producer with an even smaller return for its goods.
There are many other excellent arguments for promoting IT in developing countries, but for me this is the killer, and it is not specific to one class of countries. All countries have an interest in the forces that move export markets. Haiti exports. Burma exports. Ethiopia exports. With access to the modern tools that have transformed the Western economy over the last 5-10 years, they could have a chance at a better economic situation than ever before. Without access to those technologies, they're trapped.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.