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Providing Access to Info in Developing Countries
matt writes "Widernet is a program run at the University of Iowa to provide developing countries access to information. Most of the universities they work with (mainly in Nigeria) have no internet access or have a very expensive, limited one. So Widernet ships hard drives with a data dump of about 100G to place on the local network. Students have access through the eGranery. Some the of the problems they are dealing with are how to provide updates to the already distributed libraries, how to provide the eGranery such that it can be setup with little or no IT knowledge, and how to stretch a limited budget and donations. I sadly had to turn down an internship with them, but would still like to contribute. Surely we can help with time, resources, and/or knowledge." And you thought sneakernet was dead.
And here i thought this whole time that UI's access to technology was sub-par. Thought they were mostly a medical school. Shows what i know about my state. :/
It's the easiest way to get 1.3TB from here to there.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
This article is lying. I know several people in Nigeria that have Internet access, they send me messages every day. They also seem to have a lot of money to send me, so Nigeria is not really developing country.
Now that they have the granary, they won't loose all of their food every time the city goes up a level.
Either that, or I've been playing too much civ.
I think I need a new sig here.
Somehow I can't believe that Internet access it THAT expensive in Nigeria. At least I can't remember any rich Nigerian guy whos bank account got locked due to unpaid ISP checks.
Jim Gray (Microsoft researcher, grand Poo Bah of transactions, etc) cowrote an interesting paper 2 years ago entitled TeraScale SneakerNet: Using Inexpensive Disks for Backup, Archiving, and Data Exchange. (Word .DOC file) which analyzes the economics of transferring huge amounts of data by shipping hardware.
(Insert obligatory "never understimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of 9-track tapes" reference here.)
or thats what it seems, what about other developing countries that dont have access at all, surely they would be better served with project like this ?, dont get me wrong im all for charity (if you can call 120$ for a 120gig hard drive and $112 p&p charity) but Nigeria already has quite good network access, (judging by the amount of internet cafes and budding enterprise) perhaps we should let them develop with what they already have and concentrate on bringing computing and networks to those who are even less fortunate
120$ for a 120gig hard drive seems rather steep (and 75$ for a demo USB box) as this is more than a complete computer in the local classifieds, (not to mention a shitload of cash in developing countries) is this a charity or a commercial profit making venture ?
i always am suspicious when i see the face of a charity/good cause but then they charge for the service at above-cost especially when other companies are supplying their services for free)
cough*scam*cough ?
Give them info, and teach them to USE it. Having one without the other will just lead to a duplication of the situation we have here. Wired 100% of the time, unprecedented access to so much information... but still lead down a path of war by a bible bashing president and allowing our own government to turn over and beg for the RIAA, MPAA, ignoring our own rights at home AND those of prisoners of war overseas.
Information is one thing. Using it is something else entirely.
I used to work for an ISP offering one way satalite internet. Needless to say, it was rather difficult to support, usually not because of problems with the reciever, but because of the dialup issues and TCP/IP stack problems courtesy of whatever spyware the users have downloaded.
As most of the issues that make one way satalite data delivery problematic for consumers don't exist for this type of application, it would seem like satalite technology is a good answer to the data delivery problem.
Time could be leased on commercial communications satalites, or maybe some sort of agreement to use idle capacity at reduced rates could be reached.
The reciever hardware for one way satalite systems is relatively inexpensive, in the $200-$500 range, so it would seem financially feasable as well...
Surely the best solution is to install a DVD drive and then simply post them a load of DVD-Rs. Perhaps it might even be cheaper to use a CD drive and a load of CD-Rs. As long as sufficient instructions are provided the installation of an optical drive should be fairly straight forward.
Does this mean that future Nigerian graduates will know that the whole world is aware that their "confidential requests for business transaction" and "sincere pleas for family help" have been recognized by the whole world as scams?
so much for charity egh when pricewatch want $64 for 120Gb EIDE drive, 100% markup seems rather greedy ?
120$ for 120gb HD
250$ just to set up a server ?
112$ for postage
75$ for USB drive case
be cheaper to buy them a brand new computer from wallmart than go with this deal, seems like this is a buisness venture aimed at cashing in on less fortunate people, but then thats what western companies do in Africa right ?
Unless something like BabelCode [http://www.babelcode.org] is finished.
I hate that phrase. We are ALL in "developing countries", I hope - or we are screwed. The phrase sounds like the West has "finished developing" - which may be not be inaccurate as it drowns itself in a sea of intellectual "property" litigation, but I know I would like to see a guarantee of MY free access to information, as my fellow countrymen are doing their best to lock down that access and turn the country into a fascist police state that would have given Stalin wet dreams of joy.
The frars talk I attended was given by M0EYT and covered the future of long range digital broadcasts using Digital Radio Modiale. The BBC research labs and many others are involved with DRM research. Just about to load up M0EYT's talk (which unfortunately isn't publically available - sorry!).
Everytime something comes up about technology in developing countries someone or other posts something like this.
Guess what ? The Western world and lots of Asian countries didn't get those necessities by some nice person donating them a 100 gallon container of fresh water, some cheap pills and some old school books. They got there by educating their people to a point where they become able to take their fate into their own hands. To do this, you need more than just basic schooling, you need something a project like this might provide.
check out the prices quoted, $500 could go along way to providing basic services, i thought this project was supposed to be helping them not a VC
Useful links:
Dual layers single side DVD holds 9GB... (about 10% of the library)...
With compression could hold much more...
I agree that inroducing advantageous survival memes into a population allows it to develop independently, but is hi tech the way to go? And is the western model necessarily the zenith? Also, if the whole world becomes prosperous where are you going to get cheap oil, coffee, and tea from? I stayed with a family in the Amazon for a month, who had nothing and everything, but mostly happiness.
If I promise to be a good boy can I have some better karma?
hmm.. . every time a post about the developing world comes up somebody asks "don't they need food and clean water first"? In some places yes (and basic schooling is still needed in some parts of USA and other developed countries as well by all accounts, what's the average reading age in your local low-income area?) but for many places basic needs are addressed and its higher level issues that have to be resolved.
the DARPA or whomever is overseeing this needs to get this technology out fast out to be implemented all around faster... THAT is real solution, not sending them hard drives!
or better off using our bulbous primate minds in the pursuit of material 'higher level issues'? Most of our human endeavour is purely fetishistic mating ritual with added false reasoning.
If I promise to be a good boy can I have some better karma?
as described here.
We have restarted activity a couple of weeks ago: several LUGs worldwide have already accepted to redistribute by snail mail our CDs locally. The complete list will available monday
Marco F.
It is difficult for some of us lucky people to comprehend life without the internet as we know it.
/.) won't function properly without real-time synchronisation.
Considering the difficulty of updating the dumped pages (eg: possibility of bad links, etc) and the high costs of hard-drives and shipping costs, I would have thought that it would be more practical to HAVE a satellite connection at the eGranery and have a LARGE proxy-cache (eg: 1TB?).
Because, by deploying internet to those unfortunate fews using data-dump methods would mean that services that we take for granted (such as email and
That's my 2-cents worth for the day.
Look at this info on nigeria, it's an opec member and has tremendous oil and natural gas reserves
According to this DOE fact sheet article, until recently they were flaring off almost all the natural gas, yet local villages had little electricity. I think I see the problem here. Looks like government payola, ripping off the people, various ill will, begats violence, more bad vibes, back and forth.
Just perhaps if they hadn't been ripped off for a long time maybe the people there wouldn't be so poor. Flaring off the gas for years instead of putting in generators to use the gas seems a scosh lame to me. I imagine this fact was not lost on the locals either. Who would be blamed then, the oil producers, the government doofus who gave them the contract? I have no idea, but right there you can see just one instance on how they got shafted.
I also just read a few pretty current news articles when I was looking for that reference link. Your typical back and forth warfare,massacres, people tapping into pipelines to get fuel, oil spills and fires and explosions then, etc. Chaos and anarchy mixed with huge international money and corruption and fascism. I have no idea how to help those people there, tribalism and warfare and serious government/oil industry corruption look like the major problems. I think perhaps if they just scrap the oil contracts and renotiate and require some actual infrastructure be put in instead of just arranging more cash to whatever local warlord du juor happens to be there with his hands out might work better. The actual hardware for electricity and normal communications, make the oil companies put it in. I would bet in one day some millionaire trader sitting in an office far away from nigeria, making a bundle off the nigerian oil, swapping oil futures commodites around could pay for this localised internet deal and then some, a lot of "then some". It's this whole system that causes the problems, so it's the whole system that needs to change. There's no excuse for a nation that wealthy to have such poor people and lack of the basics.
you had me at #!
We've got a World Book Encyclopedia set here from 1979. They do look nice on the shelf, but I'd be willing to donate them.
Seriously, information can still be shared without a computer. Books are easier to get to places without Wifi, Broadband, or even electricity
It seems like they could spread the wealth a lot more widely if they just burned a bunch of CDs and sent them out. They could even send updates more quickly and easily than sending more disks.
Before the obvious comment comes back saying "but CD-ROM drives don't exist everywhere" please remember that CD-ROM drives became the standard way of distributing bulk data a few years before ATA controllers that can grok disks larger than 32G appeared. So I'm guessing that a computer in some remote area is at least as likely to have a CD drive as a controller that can take a huge disk.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Took some digging but here they are : Seeking Riches From The Poor - Part 3 & Indian Villagers Pedal Wireless.
I hope that 100GB includes wikipedia, gutenberg, and hyperphysics.
Oh, and a mirror of MIT open courseware too.
Anyone know if it has that?
Do we really want to sponsor more competition to our jobs?
Do you refuse to read .DOC files? If so, Gray's idea is to ship complete computers. You solve the standards/format problem by putting every network file sharing system known to man on the computer's hard disk and putting in a Gigabit Ethernet card.
Then the recipient has to sweat bullets wondering what kind of viruses are on the system you just shipped.
The Gray paper suggests plugging the sneakernet box into the untrusted side of your firewall or trusting the sender.
I'd suggest booting from Knoppix. But could the sender booby-trap the BIOS to load a different image from the one in the CD drive? (That would be clever but a more realistic attack would be hacking the BIOS to report some vanilla-sounding error booting from CD and let the victim boot from HD in the name of expediency).
Judging from my mailbox, it strikes me that Nigeria's problem is that they have too much internet access.
LTSP is by far the most interesting and easiest way to get a lot of older boxes running quickly. K12LTSP. Well worth the time at your local school districts. In this age of cut-backs the easiest cut is on the exhorbitant prices school's pay for proprietary apps. Look around in some of the under-funded school districts in the 'developed world' and you'll see the same have and have-not situation. K12LTSP is an ethical solution meeting the need for better distribution of tools for education for everyone everywhere.
I am getting real tired of hearing about 'bringing technology to the underpriv's of the world' - guess what : Nigeria's problems are not going to be solved via the Internet.
Countries do not evolve, grow, or progress because an extra 2% of them get dial up access to the Internet. Countries evolve, grow, and progress because every single person in the country gets involved and does some work. Look at the conditions of America circa 1650 or 1800. Those poor fuckers worked 16 hours a day to build farms, homes, roads, schools, infrastructure and the best technology they had access to was the sailboat, the wheel, and the beast of burden. If they wanted a second copy of a text file they had to write it out by hand using a bird's feather dipped in a little glass of ink, scratching it on a piece of paper. If they planned on eating they got out in the field with wooden tools and dug up the ground and planted seeds, chased off birds and rodents from their crops, and watered them by pumping water out of the ground with a hand pump. They spun wool and cotton into threads, wove those threads into cloth, cut the cloth into patterns and using a sewing needle and thread made clothes, and they washed their clothes in the river. They mixed mud and rock to make bricks, fired them in an oven, and build their homes one brick at a time. They took straw and bundled it together and if the floor in their homes got dirty, they swept it outside. They took pride in who they were, they worked their asses off, and they became who America became. Without the Internet.
Yea it's hard. Anything worth while is hard. You can't give a country 'civilization'. They have to EARN it.
BTW pangian - I wasn't reacting harshly at you directly, your post simply gave me a good anchor point.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I mean really, what alternative is there? Do we all go back to blow darting monkeys for dinner? There is not enough room left on the planet for all of us to do that. We are stuck with a social structure that requires an "economy". An ecomomy is just a crude measure of activity. It doesn't matter what that activity is (most /. would have been given an inane job at one time!). Getting people to be "active" about communicating with each other seems to me to be a GoodThing(TM). "Happiness" is where you find it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Every country has its criminals and scamsters, and the US is no exception.
This is a serious story about how to get information to people who desperately need it but who are disconnected from the world in a way most of you can't even start to imagine.
The Internet has ignored most of Africa, with several attempts to lay fibre-optic cable around the continent abandoned due to politics and war. For most people, "internet" means shared access to a VSAT link, which is a $50,000 investment and expensive charges. If you're lucky you live in a city like Lagos that has cybercafes where you can check email so a little surfing.
No p2p, no streaming, no downloads except of trivially small packages, no ISOs, no online updates,...
I've spent lots of time in Nigeria and the truth is this: most Nigerians, like most people anywhere, are hard-working, ambitious, honest, dedicated. The tragedy of their country is partly due to that "oil wealth", which does not make life better for anyone except an elite, and turns politics into a scramble for power and the money that brings.
Like much of Africa, Nigeria is saddled with political classes that throttle attempts at growth and stability. It is almost impossible, for instance, to get an education or start a business unless you are prepared to bribe your way through. Fraud and 419 crime is big business in Nigeria largely because there is so little opportunity for honesty.
One of the keys to resolving the poverty of the mind that keeps Nigerians handicapped is access to information and education. People accept situations only because they know of nothing better.
Now, some of the better suggestions here were to ship CDs and DVDs instead of disk drives. This seems an excellent idea: recordable DVDs are cheap and can be mailed cheaply, and can be distributed and copied locally.
The ideal package to send should be: a DVD, plus a DVD writer, plus 20 recordable DVDs. I don't think this would cost any more than the hard drive, and it would be a lot more useful.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
Are you for it, or agin'it?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Surfen auf Trümmern (in German).
Computer is a tool and used in appropriate manner can create wonders. And all the hype given to IT will help develop countries understand it better. Of course at a personal level their will be a paradigm shit in the way education is perceived for e.g. Lets see u need to find out grammatical errors in language and u don't need to run to a teacher all u have to do is take look at MS word . Their will be scope for self taught. And this could be achieved at a lot of levels. I certainly don't agree that a book is easily accessible than e-book which could be downloaded. Online education...Once awareness is there, will be changes in sanitation and living standard. Lay man will be open to world full of opportunities. He will place himself in the global economy. Their will be equal distribution of resources. Well I am from a developed country and I have seen changes for myself. Well I told u before ...... IT is a bomb which is gonna blast sooner than later. It will take India on a global map ... to know what we are really good at....
Also, if the whole world becomes prosperous where are you going to get cheap oil, coffee, and tea from?
When you ask rhetorical questions, it's a good idea to make sure that what you're implying is correct. Otherwise, you insult our intelligence.
It's very simple to figure out how to get cheap crops without cheap labor. You use techniques that require less labor. That's how Americans are able to grow cheap corn and wheat. I suppose when robots start farming, things will get even cheaper. I won't mind paying less.
Learn to think instead of just feel and you'll be a lot less likely to make mistakes like that.
You learned to write by reading bureaucrats and you don't even write as well as them. I don't think MS Word could have helped you. I don't think an English teacher would want to help you.
More than one person can read, yes, but not more than all the folks at this University can read - especially when you consider that they can't know what they'll want unless it's there.
I am not trying to restrict them from the internet. the entire premise of the story is that the uni there is so poor they can't get it. I merely pointed out where the money is going-out of the country and mosty of the rest into local warlords pockets-at least a huge amount of it.. They have oil up the wazoo, yet the people remain poor. maybe you think this is OK, perhaps just normal capitalism or something,too bad, the people who can grab it are "entitled" to it or something, but I think it's abhorrent and I feel totally justified in pointing it out. The uni has to go scrounging for an internet connection and jump through hoops having a canned micronet sent to them, when for a relative pittance that could come out of their oil that has most of the profits skimmed off downstream they could have a normal net connection of some sort.
I can't explain it any better other than I think it's just "wrong" and I partially at least blame the entire system the way it is set up in oil trading. I also blame the nigerians themselves for clinging to ridiculous tribalism and general petty warfare, and for the rest of the world putting up with it and trading with whatever tinpot dictator some giant cartel sticks in, and yes, that's what happens in a lot of cases. I can rattle off a list of them without breaking sweat. The so called "third world" stays that way a lot from the first world wanting it that way, it is more profitable. Been like that for centuries, I doubt it can be disputed. they just don't call it colonialism any more, it's just "international business".
As to flaring, it just wasn't considered useful to the oil producers in the past to recover the gas, so they burned it off. Deal is, it *is and was useful to the people who live in the area*. The big oil companies didn't care in the past, because they had no easy way to collect and pipe out the gas and sell it,the local peasants couldn't buy their own gas back from the oil companies, they are peasants with no money, so it wasn't "profitable" for them to cut in the local peasants/peons/whatever into any sort of piece of the pie. All that dwould do was cost them "profit", so it wasn't done, they flared it off. It's very useful to people to use though, as is natural gas all over the world useful, IF it was part of the contract to force the oil companies to do it, but it's cheaper for them to slip the local warlord an extra bag of cash to not give a care about it. That's reality as much as any technical problems. Recovery of gas is quite doable, they do it all over now,and have been for at least a decade or more at well heads. Here is one URL I found easily with examples all over the planet
http://www.seen.org/db/Dispatch?action-ProjectWi dg et:728-detail=1
And I DO commend the people bring the net to those people, I just think it could be done at a much better rate and efficiency by using the tools for the job, in this case, take the oil money that is there by the boatload and apply it to the people who actually own the oil, help them out with their interests a little bit more fairly, rather than this low budget charity deal. If they were dirt poor from no natural resources, no nothing, I could see it, but this isn't the case here. You can't tell me out of all that oil an extra million or so dollars to build some sort of internet infrastructure and electrical structure couldn't be squeezed out without any fatcats missing a single mercedes ride or "power lunch" in some downtown club.
I see it here too in rural USA. We can't get broadband for nuthin,there's "no money" for it from anyplace to run any cable or fat copper or fiber, yet property taxes go to fund incredibly stupid things like football giant stadiums at high schools, or municipal bonds go to fund professional sports teams even more stadiums. I think things like that are nuts, and I just point them out. I just call 'em like I see 'em. I don't have a 120 gig hard drive full of baby internet stuff to donate, if I did I might, my largest is an 8 gig, I'm pretty poor
The reading list for a very sound K-12 education would probably fit in a few Megs (compressed). Even a fairly complete encylopedia (i.e. Brittanica) fits in a few Gigs.
I suspect that if they're really filling these disks, they're not being very choosy and they're giving people tons of stuff they don't want. I would propose giving more people stuff that's likely to actually interest them.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of an cargo vessel loaded with 100GB hard drives.
However, the latency might not be worth it. I.e. what information is being sent? How likely is it to need to be changed?
It seems to me that although this may be adequate as a temporary fix, we need to take a close look at what can be done to help developing countries actually develop the infrastructure that they need (including internet infrastructure) and then this will be obsolete.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Yet another example of American citizens
having their money taken from them by
government and corprorations without being
asked and given to somebody they know nothing
about.
Just say no to corporate taxation and pork
barrel government spending.
Check out this article from the Feb 2004 IEEE Spectrum.
Sadly, Nigeria has had a direct link to a huge amount of bandwidth since 2001 that is pretty much completely unused, thanks to the rampant corruption in the area.
And here is direct link to the pretty map of the optical cable ringing Africa.
Send the big HD the first time. Make sure the info is sent following a tree structured around ISO library standards for the humanities and sciences.
Then send diffs with the updates on the new dual-layer CDs that can take up to 8.5 GB HDs. The first time, you may need to include a DVD drive -external would be preferable- along with the DVD. They can then copy the information either through a LAN or by using sneakernet and taking the external DVD drive around.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
It's eGranary which stems from the word granary which means a storehouse for grain.
What bunk - simply that the students in the CS department feel guilty so they want to do some good and this is the only way than can think of.
Here's a tip: save the money on the hard disks, put it together and install a new water source (called a stand pipe in Africa - pipe with a faucet on the end).
It will do more good, help more people and improve the quality of life far far more than a fat hard disk. Puleez!
I completely see that this isn't a direct reaction to my post, but I have to disagree anyway.
Un(der)developed countries aren't that way because they aren't working their asses off. Hell, I've seen women older than my grandma carrying their weight in firewood on their heads. The problem isn't that they are aren't willing to work, the problem is that given the infrastructure, corruption, undereducation, etc. that they deal with, one reasonably earnest person in the West can still outproduce ten Nigerians working their asses off.
America circa 1650 and 1800 developed because they had the cajones and the firepower to stand up and say "Hey Europe... we aren't just going to send you lumber and cotten and then buy finished products and tea from you. We're going to make our own shit, and we're going to do it the same way that you do." They may have been using bird feather pens, but they were using the same bird feather pens in use in Europe.
I'm not saying that technology is going to solve all of their problems--there are many people who put far too much emphasis on technology in development, and I imagine that this is what you are reacting to. Fair enough. However, saying that people in developing countries shouldn't have technology until they earn it is sort of like kicking someone in the balls while they are down.
You can blame it on climate or colonization or the lack of middle class or whatever, but it certainly isn't lazyness.
I'd suggest giving doctors in developing countries equal access to medical research to allow them to save lives and retrain would be useful for example...