Slashdot Mirror
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.
It's the easiest way to get 1.3TB from here to there.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.)
Useful links:
On the contrary, there are satellites above Africa; IIRC, M-Net in South Africa serves the whole continent with digital satellite TV from PanAmSat's PAS-10 and PAS-7 satellites. Given that it's possible to get DST, it's also possible to transfer data via satellite using the same satellite.
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
Surfen auf Trümmern (in German).
According to this DOE fact sheet article, until recently they were flaring off almost all the natural gas
Flaring is a method used in the oil and gas industry to get rid of the portion of flammable gas that is produced during oil recovery, and which is uneconomical to recover. Safety issues are also sometimes a driver for flaring - you don't generally want a lot of flammable gas just hanging around your well site. Blowing up is bad. If you sum over the well sites in a geographical area, there may be a considerable amount of gas being lost, but if there is only a tiny bit being released at each site it's often not feasible to do recovery.
You might be interested to know that the practice of flaring is common in the "developed" world. In Alberta, Canada, for example, there are many, many flare sites spread throughout the province and in the last few years a lot of effort has been put into strategies for flaring reductions. In fact, Alberta's efforts have become a model for other countries, including Nigeria, which have expressed a desire to make flaring reductions.
We could do a lot more good in the world if we spent more time helping and less time finger pointing - especially when we don't understand the issues. People who are working to bring the internet to those who don't have it should be commended
----- Vegans don't send SPAM.