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OLPC Wins Popular Science Award
paulmac84 writes "Popular Science has released their Best of What's New 2006 awards. In the computing section the One Laptop Per Child project took home the Grand Prize. From the article: 'The goal of the XO is simple and noble: to give every child a laptop, especially in developing countries, where the machines will be sold in bulk for about $130 apiece. But the One Laptop Per Child nonprofit, formed at MIT, didn't just create a cheap computer. In addition to cutting costs — by designing lower-priced circuitry and using an open-source operating system, among other things — it also improved on the standard laptop by slashing the machine's energy use by 90 percent, ideal for a device that could be charged by hand-cranked power in rural villages.' The Innovation of The Year Award went to 'the alpha nail that makes your home twice as tough'. Sometimes the simple ideas really are the best."
So go spend $130 on immunizing children. If you don't like what they're doing to make the world a better place, then go make it better your own way. Maslow didn't tell us how to make our world better, just what motivates our basic self-interest.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Exactly. Hell, laptops don't even seem to help students in industrial nations. One of my cousins goes to a private school (in Sydney) where every student is required to have a laptop, from what he says everyone just uses them to waste time gaming :p. I go to the university of Sydney and suprisingly few people carry laptops around. Nobody in my 3rd year physics classes does, and only one (out of 20 or so) in my computational physics class does. However, USYD has ready access to computing facilities for all the students anyway, perhaps if that wasn't supplied students would feel more of a need for their own laptop.
One of the things we need to realise is that we use computers mainly as tools for dealing with a modern world. We need to do banking, so many of us use internet banking, many shop online because the service is available, we type reports on computers because we're involved in work/studies which require them. None of these things are required by a mostly agricultural society attempting to exist without enough clean drinking water.
OLPC is a great idea, but only because the people who came up with it exists in a world where laptops are a usefull tool. If you want to help their education send them books. I've heard reports form people working on a Christian missionary ship the Doulos and quite often when they arrive in a poor country teachers will go to the ships bookshop and whatever they've got end up being that year's material.
Anyway, there's probably someone on Earth who will benefit from OLPC, and it seems a lot of good engineering was achieved through the project, but I believe it's too early for it to be usefull to most of its intended audience.
I understand and agree with the point that many of the places where these are going already have fresh water, food, etc. and investments in education are absolutely critical to their growth. But how are laptops really going to help at all? Computers are magical educational devices. You need good teachers for computers to be effective at all in the classroom. I don't know how much training teachers in these countries have using computers as educational tools. And then, why not just have a few shared computers? I don't think there's a single Western country that even approaches one laptop per child, and that's because they aren't the alpha and omega of education like some think them to be.
"If you want to help their education send them books."
Isn't something like OLPC the perfect medium for distributing books? Instead of one book in that volume of space, dump hundreds or thousands on it. Suddenly distributing useful books to the world becomes much easier.
People go on about how useless these would be to the average third world person. But combined with some basic education and the proper set of software, these could be the most incredibly useful things concieved of. Health problems? Pull up the medical journals/textbooks stored on the OLPC. Agricultural Problems? Pull up information on farming, wells, animal husbandry, etc.
The way PopSci described the laptops, they're low power tools that don't share a whole awful lot in common with what your average slashgeek thinks of when you say the word "laptop". But as the parent poster alluded to, they make an absolutely perfect way to get useful information to the third world in a very widespread way.
Most poor do not live in rural villages. Estimates put around 1 billion of them into suburban slums. So they can buy water and food if they have money. But the rampant lack of it means no one has interests to protect against those who thrive from the situation, i.e. gangs. What these people need most is some means of income that doesn't involve crime and, chiefly, is accessible to a larger fraction of the population than just the mobile, young, single males who work as day-laborers downtown. I.e. they need some viable economy, and while they don't need to compete with the big inner-city businesses, they need to be strong enough to warrant some police protection and allow some resistance against gang rule.
I do think processing power is an important part of that, because it makes possible small businesses and social organization (unions, churches, even soccer leagues), thus creating a stable society where it plainly doesn't exist now. Most significantly, masses of laptops are more likely than individual valuable items (like wells) to escape seizure and monopolization by those with the means to just take things. Even if One Laptop Per Child only allowed teenagers to mass-produce copies of current movies and sell them downtown, that's a move into the direction of equal distribution of wealth, and a stable society.
blow your mind already