Slashdot Mirror
A Dream Job - CTO of the OLPC Project
weibullguy dropped us a link from the IEEE's site. They've voted the CTO of the One Laptop Per Child project as a 'Dream Job 2007'. Held by Mary Lou Jepsen, a former CTO for Intel, the position entails world travel, speaking with heads of state, and dealing endlessly with the technological challenges of a project designed to change the world. In the article, she relates some of the details of her first task on the job - redesigning the OLPC's display. "According to Jepsen, the display her team eventually marshaled into existence requires, depending on the mode, only between 2 percent and 14 percent of a typical laptop display's power consumption. ... To save watts, the display can switch between color with the backlight on, in low light, and black-and-white with the backlight off, in sunlight. OLPC's engineers trimmed battery usage further by, among other things, adding memory to the timing-controller chip, which decides how often a display refreshes. That trick enables the display to update itself continually without using the CPU if nothing changes on the screen."
CTO stands for "Chief Technical Officer" as opposed to "Chief ToThePlaceAndFindOutWhatTheyReallyNeed Officer". The project starts with the (possibly wrong, but there's only one way to find out for sure) axiom that a laptop will be useful for these people. Perhaps technical qualifications in building laptops are more important to the CTOs position than precise knowledge of one particular area where they would be used. Note, that not only could you not have the technical knowledge if you spent your time in the places where the product would be delivered, you wouldn't even be able to tell about the special needs of the other places.
I'm personally not sure about whether OLPC is going to be a success, but the desperate knocking and bad advice the project gets seems to suggest to me that some really big commercial interests are deeply afraid of this. I wonder why? Afraid to lose your cheap labour? Afraid that it will drive the success of free software? Afraid the poor will rise up? What is it? To me it seems like a fairly innocent technology experiment which will probably be a partial success but won't live up to the wild dreams of it's originators. It's probably going to cost a bit and give an economic return which is a little bit more than the investment. Who cares? Why not leave it alone?
Maybe its because they need an effective CEO.
Start trading with them.
Buy those shoes, suits, created with "slave wages", buy African corn, sugar, peanuts, tomatoes and apples.
That's how to lift people out of poverty.
We've been waging economic war with developing and third world countries for several generations now. It's only just starting to end. You can't buy African agricultural products (about all they can produce) because of the subsidies we give our own farming sectors to produce products at below market value.
The OLPC? Frankly it's irrelevant. What 3rd world countries need is first infrastructure and education. The OLPC isn't a particularly good way to educate people and there isn't enough infrastructure to make real use of it. The money spent on producing it would be better spent persuading American and European politicians to remove agricultural subsidies.
Deleted
>In fact, Africa has probably received more charity than China or India and is doing much worse than those countries.
Exactly my point. If the third world countries knew what had to be done, they wouldn't be third world countries anymore. Africa is a perfect example- they get millions, even billions in "aid" and the government officials just end up buying nice cars and planes with the money. Africa doesn't need money or food, it needs serious investment in its infrastructure and education system. It needs economic development, and that is something the Africans can't provide. In South Africa, the unemployment rate is hovering around 40%. During the Great Depression, an American unemployment rate of 25% - almost half of South Africa - was a global crisis.
Lookie here
"In other developing countries, legions of unskilled workers have kept down labor costs. But South Africa's leaders, vowing not to let their nation become the West's sweatshop, heeded the demands of politically powerful labor unions for new protections and benefits. According to a study conducted in 2000 for the government's finance department, South Africa's wages are five times higher than Indonesia's, even though its workers are only twice as productive.
To the great detriment of its people, South Africa's leaders have been successful. South Africa is not the West's sweatshop."
Third world leaders do not know what needs to be done. The knowledge, the 2 centuries of economics research, exists in the west. A country that has never before had a thriving economy can't be expected to suddenly spawn one.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they can balance their checkbook, take classes on line, their lives will turn around in just a year, their land become "The Land of Milk and Honey" and they'll become successful members of the world community.
What WILL happen is that they'll get these machines, and if they're not stolen first, those very poor people will sell them for what they really need. This program is just a pipe dream created by a bunch of clueless sanctimonious Westerners who think that technology is the cure for everything.
You wait and see.
And when it does fail, it will blamed on the administrators of the program - not the fact that it's a dumb idea.
I also hope that I'm completely full of shit and this is raving success!
I'm a member of IEEE, so I get the magazine. Here are the rest of the dream jobs (I'll leave their names out):
Electric Detective- basically an electric/electronic CSI
Computerized Paleeontology- Uses neat equipment to help find fossils (he likes dinosaurs)
Bird watcher? - tracks birds with cellphone tech (he likes birds)
Volcano wathcer- installs and maintains volcano sensors on the Soufriere volcano (his hometown)
Lap top girl
Laser light show- designs and produces laser light shows. Also holds laser safety programs.
Electric sport cars- designs, builds, and races high speed electric cars (up to 130 km/hr with 1 G acceleration)
Chess master- built what is considered the best computer chess program (he likes chess)
AI robot designer- makes AI robots
Wireless wildman- installs wireless networks in remote places, such as the Napaski Nation (about 1100 miles south of the arctic circle in Canada) - says he likes to fish
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.