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Searching Google, Where Internet Access is Scarce
Internet searching means that finding information mundane, obscure, or fantastically useful is just a few keystrokes away — but not if you're without a connection to the Internet (or can't read), both the norm for many of the world's poor. itwbennett writes "Rose Shuman developed a contraption for this under-served population called Question Box that is essentially a one-step-removed Internet search: 'A villager presses a call button on a physical intercom device, located in their village, which connects them to a trained operator in a nearby town who's sitting in front of a computer attached to the Internet. A question is asked. While the questioner holds, the operator looks up the answer on the Internet and reads it back. All questions and answers are logged. For the villager there is no keyboard to deal with. No complex technology. No literacy issues.' This week, Jon Gosier, of Appfrica, launched a web site called World Wants to Know that displays the QuestionBox questions being asked in real time. As Jon put it, it's allowing 'searching where Google can't.' And providing remarkable insight into the real information needs of off-the-grid populations."
I suppose we could call this 'speaker net'.
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
1) The box requires less overall and less constant power.
2) An analog communications channel is much less difficult to implement over possibly unreliable wires. Let the human brain handle the error correction (static).
3) Much cheaper than installing and servicing a computer.
4) Employs local people.
5) Doesn't require the user to be literate.
6) Doesn't require the user to know how to use a computer, what the Internet is, what google is, etc. Just ask your question and get an answer.
etc etc etc
Just how DO you teach a (practically) stone-age tribesman to use a computer?
Stone age tribesman? Take a look at the questions they're asking: who is on top on football, popular NBA players, info on the Obamas, quality of life in different regions of Uganda, the causes of sexual health problems, transmission of diseases, etc. They live in an underdeveloped country, but that doesn't mean they're underdeveloped people.
If a service like this could be sustained long-term and made accessible to more people, I think this could be a great tool. In particular, the questions about conflicting religions and sexual health are striking - there's a lot of ignorance about health, religion, and science in Africa... but that ignorance is a reflection of the state of region, not the willfull behavior of the people. Access to the Internet can provide an "out" for those that want to learn but have limited options in their village.
Maybe, but the village elder doesn't have any better access to the train schedule than the other villagers, or to information about which nearby market town is currently offering a higher price for millet. This service clearly outclasses him for questions of this type. If he is at all smart, he won't try to compete on this basis. He'll restrict himself to the topics on which he is better than google, say advice about how to approach your girlfriend's parents or what you should plant in which field.
Access to information is a valuable commodity in itself, one which existing structures often withhold from the poorest, who typically are farmers or labourers. Imagine being a subsistence farmer who relies on a small surplus from each harvest in order to be able to afford access to medicines or schooling for his children. Now imagine a cooperative or community of such people having access to accurate information about crop prices (this is probably the single most important financial value to farmers everywhere) and being able to negotiate with local middle men instead of being dictated to by them. There's nothing 'primitive' about this need, it's universal and it empowers communities and individuals. In fact it's essential to anythign which pretends to be a free market. Just because someone toils in the fields doesn't mean they are unintelligent or any less astute than someone who works in an office in a developed nation, and the benefit they can obtain from affordable access to information from disinterested parties is likely to be as great or greater and certainly more vital than the benefit obtained by those of us who already have easy access to information, medicines, education etc.
In most Canadian cities you can just call your local public library with a simple question and they'll look it up for you.
Yeah, libraries are so pre-digital.
Three Squirrels
Do you not care at all what the people living there want?
You accuse other slashdotters of having a "missionary complex" and say "you should just leave them the fuck alone."
So, it doesn't matter to you at all what the people living in these places think? If they ask for our help, we should refuse? They might want our help, and we might want to help them, but no, Simonetta knows what's best for all the undeveloped areas of the world, and he says we should "leave them the fuck alone." In addition to technology, I suppose that includes other aid, like trying to dig wells to provide them with clean water? Their ancestor's children have been dying of dysentery for millennia, so we should stop trying to inflict our western anti-dysentery views upon them?
You say "why would anyone in the distant backward village want to go on the internet?" I don't know. Why don't you try using the link to go look at all the questions they're asking.
Unlike missionaries, no one is going into their villages and telling them they are going to burn in hell forever if they don't do such-and-such. They aren't trying to re-arrange their society and seize control and displace their traditions. They're just putting the phone there for them to use. If the locals don't want to use it, they don't have to. But they are using it. I suppose, though, that you know what's better for them, and it's good for your country to move ahead technologically, and learn new information, but that people in other countries are wrong to want to learn new information and use new technologies, and we should take them away from them and not let them use them? Because it's our responsibility to leave other people alone, and not offer to help other people if they're from different cultures?
Our ancestors got my just fine for thousands of years without smartphones too. Do you wish Apple and RIM would just "leave us the fuck alone" and stop pushing their newfangled technology on us?
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
For example,
2295. what are the best varieties of beans to plant
This is the sort of thing that, traditionally, first-world countries have bureaus of agriculture, county extension services, and agriculture departments at local learning institutions that help farmers with this tricky question. You need information on varieties suited to specific soil, climate and resistant to local pests and diseases and drought, and the question isn't going to gain useful results without more specificity- ie, "best" for what. The advice that comes up in Google offers information primarily aimed at amateur summer gardeners in northern climates trying to grow tasty summer vegetables, rather than equatorial hardy macro-nutrient providing staples. It takes some serious google-fu to arrive at results that are probably useful to this questioner, and you don't get them by entering his question verbatim. When I started Googling things like "bean equatorial resistant hybrid -cocoa -coffee" I started getting some interesting results, but it would still take a while to sort through that stuff and come up with real information on what beans are best-bets wherever he lives. I can't imagine him ending up with useful information off of this Google phone line though. It takes an experienced researcher to find this stuff on Google.
For this sort of thing, the best thing you could probably do with Google is figure out who he should actually be talking to. That is, I Googled "helping african farmers," which led me to Farm Africa. There's probably someone working for them who he could talk to who could really help him out.
This is just one example I went in depth on, but most of the questions are of this nature. For the questions that can be answered easily online, it seems like nine out of ten, the answer is on Wikipedia. I think these people are envisioning the internet as being much more organized, authoritative, and encyclopedic than it is. They have very practical questions, as might be expected from rural, undeveloped areas, and Google is not well designed to provide them with answers to many of them. I wonder to what extent these operators might have already been trained, or might be additionally trained, to hook these people up with non-Google provided information. From what I'm seeing, a huge number of questions could be answered much more effectively if there were any way to provide these people with access to briefly speak to a doctor (or at least a nurse or someone who can answer basic health questions) or an agricultural specialist.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
Your point would be valid if the very technology you condemn did not provide material and financial advantages to those who have it, allowing them to unfairly take advantage of those who don't. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The vast amount of information on the Internet today allows people with Internet access to anticipate changing conditions and adapt to them much more quickly than those without. This "question box" is an effort to level the playing field, allowing the least advantaged to access some of the networks and power structures that we in the developed world take for granted.
Indeed, it is you who is displaying the condescension and paternalism. You are so wedded to your "noble savage" idea of the Global South that you're presuming for them that they'd be better off without this technology. After all, no one is forcing these villagers to use the question box. What's the harm in offering it to them and letting them decide whether its worth the effort or not?
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
The problem with your assertion is that, if IQ were some genetically defined constant, the population-wide IQ average would change very slowly over time. This is not the case. IQ scores everywhere have been going up pretty constantly over the past few decades as more and more people get access to proper education and nutrition.
Also, the failure of Africans to invent anything "significant" probably doesn't have anything to do with their racial heritage, and probably has more to do with their environment, as Guns, Germs, and Steel rightly points out.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it