After I finished highschool, I worked at this internet service provider in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. This was from January to June 1998.
Basically I agree with the author of this article that while the IT infrastructure is sorely lacking, internet usage is more widespread in major African cities than commonly thought. It was very hard to get a new phone line from the local telephone monopoly and those that did exist were not reliable. Power cuts were a constant problem.
However, anyone with a phoneline and PC could get connected for about 30$ a month and we had plenty of customers to keep us busy. In the 4 years since Internet use has fairly exploded. When I was home in December 2000, I had no problems keeping up my school e-mail and slashdot from the local internet cafes.
The infrastructure is still sorely lacking, but there is gradual steady improvement. Hopefully they will deregulate the telephone services, and the planned fibre optic ring will be completed.
Also to those who will inevitably say that "Africa doesn't need IT, it needs food," that is a remarkably short sighted position. The story clearly shows that there is a hunger and a need among the local people to make use of the internet to educate themselves and to create job opportunities. Poverty is more likely to be reduced with the help of the internet than without it, particularly in a global economy that is increasingly about the generation, management and manipulation of information.
Playing soccer DOES involve solving problems of vision and cognition. Sure there is some hacking involved but work of scientific work gets done in the process.
I had a chance to attend a great presentation by Prof. Manuela Veloso of CMU just a few weeks ago and I found that that Robot Soccer is pushing a lot of advances in Multi Agent learning and planning.
The coolest part is when she played video of what the robots(these were AIBOs) were seeing when they were playing soccer. The camera was jerking all over the place, the perspective was topsy turvy, upside down, sideways, yet they still managed to find and hit the ball.Even she was surprised that they were able to work with such "dirty" data.
People are always knocking this work, but its not as trivial as it may seem at first.
I agree with you. Some Americans hatred of government seems totally out of proportion! Face it, the money has to come out of SOMEWHERE, and the taxes were put in place by YOUR elected representatives.
So unless a majority of the people are willing to cancel National Defense(400 billion alone), a lot of research funding(NSF gives out a lot of money!) not to mention the wildly popular Medicare and Medicaid programs, we are going to be paying taxes for the foreseeable future, so you might as well stop complaining. (I am just talking federal tax here, surely people don't doubt the necessity of local public schools or local police?)
Yes, nobody wants to part with their hard earned cash, but maintaining a civilized society costs a certain amount of money, and taxes are the only way that we have of getting that money.
I already knew something about P vs NP but some of these links have really non-technical easy explanations. I am particularly enjoying the one on the link between Microsoft Minesweeper and NP complete problems (Yes I remember when it was reported here, but it only linked to the guys academic paper which was too deep for me)
I would disagree with your assertion that "we don't have a clue." It is true that we don'y have a full blown solution, but that does not mean that we don't have an inkling of what might be required.
Specifically a rich detailed model of the world that can be used to accurately make inferences and choices. We don't how to build this yet, but we do know that it is necessary, unlike in the 50s when McCarthy and co. thought formal logic alone could do the trick.(someone correct me, if I am wrong)
There have been no astonishing break throughs but each year our understanding of the issues involved gets deeper(in Machine Learning, robotic manipulation and planning of actions, efficient algorithms for inference etc) and our processing power and memory capacity increases.
These may or may not lead to "Strong AI" but I don't think its correct to say we have "no clue" just because we have not succeeded yet.
Re:Definition of intelligence - it's most basic fo
on
Arguing A.I.
·
· Score: 1
very insightful, I have often had the same feeling myself, some people seem to want to define intelligence very narrowly in order to protect their pride in being "intelligent beings."
I personally feel that intelligence is "any ability to respond in a non-random way to external stimuli." We have LOTs of it, ants have very little, but they still have some. By this definition higher mammals certainly have some "intelligence", how exactly to quantify that I don't know. Rather than a sharp dividing line, we should think of a continuum of intelligence,with inanimate matter at one end and advanced abstract thinkers(human-level and above) on the other end and decide how to place entities(AIBO, dolphins, Deep Blue etc.) on this continuum.
This would be much more interesting than simply shouting "Its not TRUE AI because it doesn't write poetry/ play guitar/ cry over a broken heart" every time some AI advance is made.
I must admit though, the concept of Bessie the Cow, and Spot the dog being "intelligent beings" does make me shiver a bit.....
Unlike previous slashdot stories such as this one, the comments on this story have been remarkably free of racist vitriol. Is this an emerging trend?
Anyway as an African, I would like to say that although the article probably accurately conveyed the realities of Eastern Congo, that place is majorly F*****ED up even by African standards, because of the long running civil war and lack of ANY govermental infrastructure. Many neighbouring countries such as Tanzania, Kenya and even Uganda are a lot more stable.(OK Uganda has some rebels in the Northern part of the country but it is still much much better than Eastern Congo overall. Congo is the worst case scenario.) For example in the Arusha and Shinyanga regions of Tanzania we have exactly this same kind of mining going on but at least the miners aren't terrorized by random soldiers,(Ok, so they probably have to pay a "commission" to some people... I didn't say it was perfect) the trade is somewhat regulated, and foreign companies that invest are monitored and can work peacefully.
So my basic point is that the lawlessness in Eastern Congo is a sad situation, if this tantalum
had been found elsewhere it might have been very beneficial. e.g Botswana has managed to benefit greatly from its diamonds.
Also Congo was a very artificial creation of Colonial powers with many different ethnic groups that don't always get along. This makes a viable political system somewhat difficult. The same problems plague many African states, some more than others.
Cool! I actually learned something on/.....I am just really getting down with this field of AI especially Machine Learning, but I like what I am learning, hopefully I will be able to make a contribution......
As an aspiring(NOTE:aspiring) AI guru, I decided to "googlize" some of the cryptic abbreviations.
Backprop - The backpropagation algorithm for training neural networks. "Brought neural networks back from the dead."-popular opinion
RBF - Radial Basis Function Neural Nets.
HMM - Hidden Markov Models(I don't know what they're for)
SVM - Support Vector Machine(latest hot thing,I still don't know why its so great)
SOFM - Self Organizing Feature Maps(another NN architecure)
ART - no idea here... Like Hal Cohen's Aaron?(the drawing program)
I would like to add that I think Computational Learning Theory(COLT) and other statistical approaches seem really promising and I think we are going to be seeing some really interesting stuff in the next 5 - 10 years(ok maybe 20).
I have to agree with you completely.
I see that few Africans have posted on this story and I know it isn't because they don't read/., but rather that they are tired of the same rants every time a story about Africa is posted. Wooh for slashdot. These are the enlightened geeks who will save the world!
Let me just summarize the comments I have read so far:-
(1) Africans are too poor to care about the internet
This is absolutely NOT true. It is true that Africa is a lot poorer than the US, but you have to remember that the US is very wealthy country. Just because the average African does not have an SUV does NOT mean that all Africans are starving and illiterate. To put it more succintly there are plenty of Africans who have access to the basic necessities of life and are interested in "extras" such as internet connectivity.
My evidence? 20 years of living and growing up in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania and Mbabane, Swaziland. A computer costs ~2,000 USD. But at home there are no shortage of luxury German and Japanese cars that cost at least 40,000 USD each. True this is the elite, but just because something will help the elite NOW, does not mean that it will not be relevant to the majority soon. In the US electricity, telephones, PCs were first adopted by the affluent. The resulting volumes sales eventually brought the price down to a level afforded by the masses. The same thing in Africa, just because only the most educated and wealthy people will be able to use it now, that does not mean that the resulting infrastructure will not grow to encompass the rest of the people. (Or to put it another way, should Europe in the middle age have abandoned all Science and tech research until they had reached "modern" level of income? Hah!) Summary: Some Africans aren't starving and actually care about accessing the internet, and they aren't an irrelevenat minority.
(2) They need to get (water, health care, stable government e.t.c) first.
This is just so WRONG, I don't even know where to begin. Society is not made up of bits and pieces that can be addressed one bit at a time, but rather it is an organic whole where everything affects everything else. Do you really think that cheap and easy communication with the rest of the world is not going to have any impact on African societies? Lets put it this way:- Do you think the internet has had NO impact on American society? Of course it has, this technology really is powerful, the ability to communicate information quickly and cheaply makes an enormous difference in the long run, even if it is only introduced very gradually at first. Thus a fibre-optic backbone will not end starvation immediately, it certainly won't do any harm, and it will likely create plenty of opportunities for Africans to help themselves. Its not magic bullet, but the risks of falling further and further behind are far greater than the risks of plunging ahead with this technology.
Only time will tell, what the outcome will be, but I feel confident in saying that 10 years from now, the situation will be no worse in Africa than it is today and very probably it will be better. And that just might be because of more bandwidth as unlikely as it might sound.
Mugizi Robert Rwebangira
Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
mrrweban@us.ibm.com(for the summer)
I happen to disagree with regards to this particular story.
First of all the allegations are quite serious. If this turns out to be true, the guy would probably have to resign.
Secondly, they have been publicly made by a reasonably well known journalist(Joe Barr) who presumably wouldn't just make something up out of his ass.
Thirdly, the linked article does detail some sort of circumstantial evidence that one may examine to
see how true the allegations are. I was able to search for 'George Tirebiter' and verify that he had posted a LOT recently. While by no means conclusive(OK it doesn't prove jack), at least its not just PURE rumor like the National Enquirer or something.
Fourthly,/. is not a professional journalism site and has never claimed to be. They don't have the reseachers, editors etc that are necessary to do that kind of job, and would have to change their structure considerably to do so. What they do is post what they find interesting and provide a forum for discussion. Period.
So while I would not support/. being the origin of this story, I don't see anything wrong with them linking to it. Its similar to how Newsweek was not able to talk about Monica Lewinsky until Matt Drudge put it up on his website, once rumors go out they become legitimate topics.
Now I am not a complete apologist for/. I do recognize that the quality here has seemed to decline over the years. I am not sure if that is real or subjective, but it certainly seems there is a better S/N ratio on kuro5hin and Ars(among other places).
Two recommendations
(1) Spell check story introductions! This is so trivial and it looks stupid to see a site as famous as/. with obvious misspellings by the editors.
(2) When possible try to contact the sources to verify the more outrageous rumors. Remember this?
(I am sure there are plenty of other examples)
I think its fairly good as far as these kind of things go. It's semi-plausible and appears to have a lot of details. Also, just because its two years old doesn't mean everyone has heard about it. What I am trying to say is that hindsight is 20/20.
Anyone can be a genius after the facts come out.
Give Hemos a break, at least he spelled everything right!
Slashdot Mirror
After I finished highschool, I worked at this internet service provider in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. This was from January to June 1998.
Basically I agree with the author of this article that while the IT infrastructure is sorely lacking, internet usage is more widespread in major African cities than commonly thought. It was very hard to get a new phone line from the local telephone monopoly and those that did exist were not reliable. Power cuts were a constant problem.
However, anyone with a phoneline and PC could get connected for about 30$ a month and we had plenty of customers to keep us busy. In the 4 years since Internet use has fairly exploded. When I was home in December 2000, I had no problems keeping up my school e-mail and slashdot from the local internet cafes.
The infrastructure is still sorely lacking, but there is gradual steady improvement. Hopefully they will deregulate the telephone services, and the planned fibre optic ring will be completed.
Also to those who will inevitably say that "Africa doesn't need IT, it needs food," that is a remarkably short sighted position. The story clearly shows that there is a hunger and a need among the local people to make use of the internet to educate themselves and to create job opportunities. Poverty is more likely to be reduced with the help of the internet than without it, particularly in a global economy that is increasingly about the generation, management and manipulation of information.
LMAO!! Thanks for the link.
ROFL..! I would mod it up if I had points.
Playing soccer DOES involve solving problems of vision and cognition. Sure there is some hacking involved but work of scientific work gets done in the process.
I had a chance to attend a great presentation by Prof. Manuela Veloso of CMU just a few weeks ago and I found that that Robot Soccer is pushing a lot of advances in Multi Agent learning and planning.
The coolest part is when she played video of what the robots(these were AIBOs) were seeing when they were playing soccer. The camera was jerking all over the place, the perspective was topsy turvy, upside down, sideways, yet they still managed to find and hit the ball.Even she was surprised that they were able to work with such "dirty" data.
People are always knocking this work, but its not as trivial as it may seem at first.
I agree with you. Some Americans hatred of government seems totally out of proportion! Face it, the money has to come out of SOMEWHERE, and the taxes were put in place by YOUR elected representatives.
So unless a majority of the people are willing to cancel National Defense(400 billion alone), a lot of research funding(NSF gives out a lot of money!) not to mention the wildly popular Medicare and Medicaid programs, we are going to be paying taxes for the foreseeable future, so you might as well stop complaining. (I am just talking federal tax here, surely people don't doubt the necessity of local public schools or local police?)
Yes, nobody wants to part with their hard earned cash, but maintaining a civilized society costs a certain amount of money, and taxes are the only way that we have of getting that money.
That quote is funny as hell!
Damn, there goes my participation in The Hopefully Great Slashdot boycott....
seems to work on my machine(windows XP).
All open windows are minimized.
Perhaps its a new "feature."
I already knew something about P vs NP but some of these links have really non-technical easy explanations.
I am particularly enjoying the one on the link between Microsoft Minesweeper and NP complete problems
(Yes I remember when it was reported here, but it only linked to the guys academic paper which was too deep for me)
I would disagree with your assertion that "we don't have a clue." It is true that we don'y have a full blown solution, but that does not mean that we don't have an inkling of what might be required.
Specifically a rich detailed model of the world that can be used to accurately make inferences and choices. We don't how to build this yet, but we do know that it is necessary, unlike in the 50s when McCarthy and co. thought formal logic alone could do the trick.(someone correct me, if I am wrong)
There have been no astonishing break throughs but each year our understanding of the issues involved gets deeper(in Machine Learning, robotic manipulation and planning of actions, efficient algorithms for inference etc) and our processing power and memory capacity increases.
These may or may not lead to "Strong AI" but I don't think its correct to say we have "no clue" just because we have not succeeded yet.
I personally feel that intelligence is "any ability to respond in a non-random way to external stimuli." We have LOTs of it, ants have very little, but they still have some. By this definition higher mammals certainly have some "intelligence", how exactly to quantify that I don't know. Rather than a sharp dividing line, we should think of a continuum of intelligence,with inanimate matter at one end and advanced abstract thinkers(human-level and above) on the other end and decide how to place entities(AIBO, dolphins, Deep Blue etc.) on this continuum.
This would be much more interesting than simply shouting "Its not TRUE AI because it doesn't write poetry/ play guitar/ cry over a broken heart" every time some AI advance is made.
I must admit though, the concept of Bessie the Cow, and Spot the dog being "intelligent beings" does make me shiver a bit.....
But seriously Europeans do seem to have a more positive attitude towards Africa(compared to Americans), I am not sure exactly why.
Anyway as an African, I would like to say that although the article probably accurately conveyed the realities of Eastern Congo, that place is majorly F*****ED up even by African standards, because of the long running civil war and lack of ANY govermental infrastructure. Many neighbouring countries such as Tanzania, Kenya and even Uganda are a lot more stable.(OK Uganda has some rebels in the Northern part of the country but it is still much much better than Eastern Congo overall. Congo is the worst case scenario.) For example in the Arusha and Shinyanga regions of Tanzania we have exactly this same kind of mining going on but at least the miners aren't terrorized by random soldiers,(Ok, so they probably have to pay a "commission" to some people... I didn't say it was perfect) the trade is somewhat regulated, and foreign companies that invest are monitored and can work peacefully.
So my basic point is that the lawlessness in Eastern Congo is a sad situation, if this tantalum had been found elsewhere it might have been very beneficial. e.g Botswana has managed to benefit greatly from its diamonds.
Also Congo was a very artificial creation of Colonial powers with many different ethnic groups that don't always get along. This makes a viable political system somewhat difficult. The same problems plague many African states, some more than others.
Here is a good website for on African current events: http://allafrica.com
Rob in Dar Es Salaam
Cool! I actually learned something on /. ....I am just really getting down with this field of AI especially Machine Learning, but I like what I am learning, hopefully I will be able to make a contribution......
Rob
Backprop - The backpropagation algorithm for training neural networks. "Brought neural networks back from the dead."-popular opinion
RBF - Radial Basis Function Neural Nets.
HMM - Hidden Markov Models(I don't know what they're for)
SVM - Support Vector Machine(latest hot thing,I still don't know why its so great)
SOFM - Self Organizing Feature Maps(another NN architecure)
ART - no idea here... Like Hal Cohen's Aaron?(the drawing program)
I would like to add that I think Computational Learning Theory(COLT) and other statistical approaches seem really promising and I think we are going to be seeing some really interesting stuff in the next 5 - 10 years(ok maybe 20).
I have a copy right in front of me, and I have feeling it will be on my bookshelf 20 years from now.
Sema mzee, umewaambia kweli! he he( a TZ geek)
Let me just summarize the comments I have read so far:-
(1) Africans are too poor to care about the internet
This is absolutely NOT true. It is true that Africa is a lot poorer than the US, but you have to remember that the US is very wealthy country. Just because the average African does not have an SUV does NOT mean that all Africans are starving and illiterate. To put it more succintly there are plenty of Africans who have access to the basic necessities of life and are interested in "extras" such as internet connectivity.
My evidence? 20 years of living and growing up in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania and Mbabane, Swaziland. A computer costs ~2,000 USD. But at home there are no shortage of luxury German and Japanese cars that cost at least 40,000 USD each. True this is the elite, but just because something will help the elite NOW, does not mean that it will not be relevant to the majority soon. In the US electricity, telephones, PCs were first adopted by the affluent. The resulting volumes sales eventually brought the price down to a level afforded by the masses. The same thing in Africa, just because only the most educated and wealthy people will be able to use it now, that does not mean that the resulting infrastructure will not grow to encompass the rest of the people. (Or to put it another way, should Europe in the middle age have abandoned all Science and tech research until they had reached "modern" level of income? Hah!) Summary: Some Africans aren't starving and actually care about accessing the internet, and they aren't an irrelevenat minority.
(2) They need to get (water, health care, stable government e.t.c) first.
This is just so WRONG, I don't even know where to begin. Society is not made up of bits and pieces that can be addressed one bit at a time, but rather it is an organic whole where everything affects everything else. Do you really think that cheap and easy communication with the rest of the world is not going to have any impact on African societies? Lets put it this way:- Do you think the internet has had NO impact on American society? Of course it has, this technology really is powerful, the ability to communicate information quickly and cheaply makes an enormous difference in the long run, even if it is only introduced very gradually at first. Thus a fibre-optic backbone will not end starvation immediately, it certainly won't do any harm, and it will likely create plenty of opportunities for Africans to help themselves. Its not magic bullet, but the risks of falling further and further behind are far greater than the risks of plunging ahead with this technology.
Only time will tell, what the outcome will be, but I feel confident in saying that 10 years from now, the situation will be no worse in Africa than it is today and very probably it will be better. And that just might be because of more bandwidth as unlikely as it might sound.
Mugizi Robert Rwebangira
Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
mrrweban@us.ibm.com(for the summer)
First of all the allegations are quite serious. If this turns out to be true, the guy would probably have to resign.
Secondly, they have been publicly made by a reasonably well known journalist(Joe Barr) who presumably wouldn't just make something up out of his ass.
Thirdly, the linked article does detail some sort of circumstantial evidence that one may examine to see how true the allegations are. I was able to search for 'George Tirebiter' and verify that he had posted a LOT recently. While by no means conclusive(OK it doesn't prove jack), at least its not just PURE rumor like the National Enquirer or something.
Fourthly, /. is not a professional journalism site and has never claimed to be. They don't have the reseachers, editors etc that are necessary to do that kind of job, and would have to change their structure considerably to do so. What they do is post what they find interesting and provide a forum for discussion. Period.
So while I would not support /. being the origin of this story, I don't see anything wrong with them linking to it. Its similar to how Newsweek was not able to talk about Monica Lewinsky until Matt Drudge put it up on his website, once rumors go out they become legitimate topics.
Now I am not a complete apologist for /. I do recognize that the quality here has seemed to decline over the years. I am not sure if that is real or subjective, but it certainly seems there is a better S/N ratio on kuro5hin and Ars(among other places).
Two recommendations /. with obvious misspellings by the editors.
(1) Spell check story introductions! This is so trivial and it looks stupid to see a site as famous as
(2) When possible try to contact the sources to verify the more outrageous rumors. Remember this?
(I am sure there are plenty of other examples)
That IM song sucks hard!!
What is the Value of a Techie to an MBA?
Some of us like "Days Of Our Lives with tricorders. ;)
When you post as AC, your post invariably starts at 0.
If you click on the (#383) and look at the bottom you will see that that there was no moderation.
I think its fairly good as far as these kind of things go.
It's semi-plausible and appears to have a lot of details.
Also, just because its two years old doesn't mean everyone has heard about it.
What I am trying to say is that hindsight is 20/20.
Anyone can be a genius after the facts come out.
Give Hemos a break, at least he spelled everything right!
I think it is a chicken and egg issue, you can't address one aspect without addressing the others(technology, poverty, democracy e.t.c).
Interestingly enough the "fiery ex-convict" Malcom X was apparently very faithful to his wife Betty Shabbazz.