These are the same arguments they had with Peru a year or so ago. And the replies are the same.
Public money must buy stuff that the public can access at the lowest additional cost. It must be able to be repaired, developed, modified and upgraded by any competent person, not just an M$ one.
Being secure in some vague sense of that word might also be good
That may be because you come from a situation that is completely divorced from the Lao one. The project was devised and specified by the Lao communities, they know what their communication needs are, they understand their situation, the Jhai system has been designed to meet THEIR requirements.
The Lao are not in the habit of wasting their time and resources on useless stuff, if they say they need these tools, we should listen to them and start thinking about how we can provide them with what they need instead of preaching to them from our apparently much more superior position. Jhai foundation does that.
When we have been able to survive in the Laotian jungle, or the Kalahari desert or an atoll in the Pacific, not for half an hour, but for 5 years or so, once we have an idea of the realities of people's lives in those circumstances and perhaps some of the reasons for why things are done the way they are, once we have lived in a place where , if something doesn't work, we starve, and our kids starve, then we can tell them what they need. Until then, pay attention, listen, learn, think hard, deliver. Jhai does that too.
[Disclaimer, I volunteer some time to Jhai because what they do, and the way they do it, is better than anything I've come across anywhere else.]
Some years ago I worked in a really bad setup that caused pain all along the upper arm and through the shoulders and neck. I had to shift the mouse to the left hand because I almost literally could not use my right hand for the task. Not only did the pain go from the right arm, but it has never, after 6 years, appeared in my left arm.
I suspect the reason is that my right arm, being dominant, applies too much force for the task, which then requires counterforce from other muscles top control the fine movements needed for the mouse, resulting in unrelkeased tenmsions through the whole muscle group. Meanwhile the non-dominant left arm just gets on with the job. It takes about a day to reprogram your hand for the buttons and then forget it.
Better still, work smarter, use the keyboard shortcuts wherever possible.
Which is why they have bought Blogger. I have no idea why Google chose Blogger than any one of a dozen equally, or more effective Blogging businesses, that is a business decision. But it is pretty clear why they would do that.
The breathless story from Dan Gillmor does all the usual, but invalid stuff about the Internet.
Google is known best for its search capabilities, but the Pyra buyout isn't the company's first foray into creating or buying Internet content. Two years ago, Google bought Deja. com, a company that had collected and continued to update Usenet newsgroups, Internet discussion forums. More recently, it created Google News, a site that gauges the collective thoughts of more than 4,000 news sites on the Net.
But now, Google will surge to the forefront of what David Krane, the company's director of corporate communications, called "a global self-publishing phenomenon that connects Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation."
and yadda yadda yadda.
All that may be true but I don't believe it. This is not about "content" and Google isn't interested in "content", the news service is the result of the reliability that Google brings to other people's resource and content and the Blogger deal is the next stage in the development of Googling the net.
PageRank generates reliable sources of whatever kind of information you ask for, based on search terms generated by idiots like me. Bloggers have developed a whole new set of tools that is making the reliability of information much higher and is using massively distributed human resources to find and rank that information very quickly.
A story hits the net and the Blogosphere, using newsreaders, Blogs with Trackback links and the usual power rule processes of the network evaluates that information and weaves it into it proper place in the knowledge universe very quickly.
By making Blogs the preferred system for publishing information in the first place, Google will be able to help improve the weaving and ranking processes even more reliably and in the otherwise untrustworthy world of the Internet, that will keep them on top. While other search engines are still trying to figure out how to turn their spidered information into a business, Google is focusing on what really matters, and that is reliability. The Blogosphere will benefit because Google will fund the development of the tools and they will be open source because the more of them they have out there the more valuable they are, because Google does not sell search, it sells reliability, and every blogger and surfer and webmaster in the world is contributing to that. We do not get free services from Google, we pay for them with our clicks on their linked information. Pretty soon we will also be paying with our Blogging and we will be paid back with reliable information.
That's an information economy; the information is the currency, knowledge is the payoff and reliability is marketable to those whose reliance on it is highest.
I've said for a long time that Google is not a search engine. Now we have Larry Page's word for it.
Larry Page: "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.
"Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."
Here's another bit that makes so much more sense than most people get.
Information wants to be free? Copying doesn't cost anything. Distributing another copy costs basically zero. Google surveys the free part of the web.
Google surveys the free part of the web. Everyone wants to be on Google, because if you aren't in Google you don't exist. So you had better be free, and good, and referenced, and linked to the universe, or you don't exist and if you don't exist you sure as hell don't do business. Can we call that part of the debate settled please?
My personal filters take care of most of it by excpetion, if the filter doesn't direct it by sender or subject line to a live mailbox, it is potentially spam. New senders get added to existing filters. I agree with Frankston, get over it.
The real issue is our inability to manage our availability. As long as we give everyone our "magic" name, they have full access to us. EMail addresses don't represent physical resources. We can manage our names and thus manage others' access to us. Unlike paper mail or the telephone network, email gives us the technology to start to take charge of our availibility. Hunting for spammers might help vent our anger but only exacerbates the problem since the question of what is spam is a function of our relationships and our interests. Any static attempt to classify others as simply good or bad only makes the problem more difficult, especially if we let spam filters make the decisions for us.
Abstract
Many empirical studies assess the effectiveness of reputation mechanisms, such as eBay's Feedback Forum. These investigations involve products ranging from pennies to collector guitars; they vary widely in their conclusions on how well reputation systems perform. Part of the explanation for the disparity among prior studies is that they merely collect samples from the eBay population. Such observational studies significantly increase the number of other variables that are left uncontrolled. This makes it difficult to isolate the effects of reputation on auction outcome.
In our main experiment, we worked with an established eBay auctioneer to sell matched pairs of items -- batches of vintage postcards -- under his extremely high reputation identity, and under newcomer identities with little reputation. Our second experiment followed the same format, but compared sales under newcomer identities with and without negative feedback. Having controlled the content of the auctions, and the presentation of item information, we were able to minimize the effects of variables other than reputation. As expected, the established identity fared better. The price difference was 7.6% of the selling price. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that this amount is reasonable, given the level of risk that buyers incur. Surprisingly, one or two negative feedbacks for our new IDs had no price effects, even though these sellers had few positives.
You can get more on the TEN Site at
Jhai PC - A Computer for Most of the World http://www.techempower.net/0/editorial.asp?aff_id= 0&this_cat=Projects&obj_id=794&action=page and Jhai System Development Status http://www.techempower.net/0/editorial.asp?aff_id= 0&this_cat=Projects&obj_id=796&action=page
If you are interested in the application off grid, contact direct.
Earl Mardle
Information Manager TEN
The system will be able to have solar power but in the first instance there is the cost factor, a car battery will be needed anyway and a bike is very cheap.
Secondly, this is Laos, it may be tropical but in the monsoon there ain't much sun. Also, maybe a few turns of the crank is how someone who can't read or write, even in Lao, pays for the message to be written and sent, then read back.
Third. A lot of the communication will be between local communities and their members who have left for work in other places and send home some money or want to buy approriate gifts for local cultural events. eCommerce is not necessarily about selling ethic items to rich people. Have a look at the figures for Grameen Phone and Ethiogift.
The local villages asked for a system that would let them do this. Jhai don't do anything unless they are asked and local ownership is what makes their projects work.
Power consumption. No hard drive, it uses a big flash card and has no moving parts.
They are using dot matirix because the refills are cheap and can be done locally. While inkjets are not expensive they have trouble standing up to the environment and the refills cost a bomb, of which there are already too many in Laos.
No squids or coconut palms, Laos doesn't have a shoreline it is a landlocked country
Power source. There are plenty of fit people in rural villages in Laos. Everyone works as hard a Lance Armstrong just to stay alive.
Webmaster contact on TEN Site. Look for the link on every page that says "Contact"
I assume that the answer about other similar projects is "No"
Slashdot Mirror
These are the same arguments they had with Peru a year or so ago. And the replies are the same. Public money must buy stuff that the public can access at the lowest additional cost. It must be able to be repaired, developed, modified and upgraded by any competent person, not just an M$ one. Being secure in some vague sense of that word might also be good
That may be because you come from a situation that is completely divorced from the Lao one. The project was devised and specified by the Lao communities, they know what their communication needs are, they understand their situation, the Jhai system has been designed to meet THEIR requirements. The Lao are not in the habit of wasting their time and resources on useless stuff, if they say they need these tools, we should listen to them and start thinking about how we can provide them with what they need instead of preaching to them from our apparently much more superior position. Jhai foundation does that. When we have been able to survive in the Laotian jungle, or the Kalahari desert or an atoll in the Pacific, not for half an hour, but for 5 years or so, once we have an idea of the realities of people's lives in those circumstances and perhaps some of the reasons for why things are done the way they are, once we have lived in a place where , if something doesn't work, we starve, and our kids starve, then we can tell them what they need. Until then, pay attention, listen, learn, think hard, deliver. Jhai does that too. [Disclaimer, I volunteer some time to Jhai because what they do, and the way they do it, is better than anything I've come across anywhere else.]
I suspect the reason is that my right arm, being dominant, applies too much force for the task, which then requires counterforce from other muscles top control the fine movements needed for the mouse, resulting in unrelkeased tenmsions through the whole muscle group. Meanwhile the non-dominant left arm just gets on with the job. It takes about a day to reprogram your hand for the buttons and then forget it. Better still, work smarter, use the keyboard shortcuts wherever possible.
This makes interesting reading The Value of Reputation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment by Paul Resnick, Richard Zeckhauser, John Swanson, and Kate Lockwood[1]
Abstract
Many empirical studies assess the effectiveness of reputation mechanisms, such as eBay's Feedback Forum. These investigations involve products ranging from pennies to collector guitars; they vary widely in their conclusions on how well reputation systems perform. Part of the explanation for the disparity among prior studies is that they merely collect samples from the eBay population. Such observational studies significantly increase the number of other variables that are left uncontrolled. This makes it difficult to isolate the effects of reputation on auction outcome.
In our main experiment, we worked with an established eBay auctioneer to sell matched pairs of items -- batches of vintage postcards -- under his extremely high reputation identity, and under newcomer identities with little reputation. Our second experiment followed the same format, but compared sales under newcomer identities with and without negative feedback. Having controlled the content of the auctions, and the presentation of item information, we were able to minimize the effects of variables other than reputation. As expected, the established identity fared better. The price difference was 7.6% of the selling price. Back-of-the-envelope calculations indicate that this amount is reasonable, given the level of risk that buyers incur. Surprisingly, one or two negative feedbacks for our new IDs had no price effects, even though these sellers had few positives.
You can get more on the TEN Site at Jhai PC - A Computer for Most of the World= 0&this_cat=Projects&obj_id=794&action=page = 0&this_cat=Projects&obj_id=796&action=page
If you are interested in the application off grid, contact direct.
Earl Mardle
Information Manager TEN
http://www.techempower.net/0/editorial.asp?aff_id
and Jhai System Development Status
http://www.techempower.net/0/editorial.asp?aff_id
Secondly, this is Laos, it may be tropical but in the monsoon there ain't much sun. Also, maybe a few turns of the crank is how someone who can't read or write, even in Lao, pays for the message to be written and sent, then read back.
Third. A lot of the communication will be between local communities and their members who have left for work in other places and send home some money or want to buy approriate gifts for local cultural events. eCommerce is not necessarily about selling ethic items to rich people. Have a look at the figures for Grameen Phone and Ethiogift.