When [the next five billion] people come online, how will those all of us in the first two billion be affected?

Schmidt: These are people just like us. They’re trapped in a bad system, but they are human beings. They have the same perfection and brilliance and foibles and intuition and that we do. So the sooner we can get them the tools to get themselves organized, to get the corruption addressed, to get the healthcare better, the better off we’re all going to be. When you sit in one of these villages, and ask, how does your healthcare work, there’s a pause and they say, Well, there really isn’t any. Well then, what happens when you get sick? Sometimes you get better, and sometimes you die. It’s the most bizarre conversation. We take these things for granted, and yet this is their reality.

Cohen: The companies that originally make the tools of connectedness will come from the parts of the world that are already connected to that first 2 billion. But ultimately the best and most interesting and most creative use cases will come from the next 5 billion, because those people do more with less, and necessity drives innovation.

via Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on What’s Next for the World | Wired Business | Wired.com.

[Slightly sensationalized writeup. Still the coolest damn thing ever. -egg]

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware. Whoa.

…

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever. Just like, “hey kids, here’s this box, you can open it if you want, see ya!”

Just to give you a sense of what these villages in Ethiopia are like, the kids (and most of the adults) there have never seen a word. No books, no newspapers, no street signs, no labels on packaged foods or goods. Nothing. And these villages aren’t unique in that respect; there are many of them in Africa where the literacy rate is close to zero. So you might think that if you’re going to give out fancy tablet computers, it would be helpful to have someone along to show these people how to use them, right?

But that’s not what OLPC did. They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

via Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction | DVICE.

[One of my favorite pieces by one of my favorite composers. -egg]

Max Richter records the score for ‘Disconnect’ – YouTube.

[Whoa, no way. -egg]

David Mizejewski writes:

The video below shows some fascinatingly odd animal behavior that I’ve never heard of before: baboons stealing stray puppies from their mothers and raising them as part of their troop. This kind of interspecies interaction where one species raises another species specifically for companionship and protection–in other words, keeping pets–is behavior that is typically attributed only to humans. To see it happening with baboons and dogs is nothing short of amazing.

via Baboons raise pet dogs – Boing Boing.

[This article’s overoptimistic about some stuff, I think, but interesting food for thought. -egg]

In doing the research that led to my new book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet, I pored over a huge wealth of data on energy, environment, and natural resources. What that data tells me is that we do indeed have very serious problems to tackle. But it also reveals that we have the resources to tackle them, if we’re sufficiently clever. Indeed, if we make the right decisions, we may very well be on the verge of an explosion in global wealth, coupled by a reduction in our depletion of the planet’s resources.

Here’s why:

The World Is Not Headed For Disaster – Business Insider.

“The internet was one of the greatest disasters to befall mankind. Now its survivors share their experiences of the tragedy.”

-| Foto-Jenn¡c |-.

“This latest installation involves a forest of 150 interactive rods installed in an empty factory space that when touched trigger both light and audio cues, effectively creating a large interactive instrument.”

An Interactive Forest of Musical Lasers by Marshmallow Laser Feast | Colossal.

What Facebook doesn’t seem to get is that people generally do not love Facebook. They love their families and friends, who all happen to be on Facebook (which was mostly due to fortunate timing on Facebook’s part). But Facebook itself, they mostly just tolerate, when they don’t outright hate it for its ridiculously confusing, constant changes to its interface and navigation, and its intrusive and bewildering privacy policies.

These ads, and Facebook Home itself, reveal that the company actually believe that people love IT, Facebook, and not the connections to other people that Facebook happens (for the time being) to provide. If the company keeps thinking that way, the inevitable withdrawal of users (already happening among teenagers) will only happen faster. Nobody is ever going to be convinced that Facebook is actually better than real life.

via Facebook Is Helping Us Disconnect From the World – San Francisco – News – The Snitch.

When we are angry though, why are we angry? Certainly, sometimes our friends’ rudeness hurts our feelings; we don’t like being made to feel as though we are not important to the people we care about. But there’s something about control going on here, too. We want our friends to be able to control the urge to look at the phone. We want our friends themselves to be bound by our expectations of what listening and paying attention look like. More strikingly, those who have employees or kids want to exercise dominance over their underlings at the office, and over their children at home. When employees or kids fail to perform deference by seeming to listen quietly, it is insubordination; they reject not just their attentional obligations, but also the authority of their supervisors and parents. It may look like thumbs on a screen, but in truth it’s a middle finger raised straight in the face of power. These are recalcitrant workers, and recalcitrant daughters, engaged in micro-sociological acts of rebellion.

Perhaps sometimes people who ignore physically co-present conversation are just being rude, but—as demonstrated in two out of the three Facebook Home ads—sometimes rudeness is also resistance. When we view smartphone users as present and taking action instead of merely absent, these acts of resistance become more apparent. The bored developer rejects Mark Zuckerberg’s demands that he perform emotional labor at work and appear to be interested and engaged when he is not; he thwarts Zuckerberg’s power that keeps him sitting in that chair. The bored daughter rejects gendered expectations that she perform emotional labor at home by appearing to be a caring “good listener” when she is not; she thwarts the parental power that keeps her sitting at the table. And when I spend my drink-wait staring determinedly at my phone rather than re-acknowledge the guy who keeps touching my arm and laying artless pickup lines on me, I am rejecting his masculine entitlement to my body, my attention, and my time. In my own small way, in a way less violent than the imaginary bar fight in my head, I am thwarting the power of patriarchy. I’m not absent but present, and pissed off on top of it; my friends who are present with me through digital conversation are providing welcome support and diversion.

Here’s the other thing: We were attention-shifting before there were smartphones, and we attention-shift even when our smartphones are still in our pockets. I’ll own the fact that sometimes I don’t pay full attention when people talk to me: sometimes I accidentally space out, sometimes I have a lot on my mind, sometimes I’m too sleep-deprived to focus on much of anything, and sometimes—yes—I’m making the choice to deliberately tune out and wait for someone to please just stop talking. A smartphone in my hand may make it more glaringly (glowingly?) apparent to the person speaking that I’m not giving them my full attention, but I don’t need the smartphone in my hand to create the possibility of inattention. If we view smartphone use as “absence,” it’s too easy to see non-use automatically as presence; yet, we all know the frustration of talking to someone who’s distracted, even without a smartphone in their hand. We shouldn’t kid ourselves that we have someone’s attention just because the thumbs are still and the eyes are pointed in our general direction.

via Rudeness as Resistance: Presence, Power, and Those Facebook Home Ads » Cyborgology.

AmazingSuperPowers: Webcomic at the Speed of Light – Spring Cleaning.