$100 Laptop Archive

January 13: Cyrus on PRI’s The World

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – January 13, 2009, 4:43 pm UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Journalism, Radio, The World (PRI)

Dear Friends,

I’ve been informed that my radio piece on the “refocusing” of the One Laptop Per Child project is airing today.

It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams):

New York – 3 pm Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 8 pm Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 12 pm Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 4 pm Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 2 pm Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org

You can also find it on The World’s site later in the day and on my site if you miss the broadcast.

Also, don’t forget about The World’s Tech Podcast, hosted by my boss, Clark Boyd. It comes out every Friday.

Lemme know if you hear it!

Update: Audio is here.

August 27: Cyrus on Morning Edition (NPR)

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – August 27, 2008, 6:01 am UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Journalism, NPR, OLPC, Radio

Dear Friends,

I’ve been informed that my piece on One Laptop Per Child is/was on Morning Edition today (August 27).

It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams).

New York – 5 am to 9 am Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 5 am to 10 am Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 2 am to 9 am Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 6 am to 9 am Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 3 am to 9 am Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org

It will also be archived at npr.org and at my site if you miss it.

Lemme know if you hear it!

Update: Audio is here.

Nigeria pulls the plug on its OLPC order

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – July 2, 2008, 11:34 pm UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Africa, OLPC

Vanguard:

Dr Aja Nwachukwu, the Education Minister, told newsmen in Abuja that the scheme was discovered to be a “white elephant” project.

“We discovered that the scheme is a conduit pipe to siphon public fund,” he said.
Nwachukwu said the ministry was working on other options to promote the deployment of ICT at all levels of education.

[via OLPC News]

OLPC XO laptops stolen in Peru

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – June 10, 2008, 4:51 pm UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, OLPC

Oh man, my pal Wayan Vota has just found the first documented example of XO laptops getting jacked in Peru.

Please recall NickNeg’s argument as to why XOs would never get stolen:

there are thousands of cars in the United States stolen each day, but not one single post office truck has been stolen in the history of the United States. The reason is that there is no secondary market for post office trucks because they look like post office trucks.

Hey NickNeg, who’s going to pay for those replacements, eh?

Slate: The $100 Distraction Device

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – June 5, 2008, 11:26 am UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Africa, Economics, OLPC

Slate:

So what happens when good fortune delivers vouchers (and hence computers) into the homes of Romanian youths? Obviously a lot more time logged on to a computer—about seven hours more per week for vouchered versus unvouchered kids. Much of this computer time came at the expense of television-watching: Children in families that received a voucher spent 3.5 fewer hours in front of the tube per week. But computer use also crowded out homework (2.3 hours less per week), reading, and sleep. Less schoolwork translated into lower grades at school—vouchered kids’ GPAs were 0.36 grade points lower than their nonvouchered counterparts—and also lower aspirations for higher education. Vouchered kids were 13 percentage points less likely to report an intention to attend college. And, interestingly, vouchered students who were college-bound were not more likely to express interest in majoring in computer science.

What I’m Reading

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – May 16, 2008, 5:31 pm UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Barack Obama, China, OLPC, Politics

Ivan Krstic:

In fact, I quit when Nicholas told me — and not just me — that learning was never part of the mission. The mission was, in his mind, always getting as many laptops as possible out there; to say anything about learning would be presumptuous, and so he doesn’t want OLPC to have a software team, a hardware team, or a deployment team going forward.

New York Magazine:

The Democratic Party is closer than it’s ever been to a political nightmare—a deadlocked convention. Though the odds of its actually happening are still remote, the idea is so rich with dramatic possibility that we asked Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., former West Wing writer-producer, to play out a scenario in movie-treatment form. The premise is that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton arrive in Denver, neither having sufficient delegates to gain the nomination nor a decisive majority in the popular vote. And so it’s on…

The New Yorker:

In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies.

The New Yorker:

To his fans, Li is less a language teacher than a testament to the promise of self-transformation. In the two decades since he began teaching, at age nineteen, he has appeared before millions of Chinese adults and children. He routinely teaches in arenas, to classes of ten thousand people or more. Some fans travel for days to see him. The most ardent spring for a “diamond degree” ticket, which includes bonus small-group sessions with Li. The list price for those seats is two hundred and fifty dollars a day—more than a full month’s wages for the average Chinese worker. His students throng him for autographs. On occasion, they send love letters.

Cyrus on NPR – TOMORROW!

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – January 6, 2008, 10:02 pm UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Journalism, NPR, Radio

Dear Friends,

I’ve been informed that my radio piece on the One Laptop Per Child project will air on Morning Edition tomorrow (Jan. 7)!

It will be available on any of these stations (and their Internet streams).

New York – 5 am to 9 am Eastern – WNYC – 820 AM – www.wnyc.org
Washington, DC – 5 am to 10 am Eastern – WAMU – 88.5 FM – www.wamu.org
Los Angeles – 2 am to 9 am Pacific – KPCC – 89.3 FM – www.kpcc.opg
Boston – 6 am to 9 am Eastern – WGBH – 89.7 FM – www.wgbh.org
San Francisco – 3 am to 9 am Pacific – KQED – 88.5 FM – www.kqed.org

It will also be archived at npr.org and at my site if you miss it.

Lemme know if you hear it!

Update: Audio is here!

The Economist: One clunky laptop per child

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – January 5, 2008, 4:47 pm UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Tech in Far-Off Lands

The Economist:

Ultimately the OLPC initiative will be remembered less for what it produced than the products it spawned. The initiative is like running the four-minute mile: no one could do it, until someone actually did it. Then many people did.

WSJ skewers OLPC

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – November 26, 2007, 7:59 am UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Journalism, Tech in Far-Off Lands

Paul Boutin links to this gem in this weekend’s WSJ:

Some potential buyers are having second thoughts. Officials in Libya, who had planned to buy up to 1.2 million of the laptops, became concerned that the machines lacked Windows, and that service, teacher training and future upgrades might [therefore] become a problem.

It now sells for $188, plus shipping. The higher price has made the laptop vulnerable to competition. Taiwanese, Indian and Israeli sellers of inexpensive Windows laptop see the developing world’s more than one billion potential young customers as a big opportunity.

. . .

At a private meeting with a group from Rwanda, Negroponte announced that 20,000 laptops, courtesy of the “Give One. Get One.” program, would soon be distributed. Carine Umutesi, who works for Rwanda’s Information Technology Authority, questioned who would fix them if they break.

Mr. Negroponte said some initial tech support would be provided by Brightstar Corp., a Miami-based wireless equipment distributor. Just who would provide support a few years from now, he said, was “a frightening question.” The students, he said, will need “to do as much maintenance as possible.”

You’ll recall I tackled this same topic, for the second time, two months ago in Slate.

India’s Ministry of Human Resource Development Rejects the $100 Laptop!

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – July 27, 2006, 9:45 am UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Foreign Affairs, Tech in Far-Off Lands

Times of India:

HRD contends that spending Rs 450 crore on digital empowerment can be better spent on primary and secondary education. “It is quite obvious that the financial expenditure to be made on the scheme will be out of public funds.

It would be impossible to justify an expenditure of this scale on a debatable scheme when public funds continue to be in inadequate supply for well-established needs listed in different policy documents,” the ministry said.

It also finds it intriguing as to “why no developed country has been chosen” for MIT’s OLPC experiment “given the fact that most of the developed world is far from universalising the possession and use of laptops among children of 6-12 age group”.

Wow, I feel somewhat vindicated.

[Hat tip: Glenn Fleishman]

From the Mailbag

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – December 9, 2005, 11:48 am UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Fan Mail

Hi Cyrus,

Three thoughts on your excellent “skeptical inquiry” into Negroponte’s $100 computer.

A. You probably haven’t enough gray hair to remember the Timex Sinclair. More a stunt than a computer, but reached cult popularity with those who enjoy the challenge of writing TIGHT programs. Here’s a website with a jpeg of it being well-used as a doorstop!

B. To be fair, I’m imagining that Negroponte isn’t projecting today’s costs/components, but counting on continued leaps in integration and reductions in price. Hard to remember today that the Apple II, pre-GUI, sold for $2,600 with 48K RAM, and still had a tape drive! (And those were 1977 dollars! Compare Compaq’s bottom-of-the-line today at $600.)

C: There’s always plenty of room at the bottom. With India graduating 100,000 highly-trained, English-speaking engineers ANNUALLY (compare to the US where the Dems recently proposed graduating these many over the next five or six years was it?), it’s unlikely rapidly expanding nations like China and India will remain near the bottom long. In fact, they’ve captured most of our manufacturing already. There’s an iPod headed my way from Shanghai as I type. But even if we ignore the fact that both countries retain vast untapped reservoirs of low-wage displaced traditional farmers, China and India can indeed outsource profitably. Africa remains far below them in wage-scales even as the demand for cellular technology skyrockets there. Perhaps the next Hong Kong or Mumbai will be Lilongwe or Mombasa? And since they’ll already have those powerful, state-of-the-art pda/cell phones, maybe the best way to provide computing to Africa’s kids will be dumb keyboards and displays that they can attach to their parent’s pda/phones? Li-ion batteries and chargers, already are more available than rural electrification in the Third World. Paging Mr. Negroponte!

All my best,
Alberto Enriquez
Medford, Oregon

Intel: Poor Want ‘Real’ Computers

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – December 9, 2005, 10:00 am UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Tech in Far-Off Lands

Reuters:

Potential computer users in the developing world will not want a basic $100 hand-cranked laptop due to be rolled out to millions, according to Craig Barrett, ECO of Intel.

Schoolchildren in Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria will begin receiving the first few million textbook style computers from the MIT Media Lab run by Nicholas Negroponte from early 2006.

“Mr. Negroponte has called it a $100 laptop — I think a more realistic title should be ‘the $100 gadget’,” Barrett, chairman of the world’s largest chipmaker, told a press conference in Sri Lanka on Friday. “The problem is that gadgets have not been successful.”

“A blackboard and chalk is not as sexy as a laptop.”

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – December 5, 2005, 12:39 pm UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Foreign Affairs, Tech in Far-Off Lands

Indian Economist Atanu Dey:

I know that one should not ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained as stupidity. Not everyone involved in the “laptop for every child” is motivated by greed; some are motivated by a zeal that comes from an inability to figure out what the problem is and how it can be most effectively solved. The operative word is “effectively.” You can always use a cannon where a fly-swatter is sufficient. But for the cost of a cannon, you can get a million fly-swatters which will be more effective than one cannon. Cannons are more impressive then fly-swatters, however, and that may explain their fascination with some people.

A blackboard and chalk is not as sexy as a laptop. In fact, a TV and a media player is pretty much all the hardware that you need to provide basic education to a village full of children. That hardware (and some free software) would cost all of $200 a year, and if you pay about $2000 a year as salaries to a couple of village school teachers, you can educate a 100 kids for about $20 per child per year. Compare that to just buying $100 laptops for each kid.

Still More Reader Comments

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – December 5, 2005, 11:18 am UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Fan Mail, Tech in Far-Off Lands

A thought in response to your Slate article and the more practical Inveneo stuff. The latter relies on 12V DC for the good reasons that it’s been made ubiquitous by the car and truck industry, the gear is simple and tough, and big economies of scale have already been made. Why then does every new DC gadget call for a different voltage and its own transformer? Big purchasers like the Pentagon or the Indian government could push the industry towards standardisation just by insisting on 12V. Find a vehicle and plug it in.

Yours,
James Wimberley
Caleta de Vélez , Spain

More Reader Comments

By
Cyrus Farivar
 – December 5, 2005, 10:13 am UTCPosted in: $100 Laptop, Fan Mail, Tech in Far-Off Lands

This one came in before the one this morning:

Hello,

My name is Samir Raiyani and I am a Senior Scientist at SAP Research in Palo Alto. I really liked your article on Slate about Negroponte’s $100 computer idea. I had written exactly along the same lines on my blog – even pointing to the silly Simputer idea. My angle was slightly different and would love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks,
Samir

> Samir,
>
> Thanks so much for your kind words.
>
> Your blog entry makes sense to me. There’s a bunch of other reasons besides the ones you and I mentioned that I don’t think this project will work. I hope I’m wrong, but it just seems like it’s being poorly executed.
>
> What do you think of Inveneo?
>
> Can I quote your email on my blog?
>
> -C

Hello,

Thank you for your email. I was not aware of Inveneo; it sounds like a good concept and I’ll run it by some of my colleagues who are training teachers and helping set up elearning software in South African schools (Africa Drive Project).

I was there earlier this year and I felt that the cost of computers was not a problem. Rather, the issues seemed to be lack of cheap connectivity, unreliable power supply and software complexity.
- Power supply problems affect lights, medical equipment etc., not just computers. So solar power, inverters, pedal power etc are all potential solutions.
- The software complexity problem is not impossible to solve and a number of efforts are on to fix that issue.
- The cellular/GPRS network works quite well now all across the urban Third World (not so well in rural areas), but it’s still a bit expensive. WiFi networks reduce dependence on cellular networks, but they won’t be cheap to set up in Africa or rural India, and backhaul problems remain.

Overall, it seems that cheaper networks are a much bigger challenge than cheaper computers… Some math:
- Computers: To run a school with 500 students, with a ratio of 1 computer for 8 students (best schools in India boast that type of ratio). Let’s say the computer’s lifespan is 5 years, and cost is 250 dollars. Approximate cost – 3000 dollars per year.
- Connectivity: The cheapest 256 kbps connectivity costs $20-50 per month in the wealthy neighborhoods of urban India. Even at $200 per year, the cost comes to $12500 per year for the same computer ratio as above for 500 students!

Please feel free to post my emails on your blog. I hope you won’t mind me doing the same.

Thanks!
Samir

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