Cyrus Farivar » $100 Laptop

January 13: Cyrus on PRI’s The World

Cyrus Farivar — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:43:39 +0000

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)

Cyrus Farivar — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:01:23 +0000

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

Cyrus Farivar — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 06:34:43 +0000

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

Cyrus Farivar — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:51:38 +0000

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

Cyrus Farivar — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:26:19 +0000

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

Cyrus Farivar — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:31:44 +0000

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!

Cyrus Farivar — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:02:10 +0000

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).

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

Cyrus Farivar — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 00:47:13 +0000

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

Cyrus Farivar — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:59:52 +0000

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!

Cyrus Farivar — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 16:45:27 +0000

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]