Posts from — August 2003

World of beginnings.

Mike Taht has a fascinating essay inadequately titled The inner workings of the Internet mind. He launches the piece with a revisitation of Phillip Emeagwali's ideas, which expand on what Lewis Frye Richardson was imagining in 1922. Sez Mike:

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

The hyperball theory is fairly interesting, it will be more interesting when you have it actually going with the grid…. or doesn't this resonate with that? i think it does

Jan Velterop, Public funding, public knowledge, pu …. Jan Velterop, Public funding, public knowledge, publication, Serials, 16, 2 (July 2003) pp. 169-174. (Accessible only to subscribers.) Abstract: “The argument that publicly funded research should be publicly available is a valid one, but it cannot be the most important one in the discussion as to whether research should be freely accessible. The overriding argument is that freely accessible research optimises the scientific process as well as its Îtranslationâ into societal benefits. Free access, or Îopen accessâ as it is widely called, can be brought about by making full use of the technologies available to the world, particularly the internet, but it does need a change in traditional economic models of publishing.” [Open Access News]

This article is on ingenta… i don't seem to have access to it, which makes it extremely ironic…

TECH TALK: Transforming Rural India 2: Education.

Education plays a paramount role in the process of economic development. Besides being instrumental in development, it is also an end in itself because it helps people lead better lives. For broad-based sustainable economic development, primary education is critical. Neglect of primary education is endemic in developing nations.

Public support of education is often regressive. For instance, public spending on education for a set of selected developing countries by income quintile shows that the poorest income quintile receives around 14 percent of total spending, while the highest receives around 28 percent (Source: World Development Report 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty” Oxford University Press). Systematic discrimination against the poor regarding public spending in education is also found in India. As shown in the table below, public expenditure for elementary education is only 0.17% of GDP for India.

For 2003-04             (in US$ billion)  Percentage of GDP
GDP                          $ 581              100.00
Aggregate Govt Budget        $  93               16.08
All social services and 
poverty alleviation          $  14                2.49
All education                $   6                1.05
Elementary education         $   1                0.17

The public support of higher education primarily benefits the urban rich and middle class. The policy choice of supporting higher education at the cost of the neglect of basic education is short-sighted. Policy makers must recognize the redressing of the imbalance as one of the most critical challenges facing them. This task is made more tractable by the wide availability of ICT tools. The leverage provided by these tools releases the severe resource constraints that bound the task of bringing primary education to the population.

Education can be categorized into primary, secondary, adult, and vocational. We will focus on primary education since the arguments can be easily extended to the other categories.

Primary Education

Primary education is a public good. Therefore, the level of primary education provided by the market can be expected to be lower than the socially optimal level. Therefore it is up to the government to step in and either provide primary education itself or subsidize its provision by the private sector.

The higher income groups living in urban areas have the willingness and the ability to pay for primary education. The low income groups in urban areas and most income groups in rural areas do not have the ability to pay for education

One way of solving the problem would be for the government to provide credit to the poor so that they could pay for primary education. However, given the small size of the budget allocated for primary education and the immense size of the relevant population, it is a challenge that cannot be addressed without resort to technology induced increase in productivity in the education sector.

To briefly review the broad scope of the problem of primary education , we note that literacy is only 80% in urban areas and 60% in rural India. (For urban areas, the male literacy level is 86% and for females it is 73%; the corresponding numbers for rural areas are 71% and 47%. Data from Census of India 2001 and from the Azim Premji Foundation.) About 36% of all 7-14 year old children are illiterate. That is, the total population in rural and urban areas that needs primary education is 340 million. The annual budget for primary education is only US$1 billion (See Table 1). Therefore per capita approximately $3 per year is available for primary education. This sum is clearly inadequate even if utilized most efficiently under the current method of delivering primary education. Thus if we consider that the budget constraint is hard, then the only way out is to innovate in the process of imparting primary education .

Just to provide primary education, India requires seven million teachers if one were to have a 1:50 teacher to student ratio. Not only is that number formidable, the problem is compounded by the fact that these teachers are mainly required in the rural areas where the current number of qualified teachers is extremely low.

Tomorrow: Distance Education

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

well I'm posting this to my other research page because it just might be useful for a paper i'm working which will be a split from my dissertation.

Free Media.

As a part of the Texas Center for Educational Technology's Web Library, Free Media is a storehouse of stock photos provided under a Creative Commons license primarily for educational purposes. They currently have over 400 high-quality images in a variety of categories, waiting for your reuse.

[Creative Commons: weblog]

I'm always looking for good, free, stock photos for web design projects. this also fits into some of the archiving methods i've been thinking about.

Interesting Tidbits. Here's some stuff of interest I've run across recently: The defective yeti talks about The Armchair Economist and Steven Landsburg's Slate Columns On K5 there's a discussion around an article titled Six degrees of separation or unification? that talks about Friendster, networks of people, and so on. Dan Gilmor on VoIP services and how he's saving money on long distance calls. I had forgotten how beautiful the drive from San Francisco to the South Bay on I-280 is in the… [Jeremy Zawodny's blog]

Jeremy has some interesting links here, the six degrees article seems to be related to what i was ranting about the other week.

The future is in the hands of those who can operate a press.

The Death of the Webmaster: Why Weblogs Bring a True Revolution to Internet Publishing [via Thomas Burg]:

The future is in the hands of those who not only own a press, but that can also operate it.

Later: the post above was the one of many in my news aggregator linking to the web-site of Luigi Canali De Rossi. I've subscribed to his RSS, reading about Communication Agents Initiative and enjoying great quotes like this one:

Stop surfing, Start Making Waves!

[Mathemagenic]

Well, I'm about $500 away from founding a press right now, I have the tools, though not all the labor, we'll see how it works out.

“Stronger Together:” Why the Tenurable and the Nontenurable Should Make Common Cause. We are witnessing the transformation of our academic work and our universities. Historically, university administrators have used contract positions to fulfill specific, short-term needs. But in the past decade, administrators have increasingly chosen to use casual labour for ongoing staffing… [Invisible Adjunct]

I think unionization is the only way to go with this, i've said that before frequently. However, most places will never unionize in any effective measure as long as people think they can join the other class of faculty.

Post-cyborg event in Toronto, August 14 and 15 [bOing bOing]

this looks like fun

Has 'haven' for questionable sites sunk?. An effort to convert a platform in the English Channel into a “safe haven” for controversial Web ventures has failed due to political and other problems, one of the company's founders says. [CNET News.com] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

well it was a somewhat tenable idea i suppose, but it was way to close to land. find a sunken pacific atole to build it on and you have something perhaps.

amongst other things:

Valery is known for saying:

At times I think and at times i am…. which is clearly an indictment of I think therefor I am based on phenomenal experience of flow in thought. when thinking, the I is always fleeting.

and

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them. …. which seems true enough, politics is always based on the knowing of something and the leveraging of that knowledge to some advantage.