All those topics that i wish i had time to pursue more earnestly.

Do you have a useful skill?:
Lauren’s starting a wiki called Help Us Help Ourselves, a compilation of how-to articles created by us in the feminist community. If you’ve got a useful skill, and particularly if you have specialized professional knowledge you can share, please consider writing up a contribution. Read more about the project here.

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people helping people do whatever people want…. that’s one bonus of living in the information age… peer to peer knowledge.

I made a new category and re-categorized my one laptop per child posts so that people can find them. In general, I am against the principles of OLPC on many grounds, mostly to do with lack of technical support, educational purpose, and the general lack of awareness or outright willful dismissing of prior work in regards to projects like this.

Notebooks dropping to $99 | CNET News.com:
Circuit City will try to best Wal-Mart Stores and Staples in notebook pricing this holiday season with a Compaq notebook for $299 after rebates, or $99 with rebates and a 12-month subscription to Vonage, according to bargain-hunting Web site Black Friday Ads.

The site posts scans of Sunday newspaper inserts before they get delivered in papers. The deals can change, but history shows that the prices reflected in the ads become a reality. Steve Baker at NPD Techworld earlier this month predicted that $99 laptops, after all rebates and specials, would appear this holiday season.

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of course…. this is already there.

A $100 laptop prototype for $150 | CNET News.com:

The One Laptop per Child project on Thursday showed off the latest prototype of what’s widely known as the $100 laptop for school children in developing nations. The only hitch is that the computer costs $150 to make.

Walter Bender, president of software for the Massachusetts-based nonprofit OLPC, said that higher-than-expected costs for the laptop’s display and battery (made of nickel-metal hydride) hiked up the price.

“The goal is to get it to $100 by 2008,” Bender said at the Silicon Valley Challenge Summit, being held at Santa Clara University.

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It is partly to the right price point…

The extraordinary story of Rupert the rhino | the Daily Mail:
As pets go, Rupert the rhino fulfilled everything expected of him.

Faithful, friendly and a fearsome ‘guard dog’, like so many beloved household creatures he simply became one of the family.
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ahhh, a nice animal interest story… of course, the animal dies in the end…

Remembering Joe Hill:
I first heard of Joe Hill listening to Utah Phillips’ music. November 19th marks the anniversary of his execution. Joe Hill was an I.W.W. Activist and fought for worker’s rights. Back in his day workers were literally risking their lives fighting for rights we take for granted today. For the 8 hour day, minimum wage, 40 hour work week and worker’s compensation thanks go to people like Joe Hill and the countless other men and women who fought for worker’s rights.
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‘I dreamed i saw joe hill last night, alive as he could be’ — a lyric from a billy bragg concert.

i too learned of joe hill from utah phillips, but… i doubt many people know about him these days of 60 hour work weeks and million dollar 2 bedroom apts.

the cool hunter – GOING TO SCHOOL IN DENMARK:
We thought we’d covered the best in our Kool Kids Spaces, but out come the Danes with a school that makes us (almost) want to go back to elementary school. In Lego-bright contrast to the gloomy fate H.C. Andersen prescribed to his original Little Mermaid (that would be death, no less), today’s blond little school-going Danes are encouraged to do the sort of things for which some of us got spanked.

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How schools should be built…. for kids.

The $100 laptop: What went wrong – MSN Money:

Anyway, in general a free computer to everyone on the planet it interesting. The tool is cool. And there are many massively problematic issues involved. But that’s interesting is that this article is publishe din MSN Money. MSN isn’t part of this. I’ve read the M$ does not like open source. I wonder how much big computing, like big oil and big tobacco is willing to thumb the nose at doing something good (Gate’s work on aids in africa is not part of this debate of course) useful when it might get in the way of a little well planned out hegemony. But that’s just my personal opinion on it.

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This is one place where i disagree with Jason. The ‘cool tool’ is not a solution, it is a distraction from more serious infrastructural and educational issues and the ‘leapfrog’ of those infrastructures that it ‘represents’ actually will be impossible. I don’t think big computing is actually against this, in fact, most of them have bought in. You see, you don’t sell these things to people… You sell them to governments and the money that comes from governments will be be backed by other governments, so there is no real possibility of profit/loss . The economics of this project looks great, I think, for companies. The future of these objects as computers… is not great. The design is completely wrong for any use outside of a clean, classroom environment. It has too many moving parts and it is ‘american cool’ instead of globally useful. If you look at army troop laptops, designs that actually work in diverse environments…. they do not look like this and there is a good reason for that….. Design is one issue with OLPC, but there are certainly major socio-political implications… I’ve written on that before here. I think… OLPC is a bad program and mainly exists as a promotional tool. Putting the same money into the Million-book project’s bookmobiles would be far more productive.

CLIR Report:
This report summarizes a review of 12 e-journal archiving programs from the perspective of concerns expressed by directors of academic libraries in North America. It uses a methodology comparable to the art of surveying land by “metes and bounds” in the era before precise measures and calibrated instruments were available. It argues that current license arrangements are inadequate to protect a library’s long-term interest in electronic journals, that individual libraries cannot address the preservation needs of e-journals on their own, that much scholarly e-literature is not covered by archiving arrangements, and that while e-journal archiving programs are becoming available, no comprehensive solution has emerged and large parts of e-literature go unprotected.

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I’ve not finished reading this yet, but it looks like it could be fairly interesting.

What’s an Encyclopedia?:
John Pederson asks:

You do understand that Wikipedia is less about building an encyclopedia and more about “collecting the sum of all human knowledge and making it available for free to everybody on earth”, right?

Um… aren’t those pretty much the same thing?

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yes… and no… an encyclopedia generally is about perspectives on knowledge, one of those perspectives is sort of this ‘objective framing’ of knowledge as existent outside of human minds. I think wikipedia closes some of that gap… It is very clear, much more clear to me than from a heavily edited print encyc, that wikipedia is closer to knowledge presented as a plurality of subjective processes of coming to know and its expression in the world Even if people are being projective in that way, I do not think that wikipedia objectifies the same way as print encycs and that is important.