The following information is used for educational purposes only.
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
GRalINt/TECH-The Future of Libraries: Short on Books, Long on Tech
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
The Future of Libraries: Short on Books, Long on Tech
Where are the books?
By Margaret Rock | June 10, 2013
This isn't your childhood library. The Hunt Library at North Carolina State University is beautiful. The main floor looks more like a sleek Apple showroom than a stuffy library. And instead of a Genius Bar, there's an Ask Me alcove, where you can get help on everything from laptops to flash drives.
Rather than the Dewey system, color-coded walls, stairs and elevators help you find not just books and research papers, but also media rooms, video game collections and even a 3-D printing lab to create plastic models. But the best part? Built with state funds and private donations, it's open to the public.
Welcome to the library of the future.
"There's a lot of talk about how libraries should change, but very few ideas of how they should be shaped," said Vaughn Tan, a member of the Harvard's University Library project. "Every library should figure out what they want to be and just do that."
Across the country, in the booming Bexar County in San Antonio, you'll see the same thing: groups of people huddle over gadgets instead of the card catalog, as food and coffee vendors dot the space. No stern librarian here to hush you into submission -- if you need to concentrate, "just enough" noise is better than absolute silence. One thing's missing at Bexar County's library -- the books. That's right -- a library with no books.
The nearly 5,000-square foot $1.5 million compound, dubbed the "BiblioTech," which opens this fall, will have 50 computer stations, along with 150 e-readers, 25 laptops and 25 tablets for residents to check out. It also plans to team up with local schools and give digital literacy courses to lure visitors.
Just like traditional libraries, you use a card to check out any of the 10,000 e-books, and you'll have two to three weeks to read them before they simply disappears from your e-reader -- no late fees, overdue fines. In fact, you'll never have to step foot into the library. Just borrow and return material from a computer or smartphone. But if you forget to return an e-reader, it'll deactivate it remotely to remind you.
The all-digital library was a practical solution to San Antonio's problem -- a library system that served the city population well, but left the growing county population in the dark. Leaning on digital helped BiblioTech pull together assets and collection quickly, rather than spend time and resources building up a physical book inventory. "For us this was just an obvious solution to a growing problem," said Laura Cole, project coordinator. County judge Nelson Wolff even said the Apple store look and feel inspired its long, gadget-topped workbench layout.
It's a high-stakes gamble for libraries. And nothing, it seems, is too sacred.
Leaning on Digital
When was the last time you stepped into a library? Probably, not in a while. After all, when you have Google, you can look up anything with a smartphone or tablet.
As library attendance declines, officials facing tough budget cutbacks see them as easy targets. In 2011, nearly half of all states reported a cut in funding for three years in a row. California, in particular, cut the budget in half from 2011 to 2012, while Texas slashed two-thirds from its State Library and Archives Commission.
You may think libraries a dying relic, but surprisingly, people still go there to use computers, often to look for work or beef up their tech skills. Small businesses and community organizations also use study rooms for office and meeting spaces. And according to a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation report, nearly half of Americans living below the poverty line access e-mail and the Web from libraries, highlighting how they're still an important staple in the community.
Technology crippled libraries, but they're also helping them keep apace, as more people pick up e-readers at the cost of physical books. In the past year, a quarter of Americans read an e-book, and as of November, about one-third reported owning an e-reader or tablet, according to a Pew survey.
For Bexar, a digital library was the most affordable way to service its residents, but the idea of abandoning books isn't without controversy. Reading an e-book or using a computer requires a different skill set than reading a novel and using pen and paper. "I think there's some value to the ability to hold a book in one's hand," said Maureen Sullivan, president of the American Library Association. "There's something very special about the tactical experience, a personal connection that happens there."
Filling up a library with e-books isn't simple, either. The ALA and the big six publishers are locked in a battle over the borrowing of e-books. Fearing technology could commoditize it, much like it did with music, publishers are intent to find a business model that gives it the most control, and the highest margins. That means some publishers flat-out refuse to sell e-books to libraries at any price, while those that do charge steep prices. After all, if you can borrow e-books for free, why would you buy them online? You probably won't.
For libraries, supplying e-books can cost up to three times more than physical books. And they say if publishers continue to withhold or sell e-books at such high prices, they won't be able to continue their core mission of serving the public.
Still, cities and counties are considering a bookless model, especially those in under-served neighborhoods. Digital libraries require less space, collections of research material are easier to pull together and consumers are looking for e-books. "It is a most exciting time for libraries," Sullivan said. "Books are still important, but libraries are also delivering content and experiences to their communities in new, very different and exciting ways."
Other Ways to Keep Apace
A shift is needed. To move libraries from places where you look up facts to those where you learn skills and engage in new experiences. Instead of "shushing" librarians and stilted study rooms, libraries often have integrated art galleries, coffee shops and even cafeterias. And some are even exploring the idea of a 21st century gathering space.
At Harvard, a group of students from the Graduate School of Design created a pop-up space, called the "Labrary," which shows how a library can move to digital yet still stay vital. Open since last November, the Labrary showcases projects ranging from edible telegrams made with graham crackers and 3-D icing printers to an online photo opera where visitors enter a murder mystery photo booth and experience "death by technology." The flexible, connected space also brings together workshops to serve the community.
Libraries are also pushing to offer spaces for kids to hang out, play games and learn in what's being called a "maker culture." Three years ago, the Chicago Public Library started its YouMedia program to engage kids with interactive learning programs like those focusing on laser cutters and 3-D printers. In Chattanooga, for example, a record-setting 1,200 people stopped by the library in one day to check out large-scale industrial models, 3-D scanners and an experimental 3-D videoconferencing system using Kinect cameras. And Kids in other libraries can do more than use gadgets -- they can learn soldering and circuitry to build them.
In some ways, libraries are doing what they've always done: adapting to technology, whether by collecting documents, storing records and videotapes or offering e-books and computer terminals. Today, they're under pressure to give more and create spaces that connect people to information and ideas.
Books won't fade, but with so many other mediums to explore, libraries, especially those with technology, can enhance skills. Access itself isn't enough: libraries need to harness the sheer overabundance of information in the digital age and become facilitators to help us sort through the avalanche. ♦
Source: www.mobiledia.com
The Future of Libraries: Short on Books, Long on Tech
Where are the books?
By Margaret Rock | June 10, 2013
This isn't your childhood library. The Hunt Library at North Carolina State University is beautiful. The main floor looks more like a sleek Apple showroom than a stuffy library. And instead of a Genius Bar, there's an Ask Me alcove, where you can get help on everything from laptops to flash drives.
Rather than the Dewey system, color-coded walls, stairs and elevators help you find not just books and research papers, but also media rooms, video game collections and even a 3-D printing lab to create plastic models. But the best part? Built with state funds and private donations, it's open to the public.
Welcome to the library of the future.
"There's a lot of talk about how libraries should change, but very few ideas of how they should be shaped," said Vaughn Tan, a member of the Harvard's University Library project. "Every library should figure out what they want to be and just do that."
Across the country, in the booming Bexar County in San Antonio, you'll see the same thing: groups of people huddle over gadgets instead of the card catalog, as food and coffee vendors dot the space. No stern librarian here to hush you into submission -- if you need to concentrate, "just enough" noise is better than absolute silence. One thing's missing at Bexar County's library -- the books. That's right -- a library with no books.
The nearly 5,000-square foot $1.5 million compound, dubbed the "BiblioTech," which opens this fall, will have 50 computer stations, along with 150 e-readers, 25 laptops and 25 tablets for residents to check out. It also plans to team up with local schools and give digital literacy courses to lure visitors.
Just like traditional libraries, you use a card to check out any of the 10,000 e-books, and you'll have two to three weeks to read them before they simply disappears from your e-reader -- no late fees, overdue fines. In fact, you'll never have to step foot into the library. Just borrow and return material from a computer or smartphone. But if you forget to return an e-reader, it'll deactivate it remotely to remind you.
The all-digital library was a practical solution to San Antonio's problem -- a library system that served the city population well, but left the growing county population in the dark. Leaning on digital helped BiblioTech pull together assets and collection quickly, rather than spend time and resources building up a physical book inventory. "For us this was just an obvious solution to a growing problem," said Laura Cole, project coordinator. County judge Nelson Wolff even said the Apple store look and feel inspired its long, gadget-topped workbench layout.
It's a high-stakes gamble for libraries. And nothing, it seems, is too sacred.
Leaning on Digital
When was the last time you stepped into a library? Probably, not in a while. After all, when you have Google, you can look up anything with a smartphone or tablet.
As library attendance declines, officials facing tough budget cutbacks see them as easy targets. In 2011, nearly half of all states reported a cut in funding for three years in a row. California, in particular, cut the budget in half from 2011 to 2012, while Texas slashed two-thirds from its State Library and Archives Commission.
You may think libraries a dying relic, but surprisingly, people still go there to use computers, often to look for work or beef up their tech skills. Small businesses and community organizations also use study rooms for office and meeting spaces. And according to a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation report, nearly half of Americans living below the poverty line access e-mail and the Web from libraries, highlighting how they're still an important staple in the community.
Technology crippled libraries, but they're also helping them keep apace, as more people pick up e-readers at the cost of physical books. In the past year, a quarter of Americans read an e-book, and as of November, about one-third reported owning an e-reader or tablet, according to a Pew survey.
For Bexar, a digital library was the most affordable way to service its residents, but the idea of abandoning books isn't without controversy. Reading an e-book or using a computer requires a different skill set than reading a novel and using pen and paper. "I think there's some value to the ability to hold a book in one's hand," said Maureen Sullivan, president of the American Library Association. "There's something very special about the tactical experience, a personal connection that happens there."
Filling up a library with e-books isn't simple, either. The ALA and the big six publishers are locked in a battle over the borrowing of e-books. Fearing technology could commoditize it, much like it did with music, publishers are intent to find a business model that gives it the most control, and the highest margins. That means some publishers flat-out refuse to sell e-books to libraries at any price, while those that do charge steep prices. After all, if you can borrow e-books for free, why would you buy them online? You probably won't.
For libraries, supplying e-books can cost up to three times more than physical books. And they say if publishers continue to withhold or sell e-books at such high prices, they won't be able to continue their core mission of serving the public.
Still, cities and counties are considering a bookless model, especially those in under-served neighborhoods. Digital libraries require less space, collections of research material are easier to pull together and consumers are looking for e-books. "It is a most exciting time for libraries," Sullivan said. "Books are still important, but libraries are also delivering content and experiences to their communities in new, very different and exciting ways."
Other Ways to Keep Apace
A shift is needed. To move libraries from places where you look up facts to those where you learn skills and engage in new experiences. Instead of "shushing" librarians and stilted study rooms, libraries often have integrated art galleries, coffee shops and even cafeterias. And some are even exploring the idea of a 21st century gathering space.
At Harvard, a group of students from the Graduate School of Design created a pop-up space, called the "Labrary," which shows how a library can move to digital yet still stay vital. Open since last November, the Labrary showcases projects ranging from edible telegrams made with graham crackers and 3-D icing printers to an online photo opera where visitors enter a murder mystery photo booth and experience "death by technology." The flexible, connected space also brings together workshops to serve the community.
Libraries are also pushing to offer spaces for kids to hang out, play games and learn in what's being called a "maker culture." Three years ago, the Chicago Public Library started its YouMedia program to engage kids with interactive learning programs like those focusing on laser cutters and 3-D printers. In Chattanooga, for example, a record-setting 1,200 people stopped by the library in one day to check out large-scale industrial models, 3-D scanners and an experimental 3-D videoconferencing system using Kinect cameras. And Kids in other libraries can do more than use gadgets -- they can learn soldering and circuitry to build them.
In some ways, libraries are doing what they've always done: adapting to technology, whether by collecting documents, storing records and videotapes or offering e-books and computer terminals. Today, they're under pressure to give more and create spaces that connect people to information and ideas.
Books won't fade, but with so many other mediums to explore, libraries, especially those with technology, can enhance skills. Access itself isn't enough: libraries need to harness the sheer overabundance of information in the digital age and become facilitators to help us sort through the avalanche. ♦
Source: www.mobiledia.com
GralINt/TECH-Technology kills a lot of industries, but why won't the fax machine just die?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Facing the Fax
Technology kills a lot of industries, but why won't the fax machine just die?
By Mobiledia / Kat Ascharya June 21, 2013
Getty Images
If Franz Kafka had written a “Seinfeld” scene, this would be it. After negotiating for two hours, the student loan provider promised to e-mail me the documents. I just needed to sign and send them back to end the nightmare.
“You take e-mail, right?” I asked.
“Actually, fax them to us,” she said. “The number’s at the top of the document.”
“Really? I can’t just e-mail?” I asked.
“We prefer faxes,” she said. “If we did everything over e-mail, we’d get an avalanche of messages. Things would get lost in the flurry.”
“I guess I can see that,” I conceded. I know technology often creates as many problems as it solves, but faxing is, well, annoying. I tried again. Couldn’t I, just this once, e-mail back the files? Pretty please?
She only laughed. “We get that all the time, too,” she said. “We can only take your document via fax — sorry.”
Sheeh! Who faxes, anymore? Well, it turns out, more people than I thought.
The Island of Unwanted Fax Machines
The fax machine plays a surprisingly central role in Japanese business life. Nearly 100 percent of all companies and 60 percent of private homes have fax machines, according to the Washington Post. And last year alone, they bought 1.7 million old-school, spool-and-dial fax machines.
In fact, the Japanese still send party invitations, bank statements and shopping orders through fax. It’s a must for business, often used in place of e-mail. And when the Fukushima Daiichi disaster hit, for example, operators told the government of its plan to injection seawater, not by phone, but via fax.
But why the fascination with a dinosaur?
Well, bureaucrats want the paper trail to keep track of orders and shipments, and others, like the Yakuza, the country’s crime syndicate, say they just don’t trust the security of electronic communication. It’s such a stalwart that even gang members tell off their enemies with a cursory fax.
Of course, companies have tried to modernize, but they say it’s consumers that resist — if they don’t offer a fax number, sales and revenues plummet. Yuichiro Sugahara, owner of a bento box delivery service, for example, tried to switch to online forms, but after a drastic drop in orders, he quickly changed back. He says his customers like to add very particular requests and fax lets them customize in a way that e-mail or online forms can’t do with convenience.
“There is still something in Japanese culture that demands the warm, personal feelings that you get with a handwritten fax,” he said.
Who Still Needs to Fax?
But why do businesses insist on fax when you can just scan, convert and e-mail? You can do it to anything and send it anywhere at any time. Fax machines are relics of the Stone Age, yet they still persist around the world.
Well, it turns out heavily-regulated industries — like banking, finance, law and healthcare — are one reason sales hold steady. And despite strong competition from cloud-sharing services like Dropbox and Google Drive, over 35 million all-in-one fax machines were shipped worldwide in 2011 and 2012, according to Gartner. And that doesn’t include single-function machines, which the firm stopped tracking years ago.
“There are still plenty of fax machines out there,” Ken Weilerstein, a Gartner analyst, told Fortune. “Declining in this space doesn’t mean disappearing by a long shot.”
Despite, or perhaps due to, the plethora of cloud-based services, there isn’t an industry standard for document sharing. “It would take a monumental effort by a large group of different people to all agree on a new standard,” said Kyle Flowers, director of marketing at j2 Global, which owns eFax, a service that lets you fax as PDFs.
It lives because, for a long time, it was the best and often only way to share documents quickly. Sure, there are faster and more convenient options, but no one standard has emerged to dethrone the king from its place atop the office machine kingdom. And to understand why, we have to look at its history.
A Surprisingly Long History
The facsimile transmission has had over 160 years to cement itself as a business-world standard. In 1843, Scottish inventor Alexander Bain received a patent for a method to “produce and regulate electric currents in electric printing and signal telegraphs” — in other words, the first fax transmission.
His work expanded on Samuel Morse’s telegraph — but instead of sending just letters and words, he transmitted graphics. Cobbled together with clock parts and telegraph machines, it looked nothing like today’s machines. A simple stylus, mounted on a pendulum, swung back and forth to “scan” the form from a flat metal surface. It was crude, to say the least.
But over the next hundred years, inventors improved on his machine. By 1955, the first radio-wave fax was sent across the continent. And by 1966, Xerox released the Magnafax — a smaller, faster and cheaper model. The landmark device sent letter-sized documents in a then lightning-fast six minutes. But more importantly, it connected to a phone line, making it easy to install and use.
By the late ’70s, companies like Sony flooded the market with even lighter and cheaper units, and soon the fax became a staple of both large and small businesses alike, hitting critical mass in the late ’80s.
And since its heyday, fax machines have evolved to add the latest technology and stay relevant. Digital lines sped up data rates. And Internet and e-mail services, like eFax, took out the bulky machines altogether. Now, software converts and sends documents to the farthest ends of the world.
But as the speed of business quickens — and workers become increasingly mobile, cobbling together an on-the-go office from laptops, tablets and smartphones — fax looks like it’s on its last legs.
After all, you can take a photo of a document and send it over e-mail. And scanner apps like JotNot Scanner, in free and paid versions for iOS, and CamScanner for Android, can double as de facto fax machines. They’ll convert any picture into a PDF. You just need good lighting for a clear version as clean as a paper copy.
Apps can also send and receive faxes. IFax, for iOS and Android, can open PDFs from e-mail, Dropbox or Evernote. You can also take a photo, convert it, add an electronic signature and send it back — with a level of security so high that even the sensitive medical industry can use it.
If you need a machine to receive faxes, the app can e-mail or send a push alert when a document arrives — no screeching, electronic howls. But the innovative twist on old technology will cost you: the app is free, but sending faxes costs from $1 to $3 for up to five pages, depending on where you live. It gets expensive for more.
You’ll need a phone number to receive faxes, too. And that requires an in-app subscription, which starts at $13 a month. It’s not cheap, but if you’re a BYOD worker or you simply want to give the heave-ho to your clunky, dust-collected fax machine, apps are the solution.
The Dodo of the iPhone Era
After my futile attempt at convenience, I sucked it up and signed and faxed the forms back to the student loan provider. I thought about signing up for iFax, but after my four-year-old nephew asked, “What’s a fax?” I knew I had to take a pilgrimage to an actual fax machine — if only to show him a relic that may disappear before he gets his first job. After all, the Smithsonian added old-style fax machines to its archives last year.
So we headed to Kinko’s, where they have one, lone fax machine for general use. My nephew, who’s a whiz with the iPad, was confused. Where’s touch screen? When I told him it used buttons, he started pressing all of them, making it beep and screech and sending the store manager scurrying our way.
I showed him how to fill out a cover sheet, stack the papers just right, and type in the number. Then, as he hit the green send button, he watched with equal parts suspicion and disbelief as it whirred, making sounds and spitting out pages one by one. For $2 a sheet, the 17-page document took longer to send — and cost more — than I’d like. And my nephew, clearly a member of the post-fax generation, was bored with it pretty quickly.
As we walked out, he still refused to believe it actually worked — that somewhere on the other side, another machine was printing out that same document, ready for an unseen chain of bureaucrats to process and file it, and, perhaps, to fax it to someone else. And so the cycle repeats.
He liked how it printed out a confirmation, though, and when we came home, he asked his mom if he could buy a fax machine for his birthday. It was “fun” to press buttons and “make the machine eat the paper,” he said. And that made me think: maybe thousands of Japanese businesses, bureaucrats and gangsters are right. Maybe there is something to having a tactile experience when interacting with technology. As everything becomes digitized — electronic vapor floating in the air between machines — there’s still something engaging about an actual machine and actual paper.
Maybe the humble fax machine will continue to stand sentinel along with iPads, 3-D printers and other wonders of the electronic age, content to gather dust until the rare fax causes it to hum and screech loudly again.
This article was written by Kat Ascharya and originally appeared on Mobiledia.
www.mobiledia.com/news/181378.html#ixzz2X4phaFUs
Source: www.time.com
Facing the Fax
Technology kills a lot of industries, but why won't the fax machine just die?
By Mobiledia / Kat Ascharya June 21, 2013
Getty Images
If Franz Kafka had written a “Seinfeld” scene, this would be it. After negotiating for two hours, the student loan provider promised to e-mail me the documents. I just needed to sign and send them back to end the nightmare.
“You take e-mail, right?” I asked.
“Actually, fax them to us,” she said. “The number’s at the top of the document.”
“Really? I can’t just e-mail?” I asked.
“We prefer faxes,” she said. “If we did everything over e-mail, we’d get an avalanche of messages. Things would get lost in the flurry.”
“I guess I can see that,” I conceded. I know technology often creates as many problems as it solves, but faxing is, well, annoying. I tried again. Couldn’t I, just this once, e-mail back the files? Pretty please?
She only laughed. “We get that all the time, too,” she said. “We can only take your document via fax — sorry.”
Sheeh! Who faxes, anymore? Well, it turns out, more people than I thought.
The Island of Unwanted Fax Machines
The fax machine plays a surprisingly central role in Japanese business life. Nearly 100 percent of all companies and 60 percent of private homes have fax machines, according to the Washington Post. And last year alone, they bought 1.7 million old-school, spool-and-dial fax machines.
In fact, the Japanese still send party invitations, bank statements and shopping orders through fax. It’s a must for business, often used in place of e-mail. And when the Fukushima Daiichi disaster hit, for example, operators told the government of its plan to injection seawater, not by phone, but via fax.
But why the fascination with a dinosaur?
Well, bureaucrats want the paper trail to keep track of orders and shipments, and others, like the Yakuza, the country’s crime syndicate, say they just don’t trust the security of electronic communication. It’s such a stalwart that even gang members tell off their enemies with a cursory fax.
Of course, companies have tried to modernize, but they say it’s consumers that resist — if they don’t offer a fax number, sales and revenues plummet. Yuichiro Sugahara, owner of a bento box delivery service, for example, tried to switch to online forms, but after a drastic drop in orders, he quickly changed back. He says his customers like to add very particular requests and fax lets them customize in a way that e-mail or online forms can’t do with convenience.
“There is still something in Japanese culture that demands the warm, personal feelings that you get with a handwritten fax,” he said.
Who Still Needs to Fax?
But why do businesses insist on fax when you can just scan, convert and e-mail? You can do it to anything and send it anywhere at any time. Fax machines are relics of the Stone Age, yet they still persist around the world.
Well, it turns out heavily-regulated industries — like banking, finance, law and healthcare — are one reason sales hold steady. And despite strong competition from cloud-sharing services like Dropbox and Google Drive, over 35 million all-in-one fax machines were shipped worldwide in 2011 and 2012, according to Gartner. And that doesn’t include single-function machines, which the firm stopped tracking years ago.
“There are still plenty of fax machines out there,” Ken Weilerstein, a Gartner analyst, told Fortune. “Declining in this space doesn’t mean disappearing by a long shot.”
Despite, or perhaps due to, the plethora of cloud-based services, there isn’t an industry standard for document sharing. “It would take a monumental effort by a large group of different people to all agree on a new standard,” said Kyle Flowers, director of marketing at j2 Global, which owns eFax, a service that lets you fax as PDFs.
It lives because, for a long time, it was the best and often only way to share documents quickly. Sure, there are faster and more convenient options, but no one standard has emerged to dethrone the king from its place atop the office machine kingdom. And to understand why, we have to look at its history.
A Surprisingly Long History
The facsimile transmission has had over 160 years to cement itself as a business-world standard. In 1843, Scottish inventor Alexander Bain received a patent for a method to “produce and regulate electric currents in electric printing and signal telegraphs” — in other words, the first fax transmission.
His work expanded on Samuel Morse’s telegraph — but instead of sending just letters and words, he transmitted graphics. Cobbled together with clock parts and telegraph machines, it looked nothing like today’s machines. A simple stylus, mounted on a pendulum, swung back and forth to “scan” the form from a flat metal surface. It was crude, to say the least.
But over the next hundred years, inventors improved on his machine. By 1955, the first radio-wave fax was sent across the continent. And by 1966, Xerox released the Magnafax — a smaller, faster and cheaper model. The landmark device sent letter-sized documents in a then lightning-fast six minutes. But more importantly, it connected to a phone line, making it easy to install and use.
By the late ’70s, companies like Sony flooded the market with even lighter and cheaper units, and soon the fax became a staple of both large and small businesses alike, hitting critical mass in the late ’80s.
And since its heyday, fax machines have evolved to add the latest technology and stay relevant. Digital lines sped up data rates. And Internet and e-mail services, like eFax, took out the bulky machines altogether. Now, software converts and sends documents to the farthest ends of the world.
But as the speed of business quickens — and workers become increasingly mobile, cobbling together an on-the-go office from laptops, tablets and smartphones — fax looks like it’s on its last legs.
After all, you can take a photo of a document and send it over e-mail. And scanner apps like JotNot Scanner, in free and paid versions for iOS, and CamScanner for Android, can double as de facto fax machines. They’ll convert any picture into a PDF. You just need good lighting for a clear version as clean as a paper copy.
Apps can also send and receive faxes. IFax, for iOS and Android, can open PDFs from e-mail, Dropbox or Evernote. You can also take a photo, convert it, add an electronic signature and send it back — with a level of security so high that even the sensitive medical industry can use it.
If you need a machine to receive faxes, the app can e-mail or send a push alert when a document arrives — no screeching, electronic howls. But the innovative twist on old technology will cost you: the app is free, but sending faxes costs from $1 to $3 for up to five pages, depending on where you live. It gets expensive for more.
You’ll need a phone number to receive faxes, too. And that requires an in-app subscription, which starts at $13 a month. It’s not cheap, but if you’re a BYOD worker or you simply want to give the heave-ho to your clunky, dust-collected fax machine, apps are the solution.
The Dodo of the iPhone Era
After my futile attempt at convenience, I sucked it up and signed and faxed the forms back to the student loan provider. I thought about signing up for iFax, but after my four-year-old nephew asked, “What’s a fax?” I knew I had to take a pilgrimage to an actual fax machine — if only to show him a relic that may disappear before he gets his first job. After all, the Smithsonian added old-style fax machines to its archives last year.
So we headed to Kinko’s, where they have one, lone fax machine for general use. My nephew, who’s a whiz with the iPad, was confused. Where’s touch screen? When I told him it used buttons, he started pressing all of them, making it beep and screech and sending the store manager scurrying our way.
I showed him how to fill out a cover sheet, stack the papers just right, and type in the number. Then, as he hit the green send button, he watched with equal parts suspicion and disbelief as it whirred, making sounds and spitting out pages one by one. For $2 a sheet, the 17-page document took longer to send — and cost more — than I’d like. And my nephew, clearly a member of the post-fax generation, was bored with it pretty quickly.
As we walked out, he still refused to believe it actually worked — that somewhere on the other side, another machine was printing out that same document, ready for an unseen chain of bureaucrats to process and file it, and, perhaps, to fax it to someone else. And so the cycle repeats.
He liked how it printed out a confirmation, though, and when we came home, he asked his mom if he could buy a fax machine for his birthday. It was “fun” to press buttons and “make the machine eat the paper,” he said. And that made me think: maybe thousands of Japanese businesses, bureaucrats and gangsters are right. Maybe there is something to having a tactile experience when interacting with technology. As everything becomes digitized — electronic vapor floating in the air between machines — there’s still something engaging about an actual machine and actual paper.
Maybe the humble fax machine will continue to stand sentinel along with iPads, 3-D printers and other wonders of the electronic age, content to gather dust until the rare fax causes it to hum and screech loudly again.
This article was written by Kat Ascharya and originally appeared on Mobiledia.
www.mobiledia.com/news/181378.html#ixzz2X4phaFUs
Source: www.time.com
Saturday, June 22, 2013
GRalInt/TECH-The Brazil Riots: How Does Technology Fuel The Spark?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Social Media Marketing
The Brazil Riots: How Does Technology Fuel The Spark?
Kathryn Cave
Company IDG Connect
June 19 2013
As Brazil’s riots reach the third day, Kathryn Cave speaks to IT student Gabriel Cogo on the ground in Brazil
“Many videos are making jokes [about the riots],” Gabriel Cogo tells me: “one of my favourites is the comparison of the football star Neymar kicking and a college student kicking a tear gas bomb thrown at him by a cop. The footage shows the bomb. The voiceover [in Portuguese] is from a famous football commentator describing a goal by Neymar."
Over the last few years there have been a range of mass displays of protest from the political upheaval of the Arab Spring, to the waves of looting in the 2011 London riots and now mass disaffection in Brazil. And each new eruption of public unhappiness reveals different cultural preoccupation and approaches to technology, as Cogo translates one of the protesters' slogans: “get out of the TV and come to the internet where the truth is”.
The catalyst for this uprising was a bus fare increase in most state capitals, which as Cogo explains “makes it very expensive for most low/middle class workers and students.” This meant taking two buses per day could equal roughly 25% of many monthly incomes. And the protest quickly escalated to cover mass public outcry about poverty in the face of the sheer levels of investment in the 2014 World Cup.
“The Brazilia Stadium alone is costing more than 700 million USD. This is because most government constructions tend to be overpriced, with politicians being paid ‘in the dark,’” Cogo tells me, “99% of the protests are peaceful, mostly involving college students. [However] people of all ages and classes are participating. There have been some problems with abusive cops, but mostly because a small number of protesters just want to destroy [things] and create mess.”
“In the beginning, most of the media was against the protest and the politicians didn't take it seriously, but now even President Dilma Rousseff has noticed that the people are unsatisfied and aren’t going to put up with this anymore.”
Yesterday following the first wave of rioting, Rousseff - who began her political career in the 1960s as a Marxist guerrilla - told the media: "Brazil woke up stronger today. The size of yesterday's demonstrations shows the energy of our democracy, the strength of the voice of the streets and the civility of our population."
Like most modern protests this rioting has been fuelled by technology. In London 2011, a protest without political motivation, which largely involved surges of young people rampaging through the streets nicking consumer materials from unguarded shops, there was talk of shutting down BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) as that is how the kids were communicating.
This made me wonder if in Brazil, new free IM services like WhatsApp were being widely used. Cogo answers: “[whilst] there has been a great deal of participation on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs and websites, I haven't seen WhatsApp having a major role.”
“Many smartphones are being used to share what is going on at the moment. [And there are] many videos showing police behaviour on YouTube,” but citizen journalism aside, involvement here seems to take an almost ‘professional communication’ approach.
“Many Brazilians have been putting their opinions directly on the internet, and they have been largely shared,” Cogo explains, and examples like: “No, I’m not going to the World Cup” are incredibly slick, well put together and professional, utilising a combination of humour, direct personal presentation and nicely curated footage to tell a compelling story.
The last public protest in Brazil was in 1992, this means “the internet has definitely been instrumental,” Cogo tell me. “Most of the activity is organised through Facebook and Twitter. Blogs and other social media are used to spread information that isn't being made available in the general media.”
“There have also been a lot of protests against the biggest media groups in Brazil,” Cogo continues “especially Globo because of its alleged support of the government for so many years now. Globo is the biggest media group in Brazil, owner of practically every big football tournament in the country, including the Confederations Cup and the World Cup. It is also one of the many interested in profiting from the World Cup. This means there can be a conflict of interest with criticising the government so close to the event.” Yet activists are also using conventional media to maximise their publicity. Globo itself reported “protesters were photoshopping celebrity’s photos to say they were supporting the riot.”
“How do you feel about events?” I ask Cogo, “Personally I'm very proud,” he replies. “For some time there has been a culture in which Brazilians accept public theft without any political consciousness, but after these events many Brazilians are feeling a new sense of patriotism and pride.”
“In my personal opinion, one of the greatest problems in this country is that the vote is obligatory. This means there's a large part of the population without a good education that ‘sells’ its votes for small rewards. One of the biggest pieces of government propagandas is the ‘Bolsa-Família’; in a rough translation this means something like ‘Family Aid’ and gives about [direct income] per each child to poor families. This project alone reaches 16 million Brazilians, so they tend to vote towards this type of way to do politics, unaware of the several problems regarding the public administration. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
These events are a world apart from the London riots two years’ ago, both in the texture of the protest and in the way technology is being used to galvanise action. Yet from the Woolwich attack in the UK last month, where the perpetrators clearly hoped to start a riot but failed, to the recent upheavals in Sweden and Turkey, people are using more and more ways to communicate their grievances and thus encourage a body of like-minded people to join them.
There are two sides to this of course. On the one hand, as Cogo concludes for Brazil’s specific grievances: “It’s important that the rest of the world sees the changes that we're trying to do here.” On the other, the danger, as identified by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in their book ‘The New Digital Age’, is in the rise of wide scale “revolutionary tourists,” these are the online activists of the future who will "spend all day crawling the web for online protests to join…just for the thrill of it."
Please drop Kathryn a note if you would like to contribute information from the ground in Brazil or other parts of LatAm.
Source: www.idgconnect.com
Social Media Marketing
The Brazil Riots: How Does Technology Fuel The Spark?
Kathryn Cave
Company IDG Connect
June 19 2013
As Brazil’s riots reach the third day, Kathryn Cave speaks to IT student Gabriel Cogo on the ground in Brazil
“Many videos are making jokes [about the riots],” Gabriel Cogo tells me: “one of my favourites is the comparison of the football star Neymar kicking and a college student kicking a tear gas bomb thrown at him by a cop. The footage shows the bomb. The voiceover [in Portuguese] is from a famous football commentator describing a goal by Neymar."
Over the last few years there have been a range of mass displays of protest from the political upheaval of the Arab Spring, to the waves of looting in the 2011 London riots and now mass disaffection in Brazil. And each new eruption of public unhappiness reveals different cultural preoccupation and approaches to technology, as Cogo translates one of the protesters' slogans: “get out of the TV and come to the internet where the truth is”.
The catalyst for this uprising was a bus fare increase in most state capitals, which as Cogo explains “makes it very expensive for most low/middle class workers and students.” This meant taking two buses per day could equal roughly 25% of many monthly incomes. And the protest quickly escalated to cover mass public outcry about poverty in the face of the sheer levels of investment in the 2014 World Cup.
“The Brazilia Stadium alone is costing more than 700 million USD. This is because most government constructions tend to be overpriced, with politicians being paid ‘in the dark,’” Cogo tells me, “99% of the protests are peaceful, mostly involving college students. [However] people of all ages and classes are participating. There have been some problems with abusive cops, but mostly because a small number of protesters just want to destroy [things] and create mess.”
“In the beginning, most of the media was against the protest and the politicians didn't take it seriously, but now even President Dilma Rousseff has noticed that the people are unsatisfied and aren’t going to put up with this anymore.”
Yesterday following the first wave of rioting, Rousseff - who began her political career in the 1960s as a Marxist guerrilla - told the media: "Brazil woke up stronger today. The size of yesterday's demonstrations shows the energy of our democracy, the strength of the voice of the streets and the civility of our population."
Like most modern protests this rioting has been fuelled by technology. In London 2011, a protest without political motivation, which largely involved surges of young people rampaging through the streets nicking consumer materials from unguarded shops, there was talk of shutting down BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) as that is how the kids were communicating.
This made me wonder if in Brazil, new free IM services like WhatsApp were being widely used. Cogo answers: “[whilst] there has been a great deal of participation on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs and websites, I haven't seen WhatsApp having a major role.”
“Many smartphones are being used to share what is going on at the moment. [And there are] many videos showing police behaviour on YouTube,” but citizen journalism aside, involvement here seems to take an almost ‘professional communication’ approach.
“Many Brazilians have been putting their opinions directly on the internet, and they have been largely shared,” Cogo explains, and examples like: “No, I’m not going to the World Cup” are incredibly slick, well put together and professional, utilising a combination of humour, direct personal presentation and nicely curated footage to tell a compelling story.
The last public protest in Brazil was in 1992, this means “the internet has definitely been instrumental,” Cogo tell me. “Most of the activity is organised through Facebook and Twitter. Blogs and other social media are used to spread information that isn't being made available in the general media.”
“There have also been a lot of protests against the biggest media groups in Brazil,” Cogo continues “especially Globo because of its alleged support of the government for so many years now. Globo is the biggest media group in Brazil, owner of practically every big football tournament in the country, including the Confederations Cup and the World Cup. It is also one of the many interested in profiting from the World Cup. This means there can be a conflict of interest with criticising the government so close to the event.” Yet activists are also using conventional media to maximise their publicity. Globo itself reported “protesters were photoshopping celebrity’s photos to say they were supporting the riot.”
“How do you feel about events?” I ask Cogo, “Personally I'm very proud,” he replies. “For some time there has been a culture in which Brazilians accept public theft without any political consciousness, but after these events many Brazilians are feeling a new sense of patriotism and pride.”
“In my personal opinion, one of the greatest problems in this country is that the vote is obligatory. This means there's a large part of the population without a good education that ‘sells’ its votes for small rewards. One of the biggest pieces of government propagandas is the ‘Bolsa-Família’; in a rough translation this means something like ‘Family Aid’ and gives about [direct income] per each child to poor families. This project alone reaches 16 million Brazilians, so they tend to vote towards this type of way to do politics, unaware of the several problems regarding the public administration. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
These events are a world apart from the London riots two years’ ago, both in the texture of the protest and in the way technology is being used to galvanise action. Yet from the Woolwich attack in the UK last month, where the perpetrators clearly hoped to start a riot but failed, to the recent upheavals in Sweden and Turkey, people are using more and more ways to communicate their grievances and thus encourage a body of like-minded people to join them.
There are two sides to this of course. On the one hand, as Cogo concludes for Brazil’s specific grievances: “It’s important that the rest of the world sees the changes that we're trying to do here.” On the other, the danger, as identified by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in their book ‘The New Digital Age’, is in the rise of wide scale “revolutionary tourists,” these are the online activists of the future who will "spend all day crawling the web for online protests to join…just for the thrill of it."
Please drop Kathryn a note if you would like to contribute information from the ground in Brazil or other parts of LatAm.
Source: www.idgconnect.com
GRAlInt/TECH-South Africa: Why Have All the Rural Tech Projects Failed?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
South Africa: Why Have All the Rural Tech Projects Failed?
Kathryn Cave
June 21 2013
High profile initiatives like Microsoft’s digital villages died a death years’ ago, whilst large scale project, Gauteng online finally petered out this week. Kathryn Cave investigates what is really going on with South Africa’s rural tech initiatives
On 9th March 1997 Bill Gates visited the sprawling black township of Soweto, an area catapulted into world consciousness 20 years’ prior by its mass uprising. This township, above all, symbolised Apartheid, spliced opportunities and extreme poverty. When Gates visited in ’97 the Spokesman Review reported that in Soweto “a computer could cost as much as a house” and few people would think of going online.
This was South Africa’s first free-access “digital village,” an initiative orchestrated by Microsoft in conjunction with local computer companies and US development organisation, Africare. The idea was that by providing a $100,000 computer package, housed in the Chiawelo Community Center, it would give the township’s poor residents a link to the information age. As part of the grand opening, Gates observed a class from the local Elsie Ngidi primary school playing with computers for the first time, before telling a crowd of 200: “Soweto is a milestone. There are major decisions ahead about whether technology will leave the developing world behind. This is to close the gap.”
Today there is little evidence of the “digital villages” across South Africa. “[They] worked well for a while but collapsed as soon as the sponsors stopped funding the activities – the community had failed to make the use of technology self-sustaining.” Adrian Schofield, Vice Chairman, Africa ICT Alliance tells me: “What should have been a model for others to follow became a failure. This is a common outcome, where there is no long-term follow through.”
The same is true of numerous online projects to get rural communities connected. The Centre for Appropriate Rural Technology (C.A.R.T) has not issued any news since 2010. The Independent Online reported on Wednesday that “R1bn later, Gauteng Online is no more.” While the Computers for Schools project, which is massive across other parts of Africa, is simply not to be found in SA.
In fact many aid agencies often bypass South Africa in favour of more receptive markets. Schofield stresses: “South Africa is losing out – to Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana, Rwanda… losing out to countries where there is an appreciation that grasping the opportunities afforded by adopting technology is the only way to grow their economies and become an attractive investment destination.”
Sub-Saharan Problems & Mass Scale Government Failure
Last year, Douglas Cohen presented stats that stated 89% of the people of Limpopo live in rural areas and quoted: “A woman leaving school in Limpopo stands a one in eight chance of ever getting a job.” And the harsh truth is across sub-Saharan Africa, 91% of households are off the electricity grid entirely, meaning that the majority don’t have access to proper light in the evenings, let alone the power for laptops and other technological equipment.
“Very often, technology in schools fails because there is no (reliable) electricity or network,” explains Schofield “the teachers are not sufficiently skilled, the equipment is kept locked away (or is stolen if not locked away). Companies and NGOs continue to seek opportunities to make technology and training available to communities, but it is more scratching the surface than building a foundation.”
At the root Schofield tells me: “South Africa is a divided country, working against itself. For every community-building initiative, there is a group decrying it or even sabotaging it. Corruption is rife and the nation’s infrastructure (electricity, water, roads, railways, government buildings) is decaying from lack of investment and maintenance.”
“A succession of ineffective Ministers of Communications has meant the failure of our network infrastructure to be as accessible and affordable as it should be,” Schofield continues. This includes last week’s news that the Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry has called for current communications minister Dina Pule to be suspended in the light of a number of large scale accusations, including the channelling of R6m of sponsorship funds for the ICT Indaba in Cape Town in 2012 to her alleged boyfriend.
“The integrity of the communications ministry is critical to the economic wellbeing of the country and must be fiercely protected against corruption, profiteering and undue influence,” Viola Manuel, chamber executive director said in a statement. Yet the entire system appears to suffer from internal corrosion: “The National Development Plan (NDP) launched this year offered hope,” says Schofield “but has already been attacked from within the government that produced it.”
NDP provides a blueprint for eliminating poverty and reducing inequality in South Africa by 2030. As part of its mission it identifies the key constraints to faster growth and presents a clear roadmap to a more inclusive economy. Yet in May, Deputy Public Works Minister Jeremy Cronin said, in a public debate to the National Planning Commissioner, that the plan was fatally flawed and impossible to implement.
The National ICT Plan is another big dream for South African IT, yet again Schofield is sceptical: “[This] will be another five years in the making. Nearly every government plan talks about what will be achieved at the end of 10, 20, 40 years – none of them is held to account for steps along the way.”
“[South Africa is] small on delivery, poor at executing the plans, lousy at monitoring progress and ironing out the problems that arise along the way,” Schofield continues. “We are bad at taking the seedlings planted by social responsibility programmes and nurturing them into full growth and harvest. We are bad at applying funds in productive and accountable ways. Too many public servants see themselves as having rights and no responsibilities, serving the ‘ruling party’ rather than the citizens.”
Take the Universal Service and Access Agency (USAASA) for example. This State Owned Entity of government aims to ensure that "every man, woman and child whether living in the remote areas of the Kalahari or in urban areas of Gauteng will be able to connect, speak, explore and study using ICT's.” Yet it is sitting on billions of Rands that it does not know how to spend… and what has been spent has achieved little.
Pistorius, South Africa & the Big Image Problem
Many people believe that since the fall of Apartheid itself, South Africa has suffered from a monumental image problem. This has led the country to bluster and postulate more than most, heightening both internal and external tensions. In one advancement of this theory, the Guardian Weekend Magazine ran an article in May: “Oscar Pistorius: the end of the rainbow” which argued that “Oscar Pistorius was more than a national hero. His success came to symbolise South Africa's triumph over apartheid. Then he shot his girlfriend and left the nation's self-image in tatters.”
It was an interesting hypothesis and quoted journalist, Gerald Imray who wrote: "During his Olympic preparations in Italy, Pistorius pulled out his cellphone to show me pictures of his bleeding leg stumps, rubbed raw from the friction of pounding around the track on his blades… Until that moment, I hadn't fully realised what Pistorius went through every time he slipped on his prosthetic blades to compete or train. Not many people had, I guess."
At this point, Jonny Steinberg, in the Guardian, drew national parallels: “So, too, with South Africa. We are no miracle. We, too, have had to grind our stumps raw. We, too, have had to bury our shame. And so, when we heard what Oscar had done, we felt something like deja vu. As if we always knew that his story was not quite right.” This is an interesting point, if perhaps excessive, but really does ram home the message that whilst image is important to any country, it probably is even more so to South Africa.
And this appears to be a large part of the problem for rural schemes in South Africa: “There are no ‘big initiatives’ [for driving connectivity to the rural area, at present],” Schofield tells me: “They have faded into obscurity for all the wrong reasons. South Africa is big on policy and plans, big on subscribing to the global ‘good stuff’ and being seen on the right platforms, hosting the ‘world events’. We use imported skills and resources to do the big ‘image’ projects.”
Yet for everything that is wrong, Schofield does see clear potential for the country: “We still have the chance to stop the rot – there are pockets of excellence providing hope for the future. The ‘big initiative’ of the Square Kilometre Array will focus attention on our infrastructure and the skills to support it. R & D facilities are improving, technology ‘hubs’ are appearing and access to education and training through mobile devices is spreading.”
It seems ironic, that it might take a project which looks into space to solve some of the digital issues on the ground in rural South Africa. But really it doesn’t matter how it is done… as long as rural communities don’t have to wait another 16 years’ for the next high image, Microsoft driven initiative.
Kathryn Cave, Editor, IDG Connect
Source: www.igdconnect.com
South Africa: Why Have All the Rural Tech Projects Failed?
Kathryn Cave
June 21 2013
High profile initiatives like Microsoft’s digital villages died a death years’ ago, whilst large scale project, Gauteng online finally petered out this week. Kathryn Cave investigates what is really going on with South Africa’s rural tech initiatives
On 9th March 1997 Bill Gates visited the sprawling black township of Soweto, an area catapulted into world consciousness 20 years’ prior by its mass uprising. This township, above all, symbolised Apartheid, spliced opportunities and extreme poverty. When Gates visited in ’97 the Spokesman Review reported that in Soweto “a computer could cost as much as a house” and few people would think of going online.
This was South Africa’s first free-access “digital village,” an initiative orchestrated by Microsoft in conjunction with local computer companies and US development organisation, Africare. The idea was that by providing a $100,000 computer package, housed in the Chiawelo Community Center, it would give the township’s poor residents a link to the information age. As part of the grand opening, Gates observed a class from the local Elsie Ngidi primary school playing with computers for the first time, before telling a crowd of 200: “Soweto is a milestone. There are major decisions ahead about whether technology will leave the developing world behind. This is to close the gap.”
Today there is little evidence of the “digital villages” across South Africa. “[They] worked well for a while but collapsed as soon as the sponsors stopped funding the activities – the community had failed to make the use of technology self-sustaining.” Adrian Schofield, Vice Chairman, Africa ICT Alliance tells me: “What should have been a model for others to follow became a failure. This is a common outcome, where there is no long-term follow through.”
The same is true of numerous online projects to get rural communities connected. The Centre for Appropriate Rural Technology (C.A.R.T) has not issued any news since 2010. The Independent Online reported on Wednesday that “R1bn later, Gauteng Online is no more.” While the Computers for Schools project, which is massive across other parts of Africa, is simply not to be found in SA.
In fact many aid agencies often bypass South Africa in favour of more receptive markets. Schofield stresses: “South Africa is losing out – to Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana, Rwanda… losing out to countries where there is an appreciation that grasping the opportunities afforded by adopting technology is the only way to grow their economies and become an attractive investment destination.”
Sub-Saharan Problems & Mass Scale Government Failure
Last year, Douglas Cohen presented stats that stated 89% of the people of Limpopo live in rural areas and quoted: “A woman leaving school in Limpopo stands a one in eight chance of ever getting a job.” And the harsh truth is across sub-Saharan Africa, 91% of households are off the electricity grid entirely, meaning that the majority don’t have access to proper light in the evenings, let alone the power for laptops and other technological equipment.
“Very often, technology in schools fails because there is no (reliable) electricity or network,” explains Schofield “the teachers are not sufficiently skilled, the equipment is kept locked away (or is stolen if not locked away). Companies and NGOs continue to seek opportunities to make technology and training available to communities, but it is more scratching the surface than building a foundation.”
At the root Schofield tells me: “South Africa is a divided country, working against itself. For every community-building initiative, there is a group decrying it or even sabotaging it. Corruption is rife and the nation’s infrastructure (electricity, water, roads, railways, government buildings) is decaying from lack of investment and maintenance.”
“A succession of ineffective Ministers of Communications has meant the failure of our network infrastructure to be as accessible and affordable as it should be,” Schofield continues. This includes last week’s news that the Cape Chamber of Commerce and Industry has called for current communications minister Dina Pule to be suspended in the light of a number of large scale accusations, including the channelling of R6m of sponsorship funds for the ICT Indaba in Cape Town in 2012 to her alleged boyfriend.
“The integrity of the communications ministry is critical to the economic wellbeing of the country and must be fiercely protected against corruption, profiteering and undue influence,” Viola Manuel, chamber executive director said in a statement. Yet the entire system appears to suffer from internal corrosion: “The National Development Plan (NDP) launched this year offered hope,” says Schofield “but has already been attacked from within the government that produced it.”
NDP provides a blueprint for eliminating poverty and reducing inequality in South Africa by 2030. As part of its mission it identifies the key constraints to faster growth and presents a clear roadmap to a more inclusive economy. Yet in May, Deputy Public Works Minister Jeremy Cronin said, in a public debate to the National Planning Commissioner, that the plan was fatally flawed and impossible to implement.
The National ICT Plan is another big dream for South African IT, yet again Schofield is sceptical: “[This] will be another five years in the making. Nearly every government plan talks about what will be achieved at the end of 10, 20, 40 years – none of them is held to account for steps along the way.”
“[South Africa is] small on delivery, poor at executing the plans, lousy at monitoring progress and ironing out the problems that arise along the way,” Schofield continues. “We are bad at taking the seedlings planted by social responsibility programmes and nurturing them into full growth and harvest. We are bad at applying funds in productive and accountable ways. Too many public servants see themselves as having rights and no responsibilities, serving the ‘ruling party’ rather than the citizens.”
Take the Universal Service and Access Agency (USAASA) for example. This State Owned Entity of government aims to ensure that "every man, woman and child whether living in the remote areas of the Kalahari or in urban areas of Gauteng will be able to connect, speak, explore and study using ICT's.” Yet it is sitting on billions of Rands that it does not know how to spend… and what has been spent has achieved little.
Pistorius, South Africa & the Big Image Problem
Many people believe that since the fall of Apartheid itself, South Africa has suffered from a monumental image problem. This has led the country to bluster and postulate more than most, heightening both internal and external tensions. In one advancement of this theory, the Guardian Weekend Magazine ran an article in May: “Oscar Pistorius: the end of the rainbow” which argued that “Oscar Pistorius was more than a national hero. His success came to symbolise South Africa's triumph over apartheid. Then he shot his girlfriend and left the nation's self-image in tatters.”
It was an interesting hypothesis and quoted journalist, Gerald Imray who wrote: "During his Olympic preparations in Italy, Pistorius pulled out his cellphone to show me pictures of his bleeding leg stumps, rubbed raw from the friction of pounding around the track on his blades… Until that moment, I hadn't fully realised what Pistorius went through every time he slipped on his prosthetic blades to compete or train. Not many people had, I guess."
At this point, Jonny Steinberg, in the Guardian, drew national parallels: “So, too, with South Africa. We are no miracle. We, too, have had to grind our stumps raw. We, too, have had to bury our shame. And so, when we heard what Oscar had done, we felt something like deja vu. As if we always knew that his story was not quite right.” This is an interesting point, if perhaps excessive, but really does ram home the message that whilst image is important to any country, it probably is even more so to South Africa.
And this appears to be a large part of the problem for rural schemes in South Africa: “There are no ‘big initiatives’ [for driving connectivity to the rural area, at present],” Schofield tells me: “They have faded into obscurity for all the wrong reasons. South Africa is big on policy and plans, big on subscribing to the global ‘good stuff’ and being seen on the right platforms, hosting the ‘world events’. We use imported skills and resources to do the big ‘image’ projects.”
Yet for everything that is wrong, Schofield does see clear potential for the country: “We still have the chance to stop the rot – there are pockets of excellence providing hope for the future. The ‘big initiative’ of the Square Kilometre Array will focus attention on our infrastructure and the skills to support it. R & D facilities are improving, technology ‘hubs’ are appearing and access to education and training through mobile devices is spreading.”
It seems ironic, that it might take a project which looks into space to solve some of the digital issues on the ground in rural South Africa. But really it doesn’t matter how it is done… as long as rural communities don’t have to wait another 16 years’ for the next high image, Microsoft driven initiative.
Kathryn Cave, Editor, IDG Connect
Source: www.igdconnect.com
GRalInt-TECH-TED Talks-Juliana Rotich: Meet BRCK, Internet access built for Africa
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
Living in Africa is to be on the edge,metaphorically, and quite literally when you think about connectivity before 2008.Though many human intellectual and technological leaps had happened in Europe and the rest of the world,but Africa was sort of cut off.And that changed, first with ships when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and also the Industrial Revolution.And now we've got the digital revolution.These revolutions have not been evenly distributed across continents and nations.Never have been.
Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect Africa to the rest of the world.What I find amazing is that Africa is transcending its geography problem.Africa is connecting to the rest of the world and within itself.The connectivity situation has improved greatly,but some barriers remain.It is with this context that Ushahidi came to be.
In 2008, one of the problems that we faced was lack of information flow.There was a media blackout in 2008,when there was post-election violence in Kenya.It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time.So we came together and we created software called Ushahidi.And Ushahidi means "testimony" or "witness" in Swahili.I'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators.This is David and Erik.I call them brothers from another mother.Clearly I have a German mother somewhere.And we worked together first with building and growing Ushahidi.And the idea of the software was to gather information from SMS, email and web, and put a map so that you could see what was happening where,and you could visualize that data.And after that initial prototype,we set out to make free and open-source software so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did.
All the while, we also wanted to give back to the local tech community that helped us grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days.And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi,an actual physical space where we could collaborate,and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya.We did that with the support of different organizations like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network.
And we were able to grow this software footprint,and a few years later it became very useful software,and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti where citizens could indicate where they are and what their needs were,and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis and the tsunami in Japan.Now, this year the Internet turns 20,and Ushahidi turned five.
Ushahidi is not only the software that we made.It is the team, and it's also the community that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee.We did not imagine that there would be this many maps around the world.There are crisis maps, election maps, corruption maps,and even environmental monitoring crowd maps.We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya and that it has some use to people around the world trying to figure out the different issues that they're dealing with.There is more that we're doing to explore this idea of collective intelligence, that I, as a citizen,if I share the information with whatever device that I have,could inform you about what is going on,and that if you do the same, we can have a bigger picture of what's going on.
I moved back to Kenya in 2011.Erik moved in 2010.Very different reality. I used to live in Chicago where there was abundant Internet access.I had never had to deal with a blackout.And in Kenya, it's a very different reality,and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress and the digital revolution is the electricity problem.The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this can be, let's just say very annoying.Blackouts are not fun.Imagine sitting down to start working, and all of a sudden the power goes out,your Internet connection goes down with it,so you have to figure out, okay, now, where's the modem,how do I switch back?And then, guess what? You have to deal with it again.Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now,and other parts of Africa.
The other problem that we're facing is that communication costs are also still a challenge.It costs me five Kenyan shillings,or .06 USD to call the U.S., Canada or China.Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria?Thirty Kenyan shillings. That's six times the cost to connect within Africa.And also, when traveling within Africa,you've got different settings for different mobile providers.This is the reality that we deal with.
So we've got a joke in Ushahidi where we say, "If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere."[Most use technology to define the function. We use function to drive the technology.]What if we could overcome the problem of unreliable Internet and electricity and reduce the cost of connection?Could we leverage the cloud?We've built a crowd map, we've built Ushahidi.Could we leverage these technologies to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country?
So we looked at the modem,an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet,and asked ourselves why the modems that we are using right now are built for a different context, where you've got ubiquitous internet, you've got ubiquitous electricity,yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury.We wanted to redesign the modem for the developing world, for our context,and for our reality.What if we could have connectivity with less friction?
This is the BRCK.It acts as a backup to the Internet so that, when the power goes out,it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network.Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive.It's actually everywhere.Most towns at least have a 3G connection.So why don't we leverage that? And that's why we built this.The other reason that we built this is when electricity goes down, this has eight hours of battery left, so you can continue working,you can continue being productive,and let's just say you are less stressed.And for rural areas, it can be the primary means of connection.
The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play when we wondered how can we use the cloud to be more intelligent so that you can analyze the different networks,and whenever you switch on the backup,you pick on the fastest network,so we'll have multi-SIM capability so that you can put multiple SIMs,and if one network is faster, that's the one you hop on,and if the up time on that is not very good,then you hop onto the next one.The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere.With load balancing, this can be possible.
The other interesting thing for us -- we like sensors --is this idea that you could have an on-ramp for the Internet of things.Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this.It's built in a modular way so that you can also attach a satellite module so that you could have Internet connectivity even in very remote areas.
Out of adversity can come innovation,and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure?And for us, we begin with solving the problem in our own backyard in Kenya.
It is not without challenge.Our team has basically been mules carrying components from the U.S. to Kenya. We've had very interesting conversations with customs border agents."What are you carrying?"And the local financing is not part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects.So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that,through the support of many people,not only here but online,the BRCK has been Kickstarted,and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins.
I will close by saying that, if we solve this for the local market, it could be impactful not only for the coders in Nairobi but also for small business owners who need reliable connectivity,and it can reduce the cost of connecting,and hopefully collaboration within African countries.
The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship.The BRCK is our part to keep Africans connected,and to help them drive the global digital revolution.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Transcript:
Living in Africa is to be on the edge,metaphorically, and quite literally when you think about connectivity before 2008.Though many human intellectual and technological leaps had happened in Europe and the rest of the world,but Africa was sort of cut off.And that changed, first with ships when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and also the Industrial Revolution.And now we've got the digital revolution.These revolutions have not been evenly distributed across continents and nations.Never have been.
Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect Africa to the rest of the world.What I find amazing is that Africa is transcending its geography problem.Africa is connecting to the rest of the world and within itself.The connectivity situation has improved greatly,but some barriers remain.It is with this context that Ushahidi came to be.
In 2008, one of the problems that we faced was lack of information flow.There was a media blackout in 2008,when there was post-election violence in Kenya.It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time.So we came together and we created software called Ushahidi.And Ushahidi means "testimony" or "witness" in Swahili.I'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators.This is David and Erik.I call them brothers from another mother.Clearly I have a German mother somewhere.And we worked together first with building and growing Ushahidi.And the idea of the software was to gather information from SMS, email and web, and put a map so that you could see what was happening where,and you could visualize that data.And after that initial prototype,we set out to make free and open-source software so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did.
All the while, we also wanted to give back to the local tech community that helped us grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days.And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi,an actual physical space where we could collaborate,and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya.We did that with the support of different organizations like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network.
And we were able to grow this software footprint,and a few years later it became very useful software,and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti where citizens could indicate where they are and what their needs were,and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis and the tsunami in Japan.Now, this year the Internet turns 20,and Ushahidi turned five.
Ushahidi is not only the software that we made.It is the team, and it's also the community that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee.We did not imagine that there would be this many maps around the world.There are crisis maps, election maps, corruption maps,and even environmental monitoring crowd maps.We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya and that it has some use to people around the world trying to figure out the different issues that they're dealing with.There is more that we're doing to explore this idea of collective intelligence, that I, as a citizen,if I share the information with whatever device that I have,could inform you about what is going on,and that if you do the same, we can have a bigger picture of what's going on.
I moved back to Kenya in 2011.Erik moved in 2010.Very different reality. I used to live in Chicago where there was abundant Internet access.I had never had to deal with a blackout.And in Kenya, it's a very different reality,and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress and the digital revolution is the electricity problem.The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this can be, let's just say very annoying.Blackouts are not fun.Imagine sitting down to start working, and all of a sudden the power goes out,your Internet connection goes down with it,so you have to figure out, okay, now, where's the modem,how do I switch back?And then, guess what? You have to deal with it again.Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now,and other parts of Africa.
The other problem that we're facing is that communication costs are also still a challenge.It costs me five Kenyan shillings,or .06 USD to call the U.S., Canada or China.Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria?Thirty Kenyan shillings. That's six times the cost to connect within Africa.And also, when traveling within Africa,you've got different settings for different mobile providers.This is the reality that we deal with.
So we've got a joke in Ushahidi where we say, "If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere."[Most use technology to define the function. We use function to drive the technology.]What if we could overcome the problem of unreliable Internet and electricity and reduce the cost of connection?Could we leverage the cloud?We've built a crowd map, we've built Ushahidi.Could we leverage these technologies to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country?
So we looked at the modem,an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet,and asked ourselves why the modems that we are using right now are built for a different context, where you've got ubiquitous internet, you've got ubiquitous electricity,yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury.We wanted to redesign the modem for the developing world, for our context,and for our reality.What if we could have connectivity with less friction?
This is the BRCK.It acts as a backup to the Internet so that, when the power goes out,it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network.Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive.It's actually everywhere.Most towns at least have a 3G connection.So why don't we leverage that? And that's why we built this.The other reason that we built this is when electricity goes down, this has eight hours of battery left, so you can continue working,you can continue being productive,and let's just say you are less stressed.And for rural areas, it can be the primary means of connection.
The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play when we wondered how can we use the cloud to be more intelligent so that you can analyze the different networks,and whenever you switch on the backup,you pick on the fastest network,so we'll have multi-SIM capability so that you can put multiple SIMs,and if one network is faster, that's the one you hop on,and if the up time on that is not very good,then you hop onto the next one.The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere.With load balancing, this can be possible.
The other interesting thing for us -- we like sensors --is this idea that you could have an on-ramp for the Internet of things.Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this.It's built in a modular way so that you can also attach a satellite module so that you could have Internet connectivity even in very remote areas.
Out of adversity can come innovation,and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure?And for us, we begin with solving the problem in our own backyard in Kenya.
It is not without challenge.Our team has basically been mules carrying components from the U.S. to Kenya. We've had very interesting conversations with customs border agents."What are you carrying?"And the local financing is not part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects.So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that,through the support of many people,not only here but online,the BRCK has been Kickstarted,and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins.
I will close by saying that, if we solve this for the local market, it could be impactful not only for the coders in Nairobi but also for small business owners who need reliable connectivity,and it can reduce the cost of connecting,and hopefully collaboration within African countries.
The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship.The BRCK is our part to keep Africans connected,and to help them drive the global digital revolution.
Thank you.
(Applause)
GralInt-POV-TED Talks-Paul Pholeros: How to reduce poverty? Fix homes
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Transcript:
The idea of eliminating poverty is a great goal.I don't think anyone in this room would disagree.What worries me is when politicians with money and charismatic rock stars use the words,it all just sounds so, so simple.
Now, I've got no bucket of money today and I've got no policy to release,and I certainly haven't got a guitar.I'll leave that to others.But I do have an idea,and that idea is called Housing for Health.
Housing For Health works with poor people.It works in the places where they live,and the work is done to improve their health.Over the last 28 years,this tough, grinding, dirty work has been done by literally thousands of people around Australia, and more recently overseas,and their work has proven that focused design can improve even the poorest living environments.It can improve health, and it can play a part in reducing, if not eliminating, poverty.
I'm going to start where the story began, 1985,in central Australia.A man called Yami Lester, an Aboriginal man,was running a health service.Eighty percent of what walked in the door,in terms of illness, was infectious disease --third world, developing world infectious disease,caused by a poor living environment.
Yami assembled a team in Alice Springs.He got a medical doctor.He got an environmental health guy.And he hand-selected a team of local Aboriginal people to work on this project.Yami told us at that first meeting, there's no money.Always a good start, no money.You have six months.And I want you to start on a project which in his language he called "uwankara palyanku kanyintjaku,"which, translated, is "a plan to stop people getting sick,"a profound brief.That was our task.
First step, the medical doctor went away for about six months,and he worked on what were to become these nine health goals, what were we aiming at.After six months of work, he came to my office and presented me with those nine words on a piece of paper.
[The 9 healthy living principles: Washing, clothes, wastewater, nutrition, crowding, animals+, dust, temperature, injury.]
Now, I was very, very unimpressed.Come on.Big ideas need big words and preferably a lot of them.This didn't fit the bill.What I didn't see and what you can't see is that he'd assembled thousands of pages of local, national and international health research that filled out the picture as to why these were the health targets.
The pictures that came a bit later had a very simple reason.The Aboriginal people who were our bosses and the senior people were most commonly illiterate,so the story had to be told in pictures of what were these goals.We work with the community,not telling them what was going to happen in a language they didn't understand.
So we had the goals, and each one of these goals --and I won't go through them all —puts at the center the person and their health issue,and it then connects them to the bits of the physical environment that are actually needed to keep their health good.And the highest priority, you see on the screen,is washing people once a day, particularly children.
Now I hope most of you are thinking,"What? That sounds simple."
Now, I'm going to ask you all a very personal question.This morning before you came,who could have had a wash using a shower?I'm not going to ask if you had a shower,because I'm too polite. That's it. (Laughter)Okay. All right.I think it's fair to say, most people here could have had a shower this morning.
I'm going to ask you to do some more work.I want you all to select one of the houses of the 25 houses you see on the screen.I want you to select one of them and note the position of that house and keep that in your head.Have you all got a house? I'm going to ask you to live there for a few months, so make sure you've got it right.It's in the northwest of Western Australia, very pleasant place.
Okay. Let's see if your shower in that house is working.I hear some "aw"s and I hear some "aah."
If you get a green tick, your shower's working.You and your kids are fine.If you get a red cross,well, I've looked carefully around the room and it's not going to make much difference to this crew.Why? Because you're all too old.And I know that's going to come as a shock to some of you,but you are.Now before you get offended and leave,I've got to say that being too old in this case means that pretty much everyone in the room, I think,is over five years of age.
We're really concerned with kids naught to five.And why? Washing is the antidote to the sort of bugs,the common infectious diseases of the eyes, the ears,the chest and the skin that, if they occur in the first five years of life,permanently damage those organs.They leave a lifelong remnant.That means that, by the age of five,you can't see as well for the rest of your life.You can't hear as well for the rest of your life.You can't breath as well. You've lost a third of your lung capacity by the age of five.And even skin infection, which we originally thought wasn't that big a problem,mild skin infections naught to five give you a greatly increased chance of renal failure,needing dialysis at age 40.This is a big deal, so the ticks and crosses on the screen are actually critical for young kids.
Those ticks and crosses represent the 7,800 houses we've looked at nationally around Australia,the same proportion.What you see on the screen -- 35 percent of those not-so-famous houses lived in by 50,000 indigenous people,35 percent had a working shower.Ten percent of those same 7,800 houses had safe electrical systems,and 58 percent of those houses had a working toilet.These are by a simple, standard test:In the case of the shower, does it have hot and cold water,two taps that work,a shower rose to get water onto your head or onto your body, and a drain that takes the water away?Not well designed, not beautiful, not elegant --just that they function.And the same test for the electrical system and the toilets.
Housing for Health projects aren't about measuring failure.They're actually about improving houses.We start on day one of every project -- we've learned,we don't make promises, we don't do reports.We arrive in the morning with tools, tons of equipment,trades, and we train up a local team on the first dayto start work.By the evening of the first day, a few houses in that community are better than when we started in the morning.That work continues for six to 12 months until all the houses are improved and we've spent our budget of 7,500 dollars total per house.That's our average budget.At the end of six months to a year, we test every house again.It's very easy to spend money.It's very difficult to improve the function of all those parts of the house,and for a whole house, the nine healthy living practices,we test, check and fix 250 items in every house.
And these are the results we can get with our 7,500 dollars.We can get showers up to 86 percent working,we can get electrical systems up to 77 percent working,and we can get 90 percent of toilets working in those 7,500 houses.
Thank you. (Applause)
The teams do a great job, and that's their work.
I think there's an obvious question that I hope you're thinking about.Why do we have to do this work?Why are the houses in such poor condition?Seventy percent of the work we do is due to lack of routine maintenance,the sort of things that happen in all our houses.Things wear out.Should have been done by state government or local government.Simply not done, the house doesn't work.Twenty-one percent of the things we fix are due to faulty construction,literally things that are built upside down and back-to-front.They don't work. We have to fix them.
And if you've lived in Australia in the last 30 years,the final cause -- You will have heard always that indigenous people trash houses.It's one of the almost rock-solid pieces of evidence,which I've never seen evidence for,that's always ruled out as that's the problem with indigenous housing.Well, nine percent of what we spend is damage,misuse or abuse of any sort.We argue strongly that the people living in the house are simply not the problem.And we'll go a lot further than that.The people living in the house are actually a major part of the solution.Seventy-five percent of our national team in Australia,over 75 at the minute,are actually local, indigenous people from the communities we work in.They do all aspects of the work.
(Applause)
In 2010, for example, there were 831,all over Australia, and the Torres Strait Islands,all states, working to improve the houses where they and their families live,and that's an important thing.
Our work's always had a focus on health. That's the key.The developing world bug trachoma, it causes blindness.It's a developing world illness,and yet, the picture you see behind is in an Aboriginal community in the late 1990s where 95 percent of school-aged kids had active trachoma in their eyes doing damage.
Okay, what do we do?Well, first thing we do, we get showers working.Why? Because that flushes the bug out.We put washing facilities in the school as well,so kids can wash their faces many times during the day.We wash the bug out.
Second, the eye doctors tell us that dust scours the eye and lets the bug in quick. So what do we do?We call up the doctor of dust, and there is such a person.He was loaned to us by a mining company.He controls dust on mining company sites,and he came out, and within a day it worked out that most dust in this community was within a meter of the ground, the wind-driven dust,so he suggested making mounds to catch the dust before it went into the house area and affected the eyes of kids.So we used dirt to stop dust.We did it. He provided us dust monitors.We tested and we reduced the dust.
Then we wanted to get rid of the bug generally.So how do we do that?Well, we call up the doctor of flies,and yes there is a doctor of flies.As our Aboriginal mate said,"You white fellows ought to get out more."(Laughter)And the doctor of flies very quickly determined that there was one fly that carried the bug.He could give school kids in this community the beautiful fly trap you see above in the slide.They could trap the flies, send them to him in Perth.When the bug was in the gut, he'd send back by return post some dung beetles.The dung beetles ate the camel dung,the flies died through lack of food,and trachoma dropped.And over the year, trachoma dropped radically in this place, and stayed low.We changed the environment, not just treated the eyes.And finally, you get a good eye.
All these small health gains and small pieces of the puzzle make a big difference.The New South Wales Department of Health,that radical organization,did an independent trial over three years to look at 10 years of the work we've been doing in these sorts of projects in New South Wales,and they found a 40-percent reduction in hospital admissions for the illnesses that you could attribute to the poor environment.A 40-percent reduction.
(Applause)
Just to show that the principles we've used in Australia can be used in other places,I'm just going to go to one other place, and that's Nepal,and what a beautiful place to go.We were asked by a small village of 600 people to go in and make toilets where none existed.Health was poor.We went in with no grand plan, no grand promises of a great program, just the offer to build two toilets for two families.It was during the design of the first toilet that I went for lunch, invited by the family into their main room of the house.It was choking with smoke.People were cooking on their only fuel source, green timber.The smoke coming off that timber is choking,and in an enclosed house, you simply can't breathe.Later we found the leading cause of illness and death in this particular region is through respiratory failure.
So all of a sudden we had two problems.We were there originally to look at toilets and get human waste off the ground. That's fine.But all of a sudden now there was a second problem.How do we actually get the smoke down? So two problems,and design should be about more than one thing.Solution: Take human waste, take animal waste,put it into a chamber, out of that extract biogas,methane gas.The gas gives three to four hours cooking a day --clean, smokeless and free for the family.
(Applause)
I put it to you, is this eliminating poverty?And the answer from the Nepali team who is working at the minute would say, don't be ridiculous,we have three million more toilets to build before we can even make a stab at that claim.And I don't pretend anything else.
But as we all sit here today,there are now over 100 toilets built in this village and a couple nearby.Well over 1,000 people use those toilets.Yami Lama, he's a young boy.He's got significantly less gut infection because he's now got toilets,and there isn't human waste on the ground.Kanji Maya, she's a mother and a proud one.She's probably right now cooking lunch for her familyon biogas, smokeless fuel.Her lungs have got better, and they'll get better as time increases, because she's not cooking in the same smoke.Surya takes the waste out of the biogas chamber when it's shed the gas, he puts it on his crops.He's trebled his crop income,more food for the family and more money for the family.And finally Bishnu,the leader of the team, has now understood that not only have we built toilets,we've also built a team,and that team is now working in two villages where they're training up the next two villages to keep the work expanding.And that, to me, is the key.
(Applause)
People are not the problem.We've never found that.The problem: poor living environment,poor housing, and the bugs that do people harm.None of those are limited by geography,by skin color or by religion. None of them.The common link between all the work we've had to do is one thing, and that's poverty.
Nelson Mandela said, in the mid-2000s,not too far from here, he said that like slavery and Apartheid, "Poverty is not natural.It's man-made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings."I want to end by saying it's been the actions of thousands of ordinary human beings doing, I think, extraordinary work,that have actually improved health,and, maybe only in a small way, reduced poverty.
Thank you very much for your time.
(Applause)
Transcript:
The idea of eliminating poverty is a great goal.I don't think anyone in this room would disagree.What worries me is when politicians with money and charismatic rock stars use the words,it all just sounds so, so simple.
Now, I've got no bucket of money today and I've got no policy to release,and I certainly haven't got a guitar.I'll leave that to others.But I do have an idea,and that idea is called Housing for Health.
Housing For Health works with poor people.It works in the places where they live,and the work is done to improve their health.Over the last 28 years,this tough, grinding, dirty work has been done by literally thousands of people around Australia, and more recently overseas,and their work has proven that focused design can improve even the poorest living environments.It can improve health, and it can play a part in reducing, if not eliminating, poverty.
I'm going to start where the story began, 1985,in central Australia.A man called Yami Lester, an Aboriginal man,was running a health service.Eighty percent of what walked in the door,in terms of illness, was infectious disease --third world, developing world infectious disease,caused by a poor living environment.
Yami assembled a team in Alice Springs.He got a medical doctor.He got an environmental health guy.And he hand-selected a team of local Aboriginal people to work on this project.Yami told us at that first meeting, there's no money.Always a good start, no money.You have six months.And I want you to start on a project which in his language he called "uwankara palyanku kanyintjaku,"which, translated, is "a plan to stop people getting sick,"a profound brief.That was our task.
First step, the medical doctor went away for about six months,and he worked on what were to become these nine health goals, what were we aiming at.After six months of work, he came to my office and presented me with those nine words on a piece of paper.
[The 9 healthy living principles: Washing, clothes, wastewater, nutrition, crowding, animals+, dust, temperature, injury.]
Now, I was very, very unimpressed.Come on.Big ideas need big words and preferably a lot of them.This didn't fit the bill.What I didn't see and what you can't see is that he'd assembled thousands of pages of local, national and international health research that filled out the picture as to why these were the health targets.
The pictures that came a bit later had a very simple reason.The Aboriginal people who were our bosses and the senior people were most commonly illiterate,so the story had to be told in pictures of what were these goals.We work with the community,not telling them what was going to happen in a language they didn't understand.
So we had the goals, and each one of these goals --and I won't go through them all —puts at the center the person and their health issue,and it then connects them to the bits of the physical environment that are actually needed to keep their health good.And the highest priority, you see on the screen,is washing people once a day, particularly children.
Now I hope most of you are thinking,"What? That sounds simple."
Now, I'm going to ask you all a very personal question.This morning before you came,who could have had a wash using a shower?I'm not going to ask if you had a shower,because I'm too polite. That's it. (Laughter)Okay. All right.I think it's fair to say, most people here could have had a shower this morning.
I'm going to ask you to do some more work.I want you all to select one of the houses of the 25 houses you see on the screen.I want you to select one of them and note the position of that house and keep that in your head.Have you all got a house? I'm going to ask you to live there for a few months, so make sure you've got it right.It's in the northwest of Western Australia, very pleasant place.
Okay. Let's see if your shower in that house is working.I hear some "aw"s and I hear some "aah."
If you get a green tick, your shower's working.You and your kids are fine.If you get a red cross,well, I've looked carefully around the room and it's not going to make much difference to this crew.Why? Because you're all too old.And I know that's going to come as a shock to some of you,but you are.Now before you get offended and leave,I've got to say that being too old in this case means that pretty much everyone in the room, I think,is over five years of age.
We're really concerned with kids naught to five.And why? Washing is the antidote to the sort of bugs,the common infectious diseases of the eyes, the ears,the chest and the skin that, if they occur in the first five years of life,permanently damage those organs.They leave a lifelong remnant.That means that, by the age of five,you can't see as well for the rest of your life.You can't hear as well for the rest of your life.You can't breath as well. You've lost a third of your lung capacity by the age of five.And even skin infection, which we originally thought wasn't that big a problem,mild skin infections naught to five give you a greatly increased chance of renal failure,needing dialysis at age 40.This is a big deal, so the ticks and crosses on the screen are actually critical for young kids.
Those ticks and crosses represent the 7,800 houses we've looked at nationally around Australia,the same proportion.What you see on the screen -- 35 percent of those not-so-famous houses lived in by 50,000 indigenous people,35 percent had a working shower.Ten percent of those same 7,800 houses had safe electrical systems,and 58 percent of those houses had a working toilet.These are by a simple, standard test:In the case of the shower, does it have hot and cold water,two taps that work,a shower rose to get water onto your head or onto your body, and a drain that takes the water away?Not well designed, not beautiful, not elegant --just that they function.And the same test for the electrical system and the toilets.
Housing for Health projects aren't about measuring failure.They're actually about improving houses.We start on day one of every project -- we've learned,we don't make promises, we don't do reports.We arrive in the morning with tools, tons of equipment,trades, and we train up a local team on the first dayto start work.By the evening of the first day, a few houses in that community are better than when we started in the morning.That work continues for six to 12 months until all the houses are improved and we've spent our budget of 7,500 dollars total per house.That's our average budget.At the end of six months to a year, we test every house again.It's very easy to spend money.It's very difficult to improve the function of all those parts of the house,and for a whole house, the nine healthy living practices,we test, check and fix 250 items in every house.
And these are the results we can get with our 7,500 dollars.We can get showers up to 86 percent working,we can get electrical systems up to 77 percent working,and we can get 90 percent of toilets working in those 7,500 houses.
Thank you. (Applause)
The teams do a great job, and that's their work.
I think there's an obvious question that I hope you're thinking about.Why do we have to do this work?Why are the houses in such poor condition?Seventy percent of the work we do is due to lack of routine maintenance,the sort of things that happen in all our houses.Things wear out.Should have been done by state government or local government.Simply not done, the house doesn't work.Twenty-one percent of the things we fix are due to faulty construction,literally things that are built upside down and back-to-front.They don't work. We have to fix them.
And if you've lived in Australia in the last 30 years,the final cause -- You will have heard always that indigenous people trash houses.It's one of the almost rock-solid pieces of evidence,which I've never seen evidence for,that's always ruled out as that's the problem with indigenous housing.Well, nine percent of what we spend is damage,misuse or abuse of any sort.We argue strongly that the people living in the house are simply not the problem.And we'll go a lot further than that.The people living in the house are actually a major part of the solution.Seventy-five percent of our national team in Australia,over 75 at the minute,are actually local, indigenous people from the communities we work in.They do all aspects of the work.
(Applause)
In 2010, for example, there were 831,all over Australia, and the Torres Strait Islands,all states, working to improve the houses where they and their families live,and that's an important thing.
Our work's always had a focus on health. That's the key.The developing world bug trachoma, it causes blindness.It's a developing world illness,and yet, the picture you see behind is in an Aboriginal community in the late 1990s where 95 percent of school-aged kids had active trachoma in their eyes doing damage.
Okay, what do we do?Well, first thing we do, we get showers working.Why? Because that flushes the bug out.We put washing facilities in the school as well,so kids can wash their faces many times during the day.We wash the bug out.
Second, the eye doctors tell us that dust scours the eye and lets the bug in quick. So what do we do?We call up the doctor of dust, and there is such a person.He was loaned to us by a mining company.He controls dust on mining company sites,and he came out, and within a day it worked out that most dust in this community was within a meter of the ground, the wind-driven dust,so he suggested making mounds to catch the dust before it went into the house area and affected the eyes of kids.So we used dirt to stop dust.We did it. He provided us dust monitors.We tested and we reduced the dust.
Then we wanted to get rid of the bug generally.So how do we do that?Well, we call up the doctor of flies,and yes there is a doctor of flies.As our Aboriginal mate said,"You white fellows ought to get out more."(Laughter)And the doctor of flies very quickly determined that there was one fly that carried the bug.He could give school kids in this community the beautiful fly trap you see above in the slide.They could trap the flies, send them to him in Perth.When the bug was in the gut, he'd send back by return post some dung beetles.The dung beetles ate the camel dung,the flies died through lack of food,and trachoma dropped.And over the year, trachoma dropped radically in this place, and stayed low.We changed the environment, not just treated the eyes.And finally, you get a good eye.
All these small health gains and small pieces of the puzzle make a big difference.The New South Wales Department of Health,that radical organization,did an independent trial over three years to look at 10 years of the work we've been doing in these sorts of projects in New South Wales,and they found a 40-percent reduction in hospital admissions for the illnesses that you could attribute to the poor environment.A 40-percent reduction.
(Applause)
Just to show that the principles we've used in Australia can be used in other places,I'm just going to go to one other place, and that's Nepal,and what a beautiful place to go.We were asked by a small village of 600 people to go in and make toilets where none existed.Health was poor.We went in with no grand plan, no grand promises of a great program, just the offer to build two toilets for two families.It was during the design of the first toilet that I went for lunch, invited by the family into their main room of the house.It was choking with smoke.People were cooking on their only fuel source, green timber.The smoke coming off that timber is choking,and in an enclosed house, you simply can't breathe.Later we found the leading cause of illness and death in this particular region is through respiratory failure.
So all of a sudden we had two problems.We were there originally to look at toilets and get human waste off the ground. That's fine.But all of a sudden now there was a second problem.How do we actually get the smoke down? So two problems,and design should be about more than one thing.Solution: Take human waste, take animal waste,put it into a chamber, out of that extract biogas,methane gas.The gas gives three to four hours cooking a day --clean, smokeless and free for the family.
(Applause)
I put it to you, is this eliminating poverty?And the answer from the Nepali team who is working at the minute would say, don't be ridiculous,we have three million more toilets to build before we can even make a stab at that claim.And I don't pretend anything else.
But as we all sit here today,there are now over 100 toilets built in this village and a couple nearby.Well over 1,000 people use those toilets.Yami Lama, he's a young boy.He's got significantly less gut infection because he's now got toilets,and there isn't human waste on the ground.Kanji Maya, she's a mother and a proud one.She's probably right now cooking lunch for her familyon biogas, smokeless fuel.Her lungs have got better, and they'll get better as time increases, because she's not cooking in the same smoke.Surya takes the waste out of the biogas chamber when it's shed the gas, he puts it on his crops.He's trebled his crop income,more food for the family and more money for the family.And finally Bishnu,the leader of the team, has now understood that not only have we built toilets,we've also built a team,and that team is now working in two villages where they're training up the next two villages to keep the work expanding.And that, to me, is the key.
(Applause)
People are not the problem.We've never found that.The problem: poor living environment,poor housing, and the bugs that do people harm.None of those are limited by geography,by skin color or by religion. None of them.The common link between all the work we've had to do is one thing, and that's poverty.
Nelson Mandela said, in the mid-2000s,not too far from here, he said that like slavery and Apartheid, "Poverty is not natural.It's man-made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings."I want to end by saying it's been the actions of thousands of ordinary human beings doing, I think, extraordinary work,that have actually improved health,and, maybe only in a small way, reduced poverty.
Thank you very much for your time.
(Applause)
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