A nice way to get your hands on the coolest laptop on earth: the One Laptop Per Child give 1 get 1 program.
For 399$ you will get a laptop AND offer one to a child. Only available for a short period and US only, but worth mentioning.
This month’s Wired magazine mentions a study by professor Paul Slovic who shows how empathy doesn’t scale. Humans respond to one person’s sufferings, but when the number of victims increases, we tend to care less and less as things become more abstract. Slovic is basically explaining why we tend to react more to Madeleine McCann’s disappearance than to the Darfur Genocide.
Most people are caring and will exert great effort to rescue individual victims whose needy plight comes to their attention. These same good people, however, often become numbly indifferent to the plight of individuals who are “one of many” in a much greater problem.
That is a key information that the world’s NGOs and governments need to take into account to develop more effective ways to communicate and mobilize the masses.
Taewoo Danny Kim of TechnoKimchi is pointing to a Business 2.0 ranking of the 12 most wired cities in the world. Not surprisingly half of them are in Asia and no Swiss city cracked the list.
Bangalore is first, followed by Barcelona (surprise!) and Helsinki (re-surprise!). Seoul is 6th. No american city is ranked because it is a list for the courageous American white collars willing to risk their life eating live octopus and playing beer dominos abroad.
That is the question Paul Mason of the BBC tried to answer by visiting Kenya, “using a map of the country’s mobile phone networks as his guide”.
Africa is undergoing massive changes. From fundamental ones (access to better information, organization of protest movements to fight corrupted political systems, etc…) to more trivial things (“Masai husbands have discovered the secrets of the incoming calls list – and there’s been tears before bedtime”).
