2011 3
Wael Ghonim Google Executive, from Jail to #TED
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Wael Ghonim over video at #TED. Before the Egyptian revolution everyone was scared except a few and those were beaten up. We are not happy when we see some Egyptians eating trash while others steal millions. The Egyptian uprising started with a Facebook page honoring man tortured and killed by Mubarak. First demonstration was thousands of people in Alexandria, a silent stand. The regime attacked them regardless of how peaceful they were. But people kept protesting, and Tunisia came. Wael was detained for 12 days, blindfolded, handcuffed, he says he does not want to talk about how he was treated. I assume he was tortured. Then he was let go and when he did he saw a changed world. When he saw that he wrote “we are going to win because we don’t understand politics”. We are going to win because we are willing to stand up for our dreams. Egyptians felt freedom approaching. The power of the people is much stronger than people in power.
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2011 3
Sal Khan of Khan Academy presents at #TED
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Image via Wikipedia
First Sal Khan’s bio according to Wikipedia. Then his product, the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy is a collection of 2100 videos that Sal Khan started while in his spare time when he was working for a hedge fund. Sal comes across as a very intelligent, well educated, funny educator. The ultimate educator, the teacher we all want to have. And over a million do. Because over a million watch his academy on Youtube. And so should you.
Related articles
- Yes, The Khan Academy IS the Future of Education (video) (singularityhub.com)
- How Bill Gates’ Favorite Teacher Wants to Disrupt Education (fastcompany.com)
- 10 Excellent Ideas for Using Khan Academy in Schools (freetech4teachers.com)
2011 3
Bruce Aylward Global erradication of Polio #ted
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At first he shows a picture of polio patients in iron lungs. Speaks about the polio vaccine. The last polio case was in 1980 in USA. Polio still exists in some parts of Africa, India, Pakistan and Afganistan. And in 2 countries that had not had polio for a long time polio came back. In Russia they got polio again. But epidemics is being controlled. We need to completely erradicate polio. Polio can only survive in people so we have to make people polio free. We are doing a global partnership to erradicate polio. Disease erradication os the venture capital of public health, great risks but great rewards. Smallpox erradication was an incredibly successful investment, it pays off every 26 days again and again. Same would be true with polio. But the polio vaccine is very fragile and deteriorates in warm climate. And as opposed to smallpox that is so easy to see because of the rash, polio does not show itself when it first strikes, you can’t see the enemy.
To erradicate polio we have to create a 20 million people social movement. They are vaccinating half a billion children every year. It is oral and easy to administer but the problem is to reach all children of the world in the worst places and conditions. They have to operate in war conditions. This is foreign aid at its most heroic. Rotary international is doing this, with over i million volunteers. Results are good.
Polyo Type 2 has been totally eradicated. There’s been 99% reduction 1000 kids in the whole world now, a lot but nothing compared to 20 years ago. But even with 1000 now if we don’t eradicate the disease in 2030 we will have 300K kids again with polio again. A new polio vaccine was developed, old one was 50 years old. New vaccine is much better. Northern India is the perfect storm when it comes to polio. Sanitation is terrible. But with the new vaccine not a single got polio.
Image via Wikipedia
Nigeria has 150 million people, 70 million are poor. 20% of all Africans are Nigerians. There are the milenium development goals. MDG, 8 goals. First erradicate poverty, 2 universal primary educations, 3 gener equality, reduce child mortality, improving maternal health, combat hiv, aids, malaria, sustainable environment, lastly a global partnership for development.
in 2000 20% of children died in Nigeria before reaching 5 mostly of malaria. schoold had 100 kids in a class, half of Nigerians had no access to clean water, on top of this huge government corruption. In all this President Obasanjo got debt relief. Saved $1bn per year and used it for MDG. Amina Az Zubair was put in charge. She used that money to build results based partnership. Great auditing job as there is tremendous corruption but she argues they succeeded mostly. That most help went to those who needed it.
Amina gives a great deal of statistics that show how infant mortality has fallen and goes MDG one by one and how they are addressing them in Nigeria, she paints an optimistic vision of what is going on in Nigeria but she recognizes that there are still a lot of goals not achieved.
She argues that corruption is on the decline, that democracy is strengthened and that Nigeria is on track to achieve MDG by 2015.
2011 3
David Christian Big History project presented at #TED
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Bill Gates is guest curating at #TED. He sees this as an opportunity to pick four people who inspired him. He is in a way doing the same job as Chris Anderson, it’s a coup to get him I guess. First one is professor David Christian.
David Christian teaches Big History at TED
David Christian first shows scrambled eggs in reverse to illustrate 2nd law of thermodynamics, entropy. Yet what we see around us is staggering complexity. So how is it possible to create complexity? He calls paradigm shifts threashold moments in history. Thresholds increase complexity. He shows timeline with the whole history of the universe. 13.7bn years ago universe starts. Big Bang. From blur to distinct things. 380,000 years after the Big Bang, H and He appear. Gravity starts compacting clouds of H and He. Then 10 million degree temperature cross and then stars are formed. From 200 million years after the BB we get stars. Stars create all elements when they extinguish themselves. Our solar system starts around 5bn yrs ago. Rocky planets are born. More diverse environments. The next big thing is living organisms. Chemistry needs energy but not too much nor too little, not the center of a star, not intergalactic space. Life needs liquids. Life can’t grow in solid or gas. Our early earth was mostly water and heat coming from the oceanic vents. So first we have the right chemicals and then we have DNA to stabilize the chemistry of life. DNA is most of the time perfect and occasionally errors. Errors lead to evolution. Erros that suceed, very few of them. 800 million yrs ago multicellulars. 65 million yrs ago meteorite in Yucatan dinosaurs wiped out but mammals flourish. Humans is another threshold. What makes human different is that we are the only species that passes on learning to offspring and collective memory. Rats learn to, but can’t teach other rats what they learn, they don’t build a civilization. Humans are unique in that we have collective learning. We colonize the whole planet while learning how to cope with it.
10K years ago human learns to farm. 500 years ago humans began to link up globally. Now we are like a single global brain of 7bn. We discovered fossil fuels and those help complexity. He argues that it is not clear that humans are in charge of collective learning. We have nuclear weapons, we are using up fossil fuels. He is building an online syllabus in Big History.
Both Joe Biden and Gaddafi agree in their hatred for Wikileaks. But they have different styles. Biden likens Wikileaks to a high tech terrorist organization. Now Gaddafi, a real terrorist responsible for the downing of a commercial jet among other deeds, has a more unusual way to speak about Wikileaks. He calls Wikileaks “Kleenex” and then goes on with a rant about the Internet in general that is just funny (so long as you forget that it comes from a bloody dictator). He says:
Even you, my Tunisian brothers. You may be reading this Kleenex and empty talk on the Internet.
This Internet, which any demented person, any drunk can get drunk and write in, do you believe it? The Internet is like a vacuum cleaner, it can suck anything. Any useless person; any liar; any drunkard; anyone under the influence; anyone high on drugs; can talk on the Internet, and you read what he writes and you believe it. This is talk which is for free. Shall we become the victims of “Facebook” and “Kleenex”* and “YouTube”! Shall we become victims to tools they created so that they can laugh at our moods?
This text comes from this article in Global Voices.
2010 9
Assange’s Poison Pill
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- Image by New Media Days via Flickr
I am in the process of downloading a file that contains all the unedited cables that Wikileaks has obtained. You can do the same by downloading this link using a program like Vuze. This is a 1.4GB file so it may take a while. As far as I know it is not illegal to download it as it is not copyright material. In any case it is probably not illegal because you cannot read whatever it is that you are downloaded as it is encrypted. What this file is is a Poison Pill. Assange goes, this file is open for humanity to see.
I am downloading this file for two reasons. One is because I believe that if it was so easy for Wikileaks to obtain this information whoever our enemies are probably have it as well. Secondly because while I had mixed feelings on what Julian Assange was doing, I am so disgusted about how Western democracies are reacting towards a person who has not been formally accused of any crime that I think it’s time to stand by Wikileaks to defend freedom of the press.
Lately I have a strong feeling that the Chinese must be rejoicing at all the “retroactive law invention” that is going on in the West to put one man in jail. Because if Assange had been a Chinese citizen promoting transparency in China we would be lining up to give him the Nobel Prize. We can’t demand transparency from others and censorship for ourselves.
If the US government did not want its secrets known, all they had to do was to encrypt these secrets as Wikileak’s Assange is doing with this file. As CNN argues it comes with an encryption that not one of all the encryption crackers in the world can figure out. Think about it, we will all have this file but we will not be able to read it. Can’t the US government do the same if something is really a secret? How can real secrets be distributed among over a million of people with easy access to matters way beyond their jurisdiction and unencrypted? From now on, if you want a secret, encrypt it, and make it a crime to break the encryption.
Related articles
- Julian Assange Vows “Poison Pill” Release Of Damaging Secrets If Arrested Or Killed (alternet.org)
- WikiLeaks Ready to Release Giant ‘Insurance’ File if Shut Down (foxnews.com)
2010 6
How Wikileaks will make the world a safer place
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When I read articles like this one on CNN arguing how Wikileaks is providing potential target lists to terrorists I worry. Probably so do you. But think about this. It was so easy for all this information to leak out that we should all wonder how safe it was to begin with. If Wikileaks, without any special spying skills, just being there to collect info, could get all this sensitive data, why couldn’t have Al Qaeda or any other of our enemies have done or do the same thing? While we may object to the style of Wikileaks I have no doubt that thanks to Wikileaks, USA will completely rebuild the way it handles sensitive data and as a result the safety of the system will have been improved. Wikileaks has the effect on security that hackers have on software development. Wikileaks found simple bugs everywhere. It is up to the people whose job is to make us safer to fix it. Yes, granted, Wikileaks could have given all this info to the State Department and not publish it. But sometimes it takes a shock like this for things to really change and what should be transparent be transparent and what should be classified be classified.
- Image via CrunchBase
So this is one of the posts in which I am going to argue that when I was a teenager things were better, and you are going to think that I am one of those guys who thinks that things were always better in the past. A disgruntled modernist of sorts. But no, that is not the case. I can’t think of anything that was better 30 yrs ago than now, except one thing, music quality.
When I was a teen, I was a fan of HiFi music. I used to build my own speakers, try to get the best turntable I could find, and the best amplifier. Already playing cassette tapes was consider a “no no” as the quality would deteriorate considerably compared to vinyl records. I did like CDs though, as they seem to reach the whole sound range.
Now fast forward to 2010. My children play music off their laptops, their Macs. The speakers are terrible. Sound awful. And even myself I buy a Sonos, and the quality is acceptable, but not great. So what do I do? I still buy myself amazing speakers and amplifiers and whatever I have that produces music, I send through those. And I don’t even like the sound of Home Theaters except if you are watching movies. So we have one, but in the movie at home part of the house. Home Theaters invariably have bad speakers. So our solution for the living room and dining room is to have great old fashion Denon, Pioneer and Marantz, amplifiers connected to Yamaha speakers. It is not that the equipment is old. It’s the technology that is old. Even the Sonos I don’t use to amplify the sound, nor do I use the Sonos speakers that come with the unit. I just a use a Sonos box to convert Spotify, Last.fm and even my own music library, from an input that comes over ethernet, into an audio output that goes into the Denon amplifier and the Yamaha speakers. Something that soon amplifiers will do by themselves using AirPlay.
So in the end I walk around my home with an iPhone or HTC Nexus One (with Andronos installed) and I can play music, great quality music. And now I have both, the quality of the 80’s with the variety, accessibility and ease of use that we have 30 years later. My favorite band at the moment is The XX. My favorite song is Crystalised.
PS: I am studying the app that was made for streaming music with a Fonera,
Related articles
- Yamaha Adds Pandora Internet Radio and iPhone/iPad App Capabilities to the neoHD Wi-Fi A/V Receiver, While Reducing Price (prweb.com)
- Perfect sounds: building the perfect hi-fi (telegraph.co.uk)
2010 8
Media and the math of racism
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In Spain 1 immigrant in 1000 is a convicted criminal. That means that for every 999 immigrants Spain gets one immigrant who ends up as a convicted criminal. That means that 99.9% of immigrants are not convicted criminals. And yet, because there are very few criminals in society overall, it happens that 60% of all the convicted criminals in Spain are foreigners. And Spanish media repeats that number to the point that it is beginning to feed racist sentiments. If you read it lightly it could be understand that 60% of immigrants are criminals, not 1 in 1000. That is the worrying math of racism. Should media say that 99.9% of immigrants are honest and sell few newspapers, or should it say that 60% of the criminals are foreigners and sell many? The math of racism feeds media the wrong way.