Untitled

Playpower: An introduction from Playpower Foundation on Vimeo.

 

According to the founder of Playpower.org, more people in India have TVs at home than tap water. And there are $12 computers everywhere that uses the TVs as monitors, like so many of the personal computers of old. 

Now consider that these hardwares based off older 8bit chip designs and the softwares that run on them are more or less in public domain. We are looking at a significant portion of the entire human population just poised on the verge to hackerdom. It's not just typing education and language training. We could build entirely new framework for education in 3rd world urban area using existing tools of education and science. Imagine being able to design an 8bit program for those machines (some of them can actually do internet) that pulls data from research institutions of all kinds (BLAST, Wolfram Alpha, and etc etc) and scale it down to a form those machines and people using those machines can understand. We already have beta versions of synthetic biology CAD program that undergraduates regularly use for their school assignments and private projects, so it's not that far away in the future. 

Will a child capable of programming computers and pull data on SNP variations to do his/her own genotyping using soon-to-be widely available opensource PCR machines still languish in poverty and despair? I don't know. I'd sure like to find out though. 

 

 

 

 

Posted via email from Textdrome

Moving about

It's really difficult to concentrate on writing something these days (as I've been saying for the last year). Maybe it's because of my hasty decision to move to a blogger from previous livejournal account?

Right now I maintain about four main web presence. Twitter gets used most often, followed by tumblr, blogspot, and lastly wordpress. Twitter is really what I'd call an idea stream. I use it as a combination of microblog, mobile scratchpad and IM of sorts, and it's been pretty great at all of those things so far... Even at its current clumsy state it's a pretty good learning and research tool for a student like me (where else can you find a propulsion specialist at 3 am and ask random questions to him/her?). Tumblr is a web scrapbook. I just pour in most of the links, pictures, and videos I find interesting into it, though most of the time content on tumblr tend to be from other tumblr blogs... So while it's more colorful than a traditional blog or microblog, it doesn't hold nearly as much original content... I'm not sure why, but there's something about tumblr that stops me from uploading text heavy original content onto their services (or maybe it's just because I'm already using a number of different web services already). The blogspot one I use for relatively larger written pieces, though I never think about quality of the stuff I write there. It's meant to be a free form journal where I talk about anything from latest political scandal to promising developments in sciences and favorite books. And then the wordpress blog is the one that's supposed to be the face of my web presence... It's the kind of place where I watch my language when I write.

Well the arrangement isn't working so well now that I can hardly find the time to sit in front of a computer and do private stuff. These days, if I'm sitting in front of a computer I'm working on something, sometimes for money. It's difficult to come up with my usual text blog posts that range anywhere between 1000 to 5000 words. 

When I can write presonal stuff is when I'm walking or riding around the city to get to someplace else. While the MTA keeps deplorable timetable it gives me ample time to go through my books and write stuff down. The problem is it's difficult if not impossible to open up a laptop in a crowded F line train during the rush hour. The best I can manage is a handset, and regular blogs without straightforward mobile uploading scheme (that encompasses all froms of media, text, audio, video and etc) doesn't quite work as well as I'd like.

So, I'm reaching out to another web service again, to use posterous for all my 'flights of fancy' type posts on the run. Maybe I can do something new with this service and modern smartphones, like working on real videos that demonstrate interesting ideas rather than just simply writing about it. I always seek out professors and grad students for advice on the work I'm doing or just to talk science. Maybe I can upload some of the talks onto the web. I don't know. I think there's a lot of interesting possibility (most of which will be made unrealistic by AT&T's rather pathetic dataplan pricing scheme in which they eliminate the unlimited data and replace it with something that can't handle sending high quality videos on air).

Let's see where this idea of cloud scrapbook can take me for now. (oh, and I should look for some way to backup my posterous posts offline)

Posted via web from Textdrome