Author: Jeffrey D.Sachs
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publication date: October 1, 2006
http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/endofpoverty/
Last weekend I finished reading this book and watched Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, all in the span of 24 hours. Thoughts of global warming, the threat of a permanently altered planet, and extreme poverty killing thousands every day were swimming in my mind. While I felt a sense of urgency, I also felt conflicted. Because it’s hard to feel urgent about both. In fact, history shows it’s hard for the US government to give urgent attention to more than one crisis at a time. So what to do in the face of such cultural monsters?
Episode 04 takes us on location in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Where the first batches of XOs have been delivered and deployed. Meet the teachers using the laptops in the classroom. Where besides doing daily assignments on the machines, some students have already learned programing. Local culture has permeated the project, and as a veteran school principal explains, an improved education is set to equip a new generation of Brazilian citizens. Watch past episodes.
Here in the States, Independence Day is tomorrow. No better time, we thought, to question the systems we trust to tally and track our votes come election season. If you missed the Red Hat Summit, you missed Alan Dechert of the Open Voting Consortium. Dechert contends that voter confidence is crucial to encouraging voter participation–a hot issue in America where voter apathy is bad and seems to be getting worse. And if you can’t see how your votes are counted, how can you trust they’re counted accurately?
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For better or worse, DRM is everywhere. In the past six months, letters have zinged across the web and provided fodder for newspaper headlines. The issue balances the rights of the consumer to use purchased works against the rights of the artist to protect their works from illegal duplication and redistribution.
The 2007 Red Hat Summit hosted eMusic CEO David Pakman as a keynote speaker. If you haven’t heard his talk yet, check it out. We caught up with him afterwards to ask a few questions. Here, he explains why he believes consumer outcry over DRM is changing the music industry forever.
Like this video? Catch “The Future of Free Music” podcast. We think you’ll like that too.
Since piloting this video series, we’ve received lots of questions about the XO’s mesh network. How can these laptops “talk” to each other even without widespread internet access? How is the network they create different from the network at your home or office? Episode 03 explains it all.
Video by Brad Boll and Jim Haverkamp
Produced by Julie Bryce
Ever heard of Blackboard? Or if you’re young enough, remember online assignments using WebAssign or Maple? Moodle is a content management system with similar capabilities, but it’s open source and completely free. Free as in beer. (They do gratefully accept donations.)
The line between learning in the classroom and learning independently has been forever blurred. Thanks to the resources of the web, kids as young as nine can learn the way college students do. Completing online assignments at home, reviewing lessons from the previous day at their own pace, and communicating with instructors and peers without picking up a phone.
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Hint: Think open.
I like new words. Today’s new word is “Systers”. Here, I’ll use it in a sentence: There are plenty of Systers at the Red Hat Summit this year. If you haven’t caught on by now, systers are female system administrators. And though I thought them a rarity, the diversity in both gender and ethnicity at the Summit this year has been the best in three years. I like seeing that because it indicates that the subjects presented at the Summit hold the interest of a wide audience–not just the narrow stereotype of the geeky sysadmin living in Linuxville, USA.
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We got the chance to chat a bit with Alan Dechert during the 2007 Red Hat Summit. We asked him some questions; he gave us some answers.
Red Hat Magazine: To help readers understand the terminology, can you explain “disclosed source” and “open source” software as it relates to the voting process?
Alan Dechert: Mostly, we explain these terms informally. Where a more precise definition of open source is required, we point to the Free Software Foundation definition (four freedoms) and/or the Open Source Initiative definition (more nuanced, ten criteria). We describe disclosed source as source code that is published — freely available for public perusal. Open source is disclosed source that is not only freely available for examination, but can be used and/or modified by the recipient in accordance to a free software license.
