Category: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

OLPC at the WEF at Davos

David Kirkpatrick filed a CNN report about the movers and shakers of this world at the World Economic Forum at Davos. The Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe apparently pooh-poohed global warming and trashed Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” Kirkpatrick later asked Vinod Khosla what he thought of Brabeck-Letmathe’s position. “He should see his proctologist to find his head,” said Khosla, “and you can quote me.” I like that sort of ‘say it like you see it’ attitude.
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OLPC — Rest in Peace — Part 3

Voltaire’s dictum that the perfect is the enemy of the good is fascinating because of the delicious ambiguity embedded in it. The ambiguity arises from what one identifies as the “perfect” and the “good.” If perfection is by definition unattainable, and the good is defined as an attainable “optimal” (again defined suitably), then it is by definition true that an attempt to obtain an unattainable perfection can be a hindrance to an attainable good. Then the only disagreement remaining pertains to what is considered the “perfect” and what the “good.”

Since the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) proposal is being considered here, we have to have alternate proposals which can be considered in contradistinction to it. I propose, for arguments sake, the “One Blackboard Per School” (OBPS), “One Teacher Per School” (OTPS), and “One Set of Basic Facilities Per School” (OSOBFPS) schemes out of many potential candidates. First, we will consider how they stack up against the OLPC proposition. The next thing we do is to figure out which of the alternates is the one that is “perfect” and which therefore poses the threat to the achievement of the “good.”
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OLPC — Rest in Peace — Part 2

Voltaire (1794-1778) had observed that the perfect is the enemy of the good. In response to my requiem on the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC), my friend Dr Aniruddha Banerjee from Boston, concluded his comments with that question in his email to me which I quote below. Continue reading “OLPC — Rest in Peace — Part 2”

OLPC — Rest in Peace

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is not going to happen in India.

The Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry of the government of India recently decided to just say no to the $100 laptop that Prof Negroponte of MIT Media Lab has been furiously peddling. He wanted the government to buy, oh, about 1,000,000 of those at the modest cost of $100,000,000 and give it to school children. Mind you, noble intentions motivate this: so that no child is left behind and the digital divide is bridged and all the kids will become computer savvy and what not. Continue reading “OLPC — Rest in Peace”

Formula for Milking the Digital Divide

They don’t really intentionally kill babies just to make more money, do they? They wouldn’t, would they?

Well, I don’t really know.

Infant or baby formula was developed in the developed world when women began to join the work force and did not have the time to breast-feed their babies. What a wonderful great invention it was. Convenience for the mother, and great nutrition for the baby.

Developed as an alternative to breast-feeding, the industry promoted it aggressively in the developed world. On the way back from the hospital after the birth of a baby, the industry gave as a “gift” all that you need to feed the baby formula—the bottles and the bottle bag–and gave just enough “free” formula so that the mother stops lactating because of lack of nursing. Once the mother goes down that formula road, there is no turning back.
Continue reading “Formula for Milking the Digital Divide”