Silicon Valley Musings

Silicon Rally ? April 19, 2004
Terse due to low laptop battery
The most interesting person (aside from Dr. Engelbart) was Mora Mclean, Africa America Institute http://www.aaionline.org.

Gapminder, Ola Rosling
Open source data series visualization
Uses to visual two variables. Examples: Money vs Heath
Animated. Using Director, moving to Flash
Using the WHO and UN’s data sets. Currently for sale, but is urging them to be distributed freely.

Overview of Initiatives

Tamela Hultman, AllAfrica.com ? AIDS in Africa Initiative
Lots of grim statistics
New term ?Child headed households.? Some households headed by eight year olds.

Mora Mclean, Africa America Institute
http://www.aaionline.org
There are more cell phones in Manhattan than in all of Africa
Education in Africa matters.
One hundred thousand college age students are turned away each year because demand exceeds supply of higher education in Africa
20,000 alumni 97% performed in top ten of classes and XX% returned to their countries

Tom Scheinfeldt, Center for History and New Media
Online Living History of AIDS in Africa

Micheal Bosse, Equal Access
http://equalaccess.org/

Bertrand de La Chapelle, WSIS-Online Inititative
wsis-online.net

Q&A

“A Continent for the Taking”, Howard French, Recommended reading regarding the situation in Africa

Simputer guy was a vocal audience member

Wrye Sententia, Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics
fighting for privacy of thoughts
Memory Management Drug
Hypersonic sound
www.cognitiveliberty.org

Bootstrap Alliance
Douglas Engelbart
(Inventor of the computer mouse and modern user interface)
Big problems need to be dealt with collectively. We need to be collectively smarter
Xerox/Apple/Microsoft?s User interfaces are pigeon English. Need a much more richer vocabulary
CODIAK Collectively developing, integrating, and applying knowledge
Tech quantum leaps generate accelerating rate of opportunities, but human paradigms already lag behind opportunities
Network improvement community (NIC)
Internet needed packet switching. circuit switching vs. packet switching. Packet switching made shared bandwidth possible!!
Peer review is one way that paradigms get anchored
Prime goal: improve collective iq of NICs
OHS-HyperScope browsing

Future Technology Panel

Jhai Foundation ? Lee Felsenstein
Hand built computers and Wi-Fi network with bicycle generator
“one month away” from deployment (didn’t they say that at our Thursday seminar in November?)

Carl Page, CT Hand. Building a $129 video device. 8 dollar CPU chip. Most expensive component is the screen. The back light is $5. Proprietary compression format.

Zhore Elahian, Global Catalyst Foundation www.global-catalyst.org

Kevin Fall, Intel Research, Berkeley Lab
Delay Tolerant Network, part of CITRIS
Look for small sensors to change many paradigms

Raoul XX ? Clubs of Rome
Clubofrome.org
coordinating a conference to show case successes and failures of ICT in the run up the 2005 WSIS meeting.

Africa Education Breakout
Mora Mclean, Africa-America Institute
Developing in Human Capital
bridges.org is doing a study of open source vs. commercial software in africa. Reviewing total cost of ownership.