The beginning of Africa’s long, slow transition away from SMS – new browser kids on the block making mobile Internet access easier →
At the end of 2011, there were the first signs of smartphone use on SMS: for the first time in some countries, rather than the volume of SMS growing inexorably, it declined for the first time. Russell Southwood looks at how wider use of mobile Internet may affect SMS volumes in Africa and at two of the new generation of interfaces designed to make it easier for Africans to use the mobile Internet.
Sebastian Thrun Aims to Revolutionize University Education With Udacity | Singularity Hub
This past August fellow Singularity Hub writer Aaron Saenz wrote about Udacity, the online university created by Stanford artificial intelligence professor and Google autonomous vehicle leader, Sebastian Thrun. At the time Thrun was gearing up to teach his Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course to a class of 200 at Stanford. But why teach 200 when you can teach 1,000…or 160,000? With Udacity, Thrun and fellow AI giant Peter Norvig created an online version of the course, and anyone that wanted to enroll could – for free. The homework assignments and exams would be the same as the ones given to the Stanford students, and they would be graded in the same way so online enrollees could see how they stacked up to some of the brightest students in the world. It was to be a grand experiment in education.
Now, the semester’s over. The exams have been taken, the homework’s been turned in, computers logged off and pencils set down. How’d it all turn out? Thrun spoke recently at the Digital Life Design conference about he and Norvig’s experience. As you’ll see, his students weren’t the only ones with much to learn.
Online, the course went viral. Over 100,000 people enrolled in the initial weeks. By the time the lessons began Thrun and Norvig were instructors for a class size of 160,000. With students all over the world, they enlisted the help of some 2,000 volunteer translators to translate the classes into 44 different languages. Discussion groups were set up on social networks like Facebook so students could help each other, forming what Thrun called an “entire counterculture.”
(via smarterplanet)
Trans African Caravan of Hope →
The Trans African Climate Caravan of Hope is a road show that will seek to galvanize the cross country stakeholder voices, with an ultimate aim of telling the African story while making known the demand of Africa among its inhabitants and the rest of the world. The Caravan is a huge mobilization and awareness creation opportunity for African civil society to highlight the challenges climate change poses to African’s efforts to extricate herself from poverty and attainment of Millennium Development Goals.
This Is A Creepy Robot
This is the robot I get when I put my Tumblr name “twicr” into RoboHash.org. Yeah, kinda purple-y creepy. Give it a shot with your Tumblr name and let everyone see what weird robot avatar you’ll be turned into after the robot uprising.
(h/t PopTech)
Ha! This is ours, BTW.
Meet Mr. Toilet | Jessica Yu by Focus Forward Films
For those without access to a simple toilet, poop can be poison. Businessman-turned-sanitation-superhero Jack Sim fights this oft-neglected crisis affecting 2.6 billion people.
Inevitably, 2010 Social Innovation Fellow Ryan Smith opened his presentation with a poop joke.
“It was irresistible,” he said of the “Poop!Tech” logo on the screen behind him. Natch. Smith, after all, is co-founder and chief technical officer of Micromidas, Inc., a biotech company that uses an innovative microbial process to convert raw sewage into high quality disposable plastics.
The plastics made by Micromidas’ sewage-eating bacteria are completely bio-degradable and the implications of the technology are obvious. A non-petroleum plastic made from organic waste that completely degrades in six months to a year? What’s not to love?
RoboHash: Turn text to robots →
Looking for a friendly robot to add some sci-fi flare to your website or blog? RoboHash is a cool little script that will turn any snippet of text, username, file name, etc. into a cute custom robot (or monster, or alien!) that you can use as you see fit. You can change the size and file type to further meet your needs.
After a freewheeling, decade-long “vacation from history” at the tail end of the 20th century, the opening decade of the 21st abruptly returned us to a world fraught with fragility and surprise. And this new context is here to stay.
Each week, it seems, brings some unforeseen disruption, blooming amid the thicket of overlapping social, political, economic, technological and environmental systems that govern our lives. They arrive at a quickening, yet erratic pace, from unexpected quarters, stubbornly resistant to prediction. The most significant become culture touchstones, referred to in staccato shorthand: Katrina. Haiti. BP. Fukushima. The Crash. The Great Recession. The London Mob. The Arab Spring. Other nameless disruptions swell their ranks, amplified by slowly creeping vulnerabilities: a Midwestern town is undone by economic dislocation; a company is obliterated by globalization; a way of life is rendered impossible by an ecological shift; a debt crisis emerges from political intractability. If it feels like the pace of these disruptions is increasing, it’s not just you: it took just six months for 2011 to become the costliest year on record for natural disasters*, a fact that insurance companies tie unambiguously to climate change. Yet nobody can be sure where the next disruption will come from: in our densely and globally interconnected world, the ‘black swans’ are baked in.
In the face of such unavoidable volatility, what factors cause some communities, individuals, ecosystems, institutions and economies to break down, and which enable them to bounce back?
That simple, and increasingly central question is at the heart of a new field, and an important new strategic conversation, centered on resilience.
Image via Thai Flood Hacks
