Ho John Lee's Weblog

These are my links for May 22nd through May 23rd:

• Improve MySQL Insert Performance – Summary – use LOAD DATA INFILE
• Scratch | Home | imagine, program, share – Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively
• Alice.org – Programming language environment for teaching kids, built on Java, geared toward a story telling approach.
• Jason R Briggs | Snake Wrangling for Kids – “Snake Wrangling for Kids” is a printable electronic book, for children 8 years and older, who would like to learn computer programming. It covers the very basics of programming, and uses the Python 3 programming language to teach the concepts.
• Benchmarking BDB, CDB and Tokyo Cabinet on large datasets – CDB comes out significantly faster. (It's for unchanging data though, so not totally surprising) Benchmark data for 11M key-value pair dataset stored in Berkeley DB, CDB, and Tokyo Cabinet.

These are my links for May 14th through May 15th:

• Congratulations, Google staff: $210k in profit per head in 2008 | Royal Pingdom – Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, which beats all the other large tech companies we looked at, including big hitters like Microsoft ($194K), Apple ($151K), Intel ($64K) and IBM ($30K).
• Statistical Data Mining Tutorials – A nice collection of presentations reviewing topics in data mining and machine learning. e.g. "HillClimbing, Simulated Annealing and Genetic Algorithms. Some very useful algorithms, to be used only in case of emergency." These include classification algorithms such as decision trees, neural nets, Bayesian classifiers, Support Vector Machines and cased-based (aka non-parametric) learning. They include regression algorithms such as multivariate polynomial regression, MARS, Locally Weighted Regression, GMDH and neural nets. And they include other data mining operations such as clustering (mixture models, k-means and hierarchical), Bayesian networks and Reinforcement Learning.
• Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life – Why Twitter’s Engineers Hate the @replies feature – Looking at the infrastructure overhead required for Twitter's attempted change to @reply behavior.
• Scratch Helps Kids Get With the Program – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com – On my candidate list for 7th grade introductory programming and analysis. "Scratch, an M.I.T.-developed computer-programming language for children, is the focus of worldwide show-and-tell sessions this Saturday. "
• jLinq – Javascript Query Language – For manipulating data sets in Javascript, sort of like jQuery

These are my links for March 3rd from 05:48 to 12:10:

• Twitter Fan Wiki / USGovernment – List of twitter handles for elected officials and US government staff.
• Juno: A Lightweight and Simple Web Framework –
• Free Online Course Materials | MIT OpenCourseWare –
• Entrepreneurship Corner: Stanford University’s free podcasts and video clips of entrepreneurial thought leaders and innovators from Silicon Valley. –
• McKinsey: What Matters: Building an innovation nation – A look at innovation clusters, with chart and catchy labels. "heroic bets, irresistible deals, knowledge oases"
• 40 Useful JavaScript Libraries | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine –

Ethan Zuckerman had an opportunity to visit Nicholas Negroponte and got a good look at the mockup of the proposed $100 notebook computer for use in rural and developing education projects. This is a work in progress, but seems to have some substance to it as well.

While the actual prototype is being actively banged on (in preparation for a live, but tethered, demo at WSIS on November 16th), Negroponte keeps a cardboard mockup of the machine on the conference table in his office. It’s a clever little thing – I had a hard time putting it down after picking it up.

There often tends to be a focus on the technology aspects of these low-cost “IT-for-the-people” projects, partly because it’s hard, but also because it’s a lot easier to address than the broader social, economic, and policy issues that go with their intended use. I was glad to see some questions about how they thought the overall program was actually going to work in the field:

Scale is clearly a major part of what will make the laptop succeed or fail – the laptop won’t be produced unless at least five countries sign up at a million laptops each. With an initial production run of 5 to 10 million laptops, the price is likely to be between $130 and $150 per unit, not including any distribution costs, marketing, or any digital content that comes pre-installed on the box. As the project scales up, the $100 per box target comes into sight.

The laptop is not “for sale” – it’s going to be available for students only, and will be distributed through the same channels that school books and uniforms are. The laptops will be the property of children, not of the school. Colin Maclay, a Berkman colleague who’d joined me for the visit, pointed out that in many countries, school books and uniforms are sold by (highly profitable) local businesses, and that losing a book contract might be a major blow for local employers.
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While Negroponte has some general solutions to the interesting problems around distribution and usage, I got the sense that there hasn’t been as much detailed thinking about the on-the-ground challenges as there has been about the physical and software design of the machine.

It looks like they’ll end up with some interesting hardware and software before too long, but it’s going to take longer to figure out how to put the concept into practice. Ethan comes away with a generally positive impression about the project, and is looking into collecting comments and suggestions from existing rural development programs as input to Negroponte’s team:

On the third and fourth fronts of the project – the marketing, distribution and maintenance of these devices and their connection to the Internet, and their use in the classroom – I think there’s a lot of unanswered questions and I think the global community of folks interested in IT in education, especially in IT in the developing world, could assist Negroponte and team with their thinking.

Specifically, I think it would be great for the OLPC team to have a set of requirements and suggestions for nations participating in the program on how to distribute, link, support and teach with the laptops. It sounds like Negroponte would like to make it a requirement that every student in a classroom has a laptop. Should it be a requirement that schools implementing laptops have internet connectivity? Can this connectivity be used the way it is in the SchoolNet Namibia project, to let schools become ISPs, using revenue to subsidize the net connection and, perhaps, the laptops? Will businesses repair the laptops? Or will students do it informally, or start their own businesses?

Colin and I are talking about soliciting suggestions on the distribution and use questions surrounding the One Laptop Per Child project and compiling them into an advisory paper for Negroponte and crew. (If you’ve got questions or suggestions, posting them on this blog is a great way to start a discussion…)

It will be interesting to see whether this gets useful enough to get beyond the concept demo stage. Although I love the vision, it may be possible to do just as much good within a few years with whatever cell phones turn into by then. It’s hard to make a low volume product inexpensive, and high volume production makes ridiculously complicated technology dirt cheap.

Link: One Laptop Per Child – a preview, and a request for help
See also: Six Low Cost Computers for Rural ICT, discussion at Slashdot