More saving the world...

Listening to NPR a while back, about an American operating in yemen to make pots that are impregnated with silver, which evidently purifies the water for about 7 years. Some unknown quality about silver... he's making them all day long and selling for $25 each...  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124012949

Then read some other articles- can't remember, newsweek maybe? That a traditional treatment for diarrhea in africa is  a rehydration formula with some kind of sugar water... however, parents don't really believe it's "medicine" so don't administer it as they might normal medicine, so the kids still die of dehydration. What folks have discovered is that zinc in tablets, given during the flood season (when most get sick) dropped mortality down to zero in test villages, and provided a mechanism along with the sugar water which caused parents to administer both. Oral Rehydration System (?) ORS - now they come in packets, and have included the zinc - here's article about Bangladesh: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-05-01-diarrhea-kids_N.htm

Here's the original article about zinc- it was Time magazine... http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1914655,00.html

what else? We can't stop children from dying from dehydration and we're worried about HIV?  Maybe Bill and Melinda Gates...

I'd like to help... but wonder if I have it in me....

Inspiring Sky Ships from flickr

D.I. Introduces himself

I want to save the world...

I exchanged a brief email with a friend of a friend about possible cargo container work in Haiti... lots of people are talking and nobody's doing... and i'm a talker... and wish i was a doer...

I sent her a link to a TED lecture by Robert Neuwirth about Shadow Cities- a man who lived in slums around the world wrote about them. I was struck by his description of a kid doing his business on a pile of trash. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2Js_g7M60M

Then I replied with this:

Yes, sobering... but when i dissect it- you can take a HUGE pile of
waste and convert it into its constituent parts, and with some
cleverness, actually build things out of it - but you need some key
components- like bonding materials, mesh, etc...

there are a number of additional similar videos- one shows how to use
small cook fires to create refrigeration. Another how to make charcoal
out of unused waste. One is on a better cookstove for villagers and
another on filters that get out every single bacteria and virus known
to man (i bought one and now drink pond water out of it). That's just
the beginning. There's SODIS water filtration, solar thermal heating,
zinc/glucose/salt treatments for diarrhea, and micromotors and
generators made from spare parts. Extended bicycles for transport,
ziplines and rope bridges for crossing rivers, geodesics and
earthships and so on...

see, you got me started....


=========================which is where the email ended==============================
So I had to go back and then link to each of these items. 


there are a number of additional similar videos- one shows how to use
small cook fires to create refrigeration. Another how to make charcoal out of unused waste. One is on a better cookstove for villagers and another on filters that get out every single bacteria and virus known
to man (i bought one and now drink pond water out of it). That's just
the beginning. There's SODIS water filtration, solar thermal heating,
zinc/glucose/salt treatments for diarrhea, and micromotors and
generators made from spare parts. Extended bicycles for transport,
ziplines and rope bridges for crossing rivers, geodesics and
earthships and so on...




Follow them all...

Fwd: More on couchsurfing

(sent to my web 2.0 class)

Folks-

just wanted to give you a heads- up. I got 4 friend invites on CS so
far- the way couchsurfing is geared, it tries to establish the
authenticity and nature of the relationship- in part because you are
making recommendations about strangers staying with other strangers-
so the quality of the references matter.

As such, i'm asking you to not take it personally if I put you as
acquaintances instead of friends. I know XXX from several previous
interactions. I had Morgon in a class a year ago - YYYY and I have
had several conversations outside the class thru other media- I've
spent some time on Skype with ZZZZ. So each relationship is different,
and emerging. This will also allow you to see the variety. Obviously,
i'd like to be friends with everyone, and hope we do get a chance to
meet in person (perhaps at the NC3ADL starting this weekend? Or the
NCCIA immediately thereafter? Or the League in Baltimore at the end of
the month?).

In addition, couchsurfing is one of the few sites that encourages you
NOT to recommend people to join if you don't think CS is for them
(i.e. people who are not interested in travel or travellers, or
meeting new people, or hosting or being hosted by strangers). I don't
know you guys well enough, but it's a very rich site in the way it
uses social media, and as I've said before, very much ties the real
world to the virtual.

Please, as you look at this, and other sites and tools, compare them.
One thing that should become immediately obvious across many of these
applications is the ability to:

Customize a profile, including links to other sites, other people, and
icon/photos of self
Way to contact people via profiles, including messaging/mail service
Link to friends/others
Uploading of photos and/or videos
Creation of and joining groups, and the ability to treat those groups
as listservs
Tagging (the future- web 3.0 - the semantic web)
The ability to invite others to associate themselves with you
(friending?) and/or join
The ability to scan other applications for connections.

When I think about flickr, blogger (and other google tools),
couchsurfing, facebook, twitter, ning, and linked in, they all seem to
have MOST of these elements- so then we have to ask, what makes them
different. You can put photo albums on flickr, or facebook, or
couchsurfing - so why one over the other? Yet they all originate with
very different purposes in mind.

Part of your job is to understand the similarities and the
differences, and know when they matter, and when they don't.

--
D.I. von Briesen
God is Greater

Unified Messaging...

This is a test of posting to my new more on that later blog on
blogger. But rather than just send some dummy text, I thought I'd
share some thoughts from days of yore...

When i first started consulting (actually was in training) with Price
Waterhouse, I got to think about unified messaging. I had just gotten
a paid online fax service, so i could get travel info faxes by email
without paying hotels a buck a page - which easily paid for the
monthly service a few times over at the time. How things have changed!

Anyway, I began to think about our communications in terms of the FORM
of the media and the MACHINE that presents it. This was in about 1997,
so cell phones were not yet mainstream, and even internet access was
fairly new to many. Fax machines ruled, and each business had their
own kind of email. Ours was lotus notes, and I had my good ol'
earthlink account. I spent a while in a break room mapping this idea
out on a huge whiteboard- thinking that what we really needed was
multiple ways for the message to go in, and a machine/app in the
middle that would convert it in any way that could be converted, and
send it out to the recipient.

Let's see if i can do this in text - rough draft.

INPUTS      take the  form:
                                  DEVICE

fax                     IMAGE, but can convert to voice
                                    fax, phone, screen
photo                 IMAGE, but can be described in voice
                               fax, screen, sound player
text                    IMAGE, but can be voiced
                                      fax, text, screen, sound player
video                  IMAGE, SOUND, can partially represent, VIDEO
                        fax representative, text representative,
screen, sound player
audio                 SOUND, convert to TEXT
                                  text representation, sound player

So for example, anything that can take in a scan is basically making
an image, which can then be output to anything that can output an
image.

As I try to recreate this im reminded that the edges of what devices
do what are blurring, so it may be easier to think about this all in
terms of senses - we see stuff- either static or moving, either images
or text. We hear stuff - either real voice, simulated voice, or other
sounds. These sounds may or may not go with text, video, or images,
and vice-versa. So a rich output device would allow for video, or
text, or images, or sound, or all of them. A rich input device would
take in all those forms. A rich communications application would
seamlessly take in any form and output it to all available forms.

So you send me a fax of a printed construction quote- I want: a
picture of the scan, a voice message with the gist of the content of
the image, a video that zooms in on any details, and... what else? IT
doesn't seem so fancy anymore, now that we can attach anything to
email, have a video chat from email, and so on- but in reality, we
still have all these barriers- the best we're doing with high-dollar
scanner/printers at work is taking printed docs and turning them into
multipage pdf's... pretty weak, actually.

I look forward to apps that tie this stuff all together better.

d.i.

--
D.I. von Briesen
God is Greater

--
D.I. von Briesen
God is Greater

Meeting - where real-life meets the virtual world, or vice versa...

I replied to a [SLED] question about people meeting in real life after meeting online. This was my reply:

I have a couple of great stories about this:

I'll start with a trivial one- i don't have the specifics, but I've had online conversations with a couple in Texas (educators I think) and the avi name of the man had something to do with NZ in it, and when I asked, it turned out they'd met in Second Life and are now married in real life, living in Texas.

When I began to do a lot of SL work, I introduced a relative to SL during a visit to his home in New England. - he got an account and went whole-hog, buying land, houses, etc... a few months later, he introduced me to his SL girlfriend. Now, 2 years later, they live together in Long Island.

When i was at a sloodle meeting two years ago (being a big moodle and SL evangelist) a man/avi approached me in SL about doing a presentation in Europe. At first I thought it was in SL, but he meant in RL - to fly there and participate in a one-day workshop for librarians. In preparation for this, he introduced me to one of the leading women web 2.0 gurus in Europe - we first met (all three of us) face-to-face with adobe communicator - she was at her office in Malta, I was at a hotel room out West, and he was in his apartment in Stockholm. We collaborated heavily over skype and email after that, then met in person the day before the event.

And finally, I don't know if you'd count this, but when I was 19 in about 1989 and in college, i picked up a copy of islamic horizons and found a 2-line ad in the matrimonial section - print was the way to go before the internet. I replied with a 12-page handwritten letter. We just celebrated our 19 anniversary and the youngest of our five children is 7.

I guess there is never a finally though, LOL- one of our book reps got married to her husband after meeting him on match.com (she'd avoided meeting him for a long time because she didn't like his profile picture, despite the 93% match - but when she finally did she said it was instant.). We have another couple of friends - both Bosnian- he a war survivor, she a single child raised by an imam in florida- who met online and now have 2 kids in CA. Not sure what the site was, but he said he finally had to break down and pay the fee to be able to contact her thru that service.

Whoah... this just keeps going on and on- the best example of this sort of thing is CouchSurfing- We've hosted about 20 people, and i've been hosted by 6 in two different cities. In my experience, the richest virtual-to-real life application out there. There have been over a million brokered interactions on Couchsurfing.com so far, and growing. We've hosted vietnamese girls from france, Texas born-agains, brazilian exchange students, former clowns, hemp weavers, and more! By far the richest profiles I've seen as well... blows facebook out the window. See mine: http://www.couchsurfing.org/people/divb/

Cheers!

d.i.


On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Rik Panganiban wrote:
> Hi friends,
> Although not directly education-focused, we thought this project might be of
> interest to the SLED community.
> Global Kids is involved in the production of a new HBO documentary about
> people meeting online. The producers are open to all kinds of relationships
> that began online -- professional collaborations, student-teacher,
> cross-cultural friendships, whatever as long as its compelling.
> If you have such a story, or know someone who does, please read below.
> Best,
> Rik
> -----------------------------
> Dear Friends,
>
> Has meeting someone online dramatically affected your life? We want to hear
> your story for a new HBO documentary! (And please pass this on to anyone
> else who might have a story!)
>
> What do we mean by "meeting online"? It could be anything from Internet
> dating to making a significant personal or professional connection. In
> short, we want good stories that revolve around connections made on the
> Internet. If you've met someone online and the relationship deeply affected
> you, then we want to hear from you! You might get the chance not only to
> tell it, but to have it featured on a new HBO show respectfully sharing some
> of these tales.
>
> The show will be directed by Emmy Award winning, Oscar-nominated director
> Robert Kenner (Food, Inc.) and produced by Marc Weiss, creator of the
> critically-acclaimed public TV series P.O.V. To hear more about this
> project, and watch a sample from the show, go here.
>
> This is the digital era and the project is about connecting online - so
> please use whatever you prefer to make the connection with us:
>
> Web: Submit it via the web site: http://Meeting-Stories.org
> Email: Email it to stories@meeting-stories.org
> Video: Go to our YouTube channel and add your story as a reply.
> Voice: Use Google Voice by clicking here.
> SMS: Follow us on Twitter or post it with the hashtag #howwemet.
> Facebook: Join our group and post it there.
> Postal mail: You're kidding, right?
>
> Whatever you do, just don't keep it to yourself!
>
> To read more about the project, or read stories as they come in,
> visit http://meeting-stories.org
>
> Thanks so much!
>
> The "Meeting Online" Team
> ___________________________________
> Rik Panganiban
> Assistant Director
> Online Leadership Program
> Global Kids
> email: rik@globalkids.org
> tel: +1 212 226 0130 x139
> second life: rik riel
> http://www.globalkids.org
> http://olp.globalkids.org
>
> _______________________________________________
> Educators mailing list
> To unsubscribe
> https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/educators
>
>



--
D.I. von Briesen
God is Greater