Interesting Snippets

With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages—simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens….

The devices involved are Motorola Xoom tablets—used together with a solar charging system, which Ethiopian technicians had taught adults in the village to use. Once a week, a technician visits the villages and swaps out memory cards so that researchers can study how the machines were actually used. After several months, the kids in both villages were still heavily engaged in using and recharging the machines, and had been observed reciting the “alphabet song,” and even spelling words. One boy, exposed to literacy games with animal pictures, opened up a paint program and wrote the word “Lion.” The experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa. One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Great Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them

the so-called unbanked population grew to 8.2 percent of U.S. households.

That means that roughly 17 million adults are without a checking or savings account. Another 51 million adults have a bank account, but use pawnshops, payday lenders or rent-to-own services, the FDIC said. This underbanked population has grown from 18.2 percent to 20.1 percent of households nationwide

I was curious how people in a country with roughly four percent internet penetration and limited mobile data access interacted with Google search and products. Since radio is a popular form of mass communication in Afghanistan, it turns out that people call in to a local radio show called ‘Percipal’ (‘Seek and Search’) and ask their query to the host. The host, who has internet access, does a Google search and then reads the answer on air.

Nearly a million documents that make up Winston Churchill’s archive, ranging from school reports, drafts of his famous wartime speeches, to cigar bills, have been made instantly accessible to students, historians, and even politicians looking for lessons from past coalition governments… The digital archive, which can be accessed remotely, is published by Bloomsbury. The annual subscription for universities and libraries and other institutions starts at £1,120 for a small college rising to several thousand pounds depending on the size of the organisation

Page 13: As of December 2011, the estimated number of wireless broadband connections in the OECD (667 million) was more than double that of fixed broadband subscriptions (315 million)

Page 14: Approximately 70% of OECD households have access to broadband Internet, at increasingly higher speeds and lower costs

Page 102: Internet access in households exceeds 30% worldwide, but there are clear divides by regions. The penetration rate is highest in developed countries (over 70%), but remains low but growing in developing countries (around 20%) (ITU, 2011a)

Page 103: Broadband is available in at least 60% of households in four fifths of OECD countries

Although the majority of tweets are in English, a market research firm has estimated that 11 % are in Portuguese, 6 % in Japanese, 4 % in Spanish, and 18 % in other language. Small local languages such as Haitian Creole, Maori, and Wolof are even present on Twitter

As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it

Virtually every U.S. household with an annual income over $75,000 is online, but that’s only true for 63% of adults who live in a household with an annual income under $30,000. The numbers look quite similar for different education levels: 94% of adults with post-graduate degrees are online, but 57% of those without high school diplomas remain offline.

While Norwegian is spoken by 4.6 million people, there are 300,000 articles on Wikipedia in the language. Finnish is spoken by 5 million people, and there are 273,000 articles on Wikipedia in the language.

In comparison, there are only 154,000 articles in Arabic, despite the fact that there are roughly 374 million Arabic speakers, making it the fifth most commonly spoken language in the world. Wikipedia’s Arabic articles account for a measly 0.007% of its overall content.