Atanu Dey on India’s Development

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Entries Tagged as 'One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)'

My Indian Express column on the OLPC

February 2nd, 2008 · 2 Comments

Yesterday, the Indian Express carried a column by me on the OLPC, a favorite topic of mine. There’s nothing new in there for those who have read my views on the OLPC before. The text of the column below the fold.

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Tags: My writing elsewhere · One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

One Snowmobile Per Child

January 11th, 2008 · 2 Comments

Here’s another guy who is not all that thrilled with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. The Strange Case of One Laptop Per Child is made by Eric Posner, a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School. Money quote:
It takes little insight to see that laptops would be low on the list […]

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Intel waves goodbye to OLPC

January 4th, 2008 · 4 Comments

Barely six months after joining the OLPC project, Intel announced that it is leaving. The OLPC people wanted Intel to stop work on any products that are likely to compete with the OLPC. Which basically means that contrary to what the OLPC people were claiming–that it was not about the laptop but rather about education–is […]

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Dvorak on the OLPC

December 10th, 2007 · 1 Comment

John C Dvorak writes in PCMag “One Laptop Per Child Doesn’t Change the World.” (Hat tip: Shiv Senthilvel.)
He quotes some figures from the world hunger site:
In the Asian, African, and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called “absolute poverty.” Every year, 15 million children […]

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OLPC — The Rube Goldberg Variation

October 26th, 2007 · No Comments

As if the OLPC was not Rube Goldbergian enough! What will they try next, I wonder. Try this definition of a Rube Goldberg device from the Wikipedia and tell me that it does not fit the OLPC to a t.

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Waiting for the OLPC

September 25th, 2007 · 2 Comments

Cyrus Farivar has a piece on Slate today titled “Still waiting for that $100 laptop?“. He writes: “Negroponte’s plan to heal the world with laptops is well-meaning but fundamentally flawed. What good is a laptop in the middle of rural Thailand when electricity, much less Internet access, are spotty at best? Rather than getting laptops […]

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Tags: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

IEEE Spectrum on the OLPC

April 23rd, 2007 · 2 Comments

Everything you have ever wanted to know about the One Laptop Per Child but never dared to ask has been answered in an excellent feature titled The Laptop Crusade by Tekla Perry in the April 2007 issue of the IEEE Spectrum. (Here’s a link to the print version of the article.)

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OLPC and Markets

April 20th, 2007 · 4 Comments

Alex Singleton, President of the Globalisation Institute, a European think tank, argues against the OLPC and says that computers should be left to the market economy. “The very worst idea in international development circles is the One Laptop Per Child scheme being fronted by academic Nicholas Negroponte. ”

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Craig Barrett on the OLPC

March 1st, 2007 · 10 Comments

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has powerful interests on both sides of the debate. It is easy to guess who’s on which side. Bill Gates, for instance, is predictably against the OLPC as it does not use Microsoft software. The OLPC is not using Intel chips. That could explain why Intel Chairman Craig […]

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Thoughts on Education and OLPC - 1

February 7th, 2007 · 10 Comments

I am having a conversation with a bunch of people on the net about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and its relevance to education. I am of course speaking there from an Indian perspective. I would like to share it with you. Of course, you may have already read many of my arguments about […]

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Tags: Education · One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

OLPC at the WEF at Davos

February 3rd, 2007 · 5 Comments

David Kirkpatrick filed a CNN report about the movers and shakers of this world at the World Economic Forum at Davos. The Nestle CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe apparently pooh-poohed global warming and trashed Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” Kirkpatrick later asked Vinod Khosla what he thought of Brabeck-Letmathe’s position. “He should see his proctologist […]

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Tags: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

OLPC — Rest in Peace — Part 3

August 7th, 2006 · 18 Comments

Voltaire’s dictum that the perfect is the enemy of the good is fascinating because of the delicious ambiguity embedded in it. The ambiguity arises from what one identifies as the “perfect” and the “good.” If perfection is by definition unattainable, and the good is defined as an attainable “optimal” (again defined suitably), then it is […]

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Tags: Digital Divide · One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

OLPC — Rest in Peace — Part 2

August 4th, 2006 · 6 Comments

Voltaire (1794-1778) had observed that the perfect is the enemy of the good. In response to my requiem on the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC), my friend Dr Aniruddha Banerjee from Boston, concluded his comments with that question in his email to me which I quote below.

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Tags: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

OLPC — Rest in Peace

July 28th, 2006 · 29 Comments

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is not going to happen in India.
The Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry of the government of India recently decided to just say no to the $100 laptop that Prof Negroponte of MIT Media Lab has been furiously peddling. He wanted the government to buy, oh, about 1,000,000 of those […]

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Tags: Digital Divide · One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

Formula for Milking the Digital Divide

November 5th, 2005 · 38 Comments

They don’t really intentionally kill babies just to make more money, do they? They wouldn’t, would they?
Well, I don’t really know.
Infant or baby formula was developed in the developed world when women began to join the work force and did not have the time to breast-feed their babies. What a wonderful great invention […]

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Tags: Digital Divide · Information and Communications Technology · One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)