Travels in the Riel World

There is no doubt that Twitter has its fans and its detractors. There is also no doubt that this social networking phenomenon is affecting the way that millions of people interact online, as well as the means by which information is distributed. But can Twitter also be having an impact on a culture’s communication styles? Well, perhaps it’s not going that far, but it is certainly provoking a pretty strong conversation about communication styles in India, as reported in this recent news story.

Seems an Indian politician, Shashi Tharoor, used a Twitter post to disagree with a policy favored by his political superiors. And in the process set off a cultural firestorm over communication styles and respect for hierarchy.

That message, along with a few others mildly questioning the merits of India’s new, stricter tourist visa policies, landed him on the front page of most of India’s English-language newspapers, which accused him of a very big mistake in Indian politics: appearing to disagree publicly with his superiors on a delicate issue.

Politicians in democracies the world over have warmed to Twitter, the microblogging service, and other social media tools, like Facebook, to connect with voters…But in India, the world’s largest and most boisterous democracy, it has not caught on with elected officials. Indeed, many of India’s power elite, whether in politics, the news media or business, seem to look askance at Mr. Tharoor’s enthusiasm for a medium that collapses the distance between the governors and the governed and dismantles the layers of protocol and decorum that keep elected officials and senior bureaucrats here aloof from the everyday concerns of those they serve…

Twitter enthusiasts say the news media make a fuss about it because it usurps its traditional role as intermediary and interpreter between the powerful and the masses.

Twitter and culture. Fun stuff. And hey, if you’re interested in knowing what goes in Indian politics, then you too can follow Tharoor’s Twitter account.

In August, I wrote about some of the best stargazing destinations worldwide, based on an article I’d written for Matador Travel. Now it’s time to look more specifically about stargazing destinations in the Southwestern United States. This time, I put together a road trip itinerary for Examiner.com that stretches from West Texas to Southern California and takes in some of the best views of the nighttime sky that can be found anywhere in North America. There are numerous observatories in that region that offer public viewing programs, as well as national parks that provide you with a dramatic view of the heavens far from any cities.

Here is an excerpt from my article:

It’s one of the most sublime sights in nature: a dark sky filled with thousands of glittering stars. Our ancestors were well acquainted with this spectacle, and they could even gaze up most nights to see a gallery of shooting stars and a visible Milky Way galaxy. Today, unfortunately, light and pollution in populated areas of the world obscure all but a few hundred stars in the nighttime sky.

There are still places on Earth, however, where you can be awed by a view of the heavens, and one of those destinations is the Southwestern United States. This region has some of the world’s clearest skies and Arizona boasts more observatories than any other single state or country, according to the International Dark-Sky Association.

And here is a Google map that traces the Southwestern stargazing destinations.

View Stargazing the Southwest in a larger map

It’s one of the most sublime sights in nature: a dark sky filled with thousands of glittering stars. Our ancestors were well acquainted with this spectacle, and most nights they could even gaze up to see a gallery of shooting stars and a visible Milky Way galaxy. Today, unfortunately, light pollution in populated areas tends to obscure all but a few hundred stars in the nighttime sky. If you really want to do some first-rate stargazing, however, a few regions of the world do stand out for their clear skies. I recently published an article for Matador Trips about the world’s best stargazing destinations.Here is an excerpt:

Chile- Chile’s Atacama Desert mixes high altitude, dry air, and an absence of light pollution — a perfect recipe for some of the world’s best stargazing. The highest desert on Earth is not necessarily an easy place to get to, but if you go you’ll be rewarded with some of the clearest skies on the planet. The Observatorio Cerro Mamalluca offers public tours. Or, for a more personal experience, book a room at the Hotel Elqui Domos, where seven geodesic domes feature upstairs bedrooms with detachable roofs so guests can enjoy a stunning view of the heavens from the comfort of their bed.

Hawaii- Hawaii is also a highly regarded destination for viewing the stars. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it’s relatively untouched by light pollution. The best spot in the island chain is the volcano of Mauna Kea on the Big Island. It’s also the future site of the Thirty-Meter Telescope, which will be the most advanced telescope ever built when finished in 2018. Hawaii beat out Chile for the honor of hosting this telescope after these two destinations were judged the best stargazing locations on the planet. Visitors should begin at the Onizuka Visitors Center, which runs free nightly stargazing programs.

The full article on the Matador site has a number of other stargazing recommendations.

If you’re looking for a getaway that will also satisfy your inner scientist, then Popular Science has just the solution. Proving that there are travel destinations out there for every taste and interest, the magazine recently came up with a list of eight “geek getaways” in the United States. Such as:

Vacation with Martian Experts - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Pasadena, Calif.

If you can’t go to Mars (and you probably can’t), JPL may be the next best thing. This historic lab is the hub for the nation’s latest Red Planet research. You’ll see the Space Flight Operations Facility, where scientists monitor current missions, a Space Simulator for virtual testing, and a Marscape, where prototype rovers practice maneuvers. JPL offers a free, two-day open house every May, but private tours (also free) can be arranged year-round if booked in advance.

Watch a Parking Garage Buckle - Earthquake Simulators - Buffalo, Reno and San Diego

Never seen a “shake table” shake? Visit these labs to witness the massive platforms, equipped with hydraulic actuators, simulate the force of the world’s most devastating earthquakes. Structural engineers test everything from bridges to million-pound parking garages, sometimes shaking structures for two months at a time.

Learn Real Crime-sleuthing Skills on a Corpse Farm - Body Farms - Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina

Ever wonder what happens to your body after you die? Forensic-anthropology labs at the University of Tennessee, Texas State University and Western Carolina University are the places to find out. These facilities feature “graveyards” ranging from a garage-size plot in North Carolina to an eventual 26-acre site in Texas, where scientists study donated bodies as they decay. You can’t tour the actual “de-comp” yards, but you can learn about the recovery of remains at crime scenes and disasters such as 9/11.

Check out the entire article for all eight recommendations.

Wow. Just last Friday, I had a post about the role that the Internet and social media were playing in the Iranian election. Little did anyone know how this would truly explode in the days after the apparently fraudulent results of Iran’s voting were announced. Tens of thousands of Iranians have been protesting in the streets daily and they’ve been using social media to both coordinate their efforts and to distribute information and photographs to the rest of the world.

Although the Iranian government did successfully shut down text messaging services, they’ve been far less successful in doing anything about Twitter, which people can post to from a variety of devices and computers. It’s become so important as a communications tool, in fact, that Twitter delayed a scheduled maintenance shutdown until it was the middle of the night in Iran. The NY Times, meanwhile, has published a story for two consecutive days about the post-election impact of social media in Iran.

Here is an excerpt from yesterday’s story:

As the embattled government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be trying to limit Internet access and communications in Iran, new kinds of social media are challenging those traditional levers of state media control and allowing Iranians to find novel ways around the restrictions.

Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and, most visibly, coordinating their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. Their activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential election on Friday and ensuing attempts by the government to restrict or censor their online communications.

On Twitter, reports and links to photos from a peaceful mass march through Tehran on Monday, along with accounts of street fighting and casualties around the country, have become the most popular topic on the service worldwide, according to Twitter’s published statistics…

Twitter users are posting messages, known as tweets, with the term #IranElection, which allows users to search for all tweets on the subject. On Monday evening, Twitter was registering about 30 new posts a minute with that tag.

And from this morning’s report:

…Monday afternoon, a 27-year-old State Department official, Jared Cohen, e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.

The request, made to a Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, is yet another new-media milestone: the recognition by the United States government that an Internet blogging service that did not exist four years ago has the potential to change history in an ancient Islamic country.

If you’re interested in following along yourself on Twitter, one of the more popular posters from inside Iran is persiankiwi. Or, you can also follow the popular Atlantic writer and blogger, Andrew Sullivan, who tweets as dailydish and has been prolific in keeping up with events.

It’s not news anymore that use of the Internet and social media was a key factor in propelling the U.S. presidential campaign of Barack Obama. In fact, Obama was so successful with these tactics, and social media is now so ingrained in the lives of millions of Americans, that it would be inconceivable for a future campaign to not utilize these tools. Apparently, even other countries have taken notice, and not necessarily the nations you’d immediately think of in terms of politics and the Internet. Like Iran. But it’s true - the Iranian presidential election is taking place today and it has been significantly affected by the opposition party’s use of the Internet as an organizing tool.

The two main contenders in today’s election are the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a former prime minster, Mir Hossein Mousavi. A story in the Washington Post provides a look at how Mousavi’s camp has utilized social media during this election:

Over the weekend, a government organization refused permission for his campaign to use Tehran’s 120,000-seat Azadi Stadium for a rally originally planned for Sunday. But in less than 24 hours, using text messages and Facebook postings, thousands of Mousavi backers gathered along Vali-e Asr Avenue, Tehran’s 12-mile-long arterial road.

Many brought green ropes or strings, which they tied together to form a giant chain in Mousavi’s signature color. Groups wearing green head scarves or green T-shirts arrived from schools and universities. … “Thanks to Internet and text messages, we can rally big crowds in a very short time,” noted Ghadiri, who wore a green shirt emblazoned with Mousavi’s portrait.

A fascinating article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, meanwhile, took a broader look at how Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are changing the face of Iranian politics:

In Iran, where mosques once served as the primary campaign stump for political candidates, Facebook is changing the face of the presidential election. Nearly half of Iran’s 46 million eligible voters are under age 30, which means victory in Friday’s presidential election can be achieved only with significant support from young voters.

No candidate seems to understand this better than primary reformist challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who has become the country’s first politician to wield the power of the Internet as a major campaign tool. To reach out to Iran’s youth, he created a page on the popular networking site Facebook, which as of yesterday had garnered more than 30,000 supporters. Mr. Mousavi also uses Twitter and has even launched his own YouTube channel.

“Reformists are using Facebook to bypass official state media, which explicitly or implicitly favors the current administration,” said Mehdi Semati, associate professor of communication at Eastern Illinois University and editor of the book “Media, Culture and Society in Iran.” …

“In some ways, you can compare it to the campaign of Mr. [Barack] Obama. A lot of it is grass roots,” Mr. Semati said. “Many student groups are organizing it.”

Will the reformists succeed in ushering in a new political era in Iran by capitalizing on the Internet? Stay tuned. We’ll know later today.

Or, if not the Garden of Eden, then at least the origin of modern human beings? That’s the intriguing suggestion of a recent genetic survey, as reported in the NY Times.

Locations for the Garden of Eden have been offered many times before, but seldom in the somewhat inhospitable borderland where Angola and Namibia meet.

A new genetic survey of people in Africa, the largest of its kind, suggests, however, that the region in southwest Africa seems, on the present evidence, to be the origin of modern humans…The new data goes far toward equalizing the genetic picture of the world, given that most genetic information has come from European and Asian populations. But because it comes from Africa, the continent on which the human lineage evolved, it also sheds light on the origins of human life.

Just as interesting, I think, is this other result of the same research:

Dr. Tishkoff’s team has also calculated the exit point from which a small human group — maybe a single tribal band of 150 people — left Africa some 50,000 years ago and populated the rest of the world. The region is near the midpoint of the African coast of the Red Sea.

Gets you thinking about the origins of humanity.

Following up a recent post of mine about technology and the world, here is another example of how the new social media is transforming the way in which we receive and utilize information. NPR just did a story on how Twitter and other such media are being used in the current Gaza conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The Gaza Strip may be closed to most traditional media, but the conflict there is still being reported — sometimes in cell phone interviews and through cell phone videos posted on YouTube — and increasingly on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

People on the ground are telling their stories in 140-character bursts — “tweets” — on Twitter.com, as Hamas rockets crash into Israeli towns and Israeli forces bomb targets in Gaza. Online media are conglomerating their information, and governments are getting into the act.

There are reports coming out from individuals in Gaza…

Al-Jazeera television features Twitter and text message updates in the War on Gaza section of its Web site, and it is plotting the information it gets on a map of Gaza and the surrounding areas. The map shows the locations of airstrikes, rocket attacks, Palestinian and Israeli casualties and other information based on cumulative reports.

Al-Jazeera’s Twitter account has grown to close to 3,500 subscribers in about a week, and many of those subscribers multiply that effect by passing on what they receive in Twitter and Facebook messages, blogs and other online forums.

And there is even a Twitter feed to tell the story from the point of view of the Israeli government…

Meanwhile, Israel’s consulate in New York City has launched a Twitter feed that posts the Israeli government side of the story and responds to questions from the public. The Israeli account has about 4,000 followers…

David Saranga, Israel’s consul for media and public affairs in New York, says his government started using the Internet and social media well before the conflict in Gaza.

“Public diplomacy means you have to reach the public — and if the public is changing its pattern of gathering news, we have to change the way we deliver our message,” he says.

It’s fascinating. News reporting will never be the same again.

Two recent articles caught my eye. They are both about the impact that technology is having (or not having) on opening up the world and promoting greater transparency.

The first piece concerns technology in Egypt, and focuses on the fact that Apple disabled the GPS feature on its iPhone in that country. This was at the request of the Egyptian government, which was said to be concerned with the ability of people to get coordinates of military bases. The writer spends a bit of time discussing the failure of technology so far to promote greater openness in Egypt, but still ends the article on a note of hope in this regard. 

But thus far, each time technology has promised to help introduce democracy to the country, the young peoples’ hopes have been dashed. A movement for political reform that used Facebook to organize protests over the spring was shut down. The authorities cracked down, jailing many of its organizers. In the last few weeks, a blogger affiliated with the radical group the Muslim Brotherhood was arrested for his writings, according to the Arabic Network for Human Rights. Another blogger is being held in a military camp, the group says.

It is enough to make one wonder if new technologies - the personal computer, the Web, the smartphone - will help set us free or merely give us that illusion…

It is easy to get swept up in the utopianism embedded in new technologies. That we will be more politically engaged because of the organizing and fund-raising tools of social networking; that we will think greater thoughts now that anyone can have access to nearly everything ever written; that our tribal hatreds will melt away as the world recognizes that we are all connected.

Even those like Ganesan, who see technology abused, are cautiously hopeful. “Technologies do not hold people accountable. They give people the tools to hold people accountable.” But he added: “We believe as a human rights group that the Internet can have an opening and transforming effect.”

When Human Rights Watch was founded in 1978, he said, people were “smuggling letters by hand from the Soviet Union - that was how the world found out about a dissident.” Today, there is a range of tools for spreading the word, from blogs to e-mail to YouTube videos.

The second article dates to the time of the terror attack in Mumbai, India, and provides more glimpses of the power of technology to transform the media and our access to information. In this case, individuals who were trapped in hotels or who viewed the Mumbai violence firsthand used Twitter to communicate with the rest of the world and provide real time updates on the tragedy.

From his terrace on Colaba Causeway in south Mumbai, Arun Shanbhag saw the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel burn. He saw ambulances leave the Nariman House. And he recorded every move on the Internet.

Mr. Shanbhag, who lives in Boston but happened to be in Mumbai when the attacks began on Wednesday, described the gunfire on his Twitter feed — the “thud, thud, thud” of shotguns and the short bursts of automatic weapons — and uploaded photos to his personal blog…

The attacks in India served as another case study in how technology is transforming people into potential reporters, adding a new dimension to the news media.

At the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word “Mumbai” in it was being posted onto Twitter, a short-message service that has evolved from an oddity to a full-fledged news platform in just two years…

“When you look at TV, you see one channel at a time, then you go to another channel,” said Dina Mehta, an ethnographer and social media consultant in Mumbai. “On Twitter, you get feeds from many different people at the same time.”

Just a couple of examples of how technology quietly transforms the world in both expected and unintended ways.

There is a lot of money being thrown around on development projects these days across the Gulf kingdoms of the Arabian Peninsula, and no place is more emblematic of this construction frenzy than is the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Nevertheless, some projects still boggle the mind, like Dubai’s proposed “moving skyscraper” - an 80-story building in which each floor can spin independently, thus creating the effect of a shape-shifting building. Not only that, but the entire structure will be powered by built-in wind turbines. The BBC has the story and a video.

The Dynamic Tower design is made up of 80 pre-fabricated apartments which will spin independently of one another.

“It’s the first building that rotates, moves, and changes shape,” said architect David Fisher, who is Italian, at a news conference in New York. “This building never looks the same, not once in a lifetime,” he added.

The 420-metre (1,378-foot) building’s apartments would spin a full 360 degrees, at voice command, around a central column by means of 79 giant power-generating wind turbines located between each floor.

The slender building would be energy self-sufficient as the turbines would produce enough electricity to power the entire building and even feed extra power back into the grid.

The popular software program Google Earth is now being put to use for humanitarian reasons, as Google has teamed with the United Nations to spotlight refugee migrations around the world, according to this story on CNN.

Internet search giant Google Inc. unveiled a new feature Tuesday for its popular mapping programs that shines a spotlight on the movement of refugees around the world.

The maps will aid humanitarian operations as well as help inform the public about the millions who have fled their homes because of violence or hardship, according to the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which is working with Google on the project.

“All of the things that we do for refugees in the refugee camps around the world will become more visible,” U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees L. Craig Johnstone said at the launch in Geneva.

Users can download Google Earth software to see satellite images of refugee hot spots such as Darfur, Iraq and Colombia. Information provided by the U.N. refugee agency explains where the refugees have come from and what problems they face.

For example:

In the Djabal refugee camp in eastern Chad, which is home to refugees from the conflict in neighboring Darfur, Google Earth users can see individual tents clustered together amid a sparse landscape, and learn about the difficulty of providing water to some 15,000 people.

Just another interesting way in which technology is changing our world.

Nicholas Kristof had a thought-provoking column in the Sunday NY Times about the dumbing down of America and what this says not only about U.S. culture, but also about the potential future of our competitiveness in the global arena. An excerpt…

Americans are as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution. Depending on how the questions are asked, roughly 30 to 40 percent of Americans believe in each. A 34-nation study found Americans less likely to believe in evolution than citizens of any of the countries polled except Turkey.

President Bush is also the only Western leader I know of who doesn’t believe in evolution, saying “the jury is still out.” No word on whether he believes in little green men.

Only one American in 10 understands radiation, and only one in three has an idea of what DNA does. One in five does know that the Sun orbits the Earth …oh, oops.

“America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism,” Susan Jacoby argues in a new book, “The Age of American Unreason.” She blames a culture of “infotainment,” sound bites, fundamentalist religion and ideological rigidity for impairing thoughtful debate about national policies.

How does any of this really affect us? Kristof suggests that…

…we as a nation will have difficulty making crucial decisions if we don’t have an intellectual climate that fosters an informed and reasoned debate. How can we decide on embryonic stem cells if we don’t understand biology? How can we judge whether to invade Iraq if we don’t know a Sunni from a Shiite? (editor’s note: for a scary view of how little even our government leaders know about this topic, check out this older post of mine.)

Our competitiveness as a nation in coming decades will be determined not only by our financial accounts but also by our intellectual accounts. In that respect, we’re at a disadvantage, particularly vis-à-vis East Asia with its focus on education.

From Singapore to Japan, politicians pretend to be smarter and better- educated than they actually are, because intellect is an asset at the polls. In the United States, almost alone among developed countries, politicians pretend to be less worldly and erudite than they are…

There’s no simple solution, but the complex and incomplete solution is a greater emphasis on education at every level. And maybe, just maybe, this cycle has run its course, for the last seven years perhaps have discredited the anti-intellectualism movement. President Bush, after all, is the movement’s epitome — and its fruit.

I had to link to this article, which I found fascinating if for no other reason than that it shows how physicists seem to exist on a different plane of existence than I do. I love reading about modern physics, but I truly can’t comprehend how any of this works. What about you?

First of all, no, you’re not about to get sucked into the gravitational field of a black hole. But there are those who now contend that the Large Hadron Collider under construction in Switzerland could actually produce a black hole that consumes the Earth.

Huh?

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang…But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth…

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem…The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate. As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

O.K., so theoretically possible. But not likely, right?

William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.” …

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

So, no, we’re not in any danger. But then again, perhaps we could create a black hole that would suck up the Earth, although the circumstances would have to be “really, really weird.” Or, heck, maybe the same process would produce dragons. Like I said, a different plane of existence.

From China to Cuba, governments have done their best to control technology and the internet in an effort to keep their societies from becoming too open. They’ve had some successes, but it’s nearly impossible to stop people from connecting to the outside world, as shown by this International Herald Tribune article about Cuba.

Cuban officials have long limited the public’s access to the Internet and digital videos, tearing down unauthorized satellite dishes and keeping down the number of Internet cafes open to Cubans. Only one Internet café remains open in Old Havana, down from three a few years ago.

Hidden in a small room in the depths of the Capitol building, the state-owned café charges a third of the average Cuban’s monthly salary - about $5 - to use a computer for an hour…

Yet the government’s attempts to control access are increasingly ineffective. Young people here say there is a thriving black market giving thousands of people an underground connection to the world outside the Communist country.

People who have smuggled in satellite dishes provide illegal connections to the Internet for a fee or download movies to sell on discs. Others exploit the connections to the Web of foreign businesses and state-run enterprises. Employees with the ability to connect to the Internet often sell their passwords and identification numbers for use in the middle of the night. Hotels catering to tourists provide Internet services, and Cubans also exploit those conduits to the Web.

Even the country’s top computer science school, the University of Information Sciences, set in a campus once used by Cuba’s spy services, has become a hotbed of cyber-rebels. Students download everything from the latest American television shows to articles and videos criticizing the government, and pass them quickly around the island.

Still, it does take dedication and persistence for Cubans to maintain these channels of communication with the world:

Yoani Sánchez, 32, and her husband, Reinaldo Escobar, 60, established Consenso desde Cuba , a Web site based in Germany. Sánchez has attracted a considerable following with her blog, Generación Y, in which she has artfully written gentle critiques of the government by describing her daily life in Cuba…

Because Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet café, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand.

There is an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor about cell phone use in Africa - not only the dramatic increase in the number of cell phone users across the continent, but also some of the unique ways in which people utilize the phones as compared to the way they are used in the West. An excerpt:

Over the past decade, the number of cellphone users in Africa has grown faster than anywhere else in the world.  According to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Entrepreneurial Programming and Research on Mobiles unit, the continent’s cellphone usage has increased about 65 percent annually for the past five years – from about 63 million users in 2004 to 152 million in 2006.

“Cellphones are in the deepest rural areas in Africa,” says Saadhna Panday, of South Africa’s Human Sciences Research Council. “More people have access to a cellphone than a land line.”

And the way people use and care for their mobile phones is different than in the wealthy, BlackBerry-addicted West. Here, people send text messages to friends, but also use their cells to do banking and organize political rallies. In areas with no TV, farmers use phones to get agricultural news and weather reports. (The Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange, for instance, sends text messages with up-to-date market prices.) In townships, entrepreneurs will set up cellphone booths, where passers-by can use airtime for a slightly inflated price.

In all these ways, says Panday, cellphones have increased networking among Africans and have lessened the global “digital divide” between haves and have nots.

It’s a lofty goal, but Rwanda has begun taking steps that it hopes will lead the country to become a high tech hub for Africa — the “Singapore of Africa,” as some have suggested. The Christian Science Monitor has the story.

Sometime in the next two years, nearly every school in Rwanda from distant mountain villages to swelling urban areas will be hooked up to the Internet. And it won’t be some crummy dial-up service. It will be high-speed broadband, carried by fiber-optic cables.

The fact that Rwanda is closing in on this goal without having the massive oil wealth of Angola or Sudan, the diamonds of Congo or South Africa, or even the copper of nearby Zambia is a testimony to the power of imagination. And Rwanda imagines that one day, it will be the information technology center of Africa.

“In 2000, we decided to transform the country from agricultural subsistence to a knowledge-based economy,” says Albert Butare, Rwanda’s minister of state for energy and communications. With two fiber-optic rings around Kigali, and cable being laid across the country, Rwanda is well on its way to being wired. “Once we’ve reached the towns of each sector, it’s like you’ve covered the whole country. In another two years, we should be there.”

Rwanda’ goals have attracted both support and criticism.

Government officials and business leaders see high-tech as the best way to lift one of the world’s least-developed countries into a better position to compete globally. Local human rights activists fret that Rwanda’s money could be better spent on things like drinking water and electricity.

Countries like Rwanda, which rank among the world’s least developed countries (LDCs), don’t easily become high-tech hubs. Sixty percent of Rwandans live below the poverty line, defined by the UN as an income of less than a dollar a day. According to a 2005 study by the Australian National University, LDCs make up 10 percent of the world’s population and represent only 0.13 percent of the world’s Internet users.

Yet, there are hopeful signs. Nearly 70 percent of Rwanda’s adults can read and write. This fact, combined with Rwanda’s dense population, almost all of whom speak the same language, Kinyarwanda, make the country a much better place for establishing an Internet hub than Rwanda’s resource-rich, ethnically diverse, and less-educated neighbors.

Each year, the United States government allocates 65,000 visa slots for foreign workers who have high-tech or other scientific skills. Numerous U.S. companies, particularly in the computer field, have lobbied for a higher annual limit on these visas. As if to prove the point, the U.S. on Monday began accepting applications for those 65,000 visas for 2008 - and, according to this article, received 150,000 requests in one day!

That means, of course, that more than half of the first day applicants will be turned away. This has caused consternation in several high-tech companies, although it does raise the obvious question - where are all the U.S. technology workers and scientists? Does the demand simply outstrip the supply that our population is realistically able to provide, or are too few Americans going into math and science fields?

Employers seek H-1B visas on behalf of scientists, engineers, computer programmers and other workers with theoretical or technical expertise. At Microsoft, about a third of its 46,000 U.S.-based employees have work visas or are legal permanent residents with green cards, said Ginny Terzano, a spokeswoman for the company…

Compete America, a coalition that includes Microsoft, Intel, Oracle and others, voiced its opposition to the visa cap in a statement Tuesday.

“Our broken visa policies for highly educated foreign professionals are not only counterproductive, they are anti-competitive and detrimental to America’s long-term economic competitiveness,” said Robert Hoffman, an Oracle vice president and co-chairman of Compete America.

The group’s opponents say that increasing the visa limit would bring down wages and discourage American youngsters from pursuing technology careers.

Google has launched an initiative through its popular Google Earth program to call attention to the tragedy of the Darfur region of Sudan. According to this San Francisco Chronicle article:

In an effort to raise awareness about atrocities in Sudan, Google Inc. has updated its online satellite mapping service with images of burned villages, refugee camps and wounded children.

The project, done in partnership with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, offers users of Google Earth a bird’s eye view of the aftermath of four years of fighting between the East African nation’s Arab-dominated government and the largely black residents of the Darfur region. The United Nations has said that more than 200,000 people, many of them Darfur civilians, have died and 2.5 million have been displaced in the conflict.

Elliot Schrage, Google’s vice president of global communications and public affairs, said the new high-resolution images are intended to encourage individuals to act against what he — along with U.S. officials and many human rights groups — describe as genocide.

If you don’t have the free Google Earth software, you can get it here.