The Last Time I Checked, The World Was Still Round

Maybe I was just being Naïve. Coming to India this summer, I expected things to be different. All I had been hearing is how fast India was becoming the next China.

When I was here six years ago, I was amazed at the high level of poverty and corruption that existed throughout the country. Going from city to city, it was all the same. The basic necessities like food, water, and electricity were scarce. In many of the smaller towns, trash collection was non-existent. My most vivid memory of that trip was visiting the village where my grandfather grew up. He showed me the tree next to the lake he used to sit under to keep cool in the summer. Since then, the tree had been cut down and the lake had dried up and been turned into a landfill.

So you can understand why I would think things would be better, given the country’s impressive 8 % annual GDP growth rate.

Private Indian Healthcare – Not Your Father’s Third World Hospital

The one thing I fear most about travelling in a developing country is getting sick. The image of musty overcrowded waiting rooms and dirty needles stuck in my mind all of last week as I became increasingly ill. What I found, however, was quite unexpected.

Walking into the hospital lobby, I wondered if I was hallucinating. The place looked like the Ritz! Marble floors, large glass windows, and a beautiful receptionist with a big smile greeted me at the front desk. The whole experience was totally painless. Within one hour I had visited the doctor, had a blood test done, picked up my medication in the in-house pharmacy, and was out the door. And the best part? The whole bill (not just the co-pay) for the checkup, blood test, and drugs was under $30!

Semantic Traveller: Jayson in India

Hey Everyone,

I’m sorry it took me so long to get an email out. I havn’t had internet access for the past week and a half, and I finally found an internet cafe. Thanks for everyone who wrote me, and I’m sorry I don’t have time to write individual responses.

First off, I would just like to say, IT IS HOT. It gets over 100 degrees and it is humid! Right now I am in a small town called Auroville on the coast of southern India. The town was developed about 45 years ago by the UN and the Indian government to try to create a place “free of national boundaries”. The whole idea is that the city belongs to no country and that they can make their own rules. I’ll write my own impressions on it later, but for now I’ll just say that it is definitely a cool place to be. I am taking this two week course on arches, vaults, and domes with this crazy french architect who is obsessed with vaults. I sleep in a vault, I eat in a vault, and I take classes in a vault. The man’s house is even a vault! There are about 20 students in the class, most of whom are Indian. There is 1 other American, 2 Canadians, and 2 Frenchmen. The class itself has been amazing. The work is challanging but fun, and a lot more engineering and math intensive than I expected, considering that almost everyone here is an architect. The first week was all theory, and we each designed our own free-standing vault. (I never knew so much went into designing a vault – It took me three full days!) This week we have been actually building arches and domes. Today we went to the site of one of the buildings that the architect has designed. It is a temple right on the beach. The previous temple had been destroyed in the Tsunami, so it was pretty amazing to go out there and see it.

Apple’s Boot Camp: Is it really so great?

The Devil may be shivering in his boots, but at least now he can run Windows on his Macintosh computer.

Thats right, Hell has actually frozen over. This past week, Apple released a beta version of their software “Boot Camp” which will be included into their next version of Mac OS X. It allows Macs with an intel processor to install and run the Windows operating system.

But how could this be good for Apple?

Toshiba and Sony to Fuel Legal (and Illegal) Online Movie Downloads

As the technology and film industry gear up for the next-gen optical format war, it is important to step back and ask the question: Who will ultimately benifit from this?

Next month, Toshiba will be releasing its first HD-DVD player. Sony has also announced their first Blu-Ray player and expects to go to market before the end of the year. Initially, excitement from early adopters may drive sales. But in the long run, with the uncertainty of what movies will be available on which format, consumers will turn to an alternate source for their hollywood fix: the internet.

Within the next year a number of companies are poised to begin offering legal downloads of movies online. Starz has already opened an online movie store called Vongo, which offers unlimited movies for $9.99 a month. And with the expected release of a true video iPod, Apple might just have a thing or two up their sleeve. Although the quality of online video will initialy be nowhere near High Definition, as bandwidth increases over the next few years we will see legal and illegal downloads approaching and even surpassing that of the next-gen optical discs.

Unless Toshiba and Sony can agree to play nice, this next battle will prove a loss for both companies and mark the demise of a physical video format.

image courtesy of www.hometheaterfocus.com

Its a Bird…Its a Plane…Its a Car?

According to researchers at MIT, our world may soon look a little bit more like “The Jetsons”. Terrafuiga, a startup created by a group of MIT graduates, aims to produce the worlds first production flying car by the end of the decade. The car will fly at an altitude of around 12,000 feet, get almost 30 miles to the gallon, and will carry two people along with their luggage up to 500 miles. The wings will even fold up when not in use to allow tight parking and urban driving. If you want one of these, you better start saving up, as one will cost you a whopping $148,000. For more information check out this News.com article or click here to view mock-up photos of the car.

Stealing Music is Still the Answer

Cartoon courtesy of The Daily (University of Washington)

I don’t think Shawn Fanning had any idea of the battle he was about to begin the day he released the first version of Napster

8 years later, the war is more violent than ever. On one side you have millions of Americans who have found a way to steal and get away with it without any social or moral repercussions. And on the other side you have the RIAA vigorously preaching the sins of copyright infringement to a body of people who just don’t care. Its like watching a substitute teacher hopelessly trying to calm down a classroom of unruly students.

But is it fair to put all of the blame on the people? For the first time, we have found a way to move and manipulate our music far more than we ever have been able to before. Not only is your music stored on your computer, but it can be put on an MP3 player, burned to a CD, and even streamed through a wireless connection to your stereo. No longer are you tied to listening to the preset order of tracks on a CD. You can now match and make your own mix of music however you would like. People steal music not only because it is free, but because it is versatile.

It took a while, but the record industry is beginning to understand. Companies like Apple and Real now sell music online per track. You can move this music to an MP3 player, burn it to a CD, and mix it they way you want it. But its not enough. For one thing, if you buy a song from iTunes, you can only put it on 5 computers. While this seems like a lot, when I buy my 6th computer 20 years down the road, I’m still going to want my music. Also, if you buy a song from iTunes, it will only work on and iPod. If you buy a song anywhere else, it won’t work on an iPod. Does this mean I’m going to have to buy iPods for the rest of my life just so that I can listen to my music?

As long as the internet exists, people will continue to steal music. But until the music companies can get it right, why shouldn’t they?

Solving the World’s Problems, One Laptop at a Time

Along with poverty, hunger, and disease, philanthropists have found a new problem to throw their money at: the technological divide.

Enter the $100 laptop. Developed at MIT by Nicholas Negroponte, the laptop is aimed at the millions of children in third world countries who do not have access to the benefits of technology. Running a 500 Mhz processor with 1 GB of memory (no hard drive) and a version of the free Linux operating system, this computer isn’t going to run Doom 4. But of course, thats not its purpose. As Nicholas Negroponte put it, “If we can make education better–particularly primary and secondary schools–it will be a better world.”

But how can these laptops work in a world with almost no modern infrastructure? The bright minds over at MIT have a few interesting ideas. First, the laptop will be hand powered. A crank wheel allows up to 40 minutes of power for every one minute of cranking. There is also the option to change the screen from color to black and white to help conserve energy. The laptop will also be Wi-Fi enabled. However, instead of having to be directly connected to a Wi-Fi base, the laptops will talk directly with each other, creating a mesh network. This means that in a rural village only one person actually needs to be connected to the internet. This laptop will relay the connection over to everyone else in range. Then these laptops will again relay the signal, creating a giant hotspot.

So when can you pick one of these up? “Never”, says Negroponte, on his website www.laptop.org. “The laptops will only be distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives.”