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Let's put our collective hearts and wallets together and help erect at least one school to start the new Millenium. I came across the article below in a magazine I get and really wanted to help in some way. I thought it would be fantastic if everyone from Silicon Investor chipped in what they could to make a real difference to those who need it the most. The rural areas of Cambodia have a per capita income of roughly $37 a year. If this alone was not bad enough, they have suffered a civil war for many years, decimating their schooling and infrastructure systems. Many of us here on SI go through $37 before lunchtime. techreview.com Building an entire school in rural Cambodia costs only $14,000, with $12,000 kicked in by the World Bank. These communities have an average annual income of less than $40. Can you spare $10 or $20 to help build an "SI School"? It would take only 1400 people from SI each donating an average of $10 to build a 5 room schoolhouse(or only 700 people each donating $20). What better way to begin the new Millenium than by offering assistance to those who desperately need it the most? The completed school will have "The Silicon Investor School" on the side so your donation would in many ways be a recurring gift to generations of rural poor in Cambodia. There will also be letters from the kids and pictures posted so that you will know exactly what became of your donation. This is important to me, because I have seen firsthand the utter destitution and poverty of some of Nepal, which cannot compare to Cambodia. The areas we are talking about in Cambodia have per capita incomes of $37. To you or I or anyone else on SI, living on this amount is unimaginable. I look at charity similar to investing; that is, you put your money where it will be most effective and work the hardest for you. One more thing, please know that this charity is matched nearly dollar for dollar by the World Bank, and is lead by a department head from MIT, so you can rest assured your money is being put to good use. You may visit any time you wish should your travels ever take you to Cambodia:-) Wishing everyone Peace, Health and Prosperity in the New Year and beyond. cambodiaschools.com Please attach a note that the amount is for the Silicon Investor school. Send checks to: Bernard Krisher American Assistance for Cambodia 4-1-7-605 Hiroo Shibuya-ku, Tokyo (150) Japan *************************************************** Dear Brian Thank you very much for your kind and generous message. It is possible for you to establish a fund as you outlined and we will build a school after $14,000 have been collected (and add solar panels to the roof for an additional $1,700 that will provide sufficient energy to operate a donated computer). The checks, however, should be issued to: *American Assistance for Cambodia* (a tax deductible non-profit organization, umbrella for my various projects, and the donor can indicate in the memo portion or attach a note that the amount is for the * Silicon school *.) If it is exactly for $20 I will also assume it is for the school fund. The list of donors could be listed on the Web site, updated once a month, to provide transparency. (I would recommend, however, that donors not be restricted to $20--that could be the minimum--so the amount might possibly be reached more quickly). I attach further information on the project: The cost of a school is $14,000 ($12,000 of which goes for the matching construction fund with the World Bank and $2,000 is reserved for supplementary teaching costs over two years.) An additional optional $1,700 is for solar panels that will provide the energy to operate a computer donated by Apple-Japan. Another optional $110 buys a bookcase for a full supply of books donated by a number of publishers. Check can be issued to American Assistance for Cambodia for $15,800, the whole package, and is tax deductible. AAfC is registered as a non-profit organization in Delaware and authorized by the IRS as a 501 (c) 3 organization. Checks can be mailed to: Bernard Krisher American Assistance for Cambodia 4-1-7-605 Hiroo Shibuya-ku, Tokyo (150) Japan After receiving the donation, a school site is chosen and will be completed in six to eight months, depending on distance from the capital, landmine dangers and season. --- Look forward to hearing from you further. Best regards, Bernie ************************************************ Things That Matter: Khmer Kids Link to the Future By Michael Hawley Image of the new world: Khmer kids at Angkor come face to face with themselves in the mirror of a digital video camera. Phography by Michael Hawley Brrr! not just another frosty January in Cambridge, not just a new year, but 010101: the real dawn of the new millennium. But it feels like a digital winter in more ways than that. The Internet bubble deflated, leaving not only pissy investors and a chill on Wall Street but a generation of hackers frozen like mastodons in the Microsoft ice age, and a lot of decent people wondering: What good is this computer stuff anyway? Sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, but is it really making life more worth living? Where's the beef? Even at the MIT Media Lab, which has been ground zero for blast after digital blast, teams are scrambling to pioneer a post-computer society, exploring implications for life in the numinous high- tech beyond, sometime after the Internet. A few years ago, to teethe on this, we launched an effort called Things That Think (TTT), our cute name for a research thrust to explore embedded intelligence very broadly. What might happen when commonplace objects, like shoes or underwear or furniture or toys, begin to contain more sensory and computer power than we can currently predict, and when innate, wireless nets fluidly link them to the rest of the planet's infinitely scaling information systems? Surely, thinking machinery will infest heretofore inanimate things. What then? The implications are fantastic and profound. TTT felt like a big bang when we launched it. We put on our sunglasses with embedded holodisplays, ready for a bright future. After all, we were blazing trails into a networked world that would stretch far beyond today's Tinkertoy Internet. It was so obvious: The computer revolution hadn't even begun yet. But after just a few years, folks (observers and researchers alike) became blasé. Being digital was for old farts. As the giddiness faded, we tried being more outrageous: How about edible computing? Quantum machinery? A smart coffee cup? Teleportation? And visitors would say, "Oh." It was as if every whizzy thing that could be dreamed could be built. Science fiction was just an implementation detail. What's a poor inventor to do? Retire to a life of venture capital? As the digital industries grow out of their adolescence, people are beginning to question where these technologies are really taking us. So when an old lab's research themes fade and new ones emerge, folks pay attention. And at the Media Lab, the freshest aims involve domains such as art and human expression, creative societies in developing nations, expeditionary and ecological field efforts, and Media Labs in other countries as an ongoing way to explore creative technology in indigenous contexts—bold and humane efforts that take computing and communication and any other sort of imaginative technology utterly for granted, like paper or duct tape. To me, some of the most interesting avenues involve the deployment of powerful technologies in communities that are furthest from being overtly ready, in the hands of people who are passionate and starving to put it to use. One of the world's best examples is Cambodia. The first time I visited, about five years ago, Cambodia was a nation of about 10 million people with perhaps 10,000 telephones. You could count the cars in Phnom Penh. Most taxis were scooters (for 50 cents, you could ride almost anywhere). Few roads were paved. Electricity was sporadic. The temples at Angkor had recently reopened, though few visitors made the pilgrimage. Pockets of Khmer Rouge troops were still at large in the Elephant Mountains to the north, as was Pol Pot, so the remote temples were off limits. I saw a horrifying number of amputees. My most vivid memory, though, is of the children: There were wonderful kids running and playing everywhere, bubbling over with energy. It was like seeing the green baby plants that grow back after a forest fire. Walk through the temple ruins at Angkor, and you were never alone: A swarm of kids surrounded you, first begging for handouts but quickly giving way to laughter and games. They seemed to be able to chatter in most of the tourist languages and make lightning calculations of foreign currency values. At the time, I wondered how technology might take root there. Cell phones were a natural; developing regions often leapfrog to next-generation technologies. But with such a lack of infrastructure, how would computers find a useful role? The answer turned out to be by leapfrogging to the next generation of people. Today, for U.S. $14,000 you can build an elementary school in rural Cambodia. You can even name it for someone you love. Click on www.cambodiaschools.com and build one. Last year, I saved my money and built a school for my mom; it was the nicest Christmas present she had ever received. And what happens to your donation is extraordinary. Your $14,000 is matched by $12,000 from the World Bank. And $2,000 of it is kept for teachers' salaries (in order to import a new breed of teachers). So for $24,000 net, a three- to five-room elementary school is built in a rural village. But for an extra $1,700, the school gets a solar roof to power its computers (ah, there's the technology). Apple Japan and others have been donating machinery to these causes. Now, in these schools, there is no segregation by race, age, intelligence or anything else, which is undoubtedly a healthier way to learn than the factory format used in most Western countries. There's certainly no busing. And as quickly as we can manage it, the schools will be online: remote village schools, jacked into the world's online knowledge. You'll find Khmer kids tuning in to online lectures from great university professors. It's already happening. There's only one problem: Who can help these schools bootstrap, and bring them up to speed with computer skills? The amazing answer turns out to be—orphans. One of the heartbreaking consequences of the Pol Pot regime is the number of orphans. The Future Light Orphanage on the outskirts of Phnom Penh is a computer learning center for orphaned kids (http://www.camnet.com.kh/future.light). The orphanage has been equipped with a large number of computers (including machines no longer needed at MIT). In just a few years, some of Cambodia's savviest computer experts have grown up there. So when it came time to bootstrap computer-based teaching in rural villages like Robib (see villageleap.com), the orphaned kids were invited to help (with permission of the minister for education). Like an MIS SWAT team, the kids set up machines, got e-mail working so they could stay in touch with their pals back home, and hacked at ways to transmit Khmer, their native language (Microsoft Outlook chokes on Khmer) instead of broken English. Today, this network helps Robib villagers sell silk weavings in a new worldwide market. When you ask Cambodian kids what they want to be when they grow up, the answer used to be "a truck driver." Or a cook, or a waiter in one of the fancy new hotels. But ask the kids at the orphanage, and the answer is, "I want to be a computer pioneer." And ask the orphans after they've gone into a village to help the schools bootstrap, and they say, "I want to be a teacher." They are not just bootstrapping the technology; they are bootstrapping the culture, and the self-esteem of the community around them. By January, there will be between 30 and 50 new schools in Cambodia. Thanks to this new form of networked microphilanthropy, you can watch online, brick by brick, as the school you helped found comes together. You will receive the very first e-mail messages as kids come online. I plan to visit the schools myself in February, with my mother. Mom will help dedicate the Dixon Learning Center. It's the best Christmas present ever: a cure for the digital winter, and a reconnection to things that matter. Michael Hawley's column, Things That Matter, will look at how imbedded intelligence and networked computers will actually make a difference in daily life, following the collapse of the Internet hysteria. As one of the founders of the "Things That Think" project at MIT's Media Lab, Hawley's research has involved psychology and human-computer interfaces, computer music, digital cinema and graphics interfaces. Working with Steve Jobs, he was a principal engineer at NeXT, where he developed the world's first library of digital books. ************************************************ And finally, meet the man who is behind cambodiaschools.com and the person to whom your checks will be sent should you wish to be part of the Silicon Investor School Program: Letter from Japan: Time to Honor a Hero He helps the desperately poor gain a foothold in the future -- via the Internet By PETER McKILLOP December 31, 1999 Web posted at 4 a.m. Hong Kong time, 3 p.m. EDT Before the zeros begin to spin on Millennium Eve, I want to mark the transition on a hopeful note. No caustic commentary on Japan, no trumpeting the wonders of U.S.-styled capitalism. And absolutely no knock-knock jokes. In the spirit of charity and goodwill, I'd like to devote this column to my old friend and former colleague Bernie Krisher. Bernie is a Japan institution. As Newsweek's former Tokyo bureau chief, he was the first journalist to interview Emperor Hirohito. He did so in classic Krisher fashion -- with perseverance, charm and street smarts. He stunned and scooped a foreign and Japanese press corps that had been waiting years for such an exclusive. For decades he scraped and fought his way to the top of the news heap, and in so doing made both friends and enemies throughout Asia. Bernie eventually retired from the news business, deciding it was better to use his wonderful contacts than to be used by them. In recent years he has become a one-man United Nations. He has organized private food relief for starving North Koreans, even as governments like Japan drag their feet for inane political reasons. In Cambodia, where he is on a first-name basis with King Sihanouk, he saw hope and opportunity where most of us saw war and chaos. He started the award-winning Cambodia Daily, which now enters its sixth year of publication. Not satisfied with all of this, he badgered his contacts across the region to establish the Sihanouk Hospital--Center of Hope. It has treated 200,000 needy Cambodians in its first three years. Krisher also founded an orphanage, and today 285 war orphans are linked via the Internet to the future. The children, says Internet guru Nicholas Negroponte, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, have taken to computers and the Internet like "fish to swimming in the water." The orphanage has its own web page, at www.futurelight.org. Says Krisher: "Some have said, 'Shouldn't food and clothing be a priority?' My reply is: 'Why not both?' I'm sure that one of our children will someday be a Bill Gates or a prime minister." Helping empower Cambodian orphans gave Bernie an even more audacious idea. To help meet the challenges of the new millennium, Bernie has set a goal of building 200 remote rural schools in Cambodia by the end of the year 2000. These won't be ordinary schools. Linked by a network of computers and servers and powered by solar panels, each school will train young Cambodians on how to use computers and how to link their villages to the Internet. Krisher hopes to promote the benefits of e-education, cybermedicine and e-commerce. An e-version of African drums, the rural web network will be used to discuss, barter and sell. Call it vcb-commerce: village to consumer to business. The dream is well on its way to becoming reality. Last November, Krisher linked his first school to cyberspace. Now the war-ravaged village of Preah Vihear, in a poverty-stricken area nine hours by car from Phnom Penh, has access to the Internet, using a portable satellite dish and donated access to a satellite. The program's other founders include Negroponte, former Japanese Environment Minister Wakako Hironaka and the Tokyo Shintoshin Rotary Club. So far, Krisher has received funds for 25 schools, which are due to be completed in six months. Krisher is seeking corporate and individual donors who are willing to donate $13,000 per village school; in return, a school will be named after each giver. The money will be used to build roofs over the schools for the solar panels, purchase computers and attract teachers to the villages by supplementing their modest salaries. Donors can track the progress of the schools and their project on a website, www.cambodiaschools.com. What better way to welcome the new millennium than with evidence that this marvelous Internet technology is doing more than just making obscene amounts of money for a small techno élite. I am filled with hope that, with the vision of men like Krisher, Negroponte and Hironaka, the Internet is going where it is needed most -- to help the desperately poor gain a foothold in the future. Bill Gates, Masayoshi Son and the rest of you paper billionaires, are you listening? time.com | ||||||||||||
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