Between the socially disorienting echo of apartheid, high crime rates and HIV/AIDS, South Africa is struggling under a lot of extra weight. The group that too often bears the brunt of it is kids. South Africa has a much higher number of orphans than it should. Adult guidance of kids is sometimes in short supply. To make up in part for that, Infinite Family has stepped up.
Infinite Family connects mentors anywhere in the world with South African teens in need of adult guidance, advice and support. These "net buddies" connect via weekly video conferences.
Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter is publishing a look at the best projects the flourishing site has seen over 2010 and the award winners are really uplifting for the spirit. Journalist/cartoonist Ted Rall, for example, used Kickstarter to fund a month of reporting inside Afghanistan. His cartoons from the field were sent first to the 211 Kickstarter supporters who funded his trip.
Kickstarter helps people fund a project, almost any kind of project, by using its site as a platform for collecting donation pledges, publishing videos and updates and more. More than 380,000 people have now pledged over $30 million to fund home-recorded music projects, independent films and books and many other creative projects, in just 20 months since the site launched. Below are three of my favorite videos from Kickstarter's Best of 2010 collection.
Have you ever arrived at your local grocery store only to realize that you had left your trusted stash of carefully clipped and saved coupons at home? That may no longer be an issue with today's launch of geo-targeted mobile grocery coupons that work with mobile application Cellfire's network of 5,000 grocery stores here in the U.S.
Now, instead of browsing through the newspaper for coupons to clip, you can opt to receive a real-time alert on your mobile device of the coupons available to you, as you enter the grocery store itself.
Square, the mobile payments company launched in 2009 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is the name most often bandied about in tech circles these days when it comes to talk of credit-card swiping attachments made for iPhone. But Square was never alone on the mobile payments battlefront, and now it has a new competitor backed by a well-known brand name: Intuit.
Today Intuit is making its two-year-old premium GoPayment service free - a service which comes with a magnetic stripe reader attachment that hooks onto the iPhone, similar to the one Square offers.
The news of a large number of fish and then blackbirds dying at once in Arkansas was followed by news of more in Louisiana. Unnerving, the events led to a great deal of speculation as to the cause or causes, from gas leaking to radiation to the advent of the "end times."
According to the United States Geological Survey, mass deaths are not in fact unusual and are usually unrelated. But once you start noticing something, you see it everywhere. So if you take your data mapped, here are a couple of options.
Gary Chapman: the right and wrong of life online. Chapman, 58, died of a heart attack on a kayaking trip to Guatemala. He served as the first executive director of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. Chapman also served on the faculty of the Lydon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, the associate director of its Telecommunications and Information Policy Institute and other roles at the school. For six years he wrote a column on digital issues for the Los Angeles Times.
He was a leader in thinking critically about the opportunities and liabilities of our accelerating technical culture. He spoke out against the use of computers in military decision-making and against the "Star Wars" missile defense system. Concerned in later years with the digital divide between technological haves and have-nots, he started the 21st Century Project, which provided computing technology to low income households.
As the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2011) kicks into high gear this week in Las Vegas, we're again seeing a number of 3D-enabled products from TVs to tablets to mobile devices. It's the second (or is it third?) coming of 3D, it seems, and this time around it's often glasses-free.
Much of the development around the technology is concerned with bringing 3D to your living room, such as is the case with the 3D-enabled TVs from LG and Toshiba, for example, Samsung's 3D LED monitors, or the addition of 3D movies to the streaming service VUDU, which can pipe Hollywood entertainment directly into your living room. But 3D is showing up on other screens, too - mobile phones and tablets, gaming devices and mobile 3D DTV devices - although still in early forms.
But before you go all in, early-adopting this new craze, there's a little tidbit of not-inconsequential data you need to know first.
In time for the one-year anniversary of the destructive Haiti earthquake, a group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MediaLab have rolled out Konbit, an expansive work database for those effected by the devastation, usable by those with computers and without, by those literate and illiterate. Aaron Zinman, a grad student who, along with Greg Elliott, developed the site, explained the opportunity.
"Normally (non-governmental organizations) organizations import foreign labor into Haiti due to the difficulty of finding local talent -- a problem we are trying to combat."
Not all legacy tech sticks it out, alas. Preceding floppies into the long techno-dark is Kodachrome.
The last roll of the color film will be developed tomorrow at Dwayne's Photo in Parsons, Kansas, ending a 75-year run. Kodak's "discontinuance notice" explained the simple fact behind the end of a product that first debuted in 1935.
The Plant List is the largest, most exhaustive listing of plants in the world's history. In fact, it is a list of every single known plant on earth, over a million. And it's all available in one place online to anyone, not just academics.
The Royal Botanic Gardens and the Missouri Botanical Garden are the prime movers in this attempt to sort what Discovery News called the "taxonomic jumble" of plant names that has grown up around the study of botany.
