Endogenous Literacy and One Laptop Per Child

There's a famous paper in development economics by Ted Miguel and Michael Kremer called "The Illusion of Sustainability" (ungated copy here). In it, Miguel and Kremer look at an initially incredibly cost-effective intervention (deworming, original paper here) and examine whether the one-time intervention could be made "sustainable," i.e., whether the local community would continue to support the deworming program. They test three separate techniques that have been widely advocated as means of making interventions self-sustaining (cost recovery, health education, and a social psych "commitment" technique) and find that all fail. The paper is an excellent piece of evidence whenever someone brings up pie-in-the-sky "this will pay for itself in the long run and we won't need to pay operating costs!" -type arguments.

Which is why I was so surprised to come across this article over at MIT's technology review:

Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves
With 100 million first-grade-aged children worldwide having no access to schooling, the One Laptop Per Child organization is trying something new in two remote Ethiopian villages—simply dropping off tablet computers with preloaded programs and seeing what happens. 

[...] 

The experiment is being done in two isolated rural villages with about 20 first-grade-aged children each, about 50 miles from Addis Ababa. One village is called Wonchi, on the rim of a volcanic crater at 11,000 feet; the other is called Wolonchete, in the Great Rift Valley. Children there had never previously seen printed materials, road signs, or even packaging that had words on them, Negroponte said.  

Earlier this year, OLPC workers dropped off closed boxes containing the tablets, taped shut, with no instruction. “I thought the kids would play with the boxes. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, found the on-off switch … powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child, per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs in the village, and within five months, they had hacked Android,” Negroponte said. “Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”  

Elaborating later on Negroponte’s hacking comment, Ed McNierney, OLPC’s chief technology officer, said that the kids had gotten around OLPC’s effort to freeze desktop settings. “The kids had completely customized the desktop—so every kids’ tablet looked different. We had installed software to prevent them from doing that,” McNierney said. “And the fact they worked around it was clearly the kind of creativity, the kind of inquiry, the kind of discovery that we think is essential to learning.”  

“If they can learn to read, then they can read to learn,” Negroponte said.

I'm not quite sure how settled I am in my thinking about this (first thought: IRB), but as an idea it's fascinating, and reminds me a bit about the old saw that "if marginal productivity is declining, returns to capital investments in developing countries should be stratospherically high." Perhaps that statement, which seems not to hold true for physical capital, is truer for human capital, and this may be the small investment that's needed. If your first thought is "that's not a small investment," may I direct your attention to the end of the article:

The idea of dropping off tablets outside of the context of schools is a new paradigm for OLPC. Through the late 2000s, the company was focused on delivering a custom miniaturized and ruggedized laptop, the XO, of which about 3 million have been distributed to kids in 40 countries. 

Giving computers directly to poor kids without any instruction is even more ambitious than OLPC’s earlier pushes.“What can we do for these 100 million kids around the world who don’t go to school?” McNierney said. “Can we give them tool to read and learn—without having to provide schools and teachers and textbooks and all that?”

Quality school systems are not cheap compared to tablet PCs.

"The world's lightest electronic vehicle"

From the project's Kickstarter:

"We have backgrounds in mechanical, electrical, and aerospace engineering from Stanford. We also love longboarding, snowboarding, kiteboarding, and wakeboarding. So it's no surprise that we joined our revolutionary prototype drivetrain with our favorite longboard components. But the bigger picture is even more exciting: changing the world of transportation and shifting the perception of what a vehicle can be. Here's an example. Charge the board every day (6 miles of use). Total electricity cost? Less than $5 per year."

For reference, Wikipedia's description of the last mile problem is short but does the trick. I'm shocked at the amount of power they say the motor generates (2000 watts, or about as powerful as a moped engine).

Hail cannons?

My sister just emailed me from France to tell me that all the vineyards they were visiting talked about weather modification via "hail cannon."  I had never heard of this and did a quick search to see what it was and if there's any evidence that the technology works.

hail cannons in 1901

modern hail cannon installation
(from boingboing)

Apparently, it's a 100 year old technology with [perfect] properties that make it impossible for individuals on the ground to evaluate whether it works or not.  The manufacturer's claim is that directed explosions on the ground can generate shock waves that interfere with hail stone formation.  More "support" for this claim is here, but the latest scientific paper cited is a theory paper from 1966 (be sure to check out this entertaining "explanatory" animation).

It doesn't seem like anyone has seriously tried to evaluate whether this approach works. In 1981, a review of the evidence suggested that our understanding had changed little between 1902 and 1975:

From: History Repeated: The Forgotten Hail Cannons of Europe
Stanley A. Changnon Jr. and J. Loreena Ivens (BAMS, 1981)

A more recent review contains additional interesting history:

[H]ail cannons are the best known apparatus to fight hail by force.  They direct the sound of an acetylene explosion, more than 120 dB, upward by way of a conical vertical muzzle. Originally these cannons were developed in 1896 by Albert Stiger, an Austrian winegrower.  When in Stiger's valley no hail had fallen for two  years, employing these cannons became an immense craze in Austria and in northern Italy.  A cannon industry  developed, and over ten thousand cannons were employed in the region around 1900.  At a hail conference in Lyon in 1901, many different makes of cannon were offered for sale (Fig.5).  However, when regularly locations with plenty of cannons were heavily damaged by hail, public confidence decreased and the authorities organized a systematic experiment  of several years in some Austrian and Italian regions.  By the time that this experiment was concluded in 1906, most farmers already had sold their useless cannons as scrap iron (PERNTER, 1907; ODDIE, 1965; CHANGNON and IVENS, 1981)

RCT anyone?

Unmet need: daytime indoor lighting

One of the deeply humbling aspects of doing development-related work is the frequency with which one says "... I didn't even know that was a problem." Today's example: daytime indoor lighting solutions.

Isang Litrong Liwanag (A Liter of Light), is a sustainable lighting project which aims to bring the eco-friendly Solar Bottle Bulb to disprivileged communities nationwide. Designed and developed by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Solar Bottle Bulb is based on the principles of Appropriate Technologies – a concept that provides simple and easily replicable technologies that address basic needs in developing communities.

How it works:

First, a hole is cut in a corrugated iron sheet, and a one-liter plastic bottle that has been filled with water and about four teaspoons of bleach is inserted. A hole is cut in the house’s roof, the bottle is put in, and then the iron sheet is fixed to the roof with rivets and sealant.

“Unlike a hole in which the light will travel in a straight line, the water will refract it to go vertical, horizontal, 360 degrees of 55 watts to 60 watts of clear light, almost ten months of the year,” Diaz said.

Yes, it's a bottle of water-bleach solution that one sticks in a hole in one's ceiling. It solves a problem that's difficult to imagine until you've been in a dark shed during the middle of the day. It costs pennies. It's wildly popular. How can you not love it?

"We choose to go to the moon."

[This is a guest post by Kyle Meng.]

I woke up this morning to a radio story on NASA's last shuttle launch. Today's launch from Cape Canaveral marks the final flight for Atlantis, and indeed for our much storied space shuttle program. The story made me think of a figure I saw a few months back in a presentation made by the NYT reporter Andy Revkin. The figure, which I believe is from the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, shows the portion of non-defense R&D spending since the 1950s. What struck me when I first saw this figure was just how much was spent on the space race in the 1960s. In 2010 dollars, we were spending some $20-$30 billion dollars a year to get ourselves onto the moon. I'm not sure how that compares to defense spending during the same period but it certainly dwarfs all other public non-defense R&D expenditures back then and even today (with the exception of healthcare).

I'm not sure I know how best to think about this. President Kennedy's "we choose to go to the moon" speech certainly prompted this massive allocation of public funds but at what cost and towards what benefit? Many argue that its hard to place a dollar sign on placing a man on the moon, or on beating the Soviet Union during the hottest years of the cold war. There's also the argument that the achievements of this program inspired a generation of scientists and engineers. Yet, despite all this, which I sincerely believe has true value and import, I can't help but wonder, given our space program today, its retired fleet of shuttles, and the very real technological challenges we face, whether that bulge of R&D funding might have yielded better returns had it been invested elsewhere over these past 50 years.

Technologists often argue that what we really need to address climate change is another Apollo project. Certainly, the magnitude of investment needed probably rivals that of the Apollo project. But is the Apollo project really the best example? Looking back in hindsight, I'm not so sure. I watched Atlantis' launch, and, as always, found it amazing to behold. But now what?