Iraqi Internet Bill, Africa Connected, NComputing, and Autism Detection Software

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Iraqi Internet Bill, Africa Connected, NComputing, and Autism Detection Software

By Clark Boyd ⋅ September 18, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

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We leave the gloom behind this week, and get on with a great podcast. Some of my colleagues at the mothership, aka the BBC, are in East Africa this week churning out some great reports about the fibre-optic cable that recently went live. We hear a report from Rory Clellan-Jones, and a great audio essay by Solomon Mughera, head of the BBC’s Swahili Service. Here are some great links to follow for more of Auntie Beeb’s “Connected Africa” series:

This week’s podcast also takes a look at a new bill set to come before the Iraqi parliament this month. The bill might take a page out of the regional playbook, and severely curtail what Iraqis can and can’t see online. Cyrus Farivar has details, and talks to Iraqi blogger Raed Jarrar and Danny O’Brien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The OpenNet Initiative has this assessment of Internet freedom in Iraq.

PC Sharing Schools At left is Stephen Dukker, CEO of a California-based outfit called NComputing. We’ve got a podcast-exclusive interview with Dukker this week about the hardware and software that his company makes. Remember that old adage that humans are only using about five percent of their brain capacities? Well, it turns out that the same goes for most personal computers. NComputing has come up with a system that allows one PC to, well, become 10 or 12 PCs. The idea is getting a lot of traction both in the United States, and overseas.

And we end the podcast this week with a look at some interesting software developed by The LENA Foundation. The software is designed to analyze speech patterns in infants and young children, with an ear toward determining whether those kids might be at increased risk for autism. You can read more about it here.

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Discussion

3 comments for “Iraqi Internet Bill, Africa Connected, NComputing, and Autism Detection Software”

Bill T.

Had kind of an issue on the Autism detection software. As mentioned by the Dr discussing it it sounded like the 90% figure mentioned was related to correctly identifying children that were already diagnosed. so that would be a 10% false negative. Never mentioned was what the results were for children that were not Autistic. I would like to know how often it posted a false positive. if it was in error 90% of the time I am not sure it would be useful at all for diagnosis? if it was anything over 0% false positive, I would think most parents would be concerned with a child being incorrectly labeled autistic.
Tom

A bit late to comment but never mind. Anyway, just wanted to mention that mr. Dukker overstated his case a little.
While the tech is quite impressive it is _very_ unlikely that 12 people could effectively share a standard desktop PC without a performance hit. There is just not enough power in a single, middle of the road CPU to provide a pleasant experience in a normal workplace. I have a similar processor as the one mentioned in the podcast and the CPU usage can easily jump to 100% when browsing heavy websites. Deployment is also an issue because the shared PC must be near the gadgets that go to the users. You are also limited to 12 users per PC where you could get a strong server machine and do LTSP terminals over an existing network.

There is a reason why the biggest customer is primary and secondary education, and it will probably remain so.
http://www2.userful.com/products/userful-multiplier Pepe

Also a bit late… Your stories have a long shelf-life though. When you interviewed about the NComputing solutions I thought “Ah, I’ve used this. It works fairly well.” Alas, it was a competing solution. It’s a Linux deal and worked very well in the (Canadian) community library i was at for light tasks like web surfing and word processing. Check out it out. http://www2.userful.com/products/userful-multiplier

P.S. Thank you Clark for all of the enriching podcasts!! I wouldn’t mind one again on 3d desktop printing :)

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