Internet searching means that finding information mundane, obscure, or fantastically useful is just a few keystrokes away — but not if you're without a connection to the Internet (or can't read), both the norm for many of the world's poor.
itwbennett writes
"Rose Shuman developed a contraption for this under-served population called Question Box that is essentially a one-step-removed Internet search: 'A villager presses a call button on a physical intercom device, located in their village, which connects them to a trained operator in a nearby town who's sitting in front of a computer attached to the Internet. A question is asked. While the questioner holds, the operator looks up the answer on the Internet and reads it back. All questions and answers are logged. For the villager there is no keyboard to deal with. No complex technology. No literacy issues.' This week, Jon Gosier, of Appfrica, launched a web site called World Wants to Know that displays the QuestionBox questions being asked in real time. As Jon put it, it's allowing 'searching where Google can't.' And providing remarkable insight into the real information needs of off-the-grid populations."
Put a computer where the intercom is! (Score:2, Interesting)
If the connection between the intercom and the operator is good enough for voice, that is good enough of a bit rate for googling things. Then just putting a computer there will make things much more efficient. (you won't have to hire a operator, for one thing)
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I guess you missed the part about these people being illiterate.
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I can search google using just voice detection on my iPhone (and it works remarkably well). Then, the iPhone can read everything back to me. If a blind person can use an iPhone to search Google, an illiterate person can too. If an illiterate person can use an iPhone, they should be able to use a desktop computer.
I'm not sure how good Google's Hindi voice detection is, but I'm just saying it is theoretically possible.
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but I'm just saying it is theoretically possible.
The whole point of the exercise is that it is not just theoretically possible it is actually being done on the ground. Handing out iPhones to folk in the bush isn't gonna happen soon whereas this experiment is up and running and not only providing a useful resource to those outside the technical revolution but also providing an insight into their concerns and interests . . .
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It's not just theoretically possible, voice recognition/speech synthesizing technology is very mature, and has been for years. It can run on cheap hardware with decent accuracy.
Anyway, this exercise appears highly impractical to me - remember that it is not actually being done on a wide scale yet, so it is still somewhat theoretical.
Voice-tech Googling minus the Google-fu? No, txs. (Score:2)
Um, I thought part of the point here was that the Question Box is servicing areas otherwise totally off-grid ... which would kinda make having an iPhone an expensive exercise in futility (hint -- the back of the bush tends not to have much cell phone service, even here in North America [I have choppy reception at best]).
iPhones aside, and answering your specific point about voice recognition, any VR-based Googling system would still require the users to be literate in how best to phrase their Google quer
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If the connection between the intercom and the operator is good enough for voice, that is good enough of a bit rate for googling things. Then just putting a computer there will make things much more efficient. (you won't have to hire a operator, for one thing)
And it still won't solve the other requirement, which is making it useful to people who can't read, let alone use a computer.
Just how DO you teach a (practically) stone-age tribesman to use a computer?
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And it still won't solve the other requirement, which is making it useful to people who can't read
or the electricity or the cooling or the reliability or the wtf is this or the pr0n over narrowband frustrations which inevitably will follow. I see this innovation as a good idea and the final sentence is the clincher for me - it is interesting to see what they search for - how our species has diverged through the random inequalities of resource provision . . .
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You teach his kids (or better yet, let them teach themselves [youtube.com]), and let them help him out. Hell, that's the way it happened in North America for the most part. My parents are relatively computer-savvy, but not nearly as much as their children. And my grandparents can't even program an answering machine. When they need something technical, they seek help from the younger generations.
Re:Put a computer where the intercom is! (Score:5, Informative)
Just how DO you teach a (practically) stone-age tribesman to use a computer?
Stone age tribesman? Take a look at the questions they're asking: who is on top on football, popular NBA players, info on the Obamas, quality of life in different regions of Uganda, the causes of sexual health problems, transmission of diseases, etc. They live in an underdeveloped country, but that doesn't mean they're underdeveloped people.
If a service like this could be sustained long-term and made accessible to more people, I think this could be a great tool. In particular, the questions about conflicting religions and sexual health are striking - there's a lot of ignorance about health, religion, and science in Africa... but that ignorance is a reflection of the state of region, not the willfull behavior of the people. Access to the Internet can provide an "out" for those that want to learn but have limited options in their village.
Parent
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Stone age tribesman? Take a look at the questions they're asking...
I am. I'm seeing the same thing AC [slashdot.org] is seeing.
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I agree. I bet most people down there are, even if not as much educated, still more intelligent, as many people here.
Because they have to. While we can just whine that life is to hard, and that we demand that someone wipes our ass. ^^
Re:Put a computer where the intercom is! (Score:4, Insightful)
Stone-age? I'm guessing they have at least the same stuff my grandfather had before he bought the Massey-Ferguson and got rid of the horse in 1956. That's approximately 3,000 years after the stone age ended around here ...
Parent
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Far as I know, a lot of africa still uses spears and houses made out of excrement
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The question is made more difficult by the fact that Stone-Age is not being used in the strict archaeological sense, but as a shorthand to describe any civilization where the level of technology available to the average person is more than a certain number of years behind ours. I would be willing to be that these "stone-age tribesmen" have access to smithing knowledge, which would instantly disqualify them from the strict definition of "stone-age".
Iron tools end the stone age (Score:3, Informative)
When does a culture stop being stone-age?
A culture's stone age [wikipedia.org] ends once it gains technology to shape metal. Then it proceeds to an iron age [wikipedia.org], which lasts until literacy becomes widespread. Some cultures in areas with copper and tin ores have a bronze age [wikipedia.org] between the stone age and the iron age; others skip it.
Re:Put a computer where the intercom is! (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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A voice connection can run on a crank.
whereas it takes thousands of cranks to run slashdot.
Re:Put a computer where the intercom is! (Score:5, Insightful)
1) The box requires less overall and less constant power.
2) An analog communications channel is much less difficult to implement over possibly unreliable wires. Let the human brain handle the error correction (static).
3) Much cheaper than installing and servicing a computer.
4) Employs local people.
5) Doesn't require the user to be literate.
6) Doesn't require the user to know how to use a computer, what the Internet is, what google is, etc. Just ask your question and get an answer.
etc etc etc
Parent
Re:The problem is African IQ. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with your assertion is that, if IQ were some genetically defined constant, the population-wide IQ average would change very slowly over time. This is not the case. IQ scores everywhere have been going up pretty constantly over the past few decades as more and more people get access to proper education and nutrition.
Also, the failure of Africans to invent anything "significant" probably doesn't have anything to do with their racial heritage, and probably has more to do with their environment, as Guns, Germs, and Steel rightly points out.
Parent
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At last the perfect number (Score:2)
for who wants to be a millionaire.
better than sneaker net (Score:5, Funny)
I suppose we could call this 'speaker net'.
Where is the new Development (Score:3, Insightful)
My parents and partner use this sort of service all the time, I am the one at the end of the voice communication network. Kids also use it when lazy.
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My parents and partner use this sort of service all the time, I am the one at the end of the voice communication network. Kids also use it when lazy.
So you are saying they use the intercom to the basement?
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Probably, if we had a basement, and an intercom
And what does the local wise elder say to this? (Score:2)
Villagers used to come to him, give a small offering, ask a question, and get some advice.
Now the villagers go to the box that the government provided. This is a direct attack on his power.
Want to bet that these boxes will be blamed for next year's poor harvest?
No matter how primitive, people fight like hell to have a monopoly on information and power. More developed nations play the same game at a different level.
Re:And what does the local wise elder say to this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe, but the village elder doesn't have any better access to the train schedule than the other villagers, or to information about which nearby market town is currently offering a higher price for millet. This service clearly outclasses him for questions of this type. If he is at all smart, he won't try to compete on this basis. He'll restrict himself to the topics on which he is better than google, say advice about how to approach your girlfriend's parents or what you should plant in which field.
Parent
Just Call ChaCha (Score:2)
I believe they also take phone requests.
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indeed. just 1-800-2-cha-cha from a cell phone and leave a voice message with your question. any question. you usually get an answer in like two minutes or so. i believe it's powered by farming the voice-to-text-converted Qs out to extremely bored folks who then search google. i think you eventually can earn a bit of money if your answers are consistently 'good'. i like to ask things like "how do i weigh my own boob" or "who's the fairest of them all" or "who's cooler, cathector or cmdr taco" or "how do i d
Where I come from we call that a "Librarian" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, libraries are so pre-digital.
This answer is sponsored by Coca-Cola... (Score:2, Funny)
I wonder how these operators are trained (Score:5, Interesting)
For example,
2295. what are the best varieties of beans to plant
This is the sort of thing that, traditionally, first-world countries have bureaus of agriculture, county extension services, and agriculture departments at local learning institutions that help farmers with this tricky question. You need information on varieties suited to specific soil, climate and resistant to local pests and diseases and drought, and the question isn't going to gain useful results without more specificity- ie, "best" for what. The advice that comes up in Google offers information primarily aimed at amateur summer gardeners in northern climates trying to grow tasty summer vegetables, rather than equatorial hardy macro-nutrient providing staples. It takes some serious google-fu to arrive at results that are probably useful to this questioner, and you don't get them by entering his question verbatim. When I started Googling things like "bean equatorial resistant hybrid -cocoa -coffee" I started getting some interesting results, but it would still take a while to sort through that stuff and come up with real information on what beans are best-bets wherever he lives. I can't imagine him ending up with useful information off of this Google phone line though. It takes an experienced researcher to find this stuff on Google.
For this sort of thing, the best thing you could probably do with Google is figure out who he should actually be talking to. That is, I Googled "helping african farmers," which led me to Farm Africa. [farmafrica.org.uk] There's probably someone working for them who he could talk to who could really help him out.
This is just one example I went in depth on, but most of the questions are of this nature. For the questions that can be answered easily online, it seems like nine out of ten, the answer is on Wikipedia. I think these people are envisioning the internet as being much more organized, authoritative, and encyclopedic than it is. They have very practical questions, as might be expected from rural, undeveloped areas, and Google is not well designed to provide them with answers to many of them. I wonder to what extent these operators might have already been trained, or might be additionally trained, to hook these people up with non-Google provided information. From what I'm seeing, a huge number of questions could be answered much more effectively if there were any way to provide these people with access to briefly speak to a doctor (or at least a nurse or someone who can answer basic health questions) or an agricultural specialist.
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I began wondering about this same problem as several questions were distinctly medical (and sounded pretty urgent!). The good news is that QuestionBox is trying to recruit medical professionals to assist with these calls (can't find the link now, but it was on the QuestionBox website).
I'm sure there are plenty of $topic_of_interest geeks out there who would love to volunteer a bit of their time in this sort of capacity, and being telephone-based it's a highly distributable service. Of course, nothing beat
China and Uganda? (Score:2)
I know this is just a project in its infancy, and given [allafrica.com] the recent intimacy [globalization-africa.org] of Uganda-Chinese relations [china.org.cn], would a Googlebox built in by Chinese contractor be able to look up topics like Democracy or demonstration? Question Box has powerful potential; i wonder how vulnerable the box answers are to coercion, and whether deployment will be hindered by increasing foreign influence.
Internet scarce at Google? (Score:2)
Searching Google, Where Internet Access is Scarce
If Google's having trouble getting internet access, I wonder how Yahoo's holding up...
Internet access is scarce at Google? (Score:2)
Don't freaking underestimate people! (Score:3, Insightful)
People are not even remotely as dumb as this paints them!
One experiment shows that nicely: Someone set up a tablet PC with an Internet connection on a wall of an Indian slum, some years ago.
After some weeks, they were browsing the web, watching videos on Youtube, etc.
Interestingly, being that supportive of stupidity is more a "civilized world" thing.
If you're stupid in some hard place like a slum, in the middle of Africa, or on the mountains of South America, you won't get far. But this does not mean that people will not get far. It means that they expect themselves to come up with a solution, because they have to.
While here when we fail, we get a support here, a help there, and an assistance to wipe our asses. And naturally we begin to also expect it. I know so many people who just state that they are dumb. Because then someone else helps them, and life is easy. This is efficient *for them*, so why not?
But in these remote areas, I recommend just putting a very sturdy computer with Internet access in a room, so that it can not break or get dirty that quick, and then let people play with it. Let them try it out.
I'd bet money that before your know it, they will know how to use that thing, and get out of it what they want.
You will watch things, like a kid playing with it all day long, and the parents and friends then asking if the kid could find something for them. Etc.
I have trust in humanity, because of one simple fact: When life is hard, we excel in coming up with solutions that help us survive. And we hold that skill up very high, in so many movies, games, stories, etc, etc, etc.
This won't work. (Score:3, Interesting)
In the real world, a villager with no first hand knowledge of what the internet is and what it can do, will ask a question assuming it's going to be like some kind of oracle...
Villager: "So, how do I fix blight on my crops, and my cattle are sick too, what's wrong with them?"
[operator puts this into google now]
Operator: erm
Villager: *confused* "Um i'll just ask the witchdocter instead then..."
Operator: "yeah
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Oddly, the people using the service may not think it is useless.
Now, if you think the well-heeled feel gooders made up those questions, that's a different thing.
Re:Maybe I'm just being too cynical... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Maybe I'm just being too cynical... (Score:4, Informative)
I used to feel the same way when reading about the proliferation of cell phones in rural areas in African countries. The last thing they need is those bloody expensive luxury items, right? But, as it turns out, cell phones provide a similar and highly useful type of service, and allows people in out of the way areas to get information on farming and diseases, food and crop prices at various markets. Already this is changing the way food is grown and sold.
And what is so bad about finding out about train schedules? Who wants to waste 3 days waiting after missing a train? People moving crops or who are otherwise working hard to feed a family can't afford to waste those three days, probably less so than you or me. Personal loans? Unlike loans in the West, these will probably not go towards a down payment on an SUV or a swimming pool, but more likely will be spent on essential farming tools, or perhaps as seed capital for a small business. That's what this microcredit stuff is all about... I think it's great if a tool like this makes such efforts available to a wider audience.
Providing tools and seeds rarely helps and often destroys local markets. That is the real "feel good" stuff. There are many of such fancy and widely applauded aid programmes... please go see what became of similar programmes that were implemented 10 years ago. Broken pumps, broken tractors that cannot be repaired locally, once immaculate white school buildings, still waiting for those first teachers and those first books, pencils and blackboards to arrive. That's what you will find.
Real aid is helping people to help themselves. Access to information might seem unimportant to developing nations but it has already been proven to be a game changer right down to local villagers. Don't expect them to ask only earth-shatteringly insightful questions through this thing either, and certainly do not berate them for using it for entertainment purposes as well. These are people like you and me, not some hunger-crazed wretches scratching in the dirt for food with no time for anything else. Moyo said it best when she said: "If you see an African on TV, it's either a fly-ridden victim of famine or war, or.... it's Nelson Mandela". That is the image that we need to lose... sadly it is precisely that image which fuels the industry called "aid"
Parent
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While you're checking, settle something for us.
Any questions about COBOL [bash.org]?
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It is a great tool for detecting the areas where more education is needed and the trends of what is happening, and is also a good starting point for the NGOs to make their plans
Maybe it is time to include a lawyer in the NGO team to help the book writers, or to start promoting education about constipation prevention...
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Re:A subtle point (Score:5, Insightful)
Access to information is a valuable commodity in itself, one which existing structures often withhold from the poorest, who typically are farmers or labourers. Imagine being a subsistence farmer who relies on a small surplus from each harvest in order to be able to afford access to medicines or schooling for his children. Now imagine a cooperative or community of such people having access to accurate information about crop prices (this is probably the single most important financial value to farmers everywhere) and being able to negotiate with local middle men instead of being dictated to by them. There's nothing 'primitive' about this need, it's universal and it empowers communities and individuals. In fact it's essential to anythign which pretends to be a free market. Just because someone toils in the fields doesn't mean they are unintelligent or any less astute than someone who works in an office in a developed nation, and the benefit they can obtain from affordable access to information from disinterested parties is likely to be as great or greater and certainly more vital than the benefit obtained by those of us who already have easy access to information, medicines, education etc.
Parent
Re:A subtle point (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone is living in more or less the same way that their people have lived for the past two thousand years, then their way of life is sustainable ...
Any way of life that doesn't lead to extinction is "sustainable". When our ancestors were hunter-gatherer cavesmen tribes, their life was sustainable. It doesn't mean shit.
... and suitable for them.
And who are you to decide what's suitable for whom? They cannot truly decide themselves because they don't know any other options to their way of life. Let them find out, and then let them decide.
As for you, Mr 21st Century Caveman - what are you even doing on Slashdot in the first place? In the words of Robert A. Heinlein:
"... the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better.... Most of these long-haired belittlers can't drive a nail or use a slide rule, I'd like to... ship them back to the twelfth century -- then let them enjoy it."
Parent
Re:A subtle point (Score:5, Insightful)
You accuse other slashdotters of having a "missionary complex" and say "you should just leave them the fuck alone."
So, it doesn't matter to you at all what the people living in these places think? If they ask for our help, we should refuse? They might want our help, and we might want to help them, but no, Simonetta knows what's best for all the undeveloped areas of the world, and he says we should "leave them the fuck alone." In addition to technology, I suppose that includes other aid, like trying to dig wells to provide them with clean water? Their ancestor's children have been dying of dysentery for millennia, so we should stop trying to inflict our western anti-dysentery views upon them?
You say "why would anyone in the distant backward village want to go on the internet?" I don't know. Why don't you try using the link to go look at all the questions they're asking.
Unlike missionaries, no one is going into their villages and telling them they are going to burn in hell forever if they don't do such-and-such. They aren't trying to re-arrange their society and seize control and displace their traditions. They're just putting the phone there for them to use. If the locals don't want to use it, they don't have to. But they are using it. I suppose, though, that you know what's better for them, and it's good for your country to move ahead technologically, and learn new information, but that people in other countries are wrong to want to learn new information and use new technologies, and we should take them away from them and not let them use them? Because it's our responsibility to leave other people alone, and not offer to help other people if they're from different cultures?
Our ancestors got my just fine for thousands of years without smartphones too. Do you wish Apple and RIM would just "leave us the fuck alone" and stop pushing their newfangled technology on us?
Parent
Re:A subtle point (Score:5, Insightful)
Your point would be valid if the very technology you condemn did not provide material and financial advantages to those who have it, allowing them to unfairly take advantage of those who don't. Unfortunately, that is not the case. The vast amount of information on the Internet today allows people with Internet access to anticipate changing conditions and adapt to them much more quickly than those without. This "question box" is an effort to level the playing field, allowing the least advantaged to access some of the networks and power structures that we in the developed world take for granted.
Indeed, it is you who is displaying the condescension and paternalism. You are so wedded to your "noble savage" idea of the Global South that you're presuming for them that they'd be better off without this technology. After all, no one is forcing these villagers to use the question box. What's the harm in offering it to them and letting them decide whether its worth the effort or not?
Parent
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