Planet Sugar

The distribution of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) into the developing world including places without mains power or internet, raises the question of appropriate power technologies. A selection of small hydro schemes in Nepal below are particularly interesting in that none have road access.

Water wheel grinding cornflour
This one below Ghandruk, in the Annapurna region. There are many water mills in the region.




1 kW approximately micro hydro
Provides power for the tea house at Deurali Pass, near Ghorepani.




10 kW approximately micro hydro
This provides power for the village of Ghandruk.

If you follow the doings of OLPC, you know that there are XO/Sugar deployments in dozens of countries, that there are numerous local OLPC groups, and that Nicholas Negroponte has had discussions with the Presidents/Prime Ministers and Ministers of Education in almost all of the countries of the world. Unfortunately, there have been a number of countries which said they would order hundreds of thousands to millions of XOs, where it turned out that a handshake from a head of state or minister did not turn out to be equivalent to an authorized and signed purchase order. Libya was prominent among them.

Among the reasons for such failures were pure political posturing, elections where the other party won, a coup, a bungled bidding process, and other such ills as political and bureaucratic flesh is heir to. But now, particularly in North Africa and the Middle East, the pendulum may be swinging the other way, and it is worth our while to organize ahead of the moment when opportunity opens up. It is too soon to talk about Libya and other countries where political violence continues, but we could discuss Tunisia, and we find the process already started for us in Egypt.

When Nicholas talked with the Ministry of Education in Egypt under Mubarak, he got no commitment. What he came away with was the question, “Do XOs run Windows?” This led to a sorry chapter in which, to begin with, Nicholas badgered Microsoft to put Windows on XOs with substantial technical help from OLPC to make an XO able to handle BIOS calls. There was a trial of 5,000 dual-boot Linux/Windows XOs, and then the idea sank without trace. No country actually wanted to order any. In Egypt, Windows seems to have been a checklist question having nothing to do with actual requirements.

That was then. Now Mubarak is gone (currently in a military hospital, with the intention of moving him to a prison hospital), Windows on the XO is gone, and we get to start fresh. Maybe. Nobody knows what the next elected government will decide should be its education policy. We do know that essentially nothing can happen until after the September elections, after the new government takes office, and after the various political factions and interest groups begin to sort out their new relationships and their positions on the issues, especially economic and social development.

I think that an OLPC deployment to all Egyptian schoolchildren would be a great idea. I can’t even tell you how great an idea I think it is. But as far as I know, hardly anybody in Egypt is even aware of the possibility. So a few people have stepped forward to see whether we can use social media to change that, and get XOs on the agenda for the new government, with an OLPC Egypt cause at Cause.com. Of course I joined as soon as I found out about it, and I hope you will, too.

We are looking for donations, of course, to buy the first batch of laptops for Egypt, but more than that we are looking for people. We need volunteers in the various OLPC and Sugar programs. I know it’s hard to believe, but absolutely anybody can help, even preschoolers. We would we particularly happy to have school classes volunteer their help. We don’t just need programmers. We need help with rewriting textbooks in interactive, digital, and above all free formats, and we need help in testing and improving those Open Education Resources.

We particularly need people to spread the word, especially in Egypt, but also among the general public worldwide, and to aid agencies such as USAID and UNDP. UNESCO has recently started a discussion on Open Education Resources for every child in the world, and most interestingly UNRWA has deployed XOs in refugee camps in Gaza and Lebanon.

It happens that the Gaza deployment last year was on my birthday, the best birthday present I have ever received. My birthday is coming up again, April 29, and Cause.com recommends that I ask everybody I know to join this cause and donate to it as a birthday present to me. So here you are.

Note: The Beta version of the Causes.com software cannot find this cause in order to let me make a wish for it through their site. I have submitted a bug. But you can still join.

Sugar Digest

1. Amidst all the heated discussion about software licenses, it is worth stepping back a moment to see what people are actually doing on the ground with Sugar. Check out http://proyectofedora.org/argentina/?p=320 for an example of how Turtle Art has been modified by some of our end users!!  Free Software rocks.

2. I somehow misread the race schedule: the Sugar Labs team is not returned to Uruguay for the Vuelta de Uruguay this year (Team Chipolte/Sugar Labs won the Ruta de la Americas in Uruguay earlier this year). Nonetheless, we will continue with our plans to engage the children of Uruguay in participating in the race. With help from Ceibal Jam, RAP Ceibal, ”El Pais”, RIT, and the Sugar Labs marketing team, we now have a site enable for blogging about the race (See http://www.sugarlabs.org/vueltaciclista).

3. While we were looking the other way, we surpassed 5-million activities downloads on the Sugar Labs activity server.

4. In a follow-up exercise to the Massachusetts 4th Grade Math project, Claudia Urrea and I have been developing a correlation between Sugar activities and the Florida 4th Grade math curriculum (See Math4Team/Florida). Also, check out Innovation in Evaluation the preliminary write up on the Assessment Summit (more details to follow).

In the community

5. Cynthia Solomon has put her excellent book, co-authored by Margaret Minsky and Brian Harvey, on Logo programming, ”LogoWorks: Challenging Programs in Logo”, on line (See http://logoworks.wikispaces.com/). There is also a very nice preface by Marvin Minsky (http://logoworks.wikispaces.com/Preface). All the the examples can be run in Turtle Blocks.

6. Don’t miss EduJam (May 5-7) and Sugar Camp (May 8-9) in Montevideo.

Sugar Labs

Gary Martin has generated a SOM from the past few weeks of discussion on the IAEP mailing list.

2011 Apr 16th–22th (79 emails)
2011 Apr 9th–15th (59 emails)
2011 Apr 2nd–9th (58 emails)
2011 Mar 26th–Apr 1th (23 emails)

Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

Ron Lieber of the New York Times reported recently that in the wake of the latest financial disaster,

a number of people and organizations have taken up the cause of helping the next generation of grown-ups form better habits at an earlier age.

The examples given include a series of Sesame Street lessons with Elmo representing the child’s point of view. Sometimes Cookie Monster joins in, representing the issue of lack of impulse control. For example, at one point, instead of buying cookies with a dollar gift, he can’t wait and eats the dollar.

Although these and other lessons described in the Times are designed for children, about children learning to think about money matters and also learning about themselves, this incident with Cookie Monster represents perfectly to me the kleptocracies in charge of the poorest countries, especially those who steal more from their country than it receives in foreign aid. (Kleptocracy mean government by thieves, the kleptocrats.)

This is by no means a new idea. Adam Smith described it in 1776, in his book on The Wealth of Nations.

Everything for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to be the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

The most thorough student of these matters is Thorstein Veblen, author of The Theory of the Leisure Class, and the source of the phrase Conspicuous Consumption. An essential part of his analysis is that is not enough for the rich to be rich. They are driven to be richer than anybody else, and to make sure that you know it. Then they claim to be smarter and more moral than the rest of us on account of having made (or inherited, or stolen) tons of money. Conversely, the rest of us  are stupid, lazy, immoral chumps for not being rich, and in particular do not deserve any form of help or aid from the government, so the rich should not be taxed to help the non-rich.

In the poorest countries, then, the problem is not only that the kleptocrats steal the country blind, but that they regard it is their moral right to do so. A combination of the Law of the Jungle with Ayn Rand, you could say.

In order to help the poorest countries, then, we must not give money that can be stolen. We have to give something that cannot be sold, and the profit stolen. Something that is effective in development, too, otherwise why bother? Can you see where I am going with this? Laptops, Free Software, and Open Education Resources, of course. Including OERs teaching how to cope with and eventually prevent government corruption and private kleptocracy. Along with Internet connections and local electricity generation systems, and microfinance.

The education initiatives described in the Times article do not directly address the problem of asset bubbles, like the Clinton Dot-Com bubble and the Bush Housing Bubble, or any of the others in the historical record, such as Dutch Tulip Mania or the South Sea Bubble. That would require that grownups learn these lessons now being taught in kindergarten.

With speaking engagements and family travel for the rest of the Saturdays this month, I’ve decided not to have a formal user group meeting. Spring fever too! If anyone wants to have an informal meeting on a weeknight, I’m available the evening of Thursday, April 28th for a meet-up somewhere downtown. Wayan is pretty busy the rest of this month and then out of the country next, so we won’t be at the Looking Glass Lounge.

We will be meeting again next month on the afternoon of May 21 with the big bang of Scratch Day 2011 at the Arlington Career Center. There will be one or more blog posts and an email update coming before the event. We’re looking for volunteers to present workshops or projects as well as assist with setting up. Please contact Jeff Elkner jeff at elkner.net or Mike Lee curiouslee at gmail.com.

Illustration from the OLPC Tanzania wiki page.

Last week I described a four-week plan to survey key technologies for One Laptop Per Child's forthcoming XO-3 tablet computer. Here I'll describe the results of the first week of work, which dove into Google's Android operating system. Warning: technical content ahead...

Basic design of Sugar-on-Android

1. Cross-compile gobject/GTK/gobject-introspection/cairo/dbus for Android; distribute these key libraries as NDK libraries. This is what I spent most of my time on this week: I've managed so far to port libiconv, gettext, glib, pixman, freetype, fontconfig, cairo, libxml2, and pango. (Source code)
2. Use cairo or OpenGL backends of GTK3 to render legacy Sugar activities directly to Android canvas.
3. Modularize sugar; use D-Bus for inter-module communication. Interprocess communication mechanism is Android 'intents'; these can redirect to the web or the Android Market for missing dependencies. (Collabora reportedly already has a D-Bus implementation for Android.) Sugar components can also become Android Services.
4. Implement Sugar Home/Groups/Neighborhood views and Journal as four separate Android App Widgets. These could also be implemented by providing a new Android home application, but I think the finer-grained modularity afforded by splitting these functions would yield a better design and make it easier to incorporate upstream improvements to the Android launcher.(Android Live Wallpaper is also similar in function, but not as good a fit.)
5. The Sugar Journal becomes an Android "Content Provider", which stores/retrieves content for other Sugar activities. (There is special Android support for "collection-based Widgets" and Live Folders which may be helpful.)
6. Use gobject-introspection to build a multi-language environment. Use JGIR to expose Sugar APIs to "native" Dalvik apps; use something like the Android Scripting Environment to expose Android native APIs to GIR languages (Python, JavaScript, C, etc).
7. [opportunity] Use the Android port of OLSRd to implement a Neighborhood view. Alternatively, investigate AODV routing on Android and/or AllJoyn (which also requires root access, see pg 24-25 of the manual).

Key Benefits

• Sugar is integrated into Android environment; use native Android education apps, or apps like Movie Studio which have no Sugar equivalents yet.
• Android APIs and customization hooks are good, and provide a more-extensible framework for development.

Open challenges (general)

1. The web integration story is cloudy. Java and JavaScript can call each other inside a bundled WebView widget, but this isn't supported in standard Browser app. Browser plugin interface would help.
2. No good story for building 'native' Java/Dalvik or C apps on the device. Writing a simple Dalvik compiler would help. Dalvik specs are available, and people have written Dalvik compilers for toy languages.
3. "View source" requests can be implemented as an Android 'intent' message, but no good story for implementing this functionality other than on a case-by-case basis in each activity.
4. Although the Amazon Marketplace for Android indicates that it can be done, it appears that there is no "blessed" mechanism for creating .apk files on the device and installing them. (Android bug, discussion)

Current technical issues/bugs

1. Cross-compiling for Android is currently a miserable experience. The Android NDK appears to have been put together by a team which had never seen a proper cross-compiler before. Since I only had a week for this exploration, I mostly kludged things together to get past this, but any serious work with Android should start by defining and upstreaming proper autoconf "target triplets" for Android-on-{ARMv5, ARMv7, x86} and building a proper cross-compiler. Then patches to various tools and libraries could start being upstreamed. Using the bespoke Android.mk build system of the NDK is a non-starter. No serious obstacles here, just work to do.
2. Xoom hardware is ARMv7, but Android emulator is ARMv5 only. Unfortunately, gdb is broken on the Xoom. So we're building for ARMv5 at the moment, so we can debug in the (slow) emulator.
3. No good support for shared libraries may cause activity bloat. May be able to be worked around using the new Opaque Binary Blob (OBB) feature.
4. Much existing code (fontconfig, gettext, gtk, etc) expects to read configuration files from the filesystem. Currently we are using the default fall-back configurations. OBB support may help here as well. There are a number of different storage APIs in Android, but none seems quite right.
5. It would be nice to implement a ring-style XO home screen without completing replacing the android Launcher. No clear way to constrain app layout on home screen w/o completely replacing the Launcher. Is it worth hacking the Launcher source?
6. Mesh on Android using OLSRd current requires root access. In order to run on unrooted Android devices, we need (a) proper power management for Ad Hoc mode wifi, (b) APIs to enable Ad Hoc mode, and (c) APIs to manipulate kernel routes.
7. We're building libraries without thread support because Android's "Bionic" libc has an eccentric thread library. Linking with -lpthread fails because the thread functionality is bundled into -lc. Probably just providing an empty libpthread.so would help a lot.
8. Some work has been done to build GNU libc for Android. This bloats activities even further, but might help ease library porting.
9. Porting gobject-introspection will be painful because its makefiles are not set up for cross-compiling. Some steps want to run on the target hardware, which is difficult in the Android environment.

Bottom line

I can see how the whole Sugar stack can be put together on the Android platform. The hardest part is probably just setting up packaging and a good and repeatable build environment for the different components, and getting enough adoption of this that patches to support Android can be pushed upstream. Many of the important pieces can be developed in parallel (Theme, Journal, Mesh, Friends, Home, library porting, etc). A little early to tell how hard it will be to port existing Sugar activities to the new Python/pygobject/GTK3 framework.

Wayan recently blogged about the project SemanticXO, asking about its current status. Unfortunately, I couldn’t comment on his blog so I’d like to answer to his question here. Daniel also emitted some doubts about the Semantic Web, so I’ll try to clarify what this is all about.

To be honest, I’m not sure what that really means. Is this a database project? Is it to help translation of the Sugar User Interface? Or are children somehow to use SemanticXO in their language acquisition?

Semantic technologies are knowledge representation tools used to model factual information – for instance, “Amsterdam,isIn,Netherlands”. These facts are stored in optimised databases called the triple stores. So, yes, it is kind of a data base project which aims at installing such a triple store and provide an API for using it. The technologies developed for the Semantic Web are particularly suited to storing and querying multi-lingual data, thus activities that need to store text in different languages would directly benefit from this feature. The triple store could indeed eventually be used instead of the .po files to store multi-lingual data for Sugar.

The goal of SemanticXO is not only to provide an API to use a triple store on the XO but also to provide access to the data published using Semantic Web technologies. There has been many data sets being published on the Web, providing a network with more than 27 Billion factual information that can be queried and combined. Although not being exhaustive, the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud provides a good idea of the amount of data out there. With SemanticXO an activity developer will be able to simply get the population of Amsterdam, or the exact location of Paris, or the population of London, or whatever. The LOD cloud can be queried just like a database and it contains a lot of information about many topics. And because the XO will itself be able to use the same publication system, the kids using Sugar will be able to publish their data on the cloud directly from an activity.

Currently, it is hard, if not impossible, to get such atomic information and just insert it somewhere into an activity with a few lines of code…

Regardless of its purpose, it seems that SemanticXO development has come to a halt. The only other post from Christophe Guéret detailed RedStore running on the XO, where he noted the challenges of installing a TripleStore on an XO using RedStore, namely that RedStore depends on some external libraries that are not yet packaged for Fedora11 and since it’s not so easy to compile directly on the XO, a second computer is required.

This post was published on the 11 of April 2011. To date, there were three posts about SemanticXO: the introduction (posted on December 15, 2010), the installation of a triple store (posted on December 20, 2010) and a first activity using the triple store (posted on April 5, 2011). So there was one other post made since the installation of the triple store. But that first step of installing a triple store was indeed important for what I want to do with SemanticXO and it was not easy to find one that would fit the low specs of an XO-1. Then, the installation was a bit challenging because of the dependencies but nothing really exceptional there. Ideally, the triple store will come installed by default on the OLPC OS releases some day

Once installed, the XO didn’t return queries quickly. The XO failed on a number of benchmark different triple stores, even after being executed over a full night.

I was pleased, surprised and relieved to see that the triple store worked in the first place! From what I know, it was the first time a triple store was running on such low-spec hardware and I wanted to see how far I could push it. So I loaded a significant amount of triples (50k) and ran of the testing suite we typically use to test triple store performances. As expected, the response time was long and most complex queries just failed. But these evaluation systems are aimed at testing big triple stores on big hardware and the queries are designed to see how the triple store deal with extreme cases. Considering that on the oldest generation of XO the triple store managed to answer queries way more complex that the one it is expected to deal with, I found the results acceptable and decided to move onto the next steps.

So Christophe, what does this mean? Is a Semantic Web for children using the XO possible?

Yes, it is possible and I’m still actively working on it! The developement is going slower than I would like it to go, as many contributors I work on this project on my spare time, but it is going on. The last post on this blog shows an activity using the store for its internal data and contains a pointer to a technical report that, I hope, will bring more light onto the project goals & status. Right now, I’m working on extending this activity and implementing an drop-in replacement for the data store that would use the triple store to store metadata about the different entries. This clustering activity is only showing how activities in Sugar can store data using the triple store so I’m also working on an activity that will show the other aspect: how the same concepts can be used to get data from the LOD cloud and display it.

I have been able to detect no clear correlation between use of the term “Semantic Web” and knowledge of what it means. I think everybody just read it in Wired in 1999 and filed it away as a really good thing to put on a square of your Buzzword Bingo card.

Since 1999, and until some years ago, the Semantic Web has been searching for its own identity and meaning. It started out as a vision of having data being published on the Web just as the Web as we know it allows for the publication of Documents. Translating a vision into concrete technologies is a lengthy process subject of debates and trial&errors phases before you get into something everyone can see and play with. Now, we are getting on track with data sets being published on the Web using Semantic Web technologies (the LOD cloud, Linked Open Commerce), some dedicated high-end conferences (ISWC, ESWC, SemTech, …) and journals (JWS, SWJ, …). Outside of academia, there is also an increasing amount of Semantic Web application but most of it is invisible to the end user. Have you noticed Facebook is using Semantic Web technologies to mark up the pages for its famous “Like” button? Or that the NYTimes uses the same technologies to tag its articles? and these are only two example out of many more.

As highlighted by Tom Ilube from Garlik (an other company using Semantic Web technology), the Semantic Web is a change in the infrastructure of the Web itself that you won’t even see happening.

Related Articles

• Clustering activity for the XO (semweb4u.wordpress.com)
• A Semantic Web Founding Father Explains Why Americans Should Care About Keeping Open Government Data Alive – semanticweb.com (semanticweb.com)
• Drupal May Be The First Mainstream Semantic Web Winner – semanticweb.com (semanticweb.com)
• BBC Builders: Yves Raimond on the BBC’s interlinked, semantic web of the future (guardian.co.uk)

April news from olpcMAP:

1. The demo of olpcMAP will be presented at the Boston New Tech Meetup on Tuesday, April 12, at 7:30PM. http://www.meetup.com/newtech-73/events/16943664/

2. Social enterprise venture: olpcMAP presentation will be given on Wednesday, April 13, at 7:30PM, at OLPC office:

   1 Cambridge Center, 10th Floor
    One Laptop per Child
    Kendall Square
    Cambridge, MA  02142.

Join us and 20+ others from Tufts/MIT at the OLPC Foundation’s headquarters this Wedn evening 7:30PM led by me and Adam.  Questions for discussion:

    * Why should we volunteer, and for what, over the course of our lives?
    * What makes volunteering around ICT4D / ICT4E (*) so incredibly challenging?
    * Is “DIY Foreign Aide” a voluntourist joke, or a material change in 3G intl development?
    * Where can community tools like http://olpcMAP.net unleash grassroots power in this decade?
    * What volunteers have managed funds+community to unlock their global volunteer experience?
    * What’s behind trendy corporate social responsibility / service learning leadership buzzwords?
    * With 2 million XO laptops distributed, how do volunteers actually engage to prove themselves?
    * What differentiates our social movements from yet another Twitter/Facebook marketing campaign?
    * How did Mike Lee (in attendance from DC!) build http://olpcLearningClub.org far beyond so many others cities?
    * What can the Mideast’s Arab Spring teach US–conquering our own fears–converting self-organized aspirations to proven opportunity?

We will raffle off a RED XO Laptop to the person who asks the most genuinely eye-opening question.  By popular vote when our Wedn April 13 event ends by 9PM!  But you MUST arrive on-time at 7:30PM as the 1st floor security desk will in fact close after that time.  Hosted in conjunction with Tuft Univ’s http://compasspartners.org/meet

3. The latest thing is the news page, that was just launched by Nick, and we already added some events and updates to it, including Linuxtag event by Christoph D. The main idea is to have one stop shop for all events, meeting, news, jobs, internships, for OLPC/Sugar community, and edutech community.

How it works now: you need to type your topic in the box next to post word and then create your name and message with the link to the main page or how to contact if applicable along with the main theme (from drop down menu). We will enhance it by sorting events in chronological and geo order. Add your event/opportunity now : http://olpcMAP.net/news

4. olpcMAP will turn 6 months old on April 22, 2011. It looks more mature, check it for yourself: http://olpcMAP.net :)

5. Finally, Nick Doiron is in Uruguay doing an internship for Plan Ceibal in Montevideo. He is working on getting an open mapping program called gvSIG onto the blue XO for 7th grade and above.  ”It goes beyond the Map activity.  You can highlight all schools with <1000 students, or color each state in Uruguay to show the population density, or see how firefighters and farmers can use maps to make decisions.  The project has the support of the national Department of Transportation”.

Nick will be meeting others in Uruguay for Conozco School Tour from April 30- May 5, http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Conozco_Uruguay_Tour  and then the Summit May 6-8, http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Uruguay_Summit_2011.  Already more than 30 people signed up and it is going to be a great opportunity to witness nation-wide OLPC deployment. Christoph D will  be reporting daily about the upcoming events in Uruguay.

PS Mike Lee and Christoph D are finalizing their own map jams in coming weeks, check for updates on http://wiki.laptop.org/go/olpcMAP

Students from the College of Charleston's "Software Engineering Practicum" course, taught by Jim Bowring, are working on FOSS projects this quarter and the "Four's Company" team decided to work on "Math Adventure:Fortune Hunter." They've been sending us weekly e-mails, engaging with the original student dev team here and are doing all the right things, so Kudos to Jim and the Team!

I presented on our XO/Sugar efforts at RIT's "Connectology" conference, which focuses on leadership skills and community service.  A small but dedicated crowd played with the games on the XO's and two are likely candidates for future work with us in the FOSSBox.

Since 2008 I've been offering a Girl Scouts workshop to help them achieve their "Games for Life" badge, with the help of Professor Jessica Bayliss and a rotating pool of Grad and Undergrad students support.  We've offered the workshop four times and will be giving the 5th on April 23rd.  This quarter FOSSBoxer Justin Lewis is porting the "build a game" introductory tutorials over to Scratch and I'll be revising the slides and putting them in to Open Office format.  After the workshop is over we'll be tweaking the materials a last time and then distributing them via the web so that others can offer the workshop to their local Girl Scouts as well.  I'll be posting something after the workshop is over to discuss how it went.

It seems that Spring has finally arrived in Rochester, thank God!  Will be hitting the bike trails for sure today.

Source

One of the firsts walls or obstacles to enter Sugar development is learn our favourite control version system [git http://git-scm.com/], although somewhat counter-intuitive at the beginning, git is a very powerful tool, I wish there could be another way to have a collaborative way of development for kids, but we are not yet there.(could be other ways?)

So I wrote a paper on open source and space shuttles as part of my History of Technology class here at Olin. That is, we had to connect a narrative, in my case the Apollo 13 incident, with a framework, for which I chose paradigms. So here it is: http://sdz.fedorapeople.org/papers/sdz-hot-paper-1-final.pdf

It's Creative Commons licensed. Feedback appreciated!

Growing Pains for Space Shuttles? by Sebastian Dziallas is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

In the past few years many data sets have been published and made public in what is now often called the Web of Linked Data, making a step towards the “Web 3.0”: a Web combining a network of documents and data suitable for both human and machine processing. In this Web 3.0, programs are expected to give more precise answers to queries as they will be able to associate a meaning (the semantic) to the information they process. Sugar, the graphical environment found on the XO, is currently Web 2.0 enabled – it can browse web sites – but has no dedicated tools to interact with the Web 3.0. The goal of the SemanticXO project introduced earlier in this blog is to make Sugar Web 3.0 proof by adding semantic software on the XO.

One corner stone of this project is to get a triple store, the software in charge of storing the semantic data, running on the limited hardware of the machine (in our case, an XO-1). As it proved to be feasible, we can now go further and start building activities making use of it. And to begin with, a simple clustering activity: the goal there is to cluster into boxes using drag&drop. The user can create as many boxes as he needs, and the items may be moved around boxes. Here is a screenshot of the application, showing Amerindian items:

The most interesting aspect of this activity is actually under its hood and is not visible on the screenshot. Here is a some of the triples generated by the application (note that the URLs have been shortened for readability) :

subject	predicate	object
olpc:resource/a05864b4	rdf:type	olpc:Item
olpc:resource/a05864b4	olpc:name	“image114″
olpc:resource/a05864b4	olpc:hasDepiction	“image114.jpg”
olpc:resource/a82045c2	rdf:type	olpc:Box
olpc:resource/a82045c2	olpc:hasItem	olpc:resource/a05864b4
olpc:resource/78cbb1f0	rdf:type	olpc:Box

It is relevant to note here the flexibility of that data model: The assignment of one item to the only box is stated by a triple using the predicate “hasItem”, one of the box is empty because there is no such statement linking it to an item. A varied number of similar triples can be used, without any constraint and the same goes for actually all the triples in the system. There is no requirement for a set of predicates all the items must have. Let’s see the usage that can be made of this data through three different SPARQL queries, introduced from the simple one to the most sophisticated:

• List the URIs of all the boxes and the items they contain

SELECT ?box ?item WHERE {
?box rdf:type olpc:Box.
?box olpc:hasItem ?item.
}

• List of the items and their attributes

SELECT ?item ?property ?val WHERE {
  ?item rdf:type olpc:Item.
  ?item ?property ?val.
}

• List of the items that are not in a box

SELECT ?item WHERE {
  ?item rdf:type olpc:Item.
  OPTIONAL {
    ?box rdf:type olpc:Box.
    ?box olpc:hasItem ?item.
  }
  FILTER (!bound(?box))
}

These three queries are just some examples, the really nice thing about this query mechanism is that (almost) anything can be asked through SPARQL. There is no need to define a set of API calls to cover a list of anticipated needs, as soon as the SPARQL end point is made available every activity may ask whatever it wants to ask!

We are not done yet as there is still a lot to develop to finish the application (game mechanism, sharing of items, …). If you are interested in knowing more about the clustering prototype, feel free to drop a comment on this post and/or follow this activity on GitHub. You can also find more information in this technical report about the current achievements of SemanticXO and the ongoing work.

Last Monday I rejoined One Laptop Per Child as Director, New Technologies. My mandate is hardware and software for the XO-3, OLPC's upcoming ARM-based tablet computer for education in the developing world. The new machine should be lower cost, lower power, more indestructible, more powerful, and potentially more expandable than ever. There are about two million machines in the XO-1 family (XO-1, XO-1.5) in the hands of kids today. The XO-3 will build upon this impressive foundation to reach further into the poorest and least-connected regions of the world.

I will kick-off my work with a series of four week-long sprints between now and eduJAM Uruguay to investigate a number of possible directions for the educational software stack on the XO-3 tablet. On the XO-1—series machines OLPC ships Sugar, an impressive collection of educational software developed by Sugar Labs. How can we best keep the best of Sugar while yanking the UI forward into a touch-friendly tablet world?

1. This week (April 4-8) I'll begin by working on a port of the GTK3 UI library to Android. The GTK3 library contains touch support missing from the GTK2 library on which Sugar is currently based. The end goal here would be a full port of the Python/GTK-based Sugar APIs, running on something like the Honeycomb Android OS. Our existing educational activities could be ported to the new APIs without too much difficulty, but we'd largely use the existing Android OS facilities instead of the parts of Sugar concerned with low-level system management. To clarify: this is a preliminary exploration—we haven't decided to base the tablet software on Android (or anything else) yet.
2. The next week brings a new direction. During the week of April 11-15 I will start porting Python/GTK3 to Chrome or ChromeOS via the Google NativeClient plugin. This path would result in activities which more fully integrate with web technologies—even in disconnected regions of the world. On desktop machines, Sugar activities could be run inside the Chrome browser, while ChromeOS (or another embedded OS running chrome/webkit) would provide the system management functions on tablet machines like the XO-3. As with the Android port, this is an exploration, not a definite software direction.
3. The week of April 18-22 I hope to focus on mesh networking. This has a somewhat checkered history in our deployments; I hope to identify the remaining roadblocks and map a way forward to make this a flagship feature of the XO-3 software.
4. The week of April 25-29 is for the existing Python-based Sugar codebase. In order to continue moving forward, it needs to migrate to GTK3, gobject-introspection, and some other key enabling technologies. I believe it would also benefit from language-independent APIs and better modularization to allow a more incremental migration path.

The following week is Conozco Uruguay and the Uruguay EduJAM where I'll present my progress on these initial exploratory projects and discuss the path ahead with the wider OLPC and Sugar communities. Clearly, a week each is not enough time to finish any of these projects! But the focused effort should help to better identify the promise, roadblocks, and challenges in each of these paths, which then in turn will help us to plan the future.

I'ts certainly been a while since I posted anything, but I figured, if u have nothing worthwhile posting, don't. Well here is something worthwhile I think:

Edu Jam

The idea here is to represent the latest advancements in techology using not the XO laptops, Sugar on a Stick, LTS Sugar, or Sugar , the operating system running on multiple environments and embedded devices. Right now it stands head to head with both Android and iOS, but the big difference is that sugar was never meant to be or designed as a toy to be played with, so that later on kids might migrate to the extremely popular MS Office or even Oracle openoffice.org, becoming another one of the zombies running their lives uncreativealy through the rat race.

In any case, it seems that nature is taking things into its own hands. Both players seem to have come to the market just a little late. Apple slightly got it with its online ability to edit documents of any kind, thoughb with severe restrictions and regulations, and Google went straght for the juggular vein, allowing any user to use its office suite for free, completely compatible with previous incantations of their competitors. They got what the others just didn't appreciate or understand... I'm talking about the cloud baby, Yes... it may seem a stupid misnomer... but its very real in business terms, and Google knows it. It is really just an extension of what already was, web 2.0, web 3.0, and so on.

But lets break it down a bit. We now have smartphones, tablets, iphones, ipods, apples's flopped TV, gmail, youtube, itunes, facebook, twitter, and google's 2 crown jewels, search and Android.

Had you asked me 2 years ago, I would have said we live in boring times, but the blatant backstabing that seems to have become common place on wallstreeet and even Silicon Valley can really only mean one thing. With the lack of a trusting society, having been taught, be it on the streets of major cities, or prep schools where manners and all that crap was spoonfed to the youngsters that now walk down the halls of our ivy leauge colleges, only to be leading hthe country in a couple of years, becoming celebrities that even us skeptics thought impossible.

Yes, those individuals who ran goldman sachs into the ground, Lehmman brothers, bankrupt 2 days before anyone took notice. And hey.... lets not forget whole countries going bankrupt because of our notion that people are inhrently NOT greedy (newsflash, apart from a very very small minority... they absolutelyt are)... I speak of Iceland, who lost 10 times its GDP, Portugal, whose figures I forget but aren't really important. Today, even the EU cannot find ways to REGULATE its economy again. For more information on that, watch the documentary narrated by Matt Damon, "Inside Job", it will certainly make you think carefully about where you next invest your money :-)

So Where do we go from here?

Ok, so I started a little rough right? But if I stood up like all the ex presidents adn even our new golden boy, an simply said.... its business as ususal, that we had a couple of problems in the middle east, but that all in all the economy was geting better., but that due to certain past events he was not able to make any of his promises true. Using the same excuse ever predecessor used before him... that he'd been left with a situation caused by previous presidents.... So... we stand at a breaking point.

Our World leader cannot help to increase educational spending. My answer to that is something that stuck with me for months and haunted me:

Deep in a Spanish village , a kid came to, he knew I was a teacher, implementing a large scale educational project based on Linux. He said.... how come my 2 borthers of 17 are forced to go to military service, when they could be advancing their knoweldge, things they could use for the future, by using these academic systems you are putting in. I felt silent, becuase I had no reasonable explantaion to give the young boy.

So, I ask you, with utmost humility, could u find it in your heart to help a child obtain a laptop for under 200 dollars. Or at least donate so that vounteers like me and others at Edu Jam can try and give everyone an equal possibility at an equal education? We.... we merry few, we take care of the rest, which includes but is certainly not limited to:

• Working 12-18 hour days to update the XO computers and csutomise the laptops so that what children learn is both culturally and academcally correct.
• Create social Networking portals whereby children can publicise their unique takes on the current state of the planet, either using tools like wordpress, wikipedia, or habari
• Work with more advanced tools (sometimes called content managment systems) like Joomla and Drupal, though to be honest, they really are all the same and do the same things, perhaps slightly diffferently, but the important thing is not to get confused by the mirirad of terms. They basically all can make u a journalist or even a you tube VJ.

I'm sure I've forgotten many things, but I have been priveledged enough to be a teacher for almost 10 years, and quite an efficient science engineer for almost 15.

My main point here is is that there is no one stopping you from learning how to code in Python, Django, Photohsop, Gimp, Inkscape, Scibus, Blender 3D. Its just about picking your poison, or perhaps a couple of them.

The open source community has made it easy for us, now its time to give something BACK!

En estas últimas semanas estoy trabajando en las actividades Leer (Read) y Obtener Libros (GetBooks). La idea es mejorar la experiencia general de la lectura de libros en las XO.
Para eso aproveché bastante trabajo ya hecho en otras actividades.
Por ejemplo, en el caso de la actividad Read, tomé código de Read Etexts, para poder leer libros en formato TXT, poder subrayar el texto y que la computadora lo lea (text to speech).
En el caso de la actividad GetBooks, tomé código de la actividad Get Internet Archive Books y de la actividad Get Books Ceibal. Ahora es posible ver las tapas de los libros antes de desacargarlos, filtrar por idiomas, ver los libros que se encuentran ya descargados y consultar catálogos. También la interfase ha sido mejorada.
Los catálogos son una característica interesante, ya que permiten publicar en un servidor colecciones de libros por temas, y acercar a los niños a libros que no conozcan.
Para quienes quieran probar estas actividades, aun en desarrollo, pueden descargarlas aqui Read y GetBooks.
El código fuente se puede ver en git http://git.sugarlabs.org/read y
http://git.sugarlabs.org/~godiard/get-books/gonzalo-mainline
Otra pieza importante en la distribución de libros es el servidor de libros OPDS Pathagar. Si alguien tiene conocimientos de Django y tiene deseos de colaborar, ponganse en contacto conmigo.

Sugar Digest

1. Microsoft To Open Source Windows was the April Fools Day spoof announcement that got more press, but Sam Greenfeld’s spoof is a lot less obvious and a lot more engaging (See the email thread: Possible XO Graphics Optimization Technique).

2. I have been fielding input regarding the 4th Grade Math project and the Sugar math collection. There are still some missing activities, but it is by-and-large a rich list. Next, we need to fill in the table correlating the activities with the curricula goals. Please contribute.

3. Compare the relative interest of XO and Justin Bieber in Uruguay and Mexico. While there is obviously a vast difference in access to XOs between the two countries, it raises the question of whether we can use measures such as these as an indicator of how access to computing changes culture and it suggests another tool we can use in assessing impact.

In the community

4. Sugar will be at Linux Tag.

Help Wanted

5. Chris Leonard sent a note to the Localization list requesting help transferring strings to Glucose 0.92. Please see his email for details.

Tech Talk

6. Dextrose 2.0 has been released. Many thanks to Ceibal, Educa Paraguay, Activity Central, and the Sugar community.

7. While OLPC continues its work on XO 1.75, an ARM-based version of the laptop, community members have been experimenting with Sugar on other ARM platforms. William Schaub has Sugar running on a Genesi Efika MX smartbook and Samy Boutayeb has Sugar running on the Toshiba AC100.

Sugar Labs

Visit our planet for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments.

polyachka: So what are your future plans with DC OLPC club ?

curiouslee: We would like to do a deployment in the DC area.

polyachka: that would be good

curiouslee: But hope for that has dimmed a bit because of the change in DC govt.

curiouslee: Also, XOs are relatively hard to get and there are still many barriers with Sugar.

polyachka: barriers like what?

curiouslee: The Sugar brand and information materials need an overhaul.

curiouslee: Running Sugar outside of the XO (which itself is hard to get in smaller quantities) is difficult.

polyachka: so what do you think is in future for both OLPC and Sugar?

polyachka: should they both re-think their strategies and become for-profit?

polyachka: offering services to the developed countries?

curiouslee: They would need more capital to restructure and then ramp up as for-profit. I can’t imagine how that would happen.

polyachka: but if they pursue the idea of constructivism, then it could revamp educational system worldwide

curiouslee: Constructivism is one approach of many. It’s not popular everywhere.

polyachka: why not popular?

curiouslee: Constructionism is not known everywhere not because it is not good. There are many other schools of thought.

curiouslee: Every country has entrenched beliefs.

polyachka: I thought that constructivism is not popular as not many believe that children can progress without much supervision

curiouslee: That’s exactly right. A lot of places approach education through rote learning and total control of the children.

polyachka: too bad, i still hope that right amount of education blended with technology can save the world

curiouslee: I hope for the same thing!

polyachka: why were you in Boston the other week?

curiouslee: I wanted to visit the Computer Clubhouse an attend the volunteer meeting at OLPC.

polyachka: thank you for coming

polyachka:  we all admire your DC club and Adam secretly wishes there was a person like you in Boston to have a big OLPC following in Boston

curiouslee: If I lived in Boston, there would definitely be a big group!

curiouslee: Believe me, there have been months where I didn’t want to organize.

polyachka: but you still did and that counts!

polyachka: Thank you so much for answering all my questions!

curiouslee: Ok thanks!