Okay, I am undeterred. Where is a good port expander I can get for the Raspberry Pi? Where is a good level shifter I can get for the Raspberry Pi? Interestingly enough, both of these and the necessary instructions are found at easy on AdaFruit. I guess that is the place to go if you want to go shopping for electronic parts to use in conjunction with a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino.
20170306/DuckDuckGo gpio port expander
20170306/https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=113751
20170306/https://learn.adafruit.com/mcp230xx-gpio-expander-on-the-raspberry-pi/overview
20170306/DuckDuckGo raspberry pi level shifter
“4-channel I2C-safe Bi-directional Logic Level Converter - BSS138”
20170306/https://www.adafruit.com/products/757
20170306/http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/127606/simplest-uni-directional-level-shifter-3-3v-5v
Never fear, Raspberry Pi Zero has I2C.
20170306/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
Oh, goodie! Good news, we have progress in the development of libre firmware for the Raspberry Pi! However, note again, as usual, that the libre firmware at present only provides limited functionality. And, it has lots of issues at present and not very much testing, as is noted.
- You know, about H.264 and WebM. I think often times, when the corporations realize that a third party ends up going through all kinds of hard work to develop a libre solution, after a point in time, they end up promising not to sue the libre party. It’s kind of like you need a neutral ambassador to cool the war matters.
20170306/https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware
20170306/https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware/issues/31
And the Wikipedia article makes mention of AstroPrint? Wow, I never heard of them. Well, they’re new on the scene, they came to try to make 3D printing easy and portable for consumers. They’ve got a pretty interesting article on Medium.
20170306/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AstroPrint
20170306/https://medium.com/@AstroPrint/what-would-it-take-for-your-grandma-to-buy-a-3d-printer-1e214ffc1b0
20170306/https://trends.google.com/trends/explore#q=3d%20printing
Inspiring uses of 3D printing? Unfortunately, after having looked through all of these, I haven’t found anything particularly novel. Nope, just everything that I’d expect from 3D printing. Oh, now you point out to me. They said inspiring, which I shouldn’t misinterpret as novel or revolutionary. Nope, it’s about a more artistic sense and point of view.
20170306/https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/30-inspiring-examples-of-3d-printing/
A research paper that says, somewhere in there, that the Raspberry Pi is popular in home automation because of the lower cost over commercial solutions.
20170306/http://www.ijcsmc.com/docs/papers/May2015/V4I5201599a70.pdf
“RACHEL”? What’s that?
20170306/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RACHEL
Oh, now this totally gets to me. You know your short blip thought about Haiti? The poorest nation in the world, people are starving to death over there, and someone has said that they think it is more important to send money over there than it is to support local communities. Now, I know that is actually a bit further from the truth. Okay, here’s the thing. First of all, let’s understand this point. Why is Haiti doing so bad? Well, the historic reason was due to the French colonization followed by their rapid pull-out. That kind of left the nation in a state of ruin as to many things. They tried farming to get food, but they over-farmed the land and depleted its nutrient value.
One thing to be especially aware of in the case of indigenous communities is that money alone is often stated as “one of the biggest lies to them.” Indeed, what makes communities do well is often more than just money. In some sense, paying for all of a nation’s food is like setting up a welfare state where you are paying for a person’s food who does not have a job. It doesn’t work in the long run in making the person able to get out of the condition of lack of economic dependence, and so the same it is with nations. One thing with agriculture is that it is a highly localized practice. Agricultural techniques that work well in one region of the world are not always transferable to work well in other regions of the world, due to differences in whether a climate is arid or dry. Cultural revitalization is also a very important part in bringing local communities back to good functioning and keeping them there. So the same could be said about your local community too. So the consensus? Well, it sounds like you need to support both communities. A limited amount of financial support to remote communities, and good traditional support of local communities.
I guess here in lies the particular technicality. It’s likely that the most beneficial way to support local communities is not the donation of money, but the volunteering of useful and important cultural and practical resources, whereas for remote communities, due to practical technicalities, your support to them may come mainly through limited donations of money, and conditions allowing, other remote-transferable resources such as non-perishable food.
Note that in the case of areas of poverty, it’s important to remember that the emphasis is on the indigenous population. As far as a non-indigenous population is concerned, they can just move out of the area if it is not a good area.
Okay, so that was a long rant so it seemed, so what does this have to do with RACHEL? Well, the problem at hand is that the digital world and the definition of “education” encapsulated therein is a highly limited one, one that is not likely to provide the correct kind of educational coverage that is required in developing countries. If your goal is to learn about technology, sure, go ahead full force with RACHEL, but the “cultural material”? That is likely to be considered “junk” for the native communities.
Oops, sorry. I guess I just invalidated the purpose of keeping Project Gutenberg on your local computer, at least until the case when you can get Project Gutenberg to be representative of the information of most local communities in the world. Until then, it is best to abide by my recommendation of transforming computers into creativity machines to gather cultural knowledge.
Oh yeah, medical information, that may be a little bit useful, but again, the same problem applies here as it does in the case of cultural knowledge. The problem is that the medical knowledge in the database may be mostly relevant to people of other ethnicities and there may not be sufficient medical information as is pertinent to the local people. However, I must note that this case is not nearly as bad as it is with the case of cultural knowledge.
Still, for me personally, this is interesting, from a U.S.-centric education viewpoint.
20170306/https://racheloffline.org/
20170306/https://racheloffline.org/collections/rachel
20170306/http://worldpossible.org/docs/wp/RACHEL_LiberiaReport.pdf
Also, that Liberia Report is very interesting. One of the main caveats of the study is that the experimental group did not get the level of regular access to the computers that the researchers were hoping for, so the measured gains from the study turned out to be lower than should probably be the case.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the study is comparing the recent history of Liberia to that of the United States. There has been a civil war in Liberia ending in the year 2003, and most students and teachers were negatively affected by the war conditions and had shared experiences. They had to be in hiding during the time, thus no schooling. Another thing that happened was the Ebola outbreak crisis, which forced students to suspend school. Yeah, these have some serious negative effects on the students that have set their education behind that of their American counterparts. It also highlights how important the stable environment of the United States is for professional development.
Oh, another interesting part of the study was that the students have never had experience taking a “Strongly agree”…“Storngly disagree” survey before, so they ended up doing it wrong, thinking that there was right and wrong answers and trying to answer the correct answer. Yeah, now that I think about it, that might be something very particular to American education that is not very frequently encountered in education elsewhere in the world.
Anyways, it looks like KA-Lite is some pretty good educational material, much better than the “educational games” of time past that I have seen on computing platforms.
Oh yeah, another interesting website that I looked at. So there you go, traditional stories in modern technology.
20170306/http://www.africanstorybook.org/