Affluence has a color - green. And by that I don't mean greenback.

I was checking the Google map one day. It strikes me how Atherton, a uber rich city in California, stands out with a greenish tone. Most other urban area I looked appear grayish.

Further up north your will find another green patch - Hillsborough.

P.S. If you don't see much color, you might want a better monitor. On my Acer LCD monitor the color looks very rich. But on a Dell laptop the same picture becomes very dull.

2006.06.02 [geography] - comments

Coming from a culture where we associate news with accidents, violent crimes and disasters, I have came out and start to question our perverse obsession on negative news. Not all news agencies are created equal though. The Christian Science Monitor, for example, put a lot of focuses on education. Here is one good piece of story about an experiment in India where they put free computer stand in slums and found kids made good use of them. Surprising they found that with no supervision or instruction

the children "download and play audio and video, send and receive e-mail, chat, and so on," he says. They quickly move on to learn some English from English-language websites, read Indian newspapers, and even "look for jobs for their fathers,"

And it does not end there.

Many have changed their goals from say, rickshaw driver to engineer, and most now want to go to college.

Seeing this kind of heart warming notes really light up my day.

Thinking more about this, it is not all that surprising that kids can teach themselves about computer without any instructions. Afterall I learned much about computer and programming by myself before even set foot in the college, and all these without really spending much in gadgetry.

2006.06.01 [education, tech] - comments