Thursday, October 12, 2006

world poverty statistics

The African percentage of world poverty
2015: 68%
2000: 35%
1970: 11%




button #3 of the Gapminder Human Development Trends site





2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Bill,
Have been exploring ideas on the Berkman Center site - after being totally captured by Jamie Boyle's thinking - There is a research fellow Ethan Zuckerman whose interests seem so similar to yours - even down to providing support for anonymous bloggers. If you haven't heard of him try My Hearts in Accra

Bill Kerr said...

thnx arti, yes, some great material about Africa there from Ethan Z, which I will follow up on.

I checked out the Berkman site and Jamie Boyle as well as Ethan Zuckerman. Recognised a few names there : Lawrence Lessig, John Perry Barlow (Grateful Dead), Dan Gillmor, Lewis Hyde, Doc Searls, Jimmy Wales, David Weinberger

Nice statement by Jamie Boyle in his second enclosure article : "We are in the middle of a second enclosure movement. It sounds grandiloquent to call it “the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind,” but in a very real sense that is just what it is..."

Their Mission statement explains a lot, with its emphasis on learning about cyberspace by building for themselves in cyberspace.

The Berkman Center's mission is to explore and understand cyberspace, its development, dynamics, norms, standards, and need or lack thereof for laws and sanctions.

We are a research center, premised on the observation that what we seek to learn is not already recorded. Our method is to build out into cyberspace, record data as we go, self-study, and publish. Our mode is entrepreneurial nonprofit.


It would be nice to have a government school with a mission statement like that. Why not? You would easily get the teachers, parents and students. The only real barrier is the government.