Bill Gates Addresses the U.N. General Assembly

Excerpts from his Speech on September 25, 2008
When the Millennium Declaration was adopted in 2000, my wife Melinda and I would never have predicted the power of these goals to gather the world’s heads of state, our governments, businesses, and foundations in a focused effort to fight poverty and disease. And we certainly never expected that eight years later, one of our daughters would come home from school with an assignment to learn about the Millennium Development Goals. She was especially troubled to learn how many mothers die during childbirth.

These problems are going to be an interest and a focus of the children in her class and in her school for the rest of their lives. In its own way, this concern of the world’s children is just as important to our future as the attention of the people gathered here today.

There is more power in these goals than we ever imagined. Now that we’ve seen it, we want to work with you to intensify it – and push the day when all people, no matter where they’re born, can live a life filled with health and opportunity.

Source: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Imprisonment for Cyber Child Pornography

Robert Reinhold, 56, a pediatrician in Troy, Ohio was found guilty of receiving and possessing images of child pornography. He is sentenced in U.S. District Court for five years imprisonment. Reinhold admitted that he received and possessed over 7,900 images and 600 videos of child pornography at his house by purchasing multiple subscriptions to commercial child pornography web sites.

Gregory G. Lockhart, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, and Brian Moskowitz, Special Agent in Charge, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), announced the sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Rose.

Ask Kids Search Engine

Ask.com has announced the upgrade and expansion of its children’s and tweens’ search engine, Ask Kids (http://www.askkids.com/). The Ask Kids launch is part of Ask.com’s strategy of using its core search technology to build vertical search properties such as RushmoreDrive.com, the search engine for the Black community, launched in April 2008.

Studies prove that visual learning improves children’s comprehension, retention, critical thinking, and organization, says Ask.com. Additionally, children are better at “mousing” than typing. Ask Kids was built with this in mind, and organizes search results in a graphically vivid three-panel display that includes SmartAnswers and related images, current events, videos and encyclopedia results. 

For example, a child who enters the query “George Washington” will see options to narrow their results with “Facts on George Washington,” along with options to expand their results to learn about the “Declaration of Independence,” “American Revolution,” and “Mount Vernon.”

Intel’s Classmate for Portuguese Children

Intel will join hands with the Government of Portugal for an education program that aims to provide 500,000 educational PCs to Portuguese children. Under a memorandum of understanding, the program was kicked off by Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates and Intel chairman Craig Barrett. Termed as the Magellan Initiative (“Iniciativa Magalhães”), it’ll provide Intel’s classmate PCs to elementary school children.

The Magellan Initiative complements Portugal’s successful year-old e-School (“e-Escola”) project, which provides educational notebooks and Internet access to teachers and students for the secondary level of school education. Both programs align with the government’s far-reaching “Technology Plan – Portugal” (Plano Tecnológico – Portugal). The umbrella plan is to increase the use of computers and the Internet to provide Portuguese citizens with the latest technology and support them to participate in a knowledge-based economy.

“We enthusiastically support Portugal’s commitment to a comprehensive technological plan for education,” said Barrett, who is traveling to Portugal on behalf of Intel and is also the chairman of United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN GAID).

Intel will provide technology advice and support to the Portuguese government in managing, promoting, and implementing the e-Escola and Magellan initiatives. They’re also planning to create a “Competence Centre” in Portugal to expand the use of mobile PCs and Internet access and use that knowledge to replicate pilot projects in other countries.

“This new collaboration with Intel underscores Portugal’s commitment to advance quickly toward a knowledge-based economy,” Sócrates said. “By equipping our schools with state-of-the-art computing technology and Internet connectivity, we hope to hasten the transition to economic models that benefit our citizens.

In related educational efforts in Portugal, Intel has helped deploy the Intel skoool Learning and Teaching Technology, an interactive Web-based resource for learning math and science.

Information Source: My Techbox Online, www.mytechboxonline.com
Photo courtesy: Intel

Tech Challenge for Students

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen to inspire young people’s interest and participation in science and technology, officially launched on September 13 its 2008 FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) season with an online Kickoff event unveiling this year’s game, “FIRST Face Off!”

Ten thousand high-school-aged young people are expected to participate in this year’s competition, in which robots will navigate a variety of surfaces to place hockey pucks into a center scoring area. Extra points are scored by knocking pucks off racks and getting the robot off of the field at the end of the match. The fast-paced matches include a thirty-second autonomous period followed by two minutes of driver-controlled play.

Who is an Orphan?

Orphans
UNICEF and global partners define an orphan as a child who has lost one or both parents. By this definition there were over 132 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean in 2005. This large figure represents not only children who have lost both parents, but also those who have lost a father but have a surviving mother or have lost their mother but have a surviving father.

Of the more than 132 million children classified as orphans, only 13 million have lost both parents. Evidence clearly shows that the vast majority of orphans are living with a surviving parent grandparent, or other family member.  95% of all orphans are over the age of 5.

This definition contrasts with concepts of orphan in many industrialized countries, where a child must have lost both parents to qualify as an orphan. UNICEF and numerous international organizations adopted the broader definition of orphan in the mid-1990s as the AIDS pandemic began leading to the death of millions of parents worldwide, leaving an ever increasing number of children growing up without one or more parents. So the terminology of a ‘single orphan’ – the loss of one parent – and a ‘double orphan’ – the loss of both parents – was born to convey this growing crisis.

However, this difference in terminology can have concrete implications for policies and programming for children. For example, UNICEF’s ‘orphan’ statistic might be interpreted to mean that globally there are 132 million children in need of a new family, shelter, or care. This misunderstanding may then lead to responses that focus on providing care for individual children rather than supporting the families and communities that care for orphans and are in need of support.

There is growing consensus on the need to revisit the use of the term ‘orphan’ and how it is applied to help overcome this confusion.

Information Source: UNICEF

Protecting Your Connected Children

As Internet is spreading its tentacles in every corner of the planet, parents must be particularly worried because their children’s online safety is threatened. To address these safety issues, Cox Communications and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children held the third annual Cox Communications National Summit on Internet Safety in Washington D.C. on Tuesday (July 22). It focused on the online behaviors of tweens, children between the ages of eight and twelve.

Sixteen students from Cox communities in the U.S. participated in discussions on Internet safety led by children’s advocate John Walsh and Lauren Nelson, Miss America 2007. The Summit was inspired by the results of the Cox Tween Internet Safety Survey.

“I have worked at the Boys & Girls Club in Orange County since I was sixteen, and I always work with the tweens,” said Navid Rastin, eighteen, one of the summit participants. “I can tell how hard it is for them to make friends. Social networks are a place where they look for friends, but they find a lot of peer pressure there, and they do a lot of crazy things, including posting inappropriate pictures. It’s all about self-esteem.”

Findings from the Survey
 
• 90% of tweens report having used the Internet by nine years-old.
• Tweens online presence doubles or even triples between the ages of eight to ten and eleven to twelve.
• 34% of eleven and twelve year-olds have a profile on a social networking site. Tweens with social networking profiles post more personal information online.
• More than one in five tweens post information about themselves online, including pictures, the city they live in and how old they are. 27% of tweens ages eleven to twelve admit to posting a fake age online.
• 28% of tweens have been contacted over the Internet by someone they don’t know.
• The percentage of tweens that tell parents “a lot” or “everything” they do online drops rapidly with age. Only 69% of eleven to twelve year-olds tell Mom and Dad a lot/everything versus 86% of eight year-olds to ten year-olds.
• Of tweens who have been contacted online by someone they don’t know (28%), 18% keep the messages to themselves, and 11% have chatted with the unknown person.

The Tween Summit is an extension of Cox Communications’ ongoing Take Charge! Initiative, which aims to help parents, guardians, and kids make smarter media decisions.

This news story is taken from My Techbox Online where it was published on July 23, 2008.

Debate on Education

These days, I’m trying to persuade a few other people whom I know to join My Home Foundation as volunteers. So, I was discussing this concept with a friend and former colleague who works for an economic newspaper in Mumbai (India). The main discussion was on the curriculum design for the children. His view is that it should be the traditional government-school curriculum at least till 7th standard. Because up to that class, whatever one learns, be it history, civics, etc, does contribute towards at least language building (and general exposure). I do agree with him.

But my point was to innovate on curriculum design. If you see there are millions who have never used their pure academic learning in their profession. For example, I have done M.Sc. but have never used even a bit of that education in my entire professional career. For kids, it’ll be almost a life-long stay in My Home. We’ve to arrange for their career. This will lead to a huge business structure to accommodate thousands of such children. These children will be part of this enterprise to make it sustainable.

So I want to implement lean, focused education for these children. For example, they should learn basic arithmetic, writing, communications, different languages – English, German, French, etc. to work for clients in these markets. Then subject understanding – say, fashion, technology, politics, on which they will be working. Then they need to learn marketing and relationship skills for different industrial sectors, fundamental technology skills for promotions, etc.

For this, why should they waste time to learn complex mathematical theorems which they’ll never use but they are part of the government-school curriculum? Why should they learn Newton’s law or salts changing colors in chemistry labs?

The debate is still on. Let’s brainstorm before arriving at any conclusion. You can participate with your views.

First Step

September 10, 2008. Today, it’s the birthday for My Home Foundation. I have been thinking to start something on these lines for a couple of years. But was never prepared to take the first step. Even today, as I’m writing this post, I’m not quite clear about the path ahead. But definitely know that it’s going to be an extremely difficult journey because I’m all alone, for now at least. And the destination where I want to reach is far away – not even in sight – while I’m left with very little time to cover the distance.

Don’t have much to say today. However, will keep you informed on the pains and pleasures that I’d experience during the coming days when I’d move ahead.

Regards
Rakesh Raman