Tap Parikh presented in class today about a mobile phone based project for reporting organic farming practices developed for farmers in Oaxaca, Mexico. He spoke a little about developing this system and about its success, and mentioned his current and next inquiry regarding this and similar certification projects — namely, what are the best methods [...]
Neil Patel spoke today about some of his work developing tools for agricultural work in rural India. The two projects he described were quite different: one a system for evaluating and certifying farmers and farms as sustainable and another a voice-based system for navigating and requesting radio-program agricultural resources. He stressed attention to the end [...]
Heather Zornetzer spoke today about work with SSI (http://www.sslink.org). They run a large variety of projects. I followed up with her at the ICTD conference about potential work with the Institute. I continue to wonder about how I might be able to use my skills in the projects and contexts I’m hearing about in classes [...]
A new CRM at BusyInternet and Bodas for Life with the Blum Center
I was most interested in the presentations by the Haas students in DRCA today. They offered some insight into the variety of work that falls under the umbrella of ICTD. Neither of these projects involved developing new software, but both involved developing systems [...]
The assignment for this lab was to create something that crawls. I sewed a servo motor to a fruit container and am controlling the motor with a potentiometer. The result is an object that moves in a rather comical way with it’s awkward inching along and servo sounds.
Details/Observations:
Components:
arduino
servo motor
potentiometer
produce basket
wire
usb cable
computer
/*
* Servo with Potentiometer control
* [...]
I attended some events at the TIER workshop for ICTD (http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu/wiki/Workshop:2008). Among the presentations about specific ICTD projects, there were a few presentations about larger issues in ICTD. The one that was most interesting to me was the discussion “What is Research in ICTD” moderated by Melissa Ho and debated/discussed by Jenna Burrell (UC Berkeley [...]
For Lab this week, our assignment is to make a system that includes motion — ie. that makes use of the dc motor in our lab kit. My system has three motors, each tripped by a different photocell sensor. You trip the first sensor with your hand, causing the square paddle to rotate. [...]
http://www.replate.org/
From replate.org:
v. (re-plate): to place unwanted leftovers, typically in a doggie bag, on top of the nearest trash can so they don’t go to waste
This phenomenon is not uncommon in California (and perhaps, in other places where leftovers will not spoil in the outdoors and/or there are enough people looking for food in the trash [...]
Oil fell to under $70 a barrel today. The nytimes reports; this is a 16-month low and OPEC is alarmed. The world was just alarmed 16 months ago that the price of oil rose above $70. The news is an alarm.
I’m becoming ambivalent about these reports — concerned, but not as much as I was [...]
Google Maps
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/elections/index.html
Searching for data about how campaign and proposition donations are spent and how well money-spent maps to election-won, I came across these Google Maps showing a variety of election data including but not limited to: Primary results, Election-related twitter, Donation Density, the Life stories of both Obama and McCain.
Federal Election Committee released “Campaign Finance [...]