In addition to graduating (finally), I was part of a final project team, Migratory Words, that won a James R. Chen Award for Outstanding Master's Final Project. The competition track that our project was placed in (Information System Design) was very strong this year. Two other very excellent project groups, the Meaningful Location project and the Observations of Daily Living project, were awarded Honorable Mentions.

Alex Twinomugisha asks: "Why Are African Internet Access Prices Still High?"

Telecommunication companies such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Africa overwhelmingly rely on a small base of customers that they charge high prices. These customers (banks, large companies, multi-nationals, -collectively dubbed the “corporates,” large educational institutions, government agencies, development agencies and NGOs and a tiny number of high net worth individuals) need connectivity and are willing to pay these high prices.  This mindset still pervades the ISPs and thats why prices are still high as they “need to recoup their investments” from a small customer base. But this business model is flawed: there are millions of individual customers and small business that also need connectivity but cannot afford to pay the current high prices.

Read the entire article here.

I found something on the Internet that I like (via BoingBoing).

Tron vs. Saul Bass from Hexagonall on Vimeo.

So... Ok. I am just going to post an excerpt from this MIT Technology Review article... and just leave it at that.

At the heart of their idea is the tricky question of what happens to information when it enters a black hole. Physicists have puzzled over this for decades with little consensus. But one thing they agree on is Landauer's principle: that erasing a bit of quantum information always increases the entropy of the Universe by a certain small amount and requires a specific amount of energy. Jae-Weon and co assume that this erasure process must occur at the black hole horizon. And if so, spacetime must organise itself in a way that maximises entropy at these horizons. In other words, it generates a gravity-like force.

The so-called Lord's Resistance Army, which as early as several years ago, instigated horrific violence in Northern Uganda, killed 300+ people in villages in D.R. Congo in December. News agencies have just started reporting it this weekend.

BBC Reports:

"We don't understand what their strategy really is, but they clearly like killing, like destroying things," said Father Joseph Nzala, the Catholic priest at Tapili.

Many villagers are still too frightened to go home, and they continue to live in a makeshift camp on the edge of Niangara.

From Techcrunch's article "Reimagining The Magazine Cover For The iPad": "...the cover is still the gateway to the magazine. Theoretically, it will still be the first page people see, giving them hints of what’s inside and enticing them to dive into the issue. One way these covers could change is that instead of simply repurposing the static photographs from the print edition, the background image itself could be some sort of video loop. Jesse Rosten, a photographer in California, created the video mockup below of what a cover of Sunset Magazine might look like on the iPad."

iPad Sunset Mag Cover Spec from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

So.. this blog phenomena. New... right? Less than a decade old? A NYR blog post by Harvard's Robert Darnton discusses what exactly makes a blog post a blog post... and then looks back in time to take a look at other forms of communication that have the same characteristics. He writes:

Short, scurrilous abuse proliferated in all sorts of communication systems: taunts scribbled on palazzi during the feuds of Renaissance Italy, ritual insult known as “playing the dozens” among African Americans, posters carried in demonstrations against despotic regimes, and graffiti on many occasions such as the uprising in Paris of May–June 1968 (one read “Voici la maison d’un affreux petit bourgeois”). When expertly mixed, provocation and pithiness could be dynamite—the verbal or written equivalent of Molotov cocktails.

This subject deserves more study, because for all of their explosiveness, the blog-like elements in earlier eras of communication tend to be ignored by sociologists, political scientists, and historians who concentrate on full-scale texts and formal discourse.

Read the whole post here.