Wendell Berry's Standards for Technological Innovation

Both Waxy and Kottke pointed to this interesting piece by Kevin Kelly entitled Amish Hackers.  It reminded me of a short essay by Wendell Berry published, amongst other places, in Harper's back in the late 80's (originally?) entitled Against PC's (the Harper's version is gated but here's the essay as well as subsequently published letters between Berry and readers.).  He ends with this list of "standards for technological innovation:"

To make myself as plain as I can, I should give my standards for technological innovation in my own work. They are as follows:-

1. The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.
2. It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.
3. It should do work that is clearly and demonstrably better than the one it replaces.
4. It should use less energy than the one it replaces.
5. If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.
6. It should be repairable by a person of ordinary intelligence, provided that he or she has the necessary tools.
7. It should be purchasable and repairable as near to home as possible.
8. It should come from a small, privately owned shop or store that will take it back for maintenance and repair.
9. It should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships.

Africa.Alltop

Nice to see Africa getting some lovin' from news aggregation site Alltop.  Pointer and backstory from Erik Hersman.

Gmail Adds Encryption Option

Gmail is currently rolling out the option to default your account to HTTPS.  The functionality has always been there and most who were concerned utilized bookmarks or add-ons but it's good to see them providing a native solution.  My wife, if no one else, will sleep easier tonight.

(via)

BXVI's TXT MSG

The Pope sent out the first ever papal text message today to attendants at World Youth Day in Australia.  Here's the text:

Young friend, God and his people expect much from u because u have within you the Fathers supreme gift: the Spirit of Jesus - BXVI

He is also the first pope to have a cellphone and an iPod, all of which sounds like it puts him well ahead of John McCain.

PS - What happens when papal infallibility and txtspk collide?

Open XML File Format Converter for Mac

I somehow missed this.  I'm still running Office 2004 on my Mac and haven't seen anything yet convincing me that I should upgrade to Office 2008, so I was pleased to see that this final version of the converter now offers read/write functionality of all the new XML file types within the 2004 applications.

Technology Driven Development?

Short piece in the Christian Science Monitor on a possible shift in the WFP from dispersing aid in the form of foodstuffs to dispersing aid as cash.  Economists, of course, posit this as the most efficient means of providing emergency relief and those with an eye towards farmers in the developing world advocate it as well for sustaining, and in some cases bolstering, their local markets.  Of nearly equal interest to me is the technology being used to disperse aid money via SMS on cellphones.  Safaricom is the operator mentioned in the article being used by Concern, but Celtel is another one.  One of the arguments long posited by those endorsing the dispersal of aid as food over aid as cash is that cash has a way of finding itself into coffers and not onto plates - not that food aid is immune to the effects of political maneuvering or cronyism.  In The Bottom Billion, Collier estimates that "something around 40 percent of Africa's military spending is inadvertently financed by aid" (p. 103), so there has traditionally been good reason to be skeptical about where aid money ends up once it hits the ground.  However, this could be a case where technology provides a delivery method that circumvents the traditional hurdles to getting capital into the hands and bellies of those who need it most and thus provides a spring board for development.  

We Hurt the Ones We Love the Most

I don't Twitter but its an interesting technology, and so is this rumination on whether or not it may have to die to live - a dilemma that I think will become increasingly common with technologies emerging under this model (Free blog post idea: Twitter as tragic hero):

Is Twitter too important to be left in the hands of Twitter? That's the argument that bubbled up over the weekend. The argument is that Twitter is not distributed. This means that if Twitter goes down no one can Twitter. It also means if Twitter goes out of business, or just screws up, we could lose all of our tweet history.

. . . . It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will become too important to exist in its current form, and the community will feel it has to be replaced by an open source, distributed framework. This should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who decides open their API. While the Open API strategy has clearly sped up adoption, it may have worked too well. In fact, it may have worked so well that Twitter may be killed before it ever makes it out of the womb -- by people who love it.

. . . . The lesson from all of this may be that communications apps can't live without an open API, But they can't live with them, either. Of course I have been skeptical that any communication app can make money, and particularly Twitter, but I could not envision that they would and could be undermined as a platform like this. It is truly astonishing to watch.

I'm curious too as to whether or not (when?) such a circumstance would begin to impact innovation, or at the very least drive it back under the proprietary umbrella.