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8bitfuture:

Ethiopian kids hack Zoom tablets in five months.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project recently tried a new approach to distributing computers to developing countries, by leaving boxes of tablets in remote Ethiopian villages with no instructions. The Motorola Zoom tablets had a custom English language OS, a solar charger, and tracking software to monitor how they were used.

To the surprise of the organization, not only could the kids who started using the tablets easily figure out how to switch on and use them, but they also learnt to hack into the OS and enable features - amazing especially seeing as most of the kids had never seen a printed word before, let alone in English.

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

OLPC used the experiment to see whether kids can teach themselves to read and write English. Research shows that 100,000,000 kids worldwide don’t even make to to first grade, often because there are no schools or teachers available. For the cost of a tablet, that could all change. Previous OLPC studies have also shown that the kids will also teach their parents to read and write as well.

Very cool

(via 8bitfuture)

How many people bought this thinking it was BLUEBERRY!?

I did…

bobuhbeartoe:

This is the second most perfect picture ever

dorkly:

Nerds and Bros Are Not That Different

Hahaha

8bitfuture:

Diamond planet has eight times the mass of Earth.

55 Cancri e was found by researchers at Yale University, and is 40 light years from Earth. The planet has no observable water and is made primarily of carbon, iron, and silicon carbide. At least one third of the planet’s mass could be diamond, which equates to around the Earth masses of diamond.

“This is our first glimpse of a rocky world with a fundamentally different chemistry from Earth,” stated Nikku Madhusudhan, a Yale postdoctoral researcher in physics and astronomy. “The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite.”

Mine it!!

(via 8bitfuture)

funnyordie:

Catman Begins