So, as some of you know, I keep bees. Why I would interact, willingly and on a regular basis, with thousands of venomous insects may baffle you - it baffled my poor sweetie, who forewent his usual permissiveness when it came to what I did with the yard and forbade me to keep them at our house - but today was the big payoff: a honey harvest. Well, ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Our solar panel system has been running for about a year and a quarter now. One awesome thing about using Enphase microinverters (other than the fact that they can activate each panel independently and generate power with even very low amounts of light) is that Enphase keeps track of your production and gives you access to it through their website ( Read more... )

Hi everyone! I've been very busy of late, and using all of my writing energy elsewhere. But I wanted to let you know that I'll be speaking about open collaboration, learning, and One Laptop Per Child next Tuesday at 1:30pm at the WikiSym conference in Mountain View. I'll be joined by the inimitable Mike Ananny, Heather Ford, and Andrea Forte. It's ( Read more... )

stellae pointed out a blog with two posts relevant to my Tuesday post on Pixar, the Smurfette Principle, and the Bechdel test. First, a script writer explains how she and others in her profession are specifically told not to pass the Bechdel test. Second, there's a critical analysis of female characters in Disney movies, particularly Tangled and Beauty ( Read more... )

As a follow-up to my post earlier today about Pixar's not-so-great record of female character numbers (only 22% of voiced characters are female, and only one is *possibly* a main character), I wanted to highlight that making popular animated movies with good female lead characters can be, and in fact has been, done right. Hayao Miyazaki, of Studio ( Read more... )

It's been a long time since I've written about this, but a couple of links showed up on my RSS feed today that made me curious about the actual number female characters in Pixar films. I adore Pixar's films, but I've long felt irked by the lack of women in them, particularly in major roles. But just what are the numbers? Are they bad enough to ( Read more... )

Last month I gave a 12-minute talk at SXSW about One Laptop Per Child as part of a Future 15 panel. The crib of that talk (with picture-heavy slides) is now available on my website at http://research.morganya.org/ames-sxsw-futures15-olpc.pdf. I'd love to hear your thoughts about it. It's a pretty short read, and for those of you who have been ( Read more... )

The article on One Laptop Per Child that I co-wrote with Mark Warschauer has been publicly released! You can download it at http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/files/jia/033-051_Warschauer_bluelines.pdf.

Can One Laptop Per Child Save the World's Poor? ( Read more... )

I couldn't help but submit a comment disagreeing with parts of a recent post by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte on Boston Review. The original post to which he is responding, though, is excellent, and I really recommend reading it for a critical take on "ICT4D" (Information and Communication Tech. for Development). I'm reposting here to help me ( Read more... )