The ambitious project to provide low-cost laptop computers to poor children around the world is about to take a small step forward. More than 500 children in Thailand are expected to receive the machines in October and November for quality testing and debugging.
The One Laptop Per Child program, which began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab and now is a separate nonprofit organization, hopes to deploy 5 million to 7 million machines in Thailand, Nigeria, Brazil and Argentina in 2007.
Thailand’s government is expected to buy 1 million in the first year.
The creator of the laptop program, Nicholas Negroponte, has set a goal of making the laptops for about $100 each, though he expects the initial figure to be slightly higher and the long-term cost slightly lower.
The machines will use the free Linux operating system, include flash memory instead of a hard drive and run on electricity created by a hand or foot pump.
South Korea to dress “smart”: Technology-savvy South Korea isn’t happy making only MP3 players and the memory chips that go inside many of the more popular models. It also wants people wearing South Korean “smart” clothes with built-in digital music players.
The government is backing efforts to launch the digitized apparel by the end of the year, hoping to win a top position for the country as an exporter of such clothing.
“The research and development of smart clothing can’t be left up to the market only, because of its high risk. The government has taken the role of offsetting this risk,” Hwang Kyu-yearn, an official at the Commerce and Industry Ministry, said Wednesday, declining to elaborate on the government’s support to the industry.
Robot is “human-centered”: Ballbot, a narrow, 5-foot-tall robot, balances delicately on what looks like a bowling ball. Swaying slightly on a laboratory floor, the aluminum-framed droid seems ready to fall at any moment.
But much like a circus animal balancing on a beach ball, Ballbot stays stable, its motors whirring to keep it upright.
Some experts say robots such as Ballbot might one day help provide care and companionship to the disabled and the nation’s aging population.
“We’re very good at making machines that can compute and play chess really well,” said Louis Whitcomb, a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. “We’re very poor at developing machines with which we can interact physically, assistants that can do our bidding.”
Ballbot, created by Carnegie Mellon University Professor Ralph Hollis, represents pioneering work in the emerging field of “human-centered robotics,” Whitcomb said.
The field is already booming in countries such as Japan and Korea, where graying populations are expected to put overwhelming demands on younger health care workers, said Roderic Grupen, director of the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
A smart shopping cart: It looks almost like any other shopping cart, except sensors let it follow the shopper around the supermarket and slow down when needed so items can be placed in it. And it never crashes into anyone’s heels.
“The immediate thing that jumped to my mind was all those times as a kid when my sister would accidentally hit me with a cart,” said its inventor, Gregory Garcia. “It seems like the public would really want this, since everybody shops.”
His cart, also known as B.O.S.S. for Battery Operated Smart Servant, was one of about 30 robots displayed last week by University of Florida students.
From Herald news services
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