Liberia Outsources Primary Education

Wait. What?

Admittedly I know little to nothing about education in Liberia and it really isn’t up to me to judge the decision of their Minister of Education (how would you solve his problems?). However, I am still terribly saddened that this is apparently what we have now come to: outsourcing the education of the youth to an American for-profit company that has ‘teachers’ use scripts on their hand-held tablets. Dehumanisation backed by the capital of the likes of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Pierre Omidyar…

This is starting to beg the question: What parts of our society don’t we consider to be ripe for public-private partnerships yet? Why not work towards a true educational commons which, next to curriculum, also includes process and methodology?

Liberian education Minister George Werner announced that the entire pre-primary and primary education system would be outsourced to Bridge International Academies to manage. The deal will see the government of Liberia direct public funding for education to support services subcontracted to the private, for-profit, US-based company.Under the public-private arrangement, the company will pilot the programme in 50 public schools in 2016, as well as design curriculum materials, while phase two could have the company rollout mass implementation over five years, “with government exit possible each year dependent on provided performance from September 2017 onwards,” the report from Liberia’s FrontPage Newspaper said.“Eventually the Ministry of Education is aiming to contract out all primary and early childhood education schools to private providers who meet the required standards over five year period,” the article states.

Source: An Africa first! Liberia outsources entire education system to a private American firm. Why all should pay attention | MG Africa

Pupils at a Bridge International Academy in East Africa.

Artificial Intelligence as a Service

Companies like Google and IBM are opening up services through APIs that will allow you to do things like check if an image contains adult/violent content, check to see what mood a face on a picture is in, or detect the language a piece of text is written in. Artificial Intelligence as a Service as it were (or maybe Machine Learning as a Service would be more appropriate).

So imagine building your product on top of these services. What happens if they start asking you to pay? Or if they censor particular types of input? Or if they stop existing? Where are the open alternatives that you can host yourself?

For anyone who likes logical Lego, the availability of these plug and play services means that in many cases you don’t have to worry about the base technology, at least to get a simple demo running. Instead, the creativity comes in the orchestration of services, and putting them together in interesting ways in order to do useful things with them…

Source: Recognise This…? A Quick Round-Up of Some *-Recognition Service APIs | OUseful.Info, the blog…

Morozov: tech firms now run western politics

For the past few years I have been saying that more and more of our lives will very soon be under the governance of the big Silicon Valley information giants. Living in Google’s jurisdiction as it were.

Morozov is much more articulate than me. He is now convinced that once this transformation is complete there won’t be a way back.

In fact, technology firms are rapidly becoming the default background condition in which our politics itself is conducted. Once Google and Facebook take over the management of essential services, Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that “there is no alternative” would no longer be a mere slogan but an accurate description of reality.The worst is that today’s legitimation crisis could be our last. Any discussion of legitimacy presupposes not just the ability to sense injustice but also to imagine and implement a political alternative. Imagination would never be in short supply but the ability to implement things on a large scale is increasingly limited to technology giants. Once this transfer of power is complete, there won’t be a need to buy time any more – the democratic alternative will simply no longer be a feasible option.

Source: The state has lost control: tech firms now run western politics | Opinion | The Guardian

Raspberry Pi, ownCloud and Ubuntu

ownCloud has really matured in the last couple of months. Both from a technical perspective and as an open source community based project that just kicks ass.

The free software replacement of Dropbox (and eventually GoogleDocs) is fast becoming one the key pieces of infrastructure for a decentralised and open web. I love how absolutely hardcore pro freedom the community of developers is.

It is great to read that they are now also taking very concrete steps towards making it easier to just have this running in your own home.

[The] goal of this project is to create a product home users can buy to easily and quickly get their ownCloud up and running, based on a Raspbery Pi (or something like that!) and a hard drive (or more). Something they will be able to buy from a easy store online, receive home, plug in, configure in some easy steps and – done.

Source: WD Labs, Raspberry Pi, ownCloud and Ubuntu | ownCloud.org

A Video That Every Potential Juror Should See

I’ve written before about the use of police bodycams, mainly looking at what the first person perspective might mean for the way we will see (police) violence in the future.

The ACLU has written an blog post about a video that clearly shows the level of manipulation that is possible for the police around their own footage. The third person viewpoint of a public surveillance camera made that clear in this particular case in point.

Last year I wrote about “acting and directing with police body cameras” — how police officers are likely to increasingly learn to manipulate the photographic record that their cameras create. A stark case study in that kind of manipulation can be found in video of a 2014 arrest in Florida that was released in January and recently came to my attention. It’s the kind of video that everyone should watch in order to become sophisticated and properly skeptical consumers of video evidence.

Source: A Video That Every Potential Juror Should See | American Civil Liberties Union

Update (d.d. 4 April 2016): The New York Times has put up an interactive site that allows you to see the same footage of standard policing situations from different points of view. Do check it out. The main lesson? What we see in police footage tends to be shaped by what we already believe.