Sci&Tech History

Preparing a country report about how science and technology can reduce poverty make me wonder: where are Indonesian thoughts? I read a lot of documents about Indonesia, but most of them is written by non-Indonesian. I don’t know whether my references was influenced by the term of country report–effected the international standard asked–or is it [...]

Indonesia’s government has several technology program for rural area such as technology diffusion, appropriate technology (teknologi tepat guna). Unfortunately, those programs only sustain due to training period. After trainers left the area, people targeted as technology adopter use to turn back to their old habit. Reason of this phenomena can be classified into several level [...]

One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world’s children, has considerable momentum. Years of work by engineers and scientists have paid off in a pioneering low-cost machine that is light, rugged and surprisingly versatile. The early reviews have been glowing, and mass production is set to start on October, [...]

A friend of mine have difficulties in kept promises especially related with time. This habit doesn’t occur when he is taking a train or an airplane. Similar, offices also use machine with finger print or card to control their employee office hours. Suddenly, we become much more like machine than we realize. In the same [...]

“When we look at garbage, we don’t see garbage, O.K.?” said Robert Reed, a spokesman for Norcal Waste Systems, the parent company of Sunset Scavenger and Golden Gate Disposal and Recycling Company, the main garbage collectors in the city. “We see food, we see paper, we see metal, we see glass.” (NY Times, May 7, [...]

In what condition someone can get a bright idea to make a change? Moreover, how can the idea be brought into a prototype and than be commercialized? From references I have read, success innovation cames out not only by bright ideas but also by their network to make it formal/institutionalized. For example, by register it [...]

On July, 2004, Nature published a feature entitled The Scientific Impact of Nations. The article discuss relation between citation intensity and wealth intensity represented by a positive slope. In the graphic, we can see that citation intensity has a strong relation with wealth of a nation. The question is does wealth and citation intensity work [...]