Sci&Tech History

Reading Indonesia’s technology policies documents, delivers me to words such as human welfare, justice and poverty reduction. Should technology discourse related directly to poverty, or is it better to talk about national system innovation and see poverty reduction as an impact? The first one indicated no differentiation among government agencies in Indonesia. Every agency want to play a role from policy until practice. While the second one, indicate role distribution. Technology agencies have a role to make the innovation system work so they can sustain due to funding reduction whereas poverty issues will be conducted by planning agencies.

In it implementation, every agency has their own plan and technology policy. Is it a matter of trust or coordination? Why there are a lot of overlapping and ironically, nothing happened? I’ve got enough of big words, all I want is a real concept based on research and how the concept can be implemented. Hmmm… where does the poverty discourse goes? Does poverty reduction means charity such as Bantuan Langsung Tunai or we have to give them a little more pride so they can fight with their own hand?

I don’t know… I always impress with Grameen Bank, or even extra legal Hernando de Soto. Both talk about pride of being a human, how everyone can survive as long as they want it and being accomodate. In extra legal case, the rural people create a new system. Maybe there is something missing in understanding our society. How Indonesian people keep survive among these difficult time or on the contrary, ‘maintain’ their own difficulties? Does it related with traditional culture or there are something beyond?

Popularity: 24%

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 because Indonesian people never evaluate them self? To understand Bali tradition or Islam Java, we read Geertz, Aceh: Hurgronje, economic, health and education number we read WB or ADB report, university performance: Periskop conducted by Fraunhofer Germany. There are some exception such as Kuntowijoyo, Mochtar Lubis, or maybe Amien Rais, but how they thought influence my study is still very rare.

Am I become a non-Indonesian? I don’t know. What is an Indonesian anyway? Could anyone said that I am not an Indonesian because I don’t have any specific race flow in my blood? Or because I am not wearing batik? Or even because I prefer to take a referee from foreign report? If those points are the parameter then maybe I am not. Else, maybe nationalism has nothing to do with those formal remark.

As my colleague ever told me, we adopt technology directly without even know why it should be used. For instance, the technology that he brought after finished his study from abroad. Totally sophisticated, but then what? Does adopter really need the technology or is it for producer sake so they can get a new market?

Popularity: 22%

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 as follows:

1. Material artifact. To be sustain, a technology has to proof it performance.
2. Knowledge. Performance of the technology has to be understood by the acceptor. Bio gas reactor for example, as a machine this invention has an economic value through it capability to convert animal waste into energy. But in a cultural perspective, bio gas performance is also influenced by the society knowledge to operate the machine.
3. Incentive/disincentive. As a reward to change and face uncertainty of the new technology.

Popularity: 26%

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, 2007.

Orders, however, are slow. “I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a check written,” said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the nonprofit project. “And yes, it has been a disappointment.”

One obstacle faced by the program is open source system used in the laptop provided. “Customers have come to us and said they really like the XO laptop and they would like to see Windows on it,” said James Utzschneider, manager of Microsoft’s developing markets unit.

The first of the project’s child-friendly XO laptops running Windows XP will be tested next month in limited trials in four or five countries. Mr. Utzschneider declined to identify the countries, but he said XO laptops running Windows would be generally available by September.The pact with Microsoft is not an exclusive agreement. The Linux version will still be available, and the group will encourage outside software developers to create a version of the project’s educational software, called Sugar, that will run on Windows.

References: NY Times (September 24, 2007 and May 16, 2008)

Popularity: 29%

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 time, does this phenomena indicate the chaotic side of human?

These questions delivers me to more question about self-reliance and centralization. Democracy issues delivers us to decentralization, local knowledge, conditions which been expected to support participatory and independency of every agents  involved. As stated by Adam Smith, specialization delivers productivity. In the same time, specialization without coordination and collaboration can ends up in inefficiency and overlapping. In one side, decentralization allow the agent to be creative and accomodate heterogeneity, in the other side, it is potentially make the modality stick on small scale.

Popularity: 27%

“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, 2008)

In Indonesia, garbage still placed as waste and expenditure rather than income. A paradigm shift about how human and nature relation should be were mostly initiated by environment organization using artist as their representation. Is this phenomena indicate scientist-replaced-by-artist symptoms? Or the dichotomy of who should do what is not relevance anymore?

Popularity: 27%

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 to intellectual property agency, by promote it to the customers, and by make the product easy to reach. On contrary, can the process be inversed? With high connectivity, can someone get a bright idea?

In Newton-apple case, high connectivity with physics become pre-requirement to reach consciousness about gravitation. For me, as an amateur person, fall of an apple only has a meaning ‘Yummy’

Popularity: 27%

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 uniquely, or one of the coordinate can be substitute and also gives a positive slope? Moreover, if statistics gives a good correlation, does it work in a causal sense in reality, or the number is ‘just’ a nice coincidence?

Popularity: 28%

A study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, involved a detailed analysis of a large social network of 12,067 people who had been closely followed for 32 years, from 1971 to 2003.

The investigators knew who was friends with whom as well as who was a spouse or sibling or neighbor, and they knew how much each person weighed at various times over three decades. That let them reconstruct what happened over the years as individuals became obese. Did their friends also become obese? Did family members? Or neighbors?

The answer, the researchers report, was that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased a person’s chances of becoming obese by 57 percent. There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less influence than friends.

It did not even matter if the friend was hundreds of miles away, the influence remained. And the greatest influence of all was between close mutual friends. There, if one became obese, the other had a 171 percent increased chance of becoming obese, too. …

So, what do you think? ;p

Popularity: 30%

When people find difficulties in gaining food, is bio energy development still relevant? Does food or energy have a correlation with poverty? Both, rice or jatropha can be exchanged with money, but still the question arise, for whom we develop energy cultivation?

According to Michael Ableman, the global food system now faces a crisis of unprecedented levels primarily as the result of its wholesale dependency on fossil fuel. Food supplies are at their most limited levels in recent history, and the price of food continues to climb. Those who are already living in poverty and those who do not have access to land or the skills to grow food are the most at risk. Even the World Bank, which has historically refused to acknowledge agriculture in its quest to encourage industrialization among developing nations, recently stated that “farming must be central to efforts to reduce hunger and poverty.”

Can technology be the answer of food and energy match?

Popularity: 26%