Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "" video.

I've got a masters in education studies and people often times don't realize just how hard it is to design work that benefits from a computer for use in classrooms. I'm not really surprised that these didn't work so well in parts of the developing world as one of those computers is a massive amount of money. In some areas a single laptops is nearly the country's per capita GDP. So, for just a couple of those notebooks you could pay for another teacher or somebody to help design curriculum for the school that could more effectively make use of the resources available in the community. Or, you could buy more supplies for the school to use in testing and evaluation. Or any number of other things that could reduce barriers to education. Computers are great, but they don't contribute that much to education if you aren't already at a level of development where you have a reasonably stable internet connection and already have your bases covered in other areas. Much of the benefits that come from computers come from being able to connect to the internet and do research and actually see what various areas look like.
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That's why Windows 3.0 shipped with solitaire. It was a way of helping new computer users learn to use a mouse effectively as many people already knew how to play solitaire, so the added element was the mouse. You had to click things, double click things click and drag, basically all the basic mouse moves in one app.
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I've got a masters in education studies and it's pretty clear that a large part of the problem with modern interfaces is that they fail to take into account how people learn and how they use the software. I started using computers in the mid-80s with an Apple ][. I watched as they got easier to use until about 25 years ago when progress didn't just stop progressing, it actually went backwards. A lot of that can be traced back to people copying what Steve Jobs was doing without understanding why it was working. You had interfaces being simplified in ways that didn't make sense and prioritizing the "User Experience" over the actual functionality. You get these very nice looking interfaces that required education to use, and two programs would do things in very different ways without any real justification. Before that there was a much higher priority placed on sticking to a paradigm that was largely simile from product to product. A menu item might move between pieces of software, but you know there would be a menu item for preferences or settings somewhere and it would usually be under either file or edit. And the things would generally be categorize with hot keys for any of the most important things. That's definitely not to say that it was perfect or that there wasn't room for progress, just that we got into a cycle where removing things and hiding them became more acceptable even though things like MS' ribbon interface just made things more confusing and hard to find. I guess that they could defend it based on telemetry, but when the people who really know how to use the software turn off the telemetry, it makes it hard to get any useful information out of it. To make matters worse, because there's no reason for the way things are being arranged, it makes it much harder to learn the software and you're spending more time concentrating on the interface compared with the time on task actually doing the work.
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Considering that tsunamis happen rarely and that villagers likely only had skills related to the sea, I can't imagine why that wouldn't work.
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The biggest issue is that the pump has no backup mode of operation for when it fails and the replacement parts/cost are prohibitive. There is also the issue of there being a lot of mass to get spinning, but some creative cutting could reduce that a lot.
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I would have liked to have something like this to dump my photos onto while camping. It seems to me that this sort of thing is trying to side step the lack of other infrastructure. Ultimately, much of Africa wound up skipping desktop computers and moving straight to smartphones that are a lot easier to deploy infrastructure for than the path that the US and Europe took .
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@silvermeasuringspoons6462 Unless you're doing a lot of data entry, there's no real purpose to them. I know how to use a ten key, but I can't say that I use it that much at home. Those buttons are also useful ones to remap to macros.
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@SanityTV_Last_Sane_Man_Alive Yes, it's an incubator, you need something to make it warm, and something to vent it if it gets too warm and for none of the circuitry to electrocute the baby. Farmers have been building basic incubators for decades with just a couple incandescent bulbs on the same basic principle.
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@tomanicodin Not being sold can be a lot of things, but in this case most of these items didn't even solve the problem they were trying to solve.
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It think the design probably would have worked if they had done it a bit differently. Instead of putting car parts in there, they should have put components that could have car parts swapped in and trusted the locals to figure that out. If they had wires for the heating element that were 12v and 4.5 amp they could put in a real heating element and at some point if it does break, a local could probably just swap a car headlight in without much trouble. Same goes for the alarm light, using a voltage that could allow for a car turn signal to be wired in would achieve the goal of having these available long term.
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The incubator is an interesting design mistake. What they should have done was pick voltages that are used in cars. A heating element that can be powered by 12v and 4.5 amps could be swapped for a car headlight. The turn signal alarms may be fine, but if they put a regular light socket that magically fit a light bulb from a car, a local could figure out how to get that to work with stuff that they have on hand. I'm not personally sure that I would have caught that myself, but there is a difference between designing things that are easily jury-rigged and sending something out that's already been jury-rigged.
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