theatlantic:

The Broken Kindle Problem: An African Aid Program Runs Into Trouble

Getting textbooks into classrooms can be expensive and challenging anywhere, all the more so in rural sub-Saharan Africa — where those textbooks are in direly short supply. In five African schools a non-profit organization called Worldreader is piloting a high-tech solution: a Kindle for every student. Though the initial cost is higher than a set of textbooks, it’s much easier to add new textbooks and offer a huge variety of content.

Worldreader has already distributed a thousand Kindles to schoolkids in Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana, each already stocked with hundreds of e-books: everything from storybooks and “Easy English Learning for Junior High School” to Crime and Punishment. They’ve particularly worked to make books by local authors available, by establishing publishing partnerships with Ghanaian and Kenyan publishers.

But there’s some irony in the fact that the top item on the list of Worldreader books is a short story called “E is for E-Waste.” School children didn’t just get to read about e-waste, they got an unanticipated firsthand education in the delicate lifecycle of electronics. Over the course of the pilot study in Ghana, 40.5 percent of the Kindles broke. In their report (pdf) Worldreader called this breakage rate “unexpectedly high”; Andrew Webster of The Verge called it ”a surprisingly large amount.” […]

A broken Kindle is disappointing, yes. Expensive, yes. But unexpected? How could it be?

Read more. [Image: Worldreader]

(via npr)

npr:

My father, world-renowned virtuoso violinist and teacher Roman Totenberg, whose professional career spanned nine decades and four continents, died early Tuesday morning at the age of 101.

His death was as remarkable as his life. He made his debut as a soloist with the Warsaw Philharmonic at age 11, performed his last concert when he was in his mid-90s, and was still teaching, literally, on his deathbed. This week, as word flew around the musical world that he was in renal failure, former students flocked to his home in Newton, Mass., to see the beloved “maestro.”

Mainly, he wanted to hear them play, and several of the sessions turned into long lessons, with my father, eyes closed, conducting with one hand to keep the tempo, slowing the phrasing here and there, and at one point, asking Daniel Han, now a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra, to hand over his violin so my dad could show him some fingering.

Letitia Hom, who has a class of students of her own now, wanted a lesson on the Brahms violin concerto, so on Saturday, she stood at his bedside playing beautifully for him. At one stopping point, though, he spoke so softly, she had to bend her ear to his lips. His words: “The D was flat.”

Solo violinist Mira Wang, who came from China decades ago to study with him, played for hours on Sunday. Every time she would stop, he had just one word: “More.” And still they came, one after another, describing how he had changed their lives. So widespread was the outpouring, that one former student in Poland had to be dissuaded from jumping on a plane to the United States.

He was a caring and wise father not just to us, his three daughters, but to literally thousands of students around the world who had studied with him. I dare say there is not a major orchestra in Europe or the U.S. that does not have at least one student who studied with him. When Wang, who is 40-something with a husband and two children of her own, left our house on Sunday, she said to my brother-in-law Ralph, “Now, I finally have to be a grown-up.”

(via Roman Totenberg’s Remarkable Life And Death by Nina Totenberg)

Photo courtesy of Nina Totenberg

(via zodiacchic)

stateofkind:

You can rely on the Japanese when it comes to having nicely shaped islands.

Haha love the caption

erikangstrom:

The scale of Africa on most map projections is extremely misleading. Here are many landmasses compared to-scale with Africa.

Never liked how maps are sometimes misrepresented because of a wrong scale. Isn’t the point of maps to compare spatial differences? Just because something that is not as significant does not mean that it does not exist.

(Source: visualamor, via climate-changing)

frenchy1061:

I’ll leave the night on an inspirational note.

This is so true. Some people just don’t have ability to think ahead.

(via climate-changing)