d5w - Slashdot User

Submission + - Tech NGOs working in Haiti

Submitted by d5w on Thursday January 14, 2010 @11:51PM

d5w writes: There are a thousand and one NGOs responding in some way to the disaster in Haiti, but the necessary infrastructure is usually overlooked when people give charity donations. (In fact, some popular sites actively downgrade charities for spending on infrastructure.) Here are two organizations responding to Haiti, though, that have a purely tech infrastructure focus:

Télécoms Sans Frontières brings mobile telecom rigs and satellite phones to disaster sites, making sure that responders on the ground can communicate with each other and that individuals can contact families abroad.

MapAction sends experienced GIS people and GPS equipment to provide up-to-date mapping, which is important when the landscape has just changed drastically.

Any others?

Comment Posthumanism? (Score 1) 157

by d5w on Saturday May 21, 2005 @05:52PM (#12601512) Attached to: Cockroach-Controlled Robot

Ok, can we get a vote on whether this paragraph from the article is intended to be taken seriously or not?

This animal-controlled system is also meant to be framed within the context of embodiment, intelligence, hybridity and posthumanism. While posthumanism tends to view humanity's self-reflective reference point as significantly shifted as a result of technology, this project can be viewed as affirmation or rejection of posthuman theory; either human and computational logic can be replaced with the rugged, viseral, and adaptive logic of the cockroach, or the cockroach can be viewed as the ultimate "posthuman": proof that technology has forced a re-calculation of humanity to itself, rendering the Kafkan cockroach body as a better model of intelligence than standard human embodiment within contemporary culture.

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