Over two thousand hits and the digital divide

Well, and another milestone in my blogger experience. Thanks to the wonderful work done by Google Analytics i can see where is (almost) every person that reads the blog. The Geo map overlay of the last 500 visits are shown in the picture:

I know u cant see nothing in this view, please click on the image for appreciating the pretty orange points that represent your computers on the map. Actually the localized distribution of the people reading the blog is not surprising at all. Yesterday the Internet World Map 2007 was released in http://ipligence.com , from there this image was extracted:

It can be seen how the people hitting in this blog are confined to the areas of high density of the net. The data are quite shocking, large areas of the planet (and some of them very densely populated, Indonesia and India as the main example) are almost empty...but for putting some numbers to it, is good to recall the table ipligence provided:

Geographic Area	Number of Addresses	% of Addresses
Africa	40.241.664	1.519%
Antartica	15.620	0.001%
Asia	371.297.015	14.015%
Caribbean	1.681.866	0.063%
Central America	2.557.340	0.097%
Europe	569.838.903	21.510%
Middle East	12.011.131	0.453%
North America	1.481.754.661	55.932%
Oceania	76.417.711	2.885%
South America	93.409.304	3.525%

Some striking data are: 1. fifteen thousand IPs in Antarctica?! (that was a surprise to me) 2. Taking into account that the population of US is only the 5% of the world total, they hold the 55% of addresses 3. Africa has the 13% of the world population and only 1.5% of the IPs...and so on. Because of this, is obvious that the most of information on the net is in English, which means that a person with no knowledge of English cannot retrieve most of the data, which is a massive language barrier. Furthermore, the levels of illiteracy in many developing countries make Internet an Utopian land for many (not very extreme estimations are that 30% of people in Egypt are illiterate). Others, simply do not have access the technology as many cannot afford a computer or even paying in an internet cafe. These fact is one of the main problems of the so called "Digital Divide", which refers to the gap between those who benefit from digital technology and those who do not (please visit digitaldivide.org for a more detailed description of this global problem). Anyway those who can read and write and have access to the tech dedicate most of their online time in playing games, chatting, porn and downloading...Even in developed countries many times educated people do not make a great use of the vast amount of resources available; there are many many PhD students in European Universities that still make their research in Google (not even the scholar version).

So why is all this mess??? we have been lucky enough to be blessed with one of the most powerful cultural advances (if not the most) of all human history: the computers and the net. The last time that a similar cultural revolution took place was with the invention of the book (through the Arabs that stole the paper technology from two Chinese prisoners :P and then improved greatly the fabrication processes) and the invention of the movable character print by Gutenberg. The time that passed from the moment of the inventions until the majority of people could benefit from that massive cultural tool were centuries. So it happens now, we have an amazing tool without instructions. The people of my generation were educated in a system developed for the old world by educators that thought that www was some association of world wrestling. They did not know, they never taught us. We had to discover ourselves, to explore a vast unknown land with no much guidance...and we still are. I understand it can be very discouraging to search in the net, spending time in distinguishing between useful data and crap... it can be quite overwhelming, but that cannot be an excuse...lets go and use already discovered resources, discover new resources we did not know, use them wisely, identify new resources, use the tools to spread knowledge, to collaborate, to bridge through national borders. Do not forget that, until very recently, information was a rare precious thing. My parents in Spain could not get newspapers from France 40 years ago, and today we can read the news in real time or speak with people from many different countries just with a click.....enjoy the wonderful opportunity that is to have access to information. Enjoy the wonderful opportunity that is to have access to information from this side of the digital divide.

Some historical facts about Islamic Sci and Tech.

I have just finished reading a little lovely book called "Introduction to Islam" by Ziauddin Sardar and Z. Abbas Malik. Do not panic, oh Westerner readers!, the book does not intend to be the first step towards the conversion of the infidel. Z.Sardar is a writer, critic and broadcaster living in London, and he is the author of a great deal of books in Science and Technology in Islam and other related subjects ( http://www.counterpoint-online.org/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=533 )

Is really impressive the clarity of the explanations and level of insight achieved in this "for-children" looking like book. It guides the reader through a fascinating travel from the times of Muhammad to present day, showing a great deal of balanced criticism to certain aspects western and islamic worlds alike. This is a must read for any person that wants to understand a bit better the world we are living in, and particularly it is a very objective presentation of Islam, unlike many of the deformed visions presented daily to us in mass media. Much of the material contained in the book i knew it already, specially related with science and technology in the knowledge-based Muslim societies of early days of Islam. Others i simply did not know them. Nevertheless the author does a very good compilation of a few things that the West learned from the Muslim world. Note i have taken the liberty of rearranging the items into a more logical order, rephrasing some and adding others:

- How to argue: philosophical and intellectual methods
- Classic Greek philosophy: Plato, Aristotle and others
- Arabic numerals and the zero (from india)
- Algebra, trigonometry and spherical geometry (taken from the greeks and greatly developed in Islamic countries)
- The scientific method (mathematical abstractions and empirical method)
- Basic set of astronomical facts and laws
- Laboratory tools: test tubes, flasks, etc...
- Hospitals, surgery tools and the basic canons of medicine (Avicena or Ibn Sina)
- Bibliographics tools: Catalogues, bibliographies, dictionaries, thesauri and encyclopedias
- Organization and administration of libraries
- University system: From the two oldest universities in the world University of Al Karaouine (Fez, Morocco) and Al-Azhar University (Cairo, Egypt) established as early as the IX century. Note that in the antiquity there was other learning centres (Plato´s Academy in Athina, Greece) but they are not considered Universities for their different structure.
- Paper Manufacture (paper was invented by TS´ai Lun in 105 A.D, and "stolen" by the Arabs in 751 A.D)
- Publishing companies and bookshops
- Hydrology, advanced methods of irrigation and other agricultural technology
- Navigation, compass and astrolabe (the first analogue computer)
- Cartography, the first world map and travel books

Well, what to say? Just to point out that what we called Renaissance and the scientific revolution could have (Obviously!) never happened without all this advances introduced to us by Muslim people. Actually many of the works that we in the west believe "original" from our scientists were actually inspired or directed copied or plagiarised from some of the works in the aforementioned fields of study. The list is truly impressive and i recommend some further research for the curious mind.

The author mention: "some things that the west failed to learn from muslims (and which muslims themselves have forgotten)":

- Knowledge and values can not be separated
- The importance of holistic thought and action
- Environmental husbandry: The islam establishes protected zones, Haram and Hima, were developments were forbidden for the conservation of the environment)
- Animal rights...yes the first animal right statement was formulated by Ibn abd as-Salam in the XIII century)
- Multiculturalism: Al-Andalus, the place where i come from, was the first and the only truly multireligious and multicultural society in history; Muslim Bosnia and Malasia are contemporary examples.

And these are just the most prominent examples, there are many others...Islam is not a culture of violence, barbarism and ignorance, actually history tell us just the opposite. Nevertheless theres violence, barbarism and ignorance in all places and times regardless of the religion.

As a farewell note a quotation from Muhammad: "Go in quest of knowledge even to China"