SoundBible: A possible answer to your prayers

SoundBible is a site that contains a large number of free-to-use short audio clips. While many of these sounds can be found elsewhere, this site puts them together in one place, provides a good description, and offers them in multiple formats. These sound files are great for student projects, such as a YouTube or Power Point. This site is also a great way to expose your students to working with audio files without having to work with huge files. They have fun and your lab still has hard drive space at the end of the class.

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Radio based computer communication

While in Mali I visited a regional communications center that transmitted market information collected by a market enumerator (see photo to right). The enumerator's job is to observe real market transactions taking place on a variety of important crops. That information is then transmitted by a form of ham radio to other regional centers and to the capital, Bamako.

Internet access in Africa is very expensive and unreliable. Most of the places we visited were using vstat connections. Those links are running about $1,000-1500 per month for a 128-256Kb connection. The use of a radio based system was not a great solution in terms of speed and each center does have to have a tall tower, but at least the costs of running the centers are not high once they are going. This is a very good example of a way to handle some of the harsher technology environments. And, by the way, the room we were in was almost 100 degrees and humid. How the head of the center was able to keep his coat on was a mystery to me. I was afraid to ask how long computer equipment would last in such an environment.

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