India Launches World's First Education Satellite 263
samfisher writes "New Scientist is reporting that India has launched EDUSAT, the world's first satellite exclusively dedicated to distance learning. EDUSAT will use the virtual classroom concept to offer education to children in remote villages, quality higher education to students in areas without access to good technical institutes, adult literacy programmes and training modules for teachers. The educational programmes can be viewed on any television set through a simple low-cost receiver costing about $65."
But how much for the electricity (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:But how much for the electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But how much for the electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
You have created another division around the power issue.
I'm assuming the power issue was there already. It doesn't make sense to blame an existing technology gap on something new.
Re:But how much for the electricity (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But how much for the electricity (Score:5, Informative)
NOT FLAMEBAIT: For news stories like this, if you are totally ignorant about the foreign country being discussed, it is OK to not say anything. Seriously.
Re:But how much for fixing Indian culture? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your view seems to be, western culture is good, eastern culture is bad. We Indians were doing just fine, till the western world came to zindia in mid 15th century. The current problems that India deals with have a lot to do with the 250 years + of slavery under the British rule rather than its culture. India has always been on the radar of the world conquerors, dating back to alexander in the BC era, to the moughal and turks in and around 1000 A.D to all kinds of europeans from 17th to 19th century.
And yet the Indian culture has survived and thrived . It has gracefully accepted all other cultures and yet maintained its own Identity.
Industrialization and world domination may be your idea of progress , but not every ones. Maybe family values and education take priorities in other cultures.Did you know, that the first book written on Classical Music in India dates back 3000 years. We had universities where not only locals but students from as fas as china and other oriental places used to study.
There is a old adage in Sanskrit, one of the oldest languages and mother of most modern day indian languages. May be it will sum up the importance of Knowledge in Indian Culture
A King is respected in his Kingdom, But a learned one is respect everywhere.
Good Pricing in India (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that we far outspend the rest of the world in military spending to maintain our illusion of superiority. We spend more than the next 23 nations combined for our ability to fight a multi front war while school funding continues to slip. In the city I live in they had to close schools three weeks early last year because of lack of funding. It's a complete misplacement of priorities and both political parties are guilty of it IMO.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:3, Insightful)
Didn't any of your highschool teachers try to give you a back-handed insult by telling you how much brighter students were in [insert Warsaw pact nation here], even though many of them were stuck using nothing but slide-rules, second-rate calculators, and limited supplies of books? I got that line from teachers on several occasions(and no, it wasn't directed solely at me). That line was used, of course, to shock/jolt the cla
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
I agree that admin is too high. Look at any school district and compare their admin numbers to what it was 20 years ago. Same goes with city government as well.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
I have to question the logistics of that working in the states as well. Or at least in my area (fairly rural)---we have about 20 buses at my highschool that scour the county pretty much in set areas to get all the students to school. A "local bus company" would need at least as many, perhaps more (to account for day to day traffic as well) vehicles to accomplish the same thing, as well as taking a huge stride out of their established route to let people off at the school. In den
Re:busses (Score:2)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who just started teaching, I can honestly say that there isn't a lot wrong with education in the US, at least compared to much of the developed world. Standards for teachers have continued to rise, and the people I see entering the workplace now are more skilled than teachers were 30 years ago. Is everything roses and chocolates? Hell no! But we're not doing badly. There's always plenty of room for improvement, but I'm not worried about this country collapsing due to the educational deficiencies of the next generation.
What could be done to improve the educational system in this country? All sorts of things. The problem is that nobody can agree on those things. Personally, I think standardized tests are a crock of shit, and that they don't reliably test content knowledge nor the ability to use what one has learned. Do I have a better method to reliably and fairly assess a student's knowledge, which works flawlessly across all cultures and languages? No. And neither does anyone else.
Would more funding help? Yes. But funding is useless without training and direction. I would love to see technology fully integrated into public schools, where we teach students to make good use of it. But until we get both funding and knowledgeable teachers and administrators, that won't happen. At the moment, my high school doesn't even teach programming, and it's one of the largest schools in the area. I have a celeron 400 for a workstation, running XP, Novell desktop environment, with mandated use of Gradequick for attendance and grades. I can't run multiple apps on it at once. But it's the best we have, because the funding isn't there, and the administration doesn't see better computers as a priority. Combine these things with a school board composed of non-educators, primarily concerned with chopping down the school budget, and there will be no change in how the school views technology for years to come.
The bottom line is that in the US, we have made equality the goal, rather than maximizing the abilities of our top students. While it's a noble goal, we still aren't there, and the system is set up to force all students to a middle-point. We're a country that wants everyone treated equally rather than fairly. Education reform is tied to the government, the economy, and the citizens. The only way to make education better is to educate the general public on education, and hope that it trickles up to the government. We've been debating educational reform for hundreds of years, and we will continue to do so for hundreds more. If you want change, be sure to vote, and get on a school board, because they help set the policies and goals for schools.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
The problem with public education in America is not a lack of funding, it's a lack of accountability.
You've just repeated the same, old, tired liberal crap propaganda which has been going on since the Great Generation junk of the 60s.
There's no proven causation between amount of money spent on public education and levels of proficiency among students. If there were, U.S. public school kids would be at the top of proficiency compar
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
The problem with public education in America is not a lack of funding, it's a lack of accountability.
What do you mean by this? What would you do to introduce accountability?
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:5, Insightful)
Not disagreeing with everything you say, but for the above... that's a unviable justification. Military strength is not determined as a percentage of GDP, but as an absolute. Once you have topped the military power of another nation by a secure margin (which we'll take the relative budgets as an indicator of) there is no point in continuing, regardless of the relative percentages.
The US spends way too much on its armed forces and the population suffers at the expense of the military-industrial lobby.
I also think it would have a significant and positive effect on the rest of the world if the US scaled back it's military forces. After all, many nations follow their example. This will be especially true of space based weapons. The US has an unprecedented chance to try and stop mankind's wars spreading into space which they are walking away from. "If we don't do it, someone else will."
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2, Insightful)
Really? Amazing. And your proof is...nonexistant.
The level of creature comforts and services available to Americans continues to grow at an astounding rate. In America, a person has to truly work hard to avoid eating regularly and living in safe housing. 100 years ago, that wasn't the case in the U.S. But, of course, there weren't things like an Interstate road system or a national e
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:3, Insightful)
But, of course, there weren't things like an Interstate road system or a national electrical grid. And just why did those come into existance? They were created for national defense by those horrible capitalist industries.
... don't forget the Internet [wikipedia.org]. You know. This thing you're looking at right now.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
The internet would have come anyway, it was internet time. Universities in Britain were developing networks between themselves that would have been another internet seed. Business would also have come up with the same as corporate networks grew ever larger.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:5, Insightful)
You are a muppet.
Re-read my post. Nothing in there is anti- (or pro-) capitalism. For what it's worth, I tend towards a capitalist view of things, but Capitalism is an economic system. It is not a trademark of the Pentagon.
I also take great delight in informing you that the horrible capitalist industries do not generate 80% of the world's food. You'll find that most societies (even communists) have a tendancy to grow food regardless of their economic model. I can't think why that is.
Now to your actual point (such as it is):
And your proof is...nonexistant.
Nope, I just assumed that it was obvious that if your government didn't spend about 400 billion dollars a year on the military, then that money could be spent on something else. Assuming that they ploughed even some of that budget into education rather than explosives, then we can conclude the american public would be better off. That's logic. The only justification is if you really think the US needs to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more than everyone else on its armed forces to ensure it's citizen's safety. I think it is equally clear that it doesn't.
And finally,
Time for you to put on the big kid pants and stop complaining.
Nyah nyah!
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Some of the railways and a lot of the highways WERE due to the military. They were built by the military due to the war. But that doesn't prove anything. If the allocation was incorrect, it's wrong no matter what the result was. For instance, it would likely be more efficient for the govt to give all the money to the construction companies (or not collect the taxes in the first place) than it is to dive
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Look at it this way: when a score of men armed with box-cutters and the surprise element kill more civilians in your own country than the number of deaths among your invading soldiers in a country in the other side of the world, this means your military spending, regardless of its size, is way too biased for offense rather than defense.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:4, Informative)
US- 3.3% GDP
Japan- 1% (mandated by their Constitution post WWII)
France- 2.7
England- 2.5
Germany 1.6
Canada 1.4
China 2.2
Italy 2.0
India 2.5
Poland 2.1
Netherlands 1.8
Even if you throw out the results from small countries, we spent 25% more as a percentage of GDP. There are a few outliers above us in the developed world, such as Isreal for obvious reasons of being at perpetual war. And there's third world countries with higher, due to being dictatorships. But among developed nations we are the highest by far, and in 2003, we spent more despite the rest of the world decreasing as percent GDP. And this doesn't even mention that our by population numbers are totally skewed high.
Source: http://www.fas.org/man/crs/RL32209.pdf
If we lowered ourself just to the level of Britain and France, hardly small armies, we'd save 50 billion a year.
And if you want crazy boondongles- lets talk about the comanche. How many billions, and in the end we don't even have a prototype?
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
North Korea tops the list at 33.9%...
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
"Watch their numbers go up if the U.S. cut things dramatically"
I'd highly doubt it. If canada has no intention of invading another country now why would they want to invade other countries if we cut spending.
If anything worldwide military spending would go down if ours did because people would not feel threatened as much. Of course it's all silly because we can kill anybody
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:3)
Of course it's all silly because we can kill anybody we want any time we want. We are finally living out our John Wayne destiny.
Yep. There's the sound a nail's head being well and truly hit. Modern developed countries are like egg-shells armed with hammers. Everyone can dish it out and no-one can take it. Long range nuclear weapons have rendered existing armies useless for anything other than population control. In a way, that makes them nastier as fighting a war can concievably be an act of defence or
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
God I hate politicians.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
You didn't think "personally" even though you claimed to.
The rest of your post is just as unrealistic.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
First of all, our defense budget is closer to $450B [dod.mil].
I'm not really concerned with how much I personally have to pay each day to keep our military running (BTW, the US work force as of 2003 amounts to 146.5M people, thus placing the cost/person/day at around $6.5, or $8.4 using the $450B figure). What I am concerned with is the fact that $450B is a tremendous amount of money that could really be put to better use somewhere else. For example, 12% of our
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
I think that this war has thought us how convoluted "military" spending has become.
Due to black budgets and creative accounting we can make our military spending seem much less then it is. For example take all the mercenaries running around in Iraq, does their money come out of the military budget or some other budget. How about all those other private contractors? When the shuttle carries military payload or does military exper
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:3, Informative)
How about the average salary+benefits of being Administration? [thechampion.org] $94,500
(Look up the salary of every public teacher in the state of Illinois at thechampion.org.) For Chicago, search for "DIST 299" The numbers include pension, which they can roll over. It's the private school teachers that make next to nothing. (Catholic grade school teacher I know: ~$24,000)
The reason there's a shortage is because of race/gender affirmative act
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
In other words, THESE NUMBERS ARE COMPLETELY MADE UP.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:5, Interesting)
No matter what your criterea is if a school can get to pick who goes and who does not they will always win against a school that has to take everybody.
BTW the reason for the higher salary of public school teachers probably has to do with the fact that they are unionized. As a general rule union members get paid more in any industry.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Also... (Score:2)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:5, Interesting)
So India has found a more cost effective way of educating the population. Not only is this bloody fantastic, I also like the way that India is able to profit from the educational progress of other countries to leap ahead of them. All the technological innovation that took place in Europe and America - satellite technology, rocketry, etc., has been picked up and used without all the preliminary development having to be repeated.
I hope Europe and America can do the same a few more years down the line to leap forward on the backs of Indian technology developed with their new low-cost education system.
Of course, international patent agreements pushed by the US may prevent that.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
But he has the rest of the pack nipping at his heels.
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2, Informative)
Are you aware that Indian space program was at the receiving end of sanctions by US from 1970? That also meant that India was denied the technology that you say has been picked up, almost all the time. Even now the ISRO is under sanctions by the US [check your sanctions list] even after being
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
You're an idiot if you're paying $32,500/year for an undergraduate college education.
State schools are worse than private schools, but for the $22,500/year (or thereabouts) difference you're suggesting, at the undergrad level, they aren't *that* much worse (now, at the graduate level, it may make a real difference. But at the undergrad level, I generally don't think so, unless your comparison is Harvard to
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, the problem with public schools and our tax money is that the school don't have to be competitive in the marketplace. No matter what the results, voters choose who runs the school board. Failed leaders get re-elected based on their name recognition and advertising spending, successful leaders are ofter pushed out no matter what. On the otherhand if someone raises through the ranks and changes schools, and they aren't liked by the schoolboard then they also hit the streets.
A good example is El Paso's Yselta school district. It's one of the countries poorest schools and one man Anthony Trujullo raised test scores to some of the highest in the country. Parents were happy with the change but he was fired by the board 4 to 3. One of his supporters said it was politics, and they fired him based on no more than "a personal dislike by four members".
There is no 'market check', if you want to call it that and no competition for funds. Not that I'm for starving bad schools to death, but it makes you wonder. There is no incentive to actually make the schools better.
"No Child Left Behind" was supposed to fix this, but it has by and large failed. That isn't just my opinion. (See this NYT Article [nytimes.com], reg required... basically there isn't room in "better" schools for those wishing to switch from "bad" schools, a provision of NCLB. [tinyurl.com])
Many times, the failures of the public school system in America is deeper than it looks. Take school violence for example. I had to do a report for school with 4 others. When I suggested that violence had nothing to do with video games or TV people looked at me with awe. For more into that subject, read Preventing Violence in Schools Through the Production of Docile Bodies [inmotionmagazine.com] by Pedro Noguera (PhD). Good read, I promise. It basically says the failure of the public schools in general is based in the founding years and how they were formed after mental asylums and prison...
We all have to be educated in these areas in order to exact change. Better public schools are our way to make this country better for all, it's the first line of defense (IMHO).
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
And how do you suppose the administrative work is going to get done? You know: parents want reports on their child's performance, politicians want reports on school performance, health departments want reports, students want test scores, etc. Schools need to do budgeting, hiring and firing, human resources, etc.
Teaching is
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
If you want better public education, it would probably be good to spend more money on administrators so that teachers can focus on teaching. What may need some adjustment is the relationship between teachers and administrators: the teachers should be in control and the purpose of administrators sh
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:3, Interesting)
Over 75% of all businesses fail leaving employees, customers, vendors and everybody out in the cold. Do you really want a system where 75% of all schools in the US shut down and where you have to constantly find a new school for your kids to go to?
If the voters are not doing their job electing regents and board members then it's their fault and not the schools.
Having said all tha
Re:Good Pricing in India (Score:2)
Education in the US must be bad judging your grammar and spelling.
Heh India has outsourcing problems too (Score:3, Funny)
Re:well, here's one... (Score:2)
Here in the US (Score:4, Interesting)
It's a weird irony that it's cheaper to send up a satellite than it is to build schools to support everyone.
Re:Here in the US (Score:2)
That's progress, baby. It'll be cheaper in a few years or decades :P to give all those people a PDA with a mesh network so you don't even need a satellite.
That was my point... (Score:2)
It's nearly unimaginable that India has that level of scale that makes it more efficient to launch a satellite.
And yet, my local city government can't seem to figure out how to keep 13 high schools funded properly... (even though they claim they're raising taxes every year to do so...)
Low-cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Low-cost? (Score:2)
Re:Low-cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
In most developing countries, there are adult literacy programs that people attend -- and force their children to attend. Why? For the simple reason that they do not want their kids to lead the same shitty life that they do.
This is a wide-spread phenomenon, and something that quite correlates to a large chunk of the population from the underdeveloped areas moving into the cities.
And btw, electric power is provided FREE of cost to most farming communities in some states in India -- to help them with things like running the irrigation pumps and the like, as well as to encourage them to start using things like the radio and television.
Progress and better living for your progeny can be a very motivating thing. Especially in a closely family-knit culture like India.
Re:Low-cost? (Score:2)
This is a good thing happening in India. Good to see a lot of innovation and development in poorer countries.
Where Can I Get One? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where can one buy one of these $65 receivers? I figure the signal probably reaches about half of the globe, so mostly anybody in Asia should be able to get the signal, right?
Re:Where Can I Get One? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a bit hazy on this, but my understanding is that you can focus the transponders aboard a satellite into relatively narrow areas - the narrower the focus, the stronger the signal. The article seems to confirm this:
Re:Where Can I Get One? (Score:3, Informative)
i hope the implementation works out well (Score:5, Insightful)
Educational TV... (Score:4, Interesting)
Bi-Directional? (Score:5, Interesting)
If the classrooms have return uplinks, then this project makes much more sense than the current "Education alongside other functions", because two-way communications for students can be very important, and the multipurpose satellites would not be well-suited to the uplink needs of the classrooms themselves.
Low cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
In India average urban household income is estimated at US$2,847, while also having an average household size estimated around 5.07 people.
Thats like you feeding a family of five on $7.50 a day.
My point being, $65 is not "low-cost" for this part of the world, whether it be schools or familys purchasing this technology.
---------------
Source [marketnewzealand.com]
Re:Low cost? (Score:2)
Re:Low cost? (Score:2)
However, the comparison to the $65 set is reasonable.
Re:Low cost? (Score:4, Insightful)
Reminds me of that movie "Mosquito Coast", actually.
One way or the other, this is a great move by India. The US has some programs like this, but it'd be nice if we focused more on it.
Re:Low cost? (Score:2)
See where offshoring has brought India? (Score:4, Insightful)
(except, that is, for those who don't mind publicly stating that their having a monopoly on being educated is a good thing b/c it raises their wages. Some of us like to think that having everybody educated beyond caveman levels has been good for the world; we also believe that further education is likewise, logically, a good thing. But some people don't agree, I know...)
troll alert!! move your a**es and get back to work (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of sitting on our fat behinds (yes, 60% of our country is overweight - that is a whole different problem), it's about time we figure out how to get the house in order before blaming others. Schools suck, college costs have sky-rocketed - have the stupid politicians fix this first.
All the jobs that were outsourced are history - manufacturing jobs in the last two decades to China, and now some of the tech jobs to India and elsewhere. And any amount of crying aren't going to get those back. Figure out what is relevant in today's economy and work towards using that to your advantage.
Re:troll alert!! move your a**es and get back to w (Score:3, Funny)
Country Wide Classroom (Score:3, Informative)
I wonder.. (Score:4, Interesting)
having such a spread out population (besides the coastal areas) may require just such a thing...
not really sure how much of a space program they have though..
Re:I wonder.. (Score:3, Informative)
not really sure how much of a space program they have though..
Woomera satellite launches in the past, plus talk of new launch sites [google.com]
Re:I wonder.. (Score:2)
Re:I wonder.. (Score:2)
My family has friends who run a sheep station up in the north of SA, and I can remember when we used to go up camping there we'd stop in to say hello, etc. and seeing where their 'kids went to school'. It was a small hut separate from the homestead with a 2-way radio running off a car battery, because they'd only run their diesel generator for abo
something else... (Score:2)
Maybe that's what the original intent of the sattelite was?
not for long (Score:5, Funny)
OT:Is New Scientist a credible source? (Score:2, Informative)
Computer scientists here can go look at the article "the jumble cruncher" that is a jaw droppingly stupid story about turing machines and physic with circular logic an
Re:OT:Is New Scientist a credible source? (Score:2)
The question is just in how large of a system you define as encompassing the universe.
Re:OT:Is New Scientist a credible source? (Score:2)
Re:OT:Is New Scientist a credible source? (Score:2)
Re:OT:Is New Scientist a credible source? (Score:3, Insightful)
Realistically, no scientific journal is much better--every scientist tries to present their data in a sensationalized format, and the vast majority of published papers are irrelevant nonsense. In journals like Nature or Science, people just hide it a little better.
Re:OT:Is New Scientist a credible source? (Score:2)
Hello Class (Score:2, Funny)
Laudable achievement (Score:3, Interesting)
Education is good. Education teaches a child to think, to pick out his fights, his goals, his aspirations. Despite what Pink Floyd told us, education, atleast in the less developed corners of the world, is a must. Else we run the risk of religious dogma being fed to these children, we run the risk of them being taught by unscrupulous leaders who do not value scientific thinking, who seeks to find answers in the religious texts and lives in the past while sucking tomorrow's future down in the drain with them.
I am proud that India has been kicking it up a notch, in the field of education. When a country truly cares about the intellect of its citizens and aspires to leave its future generation with the power of thought, only then it can shine among the rest of the world. I only can hope Pakistan and other of its neighbours do the same. Religious education is good, in moderation. It should be balanced by education that teaches a child to question his beliefs and that of the society and to work towards making his life and that of around him, better.
The Western world should be glad for India and anyone else who decides to take such paths.
Re:Oh fuck. (Score:2)
Re:Oh fuck. (Score:3, Funny)
Hint: there's a world full of other countries and other universities beyond the 50 states. And, in some of those universities, you can get a real education.
By the way, if your own education had given you any sort of basic research skills, or if you weren't so damn lazy, then you'd know that he's talking about King's College, London. You'd be able to guess that from googling "King's College, but in this case you could say tha
Re:Obligatory (Score:2)
Have you seen their rocket specs? (Score:2)
Re:First America outsourced its jobs to India (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:BENEDICT ARNOLDS OF THE OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT (Score:2)