Panayotis Vryonis

Swiss designer and artist Paul Grundbacher makes incredible hand-cranked marble machines that he wrote about and filmed for Matthias Wandel’s Woodgears just this weekend. Grundbacher told Woodgears that he works mostly with firewood from a local factory and that he rarely sketches anything beforehand but has the ability to fashion each piece and try it as opposed to carefully measuring things out through any sort of blueprint. All the work here spans 2009-2012 and each piece is a mixture of his own ideas and tricks learned from watching videos of other artists creating similar wooden devices. You can read more about his inspiration and methodology behind each piece right here. (via mefi)

[…] It may seem counterintuitive, but piracy has actually saved more software than it has destroyed. Already, pirates have spared tens of thousands of programs from extinction, proving themselves the unintentional stewards of our digital culture.

Software pirates promote data survival through ubiquity and media independence. Like an ant that works as part of a larger system it doesn’t understand, the selfish action of each digital pirate, when taken in aggregate, has created a vast web of redundant data that ensures many digital works will live on. […]

When you dive into our collection of 700 Free Online Courses, you can begin an intellectual journey that can last for many months, if not years. The collection lets you drop into the classroom of leading universities (like Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Oxford) and essentially audit their courses for free. You get to be a fly on the wall and soak up whatever knowledge you want. All you need is an internet connection and some free time on your hands.

Today, we’re featuring two classes taught by Professor Richard Bulliet at Columbia University, which will teach you the history of the world in 46 lectures. The first course, History of the World to 1500 CE (available on YouTube and iTunes Video) takes you from prehistoric times to 1500, the cusp of early modernity. The origins of agriculture; the Greek, Roman and Persian empires; the rise of Islam and Christian medieval kingdoms; transformations in Asia; and the Maritime revolution — they’re all covered here. In the second course, History of the World Since 1500 CE (find on YouTube), Bulliet focuses on the rise of colonialism in the Americas and India; historical developments in China, Japan and Korea; the Industrial Revolution; the Ottoman Empire; the emergence of Social Darwinism; and various key moments in 20th century history.

Bulliet helped write the popular textbook The Earth and its Peoples: A Global History, and it serves as the main textbook for the course. Above, we’re starting you off with Lecture 2, which moves from the Origins of Agriculture to the First River – Valley Civilizations, circa 8000-1500 B.C.E. The first lecture deals with methodological issues that underpin the course.

Once you get the big picture with Professor Bulliet, you can find more History topics in our ever-growing collection of Free Online Courses.

Related Content:

Big History: David Christian Covers 13.7 Billion Years of History in 18 Minutes

A Crash Course in World History

The Complete History of the World (and Human Creativity) in 100 Objects

The Podcast History of Our World Will Take You From Creation Myths to (Eventually) the Present Day

The History of the World in 46 Lectures From Columbia University is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

Nice writeup by James Fallows of Little Outliner, much appreciated.

The story he tells is pretty typical of the software industry. He wrote about an online outliner a few years ago, but it's gone now. His favorite outliner, Grandview -- long-gone. My early outliners, gone too. A few products took their place, but nothing like the great start we got at the beginning of the PC software era.

What changed is the way we finance software.

And that seems to be a story reporters appreciate now, because one of their most-used products, Google Reader, is going away. Probably wouldn't happen if a smaller company made it, if they depended on revenue from the product to make payroll.

The wave that's undermining journalism crashed over software many years ago. That's why when journalists want us to make their mission the center of our attention, it's a bit of narcissism on their part. Because what's happening to their profession happened to mine long ago.

We human beings aren't that good at creating sustainable systems. The bees are dying. The globe is warming. And we lose great ideas in software, and it takes generations to reinvent them, only to lose them again.

I'm bringing back a little of it now. Outliners are my thing. Now let's see if we can make this work as a business. :-)

A couple weeks ago (before the Google Reader demise!), we soft launched SubToMe as a universal subscribe button. As weeks passed, we tried to promote it. We offered a SubToMe Wordpress plugin, a Chrome Extension, a Firefox Extension… etc.

Yet, several people came to us and said: Why is it better than a Google Reader button? (replace Google Reader by Newsblur, BlogLovin, or Feedly). The answer is that it’s agnostic. It’s a button that works for any of these services. But even more than agnostic, it’s a button that works for the subscriber.

It’s better for publishers

Publishers want people to follow them and subscribe to their content. Yet, they cannot realistically put buttons for each and every reader out there, not only because it would be ugly, but also because it means that when a new reader comes out, they will have to think about adding a new button.

By being agnostic, SubToMe can be the single button publishers put on their site, but still allow all of their readers to follow them on their favorite reader.

It’s better for subscribers

SubToMe includes a transparent registration mechanism so that once you use a subscribing application, SubToMe remembers it and will only show the services you used, rather than an infinite list of tools.

For example, if you are a Kippt user, you can use Feedleap to save your favorite feeds content there. Feedleap implemented the registration mechanism. Once you’ve set up a Feedleap account, click on . You will now see that Feeleap is an option there :)

Several other readers, like The Old Reader or Msgboy implement that registration mechanism. This makes following sites easier.

Trolling is a art.

Submitted by: Unknown

As you may know, we shipped Little Outliner one week ago today.

It's done pretty well. I've been watching our stats page regularly and there always seem to be at least a couple dozen people using it. Sometimes as many as a thousand people are outlining with our simple browser-based notepad.

But all the users, and esp Kyle and myself, want the full-featured product. And we'll have something for you to try out, pretty soon. We did most of the development on the full product before releasing Little Outliner. We wanted to be sure the basic outlining code works, and we wanted to start off with the simple, no-brainer product.

We will always have Little Outliner, because power-user products can get too complicated for beginners. Just like a ski mountain has a bunny slope, with a hot cup of cocoa close-by, we want to make sure there's a super-easy outliner so people can get comfortable with the idea.

Okay, so we've built a rich product, it's coming soon -- but I want to also hook up tools to produce different ways of viewing text that was written and organized in the outliner. The prototypical example of this is a slide show. That's what MORE did so well, why it won all the awards, and caught the attention of the press and investors, Guy Kawasaki and Apple, and a whole boatload of users. So that's where we begin with the plug-in story today.

We've created a little slide-show renderer, using the beautiful JavaScript presentations of reveal.js. Then we added an icon to the left side-bar of Little Outliner that takes the content of the bar cursor outline and shoots it over to the presenter. It in turn sends back the HTML which we then display in a preview window. All this is done with interfaces that are every bit as simple as they sound.

All this is accomplished with OPML, which is an incredible way to package up a structure of text to ship between programs. It's almost a whole language unto itself for specifying the arrangement of text. And as you know, we have an easy editor for producing OPML (the world-famous Little Outliner you've heard so much about). And with all the experimentation that's been done in JavaScript tools for presenting stuff, the outliner is the missing element that makes this stuff truly user-friendly. If you don't believe me, have a look at the docs for reveal.js. Or bespoke.js. Or impress.js. All of them produce wonderfully animated presentations, but you have to be a real glutton for tech detail to even begin to create your own. But with an outliner it's dramatically easy.

So now we're ready to show, dear developer, how plug-ins will work with our outliner. Right now you have to jump through a few hoops to enable the demo. This howto shows you what to do.

http://worknotes.smallpicture.com/march2013/pluginDemo

Hope you like! :-)

Any company that takes content off the web and puts it in a private silo is playing on its own team. There are lots of companies doing this, so there are lots of teams. I'm on the team that puts all the content on the web. That means that every bit can have an address. That means it can all be plugged into other applications. So our work multiplies. The value of ideas deposited on the web is much greater than ideas that are trapped in a silo. There are lots of people, companies, universities, libraries, open source projects and governments in "web team" space. It may seem naive for any single company to throw its lot in with us, but when you see the full picture, you see it's actually the other way around. What we create together can be much much bigger than anything a single company can do.

PS: Little Outliner is on the web team too. ;-)

Bitcoin, the world’s first open source cryptographic currency, which has been on a tear since the beginning of this year, set a new record for itself yesterday afternoon as the price listed on the largest online exchange rose past US $92. With nearly 11 million Bitcoins in circulation*, this sets the total worth of the currency just over one billion dollars.

The Archive Team collective of “archivists, programmers, writers and loudmouths” is trying to archive the entire public history of Posterous posts.

This is a collective effort, and they need you. Go to this page to learn more and download the necessary software to contribute to the effort.

Remember: posterous.com will close on April 30, 2013! We only have a few days to archive millions of pages.

I’ve always been an amature archivist.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been clipping articles from newspapers and magazines, pasting them on paper and organizing them in folders. For some reason, I always thought I should preserve the pieces of information that seemed important to me.

This is one such example. An article from a Greek newspaper about “super computers” in US universities, dated Aug 18, 1985 -back then, I was 12.

Few years later, I also started collecting computer magazines. I think that I enjoyed reading BYTE magazine or WIRED as much as I enjoyed archiving them. I keep doing it, not only I subscribe to print magazines, but also keep most of them.

Back then, I didn’t know how or why or even if this would be important. It turned out to be a valuable resource when I wanted to putting things in perspective, but also great brainstorming material. It’s amazing how many good ideas and concepts are forgotten, just because they failed at a certain point of time. It’s also interesting to notice patterns of concepts, ideas and trends that happen again and again over time.

Then, some publications (it must have been mid- or late- 90s) jumped on the CD revolution and created CDs that contained their full archive in digital format. The promise of having a huge archive that would normally take a good part of your library in a little disk was tempting. I soon realised that this form was not the best way to maintain a long-term archive: as I moved to non-mainstream operating systems (I used SCO Unix, and then Linux), it was clear that most of those CDs (using proprietary formats that required an MS Windows program to view) had little value as archives.

So I kept the print versions. Paper seemed a safer bet for long-term access -and I was right.

The Internet changed much. As the original format of the information I consumed was digital, archiving had to be digital too -initially, I tried printing some of them, but printing didn’t fit a natively digital work flow.

I’ve used most of the available tools to do my clipping and archiving: from self-hosted blog engines, to del.icio.us (when it was called like this), to digg.com, google reader shared items, posterous, desktop apps… You name it, I’ve probably used it. Most of the archiving I did using these tools, is lost or inaccessible, or will be lost in a couple of years.

So, I’ve come to realise that when it comes to personal digital archiving:

1. archiving should be done using the simplest possible technology.
2. archiving should not be dependant on your commitment to support it (financially by paying a service every year, technically by maintaining a server, etc.)
3. archiving should not be dependant on third parties, especially if they don’t make any commitment that they will keep providing the services you need for a long time.

This is why I’ve ended up setting a bucket3 link blog for my digital clipping needs at picks.vrypan.net.. Bucket3 generates static HTML files that need nothing but a web hosting service, any will do. I’ve ended up hosting them on github:pages that come with an extra bonus: anyone can check out the whole archive from github.com/vrypan/picks.vrypan.net [*].

The thing is, if you value your personal archive, try finding an archiving solution that generates simple, future-proof formats and its survival doesn’t depend on your support or third-party services.

—

[*] It’s the gh-pages branch. I’ll probably write a separate post describing the technical details of the work flow.

Why is 80 characters the “standard” limit for code width? Why 80 and not 79, 81 or 100? What is the origin of this particular value?

We just did a great rollout, the product is fantastic. This is going to move tech in a new direction. It'll create new standards. I'm absolutely sure of it.

Yet, even with my track record as one who leads change in technology, the release of this software has gotten almost no note from leading tech bloggers and reporters.

That's okay, because it'll happen without them. Last time I pushed something through, it didn't get support from the press either. And the time before that. We can make it happen without their help.

I think they're comfortable with big software ideas coming from big companies. But I can't make change happen within the context of a big corporation. Too much second-guessing, too many strategy taxes, too many phony business models. So I choose to do it as an independent.

I think software is like other creative arts -- music, architecture, cooking, even design of everyday things like bikes and clothes. It takes a relentless focus on the act of using, and what kind of effect you want to create. Learning from others, and stealing from the best. Only. ;-)

We can do it on our own but it would be easier if we got help from influencers and gatekeepers. So if you like anything that I helped bring about, blogging, RSS and podcasting and a few other things, please have a look at Little Outliner. It's a little product, yes -- but one with very big ambitions. ;-)

These are early days, the product is very simple, and well-documented. We went to great lengths to make it easy to understand.

Helping users understand new relevant technology is what you do, after all.

PS: I did not include comments on this post because this is the kind of thing that attracts a lot of trolls.

PPS: To users, this is why you haven't heard much about Little Outliner in the tech press. There's nothing wrong with the product.

Having had the good fortune to work with a broad range of entrepreneurs and get a front-row seat to the foundations of their success, I thought it'd be good to share 10 key tips that I've found work 100% of the time to increase your odds of startup success. Try to execute on as many of these as you can!

1. Be raised with access to clean drinking water and sanitation. (Every tech billionaire I've ever spoken to has a toilet!)
2. Try to be born in a region that is politically and militarily stable.
3. Grow up with a family that is as steady and secure as possible.
4. Have access to at least a basic free education in core subjects.
5. Avoid being abused by family members, loved ones, friends or acquaintances during the formative years of your life.
6. Be fluent in English, or have time to dedicate to continuously improving your language skills.
7. Make sure there's enough disposable income available to support your learning technology at a younger age.
8. If you must be a member of an underrepresented community or a woman, get comfortable with suppressing your identity. If not, follow a numbingly conventional definition of dominant masculinity.
9. Be within a narrow range of physical norms for appearance and ability, as defined by the comfort level of strangers.
10. Practice articulating your cultural, technological or social aspirations exclusively in economic terms.

By following these ten simple tips, you'll massively increase the odds of success of your startup! I guarantee it, or your money back.

by The Long Now Foundation. “[…] The goal is to build a social place to help make long-term thinking more automatic and common rather than difficult and rare. […]”

As we’re been providing APIs to build feed readers for years now, last week, we saw a flock of people coming to us and asking if we could help them overcome the disparition of the Google Reader API.

Replacing the Google Reader API

Superfeedr will provide a partial replacement for the Google Reader API by the end of June. We have already started on it an we’re confident we can release something quickly. As you may know, the Google Reader API actually consists of two different things:

• The entry and feed data.
• The sync’ing of user state: read/unread, starred, tags, shared items… etc

At this point, we know that we will provide a compatible API for the feed and entry data, but, more importantly, we will try to backup as much of that data out of Google Reader for the feeds that our customers have subscribed to.

In other words, our goal is to support all the /reader/atom/ prefixed calls, and the params for it, along with the historical data served by Google Reader that we will have been able to ‘rescue’.

Syncing the state

Sync’ing state has never been our core business, and as we’ve built a backend system, we are not completely sure we will be able to provide the sync layer that many developers would love to see. It will take us a couple more weeks to figure whether we can (or not) provide a replacement for that part of the Google Reader API.

However, we believe this is a less critical aspect, as people tend to stick with the same reader, which means that the sync data can be local to a given reader. After all, even Twitter is not able to sync the direct messages you get on different platforms.

We have a problem to solve.

How to create stable systems out of the Internet we have now.

What we've created is far too fragile.

It's nice that the Bigco's have their business models. But that's not the point.

I want to connect my writing with yours, and have it be readable by people no matter what device they use, where ever they are, no matter what kind of net connection they have, today and 20 years from today.

Ignore the ups and downs of the giants. They come and go.

Very dramatic, but also very predictable, and mostly off-topic.

The question is this: How do we work together to create lasting value?

One of my favorite aspects of the infrastructure of the web is that the way we refer to web browsers in a technical context: User Agents. Divorced from its geeky context, the simple phrase seems to be laden with social, even political, implications.

The idea captured in the phrase "user agent" is a powerful one, that this software we run on our computers or our phones acts with agency on behalf of us as users, doing our bidding and following our wishes. But as the web evolves, we're in fundamental tension with that history and legacy, because the powerful companies that today exert overwhelming control over the web are going to try to make web browsers less an agent of users and more a user-driven agent of those corporations. This is especially true for Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari, though Mozilla's Firefox may be headed down this path as well.

Traditionally, the ostensible protection against browsers undermining the agency of the user has been that some of the most popular browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari's browser engine) are open source, and could thus be prevented from being subverted by their corporate owners because technically-savvy users could wrest control of the code from their sponsors. What's more, all popular desktop browsers have supported some form of user scripting, whether that's in the form of plugins (which began to wane in importance a decade ago), extensions and add-ons (in Firefox and Chrome, notably) or in the form of bookmarklets which let arbitrary scripts run on pages in almost every browser.

That era of truly effective user control over user agents may be rapidly ending, for a few reasons:

• Legitimate security and performance issues have led to the death of the traditional browser plugin; Flash was perhaps the last successful browser plugin that will ever exist. As browsers get tied more deeply to operating systems and those operating systems try to lose their dependencies on particular chip architectures or system designs, plugins implemented as native code are rapidly being obsoleted.
• Increasingly large parts of the core functionality of browsers is being connected to the cloud infrastructure of the companies which create the browsers. From bookmark sync in Chrome and Safari and Mozilla to past and future efforts around browser-integrated authentication by Microsoft and Mozilla, more and more of the features we use to browse the web are plugged in by default to centralized web services. Today's browsers can certainly function without signing in to those services, but increasingly that level of convenience will be expected from any browser expected to compete.
• The move to mobile has gutted the formerly-ubiquitous forms of browser control and customizability that we used to take for granted. No popular web browser supports plugins, almost none support any form of extensions or add-ons, and it's virtually impossible to install even a simple javascript bookmarklet on common mobile browsers like Safari and Chrome.
• Google, Apple and Opera have all coalesced around the extremely popular (and currently very technically strong) Webkit browser engine, which is overwhelmingly dominant in mobile web browsing. As we've seen, a browser engine gaining over 90% share in a market leads to technological stagnation ranging from insecurities to less innovation in terms of customizability. It's possible the three (well, two and a half) competitors all relying on the platform will be enough to keep it moving forward, but that's far from certain.

Secret Agents

Though this sounds alarmist or like a dire consequence, for the most part these developments aren't egregiously bad news for the web or for consumers. In exchange for these compromises, we've seen enormous advances in browser performance, standards-conformance and capability. The centrally-connected services like bookmark synching are generally easily disabled, and not particularly intrusive even when enabled. Competition has pushed platforms forward enough that even the formerly-reviled Internet Explorer can make knowing jokes at the expense of its old versions since new ones are quite good.

But the idea that a browser can be controlled by a user is still fundamentally in danger. Google just removed the Adblock Plus extension from its Play store for Android devices. This isn't that surprising — an advertising company is prohibiting the distribution of an extension that blocks advertising. But it starts to highlight the larger issue that the straightforward ability to have user agents be, well, agents for users is now being mediated through the business concerns of the companies which create the browsers.

We need to be advocates for extremism in the name of user agent empowerment. There should be no constraint about what user agents can do on our behalf to present, transform, remix, combine, format, reformat and display the content we view on the web. If we want to make a browser or browser add-on that strips away ads from a page, that's our right. If I want to have a browser show everything in black and white? Let me as the user have that agency. Print everything upside down and in blinking text? Absolutely. Transform every mention of "the cloud" into the phrase "my butt"? You bet your... well, you know.

Agency Matters

Why is this important? Aren't these examples just trivial transformations of content? Doesn't the existence of a "Cloud-to-Butt" extension prove that these concerns are overblown? Not necessarily.

First, distribution matters when it comes to browser customizations and add-ons. Easily being able to install an add-on changes the fundamental impact that the code has on user experience as compared to something theoretically being possible. Google and others saying "well, you can distribute that plugin, but not through a method integrated into the browser" is the difference between a piece of code being a feature for normal people or it being an art project. This is the same issue we see with app stores, but with the added impact of actually impacting the open web — the same open web that's supposed to be the alternative to the wrongs of those app stores.

Second, if we follow the historical pattern of these advancements in other areas of the tech industry, we'll see the big tech companies capitulate to the desires of the legacy content industry to trump IP law and practice with private contracts that constrain our legal rights around content use and transformation. We've had our right to make backup copies of our own media in formats like DVD criminalized by their actions. We've seen the ability to route video streams to our own devices constrained by HDCP, again limiting our ability to make our own copies of content or to transform or sample that content in ways that are legally permitted.

It is obvious that the biggest companies which make web browsers all want to curry favor with media companies on the web in the same way they curried favor with those media companies in video and music.

Google, Apple and Microsoft each share a few traits:

• They want to prove they're the biggest friends to big media companies.
• They each have advertising businesses they don't want users to block.
• They each already enforce HDCP and other technical constraints that take away IP rights that citizens have always had.
• They each have closed app stores which they heavily moderate to decide which forms of customization are permitted on their platforms.
• They have each hemmed in even powerful third-party platforms like Flash, taking control over distribution and implementation of the most popular extensions/customizations.

There is no reason to believe that web browsers won't start to aggressively block capabilities that historically have been assumed to be part of user agents. We can expect messages like "this page prohibits printing for non-registered users", or "You don't have sufficient permissions to click the 'Pin It' button for Pinterest on this site", or "unauthorized bookmarklet detected; content from this site is blocked".

How It Happens

Here's where the Pollyannas in the tech industry, or those too young to have seen how the patterns repeat, say with faith and certainty, "That won't happen! My favorite browser is open source!" But imagine if this same set of features were marketed by a smart communications team at one of these companies. Instead of saying "our browser shuts off the print button", they say "we offer a pay gate feature with deep integration into the browser for subscribers". Instead of saying "We neuter competing social networks by disabling their sharing buttons" they say "We've launched a preferred partner program to enable deep browser integration from a set of verified social networks that offer the features our users want". Instead of saying "We block content from displaying if you haven't signed in with our cloud service and had your extensions approved by us", they say "Customers who sign in with their account get access to exclusive content from our partner sites."

Hey, the friendlier phrasing sounds pretty familiar, right? That's not evil at all! Except that it's the exact same constraint being introduced to your web browser, presented in a much more appetizing way. Think of how indispensable features like Instapaper or Pocket or Readability are on mobile browsers. Now understand those are seen as problematic exceptions to the model that Apple (and Google, and everyone else) would prefer to see for mobile browser usage. There's no technical reason that Adblock couldn't be enabled on mobile versions of Safari, and doing so would allow that community to begin optimizing its performance for mobile devices. Does anybody think that will ever happen?

So, I'm a user agent extremist. We should work constructively together within the tech community (perhaps led by the EFF) to create a list of capabilities in web browsers and user agents that we consider inviolate. We should take language that ordinary consumers understand, like "unlocking" in the context of a mobile phone, and apply it to our browsers. Then we can propose simple guidelines that should be enshrined in policy — every web browser should be "unlocked" by default. We need to educate all three branches of government at federal, state and local levels to expect that media companies are going to start prosecuting ordinary citizens for using user agent capabilities that we've taken for granted for twenty years.

Otherwise we can soon expect to find that the "View Source" button which has enabled the web so far is mysteriously grayed out on certain sites. Because there are companies that are going to realize that giving users agency is a really powerful thing

People may soon have to start including their Facebook and other social media accounts in their wills if they want family to have photographs and other items after they die.

A legal symposium at NUI Galway at the weekend heard that the days of families inheriting shoeboxes of photos and correspondence will soon end and instead families will be left in a legal limbo following the death of a loved one.

Last week, I had a chance to sit down with Bill Gates as part of a small group, in a discussion focused around the release of his annual letter and the progress that has been made against the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. (You can also read his annual letter as a 6.3MB PDF.) I'll write separately about what it was like having a conversation with Bill Gates, but the biggest highlight that came from the meeting was a simple lesson:

The world is getting better, faster, than we could ever have imagined.

For those of us who are fortunate enough to live in wealthy communities or countries, we have a common set of reference points we use to describe the world's most intractable, upsetting, unimaginable injustices. Often, we only mention these horrible realities in minimizing our own woes: "Well, that's annoying, but it's hardly as bad as children starving in Africa." Or "Yeah, this is important, but it's not like it's the cure for AIDS." Or the omnipresent description of any issue as a "First World Problem".

But let's, for once, look at the actual data around developing world problems. Not our condescending, world-away displays of emotion, or our slacktivist tendencies to see a retweet as meaningful action, but the actual numbers and metrics about how progress is happening for the world's poorest people. Though metrics and measurements are always fraught and flawed, Gates' single biggest emphasis was the idea that measurable progress and metrics are necessary for any meaningful improvements to happen in the lives of the world's poor. So how are we doing?

The World Has Changed

The results are astounding. Even if we caveat that every measurement is imprecise, that billionaire philanthropists are going to favor data that strengthens their points, and that some of the most significant problems are difficult to attach metrics to, it's inarguable that the past two decades have seen the greatest leap forward in the lives of the global poor in the history of humanity. Some highlights:

• Children are 1/3 less likely to die before age five than they were in 1990. The global childhood mortality rate for kids under 5 has dropped from 88 in 1000 in 1990 to 57 in 1000 in 2010. The global infant mortality rate for kids dying before age one has plunged from 61 in 1000 to 40 in 1000. Now, any child dying is of course one child too many, but this is astounding progress to have made in just twenty years.
  

• In the past 30 years, the percentage of children who receive key immunizations such as the DTP vaccine has quadrupled.
  

• The percentage of people in the world living on less than $1.25 per day has been cut in half since 1990, ahead of the schedule of the Millennium Development Goals which hoped to reach this target by 2015.

• The number of deaths to tuberculosis has been cut 40% in the past twenty years.
• The consumption of ozone-depleting substances has been cut 85% globally in the last thirty years.
• The percentage of urban dwellers living in slums globally has been cut from 46.2% to 32.7% in the last twenty years.

And there's more progress in hunger and contraception, in sustainability and education, against AIDS and illiteracy. After reading the Gates annual letter and following up by reviewing the UN's ugly-but-data-rich Millennium Development Goals statistics site, I was surprised by how much progress has been made in the years since I've been an adult, and just how little I've heard about the big picture despite the fact that I'd like to keep informed about such things.

I'm not a pollyanna — there's a lot of work to be done. But I can personally attest to the profound effect that basic improvements like clean drinking water can have in people's lives.

Today, we often use the world's biggest problems as metaphors for impossibility. But the evidence shows that, actually, we're really good at solving even the most intimidating challenges in the world. What we're lacking is the ability to communicate effectively about how we make progress, so that we can galvanize even more investment of resources, time and effort to tackling the problems we have left.

Other Perspectives

Fortunately, everyone else who participated in the roundtable discussion has also posted their thoughts; I recommend reading them all.

• Jason Kottke summarizes the letter and reaches a similar conclusion to mine: "If you read the whole thing, you'll likely be surprised, as I was, at how much has been accomplished over the past 10-15 years." You should also see Jason's account of Gates' answers to his questions.
• Tyler Cowen's excellent writeup addresses both the content and the tone of Gates' responses, and shows how the measurement-based focus can change the perspective we have on these problems.
• I really appreciated Dana Goldstein's take, which focused on Gates' efforts around education, the foundation's sole program which operates here in the United States. She also had a more personal take on the overall conversation.
• Finally, Luisa Kroll at Forbes offers her take on the conversation, focusing on Gates' useful reframing of the way we evaluate colleges in the United States.