What’s so Novel About African Bushmen Using PDAs to Track Wildlife?
Everyone's going gaga over Discovery Channel's story (cached):
Expert hunters and gatherers such as the Bushmen, the indigenous people of the Kalahari Desert, are being equipped with smart phones with special software for tracking plants and animals. Called CyberTracker, the free program combines a database of icons of animals and plants with GPS software to allow people who cannot read or write to record complex information.
The novelty rating is hard to determine, and I'm leaning towards 0. For one thing, the Handspring Visor pictured is no different than today's smartphones and PDAs, in the sense that the Cyber-Tracker also provides easy access to information. How is that different than today's basic address books and virtual calendars?
What about the "new discoveries that would otherwise have been possible." Still old hat. It becomes a lot easier to see patterns when it's easy to sort through the data in the first place.
On the other hand, African bushmen never use smartphones nor PDAs right? What do you think?
