Intel's Skoool software brings study materials to healthcare workers in developing countries

When we consider Intel's contributions to developing nations, it's hard not to hone in on the 5 million-plus Classmate PCs it's shipped over the past four years. This time, at least, Intel is leaving the hardware part of the equation to the Lenovos and HPs of the world and focusing on the software instead. The company just announced the Skoool Healthcare Education platform, a collection of online and offline educational materials designed to help healthcare workers in developing countries better treat women and children, tackling malnutrition, vaccination, communicable diseases and childbirth safety. To be clear, Intel isn't getting into the medical content business -- it didn't write these resources but instead culled them from various third-party sources. The idea is that the company will provide the platform to governments and healthcare workers for free, forgoing what might otherwise be an opportunity to collect licensing fees. (It'll be up to local governments to work with companies like Dell to secure low-cost PCs to run the software.) For now, Intel's launching the program in Sri Lanka, where it already has a working history with the President and Minister of Health, but a rep tells us the outfit hopes to expand the program to sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Central Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, reaching 1 million healthcare workers by the end of 2015.

[Image courtesy of Intel]

Connecting a World of Opportunity through the '1Mx15' Health Program

New Health Education and Learning Program to enable technology accessibility to one million healthcare workers in developing countries by 2015

NEWS HIGHLIGHTS
- Introduces Intel's 1Mx15 Health Program which will bring technology training to 1 million healthcare workers in developing countries by the end of 2015
- Includes the Intel Skoool™ Healthcare Education Platforms that provides anytime
anywhere multimedia content delivery and an assessment platform
- Sri Lanka will be the first country to take part in Intel's 1MX15 Health Program and adopt the Intel Skoool™ Healthcare Education Platform

New York, Sept. 23, 2011 – Intel® announced the 1Mx15 Health Program which will bring ICT training to one million healthcare workers in developing countries by the end of 2015. The program will enable healthcare workers with technology, education tools and 21st century ICT skills to help accelerate progress toward better health primarily for women and children. In collaboration with governments, private industry, development communities and academia the program will establish various country initiatives to increase the availability, affordability and usage of computers, and broadband.

As part of this program, Intel created The Intel Skoool™ Healthcare Education Platform that provides an anytime anywhere multi-media content delivery and assessment platform. The platform is designed to help the need for health education and capacity building of the healthcare workforce in developing countries. It will have an open access license with no charge.

Sri Lanka will be the first country to deploy the Intel skoool™ Healthcare Education
Platform designed for the educational needs of healthcare workers and students in their country.

"Sri Lanka has taken some unique steps that other countries could emulate," said the government of Sri Lanka. "Some of these projects have already commenced at grassroots level through collaborations with industry partners such as Intel."

John Davies, Intel Vice President of the World Ahead Program said, "We are very
excited to support the UN Nation's Every Woman, Every Child Initiative and believe that our 1Mx15 Health Program and the Intel Skoool™ Healthcare Education Platform will help governments address the training needs of their healthcare workforce. We believe a well-trained healthcare workforce will enable better access to quality healthcare for women and children."

About World Ahead
The Intel World Ahead Program promotes access to technology to the next billion people that helps enrich their lives and stimulate economic opportunity. Millions of people each year are getting access to helpful technology, high-speed connectivity, education and healthcare improvements, and digital content that helps them achieve sustainable social and economic gains. Key programs focus on increasing access to technologies best suited for local needs: connections to the world via high-speed Internet technologies; education that prepares youth for the future; localized Internet content and services to improve lives; and healthcare improvements via technology.

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Epigenetics: Maybe not that big of a deal, after all, says study

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Futures Impossible : a new methodology to study world events

The study of the future, as a scientific and intellectual endeavor, used to be driven by the careful extrapolation of trends, as in Herman Kahn’s Year 2000, or the forecasting of complex interaction among many variables, as in the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb. The technologies behind these studies relied on the mathematical tools of operations research developed during World War Two and on methods for the aggregation of expert opinion such as the Delphi Technique, developed at Rand and the Institute for the Future.

The scenarios and forecasts built on this technical base were supplemented by the study of a few extreme hypothetical situations known as “wild cards” or “black swans” (major earthquake in Tokyo, terrorist attack in New York, asteroid strike in Western Europe) designed to stretch the borders of the crisis management maps and to stimulate our collective thought process—while remaining within the domain of the Possible.

Such techniques for describing the future and anticipating its opportunities and dangers have largely become obsolete because of the acceleration of technology itself and the increasing vulnerability of our society to chaotic processes that are not well behaved under most classic models.

In the world of the 21st century, the situations faced by decision-makers in government and industry are of a wholly different nature. In an economic environment where General Motors could go bankrupt in one week, and Lehman Brothers in one afternoon, the extrapolation of trends and the wisdom of experts are still relevant, but a new methodology is needed to deal with unforeseen discontinuities. Neither of the above catastrophes was a “wild card” in anyone’s scenario. No classical futurist could imagine such discontinuities because the tools to anticipate and describe them were not available: they were truly “impossible,” just as the Fukushima nuclear disaster was deemed “impossible” by the General Electric experts who built the plant and the Japanese authorities who managed it. Similarly, as a society, we seem to be incapable of imagining healthy, positive “impossibilities” such as reconciliation in Palestine, an end to terrorism, or a world without starvation.

At the Institute for the Future, a team headed up by Bob Johansen, Kathi Vian and myself has begun to develop a typology of Impossible Futures, starting from four classes of events:

A. Some futures are deemed impossible because they would require an extraordinary convergence of several scenarios, each of which has very low probability. The bankruptcy of General Motors (Fortune One!) in one week is a case in point.

B. Some futures are deemed impossible because they would require the convergence of several scenarios on time scales that violate our knowledge of reality. The failure of the Madoff funds, for example, was deemed impossible by his investors, all of whom were successful financial experts. It happened because two low-probability events converged: (1) regulatory authorities repeatedly refused to act every time the illegal scheme was brought to their attention, and (2) the subprime crisis dried up sources of funds overnight, exposing the fraudulent structure.

C. Some futures are deemed impossible because they would require the convergence of several scenarios, including forces or components that do not exist within accepted knowledge. In A.E.Van Vogt’s novel The World of null-A (for non-Aristotelian), a secret agent named Gosseyn is repeatedly assassinated. Each time, he is reincarnated in a new body held in reserve by his masters in special sarcophagi, endowed with increased abilities. A future when Gosseyn could exist lies outside the natural limits of our scientific knowledge and culture.

D. There are futures that are deemed impossible because we simply cannot imagine them. In Saddam Hussein’s culture there was no scenario in which U.S. forces could see the movement of his forces even at night, through clouds or through dust storms. Most nations still have no concept for devices that could detect underground cavities invisible from the air or from space. Even in modern American culture, the fact that remote classified facilities can be detected, visited, and accurately described by mental powers alone remains beyond accepted concepts.

To a decision-maker in business or government, simply describing such impossible future scenarios is not helpful in the absence of a methodology for detecting, understanding, and mitigating their practical effects. What is needed is a deeper grid that can be used as an overlay to highlight radical discontinuities in technology, geopolitics, social behavior or economic patterns. We believe that such a tool needs to be developed if we want to survive the new realities where worldviews collide at an accelerated pace.

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