Watching Sudanese elections from your computer
Several human rights groups have teamed up along with actors George Clooney, Matt Damon, Brad Pitt, and Don Cheadle in an effort to monitor events in Africa. We speak with Nathaniel Raymond from the Satellite Sentinel project at Harvard and Jonathan Hutson from The Enough Project.
The site they’ve set up will be pretty interesting to watch, especially over the weekend when the election is in high gear. You’ll see a Google map of the region and different locations will have flags you can click for more photos and information. A damaged building, a fire, a mob, you’ll know what’s going on.
There will also be journalists and videographers on the ground; their work will be uploaded to give the viewer more of an understanding of what’s happening there. Raymond and Hutson say the technology to do all this isn’t all that revolutionary but the synthesis of all the communications, satellite, and mapping software has coincided with a willingness to make people aware of what’s going on in what could be a very dangerous spot.
Raymond and Hutson also say that this system is not built specifically for Sudan and that they intend to use it for future situations around the world.
Also in this program, the tablet computer that everyone’s talking about this year’s Consumer Electronics Show isn’t even at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show.
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