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Spiegel today has a article (german) about the influence of the information overflow on children, how they change their habits, and how it may change the future of our culture.

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Alexandra Samuel has published an interesting exercise which she did with her students: "This is an in-class exercise that I developed for The Internet and Politics, a third-year undergraduate political science course at the University of British Columbia. It was received very enthusiastically by the students, and succeeded in fostering a solid grasp of the material.The exercise had four purposes:

1. Complement course reading on the use of diverse telecommunications technologies as development tools. 2) Expand discussion of ICTs beyond a narrow focus on the Internet. 3) Develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills. 4) Foster a sense of ownership of development issues and challenges." For this exercise she dug up some interesting projects: Cell-phones in Bangladesh The hole in the wall in New Delhi The simputer in rural India Solar computers in Cambodia Community radio in Sri Lanka

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The german anthropologist Thomas Hauschild is doing reasearch in italy about mythical and magic traditions in south italian society, reports Informationsdienst Wissenschaft (german).

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A study by geneticists and linguists backs the assumption, that the click sounds in some african languages are more than 10.000 years old. A deep genetic divergence between the click-speaking groups is consistent with the hypothesis that clicks are an ancient element of human language. If, in fact, San-Hadzabe separation dates back to a time prior to out-of-Africa expansions of modern humans, clicks may be more than 40,000 years old, reports The Independent. Via Anthropology in the News

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This article from National Geographic also reports from that case.

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Wired has some notes about UN programs trying to push IT and Internet skills in Afghanistan, especially for woman.

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The peer-reviewed journal about the internet (with strong emphasis on global development of the internet) has a new issue. Among the new articles one about the Internet in China one about Cybercafes in Uganda, and a book review about Japanese Cyberculture may be of interest.

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On Friday, April the 16. the movie "Legong -- dance of the virgins" from 1935 is shown at the film-museum in Munich. The film (2-colour technicolor), directed by Henri de la Falaise, is about a beautiful but quite jealous balinese temple-dancer who falls in love with a gamelan-musician. But alas, the musician is in love with her sister ... Along with Vicki Baum's 1937 novel "Tale of Bali", "Legong" is another gem of an early artistic/ethnographic view on Balinese society. In contrast to Baum's novel, the film is hardly known and seldomly seen. The film-museum shows it during a Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-retrospective. During the retrospective other early films of the south-seas will be shown, too: "Bali -- Insel der Dämonen" (1931/33, directed by Murnau, ethnological adviser: Viktor von Plessen and the painter Walter Spies of balinese fame); "Tabu" (1929/31, directed by Murnau). You can download the program-table and the retrospective-leaflet as .pdf-files. "Legong" starts at 21:00h, admission is free.

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Nicholas De Genova, Assistant Professor at anthropology at the university of Columbia, made some critical remarks about the war in Iraq. He called for the defeat of U.S. forces in Iraq and told an anti-war gathering that he wanted to see "a million Mogadishus" -- a reference to an operation in Somalia in 1993 in which elite U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force units were pinned down in a fierce firefight. Now 104 Republican House members are urging the firing of the professor, reports Newsday. But meanwhile Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia, repeated on Wednesday an earlier statement that while he was horrfied by Mr. De Genova's remarks, they were protected by academic freedom, reports the New York Times. The case is discussed with great agitation in the american press.

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African Studies Abstracts Online is the new electronic journal of the African Studies Centre in Leiden. Like its printed predecessor (African Studies Abstracts), African Studies Abstracts Online provides an overview of articles from periodicals and edited works on Africa in the field of the social sciences and the humanities available in the library of the African Studies Centre in Leiden. Each issue contains up to 450 titles with abstracts of collective volumes, journal articles and chapters from edited works, arranged geographically. Each issue also contains a geographical index, a subject index, an author index, and a list of journals and edited works abstracted in that issue. Almost 240 journals are scanned on a regular and systematic basis. This includes all the leading journals in the field of African studies, as well as a number of journals dealing with third world countries and development studies in general. Just under the half are published in Africa. A selection of edited works is also accessed and abstracted on a chapter-by-chapter basis. All publications covered are available at the African Studies Centre library in Leiden.

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