At OLPC this morning Rumi Chunara, PhD, a Research Fellow at HealthMap and Harvard Medical School gave an inspiring introduction to her work - http://healthmap.org/en/. It's a live site that tracks global health issues through local submissions -- tracking needs that are pressing a community most direly.

OLPC has been conducting research and fieldwork that focuses on education for children in crises, cutting across areas of crucial needs such as health and shelter. The effects of tools like Health Map and Ushahidi linked to an XO for family and kid support can have untold benefits for providing life saving information to a community.

There’s lots of talk going on about the OLPC XO-1.75 now. A lot of it is inaccurate. I’ll quote John Watlington, VP of Hardware Engineering at OLPC:

Disclaimer: I’m VP of Hardware Engineering at OLPC
ARM processors powerful enough the support the user experience we wanted weren’t readily available (at the price point we work at) four years ago, when work started on the original XO design.