Dx1W is a competition for designers, artists, scientists, makers and thinkers in developing countries to provide solutions for the first world problems :

We live in a com­plex world, one full of inequities and won­der­ful things. Our fel­lows in the First World have been con­cerned for a while with us hav­ing the major share of the bad­ness, so we thought, why don’t we pay back? After all, their life isn’t problem-free either. And that’s where this com­pe­ti­tion starts.

We’re call­ing artists, design­ers, tin­ker­ers, mak­ers, and thinkers with an idea to par­tic­i­pate. Two con­di­tions only: you were born in and live right now in a Devel­op­ing Coun­try and you are 13 years of age or older.

Devel­op­ing into what, exactly?

What does it mean to be a devel­op­ing coun­try? Among other things it means that the future is to become devel­oped. We are on our way toward devel­op­ment, and we assume that’s a great thing, but let’s stop to con­sider for a minute whether devel­oped coun­tries are some­thing we want to turn into. Are peo­ple in devel­oped coun­tries hap­pier or health­ier? Do they live a bet­ter life? Do they have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of nature and live in a bet­ter equi­lib­rium with the envi­ron­ment? Do they live in peace?

We have been focus­ing our energy and resources on try­ing to solve our Devel­op­ing World prob­lems to become more like the First World. But per­haps it is time that we, the so called Third World minds, focused our energy and cre­ativ­ity on solv­ing some of the First World prob­lems. We will have a brighter future to look for­ward to, and per­haps this can help us rethink and approach our cur­rent prob­lems from a dif­fer­ent perspective.

The competition deadline is 30th May and they are calling the solutions for:

• Reduc­ing obesity.
• Address­ing aging pop­u­la­tion and low birth rate.
• Reduc­ing con­sump­tion rate of mass pro­duced goods.
• Inte­grat­ing the immigrant population.

For more updates visit their site and follow them on their blog or on twitter

NYTimes is carrying a nice story on archival of digital-born material citing the example of Salman Rushdie’s work on display at Emory University. Though the 18 gigabytes of data they have on 4 Apple computers contains lots of useful data for future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks. The problem that archivers are facing is that the “born-digital” materials – those initially created in electronic form – are much more complicated and costly to preserve that what anyone would anticipate.

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

Imagine having a record but no record player.

All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.

We recommend you to visit Born-Digital on Wikipedia and read the article Part of Our Culture is Born Digital -On Eorts to Preserve it for Future Generations (PDF) by Andreas Rauber, Andreas Aschenbrenner – Department of Software Technology and Interactive Systems – Vienna University of Technology.

Via @ananny – Thanks