PLEASE HELP THE STARVING
PLEASE READ IT WILL ONLY TAKE A LITTLE OVER 4 MINUTES
BUT IN THAT TIME NEARLY 70 PEOPLE WILL HAVE DIED OF STARVATION
52 OF THAT 70 WILL BE CHILDREN AND TODDLERS
Two numbers to change the way you think about the World Wide Web:
24,000
and 3.2 million. The second figure is the number of web pages, which were added
yesterday. The first is the number of people who died from starvation.
Let’s
try framing those numbers a different way. The web pages represent a 500th of
the online total — 1,570 million pages.
There are currently four times as many people in the world as there are web
pages, but 10 new web pages are being created for every human birth.
One
the other hand, most of the world’s people have never made a phone call, let
alone logged onto Yahoo. And every 3.6 seconds, a human being dies from
lack of food. Almost three-quarters of victims are children under five — that
means 18,000 babies and toddlers daily.
The
web figures were calculated by The Censorware Project, which monitors ways of
policing the net. Censorware states the web doubles in size every year, so by
mid-2002 there will be more web pages than people. The starvation data is taken
from www.hungersite.com which publicises
the United Nations World Food Program.
There
is no way to comprehend any of these figures. We can only stare at them and
shake our heads. The rate of technological change is baffling. The unremitting
toll of starvation is repugnant.
With
filters and search engines I can keep up with a fraction of the web’s content
— but most of it will always be beyond our reach. And despite covenants and
charity auctions, telethons and collecting boxes, most of the starving children
will inevitably die.
But
there is hope. Could the web’s pell-mell growth ever cancel out hunger?
The
Hungersite invites you to donate food by clicking a button. One click and you
surf to a page of sponsorship ads. Each sponsor pays a quarter of a cup of food
— maize, rice, or wheat — for every visitor. Yesterday, there were eight
sponsors, and half million visitors Result: a million cups of food shipped by
the UN to the worst – hit countries.
If
only 10 per cent of tomorrows new web pages carried Hungersite link, millions
more cups would be donated in the next 24 hours.
And if millions more visitors logged on to the sponsors page, dozens of new
sponsors would rush forward with their quarter-cups of rice.
Within
two years, when the web hits six billion pages. We might just have clicked
hunger out of existence.
This
Article was written by Uri Geller in Computeractice issue No. 54
There are also a number of other sites at the top of the page on the hunger site like the rainforest site the kids aid site to name but a few. Please pay the others a visit.
HELP
FIND A CURE FOR CANCER BY USING YOUR COMPUTER
