Ms Hughes is among the last of Mr Bush’s circle of advisers from Texas

Karen Hughes, a long-time adviser to US President George W Bush and the state department’s public diplomacy chief, has said she will step down this year.

Her departure follows that of close Bush aides Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett. The trio from Texas are widely credited with Mr Bush’s rise to the White House.

Ms Hughes has spent the past two years trying to improve the image of the US abroad, especially in the Middle East.

She was previously communications chief for Mr Bush when he was Texas governor.

She then became one of his closest advisers when he first arrived in the White House.

After a two-year spell back in Texas from 2002-04, she rejoined Mr Bush’s team as an election planner, going on to become undersecretary of state for public diplomacy in 2005.

In that role, she was responsible for trying to polish the image of the US overseas in the wake of the Iraq war and the damaging Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

National security

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said she had accepted Ms Hughes’s resignation “with a great deal of sadness but also a great deal of happiness for what she has achieved”.

Ms Hughes was behind the setting up of “rapid response” public relations units abroad to handle news events.

She also ensured that more Arabic speaking officials were available for interview by Arabic media outlets.

However, polls suggest that the popularity of the US overseas remains low, affected by the aftermath of the Iraq war and the unresolved Israel-Palestinian conflict in particular.

Speaking after her resignation was announced, Ms Hughes said she felt she had fulfilled her mission “by transforming public diplomacy and making it a national security priority central to everything we do in government”.

Ms Hughes intends to leave the state department by the end of the year, probably in mid-December.

As the founder and chairman of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) non-profit organisation, Professor Negroponte has worked to use computing as a means to bring education to the poorest regions of the world.

Since 2005 the focus of Professor Negroponte’s project has been to develop an innovative laptop that will be distributed to children across the developing world and cost about $100.

But founding pioneering initiatives is nothing new to the American computing guru. He obtained two professional architecture degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1960s and then set up MIT’s Architecture Machine Group in 1968.

In the 1980s he co-founded and directed the MIT Media Laboratory, where much of the technology that enabled the “digital revolution” was developed, including wireless communication, and progressive approaches to how children learn.

Professor Ken Morse, an MIT colleague, has called him: “An indefatigable leader.”

He was making grand predictions that seemed completely out in left field but as time has proven were absolutely accurate. Louis Rossetto, Wired co-founder

“He has done an amazing job of recruiting incredibly busy people, including me, to help him with his crusade to bridge the digital divide,” Professor Morse told the BBC News website.

Aside from these achievements, Professor Negroponte has shown enthusiasm for investing in embryonic companies that have gone on to become household names.

Communicate ideas

These have included Skype, and Wired magazine, for which he wrote his own column – a platform to communicate his ideas on the evolution of technology. His Wired articles formed the basis of his 1995 best-seller Being Digital.

Co-founder of Wired, Louis Rossetto, told the BBC News website: “When we were together at Wired it was remarkable because the man was always in motion. He was dedicated, and driven, and I guess obsessed.”

“He was making grand predictions that seemed completely out in left field but as time has proven were absolutely accurate.

Nicholas Negroponte is an influential figure in global technology

“He was talking about the switch from wired to wireless and that was back before there was much in the way of cell phones or anything else,” Mr Rossetto recalled.

In the early 1980s Professor Negroponte began working on projects to help educate the developing world’s children with computers.

Together with Seymour Papert, an MIT computer scientist and educator, he distributed Apple II microcomputers to school children in Senegal.

In April 2002 he kept his vision alive by providing children in a remote Cambodian village with connected laptops, inadvertently teaching them “Google” as their first English word.

The trials convinced him that the laptop could play a fundamental role in educational programmes for children in remote, rural, and poor regions of the world.

Professor Negroponte’s self-confessed “preoccupation” with bringing computing, communication, and the internet to countries which are less economically fortunate has culminated in the OLPC initiative.

Mr Rossetto said: “It’s not about building fancy gadgets for rich people as much as bringing knowledge and power to even the poorest. I think that it’s always been about democratising technology in a very concrete way.”

But Professor Negroponte’s venture to produce a low-cost laptop for education purposes has not come without opposition.

Questioned need

Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates, has questioned the need for the Linux-based laptop and doubted the suitability of Negroponte’s OLPC concept for the developing world.

The Linux operating system is an example of free, open source software that enables users to create their own software content.

When you have both Intel and Microsoft on your case, you know you’re doing something right Nicholas Negroponte

And chip-maker Intel has developed a rival low-cost laptop aimed at schools with an education program designed for teachers rather than children.

Intel had reportedly released marketing literature to governments which overtly criticised the OLPC approach.

In May this year Professor Negroponte lambasted Intel, saying it “should be ashamed of itself” for trying to undermine his efforts.

The $100 laptop is currently being developed with a processor made by AMD, Intel’s main competitor.

‘Yo-yo’ power chord Nigerian school

“If you can actually get a Linux-based computer into every kid’s hands in the world it obviously undermines Microsoft. And obviously with an AMD chip inside that computer it undermines Intel,” explained Mr Rossetto.

However, in July, Intel announced that it would join the OLPC board.

Professor Negroponte welcomed Intel’s decision to join forces, saying: “Collaboration with Intel means that the maximum number of laptops will reach children.”

‘Richest person’

“Maybe it’s testimony to him, but it’s just amazing in the face of opposition from the richest person in the world with the most powerful software company and the most powerful and richest chip company, he is still able to prevail,” Mr Rossetto continued.

Speaking at LinuxWorld Boston last year, Professor Negroponte said: “When you have both Intel and Microsoft on your case, you know you’re doing something right.”

The laptop is being trialled in schools around the world

And he has made it clear that his vision is not about the laptop itself. “It’s as if people spent all their attention focusing on Columbus’s boat and not on where he was going,” Professor Negroponte told The New York Times. “You have to remember that what this is about is education.”

Mr Rossetto commented: “I don’t think you can say definitively, butwhen Intel caves in and ends up supporting Nicholas, it’s pretty much clear that this is going to be the winning proposal.”

Receiving praise from the ex-Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, Professor Negroponte’s $100 laptop has attracted collaboration from some of the computer industry’s biggest players including AMD, Google and Red Hat.

The latest laptop model, the XO, is now in production, and with interest from several developing nations, including Nigeria, Uruguay, and Libya, Negroponte’s vision is slowly becoming realised.

“If there’s anything that could work towards true understanding, connection and peace in the world, it would be this kind of a project, enabling knowledge to be accessible to everyone,” Mr Rossetto said.

Forget Chairman Mao. Chairman Bill Gates is the new role model in China.

BEIJING — Since the passing of Chairman Mao Zedong, a new chairman has come to represent the aims and aspirations of millions of Chinese youth — the chairman of Microsoft, Bill Gates.

“Chairman Mao was the great symbol of revolutionary China, but Bill Gates has become the new idol of youths across China,” said a researcher with China’s ministry of propaganda. “Gates has become more popular in China than any government leader.”

Books by or about Microsoft’s chairman are massive best sellers across China, even in the IT-impoverished countryside, and Gates has been cited as the ultimate role model by everyone, from the founders of internet startups to Chinese cyberdissidents.

“I read about Bill Gates before I had ever even seen a computer,” said Dong Ruidong, who abandoned his rural village for the bright lights and cybercafes of the Chinese capital. “Even in the remotest villages of China, Gates is one of the most popular figures alive.”

The Chinese edition of Gates’ The Road Ahead “was one of the most successful books in our history,” said Wang Mingzhou, who edited the Chinese edition. It is “among the most important works published since the founding of the People’s Republic of China.”

Wang, who rode the success of Gates’ book to be named president of the Peking University Press, said The Road Ahead “helped launch the internet revolution across China, and gave it power and speed.”

“Bill Gates is without doubt now one of the most influential foreigners in China,” Wang said.

Chairman Gates is everything Chairman Mao was not. Mao crushed capitalists, closed newspapers and universities, and isolated China from the world. But Chairman Gates celebrates free enterprise and is busy forging partnerships with Chinese entrepreneurs, creating cybercolleges and integrating China’s best and brightest into the web-linked world.

Gates has disbursed grants from his $30-billion philanthropic Gates Foundation to bring computers to rural China and health care to the poor, and in the process has acquired the aura of an internet-age angel.

Chinese youths stand to gain from the virtual universities Gates is helping create, and from student software packages Microsoft has begun offering for $3 (1/50th the retail price) each to governments buying computers for K-12 kids.

Microsoft Vice President Will Poole, who is helping spearhead the race to double the globe’s cybercitizenry to 2 billion people by 2015, said Microsoft’s software packages could be provided in tandem with the ultra-cheap XO machines being produced in China by the One Laptop Per Child group.

China’s Ministry of Education, which paints Gates with an almost superhuman glow in books like Junior English for China, might use this software in its quest to churn out more internet-generation graduates.

China’s internet population jumped by 23 percent to reach 130 million people in 2006, but nine-tenths of China’s 1.3 billion citizens are still on the dark side of the digital divide.

At a recent Asian leadership forum in Beijing with Chinese technocrats and U.N. leaders, Gates outlined his latest goal — to extend internet access beyond the globe’s 1 billion online elite to its 5 billion digitally dispossessed — many of whom are in China.

“Microsoft is now over 30 years old, and the original dream was about computers for everyone,” he said. “As we go after this next 5 billion, it is really going back to the original roots, the original commitment of what Microsoft is all about.”

Of course, meeting that goal would also position Microsoft to multiply, by a factor of 10, its current base of 600 million Windows users worldwide, and further expand Gates’ global influence.

Microsoft’s chairman is extending lots of incentives to new Windows users here, and has become a symbol of global fame and fortune, and of American-style freedoms. While hosting Chinese President Hu Jintao at an aristocratic feast at the Gates’ private residence in Seattle last spring, Gates echoed Microsoft’s testimony during U.S. congressional hearings on “The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression.”

In remarks repeated across Chinese chat rooms, Gates told Hu: “Industry and government around the world should work even more closely to protect the privacy and security of internet users, and promote the exchange of ideas.”

During his recent tour of China, Gates predicted the next global leader might be born here: “There was a survey done in the U.S. that asked where the next Bill Gates will come from,” he said. “Sixty percent of the U.S. said the next stunning success would come from Asia.”

Yet few Chinese believe that a clone of Gates, if born in China, could become the Bill Gates.

“Piracy is so widespread here that Microsoft would never generate such massive profits,” said author Huang Wen.

Despite the massive, institutionalized piracy that has led the United States to file a complaint against China with the World Trade Organization, Gates has been amazingly tolerant of China’s counterfeiters. This has created a paradoxical image of an internet-age Robin Hood and gained him universal admiration.

“Bill Gates deserves to win the Nobel Peace Prize,” said the Chinese propaganda officer. “He gives people across the globe not only material help, but also inspiration that if they work very, very hard, they might one day become more important than a president.”

The key to university success is the students’ involvement. Communication between the supervisor and students is seen as a crucial component to success in high education. It is one of the main reasons why I place value on communication and to improve the quality of communication, I communicate to my students via this blog and other Google free software. This is an attempt that needs YOUR engagement.