Tub technology (Image: Chris Csikszentmihályi)

JANE ADONG used to ride for 10 hours on a motorcycle to get to her nearest radio station. From there, she would broadcast her show – an advice segment dealing with HIV education. Her neighbours back in the Ugandan town of Patongo would tune in and listen.

This week, she got those hours back. Adong and the NGO she founded, Gwokke Keni, now have a station of their own in Patongo, one of four prototype radio transmitters being erected in rural Ugandan towns and villages. Made from a bucket, some circuitry and a smartphone, the system is opening up information access like never before.

Although the internet and social networks have revolutionised the rich world, millions of people in poor countries don’t even have radio broadcastsThe faces of 30 white men, all speakers at an applied history conference this month at Stanford University, certainly grabbed attention as the images circulated widely last week.

And that's how the main organizer, conservative British historian Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, found himself on the defensive two weeks after the conference had ended.

Propelling the blowup was a Twitter post about the "all-male history conference" posted Wednesday by Ana Lucia Araujo, a history professor at Howard University in Washington.

"This goes for the Guinness Book of the century!" she wrote above the roster showing "a team of 30 white male historians" listed as panelists and speakers at the conference on the campus near Palo Alto, California. "What a shame."

The conference in the heart of Silicon Valley