Ubiquity of Arabic Numerals Around the World

The relative ubiquity of arabic numerals can be an oasis in the desert of cross-cultural system design.

Problems: Its a tricky business. Without knowing the subtleties, you could be way off even if something makes sense.

Offshoots: Use other common references between cultures either implictly or explicitly. These could be movies, television, products, brands, sports, etc. For example, in order to align underprivileged Brazilian/Palestinian children with the goal of making movie to show to donors whats really going on in their lives .. a goal leveraging common references like "Make a movie about how your life is different than a television character?" could be used (Scott, Deepti and I identified this goal-alignment as a crucial issue for the project). Assuming that "television life" is something that both 3rd world children and 1st world donor's are roughly familiar with.

Inspiration: Tapan Parick's cs547 lecture and Deepti Rohatgi's Improved Decision Making DV project