Year: 2007

One Laptop Per Child and Long-term Possibilities for Education

/ Christopher Parsons

Some time ago a friend and I got talking about the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, and I haven’t gotten it off my mind since. The OLPC program aims to deliver sturdy, low-power, low-cost laptops to children under the age of 12 in developing countries. The visionary of the program, Nicholas Negroponte, wants to introduce these laptops into second-world, rather than third-world, countries. The difference? Second-world countries face poverty and a host of ills, but possess the resources to purchase these notebooks, to feed their people (at some level), and build roads. The OLPC program is not currently aimed at absolutely poverty-stricken nations – those nations have other, more pressing, concerns, and their resources can be allocated to more effectively than by providing affordable laptop computers for children.

The computers are incredibly simple, providing basic computing. What’s important is that they are almost entirely open-source; kids can take them apart and learn about every element of the computers through trial and error. They’re rugged enough (both physically and code-wise) that kids can put them through hell and they’ll keep on going. While the laptops can be charged by plugging the computers into electrical outlets, they can also be powered by converting physical action to electricity – ride a bike attached to the thing and you’ll be able to charge it. The initial roll-out doesn’t have this, but it’s in the overall specs of the project.

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Online Data Storage and Privacy

/ Christopher Parsons

Last week Google, Microsoft, and Apple revealed updates to their online data storage platforms – Google now lets users purchase additional space for their various Google applications, Microsoft provides a Live Skydrive (essentially an online network drive), and Apple completely revamped their .Mac solution.

The idea behind these services is that people that are already using, or are considering using, the aforementioned companies’ online services and will be enticed by the idea that they could store hordes of information in ‘safe’ repositories; we can trust that neither Google, Microsoft, or Apple would lose our data, right? This isn’t entirely true – at least Google and Microsoft have previously lost client data and could not always restore it. Individuals cannot count on any of these services, though they are likely to be more reliable than personal backups. What’s more, these online solutions just make life easier by letting users stop worrying about performing personal data backups – this is their real selling feature.

There are issues that emerges with all of these services – first clients cannot know what country their data is being stored in, potentially leaving their data subject to foreign surveillance laws, and second clients cannot verify what any of these corporations are actually doing with their data.

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Search and Privacy

/ Christopher Parsons

People use Google and Yahoo! throughout their daily lives – they need to know how to get from point a to b, need to find ecommerce sites, need to search friends’ blogs, need to learn how to cook fish, and have (generally) grown used to having the equivalent of electronic encyclopedias at their fingertips at all times. I’m not going to bother addressing concerns that this might be detrimentally affecting how people learn to retain information (i.e. as information is increasingly retained as search strings rather than as info-articles) but want to instead briefly consider how search intersects with privacy.

We hear about the need to protect our private information all of the time. ‘Shred your bank statements’, ‘be wary of online commerce sites’, ‘never share personal information on the ‘net’, and other proclamations of wisdom are uttered in print and video on a regular basis which are, in most cases, completely ignored. Proponents of the commercialization of privacy use this as definitive proof that citizens really don’t care about their privacy like they did in days gone past – people are willing to give up their names, addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information to receive services that they want. In light of this regulators should just butt out – the market has spoken!

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Unscheduled Broadcast

/ Christopher Parsons / 1 Comment

I’ve recently been accepted to present at a conference for incoming TAs to my university. I’m giving a talk for over an hour on Web 2.0, it’s possibilities, and pitfalls. Obviously I’m going to be going nuts building up information to provide, but does anyone have anything that I *need* to be talking about? The current list is going to include things like blogging, wiki’s, and online data archival tools.

I’m going to have a 100% captive audience, and lots of time, so your ideas and suggestions would be extremely appreciated!

Open Source and Open Office XML

/ Christopher Parsons

I’ve had friends and colleagues that have championed open source software and operating systems for ages. While I’ve appreciated their arguments I’ve never been convinced by them to actually proceed and move whole-scale to open source – either because it would be inconvenient, the software that I needed wasn’t immediately available in the same format as what I was using in Windows, or I just didn’t have the time to learn an entirely new way of computing. I’ve worked with computers for the past five or six years and in all that time has been in Microsoft environments – I’ve had (and in many ways continue to have) a deep investment in Microsoft products, and that’s been a central factor in Microsoft keeping my business.

The decision to avoid switching to an open source Office Suite was practically sealed when I started to demo Microsoft Office 2007 for my workplace – I love the interface, the built-in designs, and the ability to make professional looking documents with ease. Office 2007 completely drops the GUI of all other Office packages and reinvents the wheel, somehow managing to come closer to that Form of perfect Office computing. Without knowing anything about the new document format that Office 2007 used I was just annoyed that it wasn’t interoperable with previous versions of Office, but that was relieved when Microsoft placed a free conversion package on their Window’s Update website. Finally, I thought, I’d be able to share these awesome documents that I’m making with everyone in the Windows world!

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Web 2.0, Facebook, Government, and Business

/ Christopher Parsons / 2 Comments

For the past couple of months I’ve been thinking about a post Sean Yo made about Facebook. The post was entitled Facebook and the Man, and looked at how law enforcement uses Facebook to preemptively dissuade illegal activities. In light of these ‘positive’ uses Yo questions whether or not the city of Toronto was justified in banning the social networking service from their networks without considering the technology’s possible beneficial uses. While not asserting that Facebook is necessarily suited towards governmental activities, without critically reflecting on the technology the city has lost a potentially helpful communicative medium that would let officials connect with the public.

Generally, I think that the privacy risks and challenges in establishing appropriate communications policies with Facebook are reason enough to avoid using the service for governmental activities. That said, the question of governments using Facebook has been lurking in my brain for the past little while and I’ve recently come across some posts that help to clarify some of my thoughts surrounding Facebook.

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