Posts from — September 2003

OECD Global Forum on Information Systems and Network Security.

The OECD Global Forum on Information Systems and Network Security: Towards a Global Culture of Security will be held on 13-14 October 2003 in Oslo, Norway. “A large number of non-member economies will be invited.  To reinforce the agreement made in Honolulu to increase co-operation between the OECD and APEC, many APEC member countries will also be present.”

A draft agenda [pdf] is available on the OECD website.

See also the OECD Guidelines for the Security of Information Systems and Networks [pdf]

[ITU Strategy and Policy Unit Newslog]

A Stroll Through Patent History. Petra Moser, an M.I.T. assitant professor, has examined the historical relationship between patents and innovations and come to some surprising conclusions. By Teresa Riordan. [New York Times: Business] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

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to me this speaks to issues of the transformation of patents from spurs to innovation to methods of preventing others innovations.

obstacle 1.

this is what happens when lizzy gets bored: smiley.mov.

[a jeweled platypus]

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interesting bit of production

we want your soul. Freeland's We Want Your Soul video is a cynical look at the american dream and keeping up with the joneses. Whether you agree with the point of view, it's still a pretty cool and amusing use of camera effects. (note: large quicktime on that page) [via randomfoo] [MetaFilter]

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this is pretty interesting, a music video that sort of hits some of the many cultural nails on the head.

yeah that seems like the perfect market system to me, sarcasm….. who is taking the profit from these, we need to strip this bare and do a nice supply analysis to see where the money goes.

BlurBuilding. The Blur Building. Now you can spend your day in a literal fog. [MetaFilter]

some of the papers for the recent ICS program at OII have been put up on the web, you have to get the pdf though. I thought that Christine Hine's paper looked very interesting, as did Alesia Montgomery's paper.

Monoculture on the Potomac. My next column, which appears online tonight and in print next week, quotes from a speech given last year by now-former @Stake CTO Dan Geer. (I also referred to that speech last August in this weblog). Today my RSS feed is full of news about Geer, who was principal author of a paper that was presented on Wednesday at the 30th annual Washington Caucus sponsored by the Computer and Communication Industry Assocation (CCIA). Most reports suggest Geer was fired for his role in the report, though some some suggest he resigned.
… [Jon's Radio]

Measuring poverty.

There's an article in the New York Times today looking at the US Census Bureau's calculation of poverty rates. The article calls for an update of the figure to reflect changes in consumption patterns – which, it is envisaged would increase the number of people falling within the definition of poverty.

Regular readers will know of my interest in measures of income, poverty and cost of living – a throwback to my time in eircom where I dealt with inflation figures quite a bit. What I find fascinating here, however, is that the figure is based on an absolute level of poverty. In Ireland, and I believe in many other places, the generally quoted standard is a relative measure of poverty – such as 60% of the median household income. Of course, in the case of the US we have the interesting situation that a relative measure of poverty would quite possibly fall below the absolute poverty level – I'm not sure whether this would be the case in other countries.

According to one site there are three main ways to measure poverty:

Absolute poverty, takes into account the cost of a minimum package of goods, services and considers those who䴜s incomes are equal or below this cost, to poor. Relative poverty, takes into consideration the whole group whose income is below the determine level. Example, in some countries the poor are those whose income are below half the minimum wage. This estimate is used by societies who have eradicated absolute poverty. Social exclusion, used in Europe, considers those who have no access to services, such as employment, superior education, ownership of housing, health.

[funferal]

This philosophy page from Critical Mass shows the …. This philosophy page from Critical Mass shows the power of a great graphic. They're using the industrial metaphor in the context of individualized marketing messages, but this visual could certainly be applied to the personalization of learning. There's no question that the current education system was built around an industrial model — envision the graphic going the other way, with varied individuals going into the machine and coming out the other side standardized.

Jay Cross wrote about personalizing learning this week:

“The industrial revolution succeeded because of the specialization of labor and the substitution of machines for labor; it took most of the people out of the equation. eLearning attempted to do the same thing. In the early days, eLearning was justified by the savings in instructor salaries and airplane tickets when learning migrated from the classroom to the desktop. Of course, people aren't bales of cotton and learning is social, so most of the early eLearning programs went down in flames.”

So why don't producers of educational materials, sites and software use effective personalization? Because it's more expensive and complex. Standardizing creates cost benefits because there are fewer variables to control and single versions of each piece of content. But people aren't standardized, so they tend to detest being treated as if they were. It's easy to design a bunch of pages or tasks that are connected by a fixed or sequential navigation system — creating systems that reflect and infer a user's choices is hard because they introduce variables that increase exponentially as the number of decision points grow. [Jeremy Hiebert's headspaceJ -- Instructional Design and Technology]