Broadband internet, civil right, silver bullet or mirage?
New Zealand is going through the throes of trying to figure out how to deliver real broadband internet access to all of us. despite the fact that 1.1 million of us have existing levels of broadband, the real deal is a different thing altogether. While we worry about how to spend a billion or so on the technology, one country at least is starting somewhere else. Finland First Country to Make Broadband a Legal Right [Read more →]
Welcome back to Groupings blog. Now that you are a regular, please feel free to comment on any story that you feel comfortable with.
October 28, 2009 No Comments
Inappropriate use of video
Video can be a very powerful tool for getting a story across when its used well, but when its used inappropriately, it is worse than useless; it becomes a hindrance to your objectives. Like this.Video: Low-Cost Search Tactics. [Read more →]
September 9, 2009 No Comments
Online accounting or not, balancing the criteria
Grant Hewson of Accomplish has been selling and servicing the company's PC based accounting software CashManager for a long time and about 18 months ago they decided to offer an online version which has just become available. Since they offer both versions, I figured they would be reasonably unbiased in evaluating the options so I asked him why they decided to move to both channels. (MP3 6:20 4.3MB) [Read more →]
July 1, 2009 5 Comments
Global, Social, Ubiquitous and Cheap
Yesterday I linked to a TED presentation by Clay Shirky that gave some background on how and why new media are so powerful and effective but you may not have read to the bottom of the post so here it is. If you do nothing more online today, check this. (Sorry but you probably need broadband or time for a long wait)
And remember that, although he is talking about Governments trying to control their message and failing, its also about your organisation's message and your ability to control it.
Short version, you don't have any control.
Do you have any experience of that loss of control? How did your organisation deal with it? Comments are open for your story.
June 23, 2009 No Comments
Some unrealistic expectations of ICT in pandemic response
I had a call from Matt Abud at ABC asking to discuss an article from Japan on using cellphones in a pandemic. Its interesting to see the kind of thing people are proposing these days. Here's some of the original article from behind a firewall.
The details have yet to be fixed, but SoftBank hopes to pick a school with about 1,000 students and give them phones equipped with GPS. The locations of the children will be recorded every minute of the day and stored on a central server.
The families of exposed students will be notified by messages to their mobile phones, instructing them to be examined by doctors. In a real outbreak, that could limit the rate of new infections.
"The number of people infected by such a disease quickly doubles, triples and quadruples as it spreads. If this rate is decreased by even a small amount, it has a big effect in keeping the overall outbreak in check," said Masato Takahashi, an infrastructure strategist at Softbank.
He demonstrates with a calculation: if an infected person makes about three more people sick per day, and each newly infected person then makes another three people sick, on the 10th day about 60,000 people would catch the disease. If each sick person instead infected two people a day, on the 10th day about 1,000 people would get sick.
The experiment was conceived before the outbreak of swine flu, but has drawn attention now that Japan has the highest number of confirmed cases outside North America.
It is one of 24 trials the government recently approved as part of a programme to promote new uses for Japan's internet and cellular infrastructure. The country has some of the most advanced mobile phone technology in the world. It is blanketed in high-speed mobile networks, and phones come standard with features such as GPS, television and touchless train passes.
The scheme raises privacy concerns, and one of the goals of the Japanese experiment is to judge how participants feel about having their location constantly recorded.
If a disease-tracking system were launched for real, no one would be required to sign up, Takuo Imagawa, an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, said.
Another concern for the experiment is how to inform people that they may be infected, even if it's just a virtual disease.
"If we don't think carefully about the nature of the warning, people that get such a message could panic," Katsuya Uchida, a professor at the Institute of Information Security in Yokohama, said.
SoftBank Telecom, the subsidiary that made the original proposal, might not be chosen by the ministry to run the experiment in autumn. But Mr Takahashi said that whichever company was chosen, he hoped the potential benefits of a monitoring system would be enough to persuade people to sign up and reveal their whereabouts.
There are a couple of tracks on this, the first is some preliminary discussion that we mostly didn't cover in the full interview. The second is the recorded interview, although it merges about 8:30 into a bit of extra discussion that was not meant for broadcast so I have trimmed out Matt's side of the conversation and just rambled on.
The pandemic appears not to be especially deadly at this stage (although the 1918 pandemic also started with a mild infection wave that was followed by the real thing) but it does put people out of commission for various lengths of time and disrupts systems that depend on working at optimal, if not maximal levels. This piece from the NZ Herald is telling:
Rangitoto College principal David Hodge said he learned how disruptive quarantine was when 22 students and three staff and their families were placed in isolation after going on the school's Spanish language trip to Mexico.
Closing Rangitoto - a college of 3100 students in Mairangi Bay, North Shore City - could put the whole community in turmoil.
He said the school was confident in its communication channels, and would be able to send work to students through the internet.
But it had not had been told if a school closure would apply to staff as well as students.
Schools may be able to work remotely with their students in theory, but having a system in place for 100 students, and trying to run an entire school by remote learning is an order of magnitude different. If teachers cannot get to the school with its IT and teaching resources, there can be no teaching at all, and managing entire classes remotely is vastly more demanding than teaching them in a classroom.
Then there are the issues of
- what to do about those students from the 100,000 NZ families that do not have internet access at home
- whether dialup internet for most of the rest is adequate to transferring the files necessary
- whether families can afford to have their phone line tied up for extended perioopds of the day
- many more considerations I'm sure you can add.
These issues apply equally, and perhaps more urgently, to NFP organisations and especially those in ther welfare sector.
Gladstone Primary principal Dave Shadbolt sent the pandemic plan of his Mt Albert school to parents yesterday.
Most of the advice was about general hygiene, he said, and staff were reminding students about hand-washing routines and covering mouths and noses when they sneezed.
This is good information, but do you have a plan for how, and when, to decide to close down your operation and send everyone home? By the time the government mandates it, it will almost certainly be too late, but what are the criteria you would use and how do you plan to manage things when the office is shut?
The manager of occupational health and safety for the Employers and Manufacturers Association Northern, Paul Jarvie, said the effect of widespread quarantine caused by swine flu would compound on the impact of the recession, especially for workplaces already operating with skeleton crews.
The greatest cost to companies would mostly be loss of productivity, because if an employee had used up annual sick and holiday leave entitlements, an employer did not legally have to pay them.
However, the greatest cost to society will be that many of those people are already living on the edge of financial viability, if they have to go without income for a couple of weeks, or longer, what happens to their food and medication supplies, their mortgage or rent payments, their other debts?
What is your policy for those who are without income in a pandemic and can't pay you?
Comments open now, lets get a little wisdom flowing here.
June 11, 2009 No Comments
