My county's school system uses an on-line system to involve parent's in the education process. Student attendance, assignment status, and grades are posted in the system; parents access the system to monitor how their children are doing, and can theoretically use the information to apply virtually real-time corrective action. Everyone's involved, so this is good, right?
Unfortunately, we have discovered that not all of the teachers are good at getting data in. After several episodes of us correcting our child and then finding out that the data in the system was inaccurate (assignments turned in were not credited, leading to fails and missing assignments) we have very mixed feelings about using the system.
On the one hand, having access to see that assignments are/aren't being turned in, and seeing grades even if the work doesn't make it back home, is good. On the other hand, when the quality of the data is bad, it becomes virtually useless for the purpose of involving the parent in the education process. We can never be sure that a missing assignment is really missing; often a week or more later the system will be updated to show that the assignment was turned in after all.
In one extreme example, a report that was delivered in class and turned in at the end of the presentation was given a grade of zero for never being turned in, and it was an end of the year project report worth a significant portion of the grade. When we went to bat for our kid, the teacher eventually admitted that the report had been delivered in class but didn't know where the hardcopy went. It was too late to turn in a copy of the hardcopy, so in the end that grade was just removed from my child's average. Since she had an "A" anyway, it wasn't harmful, but could have been if she had a lower grade and the report would have brought it up.
My point with all this is that these systems all sound great, but unless an incredible effort is put in the data quality may not be sufficient for the purpose of the system. Its worse to have a system with low quality data that can't be relied upon than it would be to not have the system at all, in my opinion. Depending on how many people are relying on the system and in what ways, it could be extremely problematic. The traditional "end of marking period only" grading system has lots of play where teachers can make adjustments. This is bad if they abuse the power, but is good if they simply correct for lapses. A more realtime scoring system may not have the same flexibility yet may be being used in a more direct feedback manner. Data quality issues will be harder to correct, yet the dependency on the data correctness will be higher.
I think that learning the basic aspects of programming, and some coding, provides an understanding of the formal expression of algorithms (as well as the possibilities and limitations of expressing one's self in a manner suitable for machine-interpretation) that is very useful when learning the more theoretical aspects of computer science.
There may be some value in trying to teach concepts apart from the formal expression of those concepts; we could try it out with integral and differential calculus as well - we could try teaching the concepts of calculus to people without the formalism of an algebra.
Absent a tested educational theory showing the value of teaching the concepts before the formal expression, it might be ok to follow the traditional path of achieving some formal language capability in order to bolster the teaching of the concepts.
My disclaimer: I have a very traditional "Computer and Information Science" bachelors (formal language theory, complexity, machine architecture, etc.) which I found relatively easy to get in part because I had learned BASIC, Fortran, and COBOL programming in a vocational high school. My peers seemed to struggle a lot more, even in the relatively simple Pascal programming, assembly language programming, and data structures classes. Those that survived freshman/sophomore years seemed to do ok in the more theoretical aspects, however.
I have often wondered how much critical infrastructure is connected to/through the Internet. Back in the late 1990s I was involved in security assessments of petrochemical firms. I was astounded to find out that they were beginning to attach their SCADA networks to their internal enterprise data networks, which were in turn attached to the Internet. Moving forward a couple of years, lots of companies started using Internet-based VPNs to eliminate leased-line connectivity to remote offices, because it was cheaper. The cost savings outweighed the potential availability concerns at the time. In retrospect, that tradeoff has turned out a lot better than I thought it would at the time - Internet services tend to be fairly stable. The security angle is harder to figure. It is possible to secure things quite well, but such security requires money, competent design, and a constant attention to detail over years of *nothing happening* (except for ankle-biter attacks that are thwarted easily and may very well bring about a false sense of security). By way of example, the vulnerabilities in commercial aviation security that allowed 9/11 to happen were obvious upon reflection, but weren't spotted prior even though lots of money was spent and lives were at stake.
Projecting these trends forward in time, I don't have trouble believing that there might be substantial interconnections between the Internet and critical infrastructure, and that not all of it is protected well. The idea that "disconnecting critical infrastructure from the Internet is the best way to protect it" seems simple, but economic drivers appear to hold sway and keep this from happening. The US government has a "cyber command" center at Ft. Meade specifically tasked with "critical infrastructure protection." It seems absurd for the government to drop big $$ into CIP when the simple answer is to just disconnect it from the Internet.
I don't know whether there is a lot of critical infrastructure connected to the Internet, but if there is then I believe there are big economic incentives that outweigh the security disadvantages, at least in the minds of the people paying the bills. It isn't that the Internet is required for them to function, it is that it is economically advantageous to the people who control them to use the Internet instead of some other data service. So the exposure can be real yet not very amenable to correction since it involves exactly the kind of very low probability/high impact risk that humans, especially those concerned about expenses, have trouble dealing with well.
I am not a pilot nor am I trained in aviation. My impression of the Air France disaster was that it was caused, in part, by an incorrect mental model of the situation in the mind(s) of the pilot(s). The pilot at the controls was making control inputs that didn't make sense for the situation, but he wasn't an idiot, so he must have not understood the situation. It didn't seem to help matters that the aircraft systems quit warning about a stall when the systems could not make sense of the sensor inputs, then resumed warning about a stall when the sensor inputs started making sense, possibly causing the pilot to think he had just initiated a stall (again) instead of beginning the process of recovering. It seemed like the senior pilot finally figured it out at the end (too late).
Is my understanding possible or am I way off-track?
I think I good approach would be to identify and present options to management for reducing that 8% down to 4%. Done honestly, recommending eliminating waste and increasing productivity of higher-priority services, and recommending the elimination of lower priority services altogether, this will give management an understanding of the cost to the organization of reducing the IT budget as requested. It is then up to management to decide whether they want to proceed.
Approaches that involve trying to tell management that they are wrong, or stupid, or don't know what they are doing aren't likely to go over well with management unless you can identify some factor that management isn't considering (yet). Unless one is in management, its not one's job to make those decisions. It is one's job to provide information to management so that they can make informed decisions.
The concern is "My immediate issue isn't so much about the use of the cloud services now, but the ethics over lack of disclosure in the parental consent process. Does anyone have ideas about defining the parameters of 'informed consent' where we inform of risks without bringing about paranoia? (Google Apps is just an example here, I think it applies to many cloud services.)"
I think transparency is a good thing. If the school system provides information to the parents about what kind of information will and may be stored "in the cloud," along with a summary of whatever legal obligations the school system has placed upon the provider with whom they are contracting (or whatever legal promises the provider is making if not under contract), then the goal of transparency will be met. If the school system balks at providing that kind of information, then I would question the appropriateness of the school system's action. The school system's fear of what parents might think if they knew what was being stored in the cloud is not a good reason for the school system to avoid this disclosure. My $0.02.
If the school has based part or all of their educational approach on the use of a particular cloud service for which parental consent is required but for which parental consent might be withheld, then the school system has a lot at stake in getting consent. That might be clouding their judgement. If so, there are deeper problems here than just the need for full disclosure. If the law requires parental consent, it is probably for a good reason. The school system shouldn't be allowed to subvert the requirement for parental consent by creating a situation in which a lack of consent results in a major problem for the educational approach. If the school system doesn't like that, the school system should get the parental consent law changed first. One of the aspects of the USA constitutional system is preventing the tyranny of the masses (in this case the possibility that a parent who objects to a school system practice which they disagree being made to give their consent to it by limiting disclosure because the school assumed in its plans that everyone would go along) and even if the OP is not in the US, the principle is still valid (IMO).
The whole idea of a "digital footprint," corporate data mining, etc. is (I believe) a very valid concern and one that the parents should be allowed to control on behalf of their kids until such point as their kids are on their own. Personally, I think that at a minimum the same kinds of protections that HIPPA requires for health information should apply to information stored about minors. If data mining is going to happen, it should be done in a fashion that eliminate the possibility that specific information will be tied to specific individuals.
That would be the 70's, and 50+ for those of us who saw the first movie.
I find your opinions to be no more insightful than the accuracy of your facts. Stories, even "kids stories" (fairy tales, anyone?) have morals and messages that usually transcend the simple surface reading. The ways that the characters are portrayed and act speak volumes about the society that birthed the story and the societies that have transmitted the story. For a simpler rendition of this idea, consider that etiquette guides are a good indication of what people ARE doing at a particular point in time (hence why someone writes an etiquette rule about not doing it. Modern etiquette guides don't warn people not to blow their noses on the tablecloth, but check this out http://books.google.com/books?id=J7ATQb6LZX0C&pg=PT121&lpg=PT121&dq=don't+blow+nose+on+tablecloth&source=bl&ots=6zXldEA7vN&sig=NfQbF7n-vS3ypHtZNAXdO7_r5nU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=pPLCUZjhPKvD4AO_6YGICw&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAg).
Part of the problem is that the browser, which should be a tool of the user, has become a surrogate tool of the servers which the user accesses. The more that browsers are called upon to do to offload processing from the server (Java, Javascript, etc.) the less the browser is under the control of the user. For example, reading any major news site, the "other things you may be interested in" links all appear in Explorer and Safari to be simple links, but they actually have complex Javascript that routes your click through "outbrain" for analytic processing... you can turn off Javascript to avoid this, but then many other sites you use will stop working.
Note that the claim is that Safari doesn't cache to DISK, not that Safari doesn't cache. I.e., Safara doesn't store information that was deemed sensitive enough to require a secure channel on a long-term (probably unencrypted) storage medium.
Many years ago, when I was a computer science student (1980 or so), I thought a lot about predictions of a loss of privacy due to computerization of record keeping. I postulated an argument similar to yours - perhaps the computerization of all records is merely returning our overgrown towns and cities to the previous status quo, when everyone knew (mostly) everything about everyone else. Then I realized that there was a big difference. In the small town, everyone knows everything about everyone else; its reciprocal. But with widespread electronic record keeping, there will inevitably be a state where a few people (relatively) know just about everything about most people, yet the bulk of the people will know next to nothing about those few. That is the inequity. I think its even more troubling that the mining of these massive quantities of data may be used to justify discrimination and further scrutiny against people who would otherwise not be suspected of evil thoughts. Who will watch the watchers, indeed? If the watchers are all hidden behind secrecy laws, and even the watchers interpretations of laws are secret, what is the basis for the two-way communication of knowledge that is found in a "small town"? How can we agree to be governed by laws that don't mean what we believe them to mean on their face, but which have secret meanings that are used to carry out activities many would believe illegal if those secret interpretations were made public?
The world is like an egg, the energy resources are like the yolk, and we are like the chick in the egg. The egg comes with a finite amount of resources that the chick exploits to reach a point of maturation where it can break free of the shell and survive without the yolk. If the chick uses up the yolk and doesn't manage to break free of the shell, it fails.
[Note for the pedantic - this is is just to illustrate the point; don't confuse the map for the territory and take the analogy to places it doesn't work then claim victory over the original premise]
40 years old is well into middle-age? I would estimate that you must be less than 30 years old then. From my point of view, you are still wet behind the ears. I'm not saying that to be mean, just to give some perspective.
I read once that middle-age is always 10 years older than you are now. I'm not sure that is true forever, especially since now that I'm knocking on 50 its hard to convince myself that middle age is 60:-)
My calculation for "middle-aged" is certainly different than yours, however. Take your average life expectancy, adjust it however you want to for diet, exercise, family health, etc. I'll take 78, then take a few years off because my Dad died at age 65. So for me, I'll use 72. Subtract 20 years, because the first 20 years of your life don't count as far as I'm concerned. That leave me with 52 years. Divide in half - that 26. Add 26 back to 20 to see the "middle age" of your mature life. So for me, I guess that was 46 (in the rear view mirror now).
Two years ago I quit my high-paying job with a large company, spent 6 months figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up, and enrolled in a master's program at a major research university. I got a new job, and now I'm on the 4 year master's plan (can't handle school full-time with full-time work and a family with 2 kids age 10 and 12 that I enjoy spending time with).
Being expert in something takes approximately 10 years of continual learning and focused practice. I don't know if I'll have enough time to become "expert" at my new focus of "work", but I'm using my expertise at my old focus to pay the bills while I'm developing my new focus.
The point of all this is that just like being out at night, in the snow and cold, you have to keep moving forward. Whether its developing skills that enable you to do work for which others will pay you so that you can live, or preparing for retirement, or whatever, you have to keep moving forward. If you lay down, you die (I mean this figuratively, but for some people it becomes literally true).
Being worried about "middle age" is a phase that you can alleviate quickly by staying engaged and continuing to move forward. The alternative is giving up, and essentially checking out of life.
Isn't the real problem that yet another non-scientific unproven analytic tool is going to be deployed in an attempt to discern what people are really thinking? There may be lots of reasons why someone's language changes, including events in their personal lives that have no relationship to work as long as they continue to carry out their duties competently. Imagine being called to the bosses office or HR to "explain" why your behavior has changed when you may not have realized the change yourself, and it has nothing to do with work. Failure to provide a satisfactory explanation will result in greater suspicion of your intentions, especially if the system that detected your behavioral "abnormalities" was sold with the understanding that it really could spot bad eggs before they cracked.
Government used to pay less than private industry... now it pays about the same, but with better benefits and job security, at least in the Washington, DC area. That started back when the government said they had to raise salaries in order to "remain competitive" with private industry. They raised the salaries, but kept the excellent benefits and the government union derived job lock-ins. The whole scene is a real mess. A shell of government employees filled with large amounts of creamy contractor filling. [Disclosure: I lived in the DC area and worked for government contractors at a variety of federal agencies for the last 15 years.]
Of course the cops knew he was recording; they would not have apprehended him if they didn't think he was recording.
That reminds me of a case where the police arrested someone for carry a concealed weapon. They judge asked the cop how he knew the defendant was carrying a concealed weapon. The cop told the judge he had seen it. The judge ruled the defendant not guilty because the weapon wasn't concealed.
The problem is that the video may or may not show full context of the situation - and I'm not talking about someone having edited the recording. Something that may appear excessive may only seem so without seeing the buildup to that situation.
Under the circumstances you describe, the police officer would then have the ability in court to explain that context. Surely it is better to have the police officer explain the context (plausibly) than to forbid any recording of such incidents so that the police won't have to explain the context??
I'm fairly certain that police in Massachusetts use car-mounted cameras to record the public. Why can't the public record them?
In fact, the only notice that should be required is for the police to be told that "All citizens have the right to record you and you may be subject to such recording at any time you are on the job." That would constitute the notice. If they have trouble remembering it, perhaps the watch officer can repeat it to them every day as they start their shifts.
The idea of "consent" to the recording is interesting... for instance, if you call a company that records calls for "quality purposes" you are deemed to have consented to the recording if you don't hang up. By the same token, I would say that under the circumstances I outline above, the police will have been deemed to consent to the recording by not quitting their jobs.
The police do as much as possible to retain as much control and power over all situations as possible. To the extent to which they have to restrain themselves from using the force, attitude, and their ability to play fast and loose with the law in order to avoid being provably (via photographic, video, and especially A/V recorded evidence) shown to overstep their actual authority in order to be the sole authority in any situation and to take what ever measures they deem most effective to not only remain in control, but leave no doubt as to their control, they view that as a direct attack on their ability to do their job. For them, that means taking any steps legally possible to eliminate the threat, including charging a bystander recording an incident with bogus crimes such as in the referenced article. I think that from their point of view they are discouraging such actions or even "getting even" with the people who take such actions, and as long as they do so legally (i.e., making charges which might not stick but for which charging they will not themselves be held to have violated the law), they haven't done anything wrong even though they know the charges will be thrown out (as these were).
My own point of view is that the ability for citizens to directly and provably monitor police activity has been too long in coming. I have heard of too many incidences where when Joe Public runs afoul of what a police officer wants the law to be, Joe Public loses. I have always believed that the US is a nation of laws, not men. At the lowest level this means that the same laws apply to all citizens, regardless of whether they are a police officer or not. However, courts tend to favor the testimony of a police officer over another citizen, and only in the most egregious circumstances seem to even begin to hold police officers to the same standards that other citizens are held. I know that a "dirtbag" will say anything in court to escape conviction, and so I understand (even if I don't like) the tendency to believe the police officer and not another citizen, all things being equal. However, A/V evidence has the benefit of being far more objective than any eye witness, especially those personally involved.
Regardless of wiretapping laws, concern over being exposed, etc. I think that the right of citizens to monitor the actions of other citizens placed in positions of power should be upheld in order to prevent the abuse of those positions of power. I think there is sufficient evidence of such abuses to outweigh other concerns.
I'm not sure the gestures are patented; that seems to be an assumption made by the author of the article (yes, I read the article - but not the patents called out by the article). What I would expect to be covered in the patents are the mechanisms for recognizing/processing those gestures to bring about certain results. This seems to be almost required to be so for something like a patent on manipulating 3D objects in a virtual reality space; how could one patent the very concept which is obviously not original as it happens on non-virtual space all of the time? However, the mechanisms for recognizing the movements to manipulate the 3D objects and making the necessary changes in the VR space to show the changed objects might be patentable.
Law enforcement agencies (FBI, et al.) have been quite clear that they feel it is their duty to use any law available in whatever way that they can to catch anyone they believe is breaking those laws. One test of a good bill (you know, the predecessor to a law) is how well it targets the specific behavior that is to be outlawed; many bills (that become law) fail this test. Unfortunately, when these bills become law the "intent" of the lawmakers becomes almost irrelevant - what matters is how the law enforcement agencies and the judicial system interpret them.
Allowing bills with obvious possibilities for mis-enforcement to become laws is just like taking flawed software and putting it into production. A good software release program wouldn't accept the explanation "we don't think the user will try that combination of inputs" for a flawed software component; we shouldn't accept the legal equivalent in the output from our lawmakers.
One way to think about legislators is as if they are the worst spaghetti-code lame-o programmers that you know trying to write updates to a big complex operating system. Even the most well-intentioned patches are likely to have unintended consequences (and many of the patches aren't well-intentioned, they are being put in because their friends have convinced them that the patch will be a "cool feature" that benefits less than.1% of the user base).
If a law can be "misused," it will be misused. If lawmakers pass obviously broken laws, its time to eject those lawmakers and get some new ones. Heck, someday we might even have some who know what they are doing when they are "hacking the legal code."
To what extent are the people of a country responsible for their government? Excepting the actions of external governments in internal affairs, how long does it take (can it ever happen?) that a people develop a focused-enough resolve and common understanding to push over an existing governmental structure and make a new one that works better, for them? Iran has (had?) a significant base of well-educated citizenry. How are they all being held down?
Or is it always hopeless to think that the many can take over from the few?
As an ex long-term employee of SAIC I can say that SAIC has done a lot of good work in many disciplines over the years. In my opinion, the company is not now the same as it originally was, however. It went from being a solely employee-owned company (and proud of it) to a public corporation with almost entirely new management team. The transition started happening around 2003 or 2004 or so, I think (SAIC began trading its stock publicly in the fall of 2006).
Having said that, I'm aghast at the allegations over CityTime and the sheer size of what appears to be a giant debacle.
Without claiming this is an excuse, the system was definitely not a simple web-based T&A system. Biometric data entry terminals were to be used in order to cut down on employee fraud, as I understand it. However, the actual cost seems so grossly in excess of the expected costs that this alone can't explain it.
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My county's school system uses an on-line system to involve parent's in the education process. Student attendance, assignment status, and grades are posted in the system; parents access the system to monitor how their children are doing, and can theoretically use the information to apply virtually real-time corrective action. Everyone's involved, so this is good, right?
Unfortunately, we have discovered that not all of the teachers are good at getting data in. After several episodes of us correcting our child and then finding out that the data in the system was inaccurate (assignments turned in were not credited, leading to fails and missing assignments) we have very mixed feelings about using the system.
On the one hand, having access to see that assignments are/aren't being turned in, and seeing grades even if the work doesn't make it back home, is good. On the other hand, when the quality of the data is bad, it becomes virtually useless for the purpose of involving the parent in the education process. We can never be sure that a missing assignment is really missing; often a week or more later the system will be updated to show that the assignment was turned in after all.
In one extreme example, a report that was delivered in class and turned in at the end of the presentation was given a grade of zero for never being turned in, and it was an end of the year project report worth a significant portion of the grade. When we went to bat for our kid, the teacher eventually admitted that the report had been delivered in class but didn't know where the hardcopy went. It was too late to turn in a copy of the hardcopy, so in the end that grade was just removed from my child's average. Since she had an "A" anyway, it wasn't harmful, but could have been if she had a lower grade and the report would have brought it up.
My point with all this is that these systems all sound great, but unless an incredible effort is put in the data quality may not be sufficient for the purpose of the system. Its worse to have a system with low quality data that can't be relied upon than it would be to not have the system at all, in my opinion. Depending on how many people are relying on the system and in what ways, it could be extremely problematic. The traditional "end of marking period only" grading system has lots of play where teachers can make adjustments. This is bad if they abuse the power, but is good if they simply correct for lapses. A more realtime scoring system may not have the same flexibility yet may be being used in a more direct feedback manner. Data quality issues will be harder to correct, yet the dependency on the data correctness will be higher.
I think that learning the basic aspects of programming, and some coding, provides an understanding of the formal expression of algorithms (as well as the possibilities and limitations of expressing one's self in a manner suitable for machine-interpretation) that is very useful when learning the more theoretical aspects of computer science.
There may be some value in trying to teach concepts apart from the formal expression of those concepts; we could try it out with integral and differential calculus as well - we could try teaching the concepts of calculus to people without the formalism of an algebra.
Absent a tested educational theory showing the value of teaching the concepts before the formal expression, it might be ok to follow the traditional path of achieving some formal language capability in order to bolster the teaching of the concepts.
My disclaimer: I have a very traditional "Computer and Information Science" bachelors (formal language theory, complexity, machine architecture, etc.) which I found relatively easy to get in part because I had learned BASIC, Fortran, and COBOL programming in a vocational high school. My peers seemed to struggle a lot more, even in the relatively simple Pascal programming, assembly language programming, and data structures classes. Those that survived freshman/sophomore years seemed to do ok in the more theoretical aspects, however.
I have often wondered how much critical infrastructure is connected to/through the Internet. Back in the late 1990s I was involved in security assessments of petrochemical firms. I was astounded to find out that they were beginning to attach their SCADA networks to their internal enterprise data networks, which were in turn attached to the Internet. Moving forward a couple of years, lots of companies started using Internet-based VPNs to eliminate leased-line connectivity to remote offices, because it was cheaper. The cost savings outweighed the potential availability concerns at the time. In retrospect, that tradeoff has turned out a lot better than I thought it would at the time - Internet services tend to be fairly stable. The security angle is harder to figure. It is possible to secure things quite well, but such security requires money, competent design, and a constant attention to detail over years of *nothing happening* (except for ankle-biter attacks that are thwarted easily and may very well bring about a false sense of security). By way of example, the vulnerabilities in commercial aviation security that allowed 9/11 to happen were obvious upon reflection, but weren't spotted prior even though lots of money was spent and lives were at stake.
Projecting these trends forward in time, I don't have trouble believing that there might be substantial interconnections between the Internet and critical infrastructure, and that not all of it is protected well. The idea that "disconnecting critical infrastructure from the Internet is the best way to protect it" seems simple, but economic drivers appear to hold sway and keep this from happening. The US government has a "cyber command" center at Ft. Meade specifically tasked with "critical infrastructure protection." It seems absurd for the government to drop big $$ into CIP when the simple answer is to just disconnect it from the Internet.
I don't know whether there is a lot of critical infrastructure connected to the Internet, but if there is then I believe there are big economic incentives that outweigh the security disadvantages, at least in the minds of the people paying the bills. It isn't that the Internet is required for them to function, it is that it is economically advantageous to the people who control them to use the Internet instead of some other data service. So the exposure can be real yet not very amenable to correction since it involves exactly the kind of very low probability/high impact risk that humans, especially those concerned about expenses, have trouble dealing with well.
I am not a pilot nor am I trained in aviation. My impression of the Air France disaster was that it was caused, in part, by an incorrect mental model of the situation in the mind(s) of the pilot(s). The pilot at the controls was making control inputs that didn't make sense for the situation, but he wasn't an idiot, so he must have not understood the situation. It didn't seem to help matters that the aircraft systems quit warning about a stall when the systems could not make sense of the sensor inputs, then resumed warning about a stall when the sensor inputs started making sense, possibly causing the pilot to think he had just initiated a stall (again) instead of beginning the process of recovering. It seemed like the senior pilot finally figured it out at the end (too late).
Is my understanding possible or am I way off-track?
I think I good approach would be to identify and present options to management for reducing that 8% down to 4%. Done honestly, recommending eliminating waste and increasing productivity of higher-priority services, and recommending the elimination of lower priority services altogether, this will give management an understanding of the cost to the organization of reducing the IT budget as requested. It is then up to management to decide whether they want to proceed.
Approaches that involve trying to tell management that they are wrong, or stupid, or don't know what they are doing aren't likely to go over well with management unless you can identify some factor that management isn't considering (yet). Unless one is in management, its not one's job to make those decisions. It is one's job to provide information to management so that they can make informed decisions.
The concern is "My immediate issue isn't so much about the use of the cloud services now, but the ethics over lack of disclosure in the parental consent process. Does anyone have ideas about defining the parameters of 'informed consent' where we inform of risks without bringing about paranoia? (Google Apps is just an example here, I think it applies to many cloud services.)"
I think transparency is a good thing. If the school system provides information to the parents about what kind of information will and may be stored "in the cloud," along with a summary of whatever legal obligations the school system has placed upon the provider with whom they are contracting (or whatever legal promises the provider is making if not under contract), then the goal of transparency will be met. If the school system balks at providing that kind of information, then I would question the appropriateness of the school system's action. The school system's fear of what parents might think if they knew what was being stored in the cloud is not a good reason for the school system to avoid this disclosure. My $0.02.
If the school has based part or all of their educational approach on the use of a particular cloud service for which parental consent is required but for which parental consent might be withheld, then the school system has a lot at stake in getting consent. That might be clouding their judgement. If so, there are deeper problems here than just the need for full disclosure. If the law requires parental consent, it is probably for a good reason. The school system shouldn't be allowed to subvert the requirement for parental consent by creating a situation in which a lack of consent results in a major problem for the educational approach. If the school system doesn't like that, the school system should get the parental consent law changed first. One of the aspects of the USA constitutional system is preventing the tyranny of the masses (in this case the possibility that a parent who objects to a school system practice which they disagree being made to give their consent to it by limiting disclosure because the school assumed in its plans that everyone would go along) and even if the OP is not in the US, the principle is still valid (IMO).
The whole idea of a "digital footprint," corporate data mining, etc. is (I believe) a very valid concern and one that the parents should be allowed to control on behalf of their kids until such point as their kids are on their own. Personally, I think that at a minimum the same kinds of protections that HIPPA requires for health information should apply to information stored about minors. If data mining is going to happen, it should be done in a fashion that eliminate the possibility that specific information will be tied to specific individuals.
That would be the 70's, and 50+ for those of us who saw the first movie.
I find your opinions to be no more insightful than the accuracy of your facts. Stories, even "kids stories" (fairy tales, anyone?) have morals and messages that usually transcend the simple surface reading. The ways that the characters are portrayed and act speak volumes about the society that birthed the story and the societies that have transmitted the story. For a simpler rendition of this idea, consider that etiquette guides are a good indication of what people ARE doing at a particular point in time (hence why someone writes an etiquette rule about not doing it. Modern etiquette guides don't warn people not to blow their noses on the tablecloth, but check this out http://books.google.com/books?id=J7ATQb6LZX0C&pg=PT121&lpg=PT121&dq=don't+blow+nose+on+tablecloth&source=bl&ots=6zXldEA7vN&sig=NfQbF7n-vS3ypHtZNAXdO7_r5nU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=pPLCUZjhPKvD4AO_6YGICw&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAg).
Part of the problem is that the browser, which should be a tool of the user, has become a surrogate tool of the servers which the user accesses. The more that browsers are called upon to do to offload processing from the server (Java, Javascript, etc.) the less the browser is under the control of the user. For example, reading any major news site, the "other things you may be interested in" links all appear in Explorer and Safari to be simple links, but they actually have complex Javascript that routes your click through "outbrain" for analytic processing... you can turn off Javascript to avoid this, but then many other sites you use will stop working.
Note that the claim is that Safari doesn't cache to DISK, not that Safari doesn't cache. I.e., Safara doesn't store information that was deemed sensitive enough to require a secure channel on a long-term (probably unencrypted) storage medium.
Many years ago, when I was a computer science student (1980 or so), I thought a lot about predictions of a loss of privacy due to computerization of record keeping. I postulated an argument similar to yours - perhaps the computerization of all records is merely returning our overgrown towns and cities to the previous status quo, when everyone knew (mostly) everything about everyone else. Then I realized that there was a big difference. In the small town, everyone knows everything about everyone else; its reciprocal. But with widespread electronic record keeping, there will inevitably be a state where a few people (relatively) know just about everything about most people, yet the bulk of the people will know next to nothing about those few. That is the inequity. I think its even more troubling that the mining of these massive quantities of data may be used to justify discrimination and further scrutiny against people who would otherwise not be suspected of evil thoughts. Who will watch the watchers, indeed? If the watchers are all hidden behind secrecy laws, and even the watchers interpretations of laws are secret, what is the basis for the two-way communication of knowledge that is found in a "small town"? How can we agree to be governed by laws that don't mean what we believe them to mean on their face, but which have secret meanings that are used to carry out activities many would believe illegal if those secret interpretations were made public?
The world is like an egg, the energy resources are like the yolk, and we are like the chick in the egg. The egg comes with a finite amount of resources that the chick exploits to reach a point of maturation where it can break free of the shell and survive without the yolk. If the chick uses up the yolk and doesn't manage to break free of the shell, it fails.
[Note for the pedantic - this is is just to illustrate the point; don't confuse the map for the territory and take the analogy to places it doesn't work then claim victory over the original premise]
The Internet is not the world wide web. The Internet is not the world wide web. Its much bigger than that.
Aye, but those normal looking hackers - they probably aren't True Hackers, laddie.
40 years old is well into middle-age? I would estimate that you must be less than 30 years old then. From my point of view, you are still wet behind the ears. I'm not saying that to be mean, just to give some perspective.
I read once that middle-age is always 10 years older than you are now. I'm not sure that is true forever, especially since now that I'm knocking on 50 its hard to convince myself that middle age is 60 :-)
My calculation for "middle-aged" is certainly different than yours, however. Take your average life expectancy, adjust it however you want to for diet, exercise, family health, etc. I'll take 78, then take a few years off because my Dad died at age 65. So for me, I'll use 72. Subtract 20 years, because the first 20 years of your life don't count as far as I'm concerned. That leave me with 52 years. Divide in half - that 26. Add 26 back to 20 to see the "middle age" of your mature life. So for me, I guess that was 46 (in the rear view mirror now).
Two years ago I quit my high-paying job with a large company, spent 6 months figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up, and enrolled in a master's program at a major research university. I got a new job, and now I'm on the 4 year master's plan (can't handle school full-time with full-time work and a family with 2 kids age 10 and 12 that I enjoy spending time with).
Being expert in something takes approximately 10 years of continual learning and focused practice. I don't know if I'll have enough time to become "expert" at my new focus of "work", but I'm using my expertise at my old focus to pay the bills while I'm developing my new focus.
The point of all this is that just like being out at night, in the snow and cold, you have to keep moving forward. Whether its developing skills that enable you to do work for which others will pay you so that you can live, or preparing for retirement, or whatever, you have to keep moving forward. If you lay down, you die (I mean this figuratively, but for some people it becomes literally true).
Being worried about "middle age" is a phase that you can alleviate quickly by staying engaged and continuing to move forward. The alternative is giving up, and essentially checking out of life.
Isn't the real problem that yet another non-scientific unproven analytic tool is going to be deployed in an attempt to discern what people are really thinking? There may be lots of reasons why someone's language changes, including events in their personal lives that have no relationship to work as long as they continue to carry out their duties competently. Imagine being called to the bosses office or HR to "explain" why your behavior has changed when you may not have realized the change yourself, and it has nothing to do with work. Failure to provide a satisfactory explanation will result in greater suspicion of your intentions, especially if the system that detected your behavioral "abnormalities" was sold with the understanding that it really could spot bad eggs before they cracked.
Government used to pay less than private industry... now it pays about the same, but with better benefits and job security, at least in the Washington, DC area. That started back when the government said they had to raise salaries in order to "remain competitive" with private industry. They raised the salaries, but kept the excellent benefits and the government union derived job lock-ins. The whole scene is a real mess. A shell of government employees filled with large amounts of creamy contractor filling. [Disclosure: I lived in the DC area and worked for government contractors at a variety of federal agencies for the last 15 years.]
Of course the cops knew he was recording; they would not have apprehended him if they didn't think he was recording.
That reminds me of a case where the police arrested someone for carry a concealed weapon. They judge asked the cop how he knew the defendant was carrying a concealed weapon. The cop told the judge he had seen it. The judge ruled the defendant not guilty because the weapon wasn't concealed.
The problem is that the video may or may not show full context of the situation - and I'm not talking about someone having edited the recording. Something that may appear excessive may only seem so without seeing the buildup to that situation.
Under the circumstances you describe, the police officer would then have the ability in court to explain that context. Surely it is better to have the police officer explain the context (plausibly) than to forbid any recording of such incidents so that the police won't have to explain the context??
I'm fairly certain that police in Massachusetts use car-mounted cameras to record the public. Why can't the public record them?
In fact, the only notice that should be required is for the police to be told that "All citizens have the right to record you and you may be subject to such recording at any time you are on the job." That would constitute the notice. If they have trouble remembering it, perhaps the watch officer can repeat it to them every day as they start their shifts.
The idea of "consent" to the recording is interesting... for instance, if you call a company that records calls for "quality purposes" you are deemed to have consented to the recording if you don't hang up. By the same token, I would say that under the circumstances I outline above, the police will have been deemed to consent to the recording by not quitting their jobs.
The police do as much as possible to retain as much control and power over all situations as possible. To the extent to which they have to restrain themselves from using the force, attitude, and their ability to play fast and loose with the law in order to avoid being provably (via photographic, video, and especially A/V recorded evidence) shown to overstep their actual authority in order to be the sole authority in any situation and to take what ever measures they deem most effective to not only remain in control, but leave no doubt as to their control, they view that as a direct attack on their ability to do their job. For them, that means taking any steps legally possible to eliminate the threat, including charging a bystander recording an incident with bogus crimes such as in the referenced article. I think that from their point of view they are discouraging such actions or even "getting even" with the people who take such actions, and as long as they do so legally (i.e., making charges which might not stick but for which charging they will not themselves be held to have violated the law), they haven't done anything wrong even though they know the charges will be thrown out (as these were).
My own point of view is that the ability for citizens to directly and provably monitor police activity has been too long in coming. I have heard of too many incidences where when Joe Public runs afoul of what a police officer wants the law to be, Joe Public loses. I have always believed that the US is a nation of laws, not men. At the lowest level this means that the same laws apply to all citizens, regardless of whether they are a police officer or not. However, courts tend to favor the testimony of a police officer over another citizen, and only in the most egregious circumstances seem to even begin to hold police officers to the same standards that other citizens are held. I know that a "dirtbag" will say anything in court to escape conviction, and so I understand (even if I don't like) the tendency to believe the police officer and not another citizen, all things being equal. However, A/V evidence has the benefit of being far more objective than any eye witness, especially those personally involved.
Regardless of wiretapping laws, concern over being exposed, etc. I think that the right of citizens to monitor the actions of other citizens placed in positions of power should be upheld in order to prevent the abuse of those positions of power. I think there is sufficient evidence of such abuses to outweigh other concerns.
That is how I understand it, anyway.
Law enforcement agencies (FBI, et al.) have been quite clear that they feel it is their duty to use any law available in whatever way that they can to catch anyone they believe is breaking those laws. One test of a good bill (you know, the predecessor to a law) is how well it targets the specific behavior that is to be outlawed; many bills (that become law) fail this test. Unfortunately, when these bills become law the "intent" of the lawmakers becomes almost irrelevant - what matters is how the law enforcement agencies and the judicial system interpret them.
Allowing bills with obvious possibilities for mis-enforcement to become laws is just like taking flawed software and putting it into production. A good software release program wouldn't accept the explanation "we don't think the user will try that combination of inputs" for a flawed software component; we shouldn't accept the legal equivalent in the output from our lawmakers.
One way to think about legislators is as if they are the worst spaghetti-code lame-o programmers that you know trying to write updates to a big complex operating system. Even the most well-intentioned patches are likely to have unintended consequences (and many of the patches aren't well-intentioned, they are being put in because their friends have convinced them that the patch will be a "cool feature" that benefits less than .1% of the user base).
If a law can be "misused," it will be misused. If lawmakers pass obviously broken laws, its time to eject those lawmakers and get some new ones. Heck, someday we might even have some who know what they are doing when they are "hacking the legal code."
To what extent are the people of a country responsible for their government? Excepting the actions of external governments in internal affairs, how long does it take (can it ever happen?) that a people develop a focused-enough resolve and common understanding to push over an existing governmental structure and make a new one that works better, for them? Iran has (had?) a significant base of well-educated citizenry. How are they all being held down?
Or is it always hopeless to think that the many can take over from the few?
As an ex long-term employee of SAIC I can say that SAIC has done a lot of good work in many disciplines over the years. In my opinion, the company is not now the same as it originally was, however. It went from being a solely employee-owned company (and proud of it) to a public corporation with almost entirely new management team. The transition started happening around 2003 or 2004 or so, I think (SAIC began trading its stock publicly in the fall of 2006).
Having said that, I'm aghast at the allegations over CityTime and the sheer size of what appears to be a giant debacle.
Without claiming this is an excuse, the system was definitely not a simple web-based T&A system. Biometric data entry terminals were to be used in order to cut down on employee fraud, as I understand it. However, the actual cost seems so grossly in excess of the expected costs that this alone can't explain it.