abject learning

My census profits landmine makers

Man, I must be denser than I feared. I had no idea about any of this census stuff until I saw this item on Boing Boing.

Actually I did know that our governmental web services were not kind to free and open source software. I learned that when recently submitting my taxes online. “… accessibility is limited to Windows 98, NT, ME, or XP, and Mac users with Safari 1.2.4 with webkit 125.5.7. In addition, users must have at least version 1.4.2_3 of a Java Virtual Machine on Windows, or version 1.4.2_5 on the Mac.” No Firefox nor Linux users need apply.

For me, that’s a small inconvenience — though when I switched to Safari before filing my return, the site insisted I was still using the wrong browser for some time, before inexplicably granting me access.

But it’s this related tidbit that is both surprising and disturbing. Apparently significant portions of the Canadian census process have been contracted out to Lockheed-Martin. The world’s largest arms manufacturer. Makers of weapons of mass destruction, space-based weapon boondogglers, landmine profiteers and interrogators-for-hire in Afghanistan and Iraq (including nifty work at Abu Ghraib).

Apparently Lockheed has been branching out for some time. From a 2004 article in the New York Times:

Over the last decade, Lockheed, the nation’s largest military contractor, has built a formidable information-technology empire that now stretches from the Pentagon to the post office. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft.

… “It used to be just an airplane company,” said John Pike, a longtime military analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org, a research organization in Alexandria, Va. “Now it’s a warfare company. It’s an integrated solution provider. It’s a one-stop shop. Anything you need to kill the enemy, they will sell you.”

As its influence grows, Lockheed is not just seeking to solve the problems of national security. It is framing the questions as well:

Are there too few soldiers to secure the farthest reaches of Iraq? Lockheed is creating robot soldiers and neural software – “intelligent agents” – to do their work. “We’ve now created policy options where you can elect to put a human in or you can elect to put an intelligent agent in place,” Mr. Stevens said.

Are thousands of C.I.A. and Pentagon analysts drowning under a flood of data, incapable of seeing patterns? Lockheed’s “intelligence information factory” will do their thinking for them. Mining and sifting categories of facts – for example, linking an adversary’s movements and telephone calls – would “offload the mental work by making connections,” said Stanton D. Sloane, executive vice president for integrated systems and solutions at Lockheed.

Canadians are assured that “At no point does any contractor collect, handle, or possess confidential census responses.” That settles that, then…

…is how the title of this weblog came out when I ran a vanity test of my URL on the Really Magazine 2Xlation facility, a roundtrip translator that takes a webpage into Korean and back again.

Via Darren Barefoot.

I’ll keep this short, as both D’Arcy (great discussion in the comments) and Stephen have posted substantive follow-ups to the UnKeynote.

As with my collaborators, my feelings on the whole thing were mixed. It was a worthy experiment, but I’m not sure it really took flight, though it did get better as it went along. I know that I have little desire to listen to the recorded audio (posted on Stephen’s site) and relive the experience.

The unstructured approach was less effective here than at the Salon and the Hootenanny at Northern Voice. I can think of three reasons why… The crowd and room was bigger, obviously, but actually I think this was a minor factor. Second, the audience had no idea what was coming, so they had no way of preparing themselves for something other than a standard keynote. You could tell some people were freaked, and the minor technical problems at the beginning fed into a sense of things going off the rails. Finally, I think we left the range of topics too open. If we had tried a little harder to steer discussion to the suggested topics on the UnKeynote wiki (still quite a broad range) I think it would have worked better. As it turned out, for the first 20 minutes the group talked about distance ed funding models for K-12 in BC — a worthy topic, but politically loaded, and neither Stephen, D’Arcy, nor myself had much to add on the subject. It’s one thing to be a “guide on the side,” but even that more open approach implies some degree of expertise for the facillitator.

Having said that, it was big time fun and a genuine honour to be able to share time and space with Stephen, D’Arcy and the other attendees. The beer session afterward was a great pleasure. And this event was a lot more enjoyable to prepare for than the usual PowerPoint shuffle via email that apparently is standard procedure.

On a related note, I was having a discussion with some colleagues today about clickers, contrasting their effectiveness with something less structured like the chat tool that D’Arcy set up for the session. I’ve always had a knee-jerk aversion to clickers, in part due to a bad experience ten years ago — I associate them with the worst qualities of large scale lecture halls. (I recognise I’m mostly ignorant of contemporary practice.) But at the very least, with clickers there is some mechanism in place to account for all of the student feedback. The chat, on the other hand, was mostly not referenced during the discussion. I did note that some familiar names (like Scott and Darren) were taking part in the session remotely. I found their presence oddly reassuring at the time, even though I felt unable to engage them properly given what was going on in the room. I gave the chat log a quick read later on, and was pleasantly surprised at how good some of the comments were. If I use live chat during a session again in the future, and I think I will, some additional thought will be required on how to channel it into the F2F discussion.

…instead of goofing off, which is what we are doing right now. But it’s an UnKeynote, so a certain absence of structure need not be a fatal flaw.

I feel better knowing Stephen and D’Arcy got my back. I think this is going to be fun. Let’s hope the other attendees agree.

Update: We will have an open iChat/AIM window going, if you happen to be around your computer between 2:45-3:45 PST today. Open your iChat/AIM client, from the file menu select “Go to Chat”, and enter “unkeynote” to enter the stream.

Update 2: – D’Arcy has set up a dedicated chat room at http://apollo.ucalgary.ca/chat/ – swing on by between 2:45-3:45 PST, we’ll keep a chair open for ya…

April may be the cruelest month but it promises to be chock-a-block full of rich-media chocolatey edu-blogger goodness thanks to HigherEd BlogCon, “a conversation on the use of blogs, wikis, RSS, audio and video podcasts, social networks, and other digital tools in a range of areas in academe.”

Lots of good screencasts a-coming. Giving the students what they want: Short, to-the-point e-lectures by Mark E. Ott (screenshot above) is worth a look, and I eagerly anticipate the contributions by Stewart Mader and James Farmer, among others.

Nifty model for a conference — no fees, no sign-ups, and lots of reusable, Creative Commons-licensed materials…