Driving by wire

What do you want from a car? This question seems to have been in the mind of car companies lately. Maureen Dowd, a columnist at the New York Times, has a very interesting article on this topic. Her title is pretty provocative: Have you driven a smartphone lately?

It seems that car companies want us to have fully immersive technology-driven car driving experience. Here is a set of evidence from Dowd's article:

• Ford Sync lets you sync up to apps, reading Tweeter feeds to you
• MyFord Touch plays your iPod on demand and reads your texts to you including emoticons
• Ford is working on an avatar Eva with a face, yes a face, and voice of a woman on the dashboard who can us e-mail, update our schedule, recite articles from newspapers, guide us to the restaurant and recommend selection from iPod

Do we want all these technology driven experience while driving a car? Or do we just want to arrive safely at the destination, wherever that may be?

Quotes of the day

"He lost his ability to think" said Superman

"One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me ‘Superman’ did not exist…she thought I was crying because it’s like Santa Claus is not real. I was crying because no one was coming with enough power to save us", Geoffrey Canada

"The status quo can be changed, but it takes a lot of outrage and good examples", Bill Gates

From the documentary "Waiting for Superman"

America broadband plan

It looks like President Obama is on tour to promote his vision of "investing for the future". According to the recent article in the NYTimes here, President said the followings:

• “This isn’t just about a faster Internet or being able to find a friend on Facebook. It’s about connecting every corner of America to the digital age,” the president said. “It’s about a rural community in Iowa or Alabama where farmers can monitor weather across the state and markets across the globe. It’s about an entrepreneur on Main Street with a great idea she hopes to sell to the big city. It’s about every young person who no longer has to leave his hometown to seek new opportunity — because opportunity is right there at his or her fingertips.”

Some of the goals are: securing high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans within five years.

Some of the immediate action items are:

• high-tech wireless public safety system (nationwide wireless broadband network) that would tie cities and towns together in the event of a national emergency like the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Hopefully, these dreams will come true ....

Does any of these pictures describe your relationship with your computing device?

All the pictures are from the articles "Who's the Boss, You or Your Gaget?", The New York Times

Does the U.S. have secure power grid?

A recent Audit report from U.S. Department of Energy entitled "Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Monitoring of Power Grid Cyber Security". Click here to obtain a full report.

So, what is the conclusion of the report? Do we have a secure power grid in the U.S.? In case, you wonder what the U.S. power grid looks like. Follow this link for a visual representation of the power grid.

The answer is not really. The audit report found several problems with the security protection of the power grid. But before we go any further in details. Let's define a few terms and get some basics fact down.

• The Energy Policy Act of 2005 passed by Congress gave the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission the responsibility to oversee the bulk power system also known as the bulk electric system or power grid.
• What is the bulk electric system? It consists of roughly 1,600 entities operating at 100 kilovolts or higher.
• The Comission asked the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to develop Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) cyber reliability standards for all entities to comply. These standards and their enforcement are the core of this audit report.

What are some of the (alarming) findings?

• The standards did not clearly define "a critical asset" that needs to be protected. Therefore, entities were given a discretion to choose what, according to them, are considered critical assets. The bottom line is they believe that these operators under-reported their critical assets.
• Some security practices prescribed in the standards are quite lax compared to the effective standard practices. For example, the CIP standards suggest that passwords be a minimum of 6 characters and changed at least annually. Compared this suggestion with the commission's internal policy: passwords to be at least 12 characters and changed every 60 days. Wait... That is not all. Other access controls that are commonly recommended were not addressed in the standards: limits on the number of unsuccessful login attempts and a session lock for inactivity, among others.
  
• The report also mentioned other problems related to delays in standard development, the inadequate monitoring of the performance of NERC and other regional entities resposible for the power grid.
  

What are some of the recommendations to improve the security of the power grid?

• Continue to work with Congress to obtain authority appropriate to ensure adequate cyber security over the bulk electric system
• Work with NERC to refine the CIP standards to include risk-based requirements and cyber security controls to help minimize vulnerabilities to the power grid
• Ensure timely development and approval of the CIP standards including communication with NERC and electric industry entities during the process
• Ensure the Commission adequately monitors the performance of NERC and the eight regional entities responsible for security over the bulk electric system
• Ensure that cyber security performance metrics for NERC and its regional entities are developed and utilized that enable the Commission to effectively monitor and assess program performance.

Perhaps, the Commission will benefit by looking at NIST's risk management framework to protect information assets below:

Vision of the American future

President Obama's 2011 state of the union address emphasized three key elements: innovation, education, and infrastructure investment.

Here is a part of his speech on digital infrastructure:

"Within the next five years, we'll make it possible for businesses to deploy the next generation of high-speed wireless coverage to 98 percent of all Americans. This isn't just about -- (applause) -- this isn't about faster Internet or fewer dropped calls. It's about connecting every part of America to the digital age. It's about a rural community in Iowa or Alabama where farmers and small business owners will be able to sell their products all over the world. It's about a firefighter who can download the design of a burning building onto a handheld device; a student who can take classes with a digital textbook; or a patient who can have face-to-face video chats with her doctor.

All these investments -- in innovation, education, and infrastructure -- will make America a better place to do business and create jobs. But to help our companies compete, we also have to knock down barriers that stand in the way of their success."

Smart meters and electromagnetic hypersensitivity

I am reading an article in the New York Times on smart meters and issues that people opposed their installations on the basis of health problems, privacy issues, and inaccurate readings.

One of the health issues has something to do with the health concern on electromagnetic hypersensitivity or EHS. People claim that "radiation from cellphones, WiFi systems or smart meters causes them to suffer dizziness, fatigue, headaches, sleeplessness or heart palpitations.", according to the article.

A few important concepts of control, and distrust were raised in the article as one of the issues that always arise with new technology. What is going on around smart meters mean that a lot more works need to be done to develop a better understanding of consequences of wireless devices.

Meaningful computing education

Recently, I read two articles, one on Singapore and its success as a country and the other on Google.org and its not so successful attempt to make an impact in philanthropy. I find both articles inspiring as I continue my search for "meaningful computing education". I believe meaningful computing education can be built on the guided leaning approach of "problem-solution-impact". Here are some ideas of how to implement this approach from Thomas Friedman's recent article in the New York Times:

• Teaching and learning needs to make connections between “what world am I living in,” “where is my country trying to go in that world” and, therefore, “what should I teach in fifth-grade science.”, for example.

Here is another view of the problems that prevent Google.org, known as DotOrg, to achieve its bold objective of "ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems" as suggested by Larry Page, Google founder, in 2004.

• The New York Times article reported that after five years "DotOrg has narrowed to just one octave on the piano: engineering-related projects that often are the outgrowth of existing Google products. Dr. Brilliant was sidelined in early 2009 after his loose management style created much disenchantment in DotOrg’s ranks."
• For example, "it focuses on projects like using Google Earth to track environmental changes and monitoring Web searches to detect flu outbreaks. Most of the experts it initially hired have left, and Google, a company obsessed with numbers and metrics, struggles to measure DotOrg’s accomplishments."
• What is the problem here? Joshua Cohen, a professor at Stanford, argued that Google has two different ideas about what DotOrg can do. One is that "DotOrg would completely reinvent philanthropy and, in doing so, reinvent the world and address a hugely important set of problems with solutions only Google with its immense intellectual talent and resources could find." And the other is that "DotOrg could make some headway, maybe a little, maybe a lot, in addressing these really big problems by doing what Google as a company is really good at doing, which is to say, aggregating information."
• Yet others attributed to the fact that Google used an engineering approach rather than a challenging problem approach makes it difficult for it to address important development problems. In other words, they are creating solutions and looking for problems instead of the other way around.
• For example, the idea of Google developed a system to track counterfeit drugs never got off the ground because it was proposed to build on top of SMS technology which did not excite Google engineers.
• Yet another evidence from previous DotOrg: "They never understood that technology is a means to an end, and that in the developing world, sometimes basic technology, like the collection and compilation of data, can have enormous impact."

All the evidence seems to point towards changing the way we teach computing to students.

U.S. secure border initiative network

According to the recent article in the New York Times, it looks like the virtual fence project under the Department of Homeland Security is much likely to fail. The project was originally estimated at $7.6 billion. The work by Boeing is to put up a series of towers and sensors to spot trepassers along the 2,000 miles of U.S. border.

So far, with $1 billion spent, we have less than 50 miles of these virtual fence done. Oh well...

Unintended usage of iPad

It is amazing to see an increasing number of ways that iPads are used among adults and children with disability.

Examples:

• Text-to-speech applications for patients with spinal cord injury to browse the Internet.
• Applications to teach autistic children basic skills such as brushing teeth

Pro: versatility, affordability
Con: Need human fingers to touch screen, touch screen technology can sometimes be too sensitive

Several questions remain to be studied:
- What is the effectiveness of iPad for people with disability?
- What is the efficacy of different design alternatives for different kinds of disabilities?


Here is a link to the full story on the New York Times.
Here is a link to another story on the Wall Street Journal.

Judgmental culture and new media technologies

The events surrounding what happened to Shirley Sharrod has taught us so many lessons about our actions in the world that anyone can write a so-called "news". Some of these lessons are written by the NYTimes Op-Ed contributor, Van Jones:

"The only solution is for Americans to adjust our culture over time to our new media technologies. The information system gives us more data than ever before, faster than ever before. But we don’t yet have the wisdom in place to help us deal with it."

"In time, we will. The worst of the partisans will get their comeuppance and become cautionary tales for others. Public leaders will learn to be more transparent. We will teach our children not to rush to judgment. Technology will evolve to better expose fakers."

"We have to understand that no one can be defined by a single photograph, open-mike gaffe or sound bite. Not even our greatest leaders could have survived if they had to be taken to task for every poorly conceived utterance or youthful demonstration of immature political views. When it comes to politics in the age of Facebook, the killer app to stop the “gotcha” bullies won’t be a technological one — it will be a wiser, more forgiving culture."

Effects of parent's technology use on children

The NYTimes is running a series of articles on your brain on computers. Its recent article is about effects of parent's technology use on early childhood development.

Here is the link to the article.

From a research perspective, there is no consensus on this question. Although some researchers (e.g., Sherry Turkle from MIT) found evidence of feelings of hurt, competition, and jealously in kids. Other researchers say that smartphone and laptop use by parents may not necessary be such a bad thing. Their argument is these devices allow parents to be more physically present at home with children.

What is your household like when it comes to technology use?