Julianna Yau’s blog

Jason has uploaded the video from Wednesday’s talk: One Laptop Per Child – Yaacov Iland. It’s a long video (about an hour and a half), and you may want to adjust the settings so you’re viewing it at the original size (unless you’re curious about how Yaacov looks pixillated). I apologize for the coughing—that was me, fighting the last of a lingering cold.

Yaacov’s insights were fair and well-presented. Although most of the criticisms OLPC endured recently were due to their dispatch problems, Yaacov digs deeper, asking what problems OLPC was trying to address, what engineering challenges had to be overcome, and what other challenges were still unsolved. It seems the biggest issues yet to be overcome are training for teachers, accessibility to related technologies (e.g. an internet connection, electricity), and language and cultural barriers. For an organization which has said it’s an education project, not a laptop project, I find it odd that they have made so little headway with those challenges in comparison to the work they have completed on the XO laptop itself.

Michael Geist has launched iOptOut, a free online service to send opt-out requests in bulk to companies. It’s an interesting service and I commend Geist for continuing to respond to issues about which he’s passionate (even if it comes with much flair and self-promotion). I do wonder how necessary the service really is. I don’t get too many unsolicited calls or emails, and it’s few enough that it’s easier for me to opt out of them individually. But, of course, that may a result of me being careful about how much information I give to companies and diligent about responding to their updates to privacy policies.

Today, after some bizarre yet unsurprising shipping oddities, I received my exchanged XO laptop. Somehow, Brightstar (or whoever was in charge of shipping XOs as a result of RMA requests) thought it was okay to ship my XO with a street name without a house number. Or maybe they thought I lived on the entire street? In any event, I called FedEx, got the address fixed, and they came back today. Of course, because no signature was required, they left the box on my doorstep. I was luckily planning to intercept the package around the time they delivered it, so I was already on my way homewards and was able to rescue it before a curious passer-by claimed it.

My first impressions of the XO had been near scathing, due mostly to a defective keyboard. The keyboard on this second unit is noticeably better, but also still noticeably more sticky than the one on my Eee or Toshiba. It does force me to type with my wrists up, both because it is the only way I can get close to my standard typing speed and because it doesn’t cause my wrists to accidentally trigger the touch-pad. The space-bar is still unusually difficult to register.

This XO seems to have shipped with an updated version of Sugar. I have not yet browsed the forums and wikis to learn how I can confirm that, but I do notice that the interface is a bit different from the first time. One major improvement is that clicking a “Browse’ button on a website will actually trigger a browse window (which I couldn’t get it to do last time).

Some other noteworthy items:

• the default system time does not match my actual time zone, and seems to be about 16hrs ahead (I will need to figure out how to fix that)
• still no right-click functionality, even with a USB mouse
• the SD slot seems to have more resistance on this machine than my first one
• image browsing is clunky, at best (must go to the journal, view the list of items, then launch each image in a browser)

The keyboard is still the most difficult thing for me to deal with. At Yaacov Iland’s talk yesterday I met Jason Shim, a fellow G1G1 donor who had already received his laptop. I brought my Eee with me, and upon using it, Jason remarked on how much better the Eee’s keyboard is compared to the XO. I’m glad it’s not just me! A summary of the presentation will come in a few days (probably after Jason uploads the video he took).

If it was almost love at first sight with my Eee, my relationship with my XO is definitely one which demonstrates persistence and determination.

The following notice of meeting has been released for C-10:

Wednesday, April 2, 2008
When the Senate rises
but not before 4 p.m.

Bill C-10, An Act to amend the Income Tax Act, including amendments in relation to foreign investment entities and nonresident trusts, and to provide for the bijural expression of the provisions of that Act.

I can’t seem to find the PDF I was sent on their website, so here it is. The link above is to the official governmental website.

I just found out today that there will be a presentation and discussion, featuring Yaacov Iland, at the Waterloo Public Library Auditorium: One Laptop Per Child: Appropriate Technology?

This will take place tomorrow, March 26, 2008, from 7-8pm. Click the link above for details and to RSVP.

Registration for the Technology in the Arts Conference is now open. The conference is being held at the University of Waterloo on May 9th and 10th, 2008.

From their website:

Technology in the Arts: the place for you to connect with the entire arts community in collaborative discussion and learning!

The goal of Technology in the Arts is to be a resource for the arts community, sparking dialogue around the role of technology in our planning and programming, discussing best practices as well as lessons learned, and providing hands-on, practical skills where possible.

The Technology in the Arts conference brings together the full spectrum of organizations within arts and heritage, from the local to national levels, to examine the commonalities that exist in useful technologies as well as the opportunities for partnership.

Last week, Facebook launched their new privacy control settings. Soon afterwards, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada picked up on a supposed flaw of the update. Although the flaw is true, it is (as many have pointed out), not a new flaw.

This weekend, I have updated my Primer on Privacy & Facebook, available as a PDF or OpenDocument download. The primer is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada licence. If you have any feedback on the primer, feel free to leave a comment on this post or contact me directly.

Georgia Harper writes about the case involving Turnitin, a web service which allows educators to check papers for possible plagiarism. The case deals with not only issues of copyright and plagiarism, but also freedom of choice and the dangers of clickwrap agreements.

A while ago, others wrote about the conundrum of the concept of “intellectual property” (Cory Doctorow and Mike Masnick; Russell McOrmond has also been concerned about the use of the phrase as jargon for some time). Many of the lectures presented by the Centre for Innovation Law & Policy have also touched on the link between creativity and ownership of that creativity.

I’ve been mulling over these thoughts, and am trying to make some sense of why and whether physical output is fundamentally different from intellectual output. It is difficult to penetrate this because it suffers from similar philosophical challenges as the link between the mind and body.

Issues of copyright are seeming to develop more shades of grey in the differentiation between the ownership of a thing and the copying of an idea. Copyright law generally prevents ideas from receiving protection, but whether it’s a question of basketball, wanting to be someone’s boyfriend, toilet paper or other silliness, people are pushing the limits of what can be protected by copyright and what can be owned.

The problem is perhaps how easily ideas can now be stolen from creative persons to be made into the fortunes of the business-savvy. One of the recent examples of this is OLPC‘s XO laptop, which is threatening to be another Atari 400 or Commodore 64. Although it would be difficult to successfully argue that the concept of an inexpensive and small portable computing device was “stolen” or “belonged” to the pioneers at OLPC, their literal inability to deliver the XO is suspected to be a factor in the departure of some of the major minds behind the project.

Of course, an idea on its own is almost completely useless. Whether it is political, philosophical, artistic, technological, musical or otherwise, an idea which never gets past the conceptual stage is little more than exercise for your brain. But how do we find a balance between rewarding the birth of new ideas and allowing people to stand on the shoulder of giants?

Stan Douglas has won the Canada Council Bell Award in Video Art. The CBC article mentions that some of his work are remakes of old films. This was something he mentioned at an Art Talk he presented at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo last year. One of his films (which, sadly, I haven’t been able to see) is a remake of The Outrage (1964)/Rashômon.

Other winners of the award include Paul Wong, Sara Diamond and Vera Frenkel, who were  at the Visual Arts Summit.