CSC300F: Computers and Society

Interesting Content

1. Remittances. In our first lecture, I spoke at length about the problem of remittances and the need to make them cheap. We also saw that the design of a completely hypothetical information system to do so was fraught with difficulties. Here are some important links on the subject.
   
   
   • For context, start with the Wikipedia page on the topic, which also contains some very interesting data on top recipient countries.
   • The World Bank's tracking of trends in remittances.
   • The International Monetary Fund's remittances data bank.
   
   
2. Intellectual Property. Our second discussion was largely intended to challenge if not downright confuse our notions of "property" and "ownership". There is a huge philosophical literature on this topic, and a large chasm between philosophical discourse and legal aspects of "property".
   
   
   • Once again, begin with the Wikipedia page on property, recognising that a good portion of the discussion is focused on the U.S.A.
   • We started a discussion intellectual property, which we shall continue in our third meeting as we discuss patents, The Creative Commons, and open source software .
   • Game Maker Says Courtney Love Approved Digital Kurt Cobain Character.
   • An interesting discussion on Twitter trademarks and other interesting issues.
   • An extremely influential letter by Thomas Jefferson in 1821 on "the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent".
   • A nice overview of basic issues in intellectual property.
   • Nathan Myhrvold's engaging in-the-trenches view of "investing in invention" and the uses of patents.
   • A commentary of Myhrvold's company, Intellectual Ventures.
   • Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article on inventors, inventions and (especially) "simultaneous discovery".
   • Michael Tiemann's paper, "How Open Source Software Can Save the ICT Industry One Trillion Dollars per Year".
   
   
   
3. Crowdsourcing. The integration of the spirit of "open source" and "outsourcing" has led naturally to the notion of crowdsourcing. The natural place to start on this topic is the Wikipedia article, which gives a good overview of the topic and provides many examples of this emerging area. Jeff Howe's Wired article is a very interesting longer story on various modalities of the topic. Amazon's "Mechanical Turk" is very much worth a visit.
   
   
4. The Internet and Net Neutrality. It is important to understand what technically "The Internet" comprises. This is made clear in many documents, but as usual, start with the Wikipedia article. You should gain some familiarity with the basic functions that must be supported by the Internet Protocol Suite as well as two of the basic packet protocols used by Internet applications: TCP and UDP. It will help you to understand how packets (not their content) are encoded and tracked. Follow the discussion on Network Neutrality, but noting that the issues are different in Canada (see here, for example). Indeed, the CRTC now appears have come on the side of "throttling" by ISPs and others, but has imposed disclosure requirements on carriers that employ throttling. See Michael Geist's view on this.
   
   
5. One Laptop Per Child. Start with the main OLPC page , and then follow up with the OLPC news site. Pay particular attention to the news article regarding the replacement of "XO" laptop by a commercial laptop in an initiative in India. The Wikipedia article has a nice summary of the basic components of the XO laptop. A recent paper by Kraemer et al. provides an insightful look at OLPC.