Last month, Microsoft founder turned philanthropist Bill Gates gave a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers, a US-based nonprofit made up of elementary and secondary educational administrators. While a transcript of the speech is available on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s website, most people only heard about the event from a poorly-written New York Times Article entitled “Gates Urges School Budget Overhauls.” Unfortunately, this article glosses over the entire point of Gates’ speech, choosing instead to highlight his controversial comments about restructuring educational budgets without any kind of explanation:
In a speech on Friday, Mr. Gates — who is gaining considerable clout in education circles — plans to urge the 50 state superintendents of education to take difficult steps to restructure the nation’s public education budgets, which have come under severe pressure in the economic downturn.
He suggests they end teacher pay increases based on seniority and on master’s degrees, which he says are unrelated to teachers’ ability to raise student achievement. He also urges an end to efforts to reduce class sizes. Instead, he suggests rewarding the most effective teachers with higher pay for taking on larger classes or teaching in needy schools.
The poor coverage of Gates’ speech lead to some understandably vitriolic but ultimately misplaced outrage on social networking sites like Twitter. The point that Gates tried to make in his speech, and the one that was ultimately missed by the New York Times article, is that school budgets are still constructed based on old and outdated ways of thinking about education. In light of recent advances, Gates advocates a move to a data-driven free-market based approach to improving the educational system for all involved.
Until very recently, it was nearly impossible to objectively measure student achievement, because students are dispersed geographically and come from a wide range of economic, social and religious backgrounds that impact their styles of learning and interactions with both teachers and other students. The introduction of standardized testing, while controversial, has allowed researchers to eliminate these disparate variables and isolate for the one factor that we’re actually interested in: the difference that one year’s worth of study has on student intelligence and accomplishment. After all, what is a school if not a place that we send our children to become more educated and informed members of society?
Once we can isolate for achievement, we can map it against the various factors that might influence it, including teacher salary, seniority, and education level; classroom size, and the ratio of adults to students in a classroom environment. These variables can then be altered and their configurations tested in order to optimize student achievement, thus producing a more efficient educational system that churns out smarter individuals who are more capable of contributing to society in a positive and meaningful way. At the same time, we can be certain that the money that is poured into educational reforms is spent wisely, and can be directly mapped to student advancement.
As Gates points out, these are important concepts, because the American educational system is reeling quickly towards a crisis of both funding and inadequacy. Reforms are required across the board for three main reasons:
Since the 1970s, the cost of maintaining the educational system has increased dramatically, while measurable student achievement has stayed essentially flat.
In the same period, graduation rates have dropped from 2nd in the world to 16th.
The United States now ranks behind 16 countries in scientific achievement, and behind 23 countries in mathematics achievement among students.
Combined with the stresses of the recent financial crisis, schools are being squeezed between a rock and a hard place. They need to change the way that they do business, but can’t afford to do so. This has lead school administrators to react to shrinking budgets by cutting personnel, using old and outdated equipment and text books, and closing down poorly performing schools. Although each of these strategies may help a district to balance its budget in the short term, all impact students negatively over time.
Gates’ argument is that this problem can be sidestepped by addressing the way that we pay teachers for their efforts. As would be expected, a large portion of the educational system’s operating budget is dedicated to teacher salaries. With this in mind, we must consider the two primary components of personnel costs: student to teacher ratios and instructor compensation models. Gates suggests that by changing the way that these two factors are considered, we may be able to better allocate funding, and ultimately, improve student learning.
Past reform efforts have concentrated on reducing classroom sizes. In 1960, the average classroom in the United States put one teacher in front of 26 students. Today, that number has changed dramatically, with one teacher now in charge of just fifteen students. The argument in favour of this movement has been that students benefit from more face-to-face time with teachers. Standards-based testing has shown that this simply isn’t true: There is little correlation between smaller teacher to student ratios and higher student achievement.
Gates also points out that current pay structures reward teacher seniority instead of great teaching. Teachers who have been in the system longer tend to make more money, under the assumption that they get better at their jobs over time. Again, this isn’t necessarily true: studies show that after their first five years of teaching, most teachers don’t increase the positive effect that they have on student achievement, regardless of how many more years they spend teaching thereafter.
Gates argues that by stopping our race to shrink classroom sizes and taking some time to reconsider the elements that influence teacher’s salaries, we can spend educational funding in a more positive manner. In particular, he suggests that teacher salaries be linked to the performance of their students, thus rewarding great teachers and providing constant incentive of lackluster teachers to improve. He makes a point of noting that this pay restructuring wouldn’t mean lower salaries. The average salary of all teachers could stay the same, but those who perform well would be better compensated for their efforts, creating a positive feedback loop that ultimately benefits students. In addition, Gates advocates that the best teachers be paid extra for taking on more or troubled students, which means that his new proposal could even benefit traditionally troubled poorer neighbourhoods.
“Conservative estimates suggest that we can save more than $10,000 per classroom by increasing class size by just four pupils. If we pay some of that money to our best teachers for taking in more students, we accomplish three goals at once – we save money, we get more students in classrooms with highly effective teachers, and we give our best teachers a real raise, not just for being good, but for taking on more work.”
For me, the most important part of this speech was not the claim that Gates made, but rather the reasons behind it. Once you understand why he’s advocating larger classrooms, you can see that the motivations behind such a statement are pure, and start to understand what he would like to accomplish. Essentially, he is attempting to build an economy around great teachers that rewards the best and encourages the others, while always striving to increase student achievement. That’s an admirable goal.
As someone who has spent my entire life in the school system as a student, and will very likely spend most of my future as a teacher, I have a vested interest in the education system and what it can do for society. I have had the good fortune, although it seems strange to think of it that way, to have frequently come across an alarming trend: people with poor spelling and grammar skills.
Photo from Facebook group "I judge you when you use poor grammar."
I say it’s good fortune because an awareness of the problem means the potential to fix the problem. You don’t have to be capable of writing at Giller Prize-winning levels, but everyone should be capable of distinguishing between they’re, their and there. Not everyone has a copy editor available to them, so you must become your own copy editor. Misspelling easy words is a good way for your resumé to get thrown in the trash, for your coworkers to question your intelligence level, and generally to cause all sorts of unneeded confusion.
It’s hard to say where chronic misspelling stems from. Depending on the child, it could be a result of parents who did not take the time to help them with their writing, or a teacher who told them to ‘sound it out,’ even though sounding out rhythm will never produce the correct result. In recent generations, the accessibility of spell check on computers gives students an excuse not to bother learning the correct spelling of a word, since the computer will automatically fix it for them. However, everyone knows that spell checkers are not flawless. The library in my high school has this poem posted by the computers to remind us that relying on a spell checker was not enough:
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
Students who struggle with spelling face lower grades when they are docked for extensive spelling and grammar problems in papers. Most grading rubrics incorporate nearly a quarter of the student’s mark for good spelling and grammar. Scoring poorly on this section can mean a drop from an A paper to a B paper, or a B paper to a C paper. University professors receive more and more students whose papers are filled with spelling errors, but their job is to teach critical thinking and how to structure an argument, and so they do not have the time or resources to help students (aged 17 to 23) with their spelling. Universities are beginning to deal with problems that were not addressed in high school. The University of Waterloo currently makes its students write an English-proficiency test after they are accepted to the school; an astounding 30% of them do not pass. These are not foreign exchange students, but some of the brightest minds out of our Ontario high schools. At this level, it is often grammar that students struggle with. Paul Budra, an English professor at Simon Fraser University, says that “Punctuation errors are huge, and apostrophe errors. Students seem to have absolutely no idea what an apostrophe is for. None. Absolutely none.”
Colons and semi-colons are notoriously tricky to use, but this humourous post from theoatmeal.com explains the correct circumstances in which to use a semi-colon (I’ve posted a preview to the side). Apostrophes are causing problems too, as seen with the common exactly of it’s and its (the first is a contraction of ‘it is’ while the second is possessive). Capital letters belong only at the beginning of a sentence and on proper nouns, never in the middle of a Sentence like I’ve done Here.
People often blame chronic misspelling on the Information Age; that is, access to instant messengers and cellphones have fostered bad habits in millions of people. We type u instead of you, and the result it that some people find it difficult to differentiate between when it is okay to write like this and when it is not. A former TA of mine once told us that she received a paper for a second-year English class that was written entirely in text-speak. Computers have made everything so easy for us that actually learning for ourselves has become difficult.
In the business world, misspelled words can be devastating to a career or a business. Companies who receive hundreds of applications for a single position often use poor spelling and grammar as a way to narrow the field, which means an extremely well-qualified person with a single error on their resumé will not be considered for the job. Many businesses require their employees to fill out paperwork or send emails on an everyday basis, and errors in these reflect poorly upon the company and the employee. Poor spelling and grammar skills are simply unprofessional. Most people tend to dismiss spelling once they get past the dreaded spelling tests of elementary school, but it is a critical skill for a majority of careers.
I’m not asking for perfection; even I slip up on Renaissance and Mediterranean from time to time. English is a rather confusing language, considering that it has stolen bits and pieces of nearly every other language in the world, and the grammatical rules we follow (“i before e except after c”) always have exceptions (seize, either). But that doesn’t mean that we cannot try to improve. Spelling tests usually end in Grade 6, but that is not the end of our spelling careers. There are so many ways to help ourselves with this problem; I find that simply reading books is a good way to learn how sentences should be structured, how words should look, and where commas and apostrophes actually belong. Don’t rely solely on your computer’s spell checker, but have a friend read your work and point out your mistakes. Check out this list of the 100 most commonly misspelled words and see how many you can get right. Practice spelling the words that you struggle with, especially if you use them frequently at school or in the workplace.
Correct spelling and grammar allows us to transmit our ideas to others in a comprehensible way, so that you not only are intelligent, but you also appear intelligent to the people around you. There is no shame in keeping a dictionary at hand, or asking for a bit of editorial help from your coworker who sends flawless emails (they’ll likely be happy that you’re asking, to be perfectly honest). Watch as your marks improve and your word processor stops making those angry red squiggles under your sentences. Pass on your new-found knowledge to your children and your students so that we can avoid the widespread problem that misspelling has become today in the future. Take pride in your work, in your words and never forget that definitely is definitely never spelled with an a.
Joel Salatin is a larger than life character. In his own words, he is a “gregarious, outgoing schmoozer.” If we’re relying on stereotypes to judge him, he is also the the opposite of what you’d expect from a farmer; intelligent, outgoing, and opinionated. Breaking the stupid farmer stereotype is just one facet of what he is trying to accomplish. His larger goal is to start a revolution that changes the way that we grow and eat our food. I was fortunate to see Salatin speak two weeks ago at the Bring Food Home conference in Kitchener Ontario, where spoke to the eager crowd on the idea of building a strong local food economy like the one that has sprung up around his family’s Polyface Farms in rural Virginia.
Perhaps the most important point that Salatin made about the industrial food system is that it can be differentiated from a healthy local food system by the concept of transparency. Industrial food production is not transparent, primarily because it tends to be a bad neighbour. Factory farms and processing facilities are noisy, smelly, polluting, and unpleasant to look at. Instead, farming in the manner practiced at Polyface concentrates on being aesthetically and aromatically pleasant, and invites people to visit. By putting the constraint of transparency on the operation, a farm is forced to be beautiful and community friendly.
In Salatin’s mind, the quest for farm transparency consists of a few key concepts:
Diversity: Single-species environments don’t appear anywhere in nature, so it holds that single-product farms are unnatural. Companion planting can give the farm something to produce at all times of the year, and helps to reduce weeds, animal, and insect problems.
Respect: We need to respect “the pigness of the pig.” To view animals as inanimate objects is to dishonour them, and the way that we treat our farm animals belies the way that we treat the weaker members of our society.
Balance: Everything in nature seeks balance, and the rise of food-borne diseases like e-coli correlates nicely with the rise of factory farming. Perhaps these newly rampant infections are nature’s way of saying “enough!”
A big part of the problem is that our society has been geared to drive its top thinkers away from the farm. The business knowledge of Wall Street holds that when the average working age in a company is over 35, it’s marketplace viability beings to decline because new ideas aren’t being brought to the table. Compare that with the fact that the average farmer in the USA is over the age of 60, and the problem starts to become clear. We need to bring brains back to the farm, because our current system implicitly entrusts the quality of our air, soil, water, and food supply to C-level students. Farming should be regarded as a sexy profession, with plenty of exciting problems that need to be solved by smart people who are driven to succeed.
Alright, so we can create a responsible and aesthetically pleasing farm. But what of the large factory-based processing facilities that package the majority of the products that we consume? As far as Salatin is concerned, in an ideal world, we would process our food right on the farm. In most every other resource-extraction industry, we put processing facilities near the source of the resources that they need to function. Economically then, it makes little sense to process our food hundreds of miles away from where it’s grown. On the other hand, the government will tell you that it is safer to process our food in highly-regulated government-inspected medically-sterile facilities. Unfortunately, like everything else in life, food safety is a subjective thing. The latest research into diabetes shows without a doubt that eating massive amounts of sugar in the form of high-fructose corn syrup is a life-threatening habit, but our government allows it anyway. The following infographic from Andrew Price at Good Magazine shows an interesting comparison of the food pyramid and what North American governments tend to subsidize:
The biggest lesson to learn from our experiences with factory-based food processing is that sterility is not necessarily equitable with safety. The vast majority of bacteria are essential to sustain life; Bleaching our meat to get rid of them is not. Further, the prohibitively high entrance costs to the food processing business that are created by such strict regulations tends to starve the market of innovative ideas. This isn’t to say that we should allow just anybody to process and sell meat; safety checks are necessary to ensure everybody’s health. Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemmatells the story of Bev Eggleston, an acquaintance Salatin who tried to open a small meat-processing plant for production of grass-fed beef products. He nearly bankrupted his family farm under the costs of building the facility and getting the approvals and licenses required by the USDA, only to have the plant shut down because it wasn’t processing enough animals to justify the time of the USDA-required on-site inspector.
As we know it, the factory-based food processing system also has a number of ethical issues. According to the documentary Food Inc., workers are generally underpaid semi-legal migrant workers from South- and Central-American countries trying to make a living to support their families back home. The factories know this and exploit them with low wages and unhealthy working conditions. The bottom line for workers is that it is not emotionally acceptable to have to kill animals all day, every day. Repetitive killing is a physically and mentally unhealthy chore that should not be the sole task of any person in a responsible society.
We live in abnormal times. In most cases, less than 5% of our food is grown locally, even though we have lots of farms right here in south western Ontario. As the following video sponsored by Hellman’s Mayonnaise Eat Real, Eat Local campaign illustrates, our local food system is in shambles, with the average item on the plates of eaters here in Kitchener-Waterloo having travelled well over four thousand kilometres before coming to rest on our plates:
The distribution system that has been created to serve the needs of the supermarkets and fast food restaurants has only existed for about 60 years. If we want the best food for our families, it needs to change. The supermarket is the great equalizer – the place where all food is made to look the same, with price as the only differentiating factor. The truth is that all food is not produced in the same manner, and some is better for you than others. The supermarket fails to preserve the integrity of the production behind the product, and fools people into thinking that the system isn’t broken. Good food is worth paying for, and incredibly cheap food should raise red flags with the shopper before it even enters the grocery cart. Of course, there have been efforts to create alternative markets for responsibly-produced local foods, like speciality stores and farmers markets. Unfortunately, farmers markets require that both the farmer and consumer make a commitment to get together and exchange goods. This is unproductive for the farmer and inconvenient for the customer, so it doesn’t really stand a chance of gaining widespread adoption.
Salatin finished his speech by noting that we need to bring cooking back into the home. An astounding number of families eat frozen food out of a box every night of the week, and thus create no demand for healthy, local, responsibly produced foods. Thirty years ago, every woman knew how to cut up a chicken. These days, many people have never seen a piece of chicken with skin or bones still attached. There is a sort of courtship romance to the experience of preparing food to share with your family, but somewhere along the line, we lost the idea of the family dinner; a time to share the day’s experiences over a plate of delicious nourishment prepared together and for each other.
The new food revolution doesn’t require us to give up our high-tech lifestyles. We just need to let our technology enable the local foodshed. In Salatin’s words, “We need to re-insert the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker into our communities.” Let’s learn from our mistakes – will we have a richer culture that we can be proud of with an industrial food system, or with a local food heritage?
So you’re thinking about going to university, huh? I’ve been a student at Wilfrid Laurier University for about five years now, and I’m looking at graduating at the end of this term. In that time, I have learned a lot, and want to take a moment to share some of what I know with others out there. This post is aimed primarily at students in their last couple of years of high school, but will also be enlightening reading for parents who never went to university, or who need a refresher on what it’s all about. If you’re a university graduate (or a fellow student) and disagree with anything that I say here, or would like to add your own thoughts to this post, feel free to drop me a line in the comments. So without any more nonsense, here’s a short list of what you should know before applying to university.
University isn’t your only option: There seems to be a stigma in high school that assumes that the most successful students are university-bound from the start. Courses are partitioned into college and university levels (sometimes called applied and academic), and the ideal of a university education is perpetuated to the students that the school deems have the marks necessary to pursue one.
While it is true that you’ll need some kind of post-secondary education if you don’t want to work in retail for the rest of your life, it is important to remember that university is not your only option. For those who are more interested in working with their hands and those who don’t really enjoy school, a trade apprenticeship can be a great way to secure an enjoyable job with an enviable pay check. My little brother started his apprenticeship with a co-op program when I was in my second year of university, and now makes far more money than I do, and indeed far more than I will for the foreseeable future.
For those who don’t have any idea what they want to do with their lives (don’t worry – it isn’t uncommon), I might suggest a college education instead of a general arts degree; the advantage being that a college diploma is immediately applicable to a job in your chosen industry. A general arts degree in history or psychology yields very few job opportunities aside from clerical work unless you plan to follow it up immediately with a college degree.
Always have an exit plan – What will your degree do for you?
In my experience, the biggest mistake that students make when applying to university is to choose a degree that they aren’t interested in or don’t know anything about, either because it seems like the most interesting option available, or because of pressure from a parent or loved one. Unless you happen to be extremely lucky, this is almost always a mistake.
Take some time to figure out what is involved in the degree that you’re considering before signing up. Check out the website of your chosen school and read course descriptions for classes at all levels of the program to ensure that you’re interested. Call some local companies that you’d like to work for, and ask them what they’re looking for in a recent graduate – they’ll be happy to tell you what’s important to them.
If you have no idea what you want to do with your life (again, don’t panic – this is normal), consider using your first year of school to take a number of different courses from a wide range of disciplines, and try to figure out what you might enjoy doing for the rest of your life. This may sound like an expensive experiment, but believe me – one year’s worth of tuition is better spent on finding something that you love to do than on dropping out or switching programs in your third year because the courses got tough and you don’t enjoy it any more. Plus, all of the courses that you take during this time can serve as electives towards your actual degree once you choose it.
Even though it sounds scary, remember that choosing your degree is really the first big choice of your adult life, and that will affect you for the rest of it. If you need to take some time to figure it out, don’t be ashamed of taking a year off to think it over and research your options. Just make sure that you get a crappy job during that period so that you have some incentive to return to school.
High school did not prepare you for this: Remember all of that crap that they told you in high school about adequately preparing you for university? They lied. If you were lucky, you had one teacher who took the time to actually tell you what university is all about. The truth of the matter is that even if (perhaps especially if) you were really smart in high school and got great grades without even trying, you’re nothing when you get to university.
Remember when you did really good in track and field in grade school, and then went to the regional meet, only to find out that you absolutely sucked compared to the other kids there? Same thing. Just because you were a great student in your small local high school does not mean that you are going to automatically be one in university.
University is really hard. In my first year, I managed to fail two math courses, and barely scraped by with a D in one of my physics courses. You see, in high school, I got 80s without even trying, and when I got to university, I didn’t really know how to study or budget my time, or apply myself in any meaningful way. But it wasn’t a big deal. I spent a term on academic probation, got it together, and am getting ready to graduate with a B+ average.
I’m not trying to scare you (well, not really), but I am trying to make you aware. When you get to university, you’ll be surrounded by a bunch of really smart kids, and taught by a bunch of really smart professors who by and large will not take mediocrity lying down. They know who is capable of more, and they’ll make sure that you figure it out in short order.
A minor is good, especially in a technical program: The degree that I’m working toward is in Honours Computer Science, which is a pretty great program, and I’m lucky to love what I do. In the last couple of months, I’ve gotten a job with a small local company that finally gives me the opportunity to make some money with all of the knowledge that I’ve gained in the past five years. In addition to computer science, I have been working towards a minor in history, and I consider this to be every bit as important as my primary degree.
The problem with a lot of technical programs like computer science (at least at Laurier) is that they don’t push important skills like research and essay writing on their students. Throughout my entire program, I only had one computer science professor who forced her students to write papers on a regular basis. As much as writing essays sucks (I’ve come to hate the thought of another evening in the campus library), it’s an incredibly important life skill. It teaches you the basics of finding and vetting information for accuracy and importance, and the skills that are required to be taken seriously in written form.
I can virtually guarantee that your future job will require you to write something, be it a report or a recommendation, a letter to a client, or a business plan to pitch to a bank - you need to know how to research, write, and edit your own work so that you can impress people when your winning personality isn’t in the room. Want to stand out from the pack when you start to look for jobs? Get yourself some skills that the other candidates don’t have. If you’re going into a technical field, this means that minoring in an arts program is the way to go.
Keep your loans in check:
For some reason it seems like many of my friends have run up tens of thousands of dollars in personal debt during their university careers. This is no way to start the rest of your life. Granted, I’ve been lucky because my parents saved up a bunch of money and were able to help me out with my books and tuition, but I probably could have made it on my own if I had been forced to.
Coming out debt-free requires a combination of hard work and sacrifice. I have a friend who was able to fund most of his first couple of years of tuition solely on bursaries and scholarships. It took him most of his grade 12 year to research the available options and to apply for them all, but the end result was a significant amount of money in his pocket that he would have had to otherwise borrow.
Too many kids don’t work during school. Sure, it was stressful, but even though my tuition was paid for, I worked twenty hours a week at a part time job in order to take care of my living expenses. Working as a waiter, I pulled in just under $18K a year, which would have easily covered my tuition if I had lived at home. Taking care of these costs yourself teaches you valuable lessons about hard work and budgeting, and sets you up to enter the next part of your life without a huge debt (that all of the sudden has a hefty interest rate) hanging over your head. OSAP is great if you have nowhere else to turn, but remember that it’s designed for kids who actually don’t have anywhere else to get their money from. If you can get out of school without a hefty debt, do so at all costs.
If you’re a parent reading this, start saving up some money for your kids’ educations now. The reality of university is that tuition and books will run you close to $7000 a year before living expenses. Even if you can only manage a little bit of money, it’s better than nothing, and is the most important gift that you can give to your child.
Friends are your most important asset:
You probably won’t have the good luck to graduate with a core group of friends who are interested in studying the same thing as you and are applying to the same schools that you are. I was exceptionally lucky in this regard, and ended up going to school with two of the best friends that a guy could ask for, and living with two more who have become some of the most important people in my life.
Remember that your friends are your support structure and your home away from home. Your mom won’t be there to hug you when you fail a test or get dumped by the love of your life, but your buddies will be there to take you out for a beer and cheer you up. They’ll also be there to make you some toast and a coffee when you’re too sick to get out of bed the next morning.
If you’re leaving home for school, making some good friends early on in your university career is especially important. You can’t be studious all the time, and everybody needs to go out and let off some steam now and again. Get yourself some good pals that can be counted on to support you when times are tough, and who will go out and get crazy with you when they aren’t.
Grades aren’t all that matters: After years of dragging yourself to early morning classes and pulling all-nighters in the library working on that paper that’s due tomorrow at 8am, you’ll be ready to go looking for a job that lets you move out of the stinking hovel that is student housing and prioritize both beer and food on each week’s budget. At that point, you may find out the hard way that a lot of companies out there are looking for something more than just good grades.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the people who will be interviewing you for that great job with a company car and an office with a door on it are probably interviewing about 100 other people for the same position. You need to be able to win them over without being in the same room, and this requires you to stand out from the crowd of other applicants who probably got the same education and the same grades from the same school that you did.
The best way to circumvent this problem is to take up some extracurricular activities that will help to make your resume jump off of the paper that it’s printed on. In your struggle to complete the requirements of your degree, remember to take some time for electives that you actually enjoy, and to complete at least one major project on your own time that you aren’t required to do in order to pass a class (Check out this post for a great discussion of this).
In computer science? Write some kick-ass software and grow a user base that you can boast about. Studying political science? Maintain a blog that puts your personal spin on what your government is up to, and get yourself some loyal readers. Love music? Start a rock band, play some gigs, and maybe record an album that you can be proud of later on. If your school offers a co-op program, jump in with both feet and work for some impressive companies. The idea here is to show potential employers that you had a life outside of school and that you aren’t just another cookie-cutter graduate with no individual aspirations or point of view.
So there you have it, the seven things that I think that all kids considering a university career ought to know before getting started. Feel free to drop me a line in the comments if you think otherwise, or have something to add to this list.
I have never understood how some students can justify going away for reading week, while I inevitably spend the week in the library, writing papers and studying for the next big test. But then I figured it out – if I simply took all of the time that I spend procrastinating throughout the school year and compressed it into a single week, I would have all the time in the world. Alternatively, I could have majored in communication studies.
Since this is my last reading week ever it’s a little bit late to try either of those approaches, and so I stuck with the tried and true, and spent an evening surfing the ‘net instead of doing my school work. Luckily, while squandering my precious time, I found a few excellent TED talks that I think that everybody should take the time to watch.
The first is by American author Michael Pollan, the guy who brought us the Omnivore’s Dilemma, a great book that discussed the many problems inherent in the way that we eat, as well as a few strategies for getting back to the basics and disarming the epidemics of obesity and diabetes that will become a major concern within my lifetime. He also had a big role in Robert Kenner’s Food Inc., an eye-opening documentary about the current state of the industrial agricultural system in America, Canada, and most of the western world. Together, these two works have really changed the way that I look at my food, and have influenced many of the decisions that I’ve made to try and change my diet, and to spread this message to the people that I care about most.
This talk in particular is a thought exercise that challenges the viewer to take another look at our place in nature, and to use that new view to reevaluate the decisions that we make when choosing what we eat:
The second talk that I’d like to share comes from England by way of Chef Jamie Oliver, who most people have heard of, especially if they’re of the female persuasion. He is on a serious mission to change the world through a better understanding of food. It is his dream to see a reality in which every kid is taught what they need to know about food and is armed with the education required to make healthy life choices about what we put into our bodies. And they really are life choices – the vast majority of deaths in the western world are caused by entirely preventable diseases related directly to diet and lifestyle decisions that we make every day. This talk won him an award at the most recent TED sessions, and is generating a lot of buzz right now:
Finally, I found an older talk by teacher turned slam poet Taylor Mali entitled What Teachers Make. This is an interesting attack at the old adage that “Those who can’t do teach,” that eloquently explains in only three minutes exactly why our teachers deserve more respect than they get in everyday society:
Who ever thought that not doing anything of value could be so educational?
I spent the past weekend at EpCon, a tech conference for college and university students throughout South-Western Ontario that focused on technology, the Internet, entrepreneurship, and networking. Held at the Waterloo Inn, this inaugural year featured keynote speeches from Mike Lee of Rogers Ventures and Steven Woods of Google Waterloo, among others. I saw a lot of cool things, heard a lot of great ideas, and came away with a better understanding of what the tech industry in Ontario has to offer the rest of the world.
Below are a few of the lessons that I picked up during my stay:
Cloud Computing is about…
Hype: The core content of 90% of all marketing literature about the cloud is fluff. As a concept, cloud computing is poorly defined; what we have managed to decide on is that the cloud is about only paying for what you use, purchasing services over products, and being able to quickly and intelligently provision new ‘hardware’ via virtualization
Low Prices: This is possible because of the ever dropping cost of commodity hardware. Servers are so powerful that they spend most of their time idling. We might as well use those extra cycles to virtualize more machines that can be used by more people
Data: Business models based on the cloud have an incentive to make it easy for you to put your data into their service, but hard/unattractive for you to pick up and leave
Parallelism: for Great for anything that can be split into chunks and distributed, but not so good for serial tasks
Security Risks: There is a lot of talk, but the reality is a question of whether you want your private records stored on somebody else’s servers. Remember – they have no incentive to keep your privacy, just incentive to make sure that news of a breach doesn’t leak
Perception: The Blackberry is one of the most secure devices available, but Obama’s was considered a security risk. Perception is key.
The Internet has Changed the World:
The internet is only 20 years old, but consumes a full 5% of the world’s energy. That’s intense.
IP technology has had a fundamental impact on how things work, because it’s a global standard. The cost to do business internationally is the same as the cost to do it locally.
Between 1995 and 2008, companies that had virtual monopolies on providing information became obsolete. Everybody went online and traditional news media saw massive declines
Consumers now control consumption, and piracy can be seen as a push for increased convenience and choice. The irony of the copyright battles is that consumption of media is increasing! The public simply lacks a channel for content that matches their expectations
The Internet has come through three distinct phases:
Web 1.0 was the push model, wherein content producers pushed content out to consumers
Web 2.0 was the share model, when the lines between consumers and producers were blurred, and people chose what they wanted to see, when they wanted to see it
Web 3.0 will be the live model, when people have an expectation to have anything that they want at any time, no matter where they are or what device they are using
These days, readers, not editors, determine the content. This has been the revolution of the past four years. The democratization of content.
The newspaper provides good content, but only one view of the news. It lacks reader interaction, is expensive to produce and distribute, and is at least one day behind current events
Online news sites solve the cost, distribution, and latency issues inherent in the traditional model, but still provide a single view of the news and a one-sided conversation about it
Blogs and social media changed everything. They are becoming more respected and have been demonstrated to have real impact. At the same time, twitter has been shown to to influence product buzz and box office performances
Social media allows people to participate in the discussion, express their opinions, and to provide context to the news
Think of just how amazing the Wikipedia project really is. Instead of a small group of experts writing an encyclopaedia, a huge number of people from a diverse array of fields have come together and pooled their combined knowledge into a free resource that rivals the traditional encyclopaedia for accuracy and usefulness.
Creating a Great Product:
User-Centric design is essential. You need to know as much as you can about your users, and always strive to provide interaction, insight, and innovation
Your development process should be powered by listening: “You have two ears and one mouth. That ratio is not a coincidence”
Demo Driven Development: Use daily demos to create a feedback loop that allows you to constantly refine your ideas
Customer’s expectations are moving from dynamic to adaptive experiences: Make it modular, open, and multi-platform so that users can have a personalized experience that they can participate in
Porn has created at $50M/year industry by moving from the monthly subscription model to a micro-transaction model that is very lucrative. The glut of free apps available for mobile platforms has created a downward price crush that makes it hard to sell an app for a one-time fee. People don’t feel as bad about lots of small transactions, so it’s easier to hook people on something that starts out free.
Create value by solving one problem very well. More features can always be implemented later
The idea is not your baby! You will get plenty of criticism, and need to be able to adapt. A flawless execution is better than a killer idea. Apple did not invent the mp3 player, but revolutionized it, and changed the industry forever.
Questions to ask yourself about a new idea:
What is it?
Why does it matter?
Why doesn’t it already exist?
Why can we do it?
How can we do it?
Can we make money off of it?
How do we get out?
Having the insight to figure out what’s coming next on the Internet is a huge advantage that can put you well ahead of your competitors
So what is the next big thing? It isn’t about apps or hardware or new technologies or even content; it’s about the experience. Everything else is a tool that is used to deliver that experience
On Entrepreneurial Spirit:
It has never been easier to implement an idea, and then to quickly find a market for it. The majority of the risk is market related – development is cheap. The Internet solves the traditional problems of marketing and distribution
Always strive to be a part of lose/lose partnerships. When you’re having a bad day, your partner should be too. This creates incentive for them to support and work with you.
The best base for a start up is a solution to a problem that you’ve encountered in your daily activities. If you’ve encountered that problem, chances are that somebody else has too, and will pay for a solution.
Viral marketing can make you lots of money really fast (if you can pull it off without looking fake), but establishing a loyal fan base will make you more money in the long run
It is important to get some traction with your product before looking for investment capital. Build a user base first – the money will follow the buzz. Early money is the enemy of an early exit from a successful company.
You have to live and breathe your business like a religion
You need the best possible people on your team at all times throughout your career
The reality of being an entrepreneur involves an immense amount of work and responsibility. You are accountable to your shareholders, customers, partners, employees, and yourself.
Experience is key. You don’t know everything, but can learn some of it as you go. Make mistakes on other peoples money, and bring a true professional in when you’re out of your league. They will recoup your investment 100 times over. Seeing the world and learning from others before jumping in with both feet can be an invaluable experience.
Remember who you’re doing it for. You can’t work all the time, because you risk losing your family, even if you were doing it for them in the first place. Be sure to create a solid support structure – some days will suck, and you will need people around you to prop you up.
Being an entrepreneur is a never ending passion. At the end of the day, it isn’t about the money or the freedom, it’s about the love
Quitters never win, winners never quit, but those who never win and never quit are idiots.
Thoughts about Management:
Learn to delegate so that the world doesn’t fall apart if you’re not there. You need partners and staff that can step in to fill gaps where necessary
Give people accountability and incentive, and let them make their own mistakes. They will work harder for you if they believe in your goal and see personal gain in doing so. At the same time, letting them know exactly how the company is doing gives them feedback to help them cope with hard times, and links performance with hard work
Never forget the value of human interaction
The promise of the flying car is fact that somebody out there was dreaming. Inspiration comes from those dreams
To become a better company, you must know your competition
7 Things that Google does well:
Builds teams like startups do – product teams are always made up of less than 10 people
Enables internal founders to create
20% of time spent on R&D spans new ideas. Evolving and prototyping are keys to finding the next big thing
Encourages teams to attack hard problems and tackle big ideas
Compensation is delivery oriented. Bonuses, grants, and awards encourage risks and pay off with good ideas
As a student at Wilfrid Laurier University, I spend hundreds of dollars per year on my text books. It should be no surprise to anyone familiar with the student lifestyle that as a group, we students tend to be short of money. The cash that we do have is generally obtained from some combination of scholarship programs, OSAP loans, and minimum-wage part-time jobs.
For some years now, I’ve been saving myself about five hundred dollars per year by purchasing my text books used from sellers on Amazon.ca. This year however, my attempts to save myself some rent money were foiled by the WLU Bookstore, a retail entity that sells text books and school supplies on campus.
For as long as I have been a student at Laurier, the bookstore has been responsible for releasing a list of required text books to students through its website and in-store kiosks about four weeks before the start of each new term. In previous years, this has listing included text title, author, and ISBN number, a kind of global tracking number for all books in circulation.
This combination of information has always given me the tools necessary to shop my book purchases around, while still ensuring that I got the correct editions of my text books, many of which change from year to year. This year however, the bookstore has changed its policy, and displays only the text title and price on student’s book lists, which is not enough information to be sure of an expensive online purchase.
Upon seeing that the ISBN number was lacking from the web front-end, I made a call to the bookstore to see if they would provide me with the necessary numbers over the phone. I spoke to the student manager of the bookstore, who told me in no uncertain terms that the new bookstore policy was to not display the ISBN numbers of texts online, because ‘students just take the numbers and buy their books elsewhere.’
Well that couldn’t be right. Wanting more information, I got in touch with a Ms. DaCosta, the head of bookstore operations at Wilfrid Laurier. When asked for the ISBN numbers, she gave me a slew of excuses, including a far fetched tale about their new computer system no longer tracking the number. Seeing as the ISBN number of a book is a unique identifier and also functions as a component of its UPC number, I seriously doubted her story. At the end of an in depth conversation, Ms. DaCosta suggested that I either come down to the bookstore and look up the ISBN numbers myself, or that I purchase the books online, get the numbers from the receipt, and then return the purchased books on the first day of classes.
Now let me take a moment to clarify something. As a consumer, I do not for one moment deny the retail bookstore its right to withhold information about its products from customers. However, since the bookstore is the only official source for the book list, and every student needs access to that list, I would like to see enough useful information on that list for students to be able to purchase their books wherever they see fit. If that means that the Bookstore does not get enough business from the students, they should respond by becoming more competitive in the marketplace, not by withholding necessary information from those students. I already pay thousands of dollars per year in tuition for the privilege of attending university. I should be free to purchase my books wherever it makes economic sense for me to do so.
Not satisfied with the excuses that I got from Ms. DaCosta, I contacted the purchaser for the bookstore, a Mr. Wayne Steffler and asked for some answers regarding the new policy. As his subordinate had, he gave me a slew of excuses for the new policy, and suggested that I wait until the first day of classes, when I would receive course outlines from all of my professors, which he assured me would contain ISBN numbers. On the first day of classes, it was no surprise to me that not one of my course outlines contained the information that I had requested.
In the end, I gave in and purchased all of my books at the WLU bookstore, simply because I ran out of time to fight for answers and needed to start reading for my classes. And so I have started the last term of my five excellent years at Wilfrid Laurier with a bullying from the school that has given me so much.
It turns out that the lowly student manager that I first spoke to on the phone might have been right. The bookstore seems to have changed their policy simply to force students to purchase books from them. As a retail outlet, they are entitled to protect their consumer base as much as possible, but as a university sponsored entity, and as the only official source for the book list, I think that they have gone too far. Nowhere in my agreement with the University is it stated that I must purchase my books through them at market or higher prices, especially when I could purchase them used for half the price and save myself the equivalent of a month’s worth of rent money. Unfortunately, without an ISBN number, I have no way to ensure that the text books that I purchase online will be the ones that I am required to have, and by the time that they show up at my door, it will be too late to do anything about the problem.
The following is a handy list of a few of the things that I’ve been keeping an eye on lately.
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement:
If you haven’t been reading slashdot lately, you might not know that representatives from the governments of most of the developed world have recently been participating in some top-secret meetings aimed at establishing something called the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA for short. Now, according to Michael Geist, the proposed agreement actually has very little to do with counterfeiting, and an awful lot to do with copyright protections for big content – the same guys who influenced the USA’s Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Based on leaked information, Geist has pieced together a very good explanation of the proposed agreement as an online slide show that I snagged from TVO’s Search Engine blog:
Now as you might expect, quite a few people got uppity when they found out that the government was participating in secret meetings with the aim of establishing a global copyright treaty that would bypass the house of commons and fly in the face of last summer’s copyright consultations. So many people in fact, that NDP MP Charlie Angus questioned Industry Minister Tony Clement about it during yesterday’s question period. Thanks to the work of Fair Copyright for Canada, a video of their exchange is available on YouTube:
I too am pretty incensed at the government for keeping this all as hush-hush as they have. As I understand, copyright isn’t even a law in Canada – it is in fact a right, and one that must be exercised by the right holder. In my opinion, it is not the business of the government or of the Internet at large to take care of exercising this right for the holder. Further, much of the leaked information about this law points to it having a clause that bans internet access to any person who has been accused (read: not convicted) of breaking copyright three times. If implemented, this clause would be open to abuse, and far too wide-ranging for my comfort.
Can Software Be Patented?
On a related note, the Supreme Court in the United States is apparently deciding something or other about the legitimacy of software patents this week. While I admit that I haven’t really kept up with the issue enough to appreciate its gravity, the resulting press has lead me to this incredible article on Groklaw that provides a beautiful explanation of Computation Theory and its implications on Patent law.
Of course, I learned all of the stuff in the article in school, but have never seen it explained as simply or applied as practically as the author does in the article. For those who are looking for a printed copy that will persist link rot, a PDF of the article is available here on my server. It’s a lengthy read, but most certainly worth your time if you are at all interested in computers, their history, and its implications on modern law.
Praise is a Strange Thing:
Another lengthy read, this article from New York magazine really got me thinking. It deals with the types of praise that parents give their children, and the implications of that praise throughout their lives. Essentially, there are two kinds of praise: Telling your child that he accomplished his goals because he is smart, and telling your child that she accomplished her goals because she worked hard at doing so. The former gives a false sense of achievement that doesn’t provide a framework for what to do in cases of failure. As a result, children praised in this manner tend to avoid things that they do not naturally do well at, even though they may be accomplished in other areas of life. A related article that I found over on Pixel Poppers considers the implications of this kind of research on video games. Specifically, the author discusses the ‘fake achievement’ that RPGs provide players when their characters level up in lieu of actual skills, and asks if this alone could be responsible for problems encountered in other areas of life.
Back to Studying:
Well, that’s about it for me. I’m back to procrastinating studying for finals.
In short, the concept of personal privacy in communications is possibly the most important right guaranteed to those living in a free society. It is also the single most undervalued freedom in all of Western Society. The right to say what you want to whomever you want puts governing bodies to task, enables rebellion, and ensures that those wishing to sway public opinion have to work hard to demonstrate the value of the opinions that they are trying to impress upon society.
It is thus unfortunate that technology often seems to hinder our ability to ensure personal privacy – at the very least, it makes it easy to ignore the man behind the curtain. Unless one is actively aware of the risks and works to prevent them, most common methods of technological-based communication, including Facebook, cell phones, text messages, instant messaging, web surfing and email all represent massive leaks in personal privacy. These should not be taken lightly, no matter the size of your tinfoil hat. And so, in no particular order, here are some things that you should be aware of when communicating in everyday life.
Facebook and Web 2.0 Privacy:
While this ubiquitous website has oftenbeenaccused of selling your information, I find it more strange that it’s users are surprised by the idea that a website owned by a corporation would attempt to monetize the only resources immediately available to it: the information of it’s users. To me, the more scary aspect of Facebook is the slow leak of information that it inevietably causes. Like a small memory leak in an application, it isn’t a huge problem in the short term; but given time, you lose more and more control of your information as it is perused, tagged, linked to, and otherwise aggregated by the website and it’s users.
As an example, consider the following situation: You go out drinking with friends, and do something stupid. Compromising pictures are taken, uploaded, and tagged by somebody at the bar. What do you do? Well you can un-tag them, but somebody could simply replace the tag, or mention your name in the comments. Even so, anybody who recognizes you could immediately figure out who is in the photo. You can demand the image be taken down, but are reliant on the original poster complying. And even then, who is to say how many people saved local copies of the image, saw it in their news feed, viewed the gallery, or were otherwise linked before it was removed?
Simply put, Facebook is an easy way to lose control of your personal information. Consider that anybody with a developers license (which is free) has full access to this entire API from any application that they create. The incentive to create malicious trojan applications that steal and sell off information is there. The tools with which to do it are there. And the gullible users who gladly contribute thousands of dollars worth of personal information are there. So even if Facebook is ill-deserving of the allegations of selling users’ information (doubtful), any application that you add can easily present the same danger.
When using a Web 2.0 site like Facebook, Twitter, or any other site that asks the user to post personal information on a profile, it is advisable to take a quick scan through the Terms of Service (ToS), End User Licensing Agreement (EULA), and Privacy Statement (PS) of the site. Some sites, like Facebook and even Tetris Online, post outrageous claims to user data in their ToS. While I am unaware of any court case that has established a ToS, EULA, or PS as a binding legal contract between website and user, at the time of this writing, it is safe to assume that sites could attempt to act on these ‘agreements’ should user’s violate them enough times, unknowingly or otherwise.
So what can you do? Wean yourself off the koolaid. Do you really need 300 friends with whom you will never interact in real life? How many of those applications that you’ve installed and websites that you’ve joined do you really use? Is it entirely necessary to list your favourite movies, music, books, last 10 jobs, and your educational information where anybody with an internet connection could conceivably access them? I made the decision to get rid of my Facebook account a few months ago, and have never looked back. After a week, the only thing that I missed was Tetris Friends, which I later found out is available elsewhere anyway (although I haven’t registered a user account – see Jake’s comment on the Tetris Online ToS below for the reason why). If nothing else, consider taking a stroll through the myriad of options available from the settings page of your favourite social networking site and limiting the access of non-friends to your account.
Cell Phones and GPS:
Remember the nineties movie slogan? “Shit, he’s on a cell phone. Those are untraceable!” Yeah right. By default, every cellular phone connects with two or more cell towers at any given time, and chooses the one with the strongest signal to transmit and recieve data from. This allows the phone to easily transition between towers without dropping calls while on the move. As a consequence, as long as your cellphone is on, in addition to the knowledge of what towers your phone is within range of, the phone company can locate the handset to within roughly 1-kilometer of it’s actual location by triangulation. Further, new phones often include a GPS chip that allows you to use mapping applications and geo-tag your photos. If active, the GPS chip can also transmit the location of your phone, often without your knowledge.These tracking features have many positive uses, such as enabling authorities to immediately locate the source of 9-1-1 calls, and allowing business to track the location of their employees in an effort to optimize scheduling. Unfortunately, they also have their downsides – smart phones often come with mapping applications like Google Maps that allow the user to get directions to any destination that update with respect to their location in real time. Who is to say that the almighty Goog isn’t recording all of that data, and linking it with the web-browsing habits and any email received on the same handset? While the process would certainly be undertaken in the name of increased ad-targeting abilities, having all of that relational data lying around can have dangerous side-effects if it is misused, misplaced, or simply sold.The problem of cellphone location is one inherent to the system – the ability to locate phones on the network is a natural side-effect of the way the technology works. There is little that a user can do to prevent their phone from being triangulated. GPS however, is another matter. Many phones give users the options to turn off GPS functionality, or even to limit access to the GPS radio to certain applications. Since I am paranoid, my blackberry is set to disallow Google Maps access to the GPS radio except when I explicitly allow it. This prevents the application from unintentionally spewing my location to Google without my knowledge. As previously mentioned, cameras in newer cellphones that also have GPS can record location information into images taken by the device. Users can turn this functionality off by default, which is a good idea if you intend to upload the photos to social-networking sites or other easily-accessible locations.
SMS Text Messages and Instant Messaging: At the end of 2007, an astounding 74% of cell phone subscribers used the SMS text messaging features of their phones. In the book ‘How to be Invisible’ by J.J. Luna, the author reveals that federal law in the USA requires that ‘all billable information [regarding a text message] be maintained for ten to fifteen years,’ including the message contents, date and time of sending and receipt, and the phone numbers of both sender and receiver. Remember the warnings about putting revealing information on the back of a postcard? The same applies to text messages, except that post cards aren’t kept on file by the postal service.Unfortunately, there is no easy solution to the SMS problem. Like post cards, users are best to simply limit what they say via these channels, as they are unencrypted, heavily logged, and contain plenty of identifying information.
The privacy situation surrounding Instant Messaging programs like MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and even IRC is in a similar state of disrepair. In order to ensure that MSN Messenger simply works on any machine, regardless of your network situation, all messages are sent from your computer, through a single connection to Microsoft servers, and then forwarded to the intended recipient(s). Messages can be logged on your machine, that of the recipient, or even at the Microsoft servers. Further, all messages are sent in unencrypted plain text that any server along the path from your computer to the recipient can log and store. By the distributed nature of the internet, the very thing that makes it so powerful, the path between any two machines generally consists of 10-15 intermediate hops. (You can check the virtual ‘distance’ between yourself and various institutions in many countries at this website.) That means that between you and your friend, there are 20-30 computers and the Microsoft servers, all of which are capable of logging anything that you say in your conversation.
Luckily, this problem is far more easily solved than that of SMS messaging. Third-party messenging clients like Pidgin allow you to connect to multiple networks (like MSN, Yahoo, Gmail, and even Facebook chat) at once, and offer an optional plugin called Off the Record (OTR) that can automatically encrypt any messages sent between you and a client that also has OTR running. It is easy to install and mindless to use, and should be a standard feature in every commercial instant messaging application. The only downside to Pidgin is that it looks ugly on Windows machines, but this is offset by it’s plugin abilities, and the fact that it can replace multiple IM clients.
Web Surfing and Internet Connectivity:
Many people don’t realize what the act of viewing a web page actually is. When you load up this page, your computer contacts my web server, requests the page, and begins to download it to your machine, and then processes and displays the page in your web browser. That means that when you look at this page, all of it’s text, images, and other content are stored in a folder on your computer called the browser cache.
Along with the history of visited pages that many browsers keep, this information can be used by any person with access to your machine to figure out what web pages you have recently viewed. Further, many web pages leave a file behind on your computer called a ‘cookie’ that contains information that allows web sites to ‘remember’ who you are, which lets them store things like your user name and password, your preferences, or the things in your shopping cart. Again, these files can show people with access to your machine not only what sites you have recently visited, but with what account you logged into them, and potentially, what you did while logged on to the site. You can easily clear the cache, cookies and history from most browsers, or choose not to save them at all.
Additionally, because the internet is just a massive network of computers, any time you request a page, that request and all of the content that you download from the server hosting the page can travel through multiple servers, and can potentially be logged at any one of them. Further, many internet service providers keep detailed logs of your web browsing activity that authorities or unscrupulous employees can gain access to and misuse. Lastly, in the age of widespread digital piracy, manyproviders employ a technology called deep packet inspection to determine what your computer is uploading and downloading while connected to the internet. This technology looks inside the messages that your machine sends, determines their contents, and whether or not they should be blocked or limited. By it’s very nature, it also has the ability to snoop on any unencrypted data that you are sending, including your web requests and instant messaging conversations.
Protecting your information online is a tough thing to do. Of primary concern is the browser program that you use to view web pages. Older browsers like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 have major security holes that can be used by nasty websites to steal your personal information or to install annoying programs on your computer without you doing anything out of the ordinary. Make sure that you have the latestversion of your browser of choice installed. Secondly, be careful about what kind of information you give to websites. Do you really need accounts on websites that you use once a month? Putting your name or email address up on these sites can increase spam email, and lead to identity or data theft issues – all of the issues raised during the discussion about Facebook and Instant Messaging apply doubly here. For example, if searching for a job, are resume sites like Monster.ca really necessary? Putting your resume (which contains a bunch of personal information and all of your contact information) up online can lead to some devastating consequences. Finally, make sure that you have updated virus protection and firewall software installed and running on your computer at all times, and turn the machine off when you aren’t using it. If you’re really concerned about your online privacy, look into Tor, a program that encrypts your web traffic and forwards it through a bunch of random servers all over the world so that intermediate servers have no idea where the request is coming from or what data was transferred.
Email: All email communications should be considered in the same category as Post Cards and SMS Text Messages. They are unencrypted, used worldwide, and sent through hundreds of servers that all have the ability to snoop or store copies along their journey from machine to machine. Further, webmail addresses like those available from Gmail or Windows Live store your email on their servers (sometimes indefinetly), where the messages and the information that they contain are out of your control and suceptible to snooping by authorities or unscrupulous employees.
To protect yourself while using email, you should limit the amount of sensitive business or personal information that is sent via unencrypted channels. Further, look into PGP, a (usually) free protocol that can encrypt or digitally sign all of your communications so that others cannot tamper with them. Plugins are available for most commercial email programs, although the best one that I’ve seen is the enigmail plugin for Mozilla’s Thunderbird application. Microsoft Outlook does not ship with default PGP functionality, and most of the third-party plugins that I’ve used are a pain at best and non-functional at worst. Lastly, try to limit your use of webmail, or at the very least, the amount of information that you leave on the remote servers. I use Gmail, but have Microsoft Outlook set up on my desktop which downloads all of my email, saves it locally, and deletes the copies from the server after 30 days.
Bonus Section: Safely Deleting and Protecting your Files: While not strictly a communication issue, many computer users don’t understand how the process of deleting a file on their computer actually works. When you delete a file on Windows, it is removed from it’s original location and sent to a folder called the Recycle Bin so that you can restore it in case you deleted it accidentally. However, even when you empty the Recycle Bin, the file is not physically removed from your machine. In order to save time, Windows simply marks the file as deleted, but never actually removes the data from your hard drive. If, at a later time, the system needs that space, it will over-write the file. But if your computer has a large hard drive that you never fill, chances are that the file can live on in the ‘empty’ space of your hard drive for years to come. Once marked deleted, many freely and commercially available programs can restore most or all of the file’s contents so long as they haven’t been overwritten by new files.
Because of this functionality, you should always assume that when you delete a file on your computer, it is for all intents and purposes, still available to anybody who cares to look for it. However, you can ensure that the file is safely deleted by using a program called a File Shredder that overwrites the file with random data, making it nearly impossible to ever recover. I would reccommend a free application called Eraser that allows you to shred any file directly from the right-click menu in windows, and can be scheduled to shred the contents of any folder or all of the free space on your hard drive at regular intervals.
A file shredder can be used to improve your security by securely deleting the contents of your recycle bin, free space on your hard drive, internet browser cache and cookie files, old email, and the porn that you downloaded that you don’t want your wife or boss to find on your machine. It’s easy to set up, integrates directly into Windows, and works without a second thought. Just beware – once a file has been shredded, it’s gone for good. Make sure that you aren’t going to need it before shredding it.
Finally, to prevent people unwarranted access to your sensitive data, look into a full-disk encryption application like TrueCrypt. It encrypts your entire hard drive and refuses anybody access until they enter a secret password that you set. Windows Passwords are good for preventing access to your machine, but if an attacker removes your hard drive and pops it into another computer, the Windows password doesn’t help you in the slightest. Full-disk encryption however, makes it extremely hard, if not impossible, to get at your files unless you personally unlock the machine.
The more expensive versions of Windows do offer a file encryption system called Encrypting File System (EFS) that can optionally encrypt your files and folders with a combination of symmetric- and public-key cryptography, similar to the system used by PGP. One potential problem with the scheme lies in the fact your Windows password and decryption password are one and the same. When you log in to Windows, the operating system transparently decrypts any files that are requested by applications. As long as you have a strong Windows password that you change every so often, this can be a good solution; however, by default, TrueCrypt encourages the use of two separate passwords and demands the first before Windows even boots, which can be far more secure (as long as the attacker chooses to boot Windows and not a separate OS from a CD or DVD drive if they get past the TrueCrypt password). Secondly, EFS does not provide full-disk encryption. Instead, it allows the user to choose which files and folders they would like to encrypt. This is generally alright, except that many programs leave digital litter around your hard drive that may not be encrypted under this scheme. For example, if you encrypt a Word document and then open it, Word can create a series of unencrypted temp files on your drive while you work on the file. Unless you wipe the free space on your drive on a regular basis, this may not be desireable when working on sensitive. If an attacker were to pull the hard drive from your machine, they could gain access to any files that you had not expressly set as encrypted by EFS. For this reason, full-disk encryption provides a better out-of-sight, out-of-mind solution that is guaranteed to protect all of your sensitive data.
Alright, if you’re still here after that massive article, I hope that you found it informative, enlightening, and easy to understand. Technology can seem tough and scary, but it doesn’t have to be that way. With a little bit of well-placed education, anybody can understand and improve the security of their communications in an effort to protect themselves from identity theft, unwanted intrusions, and overzealous authorities.
As this kind of stuff is a hobby of mine, I will be happy to answer any questions raised by or not covered by the post – leave me a comment!
Cheers,
Jonathan
Edit: Thanks to Tyler for pointing out that Enigmail for Thunderbird is an optional plugin, and is not included by default, as well as the information about Window’s EFS technology. Also thanks to Jake for pointing out the importance of reading the ToS of your favourite websites.
A few more excellent TED talks that I’ve recently stumbled on:
Malcolm Gladwell on what we can learn from spaghetti sauce: As per usual, Gladwell challenges the idea of “common sense” and gets you thinking in ways that you normally don’t.
Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice: Does freedom of choice really make us happier as a people?
Bill Gates on what we can do right now to change the world: As a lifelong believer of giving people the tools to solve problems well within their reach, Gates poses simple solutions to seemingly complex problems. His argument is that some problems don’t get solved simply because the market is not motivated to tackle them. What can we do to change that?
If you have a few minutes to be challenged, do drop by the TED website and listen to some smart people.
This week on SlightlySauced, our regular crew is joined by special guest Greg Lehman to talk about the impact of the lowly text message on the inhabitants of countries with less developed infrastructures. Listen in to find out how the technology that we take for granted is making a positive impact on those without access to the utilities of communication tha […]
Jon
The primary contributor to and maintainer of the site
Steph
My girlfriend, who sometimes posts her writings
Downloads
Charles Darwin
An essay that I wrote about Charles Darwin’s contributions to Science and Society for a history class at WLU
DRM Essay
An essay that I wrote for an Ethics class I took at Laurier that examines DRM, the USA DMCA, and the failures of both as security against piracy
iTunes Playlist Exporter
Exports all of the songs in any iTunes playlist file to any location on your computer. Originally written to load a blackberry or other mp3 player with music.
MAX 3D Engine
A not quite finished 3D engine written in C++ and OpenGL for my CP411 computer graphics course.
Ted Rogers
A paper that I wrote about Ted Rogers’ personal and business pursuits for a history class at WLU
The Battle of the Atlantic
An essay exploring the lessons learned by both sides during the Battle of the Atlantic in WWII. The essay explores the military and industrial capabilities of the combatants, the technology behind the Enigma and Allied code breaking efforts at Bletchley P
Tile-Based Map Editor
Written in VB for my top-down XNA rpg, allows easy creation of 2D tile-based maps, and exports to both a PNG pallete and an XML map description. Use it or modify it as you see fit.
Bus Error
Jake Billo’s excellent weblog, always good for a laugh or some handy info.
Matthew Good Online
The excellent (although sometimes jaded) blog of Canadian musician Matthew Good.
MusikPolice @ Last.fm
My profile over at Last.fm, one of the few social networking sites that I use.
The Linux Experiment
Seven Windows users with varying levels of Linux experience attempt to run it various distributions on their primary computers for four months. Hilarity ensues.
TylerBurton.ca
The blog of fellow computer enthusiast Tyler Burton, who uses it primarily as a showcase of software he’s written.
