Alex Reid

Watching this TED Talk by tech activist Jennifer Pahlka reminded me of my days working at City Hall over a decade ago. It was the turn of the century and the City of Winnipeg was just starting to use GIS and geo-mapping tools, and ten years later, they’re using a 311 system, but there still lacks a collaborative community system for neighbours to help neighbours.

The tools exist for cities to engage its citizens, and those tools are easy to use, low cost and offer a wealth of information, whether it be a Twitter feed, a wiki site, or a collaborative knowledgebase.

We’re not going to fix government until we fix citizenship.

~ Jennifer Pahlka

I was looking at Trend Micro’s web site following yesterday’s post and I found this interesting online guide titled How Social Engineering Works concerning how not to be tricked online.

This should be sent to everyone’s parents.

I will warn you though that this guide is written by a computer security company for the novice, so it can be a scary read for those new to the Internet.

There’s one part of the guide that suggests that cybercriminals are like “bad guys holding a gun to your back to take your money” but “don’t inflict that much harm unless you give in”. What?.. This is terrible advice. Bad guys holding a gun to your back are not harmless, but that’s beside the point. Cybercrooks are more like snake oil salespeople trying to steal your banking and identity information; they are data terrorists.

It’s a good starter guide. More people should educate themselves about how scams can work, and in general, question what they see and hear.

Seriously, I think more English teachers could engage students by acknowledging that (most) rap is often a poetry challenge.

Check out this rap battle between a kid and an English teacher (NSFW). Also check out Mr. Mark Grist’s web site.

As I get older, looking after myself has become more of priority; especially watching my weight. I began putting on weight after I took on a stressful job ten years ago and my weight has slowly gotten out of hand.

I’m not fat obese, but I’m certainly not as trim as I’d like to be.

An application that has proved very useful to me is Lose It! which is available both as a web site application and an iPhone application. It’s probably my most used iPhone app, after my communication tools.

You enter in everything you eat and it calculates your fat, carbs, protein and more (if you want) daily and weekly, sending you email reports every weekend. It also displays a variety of reports on the macronutrients you consume and the exercise done to burn off excess calories.

In the last few months, I’ve learned what I consume too much of and what I consume not enough of. As well, it puts emphasis on exercise. In short, it’s made me more aware of what goes in and what I burn off.

You can set goals for yourself, much like Wii Fit, and you can add your friends ala social networking, so that you and your friends can encourage each other.

At the time that I write this post, Lose It! now has 1 million users and handles thousands of users at any given time. Lose It! was the top free iPhone Health and Fitness application in both 2009 and 2010.

Whether you have an iPhone or an iPad or not, I highly suggest using their web site.

HBO’s The Wire, is now part of the curriculum at the Johns Hopkins University.

As reported by the Baltimore Sun, Professor Peter Beilenson believed that talking about the show would be an entertaining way to get students to discuss the “complex web of problems faced by American cities.”

Apparently this isn’t a new idea, as Harvard, Duke and Berkeley, also have built courses around the widely-acclaimed television show. However, Hopkins has the advantage of being in Baltimore and included some of the people that the characters were based on, such as State Attorney Patricia Jessamy and the former Baltimore commissioner Ed Norris (who ironically plays a cop who bemoans the poor state of the Baltimore police department on the show itself). And of course, for the slam dunk, the show creator and producer David Simon was brought in.

The show’s 60 episodes would be the textbook and the class sessions would feature experts explaining how they wrestle with the same issues in reality.

While Simon had always said he wanted the show to serve as a pretext to the larger discussion around the social constructs of society, students are loving the class because they “get to watch TV for homework.”