Disaster Area

Accessible Technology - On the Road to CSUN with Gary and Dan

Some friends of mine, Gary and Dan, who work at Microsoft in their accessibility organization are videoblogging and tweeting their way from Seattle to San Diego this past week on their road trip to the 27th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference aka CSUN (for Cal State Uni Northridge, where the conference originated).

One of the things I have come to appreciate as I have been exposed to it over the years is accessible technology. What is accessible technology? Basically anything that allows people with disabilities or functional limitations to participate fully in society - limited by only their own desires rather than as lack of access to all that life has to offer.

The earliest accessible technologies were things like braille and guide dogs for the blind. These are still of immense importance in the world of accessibility, but the meteoric rise in the capability of personal computers and the internet has created both a fantastic opportunity to connect people and a great challenge to make it accessible to everyone.

How accessibility technology advances in the connected world is a complex interweaving of hardware companies, software companies, advocacy organizations, charitable foundations, government policy making and the sheer determination of individuals coming up with solutions to problems they deal with every day.

Dan and Gary have an itinerary that has them dropping in on many companies and agancies on their way down the west coast. Fortunately, the west coast is ripe with opportunities to find out more about accessible technologies.

From a senior center to Boundless Technology and ViewPlus Technologies to rural communities and guide dogs for the blind, the video snippets do a great job of highlighting the need for assistive technologies and how those needs are being met.

My favorite though is when Dan and Gary visit Yahoo! which highlights how technology companies can collaborate to provide the best possible experience for the end user. Alan Brightman, Yahoo's Chief of Accessibility is a great interview. Biggest takeway -building in accessiblity from the start costs about 2% of the cost of a project. Adding it later the cost is 100% - i.e. you have to spend all that money all over again. The same general principle holds for all kinds of desing - airplanes included. It's best just to get the requirements right at the beginning...

Workplace Perception

Mostly true...

I guess this would require some modification for the engineering world. But I'm pretty sure the Project manager's line (as perceived by...) would stay the same.

Washington State Budget Crisis!!!

Times are tight here in (the other) Washington.

From the Governor's blog:

The magnitude and depth of this recession has made one thing clear — business as usual can no longer be the norm.

Our state faces a budget shortfall of historic proportions.

Often when financial crises hit, the magnitude of the crisis is well, magnified greatly by the rhetoric. Governments tend not to pay much attention when everything is going along just fine, spending every dime they can get like a drunken sailor on shore leave (all political parties - they just like to spend it on different stuff - remember how much the deficit went down under George W. Bush? - Ha!)

The following is a chart of the Washington state biennial budget for the last ten years and the upcoming projections:

CRISIS!!!!

 

The little blue line at the top right is the original budget proposed by the governor before we discovered that well, not that much money would be coming in. The crisis budget is still $2B more than the 2007-2009 biennium and only $2B less than the current biennium (or about 3%). So, as usual, the roughly $5B shortfall is only a reduction from the $3B increase that was planned.

Now, it's true that state budgets ought to be somewhat proportional to inflation and population growth. In the last 12 years, the state budget has outpaced inflation and population by 10%. The truth is there has always been enough money to do what the government needs to do, it's just that the government's appetite for new programs is pretty much insatiable. And once started they can't be stopped, because of the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" quid pro quo that is the nature of political horsetrading. Keep going and pretty soon you end up with taxation and government control like, say, France or England.

So really, the state budget "crisis" is nothing more than the government growth bubble bursting. Welcome to the real world, albeit a couple of years too late.

Two Hundred Years of Progress

This has been around for a while, but I thought I'd lob it out there with a few comments.

This is Hans Rosling's 4 minute look at longevity and affluence through the last 200 years. It's a slick way to show how data changes over time. I've seen people quibble over his definitions of wealth and longevity, but he does paint an extraordinary picture in a mere 4 minutes. You can see the impact of the Industrial Revolution, both World Wars, the progress made in the West and the catching up of most of the rest of the world. What's interesting to me are the countries that go against the general trend.

For instance, if you look carefully at around 1939 and you can see a mid-size European country drop to almost zero life expectancy and then bounce back up by the end of the war. I'm guessing that was Poland that got flattened. Then watch China in the late 1950's bounce like a basketball.

Post WW2, Africa (blue dots) was unsurprisingly lagging behind as most colonies just started to become independent about then, but got swept along for a couple of decades with rising world trends, and then it stopped. The rest of the world kept improving, leaving the majority of Africa languishing.

Rosling's point about regions in China having different health and wealth could, of course, apply to any country. New York and West Virginia in the US are quite different, as are Surrey and Tyne & Wear in the UK.

But overall, a fascinating way to look at history. The point is not so much what questions Rosling answers, as much as the ones it provokes us to ask ourselves and dig deeper.

AP: Obama announces new US approach on development

For too long, Obama said, U.S. policy has been defined by the amount of money spent and food and medicines delivered.

"But aid alone is not development," he said. "Development is helping nations to actually develop, moving from poverty to prosperity. And we need more than just aid to unleash that change."

Obama said the U.S. also is changing its view of the ultimate goal of development. He said that some U.S. aid has saved lives in the short term — such as food aid for millions of starving people around the world — but that it hasn't always improved those societies over the long term.

"That's dependence, and it's a cycle we need to break," Obama said.

via www.google.com

Interesting... it's about time someone noticed the lack of development in Africa, despite enormous amounts of aid over the last few decades. Aid is just, well, a band-aid on the problem. Nothing will change unless governance changes and civil rights are properly and universally acknowledged and promoted from within.

Female education vital for all MDGs, says UN Goodwill Ambassador

“An educated woman is an educated family and an educated country since women represent more than half the population in most countries today,” she said. “When women have no access to education all other (MDG) efforts are doomed to fail.

“Access to primary education is vital since it has a run-on impact on all other MDGs, it even determines the success and survival of some, like women’s empowerment.”

via www.un.org

I believe this is the most important of the Millennium Development Goals. Educated women have choices, which leads to smaller families that subsequently impact all of the other goals.

Slow Fade...

This is what happens when a company loses its way, gets overtaken, forgets what made it great in the first place...

Church of England take note - without a share price it's not so obvious what's happening. If irrelevance can creep up on big name company like Kodak, even with an obvious scorecard in front of them, how much easier is it when there are precious few objective measurements?

International Women's Day - Hurrah!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, what with the work trip to the UK a couple of weeks ago and then last week being occupied mostly by a not so fun medical procedure (nothing serious, and maybe more later - oh wait, no, sorry, I promised a friend I wouldn't - never mind).

The important event this past weekend was International Women’s Day on Saturday March 8. I’m not a big fan of special days or weeks or months for things (The International Day for Three-Legged Blind Dachshunds being a case in point), but this one is important.

In my opinion, the two most important Millennium Development Goals are Promote Gender Equality and Empower Women and Improve Maternal Health. The evidence from around the world shows that educating women has the largest positive effect on societal development. The effect is particularly evident in reproductive health, where sex education, and in particular birth control, always results in women having fewer babies, thereby stabilizing entire communities. Getting off the constant pregnancy/birth treadmill does wonders for not just the health of the women but the communities they live in, too. It's no big secret that the most godforsaken places on earth feature the highest birth rates and highest infant and maternal mortality rates.

Marking International Women’s Day, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour had this (among other things) to say:

“Many States appear to have simply ignored the commitments they have made. It is shameful that, in the 60th anniversary year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, fundamental rights are still not enjoyed by many women around the world.”

The leveling of the playing field needs to continue everywhere. Even in the enlightened West there is still a long way to go before women get a decent hold on what might be called equality. It’s a crying shame that one of the last bastions of male privilege remains "the church". Replace “States” with “Churches” in the previous quoted paragraph and you still wouldn’t be far wrong.

Kathy Escobar, a contributor to the Emerging Women blog, has a really great post about women finding their voice in the Emergent “conversation”. It’s apparently still a bit like trying to order two pints of lager and a packet of crisps in a crowded British pub where the barman doesn’t know you, but still, you have to start somewhere. In particular, she highlights these thoughts, and expands on them very well:

• The only way this (restoration and reconciliation in the church) can begin to happen is if power (aka: leadership, voice, value) begins to shift.
• Those without power need to begin to step into it.
• Power is not finite. If someone gives up power, it doesn’t mean that there’s now less power in the room. It actually means that there’s more power in the room.
• Don’t underestimate how much tending and nurturing this shift is going to take.

Number three strikes me as particularly important, because to too many people in power, power sharing is seen as a zero sum game, when in fact it isn’t. Acknowledging other smart people doesn’t make you less smart. It may make you feel less superior, but shouldn’t that be a good thing?

Well, it may be a day or two late, here’s to women the world round. You deserve more than a lousy single day anyway.

And About Engineering Talent...

Seth Godin has an interesting post about how companies view employees. I've never liked the term "Human Resources" because, as Seth notes, it basically says that Human Resources (HR) views people as a natural resource, like lumber. One log is much like any other log.

He wonders what would happen if the department changed its name to "Talent" and its focus as well. Interesting, because for a short while my company's HR department changed its name to "People". Didn't last long, though, for reasons I'll leave to your imagination.

What Exactly is Fair Trade Anyway?

Hat tip to bobbie for this one. Reason magazine has a very nice article exposing the fraud that is Fair Trade.

Any reasonable study of the interactions of people ought to tell you that anything - ANY THING - is only worth what someone else will pay for. If the world were a truly "fair" place, then people who grow, say, coffee, would get the fair market price for it - i.e. the highest price anyone is willing to pay for it.

The reason this method rarely works is not because of evil buyers who are trying to screw the last penny out of the growers, it's because of the interventions of governments and organizations that attempt to manipulate the system. Think of the European Union subsidies to big euro agriculture (wine lakes, butter mountains) - paying farmers NOT to produce anything.

Same in the US. The Environmental Working Group notes that US farm subsidies totaled $104 billion over the last ten years. That represents an enormous tilt in a real global economic fair trade system. It's actually a pretty small amount in terms of the magnitude of the industry here, but it's huge leverage against foreign growers.

I guess my basic point here is that any deliberate political intervention in a system, whether by governments or by "well-meaning" activist groups inevitably screws up the concept of "fairness".