Matsu’s World: The One Less Traveled

Most of you have heard about all of the technology work and call center work from Western countries moving to India over the past decade. But wait, there’s more! Outsourcing has moved to an all new level. Now you can outsource your programming homework to a person in India. (I sure hope my son is not reading this post.)

A recent Slashdot post pointed readers to this story about students who have been outsourcing their coding homework to people in India. I suppose it was just a matter of time. After all, school papers on all sorts of topics have been available for sale on the Internet for a long time, and a lot of global corporations have been outsourcing their software development to India, why not combine the two?

This is not much different than having your roommate do your homework (for a small fee). With the time differences you can literally send your homework assignment to your “homework buddy” in India before you go to bed and while you sleep the programming homework will be written so when you wake up, you are done!

How many more ways can a person cheat? As long as people are creative, there will always be some new trick. This is just a little more high-tech and international than most.

I wonder if someone in India can write my departmental annual report for me…

This week I have been in British Columbia, Canada. I was attending the annual CCCU Technology conference with two of my colleagues (well, there were a LOT of colleagues, but just two of them work with me — Bert W., and Don H.).

This year Trinity Western University hosted the conference. Steve M. and his helpers did a wonderful job. It was a great trip where lots of fun and professional development took place.

I woke up at 4:00am this morning to begin the long trip home. One of the airline flights ran late, so the trip took longer than expected. I will give a more complete post with a summary of things I learned after I’ve had some sleep. In the mean time, let me say how great it was to see Steve M., Gary H., Rick D., Chris M., Gary F., Judy D. (yup, another shout out to Whitworth!), and so many other friends and colleagues from other CCCU schools. It was also wonderful to make some new friends and welcome some first-time attendees. I hope they got as much out of the conference as I did.

Oh, and before I forget, let me say how much we all missed our good friend and colleague, Scott T. from CBU. We are all glad you are getting better and look forward to seeing you in perfect health, again. You remain in our thoughts and prayers!

Now, I’m off to catch up on some much needed sleep.

This morning during an informal coffee break at work (well, it’s Friday so it was during the donut break) I mentioned the recent release of all of Charles Darwin’s works online by Cambridge University. That seemed to be news to the group of people I work with so I thought I’d post the information here for them to easily navigate to information about this new online content.

If you want to read about the project and the release of Darwin’s work, check out this Wired magazine article.

Or, you can just go straight to the Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online and begin reading digitized copies of his many writings.

I live in central Kentucky (USA). Today a winter storm went through the state (well, it’s still going on right now, so it’s not through, yet).

I just noticed that one of the school cancellations at the bottom of the television screen is for the Kentucky Beekeeper School. I had no idea that beekeepers had their own school.

I learn something new every day. I wonder what the bees do when the beekeepers take a day off.

A few years ago a book titled “The World is Flat” was written by economist, Thomas Friedman. No, Mr. Friedman is not a member of the Flat Earth Society. The premise of the book is not that Christopher Columbus was wrong when he said the world was round and set out to sail West from Europe to reach the Far East. Instead, the premise of the book is that there are no barriers to competing on a global scale — the playing field is level — or flat. With today’s technology (especially technology like the Internet) political, geographical, racial, and even religious boundaries disappear.

Last weekend when I began to hear and read reports of the political and social upheaval in Kenya I immediately thought of a friend of mine. This friend owns and operates a free discussion board about Kenya. It was one of the earliest ones set up and since it’s hosted outside of Kenya, it’s immune from any influence from the government. This also let’s people be free to say what they want, hopefully without any chance of retaliation (assuming they decide to keep their identity private). He once blogged (here) about someone who didn’t like what was being posted on that discussion board and wanted my friend, as the sysadmin, to remove the post(s). Of course, the idea of “freedom of speech” is that people are free to express their opinions. Needless to say, with all of the sad and tragic things happening in the aftermath of the botched election in Kenya the discussion board is much busier than normal.

More than any point in history social and political injustices happening around the world can be documented and communicated to anyone (or everyone) no matter where they are in the world. The ubiquitousness of technology like digital cameras and digital video means that photos and video can be made of events and violence as it happens. Then, with the Internet and sites that provide free hosting of photo or video recordings and the availability of free blogging services anyone can publish what they capture. Why is it that when a government wants to control a people they start with the media? Because communication is power.

There is a lot of very sad news coming out of Kenya. The images and video footage of the riots and violence is really tragic. Thanks to Ruth, I just found out about this list of blogs covering the events in Kenya. I hope and pray that all of this communication enabled by technology will make a difference and people will come to the aid of the innocent Kenyans being injured or killed and their property destroyed.

I wish there was more that I could do about Kenya. Living in a flat world doesn’t necessarily prevent nor stop injustice and violence inflicted on innocent people.