Ash aftermath – Finnair and Vodafone charge exorbitant rates when trying to rebook flights

I’m sure that other people caught up in the air traffic chaos must be finding out now just how much their ‘phone bills have been charged when trying to rebook their flights!

I’m appalled to discover that it has cost me more than £600 in ‘phone charges – as a direct result of Finnair’s policies. To rebook or try to rearrange flights, Finnair gave a number that people in Finland had to call – +358 600 140 140 . What they did not say was that users were going to be charged even when their automatic statement that the lines were too busy and so could not even be answered was playing (in multiple languages)! Yes, the Finnair site did say that there was a small charge per “answered call” – but not even getting in the queue to have a human answer does not seem to me to count as an “answer”. So, every time I placed a call and I could not even get into the queue, it cost me £5.50 – even for 6 seconds! Then, when one passed that hurdle, and actually got into the queue to be answered, they kept charging. Every time I waited to be able to book a flight home, the call was being charged. And they were so busy, that callers had to wait a very long time. Eventually, waiting for 39 minutes before being answered, and then having a 6 minute and 6 second call cost me £246.53. At least I did get a flight home….

This is absolutely outrageous. Vodafone, my ‘phone provider refuse to do anything about it, and likewise Finnair. Let’s hope my insurers are feeling sympathetic. Under such unusual conditions, Finnair should have provided a freephone number, or at the very least have informed people that they were being charged even when waiting to receive a human answer. But what else were passengers expected to do? People who wanted to get rebooked onto another flight had to call that number. This is unquestionably profiteering at the expense of stranded customers! Guess I will therefore change my ‘phone supplier and never fly Finnair again. What have other people been charged by their ‘phone providers and airlines?

…….

Now I am really angry – I wrote to Finnair about this, and this is the e-mail reply I have just received “We have had a lot of customer contacts in recent days, so we regret any delay in responding to your feedback. We will reply to you as soon as possible.The estimated answering time is 2-3 months. All the contacts will be handled in order of arrival. Thank you for your patience”.

Am definitely never flying Finnair again if I can possibly help it!!!!

OLPC and the East African Community

A report today by the BBC highlights that a new partnership has been established between One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and the East African Community (EAC) to deliver 30 million laptops in the region by 2015. As the report goes on to say, the EAC first needs to raise cash for the laptops! It also comments that “OLPC has had difficulty selling its computers and its alternative vision of education around the world”.

I find such announcements hugely worrying. There have been sufficient critiques published on the OLPC model for governments, donors, and all those involved in education to be aware of the fundamental difficulties associated with its roll out (see for example Bob Kozma‘s comments in 2007, David Hollow‘s 2009 account of their introduction in Ethiopia, Scott Kipp‘s comments in 2009, and Ivan Krstic’s devastating critique of the concept and its implementation at the UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning Fifth International Seminar in 2008).

Let me here highlight what I see as being some of the most important issues:

Cost – 30 million laptops at $200 each amounts to $6,000 million. Might this money not be more effectively spent in other ways, such as providing teachers in East Africa with better training, or even simply remunerating them better so that they do not have to do several jobs at once in order to support their families?
Pedagogic model – is there one? OLPC has claimed to be an educational initiative, but a fundamental problem with most OLPC roll outs has been that they have not been integrated into the existing educational structures. In the worst instances, the laptops have been given to children but not to their teachers. The tensions that this causes are immense.
Lack of Content – the OLPC vision is “To create educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children by providing each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, joyful, self-empowered learning”. The problem is that there is very little available learning content suitably designed and integrated with the curricula in the countries where the laptops are being introduced. Simply expecting young people to be able to learn by connecting to the internet is like throwing someone into the sea and expecting them to swim.
Monitoring and Evaluation – there have been too few rigorous monitoring and evaluation studies to be able to say with any certainty what the impact of these computers might be in Africa. Surely, we should undertake high quality studies of the educational impact before spending such huge amounts of money on rolling them out?
Who gets them? This is a real issue. In many instances, the choice about where the computers are given reflects social, economic and political interests. The sampling strategy for the roll outs needs to be thought through extremely carefully, and not just left to some enthusiastic youth volunteers (as in the OLPCorps programme – the selection of participants for which is itself highly problematic and controversial). If XO computers do have a beneficial effect, then why should only some young people (in most cases those who are already privileged in some way) benefit from them? Will they go to the poorest and most marginalised, those who most need help in isolated rural areas? Ethiopia alone has an estimated 9 million children out of school. Will they receive laptops?
External technology-led initiatives – most of the evidence suggests that top-down, externally-driven and technology-led initiatives are much less successful than initiatives that are explicitly designed and tailored to the needs and aspirations of the people for whom they are intended. It is crucial that we begin with the educational needs of people in East Africa, and then identify the most cost-effective way of delivering on them. As Bob Kozma says, “Is this an education project or merely a laptop project?”.
Sustainability – what happens when the first batch of computers breaks down, or becomes outdated? Let’s be generous, and estimate that each might last five years. Can East Africa afford another $6,000 million in five years time? What will happen to the debris of the old computers? How will their materials be recycled, or will they just be dumped?
The technology? There are some great things about the technical achievements in creating the OLPC XO laptops – but anecdotal evidence suggests that actually it is not quite as good and effective as is often claimed. In particular, there have been numerous issues with the mesh networking and connectivity when actually rolled out into the rural village conditions of Africa.

So, I ask again, why does there remain such euphoria about the OLPC initiative? Surely, the East African Community has better things to spend its money on? If only it could find the funds to support good education effectively, that would be a start! Nicholas Negroponte is a charismatic and enthusiastic champion of OLPC, but is it not time that he recognises that his vision is fundamentally flawed? African governments have better things to do than to be beguiled into spending their limited resources on such a delusional concept.

Go and ogle in Southampton and beyond…

Having just posted my last reflection on “Go, ogle”, I was in Southampton on Sunday and there it was – “Ogle Road”! This must be where the Google camera van/car/snowmobile/tricycles hang out when it’s dark and they cannot take the photos that their ‘masters’ want.

It did, though, also make me reflect further on the ethical issues surrounding Google’s Street View ‘technology’. Much has already been written about this, but with the advent of Google’s 4th generation cameras that take near-HD quality images, and continuing debate in the EU about privacy issues associated with Street View, for which we should all be grateful, it is worth once again highlighting some of the issues that this raises.

A recent report by Claudia Rach for Bloomberg Businessweek has some interesting comments from Michael Jones, Google’s chief technology advocate and founder of Google Earth:

“I think we would consider whether we want to drive through Europe again, because it would make the expense so draining”
“I think that privacy is more important than technology but for privacy people it is only about privacy but for us it is also about technology”

The first of these was partly in response to the suggestion that Google should only keep unblurred images for 6 months instead of a year. Again, quoting from Rach’s report, Peter Fleischer, a Google lawyer in charge of privacy issues, said “The need to retain the unblurred images is legitimate and justified — to ensure the quality and accuracy of our maps, to improve our ability to rectify mistakes in blurring, as well as to use the data we have collected to build better maps products for our users”. This means that Google keep all this information unblurred on their servers – which, of course, means that Google and its relevant employees have access to it. What happens when someone hacks into this information, or a government asks for it in connection with some important state ‘need’?

Jones’ second comment above is indeed surprising. There is little evidence that Google has ever put privacy above technology. Its technological prowess has been at the forefront of raising new ethical questions – one of which is indeed about privacy.

So, just to add to the debate, I thought I would come up with a list of ten interesting uses for Street View:

for car thieves wanting to plan where to steal particular brands of car to order – just look on people’s drives
for double glazing companies (or for that matter firms offering to redo your drive) to target individual houses that might be ripe for marketing – individualised targeted mailings
for revolutionaries (or what governments in capitalist countries call ‘terrorists’) to decide where best to plant explosive devices to cause maximum damage
for people wanting to reconstruct buildings on streets that have been destroyed by earthquakes (or other such disasters) – you can see how it looked a year ago
for burglars wanting to find the quickest getaway having robbed a property (see Phil Muncaster’s summary on v3.co.uk)
for recognising what your friends were doing when the Google car passed – yes, of course you can recognise people even with their faces blurred
for checking out those naked sunbathers
for finding exactly what that pub that your friends took you to last night looks like in the daylight when you can’t remember where it is
for checking out what the holiday villa you are thinking of booking really looks like
and as findaproperty says, “With the panoramic street level photographs you can get a feel for the property, its location and neighbourhood, before visiting it – which saves you a lot of time and means you don’t have to decided whether you want to view a property based solely on the description of the area as provided by the estate agents” – ah, isn’t that nice…

Google tracking

Why have I never noticed before that Google is really “Go, Ogle” – meaning “Go, stare at impertinently”?

In this context, the following report by Andrew Orlowski in yesterday’s The Register makes interesting reading:

“Google’s roving Street View spycam may blur your face, but it’s got your number. The Street View service is under fire in Germany for scanning private WLAN networks, and recording users’ unique Mac (Media Access Control) addresses, as the car trundles along. Germany’s Federal Commissioner for Data Protection Peter Schaar says he’s “horrified” by the discovery. “I am appalled… I call upon Google to delete previously unlawfully collected personal data on the wireless network immediately and stop the rides for Street View,” according to German broadcaster ARD. Spooks have long desired the ability to cross reference the Mac address of a user’s connection with their real identity and virtual identity, such as their Gmail or Facebook account. Other companies have logged broadcasting WLAN networks and published the information. By contrast Google has not published the WLAN map, or Street View in Germany; Google hopes to launch the service by the end of the year. But Google’s uniquely cavalier approach to privacy, and its potential ability to cross reference the information raises additional concerns. Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said internet users shouldn’t worry about privacy unless they have something to hide. And when there’s nowhere left to hide…?”.

I have cautioned elsewhere about the implications of Google’s approach to digital information, and the enormous power that this gives the company. This is yet another example of the lack of transparency, and the secrecy underlying Google’s approach to accessing information about individuals. It may well not be illegal for Google to access Mac addresses – but if the above report is true it raises fundamental questions about Google’s approach to ethics.

I have for a long time refused to have a Gmail account – and try to ensure that they have as little of my data as possible. Perhaps the time has come for us to launch a global campaign to boycott Google? How much ogling can we all stand? The trouble is that their search engine is really quite good!

Reflections on the effects of the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption

The transport disruption caused by ash from the erupting Eyjafjallajökull volcano has had enormous impact across the world, not only for economic activity but also for individual human lives. Having been ‘stuck’ in the North Karelian town of Joensuu in eastern Finland for the last week, I have been interested and surprised by the emotional impact that this has had on me:

I discovered that eastern Finland is really a long way from anywhere! Joensuu is four-and-a-half hours by train north-east from Helsinki, and almost at the same latitude as the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland!
Finland itself is amazingly isolated, and very much like an island. Almost everyone who wanted to leave during the cessation of flights had to get ferries – from Turku or Helsinki to Stockholm, or from Helsinki to Tallinn. According to travel agents, many of these were fully booked, and so it was difficult to ‘escape’. The prospects of the Finnair offer of a 34 hour bus journey to Berlin, with two nights and a day on board, were not particularly appealing – especially when other parts of Europe seemed to be opening up their air-space. Most people who left, and took onward trains through Sweden and Denmark, or across Europe from Berlin took three or four days to get back to England! Being in ‘mainland Europe’ would have been so much easier – a train from Prague to Madrid would, for example, have been simplicity itself compared with leaving Finland!
The most disturbing feature of the disruption for me was the uncertainty! I was surprised how much not knowing when it might be possible to leave affected me – and particularly my ability to concentrate on work. Might it be worth taking the bus to Berlin – and then the subsequent problems associated with getting a train back to the UK? Should I go to Turku and hope for the best? When might flights start again? Should I try to get a train to Helsinki in case the flights from there are going to be a better bet than risking a flight from Joensuu to Helsinki first?
It can be really lonely… Thanks to all those friends who kept in touch on Skype, Facebook and by e-mail!
But I also discovered the real value of open-handed friendship. After I had stayed a couple of extra nights in a hotel, Erkki and Päivi welcomed me into their home, and this transformed things. Their hospitality enabled me to get on with some work (despite my difficulties in concentrating on it), and provided an enormous warmth of personal support. They have been absolutely amazing, and I hope one day to be able to return the favour.
A real lesson to be learnt from this is therefore that we should all be generously open and welcoming to ‘refugees’ – from wherever they come. Whilst it is completely inappropriate for those of us caught up in the dislocation caused by the closure of air space to draw comparisons with the experiences of political refugees, I do think I have gained a whole lot more insight into some of the anguish that they must face.
One can spend an age trying to rearrange flights! Many, many calls to Finnair were ‘answered’ with a message saying that their system was overloaded – even at 05.00 in the morning! Eventually, it took almost an hour of waiting earlier in the week to reschedule my flights for tomorrow – but who knows now even if that will be leaving!
It’s therefore crucially important to take advantage of every opportunity that such chaos can afford! It was great to visit Koli, and also to spend time participating in academic discussions and teaching at the Computer Science Department at the University of Eastern Finland – thanks for the opportunity.
This disruption also, though, shows the huge value of modern ICTs – the ability to hold conference calls with people in many different parts of the world, to receive e-mails (although not necessarily my ability to answer them all), to speak with loved ones ‘dislocated’ elsewhere (providing their ‘phones are charged), to find out information about the latest delays, to give a conference presentation at a distance (not easy – but see #beyond2010) and to find communal means of resolving travel problems (such as stuckineurope.com)! When the fuel runs out for ‘traditional’ air transport, life might become very much more human!

Apologies to everyone whose e-mails I have not responded to, and for the meetings I have missed! I should have been back in the UK on the 18th – and it is now the 23rd. Finavia this morning at last announced that “Based on the current forecasts all airports in Finland have been opened for air traffic and operate normally”, although lots of flights in Finland today have still been cancelled! Hopefully tomorrow will improve, and I will indeed return home. I intend to take a few days off – just to smell the late spring flowers, to taste some fine wine and to relax!

Google publishes details of requests from governments

Google has just published some fascinating data, and a map, showing the numbers of requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from its services, or to provide information about users of its services and products.

According to this, the highest numbers of requests for removals of data between July and December 2009 were from:

Brazil 291
Germany 188
India 142
USA 123

Similarly, the highest numbers of data requests were from:

Brazil 3663
United States 3580
United Kingdom 1166
India 1061

I was surprised by the high figures for Brazil, but as Google note “For Brazil and India, government requests for content removal are high relative to other countries in part because of the popularity of our social networking website, orkut. The majority of the Brazilian and Indian requests for removal of content from orkut relate to alleged impersonation or defamation”. Likewise, in commenting on the high figures for Germany, Google comment that “A substantial number of the German removals resulted from court orders that relate to defamation in search results”.

Interesting observations indeed! It is good to see Google becoming more transparent in such matters.

Unleashing the Potential: ICTs for Development

I had the privilege of being a keynote speaker at the SciFest symposium on ICT for development and learning held in association with a meeting of the Computer Science Days of the Finnish Computer Society held at the University of Joensuu on 15th April. Here is a summary of the key issues that I raised:

The main question I sought to address was “How can Computer Science contribute to the lives of some of the poorest and most marginalised people in the world?”
Much computer science seems to be very theoretical, and practised by people who prefer to remain in their familiar institutional surroundings
However, for those who wish to gain new experiences, insights and intellectual challenges, working in some of the poorest countries of the world offers great opportunities
Unfortunately, much so-called ICT4D research and practice tends to be top-down and led by people from Europe and north America
All too rarely does such research really address development needs
As privileged academics, we ought to listen much more to the stated needs of the poorest and most marginalised in crafting our research agendas
The private sector is likely to enable many relatively poor people to benefit from ICTs, but the very poorest – those with disabilities and street children – need interventions by governments and civil society organisations to help them use ICTs to achieve their aspirations
For those computer scientists not lured by the interests of capital, there remains the wonderful challenge of working for social agendas that can make a difference – both to their own intellectual benefit, and to the benefit of the world’s poorest people

The World Bank ‘releases’ its data

Yesterday, the World Bank announced the good news that it is making all of its statistical information available freely to anyone who has access to the Internet. As World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick commented, “I believe it’s important to make the data and knowledge of the World Bank available to everyone,” … “Statistics tell the story of people in developing and emerging countries and can play an important part in helping to overcome poverty. They are now easily accessible on the Web for all users, and can be used to create new apps for development”. The database includes some 331 of the World Development Indicators (WDI) covering 209 countries from 1960 to 2008 translated into Spanish, French and Arabic.

However, this reveals what is very much a ‘World Bank’ view of the world. The data are only partial, and should never be seen in some ways as ‘hard facts’. There is a real danger that sources such as this may be used uncritically to give misleading views of international development. Take education for example. There are only 5 indicators that show up when a search on “Find an Indicator” is done for “education” among the 331 indicators made available in this way:

public spending on education as a % of GDP
public spending on education as a % of government expenditure
ratio of female to male enrollments in tertiary education
ratio of girls to boys in primary and secondary education
trained teachers in primary education as a % of total teachers

However, using “Topics”, one can find a further 24 indicators about education, and this provides a much more balanced view of global education. On delving deeper, it is possible to access a still more detailed set of data from the databank itself. Here, there are some 1247 different time series on educational data, and they can also be downloaded for free. This is indeed a valuable resource.

Another problematic feature of the main public database is its maps. At first sight, these could be seen to be helpful visualisations of the data, but they are fundamentally misleading, because they use proportional symbols to represent % data – the higher the percentage, the larger the circle. While such symbols are fine for absolute data (such as total GNI), they are inappropriate for showing ratios such as percentages for a spatial territory (such as % enrollment in secondary education). For such data, it is much more appropriate to use choropleth maps that shade the areas in different densities.

These criticisms having been noted, we should applaud the World Bank for sharing its statistical understanding of the world in such an accessible way. It tells us as much about the Bank as it does about development.

Koli National Park, Finland

The air traffic disruption caused by the ash plume from the Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption has had at least one positive benefit as far as I was concerned – an afternoon’s visit to the beautiful Koli National Park in eastern Finland, made famous in the 19th century by the music and paintings of Jean Sibelius, Juhani Aho and Eero Järnefelt. [Do click on the images below to see larger versions of the photographs]

Less than half of the students accepted at UK universities have A levels!

A recent report in the Sunday Times noted that according to UCAS figures only “49.8% of the 425,000 British students accepted at universities across the UK for full-time degrees starting last autumn had taken A-levels, down from nearly 70% in 1999”. This is a remarkable figure, and reinforces my views abut the dumbing down of UK higher education that has taken place over the last decade.

To be sure, there are many reasons why A levels are no longer seen as the gold standard exam used for university entrance, but as the Sunday Times report goes on to argue, there are huge implications of this change. Certainly, universities are now taking students from much more diverse backgrounds, and with different qualifications, which is all to the good – providing of course that these students have the intellectual capacity to cope with the rigorous demands of a quality higher education system.

One of the things that really concerns me about this, though, is that as the Sunday Times notes many schools are “pushing academically bright pupils towards vocational exams to improve league table positions. The result is the students have almost no chance of gaining entry to academic courses at top universities, shutting them out of highly paid jobs”. The article goes on to quote Anna Fazackerley, head of education at the Policy Exchange think tank, who claimed that “Vocational courses can be hugely worthwhile… However, many children from less wealthy backgrounds are pushed into less academic courses simply because their school has low aspirations for them and one eye firmly on league tables.”

This is worrying on two grounds: first, that such students appear to be being excluded from the best universities (however defined) because of decisions made by school teachers so as to ensure their success in the league tables; second, that the argument helps to perpetuate the myth that universities are only about creating graduates who will get high paid jobs. We must never forget that universities should be about so much more than just enabling people to get better paid jobs!

Over the last 20 years, governments and those working in the higher education sector have combined to create a system that is fundamentally flawed, and fails to provide the intellectual and scholarly leadership that we so desperately need in this country. Since 1992, when the former polytechnics and universities were merged, attempts have continued to create a unified higher education system – driven largely by the flawed belief that we need half of our young people to go to ‘university’. We need to recognise that these have failed. We are increasingly creating a system that delivers neither on academic excellence, nor on giving people the high level vocational qualifications that they want or need.

I wish to retain the idea of a “university” as a community of scholars and learners, all of whom are committed to the advancement of knowledge for the good of society. Universities should not simply be about providing people with technical skills that certain people deem to be useful. In the UK, we are indeed in need of people with an outstanding technical education; students doing dumbed down degrees at so-called ‘univeristies’, are not gaining the skills that either they, or our economy, require. We also need outstanding scholars and scientists who are able to push forward the boundaries of knowledge; sadly, our present so-called ‘university’ system is likewise failing to deliver the excellence that it might be capable of – and it is expected to do so with increasingly severe funding cuts!