Digital collaboration technologies flourish during COVID-19

For most of human history, dyads and groups were only able to work and play together if they were collocated.  All of this changed in the 19th century, when the first remote collaboration and entertainment technologies — the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio — were developed and widely commercialized.  These were joined in the 20th century by television.  By the middle part of the century, medical images were being transmitted over phone lines; soon thereafter, 2-way television was being used for remote medical consultations.

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Ethics throughout a Computer Science curriculum

Every Computer Science student should get significant exposure to the social, political, legal, and ethical issues raised by the accelerating progress in the development and use of digital technologies.

The standard approach is to offer one undergraduate course, typically called Computers and Society or Computer Ethics.  I have done this during the current term at Columbia University, using my new textbook, Computers and Society: Modern Perspectives (OUP, 2019).  We meet twice a week for 75 minutes.  In class, I present key topics covered in the book, and welcome a number of guest speakers who present their own experiences and points of view.  Every class is interactive, as I try to get the students to express their own ideas.  There have been four assignments: a policy brief, a book report, a debate, and a research paper.  Such courses are typically not required by major research universities, which is a mistake, but they are often required by liberal arts colleges.

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Sales Support No More

In a previous blog, I spoke about outsourcing, and the trade-offs for both companies and consumers, given the practise of many companies to outsource customer support globally. Here I shall speak about a related issue — the current tendency of most companies to skimp on or omit human customer support altogether. I shall illustrate this by describing three hours I spent yesterday and today trying to find a nearby store that had a USB-C to VGA converter for my Mac laptop.

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