PP290-4 (3) Special Topics:

Information Technologyand Public Policy

Fall 2011

Tuesday, Thursday | 5:00-6:30PM |Room 105

Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley

Instructors: Prof. Michael O’Hare and Jason Christopher, Dir. of IT,

GSPP

Information Technology

and Public Policy

Ubiquitous IT Global Internet Usage Climbing Mt. Everest this Summer?

Three Policy Problems Privacy and Information Home Heating and Energy: Funding Clean Energy and Project DX Manufactured: Smallpox and the Dual-use Dilemma of Gene

Synthesis

Goals of the Class for Students! Gain IT Literacy: Skills and Concepts Build an IT Toolkit for Policy Problems

Global Internet Usage: Internet Users

Global Internet Usage: Internet Penetration by Percentage of Population

Climbing Mt. Everest this Summer? Don’t Forget your Cell Phone.

Pasi Koistinen, chief executive officer of Ncell, Nepal’s first private telecom company speaks on a cell phone at an Everest base camp

First 3G (Third Generation) cell phone call from the

summit of Mt. Everest on 6 May 2011.

Data Driven: Personalized Information

‘By now, we’re familiar with ads that follow us around online based on our recent clicks on commercial Web sites. But increasingly, and nearly invisibly, our searches for information are being personalized too. Two people who each search on Google for “Egypt” may get significantly different results, based on their past clicks. Both Yahoo News and Google News make adjustments to their home pages for each individual visitor. And just last month, this technology began making inroads on the Web sites of newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times.’

From: Op-Ed Contributor Article | “When the Internet Thinks It Knows You” |by Eli Pariser, President of the board of MoveOn.org and author of “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You.” Published: May 22, 2011 in the New York Times.

Policy Problem:

How do individuals and communities fund clean

energy initiatives?

How can one afford to go solar at home?

Home Heating and Energy: Innovative Solutions for Funding Clean Energy and Project DX

MANUFACTURED

SMALLPOX: DEFINITION

“A contagious viral disease that infected only human beings and killed about a third of its victims, claimed hundreds of millions of lives over the course of history.” 1,2

SMALLPOX

Smallpox−one of the germs in discussed in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. (W. W. Norton & Co.) that was deva-stating to the population of the Americas.Drawing accompanying text in Book VII of the Florentine Codex (compiled 1540 – 1585), showing Nahuas of conquest-era central Mexico suffering from smallpox. (wikipedia: smallpox)

SMALLPOX

Girl infected with smallpox. Bangladesh, 1973.

In ordinary type smallpox the bumps are filled with a thick, opaque fluid and often have a depression or dimple in the center. This is a major distinguishing characteristic of smallpox. (wikipedia: smallpox)

SMALLPOX

Two-year old Rahima Banu of Bangladesh was the last person infected with naturally occurring Variola major, in 1975. (wikipedia: smallpox)

She made a full recovery.

SMALLPOX: TIMELINE

1940s: A highly effective vaccine was developed

1966: The World Health Organization (WHO) launched an intensified global campaign that, over the

next11 years, eradicated smallpox from the planet…” Jonathon B. Tucker

1973: Laboratory accident at the London School of Tropical Medicine

1975: 75 known smallpox “possessor-labs”

1975: Laboratory accident at research institute in Munich

1977: Last natural outbreak of smallpox in Somalia

1981: Number possessor-labs reduced to 4

1984: 2 government facilities, one in the US, the other in the Soviet Union, with smallpox virus

1992: A former Soviet official, Kanatjan Alibekov (Ken Alibek) defects to the US and tells of a highly

lethal strain of smallpox developed by the Soviets and stockpiled in multi-ton quantities

1993: General agreement to destroy stocks of virus, but some dissent within scientific community

1994: Entire genome of Variola virus sequenced at National Institute of Health (NIH)