First of all my apologies to anyone who turned up at Sight Life on the 7th March. I was as surprised as anyone when I discovered that the shortest month in the year was going to have 5 Thursdays in it. We of course meet on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month, so a gap of three weeks between meetings!
I rapidly went through the new Topics I’d added to the various Forums, reminding those present that this was the place I’d be putting links to items of longer term (reference) interest and/or hints and tips, leaving Flipboard to be the place where news items of shorter term interest would be posted. I thanked Iain King for becoming a Flipboard contributor – the more the better.
We noted this article from Scientific American that highlights just how much electricity will be needed as we continue with our quest for artificial intelligence; a theme built on by Iain and Ian in their recent posts on the Signal group.
Finally, I mentioned that u3a have communities you might be interested in tracking; one of which is a Computing Forum, and I passed on the information that Iain King had shared with me re. Benedict Evans’ newsletters. Maybe more slanted towards the business sector, but also a useful adjunct to our Flipboard magazine.
First Iain King presented some slides and led a discussion on his visit to the Google Accessibility Design Centre (ADC). He stressed that Google didn’t just look at issues of accessibility in IT, but in all design areas including spoons!
I then re-visited the presentation I’d done last year on How does the Internet work? I’ve edited and updated the blog post and so it should be reasonably up-to-date. I highlighted however the following webpages and videos.
First the BBC Bitesize webpage “What is the internet?” It contains a brilliant video which uses pigeons and nests as analogues for the internet and its users. A must watch!!
I then showed this video which explains very well how the internet works, but towards the end betrays the fact that it’s really, really in favour of scheduling and prioritising of traffic and moving away from the long-held philosophy of the internet – net neutrality. The importance of net-neutrality – the fact that all users should be deemed to be equal, and all content providers the same – should not be taken lightly. If this principle falls then you will find investment in the internet for everyone will decline, and those that get the faster internet will have to pay for it. Please watch the Vimeo (a streaming service) video to see the other point of view.
I then showed this video from TED talks. [I mistakenly said that these talks were available from a Smart TV app – that used to be the case, but maybe not now.]
It’s a really enlightening story from an architect who got curious and wanted to discover the physical manifestation of the internet.
Finally I showed this video, one of a series that are worth watching, produced by one of the “fathers” of the internet. Someone who was in at the beginning …
Next time we’ll look at Home Networking.