PP290-4 (3) Special Topics: Information Technology and 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)Florentine Codex Nahuaswikipedia: smallpox

SMALLPOX Girl infected with smallpox. Bangladesh, 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)wikipedia: smallpox

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