Laptop Education Will Solve the World's Problems

Productivity is the key to improvement in our world. Improved productivity means that humans need to work less to produce the same amount of goods and services --that gives us more leisure time to think about making more improvements. Almost every profession in the world has increased productivity over the past century. Farmers produce many times more food per hour worked than 100 years ago. Truckers and shippers move much more goods per hour of labor, while thanks to electronic cash registers and bar codes, retailers can sell many more goods per person than ever before. Teaching is the one profession where productivity has not improved. In fact, it may have gone down. A smaller class size results in lower productivity -- fewer students taught per teacher. Of course quantity of students is not the only measure -- how much "quality" increase have students gained? Does the quality increase compensate for the quantity decrease? At any rate, if there does happen to be an increase in productivity, it is very hard to measure.
I believe computers are now able to resolve that dilemma. For the past 40 years, computers in the classroom have not improved either quantity or quality of teaching. Now,with improvements in processing power, computers are finally there. The cost of computers has finally gone down far enough that they are much less expensive than text books..if the software is done correctly.
We need an international standard operating system for classroom media. This would allow all publishers to provide educational media in a standard format that could be used by the students to learn.
The international standard needs to be "open" such that it can be used by all institutions of learning throughout the world, with a minimum of licenses or Digital rights. However it needs to do the following:
1. Manage digital rights of publishers
2. provide teachers visibility into students progress
3. Provide visibility to school system management of the progress of students and teachers
4. Provide visibility of progress to parents
5. Protect privacy of students
6. Allow for teacher-created media, and allow teachers to manipulate and reorder media
7. Maintain records of student progress in a secure environment (the cloud) such that scores cant be manipulated or adulterated
8. Allow access to rich video and animation to make learning interesting
9. Allow for protection of students from media that is deemed to be harmful or corrupting
10 Permit gradual improvements in the operating system without disruption to students


Why will this solve the world's problems? In so many countries, children are not given the chance to learn. When they are given the chance to learn, the instructions are often biased. If students have access to WWW and Google, they can always find out the truth and be more skeptical about what they are learning.

Universal Digital Signatures

We really need some internet company (Google?) to take a leadership role on digital signatures.
The problem with digital signatures is having a positive identification of the individuals. Here's the answer! Every brokerage and bank now is required to have positive ID of their customers -- to include copies of drivers licenses and passports. If Google, Yahoo, AOL, Lycos, or Hotmail would work out an arrangement with banks and brokerages to allow them to provide digital signatures (and e-mail addresses: @etrade.com, @chase.com etc) --it would finally make the digital economy work. It would also make those accounts very "sticky" so that users would never want to leave! The brokerages and banks could charge users a fee if they don't maintain a certain minimum balance, or number of trades.

Standardization to Reduce Waste

Standards are critical to commerce. For example "Signaling System 7" was crucial to automating all telephone systems in the world so they could talk to one another. Railroad track widths, standard measurement systems etc have saved the world billions of dollars in conversion costs. Other standards such as tire rims, light bulb fittings, and household power plugs we take for granted.

Standards do force some compromise and can lead to standard "mediocrity" --by slowing down creativity. However some types of creativity are counter-productive and wasteful.

For example, for years every cell phone came with a different type of power converter/charger. Each model came with a different type of plug that was incompatible with other phones, and they provided different levels of voltage and currents. Why did this happen? Each company tried to improve upon their design by making sub-optimized trade-offs.
This practice resulted in several types of waste:
1. Whenever anyone replaced their cell phone, they had to buy another charger to match it and throw away the old one.
2. Because they were unique, they weren't interchangeable. So, if a husband and wife had different cell phones, they also needed different chargers at home, different car chargers etc.
3. Sometimes plugs were similar, so a person could accidentally plug the wrong charger into their phone and actually cause damage.
4. The designs of the chargers were done as cheaply as possible, since they were virtual "throw away" devices. Therefore they all have lower efficiency and actually waste electricity when in use, and when plugged in, but not connected to a phone.

Recently the cell phone manufacturers have agreed to standardize their chargers to a common voltage and plug. This will lead to higher efficiency chargers, fewer being thrown away and much less waste all around.

The same thing could apply to all of the other chargers and power supplies used for all of the other cordless devices. These include electric drills, children's toys, laptop computers, rechargeable flashlights.  California has recently established standards for efficiency in battery chargers.  See this article in the January 14 2012 North County Times.  There are currently 170 million chargers consuming about 13% of the Nation's energy production.  More efficient chargers could save a lot of money.  More universal standards could prevent the construction and sale of millions of chargers that provide a slightly different power over a slightly different connector--with the goal of planned obsolescence.
The world has been able to live with only a few standard battery sizes AAA, AA, A, B, C, D, and 9V to run so many of our devices. It seems that chargers could also be standardized . The cable connections could also be idiot proofed to make sure that people wouldnt inadvertently connect them to the wrong device.

Positive Turn off for webcam and microphone

Because webcams and microphones are now integrated into so many laptops and monitors, we no longer have good control over whether or not we are being watched or listened to.
The controls for the switches are all buried in software, which could be taken over by malicious software.
This is needed for people working at home or at work. Many business don't want their private business meetings monitored and can't be sure if there is a computer anywhere in the room where the meeting takes place.
All that is needed is a small microswitch mounted at the top of every laptop screen or monitor screen that displays a "red flag" when the connection is made for the microphone and or camera. It could be implemented so that the microphone could be enabled without the camera and a separate position to turn on the camera. I believe everyone would pay a small extra price increase to gain this extra degree of privacy.
Also, I think that until a device like this is included on monitors, many business and government agencies will not embrace the use of the internet for video or voice teleconferences.