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Discovery Channel Footprint Quiz

Posted on July 8th, 2012

I followed a <link> left by a classmate out at Mightybell to this “quiz” . Here is how I scored:

A couple of comments: A number of questions really were more applicable to people living in an urban setting. For example, CC cameras are not present in a rural setting. I can walk through downtown Bradford without any recording of me doing so. So my “low score” is partly due to the environment I’m living in.

This brings to mind the issue of cell phone access and broadband Internet access in a rural setting. My family still has a land line and we only have a couple of prepaid cell phones for use when we are traveling. I can’t get a cell phone signal in my house and even outside I need to walk about 100 feet down the driveway to cell a couple of bars. These limitations will affect, to some extent, how I’m tracked and how much data is collected on my activities.

As far as Internet access, while we have a DSL line, it is an ADSL line and the upload speeds are not much better than a fast dial-up line. Uploading a 36 meg video to youtube required 2 hours of time earlier this week. I need to plan ahead and get the video on my school laptop and use the schools cable connection to upload and this has to be before school starts if I want it to work.

I still have students who do not have a computer never mind broadband access. For some it is a cost issue. For others, cable/dsl connections still are not available. Satellite Internet is too expensive and limiting so I don’t see this as an option for most people. It is difficult to assign Internet intensive assignments when I have to accommodate the don’t haves.

We are still a bit distant from an always connected society. There are still a lot of holes in data collection by “Big Brother”.