Author Archives: Wignall

Education as infrastructure

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teaching has changed little

There are few differences to the structures and functions of medieval and modern teaching. New communication technologies and portable networked devices may soon be changing the traditional classroom.

Education, the organized system of educating people to be literate members of a society, is an infrastructure. Like the road and rail network of a country educational systems are designed to create the structure and process by which members of society learn the language, rules, social constructs and patterns of life and belief needed for the society to continue to function.

The history of educational systems is not the same as a history of schools. The formation of modern schools, with an organized curriculum taught by teachers, developed from early teaching and training systems that we have few historical records of. Early cultures built boats, fortifications, engaged in trade and warfare and developed religions and churches– all of which required sophisticated training and education. That ancient Egyptians and Assyrians developed writing and record keeping systems is clear, but we don’t know much about the training requirements for becoming a priest, clerk or member of the elites of any early culture.

The modern school, supported by church or state funding and deploying teachers in classrooms dates back to the early Republican period in Rome and to the Han dynasty in China. Educational systems in most early societies was designed to develop a bureaucratic workforce that supported functions of government.

The microeconomics of nuclear power

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New developments in power generation are being designed around old technologies, sometimes at new scale. Using newer transmission and generation systems, and working with new storage solutions, companies are trying to create systems that are much smaller than the huge, industrial-scale gen stations and grids of the 20th century.

One example, from a recent Energy Biz magazine:

“… What’s radical about NuScale is the size of its reactors and its modular approach. Rather than building a large, 1,400-megawatt plant costing several billion dollars, NuScale is designing small – 45-megawatt – reactors, largely developed at Oregon State University, and underground containment vessels small enough to be built in this country and shipped by rail. An end-user can start with a single reactor and scale up as needed. That completely changes the economics of nuclear energy.”

Infrastructure: the term

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infrastructureInfrastructure is a term that is defined in different ways. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that originally it was meant to describe military roads and structures like bridges. The word was imported from French, where it describes a subgrade, the original material underneath pavement or a railway bed. It comes from a combination of the Latin prefix “infra”, meaning “below” and “structure”.

From the Concise Dictionary of English: The basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems, water and power lines, and public institutions including schools, post offices, and prisons.

Names on the Internet

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InterfaceThis website, and every single system on the Internet, has a name. This name is provided to represent the address number of the machine or storage device that is connected to the Internet. If these addresses and names were random you would not be able to find the websites you are searching for, use your email, or engage with anyone else outside of a small network, if at all. The association of address number for each online device is done using rules set out by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

ICANN was formed in 1998 as a global not-for-profit corporation providing the address structures that make the Internet stable and interoperable. According to it’s website:  “ICANN doesn’t control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn’t deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the Internet’s naming system, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet.” In 2006, ICANN signed a new agreement with the United States Department of Commerce (DOC) that moved the private organization towards full management of the Internet’s system of centrally coordinated identifiers. In its newest form the corporation is a collaboration between US and international groups that oversee the naming protocol structure of the entire Internet.

ICANN is responsible for managing the Internet Protocol address spaces using standards like Internet Protocol version 4 and 6 (IPv4 and IPv6), assignment of addresses to regional Internet registries, maintaining registries of Internet identifiers, and management of the top-level domain name space (DNS root zone).

ICANN’s primary principles of operation have been described as helping preserve the operational stability of the Internet; to promote competition; to achieve broad representation of global Internet community; and to develop policies appropriate to its mission through bottom-up, consensus-based processes.