Today I came across the TED Talk of Parag Khanna titled “Parag Khanna maps the future of countries“. Interested in maps, the title itself drew me towards it. And I can say it was an interesting talk! Very interesting ideas on how to solve the current/future problems of the world. What I found most intriguing was the heavy use of maps as both driving the idea of itself as well as presenting the ideas. Almost no words are used in the “slides” only maps and visual animations. This is what makes a good presentation!

From a cartographic perspective the map use was a bit novel. When emphasizing some countries (i.e. France, Italy, Spain and Russia) the map simply only displayed these countries – and nothing else. Surprisingly this worked very well – probably due to the common knowledge of a world map that everyone shares. There are a lot of subtle cartographic “tricks” that were used – it is worth watching the presentation just for this reason.

I got inspired from this technique of both (seemingly) generating ideas from maps and in addition using almost solely the map as the presentation medium.

I received a new laptop approximately two weeks ago. It is a HP EliteBook 6230p, with a 2.5GHz core2duo, ATI graphic and 4 gb ram. I had hear rumours that the university had access to Windows 7 so I decided to give it a go.

Since I had 4 gb of ram I also needed the 64 bit version of win7 – which could make things even more problematic.

My first impression of windows 7 is that it is really nice. Default settings are flashy with the aero user interface. As I’m not that geared towards this kind of interfaces I turned off everything and chose the “old-school” windows XP look. Which I find is a lot more efficient to work with. I find the possibility to disable these kind of things highly important to have and it is really nice that win7 includes them! I believe also the performance will be better when turning of the animated UI. And so far, the performance has been really great! Far better than my older laptop with XP, although that has a slower CPU and of course is packed with useless data.

One of my worries about going for win7 and especially the 64 bit was the compatibility of programs and in general the infrastructure at the university. To my surprise everything works more or less out of the box! There have been some issues though. First off there are missing some drivers for the laptops devices, nothing serious though, only the specific hotkeys for the laptop such as “volume down/up” key and similar and a driver to an unknown device which I haven’t figured out what is yet – which probably indicate that I don’t need it:) The university supports a VPN network primarily using Cisco’s VPN client. I knew from before that this client didn’t support 64 bit – and I still haven’t found a working VPN client – although I experienced a bluescreen while trying an open source client:) The lack of VPN isn’t really a big issue since I do not use it as I find it terribly slow and not providing any significant benefits.

Another problem was, of course, with the network printer which didn’t support windows 7 and especially 64 bit. However that worked out by contacting the IT-support which figured out that the current drivers for the printer was actually for an older printer(!). The drivers for the printer did actually support win7 and 64 bit(!).

So far in to the windows 7-experience I can strongly recommend it! It is fast, and reliable – and probably better than XP. (Vista was never an alternative.)

The norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.no has an article today on an idea of solving the problem of asylum centres in Norway. The problem has existed for several years. Mainly due to a non-existing strategy from the government. Asylum seekers are put in highly temporary buildings, often abandoned military areas, or similar. And very often in more or less isolation from the Norwegian culture and inhabitants. Obviously this does not motivate for integration, working or any other productive or intelligent activity. The result is often that asylum seekers, even when accepted as a refugee is not integrated in the Norwegian culture and opposite, the Norwegian culture is not integrated with the refugees cultural background. A mismatch made for conflict. In essence the Norwegians are quite restricted on their views of asylum seekers – and I bet the refugees are a bit restrictive of the Norwegians as well.

As indicated, the main problem from my point of view is the isolated and “ghetto-like” first-meeting with Norway and Norwegian culture. The article in Dagbladet propose to solve this by rethinking the concept of asylum centers. The idea is to use agricultural farms (which they are quite a lot of in Norway) to be hosts for a small number of asylum seekers. At first these farms will be adapted farms primarily used for similar activities, such as helping social troubled persons and similar. However it is not far-fetched to expand this to include regular farms or even other types of industries which can be combined with working and living at the same place (i.e. fishing industry, forestry etc).

In my opinion this idea is brilliant. The quality of integration as well as the quality of the lives of the asylum seekers is bound to increase. As a side-effect the hosts (i.e. farm owners/workers etc) would probably also achieve a positive experience and could increase the quality of work/living for those also. This could in turn affect the decline in agricultural industries which are increasingly more prominent.

All in all – this is something which should be effectuated. Specific concerns should be to give the hosts proper education, proper financial support and to develop a proper system of non-obtrusive continous evaluation, feedback and support.

I give my full support to this idea! The best idea so far today!