I'm in the first session on privacy issues. Clare-Marie Karat is presenting a paper on a system for how to express formal privacy rules in natural language.

Here's a useful and simple definition of a privacy policy:

Who has access to what personal information:

• for what purposes
• to carry out what actions
• under what conditions
• with what obligations

Many of the question revolve around ways to handle exceptions -- which is the downfall of most data and workflow automation systems.

Karen Tang presented a paper on how to preserve privacy/anonymity in mobile location-based services. Person-centric applications reduce the fidelity of queries to increase anonymity. But location-centric services/queries are different in some ways and does the fidelity-degradation approach work? (no) so what does work? The discussion of the work point out that this is really an application-layer system, and that there are many threats from other layers particularly if the application layer system is dependent upon lower layers to accurately label locations.

Kirsten Boehner is talking about 'Advancing Ambiguity' Ambiguity is 'the admitting of multiple interpretation' (Gaver, 2003).

Generally more information and awareness reduces ambiguity, but sometimes there are exceptions. 'If you have one clock, you always know the time. If you have two clocks, you never know the time.'

Wendy March talked about 'Girls, Technology and Privacy: Is My Mother Listening?' Question: do you make phone calls sitting in your closet? It turns out that lots of teenage girls do. (so their parents can't overhear)

Important learning: girls pay attention to 'location privacy' -- don't trust IM to be secret, just voice calls. But they don't feel like home is 'their place' and will take phone (cell or cordless) somewhere that they can have a private conversation. Will only use computer for private conversations if they can physically move it somewhere private.

The next day I received an email from Peter Freer, a banker from the UK who decided to raise funds for the Jaden Foundation as part of a jungle adventure challenge that was held in Belize recently . Together with his team 'the Belize Bankers' he came in 3rd place. They apparently had to kayak, run and survive in the jungle with nothing more than the shirts on their backs for several days. Thank you so much Peter for doing this for the Jaden Foundation. I think you're crazy, but there you go. You all seemed to have survived the ordeal.

There was one problem with this whole story, though. The Jaden Foundation is not registered as an official charity. I didn't do this as it would have cost me $8000 to do so. And that money I would rather spend on the Belizean kids (100% of the Jaden Foundation donations go to school fees, books, uniforms, transport and whatever else the kids need).

Peter told me that he could only donate to a registered charity, which is fair enough. So I decided that this was a sign to push through a dream that I have had for years now: to try and get as many local kids as possible accepted into a private school. The Belize Christian Academy is the closest school to us and by far the best school in this part of the country. It is linked to a registered charity in the US, so Peter and his team mates could make the donation directly to the school to pay for school fees.

It is already amazing that all the children in our community go to school these days, but if they could be going to BCA that would make an ever bigger impact on their lives. Many of the kids are currently 'falling through the cracks'. They are being passed along the grades, but should really be kept back as they still struggle so much with the English language. Right now they are crammed into classrooms with over 30 kids and don't get the attention they would need to excel. At the BCA they would be in classes of only half the size and they would not be getting so confused by the mix of Creole and English (which is another problem at the state schools)

Anyway, I am not sure what it would take to get all the children from our community accepted into that school. It may be too expensive. In that case, I will focus on getting the youngest kids in that school and let the older ones continue in the school that they are at now.

It's going to be quite a challenge, as the school fees for the private school are $250 BZ ($125 US) a month per child. I will try to get a special deal or assistance from the school & hopefully that way I will be able to send all.

Anyway, Jay and Jasper have just made a wonderful donation to the Jaden Foundation. They have given us $400 US! John and Rich' parents donate a further 20 Pounds per month & have done so for last year! Thank you, thank you, thank you, you guys. And now it looks like Peter Freer and his team mates have raised roughly $3500 US (to be donated at the end of then month). So we are getting there. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your help. This is all so exciting!

If any of you blog readers out there would like to sponsor one of the kids, please contact me. You could even donate directly to the school, so the donations are tax deductible (rather give it to these kids than the tax man, right?)

Thank you,
Simone

P.S. I'll let you know what happens in the coming weeks....

Living in Belmopan is just so civilized. We have cable television, DSL Internet, shops that are open till 8 o’clock in the evening and there are tennis and basketball courts around the corner. As it’s a concrete house, it’s nice and cool. There are no creepy crawlies, very few mosquitoes (the town sprays against them), no snakes and (best of all) bin men to collect your garbage!

Living at the Dome is more like being in the Wild West in comparison. You have to rely on yourself and your neighbors for so many things. Finding your own solutions to waste disposal, catching snakes, scorpions, tarantulas, putting out your own fires (we once waited all night for the fire brigade…they never showed up) & now the police asked us for a ‘contribution’ to buy a car and supply it with gas, to patrol our area more.

So again, we’ve come to the conclusion that we’re better off relying on ourselves and on our direct neighbors, even for something like security. It seems to be the best system when you live ‘out in the sticks’ like us.

So that makes our list of what we’re up to at the moment look like this:

• Take care of a toddler and a newborn
• Expand our resort with 2 extra rooms (in what used to be our living space)
• Build our own house
• Look after our guests every day (we’re fully booked most of the time)
• Buy back our old store in San Ignacio (The Green Dragon)
• Revamp our http://www.greendragonbelize.com/ website. Making it a separate entity from the Belize Jungle Dome, as the travel agency ‘Green Dragon Adventure Travel’
• Sort out the deal with our future business partners Tom & Marge
• Set up security systems for the local area with our neighbors

Building work at the Dome. Hard to believe that in this space there will be a bautiful suite soon.

Can you believe that this used to be our kitchen? What a mess...