Terry talks!

Terry Brooks

November 27, 2006

The Internet and State Control of Information!

Deep in a basement lab at the University of Toronto a team of political scientists, software engineers and computer-hacking activists, or “hactivists,” have created the latest, and some say most advanced tool yet in allowing Internet users to circumvent government censorship of the Web.
The program, called psiphon (pronounced “SY-fon”), will be released on Dec. 1 in response to growing Internet censorship that is pushing citizens in restrictive countries to pursue more elaborate and sophisticated programs to gain access to Western news sites, blogs and other censored material.
“The problem is growing exponentially,” said Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which designed psiphon. “What might have started as censorship of pornography and Western news organizations has expanded to include blogging sites, religious sites, health information sites and many others.”
Psiphon is downloaded by a person in an uncensored country (psiphon.civisec.org), turning that person’s computer into an access point. Someone in a restricted-access country can then log into that computer through an encrypted connection and using it as a proxy, gain access to censored sites. The program’s designers say there is no evidence on the user’s computer of having viewed censored material once they erase their Internet history after each use. The software is part of a broader effort to live up to the initial hopes human rights activists had that the Internet would provide unprecedented freedom of expression for those living in restrictive countries.
“Governments have militarized their censorship efforts to an incredible extent so we’re trying to reverse some of that and restore that promise that the Internet once had for unfettered access and communication,” Dr. Deibert said.
"Web Tool Said to Offer Way Past the Government Censor" The NY Times, November 27, 2006

 

November 20, 2006

Social power of blogging!

When people in the television news business want to find out what’s going on in their industry, they turn to a blog called TVNewser. But while the executives obsessively checking TVNewser are mostly high powered and highly paid, the person who creates it is not: he is Brian Stelter, a baby-faced 21-year-old at Towson University here, a few miles north of Baltimore.
Mr. Stelter’s blog (tvnewser.com), a seven-day-a-week, almost 24-hour-a-day newsfeed of gossip, anonymous tips, newspaper article links and program ratings, has become a virtual bulletin board for the industry. It is read religiously by network presidents, media executives, producers and publicists, not for any stinging commentary from Mr. Stelter, whose style is usually described as earnest, but because it provides a quick snapshot of the industry on any given day. Habitués include Mr. Williams and Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN’s domestic operations, who long ago offered up his cellphone number to Mr. Stelter. “The whole industry pays attention to his blog,” said Jeffrey W. Schneider, a senior vice president of ABC News. “It would not surprise me if I refreshed my browser 30 to 40 times a day.”
Perhaps this is what the techno-geeks had in mind when they invented the Internet — a device to squash not only time and space, but also social class and professional hierarchies, putting an unprepossessing Maryland college student with several term papers due in a position to command the attention and grudging respect of some of society’s most famous and powerful personalities.
"The Kid With All the News About the TV News" The NY Times, November 20, 2006

 

November 19, 2006

Social mapping via cell phones

THE diminutive cellphone is turning out to be the most clever of devices. As it connects to more networks, stores more kinds of data, delivers more kinds of entertainment — wherever we happen to be — it effectively becomes the most personal computer we own. Now, as more of the handsets are equipped to use the Global Positioning System, the satellite-based navigation network, we are on the verge of enjoying services made possible only when information is matched automatically to location. Maps on our phones will always know where we are. Our children can’t go missing. Movie listings will always be for the closest theaters; restaurant suggestions, organized by proximity. We will even have the option of choosing free cellphone service if we agree to accept ads focused on nearby businesses.
Two wireless providers recently made separate announcements about new positioning services, betting that the time has arrived. Two weeks ago, Helio — a wireless service owned jointly by SK Telecom, a South Korean cellphone company, and EarthLink, the American Internet service provider — introduced the Buddy Beacon in its new phone, the Drift, which costs $225. With the press of a button, the Drift shows on a map the location of up to 25 friends — if each is also carrying a $225 Drift.
Social mapping on cellphones is not all that new; it is just the next stage in social networking. Dodgeball.com, which has been operating since 2004, should be credited as a predecessor: a Dodgeball member uses a cellphone to send in a text message about his or her whereabouts, and notifications are then sent automatically to the member’s circle of friends. ( Google acquired the company last year.) But Dodgeball can’t update a change of location automatically. With G.P.S.-equipped handsets, the Beacon Buddy could remedy this shortcoming, but Helio elected not to enable automatic updates: a user must push a button to refresh the phone’s location. “We didn’t want a situation where someone left their Buddy Beacon on and didn’t know it,” Mr. Dayton said. When the marketplace is more familiar with the service, he added, it may introduce an auto-updating option.
"Cellphone as Tracker: X Marks Your Doubts" The NY Times, November 19, 2006

 

November 19, 2006

Fusion of television and computer!

WHEN Gail Smith left for Guam in the late 1980s, to pursue a job as a computer teacher, the television-viewing experience she left behind in Florence, S.C., had barely budged since the medium’s beginnings. Save for the introduction of the remote and the VCR, the routine was essentially the same: turn on the set, plop down in the comfy chair and veg out.
She is one of 160,000 Time Warner subscribers who, as part of a broad experiment, are living with what may well be the future of television: souped-up interactivity. As a result she gets to choose not just when she wants to watch certain programs, but to a greater or lesser extent what those programs look like on her screen — what news to magnify and what personalized information to call up, where to go deep and what to skip.
Television viewing comes in many forms, said Susan Murray, a professor of culture and communication at New York University and the author of “Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast Stardom.” “We might be a ‘couch potato’ at times, which might involve watching television in such a way that lets us zone out, or we use it as background noise or company,” she said. “At other times we might become more actively engaged with a program as we pay close attention in order to work to figure out its cultural references, the nuances of its plot and character development, the way in which it might be in conversation with other programs, or the history or details of its production.” Today’s more intricate shows, like “The Sopranos” or “Lost,” practically demand engaged, active viewing. “There’s a tolerance for complexity and paying attention that’s been bred in the audience,” said Steven Johnson, the author of “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter.” This “sleeper curve,” as Mr. Johnson refers to it in his book, began 25 years ago with “Hill Street Blues,” slowly training people to be more observant television watchers and follow more characters and plot lines.
"Your TV Would Like a Word With You" The NY Times, November 19, 2006

 

November 18, 2006

Cyber shopping!

You should not even consider compiling a holiday gift list without using some of the indispensable tools of the modern shopper: the latest Internet shopping sites and a cellphone. The market analysts at Jupiter say that 75 percent of shoppers already begin their endeavors online. But if shoppers blithely start with an old-school shopping comparison site like Google’s Froogle they often find themselves staring at a dog’s breakfast of undifferentiated and unsorted data. Typing in “T.M.X. Elmo,” the hard-to-find dancing doll, yields no fewer than 1,075 listings (in 0.11 seconds, Google tells us helpfully). Don’t even think of putting in a general term like jeans or soccer shoes. But enough chit-chat. Let’s grab our shopping lists and a few computer scientists and get started. We are looking for a new video game machine, the new Elmo, jeans and maybe some shoes. A good place to start is TheFind.com. The site pops up on the screen with a search box and a simple question: What can we find for you? Start typing and it finishes your query.
The company in Mountain View, Calif., that developed this search engine says that its software crawls over 500,000 online stores to locate 150 million products. But is also uses some proprietary algorithms to rank and order the searches so they present the results that are more likely relevant. It located an obscure Disney video, “Dr. Syn,” also known as “The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh,” (hint) with as much ease as it found a Cuisinart ICE-50BC ice cream maker (hint hint). Still, TheFind remains the technological version of traipsing through every store in every mall in the country. That is one way to shop, but the usefulness of this method is limited by how much information about the product is on display. The Web crawling search engines cannot find the best deals if the online merchants do not post prices or if they game their site so crawlers pick up discounted prices that are not actually offered.
"How to Find Those Gifts in a Flash" The NY Times, November 18, 2006

 

November 18, 2006

Cyber squatting!

Henry Treftz gets excited each time Barack Obama seems to inch closer to a run for president in 2008. Not, mind you, that Mr. Treftz is a fan of Mr. Obama, the Democratic senator from Illinois. He says he would not vote for him if he did run. But Mr. Treftz, who lives in Aurora, Ill., owns the domain name obama2008.org, and he thinks he will make a tidy profit if Mr. Obama’s campaign gets around to wanting it.
Nearly every conceivable presidential ticket has been registered, including mccaingiuliani2008.com and clintongore2008.com. Even the name hillandbill2008.com is taken. Registering a domain name is simple and costs about $10 per year. Doing so can save candidates headaches and expenses down the road, and help them avoid Web sites like hillaryforpresident.com, where a screed about the Antichrist is posted, or gwbush.com, which sells “Impeach Bush” bumper stickers. “Candidates aren’t thinking enough in advance,” said Michael Bassik of MSHC Partners, which handled Internet strategy for Senator-elect Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and other Democrats. “It’s surprising that candidates that have already expressed an interest in 2008 haven’t purchased the domains that would be related to it.”
"As Candidates Mull ’08, Web Sites Are Already Running" The NY Times, November 18, 2006

 

November 12, 2006

Web 3.0 !!!

From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence. Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century. Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.
Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like geographic mapping) and services (like photo-sharing) over the Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dot-com-style hype in Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or the “semantic Web,” for the idea of adding meaning — is only now emerging.
Today researchers are pushing further. Mr. Spivack’s company, Radar Networks, for example, is one of several working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.
Radar’s technology is based on a next-generation database system that stores associations, such as one person’s relationship to another (colleague, friend, brother), rather than specific items like text or numbers.
One example that hints at the potential of such systems is KnowItAll, a project by a group of University of Washington faculty members and students that has been financed by Google. “The system will know that spotless is better than clean,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Washington who is a leader of the project. “There is the growing realization that text on the Web is a tremendous resource.” In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.
Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense The NY Times, November 12, 2006

 

November 10, 2006

The all-day workshop at Boeing: "XML@Boeing 2006 - XML for Boeing for the 21st Century" was very interesting because it showed me where the world of structured information was going. Boeing, naturally, is interested in technical documentation and there was much reference to DITA.

The Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) defines a set of techniques for using XML in order to enable the effective and efficient development of re-usable information components, primarily in the context of technical documentation, informative Web sites, and similar types of structured, topically-focused information for consumption by humans. This activity naturally involves the combination, whether syntactically or semantically, of elements from different name spaces and governed by different schemas.

For our class: note terms such as "namespaces", "re-usable information components" and "schemas". [Note: in our class we don't get into XML Schemas. An XML Schema is like a recipe for chocolate cookies. There can be lots of chocolate cookies, but there is only one recipe indicating how to make them.]

There was also some interesting material presented about XML databases (from IBM) and materials about best practices for modelling information as XML or in a relational database.

Jon Bosak presented some material about UBL - Uniform Business Language. That is, the proposal that businesses should use standard forms (e.g., bills of lading) so as to facilitate information exchange.

Over the next week, I'll post some material to our class website.

 

November 8, 2006

Video replaces photography as the record of reality

Blogs of all political stripes spent most of yesterday detailing reports of voting machine malfunctions and ballot shortages, effectively becoming an online national clearinghouse of the polling problems that still face the election system.
And in a new twist this year, many bloggers buttressed their accounts of electoral shenanigans with links to videos posted on the video Web site YouTube.

RedState.com, the conservative journal, heralded a “massive meltdown in Pennsylvania” early in the day, citing “widespread reports of an electoral nightmare shaping up in Pennsylvania with certain types of electronic voting machines.” Erick Erickson, RedState’s chief blogger, also included a report of poll watcher intimidation in Philadelphia, along with a link to a video on YouTube that appeared to show a certified poll observer (armed with a video camera) being blocked from a polling station.www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-HK_VT81Pk&e
Blogs Take Lead in Reporting Polling Problems, With Supporting Evidence on YouTube The NY Times, November 8, 2006

 

November 7, 2006

Europeans might socialize online differently

A couple of months ago, Robert Basic, a 40-year-old technology consultant in Frankfurt, signed up for MySpace, the online social networking site, mostly out of curiosity. In September, MySpace opened public test pages for Germany and France, the company’s first versions in languages other than English. That month, the site had 2.5 million unique users in Germany and about half that in France, respectable numbers for a new venture. But Mr. Basic was only briefly among them. “I’m not a typical user,” he said. He became frustrated by unwanted messages and he did not care for the flashy pages. “People here think the design is bad,” he said, “and that is important for Germans.”

Subject as it is to the whims of young people, the social networking business can be hard to predict. For example, Orkut.com, a social networking site started by Google, now consists mostly of Brazilians. After the site went online, Portuguese speakers attracted more Portuguese speakers, to the point where those who did not understand the language felt alienated.

Europe also has dozens of sites aimed at relatively small groups of people, which would not really compete with MySpace but could potentially limit its appeal in some markets if European consumers prefer a local experience. Facebox, which is based in Brussels, for example, operates pages in different languages separately, on the logic that people prefer to join a more intimate network.
"MySpace Aims for a Global Audience, and Finds Some Stiff Competition" The NY Times, November 7, 2006

 

November 5, 2006

A father does Facebook = Social networking for the ill prepared

I HAVE many new friends. Too many. My troubles began when I signed up for a page on Facebook.com, the Web site that’s phenomenally popular with millions of college and high school students. I did it, frankly, to keep up with my own children. My daughter, Elizabeth, off at college and a 10-hour drive away, details her days on her LiveJournal.com and Facebook pages. Anyone can read the LiveJournal page, but Facebook requires that you have your own account, and be part of the same network (like University of Michigan students) or share “friend” status, to read others’ pages. But a child doesn’t need to be out of town to be a little distant. Sam, my 16-year-old son, has a Facebook page, and when he occasionally left it up on his computer screen, I noticed it was a pretty freewheeling place, with coarse language, flirtation and jokes about high-school drinking. I mean, I hope they were jokes. We’re talking about that. In any case, it all made me want to keep an eye on things.

But things took a turn on Monday, when “new friend” requests started rolling in from students at my son’s high school. It was mystifying. I dug around and found that Sam had formed a group, Friend My Father. He wrote, “My dad got a Facebook, lets make it worth his while.” He told them how to find me online, and then wrote, simply, “Go!”

I had, to coin a phrase, been friendbombed. It reminded me of what computer security experts call a “distributed denial of service attack,” in which multiple computers send so many messages or information requests that data can’t get into or out of the targeted machine. As I sat at home Monday night trying to get work done, I occasionally moaned and announced to my wife, in resigned monotone: “Andrei has asked to be my friend. Sida has asked to be my friend. Alison has asked to be my friend.” My wife, who ridiculed me for cybersnooping on our boy, laughed at what she seemed to think was some kind of poetic justice, and said that Sam had cleverly exacted his revenge.
A Son’s Revenge: ‘Friendbombing’ The NY Times, November 5, 2006

 

November 3, 2006

Put it on the Web to expose it, take it off the Web to hide it

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.
But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.
Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”
"U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer" The NY Times, November 3, 2006

 

October 31, 2006

Looking ten years ahead

What’s next? That was the subject of a symposium in Washington this month held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, which is part of the National Academies and the nation’s leading advisory board on science and technology. Joseph F. Traub, the board’s chairman and a professor at Columbia University, titled the symposium “2016.”
Computer scientists from academia and companies like I.B.M. and Google discussed topics including social networks, digital imaging, online media and the impact on work and employment. But most talks touched on two broad themes: the impact of computing will go deeper into the sciences and spread more into the social sciences, and policy issues will loom large, as the technology becomes more powerful and more pervasive.
Social networks, noted Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell, are pre-technological creations that sociologists have been analyzing for decades. A classic example, he noted, was the work of Stanley Milgram of Harvard, who in the 1960’s asked each of several volunteers in the Midwest to get a letter to a stranger in Boston. But the path was not direct: under the rules of the experiment, participants could send a letter only to someone they knew. The median number of intermediaries was six — hence, the term “six degrees of separation.”
Computing, 2016: What Won’t Be Possible? The NY Times, October 31, 2006

 

October 31, 2006

Digital Curation

I don't even know what this is...digital curation?? Note the 2nd International Digital Curation Conference "Digital Data Curation in Practice" at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2006/

Scientists, researchers and scholars across the UK generate increasingly vast amounts of digital data, with further investment in digitisation and purchase of digital content and information. The scientific record and the documentary heritage created in digital form are at risk from technology obsolescence, from the fragility of digital media, and from lack of the basics of good practice, such as adequate documentation for the data.
Working with other practitioners, the Digital Curation Centre will support UK institutions who store, manage and preserve these data to help ensure their enhancement and their continuing long-term use. The purpose of our centre is to provide a national focus for research and development into curation issues and to promote expertise and good practice, both national and international, for the management of all research outputs in digital format.
What is digital curation? Digital curation is all about maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use; specifically, we mean the active management and appraisal of data over the life-cycle of scholarly and scientific materials.
Brooks observes

Wow! This sort of thing is a natural fit for library and information science. Aren't librarians in charge of the care and feeding of digital archives? The iSchool needs a course in 'digital curation'.

 

October 25, 2006

Politics/The election and Information systems, architecture and retrieval

A friend just e-mailed me this link. It is to a blog that informs us how to use Google bombing, search, etc. to influence the upcoming election. Who says this course is not tighly coupled to reality. Yikes!

 

October 25, 2006

The youngsters/web technies have moved on to video

One of Hollywood’s top five talent agencies has created an online unit devoted to scouting out up-and-coming creators of Internet content — particularly video — and finding work for them in Web-based advertising and entertainment, as well as in the older media. The goal this time around, executives say, is not only to recruit the next generation of television and film writers and directors from the relative obscurity of sites like YouTube and Revver. It is also to help the major Web portals that are hungry for original content to find the creative people they need — just as movie studios have long turned to talent agencies when looking for new directors, screenwriters and actors. Two weeks ago, Mr. Weinstein said, one of his new agents showed him a Web video that had been up for less than an hour: “Paxilback,” a parody of a Justin Timberlake music video, “Sexyback.” The agents quickly reached out to its creators, a group of Los Angeles artists called People Food. By the time they could arrange a meeting five days later, the video had been seen 600,000 times.
"Talent Agency Is Aiming to Find Web Video Stars" The NY Times, October 25, 2006

Brooks pontificates...(i.e., essay topics)

 

October 23, 2006

Stealing information is easy

Tom Heydt-Benjamin tapped an envelope against a black plastic box connected to his computer. Within moments, the screen showed a garbled string of characters that included this: fu/kevine, along with some numbers. Mr. Heydt-Benjamin then ripped open the envelope. Inside was a credit card, fresh from the issuing bank. The card bore the name of Kevin E. Fu, a computer science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who was standing nearby. The card number and expiration date matched those numbers on the screen.

The demonstration revealed potential security and privacy holes in a new generation of credit cards — cards whose data is relayed by radio waves without need of a signature or physical swiping through a machine. Tens of millions of the cards have been issued, and equipment for their use is showing up at a growing number of locations, including CVS pharmacies, McDonald’s restaurants and many movie theaters. The card companies have implied through their marketing that the data is encrypted to make sure that a digital eavesdropper cannot get any intelligible information. American Express has said its cards incorporate “128-bit encryption,” and J. P. Morgan Chase has said that its cards, which it calls Blink, use “the highest level of encryption allowed by the U.S. government.”

But in tests on 20 cards from Visa, MasterCard and American Express, the researchers here found that the cardholder’s name and other data was being transmitted without encryption and in plain text.
"Researchers See Privacy Pitfalls in No-Swipe Credit Cards" The NY Times, October 23, 2006

Brooks suggests essay topics

 

October 21, 2006

Broadband - The new digital divide?

LAST week, Google announced that it would pay $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube, a video-sharing Web site started only 20 months ago. At the same time, CBS announced a content-sharing arrangement with YouTube. This is the new world of interactive television, all made possible by fast broadband connections streaming video over the Internet.

Any serious discussion of the future of the Internet should start with a basic fact: broadband is transforming every facet of communications, from entertainment and telephone services to delivery of vital services like health care. But this also means that the digital divide, once defined as the chasm separating those who had access to narrowband dial-up Internet and those who didn’t, has become a broadband digital divide. The nation should have a full-scale policy debate about the direction of the broadband Internet, especially about how to make sure that all Americans get access to broadband connections.
"Spreading the Broadband Revolution" The NY Times, Saturday October 21, 2006

Brooks suggests essay topics

 

October 21, 2006

Virtual identities out of control!

With his name and image on Web sites and his appearance on the “Today” show, Aleksey Vayner may be the most famous investment-banking job applicant in recent memory. Mr. Vayner’s curious celebrity came after an 11-page cover letter and résumé as well as an elaborate video that he had submitted to the Swiss bank giant UBS showed up on two blogs, and then quickly spread on the Internet. The clip, staged to look like a job interview, is spliced with shots of Mr. Vayner lifting weights and ballroom dancing and has him spouting Zen-like inspirational messages.

“This has been an extremely stressful time,” Mr. Vayner said in an interview. The job materials that were leaked and posted for public view included detailed information about him that allowed strangers to scrutinize and harass him, he said. His e-mail inbox quickly filled up, with most of the messages deriding him and, in some cases, threatening him. Mr. Vayner’s experience shows the not-so-friendly side of the social-networking phenomenon. While sites such as YouTube allow aspiring comedians or filmmakers to share their creations with millions of others, they also provide the ideal forum for embarrassing someone on a global scale. Materials can quickly make the rounds on blogs, via e-mail and through online hangouts like MySpace, becoming all but impossible to contain.
"A Student’s Video Résumé Gets Attention (Some of It Unwanted)" The NY Times, Saturday, October 21, 2006

Brooks suggests essay topics:

 

October 20, 2006

Blending virtual and real realities

It has a population of a million. The “people” there make friends, build homes and run businesses. They also play sports, watch movies and do a lot of other familiar things. They even have their own currency, convertible into American dollars. But residents also fly around, walk underwater and make themselves look beautiful, or like furry animals, dragons, or practically anything — or anyone — they wish.

This parallel universe, an online service called Second Life that allows computer users to create a new and improved digital version of themselves, began in 1999 as a kind of online video game. But now, the budding fake world is not only attracting a lot more people, it is taking on a real world twist: big business interests are intruding on digital utopia. The Second Life online service is fast becoming a three-dimensional test bed for corporate marketers, including Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Sun Microsystems, Nissan, Adidas/Reebok, Toyota and Starwood Hotels. The sudden rush of real companies into so-called virtual worlds mirrors the evolution of the Internet itself, which moved beyond an educational and research network in the 1990’s to become a commercial proposition — but not without complaints from some quarters that the medium’s purity would be lost.

Philip Rosedale, the chief executive of Linden Labs, the San Francisco company that operates Second Life, said that until a few months ago only one or two real world companies had dipped their toes in the synthetic water. Now, more than 30 companies are working on projects there, and dozens more are considering them. “It’s taken off in a way that is kind of surreal,” Mr. Rosedale said, with no trace of irony.

Virtual world proponents — including a roster of Linden Labs investors that includes Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com; Mitchell D. Kapor, the software pioneer; and Pierre Omidyar, the eBay co-founder — say that the entire Internet is moving toward being a three-dimensional experience that will become more realistic as computing technology advances.
"A Virtual World but Real Money" The NY Times, October 20, 2006

Brooks suggests essay topics:

 

October 19, 2006

Reality bites!

Very commonly students regard course work and the 'real world' as two different things. WRONG! when it comes to dLIS 540 Information Systems, Architecture and Retrieval. Here is the program of an XML conference that Boeing is going to sponsor this coming November 9. Check it out! Boeing XML Conference

Does the name Jon Bosak mean anything to you?

Time Presentation Speaker
07:30 Registration - Refreshments sponsored by Stilo
08:00 Introduction   
Welcome    		Scott Tsao
Dave Blue
08:15 Keynote:  Aviation Information Services—Strategies and Solutions for the 21st Century Dennis Floyd
08:45 Entering the Second Decade of XML Sharon Adler
09:30 Break - Refreshments sponsored by X-Hive
09:45 Supporting the Entire Technical Data Life Cycle with S1000D Ryan Augsburger
10:30 Working with Structured Content in DITA XML Erik Hennum
11:15 Web 2.0 and the New Collaboration Paradigm Joe Gollner
12:00 Lunch - Box lunches sponsored by PTC, or you may use the cafeteria on the first floor.
01:00 The The Increasing Value of Content Management in PLM and How XML Standards—S1000D and DITA—Are Driving Requirements Dave White
01:45 The Bermuda Triangle of Component Content Management
S1000D Process Data Module, Use Cases 		Jeroen van Rotterdam
02:30 Break - Refreshments sponsored by X-Hive
02:45 UBL: What XML Was Made For Jon Bosak
03:30 An Introduction to the OASIS Reference Model for SOA Duane Nickull
04:15 Conclusion Scott Tsao

October 17, 2006

Reducing movies to formulae

Copaken and Meaney also shared a fascination with a powerful kind of computerized learning system called an artificial neural network. Neural networks are used for data miningto look for patterns in very large amounts of data. In recent years, they have become a critical tool in many industries, and what Copaken and Meaney realized, when they thought about Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown, was that it might now be possible to bring neural networks to Hollywood. They could treat screenplays as mathematical propositions, using Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown's categories and scores as the motion-picture equivalents of melody, harmony, beat, tempo, rhythm, octave, pitch, chord progression, cadence, sonic brilliance, and frequency.
They called their company Epagogixa reference to Aristotle's discussion of epagogic, or inductive, learningand they started with a "training set" of screenplays that Mr. Pink and Mr. Brown had graded. Copaken and Meaney won't disclose how many scripts were in the training set. But let's say it was two hundred. Those scoresalong with the U.S. box-office receipts for each of the films made from those screenplayswere fed into a neural network built by a computer scientist of Meaney's acquaintance.
In the summer of 2003, Copaken approached Josh Berger, a senior executive at Warner Bros. in Europe. Meaney was opposed to the idea: in his mind, it was too early. "I just screamed at Dick," he said. But Copaken was adamant. He had Mr. Bootstraps, Mr. Pink, and Mr. Brown run sixteen television pilots through the neural network, and try to predict the size of each show's eventual audience. "I told Josh, 'Stick this in a drawer, and I'll come back at the end of the season and we can check to see how we did,' " Copaken said. In January of 2004, Copaken tabulated the results. In six cases, Epagogix guessed the number of American homes that would tune in to a show to within .06 per cent. In thirteen of the sixteen cases, its predictions were within two per cent. Berger was floored. "It was incredible," he recalls. "It was like someone saying to you, 'We're going to show you how to count cards in Vegas.' It had that sort of quality."
"The formula: Annals of Entertainment" The New Yorker, October 16, 2006

Brooks suggests essay topics

 

October 16, 2006

Live video

Last Wednesday, I was working late but left the office in time to watch the second episode of ABC’s “Lost.” But when I got home and booted the computer to check messages before hitting the couch, I happened to notice one of my twin daughters at a far-flung Big 10 campus was live on Yahoo! Messenger. I clicked on “View my Webcam,” as did Erin, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, and suddenly I had the chance to inspect the disturbingly large ring she recently had implanted in her lip. Live video may seem straight out of the Jetsons, but I have the computing skills of Fred Flintstone. Still, between my PC and my daughter’s Mac, we managed to get a serviceable video chat going, assisted by speakerphones on cells. My 9-year-old wandered over and, once she saw a live image of her now distant sister, acted as if I had invented electricity. We made Erin drag her new friend Sam into the picture so we could give him the once over. “He’s kind of cute,” my wife whispered sotto voce as she craned over my shoulder. (I’m reserving judgment until I can menace him in person.) Then we pinged Meagan, Erin’s twin sister up the road at University of Michigan. As soon as she accepted my invitation to view the Webcam, she exclaimed, “You’re here!”
Computers, which were designed to save time, have become machines that make it disappear and threaten to take traditional models of wasting hours (i.e., television) with them.
In the past week, Google and YouTube put a price tag of $1.65 billion on ubiquitous digital video and CBS, perhaps noticing that 100 million streams were being up- and downloaded a day, announced a revenue-sharing partnership with YouTube as well.
"Idiosyncratic and Personal, PC Edges TV" The NY Times, October 16, 2006

Brooks suggests essay topics

 

October 15, 2006

Blurring the line between real and unreal

In one corner of the monitor, an actress is projecting a series of emotions — ecstasy, confusion, relief, boredom, sadness — while in the center of the screen, a computer-drawn woman is mirroring those same emotions. It’s not just that the virtual woman looks happy when the actress looks happy or relieved when the actress looks relieved. It’s that the virtual woman actually seems to have adopted the actress’s personality, resembling her in ways that go beyond pursed lips or knitted brow. The avatar seems to possess something more subtle, more ineffable, something that seems to go beneath the skin. And it’s more than a little bit creepy.
The Image Metrics software lets a computer map an actor’s performance onto any character virtual or human, living or dead.
“We can reanimate footage from the past,” said Mr. Wood, a stolid man with a salesman’s smile. He was hired to introduce Hollywood to the technology, which the computer scientists who founded the company sometimes have difficulty articulating. “We could put Marilyn Monroe alongside Jack Nicholson, or Jack Black, or Jack White,” he continued, seated in the conference room where the emoting actress and her avatar shared the screen. “If we want John Wayne to act alongside Angelina Jolie, we can do that. We can directly mimic the performance of a human being on a model. We can create new scenes for old films, or old scenes for new films. We can have one human being drive another human character.”
"Cyberface: New Technology That Captures the Soul" The NY Times, October 15, 2006

Brooks suggests essay topics

 

October 14, 2006

Zines! [An e-mail I received Friday]

ATTENTION SEATTLE ZINESTERS!
The Seattle Public Library (SPL) is starting a trial zine collection at the Central Library. Located in the Teen Section, the collection will feature zines created by younger people in the Pacific Northwest, especially the greater Seattle area. Patrons may read zines in the library or borrow them to enjoy at home.
We encourage local self-publishers to help us broaden our collection by donating their zines, comics, and other self-published literary endeavors to SPL.* Our goal is to create a collection that will represent the amazing variety of zines, comics and other self-published works produced by young people in the Northwest and introduce these often-overlooked publications to a wider audience. By creating a zine collection, we also hope to broaden patrons’ opportunities for pleasure reading and self-education through alternative literary forms. We particularly favor zines and comics that are produced by teens and younger adults (13 to 30 year-olds) who are greater Seattle residents.
Please send your zines to: Jennifer Bisson, Teen Librarian c/o Teen Center, Seattle Public Library, 1000 4th Ave 98104, or drop them off at the Teen Center desk located on the 3rd level of the Central Library. If you have any questions or comments about this program, please write to Jennifer at TeenCenter@spl.org
Thank you for your help and please check out your zines and others at the Central Library!

Brooks suggests essay topics

 

October 14, 2006

Distributing software: Internet or desktop?

Steven A. Ballmer, the chief executive of Microsoft, has his hands full. The next version of the Windows operating system, Vista, is finally about to arrive — years late and clouded by doubts that it might violate antitrust rules in Europe. Windows Vista and Office 2007, according to industry analysts, may be the last time Microsoft can really cash in on these lucrative personal computer products, as software is increasingly distributed, developed and used on the Internet. In fast-growing consumer markets, Microsoft is playing catch-up. It trails well behind Google in Internet search. Next month, Microsoft will introduce its Zune music player, in an uphill effort to take on the Apple iPod.

Q. In the future, will the software model change? Will the Internet, for example, be the way most software is distributed?
A. That will happen. It’ll happen from us. It’ll happen from everybody.
Is Windows Near End of Its Run? The NY Times, Saturday October 14, 2006

Brooks suggests essay topics

October 13, 2006

A student writes...

Hi Terry,
After looking over your suggestions on our website, I think I'd like to focus on how people put all their personal thoughts, actions, lives on the web for anyone to view and comment on. I'm amazed by this. I'm such a private person, I can't imagine the people I interact with regularly knowing my private business much less total strangers out in www land. Can you give me some ideas on how I could approach this regarding info systems, architecture and retrieval? I'm not sure where to begin or how to turn my fascination into a paper for this class.

While our course is about three things: Information architecture, systems and retrieval, it is probably not the case that every writing topic will treat these three aspects equally. That is, some topics might emphasize the architecture aspect (i.e., "oh look, with my digital camera, which is cheap and easy to use, I can take a picture of my boy friend with no clothes on"), the systems aspect (i.e., "oh look, with the high speed cable that my parents provided me so that I can do my homework, I can easily upload the picture of my boyfriend to my MySpace web site") and retrieval (i.e., "oh look, by using my boyfriend's pet name 'Big Bunny', Google will sweep over my MySpace web site and index the picture of my naked boyfriend as "bunny"...that will have interesting consequences when little boys and girls search Google Images for pictures of bunnies"). Etc, etc., etc. I made that example up (could you tell), but it helps you to understand how certain social activities are facilitated/created by information architecture, systems and retrieval.

Now, you ask, is there material here for an essay? There is enough material here to write several books. So, off the top of my head, here are some suggested essay topics: "The advertisement of self as a function of digital photography", "The relationship between Internet personae and real people", "Accidental Internet fame", "The private relationship between people and their computers", "The emergence of video and music as exchanged texts", "Indexing images, music and video", etc.,etc.,etc.

I just made up those titles, but you can probably recognize that the writing of any of those essays would require you to consider information architecture, systems and retrieval in some degree or another.

Does this help?

 

October 12, 2006

Electronic books - next generation

The great e-book fantasy burst shortly after that speech [the keynote speech at the 2001 Women's National Book Association meeting], along with the rest of the dot-com bubble. In 2003, Barnes & Noble shut its e-book store, Palm sold its e-book business to a Web site and most people left the whole idea for dead.
Some die-hards at Sony still believe that, properly designed, the e-book has a future. Their solution is the Sony Reader, a small, sleek, portable screen that will be introduced this month in some malls, at Borders bookstores and at sonystyle.com for $350.
What distinguishes Sony’s effort from all the failed e-book readers of years gone by, however, is the screen. The Reader employs a remarkable new display technology from a company called E Ink. Sandwiched between layers of plastic film are millions of transparent, nearly microscopic liquid-filled spheres. White and black particles float inside them, as though inside the world’s tiniest snow globes. Depending on how the electrical charge is applied to the plastic film, either the black or white particles rise to the top of the little spheres, forming crisp patterns of black and white. The result looks like ink on light gray paper. The “ink” is so close to the surface of the screen, it looks as if it’s been printed there. The reading experience is pleasant, natural and nothing like reading a computer screen.
"Trying Again to Make Books Obsolete" The NY Times, October 12, 2006

Brooks comments
Slowly, slowly, inch by inch progress is being made. This is a good example of how technology moves ever so slowly towards a product that is 'human acceptable.' The adjective 'human-acceptable' means that even Terry Brooks might be willing to try it.

 

October 11, 2006

Shelfari!

Amazon.com revolutionized the way people buy books online. Now, a Seattle startup by the name of Shelfari is hoping to change the way people catalog and discuss books from their personal collections. Founded by former RealNetworks employees Josh Hug and Kevin Beukelman, the three-person company plans today to unveil a Web site that allows people to list book titles, write reviews, recommend books to friends and find like-minded bibliophiles. Shelfari plans to make money by passing leads on to Amazon and other online booksellers, taking a 5 percent to 10 percent cut of any sales that occur. An online ad component will be added in future iterations, along with the ability to catalog DVDs and CDs, Hug said. "Just as Flickr was social media around photos or YouTube around videos or Digg around news, we are building the first social media site focused on people that read books," said Hug, who, before founding Shelfari, served as director of device engineering at RealNetworks.
Shelfari an online meeting place for bibliophiles The Seattle Post Intelligencer, October 11, 2006

Brooks comments: So you're looking at a real 'information architect'. Our course is partly about information architecture. So what do you think he architects? Is he structuring information? Would he draw designs for the way Shelfari handles information and then hands these plans to programmers?

 

A student writes...

More questions from me. First of all, is it possible to put the dates of each post on your blog so that each entry is indicated by the date it was written? This would help us to see, at a glance, if there are any new entries since we last checked it and, also, sometimes the date in which something was written is relevant to the accompanying text!
Also, you state that folks all over the world are visiting our class websites and its various componenets. How can this be? I can only visit the site after inputting my UW Net ID, so how is it that folks who are neither my classmates in 540, nor are they students at UW, gaining access to these pages? Does this mean that I can view other course websites at the Information School for courses in which I am not registered?
And those are my questions for this week!

Monday, October 9, 2006
Thanks for the questions. I'll try to date my blog postings. I'm afraid that I was working on the assumption that my students would want to read ALL my blog entries, not just the most recent ones.

My claim was that the whole world is visiting our class website and its various pages. Point your browser at http://faculty.washington.edu/tabrooks/MonthlyUse.htm and you can find monthly logs of the traffic to the various course web sites that I've posted on the open web. If you check the month of September for our courses you will see, in part, the following:

Looks like some folks in Australia visited our class website in September...

 

'Massively single player' games: One person makes up many worlds

In this respect, Spore breaks decisively from the fastest-growing genre in gaming today: the so-called massively multiplayer networked games — like World of Warcraft — where thousands of players share a single persistent virtual world, interacting with other players via their onscreen characters. (Interestingly, Wright’s only foray into massively multiplayer design — the online version of the Sims that launched in 2002 — was a flop.) When you visit a bustling town center in a multiplayer game and see hundreds of characters sharing the space, you are intensely aware that each of these onscreen characters is being controlled from moment to moment by a live, sentient human somewhere in the real world. The social element is very much in the foreground of the experience. Spore flips that model on its head. Instead of a single shared world with millions of active participants, Spore promises a million alternate worlds, each occupied by a single player. You will meet creatures invented by others, but ultimately you are alone in your own private universe. Wright calls Spore “massively single player.”
The designer of the game happens to be both the most famous and most critically acclaimed designer in the young medium’s history: Will Wright, the 46-year-old creator of the blockbuster hits SimCity and the Sims. When I visited with Wright recently, he was sitting in a greenhouselike office on the roof of an anonymous-looking complex in Emeryville, Calif., a few miles west of Oakland, where his studio is based. For the first few minutes of our meeting, Wright was having trouble with the atmosphere of the game, which is called Spore.
"The long zoom" The NY Times Magazine, October 8, 2006

This exemplifies 'open ended' computer games that offer an infinity of possible solutions or 'worlds'.

Videos from the war

Videos showing insurgent attacks against American troops in Iraq, long available in Baghdad shops and on Jihadist Web sites, have steadily migrated in recent months to popular Internet video-sharing sites, including YouTube and Google Video. Many of the videos, showing sniper attacks against Americans and roadside bombs exploding under American military vehicles, have been posted not by insurgents or their official supporters but apparently by Internet users in the United States and other countries, who have passed along videos found elsewhere. Among the scenes being viewed daily by thousands of users of the sites are sniper attacks in which Americans are felled by snipers as a camera records the action and of armored Humvees or other military vehicles being hit by roadside bombs.
Anti-U.S. Attack Videos Spread on the Internet The NY Times, October 6, 2006

Brooks comments
We live in a world where our foes can broadcast directly to our desktops. This is directly due to the nature of the Internet, high-speed connections, video sharing, etc. In short, information architecture, systems and retrieval threaten the integrity of the nation state, change the nature of war, enlarge the role of propaganda, etc.

 

Measure 'sentiments' in text: "dislike" and "excoriate"

A consortium of major universities, using Homeland Security Department money, is developing software that would let the government monitor negative opinions of the United States or its leaders in newspapers and other publications overseas.
Such a “sentiment analysis” is intended to identify potential threats to the nation, security officials said.
Researchers at institutions including Cornell, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Utah intend to test the system on hundreds of articles published in 2001 and 2002 on topics like President Bush’s use of the term “axis of evil,” the handling of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, the debate over global warming and the coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.
“We want to understand the rhetoric that is being published and how intense it is, such as the difference between dislike and excoriate,” he said.
The researchers, using an grant provided by a research group once affiliated with the Central Intelligence Agency, have complied a database of hundreds of articles that it is being used to train a computer to recognize, rank and interpret statements.
Software Being Developed to Monitor Opinions of U.S. The NY Times, October 4, 2006

Brooks comments
Salton is alive and well and living abroad excoriating attempts to build computer that will understand text! Text A has 'dog' once, text B has 'dog' twice - therefore B is doggier than A. This is meaning?

 

The Simplify Button

Here is the 'simplify' button on the Roger Black web page. Point your browser at http://www.rogerblack.com/ and check out what he means when he simplifies his blog web page.

 

Like movies? Need money? Have ability to extrapolate?

Netflix, the popular online movie rental service, is planning to award $1 million to the first person who can improve the accuracy of movie recommendations based on personal preferences.
To win the prize, which is to be announced today, a contestant will have to devise a system that is more accurate than the company’s current recommendation system by at least 10 percent. And to improve the quality of research, Netflix is making available to the public 100 million of its customers’ movie ratings, a database the company says is the largest of its kind ever released.
Recommendation systems, also known as collaborative filtering systems, try to predict whether a customer will like a movie, book or piece of music by comparing his or her past preferences to those of other people with similar tastes. Such systems will look at, say, the last 10 books, movies or songs a customer has rated highly and try to extrapolate an 11th.
Computer scientists say that after years of steady progress in this field, there has been a slowdown — which is what Netflix executives say prompted them to offer the problem to a wide audience for solution.
And if You Liked the Movie, a Netflix Contest May Reward You Handsomely The NY Times, October 2, 2006

Brooks comments...
Here's a classic information-type problem...you have a huge pile of stuff, you have some objective traces of human behavior (Suzie Q likes these movies, but Billy Bob likes those movies, etc.) and then you have to somehow combine all these traces left by a bunch of strangers so as to predict what the next unknown, ad hoc movie viewer might want to see. Be sure to read Salton's solution to this type of problem in our entertainment between weeks one and two. In Salton's case the big bunch of stuff was a document collection in a database, the objective traces of human behavior were the words used by writers as they wrote those documents. Salton's solution was to count words...read the entertainment.

A student writes...

Hi Terry,
I was reading your blog and I think I need more clarification: you said that you think we should be done with everything we need to do by noon -- does that mean that there won't be an afternoon session?

You really want to listen to me on a Saturday afternoon when the sun is shining and the leaves are turning color, etc.? Even I don't want to listen to me on a Saturday afternoon when the sun is shining and the leaves are turning color.

I think that if everyone puts on their 'thinking caps' and tries really hard, we can do what we have to do by noon.

 

A student writes...

Just to clarify the schedule, does Week 1 of class start this Wednesday, or next week? Are you envisioning the weeks running Wednesday-Tuesday, or Monday-Sunday? Or doesn’t it really matter? I want to be sure I’m directing discussion for “my” article at the right time.
Also, will there be a class roster posted at some point? The i-School student directory seems to be inaccessible, and I don’t know who my “official” redaing partner is or how to get in touch with him/her.
Thanks in advance for the help. I look forward to meeting you on Saturday.

Autumn quarter starts Wednesday September 2006 so our class will cycle 'weekly' on Wednesdays. And frankly it doesn't really matter in the sense that deliverables are ultimately due at the end of the quarter. As to your discussion of a certain article, we'll talk about that during the residency and I'll give you a chance to meet with the other folks discussing an article. I'll probably urge the article reviewer's to post their review before the mid point of the quarter.
As to a class roster...there is a lot of registration churn the last few days before the quarter starts. I'll firm up the class roster by Friday September 29 and then you'll know who your article review partners will be.