It is almost Thanksgiving time, it is hard to believe. I have always wondered whether how we feel about time is more recent, due to the influence of technology in our lives and not having a pause button. I just completed three years at Wellesley and it has gone by so fast. This year, for our Thanksgiving, we will have a few additional guests and we are so looking forward to next week. Since Thanksgiving is a family “reunion”, I wanted to share with you an excellent, emotional video from Google about the reunion of two old friends who were separated due to the partition of India in 1947.
Apparently, the next big wave in technology is “Wearable Computing“. The hype really has picked up primarily due to increased use of Google Glass. The real question is how many of us are ready to wear computing? I highly recommend an excellent conversation on this subject by Bryan Alexander and Veronica Diaz from EDUCAUSE Learning Institute (ELI) which touches on many interesting areas around wearable computing devices.
I spent most of the weekend catching up on the MOOC that I am registered for – The Secret of Life. We are learning about cloning and it is fascinating. The acceleration in discoveries and innovations has gotten up to a point where the “tools” of cloning are now available in a catalog – you can order the “cloning vectors” (“Plasmids“). We are also learning how the scientists have been unraveling the “secret of life”. It is mind boggling to hear how there is always an enzyme that assists a specific chemical reaction, which led the professor to quip that “there is always an app for that”! It is pretty amazing how all of these have to come together in particular sequence (no pun intended) and at particular times for everything to work just right. No wonder it took several million years to perfect this….
Whereas this course is teaching us the intricacies of formation of life, I was so sad to see many lives lost in the Philippines due to super typhoon Haiyan. I sure hope that they get the help they need and recover quickly. We were relieved to hear how technology, combined with the government machinery, helped evacuate 800,000 people from somewhat a smaller Typhoon that hit Eastern India a few weeks ago. I still vividly remember the 1964 cyclone (cyclone, hurricane, typhoon – they are all similar) that destroyed a bridge in South India (called the Pamban Palam) connecting an island called Dhanushkodi. My cousin was coming back to Sri Lanka after a trip to India around that time and it took us several days to know that he luckily skipped the train that submerged in the waters. Communication was pretty bad in those days!
I was talking to a colleague last week about a proposal to collaborate and we were both fretting how hard it has become to collaborate. We also were wondering aloud as to “what is collaboration?” One can look for its definition in dictionaries, but I think this definition in Wikipedia captures the essence well “Collaboration is working with each other to do a task and to achieve shared goals. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals”. The key is “working together”, “shared goals” and “recursive process”. Too often, in our interest to collaborate, we lose sight of these key things.
I heard a very interesting & timely piece on NPR this evening – “The Most Secure Password In The World Might Be You” I strongly encourage you to listen to it or read about it. It is a quick review of how some big tech firms are predicting that the passwords are dead and biometrics are the way to go. The proliferation of systems that requires us to authenticate and the hodgepodge of rules for strong passwords have created a nightmare. Most users have the same password for accessing everything and worse, it is also an easily guessable password. Biometrics on the other hand relies on you as a person to do something to identify yourself to the systems – either a finger swipe, or retinal scan or a voice recognition system along with a pass phrase. Just the same way the passwords has weaknesses, each of these also have weaknesses, but they certainly have clear advantages. One of them is that you don’t need to maintain multiple passwords! Each of the biometric methods exploit the fact that they are unique to the person. One of the arguments made in favor of biometrics is that stealing the info is not scalable. That is, whereas millions of passwords stored on a server can be hacked and unencrypted in hours or days, it is hard to imagine stealing fingerprints and retinas on that scale, especially anonymously! However, some form of fingerprints and retinal scans must be saved somewhere in order to verify that it is yours. It is quite possible that these can be hacked and transmitted in some fashion to fool the system. This is pure speculation on my part, of course! If you ask me, I would like to see the passwords dead in favor of a more reliable and easy to use authentication system, but I don’t think passwords will be die that soon.
We are trying very hard to be tuned into major advances and disruptions that are taking place. The Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policies (ACLTP) has begun an overview of Library trends in order to understand disruptions in managing Collections and understand what services we should be prepared to provide. We are excited because such collaborative planning for the future always pays hefty dividends.
