Category: Uncategorized


Aug
2014

Complexities of Information

categories: Uncategorized

I have been pained to follow some of the worst things that are happening around the world – the conflict in Gaza, Ukraine, Ebola virus and continued issues in Iraq. I have been amazed how information gets passed around instantaneously now. However, this also has the downside that those who report about these events have not had time to fully understand all issues and report objectively. To make things worse, others react to these information instantaneously, without even thinking about it. Some were complaining in social media about why it is a bad idea to bring two american citizens affected by the Ebola Virus, especially Donald Trump!

Information distribution and consumption have always been problematic because of the subjective nature of the very subject. Whereas those who create “information” for the consumption by the others try very hard to be objective and factual, preconceived notions and biases almost always find their ways in. Whether it is news reporters, editors or scholars, this is true though we have had checks and balances in place to reduce the subjectivity and biases. In many cases, personal opinions are clearly identified. However, when an entire news organization has a certain bias right from the top of the organization, as perceived by those who consume the information, regardless of how the information is distributed, the consumers assume a certain bias.

All of these have gotten worse with the advances in technologies. The world wide web and more recently the social media have become an outlet for instantaneous information and this has added tremendous complexities to the information, primarily, trust. Prof Metaxas from the Computer Science department at Wellesley studies the (mis) information propagation in Twitter, which provides an excellent introduction to this topic.  (more…)


Jul
2014

Travel & Technology

categories: Uncategorized

P1030326We spent five days in Cancun, Mexico and just got back. It was a lot of fun and relaxation. The beaches were fantastic! During the travels this summer I used a lot of technologies myself and noticed the use of various technologies around me. The first and foremost thing I notice is that no matter where one is, most people are carrying a mobile device. Whether it is the trains in Malaysia or relaxing on the beaches in Cancun, many have a cell phone they are checking or talking on or are looking at things on their tablets. Of course, it goes without saying that it included me and it made me not feel guilty 🙂

Secondly, wireless was everywhere. However, depending on where you are, the access can be an issue. In Kuala Lumpur, I was able to get WiFi access perfectly in the hotel, guest WiFi at University of Malaya was a bit of an issue, wireless at Starbucks was perfect. In Cancun, one of the hotels we stayed in had no WiFi in the room (we vacated the place the next day and moved to another hotel!), but the other was perfect and the WiFi was available even in the beaches adjoining the hotel (several feet away). However, Starbucks required you to purchase something and you had to use the password printed on the receipt (waste of paper) and you had only 15 minutes of access.

(more…)


Jul
2014

Unplugging was not that bad after all…

categories: Uncategorized
IMG_20140630_051012
Pygmy Elephants in the banks of Kinabatangan River in Sabah, Malaysia

As many of you know, my wife and I spent a couple of weeks in Malaysia. One of the things I knew going in was that we were going to spend a week in Malaysian Borneo and that the internet connection would be essentially non-existent. I was very concerned about my own well being under those conditions.

I am happy to tell you that we survived being unplugged. The reason was that the unplugging was only for the first three days and even during that time, I could go to a cafe in the rainforest and after many retries, at least get to read my email.

I know that many of you feel I am crazy to be checking email on my vacation. Guess what, we are absolutely fine with it and we still enjoy our vacations tremendously. The added advantage is that I don’t have a mound of email to deal with when I get back. Anyways, these are personal preferences that we don’t have to go into.

Our first stop in Borneo was Gunung Mulu national park. It is a rainforest with some of the most impressive and massive caves. We spent three days there. We walked a lot in humid and hot conditions, took a night walk and saw some insects. However, our imagination of what a rainforest would be turned out to be very different from what it really is. For one, there was no rain for three days and though you could hear a lot of bird sounds, we did not see many of them. The canopy walk was interesting and a very early morning walk up a watch tower with a newly bought pair of binoculars yielded pretty much nothing. Nope, you can’t blame it on my inexperience with the binoculars. A gentleman from Holland who accompanied us has a lot of experience and he reminded us that these are not “sure shots”.

(more…)


Jun
2014

Importance of experiencing the “user experience”

categories: Uncategorized

I am sitting here in Istanbul airport, waiting to board a flight. Thankfully the internet is working great and because of the long layover we got lot accomplished sitting in a Starbucks.

I wanted to write about my printing experience  during last week. Those who know me also know that I am paperless and hardly print. I had to print the salary letters so I could write a note to the LTS staff in their letters. It needed to be printed in color because of a signature in color. I was told that the best place to print is the Community printer in Clapp Library.

First step, I had to install Papercut. I was very happy to see the documentation here. It is detailed and well done! One of our staff at the reference desk helped me through it. I was racing against time, so I was a bit impatient with the install, which required several steps, but I attributed that more to me than poor software design such as “Do you really want to install this?” (Why ask such a question?, puhleese)

Then started the problems. The staff member inserted the letterhead in a tray from which it was supposed to be picked up, which didn’t work. However, I needed to give a username and password on my Mac everytime I printed (which I went ahead and saved for the long haul). But to release it every time, I needed to provide my username and  password (about 15 characters long) in the printer. It was annoying, but I understand why. (more…)


Jun
2014

Collaboration – Informing vs Involving

categories: Uncategorized

These past several weeks have been very busy and exciting. One of our sons got married and the other graduated. Everything went off well and we are extremely proud of our children and their accomplishments.

I am planning to keep the next few posts short 🙂

I was talking to a few of my colleagues about why is it that some of the projects take so long. I care a lot about efficiencies. Unfortunately efficiency works against culture, and it is extremely important to find the right balance between the two. Obviously, finding such a balance is non-trivial and takes a lot of practice and time. However, if we don’t keep reminding ourselves of this, more often than not, we will sacrifice efficiencies for the sake of cultural reasons. Which way to tilt the balance depends entirely on what we are trying to do.

(more…)


May
2014

Crowdsourced research

categories: Uncategorized
Screen Shot 2014-05-13 at 7.43.23 AM
Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game

During the past weekend, during a dinner at our house, conversation shifted to how crowdsourced research is helping tackle some of the problems. The traditional research revolves faculty and others in a research group training the students in research methods as well as relationship building with the members of the research group. Implicit in all of this is that when the student researchers brings the results to the faculty, the familiarity of the methodologies as well as trust makes this relationship produce excellent results. Similarly, research collaborations happen between faculty from different areas within the same institution or from others based on common interests, familiarity and trust. Again, familiarity and trust are the basic foundations for the success of research. Of course, this is, like everything else, a gross generalization, but it captures what happens today.

Crowdsourcing of research simply means putting out a research problem out there on the internet and inviting anyone who wants to participate to contribute to the research. There is a lot more to this in that the researcher needs to define up front the process for vetting the contributions and attributions and all that jazz. But the idea, when it works, is brilliant. Instead of a few students or postdocs working in a lab, you now have literally thousands of participants from all over the world. The kinds of research one can carry out this way is certainly limited, but, it is still very powerful!

(more…)


Apr
2014

Heartbleed bug and open source

categories: Uncategorized

I just realized that I have not posted to my blog for three weeks. That is not good. Of course, I, like everyone else in the world, have been pretty busy 🙂

I traveled to Washington DC for a gathering of CIOs from other merged Library-IT organization. We belong to an organization called CLIR and we meet up twice a year to discuss various topics of interest and unique to us. I was the moderator for this past meeting. One of the most interesting topics we discussed is relevant to what we are discussing internally – library collections management. This was featured in a very interesting report from Ithaka S+R. I will write more about it in a future post. In short, all the libraries are in the process of strategizing what is the best way to manage the acquisition of and management of physical collections. Circulation statistics are on the decline, electronic versions are improving, funding is very tight and prices are going up. How do we plan for the future by taking into consideration all of these factors?

On Tuesday, April 22, I attended the gathering of several Wellesley College alumnae who were Knapp interns. Thanks to the generous support of Betsy Knapp ’64, we have been able to train several alumnae in a variety of technologies. During this gathering the alumnae explained how the experience has helped them during the course of their careers as well as in grad school. It was a fabulous gathering and it was great to hear the power of this internship experience.

I also climbed up the Galen Stone Tower on campus to see the students play the “carillons”. It was a great experience. Climbing up the tower also added significantly to the fitbit count and helped burn a few calories.

OK, if you have not heard of heartbleed bug (the media coverage on this has passed), then, congratulations to you on figuring out how to tune off from this well connected world! However, I suggest that you look at your emails to see if you got notified by anyone that you may have to change the password because their service may have been vulnerable to heartbleed.

(more…)


Apr
2014

Cool Techs

categories: Uncategorized
From: WFSB.com http://wfsb.images.worldnow.com/images/25178766_BG6.jpg
From: WFSB.com http://wfsb.images.worldnow.com/images/25178766_BG6.jpg

I have been thoroughly enjoying the past several days as every day from Saturday we have had a UConn team advance forward in the NCAA Basketball. UConn men’s win yesterday was fantastic and totally unpredicted. They outsmarted some of the best teams along the way and proved that height alone cannot win games. Looking forward to the UConn women’s game tonight.

I don’t have to tell you how mad the “March Madness” has been. As of last Sunday, only 1,780 brackets remain which correctly predicted a Kentucky v UConn finals. Wait, that many predicted this final? These folks must not know basketball or must have been in some unseemly state to have chosen these two teams. I resisted the temptations to make choices this year. I watched only a few critical match ups in NCAA Men’s basketball during the year. Was way too busy watching all the rest of the stuff on TV.

As a surprise gift, we got to see a cricket finals on ESPN2 on Sunday! It was a shortened version of a cricket match which is immensely popular now, called T20. India played Sri Lanka for the title. India played poorly and the Sri Lankans won the title for the first time. It was great to see Sri Lanka win (how can I be disappointed by my birth country winning) because this was the last game for some of the fantastic, gentlemanly players in the team.

Whether it is the replays during the basketball games or cricket, cool technologies are being developed all around us, many of them, every day. It is becoming so hard to keep up. In fact many of them seem to just come and go. As we are launching the major facilities renovation at Wellesley, we are rethinking classroom spaces and some of the newer technologies that we are looking at are really exciting. The vendors remind me that interactive displays that we are excited about is no longer “new”. They have been in the market for over 5 years and are very prevalent in K-12 space. Why do I have to be constantly reminded that Higher ed is slow to adopt newer technologies?

(more…)


Mar
2014

NERCOMP 2014 Annual Conference

categories: Uncategorized

nercomp I attended the NERCOMP annual conference from 3/24 till 3/26. It is one of my favorite gatherings (Newly constituted NERCOMP band that you see in the image entertained us). This year, we had record attendance of 725.  We had two highly entertaining keynotes – one by Jeff Borden from Pearson and the other by Bryan Alexander from NITLE. Jeff talked about the connection between neuroscience, learning  design and educational technology and how we can learn from brain research and psychology and use the emerging technologies to deliver better learner experience. Through a simple exercise of asking us all to get up and stand on one leg with arms spread, he proved that a whole bunch of us were drunk at 10 AM. There may be some truth to it! You can see a conversation with Jeff here. Bryan laid out various trends in technology and higher education nicely and made it a point to remind the audience that predictions by humans generally are worse than those based on throwing of darts or, plain random predictions. You can see a conversation with him after his talk here.

The big question in the minds of most of us in the audience is “This all sounds great and we are on board. But, whats next? How do we bring along the others such as the faculty, students and the administration to buy into all of this?”.

I sampled several very informative sessions. The session on flipping the classroom by Thomas Menella (Baypath College) was very good and you can access his presentation material here.  If you are interested, please watch the Prezi presentation which provides in great detail what Thomas does for the class. It was funny to hear him describe how they have mock trials about DNA mutation. Students are grouped together – for, against and a jury – to decide whether the DNA is guilty or innocent of mutation (or at least that is how I understood it). I was not there for the student presentations, but based on the tweets that I saw, looks like they really learned a lot from this.

Of course, we all tweeted a lot and you can see them here.  If you are interested seeing all of mine, click here.

(more…)


Mar
2014

Metrics are useful, but…

categories: Uncategorized

I am at the San Francisco Airport waiting to board a red-eye back to Boston after two days at Google for a gathering of colleagues from a few other Higher Ed organizations and K-12 school districts. I love visiting Google. Unfortunately, I cannot openly discuss everything that was part of the meeting.

I have been thinking a lot about metrics. Thanks to technology, we have tremendous amount of data. Some are clean and some are not. The balance of good to bad data depends a lot on the institution, its commitment to collecting and keeping the data clean, so on and so forth. Many institutions use them for comparison purposes, either to show the trends within the institution (faculty/administrative staff ratio over the past ten years) or with their peers. I am sure that a lot of thought goes into these metrics, but some of them tend to fall in the category of “they are doing it, so we must”.

(more…)

Skip to toolbar