Archive of ‘Uncategorized’ category
Wintonbury Hills Golf Course, Bloomfield, CT.
I just realized that I had not written for quite some time. It has to do with the fact that we are very close to the launch of some new and exciting systems (I would prefer not to reveal them publicly!) and also several things related to onboarding our first year students. I have been playing golf as always and thoroughly enjoying it. There is a lot one can learn by playing such a difficult game, and apply them both in personal and professional life.
Before I go any further, I want to say that I play golf because I love the game and I love to be outdoors for a stretch of time! Also, the outings that I have with my children are precious and priceless.
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One of the things that I most enjoyed when I came to this country was the travel with friends. Driving around in a structured environment such as lanes and highways was a brand new experience for me and the ease with which one could do it was even more exciting. Large books of maps from AAA was something that I was fascinated with and whenever I went to one of my close friend’s house, I would pick it up and start exploring it for long periods of time and literally commit to memory routes and places.
One thing that I was initially fascinated with was the TripTik travel planner from AAA, which had the whole trip planned out with folded pages of highlighted routing. Soon I began to dislike them. When you were traveling without these, there was an excitement about discovery and dynamic routing based on what you remembered. In addition, there was fierce competition amongst a few of us in the car for who had the most knowledge about maps and routes. You always used the books of maps in the car to subsequently prove that you had the superior routing skills. All of that vanished when you had TripTik, which was considered the expert opinion and therefore the best option.
This also resulted in me being really fascinated with problems such as traveling salesman problem and the minimal spanning tree algorithms (I submitted my completed program in record time for my data structures class!)
With the advent of GPS and Google Maps and Waze, I have completely outsourced this aspect of my life. I have also outsourced a significant portion of what I used to remember primarily to Google and some of the other technologies. It is true that aging also contributed to all of this and I am sure I am not the only one experiencing this.
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Today is commencement day at Wellesley. It is indeed a day of celebrations. As I was walking from the location, where we all have been asked to park, to my office, I could see the proud parents and relatives of graduates walking towards the tent to get the best possible seats. This year, because of the weather, the ceremonies will be held under a tent. That didn’t seem to damper the enthusiasm of the visitors.
For those who are graduating, about 569 this year, Congratulations on your achievements at the College! I hope you all received the best education in not just the academics, but also about life. I sure hope that we, from Library and Technology Services supported you through this journey well. Initial indications from the senior survey appears that we did well.
I want to thank all the LTS student employees (I believe 39 of them) who are graduating today for their hard work and excellent contributions over the past years that they worked for us. We cannot do our work well without our student employees! (more…)
There is no day that passes where we don’t hear about hacking of one kind or the other. The most prevalent ones are phishing attacks because they are easy to carry out and the dividends for the hackers are pretty high. Here is another link that shows more statistics on phishing. Please note that the statistics probably are way underestimating the reality because they are generally based on surveys. Since there are no legal requirements to report a phishing attack unless there has been compromises involving personally identifiable information, there is no other database of phishing attacks.
Because of the advances in operating systems and other tools such as antivirus, malware & spyware protection as well as local firewalls, personal computing devices have become much harder to invade directly, unless of course, for a variety of reasons (including the cost of virus protection software), someone decides not to install and run these protection tools. In addition, browsers have become sophisticated in helping protect our information. Again, it requires some effort in terms of updating the browser and sometimes installing additional extensions etc. I strongly recommend you reading “Securing Your Browser” from US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team), however, use your discretion in reading this given that this is from the US government which has a strong surveillance program. May be a few of their recommendations are to help them gather your information 🙂
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As a child growing up in Sri Lanka and India, I was used to how impossible it was to keep anything private. It almost felt like gossip was a full time job for many idle folks who stayed home and didn’t have much in the way of diversion. No television and radio programs of interest were fairly limited. As a result, these folks were theorizing about everyone else’s lives and fake news was all over the place. I have witnessed many cases where this had resulted in irreparable reputational damages to many.
After moving to this country, I began to appreciate the value of privacy. It is not that people didn’t gossip or wanted a window into others’ personal lives, it just was very different, both in terms of scale and the distance people liked to keep. Now, with the recent advances in technologies and lack of policies and laws, I feel that we have lost privacy forever. Anyone with a little time, minimal technical savvy and intent can learn so much about many of us at a scale that was unprecedented. As a result, it has become much easier for people to be judgmental and cause harm either intentionally or unintentionally. Worse, corporations and governments have gotten in on this to monetize and spy against the citizens.
Every day we hear one thing or the other. Today, it was Unroll.me selling to Uber information they had collected.
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Ithaka S+R is a “not-for-profit service that helps the academic community navigate economic and technological change.” They published the results of an extensive survey of academic library directors on the strategy and directions for the libraries. This is a triennial survey and is part of a collection of related surveys of faculty and students. This is a very informative survey and I strongly encourage you to read through it carefully. The authors point out that there are significant differences in many areas of the survey by the institution type. But, there are several topics in which there are commonalities. It is notable that the response rate for Baccalaureate institutions is only 43% whereas for Doctoral institutions is 68%.
Here are the key findings:
- Library directors anticipate increased resource allocation towards services and predict the most growth for positions related to teaching and research support.
- Library directors are deeply committed to supporting student success, yet many find it difficult to articulate these contributions.
- Collections have been digitally transformed, and directors are interested in expanding their collecting to include more non-textual materials.
- Library directors are increasingly recognizing that discovery does not and should not always happen in the library.
- Library directors are pursuing strategic directions with a decreasing sense of support from their institutions.
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I have been an early adopter of Inbox and I know that there are folks who either love it or hate it. I like it for a whole range of reasons which I will outline below. Spoiler alert: It is incomplete and is “in the works”, so I also have Gmail open in another tab in Chrome!
One of the most important things that I desire is the ability to scan through the emails I receive as quickly as I can, respond to the ones that I can do so immediately, but not forget some of the other ones. Inbox provides ways to do this that I love. So, here we go as to why I like it.
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I was listening to a Science Friday podcast and one of the topics was about storing data using DNA. Both DNA computing and DNA storage has always fascinated me. As we all know, DNA has a very long shelf life! The half life of DNA has recently been estimated to be 521 years under certain conditions such as vacuum packed and at -80 degree Celsius. That would roughly translate to over a million years of shelf time before the DNA disintegrates into something that is no longer useful. Given what we have seen of the shelf lives of digital storage media such as CDs and DVDs, this sounds pretty good.
In addition, the “storage density” of DNA is very impressive! In a recent study, scientists from Columbia University reported that they have developed a method through which they can store 215 petabytes of data in just 1 gram of DNA. A petabyte is a mere million gigabytes and all of it in 1 gram of DNA. How impressive is that! If you are interested in an overview of some of the earlier studies on this subject, you might want to read this article.
OK, it stays for a long time and is very efficient in terms of capacity, so what’s the catch?
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Tim Berners-Lee is widely credited with the invention of World Wide Web around 1989, though it remained a theoretical exercise until the implementation of its principles in 1993 through a browser called Mosaic by a team led by Marc Andreesen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. The rapid progress of web is testament to the notion of hyperlinked information.
Recently, Tim has moved on to the next web. He has come up with the idea called Linked Data. In simple terms, every one can put data about themselves on the web which are linked to other data and that the data is decoupled from applications that access them. One could argue that we are already there.
For example, if you store your data in the cloud with vendors like Apple, Google or Microsoft, there are literally thousands of applications that can access the data with your consent. In other words, the data is decoupled from the application. The methodology used by any application to fetch data anywhere is referred to as the Application Programming Interface or API. It is true that there is no single standard for this and each system has its own description of API and even more annoying is that these change so often. However, I am sure there is much more to this that we don’t understand but he does!
One thing that I am always interested in how to use these concepts to bring fairness to the game of data. What follows are my thinking based on some of what I understand to be the linked data concept and I may be totally off base here!
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Life is short; I wish I had more time – things that you hear all the time. I feel the same way and at my age there is an even more sense of urgency to attend to things that I want to do and learn. So, here are a few select items related to work. I have a long and unrealistic bucketlist for my personal life which shall remain where it is now…
Learn and use AI (Artificial Intelligence) – AI (Artificial Intelligence) is in the news a lot recently. Many of us will vividly remember IBM Watson winning Jeopardy in 2011. This was an awesome way in which the power of machine intelligence was demonstrated. I vividly remember the AI class I took in 1985 at the CUNY Graduate Center when I was doing my MA in computer science. It was the craze at that time. The language of choice for AI at that time (and it still continues to be) was LISP. Even though many programming languages are strange in their own ways, this is an extreme one, where the use of parentheses is so pervasive that they are annoying.
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