I was on a flight to Chicago to attend Workday Rising, the annual conference of Workday. Whenever I get on a flight, some of my early travels always run through my mind.
I distinctly remember my very first flight out of Colombo to Trichy in South India. It was in 1972, when I was coming to India for my “higher studies”. It was all so strange and I had no idea what to do and followed whatever the person next to me was doing. They gave a hot towel, which my neighbor didn’t want (clever guy). By the time I figured out what the others were doing, it was no longer hot. I was so nervous that I forgot to look out and enjoy the take off etc., which are typically the thrills of a first flight. Of course, the technology of flights themselves never crossed my mind until later.
The next one was my flight in 1978 to come to the US. Another nervous and anxious flight. I was very depressed to be leaving my family back home. All the outwardly brave statements I made to friends and family about going to the US and not coming back for years turned into an outright scare. I took a Swissair flight because it was the cheapest at that time. Everything smelled strange, including the smoke from cigarettes in such a confined space. (more…)
It must be pretty hard to be a senior executive at Google, Facebook or Twitter. Though their technologies are predominantly used in interesting and positive ways, increasingly they have become the communication platform for terrorists and many other illegal activities. In the rush to claim victory for having millions and millions of users and monetize that for billions and billions of dollars, these companies have put many important matters in the back burner – such as developing strong acceptable use policies, detection and containment of illegal activities.
Many of these issues are hard and cumbersome, but it is not clear whether these companies even feel it is their obligation to worry about them or whether we should even expect them to. The recent revelations that these platforms played an important role in the interference by Russia in the US elections is serious enough to ask hard questions about what are their obligations. They all tout the use of new technologies to improve user experience everyday, while hiding the fact that they are doing it primarily to boost their profits. I understand that they are in the business of making money, but why are they not using these new technologies also to detect and prevent illegal activities?
(more…)
As we thought about our organizational goals, one of the things we wanted to emphasize was how, Library and Technology Services should strive to be one of the best learning organizations. Taken from Wikipedia – “a learning organization is a company that facilitates the learning of its members and continuously transforms itself” Which organization doesn’t want to do this, right? But, as an organization, are we facilitating the learning process enough? that is the big question. In order for this to be successful, both the leadership and the staff must be committed to it.
I just want to make sure that some of the underlying characteristics described in the Wikipedia article as quoted from The Fifth Discipline written by Peter Senge are not directly applicable to an organization like ours. But true to being a learning organization, we should study them and distill from them what we can take away!
(more…)
Today was the first day of classes and Convocation at the College. It was great to see all our students back. I saw a couple of our Helpdesk students working hard to clear the tickets even after we closed! I wanted to write about a few things with no particular connections to each other…
Social Media Problems
A student applied and was admitted to Univ of Rochester. Then, like all teenagers, she wrote about it in Facebook! It turns out that someone from the private high school she attended who saw this information on Facebook found this to be a little disconcerting, because the administrators do not remember the student asking for grades or recommendations be sent to Univ of Rochester. Anyways, upon further investigation, the University Admissions officers revealed that she claimed that she was home schooled and used a transcript service that helps home schooled children to send transcripts and sent in recommendation letters too. Once they found the real scoop, they rescinded her admission!
Along the same lines, in June, Harvard rescinded admissions to 10 students for a “a group exchange of racist and sexually offensive Facebook messages”.
One way to look at it is that Social Media brought out the true colors of people that are otherwise hard to gauge! Tough luck for those students whose admissions were rescinded!
(more…)
Specialization is healthcare has gotten to a point where body parts and functions are being sliced and diced into so many different parts and each has a separate specialist. I remember that, a few years ago, I had to be seen by an Electrophysiologist (who focuses on your heart’s timing, or electrical, system and on diagnosing and treating irregular heartbeats or arrhythmias) in the cardiologist’s office (no worries, I am fine!). That was the first time I learned that such a specialist existed.
On the one hand, it is great to see that people devote their entire life to become experts at such a minute level, which hopefully translates to better care. But, you also have a problem that when you become so focussed on one such thing, one wonders whether the specialists understand all the interdependencies with all other things and provide a holistic treatment. One hopes that the glue to all of this is your general practitioner, but that depends!
Software in Higher Ed is fast approaching this model and all the problems associated with the healthcare generally applies here too!
(more…)
A “birdie” hole!
I have been enjoying the summer tremendously as you can tell from my tan if you happen to see me (otherwise, believe me!) 🙂 During my week off, I played golf for 6 of the 7 days, mostly with one of my kids. Such an enjoyable experience, especially because we had a couple of excellent rounds. I have also been taking some time to catch up on emerging technologies, especially one that I simply could not get my head around – bitcoin or generally, the idea of blockchains.
Whether it is technologies such as bitcoin or the gene editing story that is in the news recently, once again, the creativity and good intentions that are driving new innovations, are being rushed without proper thinking of their implications. When I was younger I ignored that thinking part and was all excited about the advances and pooh-poohed the need for policies and governance for new and emerging technologies. But as I get older, I am beginning to shift my thinking on this a lot. (more…)
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.
(more…)
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.
(more…)
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 🙂
(more…)
