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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I had an interesting conversation with folks from Handshake, which our Career Education department chose and we are thrilled to support. It was all about “Why Handshake, how did you decide” etc. You take the word “Handshake” out and replace it with “Workday” or some other product and the same applies. I want to talk about how we do it at Wellesley with the hope that this will be useful for others. I am keenly aware that no two institutions are the same in our space and therefore the applicability may be limited!
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I have been pretty upset recently about a whole bunch of things. Here are a few!
SPAM emails and Cold-calls
The sheer number of unwanted emails that I receive daily is getting out of control. I never asked for them in the first place. The CAN SPAM Act was a welcome change in 2003 when it was passed, but many didn’t read the fine print before celebrating. It is about giving the consumers a choice to opt out! It should have given the consumers a choice to opt in instead! Companies are buying bulk email lists at ridiculously low price and mindlessly blasting emails hoping for miracles. Automated SPAM detection is always late in catching up to the tricks of the marketers, so we still see many emails in our inbox. I have tried everything from Unroll.me to unsubscribing to marking them as spam. Nothing works all the time and I hate clutter in my inbox.
Phones are a bit more manageable. I have all my work calls forwarded to Google Voice and I screen calls before taking them. Also, my Android phone now allows me to mark numbers as SPAM, thank you! At home, we are extremely happy that we signed up for NOMOROBO. Though we signed up with Do Not Call Registry very early on, over the years it has become practically useless. NOMOROBO partners with the telephone service provider to detect if several phones are being called at the same time and kills the call after a ring or two. Works beautifully. But I am sure that someone is developing a way to bypass this.
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Technology ecosystems, a complex network of interconnected systems, have formed sometimes for all the right reasons, but a lot of times to fix problems created by badly designed systems. The most recent mobile app ecosystems came about because of conscious decisions made in the original design itself – realizing that they themselves did not have the bandwidth to provide all the possible functionalities, companies like Apple and Google created frameworks and allowed a community of developers to develop mobile apps for their platforms. In case of Apple, this is a carefully controlled process, whereas in case of Android, it is sort of free for all.
Then you have cases like a poorly designed Windows operating system that gave rise to a multibillion dollar ecosystem for protecting the operating system – virus protection and malware to name a few. And because these systems were originally not designed for the well connected environment we live in, new vulnerabilities are found on a daily basis. So, there is a whole ecosystem to protect essentially poorly designed systems!
Reporting and Business Intelligence ecosystems are mixed. The original ERP systems developers designed these systems to be handling large amounts of transactions. As a result these were data black holes and getting the data out from these systems required a complete new way of thinking. So, a badly designed system gave birth to data warehouses that are optimal for reporting. Then the limitations of reporting was realized and this gave birth to a whole new ecosystem called Business Intelligence that allows one to probe the data in real time without having to learn to write code!
The challenge we face is how best to support our community when easy access to several choices exist.
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Arbitrary boundaries, whether geographical or timewise, have existed for a long time and on the one hand, it is understandable that they serve a purpose, but in some cases they seem silly. I understand how we all are energized as we approach Fridays, looking forward to the weekend. In reality why does it because weekends are another couple of days. However, if I took a day off on Wednesday, it just doesn’t feel the same as a Saturday and Sunday, though it really shouldn’t. The same way, Jan 1 of every year is just like every other day. But we all think of it very differently and act that way.
Most of us set up new plans, predominant number of which fail within a few days. Why would we not do it on Feb 1? Or on one’s birthday? It is not the same. In that vein, I would like to look at what is in store for us in 2017, yet another new beginning!
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