Posts Tagged ‘Apple’
It almost looks like all of the recent advances in technologies were created with good intent as well as to reward the inventors with boat loads of money. I cannot think of any of the major technologies that have been invented by responsible companies to assist the bad guys. However, almost all of these great new technologies have and continue to be used in ways that they were not intended and for the detriment of everyone. Here are a few: world wide web – this has been a game changer and has helped bridge the technology gap around the world in meaningful ways, but has been exploited by the criminals in numerous ways; Mobile technology – again, this has revolutionized communication all around the world while introducing another path for the bad guys; Streaming media – this now helps us listen and watch what we want, when we want and where we want, but this also has resulted in intellectual property violations of all kinds; finally Social Media – well, do I need to say anything about this?
My gripe is with the technology companies, especially the startups, who do not pay enough attention to the implications of what they are putting out. They rush to get their products to go viral and this seems to be the focus rather than use current examples as a guide to structuring the products in a way that they are solid in terms of security and privacy and are sustainable for a reasonable time into the future. Of course, unintended consequences are part of the game because no technologist can ever see before hand how a criminal is likely to think and take advantage of the technology being rushed out. But…
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I was at the NERCOMP Annual Conference last week. There were some really interesting presentations that I attended, but I should say that the first keynote by Gerard Senehi was less than optimal for a conference to open. Danah Boyd, on the other hand, was fantastic, talking about how even the younger members of our society care about privacy, contrary to the myth that they don’t.
One particular talk that I liked and want to follow up has to do with open educational resources. The powerpoint presentation is available along with the abstract, so please review it. Though some of the panelists are from institutions that are very different from us, we feel that there is something here for us to learn from and educate our community.
Artificial Intelligence has been in the news recently and frankly, trying to define it in clear terms is something I am not capable of. It has morphed over the years thanks to advances in computing. Is it possible for machines to emulate humans in the way we think? This is a loaded question as you can imagine.
Theoretically speaking, an artificial intelligence system must pass the Turing test. This test involves a party game where a man and a woman play with a third person who is trying to guess the genders accurately. The man provides all answers to convince the third person that he is a man while the woman provides tricky answers to convince the third person that she is the man. Turing proposed that if you switched one of them with a machine then the person needs to guess who is a human and who is a machine. If the person failed to guess correctly more than half the time, then the machine will be declared having passed the test (that it has enough intelligence on its own to fool the third person).
There are a lot more underlying details to this of course, because of the availability of massive amounts of data and the computing power, even the “brute force” computing can be confused with intelligence.
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Last week we heard about Apple vs FBI in the fight over a locked iPhone containing presumably valuable data regarding the San Bernardino attackers who killed 14 innocent people. Last night we heard about a gunman who randomly shot people in Kalamazoo, MI who happens to be a driver for Uber. There is no direct connection between the topic of this blog and these two incidences though some indirect link exists and I will leave it to your imagination.
Regardless of our individual positions on Apple’s stand, I would be curious to know what they find in the iPhone that they cannot find elsewhere. In this so well connected and cloud driven world where every vendor seem to want you to sync all of your information with their cloud services, you must be pretty deliberate and careful about not syncing your data with other cloud based systems. A bigger question I have is, with such vast amounts of available data and sophisticated analysis tools, what prevented law enforcement from picking up something like this? Impure data? Inconclusive evidence?
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I look at such beautiful things around us on campus to get out of frustrations!
We hear the frustration about technologies on a regular basis in our business. It is our job to comfort our users and make sure that in the end they are able to get through and accomplish what they need to.
I was at the receiving end of this during the past couple of weeks and let me tell you, what I had to go through was “so frustrating” and I felt the pain first hand. I tell my staff that unless we really experience what our users experience, we are highly unlikely to know the pain that they are experiencing. So, my frustrations provided me a view into this pain. Thankfully, the frustrations I felt were all outside Wellesley 🙂
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Though we had an excellent start of the semester, there were two nagging issues we needed to solve. One had to do with the print management software called Papercut and the other had to with Macs in classrooms. The first issue was related to one of the unusually busy printing season – first two weeks of the semester. In addition, we are now using multi function devices for printing and in order to support them, we needed to move the print server to Windows server, the only supported platform. The Mac issue had to do with the way we have been reusing the computer names and how this “confuses” the active directory, resulting in the users not be able to login to the domain. Notice that both of these problems are related to Microsoft backend technologies. Just sayin’…
Thanks to the teamwork by LTS staff and their hard work, both of these problems seem to be under control. Another case that illustrates that no matter how hard you work to avoid these problems, the real field testing happens only when our faculty and students are here. This is why the best strategies are one that allows us to be prepared and solve the problems quickly. We can never rest saying “we have tested everything and they work”. No, they don’t, sorry!
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Yesterday, Orientation ’12 began and the class of 2016 and their proud parents could be seen all around campus. I made a brief visit to the “Welcome Wagon”. LTS staff were busy helping the students by excluding their PDAs from Cisco NAC. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of these devices that I saw. I also saw one student proudly declaring that she took care of the exclusion “first thing”. It would be interesting to study how the student behavior during the start of their College years translate to their ongoing academic work 🙂 Are those who filled out the checklist first, chose the Writing courses and first year seminars early the ones that are also submitting their assignments early? OK, just kidding and be assured that we are not tracking such data. I have two data points (our two boys) and I can tell you that there was absolutely no correlation between the initial enthusiasm and afterwards.
Olympics is over and the presidential elections are in full swing. As always, there are way too many things on the web to follow. I have restricted mine to a select few. I have many who I follow on twitter whose posts provide me a great list of filtered information. I have added Google Politics & Elections to one of my Circles in Google Plus. I also follow Real Clear Politics and Five Thirty Eight by Nate Silver. I should say that Five Thirty Eight has become a bit more guarded and less exciting after it moved to NY Times. In 2008 it was a bit more exciting. Actually, in 2008, everything was exciting, especially around this time. Our older son decided to work for the Obama campaign and started in late August.
I am sure that last Friday’s verdict in favor of Apple and against Samsung would have been far more in the front pages, if it is not for the Republican National Convention and Hurricane Isaac. Frankly I was very surprised by the verdict on many counts. As has been discussed numerous times, many experts blame the patent law for this mess. For eg. Apple having a patent on rectangular phone is beyond ridicule. Would you buy a phone that is not rectangular? Does this mean that only Apple can make mobile phones or as a monopoly on rectangular phones, Apple can dictate what the license fee that the other manufacturers have to pay to Apple (and therefore pass it on to us the customers)? This article provides a balanced view of the possible long term outcomes. Intellectual property & patents is a hot topic beyond this and the confusing laws in the US and lack of international standards makes it extremely hard to operate.
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This week so far has been a difficult one – too many late nights. A couple of holiday parties, meeting a good friend in Boston and then the headache caused by the OS upgrade to my machine, which I discuss in detail later. I am looking forward to the trip to Jupiter, FL next week with my family. my sons and I plan to play golf and hopefully get some time to relax too.
I was all excited by the prospect of upgrading to Lion sometime in October when I got the DVD. Here we are in mid-December and finally it happened. My frustration with the upgrade is caused by unique circumstances surrounding my own computer, however, there have been more than the usual complaints about a Mac OS upgrade like the one discussed here.
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