Posts Tagged ‘Google’
The technology transformations in the past 10-15 years has been remarkable. It is mostly driven by the internet, but there also have been several other advances in technologies that have helped accelerate research and development across the board. It has also leveled the playing field for many. For example, many authors and artists have been successful in directly reaching out to an audience through the internet that simply wasn’t possible before. The channels for success before the internet was limited, complicated and dismal.
But this also has resulted in a massive growth in the availability of information that are uncurated, biased, incorrect, so on and so forth. This has become such a huge problem that even for seasoned folks it is becoming impossible to identify whether some of what we see and read are true and accurate. One of the many horrifying examples is a recent horrifying story from India about a fake post that spread like wildfire through WhatsApp. Major technology companies like Google and Facebook continue to put in safeguards, but those intent on misusing the system bypass these immediately.
Everyone is busy producing new gadgets and monetizing the user base that no one seems to be investing enough in finding solutions for the long haul. They are busy finding bandaids and the blood appears to stop for a short period before gushing out!
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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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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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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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Image from http://google.com
Dear Google
If it is not already apparent to you, I live and breathe your tools. I own a beautiful Google Nexus 6P phone, whose battery life continues to amaze me. I use GMail, Inbox, Drive, Calendar, Keep, Google+, YouTube, Photos, Maps, you name them, and I use them. It is moot to point out that I use Google search, because, how else does one live anymore? I marvel at all the things you have done and you continue to do, manage to give so much of it away for free, yet manage to make boat loads of money. But, please, can you take care of a few very simple, but very important things first?
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I have been using the two factor authentication for Google for quite some time and have never had any issues. I have it turned on for both my personal Google account as well as for my Wellesley account. On the latter one, it is of limited use because of our own use of single sign on. I experienced a real panic this morning that was an eye opener for me.
All began with me getting excited about a Chrome extension called Spaces for Chrome. Since I am big user of spaces on Mac OS, I got all excited about using this. I typically have 20-25 tabs open in my Chrome browser and I hate restarting it. Since this Chrome extension seemed to address grouping of the tabs as well as CPU/Memory savings, I thought I would try it out. I installed and happily reorganized my tabs based on some themes. Then I noticed that the Calendar extension had a red X on it. It said I needed to reauthenticate. So I did. Since I have set up two factor authentication, I was sent a code and everything seemed OK. But then, the red X came back. Disclaimer: I have no proof that it is this chrome extension that caused the problem. It is just an assumption!
I went to look at Chrome settings and it had an authentication failure. I reauthenticated, got the code on my cell phone and everything was fine again. Except… (more…)
After a brief visit to Scripps College , I headed to Orlando to attend the EDUCAUSE annual conference. It was well attended as evidenced by long lines during lunch times. I have never seen such lines before. If you are interested in my tweets during the conference, you can check them out here. If you want to see all tweets with the hashtag #edu14, click here. Though the latter one is long, it is worth reading through some of them or by further filtering based on your interest. I was too tired to tweet after a while because the sessions I went to did not have much for me to tweet and the others were doing a better job.
I always look forward to general sessions at EDUCAUSE. This year the first one was by Clayton Christensen on Disruptive Innovation. The entire talk will be available to the public in 90 days here, unless you have a valid EDUCAUSE account, in which case you should be able to listen now. Since I have heard Christensen a few times before, there was not much here for me. Also, he has had recent health issues, and it showed. He himself mentioned his recent stroke, when he was unable to recall a word during the talk. He mentioned how Higher Ed is in a crisis and unless it is disrupted in some serious fashion, the consequences can be dire. Obviously, recent technologies have already disrupted Higher Ed, but the basic methods of teaching, learning and research have not changed and the indirect message that everyone heard is that we, as technologists, can make a difference here. Perhaps! Also, I was not fond of some of the analogies he presented because they may work for corporate America, but not necessarily in Higher Ed. On the other hand, may be that is the disruption that he was referring to.
Chsitensen was also arguing for more open, modular and interoperable “things” in general. We all, especially me, support this wholeheartedly. However, there was a problem. The slide where this appeared, was copyrighted by him!
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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.
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What you see here is the percentage of users of various age groups that use social media from Pew Research Internet Project. For more detailed data on social networking, click here. I have been fortunate to have been a participant of the Internet from very early on. Many of us in Higher Ed would relate to this because we were the first ones to experience it before it was opened up to everyone in early ’90s. In the same fashion, out of my own curiosity, I have been active in social media fairly early on. I am not sure about you, but every morning, when I get up, the first things I check are my social media applications such as Twitter and Facebook before checking my email. I have a careful subselection of everyone I follow on Twitter whose posts I value the most and this provides me such a lot of useful information every morning. While I sleep, they have done the work of scanning the world events and post information that I am most interested. It is like reading a newspaper. Similarly, I get a lot more information on Facebook about friends and family than through emails. The use of social networking tools has been on the rise as you see from the graph. Email, while its use has not declined as much as one would think, serves a whole different purpose. This is where I get most of the professional communications, be it work related or from colleagues from other institutions.
I am a big fan of modular design and reusable “things”. From Wikipedia – “Modular design, or “modularity in design”, is an approach that subdivides a system into smaller parts (modules or skids) that can be independently created and then used in different systems to drive multiple functionalities.” The general idea of looking at a problem and breaking it into smaller and reusable parts doesn’t come naturally to everyone. However, I am a big fan of this methodology and practice this as much as possible. When I was doing my Masters in Chemistry in India, I took a class in Group Theory taught by a fantastic teacher – Prof. P. T. Manoharan. It turns out that Group theory is very handy in understanding symmetries and vibrations in molecules. One of the things we learn there is the concept of “Irreducible Representations”. In simple terms, these are the representations that cannot be broken down further. All other ‘representations’ can be constructed from these. Obviously, this is like modularity somewhat and my fascination for this began in 1977 in my Group Theory class. I believe that this has wired my brain to think the modular way!
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