Posts Tagged ‘Google’
I saw this image posted by someone I follow on Google Plus and I love it. It captures the perception of various people on what you do and in reality what you actually do! I saw something similar posted to our LTS discussion group about Librarians, which was very funny too.
OK, let us get down to the topic at hand. What is net neutrality? This definition by Wikipedia captures it well “Net neutrality (also network neutrality or Internet neutrality) is the principle that Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication.” Makes sense, right? It turns out to be not so and the Internet Service Providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast have been fighting this in the courts. Net neutrality suffered a big blow recently when a court struck down this on technicality.
I am not a lawyer, so I don’t necessarily understand the intricacies of the difference, but as you see in this Time magazine article, “The groundwork for Tuesday’s defeat was established in 2002, when the FCC made the fateful decision to classify broadband as an “information service” not a “telecommunications service,” which would have allowed the agency to impose “common carrier” regulations prohibiting discrimination by the broadband companies.”
Bottom line – your ISPs will soon have a lot of control over what content and how it is delivered to you and you won’t have a say on it except to choose the best available option, which may not be necessarily the one you are so used to. You can read this article for “What the Internet could Look Like without Net Neutrality”
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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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Many of us are saddened by the Boston Marathon bombings and are relieved that the ordeal has come to an end. Or, has it? I think each of us will take our own time to reflect on the events, digest both the reliable as well as the mis-information that is being directed us from all directions, and derive our own conclusions. As I wrote in my last post, various technologies played important roles in identifying the suspects and eventually capturing one of them. They brought to light several important things – explosion of technologies, how the law enforcement relied on distributed technologies (video tapings from sources other than Law enforcement), social media and crowd-searching (crowd sourced searching), and thermal imaging.
Frankly what got lost in all of these discussions is how every one of these items is far more complicated than the positive aspects which helped us in the end. And most importantly, what led to the surviving suspect was an actual curious human being and not the technology. Quite obviously, every step of the way, there were pitfalls – privacy, security, misuse of captured information, dangers of subjectivity arising from crowdsourcing the search whi has a high probability of the wrong people being implicated etc. etc. And the massive data that was helpful in cases like this and others is the “Big Data“.
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It is snowing again, so what’s new? I was at a conference organized by MIT and Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education” last weekend. I was able to go only for part of it. On Sunday evening I attended a dinner & listened to Drew Faust, president of Harvard, Rafael Reif, president of MIT and Gene Sperling, Director, National Economic Council and Assistant to the President for Economic Policy talk about the broader issues surrounding the online education as a disruption. I was actually going to blog about that, but I found that Tom Friedman, who attended the conference did a great job in this piece yesterday in NY Times, so I won’t repeat it.
I was sitting next to Daphne Koller from Stanford, and the co-founder of Coursera. We had very interesting conversation. I also thanked Eric Grimson for his wonderful Introduction to Computer Science & Programming class in edX. The place was packed with many of the well known names from MIT & Harvard and over 60 other institutions. I had a chance to connect with some of the liberal arts college folks that were there and with a friend who works at MIT after a long time. He and I overlapped in College in India, and connected back in the mid-80’s here. He is such a busy guy, it is so hard to find a time to meet with him. So it was good to catch up.
I also visited Bates on Monday to participate in a panel where I was asked to talk about WellesleyX. It was a beautiful drive, but I wonder whether all of the drive was worth it. I could have done the same job remotely. Oh well, we can’t turn the clock back. Wait… May be. I am waiting for that discussion in my Quantum Mechanics class – Tunneling and time reversal and all that jazz.
A few weeks ago I gave a talk to Wellesley faculty and staff on “Milking Google for What it is Worth” which was well attended and I received several emails from the attendees about how they discovered so many capabilities of Google Docs that they were not aware of. I just wanted to recount some of what I talked at that meeting here.
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Last week, on Monday, I attended an NSF panel to discuss a survey that is administered by NSF regarding High Performance Computing Clusters as a part of a larger survey. The discussion was around the utility of the current survey and the results of the survey and what can be done to improve the use of the data. It was interesting to hear that with the exception of one attendee, most of us are either non-users of the data or casual users of the data. There was one person who is a heavy user because she is involved in writing a research paper on this subject with an Economist. In my opinion, NSF should partner with EDUCAUSE Core Data Service (CDS). EDUCAUSE administers a detailed annual survey that is filled out by a large group of its members and it has also developed a fairly complex tool to consume the data by slicing and dicing the data. Why replicate the effort and especially when there is an overlap in questions. Besides, we all are being surveyed to death!
Since I talk about a “duality” issue below, I thought I would share a picture of a sculpture from our trip that I talked about in my last post. If you look carefully, you should see an elephant facing left and a bull facing right. Sculptures of this kind are all over the place in that area and seems to have been a favorite pastime or challenge for the sculptors during the 6th – 11th centuries!
On thursday, I went to Google in NY City to talk to Google Sites developers (along with representatives from two other educational institutions) about how we use Google Sites and the issues we face and of course, our own opinions on how they can improve the product. Given that this team had been listening to a wide variety of users for almost a week, they seemed genuinely interested and attentive to what we had to say. I am thankful to get the opportunity and I hope what I had to say was useful.
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EDUCAUSE is one conference that I have attended for the last several years. I was not happy that this year’s conference was was scheduled to start on Election Day. I went to our home in CT on Tuesday night and watched the results with my wife, who was pretty nervous, while I was not. As I tweeted that night, In NATE SILVER we trust. It was amazing how close his predictions were to the real results. After listening to the concession speech by Mitt Romney, I went to bed around 1:30 PM. I listened to the fantastic acceptance speech by President Obama only later. The reason I had to go to bed was that I needed to leave home by 3:30 AM to catch my flight to Denver, so I can get there on time to attend a good chunk of the conference. I arrived in Denver to 70 degree weather, while leaving the east coast where it was cold and snowy. The electoral college weighted map of the USA (a cartogram where the scaling is based on different criteria, in this case the electoral college votes) from Mark Newman is on your left. For those of us who are election stats junkies, these kinds of representations are real fun.
I enjoyed the conference very well. Connecting with other colleagues and some vendors was very useful, but the presentations were below par, with the exception of the general sessions. While talking to the colleagues, I felt very good about the various things we are doing at Wellesley.
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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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Last week was a fantastic week weather-wise, not so fantastic a week for the Red Sox (who are doing well in Minnesota so far), but then we are back to “seasonal weather” again. Today is a big day at Wellesley where there are over 150 presentations by students in the Ruhlman Conference. I am very happy to say that we designed the application that the students and their advisors used during the submission and approval process – one of our PHP app connected via the My Wellesley portal. In the true spirit of collaboration, we shared the collected information with the CS department, who have developed an excellent online tool called RAPP, by which you can browse the program and create your own schedule. I plan to attend a few talks in the afternoon. I would love to attend a few in the morning on protein modeling to relive my years as a researcher in molecular modeling, but I have other commitments in the morning 🙁
The annual performance cycle is upon us and this provides us a great opportunity for reflections on how much we accomplished during the past year. It is a LOT and LTS staff should be proud of all of our collective accomplishments. It is also a time that we plan ahead for the upcoming year. As I have mentioned in the past, I was a skeptic of this whole process for a while mainly because we were all beginning to do this for the first time and didn’t do it right. I now am a believer because we have tools and mechanisms to help us manage these tasks better. Most criticisms come from the fact that goals go by the wayside because unexpected things happen during the year that takes away time from us to be able to achieve the goals. Whereas there is some truth to this, I believe this can be handled through constant communication, setting achievable and realistic goals (taking into consideration the time it takes to put out fires) and time management. If you are still a skeptic, talk to me!
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The most hyped event of the year is over and the result was disappointing for the Patriots fans. However, it was a good game with a couple of unfortunate calls by the referee and a lot of dropped passes. Well, we had a great time at our home watching the game with a lot of friends. I just realized that I have not written for a couple of weeks because I have been extremely busy with a few software projects that I am working on. I am on Acela express right now, heading to NY City to participate in a Google Apps user group meeting at Google NY. Hope to not run into the ticker tape parade for the Giants and get delayed going to the meeting.
We have been marching along in terms of software development with a slight twist – web applications for the portal which rely on authoritative data stored in Banner and other systems (such as 25Live) that look and act with a level of consistency that the users expect in software. As I have written many times over, I favor this approach to “Let us wait for Banner to deliver these services” because we will be waiting for a loooong time! Also, because this framework is under our control, the interface can be manipulated in ways that are otherwise not possible. Also, if the users are happy with the navigational approach and display of data we provide, we can leave that alone for however long the users desire. This is obviously not the case with software vendors. They seem to know what is good for us when! We all know that they rarely do a good job and choose the most inopportune moments to make changes.
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It was a fabulous weekend of football and I was glad to see the Patriots crush the Broncos. The other games were also good, especially the upset by the Giants. My wife reminded me of past life as an ardent Giants fan – a leftover from when I was a grad student going through years of agony of supporting a substandard team until Bill Parcells and Phil Simms turned things around. Somewhere along the line I switched my allegiance, primarily because of children. Anyways, this Sunday will be another terrific day and though I hope that the Pats go all the way and win it all, it is one game at a time at this point!
We also had an adventurous and long night last night, trying to get my Prius up the hill in snow onto Weston Terrace. Somehow survived all of that. It is not the morning after that adventure that I wanted to write about, rather one of our other major transition – Project Goodbye MM!.
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I saw this image posted by someone I follow on Google Plus and I love it. It captures the perception of various people on what you do and in reality what you actually do! I saw something similar posted to our LTS discussion group about Librarians, which was very funny too.
