Posts Tagged ‘Microsoft’
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!
(more…)
As everyone says “I don’t know where the summer went”. Right, it came and went before we knew it. In LTS, as always, summer was very productive. Our staff worked on several exciting projects, notably, a large contingent of both LTS staff and those from Human Resources and Finance were working extremely hard on Workday related activities as well as others working to make sure that the classroom technologies were in good shape for the start of the semester. Based on the feedback we have received so far, classroom problem calls are down to a handful, which is great news.
We also have had a few glitches that we will be attending to aggressively to sort out. Most notably, our course browser and waitlist system were way too slow for a period of time and we have already provisioned additional hardware with more memory and CPUs which hopefully will help address these issues.
We rolled out an initial version of dashboards for alumnae data using Microsoft SQL server, which I think will vastly simplify the way many offices access this data. The modern and easy to use PowerBI interface from Microsoft drives all of this and our technologists have done a terrific job of packaging the data and creating easy to use interfaces to slice and dice the data. (more…)
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.
(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!
(more…)
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.
(more…)
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.
(more…)
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!.
(more…)
We were supposed to travel to Charlotte, NC to meet with our dear friends there and spend the July 4th weekend, but on Friday morning I got the call saying that our flight was cancelled. The next flight they can book us was on Saturday, late afternoon. So, I took the option of canceling our plans and receive a refund. Well, the reservation was through Expedia for a United Flight, sort of. It is really a USAir flight. So, USAir person could not give me the refund. She could only add a note. I had to call Expedia. After 1 hour, they validated and agreed that I am eligible for a refund. I hope I will get it. Lesson learned: Whereas Expedia is fantastic in taking your money, they are not so good in giving back money that is legitimately yours. I guess one can change Expedia with any business name and the statement will hold true.
As a result of this cancellation, we had one of the most restful four days. I got an invite to join Google Plus, Google’s FaceBook. It looks and acts like Facebook with some nicer features, but also lacks some of the social networking tool integrations such as those with Twitter and Foursquare and such. They will come in due course. But, the very fact that Facebook was the earliest and that many millions are already familiar with it poses a huge problem for Google Plus or any other FB wannabes.
(more…)
I am sure that everyone is talking about the unusual snowfall this winter, roof collapses, school closings and all that. Someone I know mentioned that he knew it was way too much snow when, after he cleared the snow in his roof, he stepped right into the mound of snow he had cleared. Picture that!
Luckily, technology is well advanced now that many of us are able to get a lot of work done from home during days such as today – no meetings. Unfortunately I had a couple of meetings that I could not skip today, so I drove to work. My attempts to take the car out from the parking spot failed this morning (2/2/2011) and needed a lot of help to simply get it back into the parking spot. I was able to get it out in the afternoon. Then, my attempts to try to steer the car up a steep driveway in the evening was not successful, so I parked right in the middle of the driveway. Even worse, trying to reverse the car didn’t work well – the car got stuck in a snow bank and needed a LOT more help to get it out. Should have stayed in the apartment and worked!
OK, enough of snow talk. I want to talk about how the successful technology projects are never complete. I refer to this as “Forever Beta” along the lines of the Google philosophy. The only “finished” technologies are the ones that are badly designed and rarely used so they die a slow death. And MIT Libraries have a “Beta Graveyard” to collected those that died.
(more…)
