The hills are alive with the sound of informatics

Much of what we've discussed all semester with regards to computers strengths and weaknesses with processing text or graphics can also be said for music or sound data. Music informatics is the field of study which uses both the tools of both music and informatics. Researchers are trying to find the best ways to determine if two pieces of music are related using the computer or determine the genre of music. Two music informatics research pages illustrate the breadth of music informatics:

http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/organisation/doc/research/mi/
http://www.music.informatics.indiana.edu/student_research.html

One example of the successful commercial use of music informatics is the Listen or Shazam apps for the iPhone.

On the HCI side, information systems can be developed which help people read music or help people practice music better by training their ears or by improving their intonation on fretless instruments, for example.

Iran and certificate authorities

9 Secure socket layer (SSL) certificates were issued through a compromised account by the certificate authority Comodo. The compromised account was created from an IP address originating in Iran.

The main idea behind SSL is asymmetric key encryption, which originated with the Rivest Shamin Adleman (RSA) algorithm in the 1970s. The public-private key pairs can be used to exchange information securely and to verify identities, hence its importance in a networked age.

Happy Birthday Dear Virus

The computer virus recently turned 40.

The recent, devastating earthquake in Japan disrupted much of the Internet's infrastructure connecting to Japan (see the map at the end), but much of Japan is still connected to the Internet, albeit at a slower speed. Here is a worldwide undersea map of the Internet and one of our part of the country in PDF form. As mentioned in the textbook, accidents and natural disasters are threats to information systems.

Mmmm Bacon

Some info about the Kevin Bacon problem is available on Wikipedia. The actors that make this possible are called "connectors". A similar experiment (the small world experiment) found the same thing out about the real world 60 years ago.

The Oracle of Bacon will solve all our Kevin Bacon needs.

Here is the Internet as a graph and a person's Facebook friends as a graph and another neater one.

Finally, on an unrelated note, here's an old article about what the inventor of the web had to say about Web 2.0.

A recent article says colleges and universities are doing a poor job of training IT professionals. It is interesting to look at the features/skills companies want in job candidates and compare that to informatics training.

J.C. Penney has gotten in trouble with Google because they worked the system of the ranking process. Google has changed its ranking process as a result.

Bioinformatics is among the informatics disciplines with the most well-developed use of information systems. Entrez is a portal to a vast amount of biological information and databases.

Bye-bye ipv4

All ipv4 addresses are gone. Ipv6 is the wave of the future. Not everybody uses it.

Youtube can show us what TCP/IP internetworks look like.

Click Fraud and Grid Computing

Here is an even more sophisticated version of click fraud than we described in class last time. If one just write a program to simulate a user clicking but not buying anything, one can more easily detect click fraud. In this example, regular users are fooled into making the click happen when looking at things they were likely to buy anyway.

Grid computing accomplishes a lot in Folding@home, seti@home, and too many others. Here's a list from Wikipedia. These are examples of using crowdsourcing to solve a problem. Gamification can also be used with grid computing to encourage people to participate.

Medical IS

The LA Times recently reported that the iPad is now part of a federally approved informatics system.

An example on YouTube from 16 years ago points to the rapid change brought about by the Internet and other information systems.

RFID, IS, and Informatics

Walmart uses Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) for a variety of purposes now. They initially used RFID to streamline their supply chain during shipping and warehousing, and now they are also using them in their stores and before the goods are ever shipped to them. This article delves into the business case for Walmart pursuing RFID in their stores. RFID isn't just for Walmart. It can also be used for cows. Cows were too big a target, so they moved on to mice.

This story appearing today about Google, Microsoft, and Bing is too good to pass up. Is Microsoft using Google through internet explorer to improve Bing, or is Microsoft copying Google directly?

Also, Google just released a nifty in-browser information visualization tool for fractals.

Norm Augustine Says

Norm Augustine says that America is losing its edge in innovation as the world flattens around us.

A is for Apple and Astroinformatics

Two IS and informatics news items appeared in the last couple of days:

Steve Jobs is on leave at Apple again, and the fact that this concerns shareholders, customers, and investors illustrates the dual nature of IS.

Also, astroinformatics is in the news again as this article about Canada's astroinformatics data issues has been slashdotted.

Not all computer use in the sciences is about data management. Some of it is about computation, and the top 500 ranks the fastest computers in the world. Creating workflows and developing new applications in this environment is a problem that informaticists work with other scientists (physicists, biologists, and chemists) on.

I was saving this one for later in the semester, but the cover story on the Leo weekly this week is about LVL1, the Louisville area hackerspace, part of the maker movement.

Keeping with the Lord of the Rings theme for 1 more lecture...

A recent Communications of the ACM has this article showing the intersection of informatics and The Lord of the Rings. The link is most likely only accessible from the IU campus or through the VPN. There is a wealth of informatics content in this article:

1. The fact that new economy companies are running virtual worlds for profit.
2. That archiving such material is a complicated problem at the intersection of information systems, library science, computer science, etc. It's an informatics problem.
3. A lot of academic researchers (e.g. professors) may be interested in researching the social aspects of how people use these virtual worlds. Depending on the methods used, that could be sociological research or research in social informatics. What would the difference be?

This recent L.A. Times article shows a potential new use for BD Live Blu-ray content. Why is it posted here? What does it tell us about the New Economy or increasingly accelerated change in a digital world?

If you didn't know it before, it's official! The N.Y. Times has reported that Facebook is in a better position than MySpace.

Finally, this recent Wired article talks about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Finding new ways to use, visualize, and learn from this information and deal with the large amounts of data is the domain of astronomers, astro-informaticists, and computer scientists.

Welcome to Informatics I-101!

Welcome to Informatics I-101 at Indiana University Southeast. I'll be using this blog to put links that relate to our classes. Informatics Systems (IS) are constantly advancing and changing, so we'll be looking for IS "in the news" as we go along.

Here are two recent articles that are worth checking out:

Recent Wall Street Journal article showing benefits of a technical/computational major.
See how Apple compares to other information/tech companies in value.

This cartoon seems specific but it describes problem-solving in the modern age:

xkcd flowchart for problem solving (try this before asking somebody, i.e. me)