Welcome to the Spring 2012 Semester of INFO I-101

This blog will serve as our data warehouse for looking at current events and trends in informatics and computing. A good place to start is to look at an article describing what informatics is written for the Association for Computing Machinery magazine: Why an Informatics Degree by D.P. Groth and J.K. MacKie-Mason. This article may be behind a paywall, but it should work on campus.

Informatics is practiced by informaticists or informaticians (it's up to you which one you like best and want to use), and it is the application of computing and information technology for use in other fields such as biology, chemistry, business, sociology, or psychology, to name just a few. Informatics focuses on three things: the people, the technology, and the information involved. To be a successful informaticist, one must bring together skills from many areas.

One example of an informatics system was in the NY Times yesterday: Medical students are using a 3D informatics system to supplement learning of anatomy, which usually involves dissecting cadavers. This would be an example of medical informatics, but most people use medical or "health informatics" most commonly to refer to issues associated with medical record keeping. In that most commonly-used definition, there is a heavy focus on the information associated with patients. In the example here, informatics is being used to hopefully improve a future doctor's training.

Finally, here is one example of a "feud" between Twitter and Google indicating that information is indeed something valuable.