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.