The Web is Turned Off Today

Taking a quick look at Google or Wikipedia shows us that all is not well on the web today. Other key sites and many smaller one are also deliberately disabled or showing a different logo today in protest.

These protests are in response to the proposed Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) legislation before Congress. Much of the opposition to this legislation centers on the overwhelming amount of control that the acts give to copyright holders and the possibly unpredictable effects this could have on the development of the Internet.

Leaving aside ethics debates for now, what do we do if we need a wikipedia article today? Well, we can just access it by Google or by directly knowing the URL, for instance since Wikipedia doesn't seem to have shut down there entire site. It's also a good time to talk about how informatics systems catalog the web for us. Google maintains cached copies (which is useful for research, but how useful is it for your online privacy?) and there is something called the Wayback Machine whose very purpose is to catalog how websites change over time. In each of these cases, a vast, vast amount of data in a data warehouse is holding this information until we ask for it. It has also processed this information to make searching over it possible in the first place.

Finally, here is an interview with Conrad Wolfram on the Knowledge Economy. Conrad is the brother of Stephen Wolfram, who created the software Mathematica. Wolfram Research, his company, is also the driving force behind the natural search engine Wolfram Alpha. Informatics centers on the interactions between people and technology, and natural search is a way to attempt to enhance these interactions. Another example is through gesture based interfaces which is the subject of a recent LA Times article and something we'll talk more about later this semester. Note the use of the term disruptive innovation.

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.

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.