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.