Why should we believe that using metadata will help J. Random User get in touch with her Buddha nature?

"Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia" is a short read on why metadata may not work in the open Internet: http://www.well.com/~doctorow/metacrap.htm

For a foretaste, check out the brief chapter headings:
* 0. ToC
o 0.1 Version History
* 1. Introduction
* 2. The problems
o 2.1 People lie
o 2.2 People are lazy
o 2.3 People are stupid
o 2.4 Mission: Impossible -- know thyself
o 2.5 Schemas aren't neutral
o 2.6 Metrics influence results
o 2.7 There's more than one way to describe something
* 3. Reliable metadata

There is nothing like the open Internet to sound out ideas. My own opinion goes more towards that metadata is a tool because information is locked away from powerful search engines which necessitates organizing it with tools such as metadata, and analysis from data experts. But this model may not really help in terms of the absolutely creative nature of human endeavor. Methinks it comes more from the realm of library science and pedagogy where finding something in a physical realm and instruction is the goal, which has not caught up to the power to SEARCH, and view others' metadata such as relationships (tagging, authority - author, etc).

Still in a nation focused on UFOs and celebrities, maybe this is what is required to indulge the great unwashed jungle, and security protects the scientific and verifiable.

I would feel much better if I knew that all drug and health-related companies shared their information on research and discoveries for example.

Maybe someday instead of this Age of the Information Cold War, we will have strategies for open information presentation and a way to nix the harassment from the identity thieves.

My personal model included metrics to influence the model on purpose - but that is "mixing metadata with data" - strictly the wrong direction according to current science.

Combining the link stats (by data mining) should provide more information. It's how Page Rank score/ hit rate combine with IP address and other long term use tracking - thus relevance is displayed that makes a difference. People are lazy and many really don't get tech - so I am thinking of a way to assemble the page to include the Page Rank score/ hit rate, to help in usability.

What I want to my frequently used websites (such as the MSIM iSchool) is for it to present ALL the data specific to me. In other words I pretty much use the same exact pages over and over again - I don't want to have to search or click or anything - I just want what I use to be presented first and foremost. The other data that the 'outfit' (the UW in this case, or a business or religious or other org) wants to present to me or makes available is also interesting but less so.

Including metrics with the metadata allows information scientists to tweak their presentation model by showing it's relevance - in effect putting in metrics to view it's context to the greater whole. But not as metadata - as other information mapped to such things as sniffing my IP address.

What I mean by Medieval Information Age is that we have lots and lots of closed information and closed data systems - I hope that these will open up but I know I will not see this happen in my life time or even in the next lifetime, Greenstone not withstanding.

Meta data is like the "thin client" of the Information World - it allows lots and lots of information to be relayed very quickly, in categories.

Will we look back on this as the Medieval Information Age? I view information as a contextual circle - I know nothing.

You Can't Save the Stupid from Phishing attacks

Like many User Interface professionals I received the recent email notice from VeriSign about their new Secure Socket Layer Certificates which turn green when the site is secure - to make ecommerce and other information transfers through -

"Maximize customer confidence and sales with new VeriSign® EV SSL Certificates

In response to increasing consumer fear of online fraud, VeriSign has introduced *Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificates*. The new certificates turn the browser address bar green, communicating to consumers that your site is secure."

Taking a quick look around Technorati I found this blog Cyber Top Cops Security http://cybertopcops.blogspot.com/2007/02/green-means-trust-but-does-it-mean.html

an article which quickly pointed out that the average user could care less what color his/her browser turns for all they know it's just supposed to do that.

These Cyber Cops pointed the caring reader to Rachna Dhamija, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University; who besides an enviable career, including electronic commerce privacy and security at CyberCash, has done some interesting studies on scams and why they work on the Internet.

Replacing Rachna Dhamija's educated language with the vernacular, "you can't save the stupid people, because it doesn't really matter who you are, everyone is at risk."

Here's what Dr. Dhamija said -
"We discovered that existing security cues are ineffective, for three reasons:

1. The indicators are ignored (23% of participants in our study did not look at the address bar, status bar, or any SSL indicators).

2. The indicators are misunderstood. For example, one regular Firefox user told me that he thought the yellow background in the address bar was an aesthetic design choice of the website designer (he didn't realize that it was a security signal presented by the browser). Other users thought the SSL lock icon indicated whether a website could set cookies.

3. The security indicators are trivial to spoof. Many users can't distinguish between an actual SSL indicator in the browser frame and a spoofed image of that indicator that appears in the content of a webpage. For example, if you display a popup window with no address bar, and then add an image of an address bar at the top with the correct URL and SSL indicators and an image of the status bar at the bottom with all the right indicators, most users will think it is legitimate. This attack fooled more than 80% of participants.

We also found that popup warnings are ineffective. When presented with a browser warning of a self-signed certificate, 15 out of 22 participants proceeded to click OK (to accept the certificate) without reading the warning. Finally, participants were vulnerable across the board -- in our study, neither education, age, sex, previous experience, nor hours of computer use showed a statistically significant correlation with vulnerability to phishing."
See Fishing with Rachna
sounds friendly enough, na?

So, I believe, and catch me if I am wrong, that unless the Internet security industry comes up with better methods to prevent users from giving away their economic lives by mistake, eventually micro-public-Internets will spring up promising to provide enhanced security just like gated communities.

I know it's scary kids, but it is actually possible that AOL has a future in fear and security, if they can guarantee online safety for their stakeholder customers. It is possible that being an AOL member will mean you are richer and have more at stake than others, and we will have to forgive W because "The Internets" aren't so stupid after all.

Seattle Wireless

"Seattle Wireless is a grassroots Community Wireless Network (CWN) project in Seattle, Washington. Its goals include the creation of a broadband wireless Metropolitan Area Network, as well as the creation of tools that help us achieve that goal. We are a not-for-profit community of volunteers, and although we have many different motivations, we believe that we can build a network without recurrent fees that is not beholden to any Commercial Telecommunications Provider. Our network is a Mesh Network that follows the Free Networks Peering Agreement and is built on Open Source Software."

Check em out at: http://seattlewireless.net/

Privacy - How does the Amazon Honor System paybox know my name?

Same way they know everyone's name - they are just not sure who is steering that particular computer though "When you look at a Web page, the words and pictures you see actually may come from several sources. Your browser software assembles the pieces and displays them as a single page. On the Web site you were visiting, most of the content you saw was transmitted from server computers used by the site's operator. The image made up of the paybox and your name displayed within the paybox was different--we sent it to you directly from Amazon.com. This allowed us to recognize you by name just like we do when you visit the Amazon.com Web site. Because Amazon.com's servers transmitted the image containing a paybox and your name within the paybox directly to your browser software, the site owner never saw the paybox or your name and never received any information about you."

JXTA P2P Open Connected Network Devices

"JXTA™ technology is a set of open protocols that allow any connected device on the network ranging from cell phones and wireless PDAs to PCs and servers to communicate and collaborate in a P2P manner. JXTA is the industry-leading P2P technology, supported by over 30,000 members worldwide with downloads exceeding 12 Million."

See http://www.jxta.org/

Project JXTA Objectives:

* Interoperability - across different peer-to-peer systems and communities
* Platform independence - multiple/diverse languages, systems, and networks
* Ubiquity - every device with a digital heartbeat

The possibilities:

* Find peers and resources on the network even across firewalls
* Share files with anyone across the network
* Create your own group of peers of devices across different networks
* Communicate securely with peers across public networks

Hidden Services Tor, Onion Routing

The Onion Routing program is made up of projects which -
1. Research
2. Analyze
3. Design
4. Build
anonymous communications systems.

See http://www.onion-router.net/
The focus is on practical systems for low-latency Internet-based connections that
1. resist traffic analysis,
2. eavesdropping,
3. other attacks both by outsiders (e.g. Internet routers),
4. insiders (Onion Routing servers themselves).

"Onion Routing prevents the transport medium from knowing who is communicating with whom -- the network knows only that communication is taking place. In addition, the content of the communication is hidden from eavesdroppers up to the point where the traffic leaves the OR network."

Tor: Generation 2 Onion Routing
Visual representation of running Tor Servers

Web proxy Privoxy

RFID leaks Privacy Information through DNS, Alice Cryptology

Highly recommended - Karsten Nohl (PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, Computer Science), RFID Privacy, Old Threats and New Attacks. Hope 2006. Alice cryptography is the example here, and every minute is valuable - how RFID are related to databases, and how to detect location information through cashes in Domain Server requests. Scalability to reality in terms of billions of tags, and the tree of secrets.

Faraday cages are mentioned -
"A Faraday cage or Faraday shield is an enclosure formed by conducting material, or by a mesh of such material. Such an enclosure blocks out external static electrical fields.

RFID passport and credit card shielding sleeves are small, portable Faraday cages."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

As is ONS -
Object Naming Service (ONS)
"mechanism that leverages Domain Name System (DNS) to discover information about a product and related services from the Electronic Product Code (EPC). It is a component of the EPCglobal Network.

It is published by the EPCglobal board. Version 1.0 of the specification was ratified by the board in October, 2005."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Naming_Service

Definitions from Wikipedia.


Karsten Nohl, PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, Computer Science

International Privacy Insurance Club

Not sure where this video was filmed - poster located in Germany. Milan's Banca Intesa signs appear in this video. These guerrilla cats are taking the matter of privacy into their own hands, with interesting tools of their trade, using a map and acrobatics to systematically detect and disable video surveillance cameras.

No intention to support this kind of activity should be implied through this posting.

Invasion of Privacy for a Disabled Person in Canada

Mentioned in this news presentation is a unit of the local Canadian govt has a "Privacy Commissioner". Stephen Pate wisely wants the old inappropriately collected data removed from government computers but that is probably more difficult than can be imagined.

One suggestion:
"What floor are we on now?" as a question to gain support for a disability could be answered - "We are not on a floor, you are a person writing an inappropriate question sometime in the past."

The Conversation - Privacy

A Brief reminder of privacy views - it's ok when it's someone else being spied upon...



The Conversation (1974 USA 113mins)
Analysis by Brenda Austin-Smith, film and literature instructor at the University of Manitoba, Canada

"I don't have anything personal," says Harry Caul (Gene Hackman), protagonist of The Conversation to his landlady, ".nothing of value, except my keys." The comment, made over the telephone rather than face-to-face, confirms Harry Caul as a character pathologically obsessed with his own privacy, even as he spends his days as a wiretapping expert invading the sonic privacy of others. The immediate cultural context of The Conversation was Watergate, the release of the Nixon tapes, and growing social anxiety over surveillance. The film's release in the wake of the most significant U.S. political scandal of the late 20^th century touched a nerve with viewers and critics, who read this densely plotted tale of corporate intrigue, murder, and paranoia as a dissertation on American society in the mid-'70s. Nominated for three Academy Awards, The Conversation lost out to another Coppola film, The Godfather II, though it won the Golden Palm at Cannes.

The Conversation has been described as an "Orwellian morality play" in which the spy becomes the spied upon, and technology is used against the user.

Despite its structural flaws, its derivative techniques, and its rather hackneyed conspiracy theme, The Conversation transcends these limitations in its provision of a character study of haunting, if disturbing, power. Harry Caul, a character Coppola himself feared would be impossible for viewers to sympathize with, is the film's central figure, a man so obsessed with making himself unavailable to others that he has almost completely eradicated his own personality. His last name spelled out carefully over the phone, links Harry to those born with a caul, and indeed, the film is replete with images of Harry wearing an old raincoat, behind plastic curtains, and obscured by a telephone booth.

Harry is a surveillance genius for whom other people's privacy is an obstacle to be overcome using equipment he builds himself. He is also a man suffering intensely from guilt: one of his previous assignments resulted in the death of an entire family. This revelation, as well as the film's depiction of Harry's Catholicism (we see him at confession, an analogue of the secular eavesdropping Harry practices), complicates his detachment from others by introducing the one element that functions as the "bug" Harry can neither disable nor escape: his own conscience."
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/01/13/conversation.html

Other more recent films with privacy themes include:
Gattaca
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/

Brazil
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
with it's odd prescient "Information Retrieval" managers.

The Matrix series
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0133093/

Privacy & Law vs Google Govt Fishing Expeditions

Globalization101.org interviewed David Vise, Author of "The Google Story" on this topic: "Which do you think is the bigger cost, individual privacy or the chance to catch a criminal?"

They actually disabled embedded content so you actually have to click the link - sorry - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whanGlvZ5lc to watch their brief video.

Privacy Feature in Linden Labs Second Life

Nylon Pinkney presents a new privacy feature available in Linden Labs' Second Life.

We are teaching the machine

Highly recommended video on everything information:



We are the machine.

See the

Digital Ethnography @ Kansas State University blog at: http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/

Creating a Metadata Schema for the MSIM iSchool Website at the University of Washington

Approach
When considering administration of the University of Washington’s iSchool MSIM website, and what metadata might be helpful to do this, I considered human issues first and then the larger scope of the organizations needs, the users needs, and lastly system’s or machine level needs. My questions were “what are the needs of a website administrator”, “what is this organization and what are their needs”, and “what kind of content I am working with”, as well as “how may information be accessed and why”.

An alternative approach is to view metadata as just another level of information in the metadata stack, one which can aid the site administrator, one which can be automated using systems, and one which can be accessed using interoperable systems.

Starting with the human element first - the website administrator acts as a consultant and advisor, in effect a domain expert working to improve the interface between users and their needs, the organization and it’s needs, and what computers can do, balanced with the costs. However, administrators also actually have their own needs when handling data so I focused on that person’s real needs first and foremost.

Considering which elements are most important to include in any metadata schema, I first thought about the human input and process issues. “How much time could a website administrator reasonably be expected to spend inputting this kind of data into pages,” was my baseline question. Even if you have tools to perform this function, adding data adds cost to publication. This question lead me to conclude that “Administrators have little time to add metadata,” no matter how passionately they feel about the semantic web, or about the possible eventual use of such data.

What are the organization’s needs? The needs of institutions are many and varied whether the University of Washington or other institutions. I came to the following conclusions:

The similarities of large educational organizations needs can be summed up in one paragraph – they need three major things:

1. Educational resources, Books, images, and other stored or linked Materials

2. Knowledgeable speakers, Teachers or other Knowledge holders

3. Support from the community to maintain these resources, Funds

But in order for the combination of these to survive and thrive they also require a fourth –

4. Communication so that the educators and students, as well as other relationships, other teachers, donors, students in distance learning programs, etc can be built by finding, influencing, and interacting with each other.

Marketing arises as a delta communication and support, it may be described as “communication to increase support” - this means knowing where hits are coming from and to what resource. (See more about this subject in section two on Impact.)

The Meta data elements and controls included are based on the minimum number of requirements for an Administrator to bring those things together literally on the same page. They answer several questions shown in Table 1 below, What, When, Who, Where, and How Valuable? Providing the answers to these questions in the metadata would support the needs of the Administrator. They also include questions to provide effective feedback into the decision making process to rework the site structure, and as a process of inquiry to help decide if the metadata elements need modification.

Exploring the various existing schemes on the Metamap I found that many referred to or leveraged the Dublin Core version, based on 15 elements. As a result I reasoned that approximately 15 elements would be the maximum, this number has the practical appeal of suiting both effective and economical administrative overhead. The new ones were derived from the Dublin Core options.

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set has the main attributes both the administrator and the institution need, and the interoperability that computers require, because many other standards include it. Taking into account the fact that Dublin Core is an accepted standard, it would not require too much in the way of selling it to team members unfamiliar with metadata schemas, or standards themselves.

Impact

The conclusion that information is only valuable in context implies a corollary: contextualized information can create more relevant information for the user. From such relevant information users can realize knowledge.

Table 1

Questions	Expanded Questions and Answers	MetaData Element
What?	What is this stuff, the format I am handling? “Format” is for ease of use and knowing what to do with it and what to expect (.HTML, etc). This has somewhat limited use in non-text applications, such as graphics because you can not label an image inside the image. Image headers contain information about the image, not about the context of the image or the elements within the image or images.	Format
What?	What is it called? “Title” is what the document of X format type is called.	Title
When?	What date was it created? (when was it made?) “Date” provides the when it was created or last saved. In some ways this can imply versioning.	Date
Who?	Who provided it? “Source” tracks where the file originated from.	Source
What/who?	What language is it in? (who is it for?) “Language” helps make sure it is located in the right area, and for the right audience.	Language
Who?	Who owns the legal rights? “Rights” provides information on ownership and establishes some idea of copyright.	Rights
Who?	Who created it? “Creator” provides a information as to who made it. Often webpages have more than one author.	Creator
Who?	Who approved it? “dc.Creator.approver” gives another set of eyes[1] watching who approved the document to be published.	dc.Creator.approver
Who?	Which organization owns it?	dc.Creator.org
What?	What is the subject?	Subject
When?	What does it cover?	Coverage
When?	For what dates/time period is it valid?	dc.coverage.date
Where?	For what location does it apply or is it valid for? “dc.coverage.location” provides a detail about where the document belongs, such as an association with a specific campus.	dc.coverage.location
How Valuable/How found?	How valuable is it stacked in an outside Search entity, such as Google? “pageRank” page rank as provided by Google search engine, through Google’s API.[2] Future improvements could add pageRank.searchengine.	pageRank
Value?	How valuable is it in terms of hits? “pageRank.hits” total number of hits as compared to other pages on the MSIM site, from “Clicktracks” data.	pageRank.hits
Value?	How valuable is it scoring within the scope of the MSIM site? “pageRank score” is the mean of the PageRank and.hits, to provide scoring. This could enable authority control to other search systems, when combined with date for example or location for instance.	pageRank.score

The last three elements of Table 1 above, pageRank, seek to display how valuable a page is, which is included as an experiment. These would be auto generated on the fly as the page was assembled. These categories would be based in part on the Google PageRank API and on indexing and hits actively made in the system.

Why these and why does it matter? To help end users find the school they want and for the school to welcome them, is just one reason. In my own experience working with the Seattle Community Colleges as a web designer, reading the log files, it became obvious to me that many of the foreign nationals inquiries on the Seattle Community Colleges’ sites were not serving their potential student body, in part because no one was examining the logs. Those who rarely did examine the logs did not take the next logical step to advise the senior leadership on how to improve their website as their most functional, least expensive form of marketing. It is likely that such a field cross-referenced with other metadata could aid systems to enable end users to locate the most current authoritative information on a subject.

Nervana’s Sharon L. Bolding advised students to “Iterate to improve over time” in her class presentation. During class discussions she mentioned that organizations needs for information changes over time. If you try to think of everything you might need the administrative overhead is too large and quite simply you will fail. It’s better to think of what you need as experimental, try something, and iterate as you go along, just like all of Web design and application development.

Understanding “what is being used and by whom” in order to identify patterns, can include some automated information from trusted authorities. Combined with the need for pattern recognition the idea of trapping active logging, and exposing some of it for users occurred to me. Click tracking is done at the University of Washington by “Clicktracks”, according to Joel Larson. But what if that data was exposed at some level, such as in the metadata comments? How could this be helpful? Who will it be helpful for?

The reasons someone comes to the University website are fairly well known, however the right to view some materials is based on authentication. In this environment such user rights are controlled by the ‘PubCookie’ as an authority grantor, using databases as control agents. Customers such as students are a common end user. But are they able to find what they want right away from navigation? How many use a search engine instead, and how often? What Search engines do they use? Where do they come from and where are they going?

This solution could make a difference in the user experience on the MSIM website. It might help improve the logic in the user interface design. From the standpoint of site administration, it might help show where some static materials are helpful in certain ways, and yet completely static materials fall out of use over a longer period of time. What it may show we do not know and that itself is interesting.

Problems

Still with this additional data, we need real human beings to observe, analyze, and accept critical feedback and try exceptional things in order to improve information findability and refine that slippery thing known as User Experience. Computers are here to serve man, not the other way around.

Even the reason to ask these questions of Value is implied in the need for large organizations to continually try to improve the findability and usability of their information. In some way, one wants to take the data out of the hands of those who believe they know what, when, where, and how information is being used, and put it into the hands of the end user to make those decisions themselves. The question really is how to help users do it, and what logical steps can one take to make this possible.

What I sacrificed to make the choices was time and lack of experience in terms of what I could or actually would do with this metadata. Once exposed, how useful is it really? Does it only serve me as the administrator? How can I make it more useful?

While many of the metadata schemas were very intriguing I felt I would need more experience actually using and “munging” data to make it useful for end users, the organization, and at the machine level.

Resources

• Dublin Core. (February-1-2007) Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1.
  http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/

Considering metadata elements over several days I realized that I could not conceive of better buckets myself, not really, just derivative ones. Other appealing systems I considered were RDF, OWL and GEMS. I researched RDF and OWL because my own interest tend toward technical issues. GEMS is included because it is a metadata schema specific to education.

But ultimately I returned to Dublin Core for metadata due to simplicity. I appended that schema, and expect that I would learn much more from it “in the wild.”

• Turner, J. (February-1-2007) Metamap.
  http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/turner/meta/english/
  
  
• Crandall, M. (February-2-2007) IMT530B: Organization of Information Resources.
  http://courses.washington.edu/imt530b/index.shtml
  
  
• Bolding, Sharon L. (Saturday, January 20) “How to create Ontologies”
  University of Washington IMT530b class “Semantics Overview”, PowerPoint slide #21.
  
  
• Crandall, M. University of Washington, iSchool Class IMT530b (January -February-2007)

“Module 3a: Metadata” PowerPoint presentation, slide 4, from IMT530b class and website.

· Element refinements allow narrower definition of the elements for specific purposes http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#H3

· Encoding schemes (authority control) can be used as rules for the values allowed within elements http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#H4

Email: Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 12:29:54 -0800 Subject: RE: [Imt530b_wi07] FW: Exercise 3 instructions
… examine metadata standards that are related to content/resource description… looking for is repeated elements across many schemas, which will give you clues about what is commonly used for describing content… The standards I list in the first part of the assignment are recommended starting points, because many of the others are more technical and not appropriate for this work.

· w3schools. (Feburary-7-2007) RDF Reference.
http://www.w3schools.com/rdf/rdf_reference.asp

· Herman, I. (Feburary-7-2007) Web Ontology Language OWL.
http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/

· Seeley, R. (February-7-2007) The Semantic Web: The OWL has landed.
http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=8144&page=

“The language provides a standard way to define Web-based ontologies so that data can be described as what it is -- an enzyme in a biological application or a hotel in a travel industry application -- instead of as document in a tree structure or other database abstraction.”

• W3C Recommendation, . (February-7-2007) The global structure of an HTML document.
  http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4

W3.org information on how metatags should be formatted

• Berners-Lee, T. (February-7-2007) Paper Trial: Web Architecture Ideas.
  http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/PaperTrail.html
  “Introduction
  Social processes look like state machines. However, they don't exist as a state variable stored in one place, but as a trail of documents. You know the true state of the machine only if you have access to the latest documents. (This is not the problem addressed here, this is real life being modeled.) Paper-trail is a system which allows one to follow a strict process by creating new documents in a constrained fashion. Every paper-trail document has a pointer to a "paper-trail schema" which defines its document type (eg "constitutional amendment") a pointer to its justification documents (maybe) a notarization of when it was checked against the schema by the paper-trail program. The schema defines:

· Prerequisites for a document being valid, in terms of other documents

· Hints to other document types you can make from this one (state transitions)”

---

Alernative to Paper Prototyping - Case Study

Thought you might be interested in reading this case study about an application, iRise, which claims to reduce the cost and time to develope software substantially. It's termed "Application Definition Software" (This article was suggested by Bill Marriott to the MSIM2008 cohort as additional reading.)

See iRise's Citibank case study for increasing the competency for capturing user requirements for user interfaces along with functionality requirements:

http://www.cio.com/archive/020107/fea_tec.html?CID=28501

That article was written in Feb 2007, the iRise software, established 1996, is growing, see the site at:

http://www.irise.com/

Also see the 2005 Computerworld Honors Case study:

http://www.cwheroes.org/laureates/Business/20055302.pdf

Eventually a companies, such as Microsoft, will need to find ways to flatten the organization and cut costs and time to market. This is one of those ways -- knowing about and offering this kind of advise either to lease or build may help information managers shine in productivity and reduce the need for several levels of management governance.

Microsoft is building it's own ERP application to compete with Oracle and SAP. Assuming that Microsoft understands their small to medium business market in the ERP space still makes planning, designing, and building a new ERP solution a huge undertaking. iRise is the kind of software which could make that process easier and faster.

iRise's application could plug into Microsoft's ERP solution nicely while maintaining the kind of traceability SOX requires, especially as more Western firms leverage outsourcing to India.

This kind of application, an enhancement over tools such as VISIO could help program management shave time off of planning, and increase relevance and adaptability in what each IT unit does. As I understand it, even in considering what difficult business styles and classes of IT units need what kinds of direction and storage of related enterprise level information.

Urban -- Wildlife

What a great city - you can walk around Greenlake at 1:30 in the morning fearlessly- because there are no wild rabbits running about. Ha ha!

Accidentally I woke up the blue heron asleep at the south east corner of the lake from the crunchy sound of the gravel under my 'New Balance' sneakers. The bird rose wide and quietly flapped away, filling the space next to the dock, and I whispered - "it's ok, it's just me."

I switched to the concrete for quiet but back again - too early - unfortunately disturbing the guys sheltering under the dark trees near the hot dog stand. They rolled over and ruffled their tarp somewhat protectively I thought.

The only other humans encountered were a guy counseling a homeless looking short dude about where to find work. The councilor encouraged his full grown and wet Weimaraner hound dogs to give me love. These sweet 'Grey Ghosts' did, all snuffling and wise.

Understand y'all this is 1:30 am, it is pitch black punctuated with few street lights which lend an occasional eerie presence to very tall trees.

Actually walking Greenlake midweek in odd hours is often an improvement over middays. About 6-7 weeks ago after the iSchool class was over around 9:30 pm I drove to Greenlake and as I pulled into park -- my car lights struck an interesting sight. Blocking the street entry in the middle of the parking area, a couple was playfully laughing and goofing around. The pretty young woman had removed her clothes so that she was completely al naturale, with only her levis around her ankles and a young man was well, doing what any solid citizen would do, he was praising her in his own way, with one arm around her waist, though mostly clothed on the very chilly night. She had lovely pale skin fully lit against the dark night.

Surprised by my head lights these adventurous lovers did not rush to their car, like I would have. I paused and waited, and she swung her long hair around, as they giggled merrily, put her clothes on and shuffled to the edge of the street so I could park. By the time I was walking their vehicle was gone.

It's too cold for the northeast side bats now. I was hoping to see the lone white rat who lives on the east side next to the long extra path behind the new trees, but he's a no show for 2 months now. It all just seems so very uber urban natural.

Don't Whine to Me You Are So Well Off - Stay In School

What I wanted to say to the bright dropout University student but didn't--

I feel need to give you a reference to my perspective and you can make of it, whatever you want. So I will use myself as the example - here goes:

I'm from Alaska, I started working professionally at age 15 as a legal librarian and law clerk.Because neither of my parents saved money to send me to college I worked on the Alaska pipeline as a bullcook, seven days a week, 10-12 hours a day to save enough money for the tuition, books, materials, and living expenses.

This meant that I was a dishwasher on the Alaska pipeline camp that served meals for 400-800 men a day, and cleaned up the accidents that very drunk pipeline workers left in their beds, toilets, and the hallways where they got sick. I worked in Coldfoot Camp for 5 months with only a one day break. It was not the only job I had like that; I also slimed herring, and was a US Fish and Wildlife photographer!I went to the community college just like you did, starting when I was 16 years old.

At 21 I moved to Seattle to attend the University of Washington. I earned an undergraduate degree in fine art, which is in painting, finishing at the private college Cornish Institute - I completely funded my own education working either full time or part time while I attended school full time - it took ten years. Might as well say "would you like fries with that?" as they hand you your diploma.

After running out of money while on my own, and going without food for 4 days once in 1980 I decided I would take any job and do whatever is required to make a living.

To that end I took any job - the bottom of the barrel jobs as a support tech - while working for RealNetworks when the Internet was brand new -- I emailed someone I never met over the internet and told him I was copying his site so that I could learn to script HTML, and asked would he mind helping me a little bit?I took his site apart and put it back together as my own (http://www.wonderlane.com/).

I taught myself HTML. Once in a while I emailed him with a question and he looked at my work from Indonesia where he lived at that time. My Internet teacher and I still trade Happy New Years greetings via email - we have never met in person.From there I worked increasingly better jobs until I was earning a 6 figure salary.Now I am much older, after having worked since I was a kid, I decided I hate what I am doing for what is barely a living when I am lucky to have a contract. Like many people as I have gotten older I am earning less and less instead of more and more.

So I decided to go back to the university and earn a Masters in Information Science; I will learn something new and it is a challenge. I am not a good writer. And maybe if I am lucky and work hard to learn new things I will restart my career as a result. I follow my intuition -- one never knows what exciting thing one might do next!

One of the things that made a huge impression on me is traveling to India in 1989 and seeing starving people laying in the street and beggars with no clothes in the hundreds - standing around on street corners with nothing to do (and I thought I had it bad!) Even the educated people told me they had no jobs- so when I returned to work at Microsoft I worked to improve business relationships with India.As Americans we are such a rich people we can follow what we love to do and maximize the challenges presented to us in our lives, or we can make choices that make our lives easy.

Most of the other people in the world have no such choices. They work all the time until they die. They don't have "free time" or "disposable income" most people don't graduate from high school.According to UNESCO, at least 875 million adults remain illiterate globally, they never have any chance for an education, they never learn to read or write. Count out 875 million pennies and call me when you are done.

While in the backwoods of Nepal, one lady asked a friend of mine "is the sun that shines on your country is the same one that shines on my country?"30,000 people starve to death every day. Since you started reading this about 600+ people died. So after that grim baseline -Taking a class means taking initiative, to go through the materials, take the tutorials, and/ or work with other people, like following up on my offer to help you - I know both of those things can be challenging as learning experiences, alone, not even counting the subject matter.

And of course I have no knowledge of your background.My best advice is to follow whatever in life fills you with passion. But this was a once in a lifetime chance - everything is - it always is, nothing ever is repeated in just the same way or with just the same people. For example it is very unlikely I will be a TA again.We are very, very lucky, don't you agree? With that said we must take responsibility for every action.You have tremendous potential and only you know what that is and where to place your focus. I wish you every success.

But don't whine to me, because you are so much better off than most people it isn't even funny.

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Why Information Management?

"It's not easy to turn a conceptual grasp of a large space into workable solutions, however, and takes many different skill sets—not the least of which is learning to focus and work with talented people who may not have the overall picture but can contribute to the solution." (Mike Crandall, email Jan 21, 2007)

A thorough understanding of information, verses just design or data structures, is at the core of refined application and web design. In depth comprehension of information may help with design in ways planners, designers, and developers may not be able to imagine until actually undertaking the action to expose or make transparent data structures for human and machine use and interaction.

Is your Erdős–Bacon number indeterminate or infinite?

Is my Erdős–Bacon number is indeterminate/infinite? What is yours?

I propose by authoring this blog with a link my Erdős–Bacon number is .1/1/9 (.1.1.9) Therefore if I really do author a paper with (or am referenced by) or make a film(including clips) with Erdős or Bacon, I'd like to be a 1 like the act of Frank Aaron signing the same baseball with Erdős, but I'd still be much further down the chain of connection.


If you link your blog or web information packet to mine, than you will by the 'Totally Finite Rule of Community' acknowledge your Erdős–Bacon number.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdős-Bacon_number


Another game brought to you by The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and Google Lunar Jobs Recruiters "lunarjobs@google.com".

Cheers!~

Photographer's Ethics in a Free Society, Why is this Case Important?

Here is a case of an artist, a photographer named Philip-Lorca diCorcia, using someones image without permission, and profiting by that, even though the subject of the photo asked the photographer to cease using the photo because it runs counter to his religious tradition. See case information: http://www.bigredandshiny.com/cgi-bin/frameset.pl?section=news&issue=issue40&article=STREET_PHOTOGRAPHY_AND_25151059 (Pardon the sticky site!)

Is this really what we meant by a free society, to not respect each other's wants and needs? How is the photographer informed by the law but not by belief? Where do people get the idea they have a right to take another person's image?

From a Boston based art/music community site:
http://www.bigredandshiny.com/cgi-bin/frameset.pl?issue=issue40

"New York State Supreme Court dismissed a case contesting the ethics of street photography and whether it violates the rights of those individuals photographed"

[the person photographed without his permission and against his will] "Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew, claimed that the photographer using his image violated his First Amendment right to practice his religion on the grounds that his image constituted an engraven image that was exhibited and consumed commercially. However, Justice Judith J. Gische said that Nussenzweig's claim to privacy was not valid, finding that diCorcia created the photograph for artistic purposes."

He may have done it for artistic purposes but he certainly did it for profit: "The photographer said multiple prints of Nussenzweig's picture sold for about $20,000 each. The picture also was published in "Heads," a book that sold several thousand copies, diCorcia said. (boingboing.net/2005_07_01_archive.html)

Law.com claimed that the photographer sold 10 copies of the image for 20K-30K each - no starving artist there. "As commerce, the picture would be subject to the restrictions set forth in New York's right-to-privacy laws; as art, it would not." (http://www.law.com/jsp/law/sfb/lawArticleSFB.jsp?id=1139565912319 )

In this case the photographer may have justified this as an act of free expression, but what if it was a photo of him? or his parents? What if he was doing something embarrassing? Does this justify the artist/photographer and any American's right to make money off another person's image without their permission? How far could this be extended? Could Nike or Levis or McDonalds run images of people on TV, say making fun of them without their permission?

While dismissing the case, Gische, the judge did say this: "Clearly, plaintiff finds the use of the photograph bearing his likeness deeply and spiritually offensive," she concluded. "The sincerity of his beliefs is not questioned by defendants or this court. While sensitive to plaintiff's distress, it is not redressable in the courts of civil law. In this regard, the courts have uniformly upheld Constitutional First Amendment protections, even in the face of a deeply offensive use of someone's likeness." ( http://www.law.com/jsp/law/sfb/lawArticleSFB.jsp?id=1139565912319 )

What if Nussenzweig had just said - I don't want others to make a profit off my image. One, stop producing images of me, or two pay me whatever you make, because I did not give you permission. But he didn't - he just said 'no'. Isn't that good enough?

Here's Nussenzweig's attorney quoted on the subject:
"We claim that to take someone's picture without their consent is bad enough," said Jay Goldberg, Nussenzweig's lawyer. "But to then hang the picture in galleries, put it in books and sell it around the city without telling the person or obtaining permission is unfair and outrageous."

Wouldn't it have been more ethical for diCorcia to just respect Nussenzweig's request? What if diCorcia decided to sell the photograph of Nussenzweig for an advertisment such as a billboard or use in a film? Why does it being art or in a public place mean that a person's image is not their own? How more deeply offensive can it be and still be justified as art or good practice -- can it still be art worth all this money and hold no concern for the living person?

Are there other examples of this, where something of yours is not yours because it is art or in a public in a free society? What about medical footage taken in a state hospital of a woman having a baby? Could that be run on television without her permission? Or does she have a reasonable expectation of privacy?

In this case I asked Jeff Stein - a student in the University of Washington's Informatic program, in the Info344 class, and he told me that he feels our culture prefers to honor the needs and values of commerce over the needs of personal privacy. He said this is especially true in public spaces.

Personally if he were asked not to use a picture of a person he had photographed he would honor the request. I would too. What is artistic about not honoring people. Isn't the lack of regard for their privacy doing violence to them by ignoring their request?

How is it that people will resort to the law in such an instance and not use their own belief system to inform them of what is respectful or reasonable?

As the BigRedandShiny.com article concludes:
"From this, therefore, we can conclude that artistic rights under the First Amendment trump freedom of religion, also protected under the First Amendment - at least when considering privacy laws within the civil courts of New York. "

What I find a sad twist of fact is when querying 'diCorcia', the photographer's name, in a local warm and friendly public search engine you will receive an image of Nussenzweig, probably many of them, as I did.

Why is this case important? It's important because our sense of ethical judgment tells us it isn't right, while the law says it isn't wrong.

Freedom of speech is closely tied to freedom of thought which trumps freedom of religion.