ITIG

Be sure to check out William Gibson’s piece in the New York times today

Google’s Earth

Among the choice bits

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products.

and

We never imagined that artificial intelligence would be like this. We imagined discrete entities. Genies. We also seldom imagined (in spite of ample evidence) that emergent technologies would leave legislation in the dust, yet they do. In a world characterized by technologically driven change, we necessarily legislate after the fact, perpetually scrambling to catch up, while the core architectures of the future, increasingly, are erected by entities like Google.

Enjoy.

ITIG Blog Contributor:
Edward Iglesias
Systems Librarian
Central Connecticut State University

Two new blog posts this morning on Social Networks and Privacy.  The fist came as a tweet from @zephoria pointing to security guru Bruce Schneier’s excellent blog Schnier on Security.  This post is called
A Revised Taxonomy of Social Networking Data

and is very helpful in coming to terms with exactly what happens to the stuff you post.  Here are the key pieces

• Service data is the data you give to a social networking site in order to use it. Such data might include your legal name, your age, and your credit-card number.
• Disclosed data is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.
• Entrusted data is what you post on other people’s pages. It’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over the data once you post it — another user does.
• Incidental data is what other people post about you: a paragraph about you that someone else writes, a picture of you that someone else takes and posts. Again, it’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over it, and you didn’t create it in the first place.
• Behavioral data is data the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with. It might include games you play, topics you write about, news articles you access (and what that says about your political leanings), and so on.
• Derived data is data about you that is derived from all the other data. For example, if 80 percent of your friends self-identify as gay, you’re likely gay yourself.

Now for many people this seems irrelevant having adopted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s  Values of “openness”, “sharing” and “living your whole life on the Internet.” For those who have not ReadWriteWeb has a great post called
The Rise of the Anti-Facebooks

Heading the list is my personal favorite Diaspora

… the distributed, open-source social network all about privacy and control of your data. Diaspora doesn’t cite Facebook by name on its Kickstarter page, where its four founders raised 20 times more money than they asked for. But its founders do refer to “large corporate networks who want to tell you that sharing and privacy are mutually exclusive.”

While none of this is particularly new it is good to see that even the most ardent boosters of Social Media are starting to realize that though the message may be juvenile the medium must grow up.

ITIG Blog Contributor:
Edward Iglesias
Systems Librarian
Central Connecticut State University

Boing Boing has coverage of Carl Malamud’s presentation of his keynote at the 19th World Wide Web Consortium conference in 2010.  The video is 46 minutes but highly valuable and entertaining.

http://public.resource.org/rules/

ITIG Blog Contributor:
Edward Iglesias
Systems Librarian
Central Connecticut State University

Sign up for this free webinar series sponsored by the Information Technology Interest Group of ACRL New England
https://sites.google.com/site/nisowebinarseries/

Location: College of the Holy Cross. Worcester, MA
Webinar Series: Measuring Use, Assessing Success
About: You can sign up for only one part of the series, or both!

Part One: Measure, Assess, Improve, Repeat: Using Library Performance Metrics
Date/Time: Sept 8th, 1pm-2:30pm
Practitioners of ‘evidence-based librarianship’ will discuss and demonstrate evaluations of library collections and services using a variety of performance metrics. Metrics, when utilized creatively, offer many far-reaching applications and opportunities for demonstration of return-on-investment and proof of a library’s value to its parent institution, as well as new responsibilities to continue to show relevance.
Speakers:
Steve Hiller, Director, Assessment and Planning, University of Washington Libraries
Martha Kyrillidou, Senior Director, Statistics and Service Quality Programs, Association of Research Libraries (ARL)
Part Two: Count Me In: Measuring Individual Item Usage
Date/Time: Sept 15th, 1pm-2:30pm
Libraries’ growing awareness of performance measures has created an increased interest in and desire for fine-grained usage data. For years, gathering item-level usage data has meant counting uses of the physical containers of intellectual property, e.g.: books, tapes, discs, or periodicals, to name a few. Now that electronic versions of such items inhabit a much greater percentage of many libraries’ collections, including that held in their own institutional repositories, usage data about individual book chapters, journal articles, sound recordings, motion picture scenes, and so forth is within reach or is already trickling into libraries’ records.
Speakers:
Peter Shepherd, Project Director, Project COUNTER
Johan Bollen, Associate Professor in the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University

Update: There will be 12:30 for refreshments.  Location is Library Scalia Lab

If you have been around since the early days of email you will doubtless have seen lots of email signatures that end with something like this

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE—–
Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.14 (Darwin)

iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJMa/

tHAAoJEPn5dZT22vcrrJ4H/2gVGIOdgMc4uQ/p/PAsfYbZ
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Vj7b+WRXroZ9zONAvOVWc3A2Veycgj4hKKG8javZAgZsmM8q2LvZ2goko6miSJwE
2eMMWAtIVHaWRn8okOdkELl/bM82y5DgOUlcAlBDHEvbAYmgz72V9Mb8KJ12JYRr
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m99h3vdlwrNgeV238XPOeARO2D3D1r4xsJug3iE15ARwViaMMlsartkrj80GDv8=
=arv/
—–END PGP SIGNATURE—–

• GPGMail
• MacGPG

The instructions on the GPGMail site are very good but you must follow them exactly.  Basically download MacGPG first.  Then follow these instructions in the terminal window.  Yes, they are for linux but they will work with one exception.  Mac uses a file called .bash_profile instead of .bashrc.  So where you get instructions like