On to the Next Blog

With the end of the semester, this class blog is going silent. You can find docs latest posts on a qualitative research fluency blog.

Rise of the Wikis

Further evidence that wiki technology is changing the face of collaboration comes from the non-partisan Council on Foreign Relations, which filed a report on the use of an “Intellipedia” by sixteen intelligence agencies.

Faced with a nimble, adaptive adversary and an unwieldy bureaucracy, the intelligence community hopes that adopting a revolutionary new social networking software behind the popular “Wikipedia” network will help improve its ability to gather and disseminate information. Last month, John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, revealed the existence of the intelligence community’s own brand of the “Wiki:” “Intellipedia.” Authorized users from all sixteen intelligence agencies have access not only to read the information posted there, but also to create and edit entries where they see fit. Since its inception in April of this year, Intellipedia has grown to more than 28,000 pages generated by some 3,600 users.

I posted earlier about our use of a wiki to run a small workshop. So far, it has been a success, and we are considering using the wiki to prepare a report on our workshop activities.

Poll Workers and the New Voting Technology

There is an article in the WaPo today laying out some of the challenges for poll workers who are in charge of ensuring the election goes off without a hitch. I have always admired the dedicated, usually elderly, citizens I meet on election day. They work long hours for little pay and in every instance seem genuinely thrilled to help their fellow citizens participate in democracy. They are always pleasant and make me feel good about the act of voting.

Now comes the not too surprising news that some of them are feeling more than a little challenged by the shift to electronic voting machines. The story reports:

Goodman is part of the wave of hastily recruited Montgomery trainees, and at 73 he fits what elections officials say is the age profile of the average poll worker nationwide. Most are well into their retirement years, and the technology changes can be daunting for some of those who didn’t grow up using computers. That is why some states are looking to recruit college, and even high school, students to work the polls.

Goodman, a former NBC television news producer who lives near Rockville, said he found the jargon of the training session offered by the county Board of Elections incomprehensible and the technology overwhelming. It wasn’t long before his eagerness hardened to frustration as he realized the job of check-in judge was going to be a lot harder than he thought.

He’s no computer whiz, but given a bit more time he could manage, he said. In a single three-hour class, “there was no way to absorb all that,” he said.

Having sat through a training to learn how to assist blind voters in their use of these machines, I would add that you do not need to be elderly or a computer novice to find the training more than a little daunting. Let’s cross our fingers for a smooth, fair, and equitable election day.

“codeshop”

November 3 & 4, 2006, I will chair and my lab QDAP will host a workshop funded by the NSF called “Coding Across the Disciplines: A Project-Based Workshop on Manual Annotation Techniques” in the William Pitt Union at the University of Pittsburgh. The workshop wiki is worth looking at, since it seems to have worked well as a way to distribute the creative work of preparing for the meeting across a wide geographic distibution in an asynchronous manner. People contributed to the wiki where and when they could and in this distributed manner, we created a nice product.

Database File

Here is the file for the 1st database lab.

Broadband Divide Versus Net Neutrality

Former FCC Commissioner William Kennard argues in the NYTs that more attention should be focused on the broadband divide.

Any serious discussion of the future of the Internet should start with a basic fact: broadband is transforming every facet of communications, from entertainment and telephone services to delivery of vital services like health care. But this also means that the digital divide, once defined as the chasm separating those who had access to narrowband dial-up Internet and those who didn’t, has become a broadband digital divide.

At the same time, he paints an interesting picture of the policy agenda in Washington DC.

Unfortunately, the current debate in Washington is over “net neutrality” — that is, should network providers be able to charge some companies special fees for faster bandwidth. This is essentially a battle between the extremely wealthy (Google, Amazon and other high-tech giants, which oppose such a move) and the merely rich (the telephone and cable industries). In the past year, collectively they have spent $50 million on lobbying and advertising, effectively preventing Congress and the public from dealing with more pressing issues.

So what is his answer? Kennard advocates for a shift in the way that we fund and use the Universal Service Fund, which currently amounts to a tax on telephone subscribers. However, Kennard discloses he stands to benefit personally if a new model increased investment in firms represented by The Carlyle Group, a global investment behemoth for which he is a Managing Director.

FluWiki

Take a look at this Flu Wiki blog post from the DailyKos. This is the shape of things to come. The Flu Wiki is collaboratively edited public health resource and the “About” page states:

The purpose of the Flu Wiki is to help local communities prepare for and perhaps cope with a possible influenza pandemic. This is a task previously ceded to local, state and national governmental public health agencies. Our goal is to be:

• a reliable source of information, as neutral as possible, about important facts useful for a public health approach to pandemic influenza
• a venue for anticipating the vast range of problems that may arise if a pandemic does occur
• a venue for thinking about implementable solutions to foreseeable problems

Before the present threat of an avian flu pandemic, these tasks were formerly ceded to local, state, national and international public health agencies. But no one, in any health department or government agency, knows all the things needed to cope with an influenza pandemic. The world is filled with competent others who are likely to have credible and useful information about some aspect of each of these tasks. By pooling and sharing our knowledge, we hope to advance both preparation for and the ability to cope with events as they unfold.

Flu Wiki is not meant to be a substitute for planning, preparation and implementation by civil authorities, but instead is a parallel effort that complements, supports and extends those efforts. And while there are a small group of editors who will continue to administer and maintain the Wiki, it is the users of Flu Wiki who will shape its utility and relevance based on the contributions they make. We hope you will find the instructions sufficient to get started. You’ll soon be learning on your own.

I think we will see many more of these “distributed” knowledge models as the centralized model proves ever less able to manage modern complexity.

Encryption & Humans

I spotted this AP Wire story on encryption and it seemed appropriate for the class. It presents the sometimes controversial views of Bruce Schneier, “a geeky computer encryption expert turned all-purpose security guru,” according to AP. Schneier notes:

While encryption has its place – it is what secures Web-based banking and shopping – Schneier realized that too often it was deployed in silly ways. For example, some companies let employees unlock encrypted files with simple passwords, which often ended up being easy to steal or guess. In other words, all the technical sophistication in the world can lock data from prying eyes, but if people leave the keys in the open, not much security results.

I think it is wise to question whether all the best technology can compensate for all the worst in human nature.

IMs That Live On

The nation is riveted by another sex scandal. Who knew that the secret proclivities of a careless, obviously non-fluent with IT congressman would turn into a national lesson on what it means to type messages into cyberspace? The once fairly widespread assumption that the “delete” button actually deletes things is dying fast, as is the view that Instant Messages are also “temporary” messages. As the latest Washington Post story on Foley’s Follies leads:

People who think their instant messages disappear after being sent should think again. As the recent scandals involving former Republican congressman Mark Foley and Hewlett-Packard Co. have brought to light, text messages sent in real time via computer can be saved and retrieved…Instant messages can be saved in a variety of ways. Most popular IM programs have built-in archiving features that can be turned on by anyone who uses them. Also, many companies and government agencies use special software that scans text-messaging traffic and makes copies of the text for storage on corporate or government computers.

So where does this leave us heading as a nation? Depending on the person, I’d guess we are all more or less disgusted and yet somehow better able to assess the implications of using electronic communications technology.

Tools for Rules: A Demo

[09.30.06 Update]
The system failure in class turned out to be very fortuitous. It allowed us to *debug* the system on the fly. It turns out an older version of the Lemur tool kit was being used. This caused the data source to be corrupted when two users tried to access the data at the same time. We managed to get a work arounf in place and ran, with some glitches, three great sessions with a total of about 30 federal agency officals. The result was that the tool (what we call Tool 2 in the demo) got an overwhelming endorsement, while Tool 3 was declared not ready for prime time. We did learn important things and we made mental breakthroughs about how Tool 3 would need to be altered (hint: think dynamic, user-seeded ontologies with mini language models for each search).

There is now a unified demo page for our tools.

[Original Post]
We are testing our eRulemaking tools with three groups of federal agency officials this Friday in Washington DC. I invite you to take a look at, and experiment with, these tools.

Information Search Tool

Near Uplicate Detection Tool