February 2008 Archives

1) Does anyone read my blog?

2) Do you know of any universities that have tenure track librarians and also a library school with tenured faculty? How similar are they and how do they interact? Those I have talked to so far (including myself) only have experience where the librarians are quasi-tenure with a separate/dis-similar system. How would Penn State accommodate Library and Information Science faculty professors?

This is a microblog post that will only explain what I mean by the title "the information age is a cyberpunk dystopia". In reading lots of science fiction including the genre of cyberpunk, perhaps even playing the RPG Shadowrun, I recognized a theme that data (information) is an expensive commodity. The struggle in "the net" isn't how fast your connection is, but what you can get access to because of who you are or if you can "hack into" it. The enemy is the "corp" who has secrets that need to be unlocked for the good of mankind. You can probably see the scholarly publishing world in here, though our researchers aren't confined to plateaus in the desert at gunpoint. But things are looking up for those with government funded research and the other publishing models look to be catching on, so perhaps we're due for utopia instead.

I attended one talk during the 2008 IST Graduate Symposium this year and it was the opening keynote from Google's Dr. Peter Norvig, director of research. I was hoping to hear more about the new Google Research project that would support eScience and large data sets. Instead I got a talk that appealed to the Computer Scientist in my (ah, 211). He covered what was in the description of the keynote, the amazing ability of simple algorithms to identify images and natural language text... just because of BILLIONS of data points. Test their ability to draw semantic links between ideas from words with Google Sets.

Some gems of insight:
"Don't make algorithms that work well, make algorithms that work well with large enough data"
We can model the entire world by "using the world as it's own model"
We don't need to define rules because "the rules are in the data"