Not Quite a Blog

Here are some pics taken at our commencement... a superb pic taken by Andrew Fiore (catch his album on Facebook):

A picture taken by Jens of me messin' around (link is to my flickr set):

A picture taken by me with Yuri's camera... this is Yuri, Fredrik, danah and Jens (the other four PhD graduates):

Around midnight Jan. 9 2008, the large palm tree on the southwest side of South Hall fell down. From the look of it, a steam pipe underneath the root system essentially cooked the palm's root system. I took some pictures of the magnificent shrub, click on the image above to see the Flickr set.

• Peter Lyman's memorial today was beautiful.
• I'm so going to see Dragon Wars. I love dragons!!!
• Wow. Kathy Griffin: "Suck it, Jesus". I guess you can't say that on TV, huh?
• I've finished both Neuromancer and Count Zero and am on to Mona Lisa Overdrive. Wow... written in 1984, 1986 and 1988! Wow. And I read these after having played the Cyberpunk RPG back in the day.

Link: http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/podcast/audio/Future_of_Information_Panel_UCiSchool_26Apr2006.mp3

Yesterday the UC Berkeley School of Information (iSchool) hosted a panel discussion and reception to celebrate the change of our name (we were formerly known as the School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS)).

The event started with Dean Saxenian commenting on the one and a half year process that concluded with the decision to join the 20+ other Schools of Information in the US. The panel discussion included (from left to right above): Geoff Nunberg (UC Berkeley, Stanford), Mimi Ito (USC), Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive) and Brad Horowitz (Yahoo!). Geoff Nunberg asked each panelist to present separately first and answer two questions:

• Over the coming decades, what's likely to be the most surprising or unanticipated change in social behavior, social life, etc. that technology will mediate?
• What's likely to be the most surprising or unanticipated holdover from the present?

We had so many attendees -- more than 130 -- that we had to have an overflow room with real-time video and audio being streamed into that room. The audio is available by clicking on the title of this post or here: Future of Information Panel (MP3 Audio).

Note: we're still working out the kinks with the audio set up; you'll notice that it's quite a bit more hi-fidelity than past recordings (thanks to a grant by the iSchool). Even then there was some interference that I couldn't eliminate from the massive amount of cellphones and other devices in the audience.

Dave Schlossberg (now at IODA) has this piece, "The State of the iSchool: A response from an unarmed alum", over at his rant-space, the meat. I'll post some comments after reading it at lunch... more later.

Later: So, Dave's words aren't meant to be minced. It's truly tough love from a very smart former student who is trying to apply what he learned in the real world (and damn if IODA isn't a really good idea that he's struggling to make even better). Here are some rambles from me:

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We've changed our name from SIMS to UC Berkeley's School of Information... or iSchool for short. Check us out and our new web page: http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/.

Let us know if you have any comments on the design, content, whatever!

Link: http://groups.ischool.berkeley.edu/podcast/audio/saxenian_ischool_30-Jan-2006.mp3

Dean AnnaLee Saxenian gave the first annual State of the School address today for SIMS (soon to be called the UC Berkeley School of Information... or I-School).

I was able to record her talk and you find the audio and slides here:

• saxenian_ischool_30-Jan-2006.mp3 (11MB, MP3)
• State_of_SIMS_2006.pdf (3MB, PDF)

Make a reservation for this Commonwealth Club panel... (via the one and only ass-kicking LawGeek)

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY | THURSDAY JANUARY 26
* DAVID DRUMMOND, Vice President and General Counsel, Google
* BREWSTER KAHLE, Digital Librarian, Internet Archive
* BILL PETROCELLI, Co-owner, Book Passage
* PAMELA SAMUELSON, Professor, Boalt School of Law, UC Berkeley; Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology
* DAVID HENRY STERRY, Author, Putting Your Passion into Print
* MOIRA GUNN, Host, "Tech Nation," Public Radio - Moderator

SHOULD BOOKS BE FREE ONLINE? GOOGLE'S PLAN STIRS UP CONTROVERSY

Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could access every book from five world-class libraries for free online? Absolutely not, according to the writers and publishers who sued Google Print (since renamed Google Book Search) over plans to do just that. With accusations of copyright infringement butting up against advocates for free public dissemination of information, the battle lines have been drawn. Grab a ringside seat as our panel of experts clarifies the thorny issues in this a debate that will impact readers around the world.

In our OSDDDI course, contributing to the class blog is part of each student's participation grade. It's not weighted particularly heavily and is not the centerpiece of the course, but it can make a difference for students on the border between one grade and another.

As well as reading and commenting on student's blog posts throughout the semester to get a feel for how each student contributed, we can also do a bit of quantitative analysis (querying the back-end database) that will save the effort of manually opening up all the archives and looking at various posts to get basic data like how many posts students wrote and how long they were.

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I just presented the Voting System Information Database that I've created for my final project in Ray Larson's databases class. The data was taken largely from the VVF's Verifier tool but I intend for the VSID to be a more research-oriented collection of information. If you're a voting systems researcher and would like to give the database a test drive, go here:

http://www.josephhall.org/vsid/

Note there is a lot I'd like to do before I consider this thing out of beta status. If there's something that I could add or a different set of things you'd find useful, please let me know.