Wa Po Labs visit

WaPoLabs is the Washington Post unit that experiments with interactive and new media, user experience, and such.

A small group from the labs, including user experience and editor staff, are visiting UNC on Monday, February 27.

 They want to " chat with students about the changing media landscape and the work we do."

 They will be holding an open discussion session 3:15 - 4:30 in the Freedom Forum Room, 305 Carroll Hall. All interested are welcome to attend.

Kristen Bowen Things of Interest

Here are the pages that I shows in class today: http://www.whichbook.net/ and http://www.whatmovieshouldiwatchtonight.com/

The first is interesting to me because my favorite thing to do is read. However one of my majors is English and I don't have a lot of time to read texts that are of interest to me outside of class. Therefore, when I do get time to do so I like to have a ready made list of books that have caught my interest and this site helps me to develop this list.

The second is interesting to me because sometimes I just can't take reading anymore because my mind is tired from all of the texts I have to read for my classes and just needs to relax. I used to waste time having to look for what other people think are good movies to watch and then going to watch trailers. But, this site allows me to mindlessly find movies to watch by pulling up the trailers itself. I think both of these sites are ones that will be useful to the class.

Starters for scripting session

1. Googled - JavaScript Source: Free JavaScripts, Tutorials, Example Code, Reference, Resources, And Help. But a quick look will show you lots of others, too
2. Radio - Indaba Music is an international community of musicians, music professionals, and fans exploring the creative possibilities of making music with people in different places.
3. Newsletters - FRONTLINE: digital nation - life on the virtual frontier | PBS Frontline has created a website to accompany its television broadcast of the documentary Digital Nation. Interestingly, visitors can "Watch Online", the 90-minute video, and then read a roundtable discussion by some of the participants in the film. To the right of the comments by the participants is the "Your Thoughts" area, which contains posts by visitors to the site. The tabs near the top left of the homepage contain short videos which expound on the 90-minute video. The topics of the tabs include "Living Faster", "Waging War", and "Virtual Worlds". Within each tab are several subsections, and each subsection contains about half a dozen videos. In the "Living Faster" tab, under the subsection "Where Are We Headed", there is a brief video called "Your Brain on Google", which compares a brain scan of a person when reading a book to when they are using Google. The results are surprising. [Scout Report]
4. Interesting - imagination and insight together. TED talks video of Johnny Lee demonstrating his cool Wii Remote hacks, which turn the $40 video game controller into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen and a head-mounted 3-D viewer.
5. Economist - Companies and information: The leaky corporation Digital information is easy not only to store but also to leak. Companies must decide what they really need to keep secret, and how best to do so Feb 24th 2011 | from the print edition [you can also read this via UNC Libraries' e-journals]
6. Issues to ponder - as you are thinking about what to put on your web pages, you might want to consider how web page design is affecting and is affected by the users. Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming, by Mark Bauerlein, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 19 September 2008. If you are interested in Nielsen's original research, you can find it online as well at Alertbox, April 17, 2006: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content
7. Pioneers - Johnny Lee

Prague Summer Seminar in Libraries and Librarianship May 20th - June 2nd, 2012

Prague, the magical city of cathedrals, gold-tipped towers, and church domes, is one of the most popular destinations in East Central Europe. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science summer seminar allows library professionals to explore the past, present, and future of libraries and librarianship in the heart of one of the world's most remarkable, yet largely undiscovered, countries.

During this this two-week, residential summer program participants will enjoy lectures and tours related to librarianship in this culturally and academically rich country. In addition to visiting libraries and museums in Prague, the group will also make trips to visit two UNESCO World Heritage sites, Kroměříž (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/860) and Český Krumlov (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/617) with their historic libraries, castles, and gardens.

Accommodation in the center of Prague allows participants to explore this historic and absorbing capital city during the week, and the surrounding countryside during their free time on the weekends.

More information about Prague can be found in the Lonely Planet Guide at http://www.lonelyplanet.com/worldguide/czech-republic/prague and on the Prague information site at http://www.prague.cz/.

This seminar has been offered each summer by UNC and Charles University in Prague since 2002. Information about the seminar, including an overview of the schedule, costs, and past participant reviews, can be found at http://sils.unc.edu/programs/international/prague.

The seminar is also available for 3 hours of graduate credit. If you have any questions about the seminar, please contact Kaitlyn Murphy, by e-mail kmurphy@unc.edu or by phone 919-962-0208.

GE Tech Talks

Below is the message forwarded from GE regarding their Tech. Talk on Feb. 20th. With this event, they plan to raise awareness about employment, as well as recruit undergraduates and graduates for their IMLP program (and also for positions after graduation). Last time we had a really great turnout, so I hope for the same this time around.

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All,

I’m excited to announce our latest GE Information Technology Leadership Program Technology briefing scheduled for Monday, Feb 20 at 4:00pm! Our guest speaker for this event will be Biagio Polsinelli, IT Leader for GE Energy’s Power & Water Renewables business, who will be lecturing on Renewable Energy and Solar Power technology.

With rising fuel costs, climate change concerns, and a growing demand for electricity, renewable energy resources such as solar power are becoming an increasingly valuable part of the world's energy mix. Building on a strong power generation heritage spanning more than a century, GE is currently pursuing a number of projects that will make large-scale solar installations simple and affordable.

This event will be run via Webex video conference so that anyone not physically located in Chapel Hill may attend. The schedule is as follows:

• 4:00pm – Introduction, “We are GE” (Scott Hamrick) 4:15pm – Main presentation (Biagio Polsinelli) 
• 4:45pm – Q&A (Audience) 5:00pm – Wrap Up (Scott Hamrick)

Light snacks and drinks will be available for this event. Hope to see lots of people there!

• TOPIC: Solar Power - Harnessing the Power of the Sun DATE: Monday, February 20, 2012 
• TIME: 4:00 pm, Eastern Standard Time (New York, GMT-05:00) 
• MEETING NUMBER: 824 641 678 PASSWORD: carolina 
• TELECONFERENCE: None
• Meeting link for people with GE Single Sign On accounts: https://federation.gecompany.com/jsp/redirectWebEx.jsp?TARGET=https://emeetings.webex.com/emeetings/j.php?ED=161988167&UID=481984772&PW=NOWQxNzc1ZjMy&RT=MiM3
• Meeting link for people without GE Single Sign On accounts (or from a smartphone): https://emeetings.webex.com/emeetings/j.php?ED=161988167&UID=481984772&PW=NOWQxNzc1ZjMy&RT=MiM3

Starters for Editors session

1. Googled - help for those using editors is always available. An example is Free HTML Editors, Web Editors, and WYSIWYG Web Editors and Site Builders, which also includes links to other free services. W3Schools has online aids that can walk us through individual challenges as we work with the detail in our websites.
2. Radio - two internet radio streams, each aimed at a particular interest area
   • AIROS Native Radio Network, a way for a group to reach out beyond commercial radio
   • Radio Bilingüe, a non-profit radio network with Latino control and leadership, is the only national distributor of Spanish-language programming in public radio.
3. Newsletters - How Websites Make You Spill Your Secrets. People divulge more sensitive information on sites that look less safe. By Erica Naone FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 03, 2010
4. Interesting - Piero Scaruffi's knowledge base. An article in the New York Times said it this isn't the best web site of all time, it's at least one of the most visited. Look at his eclectic best-of lists and see if you agree with them, or if you learn anything from them.
5. Economist - E-communication and society: A cyber-house divided. Online as much as in the real world, people bunch together in mutually suspicious groups—and in both realms, peacemaking is an uphill struggle. Sep 2nd 2010 | WASHINGTON, DC [you can also read this via UNC Libraries' e-journals]
6. Issues to ponder - if you are interested in the topics of privacy and health informatics, you might find the website for the Personal Genome Project and the specific news article about the 10 volunteers with their medical histories and DNA sequences interesting. An article and a video on TechReview also discussed the same topic.
7. Pioneers - Jimmy Wales
8. Freebies - Wordle, a site that creates images out of text. You can use it to analyze your writing.

Starters for CSS practice session

1. Googled - W3C Schools CSS examples is a great source of self-help
2. Radio - Red Bull Music Academy Radio is a terrific way to introduce yourself to musicians you may never have heard of
3. Newsletters - Center for Nonverbal Studies. The mission is to advance the study of human communication in all its forms apart from language [Scout Report]
4. Interesting - Think You're An Auditory Or Visual Learner? Scientists Say It's Unlikely : Shots - Health Blog : NPR. Recent studies find that our brains retain information better when we spread learning over a longer period of time, say months or even a year, versus cramming it into a few days or weeks
5. Economist - Internet security: Duly notarised | The Economist. Every time you connect to a secure website it is parties anointed with authority from on high that tell you whether or not the site should be trusted. Such dogma has been in place since the dawn of secured web communications. But heretics are becoming increasingly vocal.
6. Issues to pay attention to - Next Generation Connectivity: A review of broadband Internet transitions and policy from around the world. Commonly known as the "Broadband Study", the purpose of this report was to look at "broadband deployment and usage throughout the world" for the FCC. The results are in and unfortunately we didn't do particularly well. In fact, the U.S. was relegated to "middle-of-the-pack performer" status, behind industrialized countries in Europe and Asia where the practice of "open access" to broadband networks by third party competitors is more prevalent. [Current Cites]
7. Freebies - Portable Free PC repair/Diagnostic Tool Box For Computer Administrators - IObit. While IObit Toolbox is described as being for "computer geeks," even casual computer users will find this toolbox quite useful. The application is web-based and does not need to be downloaded. Visitors should note that the application includes 20 different tools, including a file shredder, a registry defrag, and a startup manager. The program is compatible with computers running Windows 7, Vista, XP, and 2000. [Scout Report]

This is an article I noticed in the New York Times and thought it might be worth a few of your minutes time to glance over it. I don't think I'm going to save my Facebook stuff in a book, though.

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January 27, 2012

The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg

By CARINA CHOCANO

This kind of thing happens all the time now, but three or four years ago it still seemed momentous and thrilling: a sudden argument at a dinner party (something about Tom Selleck and Burt Reynolds and iconic mustaches of the ’70s) was quickly put to rest when half the people present picked up their phones and started to Google. Observing this, a friend of mine made what struck me as a very clever remark about our “stegosaurus brains.” It didn’t occur to me that only a dinosaur would delight in a dinosaur analogy.

As you probably already know, but as I only recently discovered while visiting the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles with my increasingly futuristic 3-year-old (who is given to swiping a finger across things like TV sets and laptop screens and declaring them broken when they fail to respond to her touch), the theory that the stegosaurus had a “second brain” that controlled the back end of its body was debunked years ago, long after it was taught to me in grade school. So not only was my friend’s analogy contingent on a discredited theory, it also rested quaintly on an Industrial Age notion: that our phones and other data-storage and network devices are secondary to our actual brains, mere auxiliary boosters bringing up the slow-moving rear of our consciousness, rather than the indispensable space-age (post-space-age?) transmogrifiers we now understand these devices to be.

“We’re all cyborgs now,” the anthropologist Amber Case said in a TED talk in 2010. For thousands of years, she said, tool-use had been “a physical modification of self. Now what we’re looking at is not a physical extension of the self but an extension of the mental self.” Our devices allow us to compress time and space in a way that we’re able to mentally transport ourselves between planes of existence with the touch of a button. (Or, rather, a digital rendering of a button.) Someone told me recently that John Perry Barlow, pre-smartphones, defined cyberspace as like “the place you go when you’re on the phone,” and Case, who grew up in thrall to the idea of instantaneous travel, realized, while writing a thesis on cellphones, that “everyone was carrying around wormholes in their pocket.” As she puts it: “You have a different type of time on every single device that you use. . . . And because of that, you start to dig around for your external memories — where did you leave them? So now we’re all these paleontologists that are digging for things that we’ve lost on our external brains that we’re carrying around in our pockets.”

Recently, in the span of about a week, a friend of mine lost her hard drive and backup drive storing years of work, her entire music collection, her photos and all her e-mail. A few weeks later, duly warned, I watched my glitchy phone finally die — and take with it almost every photo I had ever taken of my daughter since the day she was born. I hadn’t backed up my phone because I couldn’t connect my new laptop to my old external hard drive and had been planning to switch from MobileMe (to which I’d forgotten the password) to iCloud (I was holding off until I could back everything up on a hard drive, not yet purchased). My digital-storage problems had become so internecine that I didn’t stop to consider my photos’ vulnerability until it was too late. Weeks later, I’m still plagued with the back-of-the-mind feeling that one of these days I’ll figure out how to make the pictures reappear as magically as they vanished. My mind isn’t sure how to process the loss because it feels at once real and illusory.

This is the dilemma of being a cyborg: It’s not just that everything we once committed to memory we now store externally on devices that crash or become obsolete or are rendered temporarily inaccessible due to lack of coverage. And it’s not that we spend a lot of time storing, organizing, pruning and maintaining our access to it all. It’s that we’re collectively engaged in a mass conversion of what we used to call, variously, records, accounts, entries, archives, registers, collections, keepsakes, catalogs, testimonies and memories into, simply, data.

“Data” has become the default word used to describe the constantly generated, centrally stored evidence of our existence. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the word “data” comes from the Latin for “to give,” and refers to something that is given or relinquished. It also feels significant that data rests at the very bottom of the so-called knowledge hierarchy — below information, knowledge and wisdom.

For everything that’s gained by our ability to store and maintain more information than ever before, something is lost that has to do with texture, context and association. The science journalist Joshua Foer, author of “Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything,” said in a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts that people once “invested in their memories, they cultivated them. They studiously furnished their minds. They remembered. Today, of course, we’ve got books and computers and smartphones to hold our memories for us. We’ve outsourced our memories to external devices. The result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small, forgotten thing as evidence that they’re failing us altogether.” As we store more and more of what makes us us outside of ourselves, he said, “we’ve forgotten how to remember.”

When asked by his interviewer if memory isn’t also a form of baggage, a conduit for suffering or a handicap, Foer responded with two stories. The first is about a man who lost his memory and his ability to form new memories, which made him less human in a way, because “to be a person you have to exist in the dimension of time.” The second story is about a man who could remember everything but had no way of filtering the information. Foer likened this man to a character in a Borges story that concluded that the “essence of being human is not remembering but forgetting.”

Losing data is not the same as forgetting. It happens all at once, not gradually or imperceptibly, so it feels less like an unburdening than like a mugging. Similarly, accumulating data does not feel the same as gaining knowledge, experience or understanding. “What does the inside of your computer actually look like?” Case asked. “Well, if you print it out, it looks like a thousand pounds of material that you’re carrying around all the time. And if you actually lose that information, it means that you suddenly have this loss in your mind, that you suddenly feel like something’s missing, except you weren’t able to see it, so it feels like a very strange emotion.”

Foer said, “What makes things memorable is that they are meaningful, significant, colorful.” Data is weightless and characterless and takes up very little space. The more of it we save, the more we lose the ability to differentiate it, to assign significance and meaning.

I’m pretty sure, for instance, that my husband still doesn’t know my phone number, which he stored on his phone on the day we met, whereas I remember his because he wrote it down for me on a tiny scrap of paper that I pinned to my bulletin board, where it gradually accrued meaning. In my mind, my husband’s phone number is inextricable from his handwriting, and it lives on a jagged-edged, ephemeral scrap that resurfaces every once in a while, usually when I’m looking for something else.

It also used to be that the music I listened to had several visual corollaries — images on album or CD covers, marker doodles and collages on cassette tapes, the arrangement of a shelf or the jumble of junk on the floor of my car. Now, the more music I collect, the more I find myself scrolling, letting the names and titles slide past me, undifferentiated. The blurred scroll evokes nothing.

Maybe this sensation is why, in the past few years, there has been a resurgence of artisanal analog technology; for instance, Deutsche Post DHL, the German postal service and worldwide logistics company, offers a Facebook app that allows users to convert their Facebook activity into a handsome book containing all your fondest social-media memories, converted into, and preserved as, commemorative infographics. There’s also an app called Postagram, which allows you to convert photos from your iPhone into physical postcards, which are then mailed to your chosen recipient. The vinyl-philia of the ’90s and early aughts has been joined by a more recent revival of “cassette culture,” recalling the ’70s and ’80s. On Etsy, physical stationery abounds. Seemingly every bookstore now serves double duty as a fancy-notebook store. And, improbably, Polaroids are back, thanks to the obsessions of enthusiasts who started the Impossible Project, acquiring the rights to continue manufacturing Polaroid film.

Quirky indie revivals notwithstanding, my daughter will most likely never experience her photos, music, phone numbers and letters in the same way that I experienced those things: as physical ephemera to be pinned to bulletin boards, crammed in boxes and stored in attics, imbued with meaning and converted into personal talismans. This unwieldy archive of my past, all my nearly forgotten selves, will eventually be my bequeathed burden to her, I suppose.

Not that I will keep that stuff, of course. One of these days, I’ll scan all those photos, sync all my devices, rip that last box of CDs still buried in the storage space. I’ll compress time and space into the smallest possible area. I’ll allow the networked connections to form, all my data to be cross-indexed. I’ll reduce the length and breadth of my life into a searchable, geo-tagged nugget.

Recently, I reread “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” by Jennifer Egan, which is about, among other things, how music attaches itself to memories and calls them up, preserving them by association, enabling a kind of emotional time travel. The ability to store our data externally helps us imagine that our time is limitless, our space infinite. It frees us, in theory at least, from the defining constraints of being human, and sometimes that freaks us out.

It strikes me that the current fetishization of analog technology has less to do with nostalgia than it does with an urge to slow down the transfer of data from the internal to the external, from the individual to the collective, and to make it all less instant, less ephemeral, less interchangeable, and more tangible, more linear and more contextual. “People my age are products of a culture of the capital-F Future,” William Gibson said in 2010. “The younger you are, the less you are a product of that. If you’re 15 or so today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory.” Maybe our desire to digitize and archive every little thing is not proof of a fear of forgetting. It’s a manifestation of our urge to remember how to remember.        

Task 01.01

Hello All,

Name: Hye Rim Yang

Major: Economics/ Junior

Nationality: Soutk Korea

I'm an international student from South Korea who are studying Economics.

I am very excited about taking this course since this is my first computing course I've ever taken. I think that it could be a good opportunity to learn about various knowledge of computing skill.