The Quality of Information

Wikipedia & Google

2005-12-01T14:48:00.000-08:00

An interesting story in yesterday's USA Today on false biographies in Wikipedia. And another whose title Wikipedia is the Next Google says it all.

Dell and Brand Wars

2005-11-21T09:29:00.000-08:00

I thought this was interesting development in the brand wars (Dell vs. Microsoft vs. Intel). Slashdot posted a link to an announcement that Dell is planning to produce devices using AMD chips.

http://www.forbes.com/technology/feeds/afx/2005/11/20/afx2347168.html

My essay topic (Ross)

2005-11-15T14:46:00.000-08:00

So, I know this is a bit late, but... I'm currently working on my outline of my paper on the topic of how copyright has been justified as necessary to preserve the integrity of works. Basically, I'm interested in looking at how 'moral rights' arguments about copyright as a tool to stop corruption of a work work. These sorts of laws are much more prevalent in the European tradition of copyright, the English & American traditions being based much more fundamentally in an economic argument. Still, 'integrity protecting' arguments are often made by both authors and copyright holders as a reason to block appropriation of their works. I plan on looking at both how these arguments are made (historically and recently) in relation to copyright as well as how other laws enable this sort of blocking behavior (trademark, etc).

Some recent examples I hope to use to tie together this discussion - the trend of colorization of classic movies and the uproar around this, as contrasted with the controversies over recent 'updating' of movies by their creators (Star Wars, E.T., etc), and the decisions of scientific organizations to use copyright to block Kansas from using their works in a curriculum critical of evolution. This is another take on the same question - can/should a creator (or their representatives) stop a use of their work if it would be in a framework that the artist might disapprove of? It is a key tenet of copyright that one can quote from a work even if doing so to point out how awful the work may be - is there a line between this sort of use and 'corrupting' of a work by using it in a way that its creator might strongly disapprove of? (Contrasting this with the 2 Live Crew parody of 'Pretty Woman')

Also of interest is how this argument differs between European and English/American law - in Europe, certain rights to prevent this sort of corruption are fundamentally those of the creator, and may not be sold or traded away, whereas in English/American law, because of the fundamentally economic nature of copyright, often those arguing about the importance of preserving the 'integrity' of a work may even be working against the wishes of the creator. This example may reference the 'Jib-Jab' parody of 'This Land is My Land' from the last election, which was fought by the copyright holders even though many argued that the songwriter would have had no objection.

So that's the general idea... Any thoughts?

Essay topic - need feedback...

2005-11-13T23:10:00.000-08:00

My paper topic focuses on the assessment of the quality of consumer information, particularly manufacturing information, that is available for a product. I will focus on the data provided for sneaker/shoe companies, found in the websites listed below:

http://alonovo.com/
http://www.responsibleshopper.org/
http://www.idealswork.com/
http://www.corporatecritic.org/
http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/

I will critique and assess the quality of the information these websites provide to consumers doing research on product information. I want to investigate the “quality of the consumer information” that these websites provide by trying to answer the following questions:

What kind of info do they claim to provide?
How well do they deliver on this claim?
How comprehensive is the data source? What other kinds of data would be useful?
How do we know we can *trust* this data? What can this data tell us about the quality of the product?
How complex is the data set that the user wants know?
What are the different types of information that go into assessing the quality of a product when making purchases?
Is there more that could be done to make this info more accessible to users who may not be as informed about such issues?

outline: http://fusion.sims.berkeley.edu/helki/paper_outline_helki.asp

Final Proposal (Stephanie)

2005-11-02T11:39:00.000-08:00

I am interested in online communities and the different approaches they take to prevent rotten information from being added to their systems. I would like to examine an online community/social software site and the mechanisms they employ to regulate the information on their systems. Some communities use only technical measures to prevent and filter rotten information, while others rely almost completely on community filtering. There are several that have created a mix of technical and community remedies to create hybrid filtering systems. I would like to examine one of the following communities, and compare it to similar systems.

Â Slashdot (www.slashdot.com)
Â Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)
Â Flickr (www.flickr.com)
Â Friendster (www.friendster.com)

The overview would include a description and analysis. I am interested in analyzing the general cost and effectiveness, distribution of responsibility/authority to filter within the site members, and how the values of the community/users are reflected in the system.

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Update (Nov 16th)
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I've decided to focus on public news bulletin boards like Slashdot. I've posted my outline here: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~scollett/infoqual/outline.htm

Wikipedia may go to print

2005-11-01T08:09:00.000-08:00

If Wikipedia goes to print, they will certainly need to be a bit more strict with their writers and the facts they present.

Piling On

2005-10-26T18:32:00.000-07:00

Another piece on whether Wikipedia can be trusted, this one from the Guardian.

"Wikipedia Challenge"

2005-10-24T18:26:00.000-07:00

I've been reading various blog & discussion group postings about the "Wikipedia challenge," the idea being that you post some blatantly false information in some entry and see how long it takes for someone to correct it, with points awarded according to how obvious the error is and how prominent the subject. There's a nice discussion of the game at this Websnark post, which shows how the challenge underscores both the strengths and weaknesses of the open-sourceapproach.

Final Paper

2005-10-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

This was my write-up for the final paper topic:

The web allows businesses and commercial entities to interact with kids/young adults in new ways, often intentionally blurring the boundaries between content and advertising. Their goals are to engage kids, build brand awareness and loyalty, and sell products. How do these commercial entities mediate their online presence in order to attract children and teens? In what ways does commercial intent bias information presented to kids? What challenges do these websites pose to determining authority? How does the web differ from other forms of media in this regard, and in what ways is it similar?

My project will present several case studies of corporate/commercial websites targeted at kids or teens, and the methods they employ. I would be particularly interested in sites that target teenage girls, and the ways media on the web is similar or different from other forms of media targeted at young women.

This is a good example of the kinds of sites I am thinking about: Proctor & Gamble's site targetted at early teen girls.

Any feedback or thoughts are definitely appreciated in helping me refine the idea a bit. I'm working on some questions to help target it for the quality angle.

Final Paper Topic

2005-10-23T18:50:00.000-07:00

As you know from class last week, my final paper topic was a bit broad so I've decided to rethink it completely. What I've come up with is this:

My final paper will discuss the new practice of inline advertising hyperlinks, the reaction that people have had towards it and its potential effect on the quality of the content in which it appears.

The main company who provides this service is called IntelliTXT. Here is a page that uses this new advertising technique (the words underlined in double green are the ads). Here is a blog post by John Battelle discussing this technique.

What do you think of this topic? Feedback would be appreciated!

Uncyclopedia

2005-10-21T16:43:00.000-07:00

Hi.
Here is a link of a webpage that makes fun of Wikipedia. The articles about Norway were very funny:-)

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Bjorn

Objectivity

2005-10-19T10:23:00.000-07:00

Jay Rosen's Pressthink blog has an interesting post on objectivity in journalism, with comments from Andrew Heyward, head of CBS news and a retreat from Walter Cronkite's famous claim "That's the way it is".

On the same topic, you might look at Wikipedia's "official policy" on NPOV (Neutral Point of View).

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems

2005-10-18T18:40:00.000-07:00

this is great. check out the link http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/

Diplomatics & Forgery in contemporary politics

2005-10-14T10:02:00.000-07:00

Juan Cole, who blogs on topics related to Iraq, does some Mabillon-esque diplomatics on the letter purported to have been sent by Zawahiri (al-Qaeda's number two man) to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq.

While we are at it, on the day Karl Rove testifies (again) before a grand jury, we might remember that both Palmgate (wholly) and the argument for war in Iraq (partially) have roots in what was by some accounts an embarassingly badly forgery, the "Yellow Cake" memo, which was confirmed by the recently eNobled Mohamed ElBaradei. This is the Wikipedia piece on the topic, whose quality we may be in a position to judge next week. And this a newspaper article on the problems in the documents.

Newspapers and encyclopedias

2005-10-12T00:30:00.000-07:00

I am trying to establish connections between last week's class and the readings this week. And am quite amazed by how similar the evolution of newspapers and dictionaries/encyclopedias has been- the initial confusion regd. form/content, the belief that these documents must contain objective and 'correct' information and the suspicion attached to linking the documents with commercial houses. What was different (and this almost certainly has to do with the nature of the document) was the acceptance of subjectivity in newspaper journalism with time. I get a sense from the readings (and even otherwise), that the popular perception of encyclopedias/dictionaries retains the 'objectivity' and 'correctness' focus to a much greater degree than it does for newspapers.

So, the question is, does this influence the newspaper-blog and the dictionary/encyclo-wikipedia relationships and make them different ? i.e. Does newspaper journalism's acceptance of subjectivity affect the authority/acceptability/importance of blogs? Does the perception of dictionaries/encyclopedias as repositories of 'objective' knowledge undermine the acceptance of wikis (with their many unknown contributors) as authoritative sources ? And if it does not, how not? (In fact, this is probably the more interesting question!)

Recursive problem

2005-10-09T22:55:00.000-07:00

Here's another attempt to rate and categorise blogs. The problem now, I guess, is to figure out which of these rating sites can be trusted !

New & traditional media

2005-10-04T10:05:00.000-07:00

I Want Media has an interview today with John Battelle, co-founder of Wired and author of a new book on Google, in which he discusses the future of conventional print news media in the context of new-media news sources.

Blogs

2005-10-03T09:10:00.000-07:00

There were many short readings this week which tackled the topic of blogging from different angles. Rather than enumerate all the perspectives, I’m going to address one theme that popped out at me, the role of blogs in the future.

Most authors, some more zealous than others, agree that blogs will grow to play an important role in media. Andrew Sulivan refers to blogs as a “…publishing revolution more profound than anything since the printing press.” He envisions a time when authors will bypass the traditional publication chain. James Fallows also foresees changes in the chain of publication, predicting devastation to publishers similar to Napster's effect on the music industry.

A more tempered view is articulated by Jay Rossen and Peter Daou. They both examine blogs in context to understand the potential of the medium. For Rossen the context is journalism, as he contemplates the nature of journalism and the conditions necessary for its existence. Daou, on the other hand, maps out the dynamics between the blogs, media, and political establishment. I find something compelling about both of these perspectives. They don’t suggest blogs will push out the traditional media. Instead they examine the potential blogs in a world with traditional media.

I was most intrigued by Daou’s article. His analysis of political objectives was fun to read despite the lack of political science in my background. In addition to amusement, I found the idea of the triangle formed between blogs, media, and the political establishment a powerful one. It’s an idea that attempts to reconcile events where the blogs have been attributed with great influence and situations where the blogs have been powerless. The analysis of this history has often been focused on blogs as if they exist in a vacuum. In contrast, Daou examines the relationships with media and politics that facilitate the success or failure of the blogs. In a sense, I think Dauo is implying the game hasn’t changed (revolutionized), but there is a new player that will rebalance the way the game is played.

This notion of the triangle is particular relevant to our assignment dealing with CNN coverage of the blogs.

Foucault

2005-09-26T21:49:00.000-07:00

They say a good place to start is the beginning. I am going to begin at a bad place because I am not quite sure I understood the beginning of Foucault's 'What Is an Author?' (The reasons why he found this an important question to answer, as well as the background for when and how the concept of 'the death of the author' first came up, are sketchily dealt with in the article. I think these should be things we discuss in class this week.)

The concept of an 'author function' as defined in the essay is what seemed its most relevant part in the context of the classes we have had so far. Foucault makes the point that the author function does not refer only or completely to 'the person who wrote that book.' Of the 4 characteristic traits of author functions that he lays out, the first three, at least, are strongly tied in to our discussions in class so far, albeit in a slightly altered context.

The first trait he describes originates from the observation that discourses are 'objects of appropriation' and that, in fact, the author function is connected to, and shaped by, several institutions. The form of ownership of a discourse is still largely shaped by institutions, despite claims to the contrary, and this is something we have been discussing in class as well, though more in the context of the web.

The second trait is that the effect of the author function on the discourse depends on the times, circumstances and culture that it is introduced into. The example of how different genres required an author name at different periods of time, I thought, tied in to the discussions we had on when we require the stamp of an institution (including journals , newspapers, banks) to take work seriously and what circumstances prompted us to feel that way.

The third trait described by the article is that author functions are constructed through a series of operations. Assignment 2 comes to mind! Foucault talks of the four criteria used historically to make sure that a 'work' is attributed to the correct individual. Using something similar, we relied on a whole range of cues to decide if we liked/believed a source.

Overall, I think, the article tries to point out that an author, his/her work and the context within which s/he operates are all intimately connected. It is important to make these connections to understand that we all carry the conception of an author when we read a work. It is unlikely that this will change completely in the future or that there will be a time when a work will carry meaning meaning/authenticity by itself and with no links to individuals/institutions we call its author function. This is what I conclude. Unfortunately I did not understand the end of the article any more than I did the beginning. So I don't know if I am in agreement with Foucault. What do you think?

.xxx

2005-09-21T14:03:00.000-07:00

The discussion of the .xxx domains and the 'responsible' pornographers seems to me the precursor to something like the Communications Decency Act being attempted again. So, follow this chain - we define that area over there to be for porn, and we handpick the people who get to go in there. Kid filtering software, etc, blocks .xxx. Then, definitionally, anyone who is providing porn but not on .xxx is 'irresponsible', and an easily targetable group. So, ban them - pornographers who aren't within the official hierarchy are trying to subvert filtering software and therefore are peddling porn to children. Then, impose more 'responsibility' restrictions on what is allowed in/to stay in .xxx, and you can effectively control 'porn' online.

Why that's bad... 'I know it when I see it', as was pointed out, depends a lot on who's doing the looking. At this point (at the end of the chain described), we have a clear deliniation between 'approved porn' and 'illegal porn', but the decisions about what gets allowed into the 'approved' category is difficult. Border cases (nude art, let's say to start with. further along, we'll end up with sex ed pages, etc) either have to classify themselves as 'pornography' and be roped into a corner and regulated, or run the risk of being nailed for being 'illegal'. Soon (in my paranoid vision), anything remotely edgy is either regulated porn, or illegal.

OK, a little over the top, and poorly thought through... Just some ideas.

New "Lemons" ?

2005-09-20T17:28:00.000-07:00

Let me start out by saying that I found readings for this week to be quite insightful However, I had a few concerns with regards to the "Market for Lemons" article. Near the outset of this paper, the author, while distinguishing the "used" and "new" car markets, seems to treat both as equal in the subsequent analysis. The statement that struck me the most was the one referring to "lemons" both in the new and used car market. Personally, I have never heard anyone speaking of "lemons" in the new car market. Isn't that the whole point of buying a new car? When buying a new car, the consumer is guaranteed a fully functioning vehicle (i.e. a non-lemon or call it any other fruit/vegetable of your liking). If, God forbid, the car does show any severe problems, you can take it right back to the dealer and get it fixed/replaced under warranty. If the car's performance starts to deteriorate in 5,6 or 10 years, that's just normal wear and tear and , therefore, you cant call it a lemon. A Mercedes might last longer than a Daihatsu under similar conditions. That's a fact of life: you get what you paid for (usually).

So what's the point of all this semi-ranting? My point is, I believe "lemon" is a term the should only be used when referring to "bad quality" cars in the used market. And that's where the whole "lemon" problem arises. Its because, as the author states, you cannot tell if the car you are about to purchase is a lemon or not. In addition, there is usually no guarantee in the used market that your car will be functioning properly a few months(days?) after purchase, which exacerbates the issue.

Another point I wanted to make was that I believe consumers today are much more aware of the market due to new technologies (such as the Internet), making it very easy for them to research the car they want to buy (and the company/used car dealer). We have to keep in mind that the paper was written in 1970's, long before the commercialization and widespread availability of the Internet. Also, consumers tend to be more demanding these days. There is a growing market for "certified" used cars that offers a guarantee for quality, much like when buying a brand new car. Of course, this comes at a higher price. But it is definitely one way to avoid being fooled into buying a "lemon". By the way, does anyone know why they call it a "lemon"? Just curious.

Google on Googlebombing

2005-09-16T21:27:00.000-07:00

So, this popped up on the Google blog the other day - very similar to what we were discussing in class on Weds. Interesting to hear it from them...

Next week

2005-09-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

I sent a note about next week's reading and class to the quality@sims list. If you have not subscribed, please do so.

Economics, Information, and Quality Readings

2005-09-14T22:07:00.000-07:00

I must admit that my knowledge of economics is poor; I therefore had a hard time reading the formulas in the ‘'The Market for Lemons’ piece. With that aside, I did glean some useful bits of information about how the quality of goods affects a market, particularly from pages 495 to the end of the chapter. Akerlof’s primary theme is that “dishonest dealings tend to drive honest dealings out of the market.” The problem stems from a frequent inability to distinguish good wares from bad. As a consequence, reputable sellers offer guarantees and warranties on their products to counteract this effect. Additionally, people who have the ability to easily distinguish between good and poor quality items within a given market have a great opportunity for success. Akerlof describes how a financial lender armed with “intimate knowledge of those around him…is able, without serious risk, to finance those who would otherwise get no loan at all.”

These same principles can be applied to the Internet today. We know that there is an abundance of “rotten” information available on the Internet. Will this contamination drive out legitimate websites in time? Who hasn’t been frustrated when their inbox becomes clogged with Viagra spam and it becomes a nuisance just to find the one legitimate email from Mom? Or, worse, when Mom’s email gets put in the junk folder because it happens to contain the word “free.” Clearly, there is a huge opportunity for companies who have the ability to distinguish good quality information from bad – just as the lender did in Akerlof’s piece. These are the spam filter companies, the children’s Internet filter companies and the pop-up blockers of the world. But I still believe that we need more accountability on the side of the web publisher. Just as Dell provides a guarantee on their computers and the University of Phoenix is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission – content published on the web should be certified in some way by a 3rd party organization. Search engines could then add certifications to their ranking algorithm and provide users with better quality information.

In the second reading, Boyle discusses the impact that price searching has the market; specifically that it tends to reduce the disparity of prices. What instantly came to mind in reading this chapter was Froogle. Instead of having to laboriously call store to store or scour the Sunday Paper ad section for a low price, buyers can now go online and quickly do a search for the lowest price on a given product. One would think that prices would become equal as a result of this power but in fact disparities remain because not every buyer is searching and not all sellers are advertising at any given moment. In addition, seller reputation, product warranty, product quality and e-commerce usability often weigh in over price when prices are relatively close. There’s nothing like an unsecured payment information page to scare buyers away.

It was interesting how Boyle relates the expense of searching (effort, time) with the results it yields. I have a friend who is constantly searching for the lowest price. He spends hours online looking for coupons, rebates, sales, etc. Ebay, not surprisingly, is his favorite website. From my perspective, this kind of effort is rarely worth the $5 I’m going to save. But perhaps it’s because of people like him and sites like Ebay that the disparities in price have become small enough to satisfy lazy people like me.

Rottenness

2005-09-12T09:47:00.000-07:00

Two newspaper articles that point towards the subject of rottenness in today's paper. One from the NY Times (registration required) looking at post-hurricane Web sites, including one claiming that Katrina was a man-made storm designed to take control of the earth. Just so we don't think such claims a Web-based problem, the Guardian has an article on bad science and pseudo science in newspapers.

Plagiarism

2005-09-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

The readings for this week touch on several provocative issues related to plagiarism. I will focus on the role of technology, and its effects on plagiarism within academia.

There is an underlying assumption within both readings that technology, and specifically the web, poses significant threats to the integrity of student research and coursework. The hypothesis is that the abundance of information and ease of access make plagiarism irresistible to more students. There seems to be a dearth of evidence presented in either article, however, to back up this conjecture. While the Final report of the UK Joint Information Systems Committee on Plagiarism presents some statistics on rising occurrences of intentional plagiarism, there is no definitive correlation to technology. The report admits that much of the evidence it presents stems from small-scale studies, or is circumstantial in nature.

Still, the concern that the changing nature of information availability may transform the values associated with student research seems valid. The report states that the majority of student plagiarism is inadvertent, due to misunderstanding of academic conventions and standards. The major problem seems to be a breakdown in communication, or disconnect in values, between students and the institutions. While the report suggests addressing this by making standards clear to students, the deeper problem of actually defining plagiarism is highly complex. It may be that the changing nature of information availability is one source of the disconnect between the long-standing academic values and the way students see information.

One possible solution suggested is for instructors to re-evaluate the structure of coursework, either in the way they design assignments, or by examining the students’ research process. Mallon decries this as "hand-holding," and worries that it will contribute to the further "infantilization of American college life" (247). However, by asking students to look critically at the process of creating research, through peer review groups for example, students may gain a much-needed skill in an age of information abundance. The types of assignments that seem to invite plagiarism are those that require the least amount of critical thinking: researching and reporting facts or the ideas of others. Assignments that require students to synthesize ideas and think originally, rather than focusing on canonical thought, would not only be less vulnerable to plagiarism, but would be more useful learning strategies in the "information age."

Mallon, Thomas. 2001. Afterword in Thomas Mallon, Stolen Words 2d Edition. San Diego: Harcourt, pp 239-253.

Deterring, Detecting, and Dealing with Student Plagiarism. Final report of the UK Joint Information Systems Committee on Plagiarism, Feb 2005.

quality mailing list

2005-09-07T20:44:00.000-07:00

Please remember to sign up to the class mailing list. A message to majordomo at sims with "subscribe quality" in the body of the message--leave the title blank--will do it.

first week's readings

2005-09-05T20:26:00.000-07:00

Varian, Hal & Peter Lyman. 2003. How Much Information -- Executive Summary

Nunberg, Geoffrey. 1996. Farewell to the Information Age, in G. Nunberg (ed.)
The Future of the Book. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. [read to page 21]

Brown, John Seely & Paul Duguid. 2000. "Limits to Information",
Chapter 1 in John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press: pp 11-34.

So, here goes the first week's blogging for InfoQual... I think the way I'm going to approach this is to give some thoughts first on each paper alone, and then see if I can thread them together in any sort of coherent way. Forgive me for the rambling nature of all this, please... My head is a confused place, and spilling its contents without a particular goal often gets weird :P

How Much Information?
A few things bothered me about this paper. One major technical question/problem was with what was chosen to be included as information to be counted... Why, for example, is a telephone call information and a discussion at the dinner table not? Direct person-to-person communication is only counted as information in this paper if there is some sort of intermediating technology. The telephone, instant messenger, email, snail mail, etc are all counted as information, and not communication. They do clearly state their choices of media and channels, but the reasoning behind these choices are less clear.
Another troublesome question is of what this all really means. They claim that over 3 years, the amount of 'new stored information grew about 30% a year', but I really don't know that I understand what that means, particularly to me. A more valuable quantity to know, I would think, would be how the amount of information that the average individual deals with regularly has changed. Do I process 30% more information each year? Or do most normal individuals still deal with about as much information? Along with that, I guess, comes the question of the abnormal individual - who's using all the rest of the information? I don't feel like I consume so dramatically much more information now than I ever did before, so what's really going on?

Farewell to the Information Age
I must confess that I had a lot of trouble understanding much of this paper... I think I just don't have the linguistics or philosophy background to get some of it. What I did get of it, though, was interesting. A question occured to me while reading about the distinction between 'intelligence' and 'information,' however. Nunberg asserts that it is a property of the modern conception of information that we, for example, accept something read in the sports section of the newspaper as 'true' without much question, but that such an acceptence would have been absurd for someone a few hundred years ago. It seems like the particular piece of information has a bit to do with this, though. He breaks down the degree of trust to give a newspaper from the 'things that are important to us' to the 'things that are important to them.' I would characterize this continuum differently, though - it seems to go from 'something factual there is no rational reason to lie about' to 'something that people care about enough to lie about'. The same continuum applies in other modes of communication as well. I might ask the guy next to me on the bus who won the game last night, and trust his answer without any knowledge of who he is, his motives, etc, because it's just a bit weird to think of someone lying about something like that. If I make a bet with someone about who will win a game, however, I might not trust them perfectly when they tell me I lost. I suppose the institutionalization of that makes a big difference, though... If I bet with the same person daily, I'd probably stop if they proved untrustworthy. Still, though, I think that there's an interesting idea in there - the amount of skepticism we have about a piece of information is probably very directly related to how much we care about that piece of information.

Limits to Information
Something I found really interesting in this chapter was the discussion of mass-customized goods - and the idea that it would still be the megacorp of your choice providing your individualized stuff. This tied in really neatly to the other two articles for me. In relation to the Varian article, this is a way of turning, for example, one pair of jeans into a million, without increasing the number of jeans that everyone has. It's an information explosion, basically, that has no corresponding overload. This also somewhat illustrates the 'all the news that fits' problem from the Nunberg article - of course I can't read every news article in the universe every day, but I can read my own personalized news feed. This might contain articles which are only interesting to me and a few other people, and would never be in a 'normal' newspaper, but for me are great. Both of these really brought to mind the 'long tail' concept, which if anyone isn't familiar with, I really recommend you read the article.

The Brown/Duguid article really brought out most clearly for me what I see as the theme of the readings, which I read as being a warning about the revolutionary fervor of many internet enthusiasts. The takeaway point of the readings that I saw was basically to view any claims about the internet (or really, anything) 'changing *everything* completely' with a great deal of skepticism, which is probably a good idea :) Much about the world is the same now as it was before the 'information age' began (well, I assume... for me it's been the 'information age' most of my life, so...). And I guess that's about all that I've got in me for the moment. Sorry for the length and confusion of this, but what do folks think, either about my points or about the articles in general?

Digital Library Access

2005-08-31T17:01:00.000-07:00

To clarify a little what I said in class today:

If you try to access JSTOR or similar digital resources from the campus network, you should have no trouble. It is only if you are off campus that you need to set up your browser by configuring a proxy. The details are here.

INFOSYS 290 Section 10 - Quality of Information Fall 05

2005-08-29T15:09:00.000-07:00

This is the blog for the course The Quality of Information, taught by Paul Duguid & Geoffrey Nunberg.

Membership is by invitation only and restricted to members of the class.

You can find out more about the class here.

The Role of the Author in Topical Blogs

2004-12-14T01:09:00.000-08:00

This paper was also submitted to CHI 05.

Abstract Web logs, or blogs, challenge the notion of authorship. Seemingly, rather than a model in which the author's writings are themselves a contribution, the blog author weaves a tapestry of links, quotations, and references amongst generated content. In this paper, I present a study of the role of the author plays in the construction of topical blogs, in particular focusing on how blog authors make decisions about what to post and how they judge the quality of posts. To this end, I analyzed the blogs and blogging habits of eight participants using a quantitative analysis tool that I developed, a diary study, and interviews with each participant. Results suggest that authors of topical blogs often do not but strive to create new content, often follow journalistic conventions, use the content of their blogs as a reference tool for other work practices, and are connected as a community by a set of source documents. Results also show that Instant Messaging is useful as an interview medium when questions center around online content.

Full text

Excuse me, where would I get a book

2004-12-11T20:35:00.000-08:00

Where was this article when I was writing my final paper?!

Students shun search for information offline

Cites Paul as well...

This Blog's Stats and; Information Flows Surrounding the Election

2004-12-11T13:15:00.000-08:00

Two Things:

Interesting statistical information about who reads this blog and when is available by clicking the little planet image on the right hand side of the blog. Some highlights:
- The highest hour and day for traffic was 2-3pm during Wednesdays, right during our class.
- The distribution of hits per hour of the day follows what I call a "fat-man" or "urn" distribution seen on many other blog stats like SIMS PhD Student danah boyd's blog. (Here's danah's unique stats page.)
- About 25% of visitors use the Macintosh operating system...
My paper is not nearly as cool as all of yours. I examined the information flows surrounding the recent election and found that very few people have what it takes to properly evaluate most of the information flows. Here's my abstract:
"The general election of 2004 was likely the most highly scrutinized, at al levels, of any election in the history of the United States. The attention the election attracted by the public, academics and activists was particularly heightened due to a number of factors when compared to the usual election-season ramp-up of reporting by large media outlets. A substantial difference from previous elections was the maturation of the “web log” or “blog” – a style of online personal publishing that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years and which essentially allows any person with a personal computer and internet access to easily maintain a vibrant online “newspaper” – and the increase in online political participation. Another substantial difference with the attention paid to this election compared to elections past was the foresight and scrutiny of the academic community who, along with the general public, were largely caught off guard by the fiasco in Florida in 2000 involving the recounting of punchcard ballots. In this paper, I aim to describe and analyze the information dynamic between the public, advocacy and activist organizations, academics, journalists, election officials and voting technology vendors. I find that, amongst all the din, one thing is certain: few people have the ability to reasonably judge the quality of information stemming from these various constituencies."
If you really want to go through the pain of reading my paper, find it here: "A System That Should Not Be So Broken: The Flow of Information During the 2004 Election"

Evaluating Information Quality in Mediated Communications: A Case Study of Gay Marriage

2004-12-09T16:37:00.000-08:00

I address the following question:
Is the information we are looking at authoritative and how do we
assess it as such?

I looked at 4 different websites suggesting ways to determine
authority online and I compiled my own set of standards, based on my
research into the subject of gay marriage.

I broke it down into four criteria: Accessibility, Timeliness,
Authority, and Objectivity and looked at different media forms,
including books, dictionaries, online news, websites, and blogs.

I was intrigued by this subject for a number of reasons:
-the evolution of the term gay marriage in the dictionary over the
past few years as well as related terms like gaydar, gay pride,
homosexual marriage
-the nature of blogs or personal websites about gay marriages (all
were rooted in some sort of bias, many of which were faith-based,
although, surprisingly, not all Christians and other religious believers
were opponents of gay marriage, some were equally strongly in favor of
it
-bloggers have a strong say in how media and news sources have
evolved, media has to be careful about what they say!

You can read it here.

Academic Plagiarism

2004-12-09T02:41:00.000-08:00

For my final paper, I created a smallish survey to be taken by professors and university instructors, about the incidence of plagiarism they've seen in their students (and about what they'd consider plagiarism). Unfortunately, the turnout was a little under what I was hoping (I had 7 responses), but it was still enough for me to draw some interesting conclusions, and kick off some other interesting lines of thought.

A quick summary of my findings:

6 out of 7 professors have encountered it
It's typically found out by the instructor recognizing the source; another indicator can be if the instructor feels the work is too polished or sophisticated for the student, but that cue is less reliable and can be misleading
Only 1 of the professors uses an automated plagiarism service like Turnitin, but they are starting to become more popular

Turnitin works by comparing texts against a massive database of documents, including all previous papers scanned against it; nice, but not useful if the paper comes from a "guaranteed non-plagiarized" paper mill
Another option, Glatt Plagiarism Services, uses a cognitive technique where every fifth word is removed from the document, and the purported author has to fill in the missing words; also nifty, but you have to already have a suspicion in order to run this test (i.e, you can't just automatically run it on everyone like you can with Turnitin)

There's a lot of gray area cases as to what professors would consider instances of plagiarism; there's some definitions in the Berkeley student code of conduct, but they're incredibly vague.
There's lots of room for further research.

The survey itself is located here: http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu:8080/jsolomin/survey/index.html

The paper isn't currently in a very web-friendly format, but if I convert it to one, I'll post the link on the blog.

Information Filtering Behavior

2004-12-08T19:13:00.000-08:00

Here is an abstract for my project:

"Information filtering has been one of the central concerns of information science, especially with regards to information filtering algorithms for information retrieval. However, to date comparatively little research has focused on understanding how people filter information in everyday life through sociocultural and behavioral mechanisms and choices. This paper presents the results of an exploratory qualitative interview study which uncovered a number of sociocultural and behavioral adaptations in relation to information and information technologies for information filtering. Based on these findings, we make the case that further work is necessary to understand specific information filtering behaviors and their connections to existing and emerging technologies. These understandings, we argue, will be necessary for designing appropriate, effective, and sustainable information technologies."

The project itself has several elements, including a paper, and anotated bibliography, and some proposed research documents. Mostly the point was to say that this is an understudied issue, and to present some preliminary data.

The complete project is available here.

Your final project here

2004-12-08T16:21:00.000-08:00

Per the discussion in class today, if you're so inclined, please drop a message here with the abstract of you paper and maybe a link to it online. I'm looking forward to see what everyone else was working on!

Content Cliques: Content Quality and Site Restrictions

Introduction

Quality is an attribute that is generally desirable, no less so in the field of information than anywhere else. However, a general notion of quality that spans all communities and all topics seems problematic due to the specificity of each community and their interests. Yet we find that Google, with its homogenized notion of quality (captured in their notion of pagerank) has become the most widely used tool that information workers turn to when they need to find answers on the Web. How does Google’s generic notion of quality apply to the specific requirements of a very specialized (and difficult) topic, and what could be done to improve Google’s effectiveness?

In this paper, I take a community, Buddhist scholars, and a specific question “What is the relationship between Buddhism and Nihilism?” and examine how the notion of quality information searches may be problematic for Google’s generic algorithms. In addition, I present a tool that uses Google search engine technology to perform standard Google queries, but confine their scope to a small collection of vetted sites (that I refer to as a “content clique”). The results are collected and then sorted according to Google’s pagerank. In the process of creating this tool, potential avenues for creating alternative quality rankings become apparent. Some of these alternatives are briefly discussed and methods of implementation are pointed out.

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~sychan/ContentCliques.pdf

Lowering Information Quality Expectations

2004-12-08T13:30:00.000-08:00

This morning I was talking with a friend in the SIMS lounge, discussing the ideas behind the final paper that I've been writing with Dave. At one point, he stopped me and asked if I could help him solve a quality of information problem. He is one of the contributors to a group re-blogging site, unmediated.org. Apparently many of the visitors to the site are upset when they find out that the contributors do not verify the information posted on the site--they simply find interesting news, ideas or projects and post excerpts of other author's work to their site, with attribution and a link to the original text.

Perhaps unmediated.org looks too professional, or perhaps external content is not clearly labeled--but I read the site, and it appears clear enough to me. It may be that readers trust the contributors to post only 'quality' information, and to filter out 'rotten' information. The issue is not that people cannot tell the difference between the two--if it was, they wouldn't be complaining--it is that the information presented has gained the credibility by being posted on the site.

How do we lower the expectations of readers on such a site? They still want to be able to post information that may be based on rumors, just to let people see what is out there, but do not want to give the impression that everything is of the same 'quality.' Ideas?

Class project...

2004-12-05T22:22:00.000-08:00

I've trimmed down my previous post to discuss only the project for this class (see palojono.blogspot.com for the previous one):

The Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom chain: The Metaphorical link

The DIWK 'chain' was first loosely hinted at by T.S. Eliot in "The Rock" The paper discusses the conceptual differences we have in our understandings of the concepts of data, information and knowledge and how one can be transformed into another. Why can we complain of, for example, 'Information overload' but not 'Knowledge overload?' And how exactly does data become information, become knowledge? The anaylsis questioned the existence of the suggested chain at all, but found that, at least conceptually, the chain seems to have a clear logical reason for 'existing.'

The paper

'Blog' at top of Merriam-Webster's top ten list

2004-11-30T16:11:00.000-08:00

'Blog' Tops Dictionary's Words of the Year

Tue Nov 30, 2:11 PM ET
By Greg Frost

BOSTON (Reuters) - A four-letter term that came to symbolize the difference between old and new media during this year's presidential campaign tops U.S. dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's list of the 10 words of the year.

'Transitional Fair Use'

2004-11-30T09:44:00.000-08:00

First (in the style of Paul), apologies for being an absent blogger. My nearly brand new Thinkpad died a sudden (but painless) death 10 days ago, and I've been hobbled ever since.

Meanwhile:

I thought this article was interesting: 'Is Transitional Fair Use' the Wave of the Future?'

The subject of IP is a few weeks old now, but I think fair use is the most interesting aspect of it. The article lays out a scheme that HBO is planning by which someone would be able to record a show on their DVR, but only keep it for a limited amount of time. None of this watching an episode several weeks later.

Is this the beginning of the end for fair use? Or was fair use already dead?

Information Literacy

2004-11-29T01:14:00.000-08:00

Nancy posted this a few days ago... relates to last week's discussion of information literacy.

"Oregon now requires builders of affordable housing to install DSL, cable broadband or wireless access if they get federal dollars administered by the state. Last week, developers of 18 affordable-housing projects were awarded federal grants and will install high-speed Internet connections in more than 450 apartments. Many are offering tenants free or subsidized monthly Internet service.
"The access requirement pushes Oregon to the front of a national movement to bridge what's become known as the digital divide. The advocates think high-speed Internet access will make low-income youths better students and help their parents work through problems that put the family in poverty. "
Of course, this is not a panacea, but at least it's an effort in the right direction.

What happened to the University?

2004-11-21T19:54:00.000-08:00

During last week's eBay speaker, I surfed eBay's help pages to come across the eBay University which is linked through their help page. It offers courses on how to use eBay. I would have described such a class as a "workshop" or "seminar."

We've gone from The University of Phoenix Online to Kaplan University to Barnes and Noble University to eBay University. It's only a matter of time until we get Martha Stewart University and University of McDonald's and who knows what else.

My thoughts are that the popularity of online universities has led to anyone and everyone claiming what they want as a university. Without a regulatory structure, the web allows for what are traditionally respected institutions to become valueless.

Another Small Step for Open Source

2004-11-19T18:05:00.000-08:00

Though I'm not sure whether this was what Linus had in mind.

Sharpen your aphorisms

2004-11-18T11:04:00.000-08:00

The reporter that I mentioned in an earlier post is eager to go beyond what teachers say about their students to know what students have to say for themselves. He sent me the following request (from which, for the moment, I have removed the identifiers) which I now pass on to you. If anyone would be willing to talk to him, let me know and I'll make the connection.

I write about Internet topics. I'm currently working on a story about today's youths, their notion of truth and credibility and their approach to information, including resources online.
¶
Would you be willing to speak about about your experiences, including whether your skills and techniques have changed over time. I'd be interested in a sense of what you've picked up in grade school, high school and college in terms of finding and evaluating information.
¶
Anyhow, please let me know about your willingness and availability. Ideally, I'd like to talk to people today or tomorrow (Thursday the 18th or Friday the 19th), though there may be some flexibility to do interviews through early next week depending on when my editors wind up slotting the stories. We do not know for sure yet.

Racism, Wikipedia, and Vampire Watermelons

2004-11-17T20:17:00.000-08:00

Our discussion today about open source reminded me of an internet legend concerning the Wikipedia I recently came across. Inaccuracies and deliberate misinformation in the Wikipedia aren't limited to obviously contentious topics like George Bush and John Kerry. Consider the strange case of the Vampire Watermelon.

Apparently, the Vampire Watermelon is the creation of British comedic fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, but some of his fans thought it would be funny to add a Wikipedia article describing Vampire Watermelons as an actual legend of the Roma culture in the Balkans. A small but doggedly persistent group continually re-edits the entry to ensure that its true nature as a spoof is not revealed.

You can watch the back and forth on the history and talk pages for the entry. In particular, look at the edits by Heenan73 and Wetman, and notice how quickly the edits were discarded. Heenan73 has also set up a separate site discussing this issue.

I could see someone writing a spoof like this to demonstrate their perception of Wikipedia's lack of authority, but this group's goals don't seem quite so highminded. I also have difficulty believing it's some organized slur against the Roma.

Most likely it's just a juvenile prank, but it does bring up some questions about the authoritativeness of "open source" reference material. At least with computer software, there is an obvious measure of quality: Linux/Apache/etc. either works for your application or it doesn't. But phenomena like the Vampire Watermelon really make me question whether the open source model can be effective replacement for expert editors.

Open-source religion (and further digression)

2004-11-16T21:31:00.000-08:00

I thought that Steven Weber's use of religion as an instance of the struggle between open-source and classical ideas of property were pretty fascinating, particularly as it pertains to my own experience. I have a friend who's an ordained rabbi and a student at the Graduate Theological Union up the street from campus, and she was remarking to me about some similar issues. Her planned thesis topic is on worship practices of American Jews, and how some of them turn to practices like Buddhism, because they weren't satisfied with what Judaism alone was giving them. So I guess that means someone who does that is effectively a hacker, forking off their own branch of religious code. But how far does the analogy go? For instance, how about network effects and Metcalfe's Law? The Windows/Linux argument is filled with points about switching costs and the price of using something out of the mainstream. Are there any benefits to practicing a religion that many other people practice, as opposed to breaking off on your own? It doesn't really seem like it... on the other hand, maybe that's because the religious practitioner is both hacker and user, whereas the the CIO making the decision on his or her company's computing platform is just the user.

So maybe that has relevance for open-source in general. Hackers (who, I'd imagine, are nearly all users of what they hack) are much more invested in what they do than mere users. Perhaps that's an obvious observation, that you care more about something if you work on building it as opposed to just using it. But maybe open-source initiatives that make more of an effort to broaden their contributor base are more successful -- that would be interesting to discover.

In general, Weber seems to blur the conceptual line between open-source issues and copyright/ownership issues in ways that hadn't occurred to me before. As I was reading his descriptions of ownership as "excluding rights from others" as opposed to granting rights, what came to mind was Creative Commons licensing. I assume that open-source software developers don't really think about copyrights of code that they write and contribute to projects, but particularly if you apply the concepts to non-code realms, would copyright (either classic or new ideas like CC) interfere? What if you had something like an open-source book? Or, say, wikipedia -- how does ownership work? (Does anyone know the legal status of wikipedia articles?)

Youths

2004-11-15T13:21:00.000-08:00

A reporter sent me this message this morning.

Hello Paul. I'm a reporter putting together a story on the implications
of technology on today's youths, specifically how has technology
affected their perception of truth, how they find information, how they
evaluate it, trust it, does access necessarily make you better informed,
etc. Is this an area you might have some insights in?

If these are specific questions, I'm lucky I wasn't sent the general ones. Nevertheless, in the spirit of open source, I'd like to draw on the distributed wisdom of the quality blog for help in answering. Even if you don't necessarily consider yourselves "youths", any insights you might offer will be gratefully received --and, if used, attributed.

Not Your Father's Oldsmobile

2004-11-15T11:37:00.000-08:00

The topic of branding automobiles came up last week, and it brought to mind a commentary I did on "Fresh Air" a couple of years ago on GM's desperate efforts to redeem the failing Oldsmobile line in the 1990's. It also reminded me of a piece that James Surowiecki wrote in Wired recently about the paradoxical decline of brand loyalty; as he puts it: "Even as companies have spent enormous amounts of time and energy introducing new brands and defending established ones, Americans have become less loyal."

As it happens, I dug both of these out the other day in connection with a chapter I'm writing about the Democrats' efforts to rebrand themselves as a party of "values" (read, "traditional family values") in the face of the Republicans' near-ownership of the word. Is there any connection here? Can brands really float as free signifiers, even if they don't evoke a compelling and plausible narrative about the product they're attached to?

'Blinded by Science'

2004-11-13T21:21:00.000-08:00

Though it's a bit off topic for this coming week's discussion, I thought I'd share this recent article from the Columbia Journalism Review, called Blinded by Science.

It makes the argument that mainstream coverage of science has created a forum for lower-quality science because 'fringe' science makes better (i.e. more controversial) reading. Simply invoking the name of science seems to create enough readership and interest to support even the most outrageous claims based on the most scant evidence.

This was brought home to me recently when an appaled friend e-mailed me with a link to a website that claimed that recent Bush appontees to the EPA were planning on testing potentially toxic chemicals on disadvantaged children. The website, run by an organization called Organic Consumers, runs with the title 'EPA Will Use Poor Kids as Guinea Pigs.'

Not taking the site on faith, I dug up the EPA document which, not surprisingly, includes nothing remotely close to 'poor families having their children exposed to toxic pesticides,' as the Organic Consumers site claimed.

Academic plagiarism (a survey)

2004-11-12T17:00:00.000-08:00

As was recommended in this week's lecture, I thought I'd send out a link to a survey on plagiarism that I've put together. The survey's audience is faculty members who may or may not have found instances of plagiarism in assignments handed in by their students. Any thoughts or feedback that anyone has on the survey would be more than welcome! (If you take the survey, please identify yourself as an InfoQual student somewhere in the "background" section, so I don't mix you in with faculty responses.)

http://dream.sims.berkeley.edu:8080/jsolomin/survey/index.html

Thanks!

How long can social responsibility stay in style?

2004-11-10T13:27:00.000-08:00

If so many brands today fancy that they are promoting lifestyles, not products, then they must have a sense of what lifestyles people will find appealing. One especially appealing tactic seems to be targeting “Bobo” values, defined in David Brooks’ highly amusing “Bobos in Paradise.” He sketches a picture of a new kind of person, the Bobo – a term coined to invoke a sense of the contradictions between Bohemian and Bourgeois values. If memory serves, bobo archetypes are baby-boomers who are coming to terms with their anti-materialist, anti-establishment past by seeking out products that will enable them to spend their money without feeling bad about having supported the establishment and spent money on “mere” things. This will involve buying things that don’t look expensive (like driftwood desks), or that display a worldliness (old, rickety yet expensive tables made “in the traditional way” in Indonesia), or that suggest a familiarity with high art (like the clothing under the label, “Wearable Art”), to give a few examples.

(As an aside, there was one memorable incident at a friend’s house, where I’d been invited to dinner and was blithely describing Brooks’ thesis, pointing out how these Bobos will spend a fortune on a dining room table that looks like a worthless piece of driftwood, only to look down at the table and discover that it was, in fact, an elaborately constructed piece of alleged driftwood).

The Economist article suggests that social responsibility, another concept Bobos like to have associated with them, is the “next big thing” when it comes to brands. Do you agree that this is a growing trend for brands and that it will last, or that it will be supplanted soon by other sets of values? How long can social responsibility stay in style and what do you think has the potential to replace it, especially for your generation and the values you see emerging or shifting in younger people?

Micropayments and the Economics of IP on the web

2004-11-10T01:42:00.000-08:00

The two articles below are both interesting discussions of the ways in which Internet micropayments may change the role of Intellectual Property and content provided on the web.

Briefly, micropayments allow users to make tiny payments with a mouse click to access small pieces of content e.g. a newspaper article, white paper, a film or a tip for a blog post. Being able to easily make small payments, at a small cost for an individual user and an individual piece of content, is important in the hope that for a provider of a piece of content these small payments eventually add up to something significant. This mechanism may provide an incentive for people to post their thoughts and content online.

The first article, by Clay Shirky, makes a convincing argument for why micropayments are doomed to failure and that the web is destined to be free.

The second is an equally convincing rebuttal to Shirky's article, by Scott McCloud, that had me warming to the idea that micropayments really have big potential to change the way people provide content on the web and the business models, or absence of, that go with it.

Shirky's

McCloud's

I've been greatly interested recently in their potential for micro-tipping - providing an after the fact mini-tip for something you enjoyed reading. Any others have any thoughts or experience with micropayments?

Reading ahead

2004-11-04T05:49:00.000-08:00

The class on education revealed the lock which tradition can put on change. Those old institutions--Berkeley, Stanford, MIT-- and their brands raise huge barriers to entry and force new entrants to conform to "quality" standards set by the old. Unsurprisingly, in the world of information provision as in the world of politics, incumbents have a significant advantage, particularly if they can force competitors to talk on their terms.

I hope the class on IP can continue the discussion. The institutions of IP, as we tried to show in looking at print and copyright, are very old. (Universities were, inevitably, among the very early and very powerful holders of copy). And as with universities, old institutions of IP are imposing themselves on the new forms in unexpected and often retrogressive ways. I'm assuming that you all know a good deal about IP and its problematic relation to new forms of communication. The purpose of the class is to use what you know, what we are reading, and the topic of the class to understand the relationship between IP and notions of information quality.

The reading for this week (November 10):

Carla Hesse's paper was part of a symposium orchestrated by Daedalus that included James Boyle, whose work we looked at earlier, and Richard Posner, of whom a little more below. Hesse gives a good overview of the "long durée of intellectual property, indicating critical moments in the development of IP and showing the accumulated baggage that it has carried from print culture into the digital world. Like many others who look at the evolution of IP, Hesse suggests that IP is fundamentally incoherent and increasingly unbalanced.

Posner's article represents the viewpoint of the "law & economics" school. It assumes that the creation of efficient markets will solve all problems--and that efficient markets can, ultimately, be created with the help of IP. So in contrast to Hesse account of incoherence, it suggests an underlying coherence.

Neither Hesse nor Posner addresses very directly the question of quality, and both (Hesse implicitly and Posner directly) set aside the role of trademarks. I hope we can address the relation between these two. Consequently, I've included the opening chapter of Naomi Klein's anti-branding manifesto No Logo and The Economist's highly predictable response that brands play a useful role in signalling quality and in allowing consumers to exert pressure and impose standards on producers.

The reading for the following week ,(November 17):

Steve Weber will be with us for the first couple of hours to discuss his book The Success of Open Source. Again, I'm assuming that most of you are familiar with the details of Open Source software. I'd like to push beyond the confines of software to discuss the notion of extending Open Source to other domains and the challenge of quality assurance in so doing. Benkler's essay (the other paper in the reading) and Weber's conclusion both look at this idea. My article "PG tips", in the optional reading, uses Project Gutenberg to consider why quality may be problematic for some of these other "Open Source" projects. O'Mahony & Ferraro note the formal structures emerging around this apparently "self-organizing" system, while the two remaining pieces, "Wiki Wars" and "Who Knows" discuss Wikipedia, the first looking at the problems of quality surrounding the entries for the presedential candidates, and the second at the move towards a more formal institutional structure for Wikipedia.

BBC News blogging

2004-11-04T01:04:00.000-08:00

You may remember I mentioned when we were talking about the press and blogging that the BBC had their own bloggers whom they also publish on their website and encourage comments from the public.

Follow BBC blogging on the road to check out how it makes for a different kind of news story.

Somehow it being blogging seems to licence the writer to use a friendlier, more personal, style of writing. It also encourages discussion and you'll see pretty soon plenty of comments at the bottom. I wonder whether this really counts as a blog anymore now that it appears directly off the main BBC news website?
It's also an interesting alternative angle on the election results with particular reference to the Guardian's seemingly counter-productive effort to sway Ohio voters.

Rotten information

2004-11-01T16:18:00.000-08:00

Here in Denmark I am surrounded by enthusiasts for Actor Network Theory. They like to assert in one form or another that the social sciences create the world they purport to investigate. The idea is neither original nor necessarily insightful, but it seems most plausible now as opinion polls, which have a problematic relation to the process that they claim merely to observe, reach a crescendo on the day before the election.

Some 30 countries, including many here in Europe, still ban polls around election time. Several such bans have been overturned by courts (in the US, India, Philippines, among others, such bans have either been seen as an abridgement of free speech) or simply circumvented by the net. In France, for example, where there is a 7-day ban, the newspaper Liberation posted their poll results on the web site of a sister publication in Switzerland. Nevertheless, restrictions remain in the vain hope that, if information might be rotten or at least problematic, it is either wise or feasible to try to ban it. Italy has a 28-day ban and Luxumburg 30 days. The numbers seem particularly arbitrary. Britain has--it would, wouldn't it?--a generally observed gentleman's agreement among the press not to publish polls on election eve and day. British press would regard the actions of Liberation as particularly gallic and ungentlemanly--though I doubt such moral superiority would hold were they expected to hold the gentleman's agreement for more than a day or two.

WAPOR, the World Association for Public Opinion, in The Freedom to Publish Opinion Polls, a survey about surveys (another case of it would, wouldn't it), found out that 24% of its respondents were worried about "unprofessional" political polls around election time (presumably the cads doing those are not WAPOR members), while almost the same portion (23%) were worried about not so much the quality of the information, as the quality of the journalists reporting it. In the current election, this lethal combination has been nowhere more evident than in the case of Gallup's polls, which repeatedly gave the Republicans significant leads, before conforming to the norm just in time for the election. As The Leftcoaster, in another case to emphasize the value of the blogshpere, discovered, Gallup repeatedly oversampled to favour Republicans--something the rest of the press managed to overlook. Even without "push polling", it seems, statistical rottenness is something the press has trouble dealing with.

As the polls point to a statistical "dead heat" at the end of the political "marathon", to borrow the sporting cliches most commonly used, I am reminded that I was in Europe just after the last election. A Portuguese newspaper, commenting on the stand-off in Florida, noted that the trouble with Americans was they didn't play football (ie, soccer). Consequently, the article explained, they don't understand the value of a good tie. James Baker in particular didn't seem to care how long extra time dragged on. What he did care about was that he was the last man standing. I take this to be a consequence of the remarkable spoils system in American politics. With so much at stake, so much patronage to dole out, and only two parties, sharing is inconceivable. I asked a Danish politician recently how many government-appointed positions changed hands when a government fell. She said about 17. In England, the new prime minister moves into Downing Street the day after results are announced. Even were the winner to take "all" here, there simply isn't all that much to take.

Infoqual on the road

2004-10-31T04:25:00.000-08:00

Scott Carter kindly took the blog on the road to CMU last week. This week I'm taking it further afield, blogging in from Europe, where I'll be for the election and next week's class, taking the topic of quality to Denmark. I'm sorry, of course, to miss both, but in terms of the election, it's a relief to get outside the bubble in which American elections live. In my jet-lagged state, I caught the middle of a familiar tv news story about the critical election, divided populace, bitterly fought campaign, dirty tricks by the incumbent party, and partisan interventions by the press. I was about to turn off, feeling that you cannot escape America anywhere, when they cut away to some recorded footage, and I realised this story was about the Ukraine. (The cheap grey suits and cheap grey haircuts gave it away at a glance--but cheap though these suits where, nobody looked as though they had a rectangular box between the shoulder blades.) Hands up those who knew there was a critical election going on in the Ukraine.

Denmark, you will no doubt remember, is part of that plucky Coalition of the Willing , though quite how willing is not absolutely clear. The first materiel contribution Denmark made to the invasion is said to have been half-a-dozen snow ploughs. Some suggest that this was a sign of incompetence, but as the Danish are not usually known for this (though I suppose all armies are--I vaguely recall a consignment of tens of thousands of boots, but only left boots, being sent to the Crimea), others suggested it was a sign of unwillingness. Coalition membership gives the Danes a particular interest in the outcome of the US election--but all European countries are looking on with predictable amazement at the way we run our politics. Stories about voting irregularities and suspect voting machines in particular receive a lot of attention. They run under a layer of smug tut-tutting typical that typifies how both old and new world talk about each other.

Despite the belief that old world (or at least old Europe) and the new are profoundly different, there was another eerie echo in the stories about Rocco Buttiglione, Italy's nominee to be European commissioner of justice. Buttiglione is a sort of fundamentalist Catholic with an impressive record of abusive comments about homosexuals, women, and single mothers. The parliament decided they didn't want their own John Ashcroft in charge of justice and, in a poltically significant act, refused to confirm the Commission unless Buttiglione was dropped.

To bring this discussion back to the matter of our course, the parliament seems to be showing similar if surprising backbone in the matter of software patents. A decision is set for latter this month. The Council of Ministers favours patents, the parliament opposes--or at least wants restrictions on what can be patented. The European Information and Communication Technology Association (EICTA) is lobbying for the patents. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) (which clearly wanted an acronym to chime with the EFF, but couldn't bring itself to put the Barlow-esque frontier in its name), is fighting against it.

I say this by way of background for our class on Intellectual Property and Quality in a couple of weeks (which I hope can focus on the question of what part IP plays in suggesting quality, and not just IP in general). I'll post some notes here during the week about the reading.

Do Internet Users Filter for Point of View More than Other People?

2004-10-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

Not according to this study from the Pew Internet and American Life project, which says that "Wired Americans hear more points of view about candidates and other key issues than other citizens. They are not using the internet to screen ideas with which they disagree." I was surprised, but then asked myself why I should have been.

education as bricolage

2004-10-25T23:06:00.000-07:00

Given this week's concentration on education, I asked attendees of the conference I am currently attending (UIST) who have a computer science background the following question: "What are the one or two most important influences on your learning the theory and practice of programming?" By and large, respondents said that instructors, TAs, and books were the most influential influences on their learning theory (e.g., algorithms, data structures, etc.) and mostly example code (from the Internet and open-source software) and to a lesser extent peer groups and books were the most influential for practice (e.g., writing programs that compile and run). Intuitively, it seems that computer science more than other disciplines might be amenable to online education, and these results suggest that most programmers feel that they mostly taught themselves from miscellaneous sources with the help of a few mentors. This seems similar to the model proposed by Brown and Duguid in "The Social Life of Information." Are classes and peer groups relatively irrelevant for teaching computer science (Georgia Tech banned all group projects to promote better individual assessment not too long ago)? Do other domains fit this model?

give the newbies a break?

2004-10-25T22:58:00.000-07:00

The review process for papers was an issue that came up in a town hall debate at the conference I am currently attending (User Interface Software and Technology [UIST]). In particular, this conference does not use a double blind process: reviewers have full knowledge of the authors of the papers they are reviewing. This is relatively unusual in the scientific community at large. One reason given for this approach is that it is easy to discern the authors of a paper from the work presented even if the paper is anonymized and so anonymization is an unecessary burden. But another reason some attendees gave is that when reviewing papers they used author information to access the quality of the work: if the authors were junior or were new to the field these attendees would cut the authors some slack. But if they were well known in the field, these attendees would hold the paper to a higher standard. This bias seems to go against the otherwise positivist approach the field takes. But is it indeed necessary to know the author of a scientific paper in order to judge its quality?

Quality without substance? Digital documents

2004-10-19T16:27:00.000-07:00

Recently in IS203, the issue of digital documents came up, and how the physical representation of a document adds to the information contained in the document as a whole. Nancy Van House referenced a story by Paul Duguid about how the smell of vinegar is used by historians to understand the spread of disease. Apparently the adage of "the medium is the message" holds even outside of pop culture.

Simultaneously, in IS202, a reading from "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" started a discussion about how categorizations of objects based on experiential criteria seems to be more natural and pervasive, than categorizations based on abstract criteria. It reminded me of the experience of being in a library, surrounded by stacks of books. The physical substance of the books, was tied to my sense of the knowledge contained within. Large, heavy books with fine bindings seemed to have a sense of authority independent of their actual content.

If we accept that our culture is moving towards representing information and knowledge in a digital form where the physical form has little to no correlation to the content, and for information on the internet, there isn't really any physical form that is locally experienced - then what does this mean for our intuitions about the value and substance of knowledge and information?

Will the lack of physical substance for books/periodicals and other information sources lead to a change in our basic intuitions about knowledge and information? Or will there be some kind of compensation, where the "status" of some kinds of information/knowledge will be explicitly made clear via some physical proxy/storage? We talk about "quality" in very abstract terms in the class, but if many of our most basic notions are based on embodied experience, won't the notion of "quality" be in for a very radical change?

Those Frat Boys...

2004-10-18T23:45:00.000-07:00

“However we may choose to draw the actual boundaries of the public sphere, it is clear that these themes readily intersect with important areas of the sociocultural domain. I am thinking here of those everyday values, norms, practices, and procedures that may promote or hinder democratic virtues (however understood), including forms of interaction among citizens.” (page 41) -Dahlgreen’s “The Public Sphere”

The context of my story is slightly different but it is too good not to share. When I was at Dartmouth, there was a huge scandal when an internally distributed fraternity newsletter was leaked out to the public. The content of the newsletter itself was the main issue at hand because it was making fun of girls and sexual escapades.
However, I am looking at it in a different light in context of this class. We have talked about print, authorship, and the notions of public and private. Usually something is printed in order to make it more public, but in this case, they definitely did not want it read by the public. The issue is that the newsletter was obtained by people scrounging through what would be viewed as a private space (the fraternity's dumpster). Did they have a right to do that?

Read below for more details if you’re interested. There was never a concern about the fact that someone went through the trash to find the newsletter. However, if someone went through the trash to find a credit card slip, that would be viewed very differently. I am almost inclined to say that the brothers should not have been judged for something that was found in their dumpster – shouldn’t there have been some sort of right to privacy?

"The Newsletters were not intended to be seen or read by individuals who were not members of Psi Epsilon of Zeta Psi. The Newsletters were not meant to be disclosed to members outside of Psi Epsilon of Zeta Psi. They contained private communications. One Newsletter became public after it was stolen from Zeta Psi premises, a second alleged Newsletter was made public when it was taken without permission from a member's room, and a third Newsletter was destroyed by Psi Epsilon of Zeta Psi and was only made public because a Dartmouth sorority woman, not formally affiliated with Psi Epsilon of Zeta Psi, although well known to its members, decided to comb through a dumpster to find it. "-- Zeta Psi Press Release

Also see Zeta Psi Shuttered for "Abusive" Newsletter

Fact & Fiction in Encyclopedia Entries

2004-10-17T16:27:00.000-07:00

I found the article by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang intriguing. I hadn't quite realized that the move from print to electronic encyclopedias change the relationship with section authors so dramatically. Now that encyclopedias are are updated much more frequently and with greater ease, sections need to be continuously revised and authors have much more work to do.

I then started thinking, is this a great thing or is this a bad thing? On one hand, the need for constantly updated articles regarding various topics may lead to further research and revelation regarding said topics. On the other hand, perhaps authors will start to include unproven or shaky scientific or historical information in their sections for the sake of publishing new information.

In this day and age, we are taught that newer is better, and (in my experience) we tend to give greater respect to those that incorporate new theories into old events. However, this isn't to say that these new theories are anything but theories.

For example, take the historical event of the assassination of Czar Nicholas II and his family. At face value, it is a well documented historical event with a well-known chronology. Not much more can be said about it. However, there is some small controversy regarding the supposed survival of his daughter Anastasia. Though her survival has never been proven, and in fact there much evidence that she was killed, will authors of articles regarding this historical event grasp onto this controversy as fresh material? Will the drive to "update" compromise the academic integrity of the section? This is just one example.

On the bright side, perhaps the drive for fresh material will lead authors to pursue further research regarding Anastasia and even solve its riddle once and for all. But in the mean time, could they resist it as a salacious tidbit to include in their updated histories?

Library resources on quality of websites

2004-10-13T18:17:00.000-07:00

In a reading group meeting today I mentioned that we had just finished doing case studies of how one judges information quality on the web, and was pointed to a Berkeley library resource on evaluating web pages. It describes many of the quality indicators that were mentioned in class two weeks ago: the form of the URL, background information, documentation, external links, and outside opinions on the site. I imagine that our prototypical Berkeley sophomore wouldn't access a page like this before starting their Google search, but it's something that some are trying to address.

It's nice to know it's all there...

2004-10-11T16:56:00.000-07:00

Reading Pennenberg's piece in Wired News, I recalled some of the blogger reaction to a piece I wrote in the Times' Week in Review section a while ago on Google's strengths and weaknesses. Among other things, I pointed out that:

"When you search for a common item like "ford" or "baseball," the engines naturally give the highest rankings to major sites that are linked to by hundreds or thousands of other pages. But when searches are more specific � whether "second superpower" or "Sinatra arrangers" � the rankings will mirror the interests of the groups that aggregate around particular topics: the bloggers, experts, hobbyists and, often, the crackpots...

"From the standpoint of the search engines, however, this is all as it should be. The beauty of the Web, after all, is that it enables us to draw on the expertise of people who take a particular interest in a topic and are willing to take the trouble to set down what they think about it. In that sense, the Web is a tool that enables people who have a life to benefit from the efforts of those who don't."

This for some reason was taken as an attack on the blog world by a number of bloggers, who reacted indignantly, all the more because the Times itself didn't make its archives accessible to the spiders. See, for example, this. And that charge was taken other bloggers who read the description of the piece in that blog, but didn't actually look it up. In fact a writer in the Observer charged me with "fulminat[ing]...that whenever one does a Google search on any topical issue, the top page rankings often go to blogs rather than established media sources (such as the New York Times )." But he indicated that he hadn't actually gone to check the piece -- "Big Media sources increasingly are ... locked behind pay-for firewalls. (As with Nunberg's little rant, which I have just tried to re-read - and been invited to pay $2.95 for the privilege.)"

I'm used to being misread and misquoted -- that comes with the territory. But in this case, the fact that the Times kept its archives behind a firewall entailed that people couldn't or wouldn't check the original, so based their comments on someone else's description of what you said. (I post copies of these pieces to my own Web pages, but most people wouldn't think to look there.) Since then, though, the Times has made a back door to its archives accessible to bloggers -- not a moment too soon, if you ask me.

The Quality of Information of the Daily Show

2004-10-11T15:26:00.000-07:00

Reading the Manoff and Schudson (pg. 14 of the PDF) piece, I ran across this passage:

Although the dateline is a formality today, references to place do still served to establish the authority of news reports. This is most common in television, where the reporter appears before a setting that shows he or she was "really there" - the anchor appears in Beirut or, more routinely, the Pentagon correspondent appears next to a briefing-room podium with an official seal.

What instantly came to mind is Comedy Central's Daily Show with John Stewart. On the Daily Show correspondents are routinely put in front of blue/green screens and "pretend" to be in the place they are reporting on. Often the crowd laughs at the beginning of these pieces as they, being in the studio, can see the reporter right in front of them standing in front of the screen.

This made me think of the quality of information in general on the Daily Show. It sure as hell is funny, but is it anything more than that? I think so; It has a way of presenting certain issues and highlighting the really ridiculous parts of news-related stories. It does, in the end, have an certain impact as evidenced by: guests like Bill Clinton and John Kerry; a couple emmy awards and; ridicule from popular conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly who called the audience of the Daily show a bunch of "slacker stoners."

If you've never seen much of the Daily Show... check out Lisan Rein's archive.

Fourth Rate Estate

2004-10-10T18:22:00.000-07:00

A review of Robert O. Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism in the TLS of September 10, 2004, ended with a gloomy assessment of modern democratic politics:

It might well be argued that fascist regimes are nowadays unnecessary, since the modern parliamentary system does much the same job itself. Perfectly normal governments now intervene throughout society, seeking Gleichschaltung and control of all social institutions and of the private sphere; they engage in constant short-term campaigns for populist goals; they recognize but ignore, indeed tacitly welcome, the democratic deficit; and they seek control of the media in the spirit of Goebbels and Minculpop. They even wage a series of wars against weak opponents, claiming of course to be bringing liberation. With "democratic" governments like these, who needs Fascism?

Though the media come in near the end of this account of the subversion of politics, it seems reasonable to argue that they belong at the beginning. Through the media politicians are able to penetrate society and the private sphere; with the media short-term campaigns arise as needed and drop from sight when they become inconvenient; and in the media intentionaly ineffective handwringing about "democratic deficits" has become a refined art for politicians who prefer the status quo in which most incumbents face no effective opposition to reelection.

Can the press still justify its claim to be the voice of the public sphere capable of challenging institutional politics and vested interests, or is it little better than, as one history called it, a "fourth-rate estate"? And if such capablilities cannot be found in the conventional "press", then where? Do the new media of blogs offer any hope, or spearheaded by reinvented conventional hacks like Andrew Sullivan, do they only offer old wine in new bottles, to quote John Perry Barlow?

kid-safe "gay" searches

2004-10-10T13:20:00.000-07:00

I did a paper when I was a freshman in college to look at how "kid-safe" search engines (such as Yahooligans, AOL Kids Only, and Ask Jeeves for Kids) responded to the terms "homosexuality" or "gay." To my shock, the responses were terribly limited. For example, back then in AOL Kids Only, if you did a search by the term "homosexuality" only one result would be returned, and it was a biography of Alexander the Great. Similar results were yielded by the others. It was very dissapointing. If I was a 12 or 13 year old struggling with my sexuality and turning to a search engine that I had been taught to use as "safe," it would have done me no good.

Based on our discussions last week, I decided to go back and do similar searches. I can't seem to find AOL Kids Only anywhere, so maybe they took it down in the past few years, but Ask Jeeves for Kids and Yahooligans are still up. The search today yielded COMPLETELY different results. Typing the word "gay" in to http://www.ajkids.com yields a question set with very relevant questions such as "What should I do if I think I'm gay/lesbian?" and "How do I know if I am gay/lesbian/bisexual?" These questions link to reputable support sites such as PFLAG and the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. Typing "gay" into Yahooligans yields an entire category match which similar resources as Ask Jeeves for kids.

I'm pleasantly surprised. These resources were simply not indexed by "kid-safe" search engines six years ago.

Google Google Google

2004-10-08T10:16:00.000-07:00

Apparently college sophomores aren't the only ones who use google for everything...

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/10/08/google.finds.id.ap/index.html

Trusting Strangers

2004-10-03T23:36:00.000-07:00

In the "real world," most of the sources we go to for products and information are known to us. They're either widely known institutions (e.g. NPR for news or Circuit City for TVs) or individuals with whom we have some relationship. However, in the online world, it would be very restrictive to only consider sources of either information or tangible goods that we already know. eBay, Craig's list, etc. often have products at much lower prices than even online retailers, and as our search assignment has demonstrated, in some cases very good information can be obtained from anonymous people on the web.

In our real-world interactions, we tend to use past performance to predict the future -- the so-called "shadow of history." If we've had a poor experience at a store or got bad advice from a friend, we'll be less likely to patronize that business or turn to that friend again. Online, however, we generally don't have any history with the people or sites with which we're interacting. So how do we go about deciding whom to trust in our interactions with online strangers?

Clearly, this problem is one of balancing risks and rewards. We could easily chose to limit our online shopping to amazon.com and other brands we know, or ignore any information that doesn't come from major publisher. Doing so, we'd be secure in the knowledge that our online experience will be of at least a certain level of quality. But we'd miss the opportunities of getting better prices in peer-to-peer markets or of finding more current, thorough, or specific information from people not attached to large media company.

So how do we balance these risks and rewards? We all do it to some extent, often without thinking about it. Much of the information available to help make these decisions also come from strangers (e.g. retailer reviews like bizrate.com, eBay feedback, even Google PageRank uses the link structure of unknown websites to rate page quality). Are these sources sufficient indicators of quality? If so, how can we be sure that we can trust even them? What else indicates that an online entity is trustworthy? Or do we only superficially care and protect ourselves by limiting our exposure to risk? For example, I might be inclined to trust unknown websites' information when preparing a blog entry on baseball trivia, but less likely to do so in my thesis. If that's the case, how do we decide the threshold of acceptable risk?

I've been thinking about this topic a lot lately, both in conjunction with my research (quality filtering systems) and with the search assignment: I found a number of pages with thorough, well-researched information written by total strangers. Were I actually researching my search topic, I couldn't decide whether I would actually use the information or not. While all signs pointed to it being authentic, useful information, its lack of provenance was really setting off my paranoia about random information online.

The Context of Bathroom Stalls

2004-10-03T17:10:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about Paul’s lecture on Wed, in which he summarized 3 different student views of racism/porn on the web.
1. it has always been around and always will be so the Internet in itself isn’t the greatest problem
2. kids think they’ll find authoritative view info (like writing a paper about Jews based on a certain site)
3. communities can more easily gather together

I’d like to add a fourth view to that, which counters the first point, in that one of the biggest problems with racism and porn on the web is that it takes it out of context, which makes it much harder for people to recognize or know how to process it properly.

My example is based on my upbringing in Southern California. My hometown, Santa Barbara, has a very large Mexican population, and my high school was about 40% Mexican students (and is now supposedly over 50%). Every single bathroom stall in the school had “white trash” and “brown trash” written all over it plus lots of other creative phrases. Since I was raised in Santa Barbara, I was accustomed to the racial tension in its various forms and thought little of the writings on the wall, aside from the fact that they made for great reading material when I went to the bathroom.
If a high school kid were to move from Kansas to Santa Barbara, he would be shocked at the racist writings on the bathroom wall. Through looking at his surroundings both in the high school and in the community, he would (probably) get quickly used to that just being how things were.
However, if a kid from Kansas went online to something like www.browntrash.com, he could more easily internalize what he was reading without having any context to put it in, and just assume that brown people are trash.
Furthermore, if he and his family have moved to Santa Barbara, he will likely go home after school and tell his parents about what he saw at school and they will (hopefully) explain what racial discrimination is.
If he sits on the computer in his bedroom in Kansas, he wouldn’t necessarily go ask his parents about the website he was surfing. They would want to know why he was surfing such a site and maybe threaten to monitor his surfing so he has little motivation to want to bring it up.

This subject of context touches on the “place” that Geoff described in his posting. He discussed the sacrosanctity of a place, which goes along with this notion of needing to understand the surroundings of a place to actually understand the place itself.

You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful.

2004-10-02T11:29:00.000-07:00

After our discussion of why it is that people find it so disturbing to see hate speech, pornography, and other forms of pollution on the Web, I happened to be talking to my daughter about The Catcher in the Rye, which she's reading for ninth-grade English. I recalled the famous passage where Holden sees an obscenity written on the wall of his little sister's school:

Somebody'd written "Fuck you" on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and the other little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them -- all cockeyed, naturally -- what it meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it… I figured it was some perverty bum that'd sneaked into the school late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote it on the wall."

Shortly after, Holden goes into the Metropolitan Museum and wanders into the Egyptian tomb:

I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful. Then, all of a sudden, you'd never guess what I saw on the wall. Another "Fuck you."… That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose.

It struck me that the passage gets at the deepest reason why people are disturbed by seeing taboo references in public places -- it seems to violate the sacrosanctity of the place itself. In that sense, maybe Holden's explanation for why he's troubled by seeing the graffiti in Phoebe's school is a kind of rationalization after the fact : the shock on seeing the words precedes the reflections as to what his sister would make of them.

What I was trying to suggest in class is that the explanations of the dangers of online racism and porn may have the same character -- not that there aren't any genuine risks in having this stuff out there, but that the shock and indignation that people feel when they see these sites isn't motivated primarily, or at least immediately, by the concern that the accessibility of the sites will lead to an upsurge in racism or sex crimes. It's more like Holden's feeling that "You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful." I'm not sure if this is stretching things, but at any rate, it's that sense of discourse as a "place" that I want to pick up on Wednesday,

Problems with the patent system

2004-09-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

As we spent the last class talking about the economics of information I wanted to carry on some thoughts brought up by Boyle's paper concerning Intellectual Property, and in particular the intellectual property of Information.

I spent a while in an engineering design consultancy where I was in contact with IP all the time. Whilst the system was originally designed to protect inventors and promote innovation there are several key problems with how it is being used now.

1. It no longer protects the individual inventor
The lone inventor now has a hard time protecting their patents. Whilst it is still very valuable to have a patent, at least in filing, the problem occurs when the individual inventor does not have the money, or time, to follow up on any infringements. Hence, even with a patent, the cost of the court cases and legal fees that can be required to chase down any infringements from large companies with an army of lawyers can be overwhelming. At some point the inventor will ask themselves is it really worth it or would they rather still be inventing than standing in court.

2. Those with the money can abuse it
The economics of paying for and maintaining patents are now being skewed by large companies. Whilst for a small company the cost of their patents can still be significant, large companies are able to file patents at will as the relative cost to them is so small. I met a guy from HP recently who said their lawyers couldn't keep up with all the patents they wanted to file. Clearly smaller companies have to pick and choose carefully which patents they choose to apply for, which leads me too...

3. Strategic patenting
So as a big company I can file as many patents as I need. So companies have begun to build a, metaphorical, fence around their ideas with a battery of similar patents related to an idea. One central idea is protected by twenty or so related patents to cover every alternative. This can make it a difficult job to get to the real 'quality' patent that lies behind all the variations.

4. Reasons not to patent and deliberate obfuscation
But also many companies have realized the value that lies in the information contained within the patent databases. The depth of information required to file a patent means that it has become a wealth of valuable knowledge for anyone seeking to invent or improve upon existing ideas. And people regularly exploit weaknesses in patents. So when you patent you protect your idea but you run the risk of allowing others to improve upon yours as you make it public. Realizing this problem companies regularly try to obscure the key idea as much as possible to make it either impenetrable to understand or impossible to find. Alternatively, for any internal innovations many companies are simply deciding not to patent and are relying on 'trade secrets' instead.

5. Software patents
I'm no expert on software patents but there clearly holds dangers and changes ahead as the debate rages on.

Patents are a key component of the economics of information in business and relatively recent changes in the way the system is being used - often brought about through the huge imbalances in company wealth - provide a big threat.

And briefly on quality - anyone who looks through the patent system will rapidly find that the quality is generally pretty low. (In the Oakland Museum of California they have a small section with Gold Rush era patent applications where they still required inventors to provide a fully functioning scale model with their application - perhaps we should reinstate that requirement...) I've heard statistics that more than 95% of patents never make money. With numbers in the millions of patents and more being filed every year, the skill to sift out the quality from the rest will become increasingly important.

Personal Bias and Recognizing Quality

2004-09-20T19:22:00.000-07:00

A few months back I was talking to a friend at work about newspapers. He generally took the New York Times as his authoritative news source. I expressed my opinion that the news content in the Wall Street Journal was vastly superior.

My friend, who is very, very intelligent and has generally similar political leanings to me, told me that he had read some excerpts from the WSJ editorial page that were (to his mind) outrageous right wing propaganda pieces and that as a consequence he was entirely turned off from the WSJ. I said that from my readings the WSJ's content was not at all biased to the right, however the editorial page was clearly filled with masturbatory right wing polemics. I advised ignoring the editorial page, but paying attention to the news articles instead.

Months pass...
This morning when my friend wanders in and mentions that someone accidentally delivered the WSJ to his house, instead of his regular NYT. After reading the paper on BART, he agrees that the quality of the news in the WSJ is simply much, much better in terms of its depth of analysis and overal content, and that there seems to be no noticable right wing bias. I once again advise him to avoid the surrealistically conservative editorial page. But I mention that there was an article on Mary Mapes, the producer of the (now discredited) story on Bush's service record. The story was apparently well researched, and in fact, had nothing but good things to say about her - hardly the sort of thing you'd expect to read in a news source skewed to the right.

What stands out is this: my friend's notion of who he was caused him to dismiss the WSJ as a news source, due to political affiliations. Perhaps, at the same time, my own political biases were in play as well: I've become quite cynical about political parties - the Republicans are shills to big corporations, but at the same time, the Democrats pander to a different set of big businesses (most notably, as an open source advocate, I think the Democrats shill to The Mouse - the Disney Corporation, and other media interests). At the same time, I tend to think that many standard positions on the left are not well thought out, and that even very well educated liberals often take positions that are ideologically sound, but not in accord with empirical evidence.

And my point is...
People seem to put their authoritative information sources through an "ideological compatibility" filter, despite being well educated and highly intelligent - in this case, my friend only read the WSJ by accident. It appears that objectivity takes a back seat to ideology in news source selection. If my friend had an electronic subscription, instead of a physical subscription, he would never have accidentally received the WSJ, and been stuck with it on the BART ride. Given that a few studies have found that the internet allows people of a particular persuasion to meet and reinforce their common beliefs, will the internet actually result in increased polarization and less objectivity? With the supposed problem of "Too Much Information" and increased filtering capabilities actually lead to higher quality information that is ignored by a larger proportion of the audience?

Ask me a question that only someone who had seen a real raccoon would be able to answer

2004-09-20T02:48:00.000-07:00

One day in the early nineties, when I was playing outside after school, I saw a raccoon, cautious and deliberate, making its way across the lawn in measured, calculated steps. I was completely entranced; this was the first and only raccoon I have ever seen in the wild, if the suburbs of D.C. count as the “wild.” When my parents came home from work, I insisted that I be questioned rigorously. I was very concerned, I recall, with not being believed, and I wanted to dispel all doubt that I could be making this up. Besides, as an only child, it often happened that I was the only witness to the various things that strike children as remarkable, worthy of reporting, and I certainly did not want to be thought an impostor. What did the raccoon look like? How was it walking? What did its face look like? Where was it going? Did it have paws or not? These were the kinds of amusing questions I demanded be asked of me, rather incessantly I'm told, until I was satisfied that my parents believed me.

My parents seem to enjoy trotting out this story at dinner parties, and it struck me as an interesting demonstration of the difficulties that arise from attempts to determine authenticity with only text at our disposal. It also reminds me of the hilarious questions that the Leisure Suit Larry games (a seedy role-playing game for adults) would pose of the user, intended to ascertain age and maturity level. If you missed several of these questions, you would be deemed under-age and denied access to the game, even though some of the questions were culturally quite specific, involving seemingly arbitrary references to pop culture and the like (so even my mom, who had spent the last 12 years in Japan, could not always answer all of them).

Can questions alone ever unfailingly determine the authenticity of information, or how authoritative a given information source is? How good can they get? Was there any set of questions that could have established “for sure” whether I had in fact seen a real raccoon? What strategies are we developing online to ferret out impostors? When we evaluate web sites for their quality, or receive advice from people on message boards or in chat rooms, what questions are we asking? Are they the same ones we would ask off-line to establish expertise in a court, for example, or is there a new breed of interrogation evolving to address informal online environments?

The Secrets Of Mail-Order Steroid Success

2004-09-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Our writing assignment is on authoritative information, which made me think of an interesting example I read in a 202 reading, from the Sep 2, 2002 Business Week, called The Underground Web. I’ve excerpted it below. It raises the issue of who can be considered a trusted source on the web. The Elite Fitness site is clearly not an authoritative source (at least, not in my opinion). But what about a more reasonable site like MSN Health, which has MDs posting advice?

The Underground Web
The easy availability of drugs on the Web proved deadly for Eric Perrin. An avid bodybuilder, Perrin bought some dinitrophenol, or DNP, over the Net last summer because it was supposed to help him lose weight and get better muscle definition. While DNP is promoted on some fitness Web sites, it's illegal to sell for human consumption. The chemical is legal only for use in industrial applications such as a coating on railroad ties to kill fungus. In humans, DNP can shut down the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system. Last August, Perrin took DNP for several days. As his body temperature began to rise and his heart started to race, his mother, Barbara, grew concerned. ''He told me, 'Don't worry, Mom, I'll be all right,''' she says. ''He was in a lot of pain.'' Eric died on Aug. 6 at a hospital near his home in Baldwin, N.Y. He was 22.While the local U.S. Attorney is prosecuting the man who allegedly sold Eric Perrin the DNP, Barbara Perrin thinks the dealer isn't the real culprit. She places most of the blame on the Internet and Elite Fitness, a New York company that runs the Web site where her son read about the supposed benefits of DNP and got in touch with the dealer. She is convinced that without the Web, her son would be alive today. ''DNP is not something you find easily,'' she says. Without the Internet, ''Eric may have gotten steroids, but not DNP.''Even today, Elite Fitness provides what appears to be a forum for people to meet who are interested in drugs. With a quick search of the site, BusinessWeek found dozens of postings from bodybuilders promoting the benefits of DNP, explaining how to use the drug, and downplaying its health risks. After one visitor asked on an electronic bulletin board why people die from taking DNP, one of the site's moderators responded by writing: ''Get your fluids, and you'll [b]e A-O.K.'' Another moderator posted ground rules for members to communicate in private so they could share information about ''sources.'' And members write that the best way to check out a source for restricted drugs is to e-mail a moderator. Paul Willingham, a partner at New York's Caliber Design Inc., which owns Elite Fitness, says the site simply provides a vehicle for bodybuilders to talk about any subject. ''We don't provide a forum to buy and sell drugs,'' he says. ''We're building a community for discussing physical fitness.''

When life gives you lemons...

2004-09-18T10:19:00.000-07:00

An Intersing note from Boing Boing.

Deaf children in Nicaragua create new language
BoingBoing reader Prodigal Tom says, "This is a fascinating article about deaf and totally neglected children in Nicaragua inventing their own sign language. I was also psyched because I learned there is an actual job called a psycholinguist! There's also a great point about how the language has evolved, so the younger members have a slightly different version than the originators." Link to Reuters synopsis, and Link to Science Magazine article, which appears to be available only to paid subscribers. (Thanks also to Mike Oliveri and others who pointed us to this item)

This is relevant to Information Quality in that the kids didn't find the new language adequate and changed it to suit them:

Today there are about 800 deaf signers of Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), ranging from 4 to 45 years of age. Previous research on NSL has found that changes in its grammar first appear among preadolescent signers, soon spreading to subsequent, younger learners, but not to adults. This pattern of transmission, when combined with the rapid and recent expansion of NSL, has created an unusual language community in which the most fluent signers are the youngest, most recent learners. Consequently, much of the history of the language can be surveyed by performing a series of observations, progressing from the older signers, who retain much of NSL's early nature, to younger, more recent learners, who produce the language in its expanded, most developed form.

Blogging and Bush's service papers

2004-09-15T16:26:00.000-07:00

On the theme presented in class today about how blogging reacts with the mainstream press, here's some insight on the release of Bush's National Guard service papers from Editor and Publisher (a great read for anyone interested in journalism) including quotes from newspaper editors about how they view blogging:

Blessing or Curse? Editors Examine Blogs' Role in '60 Minutes' Uproar

Although editors from four major dailies contend that their product remains the most trusted source of news for most readers, they admit the blogging community is offering competition and provoking even more skepticism of the mainstream media than usual. But they are divided on whether or not this is a positive trend or not.

An email crisis?

2004-09-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

How much spam lands in your inbox? A lot? A little? How important to you is email as a form of communication? What is the fraction of important email (email you must read) compared to the rest of email you receive? What strategies, if any, do you employ to increase the signal-to-noise in this environment?

In qualitative research Judd, Peter Lyman and I did over the summer, it became obvious that an email crisis is enveloping average computer users. Email as a resource is becoming more and more "inefficient" for many users while also becoming more important as a communication medium; people rely on email at home and at work to facilitate important, sometimes even critical, communication. The amount of spam and simply unwanted mail is also increasing, as is the sophistication of spammers; often fake emails appear to be genuine. The tension between these two - the growing importance of email as a communication medium and the increasing amount of "rotten" email - has combined to frustrate both sophisticated and non-sophisticated computer users. Participants in our study made it clear that email is starting to become inefficient, to different degrees, amongst all types of computer users.

We noted a variety of behaviors people used to filter email. The most simple was to use a piece of software - like SpamAssassin, etc. or bayesian filtering tools in a mail client - to filter spam. Other tactics arose like managing many different email addresses used for specific purposes or roles. Naturally, some of these many email addresses were valued moreso than others: people only give some email addresses out to certain people or via certain channels. Some people still read each email and have their own means of deciding which emails are junk. Some people even advocate not using email at all; which eliminates spam for sure, but also excludes some from communication via email entirely or requires building a parallel, seperate electronic mail network.

What do you do to filter email? Not just software, but behaviors you employ to actively increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the contents of your inbox. Do you see evidence of this email crisis in technologically less-sophisticated family and friends? Has a valuable email address of yours from the past become essentially useless due to spam? Do you check it anyway to ensure you don't miss old friends?

What things do you do to filter mail that might not meet a formal definition of "spam"? For example, I have set up a filter that routes every email sent from a certain person directly to the trash. This is because this person sends completely worthless (to me) email.

If you want to know more, check out "Unsolicited Bulk Email: Mechanisms for Control" by Hoffman and Crocker of the Internet Mail Consortium.

Bad information is relative (or Congress is stupid)

2004-09-10T09:36:00.000-07:00

The subject of this post comes from Robert Park's book Voodoo Science. It's a short and fun book about how bad science can be and the effects this bad science has on all of us. You're hopefully familiar with the story of cold fusion, so I thought I'd try this story.
Joe Newman invented an "energy machine," a device that transformed its own matter into energy. In short, he was claiming that the 500 pound machine was a perpetual motion machine. The nice folks at the patent office rejected his patent application based on their long standing rule of refusing perpetual motion machine applications unless a working model ran for a year at their office. Of course, perpetual motion machines can't exist thanks to the second law of thermodynamics (entropy), but let's ignore physics for now.
Newman had a very flattering piece about his work aired on CBS in 1984, naming him "the man who stumped the scientists" or something similar. Following this and his failed patent application, Joe turned to his state senators who then called a Congressional hearing to sort out why he can't have a patent for the device. Newman was doing fine until John Glenn -- yes, the former astronaut and Senator from Ohio at the time -- asked him this question:
"It's a simple enough problem, you measure the input and you measure the output and you see which is larger. Would Mr. Newman agree to that? If he does, what laboratory would he like to have make the measurements?"
Newman said no, he wouldn't like the test. For any scientist or person of reasonable logical capacity, this would probably be enough to disprove Newman. However, this is a Congressional hearing and not a panel of scientists, and the testimony continued. Fortunately, the hearings eventually revealed that the special master appointed by the patent office to review Newman's case was formerly his patent attorney. The hearings quickly dissolved after that.
We can learn several lessons from this example. First, Congress might not know much about science, but they know a conflict of interests when they see it. In the context of our class, bad information is relative. Saying "perpetual motion machine" is enough to convince any scientist that this is bad science. Everyone else was convinced only after learning about the conflict of interests.
Next, where were the scientists to rip this man to shreds? Perpetual motion machines can't exist, and any scientist should know that. Rather than berate the man and pick his invention apart for the junk it is, they just kept on working, hoping that this invention would be quickly revealed as fraudulent. I guess scientists don't understand Congress, or better yet, scientists don't understand the scientific knowledge of the average person.
Finally, the media, CBS specifically, is just as culpable as everyone else in this case. Twice they aired Newman's story, and in neither did they portray him as the fraud that he is. And regardless of how nice he is or how much he believes in his invention, you would like to believe that our media would call his bluff too rather than spread misunderstanding about perpetual motion. I suppose I shouldn't keep that much faith in the media.
I can only speculate about this, but people want to believe in bad information. Whether it's perpetual motion, ESP, UFOs, or Saddam/Al Queda ties, individuals can suspend all logical and reasonable thought to jump to the incorrect conclusion. Almost no effort goes into debunking the myths people believe or disproving blatantly wrong information. What does this mean for the information we find on the Internet? Or the results of polls and other statistics? Or for Joe Newman and his 500 pound piece of garbage?

"Computer Revolution" Thought

2004-09-09T15:50:00.000-07:00

In his book Cyborgs@Cyberspace, self-proclaimed 'Cyberspace Ethnographer' David Hakken tries to problematize the notion of 'Computer Revolution' thought. His main point is to say that while we might unanimously agree that the current revolution has the potential to 'foster social transformation,' there is little agreement (and even less evidence) on whether it has thus far done so.

In particular he objects to the notion that a revolution is an all or nothing proposition. As an alternative he proposes this alternative:

"CR Thought can be arrayed into the following propositions, that

At the most expansive level, computerization will result in the End of the Human Age, the marginalization of even total transcendence of human society altogether;

Somewhat less cosmically, computerization will mean the End of the Job, the creation of a fundamentally new type of human social formation;

Even more soberly, computerization will only mean the End of Machinofacture, passage to a new stage within the same basic type of social formation; or

Anticlimactically, computerization implies the End of Nothing Really Significant. The attraction of revolutionary language is primarily rhetorical, and computerization is best seen as merely another development within the same stage of the current social formation."

This is in some ways a recounting of our discussion in class regarding identifying the 2 (or 4, or 8, or 57) information revolutions. I like Hakken's treatment in particular because he seems to come down on the side of #4: that social formations are now (and will continue) to be like they have always been. As long as there have been innovations, people have be employing apocolyptic language to describe their effects. In understanding the problem of quality of information, I think it might be more useful to adopt proposition #4 because it forces us to focus on the socio-technical systems which surround information and the historical forces that have created them as they are today.

Information Enthusiasm

2004-09-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

In addition to the texts already mentioned in class, what other manifestos of information enthusiasm have you been able to find?

Pam Samuelson typically starts her cyberlaw class by assigning John Perry Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace." Here's a passage:

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

Please post more examples in the comments to this post.

First post to Quality of Information Blog

2004-09-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

Hello, the INFOSYS 290 class at UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems will be using this space to talk about issues and themes surrounding the Quality of Information.

Please stay tuned!

Joe Hall