UC Berkeley School of Information show

UC Berkeley School of Information

Summary: Lectures, seminars, talks, and events held at UC Berkeley's School of Information.

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  • Artist: School of Information, UC Berkeley
  • Copyright: © 2005-2015 UC Regents

Podcasts:

 Rumors of the Web's Demise (Roy Bahat) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 47:46

Wired has declared “the web is dead.” We will look at several technologies and information systems that have died (or are on life support) — pigeon post, the area code — and others that are thriving — mobile applications, cable, World of Warcraft — and try to figure out whether the web is going the way of the dodo. Will our grandchildren know what a URL is? We will connect the web to ideas of location and ask: what is the meaning of place, in the digital age? Slides from this lecture are available at http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/newsandevents/events/20101027bahat

 Historical Hypermedia: An alternative history of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 and implications for e-research (Charles van den Heuvel) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 61:20

According to the article on Hypermedia in Wikipedia, Ted Nelson coined the term in 1963 and published it in 1965. The definition in the article states that “hypermedia is used as a logical extension of the term hypertext in which graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks intertwine to create a generally non-linear medium of information” and the World Wide Web is presented as a classical example. But it can be argued that the characteristics of hypermedia and their use in global collaborations go back much further in time. At the beginning of the 20th century the Belgian pioneer of knowledge organization Paul Otlet (1868–1944) began exploring “substitutes for the book” and to find new technologies to order and to link fragments of texts, images, sound, etc., for scholarly collaborations on a global level. Otlet sketched and commissioned hundreds of drawings of what we would call nowadays interfaces to synthesize global knowledge. It will be argued that Paul Otlet’s views and visualizations on substitutes for the codex book, interfaces, infrastructures and protocols for collective annotating by scholars might be relevant for recent discussions on the provenance and evidence of information in Web 2.0 and Semantic Web solutions for e-research, in particular in the digital humanities.

 Why Do We Have to Pay People to Work? (J. Leighton Read) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 81:19

Have you ever watched someone deeply engaged in a video game and performing a highly complex but completely artificial task with incredible competence? Could that focus and attention be bottled and used for something serious? We're convinced it can. In the world of collaboration taking place in the online role-playing games, every day (and night) tens of thousands of teams of 5 to 100's of people from multiple time zones, countries and cultures, each with different and highly complementary skills self-assemble around extremely challenging goals. This sounds a lot like the new world of global business collaboration. The psychological principles and affordances found in MMOs have much to teach us about teamwork, leadership, innovation, urgency, and incentives. To be clear, we are not talking about just using games for training and simulation, although these are wonderful applications. We expect a range of uses that range from borrowing a few of the key psychological ingredients from great games like World of Warcraft that will make the workplace more interesting all the way to the full Monty: re-engineering entire jobs so that workers become their avatars, building transparent and persistent reputations for tackling graded challenges with teammates inside a virtual online world as part of a compelling narrative. If this sounds fantastic, it is worth noting that tens of millions of MMO players are already carrying out tasks inside their games that look exactly like the kinds of information work that companies have to pay people to do! Because business today is dependent on voluntary creativity and collaboration of workers using their tacit knowledge, ignoring game inspired design principles is a huge missed opportunity. Games offer powerful tools for creating alignment, performance and engagement. And like any powerful technology, they can be dangerous if the implications for stakeholders aren't thoughtfully considered.

 A (very) brief history of "information"; or, what are we all doing here, anyway? (Geoff Nunberg) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 53:32

It accumulates on our hard drives and lurks in our genes. Companies and consultants promise to refine it out of data or distill it into knowledge. It can topple churches and tyrants; the health of democratic societies depends on its free exchange (and free, we're told, is exactly what it wants to be). Its revolution has upended our lives: now we do its work, suffer its fatigue from its explosion, and worry about its widening gap, as we take up our roles in its society, its economy, and its age — not to mention (in a more transitory and purely local way) its school. So what could it — or not to beg the question, what could they — possibly be? Does "information" name a single concept or a family of concepts? Or is it not really a concept at all, but just a bit of semantic sleight of hand? For starters, it helps to look at how we got here. It turns out that confusion of the meanings of "information" began at least two centuries ago (and as it happens, dictionaries all get the story wrong). "Information" has always been a jerry-built notion that conceals its own inconsistencies, so that it can slip surreptitiously between one sense and another. But ultimately, I'll suggest, that's exactly what has made the term so adaptable and so useful to us: the words we name our ages after are always ones that enable us to leave important things unsaid.

 Regulating Reputational Systems (Eric Goldman) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 79:57

Reputational information helps decision-makers predict a company's or person's future performance based on their past behavior. Our economy is filled with systems that capture and publish reputational information; examples include credit reporting databases, eBay feedback ratings, job references and consumer product reviews . This talk will survey various reputational systems, discuss some lessons about designing and implementing them, and explore how legal regulation can help or hinder the process.

 Mitch Kapor on "Commons-Based Peer Production" | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 49:07

Mitch Kapor was the guest speaker in the Info 290 seminar "Commons-Based Peer Production" on Friday; Kapor is the co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, founder of the Open Source Applications Foundation, and a member of the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation.

 Entrepreneurship as an Extreme Sport (Tina Seelig) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 74:04

Most people move through the world tripping on problems in their path. True entrepreneurs look at those problems through a different set of lenses: they see them as opportunities. This lecture will focus on creating value by turning problems on their head. Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, shares surprising stories that come from her courses on creativity and entrepreneurship that demonstrate that by creatively challenging assumptions, breaking the rules, and having a healthy disregard for the impossible you can bring remarkable ideas to life.

 Business and Consumer Experience for Media in the 21st Century (Daniel Scheinman) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 50:38

As we enter the 21st Century, the Media and Entertainment Industry has undergone changes not seen since mechanization of the theater with the advent of the motion picture camera. Several data points suggest the “tipping point” for digital entertainment (and its accompanying economic model and consumer expectations) is here, putting significant pressure on the traditional monetization and business models for entertainment content. As we enter this new age, Daniel Scheinman, senior vice president and general manager of the Cisco Media Solutions Group, shares insights on this “Media and Entertainment Disruption” that has already occurred and the online, social format of storytelling yet to come — ultimately changing the entertainment experience for both media companies and consumers.

 The Revolution Will be Digitized: How IT is Affecting Business and Competition (Andrew McAfee) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 81:53

In 1987 Robert Solow observed that "We see evidence of the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics." In 2009, the situation is utterly changed; a large and growing body of evidence reveals that IT is affecting not only productivity, but also competition. And technology's impact is not limited to only a few industries, but is instead being felt throughout the economy. Dr. McAfee will first present evidence of IT's deep and broad impact, then offer an explanation for how the humble computer could be having such a large effect. The "Computer Revolution" in business is actually four distinct but related developments. McAfee will describe each of them, then use case studies to show how leading companies are taking advantage of them to advance within their industries.

 Computer Mediated Transactions (Hal Varian) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 57:36

These days nearly every economic transaction involves a computer in some form or other. What does this mean for economics? I argue that the ubiquity of computers enables new and more efficient contractual forms, better alignment of incentives, more sophisticated data extraction and analysis, creates an environment for controlled experimentation, and allows for personalization and customization. I review some of the long and rich history of these phenomena and describe some of their implications for current and future practices.

 Predicting Social Security Numbers From Public Data (Alessandro Acquisti) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 74:14

We show that Social Security numbers (SSNs) can be accurately predicted from widely available public data, such as individuals' dates and states of birth. Using only publicly available information, we observed a correlation between individuals' SSNs and their birth data, and found that for younger cohorts the correlation allows statistical inference of private SSNs, thereby heightening the risks of identity theft for millions of US residents. The inferences are made possible by the public availability of the Social Security Administration's Death Master File and the widespread accessibility of personal information from multiple sources, such as data brokers or profiles on social networking sites. Our results highlight the unexpected privacy consequences of the complex interactions among multiple data sources in modern information economies, and quantify novel privacy risks associated with information revelation in public forums. They also highlight how well-meaning policies in the area of information security can backfire, because of unanticipated interplays between policies and diverse sources of personal data.

 Sustainable Innovation (Judith Estrin) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 81:13

Sustainable Innovation (Judith Estrin)

 The Wikipedia Revolution (Andrew Lih) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 57:40

The Wikipedia Revolution (Andrew Lih)

 Lessons from a Road Warrior (John Rutledge) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 82:41

Lessons from a Road Warrior (John Rutledge)

 The Internets We Did Not Build (David Clark) | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 69:24

The Internets We Did Not Build (David Clark)

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