William F. Garrity

By Rachel Courtland in the May1, 2008, issue of Nature: "Programs promise to end PDF paper-chase."

Researchers are buzzing about a new type of software that allows them to manage their research paper downloads from online journals much more effectively.

One of the most popular programs is Papers, a commercial offering released last year with a similar interface to iTunes, Apple’s successful music-file organizer. Papers and similar programs are able to read a file’s ‘metadata’ so that a batch of PDF (portable document format) files can be sorted by, for example, author, journal name or year. Users can add new files to their hard drives by ‘dragging and dropping’ or use the program to search and download directly from databases such as PubMed, IEEE Xplore and the arXiv preprint server.

Papers was developed by Alexander Griekspoor and Tom Groothuis, then working at the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. The idea was borne of the frustration they experienced in trying to sort and search papers they downloaded from online-access journals. Griekspoor refers to Papers as a “personal library of science” — the full text of papers in the library is indexed and easily searchable, he says.

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Mac only! 

Michael Schrage in the May/June 2008 issue of MIT's Technology Review publishes a piece about sites making "recommendations" to users, in shopping and otherwise.  Libraries should similarly recommend information resources to our clients. 

Recommendation Nation

Learning to love customers like you.

By Michael Schrage

I love books, I like music, and I don't mind the news. When I'm sent a link to something a friend thinks I should read, hear, or view, I take it seriously. Recommendations are essential to my quality of life.

It's a good thing I feel this way, because recommendations are everywhere on the Internet. Wherever I shop online, some sliver of my screen is prompting me with a come-hither like "Customers who bought this item also ... ." Pop-ups and context-sensitive advertisements have been supplemented by this low, seductive whisper of automated suggestion. The truth is that I now get more good recommendations about more things, more often, from Bayesian algorithms than from my best friends. Perhaps this should make me wistful, but it doesn't. Better tech­nology doesn't mean worse friends.

Unlike human recommenders, Apple.com, ­Amazon.com, and Google.com never insult me by implying that I spend my time, money, or attention on the wrong things. They're simply making relevant--and occasionally novel--recommendations based on my past choices and the things I attend to in real time. The focus of digital personalization has shifted from what I am interested in now to what I might be interested in next. All the choices I make in the moment are absorbed into a sphere of suggestion where, after they have been statistically weighted, they are reborn as offers and advice.

Increasingly, I find myself as curious about a site's recommendations as about what it sells. That a site is trying to sell me something else seldom annoys me. On the contrary, I like it that Internet companies have dedicated such ingenuity, memory, and processing power to offering me good suggestions. But "good" needs to get much better if recommendations are to expand beyond telling me what I might like right now.

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This post was brought to my attention by Tom M., a colleague in the Biomedical Libraries. 

EDUCAUSE is the association for higher education ICT.  It's an outstanding organization to track, and (I think) a model for a higher ed advocacy group.  (Were the Association of Research Libraries to be such!) 

Every year, EDUCAUSE publishes a list of the top issues of attention by campus ICT leaders.  Here's this year's list. 

1. Security
2. Administrative/ERP/Information Systems
3. Funding IT
4. Infrastructure
5. Identity/Access Management
6. Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity
7. Governance, Organization, and Leadership
8. Change Management
9. E-Learning / Distributed Teaching and Learning
10. Staffing / HR Management / Training

"Reality mining" is "... a twist on data mining that allows researchers to extract information from the usage patterns of mobile phones and other wireless devices."  See this article by Arik Hessesldahl, "A Rich Vein for 'Reality Mining'," in the May 5, 2008, BusinessWeek. 

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, U.S. officials quickly turned their attention to other potential targets, including California's Golden Gate Bridge. What would happen if terrorists took down the bridge between San Francisco and Marin County? How much of the region would be affected and for how long?

For insights, the Homeland Security Dept. turned to a Microsoft spin-off called Inrix. The startup analyzes data from satellite navigation gear that's widely installed on trucks and some cars to produce real-time traffic information, which it sells commercially. Parsing years of stored traffic data using proprietary software, Inrix was able to model not only the immediate impact of a Golden Gate Bridge catastrophe, but also how drivers in the region would work around it. In the model, the Bay Area pulls off an amazingly quick recovery. Within a few days, drivers understand what is happening and adapt to the new reality, says Inrix Chief Executive Bryan Mistele.

The technique Inrix used is called reality mining. It's a twist on data mining that allows researchers to extract information from the usage patterns of mobile phones and other wireless devices. Because these machines are almost always switched on and are constantly in contact with cellular base stations, they produce a persistent digital record of where the users are going, how long they stay, and who they come in contact with. Particularly when phones are equipped with global positioning system chips, they can generate precise location maps in phone company databases. Such trails are far more accurate than human beings' subjective accounts of their comings and goings.

The reality miners excel at dreaming up exotic applications. In addition to helping cities prepare for possible terrorist attacks, they have devised ways to ease traffic congestion; helped city planners find the best locations for schools, hospitals, and convention centers; and enabled all types of businesses—not least, phone companies—to improve customer service. In the future, reality mining may also allow health officials to track and contain outbreaks of infectious diseases. "There is so much societal good that can come from this," says Alex "Sandy" Pentland, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and reality mining pioneer. "Suddenly we have the ability to know what is happening with the mass of humanity."

A MARKETING BONANZA

Signals among phones and base stations can be detected by commercial sensing devices. But the detailed records of who is calling whom belong entirely to the phone companies. Right now, they make little use of that data, in part because they fear alienating subscribers worried about privacy infringement. But cellular operators have begun signing deals with business partners who are eager to market products based on specific phone users' location and calling habits. If reality mining catches on, phone companies' calling records will become precious assets. And these will only grow in value as customers use their phones to browse the Web, purchase products, and update their Facebook pages—and as marketers apply reality mining's toolkit to these activities.

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Peter Burrows in the May 12, 2008 BusinessWeek: "The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit:" 

More office workers infatuated with iPods and iPhones are demanding Macs. Is business ready? Is Apple?

Soon after Michele Goins became chief information officer at Juniper Networks (JNPR) in February, she decided to respond to the growing chorus of Mac lovers among the networking company's 6,100 employees. For years, many had used Apple's (AAPL) computers at home and clamored for them in the office as well. So she launched a test, letting 600 Juniper staffers use Macs instead of the standard-issue PCs that run Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows operating system. As long as the extra support costs aren't too high, she plans to open the floodgates. "If we opened it up today, I think 25% of our employees would choose Macs," she says.

Funny thing is, she has never received a single sales call from Apple. While thousands of other companies scratch and claw for the tiniest sliver of the corporate computing market, Apple treats this vast market with utter indifference. After a series of failed offensives by the company in the 1980s and 1990s, Chief Executive Steve Jobs decided to focus squarely on consumers and education customers when he returned to Apple in 1997. As a result, the company doesn't have ranks of corporate salespeople or armies of repairmen waiting to respond every time a hard drive fails. Nothing that could divert his minions from staying focused on Apple's core calling: creating the next cool thing for the world's consumers.

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