' ... without models there are no data. I'm not talking about the difference between "raw" and "cooked" data. I mean this literally. Today, no collection of signals or observations -- even from satellites, which can "see" the whole planet -- becomes global in time and space without passing through a series of models.'
A few pages on Edwards summarizes: "... everything we know about the world's climate -- past, present, and future -- we know through models."
This book distinguishes three types of computer models.
1. Simulation models that are built on physical theory. These use atmospheric physics to build numerical models to calculate large-scale atmospheric motion and predict the weather.
2. Reanalysis models that come from weather forecasting. These models also simulate the weather, but they also check their results with actual weather observations.
3. Data analysis models that are a collection of mathematical techniques, algorithms, and empirically derived adjustments to instrument readings.
In addition to these models, the socio-technical systems that have been developed to observe weather and climate make up a climate knowledge infrastructure. One further important observation is that this infrastructure and the models used to provide and analyze the data we have about weather and climate are constantly changing.
I have just started reading Edwards' book, but I am already taking one lesson from it: I need to understand how data and models inform what I accept as information and knowledge. As my friend Dennis Hamilton reminded me, "there are no uninterpreted data". Knowing how models and data yield information I can evaluate and use is one of those 21st Century required skills.
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There are three primary levels of usability properties: properties that enable discovery and access; properties that enable database instantiation; and properties that enable data analysis and data mashups. Dataset usability at each level requires a description of any restrictions on use; hence "Use restrictions" is the "+1" property. For example, minimal usability of a dataset requires the ability to find it and access it. Once accessed, a dataset's fitness for use can be determined. The presence of a README file with at least simple contact information is proposed as a basic usability requirement.
The "Scale" and "Meter" columns provide descriptions of appropriate and practicable metrics. Some simple metrics for the Discovery Properties are suggested. The metrics for Database and Data Analysis properties are areas of investigation. Please let us know what you think.
UPDATE1: the full Dataset Usability Properties spreadsheet is available as an Infochimps dataset .
UPDATE2: hat tip to Tom and Kai Gilb.
UPDATE3: the latest version of the spreadsheet . Image updated.
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As a panelist I had the opportunity to listen to everyone else and I have a few reflections to share.
First, some background. The Facebook Groups in Business Investigation (FGIBI) was a short empirical study of how a small number of businesses used Facebook Groups as part of their business strategies. It was a completely volunteer effort, convened by Jenny Ambrozek and Victoria Axelrod from 21st Century Organizations, and Bill Anderson from Praxis101. Jenny started with one known Facebook connection and within a few weeks we'd gathered 10 participant groups from 6 countries on 4 continents, established a set of research advisors, and a process for ongoing data collection for 12 consecutive weeks. Speaking for myself I was prepared for the effort needed to keep it going, but pleased that sharing the effort among the three convenors, and with support from the advisors, made it tractable. This was a collaboration, and couldn't have been done any other way.
Three of the study particpants were able to participate as webinar panelists and provided thoughts on their own business use of Facebook groups. In addition to the material in the slide deck, the following ideas stood out to me.
Eric Edelstein's Facebook Group eSquared Fashion focused strictly on marketing and sales. Eric's very honest assessment of Facebook groups in business? It's more work than you think. Facebook Fanclubs might be a better internet marketing venue. The best outcome is when the fans pitch in on marketing and promotion. Eric's experience is that internet marketing gets more exciting the more you put into it. So, get out there!
Kimberly Samaha ran five different groups focused on energy and sustainability (The Bordeaux Energy Colloquium was one group). She experimented with several innovative activties and interventions, as well as learning to weave networks from existing groups. The slide deck has the details of the activities, outcomes, and conclusions. Kimberly mentioned that social networking behaviors are often not viewed as business and professional behaviors. Is this changing? What are the contexts? These kinds of distinctions need more research and discussion.
Francois Goisseaux's Marketing 2.0 Facebook Group was the largest and, because of its size, quickly ran into Facebook group communication limits.* Francois attributes the growth of his group to providing a weekly event, what he called a "heartbeat" (a word with many associations). He also speculated that the name "Marketing 2.0" also attracted people who wanted their Facebook profile to be associated with the moniker "Marketing 2.0". Names matter, and the impact of identity politics on business uses of social networking platforms is another area that deserves further research.
Jenny Ambrozek summarized the shared investigation experiences noting that social networking and group work is never free. And even though I often expect activity to just happen, someone (or some ones) need to "architect the magic". By themselves, new tools, concepts, and work practices can't make anything happen. We need to "architect the magic". Now that sounds like fun.
Let us know your thoughts.
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* In an e-mail yesterday from the American Association for the Advancement of Science Facebook Group I learned that the Facebook group messaging limit has been increased to 5000. (The networks have ears.)
Technorati Tags: business, experience, experiment, Facebook, social-marketing, social-networks, Web2.0
]]>From December 2007 until March 2008, Jenny Ambrozek, Victoria Axelrod, and Bill Anderson, convened a study on the use of Facebook Groups in Business. Now the study conveners and participants will be reflecting on their experiences and learnings in a Webinar on Wed., June 25 at 3 p.m. EST over at The App Gap titled "Should Your Business Be Friends with Facebook?"
Whether you're a Facebook fan, skeptic, or bystander, consider joining us -- I know we will learn something together.
Technorati Tags: business, experiment, Facebook, Web2.0, social-networks, social-marketing
]]>Here's the summary of the second day presentations (day one summaries).
The University of North Texas is reaching out to the community to help build the metadata for their rescuing Texas history project. With about one hour of training and ongoing guidance volunteers are creating the metadata for the collection. The interaction among the volunteers when they work together is similar to a knitting circle. This is a good thing. It's not about control. Engaging and guiding volunteer efforts is how libraries can build collections.
At Texas A&M University, the preservation of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin reveals just how much work is required to turn paper into a useful digital resource. The work of scanning, reviewing the quality of the results, managing the names of individual image files, creating the metadata, etc., is tedious. It's good to be reminded just how tedious it can be.
Texas Tech University has built a digital assembly line to step up to their scanning and digitization work load. They are diligent about documenting their practices, processes, and policies, and their experience provides a benchmark for how to build a high-quality, high-volume scanning center. One tip on improving worker ability is to use quality control as a learning tool. (As I fix my own errors I learn not to make them again.)
John Leggett, TDL co-director, showed a live demo of "Vireo", a Manakin front-end to TDL that supports the deposit of, and access to, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). ETDs are good candidates for an institutional repository (IR). They need to be published and curated. They are born digital. For the TDL to support all member institutions the repository must accommodate a variety of procedures, policies and practices. The Vireo ETD service does all this and more. It serves as a learning object itself. The software engineering tradeoffs required to put Vireo into production provide valuable lessons for future IR applications.
The development and growth in the Shibboleth Federation since last year is impressive; currently there are 13 member institutions. This year's presentation highlighted the work done in building the federation, establishing the social bonds of trust, and the requisite technical operations. Furthermore, the commitment of the TDL team to implement and support the Lone Star Education and Research Network (LEARN) demonstrates how the TDL is establishing itself. A technical "Shibboleth Install-fest" will be held 14-15 July at UTexas Austin. Contact TDL for more information.
The conference ended with a call for the TDL to consider being open to all Texans (for a start), not just those with academic affiliations. This proposal grows from Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks argument about what can be called "long tail peer production". The Shibboleth work shows what it takes to provide secure, easy, and legal access to a federated library. I think it's work we should take on. And where are the resources for this?
The need for explicit resources to support the continuing development of the TDL was one theme of this year's conference. Now that projects and working groups are established and making progress, it is crucial to insure that they don't become "after work hours" activities. The visibiity of the TDL can help support its funding. That's my hope.
And finally, the plan is to hold the third TCDL held next year in conjunction with the 2009 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, which will be held in Austin. More opportunities for social networking; more visibility for TDL. In this case more is better.
UPDATE: It was pointed out that I did not include a summary of the Vireo demonstration. Mea culpa. It was in my conference notes. Another lesson for me: haste makes waste.
Technorati Tags: Austin, digital-libraries, learning, practice, systems, TCDL, web
]]>The second TCDL started with a keynote by Mark Leggott from the University of Prince Edward Island on "Virtual Research Environments". At PEI Mark and his collegues have developed a Virtual Research Environment that supports administration, learning, and research. They work in an agile and iterative way, building and learning as they go. The vision Mark has for the repository and it's supporting infrastructure is to be an invisible foudation to all areas of academic activity. It's an ambitious goal, but they seem to be achieving it. Although much of the content requires a login for access it's still worth checking out.
Mark Leggott made several points. First, research and teaching are not orthogonal, but rather on a continuum. There's no reason why fresh research results can't be accessed the next day by students for class assignments. Second, library and information management expertise is needed to help manage newly created research data, not just the published results. And third, with the tools and practices they have established at PEI it's possible to populate an institutional repository with 60% of faculty output with no faculty input. Libraries do not need to wait for faculty participation to get started. A tipping point may not be that hard to create. Finally, the PEI VRE is integrating Fedora, Drupal, and Moodle to build their services. Much can be learned from this project.
Here's a summary of the rest of the first day's presentations:
Texas Tech University is focusing on library outreach. They are prototyping Meebo as a way to implement an "Ask a Librarian" function. They are making changes ... stay tuned.
At Texas A&M University the Energy Systems Lab has constructed an online digital collection that is a model of both well documented content and development of skill and expertise.
The Texas A&M TDL Bridge Group reported on their first year of operation and laid out the real work of educating librarians and faculty on both institutional repositories and the TDL. Short story? It's real work.
At UT Dallas the library is working with researchers and faculty to provide access to datasets in management and social sciences. The library is accomodating the demands for data, but as you might imagine, it's not the easiest journey for any of the participants (researchers, librarians, and data providers).
At UT Austin tools are being developed to bring the library to users where they are. LibX, OpenSearch, a Facebook app, and an iGoogle gadget, have been developed to provide user access to the UT libraries. This is the "build it and bring it to them" model -- it looks good!
The Texas State Library and Archives Commission is working on making metadata that can support interoperability among systems. Sometimes choosing what is simplest to implement is the best choice, even when cool features are left out.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center is training librarians and faculty about the ramifications of the recent NIH mandate for deposit of research output into PubMed Central. This is a big deal. Compliance and consequences? These are empirical questions.
At UT Austin's School of Information, tools are being developed to provide rich markup and access to video materials. Quinn Stewart from the iSchool has been developing courses to teach digitization of video materials. The tools enable marking contents, indicies, and specific objects in videos. It's hard to underestimate how useful this might be.
Baylor University reported on a Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. The content collection and description work is excellent. The 30 second gospel music sample just blew me away. The one downside of this project is that all the music is locked up because the copyright issues are not clear. That's a loss.
The University of North Texas described their work with Archival Resource Keys. ARKs are a standard way of providing a persisitent naming scheme for digital information objects. An ARK provides a link to an object, its metadata record, and its available service agreements. This is an interesting project. Being able to query an object about what services it can provide is particularly interesting. But it's also creating (yet) another unique and persistent web identifier we all need to know and care about. I'd like to know the thinking that decided that DOIs and PURLs aren't good enough. I know, we're still in the early days of computers, inter-networks, etc.
So that's the end of day one. Day two promises more operational stories and an open forum. I know that a proper blog post should have URLs for all the sites and resources mentioned. I'll provide an online link to the conference presentations as soon as I have one.
Technorati Tags: Austin, digital-libraries, learning, TCDL, systems, web
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I'm not alone with this experience or, curiously, with feeling irked by it. I'm not sure why I like Twitter so much. That in itself is of interest.
Today Tim Bray suggested "Twitterbucks", a subscription business model for Twitter. I found that I would pay a subscription fee to use Twitter. I didn't even hesitate. So I do think it's valuable.
Do you? Would you pay? Take Tim's simple survey.
Technorati Tags: experience, business, social-networks, social-web, Twitter, user_experience
]]>It's the same with a computer system. I expect (or want to expect) the system to take responsibility for it's part of the interaction. After all, I'm relying on the computer when I'm paying bills online, or buying a book from Amazon, or even posting to my blog and pinging Technorati. And if I'm ever going to be able to feel comfortable with using the computer, then the builders of these systems and applications need to step up and demonstrate trustworthiness. Let's write software that takes responsibility for its own actions. Follow up when things don't go as expected. And when it's appropriate, let me know that all went well. Seriously, I need software that can help me take care of my part of the interactions. Systems are getting more complex and complicated. I think the whole computer-human-computer interaction thing would be better if the systems took some responsibility for their actions.
I know this isn't easy. But with all the recent news about software that can tell if I'm lying, or when I can be interrupted, or ..., it doesn't sound that hard. So this is a request to all systems architects and developers and service providers. Build trustworthy applications -- demonstrate that we all need to be responsible participants in this system we call the Internet.
Technorati Tags: development, HCI, software, systems, trust, trustworthiness
]]>I also wanted to get away from my customized templates. They were fun to learn about, but mostly I want to read and write. I do not want to learn CSS. So the plan was (1) upgrade from Version 3.2 to 3.36; (2) change to a more standard, freely available style; (3) upgrade to Version 4.1; (4) change to an even better looking style.
All this has been accomplished. The platform and database upgrades seem to have gone very well indeed. It's always a bit unnerving when the database tables are being updated and time ... is ... passing ... and ..... But it worked. Thanks to MT for providing a reliable process for that.
But when it came to trying to change the blog styles, well that was a different story. My final process was to export the blog content (for each blog), create a new blog, import the blog content, rename new blog to old blog (we do want to keep that indexed URL working, we really do), and delete the old blog. It takes a bit of fiddling with the filesystem as well as complete republication of the blog. This last can be time consuming and my ISP sent me e-mail asking about the CPU usage with mt.cgi.
What finally took the cake for me is that the import preserved the author name on all the posts except for the ones I wrote. What is that about? I think I have a solution, but it's going to require republishing all files. My ISP is gonna love me.
I know that this can be easy for many. And I'm sure I make my own problems sometimes. But there's a good deal of information that's not documented. For example, my ISP sets my umask such that files I download and create only have user access. It's a safe choice. But now I need to reset the permissions for all the MT files. Are only the .cgi files executable? Are *all* the other files just set to read-write? What permissions are required for files in the "tools" directory? are they executables? This is all clerical work and should be in a script or written down. There is documentation about making .cgi files executable, but nothing about what the permissions of all the other files are expected to be.
But I'll bet that my context is different than yours. I think that many (not all) systems admin problems are local. And what's needed most to work locally is hints about the dependencies that are so obvious to software developers that they never write them down. It's hard to do this because it doesn't seem needed. But I'm coming to realize that system administration tasks need to be the best documented primary because they're not done every day. If I'm lucky I won't be upgrading my blog platform for a year or more. And when I do that I'll be looking at all the notes I've made this time.
2008-04-12 UPDATE: typos, typos, and more typos. Learn to proofread, Bill.
Technorati Tags: MovableType, system_admin, user_experience
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Make Your Art Work for You was a core conversation session at SXSW 2008 with about 40 attendees. Artists came out of the tech woodwork to attend this session. The conversation pooled the group's experiences with creating art and distributing artworks including visual art, poetry, books, music and film. These various arts have rich social networks within each artform but rarely talk across disciplines unless directly collaborating, such as a book illustrator with a writer. This conversation illustrated the rich promise for social networking around the creative process as well as around the business of distributing art.
]]>I'm a good notetaker. I can type fast, do the amanuensis thing, and produce a near transcript. But I'm getting tired of the attention split that's required to listen and write notes. At this years SXSW Interactive my colleague Honoria Starbuck created notes combining watercolor painting and haiku-like text. She calls it live art blogging. Several of these are posted here, here, and here.
These paintings inspired me try taking notes by free association and writing haiku as the sessions unfolded. The results are below in time-reversed order by session (i.e., as you read down you move back in time).
Three things struck me about this process. First, by looking at these short poems I can remember exactly what the speaker(s) were saying. Second, by allowing my mind to respond associatively to the session I was able to listen and think simultaneously and create new connections. Third, because one and two above I feel confident that I will be able to recall the gist of the sessions just by re-reading the haiku. This, of course, is an empirical question about the future. I might be sadly disappointed by my actual recollections. I'm going to hedge this bet and add notes ... soon.
Here are the haiku:
March 11, 2008
Futurists Sandbox (2):
Your social footprint. / Or your ghost on the network. / You have to choose one.
Futurists Sandbox (1):
Copyright gone wrong. / Free culture movement; / Roller girl rescue.
Roll Over Gutenberg:
The New York Times web / Crashes; what will happen next? / We’re not pallbearers.
McGonigal keynote (2):
Happiness research. / Everyone wants to be happy. / Or maybe just safe.
McGonigal keynote (1):
Mobability. / Alternate realities. / Develop instincts.
Visualizing sustainability (3):
Bottom up. Bootstrap / New words for how we live. / I need to reach down.
Visualizing sustainability (2):
Show me the green / Look at the city’s worknet. / See my life cycle.
Visualizing sustainability (1):
Daily life data. / Virtual worlds; record / My footprints on earth.
Future of corporate blogs:
The right way to blog. / Respond to comments right now. / There is no buffer.
March 10 2008
True stories from social media:
Twitter is social / Tell me what you are doing / But please keep it short.
Internationalization panel:
Lost in translation: / It takes real work for global / Web conversation.
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Annex 1: My note taking process.
I listened until a word or phrase or sentence caught me. I wrote that down, listened further, waited for or sought out associated thoughts and words. Sometimes the phrase or thought had five syllables so it became the first or last line. If I had enough material I then began constructing the other lines. Some came together quickly. Some took longer. I used the rhythm of the session to force a finish. I look at this method as a way to capture ideas from a moment in the moment -- I don't think it would work to finish the poem later.
In fact, as I look at these haiku today I want to make changes in words and punctuation; I want better poetry. But I'll just leave them as they are -- my notes from SXSW Interactive 2008.
Annex 2: Another example of visual note-taking is Mike Rhode's collection of SXSW 2008 sketchnotes.
Update: couldn't resist adding the final syllable to an incomplete haiku. Sometimes rushing to the finish yields errors.
Technorati Tags: communication, culture, notes, practice, free-association, SXSW2008, visualization
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Because we are influenced more by each other than by the brand it is important to tap into the immersive social powers of the web.
1. Create pluckable information that is easy to share.
2. All departments have different constituents and should talk to them. Conduct 2-way personal conversations.
3. What we hear from each other is more important that what we hear from the brand.
In line with Shiv's research, Praxis101 develops custom and increasingly descriptive and predicting engagement metrics for each client.
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Guy Kawasaki facilitated a panel of creators and users of social sites to reflect on three aspects of their experiences with social media.
1. Tell a story about what went wrong.
2. What made you successful?
3. What would you have done differently.
"I would have hired someone who knew math".
"Stay two steps ahead of volunteer burnout -- because they will wander off."
"Get your clients to blog about you."
"Plan less -- plan for iteration."
"Controversy adds traffic."
"Twitter puts me in touch with friggin' thought leaders."
Watercolor Live Blogging by Honoria Starbuck.
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