Joohyun's fluency blog

Digital Nugget: digital identity and password

2005-12-01T05:19:00.000-08:00

40% of helpdesk calls are related to password problems by ZDNet's ZDNet Research -- According to Passlogix, roughly 40% of calls made to corporate help-desks are related to password problems. 220,000 USPS employees made 30,000 calls each month to have their passwords reset, Business Week says.

This means management of passwords securely is getting more and more complicated as more and more crucial websites you register. Passwords are keys to your digital identity assigned to each website. As long as registration to Korean websites are concerned, it is required that I should enter my resident registration number, which is comparable with social security number in the United States. Therefore, your password is a key to your most important information as a citizen.

My strategy of memorizing crucial passwords is to record them into a password-secured application in my PDA. It is ironic that I still have to learn THE password to have approach to my passwords. Keeping key to my personal identity information by safe password is needed to avoid possible identity theft.

Digital Nugget: Pittsburgh Bloggers

2005-11-17T22:27:00.000-08:00

Pittsburgh Webloggers

This site is a good example of blogsphere of a certain type: regional bloggers. Bloggers from the great Pittsburgh are welcome to register their own blogs for free on this site. Pittsburgh Webloggers aims to form an on-line community, and to go ahead into an off-line community in the future. While blogs are known as connecting physically dispersed people by comments and trackbacks, they can also be buds of a regional community where gatherings of the similar location, category, description can take places.

Digital Nugget: Copyright management

2005-11-13T08:34:00.000-08:00

Freshmen orientation includes copyright and plagiarism. Too much attenion might not be enought when the literary piracy can result in serious legal problems. Contents on the World Wide Web as well requires extra causions in creditting their creators. There are a variety of ways developed in order to catch out the improper attempt of copying even a short part of other works.

However, movements such as the Free Culture questioned this strict full application of the copyright, and suggested lighter levels of licenses. My previous posting on the Creative Commons is a representative example. We can search contents licensed as free to use, share, or modify, even commercially registered on the Creative Commons website with embedded Google and Yahoo search engines for works being licensed less heavily. Those two search engines embrace this as valid that their advanced search options also include the "usage rights": as seen in the Google Advanced Search and Yahoo!'s advanced web search.

As seen above, there is an option for filtering search results with certain usage rights. Default value refers to the general search. Four levels of different licensed contents are: free to use or share, free to use or share even commercially, free to share or modify, and free to share or modify even commercially.

Yahoo!s advanced web search has featured this as searching against the Creative Commons website. On the while, Google's usage rights search does not directly mentions of the site. I guess it searches broadly for the sites that contain the CC license notice sentences. Google's option is more in detail, too. Therefore, let's go to Google advanced search to find out some free articles.

Digital Nugget: Creative Commons license

2005-11-10T11:32:00.000-08:00

I really enjoyed reading Lessig's Free Culture mostly because I am juggling with potential copyright issues lurking around the Wikipedia in University project. I became his fan at reading his reasobable assertion on the dominance of permission culture, and how he has fought for the free culture (and has lost before.) As a sign of showing my agreement and support, I decided to put the CC (Creative Commons) license mark on my blog. Creative Commons, where Lessig is a chairman, suggested bloggers like you and me a way to choose to what level of rights we endow to the readers of our blogs, and also to let them know the choice. Click here to find out how to do it. I have selected the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, which you can see on the left down.

Along with the CC website, you can also read a brief but penetrating article by Laura Gordon-Murnane, Intranet Webmaster of the Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. Its title is "Generosity and Copyright: Creative Commons and Creative Commons Search Tools." You will learn about searching creative commons content here, too.

Milestone 10: Algorithmic Thinking

2005-11-02T02:22:00.000-08:00

Have I been algorithmic in my life, not knowing it being referred to as such? No when I recall how I tried to solve my PC problems: I tried this after another until things work out by chance. I think the ability of human brain to process multiple thoughts almost synchronously lessened the need of algorithmic thinking. However, my answer can become yes if I pay a little more attention to each step I take when in act because I cannot do multiple things synchronously. In Korea, we call such people who seem to have acquired algorithmic thinking by nature as the "men of engineers' mind." I believe anyone can learn how to get familiar with such mindset.

Algorithmic thinking makes you more "fluent" in digital environment because it is the way machines including personal computers understand and process human input and command. They say computers cannot deal with ambiguity: therefore, the possibility of different interpretations should be removed or minimized by formalization or dividing workflow into single activities. It is the ultimate potential of PC to be able to facilitate complex human thinking. Researches of artificial intelligence and expert system are serving this purpose, even though there are long way to go...

ps. I add this after Yang's presentation on the pathway her team took in designing near-duplicate detection in letters with aid of computers. What seemed like a 'magic (according to Yang)' at the first glance turned out to comprise of segmented procedures. I know similar approaches in clustering text corpus for better search and retrieval in the information science. Yes, digital technology is amazing as it can serve in various areas with diverse aims.

Digital Nugget: Ill side effect of Hactivism

2005-10-29T03:57:00.000-07:00

I am adding my belated two cents here about Hacktivism because I have read an interesting Hacktivism story aroused by nationalism among Asian countries.

August 15th is Korean Independence Day because Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945. Not only Korea but other nearby Asian countries also commemorate this day as the national memorial of the end of the World War II.

In celebration the 60th year of the end of the war on last August 15th, and as a protest to the recent Japanese nostalgic movement toward its imperialistic period, a group of Chinese hackers (or Hacktivists) had attacked Japanese official sites and Yasukuni shrine website. This news has the detail of actual sabotage at http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=13424. According to this news, most hackings involved with Denial of Service (DOS) by making unusually heavy server traffic.

I am concerned that Chinese hackers implicated Korean servers to detour the IP addresses of their own country previously banned by Japanese. Isn't this worth an obvious case of Hacktivism side-effect or drawback? Apart from the fact I agree with Jon that they are wrong as they break copyright of others’ websites, what I see as riskier is that they seem to justify their wrongdoing as they abuse their cause. If I Imagine a Japanese website administrator under attack figures out the origin of malicious service requests, and then bans the entire IP bandwidth, then implicated servers in Korea may be blindly accused and banned for Hacktivism even though they have nothing to do with the virtual attack of the Chinese hacking group. What is lost for nothing is free access and mutual communication channel across the East Sea between Japan and Korea, when Hactivism from the third country intervenes above being moderate. I, therefore, think that Hactivism's adverse side effects are so huge that it cannot justify its cause, how effective their unproven shocking impact may be.

Nugget: Information Poor & Information Don't Care - a Librarian's View

2005-10-27T04:42:00.000-07:00

Jessamyn West, an activist librarian in Vermont and an editor of Librarian.netwhich is a site for connecting library professionals to information all over the Internet, gave a presentation on the "Information Poor & the Information Don't Care: Small Libraries and the Digital Divide yesterday" on Oct 26, 2005. The content is as interesting as its title itself. In her slides, she quoted the Pew report on the Digital Divide in the United States and Vermont Telecommunications plan to illustrate the demographic contrasts of digital divide. She commented on what good and what side effects public access computing libraries provide to the public might have, while suggesting possible solutions. This would enrich the "Information Poor" with free and well-aided access to the Internet. On the while, there are another group of people who are lack of interest in information, even in libraries. It was unique that she attributed this phenomenon not only to the poor user interface and technical support, but also partly to the filtering by the USA Patriot Law and copyright enforcement. I think the latter attribution of the 'information don't care' to filtering and copyright enforcement is hasty or farfetched because patrons' holding back of further use of information is preceded by the curiosity for information being aroused. It might happen when patrons come to the library to find out and evaluate information regardless of gaps or extortions.

Milestone 9: Principles of Computer Operation

2005-10-25T21:01:00.000-07:00

Snyder Chapter 9. Following Instructions: Principles of Computer Operation

The chapter on the principles of computer operation is the most difficult to keep up because it is full of jargons and definitions. Supposedly, there are two attitudes towards machinery: my geeky friend bluffs that he intuitively understands how a certain mechanic works just by looking at or playing with it for a short while. The opposite attitude is in a person like me; given no manual, what I usually can do is to turn it on and off. Am I FIT, or not FIT, then? How FIT do you have to be in order to become a digital citizen?

A few weeks ago, my personal computer at home started to malfunction from time to time. Windows of the Internet Explorer vanish at once with no warning, for example. My friend advises me that "it is time to format and re-install the OS and all the applications, blaming Microsoft and, technology." As I read this chapter of computer operation principles, I came to wonder where in the process of computer operation is my PC's trouble located. Actually, I am clueless. Even though I know this problem will be gone once I format and re-install the entire system, I do not feel like I am competitively FIT, and/or 'computer-literate'. I ask myself again: am I FIT, or not FIT, then? How FIT do I have to be in order to become a digital citizen?

When I looked at this and our colleague students' blogs on blogger.com, I think I have a reasonable answer. We do not have to know the HTML, web server hosting, file transfer protocol, and many other 'system' knowledge once we sign up for any of the ready-made blog services. A large portion of IT skills and knowledge are not crucial elements of being literate in IT. You may want to learn more about it as your experience and motivation deepen; but, computer operation principles are not core but appendix key to your literacy in IT, in my opinion. The skill to find out and locate the most appropriate software program for your use may be enough for you to be literate in IT. However, if you want to be fluent in IT, the depth of your knowledge on programming for software and inner transactions of computer operations may also be taken seriously.

Digital Nugget: Yahoo! opened podcast search (beta)

2005-10-23T12:08:00.000-07:00

It is amazing how the Internet broadcast is spreading out to draw offline world's attention. I remember there has been people who published the opinions they have recorded, played favorite or requested music, or did interviews with a variety of people out of bigger telecommunication's scope since the emergence of the network. Faster network communication speed and lower cost of access to the Internet and buying tools for recording made this trend widely acknowledged. Whoever wants to share their thought can does it. Even I can start podcasting with my iTalk and iPod right now! Apparently, more speech on politics are to be made public. Now that Yahoo! opened podcast search at http://podcasts.yahoo.com/, it will make podcast a stronger media with lower barrier by enabling users to search, to see podcasts of similar themes, and to rate podcasts.

Milestone 8: Bits & Bytes

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

Snyder Chapter 8; Bits and the "Why" of Bytes

My initial reading stance of this chapter of "digits" is as follows.

Bytes are familiar because they are the units of natural language processing for automatic sorting and indexing in the realm of information science.
I also love metadata since they contain information about the particular data.

After reading this chapter, I cannot immediately think of any chance I will use this knowledge, aside from the brilliant analogy of symbols, binary, and sidewalk memory. But, hexa-decimal numbers appeared in front of my eyes again with the need of '16-bit Unicode representation.' It is core knowledge of representing Asian languages including Korean, my mother tongue.

Metadata is also a great theme to ponder. The example of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) shows tags surrounding a specific word endowing semantic meanings in the context. Snyder called such tags as 'structure tags,' since they may represent the structural meaning of the word in the paragraphs. While html tags are more about decorating the outer look of the document, structural tags are more about giving contextual meaning to the components (words) from the document. Therefore, I would call the structure tags enhancing semantics of the document.

Digital Nugget: Effort to "bridge digital divide" in the U.K.

2005-10-17T20:23:00.000-07:00

Compressed air could help bridge digital divide

BT, dominant telecommunication company in the U.K., is trying to wire up rural areas with broadband services by the latest fibre optic cable technology that enables "high speed using compressed air" at low cost because it can run merely using existing telephone poles. This technology is called as "droptube," which is a "lightweight tube through which up to four fibres [...] are blown at high speed using compressed air." This is currently beta-tested at several suburban cities.

Reading this short article I came across while hunting digital governance nugget, I felt kind of mixed feelings. News story writer wrote that "such a move could help reduce the cost of make bringing high-speed connections to rural areas." This is a meaningful initial step to bridge digital divide of access. As we have read in Muhlberger's paper, there remain the second divide of "skill" and "motivation." that matter when access is not a problem any more. Commercial efforts to support wired backbone of provinces should accompany with skill education and promotion toward local residents in order for them to embrace and enjoy the high-speed Intenet in their lives.

Milestone 7: Errors and debugging

2005-10-17T17:06:00.000-07:00

I have created my first personal homepage on the 25th of December, 1997. It consisted of html codes written with a commercial web editor application. I remember how proudly I have uploaded html files and image files in jpeg/gif formats through somewhat primitive web interface back then. I asked my friend a favor since his department office owned a photo scanner. I searched for its traces at wayback machine here.

Since then, continual tides of technical progress have been swept the Web and its users in and away. However, most of my knowledge in error-correcting and debugging has been gained from editing html source files with a plain text editor. Now I can recall the trial and error I have been through in running a personal webpage was a good pathway to be digitally literate. The know-how of the debugging came to me from my experience of creating and editing html codes, acquiring and retouching images/multimedia files, acquiring and editing web-based application packages, and uploading and downloading files using an ftp application for eight years.

Digital Nugget: Reason behind angry voices

2005-10-11T03:47:00.000-07:00

On the first day of October, there was a murder in a classroom of middle school in a southern city of Korea. Hong, a 14-year-old second-year middle school student, mistakingly hit Choi, his classmate, by a paperback while meaning to hand it to another friend. Choi got mad at being hit that he beat Hong repeatedly to death. Choi was reportedly a bully of the five adjacent schools including his own.

Strange it seems, news media stay relatively silent at this socially critical issue. It was Korean bloggers who got louder at this case with angry voices when mass media was reluctant to deal with this, and Naver, one of the biggest internet portal services in Korea, even tried to delete every blog posting related with Choi's murder case.

Will this uproar on the web influence on the aftermath? It seems at least certain that mass media couldn't help noticing an antipathy against their passive attitude to this case. Besides, there are a number of complicated issues including privacy, freedom of speech, and delinquency. Should the privacy of murderer be secured by means of supressing individual blog entries on the Internet? Is the extraordinary protection of Choi unjustifiable if it has anything to do with the power of Choi's family? Suspicions and rumors spread while nobody on Choi's side speak in public. The role of blogs as counter-media in the realm of democracy is working right now to many directions at the same time. I believe the ethics related with on-line blogging with opinion on individual cases are to be discussed, as well as the murder case and its punishment itself.

Milestone 6: online research

2005-10-05T21:36:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed reading chapter six of Snyder since the author's description of the pathway of performing a 'curiosity-driven research' through internet resources seemed quite meticulous enough for me to consider it as academic research (at lighter level, maybe). The most different aspect of the case study was the effort to access the authenticity and authority of the resources. It is required of the online research because it does not assure traditional assumption that information in print is to bear a certain level of reliability. I used to evaluate the reputation of website as a prime criteria in assessing authority of online information. However, it needs taking other factors into account according to the case study. It was also remarkable that the author classifies information resources into the primary and the secondary. This case study showed valuable systemic approach towards the online research, which applies larger than traditional information resources such as books and journals.

This is a picture of "Buckminster Fuller" I have located with the romanization of his name against google image search. I guess this is another strategy to find out the secondary sources in other language than the mother tongue of a certain foreign figure of your interest.

Digital Nugget: Gmail interface- "Lost in translation"

2005-10-02T20:30:00.000-07:00

Google has grown so much to expand outside of the states. Its logo on the top of google.com often changes in memory of renowned events or figures worldwide. It sometimes celebrates specific national holidays. For example, it featured chestnuts and rice-cakes in celebration of Chusok, Korean thanksgiving day on the 15th of September. Gmail, among its various beta services, provides ample storage and option of numerous interface language. I, of course, chose Korean language since it is my mother tongue.

Gmail's automatic disposal of spam messages works quite great that I rarely get annoying spam messages in my inbox. I sometimes click Spam folder with hundreds of spam mails to enjoy their desperate titles and then destroy them at once. Well, I do this for fun even though messages that have been in Spam more than thirty days are automatically deleted anyway.

Here is a screen-shot of my Spam folder. I received forty one spam messages today! I select and delete them all. A notice appears in the center of the screen. Wait, something doesn't seem alright.

The notice reads as "Oh yes, there is no spam mail at GMAIL!" It is not true. I have seen forty one of them just five seconds ago. I decided to change language option to English to see the original notice.

Simple 'Hooray, no spam here!' became 'Oh yes, there is no spam at Gmail!' only to give wrong impression that Gmail boasts of what it does not offer.

This is only an example of errors in translation I have found out actually. Some of them have already corrected while others remain as shown in my example. I expect those will be corrected during beta. While Google tries hard to enrich their service areas globally, it is significant to develop interface in other languages than English.

Milestone 5: Information

2005-09-27T17:51:00.000-07:00

Chap. 5: Searching for truth: Locating Information on the WWW

Reading this chapter about searching and locating information on the World Wide Web seems so familiar because it is so similar with my undergraduate course: 'Information Retrieval." I think all the information retrieval strategies I need to know I learned at that time, and it overlaps the suggestions in Snyder book. However, this chapter mainly discusses searching for information on the WWW as the source of searching, unlike the class in the past. I had better check the 'site map,' where the hierarchical organization of each source is provided, because it helps you to locate the very information of your purpose at the appropriate depth of hierarchy.

While I am accustomed to format queries, evaluating the site's publisher to validate whether it is hoax or not is a new lesson. A two-step IP check for the site's publisher against the InterNIC site and WhoIs Server (147) is how you can find out the legitimacy of a site and information on the site as well. In addition, this check process is also valuable method to check whether an online seller's website is hoax or not. Whether commercial or non-commercial, use of the Internet requires sharper concerns of digital citizens.

Milestone 4: HTML

2005-09-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

HTML is a nice way of marking-up natural language with tags and attributes. I focus on the function of tagging with meanings rather than tagging with display features. For example, it seems greater capability of entitling how a certain phrase functions by enclosing it inside of certain tags such as <title>. Not only HTML viewers, but also people sitting behind them can easily recognize the phrase as a title. It is simple and efficient way to transfer semantic contexts piggybacked over the language itself. In the same sense, I also find eight <head> tags and definitional lists tags fascinating. Their functions have a lot of potential for structural retrieval using textual organization as well.

Hooray I used the escape symbols to display brackets above that are not allowed from blogger.com service! They work.

Milestone 3: HCI and digital landscape

2005-09-20T18:40:00.000-07:00

Just as the eloquent explanation at the beginning of the chapter 2 of Snyder, skills for computer use were not what I learned by nature. Unlike today's kids, I was not familiar with the personal computers in my early K-12 school days. Personal computers have become a part of my life since I entered the University at the age of 18. I was highly motivated to be a master of my 386 labtop at that time because I had to hand in most of my reports typed with a word processor, and I could make lots of net-pals on a network via a VT emulator. The more I know about technology related with PC, the better user I could become. So, I did not hesitate to find out how to solve any obstacle I faced in using my labtop.

While text-based operation and navigation took much time and efforts to get familiar, the emergence of the GUI has made learning much easier. More intuitive approach was enabled by designing applications look more like the actual machines of smiliar functions. It was enough for general users to "click around (Snyder, 43-5)" to learn functions of new applications. One thing I want to point out is that at least you have to be aware not to click "yes" when a new window pops up asking you to "format everything," or to "pay with your credit card." Even though nothing truly breaks the PC as Snyder pointed out when you click around, this is a piece of new common-sense amonbg computer users to protect their assets and hard-worked files. (I once formatted my floppy diskette where I stored all my personal writings by mistake ten years ago.)

Protecting my emotional and intellectual self as well as others is an important issue. I believe most 'netiquettes' are compatible with 'etiquette,' Assuming computers' instability, I believe double-backup of files into separate storing media and on the web during and after working with PC is a part of the best practice I should keep for the lifetime.

Milestone 2: Network and Privacy

2005-09-20T13:43:00.000-07:00

People are more interconnected via the networked computers without geographic limits. I am one of the beneficiaries of the network because I can keep in contact with my family and friends in different continents more easily through IM and voice-over-IP phone services. Therefore, I agree that people are more interconnected thanks to network. On the while, depth of the overall relationships with acquaintance and thinned down because you can express yourself neither being identified nor being responsible. Networked communication is criticized as being drier and more superficial than traditional methods because it relies mainly on written text that therefore is deprived of the subtlety such as facial expressions or voice tones. Recently, 'Ack-ple,' a newly-coined word for malignant comments to original news articles or blog postings by anonymities, raised a serious issues in Korea because a guy in the late 20's committed suicide after reading an ‘ack-ple’ on his recent postings on chronic depression he had been suffered from. A bill for compulsory identification on the Internet is now being proposed. The bill insisted on forcing every adult over the age of 20 in Korea to enter the civil identification number.

However, it seems that the bill tries to go too far. Anonymity can be one of the greatest strength that encourages open interactions among people which might not have be possible before the Internet. Most of all, privacy is "a fundamental human right. Spread (Snyder, 478)." It is not legal regulation enforced, but "netiquette" educated and practiced from the childhood just as reading and writing.

Milestone 1: Defining Information Technology

2005-09-20T11:20:00.000-07:00

I have never heard of the term 'le mot juste' before. From now on, it is my guiding light in reading the Snyder book! There are two reasons: I find myself having difficulties in clearly designating all the IT words I have known up to now even though I have thought I knew them, and I also need to learn some new terms as precisely as possible as well. Accordingly, I will try to adjust my word knowledge in detail, and to live with it as well. However, I would not trash the experience of fumbling for the meaning of IT jargons because it made my memory last longer.

More than others, the term of 'algorithm' catches my eyes. Even though this term has been heard from here and there for years in my major field, library and information science, I confess that its exact meaning is hard to phrase. According to my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (3rd ed., 1996), algorithm is defined as "a step-by-step problem-solving procedure, especially an established, recursive computational procedure for solving a problem in a finite number of steps." This conforms quite much to what I have known that algorithm is for procedural programing for computer's certain functionalities. However, I expect to learn what it means more exactly in the IT fluency context later.

Analytical thinking, as suggested as a key to the measurable and thus scientific way of thinking in the text, is another thing that impressed me. I hope for growing more expressive and precise way of thinking, thanks to analytical thinking.

Digital Nugget: White House Rss Feeds and Podcasts

2005-09-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

First digital nugget is about the RSS feeds and podcasts from the White House. This page offers links to RSS feeds of Presidential News & Speeches, White House Press Briefings, Presidential Weekly Radio Address, and Discurso Radial del Presidente. The last two are podcasted as well. The address is as follows.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/rss/

In addition, this page also gives brief explanation of RSS feed.

"RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary. It is an
XML-based method for distributing the latest news and information from a
website that can be easily read by a variety of news readers or aggregators.
For more information about U.S. Government RSS feeds, please visit the RSS
Library Reference Center on FirstGov.gov."

When you follow the link to FirstGov.gov, there are more links to U.S. Government RSS Library. It's quite advanced approach to the web space. U.S. Government not only builds a website of its own, but diseminates the news and information by utilizing recent information technology.

Among others, I use 'bloglines' as my news aggregator. To add RSS feed of blogspot.com, you can put 'atom.xml' at the end of your blogspot.com blog address. For example, the RSS feed for my fluency blog is http://jol14.blogspot.com/atom.xml. This feed is open as default if you did not change the default setting when setting up your blogspot.com blog.

Fluency blog: digital governance

2005-09-19T07:18:00.000-07:00

Words don't come easy. Whenever I hear 'governance', it sounds like some kind of a dish in the opposite side of the earth. I haven't tasted or smelled it. However, I could have seen it as a dish on the table of regular dinner occasionally. Intentional attention to the details might let me taste it.

'Divital governance' is my shortcut to understand governance because I am familiar with all the 'digital' environment. I should fumble for grasping the meanings and implications of digital governance.

My postings will include some of the learnings from readings and discussions before, during, and after the class here. I will also collect interesting news stories and other blog postings related with our class as 'digital nuggets'.