Sunday, November 28, 2004

Fred Couples

Ah it is nice to see Fred Couples playing well as of late. He is my favorite golfer on the PGA Tour. Couples won $640,000 in the Skins Game. Nice.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Emergence

Recently I have started reading a book by Stephen Johnson titled Emergence. This book begins discussing a colony of ants and how they intuitively plan out their colony based on spatial relationships. Then Johnson begins a discussion of Manchester, England. The city was never planned or designed, it evolved. Interestingly enough, the city evolved as if it were planned. He wants to find out why this happened (so do I) and how these patterns emerged.

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Digital Libraries (ESA)

This seems very interesting.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Information Bomb?

Hmm.....just read a very interesting and enlightening article in today's Wall Street Journal (The Jungle/Focus on Recruitment, Pay and Getting Ahead / by Erin White; B8, Tuesday, October 12, 2004). Employers are now "googling" potential employees. They are finding information about applicants that was not available before the internet and search engines. The argument is that this information is within the public domain and may be accessed as such and used in making decisions for hiring.

Sometimes applicants have posted on blogs, guestbooks and resume websites and all information associated with them pops up on the screen and is made available to potential employers with a click of the mouse. The author of the article uses a phrase "shadow resume" to describe this information (quoting Pam Dixon of World Privacy Forum). This information is connected to you (or represented and accessed) by your name.

This article made me think about all of this information. I have a blog, I sign guestbooks in addition to posting on message boards and other blogs. Will this fear curb free speech on the web? Not sure.....but I want to find out. I must think about this more and would like to dedicate a portion of this blog to discussing these issues. Will we become a society of anonymous posters? BUT that will never happen b/c your IP address is usually logged and even if you use a public computer, there will be traces of your presence there; such as logging in and other such ways to reconstruct and trace your information although you think no one would possibly make that connection. I digress.

This is really something to think about! Perhaps this does give a new meaning to Information Bomb.