Data Unbound

CNI2006fall EDUCAUSE CONNECT has some good interviews to listen to get a feel for the national IT scene in higher education.

Mashups mix data into global service : Nature is a one-year old article on mashups in scientific computation:

Will 2006 be the year of the mashup? Originally used to describe the mixing together of musical tracks, the term now refers to websites that weave data from different sources into a new service. They are becoming increasingly popular, especially for plotting data on maps, covering anything from cafés offering wireless Internet access to traffic conditions. And advocates say they could fundamentally change many areas of science — if researchers can be persuaded to share their data.

I got to remember to check in on the webcasts in early March for this fascinating conference on the future of libraries: De Lange Conference VI Emerging Libraries De Lange Conference Rice University.

Oren Sreebny’s Weblog: (CSG 2007) Thursday workshop on collaboration tools:

….we have a tremendous proliferation of new species of software appearing almost on a daily basis and combining and evolving at a very rapid rate, making it very difficult to figure out which ones we should engage with at an enterprise level, or even how to construct a meaningful taxonomy of these applications.

Some recent observations:

• There is an increasing disconnect between the IT capabilities available to individuals, especially cutting-edge innovative individuals (as well as “ordinary people”) and what the institution is providing.
• UCB IT needs to respond to both end-users and purveyors of enterprise computing hardware and services.
• Many, many of the tools of Web 2.0 can be used to support/enhance teaching and research. Of course, it takes some learning, reflection, and experimentation to do so.
• I’d like to learn more about Information Technology Infrastructure Library – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (ITIL).

Wondering what how to keep UC Berkeley competitive in an increasingly “flat world“, I found the essay Berkeley and braving the new flat world by Richard Newton (who just passed away at the much too young age of 55) heartening:

I believe we at Berkeley must simply double-down on our efforts to identify and bring the best and brightest here to Berkeley, as undergraduates, graduates, postdocs, visiting scholars and faculty, in a strategy I call “intellectual insourcing.” We must work harder than we ever have before to build upon and extend our regional lead as the most important cradle of discovery and innovation in the world by assembling a critical mass of talent right here in the Bay Area. Ultimately, I believe such a strategy is the most important way Berkeley Engineering can help create a sizeable “bump”—ideally a mountain—on this new flat world.