64 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2024
  2. May 2024
    1. En 1999, l’Unesco ouvrira la « Chaire itinérante Edgar Morin pour la complexité » et diffusera amplement l’ouvrage Les 7 savoirs nécessaires à l’éducation du futur, une étude sollicitée par l’ancien directeur de l’Unesco Federico Mayor Zaragoza.
  3. Mar 2023
  4. Apr 2022
    1. the Institute of Medicine had released a landmark report on patientsafety, To Err Is Human. The report found that as many as 98,000 Americanswere dying each year as a result of preventable medical errors occurring inhospitals—more people than succumbed to car accidents, workplace injuries, orbreast cancer. And some significant portion of these deaths involved mistakes inthe dispensing of drugs.

      Some might see the 98,000 preventable medical error deaths reported by the Institute of Medicine in To Err is Human (1999) now and laugh at the farcical number of deaths due to coronavirus since 2020, a large proportion of which could have been prevented due to better communication and coordination?

      What if a more pragmatic anthropological viewpoint could be given to the current fractured state of American politics? If anthropologists are taught not to make value judgements on the way other cultures have come to live their lives, but simply to appreciate and report on them accurately, then perhaps we should leave those on the far right who believe in top down, patriarchal rule to their devices?

      What if we nudged (forced) them all to actually live by their own rules by enforcing them to the nth degree? Republican politicians can only get away with badmouthing abortion or homophobic viewpoints because their feet are not held to the fire when those issues impinge upon their own families or even themselves. They have the wealth and the power to flout the laws and not face the direct consequences personally. Would their tunes change if forced by their own top down patriarchal perspectives applying to them?

  5. Oct 2017
    1. Musk revealed the company’s planned next-generation rocket will make it possible to build a moon base — and the name he picked is just his latest homage to beloved science fiction, in this case, the British cult classic Space: 1999.

      One of the all time best shows! Changed my life!

  6. Jun 2017
  7. Jan 2017
    1. Year One

      2nd episode to watch should be Production No. 5: "Earthbound".

      Production No. 24: "The Testament of Arkadia" is a fitting end to Season 1."

  8. Sep 2015
    1. people able to laugh atthemselves

      It is laughable if this is considered unique to information science!

    2. one must be at least comfortable with both sides of this dualtradition

      this seems interesting - inter-disciplinarity is at the core of information science

    3. hree Big Questions can be identified within the aboveframework: (1) the physical question: What are the featuresand laws of the recorded-information universe? (2) Thesocial question: How do people relate to, seek, and useinformation? (3) The design question: How can access torecorded information be made most rapid and effective?

      This covers quite a bit of ground, and isn't that stifling.

    4. We ask what kinds of information people pre-fer to communicate through this or that new channel ofinformation technology. We always follow the information.

      So does HCI and design not fit within Bates definition of information science?

    5. Information science has a distinct universe that it studiesalso—the world of recorded information produced by hu-man agency. We can imagine all the human activities instudying the above natural, social, and artistic universesthemselves producing information entities— books, articles,databases, data files, etc.—thus creating a fourth universe,that of recorded information.

      Wait, so information science is distinct from the natural sciences, social sciences. arts and humanities? This is a bold claim.

    6. We are interested in information as a social and psycho-logical phenomenon. The information we study generallyoriginates from human agency in some way, whether it isthe data beamed down from a satellite or the text of a bookon Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Our primary, but not solefocus, is onrecordedinformation and people’s relationshipto it.

      people are central ; but aren't people central to all study, ultimatey? Isn't that what Kuhn taught us about Physics?

    7. Llewellyn C. Puppybreath
    8. In my 1980 study of citations in informationscience, Chomsky was the single most cited individual.

      Wow. Speaks to the importance of structure. I wonder what the most cited Chomsky was...

    9. form and structure

      I like it when she focuses on what the profession actually does, rather than staking out boundaries between the disciplines. Reminds me of Kirschenbaum's conclusions in What is digital humanities and why are they saying such terrible things about it.

    10. Other fields with which informationscience might have been thought originally to have much incommon, such as computer science, cognitive science, com-putational linguistics, or artificial intelligence, did not, infact, prove to be good matches.

      Oh really? Good matches for who? How is this justified? Get off my lawn, etc. No wonder other professions are put off.

    11. It is what thenewcomer or outsider does not understand

      If newcomers can't understand it, no wonder there is uncertainty about what the profession is about.

    12. My litmus test for the newcomers who are now interestedin information work is whether I can observe evidence thatthey have gone through the transformation of becoming aninformation expert.

      Drink the Kool Aid. No thanks.

    13. f you want to portray a doctor, you have to be agood actor, not a doctor; if you want to work with infor-mation organization and retrieval, you have to be a goodinformation person, not a subject specialist without infor-mation training.

      Ironically, Bates seems to be overlooking the entire genre of documentaries, where doctors do play themselves, and to great effect.

    14. features that matter to the organization and retrievalof it

      These are two purposes - are there more?

    15. as good a job

      How convenient! I wonder if the doctors agreed!

    16. Creating databases and catalogs in-volves creating representations of forms of information. Theskill a reference librarian or information specialist developsalso involves representation—figuring out how to concep-tualize and represent a user’s query, then in turn, translatingthe query (representing it) into a form an information sys-tem uses, which in turn arises from the representations ofdocuments in the information system.

      Interesting that representation is such a central component to this.

    17. A talented actor, without a day’s experi-ence in medical school, can do a much better job.

      Makes me think of reality TV :-)

    18. The answer here is that although the physicians know themost about medicine,portrayinga physician is differentfrombeinga physician. Portraying a physician requires adifferent body of talents than being a physician does. Oc-casionally, some people have both types of talent, but usu-ally not. Actors, with little or no medical knowledge, butwith experience portraying a variety of characters

      The big assumption here is that the actors are portraying medical professionals and not performing a drama that uses the setting of the hospital as a backdrop. What is "better" in this context?

    19. The Ph.D. arthistorian who gets a job working with art history informa-tion out of a love of the subject matter eventually finds him-or herself working with the core questions of informationscience, not of art history.

      Interesting progression from studying the content to studying content about content. But what content is not about other content, really? Hmm

    20. The average person,whether Ph.D. scholar or high school graduate, never no-tices the structure that organizes their information, becausethey are so caught up in absorbing and relating to thecontent. And, in fairness to them, they are not interested inthe structure.Weare interested in the structure

      Reminds me of infrastructure studies - how certain features slip into the background.

    21. rhetorical character in the broadest sense, that is, by theirselection, design, and objectives

      this is interesting ... it's the purposes that matter most -- pragmatism

    22. professional activities involving the manipulation andtransmission of knowledge

      So it is more practice oriented? Don't Art Historians have professions too?

    23. retrieval

      There's a whole lot bundled up in this one word. I'm not sure it fits.

    24. Borko, 1968, p. 3

      We read this last week.

    25. behavior of information

      It's so startling to see this idea that information has a behavior, seemingly independent of people.

    26. At this historicaljuncture, information scientists need to become more con-scious of the thought world we are operating out of, so thatwe can communicate it more rapidly and effectively to largenumbers of new people, and so that we can continue toinfluence the future of information in the 21st century.

      A same argument could be made that perhaps information science itself is going through a paradigm shift? In which case it behooves us to understand what the shift is, rather than trying to reshape it in our own image only to be left behind.

    27. Currently, the wheel is being reinvented every day onthe information superhighway

      Reminds me of Eggers thoughts about the importance of recreating wheels.

    1. The success or failure of any interactive system and technologyis contingent on the extent to which user issues, the humanfactors, are addressed right from the beginning to the very end,right from theory, conceptualization, and design process on todevelopment, evaluation, and to provision of services.

      This is an amazing summary of a way to work, it almost seems like agile software development.

    2. The strength of Salton’s model is that it: a)starts from a base of a firm grounding in formal mathematicaland other methods, and in algorithms, and b) relates directly toresearch. The weakness is in that it: a) ignores the broaderaspects of information science, as well as any other disciplinesand approaches dealing with the human aspects that have greatrelevance to both the outcomes of IR research and the researchitself, and b) does not incorporate professional practice wherethese systems are realized and used.

      Strong on theory, weak on practice.

    3. Thestrength of the Shera model is that it posits education withina service framework, connects the education to professionalpractice and to a broader and user-oriented frame of anumber of other information services, and relates it to agreat diversity of information resources

      The importance of theory and practice.

    4. human-computer interac-tion (which is also a strong area in cognitive science)

      HCI gets a mention!

    5. Interestingly, research on OPACs, now thatthey are incorporating more and more IR features, is bring-ing the two fields in closer relation. Probably, so will theresearch in digital libraries, but at this time (1998), it is tooearly to tell.

      I think this has come to pass.

    6. Uncertainty (as in informationtheory and decision-making theory) was one choice sug-gested by a number of theorists

      Sounds like an interesting road-not-taken. I wonder who he is talking about here. I wonder if uncertainty has anything to do with understanding how an information process operates: algorithmic accountability?

    7. The connectionto the information science community is tenuous, and al-most nonexistent. The flow of knowledge, if any, is one-sided, from IR research results into proprietary engines.

      Google Research, Facebook Research etc kind of geared to improving this situation?

    8. design

      What is the process of design here? What context is it happening in?

    9. The acceleration of the growth of the Web is an infor-mation explosion of the like never before seen in history.Not surprisingly then, the Web is a mess. No wonder thateverybody is interested in some form of IR as a solution tofix it.

      IR as a site for repair!

    10. users, use, situations, context, andinteraction with systems

      Seeds of HCI?

    11. Text Retrieval Conference (TREC)

      TREC is a game for IR researchers. It helps coordinate and synthesise research around a problem.

    12. Thus, the field doesnotdeal with great many other information systems, such aspayroll, inventory, decision support systems, data process-ing, airline schedules, and a zillion others, nor does it dealwith direct communication among and between persons.Information science is about a specific manifestation or typeof information that defines its scope and its systems.

      This seems like a strange thing for him to say at this juncture. Why does he say it?

    13. valued surrogates for persons

      The documents are standing in for people?!

    14. The key orientation here is the problemof need for and useof information, as involving knowledge records.To providefor that need, information science deals with specificallyoriented information techniques, procedures, and systems.

      It's interesting that he says the need for information involving knowledge records. The need isn't for the records themselves, but their use in solving a problem.

    15. big science

      Reminds me of Big Data.

    16. The two clusters are not equally populated. The retrievalcluster has significantly more authors, not to mention totalnumber of works. As in many other fields, more effort isexpanded on the applied side than on the basic side. In part,this is due to availability of funds for given topics—notsurprisingly, research goes after moneyed topics.

      The problems (and money) help shape the field.

    17. I dare to venture a prediction: fameawaits the researcher(s) who devise a formal theoreticalwork, bolstered by experimental evidence, that connects thetwo largely separated clusters, i.e., connecting basic phe-nomena with their realization in the retrieval world.

      Seems a bit highfalutin. I would need to look at his paper to see how he derived these clusters I guess. It seems like one has computers and people, and the other has texts and people. Perhaps the closest these two have been connected is in media studies?

      It is interesting that he immediately wants to connect things that he has pulled apart. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

    18. information is usedin a context and in relation to some reasons

      The effectiveness of the information to suit the problem at hand is a measure of its information content?

    19. In cases of information services, information is mostoften conveyed through the medium of a text, document, orrecord, e.g., what a reader may understands from a text ordocument

      A reader is needed. Is a human reader a requirement?

    20. Tague-Sutcliff

      Might be interesting to follow this thread.

    21. Stonier, 1997

      I didn't realize people thought seriously about this idea before Stephen Wolfram. Well, I guess it goes back to Pythagoras in a way.

    22. While we do not know what information is, or whatsome of its derivative notions, such as relevance, may be,over the years we have learned a lot about their variousmanifestations, behaviors, and effects

      It is a scientific inquiry into the nature of information.

    23. message-sense

      Shannon?

    24. Thereis gold in information. Information science has many com-petitors—it may be even swamped by them.

      What is gold doing here?

    25. [K]nowledge provesitself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is infor-mation effective in action, information focused on re-sults

      This is pragmatism, or the scientific method.

    26. Their effortsshould indeed go into reading and organizingexistingclaims, ratherthan gathering new data

      Don't rock the boat!

    27. In the U.S.,information science developed and began flourishing on itsown in a large part due to government support by a host ofagencies, as did many other fields.

      Follow the money. What is being funded today by the government, and how is it shaping the field of information science? Are there actors outside of the power structure that are helping define what information science is? Wouldn't corporations like Apple, Google and Facebook be shaping it more today?

    28. Bush addressed the problem of information explo-sion. The problem is still with us. His solution was to usethe emerging computing and other information technologyto combat the problem.

      Didn't the information explosion really begin with speaking, writing, and printing?

    29. Debates over the “proper” definition of informa-tion science, as of any field, are fruitless, and in expectationsnaive. Information science, as a science and as a profession,is defined by the problems it has addressed and the methodsit has used for their solutions over time.

      Is the problem of defining what information is a legitimate problem? What are valid problems, and how are they grouped together. I must admit I like this definition because a domain gets shaped around the problems and related problems. It is pragmatic.

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