I am pleased to announce that the Center for Information Policy Research and the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee are hosting an important conference on "The Ethics of Information Organization". The full CFP is below: The…
Tag: Information theory
NYT Discovers Data-Mining
For some odd reason, the New York Times has an article declaring that data-mining has now gone mainstream: ...a wave of sophisticated computing and mathematical analytics that is moving into the mainstream. Fueling the trend are the digitization of information,…
UNESCO Infoethics report
I missed this when it was first released back in March: UNESCO has published a survey on ethical implications of emerging technologies, "Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies": The ethical, legal and societal implications of ICTs are one of the three…
Matheson: The Original Privacy Position
David Matheson has posted an excellent essay on the blog*on*nymity research blog suggesting a merger of Nagel and Rawls into a theory of "the original privacy position": Perhaps we can make use of a privacy version of the Original Position;…
Google Q&A and the Limits of Knowledge
There has been much attention paid to Google's newest feature Google Q&A. Google Q&A (Google's response to features already provided by Yahoo & Ask Jeeves) delivers factual answers for some queries at the top of its results page, to save…
Mind-Mapping and Spatial Information Navigation
Today's New York Times includes a story on mind-mapping software, "To-Do List: Shop, Pay Bills, Organize Brain." It suggests that to learn new topics, organize ideas and spur creative thinking, people should draw dynamic and unstructured "mind maps" rather than…
Blogs as Information Interfaces
There's a discussion at Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine about what term should be used to describe "blogs" (the assumption being, apparently, that "blogs" is too techie, or has a negative connotation, or something like that). Jeff has frequently used the term…
Informational Depth
Susan Crawford comments on a recent talk by Benjamin Reeve about the impoverished nature of our understanding of information:The thesis...is that Shannon's understanding of information is not helpful -- that information is really differences that "make a difference" by causing…