Tuesday, July 25, 2006

The Two presenter day

Dr. Tom Keenan and Dr. Stan Ruecker

Dr. Tom Keenan presented in the morning about Volitional Cecity. The willingness of people to be blind in the things they do with their personal information. I fell badly that he is a little paranoid about giving out information. Not that I would blame him. I think this is mostly because of the roles he has taken with the Calgary police department that he has a bit of an edge to his trust of the users of his information. My step father is a retired police officer who trusts people lass than my mother the teacher. His experience has changed him in that because he had to deal with 10% of the people 90% of the time (not real math). I think that this would change me also.

Dr. Keenan offers up some good ways we can keep our information safe. One was, when asked to supply a name use a fake one. Almost too easy. He also tried to make us cognizant of the fact that the Law will always lag behind in the 'guidance' of technology.

Dr. Ruecker presented in the afternoon. He is an expert of visual arrangement of content in rich-prospecting browsing interfaces.

He has been working to build visual research environments. He keyed in on showing us non-textual search engines (one was the Sort Pills date base). Another visual one focused on the sorting of people by many factors: First name, Last name, Affiliation, Research Group, Gender, Hair colour, Eye colour, Eye glasses, and facial hair. Tools like these would enable business to have their employees recognize frequent customers. By opening up these searching areas we have opportunities to begin sorting and adding your own comments about these visual images. Dr. Ruecker emphasises the importance of information output.

These interfaces would be great tools as long as there are chances for users to rearrange and edit the groups that might reflect a personal understanding. These tools would allow a user of such a system to demonstrate a better context of use by allowing them to sort and create their own definitions.

Wiki idea: Give it to the First years to manage but still allow the 2nd years to be on it.

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