What Does the Internet Say About You?

A few months ago I made a post about a site called Wordle and how cool it was. One of the things I didn't talk about is how Wordle can quickly summarize a document for you by taking the most common words in the document and presenting them in a "wordle" with the most commonly used words largest. For instance, if you take the Health Care Bill currently being proposed by Congress and put it into Wordle you'll get sometehing like this:

Now I found a new website, 123people.com, that will do something similar. Put in a name, and the program will created a Wordle-like cloud based on common words found around that person's name in web pages. If you put my name in you'll see this:

It's not perfect, but it's kind of interesting. On the other hand, be warned: 123people.com is a website where I got a lot of the information for the post that I made a few days ago. If you go there, you may find there is more about you on the Internet than you'd ever want available. It's scary what conclusions a machine can draw about you in 10 seconds.

Personal Information

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how my name appeared in a phone book for the first time ever in my life, and how angry I was because that meant people could find out where I lived now. I then wrote about how silly it was for me to get upset about this, because I volunteered so much infomation about myself anyway. And since I'm a fairly heavy USER of technology and of the Internet, and since I've been publishing web sites and web pages in one form or another since 1996, I'm a pretty easy target. Also, as far as I can tell, I'm the only person in the world with my first and last name, so if you type my name into Google you will very quickly learn a whole lot about me, probably more than you ever wanted to know.

The idea of our lack of privacy never went away, though, and I have spent some time on and off thinking about this. Then, last night, I decided that I would try a little experiment: I chose someone I went to high school with, someone I hadn't kept in touch with, and I tried to find information on the person. I looked for someone with the following criteria:

• Female. I chose this because females are typically harder to find than males due to name changes caused by marriages.
• Someone with a fairly common name, unlike mine. A unique name would make the search too easy.
• Not on any social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.)
• No obvious results returned in Google Searches.

In other words, I was looking for someone who, at least on the surface, did not have an online presence at all. No blog. No photos on the Internet. No easy way to find information about this person.

I had to immediately eliminate the first three people I chose because I found information very quickly on them.When I searched for the fourth person using her first and last name I got nothing. Nada. Zip. No Facebook page. No work listing. Nothing. This would be my person.

Just to make sure, I logged into Facebook and did a search anyway. Nothing. I then went to the Facebook section for my high school and went to the year I knew she had graduated--maybe her name would be there, spelled diiferently or something. Nope.I then remembered what I thought was the middle initial of this woman. I couldn't remember her middle name, but I did remember the middle initial. I ran a search on just her first name and middle initial and then came up with WAY too many results. So I ran the search again, this time with quotation marks around the first name and middle initial, and with the word "Kentucky" following. I got a number of hits, and I scanned down them. About four or five entries down I hit pay dirt. It appeared to be some kind of geneaological site, and it listed the woman's name followed by a middle name. THAT was her middle name, I thought to myself. Also listed in the text that could be seen on the Google page were the names of two of her brothers and her father.

I clicked on the link, and it led me to a scanned page of a very poorly written 2002 history book from an eastern Kentucky county historical society. The book didn't just give me (very poorly written) information about this woman. It actually told me the (very poorly written) family history of her father's family, where in Europe her grandfather had emigrated from, what he did for a living when he came to the United States, and then it listed a family tree, all the way down to and including this woman's husband and her two chidren. And once I had the woman's married name, the sky was the limit. In another fifteen minutes I had the following information:

• Where she worked
• Her email address at work
• A spreadsheet from a government entity that included a list of 11 different trainings she had attended from 2006-2008. These trainings gave me a fairly good idea of what she did in her job.
• Her birthdate was included on a spreadsheet from a volunteer organization, along with her height and weight (She's apparently put on a few pounds since high school). The spreadsheet was a list of participants in a charity 10k run that happened in May of this year. Why it was on the Internet, I don't know. My guess is that the organization has no idea that the spreadsheet is available for anyone to see.
• There were several other links to charity runs this person has participated in over the last two years. Apparently she's trying to shed those pounds.
• A website dedicated to finding people teased me with information by telling me what city the woman lived in. It wanted me to pay $19.95 to find anything else about her. I immediately left that website and went to a white pages website, typed in the name of the city and the woman's name, and got her home address and telephone number for free.
• I used Google Maps to search for her house, and then I used the "Street View" to actually look at a 360 degree representation of her house. It was a pretty nice house in a pretty nice neighborhood. The car in the driveway was kind of beaten up, though. Maybe it was a friend's. Or her 17 year old daughter's. I know her daughter is 17 because...
• The middle school where her children went to school had posted a page in honor of a teacher who was named "Teacher of the Month" during the 2008-2009 school year. This woman had written a letter to the principal about this teacher and her letter had been the impetus for the teacher receiving the award. The web page honoring the teacher included an electronic copy of the letter, which mentioned the ages and names of the woman's two children.
• The website dedicated to finding people actually showed her husband's name alongside hers, and it listed two cities she lived in, one until 2006 and one from 2006 until now. When I clicked on her husband's name, it listed the same city until 2006 but then a different city from 2006-2007 and then another city in another state from 2007 until now. This suggested that she MIGHT be divorced or separated from her husband. Apparently she kept the married name, though.

I could go on, but I think you get my point. Twenty years ago if you wanted this kind of information about someone you had to hire a private investigator. Today it took me 30 minutes sitting on a bed with a laptop on my lap. And keep in mind, this was a person who--at first glance--didn't even exist on the Internet. This is not someone who tweets every day about what he/she had for dinner. This is an invisible person.

Who turned out not to be so invisible after all.

Does this bother anyone else? Is the ready access to all of this kind of information worth the privacy we have to sacrifice? Or am I overly worried about this?

I'm in Awe of this Guy

Back in December I wrote a post praising the vision of J.C.R. Licklider, one of the founding fathers of Information Technology. I was specifically praising an article he wrote from 1968 called "The Computer as a Communications Device." Earlier this week I read an even older article of his written in April of 1960.* This article was called "Man-Computer Symbiosis." Once again, I was blown away by this man's ability to see into the future.

Keep in mind that this article was written in 1960, before the Internet, before email, back when the idea of networking computers was just that, an idea, and an idea only to a few people. But 50 years ago, Licklider is describing how computers can make human lives better, and darned if he isn't describing something a whole lot like Google:

Men will...formulate hypotheses. They will ask questions. They will think of mechanisms, procedures, and models. They will remember that such-and-such a person did some possibly relevant work on a topic of interest back in 1947, or at any rate shortly after World War II, and they will have an idea in what journals it might have been published. In general, they will make approximate and fallible, but leading, contributions, and they will define criteria and serve as evaluators, judging the contributions of the equipment and guiding the general line of thought.

That's what humans will do. The computers will do the following:

The information-processing equipment...will answer questions. It will simulate the mechanisms and models, carry out the procedures, and display the results to the operator. It will transform data, plot graphs (“cutting the cake” in whatever way the human operator specifies, or in several alternative ways if the human operator is not sure what he wants)...In general, it will carry out the routinizable, clerical operations that fill the intervals between decisions.

To sum it up, the men will have a vague idea of something and put a question into the computer and the computer will do all of the heavy duty research work and provide a bunch of possible answers, and the human will then choose which is the correct answer. That's Google and other search engines in a nutshell!

Right after the above section Licklider admits that--in 1960--no computer system capable of answering questions in such a fashion existed. But he does go on to explain HOW such a network could be created (Licklider would be instrumental in the creation of the Internet later in the decade), and in the process pretty much describes the commercial Internet as it exists today. He doesn't call it the "Internet"--he calls it a "thinking center," but he definitely has the concept down. He writes the following:

It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a “thinking center” that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and the symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper. The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.

You can read the entire 1960 article here. It's all pretty insightful stuff when you consider it was written 50 years ago.

J.C.R. Licklider. What a guy! On the other hand, he's the nerdiest hero I've ever had!

*And yes, I AM a nerd, as evidenced by the fact that I was reading this--not for a class or an assignment or anything like that--but for my own personal enjoyment!

Website Nostalgia

It's sort of hard to get nostalgic about websites, for a couple of reasons. First, the World Wide Web hasn't been around that long, just since 1989, and I doubt that too many of the people reading this blog entry were actually surfing the web in 1989. The mid '90's is when most of us ventured out into "cyberspace" as it was called then. So must of us have only been surfing for a decade and a half. It's hard to get nostalgic about something that isn't that old.

Moreover, even if you DID have a favorite site way back in 1998, you can't really relive the experience by going to the site today. Over the last 11 years that web site, if it's still around at all, has been redesigned probably 4 or 5 times. You can't go back.

Or can you? Thanks to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, you can type an address in and see what websites looked like years and years ago. Visit microsoft.com as it looked on February 22, 1999, and note that it proudly trumpets that Windows 98 was the best selling software of the year 1998. Visit Amazon.com from March of 2000 and note that there were only about 8 different Amazon online departments, instead of the dozens online now. Or visit Yahoo.com from 1996 and see a site in its infancy.

Those sites appeal to the general population, I guess. For me, though, I enjoy seeing my school district's website from 1998, which was right about the time I took over the district site.  I wasn't sure then and I'm not sure now what the leaves were supposed to represent. I also like visiting the high school's website circa 2002, when my Integrated Web Design class was creating and updating the website. And the first web address I ever typed into a web browser was NBC.com in 1996, and it pretty much looked like this.

You can play around yourself at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Cloud Computing

I'm always amazed at my inability to see the "big picture" sometimes when it comes to technology...

...I first heard the term "cloud computing" probably ten years ago, and it sounded like the dumbest idea in the world to me at the time. "One day," I remember reading, "you won't purchase software and install it on your computer. Instead, the software will be available over a network like the Internet, and you'll pay a subscription to use that service." How dumb, I thought. I want to buy software ONCE and OWN it, not keep paying to use it.

The problem, though, is that software never works that way. After a year or two a new version of the software comes out, and the new version has new features that you want or need, and the only way to get it is to buy the new software.

Cloud computing, though, elminates that problem, as well as eliminating a lot of other problems, too. But it's always been difficult to explain.

The federal government, though, has announced a major initiative to introduce cloud computing in federal offices, and they've created a web site that explains the process. The website is http://apps.gov/, and once the page loads, on the right, there's a little video that explains what cloud computing is. Maybe this video will make cloud computing understandable for people who have better vision than I do.

Sometimes I'm on the Kids' Side

I was frantically called on the phone by a teacher at one of the schools a couple of years ago. She said that something was terribly wrong with all of the computers in her computer lab. When I asked her what the problem was, she said, "All of the screens are backward!"

"What do you mean 'backward'?" I asked.

"I don't know!" she said. "They're all backward!"

I couldn't get any more intelligently out of her, so I told her I'd get to her lab as quickly as I could. About ten minutes later I walked over to the computer lab at the school. I walked in and immediately laughed. The screens weren't backward. They were upside down. Some students had gone into the graphics properties on the computers and rotated the display on every one of them 180 degrees. The displays were upside down.

And the teacher's solution: she had turned all of the monitors upside down so that the displays would be correct. The monitors were rolling back and forth on top of their curved tops with the stands flailing back and forth in the air. And kids were sitting in chairs trying to type on these monitors.

"What are you laughing about?" the frazzled teacher laughed. "Do you see what I mean? They're BACKWARD!"

"I'm sorry I laughed," I said sincerely. "It's just that...well..you have the monitors upside down!"

"What else was I supposed to do?" she yelled at me. "I have classes to teach!"

"You're right," I said. "I'm sorry. And you did what you had to do to get back to teaching. I think it's great that you found a solution. Here," I said, pointing her to one of the computers where no student was sitting, "let me show you what's wrong." I got on the computer and showed her how to rotate the monitor's display.

"Oh my God!" she exclaimed. "That's so easy! How did you know how to do that?"

I shrugged and smiled. "It's what they pay me for. I can help you get the rest of these fixed if you'd like."

"No, no, no," she said. "I can do the rest of these! I'm just glad you came over. How do you think something like this could have happened?"

I glanced over at the students. Two boys in the corner were trying hard to stifle their laughter. They weren't very successful. "I don't know," I told her. "It could be several things. My guess is that there was some kind of update to the graphics card that was downloaded automatically last night and that might have done something. I wouldn't worry about it. You know how to fix it, and unless it keeps happening," I said as I raised my eyebrows and shot a meaningful glance at the two boys, "I wouldn't spend too much time on it."

"Well, thanks again!" she said, and I thanked HER for being willing to rotate the other monitors herself, and I went out the door.

Why didn't I call out the kids for what they did? Technically, they were vandalizing the equipment. They had violated the "Acceptable Use Policy" that they had signed. They could have been given discipline ranging from detention to a ban from computers for the rest of the year. Why didn't I give them the punishment they'd earned?

The answer is simple: when I was a student, I would have done the same thing.

I Don't Know Everything

The title of this post is obvious, but sometimes I have to admit that I really feel like a fool when it comes to things I DON'T know at work.

As the district's technology guru I'm expected to know everything there is to know about computer stuff, and many people expect me to have other technical skills as well. And the fact that I'm not afraid to go to maintenance and get a drill or a paint brush or whatever else I need to get something done adds to that belief.

But I really DON'T know everything, and I can think of two specific examples of times when I've had to apologize for it.

This morning I was the first one in the board office, which isn't a first for me, but it's the first time that's been the case since the electronic lock on our front door broke and we've gone back to using a manual lock with a real live key. And I couldn't figure out how to work the thing! I ended up standing in front of the door wrestling with the key and the keyhole until one of the secretaries showed up and showed me how it was done. And she laughed and said, "Aren't you supposed to be a technology whiz? And you can't open a lock!"

This reminded me of a situation from just a few months ago. It was Administrative Assistant's Day (used to be called "Secretary's Day"), and as a treat the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and I paid to send all of the board secretaries to dinner and to a massage/manicure during an extra extra extra long lunch break. While they were gone we agreed to answer the phones in their place.

I thought I was doing a pretty good job of answering the phones. The first couple of callers wanted me anyway, and though they were surprised that I answered the phones, I explained what was going on and things went smoothly.

The third caller wanted the superintendent. I hit the "Hold" button on my phone and then shouted at my superintendent (who is right across the hall from me), "Hey Mike! [So and so] is on line 50!"

The fourth caller, though, wanted one of the secretaries. "She's out right now," I told the caller, who was a teacher in one of the buildings and who apparently hadn't recognized my voice. "Can I send you to her voice mail?"

"That would be fine," the caller said.

I put her on hold and then stared at the phone for about 7 seconds. Then I took her back off hold and said, "Yeah, Pam...uh, I don't know how to send you to her voice mail."

"Excuse me?" she said.

"Well, I don't usually answer the phone. All of the secretaries are out of the building for Secretary's Day, and I don't really know how to send a call to the voice mail system."

By now the caller had recognized my voice. "Bryan? Is that you?"

Sheepishly I answered, "Uh, yeah, I guess it is."

"Aren't you IN CHARGE of the phone systems?" she asked me.

"Well, technically," I told her. "But I just call the guy to come and work on them. I don't touch them. And I pretty much just RECEIVE calls in my office. I never have to transfer them anywhere. No one's shown me how."

"But don't you PROGRAM the phones every year when new employees arrive and when we need additional lines?"

"No, I just make sure that a couple of people in each building know how to do that."

It was a humbling moment. And as more and more technology is placed in the district, and as I delegate more and more of it to others, I'm sure these will not be the last of these types of moments.