In the long run, perhaps UC should consider creating another category of courses that includes engineering and computer science, said Debra Richardson, founding dean of UC Irvine’s School of Information and Computer Sciences and chairwoman of the alliance. “It may be just as important for students to be conversant in computer science as in algebra. So many things rely on computers now.”
Read the full story on the Contra Costa Times website.
Informatics Professor Crista Lopes’ research project evolves into a UC-wide library data-sharing portal, the DASH system.
Informatics alumnus Nick Jonas ’09 is reinventing everyday objects, starting with a smart umbrella stand called Raincheck.
The United States is, by the federal government’s own admission, the last major industrialized nation to adopt the I.C.D.-10. Still, its expansiveness does not trouble everyone. “There are thousands of words in the dictionary,” Donna Pickett, a C.D.C. classifications administrator, told me. “No one uses all of them at the same time—some are archaic and may never be used. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you take the words out.” Proponents note that many sections of the previous edition were lacking. Ebola didn’t have a code, and new advances, such as some types of laparoscopic surgery, had to be shoehorned in under old categories. The I.C.D.-10 allows for greater precision, which is good news for epidemiologists. Geoffrey C. Bowker, an informatics researcher at the University of California, Irvine, praises it for the same reason. What if you wanted to research hazards in a specific sort of gathering place? “We want to know what happens in opera houses,” Bowker said. “We want to know if there’s a particular kind of danger that’s associated with attending the opera, which I can’t particularly imagine, apart from boredom.”
View the full story on the New Yorker website.
Mimi Ito’s Connected Camps uses Minecraft as an educational platform to connect youth engagement with learning.
A 2012 study from the University of California, Irvine found that people who were unable to access email for five days were not only more productive, they had “more natural, variable heart rates.” Over at the Atlantic today, Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, said people check their email on average about 77 times per day, and it’s the checking of email (rather than writing) that is most stressful.
View the full story on the Time website.
According to Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, … “The more email people do, the lower is their assessed productivity, … [and] the lower is their positive mood at the end of the day.” … “I just think we have to rethink email, and even redesign the way email is used,” Mark said in Codebreaker’s first episode.
Read the full story on The Atlantic website.
Even though Facebook at Work looks identical to a person’s personal Facebook, it’s meant solely for communicating with co-workers, which could make users think twice about what they’re posting.
“People will be more careful about what they post because they know it’s going to be surveilled. There’s also probably a fear by some people that you don’t want to use Facebook too much in the workplace because you’ll be perceived as not doing your job,” said Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at UC Irvine.
Read the full story on the San Jose Mercury News website.
Lilly Irani is an assistant professor in communication at UC San Diego who researches emerging digital workforces and the labor rights issues that accompany them. “My work is concerned with how innovation creates new forms of inequality,” Irani said. “Mechanical Turk is an example of a technology that lets companies outsource data processing at unprecedented scale and speed, powering AI and big data industries with skilled but undervalued data processing work.”
Read the full story on the L.A. Times website.
But will the people who pontificate online actually pay up, or will they stick to being so-called “slacktivists”? Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, defines “slacktivism” as “the sense that if you just like something or share something [on social media] you’re contributing, but not really making a big difference.”
She says user engagement can be specific in nature to a particular platform, so people who actively tweet about a candidate or campaign may not be as willing to use to platform to turn over cash.
“So I think this is an interesting play to see if people will put their money where their mouth is,” Ito says.
Read the full story on the Marketplace website.