Identity and persona

For years, people have had different facets, or different persona, for different environments: you were the beer-swilling ex-con down at the bar; the football fan at work; the gentle & loving parent at home; the party-animal when out with your buddies; and so forth.

Of course, people know that we all have these different persona – so when groups cross, you can get funny looks when your behaviour is “unusual”

When it comes to the on-line world, this practice of multiple persona continues: your facebook account is different to your Live Journal life; your Google identity is different to your work ID; and you Twitter with two or more IDs, depending on when you want to day.

The proliferation of identities is exacerbated when each service you want to use requires you to create an account: Amazon is not PayPal is not eBay is not ….. any of the previous identities either!

On the other side of the fence, service providers have to decide how AUTHORITATIVE they want the identification of their users to be. Services that are available to one-and-all (such as Flikr) can just verify that the subscriber can respond to an email message, whereas services that are limited to a specific group of people need to be more specific in who can subscribe.

In the UK academic environment, the solution to the problem of restricting access to services has been to devolve the Authentication back to Institutions…. this is what the UK Access Management Federation is: a user AUTHENTICATES their identity via their University, and then service providers can AUTHORISE for specific Universities.

Outside the closed environment of UK Higher & Further Education, there is a system called OpenID. This is most obvious when you use your Facebook Login to gain access to some other service (As an aside, Facebook uses OpenID internally for lots of things: all of these Facebook Apps that you sign up for are all using OpenID to both Authenticate you, AND access your data!)

So what is this all leading up to?

Well, we are approaching the point where people have multiple identities (or persona) and want to use them to identify themselves.

The interesting question is:

Are these all different

1. identities for the same person (meaning that the person has access to a service and can identify themselves), or
2. persona for the same person (where the different persona have different levels of connectivity to a Service)

?

Is there merit in having a system that allows different identities to me connected: so you can use a number of identities to access a service?

Is there merit in a service that will personalise your interaction depending on which persona you connect with?

 

CRUD

I have finally found out what CRUD websites are: Create, Retrieve, Update, Destroy

 

Moving host…

No, not the blog… a service I run.

It throws up some questions though:

• do I alter the layout of the installation?
• do I change names of things?
• do I take the opportunity to update some of the supporting applications?

Choices, choices…. I’ll let you know how I get on!

Its been a while….

So what’s been happening?

Well, apart from motorsports taking over my personal life, I’ve been part of Repository Fringe; built a demonstator for the HILT project; and started work on Open Access Repository Junction.

(and I’ve a passle of things on the back-burner to deal with… including moving an entire service to a new host….)

Humans need humans to be human?

There was a story, back on Tuesday, about research which shows that people who socialise on-line are less (“lazy, self-deluding thickies”, “a confused your moral compass”)

The interesting part here is not the story, but a parallel comment I’ve found:

Individuals aren’t naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are … well … human beings.

Where does this wonderful quote come from?

Terry Pratchett, in his book “Men at Arms”. Published in 1993 – so before the Internet, well before “Social Networks”

Quick code, slow code

Some work is very quick: a rapid evolution of development and testing. Bugs are quickly found, and systems can be tweeked to refine & extend the code to produce a more polished result.

On the other hand, some work is really slow: the coding is quick, but it needs to be tested against a large dataset… and that takes ages to run.

Guess what I’m doing now?

Who’s the Daddy?

My auto-update worked!

… Not that I expected it not to, but last night was the first time I’d actually had it run, on it’s own, in a live service!

1. It made the FTP connection & found the new file
2. It munged the downloaded data into an update file
3. It copied the current database and updated the new version
4. It switched the service to the new database
5. It updated the news ticker on the login page

<Does the happy dance />

The good old 80/20 rule

You gotta love it…. it turns up everywhere:

The last 20% of getting a service just right for launch will take 80% of the allocated time.

Yes folks – I’m in the tidy-up / fettle / tweek phase, and they are all nasty wee fiddly bits: something doesn’t work quite right in IE; a button needs to be moved over just so; words used in help pages; etc…

The joys of designing web sites

Creating a new service, or indeed even just changing the visuals for an old service, is never a simple task.

Firstly you have to come up with a coherent design: one that compliments the contents of the site; one that works across all pages within the site; one that is visually appealing; and one that all the parties involved are happy with… Not my forte: I get a designer to do that.

Next you need to modify this design so that it can be created as a validating, accessible, cross-platform base.

What I like to do is then mock-up a few pages, maybe half a dozen, as proper xhtml pages – so that people can poke and prod them, be happy that they render across all browers and platforms, that they scale with font sizes, and that they look fine on different monitor/window sizes.

I’ve done all that, I’ve created the 100+ web pages… and now I’m going through the laborious task of verifying each one actually validates, and actually renders correctly under a range of browsers.

… and who said writing web pages was easy? <chuckle />

Repositories and “old school” academics

On Repositories

I had an interesting chat with a self-confessed Old School academic: he’s in a deeply unfashionable area of research, and publishes in deeply unfashionable journals…. but he makes sure that everything he publishes goes into his local Institutional Repository.

I ran my idea of a CRIS-like system past him, and he spotted an immediate flaw: “It’s mine!”

He will not share anything until has been published. He will not put unpublished work anywhere that it can be got at¹. The problem is that your unpublished work can be plagerised, and published, before you finish your work… meaning that you are now plagerising someone else – on your own research!

I asked him about copies of his work, and if he keeps them on the fileservers in his college: Nope, he keeps them on a removeable hard disk, which he takes home with him every night.

So where does that leave us?

• I think we need to accept that that old school have a point: plagerism is rife, and not just at undergrad level – it happens at all levels of academia.
• I think that the “google generation” will be less paranoid about their work… and more aware of computing systems (on which: who else noticed that Peter Murray-Rust mentioned having disk-level encription on his laptop when giving his presentation at OR08?).
• I think that the idea of providing an backup (or archive) for “work in progress” is valid, and that the idea of a hierarchical system can be sold.

BUT (and you notice it is a pretty damn big “but”), we will need to be sure that the archive is secure, that work cannot be copied, and that the academic feels firmly in control.

On another topic

My friend was hugely supportive of his local repositorty: not only were the staff excellent at handling the deposit and sorting out all the metadata stuff for him; but he was actually able to raise the profile of his work!

He drums into his students two messages when it comes to publications:

1. Do NOT release anything into the public domain until your work has been definitely accepted
2. Make sure you put a copy into the local IR: the more people find your work, the greater the pool of people who might cite your work: a 1% citation rate from 10 people is 1-in-10; a 1% citation rate from 100 people is 1: a 10-fold increase!

[1] He told me a story of, when he was in China over the summer, a student submitted a piece for his Masters degree. A quick read of it showed that this was an incomplete work, by someone else. Further, fairly simple, investigation revealed it was written by a PostDoc, in a US University, and was going through it’s final review process.