Web as Brain, People as Neurons
Many of us have been influenced by far-thinker Kevin Kelly. “We are the web” inspired and was featured in M Wesch’s popular video. My colleague Sean Hansen and I have begun a discussion about what the new forms of neuroscience might look like on this global brain.
A key area to start would be to look at people’s behavior in the context of neural firing literature. We gotta Golgi stain the social media users.
Rise Above the Crowd: an interactive digital side-channel for Imagine RIT
I am VERY excited to reveal what has become a well-kept secret on RIT’s campus this Winter: Rise Above the Crowd is an interactive crowd experiment in live event journalism and community engagement that will take place during the Imagine RIT Innovation Festival on May 7th, 2011.
What is it? Rise Above the Crowd takes the digital conversations that a crowd of 25,000 people are having during an event and makes then visible on large screens and votable by cell phone throughout the campus. Your participation is rewarded with prizes based on the amount of your activity as well as the popularity and quality of your contributions. You can send text messages, tweets, and especially photos to the community and they will immediately be visible all over the campus. As the crowd votes up your contributions they will rise on our boards, giving you a greater and greater chance to win great prizes like iPads, web-enabled cameras and much more.
The system design has been a truly interdisciplinary effort with students and faculty from all over campus contributing. Journalism Prof Andrea Hickerson and I are the principal investigators and points of contact. Much, much more information is about to launch, but if you really want to know, I would be more than happy to tell you!
Don’t Know About Management Information Systems? Employers Do!
Again and again students tell me that they WOULD have chosen Saunders College’s MIS program for their major if only they knew more about it. Here is more fuel for the fire…
The new NACE salary survey is just released and again shows the demand for MIS, as they are among the BEST PAID graduates across all majors on a campus:
“NACE’s Winter 2010 Salary Survey shows that engineering disciplines account for eight of the 10 most highly paid degrees….The only non-engineering related degrees in the top 10 were computer science and information sciences and systems. ”
“As a group, graduates earning computer-related degrees saw their average salary offer soar in comparison to the other disciplines: Their average offer rose 5.8 percent to $58,746.”
| Petroleum Engineering | $86,220 |
| Chemical Engineering | $65,142 |
| Mining & Mineral Engineering (incl. geological) | $64,552 |
| Computer Science | $61,205 |
| Computer Engineering | $60,879 |
| Electrical/Electronics & Communications Engineering | $59,074 |
| Mechanical Engineering | $58,392 |
| Industrial/Manufacturing Engineering | $57,734 |
| Aerospace/Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering | $57,231 |
| Information Sciences & Systems | $54,038 |
| Source: Winter 2010 Salary Survey, National Association of Colleges and Employers. Data represent offers to bachelor’s degree candidates where 10 or more offers were reported. | |
Need More Evidence?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says “Faster than average employment growth is expected, and job prospects should be excellent.”
Note from the mayor of Saunders College at RIT
Please pay your taxes!
Congratulations new student digital entrepreneurs
Digital Entrepreneurship remains a passion of mine and an emerging strength for RIT. This Fall, students in “Building a Web Business” worked on and launched the following businesses online:
The list includes Ad-based content sites, Online retail, Amazon affiliates and others. This is very impressive work for just 10 weeks of class time. Our Digital Business minor supports students in learning about how new technologies like those deployed in this class are transforming traditional business practice!
Next up: the Digital Entrepreneurship class with students from around RIT’s campus. Last night’s team formation yielded 10 project teams creating business plans for new ideas that leverage these new technologies. Stop in at: http://digent.rit.edu to learn more.
NSF Future Internet Summit
I am honored to have been selected to attend the National Science Foundation’s Future Internet Summit. As I browse the list of attendees, I see lots of brilliant computer scientists and networking specialists, a few industry folks, and some economists and myself (in Business) rounding out the list.
This promises to be a fascinating experience interacting with some very bright people. KnowInnovation will facilitate our interactions. I’ll let you know more as the week unfolds.
From Kevin Kelly’s The Technium
From Kevin Kelly’s The Technium
Martin Heidegger: “No one can foresee the radical changes to come. But technological advance will move faster and faster and can never be stopped. In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. These forces, which everywhere and every minute claim, enchain and drag along, press and impose upon man under the form of some technical contrivance or other–these forces…have moved long since beyond his will and have outgrown his capacity for decision… Technology is in no sense an instrument of man’s making or in his control. It is rather that a phenomenon that is centrally determining all of Western history.”
These technophobes are right about so many things. The technium is the phenomenon that is centrally determining all of Western history. It is outgrowing our capacity of understanding. It is advancing faster and faster without end. It is proceeding on an autonomous course. It is an end in itself. It is a kind of fate.
This is scary. We have birthed a child more powerful than us, rocketing off to remake our essential nature, yet it zooms beyond our capacity to understand or control, accelerating in power, yet biased in its direction. No wonder the autonomy of the technium provokes such genuine concern.
Yet the very same innate forces of extropy and self-organization that nurture the technological imperative, also are responsible for real progress. We have birthed a child more powerful than us, rocketing the advance of diversity and intelligence, it multiples on its own, yet it is headed in the direction we’d all like to go — more options, choices, possibilities and free-will.
On Reconnecting with the MIS community Part 2
As expected, I learned a lot on my recent trip to the AMCIS conference in San Francisco. One striking thing is the incredibly high quality of new Ph.D.s in MIS. I met so many talented people, and interviewed as many as I could for our faculty position at RIT (http://bitly.com/ritmis). While advantageous for RIT, the true shame is that there are not enough faculty jobs for these talented people- not by a long shot. The fact that there are so few positions creates a dangerous situation where a whole generation of educators/researchers could be lost (thanks SWH for this idea). At this moment, there is not a lot that we can do about it.
However, longer term there is one obvious thing to do-increase the enrollments in MIS. I believe there are two paths to that: better communication about the discipline, and recentering the discipline on the knowledge areas of its faculty. As an example of communication, the chart above (thanks Chuck Wood) shows clearly that MIS starting salaries have been the highest in the business schools for some time. Employers REALLY want the combination of technology and business and are willing to pay for it. MIS people end up doing a wide variety of things in organizations, but their tech/business/communications skills make them the key players in a lot of what happens. My friend Richard DeMartino comments how well MIS students do in entrepreneurial teams, and I am proud of what this group accomplishes.
A second important approach to reviving the discipline is to find ways to capture the intellectual curiosity and new knowledge developed by its faculty. While for some researchers this is already happening, for many of us the curriculum is a standard that is far away from our interests. At AMCIS, I learned that MANY people are researching things that will never be taught in the standard curriculum. I feel that this is a shame, and possibly a detriment to the discipline.
The MIS discipline has room for lots of different subjects in its conferences. We should find the way to bring them back to our students, because that natural energy that comes from doing what you like does not have a substitute.
On reconnecting with the MIS community
I am off for AMCIS Thursday and looking forward to a fun few days. It has been some time for me to visit an “MIS” conference. In the mean-time I have been working on:
founding the digital business group, digital entrepreneurship
future internet economics
social network monetization and value
I am very interested in where this discipline that took me in has come since last I checked in. I will also be recruiting for the Saunders MIS group, which is one of a variety of disciplines in the College that fit together nicely. Can’t wait to see how it all comes together!
If you want to meet up in San Fran, try vperotti@saunders.rit.edu or twitter message me @vicperotti
netbook OS- Samsung N110+UNR
Day 1 with the Samsung N110 has been relatively great. I knew that a netbook would likely be a great solution for me-since I am constantly moving between meetings and locations. My initial research suggested that this one would be a decent choice, and some Saunders students have already demonstrated Samsung netbooks to me.
I am equally or more impressed with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, an OS made expecially for netobooks out of the latest Linux distribution. What’s great about this OS is that it is always current. Ubuntu is released continously, and it updates in a really simple manner.
Day 1 with the Samsung N110 has been relatively great. I knew that a netbook would likely be a great solution for me-since I am constantly moving between meetings and locations. My initial research suggested that this one would be a decent choice, and some Saunders students have already demonstrated Samsung netbooks to me.
I am equally or more impressed with Ubuntu Netbook Remix, an OS made especially for netbooks out of the latest Linux distribution. What’s great about this OS is that it is always current. Ubuntu is released continously, and it updates in a really simple manner.
The trend toward simple interfaces is strong now, with some Google Android OS (that for phones!) netbooks now available. Given the huge number of developers, the fast boot time, the ease of use. I have to believe that this is one of the best combinations of hardware and software currently available.
