Index Last Week Contact DQ News Latest Issue
New York Times Articles Focus
on Personal Data
Privacy, Quality, Availability
Two articles in the October 20th issue of The New York Times report growing concern about the amount, type, and quality of personal information available in the Internet. The first article, "Goals Clash in Shielding Privacy," was written by Nina Bernstein and appears on page A16. The second report, "In Prison, but Free to Get Information," was written by David Rohode appears on page A19.
The first article discusses the tension between First Amendment rights and the right of personal privacy. It is presently possible to obtain detailed and accurate personal information from various sites on the Internet. Such information may include name, address, date-of-birth, and social security number. Credit reports, insurance reports, driving records, and other personal information is also relatively easy to obtain.
On one hand, there are at least 40 bills pending in the U.S. Congress to protect personal privacy. On the other hand, there are large special interest groups, like law-enforcement, government agencies, and various business groups that seek exemption from privacy statutes. This has stalled almost all privacy legislation. For example, Senator Diane Feinstein recently introduced a bill that would prohibit the collection and sale of children's personal information without parental consent. The bill immediately met strong and well-financed opposition from business and marketing groups. According to the article, the privacy bill that appears to have the best chance of passage is one that seeks to protect the privacy of genetic information. Supporters of this legislation include well-organized groups of women associated with women's health issues like breast cancer. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has organized an ambitious broad-based privacy campaign, called "Take Back Your Data" to oppose government-controlled national databases of personal information.
David Rohde's article concerns the thousands of "Freedom of Information" requests filed each year by convicted and incarcerated criminals. According to Rohde's article, inmates are abusing federal and state Freedom of Information laws to obtain personal information about prison guards, victims, and people they blame for their problems. Recently, the state of Michigan banned prisoners from filing Freedom of Information requests, whereupon the number of such requests fell by 88% - to about 7000. Moreover, various state and local criminal justice agencies complain that such requests are burdensome, often providing inmates with copies of records they or their lawyers alredy received during the discovery phase of their trials.
Civil liberties groups, like the New York Civil Liberties Union, are vowing to fight any broad reduction in prisoners' right to file Freedom of Information requests. According to civil libertarians who are involved in such cases, the vast majority of Freedom of Information requests filed by prisoners are for court and police documents related to their convictions.
UC Berkeley SIMS Receives Grants
South Hall News, the alumni newsletter of the University of California at Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems, recently reported that SIMS received two grants for projects related to data and information quality.
Professor Michael Buckland has been awarded a $954,184 grant for a research
project entitled "Search Support for Unfamiliar Metadata Vocabularies."
According to the newsletter, the rapid increase in network-accessible
databases and the widespread adoption of metadata vocabularies mean that
increasingly searches will be in metadata vocabularies that are unfamiliar
to the searcher. To provide a cost-effective remedy, the project will develop
Entry Vocabulary Modules that accept topical statements in the searcher's
terms and respond with a ranked list of terms in the system's vocabulary.
A project Website has started at:
www.sims.berkeley.edu/research/metadata/
The Intel Corporation has donated 25 Pentium machines worth approximately $100,000 for research and education at SIMS. The machines will be installed in the SIMS computer lab for intensive database and information retrieval work, including calculation of very large document/document similarity matrices, real time calculation of probabilistic ranking values, sorting large databases, and developing cross-vocabulary mapping for dynamically generating controlled vocabulary queries from natural language. This involves computationally generating probabilistic data on term usage in large databases, and will develop mapping models from natural language terms to controlled vocabulary entries.
Mapping the Beach One Grain at a Time
According to an article in the October 21st issue of The New York Times, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has embarked on the largest research project ever undertaken to collect real-time data about offshore sand movement and beach erosion. The project makes extensive use of instruments mounted on a mobile platform that is able to "drive" along sunken sandbars and other areas just offshore. The "Coastal Research Amphibious Buggy" (CRAB) is a 35 foot tripod mounted on wheels, which tows a sled filled with videocameras and other instruments. These instruments enable Corps of Engineers scientists to collect extremely accurate real-time data about fluid mecahnics, sediment mechanics, and the forces that move sand in a nearshore environment. (Other structures that mount instruments are an 1,840-foot pier and a 140-foot tower). The research facility is located on the beach and offshore near Duck, North Carolina.
One of the most intensive areas of data collection and instrumentation is in the so-called "surf zone," the region whose features largely determine whether and how a beach will erode. The Army Corps of Engineers is interested in the research because it spends tens of millions of dollars each year replenishing sand from eroded beaches, only to see it wash away. The U.S. Navy is also interested because of the problems involved in making amphibious landings. Among the problems the research program faces is the difficulty of collecting high quality data when instruments are constantly battered by waves in the surf zone. The article was written by Times science reporter Cornelia Dean, and appears on page C1.
Data Every 2 Minutes are Fast Dispelling
Mystery of Giant Tuna
According to a report in the October 21st issue of The New York Times, state-of-the-art data collection "tags" attached to large bluefin tuna have provided for the first time with high quality data about bluefin migration in the North Atlantic Ocean. The multi-institutional research effort was organized by Dr.Barbara Block, a Stanford University marine biologist.
Two types of "tag" (electronic data collection devices) were used by the researchers. One type of tag was permanently attached to a fish. After two months, the other type of tag would detach itself from the tuna, float to the ocean surface, and broadcast data via satellite to the research staff. The "pop up" tags collected data on ocean temperatures and the location of the fish, measured every two hours. The tags permanently attached to other tuna recorded the fish's body temperature, depth of the fish's dives, and the tuna's body temperature. Data was collected from 26 of 28 "pop up" tags. The researchers expect to collect data from about the same number of permanently-attached tags when the fish are caught.
Obtaining high quality data about migrating bluefin tuna is important to the researchers for several reasons. As the result of demand for bluefin tuna as a delicacy -especially by the Japanese - breeding stocks in the western Atlantic Ocean have been depleted by 80 to 90 percent over the past decade. Until researchers started obtaining data from the tags, mapping bluefin tuna migration patterns was largely done by conjecture. And bluefin tuna fishing quotas are managed by two different groups of nations with different priorities. The article was written by Times science writer Jane Ellen Stephens, and appears on page C3.