Illegal downloading among college students study

College students today are savvy and know how to find what they want online including copyrighted music, music, and software downloads. But just how pervasive is this problem and how are accessing these file?

Syracuse iSchool Associate Dean for Research Jeff Stanton and Ph.D. student Isabelle Fagnot led a study at Syracuse University to find out. They interviewed a small sample of nine undergraduates to do some preliminary information gathering, and then conducted a larger anonymous paper survey of 164 students, and an even larger web-based survey of 404 students.

They asked students a series of questions hoping to determine whether they were downloading copyrighted material, uploading this material, or sharing files only with friends on an individual basis.

They discovered that about 3/4 of students were participating in peer-to-peer downloading, about ½ were downloading software, 1/3 were sharing with friends, and about 13 percent were uploading copyrighted content for others to download.

One of the most interesting findings of his study was that students who were most aware of the illegal nature of downloading copyrighted materials were also the most likely to engage in the behavior. Also, the better educated a student that he was in information security, the more likely he was to share files with his peers.

Stanton also asked students to suggest ways that the university can help prevent students from doing this, and passed that information along to university.

Attendees at the iConference also suggested ways that universities can prevent this, including following the library model, of licensing music that students could access.

Little eScience, Big eScience

eScience goes by many names, including cyberinfrastructure, but its basic meaning is the same: It is the use of information and communications technology (ICT) to support scientific work. ICTs enable research progress by providing access to data, resources, and people. Science is changing and becoming more reliant on digital resources.

Many people are familiar with “big eScience”—these are large, well-funded projects with many researchers that are all working toward the same goal, such as the human genome project to map and identify human genes or the physicists who work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland.

“Big eScience” researchers share data with each other, use the same tools, and are consistent in building repositories of their work. They get large, sometimes international grants to support their work.

Little eScience, on the other hand, involves perhaps only a couple researchers—a professor and a graduate assistant, and explore issues and new theories. The ICT issues for “Little eScience” researchers are different. These people generally are more protective of their data, and the tools and metadata they use vary from researcher to researcher.

Syracuse professors Steve Sawyer and Kevin Crowston and Ph.D. student Andrea Wiggins examined the differences between little and big eScience access to data, resources, and people, and suggested ways in which little eScience researchers could take steps to build their digital support systems.

For example, Wiggins suggested little eScientists create metadata standards, use analysis workflows, and build preprint repositories of their research. But she also said that there needs to be incentives and input of funding and human resources for these changes to occur.

The Pros and Cons of Automating the Tracking of Suspicious Behavior Online

Technology can be used to help track and catch criminals, ranging from terrorists and organized criminals to those who commit credit card fraud. But a national platform would be a more comprehensive solution to flagging suspicious behavior and preventing crimes as well as apprehending criminals.

Similar technology is currently being used to track Internet-users behavior online—what sites they visit, what they purchase, what they search for, and sometimes even where they’re located when using the Internet. But what is the feasibility of developing a national platform to flag suspicious behavior? What would be the social implications of such a technological solution?

Moderating by Syracuse doctoral students Joe Treglia and Shuyuan Mary Ho, a panel of intelligence, fraud detection, and academic experts discussed this notion of a national behavioral anomaly detection platform.

Treglia and Ho explained that the platform would provide a “statistical firewall” by creating a system of automated analysis of data indicating incidents of malicious behavior, patterns, or activities across a wide variety of industries. The system would employ spider technologies and data mining to pull relevant information from such sources as banks, telephone companies, airlines, and Internet service providers.


Much of the discussion focused on the public perception of such a tool and the threat it posed to individual privacy. Although some retailers currently track people’s behaviors online to better target their marketing without too much resistance from the public, participant doubted the public would be as permissive with law enforcement agencies collecting similar information.

For the information to be useful to a law enforcement agency, the data has to be tracked to a specific individual. The public would have to be aware and approve of such tracking, and even then, some question the ethics of doing so.

“I told my children that I would read their text logs, so they knew I’d be checking up on them,” Treglia said. “But I think halfway through the day, they forget about that. I think the same thing could happen here.”

Medical Informatics in iSchools

For children who have chronic diseases, the transition to adulthood brings a range of information management issues. Until this point, the parents have considered themselves the owner of their child’s complete medical history—pulling together all of their personal observations as well as the treatments by numerous doctors and specialists over the span of their child’s life.

Transferring medical history information from pediatricians to adult-care physicians as well as from the parents to the patient presents medical informatics challenges. This example, presented by Syracuse Professor Carsten Osterlund, is one of many discussed in a roundtable discussion, iSchool Health and Medical Research Initiatives and Opportunities, on February 9.

With U.S. President Barack Obama pledging to fund projects in medical informatics and transferring paper records into electronic medical records, iSchool faculty and students were interested in sharing information and building relationships to support their research in this area.

Genetics, patient perception, collaborative information behavior in health care teams, aging, emergency medical management, community health information, pharmaceutical connections, accessibility and access technology, and social networking and gaming in medicine were all topics of interest to those in attendance.

Professor Ellen Detlefsen of the University of Pittsburgh outlined what she considered to be “success factors” in building medical informatics research projects, including:
· One or more full-time faculty members focused on health information
· A medical or health science faculty nearby, preferably within a medical school
· Access to large academic health sciences library
· Other medical informatics research underway within the same university
· Personal, professional, and electronic links among the previous four factors

Associate Dean of Rutger’s iSchool Hartmut Mokros and Professor Madhu Reddy of Penn State said one of the challenges is understanding the language used in health information and finding the parallels to your research interests. Each discipline or field of medicine has its own language, so Mokros suggested focusing on the problem to find collaborations, rather than the discipline.

“I noticed there’s a lot of interest at the dean’s level and maybe a few Ph.D. students,” Osterlund said. “I bet there’s a lot of faculty here that didn’t come because they don’t see themselves in ‘medical informatics.’”

Faculty avoid labeling themselves, so the field within the iSchool needs to define itself as something broader than medicine, presenters said. These medical informatics projects pull together security, sociotechnology, information retrieval, information architecture, and information management, among many others of interest to iSchool faculty members.

Osterlund suggested that the iSchools create some form of formal connection around this topic—whether that is themed around funding proposals, or social networking on Facebook or elsewhere. It was then suggested to include medical informatics programs that are not located within iSchools, or making joint appointments with these individuals to iSchool faculties.

UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp examines the way universities select faculty

University of North Carolina Chancellor Holden Thorp (blog at http://holden.unc.edu) delivered the opening keynote at the 2009 iConference and challenged universities to rethink the way they hire faculty and to support goals that will make graduates successful in the global 21st century.

Thorp suggests that leadership, entrepreneurial thinking, and an institutional mindset are three key ingredients that makeup the 21st century knowledge worker.

He outlined his definition of leadership to include:

• being able to articulate the problem you’re interested in studying or the field you’ll be leading, why it’s worthwhile, and why it’s challenging


• getting resources to succeed


• being able to help people in and out of organization


• keeping your head in crisis

Then we went on to explain what he means by "entrepreneurial thinking." This doesn't necessarily mean creating new businesses, rather Thorp says it means being more committed to an idea than the process, looking for the next problem to solve, breaking through academic silos, and taking advantage of opportunities to pursue an idea.

Thorp said another necessary trait of a 21st century knowledge worker involves the ability to create an institutional mindset. To do this, one must put the common good in front of protecting personal interests, have a diverse decision-making teams, and promote people based on their ability to work "between the silos" or between divisions in the organization.

In the current economy of tightening state budgets and with venture capitalists retracting from new projects, Thorp said he sees a silver lining. Universities, particularly their graduate programs, are seeing increases in the application pools and the millennial generation filling classrooms are more committed to creativity and public service. President Obama has promised new funding for science, health care, energy, and higher education.

"I'm extremely optimistic about what our students will do when they graduate."

He concluded by questioning the current criteria most universities use to select its faculty members, and suggested that they need to value other characteristics, including teamwork, crisis management, perserverance, people skills, institutional mindset, and compassion.

Following his presentation, he answered questions ranging from how to promote interdisciplinary work to discussing the value of liberals arts education versus job preparation programs.

Most great leaders--from UNC and others--are mostly liberal arts majors, Thorp said. Liberal arts education is American, and some would argue it is the reason why the country is most of the most innovative in the world, he said.

Syracuse iSchool faculty and students are well represented at the 2009 iConference

Syracuse University School of Information Studies faculty and students will share their expertise at the fourth annual iConference at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, February 8 through 11. This year’s iConference theme is iSociety: research, education, engagement.

Syracuse University iSchool members will be presenting on a range of topics in 15 sessions throughout the conference. Their papers and presentations will explore such subjects as gaming, privacy and trust, intellectual property, international information issues, green IT, and national security, among other areas.

Thirteen Syracuse iSchool doctoral students will be among the 77 selected to present posters this year. The posters showcase the students’ groundbreaking research on a variety of issues, including national culture and knowledge sharing, older adults and e-literacy, web advertising and impact on information seeking, online collaboration and group dynamics, search engine technologies, information sharing among law enforcement agencies, and information access and government.

The 2009 iConference opens with a Doctoral Colloquium that brings together Ph.D. students from of iSchool-related disciplines and iSchool faculty to gather feedback and generate discussions about their current research projects or thesis work. At the same time, the conference is sponsoring a Junior Faculty Mentoring Session for tenure-track faculty to meet with senior iSchool faculty, including Syracuse’s Martha Garcia-Murillo and Ping Zhang, and have informal dialogue about emerging intellectual communities within the information field.

The following day, participants will hear from Jose-Marie Griffiths, dean of the School of Information and Library Science at UNC, and UNC Chancellor Holden Thorp, who will deliver the opening plenary presentation. The closing plenary presentation features Edward Seidel, director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure and Floating Point Systems Professor in Louisiana State University’s Department of Physics.

At the conclusion of the conference, Syracuse Professor Steve Sawyer and his co-organizers will lead a four-hour workshop on “The Science of Socio-Technical Systems in iSchools.” The workshop hopes to explore and begin to frame a future research agenda based on socio-technical research in the information field.

The 2009 iConference is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and organized by the iCaucus, a group of information schools from the United States and Canada dedicated to exploring the relationship of information, technology, and people, and to advancing the understanding of the role of information in human endeavors. For more information, visit http://www.ischools.org/iconferences/2009index/.

Xbox: Gaming and Communities

In 2001, Microsoft launched Xbox Live, and gamers around the globe began building their own online community. By 2004, there were more than 2,000 members, mostly males. Or so we thought.

Christa Phillips (aka TriXie), community editor at Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox.com and author of the weekly "Community Confidential" column and TriXieblog.com, said women have always been there. Maybe in small numbers, and usually very discreet, sometimes adopting gender neutral names or masculine names, but there nonetheless.

As the number of members grew, female gamers started banding together, creating mini sororities online. Unfortunately, they also started getting catty and elitist with each other. Phillips saw this downward trend, and stepped in to change the culture for female gamers. She and two other female gamers formed gamerchiX--an open and supportive online community for female gamers. They created a gamerchiX "manifesta" that outlined a code of conduct to ensure a welcoming and safe environment for all female gamers.

Phillips, who called herself the "cruise director" of Xbox live, spends much of her time working on building communities of gamers, tending to their needs, and resolving problems between gamers or small communities of gamers. In the process, she's identified some unique characteristics between female and male gamers.

Some of those differences include:
--Women tend to gravitate toward more collaborative, team-based games.
--Women tend to be more supportive to new gamers and teach these gamers the ropes by walking them through various games
--Women use a variety of consoles (Xbox 360, PlayStation3, Wii, etc.) and accept gamers from other console traditions


Phillips is hoping to encourage the number and involvement in female gamers in the Xbox environment. She currently has 4,500 gamerchiX members who range in age from 4 to 85. She alluded to studies that show gamers are more likely to stay interested in math and science, and so she hopes the young female gamers will remain interested in science, technology, and math and feel empowered to become game developers or other professionals in the gaming industry. Females only make up 12 percent of the gaming industry, as Phillips can attest to as she's often the only female in the room at work.


Phillips also tries to recruit new members and retain current gamers through a variety of special online events such as Family Game Night, gamerchiX Ladies' Night, Xbox All Nighter, Game with Fame, and Game with Developer.

"These get great response from gamers," she said. "Being able to play and possibly beat the game developer is like winning an Oscar for these people."