University of California Berkeley

On User Interface Design, Part II

The second of a pair of presentations by Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame). The presentation is from 1983 and discusses the development of user interface design from the 1960s onward.

Web Log Analysis

Getting to know your audience is key to designing a successful website. Because your audience may be spread around the world, learning about the users of your site may be quite a challenge. Even if you think you have a pretty good idea of who your audience is, in many cases, there's a lot of information that you won't know--for example, what browsers your users are using, whether or not they are connecting from on or off campus, or what pages they find most useful.

Making Choices: Video on the Web

Do you want to present your media in Real, QuickTime, or Windows Media format? Each format has its own strengths and weaknesses. We use QuickTime at the J-School because of its high quality, wide compatibility, and low cost (free). Because all Macs support QuickTime creation and playback natively, and because iMovie and Final Cut Pro generate QuickTime by default, QuickTime is an especially convenient choice if most of your media is generated on Macintosh computers, as it is in many media production environments. The choice of format you use for a given project will probably be determined by the publication you're working for. Be sure to find out in what format media is expected before you enter the final phases of production.

Document Engineering and Information Architecture

This course introduces the discipline of Document Engineering: specifying, designing, and deploying electronic documents and information repositories that enable document-centric or information-intensive applications. These applications include web services, information supply chains, single-source publishing, composite applications/virtual enterprises/portals, and so on. Course topics include developing requirements, analyzing existing documents and information sources, conceptual modeling, identifying reusable semantic components, modeling business processes and user interactions, applying patterns to make models more robust, representing models using XML schemas, and using XML models to implement and drive applications. The syllabus contains over 20 short case study examples from different industries, with special emphasis on business-to-business, healthcare and medical informatics, and e-government.

MD:Notes: Designing an Information System for Public Hospitals

By its very nature, an EMR (electronic medical record) is not subject to the physical limitations of a paper chart. Many clinics can access a patient’s EMR at once. EMRs are never in transit or waiting to be filed. For these reasons, using all-electronic records would greatly alleviate the problem of missing charts, and result in more efficient patient care.

Document Engineering in User Experience Design

Document engineering is a methodology for specifying, designing, and deploying the information models and repositories that enable document-centric applications, and a synthesis of information and systems analysis, business process modeling, electronic publishing, and service-oriented architecture.

Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication: Survey Findings from the University of California

Faculty are strongly interested in issues related to scholarly communication.a Faculty generally conform to conventional behavior in scholarly publication, albeit with significant beachheads on several fronts. Faculty attitudes are changing on a number of fronts, with a few signs of imminent change in behaviors. The current tenure and promotion system impedes changes in faculty behavior. On important issues in scholarly communication, faculty attitudes vary inconsistently by rank, except in general depth of knowledge and on issues related to tenure and promotion. Faculty tend to see scholarly communication problems as affecting others, but not themselves. The disconnect between attitude and behavior is acute with regard to copyright. University policies mandating change are likely to stir intense debate. Scholars are aware of alternative forms of dissemination but are concerned about preserving their current publishing outlet.

Cross-Cultural User-Experience Design: What? So What? Now What...

Applying culture to user-experience design theory and practice.

Copyright, Commodification, And Censorship: Past As Prologue--But To What Future?

Copyright, commodification, and freedom of expression have often been viewed as harmonious and complementary concepts. In Harper and Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises, for example, the Supreme Court characterized copyright law as the 'engine of free expression.' Holding a left-leaning news magazine liable for copyright infringement for publishing excerpts from Gerald Ford's forthcoming memoirs was not, in the Court's view, to condone an act of private censorship. It was in harmony with first amendment principles because copyright incentives would ensure that these memoirs would reach the public through the normal operation of the marketplace.

Intellectual Property and Economic Development: Opportunities for China in the Information Age

The information sector of the Chinese economy, although it has grown in recent years, remains a sector with a far greater potential for growth than has occurred to date. Intellectual property law can help fulfill China's further aspirations for growth of its economy. Markets for information products and services can only thrive when intellectual property rights are secure.

Intellectual Property Rights for Digital Library and Hypertext Publishing Systems

Computers and the concomitant capability they have provided for making copyrighted works available in digital form in networked environments have created many new kinds of expressive opportunities. Computer technology together with communications technology has enabled authors to create digital libraries and hypertext publishing systems. Active development of such systems is now underway. While some difficult technical problems must be solved to build these systems, technical obstacles are thought to be surmountable. Less clear, however, is what kind of intellectual property scheme can be used to make digital library or hypertext publishing systems commercially viable.

Technology in and Beyond the Classroom

Many professors are using the Internet and the Web in connection with teaching traditional classes. Even if you don't want to use the Internet or the Web extensively, you may want to consider using them for some communication functions (see below) or for some information technology topics you might choose to include in a traditional course. Civil procedure professors, for example, may find it useful to visit websites linking to caselaw and commentary about the criteria for obtaining personal jurisdiction over those who maintain websites or on cyberspace as its own jurisdiction. Torts professors may find of interest Web-based materials on the potential liability of online service providers for torts committed by users. A panoply of materials about the Communications Decency Act and the Reno v. ACLU case are available on various websites for constitutional law courses. At the very least, law professors may want to treat the Internet and the Web as useful sources of information when preparing their classes.

The Constitutional Law of Intellectual Property After Eldred v. Ashcroft

The past decade has witnessed an extraordinary blossoming of scholarship on the constitutional law of intellectual property, much of which focuses on copyright law. This article suggests that the scholarly debate will and should continue and that the proponents of constitutional limits are likely to enjoy some successes in the future, even if they did not do so in the Eldred case itself.

Economic and Constitutional Influences on Copyright Law in the United States

Despite the many signs of convergence of European and U.S. copyright laws, this article contends that copyright law in the United States will continue to differ in two significant respects from authors' rights laws of member states of the European Union.

Five Challenges for Regulating the Global Information Society

Information technology (IT) is unquestionably having a profound effect on many aspects of the social, cultural, economic, and legal systems of planet Earth. IT has enabled significant advances in global communications technologies, particularly the Internet, that make it more possible than ever before to contemplate the development of a global information society. (Originally published in Regulating the Information Society, Chris Marsden, ed., Routledge Press 2000.)

Intellectual Property Arbitrage: How Foreign Rules Can Affect Domestic Protections

Differences in national intellectual property rules may cause economic activity to shift from one jurisdiction to another such that a higher protection rule in one jurisdiction will be undermined by lower protection rules in other jurisdictions. This article illustrates this phenomenon with four examples: as to rules on the enforceability of anti-reverse engineering clauses of software licenses, the protectability of bio-engineered research tools, peer to peer file sharing, and exceptions to anti-circumvention rules. It considers several options nations may have to respond to intellectual property arbitrages, none of which is likely to be very effective.

Legally Speaking: Did MGM Really Win the Grokster Case?

MGM's media blitz has given the impression that the entertainment industry won an overwhelming and broad victory against peer to peer (p2p) file sharing and file sharing technologies when the Supreme Court announced its decision in the MGM v. Grokster case on June 27, 2005. MGM can, of course, point to the 9-0 vote that vacated the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision that Grokster could not be charged with contributory infringement because it qualified for a safe harbor established by the Supreme Court in 1984 in its Sony v. Universal decision (see my Legally Speaking column of June 2005). The safe harbor protects technology developers who know, or have reason to know, that their products are being widely used for infringing purposes, as long as the technologies have, or are capable of, substantial noninfringing uses (SNIUs). The Court in Grokster saw no need to revisit the Sony safe harbor. However, it directed the lower courts to consider whether Grokster actively induced users to infringe copyrights, a different legal theory.

Toward a "New Deal" for Copyright for an Information Age

A century of Congressional deference to industry-negotiated compromises has produced, Litman argues, a copyright law that is both incomprehensible and unfair. This incomprehensibility might be tolerable if copyright law governed only commercial relations among industry participants, all of whom can have copyright counsel. To the extent that copyright law applies to the conduct of ordinary persons, its incomprehensibility presents serious difficulties. Moreover, to the extent that copyright law makes illegal many ordinary activities of individuals--for example, making private copies of music for oneself or to share with a friend or forwarding articles to friends via the Internet--it has become unfair as well. In Digital Copyright, she outlines a framework for a copyright law that would be a new and better deal for the public and would be short, comprehensible, and normative in character.

Toward a New Politics of Intellectual Property

Until very recently, copyright has been on the periphery of law and public policy concerns because it provided highly technical rules to regulate a specialized industry. The politics of copyright largely focused on intra-industry bickering. The typical response of the legislature to such intra-industry struggles has been to propose that affected parties meet behind closed doors and hammer out compromise language that would thereafter become enacted into law. It didn’t matter much if the language negotiated in the heat of the night was incomprehensible (as has so often been the case) because the affected parties understood it, and that was all that mattered. Copyright law has, as a consequence, become highly complex and effectively unreadable. One reason why a new politics of intellectual property is necessary is that copyright now affects everyone.

Faceted Metadata for Image Search and Browsing

The authors present a new method of image searching based on conceptual descriptors. This method differs from the traditional methods of image searching that are based on keywords and visual similarity.

Faceted Metadata for Image Search and Browsing