UCLA student shot with taser

UCPD officers shot a student several times with a Taser inside the Powell Library CLICC computer lab late Tuesday night before taking him into custody. Here is the full story from school newspaper

The YouTube video is even more horrifying and disturbing. I could not watch all of it.

Their actions were completely unjust, and horrific. No one is "safe" when people are abused and mistreated. Many of the students in the library begged the officers to stop, and asked for their identification, but the officers just kept tasering the student. They blatantly misued their power. They even tasered the poor guy when he was handcuffed.

I hope that the officers that did this get fired, and that the school bans the use of tasers on campus.

Filed under: Thoughts

UNC Social Software Symposium

I am really excited because I have been invited to attend the UNC Social Software Symposium, which will be held from December 8-9 at UNC Chapel Hill. Fred Stutzman, the academic expert on Facebook, put it together. The symposium will bring people together that do research on social software and tagging. My research is obviously concentrating on the social tagging/classification aspects, so I am really looking forward to spending two days bouncing ideas with other people and hopefully making contacts for future collaborations. I also seriously need to think/talk about appropriate methodologies for researching social software. Currently, I am thinking of doing longitudinal sampling, social network analysis, survey, and follow up interviews. Perhaps its too much work? But this is my dissertation and all. I hope to get some good feedback on this in December, and will certainly report back what I learned.

Filed under: Academic Research, Conferences

ASIST Conference

I attended the ASIST conference in Austin, TX this year and had a really great experience. First of all, Austin kicks so much ass. Its a big enough city that there is loads of stuff to do and lots of great restaurants, but its not at all overcrowded. Plus its fairly cheap (but than again, everything is cheap compared to LA).

I attended the social classification workshop (as it is quite relevant to my dissertation), and was happy to find out that no one at that meeting is doing the research that I am aiming to do for my dissertation, which certainly makes me feel relieved. It was also really interesting to see the very different perspectives people take on the issue of social classification. Ranging from cultural issues, information retrieval, and integration of tagging into libraries OPAC systems (ex: PennTags).

I also got to see Tony Moore and Kalpana Shankar from IU, so it was really great to catch up to them! Kalpana was part of a great panel on activism, which was actually my favorite panel of the whole conference. While Tony managed to rope me into doing a technical panel for ASIST next year, which I am looking forward to. The theme for next year’s conference is Web 2.0, which should prove to be extremely interesting and I will definitely be attending.

Filed under: Conferences, Thoughts