onnect
C
Spring2004
Volume14,Number2
InformationTechnologyatNYU
Welcome to the Spring 2004 edition of Connect!
Thanks to the hard work and creativity of many talented
NYU community members, this edition of Connect is the
largest, most varied issue it has been my pleasure to work
on. It seems to have something for everyone, featuring
articles about computer security and online privacy,
digital archives, online journals, web design for handheld
devices, the redesigned campus network, support for
researchers at NYU, advances in arts technology, a recent
ITS Client Satisfaction Survey, and more.
I hope that you find this issue of Connect as informative
and interesting as I have, and that you will send your feedback and ideas for future issues to us at its.connect@nyu.edu.
As always, many thanks to Connect’s talented contributors for finding the time in their busy schedules to share
their news, knowledge, and expertise with our readership.
- Kate Monahan
Editor
Kate Monahan
kate.monahan@nyu.edu
The Editor gratefully acknowledges
the invaluable editorial support of
Jill Hochberg and Norma Kenigsberg.
Contributors
David Ackerman,
John Bako,
Robyn Berland,
Eduardo DeLeón,
Joanna DiPasquale,
Ken Fauerbach,
Philip Galanter,
Carlos Garcia,
Jill Hochberg,
David Hoover,
Jimmy Kyriannis,
Jeffrey Lane,
Frank LoPresti,
Tracey Losco,
Ben Maddox,
Kate Monahan,
Martha Rust,
Jennifer Vinopal,
James Viskochil,
Will Wilson,
Robert Yaffee,
Yingkai Zhange, and
Matthew Zimmerman
About Connect
Connect: Information Technology at NYU is edited and published
by Information Technology Services (ITS). Its scope includes
information about computing, networking, and telecommunications across NYU’s various schools, departments, and
administrative units, as well as developments in information
technology outside the University.
Print copies of Connect are available at the ITS Faculty
Technology Center, the ITS computer labs, the ITS Client
Services Center, the NYU Information Center, and most graduate school offices. Copies are mailed to full-time University
faculty, staff, administrators, and researchers, based on
mailing lists administered by the Human Resources Division.
Current and past issues of Connect are also available on the
Web at http://www.nyu.edu/its/pubs/connect/.
If you are a full-time faculty member and do not receive
a copy, please notify your dean’s office; full-time staff should
notify their human resources representative. If you are not
among these groups but would like a free subscription, please
send e-mail to its.connect@nyu.edu.
We welcome your comments about the articles in this issue,
as well as suggestions for future issues. Contributions are
invited for consideration by the editor.
Opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are
those of the authors and not necessarily those of Information
Technology Services or of New York University.
Thanks also to...
Will Arnold, Jeff Bary, Doug Carlson,
Lucinda Covert-Vail, Jane DelFavero,
Vincent Doogan, Lorna Hughes,
Carol Mandel, and Marilyn McMillan.
http://www.nyu.edu/its/pubs/connect/
Copyright © 2004 New York University.
Contents•Spring2004
Computing in the Arts
ITS Computer Labs
4 Rapid Prototyping
Additive Technologies That Will Reshape
Design & Manufacturing
By Philip Galanter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2
4 Inspiration, Innovation & Interactivity
The ITP Winter Show 2003
By Kate Monahan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
33
Humanities Computing
Digitizing Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
7
4 ITS Supports NYU Global Affairs
By John Bako and Ben Maddox . . . . . . . . .
A Look at Rocks Cluster Distribution for
HPC Researchers
. . . . 29
Social Sciences, Statistics & Mapping
4 Federal Census Files
By Frank LoPresti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
11
4 The Wireless Arch
Handheld Devices & New Usability
Heuristics
By Joanna DiPasquale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
.................
By Frank LoPresti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
46
48
NYU Libraries
Preserving & Presenting an Online Journal
4 When Computer Viruses Strike
4 Protect Your Privacy When
Browsing the Web
4 SAS Analyst
31
4 Calabash
Computer Security
Based on a True Story—Don’t Let this
Happen to You!
By Tracey Losco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4 Econometric Data Mining
with PcGets
By Robert Yaffee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wireless Computing
By Joanna DiPasquale and
Jennifer Vinopal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
18
37
41
4 ARTstor
A Digital Archive of Art Images for
Study & Research
By James Viskochil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
Outreach
Network Services
4 NYU-NET 3
4 High Performance Computing
Rocks at NYU
Simplifying Statistical Analyses
Global Affairs
By Eduardo DeLeón
Research Technologies
By Will Wilson, Yingkai Zhange, and
David Ackerman . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4 The Clerk’s Tale
By Matthew Zimmerman, with Martha Rust,
David Hoover, and Carlos Garcia . . . . . . . .
4 What’s New in the ITS Student
Computer Labs
By Robyn Berland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
4 The 2003 ITS Client Satisfaction Survey
Our Third-Generation Campus Network
By Jimmy Kyriannis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
By Jill Hochberg, with Ken Fauerbach and
Jeffrey Lane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
50
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
1
COMPU TING IN THE ART S
Rapid Prototyping
Additive Technologies That Will Reshape
Design & Manufacturing
By Philip Galanter
galanter@nyu.edu
W
hether invoked in the
may not be a prototype at all, but
creation of works of
rather the actual final object.
fine art or products
However, the traditional crefor mass consumption, the process
ation of prototypes, whether from
of design is a cycle of activity that
simple hand sketches or finely
remains the same—even as new
drafted plans, is both expensive
technologies and tools continue
and time-consuming. In practice,
to emerge. Each design cycle can
the designer often cannot afford
spawn dozens of sketches, all
the time or expense to create frecompeting for the designer’s attenquent prototypes, and thus many
tion and approval. Like a gardener
design cycles pass between physor animal breeder, the designer
ical models. Rapid prototyping
selects the best specimens from
technology offers the 3D designer
one design cycle, then transforms
a solution to this problem.
and combines them to create
Simply stated, rapid protoeven stronger designs among the
typing uses automated techprogeny. And so it goes, over and
nologies to provide substantial
over again, until the final design is
improvements in the speed and
completed.
When designing objects,
as opposed to flat images,
there is a need to create
‘three dimensional sketches’
in the form of physical
prototypes. As models,
prototypes provide the real
world sensory feedback
needed to make aesthetic
judgments. Prototypes can
also aid in the functional verification of a design, enable
an ergonomic evaluation, or
simply serve as tools of persuasion in a presentation.
And for some, especially fine
artists, the last prototype
The ZPrinter 406 rapid prototyping system.
2
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
cost of prototype creation. Rapid
prototyping does not represent a
break with the tradition of cyclical
design by incremental improvement or successive approximation; rather, it speeds the design
cycle and increases the use of
prototypes to an extent that new
ideas, new results, and new techniques become possible. It’s also
worth noting that in a commercial
setting, rapid prototyping can often
provide a significant and demonstrable return on investment.
In many ways, rapid prototyping
is the natural result of two earlier,
converging technologies. For the
past several decades, Computer
Assisted Design (CAD) software has provided designers
with computer-based tools
for drafting, mechanical
drawing, architectural blueprints, and so on, offering
advantages similar to those
available to 2D designers
using desktop publishing
tools. Over the same period
of time, machine shops have
used Numerical Control
(NC) computers with milling
machines, allowing the
automation of their operation, and thus the creation
of parts at lower expense
and greater precision.
virtual creations and reconnecting
with the physical world by using
“high-tech” tools. A sampling
of currently available devices is
described below.
Z CORP. ZPRINTER SYSTEM
Sample objects created by a Z Corp. ZPrinter.
Rapid prototyping in a sense
marries these two technologies by
allowing designers to create plans
for real world objects in the virtual
world of the computer, and then in
a single step to create a physical
object directly from those plans.
However, there is an important
difference between CAD-driven
NC milling and rapid prototyping.
Traditional
shop
techniques,
whether manual or numerically controlled, are a subtractive
process. They start with a block,
sheet, or tube of raw material and
then, by drilling, cutting, lathing,
and grinding, material is removed,
yielding the desired object or
product. Rapid prototyping, on the
other hand, is an additive process:
the desired object is built from
bottom to top in very thin layers.
Whereas subtractive techniques
require hard-earned craft skills for
the complicated and unique setups
that vary with each job, additive techniques require no special
knowledge on the part of the prototype fabricator. In fact, some rapid
prototyping systems are called “3D
Printers” because it is as easy to
send a model to such a prototyping
system as it is to send a document
to a networked printer. Even complicated mechanisms with moving
parts, multiple enclosed parts, or
trapped volumes, bearing assemblies, and so on can be “printed”
directly, without the need for
further assembly.
This fundamental change from
subtractive to additive methods
has important implications for the
future of robotic manufacturing. It
will allow, for example, the mass
production of unique objects, a
subject that will be touched upon
towards the end of this article.
Rapid prototyping is important to artists because it allows
them to directly translate ideas
into physical objects. It contributes to the trend in the digital
arts of moving away from purely
http://zcorp.com/
The ZPrinter 310 System is one
of the most popular rapid prototyping systems in the university
sector, due to its ease of use, versatility, relatively low cost, and
office-friendly operation. Like the
larger systems from Z Corporation,
the ZPrinter 310 uses a starchor plaster-based powder and a
binding agent applied by an inkjetlike mechanism.
The mechanism passes over a
bin with a thin layer of powder,
applying the binding agent only
where the resulting object is
intended to be solid. Then, a fresh
layer of powder is added to the
top of the bin, and the mechanism
selectively applies another layer
of binding agent. This is repeated
many times until the entire object
has been built up out of many
thousands of layers.
The completed object is then
removed from the bin and any
excess unbound powder is blown
off with compressed air. As an
option, the prototype can then
be immersed in liquid infiltrants,
which saturate the object and have
a lasting effect upon drying. Some
infiltrants will harden and toughen
the relatively brittle ZPrinter prototypes, while others will result in
a flexible or rubbery material.
The ZPrinter 406 System operates in a similar manner, but
along with the binding agent the
inkjet mechanism also acts like
a traditional color printer, and
applies the four CMYK pigments
that combine to produce virtually any color (see the example on
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
3
the front cover of this magazine).
The resulting object can have any
number of arbitrarily colored sections, and the color permeates the
object, allowing for sanding of the
surface, if desired.
Recently, Z Corporation introduced the Zcast process for the
direct production of molds that
can be used to cast aluminum or
other non-ferrous metals. An artist
with a metal sculpture in mind
can create the (positive) model in
a 3D package such as Autocad or
Maya, directly create a (negative)
mold in a single step on a ZPrinter
310 or 406, then bring that mold to
the sculpture studio and create a
direct cast—all without the use of
intermediates. The Zcast process
can be used with a ZPrinter 310
or 406 and does not require additional special hardware.
While the Z Corp. systems
seem to be leading the pack, especially in the university sector, there
are some tradeoffs. Starting at
about $30,000, the cost is relatively low and competitive, but
the maximum size of the resulting
object is modest, with a so-called
“build envelope” of 8” x 10” x 8”.
Each layer is only about .003”
to .010” thick, but some competing
devices allow for even greater
laminar resolution. The surface
texture is also a bit rough relative to other processes. Finally, the
material is somewhat brittle in its
untreated form, and some feel that
the need to use infiltrants as a final
step is an unwanted hassle, while
others prefer the options various
infiltrants offer.
STRATASYS PRODIGY PLUS
http://www.stratasys.com/NA/
The Stratasys Prodigy Plus is
about as easy to use as the Z
Corp. systems, but it exploits an
entirely different mechanism and
4
material. Utilizing a fused disposition modeling process, the Prodigy
Plus creates prototypes out of
durable ABS plastic. Tiny dots
of ABS plastic are deposited and
fused in very thin layers, creating
a plastic object that is as strong as
an industrially manufactured part.
Trailing the Z Corp. systems a
bit, Prodigy Plus layers can be from
.007” to .013” thick, and parts can
be only a single color (the color of
the plastic used). The maximum
size of a Stratasys object is slightly
larger than is possible with Z Corp.
systems, with a build envelope of
8” x 8” x 12”.
As rapid prototyping
literally reshapes our
homes and even our
bodies, it will become
a basic technology
of interest to all.
One interesting problem any
rapid prototyping system must
solve is the support of the object
it is building while it builds it. For
example, imagine a model of a tree
being constructed from the bottom
up—any
downward
hanging
branches would initially have to
float in mid-air until the connection to the trunk was completed in
upper layers.
In the Z Corporation system,
this problem is solved by the
excess, unbound powder that surrounds the object and supports any
unattached parts. Other systems
have to create temporary supports
that are cut away once the prototype is completed. The Stratasys
uses the unique WaterWorks
system that creates supports out
of a second, water-soluble material that can be washed away once
the object is finished.
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
The primary advantage of the
Prodigy Plus is the strength of
the ABS plastic material it uses
and, relative to some systems, the
WaterWorks removable support
system.
THE SOLIDSCAPE T66
http://solid-scape.com/t66.html
The Solidscape T66 is a specialized rapid prototyping device that
excels at the creation of small
parts with very fine details. These
parts can be used as “investment
casts” in a lost wax process for
casting metal such as jewelry.
The T66 allows a small build
envelope of 6” x 6” x 6”, and uses
only a single, somewhat soft, waxy,
thermoplastic material. This material, however, holds fine detail,
resists thermal expansion or other
distortion, and, when removed
in mold-making, leaves behind
virtually no ash or residue.
The T66 offers very high resolution, with layers from .0005” to
.003”, and the ability to produce
features as small as .01”. What the
Solidscape T66 lacks in generality,
it makes up for in resolution. For
those working with jewelry or the
casting of other very fine parts, it
is a uniquely powerful tool.
OTHER SYSTEMS
The systems noted above are
among those most often used by
artists, but there are many others:
• Industrial systems are available at greater expense from Z
Corporation and Stratasys with
build envelopes of nearly two
feet on each side.
• An older rapid prototyping
technology called stereolithography uses a vat of photoreactive liquid that solidifies at
the surface when struck by a
A sample prototype produced by a ZPrinter.
relatively cool scanning laser. A
system such as the 3D Systems
SLA 7000 offers high resolution layers from .001” to .005”
with a 20” x 20” x 23” build
envelope and very smooth surface textures. The resulting
objects are relatively strong, but
can also be used as patterns
for investment casting. (See
ht t p://w w w.3dsystems.com/
products/sla/sla7000/.)
• A large class of rapid prototyping machines use powdered
metal to create metal objects.
Selective Laser Sintering (SLS)
machines build up layers of powdered metal that are fused into
a solid object by a hot scanning
laser. SLS parts can serve as
prototypes, but are also directly used as short run products in
industries such as aerospace.
The 3D Systems Vanguard, for
example, can create arbitrary
metal objects within a build
envelope of 14.5” x 12.5” x 17.5”,
with features as small as .02”.
(See http://www. 3dsystems.com/
products/sls/vanguard/.)
• Metal objects can also be
created by a Direct Material
Deposition process where tiny
amounts of metal powder are
applied and immediately fused
to the part by a highly accurate tool—integrating the powder delivery system and a laser.
Such systems can dynamically mix different metal powders creating objects made of
alloys that vary in composition
across the object in a highly
controlled manner. AeroMet,
perhaps the largest of these
systems, can create objects
out of the usually difficult-tomachine Titanium, in a build
envelope of 10’ x 10’ x 4’. (See
http://www.aerometcorp.com/
theMachine.htm.)
THE FUTURE STATE OF THE ART
The current buzz among rapid
prototyping experts is the paradigm
shift from rapid prototyping
to additive manufacture. Most
objects now created by rapid
prototyping systems are standins for something that will later be
manufactured by other means. But
that practice is changing.
Some futurists imagine rapid
prototyping-inspired additive manufacturing factories that can laminate
all manner of materials, creating
finished products in a single pass,
allowing for personalization and
customization with each item, and
providing the ability to build all
sorts of different products without
having to reconfigure a production line. For example, imagine an
integrated car dashboard built as
a single piece on a single machine,
including all the needed switches,
displays, and mechanical indicators, or, for that matter, imagine an
entire car built this way.
The future, in fact, may not
be so far away. University of
Southern California Engineer
Behrokh Khoshnevis hopes to
create a robotic “house printer”
that can custom-pour arbitrary
cement structures as soon as
2005. Integrated with a design
system to drive the process, one
could custom-specify any number
of house designs, including
curving and irregular walls
that would be difficult to build
any other way, and then simply
“print” them out on-site. (See
http://www.newscientist.com/news/
news.jsp?id=ns99994764.)
Medical applications represent a burgeoning market for rapid
prototyping and additive manufacturing, and some products are
already available. An alternative
to braces, the Invisalign product
allows dentists to send traditional
x-rays and casts to the company’s
3D computer imaging facility.
Invisalign then uses the derived
data to drive a rapid prototyping
facility, which creates a series of
custom removable aligners made
from clear plastic. Each uniquely
fits the given person’s mouth,
and, over a period of months, the
patient’s teeth are slowly moved
into alignment. (A streaming video
about the product is available
at http://www.invisalign.com/US/
html/explore/MFGVideo.jsp.)
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
5
Envisiontec’s Bioplotter applies
rapid prototyping technology to
grow living tissue for implantation
into patient-specific shapes (e.g.,
an ear). In the future, shape information will be extracted from MRI,
CAT, or ultrasound scans, and
then used to drive the Bioplotter,
which will build replacement skin,
cartilage, or bone from biodegradable scaffold materials and
cell cultures from the patient.
Because the cells come from
the patient, replacement tissues
created via rapid prototyping
will be immune to rejection. (See
http://envisiontec.de/03hbiopa.htm
and http://www.e4engineering.com/
item.asp?id=48516.)
In the near term, rapid prototyping offers artists and designers
an extremely powerful tool. But, as
rapid prototyping literally reshapes
our homes and even our bodies, it
will become a basic technology of
interest to all.
For more information about
rapid prototyping, please see the
corresponding project page at the
Arts Technology Group website:
http://www.nyu.edu/its/atg/pages/
projects/rp/.
Philip Galanter is Associate Director
of the Arts Technology Group at ITS
Academic Computing Services.
Laser Cutting and Etching for
Artists at NYU
This spring, a new device was added to the Arts Technology
Studio at the ITS Multimedia Lab located at 35 W. 4th Street.
While not, strictly speaking, a rapid prototyping device, the
Universal Laser Systems X2-660 does allow artists to easily
cut and etch flat materials from digital plans. Just about any
flat material up to 32” x 18” other than metal can be cut or
etched, including plexiglass, acrylic plastic, vinyl, paper, matte
board, cardboard, cork, fabric, leather, rubber, and wood.
Glass, stone, and treated metal can be etched but not cut.
The Universal X2-660
Plans can be prepared using popular design packages such
as Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, as well as CAD-oriented
packages such as AutoCAD. The designer simply draws
lines or text with the standard tools, and uses colors to code
which lines are intended as cuts and which are intended as
etched lines. In addition, pixel-based graphics such as JPEGs
or Adobe Photoshop files can be burned into a surface as a
duotone or grayscale image. The system uses an extremely
thin laser beam and highly accurate X/Y plotter mechanism
allowing, for example, the creation of interlocking pieces or
inlay materials.
For more information about accessing this device, please send
e-mail to the author at galanter@nyu.edu.
6
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
Jeff Bary of the ITS Arts
Technology Group, operating
the new laser system.
HUM ANITIES COMPU TING
The Clerk’s Tale
Digitizing Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
By Matthew Zimmerman, with Martha Rust, David Hoover, and Carlos Garcia
matthew.zimmerman@nyu.edu; martha.rust@nyu.edu; david.hoover@nyu.edu; carlos.garcia@nyu.edu
F
or the past four months,
the Humanities Computing
Group within ITS’ Academic
Computing Services has been
providing technical support to
Professors David Hoover and
Martha Rust of NYU’s Faculty of
Arts and Sciences Department of
English in the development of an
electronic edition of Chaucer’s
“The Clerk’s Tale.” This edition
is part of the Canterbury Tales
Project, an international, multiuniversity endeavor based at De
Monfort University, Leicester,
England and directed by Dr. Peter
Robinson.
The Canterbury Tales Project is
working to provide new transcriptions of all the extant manuscripts
and early-print copies of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales on CD-ROM, with
the ultimate goal of determining
“as thoroughly as possible” the
textual history of the Tales.1 The
work undertaken to achieve these
linked goals may be divided into
four stages:
1. As the first step, each manuscript is transcribed and encoded. Transcription is done using
BBEdit and the Canterbury
Tales font, a character set
designed to accommodate latemedieval English manuscripts.
Encoding conforms to the guidelines of the TEI (Text Encoding
Initiative), which is the standard
for mark-up of electronic texts in
the humanities. Once completed,
each transcription is reviewed
by two separate readers.
2. Next, the transcriptions are
compared to each other using
a collation software program,
Collate, first developed for the
Project. This program creates
a record of the agreements
and disagreements among
the manuscripts and encodes
that record of variants in XML
(Extensible Markup Language).
3. Then, the body of variants is
analyzed using the “cladistic”
methods of evolutionary biologists; this type of analysis
yields a working delineation of
the “genetic” relations among
the various copies of the text
and facilitates queries against
the data in order to refine that
analysis further.
4. In the final stage of this process,
each tale is published on CD-
ROM in a format that allows
users to access black and white
images of every page of every
manuscript or early-print copy
of that tale as well as full-text
electronic transcriptions. The
CD-ROM editions also allow
users to compare differences
among manuscripts or print
copies at any given point in the
text. These comparisons are
facilitated by Anastasia, another software program that was
developed for the Canterbury
Tales Project. See figure 1 on
page 8 for an example from
Caxton’s Canterbury Tales.
To date, the Canterbury Tales
Project has published “The Wife
of Bath’s Prologue,” “The General
Prologue,” “The Hengwrt Chaucer
Digital
Facsimile,”
“Caxton’s
Canterbury Tales: The British
Library Copies,” and is working
on “The Miller’s Tale,” “The Nun’s
Priest’s Tale,” “The Franklin’s
Tale,” and “The Merchant’s Tale,”
in addition to “The Clerk’s Tale.”
The online editions are available at
http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/Caxtons/.
Since the scope of the Canterbury
Tales is so large—consisting of 24
tales in addition to the “General
1. “The Canterbury Tales Project: About the Project,” http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/projects/ctp/about.html. This web page is also
the source for the description of the Project’s stages of production and analysis.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
7
Figure 1. The Canterbury Tales website at http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/Caxtons/.
Prologue”—Robinson has begun
to form collaborative partnerships
with scholars around the world to
produce editions.
The Canterbury Tales Project has
formed partnerships with Brigham
Young University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,
the Institut für Buchwissenschaft
und Textforschung at the University
of Münster, Germany, and now New
York University. NYU’s work on “The
Clerk’s Tale” marks the first time the
group at De Montfort University has
trained another group in the entire
range of skills and tools used in this
project—from first transcription,
collation, and analysis right through
to final electronic publication.
The completion of the edition
of “The Clerk’s Tale” should take
8
about two years. The first step is
to transcribe into electronic text
the 53 existing manuscript and
early-print copies of the “Tale.”
This task is currently being carried
out by a team of five transcribers,
including Professors David Hoover
and Martha Rust and three graduate students from NYU’s English
Department: Adam Coccaro, Mark
Hewitt, and Amanda Leff. (Funds
for graduate student stipends have
been supplied through a generous
grant from the NYU Humanities
Council.)
Initially, the transcribers are
working from digitized images
derived from microfilm copies of
the manuscripts. Upon completion
of the transcription process, one
or more members of the transcrip-
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
tion team will travel to England to
consult the original manuscripts
to verify any readings that are in
question.
TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS
AND SOLUTIONS
While the transcription methods,
Collate software, and Anastasia
server were all developed by
Peter Robinson at DeMontfort,
the Humanities Computing Group
(HCG) has actively provided
technical support to the project.
Access to three computers in
the Studio for Digital Projects and
Research has been provided for
use as transcription stations. The
Studio, housed in Bobst Library, is
a joint project of the NYU Libraries
and ITS. The computers have large,
high-resolution monitors to view
the scanned manuscripts and all
of the software needed to produce
the electronic transcriptions. In
addition, the HCG provides server
space for storage of the manuscript
images and transcribed texts. This
allows the manuscripts and texts
to be accessed from any computer
with web access and also provides
data protection and backups.
Perhaps the most important
contribution the HCG has made
to the project, however, is the
implementation of a Concurrent
Versioning System (CVS) repository for version control of the transcriptions. CVS is typically used
by teams of computer programmers working on one project. It is
a client-server system that allows
a project member to “check out” a
file from a project, make changes
and additions to the file, and then
return that file to the server.
CVS keeps track of the changes
made and assigns a version
number to that file. At any time,
a user can go back and see previous versions of the file. Thus, if
a mistake was made in updating
or changing a file, the previous
version can be called up to replace
the updated version. Also, if two
people have checked out the
same file from a project at the
same time, they can work on the
files separately and both sets of
changes will be integrated into the
new version. If there are any conflicts (e.g., the same part of the file
has been edited), CVS notifies both
people before making any permanent changes.
The CVS repository has made
life a bit easier for “The Clerk’s
Tale” editors and transcribers.
Before this system was implemented, transcribers for previous
Canterbury Tales projects saved
files using a system of codes for
the tale name, manuscript name,
transcriber’s name and version
number. For instance, for a Caxton
version of “The Clerk’s Tale,” a
transcriber could create a file
called “CL-Cn-TS-1” where “CL”
stood for “Clerk’s Tale,” “Cn” stood
for “Caxton,” “TS” stood for the
transcriber’s initials, and “1” meant
it was the first version. Then with
subsequent changes to the file, the
transcriber would save it as “CLCn-TS-2”, “CL-Cn-TS-3,” etc.
Figure 2. BBEdit’s CVS Menu.
In theory this system is sound,
but in practice it is prone to problems. A transcriber might forget to
update the file name before saving
it, and therefore overwrite the previous version. Also, after months
of transcribing, there could be
hundreds of versions of one transcription, meaning hundreds of
files, usually stored locally on
the transcriber’s machine. Lastly,
there was no cataloging system to
track what changes were made in
each version of the file.
The CVS repository has solved
these problems. Typically, CVS
is run from a UNIX command
line, which is prohibitive for the
casual computer user, but for
the Clerk’s Tale project, the NYU
team is using the built-in CVS
menu in BBEdit version 7.0, a text
editor software program for the
Macintosh platform.2
Now, when an editor wants to
work on a file, he or she “checks
out” the project from the CVS
repository by choosing one of the
UNIX checkout scripts the HCG
has created, available directly
in the BBEdit menu. Files in the
project can then be opened, edited
locally, and “committed” to the
CVS repository as often as the
editor wishes.
Every time a file is committed,
it is saved to the CVS repository as
a new version of the file, thereby
preserving all previous versions.
If an editor wants to go back and
look at a previous version, he or
she can simply check that version
out of the system. These commands are all available in BBEdit’s
CVS menu (see figure 2). In addition to saving multiple versions of
the file, the CVS system also saves
certain administrative data about
each version: the username of the
person who committed the file, the
date and time it was committed,
and any comments about the file
the person may have added.
Each time a file is committed,
the person saving the file is given
an opportunity to make comments about the file or the changes
they have made (see figure 3). An
editor can also choose to compare
different revisions against one
another (see figure 4).
So now, instead of having
to save hundreds of files under
2. To access BBEdit’s CVS menu, Apple Developer Tools must also be installed (http://developer.apple.com/tools/download/ ).
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
9
work area and secure data backup.
CVS has proved to be a very successful tool for managing the large
number of files associated with the
transcription of “The Clerk’s Tale,”
and may be adopted by the other
partner universities working on the
project.
This project exemplifies how
ITS can collaborate with professors like Dr. Rust and Dr. Hoover
by providing the technical support
needed to allow them to focus on
the scholarly aims of a project and
free them from concerns about
day-to-day technical details.
RELATED LINKS
Figure 3. BBEdit’s CVS allows editors to add comments to a version.
different names and knowing little
about when those files were saved
or what changes were made, a
person can quickly see a list of all
the versions of a file, when it was
saved, whom it was saved by, and,
if comments were added, what
was changed or added to the file.
And he or she has access to any of
these versions at any time.
Although the real work of the
Clerk’s Tale project is the scholarly
editing and transcription being
done by Professors Hoover, Rust,
and their staff, the HCG has been
pleased to facilitate the project
through the technical assistance
it has provided. The transcription
stations and server space provide
the project with a dependable
• Anastasia: http://www.sd-editions.
com/anastasia/
• BBEdit: http://www.barebones.
com/products/bbedit/
• Canterbury Tales Project:
http://www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/
projects/ctp/
• Caxton’s Canterbury Tales: The
British Library Copies: http://
www.cta.dmu.ac.uk/Caxtons/
• The ITS Humanities Computing
Group: http://www. nyu.edu/its/
humanities/
• Studio for Digital Projects and
Research: http://www.nyu.edu/
studio/
• Text Encoding Initiative:
http://www.tei-c.org/
Figure 4. CVS makes it possible for editors to compare revision versions.
10
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
Matthew Zimmerman is a Humanities
Computing Specialist in ITS’
Academic Computing Services;
Martha Rust and David Hoover are
professors in NYU’s FAS Department
of English; Carlos Garcia is a student
working with the ITS Humanities
Computing Group.
GLOBAL AFFAIR S
ITS Supports NYU Global Affairs
By John Bako and Ben Maddox
john.bako@nyu.edu; ben.maddox@nyu.edu
I
n 1958, New York University
created its first “Study Abroad”
program in Madrid, Spain, as
an initiative of the Spanish and
Portuguese Literature Department.
Since then, NYU has opened centers in Florence, London, Paris,
Prague, and Buenos Aires (suspended in 2001). Additionally, in
the fall of 2004, an academic and
research center on the western
coast of Africa, in Accra, Ghana,
will open to host students, faculty,
and staff.
On the subject of spending time
abroad as a student, former NYU
Vice-Provost Farhad Kami was
fond of saying that “no 21st Century
education is complete without a
global component to it.” He also
believed that the experience is “not
only about how we see others, but
knowing and understanding how
others see us.” NYU’s investment
in the Study Abroad program is a
demonstration of the University’s
commitment to diverse educational
opportunities for its students.
When NYU students study
abroad, they register for courses
using the SIS/Albert process that
is familiar to them, but the courses
are taught by international faculty
at one of the Study Abroad locations (known as Global Centers).
The Study Abroad program
allows NYU students to immerse
themselves in a different culture
and take classes consistent with
academic standards at NYU’s
Washington Square campus, while
avoiding the pitfalls often associated with studying abroad, such as
having to transfer course credit.
Each Global Center has a student
computer lab, a local network, and
local IT support ranging from fulltime staff to outsourced maintenance and service agreements. ITS
Telecommunications, ITS Network
Services and ITS Client Services
here at Washington Square provide
support as well. The Florence and
London Centers also offer a residential network (in two residence
halls) and telephone voice mail
service and support, similar to
what is provided at Washington
Square.
The other Global Centers house
their students away from the academic center, so students manage
their own “home” computing
needs, while using the computer
labs for e-mail, coursework, and
general correspondence. Students
at each of the Centers generally can
use the labs from 8:00 am to midnight, Monday-Friday, and from
8:00 am to 5:00 pm on weekends.
During academic year 2001/
2002, activity at the NYU Center
in Buenos Aires, a modern, vibrant
facility in the heart of the city, was
suspended due to political instability in Argentina. As a result,
NYU’s Office of Global Affairs
and ITS were unable to recover
network equipment and desktop
computing hardware at the location. This situation encouraged us
to take a more structured managerial approach to lab inventory and
policies regarding desktop computing at the Global Centers.
In the spring of 2002, ITS
Academic Computing Services (ACS)
and Global Affairs collaborated
towards this end by sending staff
to NYU in London and Prague for
assessment, upgrades, and installations. We also created an online
assessment tool and questionnaire
for collecting information about
inventory and individual computing
practices. Based upon helpful feedback from the staff at each Global
Center, we formed a project plan
that outlined the need for increased
training, more web-based services,
and standards and policies for
student, faculty, and staff desktop
computing.
GLOBAL ITS MANAGEMENT
STATEMENT
Over the years, a benchmark
statement to guide technology
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
11
planning for the Global Centers
was developed and refined:
• To provide, whenever possible,
continuity of services for students, staff, and faculty from
Washington Square to each
NYU Global Center.
• To create a system of managed
expectations for support and
services.
• To select equipment and strategies which are technically
secure and fiscally responsible.
By leveraging ITS expertise, under the leadership of
Associate Provost and CITO
Marilyn McMillan, Director of ITS
Academic Computing Services
Vincent Doogan and Director
of ITS Network Services, Doug
Carlson (with the support of ITS
staff members John Bako, Jamil
Hamilton, and Carlo Cernivani),
the groundwork for change was
laid. Some common needs were
identified for each site: regular
upgrades to equipment in the
student labs; the establishment of
standards for virus protection and
computer and network security;
and staff training. For instance,
with limited bandwidth, the lab
networks were continually clogged
by non-academic usage, such as
the downloading of images, music,
and movies for entertainment—a
development that site staff was not
trained or prepared to deal with.
IMPLEMENTING THE PLAN
Execution of the Global Centers
plan is a work in progress. In
fall 2003, ITS and Global Affairs
entered into an agreement to strive
to standardize computer replacement for student lab machines at
NYU’s Global Centers. The agreedupon approach roughly parallels
the 36-month lab replacement
cycle employed at ITS student
computer labs. The goals associated with this arrangement are
to provide improved academic
support, practicality, and consistency: by giving the Centers the
tools and practices they need; by
standardizing equipment and the
approach to management; and
by offering continuity of services,
wherever possible, for students,
staff, and faculty traveling between
Washington Square and the
Centers abroad.
The first visit in support of this
new initiative was made in early
2002 to the London Center. There,
Jamil Hamilton and Ben Maddox
addressed outstanding problems
with existing equipment that negatively affected lab operations, by
sharing ITS lab management best
practices used in our Washington
Square student labs. Then, in the
summer of 2002, the Prague Center
purchased new student lab and
faculty computers. Jamil Hamilton,
John Bako, and Ben Maddox
visited the site to provide technical
support and staff training.
In 2003, ACS, given budget and
time constraints, set the goal of
upgrading one third of the oldest
computers at the Centers each
year. The decision was made to
initially focus on the Florence,
London, and Prague Centers, and
then share successes with Madrid
and Paris (currently managed
by NYU’s Faculty of Arts and
Science).
New
equipment—
including 14 computers in London
and 22 in Florence, plus one computer at each location to serve
as a server for Symantec Ghost,
Symantec AntiVirus, and Microsoft
Software Update Services (SUS)1—
was acquired by ACS. Between
January 5 and January 15, 2004,
Global Affairs and ACS staff visited
the London and Florence Centers
to install the equipment and train
local IT support staff on ITS lab
management best practices. The
staff, directors, faculty, and students at the Global Centers could
not have been more appreciative
of the equipment, training, and
support.
Plans to support the Centers
with the same kind of service provided to the Washington Square
community is an ongoing process,
full of opportunities for creativity,
as well as unique challenges, such
as how to best manage the support
needs of locations in seven time
zones, and how to find the best
financial and human resources.
By working together to listen
to the needs of the Centers,
identifying those needs which
we can address, and striving to
provide solutions, ITS is making an
impact everyday on the experience
of our students, faculty, and staff
abroad. Collaboration, creativity,
and action are the cornerstones
of our approach to supporting the
Global Centers, and the work is
flourishing. For more information
about NYU’s Global Centers,
please visit http://www.nyu.edu/
global/.
NYU Global Affairs would like
to express special thanks to the
following ITS staff for their help
involving the Global Centers:
John Bako; Doug Carlson; Jane
DelFavero; Joe DiMeo; Vincent
Doogan; Jodi Goldberg; Michael
Hocke; Marilyn McMillan; Jorge
Najera-Ordonez; Yoni Radzin;
Catherine Trejo; and Laura
Tretner.
John Bako is the manager of the ITS
Tisch Hall computer lab; Ben Maddox
is Associate Director of Global
Information Technology at NYU.
1. See http://www.symantec.com/ghost/;
http://www.symantec.com/ghost/ http://www.symantec.com/nav/
http://www.symantec.com/nav/; or http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/sus/.
12
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
WIRELESS COMPU TING
The Wireless Arch
Handheld Devices & New Usability Heuristics
By Joanna DiPasquale
joanna.dipasquale@nyu.edu
D
o you have a hand-held
wireless device, such as
a Pocket PC or Palm organizer, that has a web browser? Are
you glad to have web access, but
frustrated that some sites don’t
seem to display properly or work
well on your device? You’re not
alone: while an estimated 10%
of the US workforce “currently
use[s] some sort of personal digital assistant (PDA) or handheld for
business purposes” and universities introduce innovative ways to
use handhelds in the classroom,
few websites are “small screen”
enabled.1,*
This deficit certainly isn’t for lack
of users of handhelds or due to low
popularity of these devices: by June
30, 2002, cell phone subscribers
had surpassed the 130 millionmark, wireless “hotspots” for IEEE802.11b-compliant devices (such as
a Pocket PC with wireless card) had
fanned out across New York City,
and sales of mobile digital devices
had simply exploded.2 Yet, usability
guru Jakob Nielsen recently found
that much of the mobile Web consists of less-than-useful, restructured pages.
Rather than scaling back sites
and providing easy menus, web
designers seem to have been dis-
tracted by the novelty of the technology. “Putting them [i.e., traditional sites] on a small screen is
like the dog that sings: the miracle
is that it does so at all,” Nielsen
wrote in August 2003 (see inset
on p. 16). “While a technical
feat, usability is never going to
be good.” 3 The traditional Web,
which often uses column-structured layout and graphic-intense
screens, simply doesn’t scale down
very well. Web designers need to
look carefully at the application
and the function of each screen to
make their sites PDA-ready.
Figure 1. A sample page from the Wireless Arch, the NYU Libraries’
mobile electronic gateway to online resources
(http://library.nyu.edu/mobile/ from your handheld device).
* Endnotes for this article are located on page 17.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
13
When NYU Libraries examined its website for redesign4 and
released a more user-friendly
interface for researchers in fall
2003, we also began discussions
about various types of Internetready devices. Could we adapt
some of our pages for small
screens? What types of usability
obstacles would we meet, and
how could we overcome them to
make PDA-ready information?
Would we have a “singing dog,”
or a gateway that mobile users
could…well, use?
BACKGROUND OF THE PROJECT
Although the Libraries completed
extensive user testing, we were
unsure if this testing actually
applied to “reading in the small,” as
researchers Catherine C. Marshall
and Christine Ruotolo dubbed
traditional applications fitted to
PDAs.5 Usability testing of our
“large” site had demonstrated that
we needed an easy-to-use way to
deliver electronic resources (such
as journal articles), and that this
function had to rest at the forefront
of any new design.6 This was the
area of the site that we wanted to
adapt to the small screen.
In fall 2002, I spoke with
research scientist (and mobile Web
usability guru) Dan Moss at the
Center for Advanced Technology
at NYU about making this idea
a reality.7 Dan and I worked to
develop new guidelines for the
Libraries’ small-web interface;
the result is the Wireless Arch, a
component of the Libraries’ new
website specifically designed for
PDAs and other pocket computers.
Along the way, we learned that
many usability principles adapted
well to a smaller medium, while
others needed a new philosophy
(as Nielsen had suggested) before
a usable interface could emerge.
14
THE WIRELESS ARCH
http://library.nyu.edu/mobile/
The Wireless Arch—as the name
suggests—is a specially-tailored
mobile gateway for a more robust
system of electronic resources at
users’ fingertips: the Arch. The
Arch, available on the Libraries’
standard-sized website, provides
access to high-quality electronic
resources, and delivers lists of
items such as electronic journals,
research databases, and other
librarian-selected resources by
subject, updated in real time. 8
However, it is designed with the
large screen in mind. Thus, the
Wireless Arch provides the same
resources, but in “the small”
(figure 1). Its extensive resource
database includes items such
as the Oxford English Dictionary
Dictionary,
ProQuest, Lexis-Nexis, and Ovid.
The Wireless Arch interface has
two major search components:
(1) a comprehensive search engine
for all electronic resources, divided
by subject and type of resource
(like journals, image databases,
or subject encyclopedias), and
(2) the ability to search for an
electronic database by title. The
Arch also allows users to access
information about Bobst Library’s
Figure 2. The Wireless Arch interface was designed with usability in mind.
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
match between the system and the
“real world” by employing a tactic
familiar to users.9
We also added a brief “help”
section (figure 3) to give users
a place to learn more about the
Wireless Arch, and how to connect,
resolve password/authentication
problems, and set screen resolution.
DESIGNING-IN-THE-SMALL:
SOME THINGS WE LEARNED
ALONG THE WAY
Figure 2. A sample Wireless Arch results screen.
hours through their PDAs; pending
development includes the ability
to renew a book from the “small
screen.”
Within the interface, users
can type a few search terms,
or research by subject in three
clicks—select a subject, select a
material, and (if desired) set the
number of results per page (see
figure 1). This latter option seemed
appropriate, even if it meant one
more click for the user, because
it gave him or her ultimate control
over the display. Once a user
makes his/her selections, results
are displayed page by page (the
default is up to ten results at a
time), with the URLs needed to
connect (figure 2).
Each page has internal “back,”
“forward/next,” and “home” buttons.
We believed this internal navigation
was a high priority for our interface
design—it provided an experience
similar to a large-screen Internet
browser, no matter what operating
system a user’s handheld might
employ. This is another heuristic
adapted to wireless; it represents a
To develop the Wireless Arch,
Dan and I worked at Bobst Library
and the Center for Advanced
Technology to design an interface
that would be easy to use on any
handheld computer. We needed
to design for the “wireless Web,”
that part of the World Wide Web
“whose design is impacted by the
concern for smaller devices and
less sophisticated displays…[such
as] reduced bandwidth, limited
display sophistication, and most
intractably the limited screen ‘real
estate’ of PDAs as compared with
desktop and laptop computers.”10
Figure 3. An example from Help for the Wireless Arch,
which includes information on how to use the interface
and on technical problems and troubleshooting
(http://library.nyu.edu/mobile/ > “Help” or
http://library.nyu.edu/mobile/help.html).
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
15
The Mobile Web:
One Generation from Useful?
“Information browsing also needs to change [to become
mobile]. Currently, the best we can hope for are websites
that are basically scaled-down and redesigned to eliminate
graphics and multi-column layouts. At worst, websites offer
no mobile version, so you get crunched images and skinny
columns that are almost impossible to read.
“Clearly, traditional websites are intended for a big-screen
user experience. Putting them on a small screen is like the
dog that sings: the miracle is that it does so at all. While a
technical feat, usability is never going to be good.
“To cater to mobile devices, websites and services should
offer:
• much shorter articles,
• dramatically simplified navigation, and
• highly selective features, retaining only what’s needed in
a mobile setting.”
Jakob Nielsen, “Mobile Devices: One Generation from Useful.” Alertbox, 18
Aug 2003. http://useit.com/alertbox/20030818.html, accessed 19 Aug 2003.
This approach required stripping away most of the elements
that make the Web pleasing—
for example, color, tables, and
graphical elements—to ensure a
fast-loading, readable screen. We
needed to scale down the largescreen Arch, while providing the
same level of service. Right away,
the necessity of two interface
adaptations became clear: color
and size.
We adopted a dichromatic color
palette—maroon, gray, and blue—
which provides an interface that
is very easy on the eyes of a user
whose distance between face and
screen may be much smaller than
when using a desktop computer.
We scaled down our graphics
and, in case the device does not
read graphics, ensured that they
16
are completely unnecessary to the
execution of a search.
Additionally, we chose a vertically-based layout: point-and-click
navigation and “thumb scrolling”
(literally, using a thumb-controlled
wheel on the PDA to navigate up
and down a page) met the general
pattern of user behavior, for it is
much easier to scroll vertically
than horizontally, and useful to
“jump” to a relevant area on the
page in one click.
We also needed to tailor the
functions of the Wireless Arch to
work with other basic behavior
patterns of handheld computer
users. Bobst Library had quite
a lot of usability data indicating
that users believed more strongly
in a “data mining” approach than
a “full overview” map. Our users
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
often wanted to quickly search
for an item and generate a list of
results relevant to their topic.11
This approach worked well for
a larger medium with an external
keyboard, but fell short when measured against a handheld device.
Handheld computers lend themselves to a literal “point-and-click”
scheme: armed with a stylus (or
electronic pen that functions similarly to a mouse), our interface
had to obtain results in five clicks
or less.
We chose organized dropdown menus and divided the site
into two major sections: known
items (e.g., “I need to use LexisNexis”) and unknown items (e.g.,
“I’d like to see all of your encyclopedias in Italian Literature”). This
division made our job much easier:
by grouping the page by function,
we were able to create a scaleddown, easy interface with minimal
options but maximum power.
ACCESSING THE WIRELESS
ARCH: CURRENT AND FUTURE
FEATURES
Members of the NYU community
with a PDA and a wireless card
can access the Wireless Arch over
standard HTTP protocols using
NYURoam wireless access points,
like those located at the Kimmel
Center and on Bobst Library’s
A and B levels and 6th floor. To
connect via these access points,
users must configure their wireless
cards (on the IEEE-802.11b or
802.11g standard) to work with
NYURoam (instructions and access
location information available at
http://www.nyu.edu/its/wireless/ ).
As the Arch grows, we hope to
provide substantial increases in
records and more comprehensive
searches throughout spring 2004.
To receive updates about new
library resources, and learn more
about the Wireless Arch, subscribe
to LIBLINK, the library e-mail
newsletter for the NYU community (http://forums.nyu.edu?enterliblink). To access the Wireless
Arch, point your handheld at:
http://librar y.nyu.edu/mobile/
y.nyu.edu/mobile/.
Answers to frequently asked questions, as well as further information on how to connect, are available by clicking “help,” or going
directly to: http://library.nyu.edu/
mobile/help.html.
The development of the
Wireless Arch has brought up
many issues that libraries and
other information repositories will
face as this medium gains its predicted market share. As we adapt
our interfaces and increase the
functionality of the NYU Libraries’
websites to serve this growing
trend, the URL above will point
mobile users to more tasks that
they can do “on the go.” We also
hope to provide some functions via
cell phone in accordance with the
wireless markup language standard (WML).
Though it may have seemed
absurd only five or six years ago
for us to think that we could carry
our computers in our pockets,
clearly we can—and now we can
even read a peer-reviewed journal
on its tiny screen! As the needs of
NYU researchers grow—and their
computer devices shrink—we hope
that the Wireless Arch will be their
gateway to thousands of online
resources.
If you are interested in future
developments, or would like provide
feedback about these services,
e-mail feedback@library.nyu.edu.
Joanna DiPasquale is Web
Administrator at NYU’s Bobst
Library.
ENDNOTES
1. Delia MacMillan, William
Clark, “Client Issues for
Mobile Applications,” Gartner
Reports, 30 Oct 2003. http://
www.nyu.edu/its/pubs/gartner/
research/118200/118215/
118215.pdf, accessed Feb.
118215.pdf
22, 2004. Thomas, Karen,
“Handheld, No Hand-Holding:
Students Gain Computing
Power, Get Organized with
Help of PDAs,” USA Today
Today, 8
May 2001, p. D3.
2. Karen Alexander, “Solving the
Cellphone Maze One Twist
at a Time,” New York Times, 2
Feb 2003, Sec. 3, p.11; John R.
Quain, “Tapping Into Public
Wireless Networks,” New York
Times, 12 Dec 2002, sec. G, p.
5; Claire Tristam, Technology
Review, 105:3 (Apr 2002), 34-40.
Review
For an interesting survey
gloss on the telecommunications industry in general, and
handheld computers specifically, see TelecomWeb’s précis
at http://www.telecomweb.com/
wirelessdata/studies/
1015370659.htm (accessed 17
Feb 2003).
3. Jakob Nielsen, “Mobile
Devices: One Generation from
Useful.” Alertbox, August 2003.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/
20030818.html, accessed
August 19, 2003.
4. See Mary Jean Pavelsek, Gloria
Rohmann, and Nadaleen
Templeman-Kluit, “Web
Usability Testing: Three Cases
from NYU Libraries,” Connect
Magazine (New York: New
York University ITS, Spring
2002).
5. Catherine C. Marshall and
Christine Ruotolo, “Reading in
the Small: A Study of Reading
on Small Form Factor Devices.”
JCDL 2002: Proceedings of the
Second ACM/IEEE-CS Joint
Conference on Digital Libraries,
July 14-18, 2002 (Portland, OR:
ACM, 2002), p. 56ff.
6. Pavelsek, Rohmann,
Templeman-Kluit, Ibid.
7. http://cat.nyu.edu/
8. See James Visokochil’s article,
“ARTstor: A Digital Archive
of Art Images for Study and
Research,” on p. 44 of this
issue.
9. Nielsen, “Ten Usability
Heuristics,” http://www.useit.
com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_
list.html (accessed 09 Feb 2003).
10.John McCullough, “Redesigning
Library Applications for PDAs:
ILS Vendor Perspective.” Library
Hi Tech, 21:4 (2003), p. 396.
11. Pavelsek, Rohmann,
Tempelman-Kluitt, Ibid. For
example, a “data mining”
approach—defined in web
terms—would be a “Search
this Site” feature, where users
can explore a site based on a
keyword query. In contrast, a
“full overview” would be a web
site map, giving users all the
options on one page. An
excellent discussion of these
and other methods can be
found in Ben Shneiderman,
Designing the User Interface:
Strategies for Effective HumanComputer-Interaction, 3rd ed.
(Boston: Addison-Wesley
Longman, 1998).
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
17
COMPU TER SECURIT Y
When Computer Viruses Strike
Based on a True Story—Don’t Let this Happen to You!
By Tracey Losco
tracey.losco@nyu.edu
N
ora-yin Ulysses is a typical student at NYU: she’s
a good student, belongs
to a sorority, has a part-time job,
and surfs the Web—a lot. One
day, Nora came home from her
job, turned on her computer and
started a search on Google, when
suddenly, to her surprise, her computer automatically rebooted. She
hadn’t done anything that would
have caused this—it was almost
as if the computer had a mind of
its own.
When her computer came
back up again, Nora resumed
her search, only to find that once
she started typing, her computer
rebooted again! At this point, Nora
started feeling frustrated because
she had a really important project
due for one of her classes, and she
needed access to the Web to do
research.
Nora picked up the phone
and contacted NYU’s computer
support people at the ITS Client
Services Center (1-212-998-3333).
When she explained her situation to Joe, the support person
who answered her call, he said
that it sounded as if her computer
had been infected with a virus or
someone had broken into it. At this
point Nora went into panic mode.
“I have important information on
18
my computer! What am I supposed
to do now?”
“Do you have backups of your
hard drive?” asked Joe.
“What’s that?” said Nora.
Joe cringed and said, “That
sounds like a “no” to me. Do you
make copies of all of your important information onto another
computer or onto a disk or CD
every month or two?”
Nora answered, “No, why
would I do that?”
Joe explained, “So that you
would be able to get back your
important information if something happened to your computer.”
At this point, Nora became even
more agitated. “No,” she said, “I
don’t have copies of anything!”
“OK,” Joe said, “let’s move on.
Do you run anti-virus software on
your computer and do you keep it
up to date?”
“Of course I have anti-virus
software,” exclaimed Nora, “NYU
gives it out for free through
NYUHome. I installed it, so how
could I get infected?”
“Well,” responded Joe, “just
installing it isn’t enough. You have
to keep it updated. And, to do that,
you have to set it up to automatically check for and download those
updates, called “virus definitions.”
Otherwise the software is useless.
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
New viruses come out daily, so if
you have never updated your software, you aren’t protected from
any of the new viruses. That’s
important to remember: your software is only useful if the virus definitions are up to date.”
Nora, now both frustrated
and scared, replied, “Why didn’t
anyone tell me this? I never
updated the software. I thought
that all I needed to do was just
install it!”
“OK,” Joe said gently, “the Read
Me file that comes with the software actually explained this, and
we also have it on the ITS website
and in our publications, but the
important thing right now is that
we can get your computer running
normally again. Let’s check a
few other things. What operating
system are you using?”
Nora replied, “I’m using a PC
with Windows ME.”
“OK,” said Joe, “When was the
last time that you checked for a
Critical Update to your operating
system?”
“What’s a Critical Update?”
“Uh oh,” said Joe. Nora’s
answer told him exactly what had
happened. He explained, “Critical
Updates are important fi xes and
patches for your operating system
that are released by Microsoft
when a new security risk is discovered. You need to check for
them and install them on a regular
basis. I’m sorry to say it, but it
does sound like your computer
was attacked by either a virus or a
worm. If you didn’t have the most
recent virus definitions or any of
the Critical Updates installed, your
computer was basically an open
target.”
“Wait,” Nora exclaimed, “I
thought I heard that NYU scans all
the University’s e-mail to remove
any viruses before they get to
us? I’ve seen some of those messages in my inbox that say that ITS
caught and removed an infected
message. So, how did this virus
get to my computer? Is this NYU’s
fault?!”
“No,” said Joe, “let me explain
how NYU checks for viruses.
When messages arrive at NYU,
before they are forwarded to your
account, they are sent through
a virus filter which catches most
infected messages.1 That virus
filter is updated with new virus
definitions when they are released,
in the same way that you would
update your own anti-virus software. So, just as new viruses may
slip past your desktop anti-virus
software, some mail infected with
extremely new viruses may slip in
past the NYU mail filter without
being detected.”
“Okay, then my main question
is, what do I do now?!” asked Nora
desperately.
“Well,” replied Joe, “first we can
try and have you download the
most recent virus definitions. You’ll
need to restart your computer in
Safe Mode with Networking, and
then you should be able to get the
definitions and scan for viruses. In
order to restart in Safe Mode you
will need to go to the “Start” menu,
select “Turn Off Computer,” and
then select “Restart”. This will initiate the restarting process. Then,
while your computer is restarting,
hold down the F5 key. This will
cause the computer to display
a list of choices. Use the cursor
keys to move up through the list
in order to select “Safe Mode with
Networking.”
You should then be able to
download the latest virus definitions for your anti-virus software
from the Internet and then scan
your computer. If your software
does find a virus, be sure to have
it remove the virus and repair your
computer.
“Then, once you finish with
that, you’ll need to restart again to
get out of Safe Mode so that you
can access the Windows Update
website to download all of the
Critical Updates that are available
for your computer. This may take
a while because, from what you’ve
already told me, it sounds as if you
don’t have any of these updates.
Start this by opening Internet
Explorer and selecting “Windows
Update” in the “Tools” menu. Your
computer will be scanned, and
then you’ll see a list of Critical
Updates that have been released
for your operating system. If a
lot of updates appear, select only
three or four at a time to install,
otherwise you may run into problems. Keep installing updates and
rescanning your computer until
no more Critical Updates appear.
If your computer is a laptop, make
sure you have it plugged into the
power outlet when you’re doing
this because these downloads can
sometimes take a while.”
Nora asked, “So, does this
mean that everything is going
to be the way it was before I got
infected?”
Joe replied, “Unfortunately, no.
What this will do is protect you
from any new viruses or worms
that may be released. The steps
we just talked about might fix the
problem, but they might not.”
Nora asked, “What if my computer keeps acting strange?”
“Well,” Joe replied sadly, “you
may need to reformat your computer and start from scratch.
Sometimes computers are so badly
infected that this is necessary.”
“What could I have done to
prevent this?” asked Nora.
“Everything that we went over
earlier,” said Joe, “and be sure to
set your anti-virus software to
automatically check for new definitions and set your computer to
automatically check for Critical
Updates. We have instructions for
doing that on our website at http://
www.nyu.edu/its/faq/security/.
“But even if you keep up with
your virus definitions and Critical
Updates, there is still a chance
that you might get infected. With
viruses, it’s a constant game of
‘leap frog.’ A new virus is released
and computers get infected. Then,
anti-virus software manufacturers
create a new definition to detect
and clean this virus, and, if necessary, Microsoft releases a Critical
Update to protect your computer. Then, a new virus or a new
strain of the virus appears and the
process starts all over again.”
“Wow,” replied Nora, “I never
realized that I needed to keep track
of all these things. Is there anything else that I can do?”
“Absolutely,”
replied
Joe.
“Don’t open any e-mail attachments that you receive unless you
are expecting them. Even if you
know the sender, give him or her
a call and ask if the attachment is
legitimate before opening it. Some
1. The graphic on page 20 shows recent NYU virus filter statistics.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
19
viruses are very clever in that they
have their own mailing capabilities
and they send infected messages
to everyone in a person’s address
book…so other people will think
it’s coming from someone they
trust. You should also keep an eye
on the Security Alerts channel on
the main page of NYUHome; that
will tell you about new viruses to
watch out for.”
Nora sighed, then said, “Okay,
thanks for all of your help, Joe; I’ll
get started on this right away.”
Joe said, “Thanks for your
understanding, and take care.”
Nora spent the next few hours
disinfecting and patching her computer, then setting it up to protect
it from getting infected again in the
future. In the end, she was one of
the lucky ones—she didn’t have to
reformat her computer and none of
her important files were lost.
The moral of this story is
that no matter whether you’re a
student, a staff or faculty member,
20
or an administrator at NYU, or a
computer owner anywhere, if you
haven’t taken the steps explained
above, it’s only a matter of time
until you find yourself in Nora’s
predicament…and you might not
be so lucky! For more information
about how to protect your computer and NYU’s network, see the
resources listed below.
•
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
• The ITS Computer and
Network Security website:
http://www.nyu.edu/its/security/
• Computer security FAQs,
including instructions on how
to help secure your Windows
computer: http://www.nyu.edu/
its/faq/security/
• ITS Computer and Network
Security Awareness Month:
http://www.nyu.edu/its/
securityawareness/
• Most NYU community members can download a copy of
Symantec AntiVirus through
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
•
•
•
•
•
the Files tab of NYUHome. Log
in with your NetID and password at http://home.nyu.edu,
click the Files tab, then select
the correct version for your
computer.
The Security Alerts
Channel in NYUHome
(http://home.nyu.edu/): the
channel appears under the
E-mail channel on the main
page that opens.
ITS classes on viruses and
security: http://www.nyu.edu/
its/classes/
Windows Update: http://
windowsupdate.microsoft.com
Symantec:
http://www.symantec.com/
Center for Internet Security:
http://www.cisecurity.org
Stay Safe Online:
http://www.staysafeonline.info/
Tracey Losco is a Network Security
Analyst in ITS Network Services.
NE T WORK SERVICES
NYU-NET 3
Our Third-Generation Campus Network
By Jimmy Kyriannis
jimmy.kyriannis@nyu.edu
NYU-NET: WHERE WE WERE
& WHERE WE’RE HEADED
NYU-NET, the campus-wide data
communications network of New
York University, was created in
the early 1970s to support the
computing and networking needs
of the entire University community.
NYU's network originated with
a connection to the ARPANET,
the predecessor of the modernday Internet. A decade later, NYU
was among the first institutions
to implement Ethernet (a type of
Local Area Network [LAN] architecture), and, by 1983, fiber optic
technology was first used on
campus for data communications,
interconnecting two computing
facilities via Ethernet, representing
the first-generation NYU campus
computer network.
As it grew over the following
decade, additional departments—
and, ultimately, entire buildings—
were brought onto NYU-NET
through the use of 10base5 (thick
Ethernet), 10baseFL/FOIRL (fiber
Ethernet point-to-point links),
“5broad36” (5Mbps Ethernet over
cable TV-based broadband technology) and Ethernet bridging
technologies.
With
approxi1
mately 8,000 nodes attached to
the campus network in the early
1990s, a bridged Ethernet approach
to cross-campus networking was
reaching its limits, and in 1994, the
NYU-NET II project was begun. By
the time of its completion, NYUNET II had improved the University
network in a variety of respects,
including performance, resiliency,
and security, through the replacement of the bridged Ethernet backbone with a router-based FDDI
(Fiber Distributed Data Interface)
ring which could automatically
recover from link failures, in combination with a switched FDDI
backbone focused on the highperformance needs of those using
NYU-NET.
The NYU-NET II FDDI ring—a
ring of fiber optic cable spanning
the campus to interconnect routers
located at POPs (points of presence, where departmental networks converge)—never experienced a single failure in its decade
of operation, and has carried an
estimated 2.5PB (1 Petabyte =
1,048,576 Gigabytes) of data to
date. However, as usage of NYUNET II has skyrocketed over the
past decade, an upgrade of the
100Mbps FDDI backbone has
become increasingly necessary to
meet the greater demands that are
being placed on the network.
There have also been increasing
concerns that due to NYU’s urban
location, routine emergencies and
failures, such as steam pipe bursts,
construction work accidents, or
power outages, could wreak havoc
on the campus network, which now
serves more than 100 buildings
and supports a variety of essential
subnetworks and systems.
To address these issues, the
NYU-NET3 project (pronounced
N.Y.U.-net-three) was begun in
early 2001 to design a next-generation campus network that sought
to meet the following criteria:
• meet or exceed the automatic
resiliency features of ring-based
FDDI technology;
• leverage four locations of fiber
optic cabling convergence on
campus for redundancy and
failure protection;
• increase the performance capabilities of the University network;
• upgrade the dated router infrastructure which operated the
network;
• bring new networking technologies to bear to allow for new
services (such as the campus-
1. A “node” can be a computer or some other device, such as a printer.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
21
wide NYURoam 802.11 wireless
service);
• allow for greater access to
high-bandwidth applications
and services, such as those
related to Internet2.
As the NYU-NET3 project
progressed over the past three
years, the need for a vital campus
network that is able to adapt to
and evolve with the needs of the
University community became
increasingly evident. There are
now approximately 35,000 active
nodes attached to NYU-NET (representing more than a four-fold
growth in the past ten years) and
as this number continues to grow,
NYU-NET3 will be there to meet
the demand.
A NEXT-GENERATION CAMPUS
NETWORK: DESIGN CRITERIA
A variety of technologies and
network architectures were considered when designing the nextgeneration University network.
Unfortunately, ring-based technologies such as FDDI fell out of
favor in the industry, and their use
within campus networks has all but
disappeared. Ethernet continues
to be the prevailing technology
in use, though it offers no failure
recovery inherent within its technology. To address this problem, a
rather challenging approach was
developed, by which the resiliency
of FDDI could be matched through
the use of a high-speed gigabit
Ethernet backbone.
One focal point of the new
network design was the replacement of the existing FDDI backbones with a “core network”
which would accept high-speed
gigabit Ethernet connections for
new routers2 located in campus
POPs and server data centers.
Another was that the design had
to be downwardly compatible with
existing NYU-NET II routers that
continue to adequately serve the
needs of the departmental LANs
connected to them. (Such routers,
which provide departmental and
server network access, we call
“Access Routers” or “Distribution
Routers.”) Additionally, given the
critical nature of this new core
network, it was essential to avoid
the possibility of a single point
of failure, so that a single outage
could not disrupt all connectivity
on NYU-NET.
The goal of combining a single
unified core network with redundancy and resilience, distributed across four discrete physical
locations many city blocks away
from one another in downtown
Manhattan, posed some unique
challenges. To satisfy this goal,
given the primary building blocks
of gigabit Ethernet switches and
routers, the architecture of the
new core network depended upon
a combination of network hardware specification and implementation (i.e., how the switches
and routers were assembled and
configured) and physical network
topology (i.e., how they were
interconnected).
Working very closely with
hardware designers and network
engineers from Cisco Systems,
Inc., we validated our hardware
specifications to confirm that we
were able to address the redundancy, performance, and feature
requirements of our project.
This was achieved through the
use of several levels of redundancy within each Core Router
that made up the new network
core. This included features such
as redundant power supplies (to
protect each Core Router from
a single power circuit failure),
redundant primary routing processors (to protect each Core Router
from a primary CPU3 failure),
and redundant interfaces distributed across four interface boards
(to protect each Core Router from
an “interface processor” failure,
and from the possibility of such
an outage causing that router to
become completely disconnected
from the NYU-NET Core).
At the topological level, ultimately, concepts were drawn
from parallel processor computer
research to develop a means by
which four Core Routers—each
located at a point of fiber optic
cabling convergence on campus—
could be interconnected in a
manner to meet the project criteria of redundancy and resilience,
while maximizing the number of
connected paths between them to
offer the greatest amount of available bandwidth within the Core.
Though some basic topologies
such as a square encompassing
all four Core sites, or a full-mesh
(square with a criss-cross mesh
connecting opposite corners), met
the criteria with some success, a
“partial-mesh” network topology
did a better job.
In a partial-mesh network, only
select nodes are interconnected,
rather than all possible nodes, as
they are in a full-mesh design. The
key to achieving a partial-mesh
network topology between our
four Core locations, while maximizing the number of equal links
between them, was to abandon
two-dimensional designs such as
“flat” squares and consider threedimensional models. The additional “space” offered by three
2. Devices that forward pieces of data along a network.
3. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is essentially the “brains” of the computer, where most calculations take place.
22
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
Figure 1. One face of the NYU-NET3 Tetrahedron design.
dimensions presented many different ways in which four redundant Core Routers in four different
locations could be connected,
similar to how 4, 16, 64, or more
CPUs could be interconnected
to create a parallel processing
computer. Ultimately, the model
adopted was the Tetrahedron: a
four-cornered equilateral polyhedron.
NYU-NET3: A THREEDIMENSIONAL APPROACH
With a tetrahedron-style network,
each of the four Core Routers is
located on a corner, with three
Core Routers interconnecting
to establish each “face” of the
Tetrahedron, with four faces in
total (see figure 1). This interconnection occurs at the center of each
face. The solid lines in the diagram
represent fiber optic connections
that converge in the center of each
Tetrahedron face.
These connections can operate
at any speed (even with simple
modem-style PPP connections, if
one were inclined to do so), which
Figure 2. The Tetrahedron Core Network structure.
means that this approach is highly
scalable to any amount of bandwidth. The only requirement is that
all links on all faces operate at the
same speed, so as to ensure that
the entire network is balanced and
entirely symmetrical. The dashed
lines in figure 1 do not represent
fiber optic connections, but simply
serve to give the perspective of the
Tetrahedron face itself.
The four faces of the
Tetrahedron, when assembled,
exhibit the final three-dimensional
network architecture (see figure
2). Once again, solid lines represent fiber optic connections, while
the dashed lines simply provide a
reference to the overall structure.
The center of each face, called
a TAP (Tetrahedron Attachment
Point) marks the point on each face
where the three constituent Core
Routers interconnect.
For a substantially greater
level of redundancy and performance, rather than using a single
fiber optic connection from each
Core Router to a TAP, each Core
Router/TAP link operates at 8Gbps
full-duplex4 and consists of eight
redundant connections, each
operating at 1Gbps full-duplex,
distributed across four interface
cards on each device. Using a
technology called “802.1ad Link
Aggregation”, the eight redundant
connections act as one single connection between a Core Router
and a TAP, with network traffic
load-balanced across all eight
fiber optic members. Once again, a
single fiber optic link failure or an
interface card failure will result in
no loss of connectivity within the
Tetrahedron Core Network.
Internally, within the Core, an
Internet Protocol (IP) routing protocol called OSPF (Open Shortest
Path First) is used, which, among
other things, monitors the state
of all Core connections. If one of
the eight 802.1ad links between a
single Core Router and TAP should
fail, the amount of bandwidth on
that link will be reduced, but OSPF
will automatically adjust for that
reduction by favoring the other
higher speed Core Router/TAP
links until the failure is repaired.
4. A mode that allows the transmission of data in two directions simultaneously.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
23
If a complete failure of a
the project, it has taken
Core Router/TAP link on
some time to develop,
any particular Tetrahedron
test, and begin impleface should occur, once
menting the Tetrahedron
again, OSPF will automatiCore. Following the original
cally favor the other availdesign specification of
able links. In any of the
NYU-NET3 in early 2001,
above failure conditions, or
the
author
developed
when the Tetrahedron Core
detailed hardware speciis fully functional, network
fications and finalized the
traffic is load balanced over
architecture design, which
all available links to offer the
were then modeled in the
greatest amount of total Core
ITS Network Services netbandwidth. The Tetrahedron
working lab and tested on
Core contains 12 Core
a production basis for six
Router/TAP links. When
months without failure. The
implemented with each link
final design was presented
operating at 8Gbps, as is
to and certified by network
the case on NYU-NET, a
architecture and hardware
Figure 3. A two-dimensional representation
fully-loaded
Tetrahedron
engineering experts at
of the Tetrahedron Core with Distribution
Routers attached at TAPs.
has the bandwidth-carrying
Cisco Systems. Catalyst
capacity of 96Gbps full6500 Layer-3 switches/
duplex, nearly .2Tbps (terabits
with all four Core Routers. As a
routers were then procured for the
per second) in total. Thus far,
result, a failure of any fiber optic
project and installed in our nethowever, this Tetrahedron design
link will not result in any disrupworking lab, where they were put
represents only the Core of the
tion of network connectivity for a
through a grueling set of tests and
campus network itself. The predepartment or service.
certification steps that lasted for
viously mentioned Distribution
To offer yet another level of
another six months (see figure 4).
Routers, which provide network
redundancy, each dual connecIn the meantime, as network usage
access to multiple local departtion of a Distribution Router is,
continued to climb on the NYUmental subnetworks (subnets),
once again, established through
NET II FDDI backbones, the Friday
must then connect to the Core
the use of two different interface
night scheduled maintenance
in order to provide network concards on both the Distribution and
periods established by ITS 5 were
nectivity to departments, servers,
Core Routers, so that a single fiber
used to develop and implement a
various network services, the
optic or interface hardware failure
temporary switched fast Ethernet
Internet, and Internet2.
will not result in a disconnection
backbone network to relieve
The TAP on each Tetrahedron
of a Distribution Router (and the
network congestion problems.
face provides the interface to which
departments and services conSenior Network Engineer Keith
a Distribution Router can attach to
nected to it) from NYU-NET. If a
Malvetti and Network Engineer
the Tetrahedron Core. Since the
connection diagram of the threeYoni Radzin from the Network and
Tetrahedron provides four redundimensional Tetrahedron Core
Systems Engineering Group within
dant interfaces for attachment to
were adapted to lie flat on a sheet
ITS Network Services provided
the Core, each Distribution Router
of two-dimensional paper, it would
critical assistance in enabling
is redundantly connected to a pair
appear as shown in figure 3.
NYU-NET II to operate smoothly
of TAPs. Since each Distribution
during this time, and were also
Router can “see” or “peer with”
CURRENT PROJECT STATUS
involved in the testing of the
three out of the four Core Routers
Due to the broad scope of the NYUTetrahedron Core in its final stages
with each TAP connection, linking
NET3 project and the demands
(see figure 5).
each Distribution Router to two
of running the existing NYUAs the final step before moving
TAPs ensures that each one peers
NET II network while working on
the Tetrahedron Core into public
5. See http://www.nyu.edu/its/policies/maintenance.html.
24
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
Figure 4. A pair of Catalyst
6500 Core Routers located in our
networking lab during testing, with
their single mode fiber optic cable
connections active.
production service, several departments within ITS were connected
to the new Core and participated
in the testing of their applications
and services on this new network,
to ensure that it would perform as
well as expected. Much to our satisfaction, tests of a wide variety of
applications and services, such as
NYUHome, NYURoam, fame, and
SIS, all ran very smoothly. The
Tetrahedron Core was then fully
disassembled in our test lab, and
the four constituent Core Routers
were installed in their permanent
locations at the four discrete Core
sites. Mario Clagnaz, Manager of
Infrastructure within ITS Network
Services, and Manny Laqui, also
in that group, then implemented
the Tetrahedron Core reconstruction on-campus, which included
physical installation of the Core
Routers, establishment of electrical
power services for them, and completion of the fiber optic connections to recreate the Tetrahedron
structure.
When completed, 128 fiber
optic connections had been tested
and established in the Core itself,
with a total fiber optic cable
length—if laid end to end—of
approximately 39 miles. Finally,
after a few more weeks of testing
the Core and confirming our
results to ensure that the network
behaved exactly as it had in our
lab, we reached the beginning of
the fall 2003 semester and were
ready to launch NYU-NET3.
Since September 2003, Malvetti
and Laqui have been busy using
the ITS scheduled maintenance periods to both upgrade
existing NYU-NET II Distribution
Routers (in terms of software
and in some cases, hardware)
and connect them to the NYUNET3 Tetrahedron Core, one by
one; Radzin has been busy rolling
out new networks such as those
recently installed in Bobst Library
and the Kimmel Center; and the
author has been working on the
network design and implementation of the campus-wide 802.11
wireless network, NYURoam—all
of which has been made possible
by the Tetrahedron Core network.
MOVING FORWARD…
Looking to the future, NYUNET3 will support a variety of
services not previously possible,
at levels of high-performance.
Some new services have already
been implemented, such as MPLS
(Multiprotocol Label Switching),
in conjunction with 802.1q VLAN
tagging, to make ResNet and
administrative staff networks
simultaneously active in student
residence halls, and NYURoam
services available to remote offices
and buildings connected to NYUNET via leased line T1 and T3
services. MPLS may also provide
us with the ability to offer even
Figure 5. Yoni Radzin and Keith
Malvetti prepare a Core Router
for deployment.
greater levels of network security
in the future. In addition, the
Tetrahedron Core eliminates any
bottlenecks on the NYU-NET
backbone network, providing
computers with modern, switched,
fast Ethernet connections, and very
high-speed access to the Internet
and Internet2 research networks.
Testing of high-speed IP multicast
services is under way as well.
With NYU-NET’s roots in academic research, it seems only
fitting that the design of this innovative third-generation campus
network has drawn upon computer
processor research to solve the
rather challenging problems associated with building a data communications network in support
of the largest private university in
the United States. NYU-NET3 has
achieved all of the goals specified
at the outset of the project and
will continue to evolve to meet
the needs of the NYU community,
acting as an enabler and facilitator
of academic, research, administrative, and business applications and
functions.
Jimmy Kyriannis is Network Manager in
the Network and Systems Engineering
Group of ITS Network Services.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
25
IT S COMPU TER L ABS
What’s New in the ITS Student
Computer Labs
By Robyn Berland
robyn.berland@nyu.edu
The ITS Video Editing Lab
The all-digital Video Editing Lab
at the ITS Third Avenue North
Computer Lab, 75 Third Avenue,
doubles as a teaching lab when
a hands-on session is required.
When not in use as a teaching
space, the ITS Video Lab is used
by students to post-produce their
video projects, often overnight. Inperson reservations are required
(call 1-212-998-3500 for information), but the 15 Video Editing
stations provide adequate timeshares on a 24 x 6 schedule.
This lab has a new look. ITS
Academic Computing Services
redesigned the Video Lab to meet
the dual requirements of this
teaching and experiential space.
The new workstations are oriented toward an instructor’s
station—an interactive whiteboard (SMARTBoard) and lectern.
New lighting controls provide
choices between incandescent and
fluorescent lighting to enhance
video viewing. Faculty can play
VHS, DVD, CD, and DV content
from the instructor’s station. Each
student workstation measures 48”
x 48”, with a cutout that provides
26
room for a swivel chair (see figures
1 and 2). The work surface includes
a leaf that faces the Instructor’s
domain, providing a convenient
writing surface for note taking.
The leaf also provides additional
space for books, video-editing supplies, and the other paraphernalia
students carry around. The leaves
form natural shared workspaces
between students who wish to
work in a team and natural barriers for students who prefer to be
in their own space.
Each Video Editing workstation
contains an Apple G4 Dual GHz
computer, NTSC Monitor, Cinema
Display, and Sony DSR-11 DV deck,
all of which fit snugly but comfortably in the workspace. The operating system has been upgraded
to OS 10.2.8, and new applications have been added to the video
editing software suite, including
but not limited to Combustion, for
applying special effects to video;
DVDStudio Pro, a sophisticated
authoring tool; and FinalCut Pro 4.
Photo by Mitch Shultz.
THE ITS THIRD AVENUE
NORTH COMPUTER LAB
Figure 1. The new workstations at the ITS Video Editing Lab.
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
Windows Training Room
The
hands-on
Windows
Training Room at the ITS Third
Avenue North Computer Lab
accommodates 17 student workstations positioned along the
two long walls of the room. An
instructor’s station at the end of
the room is equipped with a Dell
Optiplex 270 computer. A new
ceiling-mounted projection unit
and a wall-mounted screen enable
ease of use and clear viewing. The
computer workstations have a
robust suite of software installed,
reflecting the course requirements of our faculty and students.
Each workstation includes a Dell
Optiplex 270 Pentium 4 2.4GHz
computer.
Faculty requests for the installation of additional software on
the computer workstations in
either the Video Editing Lab or the
Windows Training Room can be
made by sending e-mail to Robyn
Berland at robyn.berland@nyu.edu
or John Bako at john.bako@nyu.edu,
respectively. Of course, software
must be appropriate to ITS Lab and
classroom environments and meet
licensing requirements.
THE ITS MULTIMEDIA LAB
The ITS Multimedia Lab at 35
West 4th Street, 2nd floor, has new
Apple G5 1.85 GHz computers. The
computers have a large footprint,
creating natural aluminum divides
between workstations (see figure
3). What’s really new and surprising about the G5s is the
absence of troublesome floppy
and Zip drives. Zip drives can be
borrowed, if needed, for 100MB,
250MB and 750MB disks. However,
if a file is small enough to fit on a
floppy disk, it can be transferred
using the file storage capabilities of
NYUHome, or it can be stored as
an e-mail attachment.
The StuffIt Standard suite of
applications has been added, to
enable our clients to compress
larger files, which further facilitates
the use of NYU-NET as a personal
communication and transportation
medium. The “Dropbox” feature in
NYU Blackboard is also available
to students for communicating
Photo by Mitch Shultz.
Photo by Mitch Shultz.
Figure 2. Students at work in the ITS Video Editing Lab.
and storing their work. Using
the Internet in this way makes it
simple for students to dynamically
store and retrieve their work from
anywhere…in the labs, at home, or
on a laptop connected to NYU’s
wireless network, NYURoam. (For
information on NYURoam access
locations, e.g., @ the Square, 80
Washington Square East, visit
http://www.nyu.edu/its/wireless/.)
The Apple G5s have a
SuperDrive and, like the Apple G4
computers at the ITS Third Avenue
North Lab, can write data to CD
and DVD media. The recent addition of Toast Lite to our application suite allows multiple sessions
to be written to a CD, providing
an inexpensive and relatively reliable way for students and faculty
to submit their work. For larger
storage needs, Toast Lite can be
used to store data files on DVD.
Articles and information found
on the Internet do not have to be
printed and carried from place to
place. Using the software tools
available in the ITS Labs, research
information can be saved in
Adobe PDF format, or collected
in a text document, then archived
to a CD-R or CD-RW, stored in
NYUHome or transferred via
e-mail. An added perk: since this
information remains in electronic
form, it can be cut and pasted into
Figure 3. The New Apple G5
computers at the Multimedia Lab.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
27
research papers without retyping,
making students’ data less cumbersome to carry and easier to
store. NYUHome provides 50MB
of storage (http://home.nyu.edu/
help/files/fileupdownload.nyu),
and e-mail attachments (http://
home.nyu.edu/help/mail/ ) can be
up to 20MB in size.
When preparing documents
for print, use text formats such
as .rtf (rich text format) or .doc
(Microsoft Word document format)
or .txt (text format). Documents
saved in .rtf preserve formatting
across word processing applications. Use a .txt file when building
a collection of information that
does not require special formatting. Printing PowerPoint presentations and PDF documents (graphic
formats) is slow in comparison to
the text formats mentioned above.
Providing course materials in both
view and print formats will help
students work more efficiently
across environments.
ITS
Academic
Computing
Services is introducing new help
documentation on the Macintosh
computers at both the ITS
Multimedia and Third North Labs
to help students and faculty use
our computer resources more
productively. The new documentation, “ITS Multimedia Lab Help
and Information,” is located on the
Macintosh Dock. This documentation is tailored to the lab environment. For help using additional
ITS resources, go to http://
www.nyu.edu/its/faq/. Faculty and
student feedback is integral to producing good documentation; we
encourage you to use the suggestion boxes posted in each facility.
EXTENDED HOURS AT THE ITS
COMPUTER LABS
The ITS Multimedia Lab’s hours
are now extended at the end of
each semester to accommodate
the additional student workload.
Through May 9, the ITS Multimedia
Lab at 35 W. 4th Street will be open
on Sundays from noon to 11:30 pm
and will remain open for an additional two hours on Saturdays,
from 8:30 am until 7:30 pm.
This extension includes access
to the ITS Faculty Technology
Center Drop-In Areas, the Arts
Technology multimedia, rendering
and imaging stations, and the
Multimedia Lab workstations. The
ITS Third Avenue North Lab will
be open from noon on Sundays
to 7:30 pm on Fridays (a twohour Friday extension) through the
end of the spring 2004 semester.
The Tisch Hall Lab will extend its
Saturday hours to 7:30 pm through
May 8.
For details about the ITS labs,
including locations, complete
hours, and equipment, please see
http://www.nyu.edu/its/labs/.
Robyn Berland is the Computer Lab
Manager of the ITS Multimedia Lab.
A Day in the Life of NYUHome
NYUHome, the University’s web portal to a wide variety of information and services, is
being used by NYU students, faculty, and staff on an ever-increasing basis. For example, on
March 10, 2004, a typical recent day in the life of NYUHome, the portal received more than 12
million “hits” across the day. During the peak period of this average day, NYUHome accommodated 722 hits per second, with 1,464 community members using the site concurrently! As we
anticipate that this trend of increased usage will continue, ITS is in the process of engineering
the portal to handle a capacity of ten times that amount: up to 7,200 hits per second.
We are pleased that the ever-evolving NYUHome portal has proved to be so popular with
the University community, and are committed to continuing to meet your needs—both by
expanding and adapting the services NYUHome offers, and by delivering those services to you
with speed and convenience. We encourage you to help us guide the future of NYUHome by
sharing your feedback with us. Please send e-mail to home@nyu.edu, or submit your comments
through the Feedback channel of NYUHome.
28
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
RESE A RCH T ECHNOLOGIES
High Performance Computing
Rocks at NYU
A Look at Rocks Cluster Distribution for HPC Researchers
By Will Wilson, Yingkai Zhang, and David Ackerman
will.wilson@nyu.edu; yingkai.zhang@nyu.edu; david.ackerman@nyu.edu
A
Linux cluster is composed
of two or more computers,
each running the Linux
open source operating system and
connected in such a way that they
collectively perform like a more
powerful computer. This flexible, scalable, and cost-effective
configuration is rapidly becoming
the dominant system employed
by researchers requiring high
performance computing (HPC). In
an article entitled “Linux Clusters
for the Mainstream Manager,”1
Sean Dague of the IBM Linux
Technology Center says Linux
clusters are “like 1,000,000 ants
vs. one elephant.” But keeping a
million ants in lock step can be a
trying task if not done properly.
To simplify the process, the NPACI
Rocks Cluster Distribution, based
on Red Hat Linux, pulls together
the best of open source software
to make clusters easy to “deploy,
manage, upgrade and scale.” 2
The Rocks Cluster Distribution
delivers a stable HPC platform by
uniting Linux with low-cost commodity hardware. The growing
benefit of using such hardware
to tackle HPC tasks is due to a
price/performance advantage over
more expensive shared memory
machines. That advantage, however,
can disappear quickly if system
administrators get bogged down
with maintaining a large number
of nodes. Rocks employs a clever
technique to avoid this situation
by making a complete operating
system installation the basic management tool. An automated installation process is far more efficient
and effective than an alternative
process that, for example, involves
tracking down nodes that are out
of synch and require patching.
Rocks leverages the automated
installation methods of Red Hat’s
kickstart to install nodes and
allows systems administrators to
bring up a cluster in a relatively
short time.
The physical assembly of a
Rocks cluster requires network
connectivity, two or more computers—a front-end node and
at least one dedicated compute
node—and a sturdy rack (or
racks) to house the cluster. NYU’s
Information Technology Services
is currently running two Rocks
cluster installations, one built
around 16 Dell Xeon servers with
GB Ethernet (see inset on next
page), and the other running on
eight dual processor AMD Opteron
servers with both GB Ethernet and
low latency Myrinet. Each of our
Rocks clusters is configured with
a single front-end node (where
cluster users login, submit, and
monitor their jobs) and several
compute nodes.
The many services required to
manage a Linux cluster—NFS, NIS/
411, DHCP, NTP, MySQL, HTTP, to
name a few—are run on the frontend node. This node is also responsible for kickstarting or automatically installing the compute nodes.
By default, the front-end also acts
as the gateway to the outside,
since it is the only node with an
active external interface. The
front-end node requires an experienced systems administrator to
maintain the required services and
to perform the administrative tasks
that multi-user systems typically
require—e.g., assigning accounts,
performing software installs and
configurations, and so on.
The compute nodes are the
“workhorses” of the cluster.
1. Jacqueline Emigh, EarthWeb, September 25, 2003, http://networking.earthweb.com/netsysm/article.php/3083551.
2. http://rocks.npaci.edu/papers/rocks-documentation/preface.html
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
29
The CPU-intensive calculations
researchers submit are run on the
compute nodes. The data from
compute node calculations is
collected on the front-end by way of
an NFS auto-mounted file system.
Rocks maintains a MySQL
database for the cluster configuration files. Changes made to the
database are used to generate
Linux configuration files, and these
files are pushed out to the compute
nodes during the kickstart process.
An Apache server on the front-end
gives a system administrator easy
access to the MySQL database
and the Ganglia cluster monitoring
software. To access the management or monitoring services, a
system administrator can simply
start a Mozilla browser on the
front-end node.
The key to the Rocks Cluster
Distribution is its ability to
rapidly deploy numerous nodes
with quick, automated installations (less than ten minutes per
node). This method helps maintain
stability among the nodes, and
scales very well when expanding
the cluster. See the inset below to
learn more about how ITS can help
you use a Linux cluster and Rocks
to facilitate your research. For
more information about Rocks, see
http://rocksclusters.org/.
Will Wilson is a Senior Systems
Administrator in ITS eServices;
Yingkai Zhang is a professor of
Chemistry in NYU’s Faculty of Arts
and Sciences; David Ackerman is
Executive Director for ITS eServices
and Digital Library Initiatives.
ITS Offers HPC Services to NYU Researchers
If your research requires High Performance Computing,
Information Technology Services can help you. If you are
writing a grant proposal, we can advise you on the infrastructure aspects of the grant. ITS can help you architect,
select, and negotiate the price for your computational platform and network.
We have extensive experience with both clusters and large
memory systems and can host, set up the hardware, and
configure your software and application. We handle the
day-to-day management of the system, including daily
backups and security monitoring, and will perform maintenance during scheduled off-hour periods that will be
announced to you well in advance.
We work 24x7x365 to ensure the highest possible levels
of system availability. ITS will supply you with a service
level agreement (SLA) that will spell out the services we
provide, including our system availability guarantee.
We think you will enjoy working with ITS’ highly professional and knowledgeable staff. By availing yourself of ITS
HPC services, you will be free to spend more time on your
research!
For more information, please contact hpc@nyu.edu.
30
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
Case Study
In December 2003, ITS successfully
used the Rocks Cluster Distribution
to collaboratively set up a Linux Xeon
cluster (16 nodes, 32 processors) with
NYU Chemistry Professor Yingkai
Zhang, whose research involves
the computer simulation of enzyme
reactions.
Inadequate computational power has
been the major bottleneck for his
group’s research productivity. With
the Rocks Distribution, this cluster
becomes an attractive option because
of its excellent price/performance
ratio.
The cluster is now managed by ITS
with the Rocks Distribution, and is
stable and productive.
S O C I A L S C I E N C E S , S TAT I S T I C S & M A P P I N G
Federal Census Files
By Frank LoPresti
frank.lopresti@nyu.edu
T
he first Federal Census was
taken in 1790 under the
auspices of Secretary of
State Thomas Jefferson. The predominant need for this poll of the
population was, and still is, to create and manage Congressional districts. Every state gets to send two
senators to Congress—no more,
no less…no need to count. On the
other hand, the number of persons
each state sends to the House of
Representatives is proportional to
its population. To this end, Article
I, Section 2 of the US Constitution
mandates an “actual enumeration”
of the population. This requires a
periodic physical headcount of the
country’s residents, and prohibits
statistical guessing or estimation
of the population. For this purpose, Congressional redistricting
committees use the Redistricting
File and Summary Files 1 and 2
(SF1 and SF2) from the Federal
Census report.
COLLECTING THE DATA: THE
LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT
Each decade, about one sixth of the
“households” in the United States
fill out a long Census form. This
data is compiled into Summary
Files 2, 3, and 4 (SF2, SF3, and
SF4). The remaining five-sixths of
the households are given the short
form. The basic data common to
both forms yields the total counts
compiled in file SF1. To reapportion Congressional seats, these
counts are quickly released in the
Redistricting File. No statistical
sampling is used there.
The short form collects personal data (“P” variables, including
household size and occupants’
relationships, sex, and age) and
household data (“H” variables,
including location, occupancy,
and tenure of occupancy). The
long form asks many valuable but
invasive questions about each resident’s race, education, military
service, income, health, employment, and the residence’s utilities,
insurance, number of rooms, etc.
ANONYMITY: WE INSIST
UPON IT EVEN IF WE CAN’T
PRONOUNCE IT
When this sensitive data is
collected, it goes into files where
it becomes a P line if it relates
to a person, or an H line if it
relates to a residence. Several P
lines and one H line containing
the person’s address make up a
household group of data in the
original, “secret” database. Since
this database contains peoples’
addresses, it will never be released
to the public.
The issue is how to distribute
useful data without compromising people’s personal information, since without some geographic information the Census
files would be useless. To address
this problem, Census workers identify households geographically
using Blocks, Tracts, Zip Codes,
Counties, and PUMAs (described
below).
A Census Tract is usually
defined to include around 1,500
households. A Block group will
usually be about one half or one
third of that size, or even smaller,
depending on the local geography
and other logical dividing lines.
In NYC, for instance, a Block will
sometimes be a single apartment
building. If people’s addresses
were removed from a Census file
but Block location (within 500
households) remained available,
that information would still be
insecure. If someone could identify your Block, the type of house
you live in, the number of rooms
in your house, and whether you
rent or own, they could probably
figure out exactly which residence
in a given Block was yours. This
is potentially very bad business.
Imagine, for example, the opportunities for a criminal seeking likely
victims for a robbery or scam.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
31
To avoid this, the Census
aggregates data, showing only
tables of information at the small
Block level to protect the individual
identities of you, your neighbor,
and the entire Block population.
Since the Block-level Census files
provide only certain cross-tabulated tables—age by race, race by
income, etc., they do not provide
the kind of detailed information
that a “bad guy” might need.
In this way, Summary Files (SF1
to SF4) protect privacy by summarizing the information into tables.
The richest data, however, is the
raw data from the H lines and P
lines of the long form, which the
Census releases as Public Use
Microdata Samples (PUMS) data
files. This raw data is stripped of
all geographic variables except an
identifier called the PUMA (Public
Use Microdata Area). The PUMA
groups include about 200,000
households. Since that comprises
only about 1/6 th of the total
households in the United States,
the PUMA data are weighted,
which allows for statistical replication of the entire population.
The data can then be used for any
statistical purpose.
HOW TO FIND AND USE
CENSUS FILES
Many repositories and CDs containing Census data are available.
NYU is a member of the data archive
at the Inter-university Consortium
for Political and Social Research
(ICPSR). ICPSR’s Census collection
(http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/topical.
html#CENSUS2000) is available free
of charge to researchers at NYU
and includes SAS and SPSS code to
format these files. We recommend
that you use a high-speed connection such as that provided at NYU
to download these large files.
GeoLytics (http://www.censuscd.
com/ ) is also a very impressive resource. Used by many
researchers, these value-added
CDs are available for a fee. They
offer a Windows-based program
for downloading subsets of the
various files, spanning the decades
from 1970 to 2000. An application
is included which allows variables
(where it makes sense) to be taken
across several decades using year
2000 geographical boundaries.
Help and additional information about using Federal Census
data is available through the
ITS Social Sciences, Statistics &
Mapping Group. Contact Frank
LoPresti at 1-212-998-3398 or
frank.lopresti@nyu.edu for more
information.
Frank LoPresti heads the Social
Sciences, Statistics & Mapping Group
of ITS Academic Computing Services.
The First Annual ITS Staff Art Show
In March 2004, ITS held its first annual staff art show, providing ITS employees the opportunity to share
their talents with their colleagues. This informal show featured an impressive variety of work, including
photography, illuminated digital art, sculpture, and painting. The exhibit was on display for the entire
month, enlivening the halls of our facilities at 10 Astor Place. For a busy department focused on providing for the technical needs of the NYU community, this fun show was a welcome opportunity to learn
more about the artistic talents of our colleagues, and is sure to become an annual tradition.
David Ackerman and Eduardo DeLeón appreciate
a series of multimedia paintings by Callie Hirsh.
32
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
A detail of a back-lit digital print
created by Philip Galanter.
COMPU TING IN THE ART S
Inspiration, Innovation &
Interactivity
The ITP Winter Show 2003
By Kate Monahan
kate.monahan@nyu.edu
C
elebrating its 25th anniversary in 2004, NYU
Tisch School of the Arts’
Interactive
Telecommunications
Program (ITP) is dedicated to “the
study and design of new media,
computational media, and embedded computing under the umbrella
of interactivity”.1 At the end of each
semester, this pioneering graduate
program hosts an impressive public exhibition of its students’ recent
work. The ITP Winter Show 2003,
held on December 16th and 17th,
featured more than 80 student
projects and attracted a crowd of
more than a thousand.
The event was a bustling playground of sounds, images, movement, and people that filled almost
an entire floor of the ITP facilities
at 721 Broadway. The projects
showcased the students’ skills in
virtual space and 3D design, physical computing, interaction design,
video and audio installations,
visual art, and much more. The
works were created—some individually, some collaboratively—by
students in 13 different ITP courses
with such evocative titles as “The
Poetics of Virtual Space,” “Kinetic
Structures & Eco-Design,” and
“Mediated Urban Spaces.”
Each project, though distinctly
unique, employed some combination of technology and art to
investigate what happens when
viewers can affect and be affected
by the work they’re viewing.
Beautiful, provocative, inspirational, entertaining, political, or
practical, each project was continually surrounded by crowds
of fascinated attendees awaiting
their turn to—quite literally—get
their hands on it. Though it would
be impossible to do justice to all of
the projects here, a representative
sampling is described below.
“Truly Interactive TV,” described
by its creator James Robinson as “a
chat client for frustrated screenwriters,” invites participants to
repurpose quotes from television
shows into meaningful conversation. Choosing from tens of thousands of actual TV lines stored in a
database, two participants create
an often amusing exchange on the
screen in front of them (figure 1). As
one person’s choice is displayed,
Figure 1. “Truly Interactive TV”
1. http://www.itp.nyu.edu/PROGRAM/overview.html
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
33
Figure 2. “Inter-whactive TV”
the other person uses a controller
to select a response either from
the entire database or from a small
collection of responses suggested
by the software.
“23 Cent Stories,” by Lian
Chang, Michael Sharon, and
Manlio Lo Conte, uses the tradition of postcards to experiment
with interactive narrative. Using
an impressive web-based interface (http://www.23centstories.com),
a person can select a virtual New
York City postcard, write a brief
story or message, and save it to an
online database. From the website
(or from a selection of actual postcards affi xed with bar codes that
were available at the show), the
person can also retrieve existing
messages written by others for a
given postcard.
Joon Seo Lee created “Interwhactive TV” as “a digital homage
to the analog.” This fun installation presents the audience with
an old rabbit-eared television that
displays nothing but static (figure
2). Following their instincts (if
they’ve ever owned such a television) and the instructions placed
next to the piece, participants
bang on the television and twist
the antennae to make it work. The
reward? A series of crystal-clear
video images.
“WeBe” is a practical web
application that empowers individuals to collaborate in group
purchases. The goal of the creators, Brandon Brown, Olivier
Massot, Yoonjung Kim, and Megan
Phalines, is to facilitate the coordi-
Figure 3. “Silhouette Play”
34
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
nation of groups of diverse, physically distant people “so that they
can benefit from both the purchasing power of a group and from
the social effects of forming group
ties.”
Jungeun
Yoo’s
addictive
“Silhouette Play” uses an IR
sensor, a webcam, and Jitter software to create a soundscape and
display a participant’s silhouette
surrounded by multiple colorful
outlines on a large screen (figure
3). As they move or interact with
their silhouette, the sound and the
number and color of the outlines
change based on the participant’s
distance from the screen.
“Belonging,” an interactive
documentary about women who
move to New York City on their
own from another country, allows
participants to choose from among
six interviews with such women,
and to access additional information about them. The work focuses
on the women’s positive and negative experiences of being alone in
a foreign country, what they miss
about their home country, and what
special objects they brought with
them. The creators, Idit Kobrin,
Maria Michaelides, Pei-Chen Chen,
and Catherine Boelhauf, chose the
title “Belonging” based on their
shared experience that “a person
can belong somewhere, but also
can be longing for a particular
place.”
Daniel Hirschmann’s pleasing
creation, “Sculpticles,” consists of
a grid of luminescent orbs on metal
stalks that change color as people
move them up or down. “Born out
of a frustration with the passive
experience of viewing artwork on
a monitor,” Hirschmann’s goal is
to allow people the opportunity to
change the work they are viewing
through their interaction with it
(figure 4).
Figure 4. “Sculpticles”
Figure 5. “Spider Plant”
A powerful video installation by
Geraldine Chung and Vivian Wenli
Lin, “Holler!” exposes participants
to the harassment from men (whistles, stares, comments) that many
young women have experienced in
public spaces. In the installation’s
enclosed room, a sensor detects a
participant as he or she enters and
sends data to a computer that triggers a projection of various men
“hollering” onto the wall in front of
the participant. If the participant
“confronts” the images by walking
closer, the system replaces the
projection with videotaped interviews of women who are regularly confronted with this type of
unwelcome attention.
“Spider Plant,” by Ian Curry,
is a hybrid organic/digital system
consisting of a living plant that
obtains water through prosthetic
“roots” made up of a software
spider that searches the Internet
for the word “water”. When the
Java spider encounters the word,
actual water is released to the
plant and the context of the word’s
usage on the Internet is displayed
on an accompanying screen (figure
5). Curry was inspired by the idea
that “the Internet has the same kind
of fluidity as an ocean—with tides
of usage, currents, chasms and
beaches.”
“ S id e - by- S id e — Relat ional
Musical Chairs,” by Rikayo
Horimizu, invites the passerby
to sit in one of several grouped
rocking chairs. A sensor (accelerometer) embedded in each chair
is linked to a computer music
program (MAX/MSP) that generates a pleasant, ambient sound as
the participant sitting in the chair
rocks back and forth. The project
aims to connect strangers in public
“waiting” spaces such as subway
stations or airport lounges by providing the collective experience of
composing music together.
“Pixiebox,” by John Geraci,
merges the live video images
of two participants into a fluid
and evolving “organic whole” on
an LCD screen that hangs suspended between them (figure 6).
The project is an exploration of
Geraci’s notion that “real sharing
is more than simple trade—it
involves combining our resources
with others, with the anticipation
that the result will be better than
the original parts.”
Conceptualized as “a metaphor for the world as seen through
public web cameras,” “Earthsee,”
by Yoonhee Moon and Liubomir
Borissov, is an interactive map of
the world composed of “pixels”
of continually updated webcam
images from each region (figure 7).
The viewer uses two movable light
sources on a clear table in front of
the map to navigate or to zoom in
Figure 6. “Pixiebox”
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
35
Figure 7. A detail from “Earthsee”
on a specific image in the dazzling
array of options. More information is available at http://earthsee.
dadastream.com.
“Catalyst,” by Diego Bauducco,
Michael Sharon, Ron Goldin, and
Andrea Roscoe, is a collaborative
software program for artists and
designers working on multimedia
projects. “It provides a centralized environment for storing and
sharing resources, giving feedback,
and visualizing the development of
a project in a number of different
ways.” As an example, the creators describe a scenario in which
an artist working on a logo design
could upload a rough version to
the server and then invite other
collaborators to submit comments,
refined versions, or entirely new
ideas.
“The Grab Pipe,” a multipurpose instrument developed by
Evan Raskob, “combines the form
of a classic woodwind (saxophone,
oboe) with modern DJ techniques
(crossfader, rotating neck) and
tilt/shake sensing.” Participants
are encouraged to pick up this
ingenious instrument and manipulate it in a variety of ways to
create sounds on a synthesizer
and images on a computer screen
(figure 8).
These and the many other
fascinating projects at the ITP
Winter Show 2003 illustrate the
wide range of inventive ideas
and technologies being generated
and implemented by ITP students
and faculty. For more information about all of the projects displayed at the Winter Show 2003,
visit http://stage.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/
projects/show/cgi/view.cgi.
Also
be sure to keep an eye on the
ITP website (http://itp.nyu.edu) for
news about the Spring Show 2004,
coming in May.
Figure 8. “The Grabpipe”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author is grateful to Josh
Nimoy for providing photographs
of this event: http://jtnimoy.net/
itpwintershow03/. Thank you to all
the organizers and participants
of the ITP Winter Show 2003,
and especially to Midori Yasuda,
George Agudow, and Red Burns.
Kate Monahan is a Technical
Writer/Editor in ITS Client Services’
Publications Group.
NYU Voice Mail
NYU’s voice mail systems provide an easy-to-use
messaging service for recording and distributing
voice messages via the telephone. The voice mail
systems are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Messages can be retrieved via touchtone phone
from anywhere in the world. Each user is provided
with a voice mailbox which is protected by a unique
password.
Printed brochures containing instructions on using
NYU’s voice mail systems are available upon request
(send e-mail to its.telecom@nyu.edu), and the information is also available on the ITS website at:
http://www.nyu.edu/its/telephone/voicemail.html.
36
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
COMPU TER SECURIT Y
Protect Your Privacy When
Browsing the Web
By Eduardo DeLeón
eduardo.deleon@nyu.edu
W
hen you use an
Internet browser such
as Internet Explorer
or Netscape to explore the Web,
there is the potential risk that
your private information could be
captured by websites you visit, or
by other ill-intentioned people on
the Internet. While many websites
collect data that cannot personally
identify you, you still may not wish
to share it. This information can
be captured in a variety of ways,
including cookies, your browser’s
history and cache, and web forms
you complete.
HOW WEBSITES OBTAIN YOUR
INFORMATION
Certain websites require you to
sign up before you can use their
services. The online version of The
New York Times is one example.
Before you can read any articles,
the website requires that you
register by answering a number
of questions about yourself.
Alternately, sites that offer you
free things often require that
you fill out a form or complete a
survey that can potentially collect
personal information. “Personality
tests” and other novelty tests and
polls are another method. Many
websites also collect information
based on the choices you make
on a website and store the data in
cookies.
Most reputable websites (and
some not so reputable) post their
privacy policies for the public to
view. This type of policy generally outlines what kind of information is collected and how that
information is used. It may also
state the conditions upon which
any service is rendered (terms of
service). Some websites will share
information they collect from you
with other vendors and/or partners who will approach you with
related offers. This may increase
unwanted commercial offers from
third party vendors, who in turn
will share your information with
yet more partners/vendors. If
this is not acceptable, avoid these
websites and/or request that they
remove all your information.
Following are some things
to keep in mind to protect your
privacy when browsing the Web.
and Safari all offer tools to help
save you time with such forms
by storing your personal information in the browser settings. If
activated, these tools can automatically fill in the information
that you have saved (e.g., your
first and last name, e-mail address,
telephone number, postal address,
etc.) when you start filling out a
new form. The Netscape tool is
called the Forms Manager, IE offers
AutoComplete and the Microsoft
Profile Assistant, and Safari offers
the OS X Address Book and the
System Keychain. Because other
websites and/or people may be
able to gain access to the data, you
should consider removing your
personal information from these
tools.
To delete cookies in IE,
Netscape, or Safari, follow the
instructions below. For other web
browsers, see their help menu or
visit their support website.
WEB FORMS
How to Delete Your Stored Forms
Information
Internet Explorer for Windows
In the Tools menu, select
“Internet Options.” Click on
the Content tab, and then
click “AutoComplete.” Finally,
click “Clear Forms” and “Clear
Passwords.”
Web forms request information
about you in order to provide you
a service. In the previous New York
Times example, the registration
process requires you to fill out a
web form and submit it before you
can gain full access to the site.
Internet Explorer (IE), Netscape,
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
37
Internet Explorer for Macintosh
In the Explorer menu, select
“Preferences.” Click on the
“Forms AutoFill” category then
on the “Forms AutoComplete”
subcategory. Click “Delete,” then
select the “Disabled” option.
Netscape for Windows and Mac
In the Tools menu, select “Form
Manager,” then “Edit Form Info.”
Click “Remove all saved data.”
Safari for Mac
In the Safari menu, select
“Preferences.” Click the AutoFill
tab and uncheck all boxes. Click
each “Edit” button, then select
“Remove All” where available.
COOKIES
Cookies are pieces of information
created in the normal course of
browsing the Web that are stored
in small files on your computer’s
hard disk to facilitate many web
functions. For example, if you
shop online, the website may
create a cookie to keep track of
the items that are in your “online
shopping cart.” Or, if you enter a
website that requires you to log
in, a cookie may be used to store
information about your current
visit to facilitate your future access
to the site.
Cookies help websites determine who is logged in, what activities you perform while you are on
the site, and when your session
is ended. Websites may also use
cookies for other purposes, such
as targeted online advertisements
(showing ads that they think you
will be interested in, based on your
past online activity), for saving
“preferences” you may have set
for the appearance, layout, or
content of a site, or for “remembering” your name and past activities every time you visit (as seen
on http://www.barnesandnoble.com,
for example).
38
Although most cookies are
intended to facilitate or customize
your web browsing experience,
they also pose a potential risk.
After a cookie is stored on your
computer, it could be accessed by
remote computers to obtain information about you that you might
not want to share, including the
websites you visit, how often you
visit them, and what ads have been
displayed on those sites.
How to Delete Your Cookies
You can prevent this sort of information harvesting by manually
deleting cookies from your hard
drive on a regular basis. Some
cookies may store “expiration”
dates, but even after this date
passes, the cookie will remain on
your hard disk, where it could still
be accessed by remote websites
until you delete it.
With modern browsers, you
can also control which websites
can store information in cookies,
and you can even specify when to
store cookies and when not to. For
configuration instructions of this
sort, see your browser’s help menu
or visit your browser’s support
website.
To delete cookies in IE,
Netscape, or Safari, follow the
instructions below. For other web
browsers, see their help menu or
visit their support website. A word
of caution before you proceed:
because cookies save the preferences and other information
described above, the next time you
visit your favorite websites, the
appearance or sign-in process may
be different. If you prefer, most
browsers will allow you to select
specific cookies to delete, allowing
you leave other cookies in place.
Internet Explorer for Windows
In the Tools menu, select
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
Internet Options, then click
“Delete cookies.”
Internet Explorer for Macintosh
In the Explorer menu, select
“Preferences.” In the window
that opens, in the “Receiving
Files” category, select the
“Cookies” subcategory. On the
right, click on the cookie(s)
you wish to delete, then click
“Delete.”
Netscape for Windows
In the Edit menu, select
“Preferences.” In the window
that opens, in the “Privacy &
Security” category, select the
“Cookies” subcategory. Click
“Manage Stored Cookies” on
the right and then click “Remove
All” to delete all cookies.
Netscape for Macintosh
In the Netscape menu, select
“Preferences.” In the window
that opens, select “Privacy &
Security,” then the “Cookies”
subcategory. Click “Manage
Cookies” on the right and then
click “Remove All” to delete all
cookies.
Safari for Macintosh
In the Safari menu, select
“Preferences”. In the window
that opens, select the Security
icon, then click “Show Cookies”.
Next, either select the specific
cookies you would like to delete
and click “Remove,” or click
“Remove All.”
BROWSER HISTORY
All modern browsers keep a
history, or record, of all the
websites you have visited in the
recent past. By default, Netscape
keeps history data for the previous
nine days, while IE stores information for the past twenty days.
If you can visit several different
websites in a few minutes, imagine
how many websites you may have
visited in the last twenty days!
Deleting this history—which
certain websites and anyone who
uses your computer can access—
will help protect your privacy.
How to Clear the History
To delete the browser history in
IE, Netscape, or Safari, follow
the instructions below. For other
browsers, see their help menu or
their support website. A word of
caution before you proceed: if you
use your history to access websites
that you’ve visited in the past, you
should set bookmarks for those
sites before clearing your history.
Internet Explorer for Windows
In the Tools menu, select
“Internet Options,” then click
“Clear History.”
Internet Explorer for Mac OS X
In the Explorer menu, select
“Preferences.” In the window that opens, select “Web
Browser,” then the “Advanced”
subcategory. Then, in the
History section on the right,
click “Clear History.”
Netscape for Windows
In the Edit menu, select
“Preferences.” In the window
that opens, in the “Navigator”
category, select the “History”
subcategory. Then click “Clear
History” on the right.
Netscape for Mac
In the Netscape menu, select
“Preferences.” In the window
that opens, in the “Navigator”
category, select the “History”
subcategory. Then click “Clear
History” on the right.
Safari for Macintosh
Go to the History menu and
select “Clear History.”
THE CACHE
A browser cache is a special
storage location on your computer
for temporary files that can
improve the speed and performance of your web browser. The
cache (pronounced cash) stores
content that does not change often,
so that a web page you’ve visited
can load more quickly the next
time you return.
For instance, while the headline
news on The New York Times on
the Web changes frequently, their
logo does not, so it can be stored
in the cache. This way, your web
browser does not have to download the logo image every time you
visit the site.
Since there is no way to predict
what the Web browser will store in
the cache, some private information may be stored there. Emptying
the cache periodically will help
protect your privacy.
How to Empty the Cache
To empty the cache in IE, Netscape,
or Safari, follow the instructions
below. For other browsers, see
their help menu or their support
website. A word of caution before
you proceed: websites you’ve
visited in the past may take a bit
longer to load the next time you
go there.
Internet Explorer for Windows
In the Tools menu, select
“Internet Options,” then click
“Delete Files.” Click “OK” when
prompted.
Internet Explorer for Mac OS X
In the Explorer menu, select
“Preferences”. In the window that opens, in the “Web
Browser” category, select the
“Advanced” subcategory. In the
Cache section on the right, click
“Empty Now.”
Netscape for Windows
In the Edit menu, select
“Preferences.” In the window
that opens, in the “Advanced”
category, select the “Cache”
subcategory. Then click “Clear
Cache” on the right.
Netscape for Macintosh
In the Netscape menu, select
“Preferences.” In the window
that opens, in the “Advanced”
category, select the “Cache”
subcategory. Then click “Clear
Cache” on the right.
Safari for Macintosh
Go to the Safari menu and
select “Empty Cache…”
OTHER BROWSER PRIVACY
STRATEGIES
Recommended
Set your cache size low.
Setting the space designated for
cache files to a low level will help
limit the amount of information
that is stored on your computer. To
do this, adjust the size of the cache
to a lower level—an option that
is usually available in the cache
area described in the previous
section (if not, see your browser’s
help menu or support website
for instructions). We recommend
setting your cache to no more than
100 MB.
Limit the History.
You can lower the number of
websites kept in your history by
reducing the number of days worth
of history that your web browser
keeps. In IE for Windows’ Tools
menu, select “Internet Options,”
and, in the History section, enter
the number of days that you want
to keep a record of the sites you’ve
visited. In Netscape’s Edit menu,
select “Preferences,” then, in the
“Navigator” category, select the
“History” subcategory.
Please note that setting the
history to zero days will not keep
any websites in the history, and
you will not be able to use the
history to visit web pages that you
have visited previously.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
39
Take control of your cookies.
Browsers like Netscape and Mozilla
allow you to manage your cookies
with a feature called Cookie
Manager. With it, you can set your
browser to accept cookies if the
server that originated the cookie
is the same as the website that
you are visiting; to accept session
cookies; to reject third-party
cookies (cookies that are set by a
website other than the one you are
visiting); or to prompt (ask) you to
accept or deny any cookie before
it is saved to your computer. This
browser feature also allows you
to keep a list of “always-accept”
or “always-deny” websites. IE for
Windows offers a similar feature;
in the Tools menu, select “Internet
Options,” and, in the Privacy tab,
click “Advanced,” or, to specify a
list of sites, click “Edit.”
Use IE’s Security Zones.
Internet Explorer’s Security Zones
allow you to configure different
levels of security for websites that
you visit. The feature includes five
predefined zones: Internet, Local
Intranet, Trusted Sites, Restricted
Sites, and My Computer. You can
set the security options that you
want for each zone, and then
add or remove websites from the
zones, depending on your level of
trust in a website. Instructions are
available on the Microsoft website:
search for “Microsoft Knowledge
Base Article—174360” at http://
support.microsoft.com/.
Review websites’ privacy policies.
As stated earlier in this article,
most websites have a policy
about collecting and sharing your
personal information. It is a good
idea to read these policies on sites
you visit frequently, or before sub-
40
mitting any personal information
to a site.
Use a secure browser when submitting personal/financial info.
Most modern browsers support
secure browsing. This means
that the information you enter
while browsing securely will be
encrypted so that only the proper
party can read it. The URLs (web
addresses) of secure sites begin
with https:// instead of just http://.
Another sign that the site is secure
is if you see a small lock icon in the
browser’s status bar (usually at the
bottom of the window).
Strategies Worth Considering
Use a different browser.
There is a new generation of web
browsers available (including
Mozilla, Firefox, and Opera)
that take privacy concerns more
seriously. They can be downloaded
from the Internet for free.
Use a third-party program to
manage your privacy.
There are literally dozens of
programs that can help you
protect your privacy while
browsing the Web. Some of these
programs may be obtained and
used at no cost, while others are
commercial programs that you
have to purchase. A simple search
at Download.com or Google will
present you with many tools for
controlling the privacy of your web
browsing, such as Cookie Cutter,
Cookie Crusher, Norton Internet
Security, Trend Micro’s PC-cillin,
or McAffee Security Center.
For the Very Cautious
Empty the cache each time you
close your browser.
In Internet Explorer for Windows, a
setting to automatically delete the
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
temporary Internet files each time
you close your browser is available
in the Advanced tab (under
the Tools menu, select Internet
Options then click the Advanced
tab). This option is also available
in the Opera web browser.
Use anonymous browsing.
There are websites that provide
the ability to browse the Web
anonymously. Simply enter the
website address that you would
like to view, and the site will be
accessed for you. Note, however,
that this service may not work
for all websites. Some sites, such
as Anonymizer.com, also provide
software that can further protect
your privacy.
OTHER BROWSER PRIVACY
RESOURCES
The following resources may help
you better understand issues
of privacy and security when
browsing the Web:
More about cookies:
http://pages.zdnet.com/hampsi/
Articles/Cookie2.htm
Online browser security check:
h t t p : // w w w.v e r i s i g n . c o m /
advisor/check.html or http://
browsercheck.qualys.com/
Stay Safe Online:
http://www.staysafeonline.info/
Sans Top 20 Internet Vulnerabilities:
http://www.sans.org/top20/
If you have questions about
browser security, please call
the ITS Client Services Center at
1-212-998-3333, or send e-mail to
its.clientservices@nyu.edu. You can
also contact the author directly at:
eduardo.deleon@nyu.edu.
Eduardo DeLeón is a User Support
Specialist at the ITS Client Services
Center.
NYU LIBR ARIES
Calabash
Preserving & Presenting an Online Journal
By Joanna DiPasquale and Jennifer Vinopal
joanna.dipasquale@nyu.edu; jennifer.vinopal@nyu.edu
I
n the spring of 2003, Bobst
Library received a request to
help a popular NYU print journal, Calabash: A Journal of Caribbean
Arts and Letters, “go digital.” Even
in print format, Calabash is a “multimedia” publication, including
fiction, poetry, and visual art, and
representing work from around the
globe. Because of its varied nature,
bringing this exciting journal into
the digital realm presented numerous technical hurdles: how could
Bobst Library capture and digitally
present this mixed media in the
authors’ intended fashion; and
what was the best way to make
the journal available online for an
audience with divergent technical
capabilities and capacities? The
challenges brought up by the digitization of Calabash have allowed
Bobst Library to develop solutions,
apply our knowledge to new projects, and bring the journal to the
World Wide Web.
Bobst Library began the
Calabash project with the SummerFall 2003 issue (Vol. 2, No. 2,
http://library.nyu.edu/calabash/
toc.html ). The initial challenges
were formidable. First, how could
we preserve the unique formatting of poetry in electronic format?
The XHTML markup language,
even with its excellent Cascading
Style Sheet (CSS) capabilities, did
not represent a universal solution—style classes would have to
be adjusted or added per poem
per issue, and some features may
not be perfectly compatible across
browsers and operating systems.
Our goal was to protect the interest
of the artist’s work while finding a
web-ready format that could be
easily delivered.
We also learned that Gerard
Aching, editor of Calabash, did not
necessarily want to forsake the
benefits of a print journal—like
turning pages—simply for a digital
experience. As Gerard wrote:
“Almost a year ago, when we
began to mull over this new stage
of the journal’s young life, we discussed this move with a fair degree
of skepticism. First and foremost
on our minds was the bias that an
electronic journal could not replace
the beautiful objects that the first
three [printed] issues of Calabash
were and always will be.… Yet our
unrepentantly romantic inclina-
tion to lament the loss of certain
features that we associate with
reading the journal—the tangible
weight of every issue, the contemplation of the visual art that graced
each cover, the indelibility of its
printed words, and the reflex that
our pages can only be turned—
soon yielded to economic realities.”1
To keep production costs
low, an electronic format was a
viable solution, but Bobst Library
wanted to foster rather than thwart
those “romantic inclination(s)”
that made Calabash a wonderful print journal. In addition,
because Calabash is international
in scope—with a readership representing North America, Latin
America, Africa, the Caribbean,
Europe, and other areas—certain
browser accessibility concerns
had to be addressed.2 Because
of varying hardware, software,
and—most importantly—connection speeds, we could not rely
on special browser configuration requirements (e.g., JavaScript
readability),
additional
technology within an Internet browser
(e.g., Java applets), or the latest
1. Gerard Aching, “Preface.” Calabash, Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 1. Accessed on March 1, 2004, at http://library.nyu.edu/calabash/
vol2iss2/0202001.pdf
vol2iss2/0202001.pdf.
2. Taken from interviews with Gerard Aching, from Calabash print subscription statistics, and from NYU Libraries website
statistics (“Visitor Domains,” March 1, 2004).
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
41
standards to deliver this information. Our documents needed to be
light, quick, and portable.
Joanna
DiPasquale,
Web
Administrator at Bobst Library,
began contemplating the Calabash
interface with these problems in
mind. Knowing that cumbersome
graphics on a website might hinder
access, she designed small-scale
graphics and made extensive use
of CSS for color and overall layout.
Luckily, the authors’ submissions
for the Summer-Fall 2003 issue
were already in electronic form,
and thus the primary task became
finding the right electronic format
in which to present the journal.
In consultation with Jerome
McDonough and the Digital Library
Team at Bobst Library, Adobe
Acrobat’s Portable Document
Format (PDF) was selected.
Acrobat Reader software is free
and easily downloadable, and often
comes packaged with browsers. It
also represents a technology that
takes into account many library/
information technology issues: for
example, Adobe and the Digital
Library Federation (DLF) have
examined the possibilities of
archival formats and quality as the
technology ages. Importantly, PDF
allowed us to preserve the unique
formatting of poetry, and to insert
additional pages as needed.
The capacity to incorporate
additional pages was especially
necessary to address the visual
component of Calabash. Delivering
high-quality images from 35mm
slides over the Web while trying to
minimize file size presented quite a
challenge. From each slide, Joanna
scanned the images at 300dpi
(dots per inch), and then reduced
to 200dpi post-scan. She then
inserted the image files into a PDF
text document that contained information and interviews about the
42
artist, already set to 200dpi. The
result: a good-quality, web-ready
article that preserved and incorporated mixed media into one format.
After successful completion of a
digital version of the Summer-Fall
2003 issue, we turned our attention to past issues of the journal.
Calabash had produced three previous journals from 2001 to 2003,
and we had paper copies (i.e.,
“hard copies”) of each publication.
Unfortunately, we did not have the
luxury of starting with electronic
copies of the articles, so we turned
to the Studio for Digital Projects
and Research at Bobst Library
to begin the digitization project.
Jennifer Vinopal, Services Manager
of the Studio, led the project.
Our first challenge at the Studio
We thus are able to
recreate in the digital
realm the user’s
familiar experience of
“thumbing through”
each issue.
lay in the physical characteristics of the journals themselves.
Calabash was mostly text-based,
but scanning produces an image
of the page—not a file that contains editable words and letters.
To make those page images easily
readable, we needed a good quality
scan that properly displayed each
character on screen.
The plan was to scan the pages,
save the images in the JPEG image
format, then bring them into Adobe
Acrobat in order to produce PDF
documents. The better the quality
of the scanned image, the larger
the size of the electronic file produced, so we tested the process
at various dpi to determine what
quality scan would create highly
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
readable text without a file size too
large for web delivery. We determined that scanning the pages in
8-bit grayscale at 200dpi met our
needs.
While we were pleased with
the way the page images looked,
we also wanted to make the documents searchable, so readers
could find words or phrases within
each text. The Studio’s optical
character recognition (OCR) software, ABBYY FineReader, was the
perfect solution. It “reads” each
page image and translates what
it sees into machine-readable text
(i.e., a series of individual characters like those produced by a word
processor).
We then turned our attention to
the images of non-text items (such
as pictures of studio artwork). The
color photographs in the original
Calabash publications were produced in halftone, a printing technique that uses small dots of color
to create the illusion of a continuous range of tones. When halftone images are scanned, a moiré
(rippled) pattern may result from
the combination of the printing
dots and the pixels produced in the
scanning process. Bobst Library’s
Digital Conservation Specialist,
Melitte Buchman, cautioned us
about this effect and suggested
that we carefully test the process
of scanning and conversion into
PDF to minimize the moiré effect.
In digital scanning projects,
images usually are scanned at a
high resolution to produce a highquality, archival copy of the image.
However, we were quite surprised
to discover that the scanned halftone photographs looked better
when scanned at a much lower
quality than we had used for the
page images themselves. After
much trial and error, we found
that color photographs scanned at
100dpi in 24-bit color and saved
as JPEGs integrated nicely with the
text images into PDF documents.
Once we scanned each page of
each issue, we used Adobe Acrobat
to combine all the JPEG images
of text pages and photos and to
convert them into one PDF document per article.
Web pages for each individual
issue of Calabash offer links to
download these article PDFs, and
the design and layout of the issue’s
web pages maintain a print-like
browsability. We thus are able
to recreate in the digital realm
the user’s familiar experience of
“thumbing through” each issue.
But, what the digital environment
offers that the print version cannot
is a “search this site” feature that
gives users the ability to search the
OCR’d text files “hidden behind”
the PDF documents.
The PDF archives of past
Calabash issues are forthcoming.
We are adding new content and
articles each day, and hope to
finish by Summer 2004. To access
Calabash, simply point your web
browser to: http://library.nyu.edu/
calabash/.
MORE ABOUT DIGITAL IMAGING
AND CONSERVATION
• Conservation On-Line (CoOL)
from Stanford University, at
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu. In
particular, resources on Digital
Imaging at http://palimpsest.
stanford.edu/bytopic/imaging/,
are useful for learning about
industry standards, conservation methods, and conversions.
• The Digital Library Team
provides a clearinghouse of
resources on their website, at
http://library.nyu.edu/diglib/
standards.html.
• The Studio for Digital Projects
and Research enables faculty and other NYU scholars
to use digital tools and content to enhance their scholarship in the arts, humanities,
and related disciplines (http://
www.nyu.edu/studio/ ).
• Information about Adobe
Acrobat is available at
http:// www.adobe.com/products/
acrobat/.
Joanna DiPasquale is Web
Administrator at NYU’s Bobst
Library, and Jennifer Vinopal is
Services Manager at the Studio for
Digital Projects and Research at
Bobst Library.
The main page of the Summer-Fall 2003 issue of Calabash at
http://library.nyu.edu/calabash/.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
43
NYU LIBR ARIES
ARTstor
A Digital Archive of Art Images for Study & Research
By James Viskochil
james.viskochil@nyu.edu
A
nyone who has studied
art history, even in recent
years, probably recalls
spending a lot of time searching
for images of artwork in books, in
journals, or in an art department’s
slide library. But increasingly, it is
not only the art history researcher
who needs images of art and
architecture. Students and faculty
members in diverse fields, ranging from music to food studies to
medicine, frequently find that they
also need images.
A new archive of digital art
images, ARTstor, holds great
promise for anyone searching for
high quality images of art and
architecture. NYU is among the
first to gain access to this exciting
resource, along with thirteen other
museums and libraries.
WHAT IS ARTSTOR?
ARTstor is a non-profit organization that began as an initiative of The Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation to provide access to
collections of digital images from
contributing cultural and educational institutions. ARTstor’s
mission is to promote scholarship, teaching, and learning in
the arts through the distribution
of a library of digital images and
related information that serves
the needs of researchers, teachers,
and students. This is accomplished
by working closely with both
providers and users of content
from around the world to construct
a non-profit, public utility.
ARTstor’s origins can be traced
to the Foundation’s creation of
JSTOR, a comprehensive archive
of scholarly journal literature containing over 13 million pages, from
over 350 journals. In 2000, the
Foundation made a grant to the
Digital Library Federation, a notfor-profit program of the Council of
Library and Information Resources,
to explore ways of creating digital
image collections, with a special
focus on the needs of art history
faculty and students.
The result was the creation of
a web-based application which
accesses the discrete collections
from a database of combined
content provided by ARTstor’s participating institutions.
HOW DOES ARTSTOR WORK?
The main page of the ARTstor test website.
44
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
ARTstor utilizes Macromedia Flash
Player technology to provide a
web browser-based interface that
is both intuitive and contextual.
This enhanced interface provides
The ARTstor interface simplifies the process of browsing large art collections.
access to each of ARTstor’s collections through either a keyword
search or an advanced, more
highly-focused search. Browsing
the entire collection is also an
option. The advanced search
allows Boolean1 searching of each
of the 12 indexes.
ARTstor also allows searching
of the free text note fields, which
can include personal-, instructor-,
and student-created notes. This is
especially useful for academic
applications where instructors have
attached classroom lecture notes to
the images for their students.
ARTstor offers another useful
tool, the “Image Group,” which
enables each user to create a folder
containing images from selected
collections. Creation of these
image groups can greatly enhance
the learning process by allowing
students and instructors to group
images together by lectures or by
concept.
Finally, art history classroom
teaching very often requires sideby-side projection of two images
for contrast/compare discussions.
ARTstor’s interface allows the
faculty member to not only continue this traditional practice, but
to greatly enhance it with ARTstor’s
ability to display details of the work
“on-the-fly”.
THE ARTSTOR COLLECTIONS
ARTstor currently includes images
from the following collections:
• The Image Collection—A deep
and broad collection of images
of world art, architecture, and
visual art;
• Art History Survey Collection—
Key monuments of world art;
• Carnegie Art of the United
States—American art, architecture, and visual culture from
the Colonial era to the 20th
Century;
• The Illustrated Bartsch—
European prints from the
Renaissance to the 19th
Century;
• Museum of Modern Art
Architecture and Design
Collection—20th Century
Design;
• Mellon International Dunhuang
Archive—Rich documentation
of the important Buddhist cave
shrines at the Dunhuang Oasis
site on the ancient silk route.
TRY ARTSTOR!
ARTstor is in a testing phase for the
2003/2004 academic year, after
which it will be made available for
site-wide licensing by non-profit
institutions, beginning in the US.
NYU community members are
qualified to use the ARTstor site
during this test phase. To do so,
visit http://test.artstor.org from a
computer that is connected to the
NYU network.
If you have questions about
ARTstor, please contact NYU’s
ARTstor beta-testing coordinator:
Tom McNulty
Librarian for Fine Arts
Bobst Library
212-998-2519
tom.mcnulty@nyu.edu
James Viskochil is Electronic Journals
and Acquisitions Librarian at NYU’s
Bobst Library.
1. A search strategy that allows the use of operators such as “OR,” “AND,” or “NOT,” along with keywords to help refine
search results.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
45
S O C I A L S C I E N C E S , S TAT I S T I C S & M A P P I N G
Econometric Data Mining
with PcGets
By Robert Yaffee
robert.yaffee@nyu.edu
Note: The following is an excerpt from a longer article, available in its entirety at
http://www.nyu.edu/its/pubs/connect/spring04/yaffee_pcgets.html.
P
cGets (PC General To Specific
modeling), written by David
Hendry (Nuffield College,
Oxford University) and HansMartin Krolzig (formerly of Nuffield
College, Oxford and currently of
Humboldt University, Berlin), is
an econometric software modeling
package that combines ease of data
importation, user-friendliness, and
powerful graphical capability with
automated econometric modeling.
This program is nestled in
the versatile GiveWin (General
Instrumental Variable Estimation
for Windows) interface, written
in the Ox programming language
by Jurgen A. Doornik (Oxford
University). That interface allows
for easy data importation, basic
graphical analysis, and pushbutton module selection.
The PcGets module provides
options for automated generalto-specific econometric modeling
for a variety of ordinary least
squares and instrumental lagged
distributed variables estimation
of univariate models. In the documentation, Krolzig shows how
the program can be used for VAR
modeling as well. PcGets combines flexible data management,
powerful graphics, and automatic
econometric model selection into a
46
user-friendly, simple, and efficient
program.
THE GIVEWIN INTERFACE
Data importation can be done in
several ways. One can simply copy
and paste an Excel spreadsheet
into the GiveWin data spreadsheet
after defining the time span and
observational frequency (figure 1).
In the GiveWin interface, one can
select the particular Oxmetrics
module that one would like to
apply.
Of course, there is the option of
using either DBMSCOPY or STAT
Transfer to convert SPSS, SAS, or
other files to the PcGive format,
which can be read by the PcGets
module. The GiveWin interface
endows this package with exceptionally powerful exploratory
graphical capability. Whether one
is preliminarily examining the
series or doing residual graphical
analysis, this package has a large
repertoire of graphical options.
The interface allows for a variety
of time sequence graphs that can
be overlaid, edited, and annotated.
The interface permits graphs
of transformations of the series,
including logs, first differences,
growths, and means within
specified ranges. The interface
also allows the easy inclusion of
Figure 1. The GiveWin data spreadsheet.
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
Figure 2. Time sequence plot of key series.
seasonality, centered seasonality,
trends, and constants. It performs
a variety of scatterplots, with
regression lines, cubic splines and
matrices. It also permits distributional analysis with frequency
charts, cumulative frequency
charts, density plots, histograms,
and box plots. Time series graphs
include graphs for both the time
and frequency domain (figure 2).
For the time domain, there are
autocorrelation functions, partial
autocorrelation functions, and
crosscorrelation functions. For the
frequency domain, there are the
spectral density charts and periodograms. For testing residuals
and other distributions, there are
quantile plots against a uniform
distribution, a normal distribution
and against a distribution of choice.
Two series can be graphed against a
third, and contour or three-dimensional surfaces can also be graphed
and rotated to a user-specified
angle for better perspective.
PcGets itself contains a number
of other graphs to enhance parameter and residual analysis. To
assess parameter constancy,
forward recursive or backward
recursive estimation can be run
and graphed, as can a rolling
window of parameters estimated
with rolling regression analysis.
Figure 3. Residual graphics (L to R): actual vs. fitted,
fitted vs. output, normalized residual time plot, and
squared normalized residual time plot.
To clearly diagnose the model,
one can also select from a rich repertoire of residual graphics. In figure
3, a matrix of four graphs is output.
In the upper left is a graph of the
actual values plotted against the
fitted values. In the lower left, there
are the residuals plotted against the
time line, to indicate where the possible outliers reside. In the lower
right, there are the squared normalized residuals plotted against the
time line; the normalized residuals
make identification of the outliers
particularly easy. In the upper right,
the fitted values are plotted against
the output. Moreover, histograms
of residuals, auto and partial autocorrelation functions, and spectral density plots are also available (figure 4). These graphs can be
enlarged, edited, annotated, copied,
and pasted into Microsoft Word or
WordPerfect files with ease.
[Article continued at http://www.nyu.
edu/it s/pubs/spr ing04/yaf fee _
pcgets.html.]
Robert Yaffee is a statistician within
the ITS Social Sciences, Statistics &
Mapping Group.
Figure 4. Additional residual graphics include (L to R):
correlogram, spectral density chart, histogram and
superimposed normal curve, and quantile-quantile plot.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
47
S O C I A L S C I E N C E S , S TAT I S T I C S & M A P P I N G
SAS Analyst
Simplifying Statistical Analyses
By Frank LoPresti
frank.lopresti@nyu.edu
S
AS Analyst, included in
SAS Version 8 and 9 and
available as an add-on to
Release 6.12, is an application
that provides easy access to basic
statistical analyses, and has an
SPSS feel. As described on the SAS
website, Analyst is a data analysis
interface that takes a task-oriented
approach. With Analyst, one “can
compute descriptive statistics, perform simple hypothesis tests, and
fit models with analysis of variance and regression. Other tasks
include repeated measurements,
mixed models, survival analysis,
and multivariate analysis. The
application also provides some
tasks not covered by SAS procedures, such as sample size and
power computations. In addition,
you can produce several types
of graphs, including histograms,
box-and-whisker plots, probability
plots, scatter plots, contour plots,
and surface plots.”1
SAS is now beginning to offer
the type of mixed-mode usage that
has always been available in SPSS.
For example, say you’re using SPSS
to work on the research data collection phase of a project that
involves merging many files and,
perhaps, reformatting or cleaning
up variables in order to create a
“good” dataset. In SPSS, you would
click to open datasets, then click to
run a bunch of frequencies to see
for the first time what you have in
the dataset.
You might paste a lot of syntax
from a task window to the SPSS
Syntax window to build up a real
“program” for this project. If you
knew that down the road you
would repeat large areas of code
that you’re saving, you could
perhaps also add code in the
Syntax window to create new variables or scales with some missing
value logic included. You would
move between the clicking and the
Syntax method as you worked on
your project.
By comparison, let’s say you’re
creating a simple dataset in SAS
using students’ IDs and the results
of five tests that they took. You
have two missing values, “E” for
excused missed tests, and “U”
for unexcused. As shown below,
this simple data step creates
“work.Period_a” with IDs and
five test results (Test1-Test5). The
“missing” statement allows you to
have two missing values to help
keep better track of why a student
missed an exam:
data work.Period_a;
missing E U;
input Id $4. Test1 - Test5;
datalines;
1001 U 45 65 U 78
1002 86 27 55 72 86
1004 93 52 E 76 88
1015 73 35 43 112 108
1027 100 87 39 76 79
1103 98 100 57 37 E
;
Figure 1. Choosing the SAS dataset “work.Period_a” for an Analyst session.
1. http://support.sas.com/
48
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
Figure 2. The SAS Analyst window with our data,
“Period_a”, open in Browse mode.
Figure 3. Computing a new variable in Analyst.
Figure 4. Analyst simplifies the generation of data steps.
To begin using Analyst, on the
SAS startup window, just select
Solutions, then Analysis, and then
choose Analyst.2 Open the saved
dataset, “work.Period_a”, by going
to File and then selecting “Open By
SAS Name…”. In the dialogue box
that opens (see figure 1), under
Libraries, highlight Work, then the
file name and click “OK”.
Once you have opened the file,
you’ll see that the Analyst “data
view” window has two modes—
Browse and Edit. You must be in
Edit mode (which is found under
Edit>Mode…) to be able to, for
instance, create a new variable
(see figure 2). Notice that there
is only one menu bar, whereas
in SPSS you have a menu bar for
each open window. In Analyst, the
data window mode that is active,
i.e., Edit or Browse, will determine
which menu bar is visible on the
large SAS “session” window. If you
select “Save” when the Edit mode
is active, you’ll save the commands
in the Editor window. If the Browse
mode is active, you’ll save the data
in your Analyst project folder.
With the sample dataset open
in Edit mode, you can now use
Analyst to create a variable, Final,
which is equal to the average over
the five tests. In a fashion similar to
SPSS, if you pull down “Data” then
select “Compute,” a very useful
function window (see figure 3) will
help you find the correct function,
Mean, to get the desired command,
FINAL=Mean(TEST1, TEST2, TEST3,
TEST4, TEST5).
SAS commands generated by
Analyst are stored, so that you can
reuse them; you could, for example,
copy them into a program editor.
And Analyst teaches you the SAS
language just by clicking. Figure 4
shows the data step generated in
SAS Analyst (just as in SPSS) by
clicking.
Years ago, SAS first started providing tools to assist us in running
commands without being forced
to keep a manual or two at hand.
My early experience led to reviews
which recommended that you
“stick to the Edit window.” Now
that I’ve taken a look at the useful
new Analyst tool, I congratulate
SAS on a job well done!
SAS is available for use by NYU
faculty, researchers, and advanced
students at the ITS Third Avenue
North computer lab (75 Third
Avenue, Level C3). The software
package can also be purchased at
an educational discount through
ITS. For more information, visit
http://www.nyu.edu/its/software/
sas.html or contact Frank LoPresti
of the ITS Social Sciences, Statistics
& Mapping Group at 1-212-9983398 or frank.lopresti@nyu.edu.
Frank LoPresti heads the ITS
Academic Computing Services’
Social Sciences, Statistics & Mapping
Group.
2. Despite the number of clicks it takes to access the programming environment, this useful application is very likely to
become a regular part of my normal windows SAS sessions in the future.
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
49
OUTRE ACH
The 2003 ITS Client
Satisfaction Survey
By Jill Hochberg, with Ken Fauerbach and Jeffrey Lane
jill.hochberg@nyu.edu; ken.fauerbach@nyu.edu; jeffrey.lane@nyu.edu
I
n ITS, we have a tradition of
paying close attention to client feedback and taking it
seriously. There are many ways
in which we’ve sought feedback
in the past, such as through web
surveys about particular services,
meeting and working with client
groups, and tallying phone and
e-mail comments and complaints.
And we regularly incorporate the
feedback from all these sources
into ongoing efforts to improve
services.
Recently, we took our quest
for feedback to a new level. In
November, we invited upwards
of 3,000 NYU students, faculty,
administrators, and staff to participate in the 2003 NYU ITS
Client Satisfaction Survey. As our
first broad-based survey, it solicited opinions and suggestions on
a wide range of ITS services. The
sample of invitees was randomly
selected across the University.
We are thrilled that 39% of those
invited took the time to complete
the survey, a significantly higher
percentage of participation than
anticipated.
After initial reviews of the
results, we are already introducing
some improvements, while we are
also preparing the survey report
itself for publication and digging
50
deeper into the data for improvement ideas. What follows is an
overview of what we’ve learned
thus far and what we are doing
about it.
The survey was conducted
in collaboration with IT service
providers at two other universities, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) and Stanford
University. Earlier in the fall
semester, ITS had been invited to
work with them in developing and
administering client satisfaction
surveys at our respective institutions, and then to use our findings to prioritize improvement initiatives. Each university’s survey
would be a separate activity, but
with some questions in common,
although using locally familiar
names, such as NYUHome, NetID,
and so on. By combining energies,
our three organizations could learn
from one another and advance our
efforts to improve IT support for
the teaching, learning, research,
and business endeavors at our
three institutions.
GETTING READY, GOING LIVE
Under the guidance of MOR
Associates—the independent consulting firm working with all three
organizations—the 2003 NYU ITS
Client Satisfaction Survey was soon
ready to go. The survey would be
administered by MOR Associates,
who would also e-mail the invitations, analyze survey results, and
report back to ITS, keeping individual responses anonymous.
E-mail invitations went out
in November to the randomly
selected sample of full and parttime faculty, undergraduate and
graduate students in degree programs, and administrators and
Expanding on an ITS tradition of listening to our clients’ feedback,
the survey was also a new opportunity to collaborate with other
universities in formulating service improvement strategies.
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
Survey participants were asked to rate ITS services on 5-point scales like the one shown above, and were also
invited to enter their comments and suggested improvements in free-text comment boxes throughout the survey.
staff members. (ITS staff members
were automatically excluded.)
The invitations assured our invitees that their participation was
completely voluntary, that their
responses would remain confidential, and that data would be collected and analyzed by an independent outside firm (MOR). The
participants were asked to complete the survey within the following week.
Each e-mail invitation included
a unique link to the recipient’s
own, individual online survey form,
accessed through a web browser. A
few opening questions were aimed
at obtaining a profile of our respondents’ use of computers, handheld
devices and e-mail, web, and connectivity services. The remaining
items asked for respondents’
ratings of a range of ITS services,
and solicited their improvement
suggestions. Most questions dealt
with services used generally by
all ITS clients—helpdesk, telecommunications, network connectivity,
e-mail and web-based services and
support. Additional smaller sets
of questions, specific to technologies that ITS clients would more
likely use in their roles as students,
faculty, administrators, or staff,
were also included.
In a typical question, respondents were asked to rate a service
on a five-point Likert scale ranging
from “Very Dissatisfied” to “Very
Satisfied” or “Very Unimportant”
to “Very Important.” Also scattered
throughout the survey were freetext comment boxes and questions
inviting a text reply in the form of
“What would increase your satisfaction with…?” The entire survey
took about 15 minutes to complete.
WHAT WE’VE LEARNED,
WHAT WE’RE DOING
A report is being prepared as
we go to press, and will soon be
available. But here’s an overview,
based on our initial review of the
results.
At ITS, we’re impressed and
very pleased that so many NYU
community members took the time
to take our survey and share their
comments with us. Nearly 1,220
people accepted our invitation and
participated in the ITS survey, providing an excellent overall response
rate of 39%; based on their experience with other universities, MOR
had expected perhaps 30%. Of
course, as with many surveys, not
every participant answered every
question.
When asked about their satisfaction with ITS services and
support overall, 79% of those who
responded provided a rating of
Satisfied or Very Satisfied, while
fewer than 3% selected Dissatisfied
or Very Dissatisfied.
As expected, although Macintosh
use did have a respectable representation in our sample, the large
majority of our survey participants
use Windows-based computers. A
sizable portion of them reported
using more than one type of computer (desktop, laptop; Windows,
Mac, Unix, Linux). Asked which
e-mail tools they used for their
NYUHome mail, 69% of those
responding reported using the
webmail client.
Percentages of respondents who rated their satisfaction with
ITS services overall: 79% were either Very Satisfied or Satisfied,
and fewer than 3% were Dissatisfied (2%) or Very Dissatisfied (<1%).
Spring 2004 • Connect: Information Technology at NYU
51
While there was general validation of the directions ITS services
have been taking, an important
goal of the survey was to add to
our information about what future
service improvements our clients
would like to see. Based on what
we’ve discerned from results thus
far, here are some of the improvements that our clients would like
us to work on, and some of the initiatives being considered by ITS—
or already under way.
Help & self-help. We’ll be looking
at ways that we might improve the
training that ITS already offers—
such as when we roll out new or
upgraded products and services—
and reviewing our other instructional resources, such as our
online guides and in-person help.
As one example, an initiative to
offer clinics for wireless connectivity beginners is currently under
consideration. As another example,
we are revising navigation paths
on the ITS website, to make the
most pertinent instructions, FAQs,
and service descriptions easier to
find. In addition, we’ll be working
to make clients more aware of the
ITS training available to them (see
Awareness, below).
Security information & updates.
There was a great deal of positive
feedback with respect to ITS’
handling of computer and network
security issues, and security information and updates. Many respondents thought a service providing
automated operating system and
anti-virus updates would be an
important addition, and an ITS
pilot of such a service is currently
under way.
Awareness. Respondents sometimes
seemed unaware of services
already available to them—antivirus and spam-filtering services
are examples (see And Did You
Know, below). As a result, we are
taking steps to better disseminate news and information about
ITS services and resources. In
this regard, we are redesigning
Connect-Direct, the ITS e-bulletin
sent to all active NYU e-mail
account holders at the start of
each semester, and then periodically throughout the semester
to those who choose to remain
subscribed to it. Connect-Direct
will be more easily navigated,
and will feature security- and
performance-enhancing “eTips”
and “Did You Know?” sections.
We are also considering additional
ways that we can reach out to new
students, faculty, administrators,
and staff members to acquaint
them with our services.
AND DID YOU KNOW?
Some service improvements suggested by our survey respondents were
actually already in place or under
way at the time of the survey. As
an example, NYUHome has offered
a spam-filtering service since
this past September, activated at
each client’s option through the
NYUHome Preferences menu. Under
a soon-to-be-released version of
NYUHome, clients activating their
new NYUHome accounts will automatically be walked through their
anti-spam filter setups in “wizard”
fashion.
In the area of security and
anti-virus protection, Symantec
AntiVirus software is available
free of charge via download from
NYUHome to NYU faculty, students, administrators, and staff,
under a University-wide site
license obtained by ITS.1
In addition, an enterprise antivirus system automatically checks
incoming NYU e-mail for viruses
and removes any that are found; in
February 2004 alone, for example,
nearly 1.5 million viruses were
trapped at the NYU mail gateway
(see page 20). On NYUHome, a
Security Alerts channel provides
urgent security alerts (on the Home
tab) and general security news is
provided via the News channel (on
the News tab).
LOOKING FURTHER AHEAD
“Thanks to all who took the time
to share their thoughts with us!”
noted Associate Provost and Chief
Information Technology Officer
Marilyn McMillan. “As we delve
deeper into the survey results, ITS
will continue to take your opinions
and suggestions seriously. We
look forward to further collaboration with our clients in the NYU
community, as well as our colleagues at MIT and Stanford, in
the continued improvement of our
services.”
Further detail will be available in a survey report that is
being prepared for publication
in April; check the ITS website,
http://www.nyu.edu/its/survey/,
for an announcement and access
information.
Jill Hochberg is a Technical Writer/
Editor in ITS Client Services’
Publications Group; ITS Director of
Policy and Planning Ken Fauerbach
led this ITS survey effort; Jeffrey Lane
is ITS Director of Client Services.
1. A similar product is licensed by the School of Medicine for SOM faculty, students, administrators, and staff.
52
Connect: Information Technology at NYU • Spring 2004
Did You Know...
• NYUHome can help reduce all that spam clutter
NYUHome offers a customizable spam filtering service that can help reduce the spam clutter
in your e-mail inbox. Whether you access your e-mail using NYUHome’s webmail client or
a desktop mail client (e.g., Eudora, Macintosh Mail, Netscape Messenger, or Outlook), the
NYUHome PureMessage spam filter will help remove that annoying junk mail. Activate this convenient service through your NYUHome “Preferences” settings, or visit http://home.nyu.edu/help/
mail/spamfilter.nyu for a full set of instructions.
• You can download AntiVirus software from NYUHome, and easily
keep it up-to-date!
ITS automatically checks your incoming NYU e-mail for computer viruses (see p. 20),
but with new viruses emerging daily, you should take additional steps to protect your
computer. ITS provides Symantec AntiVirus (and other useful software) to the NYU
community through NYUHome. To download this software, log in to NYUHome at
http://home.nyu.edu/ using your NYU NetID and password. Click on the “Files” tab, scroll down
to the “ITS Software” channel, then click on the AntiVirus link for your computer’s operating
system. Once you’ve installed AntiVirus, be sure to use the “LiveUpdate” feature to update the
virus definitions. Then, continue to check for updates daily or whenever you’re online. (You
can set LiveUpdate to do this for you automatically.) See “When Computer Viruses Strike” on
p. 18, the Security Awareness Month announcement on the back cover, and the ITS website
(http://www.nyu.edu/its/security/ ) for more information about protecting your computer.
• What’s new at the ITS labs and classrooms
ITS’ Academic Computing Services has recently improved and expanded a number of the lab and
classroom facilities and services available to NYU faculty and students. Recent enhancements
include a redesigned Video Editing Lab, new Apple G5 computers at the ITS Multimedia Lab, and
expanded end-of-semester hours at the ITS labs and the Faculty Technology Center. See “What’s
New at the ITS Computer Labs” on p. 26 for details. And, in case you haven’t already heard, ITS
offers several hands-on computer classrooms that can be reserved by faculty for regular or occasional class meetings that require in-class computer use by students. See http://www.nyu.edu/its/
classrooms/ for more information.
• ITS can help with your research or academic project
ITS offers a variety of services in support of instructors and researchers at NYU, including
computing facilities and special resources, technical support, consultation, and resources management. Examples discussed in this issue include digital project support (“The Clerk’s Tale,” p. 7),
arts technology resources (“Rapid Prototyping,” p. 2), and high performance computing services
(“High Performance Computing Rocks at NYU,” p. 29). Contact the ITS Faculty Technology Center
to find out more about the ways that we can help: its.ftc@nyu.edu.
• You can keep in the know with Connect-Direct
Be sure to watch Connect-Direct, ITS’ monthly e-mail publication, for computer-related news,
security alerts, eTips, and other information of interest to people who use information technology
at NYU. See http://www.nyu.edu/its/pubs/connect/direct.html for more about Connect-Direct.