Sub Ubi

Today’s letter to NatWest, through their on-line comments form.

This kind of thing pisses me off to no end. It just speaks of all kinds of poor practice on the part of the developers of NatWest’s online service, that they couldn’t build an account management interface that won’t work on anything but (let me get this straight) either IE version 4 and up, or Netscape versions 4.0 to 4.78?

I am an owner of a Macintosh. I use standards compiant web browsers: Navigator (formerly Chimera), which is the core fo the Mozilla web browser, and Safari, based on the Konquorer rendering engine.

Both of these are blocked by NatWest. I cannot log in to make use of your online services. At the least you should support Safari, as it is an Apple product, soon to be shipped on all new Macs; certainly this must represent some percentage of your user-base. In a fit of desparation, I have even attempted to use Internet Explorer 5.2 for OSX; it too failed.

I would appreciate it if you would relax the draconian filtering you are clearly doing on your web-based account services, and make your on-line services more accessible.

I assume NatWest's internal developers (or the firm that NatWest contracted it's webservices to) will be happy to improve the accessibility of their website, or make recommendations as to how I can go about managing my account online.

Thank you,
Matt Jadud

PS - I do not expect to ever receive any correspondence as a result of using the Feedback from located at https://www.natwest.com/secure/natwesttools/feedback/pers_form.stm unless it _directly pertains to my feedback_. Neither NatWest, nor any affiliate thereof, has my permission (explicit or implied) to add me to mailing lists from which I would receive unsolicited email.

Grrr.

Today was my first meeting with my full committee; here at UKC, we only have two other members on your committee (other than your supervisor). This is smaller than a committee you might typically encounter in the States, but I think that’s just fine. The conversation from the meeting I want to focus on for the moment centers on the question of “what is your thesis?”

I think this picture sums up how I see the (currently) predominant themes in my exploration coming together. At the core, I really like using the notion of little languages for little robots to drive the work forward. There are ideas contained in that work that are core to the discipline; we have effectively taken something quite advanced and moved it down to a more… introductory? … context, where students can play with ideas in programming languages. There is something contained in that idea that I feel is very powerful, and cannot be ignored.

I think LLLR is hard to research, though; or, I’m stuck on the idea that it is… I’ll come back to it. The other two arrows are the results of starting the lit review and continued discussion regarding compilation histories.

1. “Motivation” keeps coming up in papers regarding robots in the classroom—yet noone cites any research about why students are motivated by these toys. Sorry—I think I’ll find some in the earlier literature, but current authors in the ACM and IEEE are just citing each-other for this information, and none of it is actually research (I’m painting in broad strokes here). Part of this is because you can’t just measure motivation. It is a difficult thing to get a handle on. That said, I think this should be addressed, since it is tied up in the why of using the LEGO Mindstorm.

2. The compilation histories work can be expanded nicely to compare interaction patterns between two types of students: those playing with LEGO, and those programming “traditionally.” I think this is a clean and appropriate way to compare across the paradigms. That, and I’m not familiar with any research along these lines; we stand to find a lot of interesting things (in positive or negative results).
   

This brings me to a possible way to structure a dissertation. The work is motivated by some exploration of (adult) student motivation with respect to the use of toys in teaching computing; the core of the study is on student interactions with their code in traditional and LEGO contexts; then, we close with a case study on one or two more students designing languages for the Mindstorm. This last element is used as a solid foundation for future work (the “Future Work” section would be grounded in a small study, as opposed to being mostly speculative). So, in some respects, the LLLR stuff becomes both an endpoint and ties things up nicely as a “thematic driver.”

I may revise this later today. It’s time for lunch.

Hell, I may revise this again fifteen times in the next month. I’ll probably just write new posts, but still… this is evolution, right?

And, this is where I start to worry about some bastard running with my ideas, and writing a paper before me…

I’m currently listening to Wicked Little Critta from the album “Mink Car” by They Might Be Giants (TMBG)

In another day or so I’ll post some preliminaries from my lit-review work; in particular, the pretty pictures that I’ve created by graphing the relationships between all the papers in my review.

For the moment, I should note that poster is a very keen little GPLed piece of software. It takes a Postscript document, and will tile it over a number of pages. This is very handy for creating large, multi-page views of my bibgraphs.

It took a long time to find. And, it is a lot cheaper than some other tools out there that are capable of similar feats of magic.

A new resources section has been added: Resources for Research and Writing. Contributed by a colleague, Ralph Miarka. I imagine this one growing and splitting into several sections over time.

Scott Rosenberg is the managing editor of Salon.com, a best-of-breed online magazine/newspaper. On the 17th, he wrote an essay titled Eve of Destruction. As an example of the kinds of responses he received, we can read a response from Rich Santalesa, who has worked in and around the software journalism industry. No doubt inspired by like responses, we have Scott’s follow-up to his own article.

I’m amazed by how daft Rich’s points are.

• Comparing the “liberation” of Iraq to the War of Independence. Hm. There is an amazing similarity between these two wars; France had a massive financial interest in the North American continent. Consider the equation:

  North America - Great Britain = More pie for France!

  So, actually, I change my mind. Rich is right-on; we have large financial interests in the region, as did France. However, Rich made the altruistic argument—that we’re doing it for the good of the Iraqi people. I don’t buy that. If that’s true, could we move on to Israel, Palestine, Ethiopia… pick an oppressive regime, I don’t care. If we’re out to prove a point and police the world, could we at least be consistent in our application of force?

• The U.N. needs to be completely restructured. What? Because we can’t do what we want on the global stage without someone objecting? Claiming that we need “one group composed of democratic countries, and another group for everyone else” is like saying we should have a government for all the white people in America, and then one for everyone else; it stinks of prejudice and a lack of world-view. Besides, Great Britain wouldn’t even make it in the group of Good Guys, as they’re still a monarchy!
  

But, why split hairs here… we’re all just pissing in the wind as long as America is led by a strong, military dictator, right?

Read the articles for yourself, form your own opinions. As a point of interest, I also found this opinion piece from The Star, a South African paper, to be interesting as well.

This post is something I may want to come back to later; its a personal placeholder for an idea, I guess. While brainstorming with a few colleagues on a ride to dinner the other evening, I wondered how you could develop a highly distributed, incredibly cheap, wireless network. Or, put another way, I wondered how I could check email from the car without an expensive GPRS system. I had some ideas, but I also knew that other people must be playing in this area—it’s a hard, open problem.

Two people came up in my poking around:

• A Google search for massively distributed wireless networks turned up an abstract for a paper by Andrea Goldsmith (abstract, presentation (PPT), homepage, CiteSeer searches [author, title]).

• Yaron Minsky’s thesis (homepage, CiteSeer entry)
  

Related, but not. I can’t find a paper associated with the presentation, which seems to be applicable (my guess is some of Andrea’s other papers would apply, and I’d have to assemble pieces to get the full picture). I haven’t really examined Yaron’s thesis yet, but I’m noting it here because, at a glance, I think there is likely something valuable in looking at the gossip protocols for ad-hoc networks.

No, this has nothing to do with my work, but this blog is a place to jot down notes related to my thoughts and work. Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes its on CS-ED, sometimes its just me being a computer scientist who has a lot of interests. I’ll try and get back on topic soon enough.

Two months ago I caught a comment from Seb to check out the Educational Blogger’s Network. I haven’t had time to follow up on this, due to travel, writing, and other things. I started digging around the web regarding weblogs in education (I was a regular reader of SIT for a long time) and was amazed to see how the edublogging community has changed so much in the last year. CS-ED.org should play in this space, I think; exactly how it should play, I don’t know. For now, I will continue reading and watching for a week or two (I just set NetNewsWire up again) and think about how I can participate. Then I’ll think about tools that make it easier for members of the CS-ED.org community (nascent as it is) to participate. Time, as always, is the critical issue: priority one is getting done.

As part of my searching, I stumbled on the article A Radical Formula for Teaching Science. This article gave me an idea that I want to hang on to, but I can’t trust the Washington Post to actually maintain a proper web archive of their content. Because I assume the content will go away, I included it here in this post, so I could find it later. Google (currently) will not see the content, but Inktomi will… can you find it? Kinda a nifty trick, I think—simple, but it works.

I think this week will mostly be about getting my house in order. I’ve been cleaning at home, backing things up on the Mac, organizing my electronic life (on three different systems, in two countries)… all important, but seemingly secondary to the work I “should be doing.”

I will, sometime in the next week or two, roll out a new default template for the whole site. It includes a bit of PHP that will include a left-hand navbar if it is present. This way, everyone can have a standard RH side, and a custom LH side, with links and whatnot (it’s just HTML). It gives the ability for people to easily customize their site with useful links and images; I feel the ability to personalize that way will be important in the future. It is implemented simply, so it shouldn’t break too easily; I’m poking at mine to see what is possible.

Lisa, one of my colleagues abroad, asked a question which a number of people have asked at one point or another:

<QUOTE>
what is the “view from the ground” in britain vis bush’s latest maneuvers? all we hear is that “Blair backs Bush despite overwhelming public opposition ” and that 2 cabinet members resigned in protest.
</QUOTE>

They don’t like it, but there’s more to it than that. I tend not to hang out in the pubs where they want to bomb the piss out of other nations; furthermore, I tend to spend most of my time with internationals–not UK citizens. I can only give you a small bit of perspective on my experience; Carrie, living on the other side of the country, interacting with a different culture, reading and listening to different bits of news, might be able to offer yet another perspective from this side of the water.

Generally, you find people are anti-war. Many don’t seem to have a clear picture of why this war is necessary, and there is a certain amount of “Anti-Americanism” running around. In particular, Bush is generally perceived as being A) daft, and B) the last person in the world you’d want running a five and dime, let alone the lone remaining superpower in the world. Given that there is a contingent that loves Tony Blair, they tend to wonder why Tony is in bed with Bush; the rest think Tony can’t be trusted with a five and dime either, but for entirely different reasons than you wouldn’t trust Bush.

I find myself discussing the war in the context of many nations; my housemates are from Germany, France, and Argentina. The people I regularly eat meals with or generally socialize with are from Germany, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Wales, Britain, Egypt, and a few other nations that escape me at the moment. It is often a challenge keeping up, as they certainly have a better sense for the European context of all of this than I do; in return, I can usually only attempt to convey a sense for what America is like between the coasts—there is a lot of country there, and I don’t think your average European has a sense for the scope of the country, and the sameness in diversity that exists. With those cultural and historical hurdles in mind, we tend to focus on current events and their portrayal in the media. We discuss and compare the reporting we get from the WWW (from native presses, for example), from the BBC (TV mostly, although some do tend to catch the radio more than others), and what we remember about any other channels we may have been connected to before moving here.

Our conclusions: the media is pretty good here, and American’s are screwed. You don’t get nearly the picture we do here, and so little of the international politics actually reach you that you’d never realize there is a world out there that might not like what’s going on. When there were worldwide marches protesting the war, many US sources didn’t even report on the scale of international marches; London had well over 2 million in attendance (conservative estimates ran around 1 to 1.5 million). Considering the total population of Great Britain, Wales, and Scotland together, that would be equivalent to 9.5 million people converging on Washington, DC. If it helps you at all, this is like New York City deciding to hop on a bus for DC and express their dissatisfaction with the (now unavoidable?) war.

Recently, a Brazilian student posted a humorous email regarding the staggering cost of this war to the all postgraduate mailing list. The only email that went out in response tells an interesting story:

<QUOTE>
I’d point out however, that the whole resolution issue is irrelevant. Saddam was supposed to have provided all the evidence and done away with these weapons in 1991(!) after the Gulf War. That he clearly hasn’t puts him in breach of several resolutions already. Is anyone seriously telling me that the ’serious consequences’ referred to in 1441 mean a slap on the wrist and few inspections? Moreover, the known consequences of leaving him in power are clearly worse than the potential consequences of removing him, especially if one happens to live under his tyranny. Or doesn’t the brutality of his crimes count any more? If anyone wishes to discuss this, you all have my email.
</QUOTE>

I’d ask the same question about Israel, but I might get Vanunued. (For a bit of history on Vanunu, see The Guardian; this fine paper is not to be taken as the pinnacle of high journalism, but it will do for the moment. Also, NPR had a bit on Vanunu just a few days ago; you can still catch it online.) The highlighted portion of the email is a problem that is less common here, but probably more common in the States: people don’t realize that the Middle East was generally cool with a madman they understood and could control. Bush & Co. decided they didn’t want him around, not the world. Remember the UN? They want to continue with something called diplomacy; that’s where you talk about your problems, not hit the other kid with a stick. You never know when the other kid will come back with 10 of his friends…

America will face the consequences of it’s broken foreign policy time and again, until we learn to live in a world as one nation of many. From the ground, talking to people from many nations on this side of the Atlantic, America is clearly showing the world that it can’t play by the rules, and doesn’t want to join the party.

These are my observations and opinions; I’d hope that you would go out there and form your own, and share them with people. An avalanche can start with a feather.

Keeping Up

You have more, powerful tools at your disposal for reading and gathering news today than ever existed before. Use them.

• Pick a paper, and read it. The New York Times is available online with a free subscription. Or, you could pay for the real thing, if you’d like. Remember, most papers that are smaller than the Boston Globe, NYT, or other major papers are almost 100% AP feeds; all you’re getting is different slices of the AP pie. The larger papers can afford to have their own reporters, and get a bit of an individual voice that way. You’re otherwise doomed to get canned meat in America from the printed page.

• Pick a magazine, and read it. Newsweek, Time, USA Today… I personally think they’re all spin factories, but you learn which writers in their soup are better than others. Just don’t forget that these magazines tend to have a slant. And, like all American media, they tend not to ask the hard questions (that is, they tend not to tell you what the hard questions are… heaven forbid we have a whole country of people questioning the actions and motives of our government!)

• Search for specific things that interest you. For example, Google has a very powerful News search feature [ http://news.google.com ]. You can go there, type “Iraq,” and you’ll get news articles from around the world on the subject. You find the BBC, Reuters, AP, Voice of Amerrica, The Hindu (India), The New Zealand Sun (NZ)… the list goes on and on. They all have a freshness tag (the first twenty articles I found were all indexed less than an hour ago) as well as links to related articles. This is an incredibly powerful service, but remember, many of the articles use the same sources, and so you’ll have to do some of your own legwork to filter out news.

• Search for editorial voices you enjoy, and read them. There are those sponsored by the media (NYT, etc.), and there are the independents. In particular, I’d recommend you look at Daypop [ http://www.daypop.com/ ]. This is an impressive tool; it only searches weblogs from around the world. (A weblog is a journal someone publishes to the WWW; it’s like a diary, but online.) Weblogs are an interesting way to see the news, because you have someone telling you about how they see the world, linking to content and other articles. This kind of writing should not be dismissed because it is not “professional;” consider that all the “professional” publications are sanitized for your protection, and nothing will give you insight into life in Iraq and the thoughts of it’s people like reading a weblog kept by someone who lives there.

  As an example, here are just a few voices crying out to the world. Read them. Think. Act.

There are tools that make the last suggestion easy to do; if you’re interested in harvesting news from 10, 15, 20… 50 weblogs effectively, please write me a note, and I’ll write up a HowTo document that will help you start seeing the world differently. It will even apply to your ability to keep up with major news sources as well; effective tool use can sometimes be a first step in being better informed. Put another way, technology is slowly becoming the New Literacy. But that’s a rant for another time.

In Closing

I’m personally overwhelmed with questions (and this one theme has permeated many of my questions since Bush/Ashcroft took office): who will police the police? If you are unwilling to accept the acts of a small number of angry militants striking at the heart of the Western world’s economy as a message, whose message will you accept? God? The combined voices of Germany, France, and most of NATO? The BBC? A small paper in India with a readership of less than 50,000? Oprah? Me?

And what will you do, if you think change needs to happen?

I think the Constitution said it best:

We the People of the United States…

This war has been brought to the world in your name.

(A summary of the resources linked to in this document can be found in the CS-ED.org resources hierarchy, under All About Weblogging. In a pinch, you can just work your way through it, without my commentary below…)

You heard about CS-ED.org, either from me or a colleague. Or, perhaps you stumbled on it from somewhere else on the ‘net. Now, you’d like to take part–something about the idea of maintaining a journal, weblog, diary—whatever you want to call it—sounds particularly appealing to you. So, you ask, and receive, and … then what?

why blog?

I think this is the question we’re dealing with at this stage, really. Or, perhaps you want to blog (you don’t know exactly why), but you don’t know how to get started. So the question becomes “What should I blog?” Both of these questions are seemingly simple, but like many things in life, simple questions don’t necessarily have simple answers.

We can start with some advertising-laden, hand-spun pulp from Xanga.com; in particular, they have two pages of chunked text all about getting started with weblogging and finding your voice. I don’t think either of these pages is particularly inspirational or insightful, but they both provide a good starting point. Given that they are

1. Sales documents, and
2. Attempting to snare anyone who stumbles in, from anywhere in the world, with any background

they are remarkably applicable to our quest of answering the question of Why. What they fail to do, however, is give us a personal perspective on the process of weblogging.

A weblog is a a shared, personal space. It is public, by nature, but yours. Coming to terms with this, and understanding the interplay between the personal and public, is part of the why and what of weblogging. CS-ED.org was established as a place to give computer science researchers, educators, and students a voice, a place to be heard and a place to discuss plans, ideas, and hopes without the chaos and transience of a mailing list.

Of course, you may use it differently, and that’s fine. I felt that Derek Powazek’s personal statement regarding why he blogs is particularly pertinent here. This is a clearly written expression of one person’s why, and there are several themes that I believe may resonate with you as you begin blogging. Or, perhaps there will be things that you push back against—and I think that’s good. In short, it’s a well-written little piece that gives you something to reflect on.

If you were to stop here for a day, and think about that, you would have done well, I think. Take the ideas home, talk about it with your kids, your family, your friends—think about why you’re about to set down this path. You might come back and ask the CS-ED.org sysadmin to nuke your blog, or you might have ideas for where to start.

what to blog?

If you look at the start of my weblog on CS-ED.org, you’ll find that I just wrote about stuff I was doing. There was no grand, unifying theme to the writing. In fact, when I’m done writing these documents, I might go back and reread some of those old posts… if nothing else, because they remind me of another continent and friends far away.

The next few links in the list of resources I’ve compiled are to the Art of Blogging parts one and two.
There is some good material for reflection here, as well as some “mechanical” bits about what constitutes a weblog post. With respect to CS-ED.org, however, I find myself tending to post in one of several ways:

• As a (developing) researcher, I tend to reflect on the practice of research. Sometimes, I write about the research itself, and occasionally thoughts for future work. I must admit that I’ve tried to contain myself a bit on the last count, as I don’t think it’s a good idea to look too far to the future when you’re trying to finish one study for one Ph.D. Big ideas that take a lifetime should really come later…

• I haven’t ever blogged as an educator, I must admit. This is, I think, a failing in my blogging practice. In particular, I really like the idea of weblogging about my practice in a place where my students can see what I’m thinking. This is because I (Matt) personally think there are too many guessing games between me as an instructor and my students. If they can see where I think the educational process is breaking down, and why, they can actually take part in the solution. Or, what might be even cooler, would be…

• Blogging as a student. This is a difficult game, at best. Is it safe, politically, to blog as a student? Can instructors actually handle real-time commentary and critique of their work? Can a dialog exist in the public domain between students and teachers regarding educational practice? At the time of this writing, we only have Ph.D. students well beyond coursework, and a number of educators. We are still waiting, I guess, for a student to pave the way on CS-ED.org and provide us with a model.

• I tend, on occasion, to blog for me. These are things I want to remember, things I think are funny, or cool, or… anything. They aren’t about work, or research, or anything else. They’re just something I want to comment on. And this is usually, I think, where the voice comes out. In the end, you shouldn’t be afraid to let yourself post things you want to post; your intuition is probably right. And when you post something Google really shouldn’t archive, we’ll tell you. That’s why this is a community.
  

Blogging for yourself brings us to joining the weblog nation; this is, effectively, a very nice collection of short links on how to behave on the WWW with a blog. Tips to networking in a weblogged world, if you will. An easy and good read, with some tips that I’m sure we’ll all violate at some time or another.

in conclusion

There are more resources out there about the process of weblogging. Microcontent news and Scripting.com are two sites that come to mind regarding reflection on the technology and practice of blogging. There are many individual bloggers out there as well, all of whom have their own voice, shouting to the darkness, waiting to be heard. I’ll cover how to “listen in” on these conversations using some really savvy tools at a later point; for now, I’m happy if you just start writing.

Don’t forget to check the HowTos regarding posting from the desktop (this entire article was written in a tool called Kung-Log for OSX, and similar tools (like w.bloggar) exist for Windows); both of these tools make jotting some notes and getting them online scads and loads easier than using the MoveableType interface on the web.