Sub Ubi

Whooda thunkit: Matt L. at BFOP has finally stepped into the arena of “Educational Politics and Rhetoric,” or Sniping at Bush on The Subject of Education, or, in you prefer a teaser of what lurks at Matt’s site:

MBL’s inspiration, for those interested.

I’ve rewritten my XML-RPC library for Scheme; it was showing it’s age. More importantly, it had two big problems:

• A hand-rolled parser, and
• It did it’s own TCP/IP work

There are lots of other issues (documentation, robustness in the face of errors, etc.) which I’ll address with this rewrite as well. It looks like I just cut the code size by a factor of four (700+ lines down to around 180). The new version uses the SSAX parser for handling XML, and SXPath queries for grabbing elements out of the XML trees. And, most amazingly, it came together in … what, two hours? Three?

This came up because my original version wouldn’t sit behind Apache and serve XML-RPC requests; it was custom-tailored to run as a servlet under the PLT Scheme webserver. At this exact moment, however, I’d like to be able to code up an XML-RPC endpoint that Apache can serve for me. The rewrite makes it possible to drop a Scheme CGI in place that can serve XML-RPC requests from either Apache (or any “standard” CGI context) or the PLT server; looks like just a few characters difference for a programmer to move their code between the two.

Yes, Noel, I promise, I’ll upload this to Schematics. Really. I wasn’t too proud of this code before; this will be something worth maintaining. Well, something I’ll keep using, anyway.

It does this.

Alan Greenspan, long-time apologist for corporatist interests and recently reborn Bush neocon lackey, has had an epiphany: He’s now decided that staggering deficits and debts are a good thing in times of low interest rates. As long as ‘consumers’ can be ‘persuaded’ to keep buying the low-quality, over-priced crap that corporatists foist upon them, and as long as the currently wildly overpriced housing and stock markets can be kept at their artificially inflated levels, “balance sheets will remain in good shape”, he says, and hence interest rates can be kept low. And as the Chairman of the US Fed, Greenspan is the guy who single-handedly determines what interest rates will be.

It’s a house of cards, of course, a total fraud and extremely
dangerous. It’s Enron accounting at its most deceptive, the kind of
self-delusion that led to the absurd run-up of stocks in 1929 and the
subsequent collapse that produced the Great Depression. Here’s the
shaky foundation upon which the entire distorted economy now rests:

1. With interest rates at historically low rates, rich
   investors’ funds, millionaires’ tax refunds and pension fund infusions
   are all going into stocks instead of bonds, pushing up Price/Earnings
   ratios of stocks to astronomical and unprecedented levels. Even the
   most bullish brokers now admit that the stock market is wildly
   over-priced, but barring a spike in interest rates, money keeps flowing
   in and pushing prices up, because there’s nowhere else to invest it.
2. To delay a stock market collapse as long as possible, large
   corporations are creating unsustainable profit growth by (a) organizing
   into oligopolies and colluding to gouge consumers, charging them wildly
   inflated prices for low quality junk, and (b) lowering product and
   service cost (and quality) by downsizing, outsourcing and offshoring
   skilled labour, creating massive unemployment, underemployment, and a
   frightened, meek and compliant workforce willing to work incredible
   hours for a pittance.
3. Low interest rates also allow consumers to be hoodwinked into incurring collosal personal debts ‘virtually interest free’ just so they can buy more stuff.
   Their investment of choice with the proceeds of this ‘free’ borrowing
   is real estate, which, in parallel with the stock market, has therefore
   been driven up to ridiculous price levels completely unrelated to its
   underlying value. It’s
   a vicious cycle of buy more / borrow more, of excessive consumption and
   excessive borrowing, a cycle of addiction, and the corporatists are the
   pushers.
4. The borrowing capacity, risk of default, and borrowing cost
   of everyone — individuals, corporations and nations alike — is a
   function of the strength of their balance sheet.
   The balance sheet measures assets (the current ‘market value’ of
   investments, real estate, and ‘goodwill’ amounts paid by corporations
   to buy and remove their competitors from play) compared to liabilities
   (accumulated debts). Lending institutions will continue to extend
   credit as long as assets exceed liabilities, and as long as interest
   rates stay low enough to keep the cost of borrowing comfortably below
   income. Because they are now allowed to charge 15-30% interest rates to
   consumers on unsecured and risky debt like credit cards, second
   mortgages and mortgages with late or defaulted payments (rates that
   used to be banned under usury laws), the banks and credit card
   companies are actually encouraged to loan money to people even if they can’t afford to repay it.
   Result: personal bankruptcies and foreclosures are at record levels.
   Even two family incomes are not enough to keep many families solvent.
5. Because they borrow a lot, and have a lot of liquid
   investments, governments and big corporations can now borrow money at
   interest rates close to zero. And because they can, they do. This is
   called ‘leverage’, and is considered to be a shrewd business practice,
   because it doesn’t take much to generate a better return on the money
   borrowed (thanks to points 1 and 2 above), than the cost of borrowing, as long as the markets keep rising.
6. At the national level, the US government and multi-national
   corporations need to find someone to loan them money at these absurdly
   low interest rates. Who do they get to do this, and how? Why, they
   borrow if from other countries, of course. They get Arab and Asian
   countries to sell them trillions of dollars worth of cheap natural
   resources and crappy manufactured goods — but the deal isn’t for cash.
   These foreign countries lend the trillions of dollars the US needs to buy these goods, at low interest rates, with the debt denominated in US dollars.
   No cash changes hands. From an American perspective, they get trillions
   of dollars of goods (assets) and an offsetting trillions of dollars of
   debt (liabilities). The balance sheet therefore stays in balance, as long as interest rates stay low. From the Arab or Asian perspective, they get trillions of dollars of receivables (which they can take to the bank, as long as the US dollar and US economy is stable),
   and they create a bunch of sweat shop jobs for their grateful populace
   in the process. So as long as the US trade deficit is at record,
   astronomical levels, a US government deficit that’s also at record,
   astronomical levels is just hunky-dory. Mr. Greenspan says so, honest!

I’m sure, gentle reader, you can see the folly here, and all the things
that can, and ultimately will, go wrong. Just as Enron’s profits and
stock value were based on fraudulent overvaluation of assets, the
‘balance’ of everyone’s balance sheet — individuals’, corporations’,
and governments’ — is fraudulently overvalued because the stock prices
and real estate prices that constitute most of the assets are absurdly
inflated.

If any of the following things occurs,
the whole house of cards collapses — stock markets will plunge,
housing values will plunge, the US dollar will collapse, and interest
rates will soar — we’re talking the worst global economic collapse
since the Great Depression:

• The IMF decides the leverage of the US debt is too high,
  and downgrades its rating of US government debt, producing a spike in
  US borrowing costs and/or a demand that future borrowings be
  denominated in Euros, which, in conjunction with the resultant collapse
  of the US dollar against the Euro, would drive up the value of the debt
  to staggering levels, making the US essentially bankrupt.
• Consumers and wise investors, realizing the stock and
  housing markets are dangerously overpriced, pull their money out of US
  investments and put their money overseas or into commodities.
• Currency speculators, who account for over 90% of all
  currency transactions, decide to ’short-sell’ the US dollar, leading to
  its collapse against other currencies (some people think this is
  already occurring).
• Consumers decide they’ve had enough of their addiction to
  consumption and debt, rein in their spending, sell off investments and
  luxury goods, make personal sacrifices to pay off their debts, and
  start buying smarter, less, and better-quality, longer-lasting, goods
  and services.
• The Arabs and/or Asians decide their heavy investment in US
  dollar receivables is too risky, and, even though it will cost them a
  lot of American business, start to insist on being paid in local
  currency, Euros, or (gasp!) cash.
• Consumers revolt against usurous interest charges and
  demand a law capping interest rates a few points above prime, causing a
  fierce tightening of credit, and a huge spike in interest rates on all
  debt to recoup the lenders’ lost revenue.

So what do we do to prevent it? We’re so over-leveraged now that the best we can hope for is a ’soft landing’.

Individual citizens can reduce their exposure to the collapse by paying
down high-interest and variable-rate debts and short-term mortgages,
selling US stocks and bonds (and getting your pension money out of
these investments, too), and preparing for the likelihood that housing
prices will plummet.

We also need to get rid of Bush and Greenspan, and ensure that Kerry
has a program for dealing with the astronomical US debt and foreign
payments deficit. And we need laws to reduce the power and influence of
corporations, electoral campaign finance reform, cancellation of ‘free’
trade agreements and vastly strengthened anti-combines law and
oligopoly regulation.

But I want to get back to my ‘pusher’ analogy. It’s really insidious.
Just as rats in the laboratory have been ‘trained’ to push a button to
get a ’shot’ of addictive pain-killing drugs, and start pushing the
button more and more often, we’re being trained — by our education
system, by advertising, by the media, and by the entire oil-fueled
corporatist economic machine — to want and ‘need’ to buy more and more
stuff, to throw things out instead of fixing them, to get stuff done
for us instead of doing it ourselves, to buy an endless stream of
flimsy $5 doodads made in China instead of one $20 doodad made
domestically that will last a lifetime, to undervalue our time and
overvalue possessions, to buy overpriced ‘brand names’ for status, and
to be terrified of not having enough.
And to pay for our addiction to all this overpriced crap, we’re
encouraged to borrow more and more money now (”no interest!”, “don’t
pay a cent until 2005!”, “zero down!”) so we get as addicted to debt
and as dependent on low interest rates as the big corporations and the
Bush government.

By encouraging this reckless excess, Alan Greenspan really is the
ultimate drug pusher, and he damn well knows that this, like all
addiction, must ultimately end in tragedy. The corporatists, like all
drug pushers, depend on reducing the people, the citizens, to mere
consumers, mindless zombies. It’s irresponsible. It’s destroying our
social fabric, wrecking families and causing irreparable damage to the
environment. It’s shameful. It has to stop.

In thinking about distance ed, and trying to solve some practical problems regarding communication and collaboration while using BlueJ at the UKC, we (Ian and I) realized that we had a reasonably interesting BlogTalk 2.0 presentation. So, we dropped a proposal into the email, and we’ll see what happens!

The goal of the work described in this paper is to improve the interaction between students, their peers and their instructors in the context of introductory programming education. It is a common misunderstanding among students that programming is about hacking code as a solitary activity; in professional practice, it is much more about communication of design ideas and potential solutions. While it might be too much to expect this kind of communication from a student at the very beginning of their studies, we can at least introduce them to tools like weblogs and the style of interaction that they foster and show them the value of using the tools in a context where they have a real, pressing, need for communication.
Initial programming courses at the University of Kent use the BlueJ integrated development environment; which is designed specifically to support beginners programming in Java. It is currently used in over 350 Universities worldwide, as well as in a number of distance-learning contexts, both academic and commercial. Recently, one of the authors has been involved in providing an extension framework for BlueJ to allow educators to tailor it for use in their own environments. One of the primary principles of this extensions work is not to duplicate existing tools, but to interface with them and then leverage their specific functionality.

An early product of this work is an extension which allows BlueJ users to submit the work they have been engaged in to teachers either for assessment or for help and advice. This submission extension uses email, FTP and HTTP POSTs to submit students’ work, rather than inventing a new, proprietary, protocol and submission handling system, which means that it can be used with Learning Management Systems like Blackboard and WebCT.

The extensions framework has also made possible an ongoing study of novice programmers learning Java using BlueJ. The goal of this work is both to inform instructional practice in the classroom and to help guide future development of the BlueJ programming environment. Initial results have already helped us understand the kinds of mistakes beginners make most often, and the ways in which they write their code.

As we look to use BlueJ in our own distance-delivered courses at the University of Kent, we need to provide ways to allow users who already use weblogs, wikis and the like a simple mechanism for incorporating material from BlueJ into their interactions with peers and teachers. This will support not only ad hoc interactions but facilitate our goal, in studying novice programmers, of automatically prompting them when such interactions might help them past a point where they are stuck or lost.

Our first step in facilitating this interaction is to provide students with a lightweight mechanism for communicating with teachers from inside BlueJ. We use the MetaWeblog API to send questions, code fragments and pleas for help to their peers and teachers, but do not attempt to duplicate the other functions of weblog systems. Weblog systems like Movable Type already provide mechanisms for archiving, search and syndication that both instructors and students can access using a web browser or third-party tools.

Holly has discovered the personal data warehousing problem:

I don’t have a solution for the piles of PDFs all over my hard drive, but I do think the cards work well (and I’m a CS grad student!). I keep my bibliography in BibTeX (a tool, well, similar to EndNote), but I keep my notes for authoring papers on 3×5 index cards. Why?

1. Cards are portable in a way that computers are not. Even my Powerbook.
2. Cards can be rearranged in ways that notes in the EndNote DB cannot.
3. The act of making the cards helps me remember the content in ways typing a few words into the EndNote DB does not.
4. The act of making cards helps me think about how to summarize the thesis of a paper, section, or paragraph, which is useful for relating other people’s work to my own.
5. Cards can be shared (with ones supervisor, say) easily in a meeting, shuffling through them when discussing ideas.

BibTeX is a lifesaver when it comes to including citations in a paper, but I don’t use it for managing the writing process; perhaps EndNote is particularly useful in that respect. I suspect it depends on how one likes to write. I haven’t quite figured out how I like to write yet, so I started with a simple system that’s been tried and tested.

On another note, I wonder if you’re familiar with the paper Prototyping for Tiny Fingers? I assume you have access to the ACM Digital Library at Columbia. This came to mind because you reached straight for a piece of software in which to build your simulation—is that a requirement? Would it be easier to get to the meat of the exercise—the testing—if you weren’t constrained to developing your simulation on-line? And wouldn’t it be easier to adjust the simulation over time as you discover flaws with it? Food for thought, anyway.

And lastly, is there a possibility that a constructivist simulation environment for learning how to filter email would be one in which the application itself supported exploration on the part of the user—perhaps by having context-sensitive help and appropriately named and placed “wizards”? Or, perhaps it provided you with an “email filtering game” that you could use to test your filter-writing abilities (a way to practice)? Since email filters are, effectively, regular expressions against semi-structured text, learning how to use them (without learning what “regular expressions against semi-structured text” means) might be done best when you’re playing a game and not worried about mucking up your own email. Consider FrontPage: you can fiddle all day with it, but it isn’t “live” until you want it to be live. Seems like a similar notion might apply here.

http://www.bloglines.com/ is a web based newsreader. With it, you can subscribe to the machine-readable newsfeed generated by sites like this one (see the little orange “XML” button over there?). As a result, you have one webpage to visit, which tells which of all the weblogs you’re interested in have updated. Quickly. Simply.

And, you can save posts you like. This is like clipping an article out of the newspaper, and saving it for later. That is probably my favorite bit. Well, that and the simplicity. It’s a Good Thing.

Two fun things to do when you are bored to the point of tears:

Fun with tinyurl.com

TinyURL is a great service. You paste in a long URL, and it becomes short. For example, the URL for my GoogleImageWhacking post is

http://www.cs-ed.org/blogs/mjadud/archives/000373.html#373

That’s pretty long; almost too long to mail people, too long to retype. So, I go to TinyURL.com, and they give me

http://tinyurl.com/272xv

Now, that’s not the end of it. You see, the real fun is guessing what is behind other TinyURLs!

For example, the TinyURL http://tinyurl.com/272ab links to an Amazon page where you can purchase A Fisher Price Loving Family Sweet Streets Country House. The TinyURL http://tinyurl.com/270xv links to … some kind of gallery of IRC users; in particular, some guy called… I don’t know. Looks like it’s in Finnish. Maybe.

Tired of guessing TinyURLs? Try this, then:

Guessing Hotmail usernames!

In three easy steps:

1. Get a hotmail account.
2. Send mail to a hotmail account. Any account. Just guess. For example, you might try heather2002@hotmail.com, or perhaps kenyongrad1994@hotmail.com.
3. Be polite, introduce yourself. Wait to see if they write back.

OK. It’s kinda weird, and not as immediately gratifying as the TinyURL idea. Who knows—maybe you’ll meet the love of your life?

OK. I’m done now; honestly, I was just killing 15 minutes between the last bit of “work” type stuff I was doing and heading off to the gym.

Like I said a few posts back, weblogs are a long way off from replacing conferences and refereed journals.

Googlewhacks were popular a few years back. The next step: Googlewhacking the Google Image Search.

For example:

Busty Fish

Whacky Kitten

The game? Come up with a two word Google Image search that returns only one picture. Include that image on your webpage, renaming it with the two words you used to find it (both of which must be real words, as indicated by their link in Google to dictionary.reference.com). In all likelihood, Google will incorporate your copy of the image with the DB, thus bringing up two images when you do the search.

In this case, I’ve tried it with the images returned from searches for busty fish and whacky kitten.

This is probably really easy. That, or I found two in 30 seconds because I’m a Googlewhack Master.

Probably the former.

Hitachi (who merged their harddrive business with IBM a while ago) announced a new 400GB, 3.5″ drive. The previous heavyweight was around 300GB, so this isn’t a huge leap, but it’s still something.

So, I thought to myself: how would you archive that drive? You know, back it up?

Travan makes DAT (digital analog tape) drives. Their largest drive seems to be a 40GB tape. So, assuming you get good compression on your data (meaning you’re not trying to store pictures, moves, and audio), you could get away with as few as five or six tapes to backup a whole disk. If you’ve got a lot of audio and video, you’re going to have to use as many as ten tapes to do your backup. And it is slow.

There are two problems on the horizon, and some of us are already hitting them:

1. The “personal data warehousing” problem, and
2. Archiving.

The first problem relates to how we keep track of all our stuff. I have email going back for years, but no effective way to store and search it. I have PDFs of papers I’ve collected over the years, but no way of searching them for information. I’ve got text and Word documents galore that I’ve written, but … you get the picture? I have all this data, and no way to use it. In short, I need Google on my harddrive.

Then, we have the problem of backing up our stuff. My mother has this problem already: she has 6GB of photos in her iPhoto library. That doesn’t even fit on one DVD! Likewise, I have CDs going back for years, but again—the media will fail someday, and besides, as harddrives get bigger, and I accumulate more data, it’s hard to store it and keep it archived in case of snafu or drive failure.

In short, we’re all going to need redundant, live storage solutions. Instead of buying one 400GB disk, I need five 200GB drives arranged into a RAID5 array; this way, if one drive fails, I just slip a new one in, and there’s no loss of data. Inside of ten years, I expect there will be consumer-level disk arrays that are designed to be plugged in and used without any expertise. We’re seeing the start of this with network attached storage, but soon it will hit the consumer market full-on.

But, for the moment, I wouldn’t mind more drive space so I could sort out the 40 to 60 CDs I’ve made over the last few years (data backups from several machines and accounts) and get them organized. In short, attempt to start tackling problem #1, at least personally. Anyone want to buy me a 400GB drive?