Sub Ubi

I’m going through email from when I was away, and found this gem:

The Library is introducing on Monday October 18th a £5 charge for a Day Card for students who wish to use the Library but do not have their Library card with them. As my attached letter explains we have been surprised to find that we have been issuing hundreds of visitors’ Day Cards a week in term to University members who do not have their Library card with them when they visit the Library.

Last year, the library placed turnstiles at the doors, and we had to swipe our card to get in. Now, if I don’t have my card with me, I can’t get in without paying £5. And guess what—I’d sooner not use the library than pay £5. What if I want to run in and check my email, why do I need a card? What if I just want to look up an article and photocopy it—why do I need my card? In short, if I’m not checking out a book, what resources in the library are so critical that we have to make sure that only students and staff with a valid card can make use of them?

I understand they feel the “guest card” was being abused, but that’s only because the library chose the wrong technology for tracking students’ use of the library; now, they’re compounding one poor technological choice with an ugly rule and fines. The end result will be that people will avoid using the resources the library provides; it will not, as they would prefer, make more people remember to take their card out of their squash racquet case after going to the sports center.

Good luck, kids. You’re on a downward spiral now. If you really want to track usage of the library, put in a kiosk that requires you to push one button on a touch-screen before the turnstile can be traversed. This way, I walk in, press “Undergraduate,” “Graduate,” or “Staff,” or (God forbid!), “Random Member of Community,” and then I can walk through. You get your usage data, and you don’t discourage usage of the very resources you are paid and expected to increase the usage of.

You’re a failure, Mr. President, and the only way this country can get back on track is by putting you on the unemployment line.

They can keep the angry demonstrators far away from Bush’s speeches. They can jack up the polls with deceptive ads. But, so far at least, they can’t stop the opposition candidate, if he has the requisite nerve, from speaking the truth on live television.

(Excerpted from Scott Rosenberg’s weoblog [Managing Editor, Salon])

Having just spent two weeks on a small Greek island, it was amazing how many Greeks, when they found out I was an American, expressed exactly this opinion: we don’t hate you [as an American], we just hate what your government has done to the world.

A few months back, I met a fellow from Kosovo (doing a Masters degree in International Conflict Resolution) who felt that Bush Jr. was the best thing to happen to the States since sliced bread. In my experience living abroad these two years, he is in the vast minority of Europeans. Time and again, they say the same thing: it’s not you, it’s your government. It’s your government’s war. It’s your government’s disregard for international treaties and the inability of the United States to be a responsible citizen of the world.

I hope my ballot makes it here in time.

In this week’s Apple Developer Connection newsletter:

[6] Java Tool News: BlueJ 2.0

BlueJ 2.0 from University of Kent at Canterbury is an interactive, full-Java interactive development environment (IDE) aimed at helping users learn programming, Java, and small project development. This version adds substantial improvements to functionality and the interface.

http://www.bluej.org

In a few months, I’ll probably nuke the system for a move to 10.4. There’s all kinds of applications I have on my machine that I make use of that I might forget about, and end up wondering what they were.

• SoundSource
  This makes it easy to switch where audio goes (in and out).
• Quicksilver
  This became invaluable incredibly quickly.
• ecto
  Where weblog posts come from.
• Firefox and Thunderbird
  Although these aren’t small utilities, I’ve switched from Safari and Mail.app to these two (excellent) open-source tools. I installed the Google toolbar plugin for Firefox as well.
• Disk Inventory X
  A handy little utility for seeing where disk space went.
• Skype
  Suddenly, this is how I make all my phone calls, both in the UK and to friends and family in the States. Amazing. (It’s also how I annoy my oficemates.)
• MORE
  Still, my favorite outliner available for the Mac. Hopefully Apple doesn’t kill the Classic environment anytime soon.
• OSXvnc
  Along with the VNC client, I can help my parents out with things on their Mac from across the Atlantic. Mind you, I rarely need to do this, but it’s a powerful tool just the same.
• Postman Query and CocoaMySQL
  These two apps are quite handy for database work; both of them play a role in my research.
• Taco HTML Edit
  A handy, and pleasant-to-use HTML editor—for when I actually have to author HTML, and not write programs that generate HTML.
• TeXShop
  There’s no other way to author LaTeX documents on OSX, in my opinion.
• VLC
  Video Lan Client plays all kinds of video content, and (I think) manages to play any region of DVD, although I’ve not tested this yet.
• WireTap
  This lets me record audio from any source direct to the hard drive. Occasionally useful.
• Temperature Monitor
  This little utility tells me how warm my Powerbook is. Handy.
• Fink Commander
  For installing all those UNIX utilities I don’t want to build and install myself.
• PLT Scheme
  I do most of my programming in Scheme. I sometimes use Emacs for editing code, and sometimes I use DrScheme. Either way, PLT Scheme is my implementation of choice, as it is robust, runs everywhere, and is free.
• R
  R is a statistical programming language. Also very important in my research, as it gives me more power and flexibility than Excel.

That’s most of them, I think.

A good friend of some years dropped an email a few days about with some reflections on how he might envision his children being educated. Not that he has kids, mind you, but he was thinking ahead. His own education was fairly non-traditional, and somehow, despite being raised by wolves, turned out relatively brilliant. Except when he’s being stupid, of course.

Point being, his musings primarily concerned ways that a small community might go about organizing to provide home schooling for more than one child, utilizing the expertise of everyone in that community. In this way, his expertise in (say) Physics might be leveraged, while someone else’s expertise in Literature or Ecology would be utilized elsewhere.

I think, however, that he glossed over what probably matters most in the scenario he laid out. One of his starting assumptions was

I’m also proceeding from the standpoint of someone who will one day be a parent, and furthermore the parent of a child who … will get lots of love and attention at home.

I think that might be the single most important factor in the whole equation. Instead of worrying about expertise in Physics or Ecology, you could go a long way to having parents in a community host homework sessions for a group of students, where the parents take turns with small groups of kids asking them questions about their homework, taking interest in what they do, etc. Or, put more simply, I don’t think expertise matters in this situation, but I think the attention and respect are key.

It was an interesting email to receive as CSCS is starting up in a few days. We’ll see how many students show up this year, but the premise is daunting (yet exciting) from an instructor’s point of view: as long as we don’t do things that suck, the students will show up. Or, as long as we respect the time the students are putting in, I’ve noticed that the students respect our time as well, and participate actively. Working with things the students are interested in (little robots) helps out, so I think it’s a healthy combination of respect and motivation that play a key part.

Is my friend’s “home school collective” related to CSCS? I think so, because I think that capturing a student’s imagination is a critical first step in the learning process. And I think that this was implicitly (and somewhat explicitly) behind my friend’s preflections on his children’s future education: how can I get them to be excited about learning (because I don’t think your typical school environment manages)?

I have been poking at things all day: getting my calendar for the semester sorted, running little errands, cleaning up my filesystem… all just getting ready for the year, really.

I just downloaded Quicksilver. This nifty little app lets me hit CTRL-space, and then I can start typing the name of an application, URL, or any of a host of other bits of information. So, for example, to launch iChat, I hit CTRL-space, start typing “icha”, and hit return.

It also indexes all my bookmarks and the address book; this way, I can do CTRL-space, start typing something from a URL (either the title or URL itself), and it will launch a browser to that page.

Nifty.

We’re getting an iSight camera into the office soon (well, Christian is getting one), and I was looking at what it takes to mount it on a tripod (although these flexi stand things might be better). What was cooler was I found software for creating stop-motion movies with an iSight.

That’s so cool. I just watched a half-dozen movies linked in from the site, and people did some really neat things. It would be so cool to have a couple iBooks on carts in a school with iSights, and have an art teacher be able to do a unit that ties into the curriculum by having students make stop-motion claymation movies (or cut-paper a la South Park, or with pipe-cleaners, or any number of media) using this kind of software.

This ties into another thought I had this morning while speaking with a colleague; I wondered if the spread of voice-over-IP will find it’s way into language classrooms. Instead of having pen-pals (or, probably, email-pals) in other countries, I wonder if schools around the world will start connecting their students up and have them spend a half-hour twice-a-week as part of their language instruction speaking with peers on the other side of the globe. This strikes me as such a powerful use of a free, enabling, and (in some ways) disruptive technology.

I mean, how cool would that be? You’re taking intro Spanish in Iowa, and you chat on Skype to a peer taking intro English in Mexico, or you’re taking intro German in Scotland and you chat with a peer in Vienna. Instead of memorizing dialogues (which have their use in terms of language learning), you get to practice conversational skills practically, and visa-versa (each student takes turns conversing in their native tongue and the learned tongue).

Anyway. I’m not getting much work done this morning, it looks like…

Before taking a 2-week break from the world, I was excited to discover that Skype had been released for OS X. Just like I had been earlier excited by the discovery that I could talk to my family using iChat, I now discovered that I can, using my laptop, call anyone in the US for 2 cents a minute. That is, my voice goes through my computer, over the Internet, and pops out somewhere in the USA and lets me talk to friends on the phone.

Given that I am rarely far away from an Internet connection, this makes it much easier to try and stay in better touch with people on the other side of the Atlantic. I can make calls from home (over our wireless network, even), or from my office. Very, very handy.

So, if you’re keen, go download Skype, and drop me an email with your username. Calling from PC to PC is free. Or, if this sounds like too much technology, drop me an email with your phone number; I have fewer excuses now for not keeping in touch!

“It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press. It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.”
— Zell Miller, Republican National Convention 2004

I refuse to be intimidated by my leaders. I refuse to be cowed into believing that war is the only choice. I refuse to believe that by invading a sovereign nation without the support of the world will make my homeland safer. I refuse to don my boots and fall into lock-step with the party line. I refuse to believe that the Constitution of the United States of America is dead.

I refuse to believe that freedom comes from the end of a gun.

I refuse.

I think it might be an intrinsic component of human nature to listen to others tell stories more than to tell our own.

And if this is true, why are there so many weblogs?

Why do people keep photo albums?

Why do we love to talk on the phone with friends and family?

I think these are all acts of “storytelling” that are simple, personal, and powerful. Those three criteria are probably reasonable criteria for a storytelling device that can change the world. The phone (and now mobile phones) is probably the single most powerful device. The camera has played a profound role as well; why do you think people are working to combine these things. They let us tell the story of our lives in the most personal and profound way possible, right now.

No. We are all storytellers. It’s just a matter of how we like to tell our story.