Highed ed

Today's post is all related to higher education.

First, one of my favorite profs Bob Sutton has a take on the infamous tenure vote discussed in Inside Higher Ed. I've participated in some lively tenure votes, but nothing where branding was involved:

When Reader learned that Hodson planned to recommend against awarding tenure, he made the bizarre decision to expose scars on his arms where he had used a branding tool to burn the words “comfort” and “truth” into his flesh.

Shudder. There's also something that must give people with nonacademic jobs a good chuckle:

To exact his revenge, faculty were told, Reader imagined one day being able to schedule them for teaching on Friday afternoons, the report states. Reader has denied saying he was "out to get" anyone, and he's disputed the claim that he hoped to someday create undesirable schedules for those who voted against him.

Class on a Friday afternoon? Preposterous!! :)

A lighter topic: besides "Writing across the curriculum" a few colleges have tried mathematics across the curriculum. Dartmouth's website says

In the same way that all students should be able to write an essay in any subject they have studied, all students should be able to look at a problem or situation or experiment and ask suitable mathematical questions. They should then have some idea of how to seek the answers to their questions. This is inevitably tied to the reduction of a lot of anxiety about the use of mathematics among the students and, we cautiously point out, the faculty.

Mount Holyoke's classes sound great.

Two things on NPR today reminded me of previous posts: "Humans were born to run barefoot" (remember I already talked about the Vibram FiveFingers shoes), and "California budget woes hurt university system".

Finally, y'all should be listening to Grammar Girl.

Brain strangeness, electric cars

As usual, good stuff in IEEE Spectrum: how our current grid is not build to charge many electronic vehicles overnight, and a piece on "why the Chevy Volt will fizzle" (as part of the January issue's Winners & Losers). About the grid:

EVs need lots of power, especially when charged quickly. Utilities bet that most buyers will want a 240-volt charger that can "fill the tank" of a modest-size EV in 2 to 3 hours, four times as fast as a standard 120-V charger can. Such "AC Level 2" chargers, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers' emerging J1772 standard, draw up to 6.6 kilowatts. Turning one on is like adding up to three homes to a neighborhood, and that's with the air conditioning, lights, and laundry running.

Interesting college factoid: Of KIplinger's top ten best values among California public universities, only one has more male students than female students.

Also, the Sacramento Bee published a stunner: an examination of the top 120 college football programs showed that athletes were more likely than general applicants to receive special admission.

I've posted before about perception of time. The NYT's has a nice review "Where did the time go? Do not ask the brain" (info about Bob Levine's Geography of Time book here). You might also remember this previous post about the perception of time during crisis.

Speaking of brain-strangeness, we also have seating preferences in theaters based on dominant brain hemisphere. It doesn't have anything to do with brains, but you should probably also read about "The unfortunate sex life of the banana". You'll find out what bananas and navel oranges have in common.

Two final things: more from Doug Engelbart and the invention of the mouse. I talked about other Engelbart stuff back in 2005. Finally, something I didn't know existed until this week -- The Mid-Atlantic accent. That explains why people in old movies sound strange :)

My mistake

I admit it, I was wrong, in the previous post I said "This guy ..." has a vegetarian crock pot blog. I was chromosomally wrong.

And now I really want to try her crock pot tamale recipe. We recently lamented the lack of holiday tamales this year, and this looks like a good solution. Although I might use fake pork.

Starting 2010

This is additional 2009 wrap-up, but I'm too late for that. Here's more:

Security

Always good to see what Bruce Schneier is thinking about "TSA Absurdity and the Need for Resilience". This time, in The Atlantic.

Obsolete learning technologies

Including a link to 21 technologies that became obsolete in the 2000s.

The serendipity of Google Streetview

Lots of people are finding interesting things on streetview, so I looked around Fresno and found these folks downtime. OK, not very interesting.

Cool cities

There more to it than attracting knowledge workers, see "Attracting "Knowledge" Workers is a Bad Strategy".

Water

A provocative piece on "Unpacking the Central Valley “dust bowl” lies". You can also watch the recent 60 minutes segment.

Slow cookin'

This guy "started an experimental crock pot based vegetarian lifestyle in September 2009" and blogs about it daily, well almost.

Wrapping up 2009

I'm using the holiday to go through a bunch of clippings (physical and electronic) so here is what Alex Trebek would call a potpourri:

Student ratings

There's always angst when it comes to student ratings of faculty instruction ("student evaluations"). Research shows it doesn't take much time for students to form an opinion of the instruction (something Gladwell also mentioned in Blink):

So we do appear to be quite effective at making judgements about teaching ability even after viewing only a total of 6 seconds of actual teaching, and without even hearing the teacher's voice.

This is related to quick judgements of traits, see "How many slices does it take to accurately judge personality and intelligence?"

So using a bunch of judges to watch short clips of behavior can be a good way to judge personality and attention -- but only up to a point. Once you exceed six judges, there isn't much improvement. And watching these thin slices of behavior doesn't work as well for every personality trait: while it works pretty well for intelligence, it's not so useful for judging conscientiousness.

Programming languages

The September 2009 ACM Software Engineering Notes included links to programming language comparisons. The first of the two Programming Languages links has a nice matrix of PLs and properties. One property I point out to software engineering students is the last row "Capers Jones language level". Essentially this tells you how much bang you get for each LOC. You can see similar information on LOC per function point. Roughly speaking, it takes 200 lines of assembler but only about 50 lines of Java or 20 lines of Smalltalk.

Critical systems

Two interesting slide sets from two smart guys: Peter G. Neumann's "Hierarchies, Lowerarchies, Anarchies, and Plutarchies (Parallel Lives)", and John Rushby's "Composition of Critical Properties". The stuff we did in graduate school is back in style again, see "Using formal specifications to support testing" from the February 2009 Computing Surveys and "Correct OS kernel? Proof? Done!" in the December 2009 issue of usenix's ;login:

Wind chimes

Yesterday at Buttonwillow Nursery I looked at pricey wind chimes, If you are going to spend that much money, you might as well listen to them first (click on a tuning to get to the mp3s).

Last words

Speaking of critical systems, you can read transcripts of cockpit voice recordings for quite a few accidents. AA965 is a classic example of interface problems and the important of situation awareness. About a year ago (and a year before that), I also posted something about cockpit dynamics.

Root crops and moon rocks

Two unrelated things: First, I was surprised that people have suffered botulism posioning from fried onions and baked potatoes. The common cause is naturally occuring bacteria in the soil that then multiplies in an oxygen-poor environment: onions slathered in margarine and foil-wrapped potatoes. Amazing. And don't eat green parts of potatoes either :)

Second, I like moon rocks as much as the next guy, but some of this seems a little strange:

• Countries keep losing their goodwill moonrocks (from 2004) or misidentifying petrified wood as their country's goodwill rock (isn't this obvious to anyone who's seen petrified wood?). Good to know they'll be sticking with the paintings

  The Rijksmuseum, which is perhaps better known for paintings by artists such as Rembrandt, says it will keep the piece as a curiosity.

• sending a moon rock to the International Space Station? Does that make sense? The plastic holder/display thing looks good,
• and I was going to buy this, it's only $35k, but they don't take paypal so forget it :) I might have to settle for Apollo 17 surface-flown film.

Tweckling

Another example of technology making something possible in a big way that's been going on for years: using twitter (tweckling) during conference presentations. Two recent examples are the disastrous SXSW "interview" and the HighEdWeb keynote.

It reminds me a bit of the more constructive real-time "fact checking" that students do now using google and email. When I started teaching online I quoted one of the patriarchs of the field. One of the students -- demonstrating the hierarchical flattening of the Internet -- emailed him and asked about the quote. Which he denied saying. Which was interesting since the quote came directly from an interview he'd given a couple years earlier in a reputable professional publication. Hmm.

Electronic veracity checking is interesting to think about. Over a decade ago a Major Company Whose Name You'd Recognize flew me to Newark as part of a day to talk to about software for safety critical systems. At lunch, one of the other presenters (I still think his undergrad software engineering books is one of the best) made a statement about formal methods and Dr. XYZ (who I would say is still top in the field). I said well I think XYZ's views are a little different, and actually closer to other presenter's position. He said, essentially, no no Dr. XYZ would never say that. But, I had XYZ on video saying exactly that during his guest lecture the month previous for my satellite-delivered class (this was before the days of LMSs :)

Back to tweckling, I first saw at that in the early 1990s at a HICSS conference. HICSS was big on the latest in DSS (decisions support systems) and GSS (groups support systems). Back then, conference rooms would be set up with computers at every seat with software that allowed you to chat, ask questions, and organize information in collaboration with other attendees. One of the presenters was not pleased with the background conversation going on about his talk :)

Tonka nostalgia

Wow, this takes me back. I think this Green Giant truck was my first. I also had this cement mixer, and this camper, and the beach buggy, and the tiny Tonka pick-up, and a Ny-lint pickup and trailer, and a couple of hydraulic dump trucks, and a bright yellow road grader :)

Enough already

Can we software folks take an oath that we're not going to build radiation treatment systems that fry patients?

2008

The Gamma Knife

2000

incidents at the National Cancer Institute in Panama

1980s

the infamous Therac-25.

Kids nowadays, and data viz

There's much handwringing about the demise of reading and writing. Clive Thompson has a different take:

Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment... Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos -- assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

Changing subjects completely, here's some great data visualizations (I think you can see Tufte's influence):

Have you ever rushed to the airport only to find that your flight was delayed or canceled? In the most recent Data Expo at the annual Joint Statistical Meetings, data heads explored 120 million departures and arrivals in the United States, with the goal of finding "important features" such as:

• When is the best time of day/day of week/time of year to fly to minimise delays?
• Do older planes suffer more delays?
• How does the number of people flying between different locations change over time?
• How well does weather predict plane delays?

More data visualization: although this is over a month old, Umair Haque at the Harvard Business Review shows data about US healthcare.

There's a yawning gap between left and right in America today: the healthcare debate has grown so convoluted that both sides are talking past each other. Why? I think much has to do with the fact that one side is talking apples, and the other side is talking oranges. The right is focused on benefits foregone, while the left is focused on costs incurred.

A more productive debate must compare the two, to look at returns. So I thought I'd spend an hour or so trying to come up with a number that might help focus a more productive debate about authentic value: a measure of just how effective the American healthcare system is.

Vernier jets

Wow, something I actually know about the space shuttle. Discovery's vernier jets failed, so they have to use the primary reaction control system (RCS) jets to move around while on orbit. The bigger RCS jets are at 90 degrees to each other (i.e., directly in line with yaw, pitch, roll axes), and the vernier jets much less powerful, so aren't as jerky for maneuvering. From Spaceflight Now:

The shuttle's forward reaction control system, or RCS, includes 14 primary engines and two vernier jets. Two aft RCS pods feature 12 primary thrusters and two verniers each. The primary engines generate 870 pounds of thrust while the verniers produce just 24 pounds of push.

The software we were analyzing was the DAP jet-select and deadbanding (more than you ever wanted to know here). We spent a lot of time with this "Phase-plane" diagram.

Changing subjects, a Wyland painting was stolen from a Waikiki store on Lewers Street. Which is more surprising: that it was snatched from a gallery during business hours, or that there's a Wyland painting worth $700k? :) Anyway, support your local tiki.

Arnold say furlough

The Mount Wilson observatory that Hubble famously used survived the recent wildfire. Interesting pictures at Wired.

Lots of people on furlough. I was thinking it would be good to augment these days of the week shirts with an eighth saying FURLOUGH. You can support some local state employees by visiting their Cafepress store. I recommend the coffee mug.

If things get bad you, might want to read Getting Even, about workplace justice. Or take a trip to Reno. Or rent a timeshare week from me at Jensen Beach and snorkel during low tide at nearby Bathtub Reef.

In techie news, the author of Showstopper wrote a Technology review article about whether it's wise for Google to develop an operating system. The "Good enough" revolution (reminds me of James Bach's "satisficing" idea), and the "new literacy" are also discussed.

Both Spectrum and Wired have articles about the Beatles and RockBand, but I recommend the Spectrum article for getting into what was required to make it work, and for you old timers, a nice column by Bob Lucky, a profile of the Stanford prof who came up with the iPhone ocarina app, and bad news for you face-recognition folks..

Finally, tomorrow Wired is paying a guy to fly in Jetblue every day for a month, and write about it. Hmm.

You mean the Sun doesn't go around the earth?

A Nature Conservancy blogger says that scientists are to blame for an anti-science country (the part about writing passively is amusing):

Between 2002 and 2007, nearly 32,000 Ph.D.s in science were awarded in the United States. These not so-young Ph.D.s (median age for receiving a Ph.D. is 33) are trained to become like their mentors — college professors, even though at best only one in 10 will actually land a tenure-track job. And that was before the recession. These scientists are deft at statistics and experimental design, and have been schooled in writing passively, without adjectives or storyline or anything that could capture the interest of anyone other than the 17 other specialists working on the same research topic.

He even talks about C.P. Snow at the end, who's famous lecture is 50 years old. Snow was the topic of one of my first posts.

Finally, during jury duty in April and May I spent a lot of time looking at the Security Bank building out the window. They look like great lofts, but pricey.

More UCM woes

An article from Inside Higher Ed is about the newest UC campus at Merced. Putting on my three-time UC alum hat, it should have been in or near Fresno. Clearly it's not a matter of being in the valley or close to a CSU (UCD and Sac State seem to be doing OK). I remember the UC president at the time being tired of hearing from Fresno-area alumns about picking the wrong site :)

Physician envy?

Steve's thoughts about software development as a stochastic art (you should read it) got me thinking again about how software developers look to the medical field for inspiration, or at least metaphor, or analogy?) But the question that has nagged me for a couple of decades is why we would want to model ourselves after an industry in which all the users die and is running us out of money :)

Some random thoughts about health care and software development:

• Back in 1992, Tom McCabe and Charles Butler suggested that cyclomatic complexity and essential cyclomatic measures could be used like blood pressure measurements to determine the health of code. A high cyclomatic complexity can be treated by restructuring the code (abstraction, essentially), but a high essential complexity is more difficult to address since it means that the essence of the code's structure can't be reduced beyond this point. There's a scanned PDF version here, but you'll have to scroll about 60% down, and look for "A clinical approach to reverse and reengineering" (IEEE Software, January 1992).
  
  
• Over thirty years ago chapter three of Fred Books' The Mythical Man-Month describes the surgical team (aka Chief Programmer Team) organization for software development. Amazingly, this is yet another idea that originally came from Harlan Mills, a great thinker who most developers never heard of (chief programmer teams, cleanroom software engineering, structured programming, ...)
  
  After reading Brooks back in the day, I first started thinking about the big "individual differences" in programing performance and how to leverage that (McConnell has a nice discussion).
  
  
• Although I think he gets a little "out there" at times, in Jim McCarthy's Dynamics of Software Development is suggestion that we "Be more like the doctors". I can't find my copy right now, but a good quote is here:

  For now, we really need to learn to be like doctors. They are able to say, quite comfortably and confidently and with conviction, "These things are never certain." Doctors seldom if ever state with certainty what the outcome of any procedure might be. Yet software managers, operating in a far less disciplined and less data-driven environment... blithely promise features, dates, and outcomes not especially susceptible to prediction.

  Interestingly, the uncertainty that McCarthy cites is a motivation of the evidence based medicine (and evidence based software engineering) movements.
  
  You can watch a really old video of McCarthy giving his famous "23 Rules of Thumb" here. You can tell it's an old video since they talk about consultation fees being $100/hour:)
  
  
• Anecdotally, when expert systems burst on the software stage, the software was better at diagnosing rare diseases than human physicians were. I'll have to try to find some citations. But is there something in that we can transfer to software development? As I remember, Feigenbaum's systems being pretty good, but Lenat's CYC not being so good at diagnosis (concluding that Lenat's rusted-pocked car had chicken pox :) Britannica has an intriguing summary of Feigenbaum's work:

  Experience with DENDRAL informed the creation of Feigenbaum’s next expert system, MYCIN, which assisted physicians in diagnosing blood infections. MYCIN’s great accomplishment lay in demonstrating that often the key is not reasoning but knowing. That is, knowing what symptoms correspond to each disease is generally more important than understanding disease etiology. At a basic level, MYCIN also demonstrated that the means of navigating the reasoning tree and the contents of the different branches can be treated separately.

  
  
• Finally, one of my favorite examples of a disconnect between software developers and physicians is here: "Building an Information System for Collaborative Researchers: A Case Study from the Brain-tumor Research Domain". A lot of stuff to think about, unfortunately I can't find a free copy to link to. But if you have access to Science Direct or the ACM Digital Library you can read it.
  

Bottom line -- for anyone working in requirements, the paper above is probably the most important thing in this post. The other big ideas to think about are putting software development (and medicine) on a firm evidence-based foundation.

Mother knows best?

Mother Earth News is still published. Or should that be Mother Earth News is still published? Yes, and "fascinating" as ever, for example readers report their most amusing superglue accidents, and an interview with radical farmer Joel Salatin. Here's an excerpt from "Everything he wants to do is illegal" about vegetarians:

This philosophical and nutritional foray into a supposed brave new world is really a duplicitous experiment into the anti-indigenous. This is why we enjoy having our patrons come out and see the animals slaughtered. Actually, the 7- to 12-year old children have no problem slitting throats while their parents cower inside their Prius listening to “All Things Considered.” Who is really facing life here? The chickens don’t talk or sign petitions. We honor them in life, which is the only way we earn the right to ask them to feed us — like the mutual respect that occurs between the cape buffalo and the lion. To these people, I don’t argue. This is a religion and I pretty much leave it alone.

What?? Sounds like Ted Nugent with a dose of anthropomorphism :) Anyway, at least there doesn't seem to be as many weird personal ads in Mother Earth Newslike there were in the 1970s. Shudder.

More interesting, because of the state budget and work furloughs, I'm reading Getting even: The truth about workplace revenge and how to stop it. It's not about workplace violence and "going postal", but about little things that people do for the sake of "workplace justice". Here's a little bit from the introduction:

... managers already spend an inordinate amount of time trying to sort out conflict. One study showed that middle managers spend an average of 25 percent of their time on this effort, while the numbers were even higher for first-line supervisors. The same study found that CEOs spend 26 percent of their time dealing with conflict... we argue that the motivation for revenge is primarily rooted in the sense of injustice. Further, revenge should be seen as actions intended to restore a sense of justice.

Bob Sutton liked the book.

40 year anniversary

Since the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is coming up, here's a few things:

• The Kennedy presidential library has a real-time replay of the mission. All the audio, plus things you can click on.
• Walter Cronkite didn't quite make it to the 40th anniversary, but his reaction was pretty memorable at the time.
• Three new books to check out: The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Spacesuits by Amanda Young, a spacesuit curator. Lots of good pictures. Speaking of pictures, Apollo through the eyes of the astronauts combines images, text by the astronauts, and a forward by Lucy and Stephen Hawking. Andrew Chaikin (I previously talked about him) returns with Voices from the moon: Apollo astronauts describe their lunar experiences.

Finally, I finally finished Dragonfly: NASA and the crisis aboard Mir. It is a 500 page book that I read a few pages at a time, like I did with Digital Apollo. The book discusses scary events, like a fire onboard the Mir space station, a collision with a Progress cargo ship, a decompression, leaking cooling systems and an airlock door held in place with C-clamps. That was on the Russian Mir, and the NASA astronaut selection and training side of things was just about as scary. It's amazing no one died. ISS still uses Progress cargo ships - and sometimes amateur astronomers gets pictures of ISS and Progress from their home telescopes.

Bonus: an amusing Q&A with "the third one", a grumpy/lucky Michael Collins.

Underdog strategies

Malcolm Gladwell's been writing about underdog strategies, and one example is using the full court press in basketball. He writes about the success a novice coach and inexperienced young players have using the press (and relates it to other struggles in history). He's also going back and forth with ESPN's Bill Simmon's about not only the press, but the NBA draft. So I asked one of our local basketball gurus, Jack Fertig to comment (Jack was head of basketball operations for Tark when coached Fresno State). Jack's interesting response is here.

Gladwell's original New Yorker column is pretty good, here a sentence describing the approach of a coach with no previous basketball experience:

The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

Update: I forgot another summer reality show I should have included in a previous post: Discovery Channel's Treasure Quest. Interesting show about looking for shipwrecks using high tech gizmos. The technology turns on them sometimes, for example they complain that the public database of ship locations tips off their competitors to their finds. Here's the map of real-time shipping (click to zoom). It reminds me of the flight map.

Maybe I'm just on parole

What's happened since I was locked up? Well, NPR interviewed the author of You are here:

Ellard also examined why men have a reputation for not asking for directions. He found that men may not ask because they have greater difficulty following turn-by-turn directions. Whereas women navigate using routes, men navigate using compass orientation.

Lehrer has a great review of Ellard's book here. Speaking of brains, Harvard Business discussed Robert Macnamara's brain:

... McNamara was a hedgehog rather than a fox, an engineer rather than an ecologist. The hedgehog knows one big thing, and for McNamara that was rational systems analysis. If he'd been a fox, he'd have brought additional perspectives to America's pressing problems. Like a dogged engineer, he believed that you could model and manipulate the inputs and outputs of any system. Unlike the ecologist, he didn't seem to appreciate the complexity of systems involving living things. If the variables explaining poverty or victory in guerilla warfare were unwieldy or unmeasurable, he simply ignored them.

National Geographic's Secret History of Gold makes a provocative statement about how all the gold ever mined would fit in the base of the Statue of LIberty, i.e. "All the gold in the world still isn't very much" (see video).

Since there's not enough gold to go around, IEEE Spectrum has ideas for getting and giving recognition at work which reminds me of UH's "making the elephant dance" award.

What else? The CMU prof who came up with the now ubiquitous captcha has an amusing blog, this post is about doing high production value videos of his lectures. Speaking of university professors, are there too many scientists?

Over the last few days there's been a couple of launches (a successful SpaceX satellite) and, finally, a space shuttle. One day the shuttle launch was scrubbed because of lightning. I like this explanation about why lightning is a concern:

"The concern really is mostly in those pyrotechnic systems," he said. "There are a lot of things that have to go right. You need the SRB igniters to fire, you need the separation bolts to fire to release the SRBs from the mobile launch platform, you need the separation motors to fire to separate you from the external tank. We don't like to talk about it, but you need the self-destruct system to work if you truly needed it to work.

Finally, more about feet and those funny looking shoes I mentioned before, and a possible relationship between the spacing of birds on a wire and parked cars.

Free at last

My blog was flagged as spam and locked for a week until a human could look at it and set me free. While I was locked out, I watched the finale of one of the more interesting reality shows, the History Channel's Expedition Africa. Great HDTV scenery. The NY Times had an amusing review, but I liked studio daily's article about how it was produced and filmed since it was all about the logistics and lugging the equipment around yet staying out of sight.

Yes, in addition to Expedition Africa, your summer could be filled with new episodes of Ice Road Truckers (why's that on the History Channel?), Deadliest Catch, Whale Wars, and starting this Sunday, Pawn Stars. And if you are going to watch Big Brother, at least don't admit it to anyone.