I usually prefer a bland-looking plate of chocolate chip cookies to most crafty no-bake treats, but these Halloween “crawly cakes” over at Not Martha, based on snack cakes and pocky, are really adorable. You could clearly do this with homemade cupcakes, but I think the snack-cake look is a big part of their charm.
What’s the edge representation for a nasty breakup?
I love it – it’s movie seating charts as a variation on traveling salesman. xkcd has become my favorite comic on the web.
But from whence the five minute rule?
If I could afford to add any more books to my to-read list, I would pick up a copy of Clark’s Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University, reviewed here by The New Yorker [via Arts & Letters Daily] Tracing the history of modern academia and its traditions forward from their roots in 18th century Germany (including the ancient roots of faculty balking at oversight and bureaucratic instrusion, such as early requirements that faculty publically list what courses they are taking in a course catalog), Clark uses the idea of charisma to talk about the sources of authority and tradition in the classroom:
The organizations that became the first Western universities, schools that sprang up in Paris and Bologna, were in part an outgrowth of ecclesiastical institutions, and their teachers asserted their authority by sitting, like bishops, in thrones—which is why we still refer to professorships as chairs—and speaking in a prescribed way, about approved texts. “The lecture, like the sermon, had a liturgical cast and aura,” Clark writes. “One must be authorized to perform the rite, and must do it in an authorized manner. Only then does the chair convey genuine charisma to the lecturer.”
I think we all know how religion has played a role in granting academics authority – you don’t have to go back to the German Middle Ages but can look at the history of America’s oldest colleges as well. I find it intriguing to look at the specific impact this has had on how modern education works, though. For example, the review mentions an old alternative to the lecture – the disputation, “in which a respondent affirmed the thesis under discussion and an opponent attempted to refute it”. As the review notes, this is now seen in dissertation and thesis defenses. As a student, I think it would be interesting to understand the roots of this seemingly adversarial structure; in the course of the many reports and defenses I have given, I’ve never seen a faculty member verbalize that the antagonist role they adopt is part of a different type of pedagogical tool. I, in fact, hope that students do read this book. It sounds like it could do them as well as faculty some good in thinking about why we do things the way we do.
Clarke’s main thesis is about how the shift towards researched-focused universities occured, and he seems in the end to have come up with a fairly insipring description of academic revolution. At the very least read the review – and make sure you get far enough through to encounter some of the great anecdotes about how academia used to be and probably my favorite quote from the whole review:
In an even more radical break with the past, professors began to be appointed on the basis of merit.
Watch out for nanoids!
The newly popular Warning Signs for Tomorrow are half hilarious and half thought provoking. On the one hand, there are signs I’m tempted to hang on my office door, and on the other hand there are warning signs that, ethically speaking, we ought to have right now. I think, given the point in the semester we’re at right now, that Cognitive Hazard is resonating with me the most closely.
Your father’s social networking site?
After the rash of articles about how “young people” don’t use e-mail anymore (and, by the way, how in the world does that work??? IM is a nice tool and I use it too, but it can’t seriously be an e-mail replacement, can it?) it is now being reporrted that the majority of MySpace visitors and a significant portion of visitors to other social networking sites are over 35 [via Clicked].
First, I spent some time poking around the comScore website trying to figure out exactly how they determine the demograpics they claim to be measuring with their Mdia Metrix but have not found anything. So, I’m maintaining reservations about the reliability of the data, though they are taking a good sized sample.
But if one takes the results as accurate, a couple of other interesting facts fall out. For example, the press release says that MySpace and Friendster are skewing older, but that Facebook attracts a college-aged demographic and Xanga a teen to pre-teen demographic. This is true in one view of the data – of the 18-24 year olds viewing a social networking site, the largest percentage, 34%, are visiting Facebook. But, and this is of particular relevance to all of those students who say that Facebook is a closed setting, 41% of the visitors to Facebook are 35 or older. The niche theory seems flawed. In particular, it seems that younger users are more likly to flock to the newest systems, whereas older users, often with less free time on their hands, will stick with something that is working for them. Hardly a shock – isn’t this why so much advertising targets the teen and young adult markets?
Get some culture!
Tomorrow is Museum Day. What is Museum Day? Started by the Smithsonian Institution, it is a day when a number of museums across the country offer free admission to visitors who present the Museum Day Card available on the page I just linked to. For those in Western PA, the Carnegie is participating, so this is a great opportunity to check it out if you haven’t been before.
New Knitty!
New Knitty! New Knitty! Curl up with a cup of coffee and plan your projects for the next couple of months! (That’s what I’m doing!)
Ivy is a gorgeous wrap sweater with amazing cable details at the waist and cuffs. On the sock front, Red Herring have a nice herringbone pattern and is the pattern from this collection I’m most likely to actually make. Little slip of a thing is a great-looking felted bag that – very cool – only uses one strand of yarn throughout but supposedly still has fairly robust structure. Intolerable cruelty is also drawing my attention, even though it probably shouldn’t….
Not BASIC Enough
David Brin laments the lack of simple built-in programming environments on personal comptuters [via Slashdot]. I too remember learning to program on my Apple IIe – if you turned on the computer without a programmed disk in the drive, you fell into BASIC, and I copied many listigs out of magaziines or books and played around with their functionality. Brin is entirely right – this type of built-in, no-fuss programming environment got a lot of us started.
Now, there are still command-line options. My programming students download Java off the Sun website and compile and run from the DOS prompt, and they could use Notepad to write their code, though I think a more supportive editor is desirable. But, Java isn’t accessible in the same was BASIC was. And installing and running it this way requires some wrangling with your PATH environment variable – particularly if you have Quicktime installed.
And Brin points out that even if you can fairly quickly get a Java environment (or C++, or…..) going on your computer, these alternatives do not match the advantages of BASIC. I’m not going to head down the path of arguing comparative programming languages, though I think there are other programming languages that can be interesting tools for early exposure (okay, I’ll just mention LISP and its functional ilk…..) but will agree that our modern robust languages don’t lend themselves to back-of-the-book, type-it-in experimentation.
The whole article is a really good read, but Brin’s bottom line point is that without this ease of experimentation, today’s children will grow up with the computer being a perevasive tool but no more understanding of how it really works than most of my generation has of the workings of our car (especially compared to the knowledge of our grandparents). Says Brin:
The parallel technology of the ’70s generation was IT. Not every boomer soldered an Altair from a kit, or mastered the arcana of DBASE. But enough of them did so that we got the Internet and Web. We got Moore’s Law and other marvels. We got a chance to ride another great technological wave.
I thtink Brin is a bit too dismissive of the value of “information consumption devices” when engineering and used properly. But given that there is no technological reason why such devices can’t also allow easy access to minimal programming environments, I think he is right to question whether we are advancing ourselves beyond a point that invites the energy and enthusiasm of novices and hobbyists.
On the internet,, everybody knows you’re a dog.
The latest Craigslist kerfluffle described here at Slashdot reminds me of the case from about a year and a half ago of someone posting their chat sessions with a plagiarist soliciting them for an essay. In both cases, you have people assuming that their one-on-one conversations will be kept private and sharing information with a complete stranger that they would not want made public.
Clearly, this is not a nice thing to do. I think it is also unethical – unlike the plagiarism case where the recipient of the advances was able to check that such behavior was prohibited at the student’s school, there is no reason to believe that what these people are doing is wrong, even if they are married. Certainly, it is anti-social. The same “experimental results” about rates and types of responses to an on-line solicitation could have been reported while ensuring the respondants identities.
But, it is unbelievably stupid to not assume this will happen every time you share personal information over the internet. One response has been that this type of revelation of personal information is illegal, citing Washington state law. I hope the problem with this objection is obvious – not everyone on the internet is governed by the same laws – they may be in different states or countries. In short, there is no way to stop this without fundamentally changing the structure of the internet.
It’s simple – if you wouldn’t say it to your mom, your boss, your best friend, your worst enemy, and your next door neighbor, don’t say it on the internet to a complete stranger!
Design of Text Documents
The latest post at India, Ink about using templates in document formatting software made me feel a little guilty, but reminded me why I actually miss LaTeX a little bit. I really don’t understand styles and templates in MSWord, which I used to format my most recent couple of papers, and while it is nice to throw together a handout without having to wrestle with LaTeX, I missed its clarity of structure when dealing with sub-sub-sections and captioning figures and including citations (BibTeX, I miss you so….)
The point at that we ought to learn to use our tools is valid. However, I do think a tool like MSWord discourages us from really learning to use it as a document design tool as compared to a document layout tool. All of the things that are made easy or provided with icons have to do with forcing a particular view of a specific piece of text. You can select a paragraph and change its indentation, font or alignment with a single button-click or keyboard shortcut. You can create an entire document in “normal” style, and it looks fine to the eye. But, as India notes, this doesn’t scale, and it isn’t reusable. It is horrid design.
And yet, while LaTeX puts the design issues front and center, MSWord makes the process more mysterious. Perhaps it can do this, and I have never found the feature, but being able to show the user a marked up version of their text, like the switch between the WYSIWYG and HTML panes in Frontpage, would help, but I’ve only been able to check my designated style by highlighting the text of interest and seeing what the style menu says it is in. Not good for a quick consistency check across a whole document!
I am picking on MSWord, only because I’ve been using it for forever, but the criticism holds for the other WYSIWYG text editors I’ve used as well. They may allow good document design, but they don’t make it easy. I suspect that India is working with way more high-powered tools than these, but I think her point stands that we don’t worry about the design of our text documents the way we ought to, particularly when there is so much potential for them to change presentation format, and the consumer grade tools ought to address this.