I am … unhindered by talent

This wonderful little video (produced by some U of M Twin Cities mathematicians) has apparently been viewed over 1 million times now, which is a lot more views than it would ever get in class. I frequently run into faculty that are very intent on holding on to their teaching ideas and techniques, and certainly not sharing them openly with the world. They see those ideas as “their property”, to be guarded and controlled as much as possible. It’s a weird attitude, because almost none of them will ever see any money from those ideas, and the potential for wider viewing and usage is just so much greater if they open up (as in this case).

A good video like this takes a lot of time to produce, but faculty often put in huge hours on their lectures, labs, and demonstrations. Get it out there!

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Apparently Facebook is collecting even more information about us than we thought:

A Computer Associates security researcher is sounding the alarm that Facebook’s controversial Beacon online ad system goes much further than anyone has imagined in tracking people’s Web activities outside the popular social networking site.

Beacon will report back to Facebook on members’ activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends.

I can’t say I’m surprised - the entire design of Facebook has consistently been geared to extract as much information as possible from their users, and they haven’t exactly been sneaky or subtle about it. Still, a depressing wake up call for all those folks who are blithely spilling their lives all over social networking systems.

They don’t provide much in the way of technical details. However, as the wonderful Web 2.0 world moves us farther and farther away from the web as a collection of simple text pages with HTML tags thrown in for pretties, there are more and more ways that we can be tracked and subverted. We can certainly do more (I do love Flickr, and Google Calendar is a joy), but we expose ourselves to increasingly more risk as a consequence.

Caveat emptor.

(Apparently Facebook has turned off Beacon, although my suspicion is that Beacon is just the tip of Facebook’s data collection iceberg.)

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UMM’s brought in some outside consultants to assist us in our “branding”. I find the term quite shudder inducing, but what little I’ve seen from these far off lands suggests that the people they’ve brought in are saying some useful things. One bit I liked from their recent report:

UMM’s “quirkiness” [is] appreciated (e.g. Zombie Dance, drag show, etc.) [by the students], but
students felt this was not presented prominently enough

One of the things I’ve always loved about UMM is that it is quirky. Maybe not quite as a “out there” as Reed was, but there are people being individuals and pushing some boundaries in important and valuable ways. We seem shy about sharing that, though, usually in the guise of not wanting to scare off potential students. So instead of emphasizing the cool and strange things that our students are doing, we have tended to focus on a kind of ethnically diverse whitebread image (if that makes any sense).

Our web site, for example, has usually featured these predictably bland photos that wouldn’t typically remind an alum of anything they remember from their time in Morris. A few years ago Jess Larson and others in Studio Art got those replaced by a lot of cool photos that UMM art students took. The student photos were much more visually interesting, and I think actually said something about what UMM was at that time. It didn’t last long, though, and at the next major revision of the web site all those images got replaced by bland professionalism once again. Sigh.

I think there’s a ton of still imagery, video, and audio that we could use on our web site to promote what a neat place UMM is, but we don’t. Below, for example, are four really nice shots from UMM’s Flickr group. Only a handful of people know about or use that group, and it’s probably 75% my stuff, but there are quite a few excellent (and interesting) images there that I think would be really cool on our web site.

Daniel J. Moore	Michael Anderson
Cory Q from Monkey River Town	bam.bam.

Thanks to all those folks for sharing their photos on Flickr!

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I’m back after a wonderful three days in Dublin (thanks to Mike and the gang at UCD!). JOCP but there’s a lot of e-mail that piled up while I’m away, and my head is full to bursting with research ideas. It’s going to be tough to prioritize and focus here in the next few weeks.

I’ll try to sift through my photos over the weekend and get some of them posted.

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I was listening to a recent podcast from Steve Lamacq’s “In new music we trust” program where he was interviewing the Video Nasties. At one point Lamacq asks them how they got turned on to all these classic punk recordings as kids. It was from going through their dad’s record collection!

When I went through my Dad’s record collection, I was discovering excellent jazz from the 40’s and 50’s, as well as brilliant stuff from Mort Sahl and Tom Lehrer. Other kids my age might have reasonably found early recordings of Elvis and classic 50’s R&B, blues, or country.

For Sub-Evil Boy’s generation, this is how they might find the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie And The Banshees.

Now I definitely need to go lie down.

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This morning I’m off for Dublin! With scheduled entries broken, however, so there could well be a yawning silence for a few days. I’m not taking a laptop (gasp!), so unless my B&B has a a computer out for their guests I’ll just have to cut you all loose for a few days.

Consider it a holiday gift from me. :-)

The photo? It’s from the Prairie Pioneer Days parade in Morris in July, 2006. Gotta love the glasses on that one young lady.

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Alert! One of our eagle-eyed readers (Lambo) pointed out in the comments that the details of this chart are almost certainly broken, and that the PCRM may not be quite the upstanding source that we might have hoped for. I think the larger point probably still holds, but this graph needs to be taken with more salt than is dietarily good for you. See the comments for more.

We are what we eat, and (all too often) we eat what’s cheap, and what’s cheap is what we subsidize.

Or, turning the thing around…

We subsidize unhealthy, environmentally irresponsible foods, so it’s hardly a surprise that, as a nation, we eat tons of the stuff.

To cleanse your pallet, I’ll leave you with a delicious organic mushroom from River Nene Farms…

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Our recent upgrade of WordPress has brought with it many bits of nifty goodness. The one (and so far only) downside is that scheduled entries are broken. I can schedule them fine, but they never show up. The “count down” just goes right on by and then starts counting back up. Foo.

Some poking around in the forums suggests that the problem isn’t unknown, but is rare, and the little bits of discussion frankly didn’t make much sense. So, for the moment, I ain’t gonna bother.

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I keep going on about how hard it is for well meaning people to make good decisions without accurate feedback, and this video has a nice way of visualizing the problem. Now if I could just get all our appliances to make balloons like that…

Coin operated gas meters were common in the UK for many years, and in some ways it would be nice to return to something like that. It would make you think a second before automatically hitting that light switch when you enter a room, and it would certainly encourage you to turn the damn thing off when you leave. We still haven’t gotten a bill from all the utilities we’re connected to here in the UK, and we went months with absolutely no feedback on our energy consumption. If there’d been little meters on everything, we would have very quickly learned where the big energy sinks were. As it is, we’ll probably never really know.

It’ll obviously never happen, but I can dream.

Thanks to Tim O’Reilly for the pointer.

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The death of the book has been oft prophesied, and so far the old dear keeps hanging in there. Here Bill Janssen is quoted by Peter Brantley, suggesting that what the casualties may be are forms of content rather than forms of publishing.

Will the novel become a marginal form like opera?

In the hype around the Kindle, I haven’t noticed a mention of Monday’s NEA report, To Read or Not To Read. Seems much more interesting.

I’ve been saying for a few years that we are entering an age where textual fiction is becoming less and less significant, particularly for the canonical long text, the novel. The novel is a relatively recent innovation in entertainment, and the popular novel is a product of cheap production and distribution, thanks to the industrial revolution.

The delivery channels have multiplied, and the economics have changed. Television killed off the pulp magazine (and crippled the market for short stories). What would replace the novel? Something which would produce a ludic experience for hours at a time — a movie. But movies have not succeeded in killing off the novel. They’re too expensive and too complicated, and major players control the distribution channels. The best they could do was to absorb years of talents like Chandler and Faulkner.

But now we have kids who don’t read, the Web, game engines, and the writers’ strike. Game engines and machinima make it possible for writers to produce and direct their own work without actors or sets, for a relatively modest capitalization (a game machine). The Web provides free distribution. Kids provide a hungry audience. But the wild card here is the WGA strike. Suddenly all the folks who normally spend their days creating teleplays are looking for other outlets for their creative energies. Maybe write that novel they’ve been talking about? Maybe not. People like Rob Long (Cheers) are suddenly blogging. Maybe someone will tell them about machinima. We may be entering a twilight for the popular novel, perhaps relegating it to a niche more like opera.

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