It actually took me a second to get it - how annoying that a web comic would actually be subtle enough to challenge a little :-).
Tags: bias, discrimination, Education, feminism, Mathematics, Science
The Economist has an interesting piece on why government web services tend to suck, especially when compared with the best corporate services. Their take is that a significant part of it is that isn’t any kind of competition, so there isn’t much fall out if government web tools are wretched:
When Britain’s Inland Revenue website crashed on January 31st—the busiest day of its year—the authorities grudgingly gave taxpayers one day’s grace before imposing penalties. They did not offer the chance to pay tax in Sweden instead.
I suspect there’s significant truth in this, but I’m not convinced it’s the whole story. It’s amazing, for example, how many university web sites/tools are pretty wretched, including those in the computer science departments. You’d think that would drive away prospective students in ways that, in this very competitive environment, would have the kind of direct consequences that purportedly drive Amazon and Google. I certainly know that the U of M’s growing adoption/creation of on-line tools has hardly been without its trials and travails; many of their web tools are really nice, while others totally make me want to cry. Sometimes the problems are lack of infrastructure supporting the development and maintenance of the tools (a problem that’s clearly plagued many business making the transition from bricks and morter to on-line). Sometimes the problem is infighting and bureaucratic silliness that would be cut off at the knees in a well managed company (but isn’t always - not all companies are well managed).
I think, however, that one of the chronic problems (for the U of M, for governments, and for many companies) stems from the fact that the key decision makers just don’t use the internet much, so they’re not well positioned to judge the success and failure of their organization’s efforts. They often don’t use their own tools, so they don’t know how painfully awful they are, and when they do use them they don’t have the rich frame of reference needed to see what could be instead of just what is. And thus we get embarrassingly precambrian web tools. Compare this to Google, for example, where it’s clear that (a) their people are using their tools at all levels and (b) they’re very aware of what other people are doing on the web (and not just in the area of search tools).
Tip of the cap to Naughton once again for the pointer.
Tags: Computing, government, internet, on-line communities, University of Minnesota, Web development
I realize that I’m fashionably late for Darwin Day (12 Feb), but I offer cool-scary dinosaur skeletons and flesh-eating beetles in apology!
We were in London Friday to see the Kildegaards who (a) are friends of ours from Morris, (b) are living in Denmark this year on sabbatical, and (c) were in London for a week. We had a wonderful day, which included time in both the Natural History Museum (NHM - where the photo above was taken) and the V&A.
As part of our time in the NHM, we toured the wonderful Darwin Centre. (See the nifty connection? See? See? :->) This included amazing cool things such as a giant squid in a tank, loads of great big animals (mostly fish) preserved in equally big custom-made glass jars (including a Coelacanth and a whole jar of platypi), and flesh-eating beetles! They have a whole room of incubators of flesh-eating beetles that they use to clean specimens without damaging the skeletal structure. And to top off this festival of biological delights, they have a real-time beetle-cam where you can watch the little critters roaming around over the carcass of the moment (in a grainy, low-res format, to be sure), busily contributing to the scientific process. I suspect, in fact, that they will, in their oblivious fashion, will probably contribute more to science than someone like Huckabee.
I want to thank our tour guide (whose name I, sadly but predictably, have forgotten), as she did a great job. She was full of useful information, and handled our numerous questions gracefully and informatively.
Tags: beetles, Darwin, dinosaur, Friends, history, London, museum, Natural History Museum, Sabbatical, ScienceGravel? I’d never actually heard of him, and at this point he’s pretty much out of it, so it’s all a moot point. The ordering of everyone else is roughly as I would have guessed, although I didn’t expect such a big jump between Obama and Clinton. Nice to see that it correctly deduced that Huckabee and I live in different universes. I can’t decide if I actually want Huckabee to get the nomination in the hopes that he just has to then lose the election. I think not, though, ’cause there’s always that chance that he’d win. And then we’d have to move. And I’d be sad.
| Mike Gravel |  |
114 | ||
| Barack Obama |  |
109 | ||
| Hillary Clinton | |
57 | ||
| John McCain | -12 | |
||
| Ron Paul | -33 | |
||
| Mike Huckabee | -123 | |
You expected: Barack Obama
Your recommendation: Mike Gravel
Party: Democratic
Born: 1930, Springfield, Massachusetts
Family: Married twice. Two children and four grandchildren
Career: US Army; Special Agent in the Counter Intelligence Corps; taxi driver; barman; brakeman; property developer
Political career: 3rd Speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives, 1965-6; US Senator from Alaska 1969-1981. Environment and Public Works and Finance and Interior Committees; chaired the Energy, Water Resources, and Environmental Pollution subcommittees
Hot topic: Fair tax
Did you know? Born to French-Canadian immigrant parents, Marie Bourassa and Alphonse Gravel; Mike spoke only French until he was seven years old
Supported by: Ralph Nader
Chris posted some cool questions on my earlier post about decentralized behavior in social insects:
so what kinds of things do computer scientists do w/this idea? is sort of what evolutionary computing is about? i picked up the evolution of cooperation recently (tit for tat wins prisoner’s dilemma) you must be familiar w/this, yes?”
There’s really three different (but related) ideas in this question:
I’ll take them one at a time, with more on the first of the three, at least for now.
Tags: Computing, cooperation, distributed systems, emergent behavior, evolution, evolutionary computation, insects, prisoner's dilemma, programming, Science
As far as I can tell, most of the major news outlets have yet to report the details of yesterday’s Democratic Caucus results from Stevens Country, MN. The county DFL chair Peter Wyckoff has, however, sent out the results, allowing me to fill that key gap. Arguably the best news of the evening is that there were 540 total votes, which is way up from 192 votes in 2004. Not being in Morris, I don’t have anything concrete to say about the reasons for this, but an increase in participation is almost certainly to the Good.
As far as those silly candidate like things go, Obama pretty much cleaned up in Stevens Country, mirroring his success in Minnesota in general:
| Barack Obama | 387 | 72% |
| Hillary Rodham Clinton | 139 | 26% |
| John Edwards | 8 | 1% |
| Dennis Kucinich | 2 | 0% |
| Uncommitted | 2 | 0% |
| Frank Lynch | 1 | 0% |
| Joe Biden | 1 | 0% |
| Chris Dodd | 0 | 0% |
| Bill Richardson | 0 | 0% |
It’s hard for me to make a lot of immediate sense out of the results nationwide as they seem extremely scattered. One thing that I think is interesting, though, is that Clinton only carried more than 60% in one state (Arkansas - her previous home), while Obama carried 8 states with more than 60%, two of which were over 70% and one (Idaho) with a whopping 80%! OK, I realize that 80% of the handful of people in Idaho aren’t going to swing a national presidential election, but the fact that he carried so many states so strongly does seem to speak to larger questions of electability in November.
Tags: elections, minnesota, Morris, Politics, president, Stevens Country
A couple of weeks ago the wonderful Desert Donkey posted a comment tipping us to a nice article at Atlantic.com on the future of radio.
The iPod shows you mainly what’s already going on in your head—it’s cool, but only as cool as solipsism can ever be. I’ve got a way cooler device: a squat little box that sits on your kitchen counter or your bedside table and connects you to pretty much the entire Earth. And in so doing makes you think anew about the global and the local and what community amounts to—makes you think about connection, which is, after all, the main topic of our age. It’s a kind of home epistemology center that also happens to rock.
There’s some nice analysis, and lots of pointers to cool on-line radio stations (including plenty of Beeb product). One thing I think it misses out is the interaction between live radio and podcasting, or at least the possibility of timeshifting radio as a matter of course. The piece also assumes that listeners want to hear new things and have their horizons expanded, and I think the jury’s still out on that one.
Thanks to DD for the tip; sorry for being a bit slow about promoting it!
Tags: comments, Desert Donkey, future, media distribution, Music, podcast, Radio
Almost had an alliteration in the title, but then lost it at the end. Sigh.
I’ve finishing dumping all my Dagstuhl photos (uncleaned and unedited) to my event account on Flickr, so those with more time than sense can rush over and gaze upon them all. Over the next week or two I’ll work on cleaning some of my favorites and posting them to my “real” Flickr account, but who knows how long that will take.
Tags: Computing, conference, Dagstuhl, Flickr, Germany, Research, Sabbatical, Science, seminar, workshopWhich of the following was written by (a) me, (b) William Shakespeare, and (c) Charles Darwin?
“I would have sent to Rome that’s worthy death?”
“The naturalist looking at species as he might succeed from a fork low down in the separation of the species of any species in a more or less from their sap this is unimportant for the instincts already possessed by certain plants so that natural selection of mere piles of superimposed strata and watch the sea separating an island even if we believe that pure water can effect little or no offspring.”
“The troubling aspects of a building block semantics in a given tree in the context and false.”
The answer and (much) more is below the fold.
Tags: Computing, Dagstuhl, estimation of distribution algorithm, evolutionary computation, genetic programming, N-gram, programming, Research
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