Sometimes you’re just minding your own business, trying to get a little science done, and a little art pops out at you all unexpected.
What?!? You want to know where this comes from? All is revealed beneath the fold…
Tags: evolution, evolutionary computation, genetic programming, graphics, Mathematics, Research, Science, symbolic regression
Is it just me, or is this a desparately classic case of old folks (i.e., people my age) just not realizing that the world has moved on a wee bit?
The University of Minnesota Office of Information Technology is proud to announce that the University of Minnesota is soon to become a member of ResearchChannel. ResearchChannel was founded by a consortium of leading research and academic institutions to share the valuable work of their researchers with the public through a cable television distribution network. ResearchChannel is now available to more than 30 million U.S. satellite and cable television subscribers and more than 1.6 million people who visit the ResearchChannel Web site at http://www.researchchannel.com each year. The channel also is available on 70 university and school-based cable systems in the United States…
Cable TV was cool when I was college age a zillion years ago (back in the 80’s), and we thought MTV was pretty darn cool.
That was then, though, and now is different. Sub-Evil’s generation don’t channel surf through the cable offerings, amazed that they have more than 4 options. They just don’t watch TV like we did. They time shift like mad, and cruise through a vastness of on-line offerings that make those early cable days seem positivity puny by comparison.
And now the U decides to get excited and pipe its research out to students on a cable television distribution network?!?
Uh, sorry, but I have my doubts. 30 million U.S. satellite and cable television subscribers?
Ooh.
Ahh.
Yawn.
In fairness, however, they do almost address this, even if in the tone of an afterthought:
…and was recently launched on iTunes U and YouTube.
w00t! YouTube! They get it!
Well, sort of.
You see, a quick look suggests that what they’re providing is honking great collection of lectures. They’re almost all long (mostly on the order of an hour, some closer to two), and seem to be largely academic “talking head” videos. Just what a college student wants to unwind with after a long day of…um…lectures.
Thus it’s hardly surprising that ResearchChannel’s most viewed video on YouTube has only been viewed (as of 2 Mar 08) 1,592 times, and their 10th most viewed has only been viewed 153 times (so a very steep drop in views). For comparison, the video of Sub-Evil’s performance of “Taco Man” at the ASA Talent Show 1.5 years ago has been viewed 1,033 times. It’s 1.5 minutes long, was shot will a cell phone from the audience, and only shows the second half of the song. But it would place a solid fifth in view count amongst the 166 videos that ResearchChannel has on Youtube. To be fair, it doesn’t look like any of the ResearchChannel videos has been up for much more than a month. Sadly, though, I suspect that the fragmentary “Taco Man” video will continue to hold its own against most of these even if we check back in a year or two, even with whatever marketing and promotion ResearchChannel and the associated universities might put into this.
And that video of the cute kid summarizing Star Wars? Almost 4 million views in less than two weeks.
I’m a big fan of serious content vs. sound bites, and I think ResearchChannel has their heart in the right place. There are cool examples of videos generated by university types that really take advantage of the medium and are successful in reaching an audience. I have grave doubts, however, about the likelihood that this simplistic mapping of the old lecture model onto (semi-)new technology is gonna get any traction with our son’s generation. I’m sure that some are quite good, and I can imagine that some might be quite popular/successful. But I’m guessing that those are the exceptions rather than the rule, in large part because this model just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
It’s like TED, but four times as long-winded, with less quality control, and worse production values.
Ought to just pull in droves of kids.
Really.
Droves.
Tags: academia, cable TV, media distribution, Research, technology, TV, University of Minnesota, Video, YouTube
It’s pretty cool when you update your repository and see
At revision 400
We just hit that on the genetic programming book that Riccardo and Bill and I are working on; we’re currently averaging close to 10 commits a day here in the final stages. We hope to wrap it up in the next 1.5 weeks and then off to the printers for fun (and no profit in the traditional sense)!
P.S. Anyone want to proof read a few pages? Get in touch and we can work something out.
Tags: Books, change, evolution, evolutionary computation, genetic programming, GP Book, programming, Research, Sabbatical, Writing
Just finished my GECCO reviewing, and I must say that is seriously sucks when people don’t attend to even the most basic of issues. Two things almost guaranteed to majorly annoy a reviewer:
And just guess the average publication date of 8 fine references.
1985.
Yeah, over 20 years ago.
3 entries were books (two of which were over 10 years old), and the only 2 journal articles were from 1938 and 1964 respectively.
Strangely enough, I didn’t encourage acceptance of that paper.
The really depressing thing is that most of our (undergraduate) students at UMM would do better than this.
No, maybe that’s the uplifting thing.
Maybe the really depressing thing is that I see papers with this kind of bibliography fairly often. I’d almost recommend some sort of automatic rejection system for obviously stupid bibliographies, but then people would just start padding their bibliographies with random citations to get past that blockade.
Sigh.
photo credit: markopoulos
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
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
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
All good things must come to an end, and our week at Dagstuhl ends tomorrow after lunch. Above is yesterday’s group picture (I’m in yellow near the front) just before the traditional Wednesday hike (below), which was wet and misty but still an enjoyable few hours out in the world.
I gave a talk this morning which (I think) went well, especially since I didn’t know I was going to be giving a talk until Tuesday afternoon! There was certainly a lot of good discussion and people came up with tons of suggestions and ideas, which is what I really love about presenting at Dagstuhl. I started with something quite fun, which I’ll post here later. Most of the talks have used computer slides (PowerPoint or some more sensible alternative like LaTeX/Beamer), but Jon Rowe did a great blackboard talk on Tuesday (pictured below).
I was greatly inspired and did almost all of mine on the boards as well. I had four slides at the beginning that really needed to be slides, and then I did the bulk on the boards, and came back to a fifth slide at the end.
Tomorrow there are talks before lunch, including a talk/discussion thing that Riccardo is doing that I’m sure I’ll be roped into in some mysterious way. Then we eat, and it’s a taxi out to the Frankfurt Hahn airport for our flight back to the UK!
Tags: Computing, Dagstuhl, evolutionary computation, Germany, ResearchIn a well written and thoughtful endorsement that (not surprisingly) focuses on tech related issues, they’ve gone for Obama and McCain (with a strong preference for Obama between the two).
Obviously technical issues aren’t the only important issues facing the country, and silicon valley tech issues aren’t necessarily always the same as general science issues. Nothing was said about the war in Iraq, for example, and while they wisely include things things like math and science education in their focus issues, there’s no mention of the continuing struggle over the stain of creationism in that education.
Not perfect, but a thoughtful summary of positions on an important set of issues.
Tags: Education, elections, Politics, president, Science, technology
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