I am … unhindered by talent

photo credit: brianwallace
Three different not-in-Morris people were kind enough to ask today in one form or another if I was dead. To quote one

All OK? You’ve been soooooo quiet.

Many, many thanks for asking. It’s nice to be missed :-).

And yes, all the big things are OK, even if some of the details are a little stressful at the moment.

My wife and son are still amazing people, UMM is still home to some incredibly cool folks at all levels, and institutional corn dogs at the Student Activities Fair remain one of my favorite start-of-the-school-year rituals.

On the other hand, I’m still scrambling with some school stuff like syllabi and planning — I’m seriously crap at almost all of the mechanics of teaching, which makes my career choice unfortunate at times. (At least I like my job, though, which puts me way ahead of lots of folks.)

Computer Science at UMM is also really swamped because a search failed and we’ve got 3 faculty doing what 5 faculty (actually 6 people, two of which were half time) were doing four months ago. We canceled a couple of things, and moved a few other things around, so I think it will all work out fine, but it’s a challenge.

And on top of that, it turns out that I have arthritis in my neck that is causing my vertebrae to poke at my spinal cord in ways that express themselves annoyingly in my left arm. I got a steroid shot in my neck last week up in Fergus Falls that was (I think) helping. Unfortunately I pulled an almost-all-nighter night before last doing course prep, and may have undone much of that progress. Damn. It would be useful if I remembered that I’m no longer 18 at key moments… On the neat side, though, I’ve got the MRI images, so I have lots of cool pictures of my spine which I can give to Len Keeler’s physics course on medical imaging. So there will be a bunch of physics students marveling at what a complete mess my back is, and getting college credit for their trouble!

So in short, everything big is all still fine. Some of the details are a pain, however, and that tends to draw energy from all the “optional” pieces of my life (blogging, Flickr, people who aren’t standing in my office door looking confused or unhappy or just glad to see me again). Hence a fair amount of Twitter, but very little that moves any closer to the paragraph form.

Sorry, and thanks for asking. Hopefully things will settle down in the next week or two. If you can’t find me in my office, I might be taking a nap on the couch in the computer science lounge.

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photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

When I edit, I tend to scribble a lot, even when it’s my own stuff (or the writing of people I really like). Last January, for example, I took a set of photos after scribbling all over a paper that Riccardo and I were working on for GECCO. This paper went on to win the Best Paper award in the genetic programming track at GECCO last month, so I’d like to think that all this editing had some value :-).

I posted the full set over in my events account, and I plan on using some of them to show my students that I’m not just being mean to them — I’m mean to everyone, myself included!

This showed up here now because a publisher contacted me about using it in a college writing textbook. I figured I’d clean it up and post the full size version.

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photo credit: Unhindered by Talent

Backups are good.

Everybody says so.

Really, Really Good.

So you’d think the University of Minnesota would be working to provide a reasonable on-line, off-site backup system for its folks. Unfortunately, their pricing structure seems to be from another planet where storage is, like, well, really … uh … expensive!

To quote from the relevant web page:

OIT-UDMS Backup pricing (as of 2/2008)

Storage used Cost per month
  <128GB $25
  128GB – 256GB $50
  256GB – 384GB $75

To calculate the cost of backup service, simply round up the amount of data you need backed-up to the nearest increment of 128GB and use the formula of $25/128GB/month multiplied by the retention period (30 day backup is 4X the primary data). Backup data can be held for up to 90 days. Incremental backups are run daily and that data is retained for 2 weeks. Full backups are run weekly and those backups are held for one month.

We have the additional options of 2 weeks, 30 days and 60 days if your requirements for retention are shorter.

Yup, that’s right. $25 a month for 128Gb of storage. I can buy 500 Gb hard drives for under $100, so I could buy 3 drives (1.5 Tb of storage) a year for he cost of their backup system. Mozy.com will backup an unlimited amount of data for $5/month for home users; not sure what their enterprise pricing is like, but I kind of doubt that they’re going to jump to the U’s pricing.

Bet the U doesn’t get a lot of takers at these prices. Bet their staff aren’t backing up nearly as much as they’d like, either. Hmmmm … a relationship worth exploring?

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I just had to take four on-line safety courses here at Essex in order to get money from our research grant. I’ll spare you the horrors, although I did twitter on about of some of them as I went as a sanity saving device, and will share a couple:

“Keeping your workstation and office tidy is crucial to short-term and long-term health and wellbeing.” I am doomed.

[The] Irony of spending much of an hour wading through a tedious online lesson on risks of spending too long at the computer is not lost on me.

As if the exams themselves weren’t annoying enough (and trust me, they were), the people that assembled them implicitly assumed that everyone in the world is in Microsoft’s pocket. I eventually became so frustrated that when I’d verified that I’d passed them all, I sent the following along to the folks that put all this together:

While I’m here, I should mention that there were several pieces of media that seemed to assume that one was on a Windows box. Quite a few images (clip art, I assume) didn’t load on either a Linux box or a Mac. Also the PowerPoint in the “Working at height” lesson assumed that you had PowerPoint or some compatible viewer, which isn’t always going to be true.

None of these problems were fatal for me. There didn’t appear to be important content in any of the images that I couldn’t view, and I was able to view the PowerPoint file in another program. Still they were confusing and frustrating (especially at first), and it would presumably be fairly easy (if somewhat tedious) to convert them all to a more standard and open format.

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Penguin’s promoting some exploration of the concept of “book” in their We tell stories series, where six authors have contributed new works, each of which explores some aspect of on-line story-telling, sometimes quite distinct from more traditional printed books.

Not all of these are equally successful (I thought the idea of “The 21 steps” was better than the execution). My favorite of these is probably “Hard times”, by Matt Mason and Nicholas Felton. It’s a short, but (for me) very effective collection of data points making it clear how much things have changed and are changing, and hinting about what it might all mean down the road. Most of the info was at least somewhat familiar to me, but I love the way the details are brought together into a compact compelling argument — a sort of data poetry.

From Part VII: “Ideas are travelling faster” (crediting the data to Seth Goodin’s Unleashing the idea virus):

The time required to achieve Ten Million Users:

• Radio: 40 years
• Television: 15 years
• Netscape: 3 years
• Hotmail and Napster: < 1 year

Part IX-A has a tremendous title — “Our parents killed bad ideas with music. We kill bad ideas with new buiness models” — and delivers excellently on that promise.

Thanks to jakebouma for the cool photo.

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Every science nerd hopes to get something named after them, with the mostly likely candidates being small invertebrates or small celestial bodies as there are lots of both still without names.

As further proof of how cool PeeZed is, he just got an asteroid named after him! The little rock formally known as 153298 is now “paulmyers”, which is certainly easier to remember for the test. Visit MPR for an interview.

(The asteroid in the photo isn’t “paulmyers”; it’s a photo of the Toutatis asteroid from JPL.)

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Just did a pile o’ dishes and listened to a SciAm podcast featuring the remarks of Robert Rosner (head of Argonne National Laboratory). The short version is that science (and, I would argue, education in general) is a matter of necessity plus vision. First, science is not a luxury, but instead a necessity:

Without the science base, you cannot build an industrial base.

Second, science requires long term vision and public and private support in in basic research. It typically takes decades for culture changing technologies to move from the basic idea to ubiquity; Rosen gives as examples railroads, airplanes, transistors, computers, the internet, and lasers. The question then is

How do you convince the politics and the public that that lag in fact is real and that if you don’t make the investments … today … we’ll be lagging things that other folks that are making the investments

Rosen is (quite reasonably) focussed specifically on the question of support for science, but points out that this is part of a larger trend of irrationality in the U.S.:

But we all know that in the United States there are long traditions of anti-intellectualism, of what the Times today also refer to as anti-rationalism, the idea that there really are no facts, it’s all opinion, the idea that scientists [are] just playing their sand box and don’t connect with anybody.

What it really comes down to is a distressingly common failure for Americans to see any form of education (science or humanities, K12 or university) as a necessary investment in the strength and future of our society and country. For me this has become a useful litmus test to separate sensible conservatives (who understand the economic necessity of investment in key areas) from the wingnuts that have come to dominate the Republican party (who spout anti-intellectual nonsense while shredding schools and lining the pockets of themselves and their friends).

Eisenhower understood the practical necessity of an interstate road system, and encouraged and supported that investment. All Shrub can seem to invest in is Halliburton and their ilk.

Things to think (and ask) about in this happy election season.

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As mentioned earlier, our paper “Semantic building blocks in genetic programming” with Brian Ohs (UMM ‘08) and Tyler Hutchison (UMM ‘07) was nominated for Best Paper at EuroGP 2008 in Naples, Italy.

We won!

That a paper co-authored with two undergraduates from a small, public, undergraduate liberal arts institution like the University of Minnesota, Morris, could win an award like this at an international science conference is just too damn cool. Well done to both Brian and Tyler!

In the hectic melee of the conference, most folks don’t have time to do anything more than skim the nominated papers, and usually not even that. This makes the talks a crucial part of an award like this, as much of the voting is based on them. Tyler (pictured above at Castel dell’Ovo in Naples) was a huge help in that regard. He flew over to the UK several days early so we could work on our talk, giving us the time we needed to revise and practice. He also produced a super cool little six page comic with a nifty introduction to our work that the audience could follow along with. We did a joint presentation, each covering about half the paper. Our talk was well received, and Tyler’s comic was incredibly (and deservedly) popular, and there’s no doubt that his participation was a huge help.

(And all this is on top of Brian and Tyler’s hard work and contributions on the paper itself. Obviously without that content we never would have had the paper accepted or nominated in the first place. So they both deserve huge kudos for that as well.)

Friday morning our paper was voted Best Paper by the conference attendees, and we were presented with a certificate, a box of Italian lemon cookies, and a box of Irish chocolates. All the Best Paper winners from the various EvoStar conferences and workshops also got to choose a free book from the Springer table. Tyler got a really cool book enitled Leonardo’s Lost Robots, and I got The forgotten revolution: How science was born in 300 BC and why it had to be reborn. (It was all terribly liberal arts of us - pretty much everyone else took evolutionary computation/artificial intelligence books of one form or another.)

Tyler upheld a fine tradition of our students making UMM look really good at conferences like this. From his deportment and grasp of the material, most people assumed he was a graduate student, despite the fact that the looks like he’s about 16 :-). He’s currently doing contract work as a web developer and designer, but is seriously interested in going to graduate school in the near future, and he definitely impressed the folks at the conference. I’ve been really lucky to work (and co-publish) with a string of great UMM students, and am looking forward to continue that with a very sharp student named Sara Lahr when we get back.

The trick for me (sometimes) is remembering just how good our students can be. The room we spoke in was this grand space of inlaid wood and marble that was quite a surprise in several ways. This was made worse by the fact that we were in the first session, so we had very little time to adjust and adapt. I was worried about running long (we had a lot of material to cover), and started to lose my nerve about having Tyler wandering around the room at the beginning handing out the comic. Tyler was really calm and collected about it, though, talked me down, and everything did in fact go really smoothly. The moral? Handouts are Good, really cool comics handous are Even Better, and I need to remember to listen to my students :-).

Thanks a ton to Brian and Tyler and all the people and offices at UMM that supported our work, and everyone who voted for our paper at EuroGP! Special thanks also to Riccardo Poli for hosting me on this sabbatical at the University of Essex. I’ve gotten a ton of cool work done here with Riccardo, including “A linear estimation of distribution GP system” at EuroGP, which was also nominated for Best Paper (and which I suspect was also strongly in the running).

I’ve dumped all the photos Tyler and I took in Naples onto my events account on Flickr. I’ll try to clean up a few to post to my main Flickr account in the next week or so.

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Last night’s unveiling of A Field Guide to Genetic Programming was a huge success! We had one of the poster “stalls” with 50 copies of the book that we’d purchased from Lulu as our initial “print run”. We were wearing cool t-shirts sporting that wonderful cover, had the nice poster shown to the right, and even had spiffy postcards with the cover to give away.

The book was a big hit with the Evo* crowd, and we sold out the full set of 50 pretty quickly. Lots of folks had us autograph their copies, many of which are now destined to be collector’s items with the signatures of all three of the authors. Some even have the signature of Tyler Hutchison, who did the nifty cover art for us and helped a lot with the roll-out.

There were tons of photos taken at our booth, including candids of us signing and working the crowd, and posed shots with our cool Field Guide shirts. People have promised to send us photos and links, so check back in the next week or two for some of the finest in EC book release amateur photojournalism! (And if you’ve got a photo from the event, or a nifty shot of your copy in its place of pride on your bookshelves, please pass it along.)

As mentioned before, the book is now officially released and available to any and all via lulu.com, both in an inexpensive printed form (what we were selling last night) and as a free downloadable PDF.

So go check it out - 50 whole Field Guide fans can’t be wrong!

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While I’ve been utterly swamped with Jess’s visit (here and there), preparing for EuroGP and the book release, and various random deadlines, life has (strangely enough) continued around me.

Included in this mêlée of activity is the crazy news that PeeZed got expelled from Expelled. This is (by numerous accounts) a fairly dreadful film about how hard done by those poor ID folks are, and how mean and nasty those icky evolutionists are. Waa. Both PeeZed and Richard Dawkins were interviewed for the film under false pretenses, and get non-trivial screen time. There was a free pre-screening of the film in the Cities last night, which conveniently (and I think accidentally?) coincided with a major atheist meeting in the Cities. So PeeZed and various of his family and friends including Dawkins(!) all trouped off to check it out.

The wonderful kicker is that one of the producers

• Recognized PeeZed in line,
• Had PeeZed expelled,
• Failed to recognize Dawkins (or any others in his group)

Saw Dawkins got to see the movie, but Paul had to hang out in the mall waiting for them to get out! The Mall of America (where all this happened) is big, but I’m not sure it’s big enough to hold that much irony.

There’s loads o’ blogging on the subject; PeeZed is collecting and sharing links (here, there, and elsewhere, plus his post from the Apple Store during the film). Quite happily, it’s also being reported for the fiasco that it is in the mainstream press (e.g., Pioneer Press and the NY Times).

Thanks to Dan Flies for sending me an e-mail about all this. I really had missed it all, so having the direct pointer was a Good Thing.

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