I am … unhindered by talent

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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I first noticed this sign yesterday walking home after my morning walk with Sub-Evil Boy. Presumably they’ve had some big lorries follow their sat nav system and get stuck down the end of this little road. Can’t quite decide whether I think this is hilarious or sad. Perhaps both. (Geotagging it on Flickr was a pleasantly ironic experience as well.)

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I suspect many of our readers will already have seen something about this, but just in case it hasn’t gotten a lot of U.S. press, Chancellor Alistair Darling (a very high ranking member of the British government) announced today in the House of Commons that 2 discs (CDs or DVDs - I’m not sure) were lost that contained highly confidential information for 25 Million Individuals. This data included names, dates of birth, insurance numbers, and (in some cases) bank account details — essentially all the toys you’d need to execute identity theft and fraud on a massive scale. The kind of stuff that an organized crime outfit would probably pay mucho top dollar for.

And the data was unencrypted.

Yup.

Unencrypted.

Makes you want to cry.

(In fairness, the discs were “password protected”, but no one seems clear on what that actually means. Given that most password systems for discs and files are child’s play to get through, without solid encryption on the other end “password protected” doesn’t offer much comfort.)

Unfortunately, as several of the talking heads pointed out, this is at some level inevitable as governments, corporations, and educational institutions move to larger and more centralized databases. Consider, for example, last year’s leak of the search histories of half a million AOL users.

The U of M at least tries to take these things seriously, but they don’t always get the stick by the right end. There’s a lot of noise, for example, about whether faculty like myself should be able to hold confidential student data (including things like homework grades) on our office computers or (far worse) on laptops or home computers. This is partly a security concern (stolen laptops are always a risk, who knows how well I’ve configured and updated my computers), and partly a data protection concern (how often do I actually backup my data). If they seriously go down this road, however, then one consequence is that all this grade data for the entire University is in one place. At the moment, if my computer gets lost or destroyed or stolen, there’s not much exposure. It would be painful and unpleasant for me and several dozen students, but the ripples would stop pretty quickly. If all that data is centralized, however, then the risk is arguably much greater, especially if it’s not managed well.

In reality, I’m not their real problem. I just don’t have access (and rightly so) to enough data to mess up very many people’s lives. There are admin and support staff, however, that have access to enormous amounts of sensitive information. Are they able to burn a couple of DVDs full of the stuff? Probably (but hopefully not easily). Are they trained on why that would be a really dumb idea? I think so.

But then I would have thought that staff at Revenue and Customs over here would have had that sort of training.

And apparently I would have been wrong.

Thanks to the fine folks at MonkeyRiverTown for the great photo.

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One of my constant struggles as an educator in computer science has been helping students see a bigger picture, look past the mundanities of yesterday’s “help wanted” page, and see what the world could be rather than what it has been.

One way this has often played out has been in debates over programming languages and development tools. Students are (quite legitimately) concerned with their near term employment prospects, and so they tend to focus what they’ve heard of, and what they see in the job web sites. Unfortunately that is almost always an exercise in looking backwards in time. When I started in 1991, the problem was getting students out of Pascal and C and start thinking about objects. Now we’re working to add things like Ruby and Python to our Java-heavy toolkit. Constant throughout has been the difficult task of getting them to take (semi-) functional languages (Scheme, Haskell) seriously or, in fact, any language doesn’t have a “For dummies” book at their local mega-bookshop.

I need to be fair, though, and make it clear that we’ve always had students who could see the bigger picture, and have often pushed us faculty to open some important new doors. I suspect that we’ve actually been luckier in that respect at UMM than many other programs. That said, you still get groaners (often very vocal) who never seem to be happy unless you’re emphasizing whatever tool or language they’re firmly convinced is their only road to employment.

This is one of the reasons that it makes me so happy to see the list of programming languages used in the One Laptop Per Child project:

We will support five programming environments on the laptop: (1) Python, from which we have built our user interface and our activity model; (2) Javascript for browser-based scripting; (3) Csound, a programmable music and audio environment; (4) Squeak, a version of Smalltalk embedded into a media-rich authoring environment; and (5) Logo. We will also provide some support for Java and Flash.

OK, we can debate the details (and I’m sure people have and will), but let’s skip all that shall we? Let’s instead note that none of these was a “heavy hitter” 5 or 10 years ago, and there are plenty of people who would (wrongly in my opinion) argue that none are terribly important today. How many data structures classes in the U.S., for example, (a key “bread and butter” course in most computing curriculums) use any of these languages? I’m sure there are a few (especially Python), but proportionally I bet it’s pretty tiny. (Try searching either Amazon or the web for textbooks for such a course, for example.)

It’s also worth considering impact here. Sure, I doubt that anyone’s likely to start building inventory control systems in Logo, but should that be the issue? What’s the real opportunity for impact here? How do I change the world? By building accounting systems? Or by contributing to a project that plans to put computers and software in the hands to millions of kids all around the world?

You want to make the world a better place? You want to really fight terrorism? Then give people hope, a chance to grow and make their world better. Give them something to protect. Contribute to a project like this.

And, if you’re contributing to this project, you apparently program in Python, JavaScript, CSound, Squeak and Logo.

So let’s put an end to the whining about these not being “real” programming languages and nobody building “real” programs with them. I’ve written a crapload of Java code in my day that only a handful of people will ever use. Some bright bulbs used Squeak to build Scratch, which I suspect will be used by millions. Hmmm … which do I find more impressive?

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I doubt this will be news to many, but it’s a really cool idea and worth the plug. The One Laptop Per Child program is making that crucial leap from great concept to spiffy, shipping technology. These are designed to be used by groups of kids in the developing world, but the project’s viziers had the clever idea of allowing folks in the U.S. and Canada to buy one of these first units under their Give One Get One program. You pay $400, and $200 goes to sending you a wondrous new XO laptop, while the other $200 is a tax deductible donation that puts one of these gems in the hand of a child in the developing world. This is only for a limited time, however: November 12 and November 26

As Michael Tiemann points out, however, if you’re gonna get one, you really should consider getting two. These things are designed to form little ad hoc wireless networks whenever they’re near other XO laptops, and lots of the software assumes the existence of other XO laptops more than it assumes access to the full force of the internet (which so much traditional software now assumes). So you, your kids, and whoever you’re showing off your new toy to will be much more impressed if you have two of them to play with.

I’ve had some people ask if we were planning to buy one. Unfortunately (a) we can’t buy one from the UK in a straight-forward way and (b) we’re pretty tight for cash with partial salary and the damn exchange rate. So the answer is no, for now, but not for lack of wanting to. My guess, however, is that this short window of opportunity is a nice marketing scheme to bring in some cash fast, and that down the road they’ll open things up more broadly on a similar scheme. And why not? It raises their profile, and the “Give one, get one” scheme puts more in the hands of the target group of kids.

Cleverly, KK has proposed that UMM’s CSci discipline buy four of them for students and faculty to do projects on. I think that’s a great idea for a lot of reasons, only one of which is that there will be some waiting for me to play with when we get home :-).

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