And has packed his bags for Egypt.

He’s going on a UMM course “Pyramids and politics on the Nile” led by UMM Poli Sci faculty Sheri Breen and UMM librarian Jayne Blodgett, both super cool people. This is a pretty structured experience (full itinerary as a PDF) using Cairo as their primary base but with trips down the Nile to Luxor and Aswan, visits to Alexandria, and time at a desert research station.

One of their requirements is to keep a journal during the trip, and they all had to write a “Letter to Cairo” before departing as their first entry, and I thought I’d play along.

Dear Cairo,

Please take good care of our son. I really wanted to start with something more profound, but to be honest this is the first thing that I thought of. I’m genuinely not worried. His mother and I survived a number of great study abroad experiences which did so much to define who we are, and we’re sure he’ll have an amazing and glorious time. Still, it’s an exciting time to be in Egypt, and I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d play nice.

Inspire some wonderful writing. People keep telling him to take lots of pictures, but they’re really barking up the wrong tree, as he doesn’t really do that. (Here the apple fell on a slope and rolled well away and down the hill.) Tom is much more likely to digest and record his experience in words than images. It probably won’t be straightforward journaling, however, and instead be more indirectly represented in his poetry. “Vulcan’s bed”, for example, is a response to his time with me in Lava Beds National Monument two years ago; it is his version of all my photos. So while I know that he’ll have phenomenal experiences in Egypt, I hope to see them creep (or smash) into his poetry and other writings.

Open some doors; I’m sure he’ll walk through them. Morris has been a wonderful town for Tom to grow up in, but it’s a pretty small world. Thomas has had the huge advantage of living in the UK twice, and travelling in Europe on both of those trips, but it’s still been a very European life. You represent such a fascinating crossroads of history and culture: Mediterranean and Arab and African and Islamic and pharaonic and crowded and vibrant and changing and old and new. In 3.5 weeks he’ll only be able to sample such a feast, probably taking more than he realizes in some ways and less in others. When he comes back, though, I suspect he’ll never quite see things the same, sometimes in ways that may take years to fully realize.

I know that he’ll be a tiny mite on the huge organism that is Cairo, so odds are that you’ll never even notice he was there. You’ll loom huge for him, however, and we appreciate all you have to offer.

Best wishes,

    Nic aka Thomas’s Dad

Some of these changes are “big”, like the fact that we now can use Google Reader (a very nice RSS reader – I definitely recommend it). Others are more subtle. One of these hard-to-spot changes that happened in the last few weeks is the addition of some new visibility options in Google Calendar. When they first set things up, you could share a calendar, but you couldn’t share any of the details outside of UMM. So local folks could see the details (if you wanted them to), but everyone else (even people on the TC campus) saw everything marked as “Busy”. Recently they quietly changed things so you can open up your calendars to be fully visible if you are so inclined.

Whee! I’ve been waiting for this for a while, and it’s nice that it’s finally happened. Now I can embed my calendar in places like my university web page and folks can see more than lots of little blue blocks marked “busy”. I’ll have to be a little more careful to mark certain events as private, but it’s definitely worth it.

30 days of November

A lot of her work these days is sculpture, but she is submitting one art book: “30 days of November”. The pages are all “tea sheets”, one from each day in November, 2008. For 2.5 years she’s been documenting every time she’s had a cuppa in a variety of ways, one of which is tipping out the leaves onto a 4×3 inch sheet of paper, which then leaves a stain. The “front” side of each page is the “stain” side, and she then embellished the backs in a number of different ways.

I’ve taken some other photos of the process (10.10am, The aftermath, and Pekoe), and it’s really cool to see a book made out of these. The “triptych” above is what she’s actually submitted for consideration. The shot below didn’t end up in the submission shot, but I liked the way the light worked so I posted it on Flickr anyway.

Archeology (Layers of time)

Solid as (h)air

The other pieces she’s submitting are all metal sculpture, three in aluminum, and one in bronze. One of the cool things about the one to the right is that the top part is made using hair. Sue’s been collecting her hair for quite a while, and she finds that it naturally balls up in interesting ways. Here she’s packed a ball of hair in damp sand and poured in molten aluminum to capture the texture.

The other aluminum pieces were made by carving polystyrene foam, which the molten aluminum replaces. The bronze piece at the bottom was made using a silica mold, and then treated in all kinds of crazy ways to get a patina she was happy with.

Mother and child

Polar bear

Jousting

In the meantime, we have had a ton of snow this winter. Just sayin’

Blizzard in downtown Minneapolis

Road in fog and snow on the drive south for the holidays

Snow covered fields on the drive south for the holidays

Tracks and footprints in the snow

Wide load

As mentioned earlier, I submitted a number of photos for consideration in a call for art for UMM’s new Welcome Center. Much to my delight two photos were in fact chosen, being I think the first two pieces of mine to ever be purchased as art (as opposed to illustration or journalism). The first is the train panorama above, and the second is the turbine shot below.

Turbine, sun, and fog

Michael Eble (the curator for UMM’s HFA Gallery) also asked if he could exhibit four other photos (below) that I submitted in the 2010 Celebration exhibition in the HFA Gallery! They’re hanging now (in the upper level down at the end). There will be special showings during Founders Weekend, September 23–26 and Homecoming Weekend, October 8–10, and the exhibit closes on 16 October.

Evening jam	All work and no play
Scheming a brother's downfall	Reflecting on pasts and futures

Speech!

Tuesday we saw James T. Wilson, a two person show including Stanton Pavlicek in the title role. We know Stanton and his family from Morris (his dad was a huge help in building an enormous frame to hold up our gargantuan honeysuckle vine), and it was cool to see two 18-year olds just out of high school in this setting. The show itself was still struggling to become, and while there was a of potential, it’ll need some more work to realize that possibility.

Thursday we saw Speech!, an absolutely hilarious comedy about the goofy (and often twisted) world of high school speech competitions. The writing and performances were tres sharp, and the audience was rolling in the aisles from the start to finish. This show has received a number of well deserved nominations, including a best male performance for our friend and UMM alum Tim Hellendrung! Tim’s did lots of cool improv back at UMM (as well as being an excellent manager for the campus radio station), and has continued to develop at Comedy Sports in Minneapolis. It was great to see him do such a fine job in a great ensemble production like this. Big congratulations to Tim and the entire cast and crew!

Last night (Friday) we saw what will sadly be our last show, because we head back to Morris this afternoon so Tom can hang with his friends some before we come back to the Cities Sunday night. We went out with a bang, though, catching the amazing O(h) by casebolt and smith, a two person show unlike any dance performance I’ve ever seen before. They combined some great dance with liberal splashes of spoken word and singing, providing a rich piece of performance than transcended any simple notion of genre. There was wonderful (often comedic) commentary on both culture in general and dance in particular, creating a really fun experience that was also chock full of food for thought. They also received a number of nominations, and our group (two straight guys and a woman) all agree that a sweaty Joel Smith in Superman briefs is hot!

O(h)

There’s a great section in this performance about intellectual property that inspired a long enough commentary that I’ve moved to it’s own post. It’s not often in my experience that a dance performance explicitly opens these kinds of doors, so check it out.

Via TechDirt I found this very cool video on how our “standard” notions of incentives don’t always work very well, especially when it comes to cognitive work. There’s a ton of cool ideas in the video (and more in the TechDirt piece, including some cool links).

The incentives in the talk are typically money, but I suspect that there are interesting things to be said about grades as an incentive in the academy. Does anyone know of work along those lines?

One really interesting story is about Atlassian, an Australian software company. (Their stuff is cool, and we’ve used some of it here at UMM in the past, but it’s gotten pricey and we’ve moved to other tools.) Apparently Atlassian gives their employees a 24 period every quarter to work on whatever they want, and then they have a party where people share what they’ve done. This apparently leads to a ton of cool ideas, bug fixes, and development. So, so cool.

How could we apply that here in the academy? What if we gave everyone in our Computer Science discipline a 24 hour period to work on whatever they wanted to and then had a big party where people shared what they did? Could we do it? Would it make sense if we did? What would it mean? We’d probably have to cancel at least our CSci classes that day, and probably make sure that no one was giving an exam the next day, etc., etc.

Because we would only control our discipline’s behavior, though, we wouldn’t give many of the students the freedom they’d need to really take advantage of the opportunity. It would presumably work a lot better if we did this across the entire campus – no classes, no exams, no papers due, and then some sort of event (or set of events distributed across campus) at the end for people to share their results.

Hmmm…

Reflecting on pasts and futures

I took over 1,000 pictures at yesterday’s 2010 graduation ceremony at UMM, and will sometime be putting the least bad of them on my events account on Flickr, but at the moment I have a ton of deadlines looming (grades, etc.) so that’ll have to wait a bit.

The wind ensemble and choir both did an excellent job (as they always do); these are from before the ceremony started while people were filing in and taking their seats. I really loved the reflection in the euphoniums, especially the mirror sharp reflection of the Student Center, trees, and sky in the silver instrument.

I took quite a few pictures of that reflection, and struggled a bit with the final presentation. It’s not clear to me whether the emphasis provided by the desaturation above, or whether I’m better off leaving the color alone (below).

The top one makes a really nice desktop image, by the way :-).

A beautiful day for a graduation

This year’s CSci graduates included students graduating with high distinction, students who’d published their research in major international conferences, done extensive volunteer work, travelled the world, pursued diverse interests, and won highly competitive national awards. Some are going into grad school, some to jobs, some to volunteer work, and some are still trying to figure out the next step. One of the great advantages of a small department is that I’d worked personally with almost all of them on special projects, and had the rest in at least a few classes, and I consider it an honor and a privilege to have gotten to know them.

And that’s just the CSci grads. Another advantage of a small campus is you get to know lots of students in lots of areas. People I knew from the radio station graduated today, along with committee members, musicians, artists, actors, historians, psychologists, biologists, and the lot. This included two Truman Scholars and, as we were reminded today, the only other schools that could boast two Truman Scholars at their graduation this year were Stanford and Wellesley. Not bad for a little school in the middle of nowhere that no one’s ever heard of, eh?

Talking about how great this or that group of students is always sounds dangerously like comparing children, but we just keep getting cool students to work with. This is really the “norm”, whatever that means when both the individuals and groups have such distinct personalities. These folks leave, taking with them a lot of experience and knowledge and enthusiasm, and there’s no doubt that we’ll miss them. There are, however, plenty of great students still on campus, and wonderful new admits that will be joining us in August.

So, best wishes to all this year’s graduates.

Do cool things.

And send us a postcard now and then.

P.S. I’ll try to get the pictures I took today up on Flickr sometime in the next few weeks, but with grading, the May Session course, and being in Ann Arbor the second half of the week, processing all those photos is going to have to wait a bit.

CACM page spread featuring UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison at MICS

The May, 2010, issue of the Communications of the ACM (CACM – the flagship magazine of the ACM) features a photograph of UMM CSci alum Tyler Hutchison presenting research work done with Andy Korth and Nic McPhee at MICS 2007. The article is “Student and Faculty Attitudes and Beliefs About Computer Science”. Andy and Tyler won the best student paper award at that year’s MICS for their paper “On the impact of geography and local mating in evolutionary computation”. The photo (taken by me during Tyler and Andy’s joint MICS presentation) features some of Tyler’s artwork illustrating the material.

The graphics folks at CACM found my photo on Flickr, and contacted me via Flickr offering to pay me a small fee if I’d be willing to let them use it. I happily said "Yes", and the rest is history.

As well as being a cool computer-science-type, Tyler is also a cool comic-art-type, and did the nifty drawings for the cover of our book "A field guide to genetic programming".

Happy, happy, happy.

But I’m easily amused :-).

In fairness, this could well be the one and only time I ever get published in CACM. I’m not all that likely to submit an article to them (in part because I don’t tend to write things they might want), so this could easily be the pinnacle of my career in terms of the number of people in my field seeing my work.

Weird.

But cool.