This blast from the past was taken in the mid-70’s and features a much younger (but no less geeky) yours truly, his squirt of a sister, and our dad.

Me

• Just turned 50
• Just celebrated 24 wonderful years of marriage to a woman I couldn’t have dreamed of meeting when this was taken
• Have a 19-year-old son, making him quite a few years older than me in the picture
• Work in computing (not much of a surprise to someone who knew me then)
• Teach for a living (probably a lot less obvious when this was taken)
• Have more than a little gray hair to document the years in between :-)

Misty

• About to turn 46
• Turned out to be the actual outdoorsperson in the family (we were a little slow to figure that out – gender stereotypes weigh heavy in the world)
• After traveling through an undergraduate degree in music history, got a PhD in biology and now teaches animal behavior and conservation at UW Oshkosh
• Is biking this summer (with her awesome dog in a trailer behind her!) from Ann Arbor, MI, to Ithaca, NY (I consider biking the 15 minutes across the Mississippi into downtown Minneapolis without dying an accomplishment)
• Also turned out to be a teacher for a living, and an exceptional one at that (I suspect our mother has something to do with that)
• Got to do field work in cool places like the Galapagos and Turkey (yeah, I have biologist envy)
• Also has more than a little gray hair to document the years in between :-)

Dad

• About to turn 83
• After living for decades in Wichita Falls, TX (where Misty and I essentially spent our whole lives before going away to college), moved to Houston for roughly a decade
• Then retired to NW Arkansas, where our folks still live an incredibly active life
• Got really involved in the NW Arkansas jazz scene and knows all the celebs
• Rediscovered (with Mom) his love for bridge, and they get invited to play with some pretty serious heavy hitters which is super cool
• Joined with a submariner veterans group in NW Arkansas and has become a lot more connected to his experience on subs during the Korean War
• Fishes as much as circumstances allow, but physically managing the boat and the truck and the gear, etc., etc., is proving tougher. Luckily he’s got friends that help a lot.
• Has beaten cancer twice, but it hasn’t been easy and those battles have definitely left their marks

The crazy thing, though, is how much this old picture resonates with now. My sister and I have changed a ton, but my Dad still looks a lot like that. Thomas, Dad, and I went trout fishing on the White River in Arkansas last week, and it was pretty much just like I remember events like this picture. A few weeks before that, he and Misty went fishing in Lake Michigan near Green Bay. While we were in Arkansas, he and I took the recycling to the recycling center. He came with me to the car place while they looked at a rattle. We went to a picnic hosted by his submariners group. We listened to live jazz over a Sunday brunch. A lot of the details have changed, but the broad brushstrokes are still very recognizable; it’s definitely our strange, happy family.

Since she’s not in the picture, I end up pretty much ignoring my wonderful mother in this, which isn’t really cool. She just turned 75 and totally rocks, and is the rock of the family in so, so many ways. I suspect that while we were fishing she was back at the camper, bravely enduring the “great outdoors” when she would have much been somewhere with indoor plumbing :-). Love you Mom!

Looking back, it can be hard to imagine why people in the past just didn’t get it. Why they thought women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, and why blacks and whites couldn’t use the same restroom, or the same school.

The people that voted to supported these old ideas were not all Bad People going out of their way to work against the rights of others. I know some where my relatives, and I’ll bet that some were yours. Certainly, there were plenty of small-minded, mean-spirited people leading the charge, but they depended crucially on the passive support of numerous well-meaning folk who mostly just didn’t want to rock the boat or weren’t very comfortable with change.

Tomorrow in Minnesota we get a chance to vote on whether our state constitution should be amended in an attempt to block all future efforts to allow gays the human & civil rights of marriage, & the legal protections it affords. As you consider this amendment, it might help to ask yourself: How do I wish to be remembered? As someone who quietly stood with those who would limit the freedoms of those different from themselves, or with those who believe in liberty and justice for all?

And let us be clear: This is a human rights issue.

Sue & I have been married for over 20 years and she has been a full, equal, & wonderful partner in building our shared life. Her creativity and passion flows through our child, our home, and the experiences we’ve shared. I would hope that our community would recognize this and support her associated rights, which include critical things such as health coverage, our pension, and her right to speak for me regarding medical treatment. If, however, someone didn’t recognize her rights, she would have the legal backing of the state of Minnesota, which ensures the human and civil rights of a spouse in numerous ways.

Why should any committed couple be denied these same rights, regardless of their genders?

Which brings us back to the question: How do we wish to be remembered? Do we want to be remembered as supporting a last, desparete gasp of a group attempting to deny yet another group a basic human and civil right? Or do we want to be on the right side of history tomorrow, knowing, win or lose, that we voted to treat our fellow travellers humanely, with courage & justice?

So I urge you to Vote No. It’s a vote your grandchildren can be proud of.

I would also strenuously encourage you, for many of the same underlying reasons, to vote no on the proposed Voter ID amendment. I recommend that you check out Guante’s excellent video on the Voter ID amendment if you wish to learn more:

You might also want to check out MPR’s nice video on the huge amount of vagueness and uncertainty there is in the proposed Voter ID amendment:

So go vote tomorrow. It matters. I know that the weird math of the electoral college can make it seem like voting for president doesn’t matter unless you live in Ohio or Pennsylvania or Florida. And it can seem like incumbents have a lock on everything. But on either of these amendments, it could literally come down to a few votes. So don’t say your voice doesn’t matter. Don’t say you don’t have time. Don’t say no one cares. Instead be a voice, however small, for a more humane world.

Vote No on both proposed amendments.

UMM has recently opened a position for a new Director of Information Technology. The full job description is attached, and the description and application page are on-line.

Some highlights from the “Purpose of the Position” section:

General priorities for the position include:

• promoting a 21st century learning and teaching environment for an undergraduate focused residential campus;
• supporting through technology and information resources the research endeavors of a highly qualified and active faculty; and
• advancing the use of technology to engage a growing base of prospective students, donors, and alumni.

Specifically, the Director of Information Technology will:

• Provide IT leadership to the Morris campus and in the broader University community.
• Serve as a key member of the Morris campus and University of Minnesota technology leadership team, which formulates and implements local and institutional goals and initiatives.
• Partner with the academic and administrative leadership across the Morris campus and university-wide to participate in the creation and implementation of strategic goals and IT initiatives.

I’m a member of the search committee, and I want to share this information here for two reasons.

First, if anyone reading this is interested, please consider applying!

Second, the search committee is gathering feedback from various stakeholders about what we want this person to be and do. Before we begin to look at applications, the committee would like to try to clarify as best we can what the campus wants and needs from someone in this position.

So, what do you think are the priorities for UMM’s Director of Information Technology? What do they need to do to support the teaching, research, and service missions of campus? Looking ahead 5 years, what issues do you feel that this person will need to address/get ahead of? On of my concerns in recent years has been that the campus has been far too reactive to technological change, and instead of being ahead of the ball we’re constantly scrambling to respond to events and put out fires. What skills and background does this person need to help us turn that around?

I’d be happy to discuss this at UMM CSci tea tomorrow afternoon (4-6ish in the lab), or hear from anyone by whatever other means work for you. If you have ideas or thoughts, however, please share promptly; we want to wrap up this fact finding process in the next two weeks (by the morning of Tuesday, 20 Apr).

They’ve finish 4 weeks (or 20 episodes), and the objects and their stories have been consistently engaging and informative. Some standouts have been the carving of the swimming reindeer, the Egyptian clay model of cattle, and the Rhind mathematical papyrus, but it’s awfully hard to choose favorites when the quality has been this good. If I had to pick just one out of what they’ve broadcast so far, it would probably be the Jomon pot episode. This type of pottery changed the way we understood the development of this crucial technology, and the way these objects were revered in Japan thousands of years later is quite wonderful. This particular pot, made some 7,000 years ago, was valued so highly a few hundred years ago that it was lined with gold and incorporated into the tea ceremony.

I’ve been to the British Museum several times over the years, and taken way too many photos there. (A few on my “main” Flickr account, and way too many on my events account.) One thing that’s been cool about the series is that in the first 20 episodes there was only one object that I remember seeing and actually photographed: The statue of Ramesses II up above. He’s huge and pretty hard to miss there next to the Rosetta Stone. Many of the objects in the series have been small and subtle, however, which nicely illustrates the value of a cool program like this. Some objects are pretty remarkable in and of themselves, but others benefit enormously from a guide who suggests we slow down and really look at this stone or that statue. Here MacGregor and his guests help us understand the significance, context, and impact of these objects, and totally make me want to go back to the Museum and seek these treasures out.

There are some other objects in the series that I’ve seen and photographed (such as the Assyrian Reliefs below), but most of them will be new to me. I’m eagerly looking forward to the remaining 80 episodes!

It’s an interesting study, and likely to spur a whole new slew of interest in on-line courses, but it’s really not clear what it means. I’m sure there are a zillion ways I could pull together data showing an education advantage of X over Y, for a zillion Xs and Ys, but one would have to be very careful in the interpretation. I’m willing to bet that most of my colleagues here at UMM would teach better in English than Chinese, and most faculty in China would teach more effectively in Chinese than English, but that hardly means one is a better teaching language than the other. Context is everything, and it’s not clear (at least in the survey study) what the contexts are.

A few possible issues:

• 12 years is an eternity in the history of the web and web-based teaching. Are the studies from 12 years ago even talking about the same things as those now?
• What are we actually comparing? Face-to-face courses have all kinds of variance, and their effectiveness changes with the instructor, the students in a particular running of the course, and external events. Presumably on-line courses will as well. Are we comparing the best to the best? The median to the median? I can easily imagine that an on-line course of a few dozen people can be a vastly better experience than a huge lecture hall of 800 students, even if the latter is still called “face-to-face” instruction. Similarly, one person struggling to manage 150 on-line students is not likely to look good compared to an energetic classroom discussion section of 12 people. The meta-survey doesn’t make it easy to see clearly what the comparisons are in the individual surveys, and I suspect that they probably vary widely, ranging from the pretty reasonable to apples-vs-kumquats.
• How much of this is simply a function of novelty, both in faculty putting a lot of effort into a cool new thing, and students being impressed by the shiny new toy?

Etc., etc., etc.

I think the question isn’t, and can’t ever be, whether on-line is better than the classroom. In the end it’s about finding a way for a particular instructor and a particular student (or group of students) to work well together, and that’s going to depend on an awful lot of things and almost certainly change over time as teachers, students, and the world changes. On-line education and classroom education augmented with on-line components are clearly going to be an important (and probably increasing) part of that, but there will probably always be circumstances where a group of people are better served by some face time than by an on-line experience.

This study also looks at courses as isolated experiences. At a residential university like ours, the courses are crucial, but hardly the whole picture. Students learn a ton from simply living together, eating, doing laundry, volunteering, going to the movies, dating, being in clubs, and generally making all sorts of vital transitions as they move from 18 to 22 (give or take). Look at the important differences between someone’s who’s 16 and someone who’s 26, and an awful lot of that has nothing do to with courses. A good university experience can play a critical role both in and beyond the classroom, and a heck of a lot of that is tied up in physical presence.

It’s interesting to see in what ways various organizations do and don’t “get” these changes. Sadly, the U in general and the Morris campus in specific, for example, aren’t generally real on top of things when it comes to modern web technology. What’s particularly frustrating is the U’s unwillingness to work with and empower their users to help generate and manage content and value. Big Web 2.0 successes like Google and Amazon, Twitter and Flickr are all about leveraging user generated content. The U has its little fits in that direction (the U of M wiki, the UThink blogs), but they’re always peripheral to the life of the University, always in the back alleys instead of on the front page.

The ThoughtWorks discussion runs about an hour, and they divided it up into three chunks for podcasting. Unfortunately they haven’t released a new podcast since last July, so it appears that I’m late to the party and the party may be over. I look forward to listening to their other podcasts, and I certainly hope that they start making new episodes sometime soon.

If you’re interested you can find all their podcasts on the ThoughtWorks What We Say page through either RSS or iTunes.

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.

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.

In “Is language extinction a good thing?” Thomas Hawks reviews some recent writing on language extinction, focusing on differing attitudes to the question of how “bad” it really is when a language goes extinct.

Languages are clearly fluid, dynamic things, and statistically we’re going to lose some along the way. In this age of massive globalization and urbanization, however, we’re losing lots, and quickly. (This and the work of Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages was a feature topic in cool podcast from last fall.)

Hawks quotes several folks who argue that language loss is a key part of the “assimilation” process that converted my starving Swiss ancestors into successful dairy farmers in Wisconsin, and thence to high-level investment analysts, and therefore we shouldn’t moan about it so much. While I’ll certainly acknowledge that there is an inevitability to certain amounts of language loss, I’m definitely not as comfortable with it as some of the people Hawks quotes for two key reasons: (a) So much of it was (and is) done against people’s will, and (b) as with biological extinction, there is potentially valuable information and history that is lost.

On the first point, I think that the “why” of the thing is crucial, and doesn’t come up anywhere in Hawks’ piece. (In fairness, Hawks is really just quoting a bunch of people here, so he’s arguably the messenger.) If the kids just aren’t interested in learning grandma’s weird old language, then at some level that’s their choice and we can’t force them to change their minds. My Swiss-German-speaking grandfather married a woman of primarily British descent, (American) English was their shared language, and neither my mother or aunt heard or learned any significant Swiss-German at home. My grandparents had the luxury of choice, and those are the choices they made.

All too often, however, minority groups have been forced to set aside their cultural traditions, language included. Native Americans, for example, were frequently punished severely (including beatings) if they used their native languages while in the boarding schools (which they were often forced to attend). Similarly Cajuns were often whipped for speaking their French in schools in Louisiana. Sadly, I’m sure we could pull together an embarrassingly long list of such cases worldwide, and it seems to be that we should mourn and decry every such loss in the strongest possible terms. To the degree that any given language extinction was aided by such behavior, we dare not be flippant about it’s disappearance, for it speaks ill of us all.

As to the second point, I am continually amazed and frustrated by certain people’s willfully obstinant refusal to recognize the very real value of diversity. This isn’t just some liberal whining about “Can’t we all just get along?”; I’m not arguing that the world is somehow “just a better place” when we have diversity. Diversity is vital in generating innovation and adapting to change (issues of at least a little importance in the world we have made for ourselves). Diversity manifestly enriches our lives (consider, for example, the wonderful diversities in world cuisine and world music, and how much more cooler our days are because of them).

And every language that goes extinct is a great chunk of experience, calved off the glacier of human history to melt away forever. Languages embed both knowledge and world view, and the loss of a language is the potential loss of much of that knowledge. The fact that a group in South America has over 70 words for “wasp” shouldn’t be seen as an oddity, it should be seen as a demonstration of the enormous importance of that insect to those people, and a collective encoding of a great deal of information about wasps. If that language goes extinct, that knowledge of those wasps goes with it.

This doesn’t mean that we should “freeze” languages, or force people to preserve their languages whether they want to or not. But we should be sad when one vanishes, and we should support people who wish to maintain their language in the face of all the pressures to the contrary.

It’s probably old news for some of you that Lawrence Lessig is considering running for Congress, but I only just had time to watch Lessig’s video, and I definitely want to put in a plug for it, and for him, and for his possible campaign. Lessig has written some excellent books (Arne Kildegaard and I have used both Free culture and The future of ideas in our interdisciplinary network economics course), and is a wonderfully clear thinker with a powerful grasp of what’s necessary to effect change (rather than just make noise). (He’s been a key player in the Creative Commons movement, for example.)

I couldn’t claim to have done the sort of homework needed to make any concrete statements on his policies or particulars, but I can say that he’s a smart, effective guy who’s trying to address real and important problems. And that seems to be a pretty good pedigree for someone running for Congress. I quite like the message of the video as well, and think it would be quite fascinating to see him take on an extremely experienced and successful (his words) politician.

I’m also impressed by his willingness to actually stick his neck out, because I know that I find that hard. I’ve thought, for example, about running for school board in Morris, but I’ve never quite screwed up the courage to try it. It’s obviously very important, and I care a lot about (and frequently disagree with) the Board’s actions. I also know, however, that it would take a lot of time to do well, and probably be pretty frustrating (you’ll never make everyone happy, and there’s likely to be a shortage of easy answers). Thus nothing has actually happened (at least so far).

So well done to Lessig, and best wishes.