Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg have made some very cool and wonderfully subtle animated GIFs that may possibly be the most interesting use of that technology that I’ve ever run across. Sadly, a lot of what they’ve done with it isn’t that exciting (lots of clothes and hair moving gently in a breeze), but there are a few examples (such as the one above) that are real gems. If you’re interested you might check out “Far Better Than 3-D: Animated GIFs That Savor A Passing Moment”, a nice article on their work (which is I where I learned about it). You can also see more of their animations here and there.

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 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.

Today, 24 March, is Ada Lovelace Day, honoring the remarkable woman that is arguably the first computer programmer, working a full century before the construction of the first electronic machines that we would typically recognize as modern computers. In honor of her work and the crucial but typically underreported contributions of women in technology, over 1,700 are writing today “about a woman in technology whom I admire”. This is my contribution.

When Charles Darwin published his landmark Origin of species 150 years ago, he played a critical role in transforming biology from an exercise in bug collecting and guesswork to a science, with testable hypotheses that could give meaning to all the data people were collecting in the field, and tie down some of the more wild-eyed speculations. One of the huge holes (a gap Darwin freely acknowledged) was the how of inheritance. That inheritance existed was empirically obvious, but the mechanism by which it occurred was a complete mystery. In subsequent years, the work of Mendel and others shed crucial light on the properties of that mechanism, but still left open the key question of how exactly it happened.

This puzzle was solved in the 1950’s, with a central breakthrough being the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA. The fact that DNA is composed of two strands bound together, each carrying essentially the same information, meant that it can be split and copied, allowed the genetic code to be copied and transmitted from one cell to another in cell division, and ultimately from one individual to another in reproduction.

It is hard to overstate the impact of this achievement, which totally revolutionized the methods and approach of biology, ultimately leading to modern molecular biology, gene sequencing (including the Human Genome Project), reconstruction of phylogenetic trees, gene therapies, genetically modified organisms, and new medical diagnostic tools. All of this depends crucially on the discovery of the role and structure of DNA, firmly placing those discoveries among the most important of modern science.

But who then do we credit for this remarkable achievement? The names that readily come to mind are Watson and Crick, that dynamic duo at Cambridge immortalized in Watson’s The double helix (I recommend the Norton Critical Edition). If one looks to the Nobel Committee for guidance, a less well known name is added to those of Watson and Crick: Maurice Wilkins. Wilkins worked at King’s College London, where empirical data was collected that was vital to Watson and Crick’s ability to build the celebrated double helix model. The three were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material”.

Missing from this pantheon, however, is Rosalind Franklin: the person who painstakingly collected and analyzed that empirical data, including X-ray crystallography described by J. D. Bernal as “among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance every taken”. It was her methodical study of DNA (which was already widely believed to be crucial in the transmission of genetic information due to the Avery-MacLeod-McCarty experiment) that led to the key insights into DNA’s structure. She herself understood well in advance of Watson and Crick’s breakthrough that what she called the B Form of DNA almost certainly had a double helix structure, but chose to complete her analysis of the A Form (where there was still uncertainty regarding the structure) before engaging in what she considered the speculative business of building models before all the data was in.

Yet while she methodically collected and studied, the impatient boys up the road gained indirect access to her images and measurements, data that was crucial to their model building, apparently without Franklin every knowing how much they’d obtained, and how important it had been. Franklin worked under Wilkins at King’s but was barely on speaking terms with him, and there is no evidence that she knew that Wilkins had shared some of her key data with Watson, or that a UK Medical Research Council review process gave Watson indirect access to detailed summaries of her work. Her untimely death five years later due to cancer was almost a decade before Watson’s book first publicly discussed the back channels he’d used to access her data. It seems likely, then, that she never fully understood how important her own work was to their achievements, and Watson’s deprecating portrayal of Franklin both as a person and as a scientist in his book did little to improve her reputation.

In fact, however, Franklin was clearly a gifted and dedicated scientist who made numerous valuable contributions in her short life in areas such the structure of coals, the structure of viruses, and the structure of DNA. Her work on DNA, for example, included the design and application of new imaging equipment, the collection of numerous of images from different angles, and the laborious hand calculations needed to extract quantitative measurements from those images. At the time of Watson and Crick’s famous model building, Franklin was trying to finish up her work at King’s so she could start a new position at Birkbeck, a move already delayed several months. Would she have developed the double helix model on her own if she’d been better supported at King’s, less distracted by the move? We’ll never know. It is clear, however, that her data was vital to Watson and Crick’s success, providing the empirical foundation for their theoretical leap.

Why, then, was she not recognized by the Nobel committee in 1962, alongside Watson, Crick, and Wilkins? The short, simple answer is that she was dead by then, and there are no posthumous Nobel Prizes. Less clear, though, is whether she would have gotten the award if she’d still been alive. As well as prohibiting posthumous awards, the Nobel rules also limit the number of co-recipients to three, and Watson, Crick, and Wilkins formed a full set. It would be pretty hard to justify bumping either Watson or Crick from the podium, since their paper contained the key theoretical breakthrough and would likely have the most significant long-term impact. Wilkins, on the other hand, was a different matter. He’d done little to contribute to Franklin’s work, and his own work had been far less significant to Watson and Crick’s insight. He was, however, her boss and a senior scientist, while she was effectively just a scientific hired hand at King’s, serving a two year position and moving on. And, of course, she was a woman, and the Nobels have not been kind to women, especially in the sciences. We can obviously never know what would have happened had she still been alive in 1962, but it seems naive to feel any certainty that she would have been recognized in Stockholm if she had lived.

For people looking to learn more there’s lots on-line, with all the associated pros and cons. Brenda Maddox’s Rosalind Franklin: The dark lady of DNA is a very nice biography and certainly helped a great deal in writing this. The epilogue to that work makes a nice antidote to the not entirely convincing epilogue to Watson’s The double helix.

As computation becomes smaller and cheaper and more powerful, the big question remains “What are we going to do with all that?”. Cell phones and iPhones are one answer to that question, but in some sense a boring one because they’re mostly just littler laptops. Siftables, on the other hand, are representative of some of the genuinely new possibilities that these technologies enable, and are therefore much, much cooler :-).

To be honest, it’s not the best talk in the world, and probably not as compelling demo of the possibilities as one might hope for. That said, I can definitely see these being a blast, especially as people come up with cool new ways to use them.

Also, many apologies for the silence here. I’ve been much more active on Twitter than here; things have been super busy, and the 140 character world of Twitter has been much more amenable to my life and schedule than thoughtful blogging here. Lame, perhaps, but the truth nonetheless. Figuring out the balance is going to be a challenge, but that’s not today’s activity.

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.

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.

The short version is the the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), created in 1972 to provide non-partisan “user-friendly scientific advice to members of Congress”. After several successful decades (and providing a model for numerous other countries), it died a partisan death in 1995 at the hands of Gingrich The Newt and crowd. Mooney and others had hoped that the OTA would be reconstituted when the Dems regained control of Congress in 2006, but an attempt to include it in the legislative appropriations bill over the summer failed.

The problem? Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), a physicist and supporter of the return of the OTA found that many of his colleagues just didn’t see the point.

Many members of Congress don’t even see the scientific component to many policy issues. “I use voting as an example,” Holt explains. “Not a single one of my colleagues really understood the problem that was presented by unverifiable voting machines. Scientists or engineers would get that immediately. But Congress didn’t.”

I’ll understand if you need leave the computer for a bit to go rock back and forth in a dark corner and moan. Go ahead – I’ll be here waiting for you when you’re done.

I certainly wouldn’t expect any politician to understand all the complexities of the technical and scientific component of every issue that comes before them. That would be an insanely superhuman task, which is why politicians (should) have (good) advisors. From a statement Holt made before the House Science Committee:

None of us in Congress have time to analyze scientific and technological advances and make reasoned, logical determinations of their direction and impact on industry, nations, and education, but we vote on decisions about topics on a regular basis that include technical or scientific components. The connections to science and technology are not always obvious, especially to Members who avoid science and technology, which are most Members. We cannot do this alone.

Unfortunately, it appears that most Congress Critters don’t have “official” science advisors (if they have them on their staffs, it’s bloody difficult to find that info on-line), which is exactly the gap the OTA was intended to fill.

Given that almost every issue of substance these days has a non-trivial science/technology component, this is particularly disconcerting. From Mooney’s piece (his emphasis):

But in truth, science pops up again and again across a wide diversity of political issues, including many unexpected ones, which is why the entire Congress needs the service of an agency specially suited to analyze issues with that in mind, as well as to look forward to future science-related quandaries on the horizon.

Where do your legislators stand on the restoration of OTA funds? We’ve got to ask these questions if we want them to take the issues seriously.

Yesterday I posted a somewhat knee-jerk vote in favor of the idea of a science debate. Poking a little at the enormous lists of blog posts on this topic that A Blog Around The Clock has collected, one finds that while most people are definitely in favor, some people aren’t entirely convinced. The concern typically seems to be some variant/subset of “It’ll be too technical, the general public doesn’t care/understand, the candidates will get it all wrong, and there’s no way to correct that sort of thing in a live debate”.

These are real concerns. The NPR sponsored debate early in the year (involving non-politician panelists) on the question “Global warming is not a crisis” made me want to throw things. There should be a special punishment for dissembling people like Crichton, but unfortunately the scientists arguing that there is a crisis were largely ineffective in their responses. One was condescending to the audience and their ability to understand (and got rightly booed for his troubles), and they all allowed red herrings to distract the discussion, creating a “teach the debate” atmosphere depressingly similar to the whole creationist nonsense.

In short, there’s a good chance that the whole thing could go pear shaped if not handled well.

But that’s no reason not to do it.

Just because these issues are complex doesn’t somehow make them less important or worthy of public discussion. Their importance, however, does put a greater burden on everyone (scientists and politicians included) to step up their game and find ways to make sense of these issues in a public forum. I would argue, for example, that it’s part of the job of politicians to help the public understand complex issues, and if they’re not doing that we damn well ought to complain. I’m near the end of Goodwin’s wonderful A team of rivals about Lincoln and his cabinet, and it’s clear that one of his great gifts was helping both individuals and the general public understand the truly monumental issues that faced the U.S. at that time. He didn’t do this by talking down or over simplifying or dissembling. He did it through honesty, careful thought, and a keen intelligence. And he was largely successful.

I suspect that if we had a science debate there would be much that would be depressing and broken about it (especially in it’s inaugural incarnation). But that’s where the press (and the blogosphere) comes to play, taking it all apart, pointing out the misconceptions and unsupportable nonsense. The debate starts a vital conversation, says science and technology are crucial in our affairs (duh), and encourages us all to continue the debate long after the TVs are turned off. A debate like this isn’t going to convert creationists into evolutionary biologists, or hard core believers in climate change into denialists; it’s unlikely to affect the poles in any significant way. What it can do, however, is signal to the middle that these are important, complex ideas, and that asking questions and paying attention might be a good idea. That it matters where and how your food and energy are produced, how you move yourself around your world, and what medicines really make sense for a cold or earache.

So I’m full square in favor. Even if it isn’t gonna be perfect, it really needs to be done. Now.