From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Jul 16 00:38:04 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:18 2006 Subject: Stain Removal Guide Message-ID: Subject: Stain Removal Guide Dear Colleagues - From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Jul 17 18:21:08 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:18 2006 Subject: [EAS-I]Ill-Informed Citizenry Message-ID: Mail*Link? SMTP Ill-Informed Citizenry Dear Colleagues - Today's Gary Chapman column reminds us that the information age "diet" is producing "fast-food junkies" -- fat but not healthy. What some have called "McDonaldization" can also affect our curricula under the ever greater pressure to accommodate additional technical facets. Courses become fat, with little conceptual sinew. Although one of my areas of teaching, circuit design, offers what for many of my readers will be a very specialized example, as much as possible I try to relate circuit specifics to important general design principles, such as symmetry, equilibrium and superposition. Late in the semester I review earlier material with renewed emphasis on the role of these principles. Practicing thinking in those terms may be the most durable aspect of the course for many students. --Peter Kindlmann ------------------------------------------ Monday, July 17, 2000 Well-Informed Citizens Increasingly Rare in Information Age By Gary Chapman Copyright 2000, The Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved Last month, the National Science Foundation released its report "Science and Engineering Indicators 2000" (http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/seind00/), which revealed some data about Americans' understanding of the world that are strikingly at odds with the ubiquitous hype about our "Age of Information." "Most Americans," the report says, "know a little, but not a lot, about science and technology." Given some of the findings, even that may be generous. While more than 70% of the people the NSF surveyed knew that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, and that humans and dinosaurs did not coexist, only 16% could define the Internet and only 13% could accurately describe a molecule. At least those numbers are going up, the report's authors noted diplomatically -- five years ago, only 11% could define the Internet and only 9% could describe a molecule. "Science literacy in the United States [and in other countries] is fairly low," says the report with typically measured understatement. Only about a fifth of the Americans surveyed could describe what it means to study something scientifically. In a classification of the level of interest in science and technology among Americans, the NSF study used a category labeled "the attentive public," meaning people who "express a high level of interest in a particular issue, feel well-informed about that issue, and read a newspaper on a daily basis, read a weekly or monthly news magazine, or read a magazine relevant to the issue." A mere 10% of Americans fit this description, according to the report. About 40% of the survey population reported being very interested in science and technology, but only 17% thought they were personally well-informed. About 30% thought they were poorly informed. These discouraging data fit with other patterns in Americans' knowledge about things, like current events. In 1997, researchers at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press in Washington said, "An analysis of public attentiveness to more than 500 news stories over the last 10 years confirms that the American public pays relatively little attention to many of the serious news stories of the day." Last month, the Pew Research Center reported that 84% of people surveyed "are not paying a lot of attention to the Microsoft breakup," perhaps the most important antitrust case of the last 80 years. Over 70% were unaware that there is a federal budget surplus, and 56% had "no idea who Alan Greenspan is." (Greenspan is chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.) Ten years ago, Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Center, said, "The ultimate irony of [our] findings is that the Information Age [has] spawned such an uninformed and uninvolved population." There doesn't appear to be sufficient reason to change this assessment even five years into the boom of the Internet. Such surveys of American knowledge seem to paint a picture of us that is reflected in many of our more popular political leaders: optimistic, generally untroubled by the world's woes, but manifestly ill-informed. We have tended to accept this because of our faith in native pragmatism and common sense. But with the world getting increasingly complex, technologized and competitive, such faith may verge on the delusional. "After a steady series of breakthroughs in information technology," wrote David Shenk in his 1997 book "Data Smog," "we are left with a citizenry that is certainly no more interested or capable of supporting a healthy representative democracy than it was 50 years ago, and may well be less capable." Improving education is the most common knee-jerk plan of action for perceived deficits in American understanding and knowledge, especially in math and science. No doubt there is vast room for improvement in U.S. education. But as political philosopher Benjamin Barber of Rutgers University has pointed out, young people tend to learn what society teaches them to value. The simple truth is that deep study of science, math, history, literature, art or familiarity with current events cannot compete with celebrity gossip and scandals, large calamities, TV and video games, voyeurism, consumerism, instant fortunes, advertising and popular but ephemeral fascinations. University educators, like me, are constantly astonished at the depth and breadth of students' knowledge about popular culture and consumer products and by the weakness of their grasp on valuable and vital subjects. They are learning, but not what we usually think of as "learning." Too many are learning answers to the questions on the runaway hit TV quiz show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," instead of the answers to life's most important questions. Studies have shown that U.S. parents have much lower expectations of their children and much higher opinions of their children's educational achievements than parents in other countries. It's very common for American parents to mistake their child's deep knowledge of some idiosyncratic fixation for general educational competence. This is perhaps the true ultimate irony of the Information Age: As high-tech leaders persistently, almost desperately, call for more educated workers, the "info-tainment" business that is rapidly absorbing the Internet and all other media makes well-informed citizens even more rare and unusual. The constant "dumbing-down" and vulgarization of the culture industry, driven by mass marketing and profits, is clearly at odds with educational excellence, but few high-tech leaders can bring themselves to admit their role in this depressing decline. Until we sever education from beeps, clicks, dancing cartoons, games, celebrities, ads, trivia and marketing hype, the idea of living in an Age of Information will continue to be something of a cruel joke. Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu. ------------------------------------------ To subscribe to a listserv that forwards copies of Gary Chapman's published articles, including his column "Digital Nation" in The Los Angeles Times, send mail to: listproc@lists.cc.utexas.edu Leave the subject line blank. In the first line of the message, put: Subscribe Chapman [First name] [Last name] Leave out the brackets, just put your name after Chapman. Send this message. You'll get a confirmation message back confirming your subscription. This message will contain some boilerplate text, generated by the listserv software, about passwords, which you should IGNORE. 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Questions should be directed to Gary Chapman at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu. ==================================================================== From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jul 19 21:40:38 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:18 2006 Subject: [EAS-I].sucks Message-ID: Subject: .sucks It's a fun idea, but I doubt it'll go through. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------ (from Edupage, 19 July 2000) NADER PROPOSES NEW DOMAIN NAMES FOR PROTESTERS Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader--in conjunction with two activist groups, Consumer Project on Technology and Essential Information--is asking ICANN for authorization to construct 10 top-level domain names, such as .sucks, .complaints, and .isnotfair, in order to ensure the rights of free speech to unhappy consumers. The move would also prevent larger companies like Bell Atlantic from registering domain names such as BellAtlanticsucks.com in order to dissuade or avoid protesters. Barring organizations that own a particular domain name from utilizing the .sucks version of that domain name will ensure that critics of that organization will have an opportunity to share their opinions. The Dot Sucks Foundation would receive all the money raised by selling access to these domain names, and this money would be used to assist in the funding of online free-speech arguments. Other Nader-proposed top-level domains include .union and .customers, the latter of which would be utilized "to create democratically managed membership organizations of the customers of particular companies," says Nader. (Christian Science Monitor Online, 17 July 2000) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jul 20 19:13:47 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:18 2006 Subject: [EAS-I]FWD>Physics News Update #49 Message-ID: Mail*Link? SMTP FWD>Physics News Update #495 Dear Colleagues - I'm forwarding this issue of this weekly newsletter from the AIP, because it is a worthwhile publication to be aware of, and because both items were in the popular news recently, where they always acquire strong science fiction overtones. No, space travel at speeds faster than light is not imminent. All best, --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 7/20/00 12:54 PM From: AIP listserver PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 495 July 20, 2000 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein DIRECT EVIDENCE FOR TAU NEUTRINOS will be reported tomorrow in a seminar at Fermilab. While the existence of neutrinos associated with the tau lepton was not in doubt, actually observing the particle interact had not occurred until now. This rounds out the program of experimental sightings of the truly fundamental building blocks prescribed by the standard model of particle physics. This official alphabet consists of six quarks known as up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom and six leptons electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, and tau neutrino. All matter, according to the theory, should be made up from these most basic of constituents. Other particles, such as the anti-matter counterparts of the quarks and leptons, the force-carrying bosons (e.g., photons, gluons, etc.), and the Higgs boson (which confers mass upon some of the other particles) also appear in the theory. (Still other candidates, such as the "supersymmetric" particles, are not part of, but are expected to be compatible with, the standard model.) The evidence for the tau neutrino is slim but impressive: five scattering events are being exhibited at the seminar by Fermilab physicist Byron Lundgren, leader of Experiment 872, the Direct Observation of Nu Tau (or DONUT) collaboration (http://fn872.fnal.gov/). Their experiment proceeds in the following manner. Fermilab's 800-GeV proton beam (the highest beam energy in the world) was steered onto a tungsten target, where some of the prodigious incoming energy is turned into new particles. Some of these quickly decay into taus and tau neutrinos. Next comes an obstacle course of magnets (meant to deflect charged particles away) and shielding material (meant to absorb most of the other particles except for rarely interacting neutrinos). Beyond this lies a sequence of emulsion targets in which the neutrinos can interact, leaving a characteristic signature. Evidence for a tau neutrino in the emulsion is the creation of a tau lepton, which itself quickly decays (after traveling about 1 mm) into other particles. The E872 physicists estimate that about 10^14 tau neutrinos entered the emulsion, of which perhaps 100 interacted therein. It is a carefully analyzed handful of such events that is now being presented to the public in evidence. The tau neutrino is the third neutrino type to be detected. The detection of the electron neutrino by Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines garnered Reines the 1995 Nobel Prize for physics (Cowan had died some years before). For discovering the muon neutrino, Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Jack Steinberger won the Nobel Prize in 1988. SUPERLUMINAL LIGHT PROPAGATION. Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton have performed an experiment in which the group velocity of a light pulse traveling through a special medium appears to be faster than c, the speed of light in a vacuum, without, however, violating the principle of causality or the theory of relativity. Such experiments have been performed before and have exploited the fact that a finite pulse of light is necessarily the sum of an ensemble of waves at different frequencies. One therefore speaks of a "phase velocity" for component waves and the "group velocity" for the pulse as a whole. When such an ensemble enters a medium with a frequency-dependent index of refraction, interesting things start to happen. In a Harvard experiment last year, for example, the component light waves of a pulse passing through a Bose-Einstein condensate were affected in such a way as to yield a group velocity of only 17 m/sec (Hau et al., Nature, 18 February 1999). Working in the other direction, manipulating the component waves in order to achieve a higher group velocity, is more difficult to establish since it usually occurs when the index of refraction is varying rapidly in a frequency range where the light is being absorbed by the medium; hence the light pulse can be severely distorted or attenuated, making it difficult to detect superluminal effects. In the NEC experiment, by contrast, the medium in question, a cell filled with a gas of cesium atoms, does not absorb light at the crucial frequencies but actually enhances the light through a type of laser action; that is, the cesium atoms are promoted into an excited state and contribute to the light pulse when it travels through. Consequently the pulse shape is largely preserved even as the component waves interfere (through a process called anomalous dispersion) in such a way as to shift the pulse forward in time by a tiny amount, about 1.7% of the original pulse width, compared to the situation in which the cell is not present. According to the NEC researchers, "the peak of the pulse appears to leave the cell before entering it." This superluminal behavior does not contradict the principles of Einstein's relativity theory, but it might well encourage further discussion among scientists about how exactly to specify the onset of light signals. (Wang et al., Nature, 20 July 2000.) ------------------ RFC822 Header Follows ------------------ Received: by design.eng.yale.edu with SMTP;20 Jul 2000 12:47:58 -0400 Received: (from root@localhost) by pinet.aip.org (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id IAA07244 for physnews-mailing; Thu, 20 Jul 2000 08:44:23 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 20 Jul 2000 08:44:23 -0400 (EDT) From: AIP listserver Message-Id: <200007201244.IAA07244@pinet.aip.org> To: physnews-mailing@aip.org Subject: update.495 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jul 21 21:38:16 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:18 2006 Subject: [EAS]Unique Mat Web Site(s) Message-ID: Subject: Unique Mat Web Site(s) A unique example of effective hyperlink explication. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Metamath Proof Explorer http://www1.shore.net/~ndm/java/mmexplorer1/mmset.html Theoretical mathematicians, behold the wondrous Metamath Proof Explorer! This site consists of interconnected Webpages containing over 3,000 completely worked out proofs in logic and set theory. "Each proof is pieced together with razor-sharp precision using simple rules, allowing almost anyone with a technical bent to follow it without difficulty. With point-and-click links, every step can be drilled down deeper and deeper into the labyrinth until axioms will ultimately be found at the bottom. Armchair mathematicians can spend literally days exploring the complex tangle of logic leading, say, from 2 + 2 = 4 back to the axioms of set theory," says the site's coordinator, MIT alumnus Norman Megill. The site makes available basic user instructions, lists of axioms, starting point suggestions, a complete list of theorems (520K), and even a game using the Proof Explorer. This site is ideal as a diversion for mathematicians or for use in advanced, university-level mathematics classes. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jul 26 01:33:55 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:18 2006 Subject: [EAS]Collegiality & New Faculty Message-ID: Mail*Link? SMTP Collegiality & New Faculty Dear Colleagues - Encouragement on a topic sometimes given inadequate attention. --PJK ============================================================================ TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" http://sll.stanford.edu/projects/tomprof/newtomprof/index.shtml Over 10,000 subscribers in 86 countries ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Produced by the Stanford University Learning Laboratory (SLL) http://sll.stanford.edu/ in a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ and The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Folks: The excerpt below is from: The Department Chair's Role in Developing New Faculty Into Teachers and Scholars, by Estela Mara Bensimon, Kelly Ward, Karla Sanders, Anker Publishing Company, Inc. Bolton, MA (pp. 123-25). In it, Professor Anna Neumann of Michigan State University, offers advice to department chairs on helping newcomers develop a greater sense of colleagueship, a term with a different meaning than collegiality. Copyright 2000 by Anker Publishing Company, Inc. Reprinted with permission. Regards, Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Living and Studying Together ------------ 1,060 words -------------- HELPING To FOSTER COLLEGIALITY FOR NEWCOMERS A Letter from Professor Anna Neumann Collegiality is a much misunderstood word, and the expectations it raises, while admirable, can be unrealistic. Collegiality, in its conventional use, refers to the ideals of faculty life-professors collectively and harmoniously engaged in the pursuit of knowledge, the crafting of curriculum, and the planning of teaching programs. While the inhabitants of this idealized world don't always agree, they rely on reasoned discussion with peers and sage advice from "elders" to resolve the differences of opinion that emerge. Consensus rules in this collegial world. I would argue that wishes for collegiality are, for the most part, just wishes, and that collegiality, while remaining an important ideal in academe is just that. In real life, professors are more likely to strive for collegiality than to achieve it. While collaboration exists, so does strife, an aspect of faculty life that the word "collegiality" does not pick up very well. To describe faculty relations as faculty members experience them-helpful, hurtful, and inconsequential-I prefer the word colleagueship because it brings forth both positive and negative aspects of faculty relations. Collegiality focuses mostly on the positive that we wish for. But if we take the word colleagueship as our point of departure, what do we see? And what are the implications of what we see for department chairs working with pre-tenure faculty? Let me reiterate: Colleagueship, as I'm using it, refers to the range of relationships that may exist among professors-from friendship to contentiousness, from close and regular engagement to alienation, and everything in between. If you're a department chair who would like to enhance new faculty members' experiences of colleagueship, what might you do? Let me begin with some perspectives. First, when junior faculty enter an institution and department for the first time, they are entering a web of well-established (though sometimes shifting) relationships, some positive, some negative, others neutral. These new faculty are, in essence, strangers-formally in the door of the department, yet outside the ebb and flow of its internal, colleague-based relationships. This colleagueship, whatever its quality, is, for the most part, not reflected in the university's bureaucratic structure, including its departments. For example, that a group of people belong to a particular department does not mean they agree, understand, support, or even know each other or each others work. A new faculty member, especially one just out of graduate school, may be unaccustomed to-even unaware of-the ambiguity and discord of departmental life. Second, a new faculty member is likely to be engaged in the crafting of her or his scholarly agenda, including the program of work that will inform her/his research and reaching for years to come. This person is probably learning in the best sense of the word. The relationships that she or he forms in the new department are likely to affect that learning, and importantly, what she or he becomes as a scholar and teacher. Thus while the new professor's scholarly values and interests arc central to her/his work, the colleagueship that this person finds herself or himself in can be very formative. For these reasons, the colleague-based relationships that a new faculty member makes-or stumbles into-can be crucial. How might department chairs help? Here are some thoughts derived from my own writing on this subject. 1. Introductions and announcements that a new colleague has arrived are never enough. Help a new faculty member make substantive connections to campus-based colleagues who are working in areas related to the newcomer's expertise and/or interests. This is something you, as chair, should consider doing continuously for the newcomer during her/his early years on campus. For one thing, the new faculty member's interests may just be emerging, or it may take you a while to understand those interests in relation to the work that others on campus do. Inform established colleagues about the newcomer's interests in ways that will help them see the connections to their own work. Such links are not always immediately obvious. 2. Provide opportunities for junior faculty members to get to know each other as colleagues and friends. While competitiveness does sometimes grow among untenured peers, this need not be the case. The friendship that grows among junior faculty can grow into good colleagueship in the middle and senior years of their careers. Actively discourage competitiveness. One way to do this is to evaluate peers only in reference to their own accomplishments and not in comparison to each other. Another suggestion is to emphasize publicly the unique identities of junior faculty-for example, as reflected in their work-as opposed to speaking of them in ways that make them appear interchangeable. This is particularly important when the peers themselves are different from the majority of their senior colleagues-for example, two women or two ethnic minorities in a traditionally all-male department. While emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals, you might simultaneously applaud their efforts to work together in reaching, research, curriculum development, or other projects. 3. Introduce new faculty to departmental colleagues, but don't stop here. Help them get to know colleagues with related interests in other departments as well. 4. While junior faculty are often advised to avoid excessive committee commitments, some committee service that brings new professors into contact with other faculty (who might become future collaborators) can be a good thing. Help the new faculty member choose committee service that makes sense. But consider the other side of the coin as well: Discourage the newcomer's service on committees that are excessively politically entangled or that may draw the newcomer (unknowingly) into longstanding difficulties. However, alerting the newcomer about those difficulties is not a bad idea. Some department chairs may believe they are shielding newcomers by not talking to them about the politics of the new setting. Chances are that if a newcomer doesn't hear about departmental and institutional troubles (including feuds and alliances) from a senior colleague, she or he will learn about them the hard way-by falling into them. 5. Be aware that a new faculty member is stepping into a stream of institutional conversation-institutional meaning-that has been in progress for a long time. Be prepared to help the newcomer decipher words and deeds that make little or no sense to her or him. I wish you, and those to whom your handbook is addressed, my best as you-and they-continue in efforts to illuminate and humanize the experiences of new faculty. Sincerely, Anna Neumann Associate Professor Michigan State University ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to Tomorrows-Professor Listserver by sending the following e-mail message to: subscribe tomorrows-professor To UNSUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor send the following e-mail message to: unsubscribe tomorrows-professor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**== This message was posted through the Stanford campus mailing list server. If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message body of "unsubscribe tomorrows-professor" to majordomo@lists.stanford.edu From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Jul 29 19:51:11 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Web Size & Legacy Message-ID: Subject: Web Size & Legacy Dear Colleagues - The two items below from EDUPAGE remind us of the too-seldom considered archiving of digital information, now that so much intellectual value is generated in purely electronic form. The Library of Congress is already so overloaded with the volume of print items that quite some time ago they had to stop shelving new arrivals by subject matter. They now just give each item an accession number that links to a computer catalog entry. The books etc. are just 'shovelled' onto shelves. So no more proximity browsing there the way you can still do in our Yale libraries. Enjoy that while you can. And the fact that Web resources are much vaster than what search engines index should not be news to readers of these mailings, having recently been commented on in http://www.yale.edu/engineering/eng-info/msg00724.html --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from Edupage, 28 July 2000) SAVING THE NATION'S DIGITAL LEGACY The National Academy of Sciences released a report yesterday severely criticizing how the Library of Congress has conducted the archiving of electronic material. The report says the library has neither the digital storage capacity nor the technical expertise necessary to preserve the immense amount of copyrighted material based on the Internet and other electronic sources. Furthermore, the library is so dependent on bureaucratic measures that it cannot react quickly enough to preserve Web sites and other such media that may not exist for long. For example, there is no record of Web sites that went offline before 1996. The library has acknowledged its shortcomings, but its head librarian cautions that the library is likely to be short on funding for its electronic archives. Still, the head librarian believes that the library will be able to maintain these archives through partnerships with other libraries and institutions as well as advances in the library's own archiving systems. The Library of Congress, like all major research libraries, must also determine what part of the wealth of electronic content is worthy of saving. (New York Times, 27 July 2000) STUDY FINDS WEB BIGGER THAN WE THINK The Web is expanding so rapidly that today's search engines only cover a fraction of the existing pages, but some companies are developing new search software that will tap the volumes of information that are now part of the so-called "invisible Web." BrightPlanet, a company that offers sophisticated search software called LexiBot, on Wednesday released a study estimating that the Web is 500 times larger than the segment covered by standard search engines such as Yahoo! and AltaVista. Although the Web now holds about 550 billion documents, search engines index a combined total of 1 billion pages, BrightPlanet says. One reason that search engines have not kept up with the number of pages on the Web is that data is increasingly stored in large databases maintained by government agencies, universities, and companies. The dynamic information housed in databases is difficult for traditional search engines to access, because the search software is designed to locate static pages. However, BrightPlanet created its LexiBot to find information in databases, as well as data that is covered by traditional search engines. LexiBot targets advanced users in the academic and scientific communities. (CNet, 26 July 2000) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Aug 2 03:15:06 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]The Future of Work? Message-ID: Subject: The Future of Work? Dear Colleagues - Glimpses, one of them a Gary Chapman column, of the modern high-tech workplace. --Peter Kindlmann "You've got be careful if you know where you are going, because you might not get there." (Yogi Berra) "Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." (E.F. Schumacher) ================================================================= (from INNOVATION, 24 July 2000) EMPLOYEE LOYALTY? WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME? Back in the days when a person could reasonably expect to spend his entire working life with one employer, loyalty was almost a given. But companies today are paying the price for the mass layoffs and cutbacks of a few years ago. The realization that no company was ever going to love them back sunk in, and employees began to turn the tables, jumping ship for even a slightly better offer. But even in a climate of constant movement, companies need employees to be loyal -- at least for the time they're there. "The only real advantage today is a competent, committed workforce," says Jim Harris, author of "Getting Employees to Fall in Love with your Company." Harris says the key to loyalty is recognizing what the company values, and rewarding employees for upholding those values. When rewards are aligned with the company's core culture, it not only increases retention, but also boosts profits. Besides monetary rewards, employers need to respect employees' outside lives by offering options like flextime, telecommuting and onsite daycare. Perhaps most important, companies need to communicate. Employees deprived of the chance to give and receive feedback are bound to feel disconnected, increasing the likelihood that they'll leave at the first good opportunity. (Employment Review Aug 2000) http://www.employmentreview.com/2000-08/features/CNfeat04.asp ================================================================= (from INNOVATION, 31 July 2000) REWARDING LOYALTY WITH LOWER PAY "When the job market is tight, life's just not fair," says one employer, explaining the growing practice of recruiting new employees at substantially higher salaries than those earned by veteran employees. "It's this strange situation where loyalty isn't rewarded, where employees who stay with their companies get paid less than those who jump ship at the earliest opportunity," says one recruiter. Clearly, this isn't the way to build morale. In some cases, disgusted employees may jump ship themselves when they feel undervalued. Worse, they may stay -- but grudgingly. Productivity suffers, resentment grows, and they may be reluctant to help the new recruits learn the ropes. Moreover, veteran employees aren't the only ones in a bind. Highly paid recruits are often under tremendous pressure to perform dazzling feats of brilliance right out of the gate -- an expectation that almost nobody could live up to. As one compensation consultant explains, "Companies expect these people to come in not just running, but absolutely flying, and that's not always possible to do." This, in turn, drives many frustrated recruits out the door, worsening an already difficult staffing scenario. (The Wall Street Journal 25 July 2000) http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB964483095850868736.htm ================================================================= Monday, July 31, 2000 DIGITAL NATION Cool Counts in Luring Hot Techies By Gary Chapman Copyright 2000, The Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved The No. 1 problem for high-tech firms these days is the shortage of skilled workers, especially those with the talent to make an entire company succeed. And the "talent wars" -- firms raiding one another for top people -- are going to get even worse. What's also interesting is how the shortage is influencing the character of communities and, in turn, urban politics. Richard Florida, a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, produced a fascinating report in January titled "Competing in the Age of Talent: Environment, Amenities and the New Economy" (http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~florida/talent.pdf). Florida's yearlong study looked at how cities and regions compete for technical talent in the new economy, and the role that environmental and "quality-of-life" factors play in this competition. "Knowledge workers," says the report, "essentially balance economic opportunity and lifestyle in selecting a place to live and work. Thus, lifestyle factors are as important as traditional economic factors such as jobs and career opportunity in attracting knowledge workers in high-technology fields." Five years ago, some pundits claimed that the flexibility of the new economy would spell trouble for cities. George Gilder, for example, proclaimed that the Internet would lead to the "death of the city." What he didn't anticipate is that young people tend to like being around other young people. The result is that hip, young technology companies have revitalized many downtown neighborhoods, as in Manhattan's Silicon Alley, Seattle's Pioneer Square, San Francisco's China Basin, Santa Monica's downtown area and Austin, Texas' Congress Avenue. Florida says that because young workers can essentially choose to work nearly anywhere, they gravitate to places that offer a fairly distinct mix of environmental quality, social life and "amenities," including youth culture, sports, night life, music and "coolness" -- in short, an urban identity that everyone knows exists but that is difficult to describe completely. "Due to the long hours, fast pace and tight deadlines associated with work in high-technology industries, knowledge workers require amenities that blend seamlessly with work and can be accessed on demand," Florida wrote. Austin Mayor Kirk Watson -- a young politician to watch with a record-breaking 82% of the vote in the city's last election -- is one of the few political leaders who seems to sense this transformation. Watson calls it "convergence." He means that, just as city governments are trying to figure out how to reconcile economic growth with environmental quality and avoid sprawl, the dynamics of the labor market in high tech are helping point to a solution. Young high-tech workers are not attracted to sprawling, remote and sterile suburban developments, or even to "edge city" clusters of campus-like high-tech companies. They want to be where the action is and, consequently, companies want to be there too. That provides growing support for so-called "smart growth" strategies, more dense and diverse communities, more redevelopment of under-used real estate and more attention to environmental quality in protected natural landscapes. This is happening in Los Angeles too, although it is only just emerging. Jason McCabe Calacanis, editor of Digital Coast magazine, says Los Angeles is attracting young workers who want to put the Internet to use, the creative people who are more interested in content than in chips. "They don't care what browser people are using. They don't care how fast your computer is," Calacanis said. "Everyone thought that technology would be the driver of the new economy, but it turns out it's content, it's art. That's why in L.A., you see energy and entrepreneurship." He says the "epicenter of the Internet in Los Angeles" is the Coffee Bean cafe on 4th Street in Santa Monica. Ross C. DeVol, a senior researcher at the Milken Institute, agrees with Calacanis. "In the recent past, we've had earthquakes, riots, fires, recession, etc.," he says. "Sometimes Los Angeles can be its own worst enemy. But last year, we had the first positive domestic migration to Los Angeles in any year since 1989. That's a good sign for L.A. Young people come here to work with cool technologies, like computer games, movies, animation, special effects and Web design." What this all means for political leaders eager to promote economic growth is that they now have to pay attention to the idea of a "place," a concept far beyond the traditional blend of tax rates, labor costs and business infrastructure. The hot technology companies don't have time for negotiations over tax abatements and new highways. They just want to be where the workers are. The workers want to be where the fun is. And political leaders now need to figure out how to get all those ingredients to work together. This is all good news for those few places that have the right mix of a high-quality environment, plentiful outdoor activities, a robust urban youth culture and what Florida calls a "thick labor market" of talented young technical workers -- in other words, lots of them with lots of churn, job-hopping and innovation. Other places are unfortunately out of luck. There's a steady "brain drain" going on across the U.S. as communities that are less than "cool" lose their best and brightest and thus slowly sink into economic stagnation or decline. It's also tough if you're not a good fit with a hothouse culture of young, type-A personalities who do everything at top intensity. The emerging culture of the new economy is hard on older workers, workers with families and on women and ethnic minorities who haven't absorbed the tastes and energy levels of young, affluent techies, entrepreneurs and new-media hipsters. As with most other developments brought on by technology, these social changes tied to the new economy are Janus-faced -- encouraging and discouraging, appealing and alienating, creating new winners and new losers all the time. Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu. ------------------------------------------ To subscribe to a listserv that forwards copies of Gary Chapman's published articles, including his column "Digital Nation" in The Los Angeles Times, send mail to: listproc@lists.cc.utexas.edu Leave the subject line blank. In the first line of the message, put: Subscribe Chapman [First name] [Last name] Leave out the brackets, just put your name after Chapman. Send this message. You'll get a confirmation message back confirming your subscription. This message will contain some boilerplate text, generated by the listserv software, about passwords, which you should IGNORE. Passwords will not be used or required for this listserv. Mail volume on this listserv is low; expect to get something two or three times a month. 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Questions should be directed to Gary Chapman at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu. -------------------------------------------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Aug 2 20:37:49 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]West Nile Virus Message-ID: Subject: West Nile Virus from The Scout Report for Science & Engineering August 2, 2000 Volume 3, Number 24 http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sci-eng/current/index.html The West Nile Virus in North America: General Information, Maps, FAQs Testing and Control 1. West Nile Virus -- Centers for Disease Control (CDC) [PowerPoint] http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/westnile/index.htm 2. "The U.S. Centers for Disease Control Announces that Birds Collected in NYC Test Positive for West Nile-Like Virus," September 1999 -- NYC Department of Health http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/doh/html/public/press99/pr66-924.html 3. West Nile Virus Map http://www.nationalatlas.gov/virusmap.html 4. Arboviral Encephalitides -- CDC [.pdf] http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/arbor/arboinfo.htm 5. "Mosquito Borne Viruses of New Jersey" -- NJ Department of Health http://www.state.nj.us/health/cd/westnile/arbrochure.pdf 6. Press Release from NJ Department of Health http://www.state.nj.us/health/news/p00721a.htm 7. The New York City Department of Health West Nile Virus Information http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/doh/html/wnv/wnvhome.html 8. Mosquito Control and West Nile Virus Information -- New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection http://www.state.nj.us/dep/mosquito/ 9. Pesticides and Mosquito Control -- EPA [.pdf] http://www.epa.gov/pesticides/factsheets/skeeters.htm 10. American Mosquito Control Association http://www.mosquito.org/mosquito.html 11. "Comprehensive Arthropod-borne Disease Surveillance and Control Plan 2000" -- NYC Department of Health http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/doh/html/wnv/wnvplan.html 12. Two from the Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA): a. "Toxicology and Environmental Fate of Synthetic Pyrethroids" http://www.igc.org/panna/resources/_pestis/PESTIS.1996.14.html b. "Cyfluthrin Fact Sheet" http://www.igc.org/panna/resources/_pestis/PESTIS.burst.676.html The West Nile Virus, a mosquito-borne virus that causes encephalitis in vertebrates, was only found in the Eastern Hemisphere until 1999, when it was isolated in the northeastern United States. Seven deaths and several cases of severe illness caused by the virus have raised concern for public safety in the region. Recently, a special West Nile virus surveillance program has been funded in seventeen states and two cities; data are being collected on a weekly basis. This week's In the News follows the developments in West Nile Virus detection and control in the United States. The first resource (1), provided by the Centers for Disease Control's (CDC's) Division of Vector-Borne Infectious diseases, is the most comprehensive West Nile Virus information site available so far. The CDC's West Nile Virus site features a good FAQ page, a color map of the distribution of encephalitis-causing viruses (including West Nile) around the world, and a downloadable teaching slide set (MS PowerPoint). The site is divided into sections dealing with entomology, virology, and vertebrate ecology; publication lists and links are also available. The second resource, (2) is the original press release from the City of New York announcing the earliest detection of the virus in the Western Hemisphere (it was found in bird specimens from the Bronx Zoo). Number (3) is a site from the US Geological Survey featuring maps of the distribution of West Nile Virus. This site was reviewed in full in the July 19, 2000 _Scout Report for Science and Engineering_. The Arboviral Encephalitides site (4) from the CDC concentrates on arthropod-borne viruses ("arboviral"), providing detailed information on the life cycles of arthropods and the viruses involved. Highlights include a flow chart of the transmission and maintenance of arboviruses (.pdf), fact sheets on LaCrosse, Eastern Equine, St. Louis, and Western Encephalitises, and a computer generated model of the surface of an alphavirus. The next few sites, (5), (6), (7), and (8) come from state and federal agencies dealing with the spread of the West Nile Virus in New York and New Jersey. An important concern raised by the West Nile Virus outbreak is the effects on human health of pesticide spraying, used to combat the mosquito-borne virus. Sites (9), (10), (11), and (12) discuss some of the facts of pesticide spraying (note that #10 is sponsored by an association of pesticide producers). Both the EPA and the CDC supply basic information about synthetic Pyrethroids that are commonly-used against mosquitoes. More detailed information about Pyrethroids can be found on these two pages from PANNA (note that this site features only pesticide-alternative journals): (12a) and (12b). ------------------------------- Copyright Internet Scout Project, 1994-2000. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/ ------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Aug 4 17:38:54 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]What's New for Aug 04, 2000 Message-ID: Reply to: What's New for Aug 04, 2000 A nice issue, worth sending to you in its entirety. [In case you're too young for that "Mouse that Roared" reference, it is a 1959 Peter Sellers movie about a small country that invades the US, so that they can be defeated and get foreign aid. See that great resource, the Internet Movie Database, http://us.imdb.com/Title?0053084 ] --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 8/4/00 4:16 PM To: pjk From: What's New WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 4 Aug 00 Washington, DC 1. SURVIVOR: CREATIONISTS ARE VOTED OFF THE ISLAND. It was just one year ago that the state school board in Kansas removed human evolution and any mention of the big bang from the state science standards (WN 13 Aug 99). In Tuesday's Republican Primary, which is almost the same as election in Kansas, three of the four creationist board members running for reelection fell victim to natural selection. The largest margin of defeat was reserved for Linda Holloway, the board chair, who had raised $100K for a race that would normally have cost a few hundred dollars. Tuesday's vote virtually assures that last year's action will be reversed. 2. WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?: SHE SHOULD READ WHAT'S NEW. A contestant on last night's program was asked: "The James Randi Educational Foundation offers $1 million to anyone who can provide solid evidence of what?" She didn't know! The correct choice was "paranormal powers," but the offer is much broader than that. For example, JREF just offered the $1M to Florsheim, if it can demonstrate its claims for MagneForce Footwear in a formal double-blind scientific test. My question to you is: Will Florsheim take up the challenge? I think you know the answer. 3. MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: BECOME A PUBLIC AFFAIRS FELLOW AND SAVE THE WORLD. The APS Washington Office is looking for an idealistic physicist to spend a year in Washington working on improving the relationship between science and government. Application details will be posted Monday on www.aps.org under Public Affairs. 4. THE MOUSE THAT ROARED: THE NORTH KOREAN MISSILE SHAKEDOWN. According to a story in this morning's Washington Post, N. Korea has reaffirmed to Russia that it will drop its ballistic missile program -- if other countries will just launch a few satellites for them every year. This is clearly a bargain -- for $60B you can launch a lot of satellites. But do we see a pattern here? When we objected to North Korea's development of nuclear power, Pyongyang agreed to let us do it for them. Next, perhaps, North Korea will begin developing nuclear submarines -- for peaceful purposes of course. Perhaps they'll agree to let us supply them. 5. LIVIN LA VIDA LOCA: WHITE HOUSE PANEL ON ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE. President Clinton last month named James Gordon, who heads the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, to chair a White House Commission on Alternative Medicine. Gordon's book, "Manifesto for a New Medicine," finds no reason to doubt any alternative therapy. My personal favorite is his discovery that hypnosis can "cure warts, and increase breast size." The White House panel is charged with recommending public policies that will "maximize the benefits to Americans of complementary and alternative medicine." (Maria Cranor contributed to this week's WN.) THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY (Note: Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the APS, but they should be.) ------------------ RFC822 Header Follows ------------------ Received: by design.eng.yale.edu with SMTP;4 Aug 2000 16:10:44 -0400 Received: (from whatsnew@localhost) by tron.aps.org (8.9.1b+Sun/8.9.1) id QAA05466; Fri, 4 Aug 2000 16:15:17 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 16:15:17 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <200008042015.QAA05466@tron.aps.org> To: pjk@design.eng.yale.edu From: "What's New" Subject: What's New for Aug 04, 2000 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Aug 4 21:58:56 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]The Future of IP? Message-ID: Subject: The Future of IP? No, not Internet Protocol, but Intellectual Property. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from Edupage, 2 August 2000) THRILLING NEWS: KING FINDS HONESTY PAYS OFF ON THE INTERNET Stephen King's experiment with using the honor system to encourage fans to pay for the first part of his online novella "The Plant" has proven successful so far, with an estimated 76 who have already paid or have agreed to pay the author. About 93,000 fans have paid the $1 fee King requested, out of a total of 152,000 people who downloaded the work in its first week online. King promised earlier to continue posting installments of "The Plant" if more than 75 percent of readers paid the fee, and he now plans to proceed with putting the second installment on his site. The publishing industry is watching King's online move closely, and publishers expect other well-known authors to follow King's lead based on his success. Experts say King's success is partly due to devoted fans who did not did not want to feel as if they were cheating their favorite author. If the honor system continues to prove effective, the strategy might move beyond the publishing industry, observers say. (Los Angeles Times, 1 Aug 2000) (from NewsScan Daily, 4 August 2000) STEPHEN KING NOVEL MAY HAVE SCARY CONSEQUENCES The new Stephen King novel, published on the Web with a request that at least 75% of downloaders send the author $1 for the privilege, may well change the way all sorts of intellectual property is marketed, says R. Polk Wagner, a Penn law school professor. "Traditional intellectual property theory holds that producers (that is, King) won't produce unless they have the ability to restrict the access of others to their goods. Here King is doing two significant things: First, he's only asking 75 percent of the people to pay him, thereby engaging in an unusual form of price discrimination where only those who feel the moral pressure to contribute will do so. That is, King acknowledges that not everyone will pay. Second, he's explicitly asking people to pay for his future services. The traditional theory of intellectual property would not consider this possibility. Classic intellectual property theory holds that producers must get paid for the works they've already created, not works they've yet to produce." The result could be troubling for publishers, who depend on the sacredness of intellectual property for their livelihood. "If Stephen King, one of the 'poster boys' of the intellectual property industry, doesn't need intellectual property (protection) anymore, what does that mean for intellectual property generally?" (Knowledge@Wharton 3 Aug 2000) http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1007-200-2419316.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Aug 7 21:05:50 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Burning the Boats Message-ID: Subject: Burning the Boats (from INNOVATION, 7 August 2000) BURNING THE BOATS AND OTHER STARTUP STRATEGIES "I don't have a spiritual life. I haven't seen my family in eight months. My friendships are only with people I see at work. I have no hobbies. And I'm physically falling apart." Welcome to the glamorous world of David Kidder, 21st century Webpreneur. If you harbor any notions that launching a successful company in today's crazed e-business marketplace is a cakewalk, this up-close look at the three principals behind smartRay Network should be enough to make you think at least twice before giving up your day job. SmartRay offers a sort of Web editor for mobile-communication devices, allowing users to have information delivered free to their phones or pagers. The technology is unquestionably sound, and the market potential for wireless content delivery is staggering. But smartRay is playing against the clock, trying to leverage its early arrival against the 800-pound gorillas that have started to join the game. Founded on 24x7 workdays and a bare minimum of investment capital, smartRay's best hope for long-term success is a buyout. Without that, the best the founders can hope for is survival on the shreds of the market the big guys leave them -- not an option when they've sacrificed everything for the chance at the big score. CEO Troy Tyler says entrepreneurs must be willing to "burn their ships on the shore" as the Vikings did -- to leave everything behind in dedication to the quest. "Strategy is all about commitment," he says. "If what you're doing isn't irrevocable, then you don't have a strategy -- because anyone can do it. That's why burning the boats is so important. I've always wanted to treat my life like I was an invading army and there was no turning back." ("Soul Proprietor," Keith Hammonds, Fast Company, Issue 37) http://www.fastcompany.com/online/37/tyler.html ------------------------------------------------------------------ Jeez, get a life, Mr. Tyler. First the business mantra was "if you're profitable, you're not aggressive enough", (i.e. burn money), now we also have "if what you're doing isn't irrevocable, then you don't have a strategy" (i.e. burn people). One of my Yale colleagues gratified me by picking up on the E.F. Schumacher quote in the last mailing, saying that Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered" (1973) was one of the most influential books that he had read while in college. I hope Schumacher is still read, and I would add his "Good Work" (1979) and "A Guide to the Perplexed" (1977). He and Victor Papanek, http://www.yale.edu/engineering/eng-info/msg00368.html cared about work and technology that really met human needs, like starvation and disablement, facets of life that modern entrepreneurs seem only to know in self-inflicted form. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Aug 7 22:40:46 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (Peter J. Kindlmann) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Alec Guinness Dead at 86 Message-ID: <398F7327.297C7D36@design.eng.yale.edu> Dear Colleagues - Forgive a note more personal than my usual personal mailings about technology, education and common sense. Alec Guinness was one of my favorite actors, judging from the loss I feel, perhaps my favorite actor. I saw his "Tunes of Glory" when in college and in its different way it made as deep an impression as Ingmar Bergmann's "The Seventh Seal" which I saw the same year. (I also saw Brigitte Bardot's "And God Created Woman" that year, and it too made a deep impression, but not one that has stood the test of time so well.) I still watch "Tunes of Glory" every five or so years, and many of my other Guinness favorites, astonishing in their quiet virtuosity, like his George Smiley in "Smiley's People" (a BBC TV production). Rent a Guinness movie and reacquaint yourself with one of this century's great actors, who, like Henry Fonda, always dissolved into the character he was playing. And if you read his two-part auto-biography "Blessings in Disguise" (1985) and "My Name Escapes Me" (1996) you will find him to be a wholly likeable man, boastful of only one thing: "I am unaware of ever having lost a friend." --Peter Kindlmann =================================================================== August 7, 2000 Sir Alec Guinness, Elegant Actor of Film and Stage, Is Dead at 86 By ALBIN KREBS [S] ir Alec [Image] Guinness, the The Associated elegant and Press versatile British Sir Alec Guinness actor known to in the film "Star older audiences for Wars" in 1977. films like "The Slide Show (8 Bridge on the River photos) Kwai" and to a -------------------- whole new Articles About Sir generation for his Alec Guiness role as Obi-Wan * Colleagues Honor Kenobi in "Star Sir Alec Guinness Wars," died late (Apr. 28, 1987) Saturday at a * A Reticent Alec hospital in West Guinness Awaits a Sussex, England. He Movie Tribute (Ap. was 86. 27, 1987) * TV Views of Possessing a Guinness on Acting plain-as-porridge (Nov. 8, 1986) but chameleonlike * Guinness face, Sir Alec was Remembers 'Kind one of those gifted Hearts' (Oct. 26, actors who left 1984) audiences awed with * Alec Guinness his seemingly Does a Second Tour effortless, perfect of Duty as le performances, which Carre's Spy (Dec. he carried off with 20, 1981) quiet subtlety and * Alec Guinness undemonstrative Spies a Television skill. Role (Sept. 28, 1980) Although his * Sir Alec notable career Reluctant Memoirist encompassed the (Mar. 11, 1986) stage and television, it was Reviews of Books by in motion pictures and About Sir Alec that a much wider Guiness audience found Sir * Guinness on Tap Alec unforgettable (Oct. 31, 1999) almost from the * A Friend to Man moment he first and Bumblebee (Aug. appeared on screen. 25, 1997) * Conjuring Up He was a most Enchantment in a versatile Quiet Routine (Aug. performer, capable 22, 1997) of playing a wide * The Record Book range of roles, of Guinness (Apr. beginning in 1946, 6, 1986) when he was Herbert Pocket in the movie Slide Show adaptation of * Elegant Actor of Charles Dickens's Film and Stage (8 "Great photos) Expectations." He delighted millions Video with his wittily * Alec Guinness as etched, Obi-Wan Kenobi with tour-de-force Mark Hamill as Luke delineations of Skywalker in 'Star assorted members of Wars' an eccentric English family -------------------- (including a [Image] spinster and a The Associated character in an oil Press painting) in "Kind Guinness in British Hearts and uniform during the Coronets" in 1949. filming of "The And he developed a Bridge on the River cult following for Kwai" in 1957. his merry antics in -------------------- "The Lavender Hill Mob" and "The Captain's Paradise." One of his most memorable dramatic roles was the driven regimental colonel in postwar Scotland in "Tunes of Glory." And another military role, as the slightly mad military prig of a colonel in "The Bridge on the River Kwai" in 1957, won him an Academy Award. He was knighted in the late 1950's, but still had a long career ahead of him. Although it was often said that as a master of disguise he was an actor with no face of his own, it was, in fact, the intelligent use of his malleable features that served him so extraordinarily well. In situations where lesser performers required several lines of dialogue to accomplish an effect, Sir Alec used his own facial shorthand -- the faint curling of a lip, a seemingly apologetic furrowing of the brow, the quizzical upturn of an eyebrow, a sudden brief smile that could radiate approval or signify chilly disdain. Particularly in motion-picture close-up, he did not so much act as allow his face to react to what another actor was saying. He was the antithesis of the personality player or star, for he accepted small and large roles that ranged from the starkly dramatic to the predictably melodramatic to the maniacally whimsical. "Everything I've done has been on the spur of the moment," the actor said some years ago. "That's why my career has been so haphazard." Haphazard or not, it was a notable career, one in which Sir Alec triumphed in the theater in roles as startlingly dissimilar as Hamlet and the suave psychiatrist in T. S. Eliot's "Cocktail Party." He was the drink-sodden and doomed Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in Sidney Michaels's biographical drama "Dylan" and the tragically broken and brainwashed prelate in "The Prisoner." He also played a Japanese businessman in "A Majority of One" in 1962, the same year that he was seen as the Arab prince, Feisal, in "Lawrence of Arabia." He had business savvy as well -- for his memorable role in the 1977 blockbuster "Star Wars," he received a percentage of the gross. Sir Alec was born in London on April 2, 1914. He was often mistaken for one of the "brewery Guinnesses," he said, and in his adulthood several members of that family of millionaires cultivated his friendship. In his autobiography, "Blessings in Disguise," published in the United States in 1986, Sir Alec cleared up longtime speculation as to whether he was an illegitimate child. He was indeed, he said. "My birth certificate registers me as Alec Guinness de Cuffe," he wrote. "My mother at the time was a Miss Agnes Cuffe; my father's name is left an intriguing, speculative blank. When I was five years old my mother married an Army captain, a Scot named David Stiven, and from then until I left preparatory school I was known as Alec Stiven (a name I rather liked, although I hated and dreaded my stepfather)." His mother's "violently unhappy marriage" lasted only three years, ending when Captain Stiven was posted to New Zealand, Sir Alec said. At Pembroke Lodge, a boarding school, the headmaster discouraged the youth from student theatricals by telling him, "You're not the acting type," but later, at Roborough School in Eastbourne, he won the role of the breathless messenger in "Macbeth." The skinny, wild-eyed boy prepared for his bit part the night of the performance by running around the football field twice, timing himself to dash through the auditorium's side door and run onstage at the moment of his cue ("Enter a Messenger") and collapse in front of Macbeth. "Gracious," he genuinely gasped, "my lord (gulp!), I should report (gasp!) that which I . . ." The schoolboy audience burst into applause, and that night an actor was born. His schooling finished in 1932, he went to work as an apprentice copywriter in a London advertising agency. "The very first thing I did was on impulse to phone Martita Hunt and ask her to give me acting lessons," he recalled years later. "After a few lessons she sent me packing." In fact, after 12 lessons, Miss Hunt, a renowned actress who later played Miss Habersham with him in "Great Expectations," told the drab and emaciated young man in 1933, "You'll never make an actor, Mr. Guinness." Nevertheless, the would-be actor applied to the Fay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art, which gave him a modest scholarship, and he was able to study and live on a single baked-beans-on-toast meal a day. He went to classes but augmented his training by following Londoners about, mimicking their gait, their traits and their gestures -- all of which would be put to good use in a brilliant career to come. On the other hand, he found the studio tiresome. "We did dancing and singing in the mornings," he recalled later. "Tap dancing was very much in vogue then so I'm afraid we did an awful lot of that. In the afternoons it was drama, and I remember we were taught that there was a correct and an incorrect way of executing the most detailed stage business." Mr. Guinness left the Compton Studio Partial Filmography after seven months, but not Great Expectations, before an annual 1946 recital at which Oliver Twist, 1948 the judges, John A Run for Your Gielgud among Money, 1949 them, awarded him Kind Hearts and a major prize. In Coronets, 1949 the years to come The Mudlark, 1950 he was to refer The Man in the White often to the older Suit, 1951 actor as "the The Lavender Hill great hero of my Mob, 1951 youth," and in The Captain's fact on more than Paradise, 1953 one occasion the The Malta Story, older man helped 1953 him along in his The Detective, 1954 career, The Prisoner, 1955 encouraging him The Ladykillers, and offering him 1955 money when he The Bridge on the needed it. River Kwai, 1957 The Horse's Mouth, Some Struggles at 1958 the Beginning The Scapegoat, 1959 Tunes of Glory, 1960 In 1934, literally a starving young Lawrence of Arabia, actor, Mr. 1962 Guinness got work Fall of the Roman in a lurid Empire, 1964 shipboard Doctor Zhivago, 1965 melodrama called "Queer Cargo," in Hotel Paradiso, 1966 which he played three small roles. The Quiller Then Gielgud gave Memorandum, 1966 him his first big Scrooge, 1970 break, casting him Cromwell, 1970 as Osric and the Murder by Death, Third Player in a 1976 production of Star Wars, 1977 "Hamlet." Star Wars: The Empire Strikes "My theater tide Back, 1980 began to come in Raise the Titanic, because of Sir 1980 John's generosity, Star Wars: Return of for from that the Jedi, 1983 point on I was A Passage to India, never truly out of 1984 a job unless I Little Dorrit, 1988 wanted it that A Handful of Dust, way," Sir Alec 1988 recalled in 1982. Kafka, 1991 He was from the Mute Witness, 1994 start a sort of critics' darling -- one called his Osric in "Hamlet" an "admirable popinjay," and later his Sir Andrew Aguecheek in "Twelfth Night" was pronounced "a collector's item." At age 24 he played his first Hamlet in a Tyrone Guthrie production at the Old Vic, and although it was, on the whole, an ego-chastening experience, one critic kindly conceded that if the young actor's Hamlet was short on force, his performance was "touched with sweetness and an aching sincerity." Of his apprenticeship under Gielgud, whose London company he had joined in 1937, Sir Alec said, "Working with him in the 30's was a great and good discipline because his precision demanded the same from you." And, he said: "Going into Tyrone Guthrie productions on the other hand was a great liberating influence. He could relax you as an actor where Gielgud could make you feel stiff. I was extraordinarily fortunate to be oscillating between these opposite poles." Sir Alec, a quietly modest man known for his unelaborate courtesy, was equally grateful to others in the theater. "Martita Hunt had been the first truly sophisticated person I had met, and she developed in me a sense of taste," he said in an interview. "So did Edith Evans, from whom I learnt things of value technically." Speaking of a producer and director at the Old Vic, he said: "Michel Saint-Denis, on the other hand, woke me up to what theater was really all about and was the first person to give me a sense of reality for the words I was speaking. Gielgud, Guthrie, Martita Hunt, Edith Evans, Michel Saint-Denis -- they were the formative people in my life." Before enlisting in the Royal Navy in 1941, the actor had learned many lessons well, having played 34 parts in 23 plays by Shakespeare, Pinero, Chekhov, Shaw and Sheridan. "It was obvious," Tyrone Guthrie said about that period, "that he was going to be tremendously talented. It was not so obvious that he was going to be so popular." Mr. Guinness's "war" was distinguished only by an incident that might have made a vignette in a Guinness comedy. In the invasion of Sicily, the actor-turned-landing-craft-skipper was actually the first person ashore, a nonheroic deed of derring-don't blamed entirely on an hour's error in orders. When the admiral in charge blustered his way ashore at last, the young Mr. Guinness is said to have blandly assured him that such tardy timing of an entrance would never be tolerated in the theater. On being mustered out, he resumed his writing and stage career in the role of Mitya in his own version of Dostoyevski's "Brothers Karamazov," an artistic success that failed at the box office. His other stage appearances in the postwar period included roles in Sartre's "Vicious Circle," the Dauphin in Shaw's "Saint Joan" and the title role in Shakespeare's "Richard II." Of the last, the critic for The Sunday Express of London wrote: "Mr. Guinness is slight, with an interesting angular face and a clear, flexible voice. He has dignity, but no majesty; he has range and control, but no surprises. He is intensely good without being great -- yet. His future may bring that." Shifting Over to the Movies Having played so many classical roles, he decided it was time to tackle the movies, commenting, "On the stage I never seem to have a chance to wear trousers." He had been an extra in his first movie, "Evensong," in 1934, and remembered it as "a horrible experience." But in 1946, the director David Lean cast him as Pocket in the now-classic film version of "Great Expectations." Mr. Lean then allowed him to play an extremely wicked Fagin in a controversial version of "Oliver Twist," whose release in the United States was held up for more than two years because of pressure brought by groups that considered the Guinness characterization anti-Semitic. The American version was also censored, but among moviegoers worldwide, Alec Guinness had clinched his claim to fame. Now much in demand on the screen, in 1949 he made "A Run for Your Money" and "Kind Hearts and Coronets"; in the latter, he played several members of a dotty family who fall prey to a murderous relative. It was that set of performances that forever sealed the actor's reputation as a rubber-faced British zany in the tradition of Sir Harry Lauder. He was thenceforth to be hailed as the actor who could play any part. In 1949 he also created the role of the seemingly omniscient psychiatrist in T. S. Eliot's "Cocktail Party" at the Edinburgh Festival, and the following year went with it to Broadway, where his performance bowled over critics and audiences alike. His first films were making him famous and moderately wealthy, but he fancied himself rather a tragedian than a comedian and, once more, in 1951, assayed "Hamlet" on the West End, directing the play himself and presenting the tragic Dane as cold, existential and matter of fact. The flop, which he was to brood over for years, propelled him more and more into movies. In early 1950's films he was a shrewdly wary Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in "The Mudlark"; a droopy-lidded, bowlered and bespectacled bank clerk who engineers the smuggling of a hoard of gold bullion out of England in "The Lavender Hill Mob"; and, in "The Man in the White Suit," a chemist single-mindedly devoted to developing a miracle fabric that would never soil or wear out. Yet another choice comedy role came in 1953 in "The Captain's Paradise," when he played a Mediterranean ferryboat skipper who commutes between wives as well as ports. Audiences delighted in his sly, mirthful charm as G. K. Chesterton's priestly sleuth Father Brown in "The Detective," also in 1954. Then along came "The Ladykillers" in 1955, closely followed by his first Hollywood film, a glossily cold remake of Molnar's "The Swan" in which he starred with Grace Kelly. Unlike many of his compatriots who despised Hollywood, Sir Alec said, "I found it warm in every way, and would have stayed on had there been work for me." In his greatest film triumph, "The Bridge on the River Kwai," Sir Alec was called upon to be "both admirable and tiresome," he said, as the fascinatingly paradoxical Colonel Nicholson, a British officer interned in a hellish Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Burma. He made Nicholson at times infuriating, at times pitiable, a man whose strict adherence to an old-fashioned code of military ethics was both his scourge and his moral salvation. The next year he gave a full- rounded portrayal of Gulley Jimson in "The Horse's Mouth," a Swiftian satire in which he was an unkempt old rogue of a painter so obsessed by his art that he had no regard for the feelings or needs of anyone who dared impinge on his creativity. Sir Alec received an Academy Award nomination, not for his acting, which was splendid, but for the screenplay he wrote from the novel by Joyce Cary. Other film roles included "The Comedians," "The Quiller Memorandum" and Franco Zeffirelli's "Brother Sun, Sister Moon," none of which reversed the descending trend of the actor's film fortunes in the early 1970's. In 1976, however, he easily stole all his scenes in Neil Simon's "Murder by Death," a mystery spoof in which he played a blind butler. Then, in 1977, came the first installment of George Lucas's legendary space sagas. "I might never have been heard of again if it hadn't been for 'Star Wars'," Sir Alec once said. Yet he also said that he didn't care for the "Star Wars" frenzy. Among Sir Alec's later films were "A Passage to India" (1984) and "Little Dorrit" (1987). He also wrote another book late in life, "My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor" (1997). Acclaim in London and on Broadway Although films occupied most of his time, Sir Alec did not entirely desert the stage. He opened Canada's Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, in 1953, appearing as "Richard III." In London the following year he was praised for his harrowing performance in "The Prisoner," Bridget Boland's intense study of the brainwashing of a Roman Catholic cardinal in an Iron-Curtain country. (He made the film version in 1955.) He was also seen onstage as a would-be adulterer in Feydeau's "Hotel Paradiso" in 1956 and in 1960 had the title role in Terence Rattigan's "Ross," a portrait of the enigmatic T. E. Lawrence. His greatest success on Broadway came in 1964, when Peter Glenville prodded him into taking the tricky and difficult title role in "Dylan," an anecdotal drama dealing with the self-destructive poet Dylan Thomas's last liquor-sodden months. Sir Alec was the antithesis in character of the Welsh poet, but he gave a performance so heartwrenchingly sad that he won almost every available acting prize that season. Walter Kerr termed the performance "mesmerizing," adding, "There is a still center in the actor, a coal in the ashes that defies us to will our eyes away." (Years later, commenting on a trifling play superbly acted by Sir Alec in London, Mr. Kerr, not content with the title Queen Elizabeth II had conferred on the actor, dubbed him "St. Alec.") Sir Alec's appearances on television were rare but memorable. His most notable achievement was the character of George Smiley, the retired British intelligence officer he created in two multipart series seen in Britain and the United States in the early 1980's -- "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "Smiley's People," written by John le Carr?. His understated characterization of the aging, forlorn former spy underscored his reputation as "an actor who makes you forget that he is acting." Sir Alec, who had been almost bald since his late 20's, was often described as "dignified" and "quiet, unassuming." He lived in an unpretentious house in Hampshire, in the south of England, with his wife, Merula Salaman, who survives him along with their son, Matthew. They were married in 1938 when both were appearing as animals in John Gielgud's production of "Noah." Of Sir Alec's acting technique, Kenneth Tynan, the late critic, writer and director, once said: "My point is that the people Guinness plays best are all iceberg characters, nine-tenths concealed, whose fascination lies not in how they look but in how their minds work. The parts he plays are, so to speak, injected hypodermically, not tattooed all over him; the latter is the star's way, and Guinness shrinks from it." The actor was mildly amused by such esoteric analyses of his art. "I have no ax to grind, and no interesting theories to propound," he said. "If a play comes my way which appeals to me and which I am free to do, I do it. It's as simple as that." There was, however, one sort of script he avoided, the sort proffered with the assurance, "It was written just for you." "I'm afraid I was a little abrupt recently with a producer who sent me a screenplay," he once confessed. "It was rubbish, really. I sent it back with a polite rejection. Then he came back with the plea that 'we tailored it just for you.' I replied simply, 'But no one came to take the measurements.' " ----------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Sep 13 01:24:40 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]The PhD--So Long and Thanks Message-ID: Mail*Link? SMTP The PhD--So Long and Thanks Dear Colleagues - A lot of 'resonances' in this, the student's cultural background in relation to research performance, etc. The graduate Student Resources Web page that Rick Reis highlights is impressively extensive. Please forward this to anyone whom it might interest. You have not had a mailing from me in a while. Part of August I was on vacation, and now the start of the Yale semester has me in its grip. But I haven't forgotten and will resume a trickle of interesting material in your direction. As an administrative reminder, info about (un)subscribing to this list can be found at http://jove.eng.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/eas-info . All best, --Peter Kindlmann -------------------------------------- Date: 9/12/00 9:37 PM From: Rick Reis TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" http://sll.stanford.edu/projects/tomprof/newtomprof/index.shtml Over 10,000 subscribers in 86 countries ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Produced by the Stanford University Learning Laboratory (SLL) http://sll.stanford.edu/ in a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ and The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Folks: I highly recommend that all potential and current graduate students, as well as their faculty supervisors check out the Graduate Student Resources on the Web at: http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Edanhorn/graduate.html. It has a wealth of information on all aspects of the graduate student experience with excellent links to additional resources. Below are two excerpts from the posting, "So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!" by Ronald T. Azuma, found at the above site. The first excerpt is on initiative and the second on tenacity, both essential personality traits for success in graduate school and beyond Regards, Rick Reis Reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Bridging Distance, Culture, And Time Tomorrow's Graduate Students and Postdocs ---------------------- 853 words ------------------------ SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR THE PH.D.! "So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!" a.k.a. "Everything I wanted to know about C.S. graduate school at the beginning but didn't learn until later." The 4th guide in the Hitchhiker's guide trilogy by Ronald T. Azuma, v. 1.07 Original version 1997, revised March 2000. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html Initiative "The difference between people who exercise initiative and those who don't is literally the difference between night and day. I'm not talking about a 25 to 50 percent difference in effectiveness; I'm talking about a 5000-plus percent difference, particularly if they are smart, aware, and sensitive to others." - Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The dissertation represents a focused, personal research effort where you take the lead on your own, unique project. If you expect that your adviser is going to hold your hands and tell you what to do every step of the way, you are missing the point of the dissertation. Ph.D. students must show initiative to successfully complete the dissertation. This does not mean that guidance from professors is unimportant, just that this guidance should be at a reasonably high level, not at a micromanaging level. If you never do any tasks except those that your professor specifically tells you to do, then you need to work on initiative. At UNC, there is a famous anecdote about a former UNC graduate student named Joe Capowski. Many years ago, UNC got a force-feedback mechanical arm to use with molecular visualization and docking experiments. The problem was how to move it to UNC. This mechanical arm is a large, heavy beast, and it was in Argonne National Labs in Chicago, IL. Unfortunately, there was a trucker's strike going on at the time. Joe Capowski, on his own initiative (and without telling anyone), flew out to Argonne, rented a car, drove the mechanical arm all the way back to North Carolina, and then handed the computer science department the bill! Many years later, Joe Capowski ran for the Chapel Hill city council and won a seat. Prof. Fred Brooks gave him an endorsement. I still remember the words Dr. Brooks said: "I may not agree with his politics, but I know he'll get things done." While the Joe Capowski anecdote is perhaps a bit extreme, it does show that it is often better to ask forgiveness than permission, provided you are not becoming a "loose cannon." Certain universities (e.g. MIT) are good at fostering a "can do" attitude among their graduate students, and therefore they become more assertive and productive. One of the hallmarks of a senior graduate student is that he or she knows the types of tasks that require permission and those that don't. That knowledge will come with experience. Generally, it's the senior graduate students who have the most freedom to take initiative on projects. This privilege has to be earned. The more that you have proven that you can work independently and initiate and complete appropriate tasks, the more your professors will leave you alone to do what you want to do. Tenacity "Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity." - Louis Pasteur You don't need to be a genius to earn a Ph.D. (although it doesn't hurt). But nobody finishes a dissertation without being tenacious. A dissertation usually takes a few years to complete. This can be a culture shock to former undergraduates who have never worked on a project that lasted longer than one quarter or semester (at the end of which, whatever the state of the project, one declares victory and then goes home). No one can tell you in advance exactly how long the dissertation will take, so it's hard to see where the "end of the road" lies. You will encounter unexpected problems and obstacles that can add months or years to the project. It's very easy to become depressed and unmotivated about going on. If you are not tenacious about working on the dissertation, you won't finish. Tenacity means sticking with things even when you get depressed or when things aren't going well. For example, I did not enjoy my first year of graduate school. I didn't tell anyone this until after leaving UNC. I was not on a project and was focused on taking classes, some of which I didn't do all that well in. I didn't feel a part of the Department, and really wondered whether or not I fit in. Still, I stuck with it and when summer rolled around and I got a job in the Department, I became much more involved in research and enjoyed graduate school much more. Part of earning a Ph.D. is building a "thick skin" so you are not so fragile that you will give up at the first sign on any difficulties. One lesson I learned as a graduate student is the best way to finish the dissertation is to do something every day that gets you closer to being done. If all you have left is writing, then write part of the dissertation every day. If you still have research to do, then do part of it every day. Don't just do it when you are "in the mood" or feeling productive. This level of discipline will keep you going through the good times and the bad and will ensure that you finish. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Sep 20 03:19:22 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Value-Sensitive Design Message-ID: Mail*Link? SMTP Value-Sensitive Design Dear Colleagues - Gary Chapman's Monday column in the L.A. Times about an interesting NSF-sponsored workshop. For us in education, value-sensitive design should start with a careful look at the contributions of technology to education. Some work well, others are doggedly pursued distractions from what teaching should really accomplish. All are ardently championed by the technology industry. Note the passing mention of two contrasting approaches to "expert systems." It says much about different attitudes toward people and machines in our "knowledge-based" society. All best, --PJK ------------------------------------------ DIGITAL NATION Seeing the Value in the Social Impact of Design By Gary Chapman Copyright 2000, The Los Angeles Times, All Rights Reserved We're all familiar by now with the amazing capabilities of information technologies and automated systems. But few people stop to think about how these same systems impart and embed values into our lives. That was the subject of an intriguing workshop on "value-sensitive design" held last week at the University of Washington in Seattle. Hosted by professors Batya Friedman and Alan Borning and sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the workshop brought together computer scientists, philosophers, social scientists, software designers and humanists from academia and business. The participants discussed how to integrate value choices into the design of technical systems, which can be intertwined with everything from issues of privacy to corporate power structures. Some large companies now employ anthropologists, social scientists, psychologists and even artists to help them think through the implications of design choices. A few companies, including Microsoft, have recently included "chief privacy officer" in their organizational charts. At the Seattle conference, Jonathan Grudin of Microsoft Research described his investigation of how companies use enterprise-wide calendaring systems, for example. Microsoft uses a calendaring system that lets employees see the daily calendars of other staff members, but the software reports only whether someone is available or not; it doesn't display details of the person's daily activities. Sun Microsystems, on the other hand, uses its own proprietary calendaring software that lets employees see all the details of another employee's schedule, such as where someone is, who they're meeting with and the subject of the meeting. Grudin said the employees of each company tend to be strongly attached to the way their company displays and uses work calendars. At Microsoft, the calendaring system was crafted chiefly by programmers and researchers, who were averse to revealing the details of their schedules, Grudin said. At Sun Microsystems, the deliberate inclusion of clerical and administrative staff in the design process led to the display of such details because these employees believed that they could be more efficient if they knew what other people were doing and where they were. Who had power over the design made the difference, and consequently the value choices came out quite differently. There are many other examples of this phenomenon in the computing field. In the United States, we have an entire class of software applications known as "expert systems." These are typically sophisticated databases of specialized knowledge with a user interface that imitates the way one asks questions of an expert. In Scandinavia, however, programmers and designers have developed what they call "systems for experts." These are information systems designed to augment and support the judgment of an expert, not replace it. A simple twist of terminology reveals a stark contrast in values: Is expertise something to be replaced by machines, or something to be valued and enhanced? There are also portentous controversies over design and values. In the legal case over the music-sharing program Napster, for example, federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel said Napster was designed to violate copyrights; its illegality is inherent in its technical design, she suggested. But a consortium of large companies and industry associations, including Napster's critics, objected to this sweeping characterization, because Napster's peer-to-peer file-sharing design may be useful for legal activities. We're also struggling over the politics of designing privacy into Web sites and other online services. Should Web pages that gather information from users offer an "opt-in" or "opt-out" choice -- that is, ask users whether they want to be included in a database that might be sold to third parties? And if so, should the automatic default (the choice when the user does nothing) be opt-in or opt-out? The default indicates a certain value choice, and that choice is likely to determine the economic value of the information collected. At the Seattle workshop, the participants discussed whether there are ways to formalize these evaluations of value choices in the design of technical systems. There are a variety of techniques that need more work, such as the "participatory design" approach, in which a system's users are involved in its design process. The biggest obstacle to a complete consideration of value choices in technical design is speed to market. Most companies just don't have time, or take the time, to ponder the social impact of their designs. There is also an unspoken but strong tradition in engineering that attention to values is "soft and fuzzy," not a subject fit for engineers. "Why is value-sensitive design important now?" the Seattle workshop audience was asked. Because we're setting technical standards that could last a generation, said one participant. Another answered that, unlike the past, today a single programmer or a small group of developers can influence the behavior of millions of people. It's therefore imperative that we press for accountability and ethics. And yet another speaker said that, given the importance and omnipresence of technology today, technical design decisions are increasingly substituted for what were once issues of public debate and politics. That's why we have an emerging and increasingly urgent "politics of design," politics with no candidates, campaigns or slogans, but politics with serious consequences. Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu. ------------------------------------------ To subscribe to a listserv that forwards copies of Gary Chapman's published articles, including his column "Digital Nation" in The Los Angeles Times, send mail to: listproc@lists.cc.utexas.edu Leave the subject line blank. In the first line of the message, put: Subscribe Chapman [First name] [Last name] Leave out the brackets, just put your name after Chapman. Send this message. You'll get a confirmation message back confirming your subscription. This message will contain some boilerplate text, generated by the listserv software, about passwords, which you should IGNORE. Passwords will not be used or required for this listserv. Mail volume on this listserv is low; expect to get something two or three times a month. 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From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Sep 23 17:27:56 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Aspects of Good Teaching Message-ID: Subject: Aspects of Good Teaching Dear Colleagues - Apart from its astonishingly clumsy title (all too common on the Internet) the method of online education support described in the abstract and article below is one that ought to be explored much more than it has to date, by proper partnership between course instructor and technical staff. Such partnership needs to be carefully nurtured, because it is not the automatic result of providing comprehensive technical services in a University. Far from it. To think adequately deeply about synergy between each other's roles, technical staff need to be seriously involved with day-to-day actual teaching, and faculty need serious personal awareness of technical opportunities. Almost always this comes about only through actual collaboration and the constructive example it can set for others. We are talking about drawing on the insights of experienced instructors in a given subject for dealing with those often diverse conceptual mismatches that impede the learning of a given concept. In my area of electronic circuits and design I have seen this spectrum _increasing_ in recent years. Pre-college education seems to have lost important nutrients. Among the students in my classes there are now more, and often strikingly different, impediments to understanding. In this regard new instructors and teaching assistants will be hard pressed. And the experience of senior faculty often retires with them. Like many of you, I have my reservations. Yet exploratory work on methods of bringing technology into tutoring, as in aspects of expert systems, means that one is led to deeper thinking about how students think, which then also enhances the in-person teaching, as opposed to thinking just about automating course administrative functions, which can lower the intellectual and motivational tone of the entire teaching process. All best, --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- | Peter J. Kindlmann | Prof.(Adjunct), Director of Undergrad. | | Dept. of Elect. Engrg. | Studies and the Morse Teaching Center | | Yale University | tel.(203)432-4294, fax (203)458-3803 | | New Haven, CT 06520 | email: pjk@design.eng.yale.edu | | http://www.eng.yale.edu/EE-Labs/morse/about/pjk.html | -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from Edupage, September 22 2000) GRADE GRINDER BRINGS LOGIC TO ONLINE LEARNING Grade Grinder, a software program developed by Stanford University Professor John Etchemendy, provides real-time tutoring for students working on homework assignments in their logic classes. Etchemendy and co-developer Dave Barker-Plummer believe the software's role as a tutor distinguishes it from software that merely scores students' work, an application that Etchemendy characterizes as dangerous because it encourages only the simplest forms of pedagogy, such as multiple-choice tests. The tutoring program eliminates the need for instructors to grade their students' assignments--a tedious, impractical process in a field where a question may have several hundred correct answers. Etchemendy believes that Grade Grinder best demonstrates the potential of distance learning, alleviating unnecessary work while not completely eliminating teacher-student interaction. Although he and Plummer sometimes monitor the system seeking ways to improve it, he says it is secure, and a student's instructor will be able to view only those answers the student finally submits. The software has handled nearly 220,000 assignments since its 1998 launch. (SiliconValley.com, September 22 2000) ------------------------------------------------------------------- Published Friday, September 22, 2000, in the San Jose Mercury News Grade Grinder brings logic to online learning BY DEBORAH CLAYMON Special to the Mercury News Stanford Professor John Etchemendy doesn't know Nathan Lemp, a senior at the University of California-Berkeley, but he has just watched him master his homework for a course in logic. Etchemendy didn't even leave his desk. Etchemendy is dialed into Grade Grinder, an Internet-based grading service he developed with a Stanford University senior research engineer, Dave Barker-Plummer. Grade Grinder doesn't just swallow homework and spit out a score. It's a virtual tutor, giving students instant feedback to address the shortcomings of any wrong answers before they submit their final work via e-mail. For students who repeatedly use it, Grade Grinder is "like having a teaching assistant sitting over your shoulder, saying 'That's not quite right -- why don't you think about it this way,'" Etchemendy says. Lemp, a chemistry major, agrees. "It makes it easier. You don't have to ask someone when you've gone wrong." While the Stanford campus is still quiet (the fall quarter kicks off Monday), Etchemendy entertains his teacher's instincts by watching Grade Grinder coach students from more than 80 schools already deep into the semester. In less than a minute, assignments pour in from the University of Minnesota, University of Illinois and University of London's School of Computer Science. Since 1998, the system has processed upward of 220,000 exercises. "Sometimes I see the first submission and think this student is not going to make it," Etchemendy says. "But there's nothing more rewarding than seeing a student in the middle of the night go from a position of complete confusion and end up with an exercise where every answer is correct." Grade Grinder originally was devised to save instructors from the tedium of scorin logic exercises -- in which any given question can often have hundreds of possible right answers -- and to free them for more face-to-face time with students. Etchemendy and Barker-Plummer developed the Internet system in conjunction with a textbook and software for introductory logic courses called Language Proof and Logic. Etchemendy is also co-author of the book and the accompanying software, the latest evolution in his 16-year research on how to develop better teaching techniques for logic. But letting computers score students' work was an educational minefield that Etchemendy, who chaired the university's Commission on Technology in Teaching and Learning, was determined to avoid. "There's a danger in adjusting pedagogy to fit technology," he says, where questions easily answered by multiple choice become the only questions asked. So instead of actually grinding out grades, Grade Grinder churns out practical advice. "The exercise is incomplete because you didn't submit Proof identity 1," reads one common response. That same response might come from a human instructor days, even weeks, later. Before Grade Grinder, Cindy Stern, a philosophy professor at California State University-Northridge, didn't have students turn in the homework assignments in Symbolic Logic. She simply didn't have the time to grade them. "Now students can get feedback instantly and I can see the patterns of what a bunch of students are having trouble with," Stern says. Indeed, Grade Grinder isn't completely devoid of human-like personality. Right answers are greeted with praise. "Your world is a counter example to the given argument. Bravo!" reads one message. Another correct message response cheered, "Bless my collar button!" Grade Grinder, a centralized system, itself is subject to constant feedback. Etchemendy and Barker-Plummer continuously monitor its advice to students, making changes when they encounter a glitch. Most students, however, remain unaware that Etchemendy and his team at the Stanford Center for the Study of Language and Information are at times "peeping" in on their homework from afar. But privacy is something Etchemendy and his colleagues keep top of mind as they fine tune Grade Grinder. Unlike the Stanford developers, instructors are able to see only the results the students have asked to have sent to them. And the developers, Etchemendy says, only peek in an effort to improve the system. "I'm not following any individual student's progress, but only checking to see whether Grade Grinder is providing accurate responses," he says. Although Grade Grinder isn't classic distance education, Etchemendy believes it could be one of the first programs to provide the "best of both worlds." Grade Grinder will never replace the human instructor, but the software can free instructors and students from tedious interaction so that they may spend their face-to-face time exploring deeper conceptual learning. When the school year starts, Etchemendy is taking a break from teaching to serve as Stanford's provost. But through Grade Grinder he'll still be able to keep tabs on thousands of students. Seeing the influence of his teaching method on so many students continues to overwhelm him. Says Etchemendy, "It comes home to you in a way it doesn't when you simply send a book out into the world." Deborah Claymon is a San Francisco freelance writer. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Sep 24 03:34:02 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]e-Literature Directory Message-ID: Subject: e-Literature Directory (from The Scout Report--September 22 2000) http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/current/index.html Electronic Literature Directory http://directory.eliterature.org/ Electronic Literature Organization http://www.eliterature.org/index2.html The heart of the Electronic Literature Organization's Website, this Website presents a "comprehensive directory of work" in the field of electronic literature. Electronic literature is here defined as any literature with an electronic element available on the Internet and thus includes both experimental Internet novels and animated poems as well as audio versions of traditional works that have been made available on the Web, such as the postings of authors reading their own works available at sites like the Atlantic Monthly's Poetry Pages. The directory's virtues include size -- there are over 400 links for poetry alone; thoroughness of annotations; and ease of access -- the directory allows users to search and browse by author, traditional genre, type of electronic media (hypertext, recording, animated text, online generated text, and other multimedia), and keyword. In addition, the creators have struck a balance between the democratic impulse of the Internet and the desire for aesthetic quality, allowing individuals to register to have their works appear in the directory but requiring submission of their work to an editorial review by the Directory's board before posting. With individuals like the postmodern novelist Robert Coover and Larry Wangberg, CEO of ZDTV, behind it, this Website promises to give electronic literature a new level of visibility and credibility. A good thing, even if Coover's prediction that "the vast majority of the human race will simply do without literature" if they cannot find it on the Web does strike us as a premature epitaph on that four-centuries-old technology: the printed word. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Sep 28 01:11:21 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]FirstGov.gov Message-ID: Subject: FirstGov.gov A worthy attempt at a Web site for a labyrinth. --PJK --------------------------------------------------------------- (from Edupage, September 27 2000) NEW SITE STREAMLINES ONLINE GOVERNMENT http://www.FirstGov.gov/ President Clinton on Friday launched FirstGov.gov, a single portal that will connect citizens to nearly all online government resources. By linking nearly all government resources, the site will allow users, for example, to download tax forms, apply for student loans, track Social Security benefits, and make reservations at national parks. Using a privately developed search engine called FedSearch, FirstGov combs through 27 million Web pages from 20,000 government sites. "This cutting-edge site gives the American people the 'Information Age' government they deserve," Clinton said. Inktomi chief scientist Eric Brewer, who suggested the idea for FirstGov when he met Clinton at the 1999 World Economic Forum, created and donated the FedSearch engine. Brewer also established a foundation that will maintain FirstGov for the next three years, with $4.1 million in government funding. (Washington Post, 23 September 2000) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Sep 29 20:43:31 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]PowerPoint Crackdown Message-ID: Mail*Link? SMTP PowerPoint Crackdown Dear Colleagues - Excerpts (and full text) of a WSJ article, passed on by a colleague. Like all such technology, Powerpoint can become a serious obstacle to communication if used too robotically. And if you're unclear what contributes to making PowerPoint presentations a form of anesthesia or torture, I've appended below the PowerPoint guidelines with which one of America's largest computer companies enjoins its employees. --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- | Peter J. Kindlmann | Prof.(Adjunct), Director of Undergrad. | | Dept. of Elect. Engrg. | Studies and the Morse Teaching Center | | Yale University | tel.(203)432-4294, fax (203)458-3803 | | New Haven, CT 06520 | email: pjk@design.eng.yale.edu | | http://www.eng.yale.edu/EE-Labs/morse/about/pjk.html | -------------------------------------------------------------------- ====================================================================== --EXCERPTS--- "Shelton's order is only the Pentagon's most recent assault on a growing electronic menace: the PowerPoint briefing." "'The idea behind most of these briefings is for us to sit through 100 slides with our eyes glazed over, and then to do what all military organizations hope for ... to surrender to an overwhelming mass,' says Navy Secretary Richard Danzig." "Navy Secretary Danzig announced late last year that he was no longer willing to soldier through the slide shows. He maintains that PowerPoint briefings are only necessary for two reasons: If field conditions are changing rapidly or if the audience is 'functionally illiterate.'" "'PowerPoint Ranger' is a derogatory term for a desk-bound bureaucrat more adept at making slides than tossing grenades. There is even a "PowerPoint Ranger Creed," a parody of the Marine Corp's famous 'Rifleman's Creed': 'This is my PowerPoint. There are many like it, but mine is [PowerPoint] 97. ... I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its fonts, its accessories and its formats ... My PowerPoint and myself are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our subject. We are the saviors of my career.' --FULL TEXT-- Pentagon cracks down on ... PowerPoint By Greg Jaffe, WSJ Interactive Edition April 26, 2000 7:44 AM PT WASHINGTON -- Earlier this year, Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued an unusual order to U.S. military bases around the globe. His message: Enough with the bells and whistles -- just get to the point. It seems that e-mailed military briefings larded with electronic "slides" of booming tanks and spinning pie charts were gobbling up so much of the Defense Department's classified bandwidth that they were slowing more-critical communications between headquarters and units in the field. "The chairman basically told everyone that we don't need Venetian-blind effects or fancy backdrops. All we need is the information," says one senior Defense Department official. Shelton's order is only the Pentagon's most recent assault on a growing electronic menace: the PowerPoint briefing. Sure, business executives complain about the seemingly endless PowerPoint presentations put on by overeager middle managers in darkened boardrooms across America. But in the military, the Microsoft program, which helps users create computer-based graphics and sound effects, has become one of the most dreaded facts of life. And it's even shouldering the blame for at least some of the armed forces' ills. PowerPoint-induced coma Congressional support for new weapons programs isn't as strong as expected? Army Secretary Louis Caldera suggests that PowerPoint presentations are alienating lawmakers. "People are not listening to us because they are spending so much time trying to understand these incredibly complex slides," he says. Too many bright, young junior officers are leaving the military for the private sector? A recent survey of captains at Fort Benning, Ga., cites the "ubiquity of the PowerPoint Army" as a prime reason for their disaffection. "The idea behind most of these briefings is for us to sit through 100 slides with our eyes glazed over, and then to do what all military organizations hope for ... to surrender to an overwhelming mass," says Navy Secretary Richard Danzig. Old-fashioned slide briefings, designed to update generals on troop movements, have been a staple of the military since World War II. But in only a few short years PowerPoint has altered the landscape. Just as word processing made it easier to produce long, meandering memos, the spread of PowerPoint has unleashed a blizzard of jazzy but often incoherent visuals. Instead of drawing up a dozen slides on a legal pad and running them over to the graphics department, captains and colonels now can create hundreds of slides in a few hours without ever leaving their desks. If the spirit moves them they can build in gunfire sound effects and images that explode like land mines. "There is an arms-race dimension to it," says Peter Feaver, a military expert at Duke University and frequent PowerPoint briefer at various war colleges. "If there are three briefings in a row, and you are the one with the lowest production values, you look really lame." PowerPoint Rangers PowerPoint has become such an ingrained part of the defense culture that it has seeped into the military lexicon. "PowerPoint Ranger" is a derogatory term for a desk-bound bureaucrat more adept at making slides than tossing grenades. There is even a "PowerPoint Ranger Creed," a parody of the Marine Corp's famous "Rifleman's Creed": "This is my PowerPoint. There are many like it, but mine is [PowerPoint] 97. ... I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its fonts, its accessories and its formats ... My PowerPoint and myself are the defenders of my country. We are the masters of our subject. We are the saviors of my career." The parody is zapping around the Defense Department as a PowerPoint slide complete with the sound of explosions and featuring an animated John Wayne in Army Ranger garb wielding a laser pointer. How did a piece of technology that was supposed to improve communication become a barrier to it? Some military sociologists say the endless presentations are a product of the military's zero-defect culture, in which one mediocre review by a superior can torpedo a career. "Young officers are worried that they might leave something out of their briefing, and a supervisor might say something about it. So they pack their presentations with every detail that they can think of," says Charles Moskos, a military-culture expert at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Others blame the problem on the absence of a formidable enemy. "We crave something that explains who we are," says retired Army Col. Henry G. Cole. "The PowerPoint game creates the illusion of control. All those moving arrows and graphics become reality for a military that is trapped in this permanent state of shadow-boxing an enemy that no longer exists." Frontal assault whatever the cause, a handful of senior Pentagon officials have decided to attack the PowerPoint problem head-on. Navy Secretary Danzig announced late last year that he was no longer willing to soldier through the slide shows. He maintains that PowerPoint briefings are only necessary for two reasons: If field conditions are changing rapidly or if the audience is "functionally illiterate." "In the Pentagon the second seems to be the underlying presumption," grouses Danzig, who now asks to get all his briefings in written form. Danzig's Army counterpart, Caldera, says he, too, would ban the presentations if he thought he could get away with it. "For some of these guys, taking away their PowerPoint would be like cutting off their hands," he says. Caldera's strategy is to interrupt the show with questions when he gets bored. Despite such countermeasures, PowerPoint is showing no signs of retreat. Indeed, it seems to be spreading. James A. Calpin, an officer in the Naval Reserves, just returned home from duty in Operation Northern Watch in Turkey, where PowerPoint has just begun to surface in officer presentations. "I was able to come in and spruce up their briefings, and they were just wowed," he says. "People over there just loved it." Foreign armed services also are beginning to get in on the act. "You can't speak with the U.S. military without knowing PowerPoint," says Margaret Hayes, an instructor at National Defense University in Washington D.C., who teaches Latin American military officers how to use the software. Unfortunately, Hayes admits many foreign officers, including those fluent in PowerPoint visuals, still struggle to understand their U.S. counterparts' complicated slide presentations. "We've gotten away from inviting our colleagues from the Department of Defense to brief our visiting officers. Some of their presentations are a little bit too complex and too inhibiting," she says. All of which makes Duke University's Feaver wonder if the U.S. military is misusing the technology. "If we really wanted to accomplish something we shouldn't be teaching our allies how to use PowerPoint," he says. "We should give it to the Iraqis. We'd never have to worry about them again." ================================================================== (from one of America's largest computer companies) Subject: Revised presentation templates Attached are the most current versions of the corporate PowerPoint presentation templates (blue background and white background.) The templates have been 'color- coordinated' to ensure quick and easy transitions when changing a presentation from one background color to the other. These templates are to be used for all internal and external presentations. They are not to be modified for your department or division in any way. The revised templates will be posted on the Brand Identity website, under 'What's New'. Please be sure to use the "white" template for internal presentations, and the "blue" template for presentations to external audiences. Also included with both templates are guidelines for writing presentations. These are provided so that presentations are consistent in appearance and terminology for all audiences, regardless of who writes the presentation. "Rule of Seven" A critical part of these guidelines is the "Rule of Seven". The "Rule of Seven" means seven (7) bullets or lines per page, seven (7) words per line. By writing your presentation in this manner, you help (1) increase the readability of each slide; (2) reduce the 'clutter' on each slide; and (3) your audience focus on and retain key information. In addition, the Rule of Seven helps minimize the tendency of some speakers to 'read' their presentation to the audience - something the audience can really do on its own. The speaker notes should contain notes on areas the presenter can emphasize - without putting each and every word on the slide itself. Capitalization: We are asking everyone to use "Sentence" case for all titles as well as 1st and 2nd level bullet points. "Sentence" case means that you only use an "initial" cap on the first word of each new bullet. Third (3rd) level bullet points should appear in all lower case letters. "Highlight" Colors When you want to call attention to a key word or phrase, please use the following colors from the template's color palette. "Blue" background First level Bright green Second level Bright blue Third level Gold Fourth Purple "White" background First level Bright green Second level Bright blue Third level Gold Fourth level Purple -------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Sep 29 21:14:39 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Classical Music Resources Message-ID: Subject: Classical Music Resources Dear Colleagues - As one would expect, many of the best resource sites are by librarians at colleges and universities. This is not surprising. Much of what is best about the Web is really just an encouraging amplification of previous best practices. We don't need as many "revolutions" as are currently for sale. http://www.lib.duke.edu/music/resources/classical_index.html is a really fine resource on all facets of classical music. I spent a couple of hours last night visiting favorite composers. Whether you're interested in the famous like Bela Bartok, or lesser masters like Frank Martin, you will be rewarded. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 3 22:37:28 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]List Administrative Message-ID: Subject: List Administrative Dear EAS-INFO Recipients - To my embarrassment I discovered yesterday that access to the Web page for this list and its archives, and for (un)subscribing http://jove.eng.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/eas-info was not world-accessible (only Yale). This has now been remedied, as best as I can verify with means available to me for making myself non-Yale (an occasionally worthwhile effort, but a hard habit to break after 38 years). So feel free to recommend this list of occasional quizzical mailings to your friends and colleagues. And please let me know personally if you or they encounter any problems. All best, --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- | Peter J. Kindlmann | Prof.(Adjunct), Director of Undergrad. | | Dept. of Elect. Engrg. | Studies and the Morse Teaching Center | | Yale University | tel.(203)432-4294, fax (203)458-3803 | | New Haven, CT 06520 | email: pjk@design.eng.yale.edu | | http://www.eng.yale.edu/EE-Labs/morse/about/pjk.html | -------------------------------------------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Oct 4 00:26:51 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Voice Traffic on Internet Message-ID: Subject: Voice Traffic on Internet (from NewsScan Daily, 3 October 2000) C&W TO MOVE ALL VOICE TRAFFIC TO INTERNET UK telecom giant Cable & Wireless is planning to shift all of its voice traffic over to a new IP-based network within three years, in a move that highlights the speed with which the Internet is undermining traditional telecommunications systems. Although all the major telecom operators, including AT&T, British Telecom and Deutsche Telekom, are investing heavily in IP networks for data transmission, C&W will be the first to migrate its entire voice service to the Internet-based system. Mike McTighe, head of C&W's global operations system, says each incremental minute of voice traffic transmitted over an IP network costs only a fourth as much as the same traffic transmitted over conventional circuitry. Nortel Networks has a 10-year, $1.4-billion contract to build and manage the new network for C&W. (Financial Times 3 Oct 2000) http://news.ft.com/news/industries/telecommunications From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Oct 5 22:01:35 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Inventing History Message-ID: Subject: Inventing History Even the history of technology itself has not been left untouched by this trend. We are all living in someone else's Adobe PhotoShop file. --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 5 October 2000) http://www.newsscan.com/newsscan/hs.html WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE INVENTION OF HISTORY Keith Windschuttle warns in "The Killing of History" that today each historian makes his own history. "History is an intellectual discipline that is more than 2,400 years old. It ranks with philosophy and mathematics as among the most profound and enduring contributions that ancient Greece made, not only to European civilization, but to the human species as a whole. Instead of the mythical tales which all human cultures have used to affirm their sense of self-worth and their place in the cosmos, the Greek historians decided to try to record the truth about the past. They did this even though they knew their stories would expose how fragile was their existence, how their heroes could not guarantee their victories, how their oracles could not foretell their future and how their gods could not ensure their fortunes. The greatest of them, Thucydides, revealed how the fate of people was entirely contingent upon human actions and social organization. Myth had been comforting, but history was bracing. For most of the last 2,400 years, the essence of history has continued to be that it should try to tell the truth, to describe as best as possible what really happened. Over this time, of course, many historians have been exposed as mistaken, opinionated and often completely wrong, but their critics have usually felt obliged to show they were wrong about real things, that their claims about the past were different from the things that had actually happened. In other words, the critics still operated on the assumption that the truth was within the historian's grasp. "Today, these assumptions are widely rejected, even among some people employed as historians themselves. In the 1990s, the newly dominant theorists within the humanities and social sciences assert that it is impossible to tell the truth about the past or to use history to produce knowledge in any objective sense at all. They claim we can only see the past through the perspective of our own culture and, hence, what we see in history are our own interests and concerns reflected back at us. The central point upon which history was founded no longer holds: there is no fundamental distinction any more between history and myth." See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1893554120/newsscancom/ for Keith Windschuttle's "The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Killing Our Past." (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy action programs.) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Oct 6 03:34:28 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Serbia Message-ID: Subject: Serbia By the way, the revolution in Serbia is in full gear. For real news, see . --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Oct 7 21:55:43 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]More on Serbia Message-ID: Subject: More on Serbia (from The Scout Report -- October 6 2000) All Signs Point to Milosevic Ouster Uprising in Serbia -- CNN [QuickTime, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player] http://europe.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/yugo.crisis/index.html Yugoslavia Today -- Central Europe Online http://www.centraleurope.com/yugoslaviatoday/ Crisis in Yugoslavia -- BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/in_depth/europe/2000/yugoslav_electio ns/default.stm Balkan Crisis Reports -- Institute for War and Peace Reporting http://www.iwpr.net/index.pl5?balkans_index.html Tanjug News Agency http://www.tanjug.co.yu/ Free B92 [RealPlayer, .mp3] http://www.freeb92.net/ Serbian Info News -- Ministry of Information http://www.serbia-info.com/ Democratic Party (Yugoslavia) http://www.ds.org.yu/english/index.html Socialist Party of Serbia http://www.sps.org.yu/eng/index-n.htm "In Belgrade, Russian Envoy Greets Kostunica as Army Remains Aloof" -- _New York Times_ http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/06/world/06CND-YUGO2.html "Yugoslav Citizen Army Seizes Belgrade" -- _Washington Post_ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20129-2000Oct5.html Slobodan Milosevic's allies have apparently deserted him en masse as a citizen army hundreds of thousands strong throngs Belgrade in support of the opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica. After several days of successful general strikes in the countryside and smaller towns, opposition supporters descended on the capital in huge convoys yesterday and seized control of the federal parliament building after encountering only brief and sporadic resistance from the police. The reluctance of the police to prop up Milosevic's regime was matched by the nation's military leaders, who met yesterday to discuss their response to this relatively nonviolent revolution. Though they issued no formal statement, it has become increasingly clear that the army will not act to disperse the demonstrators or maintain Milosevic in power. Another and perhaps final blow to the Serbian president came today when Russia, Serbia's most powerful and consistent ally, recognized Mr. Kostunica as president-elect. Milosevic is rumored to be in Belgrade, where he apparently met with the Russian Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, to discuss the handover of power. In addition to securing control of the major media outlets in Serbia, the opposition under Mr. Kostunica has announced the creation of a crisis committee to govern the country and secure order after several days of a political vacuum. They hope to convene the new federal parliament on Saturday to swear Kostunica in as president. In a show of support for the opposition, European Union leaders have indicated that sanctions against Serbia may be lifted as early as Monday. While many questions remain, not the least Mr. Milosevic's indictment for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal, it does indeed appear that he has fallen from power faster and with less violence than anyone might have predicted. CNN offers a fairly deep special report on these events, with breaking news, archived articles, photos and video, analysis, and some interactive features. Additional special reports are available from Central Europe Online, the BBC, and the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. Breaking news and analysis from within Serbia are available from the state news agency Tanjug (now controlled by the opposition) and Free B92. The Serbian Ministry of Information site, at time of writing still under the control of Milosevic supporters, reports on recent events from the opposite perspective. Official press releases from the opposition are available at the Democratic Party site, while the site for Milosevic's Socialist Party appears not to have been updated for a few days. Finally, more analysis is available from the _New York Times_ (free registration required) and the _Washington Post_. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 10 16:23:07 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Integrated Circuit Origins Message-ID: Subject: Integrated Circuit Origins Dear Colleagues - On a day when Jack Kilby shares the Nobel Prize for Physics for the invention to the integrated circuit, it is well to remember a contributor on whose pivotal invention of the planar process the entire integrated circuit industry is built, but who did not live to be considered in this context--Jean Hoerni of Fairchild Semiconductor. I have commented on his work in these mailings before, at http://www.yale.edu/engineering/eng-info/msg00286.html You can also get biographical details about Hoerni at http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue42/obituary.html About the early days of the semiconductor industry there is a fun piece by Tom Wolfe at http://info.med.yale.edu/caim/lynch/engineering_comps/splash_comps3.html For the full details of how a new semiconductor technology is spawned by a complex mix of device physics, entrepreneurship instincts and dire corporate economic necessity I refer you to the meticulous history "Revolution in Miniature" by Ernest Braun and Stuart MacDonald (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1982). It is a remarable book, the only one known to me that handles semiconductor technological history with full academic standards. (Out of print, but trivially easy to find at . All best, --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 10 17:49:26 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Integrated Circuit Origins Message-ID: Mail*Link? SMTP Integrated Circuit Origins A resend, after it was pointed out that the Tom Wolfe URL was wrong. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Colleagues - On a day when Jack Kilby shares the Nobel Prize for Physics for the invention to the integrated circuit, it is well to remember a contributor on whose pivotal invention of the planar process the entire integrated circuit industry is built, but who did not live to be considered in this context--Jean Hoerni of Fairchild Semiconductor. I have commented on his work in these mailings before, at http://www.yale.edu/engineering/eng-info/msg00286.html You can also get biographical details about Hoerni at http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue42/obituary.html About the early days of the semiconductor industry there is a fun piece by Tom Wolfe at http://acomp.stanford.edu/siliconhistory/WolfeT/TinkeringsRobertNoyce.html For the full details of how a new semiconductor technology is spawned by a complex mix of device physics, entrepreneurship instincts and dire corporate economic necessity I refer you to the meticulous history "Revolution in Miniature" by Ernest Braun and Stuart MacDonald (2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1982). It is a remarable book, the only one known to me that handles semiconductor technological history with full academic standards. (Out of print, but trivially easy to find at . All best, --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Oct 12 22:02:40 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]PhD Overproduction? Message-ID: Mail*Link? SMTP PhD Overproduction? Grad Student Needed--PhD Incidental. The article refers primarily to the biomedical area, but may be relevant, or equally irrelevant as some would claim, to other areas of PhD studies. --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 10/12/00 9:09 PM From: reis@stanford.edu TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" http://sll.stanford.edu/projects/tomprof/newtomprof/index.shtml Over 10,700 subscribers in 86 countries ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Produced by the Stanford University Learning Laboratory (SLL) http://sll.stanford.edu/ in a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ and The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Folks: The excerpt below looks at a new study arguing against increasing Ph.D. production in the biomedical, clinical, and behavioral research areas. The question of the appropriate level of Ph.D. output in any field is controversial because of the difficulty of predicting demand 4-6 years in advance, and because of other factors such as the mix of industry and academic positions (very discipline dependent), and the role of postdocs in advancing research (essential in most sciences). The excerpt is from The Scientist 14[19]:32, Oct. 2, 2000, by Douglas Steinberg. The full article, with additional tables, can be found at: . Reprinted with permission. Regards, Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: E-Moderating - and I'ts Role in Teaching Tomorrows' Graduate Students and Postdocs -------------------- 1,803 words --------------------- ANOTHER STUDY RAPS Ph.D. OVERPRODUCTION NRC panel recommends a no-growth strategy The Scientist 14[19]:32, Oct. 2, 2000, By Douglas Steinberg At a meeting right after Labor Day, Princeton University's molecular biology department surveyed the plans of its recently graduated seniors, and professor Shirley M. Tilghman wasn't happy with the results. Thirty-one out of 72 students awarded bachelor's degrees last June were going to medical school, eight planned to do community-service work--and only three were heading directly for Ph.D. or M.D.-Ph.D. programs. Recalling the meeting, Tilghman notes that the cohort of doctoral wanna-bes has never topped 10 percent of graduates. But she describes this year's yield as the worst ever. "It worries me because the future of science needs these kids opting to do science," she says. "And they're not opting to." A new 120-page report from the National Research Council (NRC) helps explain why. "Addressing the Nation's Changing Needs for Biomedical and Behavioral Scientists" (www.nap.edu/books/0309069815/html) is the 11th in a series of reports since 1975 mandated by the National Research Service Award (NRSA) Act. Rife with graphs, tables, and demographics, this "National Needs" report differs from earlier ones by examining the entire workforce in the targeted sciences, not just NRSA trainees. Drafted by an 11-member committee drawn largely from academia, the report discusses biomedical, clinical, and behavioral research, as well as inadequate minority representation in those fields. Its starkest conclusion about biomedical science is that the number of new Ph.D.s awarded annually "is well above that needed to keep pace with growth in the U.S. economy and to replace those leaving the workforce as a result of retirement and death." The report notes that biomedical Ph.D. production swelled over the past quarter-century as the bulk of funding shifted from training grants to research grants. It recommends that "research training and overall Ph.D. production in these fields should not be increased." No particular strategy is advocated to achieve that goal. Why didn't the committee call for a decrease in the number of Ph.D.s awarded? Chairman Howard Hiatt, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, explains that "to change suddenly the numbers of people could be very disruptive to the research that's going on at the present time"--research that he stresses is "extraordinarily effective." Insisting that "the notion of keeping things constant is, in itself, a major step," he observes that a future committee could assess the outcome of a no-growth strategy and, if warranted, propose a decline in Ph.D. production as a further step. As another observer points out, NRC reports are political documents whose messages are carefully calibrated to be taken seriously. If the committee had advocated a cutback, this observer continues, "All hell would have broken loose," even though the proposal may have lacked any practical means of enforcement. Reports Have Impact The findings and advice presented in the National Needs report should induce a sense of d?j? vu. Two years ago, an NRC-sponsored committee chaired by Tilghman also depicted a Ph.D. glut in the life sciences and called for restrained growth of the graduate student population.1 And in 1995, a paper by William F. Massy, now professor emeritus of business administration and education at Stanford University, and Charles A. Goldman, a senior economist at RAND in Santa Monica, Calif., shoehorned science training into a theoretical framework consistent with the new report.2 Massy and Goldman argued that doctoral enrollment was driven more by the need for research and teaching assistants than by the labor market. The resulting Ph.D. glut, they explained, had led to chronic underemployment and deteriorating career attractiveness, particularly to American students. Though the paper encountered some hostility at first, Goldman points to "an accumulation of corroborating evidence and perspectives in the last five years." Although these reports and papers may seem ineffectual--as well as obvious--to many biomedical trainees, their authors do perceive the work as having an impact. "I think there's a lot of interest in and concern about these issues" at the National Institutes of Health, says Michael S. Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York and a member of the panel that drafted the National Needs report. Tilghman notes that unpublicized proposals "are wending their way slowly through the NIH machinery." Both the 1998 and the new NRC reports mention gradual increases in the duration of graduate and postdoctoral training. Tilghman points to a recent initiative to treat this "symptom of a system that is broken": In 1998, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory established a small graduate program that expects its students to earn Ph.D.s in four and a half years. If the program succeeds, she hopes it will force other elite programs that compete for the same pool of applicants to speed up training as well. According to Goldman, the NRC studies and his and Massy's paper have had two other notable effects: Graduate departments are increasingly exposing students to teaching skills, which are in greater demand than research skills. Departments are also much more conscious that "large numbers of their students will not be going into academic careers." In the last few years, that realization has apparently taken hold among students and postdocs. "Now I go to Career Day meetings at universities, and people are admitting that they got into their Ph.D. program in order to get a job in industry," says David G. Jensen, managing director of Search Masters International, a Sedona, Ariz., recruitment firm for the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Stephen Rosen, chairman of Celia Paul Associates in New York, notes that most scientists who consult him about career transitions "are trying to move out of the academic environment into an industrial environment," even if that means changing fields. The National Needs report asserts that growth in industrial employment slowed in the mid-1990s, with the percentage of biomedical scientists working in industry slightly lower in 1997 (23.9) than in 1993 (25.1). But for now, Jensen sees a swelling demand from companies, which keeps recruiters "very, very busy." He acknowledges, however, that the job market still isn't hot enough to absorb all Ph.D. recipients, except for those in a handful of specialties. Postdocs and Post-Postdocs The National Needs report documents a drop in the fraction of new Ph.D. recipients planning postdoctoral study, from 73 percent in 1996 to 65.1 percent in 1997, the lowest such figure since 1977. But it's too early to tell if this downturn signals a trend or is merely a historical blip. The preliminary figure for 1998, according to NRC project officer James A. Voytuk, is 67 percent. "Our initial reaction was that the figure for 1997 was a reflection of improvements in the economy," says Jennifer Sutton, NRC study director for the National Needs report who has since moved to the National Cancer Institute. Instead of planning to do a postdoc, "[Graduates] were more likely to find other types of more permanent or more attractive jobs." Graduates were never interviewed, however; they merely indicated (on a survey form) their plans rather than their subsequent actions, and Teitelbaum describes the numbers as "really hard to interpret." For Ph.D. recipients who carry through on their intentions to become postdocs, the report suggests their plight better than it does their options. It briefly mentions a 1998 paper by Elizabeth Marincola, executive director of the American Society for Cell Biology, and Frank Solomon, a biology professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that advised "the creation of respectable, reasonably paid professional scientist positions, to be held by fully trained researchers who neither write grants nor train others."3"People genuinely want to do labwork at the bench as their career," Marincola remarks now. "But we've not yet made a place for them." While acknowledging that a few such positions already exist, she adds, "The vast majority lack the stability that we would like to see them have. And I think it's a critical mass issue, because unless jobs are available on a fairly wide scale, then they stand a good chance of being marginalized." A case to consider are the hundreds of nonpostdoc, non-tenure-track staff scientists employed by NIH's intramural program. Generally appointed five years or more after they have received their doctorates, they lack independent resources and are supervised (usually one per lab) by senior investigators. Their appointments can last as long as five years, and annual salaries start at about $55,000. Noting that many staff scientists' appointments have been renewed, Michael M. Gottesman, deputy director for intramural research, asserts that he "can state unequivocally that this new professional designation has been a big success at the NIH" since it was introduced six years ago. More Studies--and More Money? According to Hiatt, NRC plans to send the National Needs report to the NIH director, who will forward it to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Hiatt is set to discuss the report with the director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. An NIH spokesman says the report will be sent to congressmen who request it.NRC issued the report six years after the last National Needs report and almost two years late. More frequent publication, however, may be in the offing. NIH research training officer Walter T. Schaffer says that the National Academy of Sciences (of which NRC is an operating agency) has proposed providing interim reports to NIH. These would appear every two years following release of the demographic data on which the National Needs reports are based. Marincola and Solomon, meanwhile, are wrapping up a second phase of their work, in which they're collaborating with Richard B. Freeman and Eric R. Weinstein of Harvard and the National Bureau of Economic Research, a think tank in Cambridge, Mass. (Freeman was also on the committee that drafted the new National Needs report.) Focusing on 25 prominent cell and molecular biology labs in the United States, the group is asking all the principal investigators and many of the postdocs and graduate students detailed questions about their productivity and career choices. The study, which the group hopes to publish by year's end, examines subjective judgments of productivity rather than objective measures such as numbers of papers published.Goldman says he and RAND colleague Valerie Williams may do a study pursuing topics in the National Needs report in greater depth. One idea meriting further analysis, he adds, is "increasing the [NIH] stipend in good times so that when funding is increasing, the number of positions that are created does not expand as fast as the funding. Then when funding is leaner, keeping the rate of stipend growth low so that the number of positions can be preserved until the next funding increase." In a similar vein, the National Needs report recommends regular cost-of-living increases in stipends and other forms of trainee compensation. It advocates that such increases "be incorporated into budget planning, so that stipends are not again allowed to decline in real value." Recalls committee chairman Hiatt: "We urged these changes because they seemed so obvious." Douglas Steinberg is a freelance writer in New York. References 1. P. Smaglik, E. Russo, "NRC report: cap life sciences graduate school enrollment," The Scientist, 12[19]:6, Sept. 28, 1998. The report is at the Web address books.nap.edu/books/0309061806/html/index.html. 2. W.F. Massy, C.A. Goldman, "The production and utilization of science and engineering doctorates in the United States," Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research Discussion Paper, 1995. This paper is soon due to come out as a book, The Ph.D. Factory (Bolton, Mass., Anker Publishing Co., 2000). 3. E. Marincola, F. Solomon, "The career structure in biomedical research: implications for training and trainees," Molecular Biology of the Cell, 9:3003-6, 1998. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to Tomorrows-Professor Listserver by sending the following e-mail message to: subscribe tomorrows-professor To UNSUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor send the following e-mail message to: unsubscribe tomorrows-professor ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**== This message was posted through the Stanford campus mailing list server. If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message body of "unsubscribe tomorrows-professor" to majordomo@lists.stanford.edu From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Oct 12 22:23:11 2000 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Site for Thieves Message-ID: Subject: Site for Thieves Another example of community formation on the Internet. --PJK http://www.TheBurglar.com/default_frame.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from NewsScan Daily, 12 October 2000) THIEVES' SITE DRAWS FIRE A Web site devoted to the sale of stolen goods has raised the ire of British lawmakers, who point out that it is illegal to sell stolen property back to its owner. TheBurglar.com is accused of violating the Theft Act by charging people "reward" money for the return of their possessions. Victims of burglaries can post the details of their losses on the site, and burglars are then invited to anonymously contact their victims by e-mail to negotiate the return of the stolen property. The site collects the agreed-upon cash, and keeps it until the victim has verified receipt of the goods. TheBurglar.com then sends the payment to the address or account of the thief's choice. And despite outrage among law enforcement officials, TheBurglar.com likely will escape prosecution. A note on its site reads: " TheBurglar.com Headquarter is placed in Copenhagen, but due to spite we have moved the office to a secret location." (ZDNet UK 11 Oct 2000) http://www.msnbc.com/news/475316.asp From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Tue Oct 17 14:02:10 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Votes for Sale Message-ID: Subject: Votes for Sale Dear Colleagues - My "Site for Thieves" mailing about burglar.com shocked some of my readers. What is next, they asked. Another of my colleagues provides a timely answer http://www.voteauction.com/ about a site where you can sell your vote. He comments > Apparently it has been getting a lot of attention in Chicago which > was already in the midst of an absentee ballot scandal. Here in > Oregon where we have just converted ALL elections to vote-by-mail, > virtually every ballot is available. This site shows nearly 400 > ballots currently for sale in Oregon. This isn't a huge number, > but we have a US congresswoman in the Portland area who won with a > smaller margin than this two years ago. To date there has been no > significant evidence of fraud in our voting, but it doesn't seem > like it would take too much effort to convince useful numbers of > disinterested voters to sell their signed but unmarked ballots. Modern information technology is like a fluid that seeps into the interstices of our social structures, sometimes as a welcome lubricant, sometimes as a corrosive solvent. --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- | Peter J. Kindlmann | Prof.(Adjunct), Director of Undergrad. | | Dept. of Elect. Engrg. | Studies and the Morse Teaching Center | | Yale University | tel.(203)432-4294, fax (203)458-3803 | | New Haven, CT 06520 | email: pjk@design.eng.yale.edu | | http://www.eng.yale.edu/EE-Labs/morse/about/pjk.html | -------------------------------------------------------------------- From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Thu Oct 19 02:08:07 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]IG Nobel Prizes Message-ID: Subject: IG Nobel Prizes (from TOURBUS - 17 Oct 2000) ==================== THE IG NOBEL PRIZE ==================== What? You haven't heard of the Ig Nobel Prize? The Ig Nobel Prize honors individuals whose achievements "cannot or should not be reproduced." The Igs, which are sponsored by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative, and take a good-natured poke at some remarkably goofy things done in the name of science. http://www.improbable.com/ig This year's winners were announced earlier this month and included a study "On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica", software that detects when a cat is walking across your computer keyboard, and a report "The Collapse of Toilets in Glasgow." ================================================================= There are many gems there. I'm particularly fond of the Ig award for Psychology, to > David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kreuger of the > University of Illinois, for their modest report, "Unskilled and > Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own > Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." [Published in the > Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 77, no. 6, > December 1999, pp. 1121-34.] Indeed an important topic, but I'm just too old-fashioned to be content with seeing every shortcoming the world confronts us with, lack of humility in this case, become a cheerful professional pursuit. Better perhaps to do epidemiological studies of incompetence, its spread, distribution and, it is to be hoped, control. --PJK From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Mon Oct 23 03:58:37 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Hunting Patents for Bounty Message-ID: Subject: Hunting Patents for Bounty Some of my readers appreciated my metaphor of information technology as a sometimes welcome lubricant, sometimes as a corrosive solvent. This instance is somewhere in between, more like spot remover. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from NewsScan Daily, 20 October 2000) NEW WEB SITE REWARDS PATENT INVESTIGATORS Amid fears that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is overwhelmed by the demands of high-tech patent verification, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and publisher Tim O'Reilly are backing an Internet startup that offers cash rewards to individuals who can prove or disprove a company's claim to a patent. "BountyQuest empowers the individual to participate in the patent validation process by harnessing the power of the Internet," says Bezos. Companies desiring to prove or disprove a patent claim can post their requests anonymously after paying a $2,500 registration fee. Companies must then place the bounty offered in escrow, and pay a commission if someone is able to supply all of the required information and claims the bounty. BountyQuest expects its "Bounty Hunters" will include scientists, engineers, professional researchers and specialists. Over 50 bounties are currently listed at the site, with offered rewards totaling $324,159. Among the patents for which a bounty has been offered are Amazon's 1-Click payment system, Priceline's reverse auction search engine, and DoubleClick's banner ad patent. (E-Commerce Times 20 Oct 2000) http://www.ecommercetimes.com/news/articles2000/001020-1.shtml From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Tue Oct 31 03:45:06 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Great Strides Message-ID: Subject: Great Strides (from INNOVATION, 30 October 2000) MAKING GREAT STRIDES Engineers at Russia's Ufa Aviation Technical University have developed strap-on, gasoline-powered boots, originally conceived to enable soldiers to cover a lot of ground. The boots enable the wearer to take 14-foot strides and jog at up to 23 miles per hour, by incorporating a gas-fired cylinder that pushes a metal plate away from the bottom of the boot and shoots the walker into the air. Project chief Boris Rydoi is hoping to find western buyers for $400 contraptions, pitching them as an alternative to in-line skates. ("These Boots Are Made for Galloping" Discover Oct 2000) http://www.discover.com ----------------------------------------------------------------- Why does this remind me of the Monty Python episode where athlete's foot is treated with small sticks of explosive. A summary of the results includes the telling category "missing, presumed cured." --PJK From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Sat Nov 4 18:25:34 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Portfolio Projects Message-ID: Mail*Link? SMTP Portfolio Projects Dear Colleagues - [I am mailing this to both the Yale Engineering [all-faculty] list, and to my wider EAS-INFO list audience . So as Yale engineering faculty many of you will get two copies. My apologies, but I consider the subject important and have no easy way of avoiding this duplication.] Whether for reasons of ABET accreditation, or just taking a probing interest in the effectiveness and evolution of our curricula, one is faced with the difficulty of determineng what & how our students learn. Since teaching, and feedback via homework, tests, reports, etc. usually all happens within the confines of a course, it is especially difficult to determe whether students are learning in ways that integrate across courses. Well-chosen and well-supervised projects can probe these more integrative perspectives, as can frank and frequent enough individual talks with students. But even with a major faculty commitment to improved student learning, both those processes are too rare to generate predictable feedback. Portfolios are becoming a process used in many schools as a way of having students form a cumulative record of their learning. Below I forward a mailing from a Stanford list with more details about the portfolio process. A classical form of portfolio would be the collection of sketches, drawings and photographs that have long been required of art and architecture majors have as part of their education, even as part of their qualification to admission to more advanced courses. Especially in smaller engineering programs the opportunities for students' personal expression via portfolios should be just as apt. And as described below, Web-based tools can be used to facilitate this. I strongly encourage you to think about how you can build this process into your courses. At Yale, please give Roman Kuc feedback about this, as we need explicit learning evaluation in place for ABET accreditation. With best regards, --pjk -------------------------------------------------------------------- | Peter J. Kindlmann | Prof.(Adjunct), Director of Undergrad. | | Dept. of Elect. Engrg. | Studies and the Morse Teaching Center | | Yale University | tel.(203)432-4294, fax (203)458-3803 | | New Haven, CT 06520 | email: pjk@design.eng.yale.edu | | http://www.eng.yale.edu/EE-Labs/morse/about/pjk.html | -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" http://sll.stanford.edu/projects/tomprof/newtomprof/index.shtml Over 10,000 subscribers in 86 countries -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Produced by the Stanford University Learning Laboratory (SLL) http://sll.stanford.edu/ in a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ and The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Folks: Electronic portfolios have proliferated over the past 2-3 years and are being used to assess student learning at all levels. The American Association for Higher Education [http://www.aahe.org/] has adopted - and adapted - The Portfolio Clearinghouse from Kalamazoo College and has made it available on its web site at: http://www.aahe.org/teaching/portfolio_db.htm Below is a brief description of the project followed by two examples: (1) Portfolios at IUPUI School of Liberal Arts: IUPUI Undergraduate Electronic Portfolios, and (2) Portfolios at Stanford University: Learning Careers. Regards, Rick Reis Reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Tenure and Academic Excellence Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning ------------------------- 1,022 words --------------------- THE AAHE ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIO CLEARINGHOUSE The Portfolio Clearinghouse, recently acquired from Kalamazoo College, is a searchable collection of portfolio projects from around the world. This database is a tool for institutions researching the ever-growing number of portfolio programs in use at institutions of higher education and a resource for individuals looking to the portfolio as a means of assessing student learning on the student, faculty, or institutional levels. Portfolios vary greatly in the following four ways: * Target populations: students, faculty, institutions * Content: coursework, reflections, samples of best work * Purpose: assessment of subject-area knowledge, assessment of overall skills, self-presentation (for employment or tenure), program assessment, reflection on growth, goal-setting * Media: paper, web, CD-ROM, video, or some combination. The database may be searched by purpose, media, institution, or keyword (such as "reflection" or "tenure"). The current records focus primarily on student portfolios, both paper and electronic, used for assessment and reflection, although some information on faculty and institutional portfolios is included and will be developed more extensively in the future. If you have suggestions of other programs that should be included, please e-mail the database manager, Emily Springfield, at emily@drgndrop.com. Example # 1: Portfolios at IUPUI School of Liberal Arts: IUPUI Undergraduate Electronic Portfolios Name: Dr. Sharon Hamilton Director of Campus Writing Contact Information: 815 West Michgan St. Indianapolis IN 46202-5195 USA (317) 278-1846 shamilto@iupui.edu Basic Information Name of Program: IUPUI Undergraduate Electronic Portfolios Department overseeing program: University College and the Dean of Faculties URL of your Portfolio's Web site: http:// Scope The stage of development of the institution's portfolio: Currently implemented Year implemented, if applicable: 2000 Users of this portfolio: Student Duration of portfolio use: Four or more years Portfolio required: Prototype phase Why did you initiate the portfolio program? Problem it solves: The primary one is to enable students to document their evolving understanding of the principles of undergraduate learning that are the hallmark of the undergraduate experience at IUPUI. After that primary purpose, the reasons vary from providing all students with tangible documentation of their evolving understanding for career and graduate school purposes; providing a means of assessing evolving understanding at the level of the major and the campus level.It addresses one of our goals of computer literacy among our students; it addresses the campus need for a way to gather evidence of evolving student understanding and proficiency at the campus level. Primary purpose of the portfolio: Reflection Additional uses of the portfolio: Career/resume planning What format does it take? Medium of portfolio: Web-based Software or course packets used: A customized version of Angel, which is a second generation version of OnCourse, a software program developed on our campus. Eventually, we hope to add CD-writing capabilities. Students reviewed their portfolios with: Professor How is it reviewed, and how often: The pilot will take place in the fall and will be reviewed throughout the fall semester and retooled during the spring semester. I expect there will be an oversight committee for once per semester reviews thereafter. Results General Results: We have been working at this for more than three years, but it always reached a plateau prior to actual pilot and implementation. This year it looks set to go for the pilot. Opinions: Faculty have many concerns. They generally applaud the notion of student portfolios maintained by students. However, they have many concerns about using them for assessment of curriculum, teaching, and even learning. How will entries be validated and not later changed by students, for example? How is the institution protected from inappropriate entries in the portfolio? How are faculty's rights protected? Students' rights? Etc. Institutional opinion: the administration sees value for students, faculty, the institution, and community stakeholders in these portfolios. Caveats: As the incoming chair of this committee, I would play down what the administration wants and let faculty ideas, concerns, and questions play a stronger role earlier on. I am doing that now, but it has taken some backtracking to achieve that. Finding the balance between institutional needs and faculty needs has been the main challenge. Example #2: Portfolios at Stanford University: Learning Careers Name: Dr. Helen Chen Research Scientist, Stanford Learning Lab Contact Information: Office of the President Building 10 (SLL) Stanford CA 94305-2060 USA (650) 723-8161 hlchen@leland.Stanford.EDU Basic Information Name of Program: Learning Careers Department overseeing program: Stanford Learning Lab URL of your Portfolio's Web site: http://learninglab.stanford.edu/projects.html Scope The stage of development of the institution's portfolio: Currently implemented Year implemented, if applicable: 1999 We estimate that 0.5% of students in our Entire institution use portfolios. Users of this portfolio: Student, Institution Duration of portfolio use: Four or more years Why did you initiate the portfolio program? Problem it solves: Little is known about how students acquire, maintain and employ the knowledge and skills they accumulate over the course of their college career. The Stanford Learning Lab's Learning Careers project will explore the real-life shape of individual learning patterns by establishing a longitudinal study to track the undergraduate learning careers of thirty freshmen (Class of 2002) through their four years at Stanford University. The objectives of this study are two-fold: to develop a systematic understanding of the entire educational experience of Stanford undergraduate students and to capture the interaction between formal curricula and informal learning taking place within the university environment. One of our three hypotheses is that students will benefit from organizing their diverse experiences into coherent and articulated formats and from using this accumulated information to plan and assess their progress. The tool we will use to assess this hypothesis is the Electronic Learning Portfolio. Primary purpose of the portfolio: Program evaluation/Institutional assess. Additional uses of the portfolio: Reflection,Integration of curriculum/co-curriculum What format does it take? Medium of portfolio: Web-based Software or course packets used: We are currently creating a web-based interface for the learning portfolio within the Stanford Learning Lab. Students reviewed their portfolios with: Learning Lab Staff How is it reviewed, and how often: Not yet applicable. Results General Results: Follow the link to "Learning Careers Report" at http://learninglab.stanford.edu/projects.html for a PDF-format report of the first year of the project. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to Tomorrows-Professor Listserver by sending the following e-mail message to: subscribe tomorrows-professor To UNSUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor send the following e-mail message to: unsubscribe tomorrows-professor ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard M. Reis, Ph.D. Executive Director - Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford (AIMS) Director for Academic Partnerships - Stanford Learning Lab. (SLL) Consulting Professor, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering Departments Building 02-530, Room 225, 440 Escondido Mall Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-3036 (650) 725-0919, Fax (650) 723-5034 Interested in an academic career? Check out Tomorrow's Professor Listserv at: http://sll.stanford.edu/projects/tomprof/newtomprof/index.shtml -++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**==--++**== This message was posted through the Stanford campus mailing list server. If you wish to unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message body of "unsubscribe tomorrows-professor" to majordomo@lists.stanford.edu From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Thu Nov 9 00:28:06 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Visual perception of docume Message-ID: Mail*Link? SMTP Visual perception of document images Forwarded from the RRE list. Sensitized by this high-impact election event, it is worth reflecting for a moment on the cumulative detrimental effect of interacting with computer screen interfaces often just as poorly designed, and daily events. --PJK ====================================================================== Date: 11/8/00 9:15 PM From: Phil Agre [Eric Saund is a research scientist at Xerox PARC. I have known him for many years. He is an authority on the architecture of human visual perception and its consequences for the design of documents. Here he analyzes the claims that the disputed presidential election ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida is misleading and ambiguous. You can see images of the disputed ballot in many places on the net, including these: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/elections/palmbeachballot.htm http://cnews.tribune.com/news/image/0,1119,sunsentinel-nation-82373,00.html Here is another analysis by Dan Bricklin: http://www.bricklin.com/log/ballotusability.htm I have reformatted Eric's message to 70 columns.] =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" option. For information about RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Date: Wed, 8 Nov 2000 20:00:26 PST From: Eric Saund Subject: Visual perception of document images Controversy has arisen over a ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida that many people have claimed is misleading and ambiguous in its design. By at least one news report, the local election commissioner claims "There is nothing wrong with this ballot". Clay Roberts, director of Florida Department of Elections, is quoted to have said, "The ballot is very straightforward. You follow the arrow, you punch the location". I am a visual perception scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. I study visual perception of document images: How do people's brains connect the image on their retinas to the meaning formed in their minds. Spatial layout is critical. In my judgement, this ballot is visually ambiguous. There are two valid ways of parsing this image. One way is by following the arrows from candidates names to punch holes. The arrows are rather small and not clearly shaped, and they have little numbers next to them that add to the visual clutter. It would be perfectly natural for your visual system to treat the arrows as visual texture, and just filter it out. A second valid way of parsing this image is by reading order. When we open a book we don't take it in all at once. We direct our attention first to the left page, then move our eyes left to right, top to bottom. Then we look at the right page. It would be perfectly natural for a person to read down the left page, see the candidate they want to vote for, then stop reading. Now they switch tasks, to finding which hole to punch. One way of doing this is by noticing and following the arrow. Another way is by keeping a mental count. If you want to vote for the second entry, count down two holes. You probably couldn't vote for the sixth ballot entry this way, but the second, sure. Why didn't they catch this before? If you're inspecting the ballot to proofread it, making sure no one's name is spelled wrong, then you might not notice the layout problem. When you know the intent of the ballot layout, then your top-down processing can influence your perception and resolve the ambiguity automatically so it all looks like it makes sense. But to someone seeing this image for the first time, in the polling booth, they have to figure it out in the moment. It takes a different kind of looking to notice the layout problem. It's something that good graphic designers do intuitively. Seeing is an automatic, unconscious process. We are not aware of all the assumptions our minds make when we view a scene. It is perfectly plausible that a visually ambiguous ballot could get through the inspection process. I would not fault anyone for punching the wrong hole on this ballot. This ballot is poorly designed. -Eric Saund -------------------- Eric Saund, Ph.D. Xerox PARC 3333 Coyote Hill Rd. Palo Alto, CA 94304 (650) 812-4474 (650) 812-4334 (fax) saund@parc.xerox.com http://www.parc.xerox.com/saund From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Thu Nov 9 03:43:28 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Art of Renaissance Science Message-ID: Subject: Art of Renaissance Science From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Sun Nov 12 22:36:10 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]On-Line Books Message-ID: Subject: On-Line Books Dear Colleagues - My technical readers should note that just at e.g. http://digital.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/subjectstart?TK this collection includes many classics, such as Claude Shannon's "Mathematical Theory of Communications" (1948), Brendan Kehoe's "Zen and the Art of the Internet", William Mitchell's "City of Bits" and much else. And even more if your interests go beyond technology. ;> Also note, that as always on the Web, the book listing are incomplete, especially as regards "books" written for the Web, such as a couple of favorites on liquid crystals http://www.sharp.co.jp/sc/library/lcd_e/indexe.htm http://abalone.cwru.edu/tutorial/enhanced/files/textbook2.htm and an intro to logic for liberal arts and business http://147.4.150.5/~matscw/RealWorld/logic/logicintro.html and much else. --PJK ================================================================= (from The Scout Report -- November 10, 2000) http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/current/ On-Line Books Page http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ Originally reviewed in the July 1, 1994 Scout Report, the On-Line Books Page has expanded considerably in the intervening six years. Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom since its inception, the site has moved with him in 1999 from Carnegie Mellon to Penn and has increased its listings from about 300 when Scout first visited the site to over 12,000 today. The site only indexes books (all located at other sites) that are full text, free, and not copyrighted. Users can search the listings by author and title, or browse by author, title, subject, new listings, or by serial archives. The site also offers three special exhibits: A Celebration of Women Writers, Banned Books On-Line, and Prize Winners On-Line (under construction). In addition, the site includes a collection of links to other electronic text resources and a list of works in preparation is also provided. An excellent portal for e-books of all kinds. From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Tue Nov 14 20:30:29 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Presidential Election URLs Message-ID: Subject: Presidential Election URLs Dear information-soaked Colleagues - The Florida situation is generating a huge number of URLs. A worthwhile selection (compiled by a Democrat) is at http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/florida.html --PJK From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Sat Nov 18 15:06:04 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Cyber-ethical Vacuum Message-ID: Subject: Cyber-ethical Vacuum (from Edupage, November 17, 2000) TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL Educators and high-tech leaders are recognizing the importance of teaching Internet ethics in school as children grow increasingly proficient with technology. Many students have the skills to hack computer systems, spread viruses, download illegal music files, and plagiarize content from the Internet, but they do not understand the ethical issues involved in these activities. "Kids today have the technical skills of adults but the ethical skills of very small children," says Cherie Geide, an adjunct professor at Marymount University. A recent Scholastic survey reports that almost half of elementary and middle school students indicated they do not believe hacking is a crime. Students tend to view stealing and other illegal activities differently on the Internet than in the real world because victims and perpetrators are anonymous in the online environment, Geide says. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice and the Information Technology Association of America have formed the Cybercitizen Partnership, which is creating a technology ethics curriculum that will be released to schools next year. (Industry Standard, 20 November 2000) From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Wed Nov 22 16:32:06 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]The Fruits of Science Message-ID: Subject: The Fruits of Science (from WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 24 Nov 00 Washington, DC) BOOK REVIEW: "ICONS OF EVOLUTION" BY JONATHON WELLS. There are lots of unscientific books out there, but only a few of them are truly anti-science; this one qualifies. Wells seems particularly incensed by Dobzhansky's 1937 observation that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. Nonsense, says Wells, it all makes perfect sense once you realize that a supernatural intelligence decides everything. Who are we to ask why this intelligence chose to trick us with false clues? Genes, we learn, aren't the whole story. "If our developmental genes are similar to those of other animals," he puffs "why don't we give birth to fruit flies instead of human beings?" (Clearly, we do give birth to fruits.) Wells also frets over a conspiracy, led by a "small faction in the National Academy" who have "exploited the Academy's reputation to propagate Darwinian dogma". But he's confident that scientists will retaliate once they "realize what is being done in their names." Yawn. From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Wed Nov 22 16:46:31 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Connecticut History Message-ID: Subject: Connecticut History From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Wed Nov 22 17:25:11 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Unit Conversions Message-ID: Subject: Unit Conversions From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Thu Nov 30 19:54:50 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Manual Ballot counting Message-ID: Mail*Link? SMTP Manual Ballot counting Dear Colleagues - If had sent out all the Florida recount items I got, I'd be in the hundreds by now. But I thought this description of a scrupulous handcount might interest you, since there's been so much flak about it. --PJK =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= This message was forwarded through the Red Rock Eater News Service (RRE). You are welcome to send the message along to others but please do not use the "redirect" option. For information about RRE, including instructions for (un)subscribing, see http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= [I don't have the original headers.] Ron Albert Broward County Board of Commissioners Office of Internal Audit 115 S. Andrews Ave. #520 Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301 954 357-5967 (fax 954 357-7314) "Ron Albert" 11/19/2000 5:34:49 PM To my relatives, friends, and colleagues: Yesterday, I was a part of history. My wife Annie and I volunteered to take part in the manual recount of the presidential ballots in Broward County, Florida. I know that many of you, especially those of you from other parts of the country, have been given a very jaded picture of this process. I want to share our experience with you and attempt to set the record straight. The EOC (Emergency Operations Center) was under intense security. You even had to sign in and out to go to the restroom. Each team of counters consisted of two county employees (in our case it was me and Annie) and an observer from each major party, one Democrat and one Republican. The room was FILLED with supervisors and floor personnel from both parties also. The media presence was everywhere as well. During the lengthy day, we counted two entire precincts. The process was as follows: We received a box of ballots for that precinct from an employee of the Supervisor of Elections. Until that point, no one was allowed to touch the boxes of ballots, and that was under the scrutiny of the Broward Sheriffs Office (BSO). Neither party observer was permitted to touch the ballots. Only Annie and I on our team were allowed to touch them. Our sequence went something like this: I would pick up a ballot and scan the column for the presidential vote to determine whether a 2 was punched (Bush), a 3 was punched (Gore), or 4 through 11 (the other 8 candidates). In some cases, there were more than one punch in that column and those were placed in a pile marked "Over punched". In other cases, nothing was punched in that column and those were placed in a pile marked "Under punched." As I announced to our team which one was punched, I would then show it to the Democratic observer who was literally attached to me at the hip. He or she would look at the front of the card and then I'd turn it around so the back could also be carefully observed. Next, I'd pass the ballot to Annie and she would repeat the process with the Republican observer. After all four of us looked at the ballot, it was placed in a pile marked "2 Bush", "3 Gore", or "4-11 Other". On occasion, one of the observers would challenge the ballot because of a hanging chad, a pregnant chad, or some other irregularity. These ballots were placed in the final pile marked "Challenges". Once all of the ballots had been processed, we would then count each pile. I did the counting for our team, and the ballots were separated into piles of 25. These were held up to the light for all of us to check to make sure that we could see through the hole punched for that candidate, ensuring that only Gore votes were placed in his pile, only Bush votes were placed in his pile, etc. I then crisscrossed each group of 25 until we had them all counted. Then, I totaled up the groups of 25 and came up with a count for that candidate. This was agreed to by all four of us and then it was logged on a summary sheet for that precinct. In each of the two precincts that we counted, our counts exactly matched what the Republican observers had recorded on their clipboard. When we were done, an election official came over to collect our ballots in boxes once again and to return them to the room in which they were stored (which was under lock and key with security supplied by BSO officers). The room is glass encased, so anyone in the main "war room" could see into that room. The media spent the entire day in the media room, another glass encased room, and they had the ability to observe every single counting team in the room on a constant basis. This was also true of the parties' supervisors and floor people who walked around the room all day. About every hour, one group of media people were allowed into our room to videotape the proceedings. You weren't allowed to have anything on the tables like pens or any sharp object that could possibly be used to punch a hole in the ballot. If you needed to stand up, you had to raise your hand and an election official had to come over to "supervise" that process. When we broke for lunch (supplied by the county), BSO officers cordoned off the entire area and stood guard during our 30-minute gourmet lunch of sandwiches. What I'm trying to portray is that there was not a single chance for any kind of fraudulent activities or underhanded stuff. This was a very well controlled process and it was done in a most professional manner. Following the collection of our counts, each precinct's results were to be compared to the initial machine count. In the case of discrepancies, those were resolved, and it is my belief that the hand count would prevail. Anyone in his right mind would have to recognize that this process was way more accurate than any machine could ever hope to be. When we left the EOC, we had a very strong feeling of pride and patriotism for having done an important service to our country, and we felt very good that it had been done fairly, honestly, and professionally. Imagine our anger when we heard on the news that one of the major parties was claiming that the entire manual count was tainted by blatant fraud. In the span of three seconds, they had diminished all that we (and hundreds of others) had done. Other than an attempt to "save face" just in case the manual count did manage to turn up enough missing votes to send the election to Mr. Gore, I can't imagine why Mr. Bush's representatives would make such false allegations. Based on the early results of this process in Broward and Palm Beach Counties, it is unlikely that Mr. Gore will gain enough votes to win the state. But, I think it was important to go through this process, and I am proud that my wife and I were able to take part in this historical event. I wish I had the e-mail addresses for many more acquaintances, but I don't -- so, please feel free to forward this to whomever you think might be interested in hearing the real facts. Please remember that if you wish to reply to me, don't impose on the rest of the people on my list by doing a "reply to all" -- please make sure your replies are just sent to me. Thanks for listening. -- Ron Ron Albert 527 Water Point Weston, Florida 33326 954 389-0750 (voice) 954 389-0749 (fax/modem) From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Fri Dec 1 17:18:08 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Supreme Court Web Message-ID: Subject: Supreme Court Web The URL did not work for me just now (overload?), but you can go to and get "Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board" as the top link. --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 1 December 2000) SUPREME COURT ON THE WEB As a byproduct of the intense interest in the Presidential election dispute now being heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court has changed the rules used to manage its official Web site . For the first time, a transcript will be posted within hours of oral arguments made by the various protagonists in the case. Legal scholars throughout the country are hailing this new development. Jerry Goldman, a professor at Northwestern University , articulated this sentiment by saying: "On the one hand, this is an exceptional situation because the election case is so important. But an exceptional situation can become the rule." Goldman is the director of the Oyez project, a Web site offering audio recordings of hundreds of Supreme Court oral arguments." (New York Times 1 Dec 2000) http://partners.nytimes.com/2000/12/01/technology/01CYBERLAW.html http://oyez.nwu.edu/ From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Sat Dec 2 14:12:57 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Gutenberg Bible Digitized Message-ID: Subject: Gutenberg Bible Digitized (from The Scout Report - December 1, 2000) http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/current/index.html The Gutenberg Bible: Digitised Images http://prodigi.bl.uk/gutenbg/default.asp The British Library has announced the online release of digital facsimiles of the two copies of the Gutenberg Bible in the library's possession, the paper King's Library copy and the vellum Grenville copy. Visitors can browse either or both copies side-by-side by selecting a Book of the Bible from the search page. Users are presented with a collection of thumbnails which link to an enlarged image and then finally a very large readable image. While this site is not quite as feature-rich as the Goettingen Gutenberg Bible (reviewed in the June 30, 2000 Scout Report http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/2000/scout-000630.html#3), these are lovely copies, and the British Library is to be thanked for making them available to the world. -------------------------------------------------------------------- And keep in mind that you can see a real Gutenberg Bible at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library, but you can't turn the pages. --PJK From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Tue Dec 5 00:21:30 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Liquidating Privacy Message-ID: Subject: Liquidating Privacy (from Edupage, December 4, 2000) DOTCOM LIQUIDATIONS PUT CONSUMER DATA IN LIMBO When dotcom companies go bust they are often faced with the prospect of satisfying their creditors by violating their own privacy policies and selling the data they have collected from their customers. In at least two instances, the FTC and state attorneys general have stepped in to prevent bankrupt online retailers from selling their consumer data. However, lawyers are now saying that the FTC's authority in these matters may be preempted by bankruptcy law. Bankruptcy lawyer Howard J. Berman says he believes that the courts will side with bankruptcy law so long as an acquirer "structures the transaction so it adheres to the privacy policy the seller had." Eric London, the FTC's director of public affairs, says there are no cut-and-dried legal guidelines for such issues. This legal uncertainty has allowed an increasing number of online companies to change their privacy policies so that they may sell off their consumer data if they go bankrupt. (New York Times, 4 December 2000) ----------------------------------------------------------------- [The implications of our new 'service economy' take a while to sort out. I'd forgotten that includes a lot of dotcom bubbles inflated with customers' personal and business data. In addition to all the 'standard' online purchasing, think of all the new start-ups that back up your or your business's data, archive your photographs, pay your bills, offer you a free onlne appointment calendar, email account, etc. --PJK] From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Mon Dec 11 04:18:23 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Iridium Reprieved Message-ID: Subject: Iridium Reprieved Dear Colleagues - Back in April I commented on the sad state of the Iridium communications system, splendid technology (on-satellite signal processing and inter-satellite crosslinks allowing satellite-mode service to any open area on earth) but as a business model about to go down in flames. http://www.yale.edu/engineering/eng-info/msg00701.html The system has now been reprieved by a contract for satellite communications services awarded by DoD's Defense Information Systems Agency http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Dec2000/b12062000_bt729-00.html because it can provide "provides mobile, cryptographically secure telephone services to small handsets anywhere on the globe, pole-to-pole, 24 hours a day." This also relieves worries about predictably burning up 88 giant satellites over uninhabited areas. --PJK From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Mon Dec 18 23:52:54 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]union.com Message-ID: Subject: union.com (from INNOVATION, 18 December 2000) LOOKING FOR THE UNION LABEL About 50 Amazon.com employees recently held a meeting that some say was a major turning point in the industry. They met to join a trade union. Citing long hours, mandatory overtime and sudden changes in shift schedules, the service workers set up an organizing committee to seek affiliation with the Communications Workers of America and to win union recognition from Amazon. While some observers don't see a big threat, union officials say many Internet staffers are unhappy, and companies will have to find ways of dealing with their grievances, especially as the companies try to cut costs. Lost amid the hype over paper millionaires are the tens of thousands of employees involved in tedious, often mind-numbing, tasks. "The industry might be high-tech but the working conditions are such that people want representation," says a CWA spokeswoman. Many professionals, lured into the e-world with share options, also are growing dissatisfied and disillusioned that dot-com employees are not having "more fun, more freedom and more scope," according to a report from one executive recruitment company. "Our study explodes the general consensus that dot-coms offer a better quality of life and a more fun environment. The hours worked are longer, the travel is more onerous and time at home is limited. The new economy company increasingly mirrors the old, but without a supportive infrastructure." (Financial Times 30 Nov 2000) http://news.ft.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ Let me also recommend a good book from before the dot.com craze even reached full bloom, by the Harvard economist Juliet Schor, "The Overworked American" (BasicBooks 1992). --PJK From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Tue Dec 19 04:55:24 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]E-Publishing Message-ID: Subject: E-Publishing (from CIT Infobits -- December 2000) http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/infobits.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- SHOULD YOU PUBLISH IN E-JOURNALS? Aldrin E. Sweeney, assistant professor of science education at the University of Central Florida, surveyed faculty and administrators and found they are still on the fence about e-journals. Some of the questions Sweeney's survey asked included: Is the peer-review process as thorough in electronic journals as with paper? Does electronic publishing undermine the integrity of academic rigor? Should electronically-published articles be counted in the tenure and promotion process? The respondents' comments and the survey findings are summarized in "Should You Publish in Electronic Journals?" (THE JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING, vol. 6, issue 2, December 2000). The article is online at http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-02/sweeney.html The Journal of Electronic Publishing [ISSN 1080-2711] is published free of charge on the Web by the University of Michigan Press, 839 Greene Street, P.O. Box 1104, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1104 USA. For more information contact JEP: email: jep@umich.press.edu; Web: http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/ From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Tue Dec 19 05:01:11 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Hype(rtext) Message-ID: Subject: Hype(rtext) (from CIT Infobits -- December 2000) http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/infobits.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- RECOMMENDED READING "Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column. "Don't Believe the Hype(Rtext): A Meta-Meta-Criticism of Meta-Criticism" by Curt Cloninger, in *spark-online.com, issue 14.0, November 2000. ". . . hypertext literature is a wonderful subject for discourse, theory, and intellectual hobnobbing; but in the final analysis, there's really not that much to it. . . . Insofar as hypertext comprises a new literary genre, it's about as riveting as those 'write your own story' books that came out when I was a kid ('If you choose to fight the dragon, turn to page 72. If you choose to elope with the maiden, turn to page 287')." Read the entire article online at http://www.spark-online.com/november00/discourse/cloninger.html From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Sat Dec 23 16:13:14 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Global Trends 2015 Message-ID: Subject: Global Trends 2015 Dear Colleagues - My US readers may have heard this report discussed on National Public Radio. Although this document is very sketchy, material of this kind benefits courses where one wants to teach students to distinguish between projections based on plausible demographic extrapolation (e.g. evolving population age distribution and health care) vs. those based on hopes, fears, beliefs and dreams. Projections about the role of technology are usually in the latter category. They stir far greater media coverage which accords them the inevitability of natural law. One could juxtapose such 'technological determinism' to readings of earlier projections, such a John Naisbitt's books "Megatrends" (1982) and "Megatrends 2000" (1990), and their varied outcomes. This might make a more valuable contribution to engineering education than the latest technological wrinkle. Much uncritical generation and consumption of technology trend projection would be curbed by a grasp of the history of technology, going back at least 15 years, preferably 50 years or more. But like most instances of reflection and evaluation, it would probably be bad for the economy. --Peter Kindlmann ================================================================== Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/globaltrends2015/index.html Recently released, this report was prepared under the direction of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) and is the product of numerous workshops and conferences which included specialists from academia and the private sector. The report is an effort to "identify major drivers and trends that will shape the world of 2015." Among those identified are demographics, natural resources, science and technology, globalization, and the role of the United States, among others. The report begins with an overview and summary of the key points, then each of the trends are examined in turn. From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Sat Dec 23 16:35:00 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Utility Deregulation Message-ID: Subject: Utility Deregulation The new brave world of deregulated power prices is not quite working out as projected. Instead of going down under competitive circumstances, prices have jumped sharply higher in California. --PJK ================================================================== Electricity Shortage in California 1) "Power plant blues: Silicon Valley is high on tech, low on watts" -- _Sacramento Bee_ http://www.sacbee.com/voices/news/voices03_20001221.html 2) "Calif faces second power crisis this year" -- Excite News http://news.excite.com:80/news/r/001219/17/energy-california-chronology 3) "Electricity Deregulation Was Doomed From Start" -- _Los Angeles Times_ http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20001221/t000121540.html 4) "Energy crunch hits poor, middle class" -- MSNBC http://www.msnbc.com/news/506251.asp?cp1=1 5) "Electroshock in California" -- Money.com http://www.money.com/money/depts/investing/sivy/archive/001208.html 6) Federal Energy Regulation Commission http://www.ferc.gov/ 7) California Energy Commission http://www.energy.ca.gov/ 8) Electricity Deregulation -- Public Citizen http://www.citizen.org/cmep/restructuring/utilityderegulation1.html 9) California Independent System Operator [.pdf] http://www.caiso.com/ Much to the dismay of Californians, two large utility companies, Pacific Gas and Electric Company and Southern California Edison Company, have been granted consumer rate increases for the price of electricity. This rate hike will affect over ten million California residents who have already endured more than 30 power alerts since June including threats of state-wide rolling blackouts. The deregulation of power prices in California has led to soaring wholesale costs for electricity and frozen customer prices, creating $8 million in combined losses for these two companies. The price for power in the West skyrocketed to $1,400 per megawatt hour, as compared to $35 per megawatt hour at this time last year. Meanwhile, US Department of Energy Secretary Bill Richardson extended an emergency order which forces marketers and generators with access power to provide electricity to California. Richardson blamed the power shortage on the booming technology industry which has caused electricity use in California to rise thirteen percent and energy use throughout the US to increase by fourteen percent in the past year. Although the consumer price increases have not been determined, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has suggested a seventeen percent increase, which would raise the average monthly electricity bill in California from $54 to $63. The _Sacramento Bee_ blames Silicon Valley for California's current power shortage, while Excite News offers a four-year timeline chronicling the state's troubled electricity situation. An editorial from the _Los Angeles Times_ considers the failures of California's power deregulation, which was signed into law in 1996. MSNBC looks at the effects of the rising costs of energy on middle and lower class Americans during the holiday season, while an article published earlier this month by Money.com gives an excellent overview of the ways in which deregulation has hindered power companies and consumers. The Federal Energy Regulation Commission regulates transmission and prices for many of the major power resources in the US, and the California Energy Commission is California's main energy policy and planning agency. Public Citizen, a program that investigates mass energy and the environment, gives frequently updated information about electricity deregulation. The California Independent System Operator (CA-ISO) provides daily market updates on the price of power. From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Sat Dec 23 17:35:32 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Robots Message-ID: Subject: Robots Database on Service Robots http://www.IPA.FhG.de/srdatabase/ Cool Robot of the Week http://ranier.oact.hq.nasa.gov/telerobotics_page/coolrobots.html As technologies become pervasively and reliably useful, they become 'transparent' tools, used with the user's mind focussed on the intended result, not held captive by the often refractory marvels of the implementation. This is how we use our cars, appliances, PalmPilots, and CD and DVD players. To me that is the measure of success of a technology. In many applications, robots have joined the ranks of transparent technology, as demonstrated by the database on Service Robots, produced by the IEEE and the Fraunhofer Institut. The Cool Robots site, produced by the NASA Space Telerobotics Program, features innovative robotic applications, updated weekly. Some are for fun, others seriously useful. Archives dating back to 1996 are included at the site. You get a lot of 'technology criticism' from me. The struggle for common sense must go on. But in the spirit of the holidays I thought we might share a technology success story. All best, --Peter Kindlmann From peter.kindlmann at yale.edu Wed Dec 27 17:02:21 2000 From: peter.kindlmann at yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:19 2006 Subject: [EAS]Best New Year's Wishes! Message-ID: Subject: Best New Year's Wishes! Dear Colleagues - My rather tardy best wishes for the holidays from EAS-INFO. May the gap between semesters provide opportunity for relaxation and reflection. My reflections tend to gravitate toward education amidst all the technological flux that surrounds us. How do we avoid froth? How do we decide what is important? So rather than sending you an affirmation of what is good and true, some text of a "tablet in a church", I'm sending you an excerpt of a mailing by Phil Agre of UCLA, whom you know to be one of my favorite Net thinkers. Though long, I found it to provide affirmation, good questions, in all worthy food for thought for the year to come about cultures, institutions, research and education. It will continue to be hard work to construct the dial of our compass, to earn our certainties. All the best in the New Year! --Peter Kindlmann "We move forward and become like that which we think about. Isn't it time we began to think about what we're thinking about?" Don Coyhis, Mohican, 1993 American Indian Science and Engineering Association ================================================================= (excerpted from http://commons.somewhere.com/rre/2000/RRE.notes.and.recommenda12.html) The importance of overlapping knowledge. On one level, an institution is a set of roles and a set of rules. That's the formal level on which we all get defined as doctors, patients, teachers, students, defendants, jurors, coaches, players, and audience members in our various dealings with one another. On another level, an institution is a body of knowledge. The people who occupy those roles and confront those rules develop a body of intuition, of lore, of savoir-faire, of settled practice, of maxims and how-to's. That's the substantive level on which the collective learning of society gets applied to practical outcomes for better or worse. Here are some examples of the substantive level: * * The detailed manufacturing knowledge that is accumulated by the engineers in an industry (a phenomenon first identified by Thorstein Veblen and recently expanded upon in the work that Alfred Chandler summarizes in the passages I quoted the other day) * * The highly evolved strategies for networking and career-building in the research community that I have outlined in "Networking on the Network". * * The skills and customs for collective problem-solving that build up in the political culture of a democracy (see, for example, Harry Eckstein, Division and Cohesion in Democracy: A Study of Norway, Princeton University Press, 1966). The two sides of an institution, formal and substantive, presuppose one another and play off against one another. Both are part of a big story about human activities get coordinated, and how people manage to be so brilliant collectively even though they are so finite in isolation. Both sides of the institutional story can become invisible, taken for granted, because the framework of institutions that organizes a society does not often change. So it is easy to adopt simplistic or even destructive attitudes toward institutions. Proponents of technology-driven change look at the gathered wisdom of institutions and see pure reactionary resistance to the imperatives of progress. Conservatives, at least when it benefits them to do so, claim that only a blind reverence for tradition will enable the accumulated wisdom of institutions to persist and society to avoid falling into chaos. That is what conservatism means. Realists occupy the rational middle ground between these two extremes. They realize that the accumulated knowledge of institutions is both valuable and a hindrance. No institution is perfectly just or perfectly efficient, and much of the settled practice of any institution consists of hidden interests and routinized log-rolling. We cannot go around randomly blowing up institutions, because we do not know how to fabricate new institutions to replace them on short order. Yet we cannot simply let them be, since the world can most assuredly be better than it is now. Because institutions exist largely to solve informational problems, these things matter especially in our current times of radical change in information technology. Yet we know so little about them that a great intellectual vacuum is opening up. The fall of communism and the spread of democracy created intellectual interest in the nature of institutions. Economic analysis of industry structure is proving a valuable tool in parsing the unexpectedly complicated patterns of change that new information technologies are bringing to markets. And historical studies have shown how institutional take form through disputes between social groups. Even so, we still know almost nothing about institutions and the ways they change. So in reading the literature on the subject, I try to articulate useful intuitions about institutions -- intuitive ways of explaining how and why the social world works -- so that we can have a chance of moving toward fairer, healthier, and more efficient institutions as the possibilities afforded by new information technologies begin to unfold. I want to sketch one of these intuitions, which I'll summarize using two concepts: anamorphism and overlap. First, anamorphism. You've seen Saul Steinberg's cartoon, "View of the World from 9th Avenue", that was on the cover of the New Yorker in 1976. It's a map of the world, but with lots more detail in Manhattan than anywhere else. The further away you get from 9th Avenue, the less detail, until the American West is just a cactus and Japan is just a blob on the horizon. In mathematical terms Steinberg's map is anamorphic: relationships of geographic locality are more or less preserved -- stuff that's close together in the real world is close together on the map -- but the map is grossly deformed, as in a fun-house mirror, so that some parts are much bigger than they ought to be, and other parts are much smaller. The joke was on New Yorkers, but everyone knows that the lesson applies to them as well. We all know our corner of the world the best, and none of us knows the world as a whole. Parochial or not, it's simply impossible to know the whole world. We're all locals. But our knowledge is not limited to our immediate vicinity. Every one of us has some vicarious knowledge of many other parts of the world: through our past experiences, our friends and family, people we meet socially, the newspaper, novels, movies, etc. The knowledge is often sketchy and distorted, but it doesn't vanish at the end of the block. It's an anamorphic map of the geographic world and of the various social, professional, and cultural worlds, including the ones we inhabit and the ones we don't. Next, overlap. You have an anamorphic map of the world, and so do I. Your map is centered in your home and neighborhood, your office and profession, your social network, your reading material, your resume, and so on. My map is centered differently. When I travel, I often ask myself, "What's it like for this, here, to be the center of one's world?" I chat with the elderly couple who run the dim sum shop on the side street in Chinatown, and that's the center of their world. They know the regulars in the shop, the politics of small business people in Chinatown, their relatives, the news from China, their kids at college, and so on. Of course, they also know about US national politics and the Internet and everything else, just like anyone else does, just like I do. It's just that the proportions are different. Their map is deformed; so is mine. They have a 9th-Avenue knowledge of things that are like the lone cactus in the West for me, like how on earth people manage to stay married for fifty years. I probably know a few things really well that they've spent maybe ten seconds thinking about. The point is, our maps overlap. We know many things in common. We can chat because we have a reservoir of references that we can make in common. We don't live in different worlds -- we live in the same world. We just have different anamorphic maps of it. Anamorphism is a measure of our finitude and difference. Overlap is a measure of our universality and commonality. The relations between our maps are not random, but neither are they especially predictable. And institutions depend on anamorphism and overlap. Take the case of the institutions of research. The idea of research is that everyone is supposed to do something new all the time. It's very hard to do anything new. And it's hard to run an institution in which everyone is always doing something new, because the institution won't work unless it can evaluate the work, allocate resources, and create the right incentives. The need to credit all relevant work motivates everyone to develop an extensive map of the literature. The sheer magnitude of the literature ensures that these maps will be anamorphic, since nobody could ever read it all. The need to differentiate one's work from everyone else's means that everyone's anamorphic map will be centered in a different place than everyone else's. But the maps will overlap a great deal. At least, everybody's map will overlap a great deal with many other people's maps. Junior scholars typically have very focused maps; senior scholars typically have more extensive maps. The senior scholars, being older, have had more time to map things, but one's role also shifts with seniority, so that one is called on to set agendas and evaluate work that encompasses larger territories beyond one's immediate speciality. Anamorphism and overlap work together to keep the institutions of research reasonably healthy. Peer review means that everyone's work is evaluated, and feedback on it is generated, by people whose maps overlap enough to evaluate it responsibly, but whose maps are nonetheless different enough that fresh perspectives are brought to bear. So I might write about the role of information technology in higher education, but I make no claim to be a scholar of higher education -- I've skimmed the journals in that area but am not deeply immersed in them. A journal editor might therefore send my paper to be reviewed by someone whose anamorphic map of the literature has its dead center in the literature on higher education, someone for whom the literature on higher education is three-quarters of the world, just as Manhattan is three-quarters of the world for the people Saul Steinberg had in mind. That limitations of that person's world view might prevent them from fully understanding my argument, but I can correct for that. In fact their misunderstanding will be useful, because it will help me to unearth the unarticulated assumption that was leading his or her interpretation of my argument onto a different path from the one I had in mind. When this system is working right, the institution can bring far more knowledge to bear on a question than any individual could possibly bring alone. The institutions of the research community provide an ordered diversity, diversity within a common framework, so that everyone gets the benefit of feedback from people who really know the subjects that their work touches upon. Anamorphism and feedback are also important in social and political terms. Two hundred years ago, people like Herder invented the idea that people's ways of life are sorted into discrete cultures: German culture, for example, or French, or Chinese. The historical context of Herder's thought makes clear why this idea made sense: Germany at that time was politically fragmented, and the idea of a unified German culture was part of the political movement that led to a politically unified German nation. Other nationalist movements found the idea of a unified and discrete culture appealing as well, and in fact Herder's ideas were anticipated in large part by an author in another fragmented not-yet-nation, Giambattista Vico, who wrote in Naples. This idea of discrete cultures, however, has had unfortunate consequences. If each culture is an organic whole that expresses its totality in every word and artifact, then overlap does not exist. Herder did believe that it was possible to understand another culture, but only by getting the entire culture into one's head through extensive scholarly study. It must be said that there is some reason for skepticism about the possibility of communication between cultures, given the capacity of "civilizations" to stereotype one another to such an extent that they don't even care to communicate. But the empirical fact is that cultures are not discrete. German and Dutch cultures emphasize their differences so strenuously precisely because they have so much in common. There really are common themes among the Meditteranean cultures -- overlapping elements that different subsets of the cultures share. And the same is true for almost any geographically adjacent cultures around the world. Cultures, in other words, are really overlapping bundles of traits rather than organic wholes. Cultures do work to integrate their various traits, but in practice they can exist in contradiction and tension as much as in organic unity. A culture is better understood as a repertoire of themes, some of which are consistent with one another and others of which are not. A culture's repertoire is always available to its members, who appropriate whatever themes might be useful for them for a given purpose, and the various themes get coded and recoded through various movements and disputes over the course of centuries. Once we understand all of this, the idea that cultures are hermetically sealed from one another becomes less defensible. Identity politics starts from this assumption of separate spheres, so that every culture must be seen to have its own variety of science and politics and everything else. Fortunately, the intellectual leaders of identity politics -- if not the routinized identity movements themselves -- have gotten beyond this simplistic view of cultures and identities are separate worlds. By acknowledging both anamorphism and overlap, it turns out, one can be oneself, value others, and presuppose an extensive basis for communication and cooperation, without fearing the return of a false conception of universality -- the impossible but easily imagined idea of a perfect and complete map. Anamorphism and overlap also help institutions to regulate themselves. The legal system, for example, only works if every law lies at a point of overlap of many different parties, each with different kinds of interests. Most especially, each law should be monitored by diverse interests who care mainly that the law be rational -- for example that it be applied consistently and logically, without indefensible double standards. Why is this abstract principle of rationality in anybody's interest? Because they have other laws that they care about on a more substantive level, and they want those laws to get applied in the way they want. They need legal protection to do business, for example, and they need to make sure that the legal system keeps working to that end. Now, of course, the legal system doesn't always work in this way. Every law tends create coherent classes of people whom it affects asymmetrically, and those people will always try to pull against that particular law on a substantive level in one direction or another. The dangers of corruption are great, if only intellectual corruption, and that's why it's important to have a large variety of third parties whose interest in the issue is more abstract. People who are affected by the law will always form large coalitions, for example to make it easier or harder to file class action lawsuits, but the system will only work correctly to the extent that even more players retain an abstract interest in the outcome of the coalitions' struggle remain rational, regardless of how it ends up substantively. The same principle applies to every other institution. John Commons points out that every institution has its own rules and its own informal mechanisms for enforcing them, whatever formal mechanisms it might also have. Institutions socialize people into their values, or at least into their language and practices. And so long as most participants in the institution retain a stake in its functioning, they will act on their socialization to spontaneously enforce the institution's rules. Again, this is not some kind of law of nature, and we must inquire in every case to determine whether and how well it works. If everyone is engaged in log-rolling then a new layer of rules will emerge to regulate the processes by which people allow one another to bend the official, public rules. Institutions that depend on representation, delegation, and agency tend to suffer from this sort of institutionalized log-rolling, but the result may well be more efficient, and certainly more orderly and thus predictable, than any known alternative. The point is that an institution's functioning is dependent on the concerted interests of many parties whose standpoints on a given issue differ but overlap. The principles of anamorphism and overlap are hardly sufficient to explain every aspect of institutions and their functioning. But they do suggest ways to assess institutions and perhaps to improve them. Does the institution socialize people to cultivate an anamorphic map of the relevant world? What are those maps like? How focused or broad are they, and how does the degree of focus or breadth depend on an individual's location? How different are individuals' maps? Are they randomly or systematically different? What incentives do people have to map the world? Are there points of low overlap in the world, such as borders between nations whose citizens know little about one another? What kinds of mapping tools do the people have? What roles do informal contacts play in extending people's maps, and then what roles do formal mechanisms like journalism play? Are there adequate mechanisms for drawing a diversity of people with overlapping maps into the deliberations over a given issue? How do people even find out when issues arise that fall in the middle ranges of their maps -- not 9th Avenue, perhaps, but not the single cactus in the West either? Do overlaps in people's maps serve as the basis of systematic methods for building social networks? If a citizen wants to know about topic X, how easily can s/he find another citizen with an overlapping map (so as to facilitate communication) that also includes X (so as to facilitate learning)? Is it worth trying to make the maps explicit? That way people could search for one another by their pattern of knowledge. Do professions encourage their members to develop maps that are too similar and not developed enough outside a parochical boundary? How diverse are people's maps? Does everyone effectively choose from a dozen stereotyped maps, or does every individual end up with a unique map as a result of their unique interests and life experience? What kinds of overlap is it useful for everybody's map to have? Is intellectual diversity a scarce and dwindling resource, or do modern knowledge institutions actually promote increased diversity despite the leveling effects of global media and telecommunications? What consequences do these phenomena have for the design of digital libraries? How can we conceptualize anamorphism and overlap without falling into the twin extremes of pretending that everybody knows everything or that everybody knows nothing? How can people design their own maps, aside from choosing the electives they take in school? Can anamorphic maps be rationally designed? Is it possible to work backward from life and career goals to the design and maintenance of such maps? Is it possible to develop social networks that provide access to people whose maps are complementary in the most useful ways? Can the rationalization of anamorphic maps become an instrument of social control? Is it good enough to have diversity in a standardized framework, as for example in the case of the research community, or is it also important for different people's knowledge to be organized in quite different institutional ways? Good questions. Okay. Having sketched my intuition about the substantive analysis of institutions, let's stop and appreciate my new phrase: "the principles of anamorphism and overlap". Doesn't that sound impressive? A long time ago I figured out that I could think better if I made up words and phrases to name every intuition that started taking form in my notebook. The very act of putting a name on an idea causes it to take form. It causes me to notice examples of it, because you can only see things that you have names for. It encourages me to multiply questions about it, and compare it and contrast it to other ideas, and so on. So I teach this to students. In fieldwork classes for example, I send them out to interview, encourage them to explain what they found interesting, and then we put a name on it. Sometimes I compel them to make up their own name. They find this odd, because in their experience names are just there, the taken-for-granted gift of authorities, and not something that anyone can make up for themselves. You too, I say, have a right to put names on things. In fact that's one of the main ways that we make ourselves useful as scholars: if we observe something and name it, then other people can observe it too.