From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Jan 1 15:17:52 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]The Surveillance Society Message-ID: Subject: The Surveillance Society This further to the several previous mailings on privacy, or the lack thereof. [Go to and do a text search on "privacy" (without the quotes).] As this WIRED article's subhead puts it "We routinely sacrifice privacy for convenience and security. So stop worrying. And get ready for your close-up." --PJK --------------------------------------------------------------------- (from Edupage, December 31, 2001) THE SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY In the battle between privacy and security, the events of Sept. 11 may favor security, but the United States was leaning toward surveillance even before that. Americans now seem more willing to accept technologies that can be used to track them, as long as they offer protection. Cameras mounted on traffic lights, electronic cards that record users' locations, and computerized financial records are only the tip of the surveillance iceberg. Law enforcement agencies are taking advantage of tools that allow them to follow data trails to apprehend criminals and suspects. Cameras that use face-recognition software are widely accepted in Britain, where about 1.5 million police surveillance units are in operation, with more on the way. Researchers are developing software that can gather information from a wide variety of disparate sources based on user requests. The level of protection that society desires raises fears that a giant surveillance network could be created--one that could erase personal privacy and public anonymity. However, citizens can use the same technology to make sure that the government does not exceed its authority and acts responsibly. (Wired, December 2001) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jan 4 17:52:37 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Idiot Savants Message-ID: Subject: Idiot Savants (from NewsScan Daily, 2 January 2002) WORTH THINKING ABOUT: IDIOT SAVANTS In his latest book, "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline," the erudite author and jurist Richard A. Posner is harshly critical of academic pundits who pontificate on subjects outside their narrow realm of expertise: "Most people, including academics, are confusing mixtures. They are moral and immoral, kind and cruel, smart and stupid -- yes, academics are often smart AND stupid, and this may not be sufficiently recognized by the laity. They are particularly likely to be both smart and stupid in an era of specialization, when academic success is likely to crown not the person of broad general intelligence but rather the person with highly developed intellectual skills in a particular field, and both the field and the skills that conduce to preeminence in it may be bulkheaded from the other fields of thought. The brilliant mathematician, physicist, artist, or historian may be incompetent in dealing with political or economic issues. Einstein's political and economic writings are a case in point. Picasso's artistic, or Sartre's literary and philosophical, or George Bernard Shaw's dramatic genius did not inoculate them against Stalinism, or Heidegger's philosophical genius against Nazism. But if the compartmentalization of competence, and the underlying disunity of the self, are not widely recognized--and they are not--a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot. It doesn't help that successful people tend to exaggerate their versatility; abnormal self-confidence is a frequent cause and almost invariable effect of great success." See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067400633X/newsscancom/ for Richard A. Posner's "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy action programs.) --------------------------------------------------------------------- It is indeed getting harder to find intellectual companionship of the "broad general" kind. Modern information technologies 'empower' us to do/read/buy many things for ourselves online, but these transactions are seldom imbued with trustworthy, if any, editorial judgment, that comfortingly resonant yet broadening point of view. Getting 'more voluminous and less decisive' describes not just most of the magazines we subscribe to, but our lives in general. I have often said that 'points of view' are the last great marketing opportunity, and of course they have been for some time, e.g. the 'decorative' views espoused by Martha Steward or Oprah Winfrey. It seems a lot like the Appearance Control Panel on my Macintosh computer, where one can select different themes. But I doubt that their book recommendations, as an extension of the decorative arts, are a good model for how to expand one's sense of judgment. And most public intellectuals, as Posner notes, have become increasingly specialized. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Jan 5 10:00:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Send Me ASCII Message-ID: Subject: Send Me ASCII (from NewsScan Daily, 4 January 2002) SEND ME ASCII: A DAY IN THE WIRED LIFE Sun chief executive Scott McNealy, like the rest of us, gets a lot of e-mail messages: "I get hundreds a day, I review them all, answer many, forward many for response, hate the junk, I type really fast, ignore perfect grammer and typin, getting more over time, but can read e-mail from any browser, have T1's into my homes and read all that is left from the day before I go to sleep after the boys go down and get up before they do to read what came in while sleeping... I HATE attachments, MSFT docs are the WORST! I send them back. Send me ascii." (USA Today 4 Jan 2002) http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2002/01/04/email-overload.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm glad somebody famous said it for me. Very much my sentiments also. Luckily I don't get quite as much email as McNealy, usually not more than 50 a day, but I don't type real fast. Frankly, html email is a waste of ASCII character space. I now just delete it. Attachments are a real nuisance and only justify themselves if they represent real work in progress. Even then, avoid large attachments. When possible, create an access-limited group work Web site instead, and stick the document(s) there, where the interested parties can retrieve or even just read them, without cluttering up their computer with more files or their desks with more paper. This is done too rarely. Everything else should be plain ASCII text for efficient email transactions. Think about what you expect from the email recipient, and know your mailer's properties well enough (e.g. via cc:s to yourself) to know what your recipient will actually find in their mailbox. Also see . --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jan 9 00:15:20 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Do Engineers Lack Humor? Message-ID: Subject: Do Engineers Lack Humor? http://www.ProgressiveEngineer.com/frm_edit.htm A nice editorial by Samuael Florman, whom many of you will recognize as the author of "The Existential Pleasures of Engineering" and several other books, and as regular editorial contributor to a number of engineering publications. While you're at it, check out the online publication where this editorial appears, "The Progressive Engineer," a very worthwhile bookmark. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jan 10 16:07:41 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Planet Microsoft Culture Message-ID: Subject: Planet Microsoft Culture Amusing but predictable. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2102244,00.html This passed on to me by colleagues--Microsoft's efforts at "ballot box stuffing" in a survey of Java use vs. Microsoft's competing .Net product. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jan 17 02:07:24 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Quantum Gravitation Message-ID: Subject: Quantum Gravitation In a somewhat different vein I wanted to communicate my wonder about much recent experimental work at the limits of quantum physics, this perhaps most astonishing of all in recent months. --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 573 January 16, 2002 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and James Riordon QUANTUM GRAVITATIONAL STATES have been observed for the first time. An experiment with ultracold neutrons shows that their vertical motion in Earth's gravitational field come in discrete sizes. Quantum properties such as the quantization of energies, wavelike dynamics including interference, and an irreducible uncertainty in the simultaneous measurement of position and momentum usually emerge only at the atomic level or under special circumstances (e.g., low temperatures) wherein a particle is trapped in a potential well by a controlling force. Observing such properties in phenomena governed by the electromagnetic or the weak and strong nuclear forces is common enough, but the strength of gravity, many orders of magnitude weaker than the other forces, has not previously been strong enough to enforce the kind of confinement needed to make quantum reality manifest. Such an effect has now been seen. Physicists at the Institute Laue-Langevin reactor in Grenoble, France employ a beam of ultracold neutrons. Moving at a pace of 8 m/sec (compared to 300 m/sec for an oxygen molecule at room temperature), the neutrons are sent on a gently parabolic trajectory through a baffle and onto a horizontal plate. Because the neutrons bounce at such a grazing angle, the plate is essentially a mirror for the neutrons, which are reflected back upwards until gravity saps their ascent; then the neutrons start falling again, eventually to be captured by a detector. In effect the neutrons are caught in a vertical potential well: gravity pulls down, while atoms in the surface of the mirror push up. The researchers report seeing a minimum (quantum) energy of 1.4 picoelectron volts (1.4 x 10^-12 eV), which corresponds to a vertical velocity of 1.7 cm/sec. A comparison of this energy level to the minimum energy for an electron trapped inside a hydrogen atom, -13.6 eV, demonstrates why this kind of detection has not been made before. The experiment provides also preliminary evidence for higher quantized motion states as well. In the horizontal direction there is no confinement and therefore no quantum effect. (By the way, neutron-interferometry experiments, in which neutron waves are split apart, moved around separate paths, and then brought back together in order to produce an interference pattern, have been influenced by gravity, but these neutron waves were not quantum states owing to the gravitational field. By contrast, the Laue-Langevin experiment is the first to observe quantum states of matter (neutrons) in Earth's gravitational field.) The next step is to use a more intense beam and an enclosure mirrored on all sides (the energy resolution improves the longer the neutrons spend in the device). An energy resolution as sharp as 10^-18 eV is expected, which would allow one to test such basic propositions as the equivalence principle, according to which the neutron's gravitational mass (as measured by its free fall in gravity) is the same as its inertial mass (as prescribed by Newton's second law, F=ma, where F is a generic force and a the acceleration imparted). (Nesvizhevsky et al., Nature, 17 Jan 2002.) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jan 17 02:42:29 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]The Customer's Name Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP The Customer's Name Long-time EAS-INFO reader Steve Portigal has his own (nomenclatorially non-vegetarian) newsletter on perspectives in product design. I'm herewith forwarding (with permission) his latest issue on the mispronunciation of names, and possible technical solutions. This is the kind of quiet thinking about technology solutions that appeals to me, in contrast to the crass nonsense I typically get in my mail order catalogs. It also reminds me of the early days of mail-order at MacConnection (late '80s), then my favorite phone mail-order store. If I phoned in an order before 2am, they'd deliver the next day for a flat $3 shipping. They did that in part by having their warehouse right at a UPS hub airport, and could get a package on a planein under two hours--but that's another story. When I called them, their system's caller ID feature would automatically forward the information to the operator who picked up my call, and a practiced voice would purr "Good evening, Mr. Kindlmann, how can we help you tonight?" _And_ then the operators were very knowledgable about the products. I must say, I felt well attended to. --PJK ========================================================= FreshMeat #13 from Steve Portigal (__) (oo) Fresh \/ Meat Gimme gimme gimme! Gimme FreshMeat, Gimme FreshMeat! Read past issues: http://www.portigal.com/FreshMeat.htm Get regular delivery: FreshMeat-subscribe@topica.com Discuss this issue: http://www.quicktopic.com/11/H/Qq84baigKNm ========================================================= Over the last couple of years, the Safeway grocery chain has attempted to improve their quality of service by addressing customers by name. You see, if you use their loyalty card, or if you pay by debit or credit card, they retrieve the text of your name and print it on your cash register receipt. Checkers are required to thank you by name, which they read off the receipt, before they hand it to you. This doesn't work so well, because it takes more than a few seconds for some checkers to read some names, and that delay at the conclusion of your service is intolerable. Add to that, an increased likelihood of having one's name mispronounced, and you've got a customer service failure. I mean, if I had a dime for every time they've called me "Mr. Portugal," well, I wouldn't have to shop at Safeway! (This customer service problem was parodied by Saturday Night Live back in 1992. You can read a transcript of the sketch here: http://snltranscripts.jt.org/scripts/92ababynames.phtml) Recognizing the long-frustrating problem of mispronunciation of names during commencement ceremonies, schools like Baylor and Worcester Polytechnic Institute use the web to collect phonetic spelling info from their grads. (http://www.wpi.edu/News/Commence/Ugrad/pronunciation.html) The need is clear, and the technology is ready. Products like Espeech (http://www.espeech.com/NamePro.htm) and Orator II (http://www.argreenhouse.com/ORATOR/) can begin to solve this problem. The technology that translates text to speech actually builds a sequence of phonemes (the basic speech sounds used in a language) that could be spoken (by a speech synthesizer) or output as phonetics. Just add another field to all those databases of customer names. Let the software take the first stab at guessing how to pronounce the name. Checkout clerks and telemarketers would be shown a pronunciation key at the appropriate time. If the customer offers a correction, update the field. If the companies that consumers do business with (airlines, grocery stores, phone companies, banks, etc.) are going to be addressing them by name, is it really so crazy to spend some money getting those names right? Safeway obviously has an inkling that they could deliver better service and forge the right relationship through judicious use of their customers' names, maybe they need to step up their efforts just a notch or two, and get it right. -- If you are interested in ideas for products and services, check out http://www.idea-a-day.com (updated daily, as the name implies, or available as a daily email), or http://www.halfbakery.com/ (looks cool, but kind of impenetrable UI.) -- Steve Portigal is a consultant who discovers unmet user needs and recommends products, services and strategies to address those needs. You can call him Steve, or you can call him Stephen, but you doesn't have to call him Portugal. The URL, my friends, is http://www.portigal.com. Misspell my name at steve@portigal.com, or say it wrong at (650)367-6153. Need more? Blog me at http://chittahchattah.blogspot.com. ==^================================================================ EASY UNSUBSCRIBE: send an email to freshMeat-unsubscribe@topica.com T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================ From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jan 18 23:53:45 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Martin Luther King Tribute Message-ID: Subject: Martin Luther King Tribute (from The Scout Report--January 18, 2002) A Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/library/mlking.htm This site, which was written and composed in 1998 by Professor Melvin Sylvester of Long Island University, gives modest historical data concerning the life of Dr. King. It contains a brief tribute and provides significant dates in Dr. King's life, ranging from his birth in Atlanta, Georgia in 1929 to his assassination in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968. It also reveals Dr. King's writings, offering an extensive reading list for users interested in finding out more about the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. Although the site lacks navigational icons (forcing one to scroll from one field to the next), it is an excellent addition to the Dr. King sites already existing in the Scout Report Archives. Copyright Internet Scout Project, 1994-2000. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Jan 19 00:07:55 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Education Reports Message-ID: Subject: Education Reports (from The Scout Report--January 18, 2002) The Knowledge Economy and Postsecondary Education 2001 Report http://www.nap.edu/books/0309082927/html/ Americans have witnessed and participated in an "extraordinary decade of economic volatility and educational reform." As a result, the National Academy of Sciences appointed a committee to organize a workshop to explore how the various participants in the post-secondary sector have been responding to economic changes. This workshop, which was held in May 2001, was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council and has recently been transcribed into this 199-page document. The document consists of an 8-page workshop summary report, and 186 pages of papers presented during the workshop. Some of the paper topics include "Demographics and American Trends in Post Secondary Education," presented by Lisa Hudson, and "Creating High-Quality Learning Environments: Guidelines from Research on How People Learn," presented by John Bransford. It is important to mention that the focus of the workshop was on the post-secondary system itself rather than an attempt to explain the manner in which the United States economy influences higher education. Growth Continued in 2000 in Graduate Enrollment in Science and Engineering Fields http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/databrf/nsf02306/db02306.htm The National Science Foundation/Division of Science Resources Statistics recently released this brief report on the trends in enrollment of science and engineering graduate students from 1993 to the fall of 2000. This four-page report is accessible in hypertext format or .pdf, and it contains information on enrollment by field, citizenship, race/ethnicity, and postdoctoral appointees. Data presented in this report are from the Fall 2000 Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering and were collected from approximately 11,800 departments at approximately 600 institutions of higher education in the United States. More detailed information is soon to be released in a forthcoming report entitled Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering: Fall 2000. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright Internet Scout Project, 1994-2000. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Jan 19 03:16:12 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Screw Standardization Message-ID: Subject: Screw Standardization I had to catch your attention somehow. No, not defiance against standards, but screw threads as a historical case study in standardization, with the protectionism of the custom-made opposed to the 'slippery slope' of standardization, championed by the pioneering machinist William Sellers. > The American machine-tool industry was to the second half of the 19th > century what the computer and networking industry was to the second > half of the 20th: the country's most important driver of technological > innovation. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Jan 22 04:04:08 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Microsoft Security Message-ID: Subject: Microsoft Security What's Really Behind Microsoft's New Commitment to Data Security --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jan 25 19:52:45 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Voodoo Science Defenses Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Voodoo Science Defenses Dear Colleagues - Please read this and think about it. That there have been worms in the apple of science is not new, that they are gaining larger niches in funding agencies and the public's attention is! At a time when many of us at Yale are thinking about educational objectives for our ABET reaccreditation, a nice objective would be to have our engineering graduates live in their complex technological world in an informed and reasoned way. The charlatans below should provoke their scientific and technological "immune responses." But is our teaching in fact accomplishing that? This is good material for science fact vs. science fiction. All best, --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 1/25/02 3:45 PM From: What's New WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 25 Jan 02 Washington, DC 1. DOE VOODOO: INSPECTOR GENERAL UNCOVERS MORE HIGH-TECH DOWSING. The DOE Office of Environmental Management supports development of innovative environmental cleanup technologies. It would be hard to imagine anything more innovative than "Passive Magnetic Resonance Anomaly Mapping," which combines an electronic system and a human operator into a single bio-sensory unit by connecting the operator at the wrists to an electronic system strapped to his waist. The device is supposed to locate underground water, faults, fractures, buried objects and chemicals. Specifics on the interaction between the operator and the electronics are, of course, proprietary. However, it relies on the operator's ability to sense tiny changes in magnetic fields. You've been having trouble sensing magnetic fields? Not to worry. The operator, a Ukrainian, is said to be the only person in the world who can. According to the DOE Inspector General's report, no peer review was sought before spending $408,750 on field tests. You will be shocked to learn that it failed every test. The company that developed it blamed calibration problems. We are reminded that DOE also bought into the DKL LifeGuard. It was supposed to detect a human heartbeat through 500 ft. of concrete and steel(WN 25 Sep 98). Before that, DOE fell for the Quadro Tracker, a dowsing rod with lights and buttons (WN 12 Jan 96). 2. IRISH VOODOO: REUTERS BITES ON THE LATEST FREE-ENERGY CLAIM. I got a call this week from a Reuters correspondent in Dublin who had witnessed a demonstration of the Jasker Power System, a motor that is said to replenish its own energy source. All he could tell me about it was that it's the "size of a dishwasher," and it kept three 100-watt light bulbs lit for two hours without running down the "starting batteries." To prevent the idea from being stolen, everything else was secret. It was developed in Ireland to keep the U.S. government from suppressing it. What did I think? I think he was a damned fool for covering it. The first warning sign of voodoo science is that it's pitched directly to the media. Second, details of how it works are withheld. Third, a powerful establishment is said to be attempting to suppress it. 3. PRAYER: DOES BELIEF INFLUENCE WHAT THE RESEARCHER REPORTS? As WN reported last month, Mayo Clinic researchers could find no benefit to coronary patients from prayers if the patients didn't know they were being prayed for. This week, writing in Time.com, Leon Jaroff points out that, by contrast, Elizabeth Targ, who is funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, found a positive distance healing effect on AIDS and cancer patients. Jaroff says such work should be monitored by qualified scientists from outside the paranormal and quack communities. "Past experience," he writes, "suggests that under such safeguards miracles do not occur." THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY Opinions are the author's, and are not necessarily shared by the University or the American Physical Society, but they should be. ------------------ RFC822 Header Follows ------------------ Received: by design.eng.yale.edu with SMTP;25 Jan 2002 15:45:19 -0500 Received: (from whatsnew@localhost) by tron.aps.org (8.9.1b+Sun/8.9.1) id PAA03820; Fri, 25 Jan 2002 15:44:43 -0500 (EST) Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2002 15:44:43 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <200201252044.PAA03820@tron.aps.org> To: pjk@design.eng.yale.edu From: "What's New" Subject: What's New for Jan 25, 2002 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Jan 29 22:32:21 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Women in Computing Message-ID: Subject: Women in Computing (from NewsScan Daily, 29 January 2002) Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, coauthors of the new book "Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing," say that the gender gap in computer use comes about because girls, unlike boys, don't feel a "magnetic attraction" to technology: "We found that men and women tended to come at computing with different orientations and different goals. The men were motivated primarily by their interest in and enjoyment of technology; the women tended to be motivated by what it was good for, how it could be used to help people.'' (San Jose Mercury News 29 Jan 2002) http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/svfront/women012902.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------- This difference in attitude has been commented on before, but it is easy to forget in the male-dominant computer and engineering environment. Subtler and also easily forgotten is the implication that the standards of personal competitiveness by which junior faculty are valued come more easily to those driven by interest in technology itself, than to those motivated by the implications of technology, whether women or adjuncts. It is always easier to be single-minded about causes than effects. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jan 30 04:22:15 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Joy of Convolution Message-ID: Subject: Joy of Convolution Dear Colleagues - From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jan 31 19:23:28 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]EAS-INFO Archiving Message-ID: Subject: EAS-INFO Archiving Dear Colleagues - For those of you who have used the archive of all past EAS-INFO mailings at , some 6 years worth, this is the last message that can be archived there because of security related server reconfiguration. I am told that what is there, however, will continue to be available on the Web. Since mid-2000 a parallel archive has been growing at . So from now it will be only there that future mailings will be archived. All best, --Peter Kindlmann From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Feb 1 01:30:15 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Technology's Educational Va Message-ID: Subject: Technology's Educational Value (from CIT INFOBITS -- January 2002) CALL FOR AN EDUCATIONAL THEORY OF TECHNOLOGY Concerned that "[n]ew 'partnerships' of designers and developers committed to technology for its own sake now create products for the 'education marketplace,' with little or no experience of, or interest in, underlying educational goals," Suzanne de Castell, Mary Bryson, and Jennifer Jenson ("Object Lessons: Towards an Educational Theory of Technology," FIRST MONDAY, vol. 7, no. 1, January 2002), make a case for an educational theory of technology, as opposed to a theory of educational technology. "The difference between these is that whereas theories of educational technology take for granted, whether as good or as harmful, the integration of education and technology; an educational theory of technology, by contrast, would investigate technology from the standpoint of educational values and purposes, and with reference to what can be discerned from a study of 'educational technology' as a socially-situated artifact. . . . In order to learn from our tools, we have also to take seriously the study of them, in the multiple and variable contexts of their intended and actual use." The article is available online at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_1/castell/index.html The authors are members of GenTech, an applied research project whose mandate is to create conditions within which girls and women have maximum access to, and confidence in, a wide range of new information technologies. For more information about GenTech, link to http://www.shecan.com/ First Monday [ISSN: 1396-0466] is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original articles about the Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is published in cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA; email: ejv@uic.edu; Web: http://firstmonday.dk/ See also: OVERSOLD AND UNDERUSED: COMPUTERS IN THE CLASSROOM By Larry Cuban Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001; ISBN: 0-674-00602-X Larry Cuban, Stanford University Professor of Education (Emeritus), "argues that when teachers are not given a say in how the technology might reshape schools, computers are merely souped-up typewriters and classrooms continue to run much as they did a generation ago. In his studies of early childhood, high school, and university classrooms in Silicon Valley, Larry Cuban found that students and teachers use the new technologies far less in the classroom than they do at home, and that teachers who use computers for instruction do so infrequently and unimaginatively." The book is available for online browsing at http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/CUBOVE.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2002, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Instructional Technology. All rights reserved. May be reproduced in any medium for non-commercial purposes. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Feb 2 02:50:55 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Not For Women Only Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Not For Women Only More about women in science and engineering graduate programs, from the IEEE Press. --PJK ====================================================================== Date: 2/1/02 4:51 AM From: Rick Reis "Women with dreams of a doctorate in science or engineering would be well served to forget what mama always said about playing nice." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" STANFORD UNIVERSITY LEARNING LABORATORY (SLL) http://sll.stanford.edu/ Note: Previous Listserv postings can be found at: http://sll.stanford.edu/projects/tomprof/newtomprof/postings.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------- Folks: The review below is of a new book, The Woman's Guide to Navigating the Ph.D. in Engineering & Science, by Barbara B. Lazarus, Lisa M. Ritter, and Susan A. Ambrose, published by IEEE Press. It should be of interest to all graduate students and faculty in engineering and science. The review, by Margaret Mannix, appeared in the January 2002, Volume 11, No. 5, of ASEE Prism, the journal of the American Society of Engineering Education. http://www.asee.org/prism/ Reprinted with permission. Regards, Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Using Mentoring as a Form of Professional Learning Tomorrow's Graduate Students and Postdocs ----------------------------- 1,300 words ----------------------------- NOT FOR WOMEN ONLY By Margaret Mannix ASSE Prism pp 34-35 A new book unravels some of the mystery for women about graduate school programs in science and engineering-and offers insights to administrators and advisers on keeping them in the program. Women with dreams of a doctorate in science or engineering would be well served to forget what mama always said about playing nice. If females want to succeed in graduate school, they've got to be just as pushy, bossy, and aggressive as their male lab partners. Says one doctoral student in physics: "You really can't survive if you're timid." That's just one of the lessons in the new book, The Woman's Guide to Navigating the Ph.D. in Engineering & Science, recently published by IEEE Press. In this day and age, it's hard to fathom the necessity of such a tome. But one look at the numbers and you'll understand why: According to the National Science Foundation, women earned less than half of the doctorates in science in 1998. Of those, only 16 percent were in engineering. Culture is to blame for some of that imbalance, as society seems to rubber-stamp males as the brainiacs of math and science. Women who excel in those disciplines are oftentimes considered anomalies. However, some of the bleak showing in the statistics lies in the nature of the doctoral programs. Co-author Barbara Lazarus, associate provost for academic affairs and adjunct professor of educational anthropology at Carnegie Mellon University, says the testosterone-laden fields of science and engineering are booby-trapped with all sorts of stereotypes and hidden barriers. "Women need to learn how to maneuver in a predominantly male graduate school environment, how to think like academics, and how to be politically astute," she explains in the book. Doctoral candidates aren't the only ones who will find the insider secrets spelled out in the book to be illuminating. If higher education is serious about attracting more women to engineering, then administrators, advisors, and professors of both sexes must critically examine what's going on in their own backyards. That's crucial, says Lazarus, because "there are all kinds of little ways in which the system does not work for women." It could a good old boy atmosphere that short-changes female opinions and contributions. It could be that the male doctoral candidates gather for informal lunch bunches, unwittingly trading inside knowledge much like key business gets conducted on a golf course. It could be that department meetings are held at a time when, say, children need to be picked up from school, a disadvantage to someone who has a major role in child rearing-typically the female half of the parenting duo. It could be a dearth of female role models or inequality in financial backing. Lazarus et al have divided their counsel into four sections that reflect the graduate school experience: How a Ph.D. program operates; making it work; potential perils and pitfalls; and, last but not least, life after the Ph.D. (In other words, finding a job.) Sprinkled throughout the various chapters are instructive vignettes from current doctoral students and women in leadership positions in academia, like Lydia Villa-Komaroff, associate vice president for research administration and professor of neurology at Northwestern University. During graduate school, Villa-Komaroff purposely avoided contact with anyone who didn't think women belonged in the world of science. "I guess that was a blessing because I never felt like I didn't belong or shouldn't be pursuing something that I loved. I learned early on that it's a very good ploy to act confident even when you're not because then people perceive you as confident, and that makes a big difference." One of the most important strategies in a successful doctoral journey is working with the right adviser, one that will help develop a student's full potential and remain a lifelong sponsor. Lazarus and her co-authors highlight what makes such a relationship tick. A faculty member who shares the same interests and philosophies tends to make a candidate feel more comfortable. An adviser should be able to communicate honestly and effectively. After all, the pairing may last several years. Of course, senior faculty members are no doubt better connected, but may not be able to spend as much time with the student as a junior faculty member. But what if the match isn't made in heaven? Changing advisers might be tough. Perhaps other faculty can fill the void in the existing twosome. In any case, remember to approach the problem with tact. You never know when you'll need to rely on your former adviser. The chapter also provides insightful tips and nitty-gritty advice on acing qualifying exams, choosing a dissertation topic, and developing a thesis action plan. For example: "Plan far ahead when ordering equipment for experiments. It may take a long time for it to arrive." Women graduate students with low self-esteem will find the book chock full of ways to exude confidence, a major prerequisite when defending research, abilities, and accomplishments. As most professors and students in science and engineering are male, woman may need to bring in reinforcements. Lazarus suggests building a support group, seeking counseling, joining professional organizations, participating in student activities, and attending conferences. Above all, get a grip on the realities of graduate school. "It's not a sign of weakness to need a supportive environment," say the authors. Women might also find the learning method in graduate school unfamiliar, intimidating, or difficult. No more lecture-study-test that defines the undergraduate years. In graduate school, learning stems from critique and discussion. Some women tend to feel browbeaten when bombarded with seemingly harsh questions or consider them personal affronts. Negative feedback should be viewed as part of the process. Learn to evaluate criticism (opinion) and decide if it's valued, say the authors. Females also tend to internalize problems, which leads to discouragement and feelings of self-doubt. The man "is more likely to think the equipment was bad or the gods were conspiring against him," says Lazarus. "He is more likely to externalize the problem." Women students who strive to balance school and private lives may also find their doctoral sojourn a smoother ride. Learn to focus on the task at hand, prioritize, and set realistic goals. Everyone-not just graduate students-occasionally feels overburdened and anxious. Again, turn to friends and colleagues for support and advice. "Find a group of confidants whom you can trust." And, for goodness sake, ride a bike, sit down to dinner with the family, or take a vacation. Making use of a newly earned Ph.D. can be a challenge, so the book's final chapter helps students decide what type of job they might like, how to approach and conduct the job search, and how to go about the all-important task of networking. "No one should be left out of your circle; you never know who can give you a promising lead on the perfect job," say the authors. Facing an academic or industry interviewer? The book spells out how they differ. There are examples of what sorts of questions a student might expect and shouldn't expect ("Are you pregnant?" is a no-no) from a potential employer and how to be a model interviewee. "Always have at least a few questions for the interviewer. It shows your interest in the job and in the process." Of course, one of the most important questions in the job search is usually saved until last: salary. For women, negotiating an offer can be a daunting task. But consider this, says Lazarus: A man and a woman are offered the same salary in the same department. "She will say thank you very much and take the job. He will say, is that your best offer? He will get another $4,000 and she won't." That smaller sum can haunt a woman during her career, as increases are typically percentages of current compensation. Who says talk is cheap? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------- Margaret Mannix is a freelance writer based in suburban Washington, D.C. She can be reached at mmannix@asee.org. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR LISTSERV is a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------- Note: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to Tomorrows-Professor Listserv 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 Feb 2 19:49:46 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Best Companies To Work For Message-ID: Subject: Best Companies To Work For Technology companies are well-represented, Xilinx and Qualcomm ranking highest among them. --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from The Scout Report -- February 1, 2002) Fortune: Best Companies to Work For http://www.fortune.com/lists/bestcompanies/ Fortune has recently released its list of the "Best Companies to Work For." According to Fortune, the list consists of 100 companies who were willing "to come up with creative ways to keep their employees satisfied" and treated them with "respect and dignity." 80 companies on the list avoided layoffs last year (in the wake of the September 11th tragedy), while 47 reported that they have some sort of official policy barring layoffs. Of course, sometimes companies are forced to take the drastic step of laying off employees, and when layoffs occurred, Fortune gave companies credit for offering generous severance. Click to this site to find out who made the list and a detailed explanation of how the companies were chosen. Copyright Internet Scout Project, 1994-2002. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/ From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Feb 2 23:07:51 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Open Source Encyclopedia Message-ID: Subject: Open Source Encyclopedia Another interesting example of Internet collaboration. [The word Wiki itself comes from wiki wiki, a Hawaiian phrase meaning "quick."] --PJK _________________________________________________________________ (from Edupage, January 23, 2002) FREE ENCYCLOPEDIA PROJECT CELEBRATES YEAR ONE Wikipedia is commemorating the one-year anniversary of its free, collaboratively developed encyclopedia with the announcement that circulation for the project has doubled in just four months. Wikipedia said more than 20,000 articles can now be found on its Web site, up from 10,000 in September 2001. As an open project, visitors to Wikipedia's site can edit an article without signing up for the service. Part of Wikipedia's success is attributed to a strong core group of contributors who maintain community standards of quality and neutrality. Wikipedia can be distributed for free under the GNU Free Documentation License. Almost 200 people worldwide work on the project on a daily basis, and over 1,000 people have contributed to the encyclopedia, organizers said. They credit the project's "nonbias" policy and the fact that participants can easily edit each other's work as factors why so many diverse people can work together with little oversight. (InternetNews.com, 17 January 2002) http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article/0,,3531_956641,00.html http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/24/43858/2479 http://www.wikipedia.com/ From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Feb 5 00:08:52 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Into Moore's Vortex Message-ID: Subject: Into Moore's Vortex (from NewsScan Daily, 4 February 2002) FASTER, FASTER: NO SLOWDOWN IN MOORE'S LAW "Moore's Law" -- the remarkably accurate 1965 prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip would double about every 18 months (thereby also roughly doubling the chip's computing speed) -- is truer than ever, with new evidence suggesting that the computer industry will be able to further shrink one dimension of modern processors (the "physical gate length," or the space between two key components in a solid-state transistor). The result will be even-faster chips a few years from now, and one example of the new chipmaking environment is Intel's announcement of a chip that has performed at up to 10 gigahertz speeds at room temperature, the fastest performance yet for any microprocessor. (New York Times 4 Feb 2002) http://partners.nytimes.com/2002/02/04/technology/04CHIP.html _____________________________________________________________________ This year's International Solid State Circuits Conference began in San Francisco Feb. 3rd. > Today, in the most advanced chip designs, the [gate length] space has > shrunk to just 90 nanometers Ñ equivalent to about 360 atoms laid end > to end. > > Other research advances to be presented at the conference include a > single-chip, solid-state gyroscope from Analog Devices and an > all-electronic sensor array making it possible to do DNA analysis > without optical components. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Feb 7 14:10:41 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]2001 Turing Award Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP 2001 Turing Award Dear Colleagues - This from Gary Chapman, whose syndicated column "Digital Nation" in the Los Angeles Times was cut by them last July because of 'financial constraints'. It had been well-received technical commentary whose decline parallels the general US decline in thoughtful writing about science and technology. By thoughtful I mean observations about effects and cost/benefit tradeoffs. All best, --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 2/7/02 10:16 AM From: gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu Please feel free to pass on this message: Dear friends, I'm happy to pass on the news that the 2001 Turing Award, the highest award in computer science, has been awarded to Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard of Norway, for their invention of object-oriented programming, the most widely used programming paradigm in the world today. The formal citation of the award is on the Web at http://www.acm.org/announcements/turing_2001.html. The Association for Computing Machinery will present the A.M. Turing Award, its most prestigious technical honor, at the annual ACM Awards Banquet on April 27, 2002, at the University of Toronto in Canada. It has been my privilege and honor to serve on the selection committee for the Turing Award, in a group of five people, and I am particularly pleased by this year's award. Congratulations, Kristen! Best to all, -- Gary Gary Chapman LBJ School of Public Affairs University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Feb 7 23:00:54 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Heisenberg and Bohr Message-ID: Subject: Heisenberg and Bohr from PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 576 February 7, 2002 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and James Riordon WERNER HEISENBERG'S WARTIME VISIT to Niels Bohr, recently dramatized in Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen," has, sixty years after the event, just taken a new turn. In a letter made public yesterday for the first time, Bohr accuses Heisenberg of misleading others, in the aftermath of WW II, by claiming to have purposely undermined the German atom bomb effort. In the letter, composed around 1957, Bohr claims that in his recollection of their encounter Heisenberg seemed less ambivalent (and more knowledgeable) about building a bomb than Heisenberg later implied. This letter, now made public by the Niels Bohr Archive in Denmark (www.nba.nbi.dk), was never sent and has since Bohr's death in 1962 been sealed away, leaving physicists, historians, and now artists to wonder about Heisenberg's motives. Upcoming events surrounding the play "Copenhagen" include a month of performances at Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; a daylong symposium on March 2 at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History , including physicists, historians, the President's science advisor John Marburger, Heisenberg's son, and Bohr's grandson; and a session on the subject at the April APS meeting in Albuquerque. ______________________________________________________________________ Other aspects of the past relating to the atomic bomb have had to be revised by the NSA's release of the Venona files , with the current NSA Venona homepage at . A google.com search on Venona will turn up much other interesting material. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Feb 9 22:15:26 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Enron & DRAM Pricing Message-ID: Subject: Enron & DRAM Pricing This fascinating little item indicates that plans for hedging DRAM prices had, I am not surprised, moved quite far along--at Enron, that most inventive enterprise for creating new markets. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/23982.html --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Feb 13 21:01:22 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Babel fish Message-ID: Subject: Babel fish The babel fish universal translator that you slip into your ear in Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is getting closer. (Our doors haven't gotten very intelligent yet, but then there is always that risk of obsequiousness. Sorry, you'll have to read the book.) The device described below does the reverse at this time, converting spoken English into the spoken foreign language. But it's not so hard to imagine this function in an already all-digital hearing aid package. The present translator's accuracy is said to be 90%. It translated a question about a charge for extra luggage as "when is the train going to depart". But since it is geared toward standard phrases, it is at least unlikely to come up with "My hovercraft is full of eels" from the Monty Python Hungarian phrase-book sketch. [And a much delayed thanks to Yale alumnus Andy Bliven (EE '77) who first introduced me to the Doug Adams books. --PJK] -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 13 February 2002) HANDY TRANSLATOR A Russian company has developed a handy pocket-sized gadget that translates English phrases into French, German or Spanish and then repeats them out loud in a robotic voice. "This is the first translator in the world that understands voice and it was primarily designed for travelers," says Arkady Davydov of Ectaco, which developed the device. "It is more than an electronic phrasebook because it recognizes any phrase you say. In the future we will have models for all the other languages." Davydov says the next step will be adding English-to-Chinese capability by the end of the year. "Two speakers, English and Chinese, will be able to communicate live without having to use the phrasebook or dictionary," says Davydov. "It is going to be really amazing." Developers of the Universal Translator UT-103 used recordings of more than 700 native English and foreign speakers to create a phonetic bank of all recorded phrases, so the device is capable of "understanding" English spoken in a wide variety of accents. It's priced at $249.95 and runs on AA batteries. (BBC News 12 Feb 2002) http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1814000/1814724.stm From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Feb 25 03:01:42 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Ken Lay Professorships Message-ID: Subject: Ken Lay Professorships A Fellow May Squirm a Bit in a Chair Endowed by Ken Lay http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-000014258feb24.story > reviled tycoons have long bankrolled the nation's finest universities > Morton Owen Schapiro, president of Williams College in Massachusetts > and an economist with expertise in university finance, said schools > too often appear to take their cue from an old joke in fund-raising > circles: "The only thing wrong with tainted money is that there > 'taint' enough of it." --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Feb 27 08:14:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Complexity & Ethics Message-ID: Subject: Complexity & Ethics Dear Colleagues - The main precept of professional engineering licensing is to protect a lay public unable to vouchsafe technical competence and safety. It has its roots in civil engineering where, say, a town's safety must be protected in the design of its water supply. Honesty, competence and foresight vis-a-vis contingencies are the qualities sought for professional engineers, and ought to apply to all engineer. But the likelihood of technological malignancy increases greatly in areas of rapidly spreading technology whose complexity far outstrips the honorable intentions and pace of professional registration. And I am not primarily concerned about unethical behavior, though that happens also, but about an increasingly large web of technological operations locally envisioned and happily interconnected on a much larger scale, with ever greater Internet communications speed "turning up the gain of all the feedback loops." The survey The Real-Time Economy http://www.economist.com/surveys/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=949071 deserves your attentive reading with that concern in mind. And if you want to add a few highlights, consider e.g. Contracts So Complex They Imperil the System http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/business/yourmoney/24DERI.html?pagewanted=print In November 1965 we had the big East Coast power blackout because the stability of power distribution networks was, one must conclude, still inadequately understood though they had been extensively studied. Triggered by a switch failure at an electrical station near Niagara Falls, within 13 minutes the power failure stretched from two Canadian provinces through nine U.S. states as far south as N.J. and Penn., covering 80,000 square miles and leaving 30 million people in the dark for over 12 hours. (New Haven cut lose from the grid in time and maintained power--and saved my thesis apparatus at Yale from serious damage.) Inadequate control of local electricity systems led to the competition for the diminishing available power, causing the wave of failures. When the Northeast utility grid of its day operated, it operated splendidly everywhere. But when it broke down, inadequate provisions for retaining local power autonomy made it break down almost everywhere on the grid. (On the lighter side, many UFO sightings near Niagara were reported and blamed, and the birth rate spiked sharply nine months later.) As The Economist survey makes quite clear, a highly complex new "grid" of financial flows, manufacturing materials flows and again (vide Enron) energy flows is growing rather arbitrarily across the US (and beyond). Its architects are as diverse in background as the builders of the Tower of Babel. Much public good is at stake. Has this new grid the right balance between local autonomy and interconnectedness? Has anyone even mentioned the relevance of a new kind of professional engineering licensing in connection with any of it? A kind of licensing that deals with the ethics of scales of complexity? --------------------------------------------------------------------- | Peter J. Kindlmann | Prof.(Adjunct) pjk@design.eng.yale.edu | | Dept. of Elect. Engrg. | "I wish it would dawn upon engineers that, | | Yale University |in order to be an engineer, it is not enough| | New Haven, CT 06520 | to be an engineer." Jose Ortega y Gasset | --------------------------------------------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Feb 27 18:17:35 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Ascent of Science Message-ID: Subject: Ascent of Science (from NewsScan Daily, 27 February 2002) THE COSMOS AIN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE Or maybe it is -- but we'll need more research to learn the answer. Scientist Brian L. Silver writes: "When we gaze at distant galaxies, or at the birth of a far-off supernova, we are watching objects and events as they were billions of years ago. And all this is being done from the Earth and some satellites mainly confined to the solar system -- a ludicrously limited platform on which to put our instruments. "Cosmologists have ventured to construct theories explaining the history of the universe. One of the tests of a theory is whether it can assimilate new facts naturally. The Big Bang theory was capable of doing this with the CBR (cosmic background radiation) and with the ratios of hydrogen to helium, and hydrogen to deuterium. It should be remembered that we are dealing with events that happened some 15 billion years ago under conditions far removed from anything man can create or observe today. The miracle is that the theory is moderately successful, but the theoreticians would be the first to admit that it is not successful enough." See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195116992/newsscancom/ for Brian L. Silver's "The Ascent of Science" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy action programs.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- In this vein let me also recommend Jacob Bronowski's "Origins of Knowledge and Imagination." --PJK Thomas Carlyle, surveying the multitude of galaxies, addressed the question of life in the universe: "A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they not be inhabited, what a waste of space." From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Feb 27 18:20:48 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Chip Implants Message-ID: Subject: Chip Implants (from NewsScan Daily, 27 February 2002) CHIP IMPLANT COMPANY SEEKS FDA APPROVAL A Florida company that has developed a computer ID chip suitable for implanting in the human body has applied to the Food and Drug Administration for approval of its product. The VeriChip, as it's called, can be used to store information, such as medical records, which could be accessed by emergency medical personnel in the event of an accident. Applied Digital Solutions says it plans to limit its marketing of the VeriChip to companies that ensure its human use voluntary. A person or intermediary company would buy the chip for about $200 and have it encoded with the desired information. The person seeking the implant would then take the chip -- about the size of a grain of rice -- to a doctor, who would insert it under the skin with a large needle device. Meanwhile, privacy advocates have expressed doubts about the VeriChip: "The problem is that you always have to think about what the device will be used for tomorrow. It's what we call function creep. At first a device is used for applications we all agree are good but then it slowly is used for more than it was intended," says Lee Tien, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (AP Feb 27 2002) http://apnews.excite.com/article/20020227/D7HUDV3O0.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Mar 2 20:39:22 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]NSDL & Scout Projects Message-ID: Subject: NSDL & Scout Projects NEW SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY REPORTS FOR EDUCATION COMMUNITY As part of the NSDL (National Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Digital Library) project, the Internet Scout Project announced the publication of three new, bi-weekly online reports: -- NSDL Scout Report for Life Sciences: Biology, Zoology, Ecology, Botany, and other Life Science topics; -- NSDL Scout Report for Physical Sciences: Geology, Chemistry, Astronomy, Physics, and other Physical Science topics; -- NSDL Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology: Industrial Engineering, Calculus, Algebra, Geometry, Civil Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Human Factors, Hardware, and Software, and related topics. For more details about these reports, see: http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/nsdl-reports/ To subscribe to the reports, see: http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/nsdl-reports/subscribe.html The Internet Scout Project is located in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is sponsored by the National Science Foundation to provide timely information to the education community about valuable Internet resources. Daily and weekly updates are offered for K-12 and higher education faculty, staff, and students, as well as interested members of the general public. For more information about all the activities of the Project, link to http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/ The National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) is currently under construction with funding from the National Science Foundation. The NSDL will offer, via the Internet, high-quality materials for science, mathematics, engineering, and technology education. Its initial release is scheduled for Fall 2002. For more information, link to http://nsdl.nsf.gov/ From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Mar 4 14:50:41 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Gutenberg Digitized Message-ID: Subject: Gutenberg Digitized (from NewsScan Daily, 4 March 2002) LIBRARY OF CONGRESS DIGITIZES GUTENBERG BIBLE The Library of Congress has teamed up with digital imaging firm Octavo to photograph, scan and digitize every binding, end sheet and page of the three-volume Gutenberg Bible housed at the library -- one of three perfect examples printed on vellum that are known today. The other two copies are owned by the British Library in London and the Bibliotheque Nationale in France. A similar project undertaken by the British Library racked up 1 million hits in its first six months. "We're hoping to take digital technology as far as it goes and bring this book to life," says Elaine Ginger, editorial director of Octavo. Viewers will be able to download the text in full-page format and zoom in on high-resolution details of single letters. The digitization process will take about six weeks, and a CD-ROM version likely will be available for purchase through Octavo in June. Meanwhile, the British Library recently announced that it will digitize the first edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and will post 1,300 high-resolution images of the 15th century work online. (Wired.com 4 Mar 2002) http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,50589,00.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Mar 5 18:49:21 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Girl Hackers Message-ID: Subject: Girl Hackers (from NewsScan Daily, 5 March 2002) GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE HACKER FUN An unidentified hacker who claims to be a 17-year-old girl says she was motivated to write the "Sharpei" worm to dispel the notion that there aren't any female virus writers and to annoy Microsoft, rather than to have it spread to actual computer users. Going by the name "Gigabyte," she says on her Web site that she's a high-school senior who takes kick-boxing classes and likes techno and trance music. A consultant for Sophos, the U.K. based security company that reported the worm says, "I just don't know what she's accomplishing by this. She's neither hurting nor helping people." The worm was written to spread via Outlook Express e-mail, with a subject line reading, "Important: Windows Update." (Reuters/New York Times 4 Mar 2002) http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-tech-feminist.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- To me the consistently remarkable thing about such stories does not involve gender, but the blithely accepted proposition of building a huge infra-structure with technology so easily hacked. There are a lot of teenagers with computers in the world. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Mar 8 03:20:39 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]12 second reboot Message-ID: Subject: 12 second reboot The military plans to have soldiers calling in airstrikes using Windows CE on a hand-held Pocket PC ! (hopefully the coordinates for Redmond won't be the defaults) --------------------------------------------------------------- from Phil Agre's latest mailing of URLs. My favorite quote > If the Windows-based machine crashes, ......, it can be rebooted > within 12 seconds. But can a Pocket PC -- more at home in a > Starbucks coffee bar than on the battlefield -- handle combat > conditions? --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Mar 10 02:29:01 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Technology & Learning Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Technology & Learning Dear Colleagues - The topic is hardly new to this list, but this mailing from Rick Reis is suggestive in being specific to engineering education. I have some comments at the end. --Peter Kindlmann ********************************************************************** "Many of the much greater number of less prestigious universities will try to keep doing business as usual, but having to compete for a shrinking pool of undergraduates will force them to either change their practices or close their doors." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" STANFORD UNIVERSITY LEARNING LABORATORY (SLL) http://sll.stanford.edu/ Note: Previous Listserv postings can be found at: http://sll.stanford.edu/projects/tomprof/newtomprof/postings.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Folks: The posting below looks at some of the opportunities provided by technology in teaching and learning. The two scenarios that are presented are from chemical engineering, yet the more general argument which follows clearly applies to teaching and learning in a number of disciplines. The article is by Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent of North Carolina State University and is reprinted with permission. Further information can be found at: http://www2.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/ Regards, Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Slow Knowing Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning ---------------------------- 1,152 words -------------------------- IS TECHNOLOGY A FRIEND OR FOE OF LEARNING? Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent North Carolina State University In almost every teaching workshop we give, someone asks if the rise of instructional technology and distance learning signals the end of higher education as we know it. As it happens, we believe it does, but we regard this as good news, not bad. Consider the following two scenarios. Scenario 1 Sharon boots up her computer, connects to her heat and mass transfer course web site, checks out the assignment schedule, sighs heavily, and gets to work. In the next hour and a quarter, she: - quickly reviews last week's multimedia tutorial that presents material on convective heat transfer, asks questions and poses problems, and provides feedback on her responses and corrections if she misses; - watches a video of her instructor lecturing on the same topic, advancing rapidly to his discussion of a particular homework problem that gave her a lot of trouble; - begins working through this week's tutorial, which deals with a shell-and-tube heat exchanger preheating the feed stream to a distillation column, and clicks on a hot link in the process description that takes her to supplementary material on heat exchangers, including a cutaway schematic, photos of commercial exchangers and tube bundle assemblies, and outlines of exchanger operating principles and design procedures; - returns to the tutorial and builds the steady-state energy balance and heat transfer equations, branching to a linked database to retrieve needed physical properties of the process fluids; - uses linked numerical analysis software to solve the equations, size the exchanger, and generate plots of shell-side and tube-side temperatures vs. axial position along the tubes; - brings up a heat exchanger simulation and first predicts and then explores the effects of system parameter changes on exchanger performance; - closes the tutorial, checks her e-mail and finds a message from her instructor clearing up a point of confusion she had e-mailed him about late the previous night, sends a message to the other members of her class project group reminding them of their scheduled chat room conference at 7:30 that night, and logs off. Scenario 2 Fred goes to his 8 a.m. heat and mass transfer class, drops his homework on the front desk, takes his seat, yawns, and wonders if he'll be able to stay awake until 9:15. Professor Maxwell greets the class and asks the students if they have any questions. One of them asks about a homework problem and she goes through the solution on the board. She then draws a block diagram of a heat exchanger and writes the energy balance and heat transfer equations. When she finishes writing the last equation she asks the class how they would determine the film coefficients in the expression for the overall heat transfer coefficient. Fred vaguely recalls something about correlations from the last lecture but doesn't feel inclined to say anything. When no one volunteers a response the professor reminds the class about the correlations and writes the equation for one of them on the board, and then completes the calculations. She asks again if any of the students have questions, and they don't. She then notes that different correlations must be used for laminar flow, and she writes an expression for one of them. While she is writing Fred glances at his watch, sees that it is 9:13, and closes his notebook. The instant she finishes he wakes his neighbor and heads for the door with the rest of the class. These scenarios raise a question currently being pondered throughout the academic world. If Sharon and Fred are roughly equivalent in intelligence and knowledge of the course prerequisites, which of them will learn more-the one taught in the live classroom or the one taught with technology? There's no way to know for sure, of course-how much a student learns in a course depends on many things-but technology is the way to bet in this example. The rich mixture of visual and verbal information, self-tests of knowledge and conceptual understanding, practice in problem-solving methods, and immediate individual feedback provided by the technology in Scenario 1 are far more likely to promote deep learning than the passive environment of the traditional lecture class...and the fact that Sharon lives 750 miles away from her instructor's campus and has never seen him in person doesn't change the likelihood that she will learn more and at a deeper level than Fred. This speculation is not baseless: studies comparing technology-based and traditional course offerings are beginning to appear with regularity, and technology is looking better all the time. Universities that specialize in distance education are learning how to use multimedia courseware and the Internet effectively and the quality of their offerings is gaining increasing recognition. When students in the near future have a choice between (a) attending passive lectures at fixed locations and times in a campus-based curriculum and (b) completing interactive multimedia tutorials at any convenient place and time in a distance-based curriculum, guess which alternative more of them will begin to choose. This is not to say that technology is a panacea. Passive instructional technology-e.g., simply pointing a video camera at a conventional lecture or using the Web only to display text and pictures-does not promote much learning, no matter how dynamic the lecturer or how colorful the graphic images. Moreover, even at its best technology will never be able to do some things that first-rate teachers do routinely, such as advising, encouraging, motivating, and serving as role models for students, helping them develop the communication and interpersonal skills they will need to succeed in their careers, and getting them to teach and learn from one another. Most successful people can think back to at least one gifted teacher who changed their lives by doing one or more of these things; it is unlikely that anyone will ever be able to do the same for a software package. Here, then, is what our crystal ball says about the future of higher education. An increasing share of undergraduate degrees will be earned in well-designed distance-based programs at conventional universities and institutions without walls like the British Open University,2 and an increasing number of people will bypass college altogether and seek competency-based certification in fields like information technology. Some highly ranked research universities will still teach traditionally and continue to attract undergraduates by virtue of their prestige, serving primarily as training grounds for graduate schools. Many of the much greater number of less prestigious universities will try to keep doing business as usual, but having to compete for a shrinking pool of undergraduates will force them to either change their practices or close their doors. And a growing number of universities will systematically incorporate interactive multimedia-based instructional software in their live classroom-based courses, making sure that the courses are taught by professors who serve as true mentors to their students and not just transmitters of information. These universities will continue to thrive-and they will provide the best college education. --------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR LISTSERV is a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to Tomorrows-Professor Listserv 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ********************************************************************** Hello again - A few things came to mind as I read this, some of them rather obvious: - The quality and compass of the online material described far exceed what is usually available. Preparing it takes great effort, one which textbook publishers are only just beginning to motivate as they migrate toward becoming electronic publishers. - The technologically enabled situation above is juxtaposed to rather inferior teaching, far from the best one can do in person in a classroom. In fact it suggested the classroom scene near the beginning of the movie "Ferris Buehler's Day Off." There was no _interactive interpretation_ of the design choices, as only a deeply and directly experienced teacher can do -- in person. - More troubling to me are questions about the intellectual content of engineering courses. There are core engineering principles which must not be rushed past just because we see the educational road getting ever longer as the frontiers of engineering advance. We want to prep our students with the latest hot topics for a fickle job markets. Teaching students to distinguish education from training is itself a teaching responsibility. Students rarely come to us knowing that distinction. - Just making Web page equivalents of paper is, and always was, training suitable for high-school. Seeking to understand how the Web medium offers a better way of explaining and learning is the challenge. It is clear by now that Matlab and Mathematica have transformed the role of mathematical tools in engineering courses. Making Web course material with such tools embedded, combined with interactive conceptual explorations, offers powerful opportunities. But it is a huge amount of work. It will only happen by committed partnerships with technology experts, and by granting faculty teaching leaves in aid of course development. - The interactiveness of Web environments offers the opportunity of online assessment of what is being learned and how learning could be improved. Feedback about learning in most regular lecture courses usually ranges from inadequate to abysmal. Course critiques at the end of the semester are at best a help in improvements from one semester to the next. Online feedback _during_ the semester is much to be encouraged, but it will take cultural changes in students' perceptions about courses and the role of instructors to make happen. - Teaching with technology in the humanities is a lot less confusing than doing it in engineering. For the humanist technological tools either work or they don't. Vide the success of Jim O'Donnell in his classics courses. The engineer is enmeshed in the ambiguities in using technology to teach about technology. On one level that is trivial, e.g. the many early online courses about the Internet itself. I.e. technology talking about itself, like Noel Coward's favorite subject - himself. Teaching engineering with technology makes it hard to not confuse the medium with the message. It is clear that teaching methods will have to evolve toward more technology, deftly used. We are competing for student customers for a by now hugely expensive college education that can therefore never again be completely detached from attempts at glitzy attractiveness and providing short-term training for the job market. But deeper educational meanings and values are critical to our survival as educational institutions, and to the ability of our students to reach the social and technical goals for which we claim to educate them. --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 Mar 13 17:29:54 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]High Tech? Well, like, no. Message-ID: Subject: High Tech? Well, like, no. (from NewsScan Daily, 13 March 2002) DO VALLEY TEENS WANT HIGH TECH CAREERS? WELL, LIKE, NO. A study of Silicon Valley 8th- and 11th-grade school children, virtually all of whom had access to computers, found that only a third of them are interested in pursuing the kind of high-tech careers for which the Valley is world-famous. Many of them regarded technology careers as boring or intimidating, and one young girl whose mother worked at a high-tech company said, "Every time I go visit her there, I see these guys. They're losing their hair; they're really stressed out." The report was prepared for Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, and the chairman of that organization said: "By eighth grade, people don't know what they want to do, but they do know what they don't want to do." (San Jose Mercury News 12 Mar 2002) http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/2847753.htm --------------------------------------------------------------------- A Yale engineering degree, embedded in a rich, socially aware, liberal arts setting, ought to be something we can make attractive to those teens. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Mar 16 10:01:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Enronic Deals Message-ID: Subject: Enronic Deals http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/10/business/yourmoney/10STRU.html Interesting technical article on the "structured finance" entities Enron was using--and were not alone in using. Such special purpose entities can sell notes to public investors, and the supply of such notes today rivals the conventional corporate bond market. Fascinating and disquieting. Given the byzantine technical complexities of the more creative arrangements, it becomes clearer why financial firms are hiring Yale math, science and engineering graduates. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Mar 16 23:01:38 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]NSDL Scout Reports Message-ID: Subject: NSDL Scout Reports Dear Colleagues - The NSF-supported Scout Project at the Univ. of Wisconson has reported in its Scout Reports on quality Web resources since 1994 (!), often to the benefit of this list. Earlier this year they started, as part of the NSDL project (National Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics Education Digital Library), the bi-weekly Internet NSDL Scout Report for quality information in those disciplines. It comes in three flavors NSDL Scout Report for Life Sciences: Biology, Zoology, Ecology, Botany, and other Life Science topics. NSDL Scout Report for Physical Sciences: Geology, Chemistry, Astronomy, Physics, and other Physical Science topics. NSDL Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology: Industrial Engineering, Calculus, Algebra, Geometry, Civil Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Environmental Engineering, Computer Sciences, Human Factors, Hardware, and Software, and related topics. The last is probably closest to the interests of the majority of EAS-INFO readers. Have a look at the table of contents of the issue current at the time of writing. Each item is a link to a short description, which in turn takes you to the described resource. You will find much of interest here. Well-meaning colleagues have assured me that nobody takes the time to click on the links I send out in these mailings. I can only hope that not all of you have such confined and driven existences. Of particular interest to me in this issue were [with my reasons appended]: JPL Sensor Webs Project http://sensorwebs.jpl.nasa.gov/ The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory has devised a remarkable new type of sensor that could revolutionize the way scientists gather data. A Sensor Web is a network of many individual sensors that are about the size of a ping-pong ball. By themselves, they collect a single measurement-like temperature or humidity. But an entire Sensor Web can be spread out over a very large area and collect vast amounts of data remotely. The Sensor Webs Web site has a lot of information about the technology and its applications. A fun activity for kids is also given that teaches the basic techniques that Sensor Webs use to collect data. [There has been a lot of suggestions for EE teaching lab activity in remote measurement, ineptly described as students being able to do lab experiments from their dorm room. But using serious distributed remote measurement to bring data _into_ the laboratory from outside settings, e.g. in environmental engineering, is indeed educationally fitting. --PJK] FreeCalc.com: Online Applications for Engineering Design http://www.freecalc.com/ FreeCalc.com has over fifteen engineering design applications developed by Beacon Engineers Inc, which are useful for quick calculations for work or research. The applications can be used freely online; to be able to save your work and get further benefits, a subscription is required. Categories include general engineering, liquid and gas flow, fans and HVAC, pumps, heat transfer, vessels and tanks, and civil and structural engineering. Each application has a very easy-to-use interface, and there are many options from which to choose. Equipment data sheets are also given on the site for quick printing and submittal to suppliers. There are several additional applications under development. [This represents a developing facet of software as education will use it. Instead of struggling to maintain complex design and simulation software on campus, one will access it via the Web at the host company, on a fee-for-use basis. Whole large-scale corporate project management processes are already being handled this way. Instances where a much touted corporate software donation to a university became a white elephant there could be avoided. --PJK] Introduction to Mechanisms http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/People/rapidproto/mechanisms/tablecontents.html Most grade school students learn about the lever, the pulley, the inclined plane, the wheel and axle, the wedge, and the screw. These are collectively known as the six simple machines. The Introduction to Mechanisms offers a much more in-depth look at the underlying principles of these and other more complex devices. The material is appropriate for advanced high school students, engineering students, or anyone interested in learning how mechanisms work. Hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, the site is essentially an online book with a well-defined table of contents and hyperlinked index. Besides the simple machines, other topics include physical principles, kinematics, planar linkages, cams, and gears. Each chapter has many figures and diagrams that illustrate the concepts. [There is already numerous electronic textbooks on the Web that can be tied into courses. This is an example on an introductory level. Others have been mentoned on this list before, e.g. and others. --PJK] Bad Human Factors Designs http://www.baddesigns.com/ Here is a site that is not only useful, it is also somewhat amusing. The basic concept being conveyed is why learn from your own mistakes when you can learn from someone else's? Any type of engineer, student, or professional should know the difference between a bad design versus a good one. This site has a long list of bad designs, and new ones are added regularly. The material is maintained by a usability engineer, which means he obviously knows a lot about the topic. Some examples include a stapler, a paper towel dispenser, and a shower faucet. They might not make sense right now, but look over the site. You should soon realize the importance of a good design. [Although Donald Norman tried to call attention to the difference between good and bad design in his 1988 "The Psychology of Everyday Things," most engineers and engineering teachers do not spend much time on this topic. Even ABET, our engineering accrediting agency, though concerned about ethical awareness does not show explicit concern about the related issue of distinguishing bad design from good. The need is as great as ever. --PJK] Anyway, bookmark the NSDL Scout Report of your choice, or subscribe to the email version at . All best, --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Mar 21 08:34:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Nigerian Email Scam Message-ID: Subject: Nigerian Email Scam More on "419" scams from Nigeria, including law enforcement contact information http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2002/03/14/nigerscam.DTL > Mrs. Mary Mohamed urgently and confidentially needs your assistance. > > > Her husband, a prominent Kuwaiti citizen, was murdered by Islamic > extremists for condemning the terrorist attacks of September 11, and > now, she says in her hastily typed e-mail, those same extremists are > out to kill her. > > The situation is desperate, but you can help. All Mohamed asks is a > letter of invitation so she can obtain a U.S. visa and your > bank-account number so she can move the $40 million her husband > secretly bequeathed her to the United States. Variants of this have been flooding my email, as many as three per day recently. If you have also been afflicted, this may interest you. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Mar 24 15:35:05 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]E-subpoenas Message-ID: Subject: E-subpoenas The latest legal e-wrinkle. ---PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 22 March 2002) COMING TO YOUR IN-BOX: "YOU'VE GOT A SUBPOENA" A federal appellate court has ruled that a Las Vegas casino suing an unlocatable Internet gambling group can use e-mail to send sufficient notification of the legal action it is taking. Law professor Ann McGinley of UNLV says the decision sets a precedent that will "make it easier for lawyers to find elusive defendants. I think we are moving in the direction of service by e-mail." (AP/San Jose Mercury News 22 Mar 2002) http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/2913542.htm From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Mar 26 14:07:55 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Dead(ly) Batteries/Smart(?) Message-ID: Subject: Dead(ly) Batteries/Smart(?) Highway "Friendly Fire" Deaths Traced to Dead Battery ("the machine was programmed to come back on displaying its own coordinates") http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8853-2002Mar23.html The Smart Highway (or not) http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/083/metro/The_smart_highwayP.shtml -------------------------------------------------------------------- In their very different ways, some good study material about engineering design in the "real world." The former is a tragic gaffe in 'system initialization', the latter reminds me a little of when aerospace companies were contracted to design the first hospital intensive care units--too complex to be effective. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Mar 28 23:42:30 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Teaching with Technology Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Teaching with Technology Dear Colleagues - The latest issue of CIT INFOBITS, on my 'short list' among the 20-odd e-newsletters I get, is devoted to the pros and cons of teaching with technology. It is worth your attention in a moment of reflection. (You still do have such moments, don't you?) 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 | -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------- Date: 3/28/02 1:51 PM From: kotlas@email.unc.edu CIT INFOBITS March 2002 No. 45 ISSN 1521-9275 About INFOBITS INFOBITS is an electronic service of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Instructional Technology. Each month the CIT's Information Resources Consultant monitors and selects from a number of information and instructional technology sources that come to her attention and provides brief notes for electronic dissemination to educators. ...................................................................... "No Significant Difference" Revisited Recent Articles on Teaching with Technology -- Adopters and Optimists -- Skeptics and Pessimists Higher Education Institutions and the Corporate Model Recommended Reading ...................................................................... "NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE" REVISITED For many years Thomas L. Russell, Director Emeritus of the Office of Instructional Telecommunications at North Carolina State University, has compiled quotations from research reports, summaries, and papers to demonstrate that using technology to deliver instruction is no better and no worse than other methods. Richard Clark, in his article "Media Will Never Influence Learning" (EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT, vol. 42, no. 2, 1994, pp. 21-29), advised researchers to "give up your enthusiasm for the belief that media attributes cause learning." Now Thomas R. Ramage (Associate Vice President, Parkland College, Champaign, IL) revisits the issue in "The 'No Significant Difference' Phenomenon: A Literature Review" (E-JOURNAL OF INSTRUCTIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, vol. 5, no. 1, April 2002) and attempts to answer the question "Does technology impact learning?" The article is available online at http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/html2002/ramage_frame.html Russell's website, "The 'No Significant Difference Phenomenon'" is available at http://teleeducation.nb.ca/nosignificantdifference/ His research has also been published as THE NO SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE PHENOMENON (Montgomery, AL: International Distance Education Certification Center, 1999). For more information, go to http://www.idecc.org/IDECCorderform.pdf e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology (e-JIST) is published by the Distance Education Centre, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Queensland 4350, Australia; Web: http://www.usq.edu.au/dec/ Current and back issues of e-JIST are available at no cost at http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/ ...................................................................... RECENT ARTICLES ON TEACHING WITH TECHNOLOGY: ADOPTERS AND OPTIMISTS "Commonsense Ideas from an Online Survivor" by Herman D. Lujan EDUCAUSE REVIEW, vol. 37, no. 2, March/April 2002 http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0222.pdf "Many myths surround technology and its role in teaching and learning. One myth is that online instruction requires big bucks. It does not. . . . Another myth concerns the view that online instruction is great for the pre-academic experience . . . but that online instruction cannot serve 'real education' well." In this article Lujan debunks these and other myths of online education. EDUCAUSE Review [ISSN 1527-6619] is a bimonthly print magazine which explores developments in information technology and education. EDUCAUSE Review is published by EDUCAUSE, 4772 Walnut St., Suite 206, Boulder, CO 80301-2538 USA; tel: 303-449-4430; fax: 303-440-0461; email: info@educause.edu; Web: http://www.educause.edu/ Articles from current and back issues are available on the Web at http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm.html "Online Education Must Capitalize on Students' Unique Approaches to Learning, Scholar Says" by Michael Arnone THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, March 4, 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/2002/03/2002030401u.htm In a recent interview, Nishikant Sonwalkar, principal educational architect at the Education Media Creation Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says "online learning provides tremendous opportunity for providing pedagogical choices to learners that cannot be provided by a single professor or teacher in a classroom situation. Online education provides a unique opportunity to use multiple representations of knowledge in terms of media. At the same time, it also provides opportunity to sequence this knowledge in a way so that it makes more pedagogical sense, by providing different learning strategies." The Chronicle of Higher Education [ISSN 0009-5982] is published weekly by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc., 1255 Twenty-third Street, NW, Washington, DC 20037 USA; tel: 202-466-1000; fax: 202-452-1033; Web: http://chronicle.com/ ...................................................................... RECENT ARTICLES ON TEACHING WITH TECHNOLOGY: SKEPTICS AND PESSIMISTS "High-tech teaching could be 'suicidal,' scholar says" by John Sanford STANFORD REPORT, February 11, 2002 http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/february13/gumbrecht-213.html Speaking at the Stanford University Center for Teaching and Learning's "Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching" series, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guerard Professor of Literature, said, "I think this enthusiastic and sometimes naive and sometimes blind pushing toward the more technology the better, the more websites the better teacher and so forth, is very dangerous -- [that it] is, indeed, suicidal." Stanford Report is published daily by the Stanford University News Service, 425 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford, CA 94305-2245 USA; tel: 650-723-2558; email: stanford.report@forsythe.stanford.edu; Web: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/ "Philosopher's Critique of Online Learning Cites Existentialists (Mostly Dead)" by Michael Arnone THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, March 15, 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/2002/03/2002031501u.htm Hubert L. Dreyfus, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, "argues that the Internet's promise of extending and improving human interaction through the digital medium isn't everything it's cracked up to be. . . . To prove his point, Mr. Dreyfus calls on existentialist philosophers from the 19th and 20th centuries, most of whom never saw a computer or heard of the Internet." "Oversold and Underused: Why Faculty Don't Use Computers in the Classroom" by Larry Cuban AFT ON CAMPUS, March 2002 http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/march02/technology.html While affirming that most academics make great use of computer technology in their writing, research, and communication, Cuban argues that "University promoters of computers for instruction need to downsize their expectations for deep changes in pedagogy or seriously examine other factors that influence how professors teach." He believes that "[t]raditional forms of teaching seem to have been relatively untouched by the enormous investment in technologies that universities have made in recent decades." AFT On Campus is published eight times a year by the American Federation of Teachers, 555 New Jersey Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20001 USA; tel: 202-879-4400; email: online@aft.org; Web: http://www.aft.org/ Current and back issues are available at no cost at http://www.aft.org/publications/on_campus/index.html ...................................................................... HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS AND THE CORPORATE MODEL "As institutions of higher education throughout the US and abroad have adopted the corporate model, 'efficiency' and profit have been emphasized, while students have been redefined as 'customers,' 'consumers,' and 'clients.' In reality, what we are currently witnessing, as the result of this corporate paradigm, is the destruction of American higher education." In "Higher Education and the Corporate Paradigm: the Students are the Losers" (WORKPLACE, issue 4.2, February 2002) Zuleyma Tang-Martinez (professor of Biology and Women's Studies, University of Missouri, St. Louis) argues that this model leads to putting the requirement of profit before the needs of students, creates a threat to the tenure system, and promotes distance education as a cheap path to degrees. The article is available on the Web at http://www.louisville.edu/journal/workplace/tang-martinez.html Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor is published by a "collective of 50 scholars in critical higher education" on a website hosted by the University of Louisville (Kentucky, USA). For more information and back issues, link to http://www.louisville.edu/journal/workplace/ Tom Moore, dean of Babson College's School of Executive Education, writes: "The popular notion of a new graduate entering 'the real world' points to the fact that we commonly view academia and the corporate environment as two disparate, almost polarized communities. The perception may be that universities focus on theory while businesses concentrate on practice. And to combine the two--to influence academic curriculum on behalf of corporate needs--has traditionally been frowned upon as a corruption of pure academic purpose." In "Tailor-Made Degrees: Customized Corporate Education" (SYLLABUS, vol. 15, no. 8, March 2002, pp. 30-1, 33), Moore describes how Babson created a school that can be customized to meet individual corporation's needs while students benefit from both e-learning and face-to-face instruction experiences. The article is available online at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=6135 Syllabus [ISSN 1089-5914] is published monthly by 101communications, LLC. Annual subscriptions are free to individuals who work in colleges, universities, and high schools in the U.S. Contact Syllabus Press, 345 Northlake Drive, San Jose, CA 95117-1261 USA; tel: 408-261-7200; fax: 408-261-7280; email: info@syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/ In his book, HIGHER ED, INC: THE RISE OF THE FOR-PROFIT UNIVERSITY (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), Richard S. Ruch writes, "I must confess that until a few years ago I thought that all proprietary institutions were the scum of the academic earth. I could not see how the profit motive could properly coexist with an educational mission. While I did not know exactly why I believed this, I was certain in my conviction that non-profit status was noble, just as the profession of education is noble, and that to be for-profit meant to be in it for the money, which was corrupting and ignoble." Based on his subsequent experiences with for-profit colleges and universities, Ruch re-examines these assumptions. The first chapter of the book is available online at http://www.press.jhu.edu/press/books/titles/s01/s01ruhi.htm ...................................................................... RECOMMENDED READING "Recommended Reading" lists items that have been recommended to me or that Infobits readers have found particularly interesting and/or useful, including books, articles, and websites published by Infobits subscribers. Send your recommendations to carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu for possible inclusion in this column. Co-author (and Infobits subscriber) Alfred Bork recommends this new book: TUTORIAL DISTANCE LEARNING: REBUILDING OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM By Alfred Bork (Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine) and Sigrun Gunnarsdottir (Research Department, Iceland Telecom, Reykjavik) New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001 ISBN 0-306-46644-9 More information: http://www.wkap.nl/prod/b/0-306-46644-9 "The book begins with the problems and goals of learning. It considers possible forms of distance learning, looking at the variables involved, current examples of distance learning, and possible future forms including examples from science fiction. It then investigates student interactions, considering both frequency of interactions and the quality of each interaction. Programs developed in the Educational Technology Center at the University of California, Irvine, illustrate the critical idea of tutorial learning with computers. Production of tutorial learning material and costs for a student hour of learning is discussed. The book ends with suggestions for future progress." Chapters 1-3 (in PDF format) are available for downloading at no charge at http://www.wkap.com/tdl/ ...................................................................... To Subscribe CIT INFOBITS is published by the Center for Instructional Technology. The CIT supports the interests of faculty members at UNC-Chapel Hill who are exploring the use of Internet and video projects. Services include both consultation on appropriate uses and technical support. To subscribe to INFOBITS, send email to listserv@unc.edu with the following message: SUBSCRIBE INFOBITS firstname lastname substituting your own first and last names. Example: SUBSCRIBE INFOBITS Jessica Mitford or use the web subscription form at http://listserv.unc.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?join=infobits To UNsubscribe to INFOBITS, send email to listserv@unc.edu with the following message: UNSUBSCRIBE INFOBITS INFOBITS is also available online on the World Wide Web at http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/ (HTML format) and at http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/text/index.html (plain text format). If you have problems subscribing or want to send suggestions for future issues, contact the editor, Carolyn Kotlas, at carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu Article Suggestions Infobits always welcomes article suggestions from our readers, although we cannot promise to print everything submitted. Because of our publishing schedule, we are not able to announce time-sensitive events such as upcoming conferences and calls for papers or grant applications; however, we do include articles about online conference proceedings that are of interest to our readers. While we often mention commercial products, publications, and Web sites, Infobits does not accept or reprint unsolicited advertising copy. Send your article suggestions to the editor at carolyn_kotlas@unc.edu ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2002, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Center for Instructional Technology. All rights reserved. May be reproduced in any medium for non-commercial purposes. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Mar 31 16:09:57 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Alternative Publishing Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Alternative Publishing Two approaches with contrasting implications. See also --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from CIT INFOBITS -- December 2001) http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/ SELF-PUBLISHING A SCHOLARLY MONOGRAPH When Harvard University historian Marshall Poe couldn't get his book on seventeenth-century Russian history published, he took matters into his own hands. In "Note to Self: Print Monograph Dead; Invent New Publishing Model" (THE JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING, vol. 7, issue 2, December 2001), he explains how he self-published and self-publicized a monograph titled The Russian Elite in the Seventeenth Century: A Quantitative Analysis of the "Duma Ranks," 1613-1713. First he formed his own informal peer-review panel of experts. Next he "made" the book, formatting the manuscript with a word processor and adding a title page, table of contents, running headers, and index. To make the book more system-independent, he next converted it to Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). He put his book on the Web and, using email, marketed it to a list of Slavic history scholars. To get his book reviewed, he sent email to journal editors with the book as an email attachment. Finally, he talked with librarians about getting the book cataloged and into libraries. Not all scholars will have the patience, persistence, and technical skill to follow Poe's path to publishing; however, for those who will, he presents an encouraging, realistic example to follow. 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-info@umich.edu; Web: http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/ -------------------------------------- Date: 3/29/02 2:55 PM From: What's New WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 29 Mar 02 Washington, DC [... snip ...] 2. ALTERNATIVE PUBLISHING: COMMUNICATING SCIENCE BY FULL-PAGE AD. Scientists going through the March 17 Sunday New York Times were startled to find a paper titled "The Collapse of the Big Bang and the Gaseous Sun," by Pierre-Marie Robitaille, published as a full page ad. A professor in Radiology at Ohio State, Robitaille had built the first 8 Tesla MRI. But this paper/ad was outside his field, cost a bundle (about $125 thousand) and didn't have a clear target audience the public couldn't read it, but neither was it in the mathematical language of physics. On the other hand, Robitalle didn't have to put up with peer review and he had full control over timing. The timing raised eyebrows. Ohio is in the midst of a heated debate over a move to put Intelligent Design on an equal footing with Darwinism in the classroom (WN 15 Feb 02). ID is the fallback position of the creationists, who hate the Big Bang as much as they hate Darwin. Their strategy has been to portray the Big Bang as a divisive issue, with a powerful science establishment seeking to suppress dissenting viewpoints. Robitaille, who did not return our calls, seems to cast himself in the role of a lonely defender of truth who must spend a year's salary to get his side of the story out. THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University or the American Physical Society, but they should be. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Mar 31 20:28:09 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]No More Teams Message-ID: Subject: No More Teams [Comments follow further below. --PJK] ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 20 March 2002) NO MORE TEAMS! So writes Michael Schrage in his book of the same name. In a recent interview, he elaborated on his theory. "There's this view -- or, heaven forbid, paradigm -- that if you want to produce successful prototypes or models, you need to create an innovative team." According to this view, innovative teams create innovative prototypes. That's wrong, says Schrage. "If you look at how prototypes are really created whether they're Microsoft software or General Motors cars or Sony electronics -- what happens, more often than not, is that innovative prototypes generate innovative teams." Schrage insists innovative teams don't create innovative prototypes. Rather, it's the other way around. "What really happens," he says, "is that innovative people build a model of something and then they show it to others they think might have an interesting comment. A team forms. The prototype generates a community of interest. So the whole design philosophy behind 'the team' is flawed. The issue isn't using a team to build a prototype; the issue is how do you use the prototype, how do you use the model, how do you use the shared space to build the right team." (Knowledge Inc.) http://webcom.com/quantera/schrage.html SHOULD BUSINESS TEAMS BE MORE LIKE SPORTS TEAMS? With the Winter Olympics over and the baseball season beginning, sports metaphors in business will be sprouting like daffodils. So this is an opportune moment to remember what sports can really teach us about teams and winning. After all, the sports world is full of valuable insights for business people, although some may not really want to face them. First, remember that teams have stars. Jack Welch and other successful managers believe top performers should get paid a whole lot more than mediocre ones. But plenty of managers find this idea unbearable. "It disrupts the team," complained one. "How can you have a guy working next to another guy who's making 50% more?" But the truth is that every team has stars, and everyone on the team knows who they are. A lot of corporate teams try to suppress that reality -- winning athletic teams embrace it. Second, a lot of companies claim to be world-class, but most people don't grasp what that really means. At the recent Winter Olympics the difference between gold medal and no medal was often less than 2%. A lot of managers claim their companies will "bring home the gold" this year. A terrific goal, but just remember that many excellent Olympic athletes were 98% as good as the very best -- and brought home nothing. By all means try to bring home the gold just don't delude yourself about how hard it is. (Fortune 18 Mar 2002) http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=206732 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The reality of engineering teams has not lived up to their energetic promotion as educational policy by business to academia. Business has long been suffused with metaphors of sports (and war). Since we know that metaphor is not just a matter of language but a rather direct reflection of a person's or organization's conceptual structure, I do not doubt the sincerity of business in promoting teams. Michael Schrage, also author of "Serious Play: How the World's Best Companies Simulate to Innovate" (Harvard Business School Press, 1999) comments on the relationship between innovation and team work. And I have previously expressed the view, in that teamwork can be antithetical to achieving simple design solutions. Examples abound--for the moment just look at the visual clutter of the operating system features on your screen, each the "thumbprint" of a team member, and the tiny remnant of a window within which you are reading this. It has been unclear to me why the team concept should find such ready resonance in academia, which is for the most part an environment of staunch individualists who got tenure that way. As such, their relationship to technology should emphasize its personal leverage. Now that the enhancement by technology of physical capability, i.e. of dexterity and brawn is thoroughly established through industrial robotics, next ought to come the enhancement of 'brain' in the form of tools that allow the _individual_ intellect to handle a maximum of complexity. (And I don't mean online shopping and making your own airline reservations.) Once the enhanced individual reaches the limits of complex problem solving, we should return to Adam Smith and such precepts of collaborative division of labor as now apply in a more highly technological setting. The evolution of tools, of computer-facilitated enablement, doesn't quite seem to be going that way. We spend ever more of our time doing what our 'secretaries' used to do, because we are now electronically 'empowered' to do so. And when things get complex, as they often do because we have let them get that way, we propose huddling together in teams (or committees). The term "team" should be given a rest, much as a rest was enforced on "artificial intelligence" when it couldn't live up to its early encompassing promises and found itself a unifier in name alone. Still, many advances that early AI enthusiasts would have considered too mundane are now the stuff of solid progress, e.g. in language translation, neural networks and decision-making software. (see ). Similarly, many advances have been made in the methodologies of collaboration under the "team" banner, but those details gets drowned out by the "team" cheer-leading. I propose that we drop the reflexive emphasis on "teams" for a while and concentrate on the real technical and sociological details of how and when collaboration works best, and how our tools and procedures can be optimized to serve that process. Toward that goal, we should not be afraid to _first_ maximize the scope of the _individual_ within the larger collaborative context. So, not so much "no more teams," but more constructive distinctions about the terms of collaboration. And when we feel unfairly treated or lonely, and want to be democratic and gregarious, there are better responses than the tiresome appeal to teams. --Peter Kindlmann From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Mar 31 21:24:05 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Billy Wilder Dead at 95 Message-ID: Subject: Billy Wilder Dead at 95 Dear Colleagues - I recognize that the comments in these mailings are intended to be at the intersection of technology, education and culture. And generally they have been. But when my favorite actor, Alec Guiness, died in August 2000, I sent a personal note at the time Permit me another such, now that my favorite director, Billy Wilder, has died. And let me mention a less well-known film of his, "Avanti" (1972) which, though a bit long, never fails to cheer me up. --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from Scout Report -- March 29, 2002) Legendary Filmmaker Dies at Age 95 United Press International: Pneumonia kills Hollywood director Wilder http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=29032002-051902-3686r Films by the Late Billy Wilder http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/wire/sns-ap-wilder-films0328mar28.story?coll=sns-ap-entertainment-headlines American Cinema: A Tribute to Billy Wilder http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Cinema/1012/wilder.html A Tribute to Billy Wilder - Part II http://classicfilm.about.com/library/weekly/aa062401b.htm Billy Wilder's Wit and Wisdom http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/wire/sns-ap-wilder-quotes0328mar28.story?coll=sns-ap-entertainment-headlines Legendary filmmaker Billy Wilder, who went from being a crime reporter in Vienna and a refugee from Nazism to becoming the creator of such classic films as Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard, died at the age of 95 at his home in Beverly Hills this past Wednesday. With an extensive movie career that spans several decades, Wilder was the recipient of six Oscars and was the first filmmaker to win three Academy Awards in a single year. He was a master storyteller who specialized in exploring the dark side of American life with a cynicism and humor that few movie makers have ever matched. A writer, director, and producer, Wilder produced some of the industry's best dramas, like Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend, as well as some of its funniest farces -- Some Like It Hot and The Fortune Cookie. He also was the man who first paired Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, creating one of the screen's most beloved comic teams. Wilder was born Samuel Wilder on June 22, 1906, in the Polish town of Sucha, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His mother nicknamed him Billy because of her fascination with the Western hero Buffalo Bill. In 1924, after briefly attending the University of Vienna, Wilder landed a job as a police reporter. His aggressive journalism led him to Berlin, where, enchanted by the city's film community, he decided to become a movie maker. For more information on this story, viewers may access the first two articles published by the United International Press and the Associated Press respectively. Those interested in a list of Wilder's many films may access the third site, also by the Associated Press. Sites four and five both give tribute to this filmmaking icon. Offered by the American Cinema, the first tribute provides biographical information on Wilder, as well as information on his filmography, academy awards, and co-screen writers. The second tribute offers various links to other Billy Wilder sites. Finally, the last site list quotations by Billy Wilder taken from "Conversations with Wilder" by Cameron Crowe. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Apr 2 00:04:12 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Science and Ultimate Realit Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Science and Ultimate Reality A fascinating recent conference. --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 4/1/02 7:37 PM From: AIP listserver PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 583 April 1, 2002 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and James Riordon "SCIENCE AND ULTIMATE REALITY," a meeting about forefront theoretical and experimental physics, was held at Princeton 15-18 March in honor of John Wheeler's 90th birthday and his many contributions to quantum mechanics, cosmology, and information science. Such a meeting is especially timely because these fields have enjoyed a burst of fruitful research in recent years. New experiments demonstrating nonlocality, the idea that an event in one place can affect an event at another place more quickly than it would take a light pulse to pass from the one place to the other, and the pursuit of robust systems which could perform extended "quantum computing," have energized the study of quantum reality. In the celestial realm the advent of automated redshift surveys of the galaxies and compilation of sharp maps of the cosmic microwave background are making possible an era of "high precision cosmology." The Princeton meeting served up an impressive menu of hot topics and notable speakers (http://www.metanexus.net/ultimate_reality/agenda.htm). Examples include the subject of decoherence (Wojciech Zurek, Los Alamos), the process by which a quantum system (one whose whereabouts and movements can only be described in terms of likelihood, using a complex wave function) converts to a classical system (with definite observable coordinates) by subtle but often swift interactions with the surrounding environment; the many- worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (Bryce DeWitt, Texas), according to which a quantum system does not suffer a "collapse of probability" rather the universe itself continues to bifurcate into multiple versions corresponding to the many possible histories available to the quantum system as it moves through space-time; the entanglement of ions in an atom trap (i.e., putting them into a special quantum state in which properties of the participating particles, such as spin or movement, are correlated) for the purpose of forming logic gates for a future quantum computer (Chris Monroe, Michigan). Several speakers addressed the persistent problem of bringing quantum mechanics and general relativity into a single framework. Prominent issues here include the fate of information supposedly lost inside black holes (Juan Maldacena, Institute for Advanced Study); comparisons of string theory with the rival quantum loop gravity theory, which holds that space is not a mere platform for interactions but is itself a sort of dynamical thing; how gravity behaves in extra dimensions (Lisa Randall, Harvard); and the effort to detect gravity waves. Raymond Chiao(UC Berkeley) described an experiment in which he will try to convert electromagnetic waves into controlled gravitational waves inside a device in which a circuit is poised to go from a normally conducting state into a superconducting state. Using a second such device he hopes to convert gravity radiation back into electromagnetic radiation. Robert Laughlin (Stanford), who won the Nobel Prize for his studies of how patterns emerge in two-dimensional electron gases by way of the quantum hall effect, spoke about how general relativity might "emerge" at the edge of a black hole (for background see the online paper arXiv:gr-qu/0012094). One purpose of the meeting was to promote freewheeling debate on all of the above issues, including the role of human consciousness in the measurement process. Young scientists were especially encouraged to engage in this debate, for which scholarships were given for attending the meeting. In fact a Young Researchers Competition was held for papers on quantum reality. The joint winners, from among 64 entries, were Raphael Bousso from UC Santa Barbara and Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara from the University of Waterloo in Canada. At the heart of the meeting was the keynote speech by the always interesting Anton Zeilinger (Vienna), who paid tribute to John Wheeler's many physics insights. One of those ideas was a proposal for a "delayed choice" experiment in which the dissipation of wavelike interference effects brought about by the experimenter's efforts to determine which of several possible paths a particle took in going toward a detector might be avoided by delaying the observation of the path until the particle (or wave) had made its mark. Zeilinger has carried out just such an experiment with entangled photons in a setup he referred to as a "Heisenberg microscope." Zeilinger mentioned another of his recent experiments, one in which carbon-70 molecules, in wavelike form, passed through a series of slits to form an interference pattern. The C-70 molecules, however, were produced in an oven at 900 K, and this warm birth imparted a diversity of vibrations to the molecule, prompting it to shed an average of four or five photons on its way through the apparatus. Why did this communication between the molecule wave and its environment not result in decoherence and loss of interference effects? Answer: the "size" of the photons was much larger than slit spacing or the deBroglie (quantum) wavelength of the molecule itself, and so the photons did not betray any "which- path" information. Apparently a quantum system doesn't decohere if useful information is not being passed along. Zeilinger holds that quantum reality needn't seem so weird if only students were exposed to the subject at an earlier stage. After all, we teach youngsters that the Earth goes around the sun and not vice versa, even though the sun seems to "rise" each morning. Could early instruction in wave mechanics reduce schoolkids' (and adults') alienation from "quantum weirdness"? Zeilinger thought that the time to start was in kindergarten. He said someday he wanted to devise a game with slits and counters which would show what happens when you turn interference off and on. He hadn't thought of the details for the game but he knew there would be no math, no equations, just demonstration. ------------------ RFC822 Header Follows ------------------ Received: by design.eng.yale.edu with SMTP;1 Apr 2002 19:32:36 -0500 Received: (from root@localhost) by pinet.aip.org (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id OAA12013 for physnews-mailing; Mon, 1 Apr 2002 14:22:09 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2002 14:22:09 -0500 (EST) From: AIP listserver Message-Id: <200204011922.OAA12013@pinet.aip.org> To: physnews-mailing@aip.org Subject: update.583 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Apr 2 22:00:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]WebWasher Utility Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP WebWasher Utility Dear Colleagues - Recommending software is even more risky that recommending restaurants, given the many risks of things not working in a given instance. But I have now used WebWasher, a utility for both PCs and Macs to suppress pop-up windows and ads, since TOURBUS (issue forwarded below) first brought it to my attention, and am quite pleased with it. It works for me as described, and I can only hope it works as well for you. All best, --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TOURBUS Volume 7, Number 58 -- 24 Mar 2002 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _________ ____________ ________ __________ _____________ ___ _ / | / | | / | \ | F-R-E-E C-O-M-P-U-T-E-R T-R-A-I-N-I-N-G / | \ |__________|__________/__________|__________|___________/_____| \ / |----\ | Please click below to order the FREE lesson of your choice |////| | (you only pay the shipping and handling). Your FREE Video |////| | Professor lesson will arrive right on your doorstep. Join |////| | over 4 million satisfied users learning: |////| | |////| | --> Windows 98/XP - Outlook - Excel - Access - Lotus |////| | --> Quicken - Internet - Word - WordPerfect - PowerPoint |////| | |////| | Click Now! |////| \_______________________________________________________________|____| / \ / \ / \ \___/ \___/ T h e I n t e r n e t T o u r B u s \___/ Visit the Tourbus Home Page at http://www.TOURBUS.com ! TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP(S): WebWasher (Take Two) TODAY'S TOURBUS ADDRESS(ES): http://www.webwasher.com/en/products/wwash/download_license.htm http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10000-7-1526174.html Blah blah blah Orange Curtain blah blah blah blash largest strawberry blah blah. :P TOURBUS is made possible by the kind support of our sponsors. Please take a moment to visit today's sponsors and thank them for keeping our little bus of Internet happiness on the road week after week. +------ NORTON SYSTEMWORKS PRO 2002 - $300 VALUE FOR $29.99 ------+ Norton SystemWorks 2002 Professional Edition is 6 Feature- Packed Utilities with advanced tools for optimal PC tuning, protection and performance. Just $29.99 gets you *ALL* of the following titles and the shipping is also FREE! - Norton Antivirus, Norton Ghost, Norton Utilities, - Norton Cleansweep, Norton WinFax, Roxio GoBack Quantities are limited, take advantage of this offer today. CLICK HERE +-----------------------------------------------------------------+ On with the show ... There is an old rule in show business that you should never follow an animal act. The reason behind this is self-explanatory: no matter how hard you try, you'll never be able to top a wombat playing "Lady of Spain" on some bicycle horns. [And, like Joan Rivers, animal acts are also known to poop all over the stage.] There is a similar rule in online newsletter writing: don't write about software. The reason is a little less self-explanatory (and much less gross): you can't guarantee that a particular piece of software will work on everyone's computer. Two years ago I wrote about a wonderful software program called "WebWasher." Unfortunately, WebWasher didn't work on everyone's computer. And for that I am TREMENDOUSLY sorry. The smart thing for me to do would be to put this whole sordid episode behind me and move on. But the fact that some of the people on our little bus of Internet happiness had problems using WebWasher has bugged me ever since. So, I am going to break the "don't write about software" rule and take another stab at WebWasher. Hopefully it will work this time. --------- WebWasher --------- The three things that annoy me the most are banner ads, javascript pop-up windows, and Joan Rivers. I don't think I can do much about Joan, but I have found a way to deal with the first two: WebWasher. You've probably already heard of WebWasher. Originally developed by German electronics giant Siemens, WebWasher is a free filter program for both the PC and Mac versions of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. You heard right, folks. WebWasher works on *BOTH* PCs AND Macs! Now for the bad news. WebWasher works only with Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. It does *NOT* work with AOL's built-in browser (but you can always connect to AOL, minimize AOL, and then launch a WebWasher-enabled version of Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer installed on your computer.) Once you install WebWasher on your computer, the program automatically blocks unwanted Web content like banner ads and pop-up windows. Instead of the ads, all you see is white space -- the ads aren't even downloaded! :) Why would anyone want to block out banner ads? Well, some banner ads are offensive to children (I did a Yahoo search for "Patrick Crispen" while I was at a local elementary school, and a banner ad for Playboy appeared. Granted, it was funny ... just not appropriate.) Also, cutting out banner ads and pop-up windows speeds up your Web surfing (one less thing to download). Finally -- and correct me if I am wrong -- I think blocking banner ads also solves the DoubleClick "tracking cookie" problem we talked about a couple of years ago. Aren't DoubleClick's cookies served with their ads? Block the ads, and I think you also block DoubleClick's cookies (but I could be wrong). ---------------- It's FREEEEEEEE! ---------------- What is most amazing is that WebWasher is free for non-commercial (home) users. You heard right, folks: IT'S FREE! To download it, point your Web browser to http://www.webwasher.com/en/products/wwash/download_license.htm . Now, this is where things get confusing. The top of this page announces that You can test WebWasher with a free 30 day evaluation. If you would like to purchase the software, please purchase either directly from a WebWasher Sales office, or from our secure Online-Shop A *BUNCH* of people are going to read this and think I am lying when I say that WebWasher is free. But notice that the 'WebWasher is free for 30 days; after that you have to buy it' quote is located under the section "Commercial and business users." Chances are you are neither a commercial OR business user, so this section doesn't apply to you. If you'll scroll down the page a bit, you'll see a second section -- "Home and educational" use -- that says "WebWasher is available for home and educational use (schools and Universities) for free." Remember, despite what the WebWasher page says about licensing for commercial and business users, WebWasher is free for non-commercial (home) and education users -- US! ----------------- Getting WebWasher ----------------- To start the download process, click on the "I agree" button at the bottom of the page. On the next page, choose the operating system that you are running -- Windows, Linux, or MacOS. This takes you to the download page. You will then be given a choice of whether your want to download WebWasher from an HTTP (Web) server or from an FTP server. Choose HTTP. The link to begin the download isn't the greenish-blue "Download" button but rather the non-underlined link to the right of the button. [You'll see what I mean when you get there.] By the way, there are two versions of WebWasher for the Mac: an English version and a German version. Choose the one written in your mother tongue. There are also two versions of WebWasher for the PC: version 3.0 and version 3.2 BETA 3. Unless you are feeling particularly adventurous, choose version 3.0 (and ignore the "$19.00 per license" note at the top of the Windows download page -- again, that is for commercial users, not for us.) I'm going to assume you know how to download files. If not, take a look at http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10000-7-1526174.html . Our friends at CNET have written a wonderful, free tutorial called "The Beginners Guide to Downloading" that shows you everything you need to know to download stuff on both a PC and a Mac. -------------------- Installing WebWasher -------------------- Once you have downloaded WebWasher's installer file, double-click it. The first screen that comes up lets you choose the language you would like to use during the installation: English or German. Again, choose your mother tongue and then click on OK. The next screen is a welcome screen that tells you to ... Klicken Sie auf die Schaltflache Weiter, um mit der Installation fortzufahren ... Oh, wait. I clicked on the wrong button. That should say Click on the Next button to continue with the installation. Click the Cancel button if you want to quit the Setup program. Click on the "Next" button. The next couple of screens are identical to the screens you have seen when you've installed other programs: a license agreement, a destination location chooser, and an icon group chooser. Eventually, you'll see a "Start Installation" screen that asks you if you want to start WebWasher when your computer starts. UNCHECK THIS BOX! You do *NOT* want WebWasher running all the time. (As for adding a shortcut to the desktop or adding a shortcut to the quicklaunch bar, I'll leave that up to you. I unchecked both). Click on the "Next" button to begin the installation process. WebWasher should install pretty quickly. The last screen you'll see asks you if you want to view the readme file and if you want to launch WebWasher. Uncheck the readme file -- does anyone EVER read those? -- and leave "Launch WebWasher" checked. Then click on the "Finish" button. ------------------------ Configuring Your Browser ------------------------ Now for the fun part. Once you have installed WebWasher, the program's Browser Configuration screen will appear. You'll see a list of the browsers on your computer and underneath those browsers will be a list of ways that you connect to the Net, one of which will be in bold Chances are WebWasher will automatically find your default browser and your default Internet connection. If you want to change what WebWasher has chosen, just click somewhere else. For example, I use Internet Explorer 6 and connect to the Net through both a LAN and, in case of emergency, a dial-up connection. The word "LAN" under Internet Explorer is in bold, meaning that WebWasher will work with IE when I am using my LAN connection. Beneath the configuration screen are two checkboxes: 1. Always use these settings and don't ask me again; and 2. Start the selected browser. Check "always use these settings" and UNCHECK "start the selected browser." Then click on OK. --------------------- Configuring WebWasher --------------------- The final thing you have to do is tell WebWasher what you want it to block. Open WebWasher (by double-clicking the blue "W" icon in your task bar in Windows, launching the program from the Start menu, or double-clicking on the WebWasher program icon on your computer.) WebWasher's configuration screen appears. This is where you choose what WebWasher will and will not block. The choices are completely up to you, but there is one thing you need to remember: UNDER *NO* CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU ENABLE THE PROXY ENGINE, EITHER CLIENT OR SERVER. You just don't need it. So, UNCHECK both "Client" and "Server" under "Proxy Engine." What about the rest of the checkboxes on WebWasher's configuration page? If you want to learn more about each of WebWasher's functions, check out http://www.webwasher.com/en/products/wwash/functions.htm . If you want to know how *I've* configured WebWasher, here is a list of the stuff that I have checked: Standard Filter Dimension Filter URL Filter Popup Windows Scripts Privacy WebBugs Filter Cookie Filter Prefix Filter Everything else I left unchecked. When you check Dimension Filter, URL Filter, Scripts, and Cookie Filter, WebWasher shows you a bunch of options on the right side of the screen. I trust WebWasher, so I didn't change any of these. Click on "OK" and you are done. :) --------------- Using WebWasher --------------- Your browser should now work both with and without WebWasher. To see if WebWasher is working, point your browser to http://www.yahoo.com/ and look directly under the red Yahoo icon. If all you see is a blank space, WebWasher is working! If not, well ... um ... I can play "Lady of Spain" for you on some bicycle horns. ------------------- Disabling WebWasher ------------------- To turn off WebWasher, right-click on the WebWasher icon in your task bar and choose "Close WebWasher." I haven't used a Mac in a while, but there is something on the top right side of the Mac screen that lets you see which programs are open. You should be able to close WebWasher from there. And, since we chose *not* to have WebWasher automatically load every time we start our computer, another way to disable WebWasher is to simply restart your computer. ----------------- Killing WebWasher ----------------- If WebWasher isn't your cup of tea and you want to nuke it permanently, remove the program from your computer. Then, 1. If you have IE, go to Tools --> Internet Options. Click on the Connections tab. Then click on the LAN Settings tab. Finally, uncheck "Use automatic configuration script." 2. If you have Netscape, go to Edit --> Preferences. Click on the plus sign next to the word Advanced. Click on Proxies. Choose "Direct Connection to the Internet." ------------ A Final Word ------------ Gosh, I hope this works. That's it for today. Have a safe and happy week, and we'll talk again soon! :) --------------------------------- TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORD OF THE WEEK --------------------------------- KERNT (adjective). Belonging to the present time. Usage: "Bubba, you know nothing about no kernt 'fairs!" [Special thanks to CJ Stanman for today's wurd] =====================[ Tourbus Rider Information ]=================== The Internet Tourbus - U.S. Library of Congress ISSN #1094-2238 Copyright 1995-2002, Crispen & Rankin - All rights reserved Tourbus Archives CDROM - http://www.tourbus.com/cdrom.htm Subscribe, Signoff, Archives, Free Stuff and More at the Tourbus Website - http://www.TOURBUS.com ===================================================================== .~~~. )) (\__/) .' ) )) Patrick Douglas Crispen /o o \/ .~ {o_, \ { crispen@netsquirrel.com / , , ) \ http://www.netsquirrel.com/ `~ '-' \ } )) AOL Instant Messenger: Squirrel2K _( ( )_.' '---..{____} Warning: squirrels. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Apr 3 22:32:10 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Charles Handy Lessons Message-ID: Subject: Charles Handy Lessons As one of my favorite authors on education, economics and organizations, Charles Handy has figured in these mailings before, e.g. . This is certainly another book of his I look forward to reading. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from NewsScan Daily, 3 April 2002) WORTH THINKING ABOUT: ALCHEMY AND EDUCATION In a charming new memoir called "The Elephant and the Flea: Memoirs of a Reluctant Capitalist," Charles Handy recalls this about his early schooling: "I have often said that I remembered only one thing from my schooldays, the implicit message that all problems in the world had already been solved, that the answers were to be found in the head of the teacher or, more likely, at the back of his textbook; my task being to transfer those answers to my head. When I joined my corporation I assumed that it was the same; my superiors, or some consultant, would know the answer. It was a shock to realize that I was supposed to come up with my own solutions and that many problems were to do with relationships, where there was no textbook answer. It is better now in most schools, but not much, and I have thoughts for the way it needs to change. But learning does not finish with our schooldays. We should be grateful, because later learning is much more fun. "I have learnt more from art galleries, theatres, cinemas and concert halls than I ever did from textbooks. Travel too, the chance to dwell for a time in other cultures, provides a different lens through which to view one's own world, to question things whose very familiarity have rendered them, almost invisible to us. America, India, and Italy, three very different cultures, have each taught me a lot. 'Life is for lunch' they say in Tuscany, but they still manage to work productively as well as live convivially, combining leisure and work in a way that eludes other cultures. America, that land of the free, taught me that the future is something to be welcomed because it can be shaped by us, while India's Kerala state demonstrated to me how a combination of socialism and capitalism, properly directed, can transform poverty into prosperity. "Most important of all, however, was the lesson that I learnt from the study of people who create something in their lives out of nothing -- we termed them alchemists. They proved to me that you can learn anything if you really want to. Passion was what drove these people, passion for their product or their cause. If you care enough you will find out what you need to know and chase the source of the knowledge or the skill. Or you will experiment and not worry if the experiment goes wrong. The alchemists never spoke of failures or mistakes but only of learning experiments. Passion as the secret of learning is an odd solution to propose, but I believe that it works at all levels and all ages. Sadly, passion is not a work often heard in large organizations, nor in schools, where it can seem disruptive." See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1578518229/newsscancom/ for Charles Handy's "The Elephant and the Flea: Reflections of a Reluctant Capitalist" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy action programs.) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Apr 7 00:17:58 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Free Energy Message-ID: Subject: Free Energy Dear Colleagues - 2002 promises to be an eventful year for new forms of free energy. Somewhere amidst the high-tech complexities of our curricula, do let's try to still inoculate our students with enough basic science and physical investigatory sense to help fight these increasingly frequent scams. There are many more besides the ones below. Magnets attached to water pipes for softening water, or to a car's fuel line for better mileage. Some scams are squarely in the realm of electrical engineering, like little boxes you plug into outlets, and then you plug your appliance into the box, with promised major energy savings. Scams, all of them, but the US government, state and local agencies, and many consumers regularly get suckered into buying them. These delusions are _not_ subtler than they were 20 years ago. Rather they are more numerous and often even crasser, as if nourished by a steady decline in the basic science and physical and electrical reasoning "IQ." Is science and engineering education recognizing its "civic duty"? Should we collect a bunch of these examples and have a course in science reason and science delusion? --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 4/5/02 2:46 PM From: What's New WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 5 Apr 02 Washington, DC FREE ENERGY: PERPETUAL MOTION SCAMS ARE AT AN ALL-TIME HIGH. In 1999, I went to Columbus, Ohio for ABC News to witness Dennis Lee demonstrate a permanent-magnet motor that was "more than 200% efficient." Actually, he didn't really demonstrate it. He stuck a magnet on the side of a steel file cabinet; turning to the audience he asked, "How long do you think that magnet will stay there?" He answered his own question, "Forever. That's infinite energy." Don't laugh, this week, Patent 6,362,718 was issued for a "Motionless Electromagnetic Generator" that "extracts energy from a permanent magnet with energy-replenishing from the active vacuum." Already in 2002 we've had the Jasker Power System (WN 25 Jan 02), Chukanov Quantum Energy (WN 8 Feb 02), Bubble Fusion (WN 15 Mar 02), and now a permanent magnet motor. These are the items referred to in previous "What's New"s: IRISH VOODOO: REUTERS BITES ON THE LATEST FREE-ENERGY CLAIM. I got a call this week from a Reuters correspondent in Dublin who had witnessed a demonstration of the Jasker Power System, a motor that is said to replenish its own energy source. All he could tell me about it was that it's the "size of a dishwasher," and it kept three 100-watt light bulbs lit for two hours without running down the "starting batteries." To prevent the idea from being stolen, everything else was secret. It was developed in Ireland to keep the U.S. government from suppressing it. What did I think? I think he was a damned fool for covering it. The first warning sign of voodoo science is that it's pitched directly to the media. Second, details of how it works are withheld. Third, a powerful establishment is said to be attempting to suppress it. THE GREAT SPAM SCAM: A "NEW GROUNDBREAKING SOURCE OF ENERGY." You probably got the same SPAM this week, announcing discovery of an "unlimited source of energy," having something to do with "ball lightning." I don't know what the big deal is: new sources of "infinite energy" are announced almost daily, and "ball lightning" is invoked about as often as "zero point energy" or "cold fusion." One thing is new; the most frequent warning sign of voodoo science is that claims are pitched directly to the media (WN 25 Jan 02). Chukanov Quantum Energy, has taken a different road, e-mailing their pitch to thousands of scientists. BUBBLE FUSION: IT'S NOTHING LIKE THE COLD FUSION FIASCO. But it's getting there. The first warning sign that a scientific claim is voodoo is that it's pitched directly to the media. That didn't happen with the Taleyarkhan et al. bubble-fusion paper (WN 8 Mar 02). The authors went through all the hoops, submitting their paper to a respected, peer-reviewed journal. It was Science that seemed determined to sensationalize the work. In the course of a year, various drafts went to 13 or 14 reviewers, which does not inspire confidence. A number of reviewers reportedly advised against publication and some complain that Science did not tell them of Shapira and Saltmarsh's failure to confirm fusion claims. The second warning sign of voodoo science is that any failure to confirm is blamed on an "establishment" conspiracy. A Business Week story says one author of the Taleyarkhan paper "hinted" that Shapira and Saltmarsh were protecting "the fusion establishment." --------------------------------------------------------------- THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University or the American Physical Society, but they should be. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Apr 8 17:05:47 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Theories of Grading Message-ID: Subject: Theories of Grading A timely, and not burdensomely philosophical, reminder about an end-of-semester preoccupation. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 8 April 2002) WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THEORIES OF GRADING What's your favorite theory of performance evaluation? The quality of the work? The talent or effort of the person? How much the person "grew" from doing the work? Some other theory? Sally, the "Peanuts" character, rejects them all. Given a grade of C, she says to her teacher: "A 'C'? I got a 'C' on my coat-hanger sculpture? May I ask a question? "Was I judged on the piece of sculpture itself? If so, is it not true that time alone can judge a work of art? "Or was I judged on my talent? If so, is it right that I be judged on a part of life over which I have no control? "If I was judged on my effort, then I was judged unfairly, for I tried as hard as I could! "Was I judged on what I had learned about this project? If so, then were not you, my teacher, also being judged on your ability to transmit your knowledge to me? Are you willing to share my 'C'? "Perhaps I was being judged on the quality of the coat hanger itself out of which my creation was made? Now, is this also not unfair? "Am I to be judged by the quality of coat hangers that are used by the dry cleaning establishment that returns our garments? Is that not the responsibility of my parents? Should they not share my 'C'?" The teacher relents, and gives Sally a higher grade. Whereupon Sally says to herself, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease!" (And that is the text for this Monday's meditation on the mystery of life.) See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0689848218/newsscancom/ for the "Peanuts" collection "A Charlie Brown Valentine" by Charles Schulz -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy action programs.) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Apr 8 21:48:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Bubble Conditions Message-ID: Subject: Bubble Conditions On the persistence of techno-optimism in the economy http://www.morganstanley.com/GEFdata/digests/20020118-fri.html --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Apr 12 01:36:13 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Management Fads in Higher E Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Management Fads in Higher Education Dear Colleagues - I wasn't sure whether to forward this to the list, but decided to do so. There are good common sense reminders here, with echoes of my recent mailing on teams. In some places they work, in others they don't. Read on. All best, --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 4/12/02 12:44 AM From: Rick Reis "Thinking that what is good for one kind of organization is good for another is like thinking what is good for dogs is also good for cats. Universities and businesses are different kinds of organizations." --------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" STANFORD UNIVERSITY LEARNING LABORATORY (SLL) http://sll.stanford.edu/ Note: Previous Listserv postings can be found at: http://sll.stanford.edu/projects/tomprof/newtomprof/postings.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------- Folks: The excerpt looks at some of the differences between higher education and what is found in the corporate world. It is from Chapter 9, Managing Fads, pp 215-218, in Management Fads in Higher Education - Where They Come From, What They Do, Why They Fail, by Robert Birnbaum. Copyright © 2000 by Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, California 94104, Jossey-Bass is a registered trademark of Jossey-Bass Inc., A Wiley Company. Reprinted with permission. Regards, Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Student Learning and Intellectual Development Tomorrow's Academia -------------------------- 1,013 words ------------------------- MANAGEMENT FADS IN HIGHER EDUCATION Managing Fads I have two dogs and three cats. The all have fur, four legs, and tails. The physiology and biochemistry of both species are quite similar, and they share much of their genetic structure. But they behave differently. The dogs come when they are called, seek affection and attention, and warn when strangers approach. The cats come when they feel like it and hide under the bed when strangers lurk. Why can't a cat be more like a dog? On the other hand, I have to walk the dogs even in freezing rain, while the cats use their sandbox in the warm, dry basement. And the dogs need to be washed, brushed, and clipped, while the cats groom themselves fastidiously. So why can't a dog be more like a cat? I think about dogs and cats whenever someone says, "Why can't a university be more like a business?" Most business leaders think that colleges and universities would become more efficient and productive by adopting business practices. Most faculty members believe on the contrary that their missions are so different that higher education has little to learn from business (Immerwahr, 1999). It is not a new debate: "We have heard it all before: if we could just run our universities as General Motors is managed, most of our educational programs would vanish" (Bailey, 1973, p. 8). Thinking that what is good for one kind of organization is good for another is like thinking what is good for dogs is also good for cats. Universities and businesses are different kinds of organizations. Certainly institutions of higher education resemble businesses in some ways. They both sell goods and services, higher personnel and secure other resources, compete for customers, and depend on external support. "So if it walks like a firm and it talks like a firm, isn't it a firm? The answer, pretty clearly, is No" (Winston, 1997, p. 33). Institutions of higher education (except in the proprietary sector) have no owners and cannot distribute profits, so there is less pressure to operate efficiently. They function in a "trust market," in which people do not know exactly what they are buying and may not discover its value for years. Their participants and managers tend to be motivated by idealism rather than profits. All "customers" are subsidized, the product is sold at less than the cost to produce it, and the value of the product is enhanced by the quality of the people who purchase it. Compared to business firms, colleges and universities have multiple and conflicting goals and intangible outcomes. "Employees" may be more committed to professional groups outside the corporation than to their own managers, may think of themselves more as principals than agents, and may themselves have roles in management (including selection of the chief executive), as well as permanent appointments over which managers have no discretion (Winston, 1997; Brock and Harvey, 1993; Marks, 1998). One former college president, who subsequently served as a corporate CEO, characterized some of the differences between the reactive world of business and the reflective world of the university in this way: "Business leaders do not speak of constituencies to be wooed, appeased or won over, as do college presidents; higher education leaders do not issue directives, orders, or edicts as do business CEOs. In all my years in higher education, I never once heard a dean, faculty member, or anyone else respond, 'Whatever you say, Chief'; in business it's common to hear it" (Iosue, 1997, p.10). The differences between cats and dogs can be explained by genetic structures developed over eons of time and modifies by the intentional breeding practices of humans. Organizations, unlike animals, do not have genes; they have memes. The differences between universities and businesses can be explained by the cultural replication of successful social forms over time. Businesses look the way they do because firms with this form have proven to be more successful than firms with alternative forms. Universities look the way they do for the same reason: their form has proven to be superbly suited to what they do. The differences between firms and universities reflect the requirements of their different technologies, as well as the need to conform to the expectations of the social groups to which they are responsive. But although the similarities between businesses and universities are superficial, the more we appear to be business enterprises, the more that business solutions are likely to be prescribed for our problems. Are weak leaders and intransigent faculty inhibiting change? The answer is restructuring and reinvention. Abolish tenure, higher outside contractors at lower cost, and get rid of unproductive programs. Establish an "Endowed Chair of the Junkyard Dog" to set concrete efficiency goals, reduce costs, and eliminate the unnecessary (Mahoney, 1997, p. B5). Never mind that "some of the redundancies and inefficiencies of universities are part of that ultimate product of human activity which is the reason for living at all. These redundancies are also an extremely important reserve of high-quality ability in time of crisis. To make universities narrowly efficient might well be the greatest disservice we offer society" (Boulding, 1978, p. 45). Calls for business-related reform ignore a significant body of theory and research showing that management theories, control systems, strategies, and structures that are sensible for some kinds of organizations may be unthinkable and destructive in others (Sergiovanni, 1995; Scott, 1995). The strength of higher education comes precisely because of its perceived contrasts with the world of commerce, and treating academic institutions as if they were businesses would destroy their autonomy and their cultural cohesiveness (Bowen, 1993; Kennedy, 1996). If we model ourselves increasingly on business and are seen by society as using business techniques and exploiting business opportunities, we become just another voice among many in the marketplace. As we respond to diminished funding by seeking new sources of financial support, academic altruism gives way to academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997). "The more we're like other enterprises, the more easily trust is displaced by a familiar sense of 'caveat emptor'- let the buyer beware" (Winston, 1993, p. 407). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR LISTSERV is a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------- Note: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to Tomorrows-Professor Listserv 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 Apr 13 17:42:50 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]$500,000 Teaching Prize Message-ID: Subject: $500,000 Teaching Prize (from ASEE Prism -- April 2002) A Top Prize The National Academy of Engineering has awarded its inaugural Bernard M. Gordon Prize for inventiveness in engineering and technology education to Drexel University's Eli Fromm, a Roy A. Brothers University Professor and an instructor of electrical and computer engineering. Fromm is known for developing a revolutionary teaching program that focuses on making engineering courses available to freshmen and sophomores, incorporating liberal arts into the engineering curriculum and teaching students in a lab. Called Enhanced Education Experience for Engineers, the program was introduced at Drexel in 1989 and has expanded to 60 universities across the globe. As the Gordon Prize recipient, Fromm received a gold medallion and a half million dollar award to be split with Drexel. -------------------------------------------------------------------- More details at http://www.drexel.edu/dateline/default_new.pl?p=releaseview&f=20020219-02 the text of which follows below > Drexel University engineering professor Dr. Eli Fromm, who developed > the revolutionary Enhanced Education Experience for Engineers (E4) > Program, was honored by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) > with the inaugural Bernard M. Gordon Prize for inventiveness in > engineering and technology education Tuesday, February 19, 2002, at > Union Station in Washington, D.C. > > The Gordon Prize, to be awarded biennially, carries a gold medallion > and a $500,000 cash award to be divided equally between Fromm and > Drexel University. > > As an electrical and computer engineering professor at Drexel in the > 1980s, Fromm observed an increasing number of students dropping out > of engineering studies. Fromm knew it was time for an overhaul of > DrexelÕ traditional undergraduate engineering curriculum for > freshmen and sophomores, whose coursework included at least a year > of hard science before the introduction of more creative engineering > concepts. > > "I felt we needed to make changes in the undergraduate programs Ñ > more than just course content Ñ but the entire philosophy," said > Fromm, a resident of Broomall. "The greater practice and design > orientation I had as an undergraduate had given way to theory and > analysis. At the same time, many of the students no longer had the > opportunity to ÔtinkerÕ with things before coming to college. Some > of the important issues for a future practicing engineer were > beginning to get lost." > > Conceived in 1988 and introduced at Drexel in 1989, E4 centered on > six basic principles: offering engineering courses to freshmen and > sophomores, incorporating liberal arts, basic sciences and > mathematics courses into the engineering curriculum within an > engineering context and teaching students in a lab, the natural > setting for practicing engineers. > > Fromm recruited more than 40 Drexel faculty members to co-teach > other disciplines such as writing and history with engineering > professors in a hands-on lab setting. E4 went on to win the NSFÕs > designation as a national model for undergraduate engineering > studies. Drexel renamed the program the Drexel Engineering > Curriculum, "tDEC." > > With funding from the Engineering Directorate of the NSF in 1992, > FrommÕs pioneering curriculum expanded to seven other academic > institutions through the Gateway Engineering Education Coalition, > which, among other things, brought E4 to the entire curriculum, > introduced technology into the classroom and established measurable > course outcomes. > > Gateway Coalition and E4 programs have been extended to more than 60 > institutions around the world. Fromm leads the Gateway Engineering > Education Coalition from its headquarters at Drexel. > [see --pjk] > > "In todayÕs world, an engineer must be comfortable working with > product development teams consisting of marketers, financial people > and manufacturing specialists Ñ in addition to other engineers," > said NAE President William A. Wulf. "The new environment requires an > engineer to have communication skills, understand more about > business and a deeper understanding of the design process itself. > Dr. Fromm and his colleagues were among the first and most > influential in bringing these kinds of skills into the early part of > the engineering curriculum." > > The Gateway Coalition and tDEC programs have shown dramatic results > in such areas as student retention and minority involvement. > Participant schools, some of which networked together via the > Internet, achieved an 86 percent increase in freshmen retention. The > number of engineering degrees at those schools has risen among woman > 46 percent, Hispanics 65 percent and African Americans 118 percent. > > "The NAE decided to create the prize to emphasize the importance of > the continual improvement of engineering education and to underscore > our commitment to that improvement," Wulf said. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Apr 13 19:16:17 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Profits over Privacy Message-ID: Subject: Profits over Privacy Wondering why you've been getting more junk mail again, even telephone solicitations? Although Yahoo and Excite say they hane not actually used user's phone numbers for any marketing programs, others appear to have done so. --PJK Seeking Profits, Internet Companies Alter Privacy Policy http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/technology/ebusiness/11PRIV.html?pagewanted=print From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Apr 15 02:50:49 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]XP Phone Home Message-ID: Subject: XP Phone Home An article about how Windows XP Search Assistant silently exchanges files with a site at Microsoft. > Certainly, the minute one ventures onto the Web, one starts bleeding > information all over the place, fetching images and ads and taking > cookies from secondary and tertiary sources too numerous to mention. > > But when we run an application for some local business like a file > search, we don't expect it to connect silently to the Net, even for > a good reason. When we discover something like this, it feels like > someone else is in control of our computer, and that is definitely > not a good feeling. > > If Trustworthy Computing is going to mean anything, it's going to > have to mean that actions like file downloads aren't going to happen > without the user's knowledge and consent. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Apr 15 16:34:50 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Things get chatty Message-ID: Subject: Things get chatty (from NewsScan Daily, 15 April 2002) THINGS COME ALIVE We're just at the beginning of a new age of products, devices and objects that talk to us -- and to each other. "We're really talking about the next 50 years of computing," says the executive director of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, which is one of the organization studying ways of using computer chips embedded in tiny pieces of plastic attached to just about everything, including egg cartons, eyeglasses, books, toys, trucks, and money. The tags are currently known as Radio Frequency Identification Tags (REIG), and the Auto-ID Center calls the core of its standard "ePC" or Electronic Product Code. Companies such as Wal-Mart, Gillette, and Procter & Gamble have committed to using the technology. As for privacy issues? Accenture scientist Glover Ferguson agrees that privacy will be an issue, and says: "There will have to be a social discourse about what we want and don't want. But the technology isn't going away. You can't un-invent it." (USA Today 11 Apr 2002) http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/2002/04/12/tinyband.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------- Well, 'alive' is a bit strong, 'insistently chatty' strikes me as more like it. Even though I'm an execrable typist, I've never felt that talking to my computer (when I tried voice commands or voice text entry) was an engaging alternative. Maybe human speech is too, well, uniquely human, to waste on machines. And I don't have a dog, so have not explored that aspect of voice communication. Nor do I like my computer to talk to me. I need quiet to really think, and being seen but not heard is part of makes my relationship with my computer productive. I don't even like to hear the fan. So I am ill at ease with everything having radio frequency tags, or even an Internet connection, as some have proposed, letting 'things' swell the techno-babble around us. We need to pay attention to our latter-day Henry David Thoreaus who remind us of the need for a reflective individual life shaped by inner principles. Charles Handy's recent book "The Elephant and the Flea," which I've started to read, falls into that category , as does the work of Steve Talbott . And the equivalent of Thoreau's essay on "Civil Disobedience" would be one on consumer disobedience. So we actually have Thoreaus among us now, but like Henry David they are likely to be too little heeded in their time and only appreciated later. Although we speak of living in the post-industrial age, only the technology has changed, not the attitude. The motto of the 1933 Century of Progress International Exhibition in Chicago exclaimed, to a depression-weary world, "Science Finds -- Industry Applies -- Man Conforms" . Shouldn't we have more perspective amidst our greater present affluence? > "... But the technology isn't going away. You can't un-invent it." Humbug. Don't buy it. It's probably poorly desiged, by people who only know about chips and not the basic necessary functions, like what makes a toaster good. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Apr 16 08:34:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]New CT Driver Licenses Message-ID: Subject: New CT Driver Licenses For the CT readers of this list Viisage Awarded $7.5 Million Contract by State of Connecticut New driver license and identification cards will have advanced security features, linked to face recognition technology. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Apr 16 09:21:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Aircraft Safety Message-ID: Subject: Aircraft Safety Can Technology Foil Hijackers? (lots of opportunity for the study of possible unintended side-effects) http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/11/technology/circuits/11FLYY.html?pagewanted=print --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Apr 18 03:50:50 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Quantum Computers Message-ID: Subject: Quantum Computers The April 12, 2002 NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering & Technology presents an in-depth set of Web resources on quantum computing, at --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Apr 24 13:01:11 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Debates and Bets Message-ID: Subject: Debates and Bets (from INNOVATION, 24 April 2002) WANNA BET? What's the big idea? If it's socially or scientifically important, well-informed skeptics are sure to challenge it. But suppose money was involved -- a wager. Suppose the visionary and the challenger each had to put up $1,000 or more, along with their big idea, with the winnings going to charity. Both parties would be forced to rethink their ideas and refine their critiques, improving the quality of the predictions. That's the idea behind the Long Bets Foundation -- to track our pronouncements about the future. Masterminded by Well founder Stewart Brand and Wired editor-at-large Kevin Kelly, the foundation hopes to raise the quality of our collective foresight by incorporating money and accountability into the process of debate. And since Long Bets wagers always involve future events, the foundation will also keep track to see who won. The initial round of Long Bets include: that commercial airline passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes by 2030; that more than half of all books sold worldwide by 2010 will be printed on demand at the point of sale; that the universe eventually will stop expanding; and that the US men's soccer team will win the World Cup before the Red Sox win the World Series. (Or will the universe stop expanding before the Sox win the Series?) A number of open bets are also at www.longbets.org. (Wired May 2002) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.05/longbets_pr.html [And to give you another topic to 'bet on', how about the future ubiquity of voice activation? --PJK] NATURAL LANGUAGE TECHNOLOGY WILL CALL THE SHOTS "Voice activated software will be universally accepted and a range of applications such as banking will be commonplace," says Benjamin Fisher, an analyst at Datamonitor, which is predicting that speech recognition software will be worth $1 billion by 2006. Among the applications predicted are voice-activated call centers that use speech technology known as Natural Language ASR that enables computers to respond to the meaning of sentences rather than just specific words. "You can say what you want, rather than to listen to what you might want," says Stuart Patterson, CEO of SpeechWorks. Other future applications include voice-activated automobile systems and entertainment applications. Microsoft is considering voice-enabling its Xbox game console and the latest Harry Potter DVD includes a feature that enables children to wander around Hogwarts by giving voice directions. (BBC News 20 Apr 2002) http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1924000/1924144.stm From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Apr 25 00:06:30 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Neutrino Flavors Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Neutrino Flavors Fascinating measurements from the Canadian neutrino observatory. --PJK --------------------------------------------------------------- PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 586 April 24, 2002 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and James Riordon THE SOLAR NEUTRINO PROBLEM HAS BEEN CLOSED and the ability of neutrinos to change from one type, or "flavor," to another established directly for the first time by the efforts of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) collaboration. This finding gives physicists new confidence that they understand how energy is produced in the sun's core and that neutrinos are just as quirky as we thought. The benevolent sunlight we receive on Earth has its origin in the sun's central fusion furnace, whence the light must fight its way outwards in a series of scatterings that takes, on average, hundreds of thousands of years. Solar neutrinos, setting out from the same place, flee unhindered, thus providing the most unadulterated proxy of activity at the core. Measurements dating back to the 1960's of this neutrino flux were puzzling: only a fraction of the expected number arrived at detectors on Earth. Suspicion naturally fell on the experiments and on the standard solar model (SSM) used to calculate the flux. Soon, however, the neutrinos themselves were implicated. If on their journey to Earth some of the neutrinos (basically solar reactions produce electron-neutrinos exclusively) had changed into muon- or tau-neutrinos, then terrestrial detectors designed only to spot electron neutrinos (e- nu's) would be cheated of their rightful numbers. SNO scrutinizes a particular reaction in the sun: the decay of boron-8 into beryllium-8 plus a positron and an e-nu. SNO's gigantic apparatus consists of 1000 tons of heavy water (worth $300 million Canadian) held in an acrylic vessel surrounded by a galaxy of phototubes, the whole residing 2 km beneath the Earth's surface in an Ontario mine, the better to filter out distracting background interactions. Last year SNO reported first results based on reactions in which a solar neutrino enters the detector and either (1) glances off an electron in one of the water molecules (this so-called elastic scattering (ES) is only poorly sensitive to muon and tau neutrinos) or (2) combines with the deuteron to create an electron and two protons, a reaction referred to as a "charged current" (CC) interaction since it is propagated by the charged W boson. The SNO data, when supplemented with ES data from the Super Kamiokande experiment in Japan, provided preliminary evidence a year ago for the neutrino-oscillation solution for the solar neutrino problem. Now the definitive result has been tendered by SNO scientists at this week's joint meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Albuquerque. The new findings update last year's CC and ES data and introduce, for the first time, evidence deriving from a reaction in which the incoming neutrino retains its identity but the deuteron (D) is sundered into a proton and neutron; this is why SNO went to such trouble and expense of using D2O for the weakly-bound neutron inside each D. This interaction, called a neutral-current (NC) reaction because the operative nuclear voltage spreads in the form of a neutral Z boson, is fully egalitarian when it comes to neutrino scattering; unlike last year's ES data, the NC reaction allows e-nu's, mu-nu's, and tau-nu's to scatter on an equal footing. The upshot: all the nu's from the sun are directly accounted for. The missing nu-e flux shows up as an observable mu-nu and tau- nu flux. This conclusion is established with a statistical surety of 5.3 standard deviations, compared to the less robust 3.3 of a year ago. The measured e-nu flux (in units of one million per sq. cm per second) is 1.7 while that for the mu-nu and tau-nu combined is 3.4. (When one includes the neutrinos from other reactions, the flux from the sun is billions/sqcm/sec.) Even the issue of how the neutrino changes from one flavor to another can be addressed by viewing the day-night asymmetry of neutrino flux. When the whole of the earth is between the sun and the detector (night viewing) the oscillation process, which depends on a density of matter through which the nu proceeds, should be speeded up. This type of measurement will also contribute to the eventual study of neutrino mass. An experiment like SNO can measure not mass but the square of the mass difference between nu species. Even if the nu mass is quite small (much lighter than the previously lightest known particle, the electron) it might still have played a large role in cosmology, where it might have been instrumental in shepherding galaxies; in supernovas, neutrinos might carry away as much as 99% of an exploding star's energy. The SNO team has submitted its results to Physical Review Letters; preprints are available at the online preprint server: nucl- ex/0204008 and 0204009; see also www.sno.phy.queensu.ca. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat May 4 03:25:33 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Museums Online Message-ID: Subject: Museums Online (from The Scout Report -- May 3, 2002) http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/2002/scout-020503.html Museums Online http://www.museumstuff.com/ MuseumStuff.com is the one-stop shop for museum information, where Internet users can discover and explore thousands of museums and related resources around the country. This search engine, which features a "broad range of museum 'stuff,'" offers links to various museums, virtual exhibitions, museum events, fun and game sites for secondary and post-secondary students, and educational links. The museum links are arranged in three separate categories -- art, history, and science -- and can be accessed from the main page. The virtual exhibition section offers 55 topics ranging from African American, to ceramics, to evolution, to motorcycles, to religion, to zoos/ animals. Viewers can search for museum events by organization name, month, and specific day, or perform an advanced search using a combination of selections. On the whole, this gateway to museum stuff provides enough resources to pique the interest of persons in many different areas. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright Internet Scout Project, 1994-2002. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/ From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat May 4 03:41:43 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Rat Robot Message-ID: Subject: Rat Robot This is a little weird, good material for a course on ethics, on Jesse Helms, or Jose Delgado (with whom I almost collaborated on some epilepsy research long ago before he relocated to Europe because of US issues with his animal experiments). --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from The Scout Report -- May 3, 2002) http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/report/sr/2002/scout-020503.html Rat Robot Boston Globe: Scientists Produce 'Ratbot' - First Radio-Controlled Animal http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/122/nation/Scientists_produce_ratbot_first_radio_controlled_animal+.shtml New Zealand Herald: New York Scientists Unveil Robo-rat http://www.nzherald.co.nz/worldnews/../storydisplay.cfm?storyID=1843131&thesection=news&thesubsection=world Considerations for the 2002 Farm Bill http://www.fb-net.org/FB/ Farm Bill Network Information on Use of USDA Conservation Programs http://www.fb-net.org/ Intro to Jose Delgado http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/implant/ Dr. Jose M. R. Delgado http://earthops.net/klaatu/delgado.html Scientist have created the world's first radio-controlled animal by wiring a computer chip directly into the brain of a living rat. The rats, each wired with three hair-fine electrical probes to their brains, can be directed by remote control by an operator typing commands on a computer up to 500 meters (1,640 feet) away. Developed by Sanjiv Talwar at the State University of New York and colleagues, this latest discovery in machine-based mind control not only responds to a user's commands, but also transmits a sense of touch. "The animal is not only doing something -- it's feeling something," said Talwar, who also suggests the rats might be used as scouts for sniffing out hidden land mines or for search and rescue teams that look for survivors amid rubble. Unlike clunky machines, Talwar reveals that rats have the ability to travel adeptly over rough terrain and, therefore, might be more easily deployed in chaotic environments. Last year, the US Department of Agriculture adopted regulations that might someday limit such experiments if they're shown to cause unnecessary harm or stress to laboratory rats and mice. However, an amendment to the Farm Bill, now pending in Congress, would repeal these protections. Sen. Jess Helms (R-SC) inserted the amendment in February that would scuttle any protections for laboratory rodents or birds. Helms asserted the regulations would only lead to cumbersome paperwork. "Isn't it far better for the mouse to be fed and watered in a clean laboratory than to end up as a tiny bulge being digested inside an enormous snake?" Mind control research projects is nothing new to the scientific world. In the 1960s, Yale physiologist Jose Delgado proved he could influence the mood and actions of animals through remote control. In one famous demonstration, Delgado stood, unarmed, in front of a charging bull. As the bull bore down on him, Delgado flicked a switch on a small radio transmitter that sent charges to electrodes implanted inside the bull's brain, causing the animal to immediately brake to a halt and meekly walk away. Delgado also experimented with monkeys and cats, and generated horror when he suggested the technology could be used to limit obsessive and criminal behavior in human societies. For recent press releases on the rat robot phenomenon, viewers may access the first two links listed above. The third link gives information on the status of the 2002 Farm Bill, as well as other major bills. The fourth link provides information from the US Department of Agriculture Farm Bill on use of USDA conservation programs. Finally, the last two links provide information on Jose Delgado's research and practices. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright Internet Scout Project, 1994-2002. http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/ From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue May 7 15:39:43 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Major Software Bugs Message-ID: Subject: Major Software Bugs This is a collection of major bugs with grave consequences, like death and destruction. Useful material for studies in ethics and safety-critical software. (I also refer you to a good article on this subject in the last issue of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Spring 2002). --PJK http://wwwzenger.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/persons/huckle/bugse.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed May 8 20:24:41 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Technology Police Message-ID: Subject: Technology Police (from Edupage, May 08, 2002) FOREIGN STUDENTS MUST PASS SCREENING FOR CERTAIN SUBJECTS In October, in response to the events of September 11, President Bush said new measures would be taken to "end the abuse of student visas," including prohibitions against foreign students enrolling in certain courses of study deemed "sensitive." Under new rules released by the Bush Administration, foreign students who want to study in these "sensitive" areas will be screened by a panel of federal intelligence and law enforcement officials. An official at the technology police office said that between 1,000 and 2,000 people per year would likely be subject to the screening process. New York Times, 7 May 2002 (registration req'd) http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/08/education/08STUD.html -------------------------- See also under "Abuse of International Student Status" in --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed May 8 20:28:38 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Cell Phone Ecology Message-ID: Subject: Cell Phone Ecology Two somewhat poignantly juxtaposed items. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from Edupage, May 08, 2002) AMERICAN UNIVERSITY MAY END WIRED PHONE SERVICE Officials at American University in Washington, D.C., are considering phasing out the wired phone service currently offered in student dormitories. Because so many students have cell phones, and because a new wireless network being installed this summer can support cell phone signals as well as other data transmissions, administrators question whether they need to continue providing wired phone service for students. The university solicited student comments, which included concerns about hardware compatibility, cost, and portability of phone numbers. Unlike a voice-over-IP phone network, for which the phones only work on that network, American's service would work with cell phones that work on public networks. Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 May 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/2002/05/2002050801t.htm STUDY RAISES ISSUE OF POLLUTION FROM CELL PHONES Inform, an environmental research organization, has produced a study that warns of the environmental and public health implications of the disposal of cellular phones. Similar to PCs, cell phones include parts that contain toxic metals and other harmful materials, presenting a challenge for disposal. Industry sources estimate the number of cell phone users at 135 million, growing to 200 million by 2005. According to the study, most cell phones are kept an average of 18 months, and within three years Americans will be throwing away 130 million cell phones a year. The study recommends that efforts, such as "take back" programs that keep cell phones out of landfills, be instituted to manage the disposal. Some states have proposed legislation requiring manufacturers to pay for the disposal of electronic devices. Wired News, 7 May 2002 http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52375,00.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu May 9 01:50:27 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Common Sense, Death of Message-ID: Subject: Common Sense, Death of (from INNOVATION, 8 May 2000) THE RARITY OF COMMON SENSE Much has been written about the qualities necessary to succeed in business -- everything from technological competence to an ability to adapt to change. But one often overlooked -- yet critical -- factor is common sense. By its very name, common sense is assumed to be, well, common. "It is possessed by any human being who bears even a modicum of sanity and rationality," writes Henry Astorga. "What is it then that makes people up and down organizational ranks and in their professional lives -- accomplishments and erudition notwithstanding -- succumb to behaviors and actions that reduce them to asinine nincompoops?" Astorga cites notable examples of business, political and religious personalities who, despite a wealth of talents and professional accomplishments, have fallen from public adulation and grace because of their utter lack of common sense. He writes that while highly competent people share certain traits, such as being decisive, ethical, perceptive and empathetic, "we can also find common traits among those people who, in spite of their intelligence, appear to be devoid of commonsense. They are self-absorbed, arrogant, insensitive, and unethical among others. Thus, might it be fair to contend that skills and competencies may propel us to untold heights of fame, fortune and mastery but it is commonsense that allows us to stay there?" (Asia Pacific Management Forum 29 Apr 2002) http://www.apmforum.com/columns/eaststrategy4.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------- More than common sense is threatened with extinction. What's really happening is a steady migration away from broader principles toward detailed prescriptive rules. Heads of organizations (presidents, directors) are now seldom the "soul and conscience" of their organizations. The particulars of their jobs are assumed to derive from lists of responsibilities and from organizational charts. Or take the current Enron et al. accounting scandals. In America, accounting standards are defined by a byzantine web of accounting rules, dating from the 1930s and now produced by the FASB, a private-sector body staffed by accountants. Outside America accounting rules lean more toward broad principles, particularly in Britain, where the importance of providing a "true and fair" view of a company's performance overrides specific rules. Rear a generation of clever monkeys in a jungle of accounting (and other organizational) rules, and "soul and conscience" and "true and fair" become meaningless. I don't have to remind anyone of the legal dimensions of common sense giving way to a system of regulations that go too far and do too little. One guide to that landscape is Philip Howard's "The Death of Common Sense" (Random House, 1994) . I've told you about simple extension cords with ludicrously detailed safety instructions . With an abundant supply of technology for customers with diminishing technological common sense, all facets of technology become legal sub-specialities. Nor have the academic dimensions of the loss of common sense gone unmentioned in these mailings. There are ever more Institutes for the Study of [you name it]. And I'm not talking about the important pursuits of new interdisciplinarities. Rather, what irritates me is the "rediscovery" of fragments of a forgotten larger fabric of common sense as subjects of specialized study. In the extreme we would have an "Institute for Stupidity Studies." Not, mind you, an "Institute for Studies in Good Sense," that would be too unfundably vague. Rather, the "Institute for Stupidity Studies" would address many distinct facets of stupidity, lending to each a certain official acceptability, even inevitability, and culminating for each in specific programs for remediation. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri May 10 01:52:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Management Trends Message-ID: Subject: Management Trends (from INNOVATION, 8 May 2000) THE DECREASING HALF-LIFE OF MANAGEMENT TRENDS Before Tom Peters began searching for excellence, there was no such thing as a "management trend," per se. But since the mid-'70s, we've seen the rise and fall of everything from total quality management to competitive gaming. A list of current management tools maintained by the consulting firm Bain & Co. lists 66 entries. And while management trends are proliferating, their life spans are also shrinking. The average life cycle from introduction to decline for management fashions from the '50s to the '70s was 15 years. In the '80s, the cycle was about seven and a half years. "Fashions introduced in the 1990s," she says, "have an average life cycle of two and a half years." Besides being more fleeting, today's management trends tend to revolve around three overriding themes: reengineering business processes, managing knowledge and facing the changing dynamic between management and employees. "The whole idea of the employee has been radically altered in the last five years," says Jack Duncan, a management professor at the University of Alabama. Concurrent rises in free agency, telecommuting and collaboration among employees have drastically changed the way people have to be managed, he says. "It's more of a networked or virtual organization than a hierarchical organization." (Entrepreneur May 2002) http://www.entrepreneur.com/Magazines/25thAnniv/article/0,5794,298976,00.html ADVICE ON LEADERSHIP FROM TOM PETERS OF "EXCELLENCE" FAME "A new brand of leader will be the most valuable commodity in future business success," says Tom Peters, the well-known business management consultant, speaker and best selling author. Peters says this is not the era for "sucking up to hierarchy," in-step following or the "promise 'em everything" tracks from the past. So what should we look for in a good leader? Peters has a list of no less than 50 characteristics, leading off with the following: A model leader is a good communicator, who oversees a satisfying two-way information flow. This includes, Peters explains, imparting vision and objectives that everyone understands, listening to associates, and maintaining an open-door policy to discuss organizational and personal objectives, issues and solutions. Regular feedback forums in both casual and formal environments should be in place. A leader shows respect to employees comparable to what is given to the company's customers. A leader is fiscally responsible, paying fair wages and incentives. He also provides tools that assist people in meeting their potential, with special attention given to the training individuals need to succeed. In a final word of advice, Peters reminds his readers that the best leaders get their kicks from orchestrating the work of others -- not from doing it themselves." (ASTA 1 Apr 2002) http://www.billcom.com/box/market/market_tra_asta.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- An essential companion to all this is Charles Handy's delightful and highly recommended new book "The Elephant and the Flea". See . --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri May 10 20:34:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:21 2006 Subject: [EAS]Implant Chips Message-ID: Subject: Implant Chips From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat May 11 01:54:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Science of Persuasion Message-ID: Subject: Science of Persuasion > Scientists are uncovering ways of making messages more persuasive. > Politicians and salesmen use such tricks already. Who can afford not > to read on? From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat May 11 13:43:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Nano-Bugs Message-ID: Subject: Nano-Bugs A fascinating new microbe discovery, and a major challenge taxonomically and phylogenetically. http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v417/n6884/full/417027a_fs.html http://www.biologie.uni-regensburg.de/Mikrobio/Stetter/Bilderhtml/nanoarchaeum.html http://www.nature.com/nsu/020429/020429-8.html http://www.nature.com/nature/links/020502/020502-5.html http://www.forbes.com/home/2002/05/06/0506dvsa.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed May 15 13:37:57 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Data Dyspepsia Message-ID: Subject: Data Dyspepsia (from NewsScan Daily, 15 May 2002) DATA DYSPEPSIA The quantity of information flowing into your office on a daily basis has reached an officially indigestible level, says Gartner, which reports that 90% of companies are suffering from data overload to the point where it's affecting their productivity. Gartner estimates that businesses will spend as much as $30 billion this year alone on information management systems in the hope of digging out, but it still may not be enough to improve the signal to noise ratio in most offices. Surprisingly, Gartner found that the most useful information employees receive comes from personal contacts, contact with friends and colleagues and e-mails, rather than the corporate Intranet. The company has therefore recommended that businesses encourage more social interaction -- in cafeterias, lounges and around the water cooler -- while at the same time implementing workflow tools that can help stem the tide of useless information. (The Register 15 May 2002) http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/23/25283.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- > Surprisingly, Gartner found that the most useful information > employees receive comes from personal contacts, contact with friends > and colleagues and e-mails, rather than the corporate Intranet. What's surprising is that they should find this surprising. Ah, the endless frontiers of innovation possible by forgetting the obvious. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu May 16 15:02:42 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Perceptual Clarity Message-ID: Subject: Perceptual Clarity (from NewsScan Daily, 15 May 2002) HYBRID VIGOR The Hybrid Vigor Institute, a nonprofit research institute dedicated to solving complex problems by synthesizing and integrating expert knowledge, has just published "As If You Were There: Matching Machine Vision to Human Vision," by Richard Jay Solomon. Solomon, who was instrumental in the creation of a super-high resolution video camera for Polaroid, Philips and MIT, embarked on a multi-year research project starting in the 1990s to discover why even the vastly sophisticated camera he helped create could not "see" as accurately as the human eye. His latest research on the human neurological system questions long-held assumptions about how electronic transmission components, cameras, displays, processors, and even audio speakers should work, and will doubtless provide the foundation for a new generation of machine vision systems that can more accurately replicate presence, or the sensation of "being there." (Hybrid Vigor Institute May 2002) http://hybridvigor.net/human/pubs/index.html. -------------------------------------------------------------------- An examination of acquisition, transmission, compression and reproduction beyond the usual engineering outlook of "how little information do you need to transmit to make the picture look good," e.g. the premise of HDTV. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri May 17 17:52:19 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Innoveillance Message-ID: Subject: Innoveillance (from INNOVATION, 1 May 2002) 'INNOVEILLANCE' GIVES COMPANIES THE EQUIVALENT OF NIGHT VISION It's one thing to conduct market surveys and focus groups, to ask people how they use your product and quiz them on what they think of new features. It's quite another to actually see for yourself how they're using -- or misusing -- your product. But (privacy issues to be dealt with at a later date) that's the latest in corporate intelligence-gathering. "Innoveillance" market research combines video and audio technologies, and remote diagnostics to give innovators a window onto the adoption and adaptation of their offerings, says Fortune magazine columnist and MIT Media Lab research associate Michael Schrage. One medical device company that videotaped how nurses used a prototype drug delivery system immediately saw that its product wasn't being used as intended. Observers also witnessed the kinds of shortcuts nurses took to get the system to work, and at what points they would either ask for help or simply give up. Such information led to a fundamental redesign of both the product and how hospital staffs are trained to use it. That, in turn, completely changed how the company marketed its systems to hospitals and nurses. (Technology Review May 2002) http://www.techreview.com/articles/schrage0502.asp -------------------------------------------------------------------- Good companies have always had programs for following up on their customers' satisfaction with their products and services, and making such followup part of a quality control cycle. Have we now entered a sort of 'informational night' where innovation only consists of design without feedback? With a catchy new word, "innoveillance" and a redeeming metaphor, "night vision," another high-tech rescue operation is mounted for a piece of common sense lost among the technologically lobotomized. Of course this still assumes that technological obsolescence hasn't already set in when the customer gets the product. In that case the customer isn't qualified to render an opinion. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri May 17 18:09:02 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Privacy Struggles Message-ID: Subject: Privacy Struggles (from NewsScan Daily, 17 May 2002) CREDIT REPORTS STOLEN FROM EXPERIAN DATABASE Network vandals have stolen 13,000 credit reports in recent months from Experian, a national reporting agency. An Experian executive said, "I've never seen anything of this size. Privacy is the hallmark of our business. We're extraordinarily concerned about the privacy issue here, and the trust factor." The intruders used an authorization code from Ford Credit to obtain the reports, which gave the intruders access to each victim's personal and financial information, including address, Social Security number, bank and credit card accounts and ratings of creditworthiness. Ford has sent letters via certified mail to all 13,000 people, urging them to contact Experian and the two other major credit reporting companies, Equifax and TransUnion, and to report any evidence of abuse to the FBI. (New York Times 17 May 2002) http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/17/technology/17IDEN.html 'GUMMY' FINGERS FOOL FINGERPRINT SECURITY SYSTEMS A Japanese engineering professor has managed to trick biometric security systems using artificial fingers made with gelatin. In addition to creating a fingerprint by pushing a finger into a malleable plastic mixed with gelatin, the researchers were able to create credible fingers using fingerprints lifted from a glass. First, the latent print was hardened, using glue that sticks to the ridges of the fingerprint. The hardened print was then photographed, using a digital camera, and enhanced using Adobe Photoshop software to create heightened contrast between the ridges and gaps. The image was then transferred to a photosensitive sheet, etched into copper and used to create another mold. Both methods resulted in a fake finger that was able to fool a variety of biometric readers 80% of the time. Security experts say the experiments cast serious doubt on any claims that this type of biometric system can be made fully secure. (BBC News 17 May 2002) http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1991000/1991517.stm (and from INNOVATION, 1 May 2002) STRUT YOUR STUFF FOR QUICK IDENTIFICATION One new area of research in identification technologies involves "gait-recognition." Funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a handful of universities are developing ways to identify people through their body language. One approach underway at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute involves creating a "movement signature" for each person. Subjects are filmed walking and running on a treadmill, and then software tools are used to remove all background footage, creating silhouettes of each person which are then stored as digital images. The same people are filmed again in an entirely different context, and the computer is instructed to identify each individual based on the stored images. "The system generalizes well across all the different gaits," says research scientist Robert Collins. "So far we're getting a 90 to 95 percent correct match." Meanwhile, a team at Georgia Tech is using a method called structural analysis to measure properties like a person's stride length and leg spread, and a team at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab is using software designed to re-render an image of a person walking at new angles. "It explicitly re-visualizes the image as if it was a straight line, and then runs the old algorithm," says team leader Trevor Darrell. The system is running at "roughly 95 percent accuracy," says Darrell. (Technology Review 23 Apr 2002) http://www.techreview.com/articles/wo_cameron042302.asp -------------------------------------------------------------------- Remember those movies where a dam starts leaking, the cracks get bigger, and pretty soon there is a major gusher? That's the feeling I get here. Security is always just as much a people issue as a technology issue, and is full of leaks. And as regards yet another means of identification, via "slouch-prints"? Come on, don't they have anything better to do? Research these days is increasingly a pure marketing process--if you have the name, and the funding, it _is_ respectable. Period. Dark days ahead in academia. They could use a little "innoveillance." (With luck someone interested in gait and its relation to lower-back problems will get involved. That could be useful.) --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat May 18 00:09:12 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]What's New for May 17, 2002 Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP What's New for May 17, 2002 Dear Colleagues - Time again to remind you of the weekly "What's New" from Bob Park, Prof. of Physics at the Univ. of Maryland. Consider a subscription. It's invariably provocative and informative. --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 5/17/02 3:57 PM From: What's New WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 17 May 02 Washington, DC 1. SECRECY: SWIFT ACTION TAKEN TO DEAL WITH MISSILE FAILURES. On Tuesday, Defense Daily revealed that a Lockheed-Martin Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missile did not destroy its target as the Missile Defense Agency had stated. A second PAC-3 failed to launch. The Pentagon lost no time in taking firm corrective action: on Wednesday, Defense Daily reported that in the future all specifics of the targets and countermeasures used in tests will be classified. Officials denied that the secrecy order was intended to prevent any independent review of the missile-test program. And I'm an alien from the planet Mongo. 2. ARMS REDUCTION: THREE-PAGE TREATY CUTS ARSENALS BY TWO-THIRDS. This is far more practical than destroying nuclear missiles with interceptors. It's also much more than a hand-shake. The cuts are similar to those in Start III, negotiated by Clinton at the 1997 Helsinki summit, which the Senate declined to ratify. One difference is that this treaty will be signed by a Republican President. This treaty is also full of loopholes insisted on by the U.S. Over strong Russian objections, the count doesn't include warheads that are not "operationally deployed." Nor is there a timetable for the destruction of weapons, as long as it's done within the 10-year life of the treaty. 3. NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW: SENATE HEARING TAKES UP THE DEBATE. The Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs convened on Thursday to consider implications of The Nuclear Posture Review, a Pentagon report leaked to the media (WN 15 Mar 02). With no imminent threat from the former Soviet Union, the report calls for a new class of smaller nuclear weapons more suited to our post 9/11 conflicts, including earth-penetrating nukes. Development would violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the test moratorium, and common sense. Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg explained why earth-penetrating nukes would not work against deeply-buried targets, and could end up "killing our own troops and the local population." Developing new weapons sends the wrong message. 4. "LIFTERS": ALIEN TECHNOLOGISTS SEEK MEDIA EXPOSURE. WN got a call this week from a network television reporter asking about "lifter" technology. Since NASA's Podkletnov gravity shield flopped (WN 12 Oct 01), the only anti-gravity claim around is the "lifter." Developers refused to deny rumors that the idea came from wreckage taken from the Roswell UFO crash. Could this be? According to the official Air Force report, the wreckage consisted of balsa wood sticks, metal foil, plastic tape and neoprene. So we went to web site of American Antigravity, which lists materials needed to construct a lifter. Same stuff! (Christy Fernandez contributed to this week's What's New.) THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY Opinions are the authors, and are not necessarily shared by the University or the American Physical Society, but they should be. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed May 22 20:57:54 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]It's People, Stupid! Message-ID: Subject: It's People, Stupid! (from INNOVATION, 22 May 2000) GOOD COMPANIES RUSHING TO PERDITION They're falling to the left, they're falling to the right. It's more than a trend, it's a mad rush. Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Kmart, Polaroid, Andersen, Xerox, Quest. What's going on? Question: Why do companies fail? Answer: Managerial error. That's right. Forget about (or at least put to one side) all those other reasons: bad economy, market turbulence, blah blah -- all those things outside management's control. Let's not kid ourselves: failure isn't impersonal, it has a human face. What undoes companies that fail "is the familiar stuff of human folly: denial, hubris, ego, wishful thinking, poor communication lax oversight, greed, deceit, and other Behind the Music plot conventions. It all adds up to a failure to execute. This is not an exhaustive list of corporate sins. But chances are your company is committing one of them right now." But this rush to failure is not new. A good golden-oldie from the failure archives is the 1980s NASA, where a "success-oriented" culture produced the Challenger disaster largely because of the organization's "mind-numbing complexity and unrealistic performance goals all mixed up until the violation of standards became the standard." A more recent example is Cisco, which was lulled into complacency because it had recorded 40 straight quarters of growth. (Surely that trend would go on forever!) Boston College sociologist does a good job explaining why people and companies march off cliffs, completely incapable of revising their mental models of reality: "They may puzzle over contradictory evidence, but usually they succeed in pushing it aside -- until they come across a piece of evidence too fascinating to ignore, too clear to misperceive, too painful to deny, which makes vivid still other signals they do not want to see, forcing them to alter and surrender the world-view they have so meticulously constructed." (Fortune 27 May 2002) http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=207919 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Jun 15 21:26:30 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Think Tanks Message-ID: Subject: Think Tanks http://www.nira.go.jp/linke/tt-link/ For policy wonks world-wide. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Jun 15 22:25:40 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Micro Flight Message-ID: Subject: Micro Flight Engineers (and students) building micro flying machines based on insects http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-000041725jun14.story (requires free registration) --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Jun 17 20:50:33 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Knowledge Web Message-ID: Subject: Knowledge Web The KnowledgeWeb Project http://k-web.org/ also of related interest http://www.palmersguide.com/jamesburke/ (from INNOVATION, 22 May 2000) BUILDING THE KNOWLEDGE WEB James Burke, the Oxford-educated historian whose fascination with technology and history led to the TV series Connections, has a new pet project. Knowledge Web, as it's called, is intended to be the visual and virtual extension of Burke's efforts to show how all knowledge is somehow connected to all other knowledge. The project so far is "totally grassroots," says project manager Patrick McKercher, and volunteers have typically been Web surfers who just happened upon Knowledge Web status announcements while looking for more information on Burke's books or TV shows. "As soon as I heard about the project, I know I wanted to be involved," says Lisa Colvin, a data architect and member of the Knowledge Web technology team. "The most interesting part of Burke's Connections is the serendipitous ways in which ideas, events and people are joined through history. In contrast to the paid ontology work I've done in the defense industry, Knowledge Web work is rewarding because I'm contributing to a great educational tool." Site visitors will be able to follow a guided path or blaze a new trail through thousands of interconnected "nodes" containing information about a technically relevant person, place, thing or event. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jun 20 18:04:51 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Privacy Victory Message-ID: Subject: Privacy Victory (from ACLU Online: June 20, 2002) STUNNING VICTORY FOR PRIVACY IN AMERICA'S HEARTLAND The ACLU has applauded the people of North Dakota for defending their privacy by rejecting a ballot measure that would have allowed banks to share customers' information without their permission. "This vote was a stunning defeat for the powerful financial companies who were trying to bamboozle the citizens of North Dakota into acting against their own interests," said Jennifer Ring, Executive Director of the ACLU of the Dakotas. The battle over the ballot measure was a true David-and-Goliath story. On one side were wealthy and powerful financial interests, including major national banks and insurance companies. They ran a sophisticated media campaign that included heavy television advertising, and outspent the pro-privacy forces by a factor of at least 6-to-1. The pro-privacy campaign was waged by a group of citizen-volunteers led by Charlene Nelson, a homemaker and mother of three working out of her home in Casselton. Until a last-minute $25,000 contribution by the ACLU for radio ads, the privacy forces had reported donations of just $2,450. Despite this lopsided battle, unofficial results posted by the North Dakota secretary of state show that more than 72 percent of those casting ballots voted to protect their privacy. "If the voters in a small Midwestern state vote for privacy by more than a three-to-one margin despite a deep-pockets media campaign urging them not to, then politicians in Washington and Sacramento and Albany ought to be listening," said Barry Steinhardt, Director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program. Click on the link below to read more: http://forms.aclu.org/L/www.aclu.org/issues/privacy/Financial_privacy_feature.cfm?MX=374&H=0 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jun 28 23:11:59 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]What's New for Jun 28, 2002 Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP What's New for Jun 28, 2002 Another "What's New" worth sending you in its entirety. Nice to have the American Physical Society, never likely to rush into public statements, finally making one in this case. I wonder how many physics courses for liberal arts majors (or even science majors) spend time forcefully highlighting this rampant nonsense around us, as opposed to dutifully putting students to sleep with their syllabi. "What's New" subscription info and archives at . --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 28 Jun 02 Washington, DC 1. FREE ENERGY: APS BOARD SPEAKS OUT ON PERPETUAL MOTION. Well, it's not exactly the frontier of physics research, but somebody had to say it. Already this year we've had the Jasker Power System (WN 25 Jan 02), Chukanov Quantum Energy (WN 8 Feb 02), and the Motionless Electromagnetic Generator (WN 5 Apr 02). Not to mention Bubble Fusion (WN 1 Mar 02), hydrino rockets (WN 21 Jun 02), and whatever scam Dennis Lee is running now (WN 3 May 02). So, on Saturday, 22 June, the Executive Board of the American Physical Society unanimously adopted the following statement: "The Executive Board of the American Physical Society is concerned that in this period of unprecedented scientific advance, misguided or fraudulent claims of perpetual motion machines and other sources of unlimited free energy are proliferating. Such devices would directly violate the most fundamental laws of Nature, laws that have guided the scientific advances that are transforming our world." 2. COUNTER-TERRORISM: ACADEMY STUDY EXAMINES THE ROLE OF SCIENCE. "In the war against terrorism," the President declared on 6 June, "America's vast science and technology base provides us with a key advantage." In a report released this week, a huge committee of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine, lists actions that need to be taken immediately to protect the nation: controlling nuclear materials, producing vaccines, improving ventilation systems, etc. That'll fix 'em. The report will be examined carefully by terrorists, not to discover new opportunities--there are lots of those--but to scratch old ideas off their list. 3. CYBER-TERRORISM: WAS THAT ON THE ACADEMY LIST? The FBI is watching suspicious electronic "visits" to digital systems that control such things as flood gates in dams, reactor cooling in nuclear power plants, and air traffic. The possibility that such controls might be manipulated raises the specter of the Internet being used, not just to disrupt or shut down facilities, but to turn them into weapons. It demonstrates how difficult it is to anticipate where or how terrorists might strike. 4. DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION: SENATE BILL CREATES A DILEMMA FOR BUSH. The White House made it clear that any bill that cut $814M from missile defense, as the Democratic version did, would get vetoed. In a classic compromise, the money was restored, but the language left it to the President to decide whether to spend it on defense against non-existent missiles or in the war against terrorism. Why not both? Just hire Arthur Anderson to keep the books. (Christy Fernandez assisted with this week's What's New.) THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University or the American Physical Society, but they should be. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Jul 2 15:08:50 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Search Biases Message-ID: Subject: Search Biases (from NewsScan Daily, 2 July 2002) FTC WARNS SEARCH ENGINE SITES TO IDENTIFY PAYING CUSTOMERS The Federal Trade Commission is sending letters to various Web search engine operators (such as AltaVista, AOL Time Warner, iWon.com, Looksmart, Microsoft, Terra Lycos, and Direct Hit) warning them to make it clear to consumers when search results yield sites that have paid for inclusion in those results. Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert, an organization that had complained to the FTC about the practice, said: "We hope that when search engines disclose when ads are ads, then search engine users will flee those engines that have no editorial integrity." One corporate executive who is proud of his company's policies is AltaVista's Fred Bullock, who says: "We believe that the paid listings that we display on our site are delineated from our search results, and that the disclosure is not misleading." (New York Times 2 Jul 2002) http://partners.nytimes.com/2002/07/02/technology/02SEAR.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- One wonders, of course, when such commercial biases could start to 'infect' more academically oriented searching, given the growing links between academic research and its commercialization, which I've commented on before, e.g. . --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Jul 2 15:32:14 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Spam Map Message-ID: Subject: Spam Map In recent months I've experienced dramatic increases in spam email, everything from sex, mortgages, and buying Chinese bicycles. http://www.cluelessmailers.org/spamdemic/mapfullsize3.html This interesting site maps out (caution: it's a big map) the connections in the unauthorized spread of one's email address, and provides a "blacklist" of offenders. But it's mostly for your information about the growing dimensions of the horror show. Other than adding layers of filtering, and ultimately maybe changing your email address, there is rather little one can do. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Jul 2 16:03:15 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]WorldCom Damage Message-ID: Subject: WorldCom Damage The destruction caused by systemic fraud at WorldCom: "internal auditors are uncovering further troubles. They include double-counting of revenue as far back as 1999, debt that may not have been previously disclosed, and booking of revenues that haven't yet been received from long-term contracts -- issues that could push the ultimate restatement to $5 billion or more." "competing against WorldCom for the attention of investors and Wall Street analysts in recent years was essentially like running track against an athlete who is later discovered to be using steroids" "it now appears at least possible that had it not been for comparisons with some bad seeds like WorldCom, AT&T could still be one company" "Of the 29 or 30 public companies that are carriers, easily 20 of them could declare bankruptcy" http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/30/business/yourmoney/30TELE.html?pagewanted=print http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2002/tc20020628_3955.htm From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jul 3 08:52:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]more pointers Message-ID: Subject: more pointers (interesting items from the most recent (7/2/02) RRE News mailing) http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html Burst.com Accuses Microsoft of Theft http://news.com.com/2100-1023-937501.html http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020620.html http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hollywoodreporter/convergence/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1521467 Library Digitization Projects and Copyright http://www.llrx.com/features/digitization.htm Media blackout on best-selling liberal books (those tricky liberals, always up to something) http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13476 The tricky economics of auction design http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1200807 Systematic Pattern of Rainfall Across US Discovered http://unisci.com/stories/20022/0627022.htm From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jul 5 16:52:28 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]EE Teaching with IT Message-ID: Subject: EE Teaching with IT Dear Colleagues - This site is another excellent example of the kind of enhancement that can be given to teaching, in this case undergraduate EE, by joining information technology with classical aspects of engineering pedagogy. And here it is even a commercial site, where intellectual enlightenment might be expected to be curbed by economic self-interest. (The engineering programs at other universities are developing much online material of their own, also a subject of past EAS-INFO mailings.) Take a thoughtful look at the material at this site. What are its implications? If we want to develop/refine further such material for our curriculum, what terms of partnership are implied between information technology and faculty? --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from The NSDL Scout Reports for Math, Engineering, & Technology, July 5, 2002 http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/nsdl-reports/met/2002/met-020705.html The whole issue is very worth your while, particularly its Education section, from which this is drawn.) Agilent Technologies: Educator's Corner: T&M Fundamentals Corner [.sit] http://www.educatorscorner.com/tools/fundamentals_corner/index.shtml Maintained by Agilent Technologies, this large site covers many aspects of electronics testing and measurement. The major categories of instructional material are Basic Electronics, Radio Frequencies/ Communications, Lightwave/ Optics, and Digital Design/ Logic; each of these has several interactive lessons, slides, or Java applets that address specific topics. The exercises teach the underlying theory of the concepts while stressing the importance of good practices and proper equipment use. The site's content is very well organized and is best suited for undergraduates in electrical engineering or a related discipline. of related interest TelecomWriting.com: Journey to the Bottom of Your Rig http://www.privateline.com/radio/index.html Most of the content of Journey to the Bottom of Your Rig was originally published in a book about Citizen's Band (C.B.) radio. Now with added comments by the operator of the Web site, it offers an insightful look into the fundamentals of radio and equipment. The reading is light and slightly humorous, and it is suitable for anyone who wants to know how a radio works. A radio's transmitter and receiver are examined, and the operation of the main components of each are described. More detailed discussions of the oscillator and the principle of modulation are given by the site's creator. and finally, in a different area (aerodynamics), this nice counter to the now pervasive $100+ prices for course textbooks. (Numerous other online textbooks have been mentioned in past EAS-INFO mailings) Aerodynamics for Students [.xls, .m, .f, .zip] http://www.aeromech.usyd.edu.au/aero/contents.html This Web site serves as an online aerodynamics textbook for college students. Offered by the department of Aerospace, Mechanical, and Mechatronic Engineering at the University of Sydney, the material is divided into several main categories. These include fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, gasdynamics, aircraft performance, and propulsion. Each of these sections has many specific topics that are discussed in detail. There are MATLAB, Excel, and FORTRAN files and data sheets that accompany the reading, but they are best used as reference and are not needed to understand most of the material. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jul 5 21:10:42 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Science Fair Project Message-ID: Subject: Science Fair Project A rather nice one, too. --PJK --------------------------------------------------------------------- (from Edupage, July 05, 2002) CRYPTOGRAPHY BASED ON RANDOM NUMBERS Jason R. Kauffman, a sophomore at the University of Dayton majoring in mechanical engineering, has developed a new encryption technology based on random-number generation. Kauffman first thought of the idea while working on a science-fair project to improve computer animation. He extended a mathematical technique used in Disney's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," which assigned pseudo-random numbers to body movements for a crowd scene in the film. While studying number generators, he found references to theories that the technique could be used in encryption technology, but no details. He then thought of a unique way to use random numbers in a math equation to encrypt data. He and his father, Robert Kauffman, formed a partnership with the University of Dayton to patent the idea. Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 July 2002 (sub. req'd) http://chronicle.com/free/2002/07/2002070301t.htm From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jul 10 15:20:41 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]NanoNews Message-ID: Subject: NanoNews (from NewsScan Daily, 10 July 2002) MORE LIFE IN MOORE'S LAW Moore's Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double very two years, will "slow down" a bit in the coming years, says Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, for whom the law is named. "You really get bit by the fact that the materials are made of atoms." Alternatives to conventional chipmaking techniques, such as nanotechnology, are still in development, but haven't evolved to the point that they can take on silicon, says Moore, who notes that crafting single transistors is one thing, but "housing a billion of them on a chip is another." Still, scientific ingenuity has overcome conventional thinking in the past: "I remember we didn't think we could go beyond 1 micron because of optical lithography." (CNet News.com 9 Jul 2002) http://news.com.com/2100-1001-942671.html?tag=fd_top A LITTLE NANO NEWS Researchers at Purdue University in Indiana have developed a way to get molecules to grow into microelectronic circuit elements, which will -- sometime in the fairly distant future -- make it possible for microscopic integrated circuits to be put together molecule by molecule. Nanotechnology expert Chad Mirkin cautions against false optimism: "In nanotech, you have to be careful about overselling the electronics side of it, even though that's what's driven a lot of interest in this research. Nanotech is going to impact so many areas, but electronics will be one of the last ones because it is so hard." (KRT/San Jose Mercury News 10 Jul 2002) http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/3634752.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------- That's usually the rub, that even while it becomes possible to make single, or small groups, of ever smaller devices, one mustn't get one's hope up too fast, because making them cheaply and reliably in huge coordinated numbers can be very hard. But that's the necessary basis for electronics. Also not to be forgotten alongside Moore's Law is the lesser-known Rock's Law (named after Arthur Rock, Intel's first venture capitalist investor), which posits that the cost of a wafer fabrication plant doubles every four years, expected to be in the $30 billion range by the end of this decade. Both "laws" (Moore's and Rock's) have of course nothing to do with natural law, but describe a balance between technological progress and available capital investment, the latter governed by your eagerness to buy your next computer. --PJK P.S.: The processing of these mailings into the archives at has a glitch (MIME-compatibility related) that makes URLs with |=| signs have an extra 3D after it. We are trying to fix this. But if the first URL above looks like and thus won't work, take out the 3D. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jul 11 03:08:47 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Mysteries Under Moscow Message-ID: Subject: Mysteries Under Moscow And now for something completely different .... --PJK Mysteries Under Moscow (1997) http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/1997/mj97/mj97ilnitsky.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jul 12 18:42:15 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]NanoGravity Message-ID: Subject: NanoGravity WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 12 Jul 02 Washington, DC http://www.aps.org/WN/WN02/wn071202.html SPACE STATION: SCIENCE PANEL WANTS TO SEE A LITTLE SCIENCE. The International Space Station was sold to Congress as science, but a $5B budget shortfall halted work on two of the modules and the crew was cut from 7 to a Mir-sized 3 (WN 9 Nov 01). It was that or hire Arthur Anderson to do the accounting. The need for budgetary discipline also led to a bean counter from OMB, Sean O'Keefe replacing Dan Goldin (WN 16 Nov 01). In March, O'Keefe named a 20 member panel of scientists-turned-administrators, mostly from the life sciences, to assess the ISS research priorities. The panel reported to the NASA Advisory Council on Wednesday that there is no research on the ISS to assess. The crew of 3 can barely find time to clean the toilet. So the panel called for a larger crew, completion of the unfinished modules, and more resupply missions. In other words, undo everything done in March to deal with budget overruns. What were they thinking? It makes no sense to have a research laboratory that does no research, but $5B is a lot of money. Do we want to spend triple the NSF research budget to have a bigger crew? The only thing the ISS has going for it is micro-gravity, but decades of micro- gravity research on the Shuttle and Mir had no discernable impact on any field of science. Congress may be in a mood to scrap the giant money-shredder; scientists should plead with them to do it. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Or the ISS could become a critical component of an anti-missile defense program. That would assure generous (classified) funding. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jul 12 19:25:37 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Seymour Cray Message-ID: Subject: Seymour Cray (from NewsScan Daily, 12 July 2002) [comment at the end, as usual.--PJK] HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: SEYMOUR CRAY Today's Honorary Subscriber is the American electronics engineer Seymour R. Cray (1925-1996), whose name has become synonymous with large-scale, high-performance computing because of the Cray supercomputer he designed and built in 1976. Cray was born in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. His father was the town's civil engineer, and Cray grew up fascinated with electronics, spending much of his time in his father's electrical engineering laboratory, toying with radios, electrical motors and other kinds of electrical equipment. He graduated from high school in 1943 before getting shipped off to war, where he spent time in both the European and Pacific theatres before returning home and resuming his education. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1950 and a Master of Science degree in applied mathematics a year later. He began his career as a computer scientist working on UNIVAC I, a landmark first-generation electronic digital computer that became the first commercially available computer. In 1957 Cray helped found Control Data Corp., which became a major computer manufacturer. There Cray designed the CDC 6600 and the CDC 7600, large-scale computers notable for their high processing speeds. In 1972 he left Control Data to found his own firm, Cray Research Inc., with the intention of building the world's highest performance general-purpose supercomputers. He realized his goal through a multiprocessor design that employed computer processors working simultaneously in parallel. His company's first supercomputer, the Cray-1, which came out in 1976, could perform 240,000,000 calculations per second. It was used for large-scale scientific applications, such as simulating complex physical phenomena, and was sold to government and university laboratories. Further supercomputers followed, each with increased computing speed: the Cray 1-M and the Cray X-MP. Cray resigned as chairman of his growing firm in 1981 and became an independent contractor to the company, designing ever-faster machines at his laboratory in Chippewa Falls. In 1985 the Cray-2 was introduced to the market. This machine, which was cooled by Fluorinert, could perform 1,200,000,000 calculations per second. In 1989 Cray founded the Cray Computer Corporation, but with the end of the Cold War the military demand for supercomputers disappeared, and by 1995 Cray Computers was forced to file for bankruptcy without having sold a single computer. Nonetheless, in 1996 Seymour Cray undertook a new computer venture that was just barely off the ground when his life ended in a tragic auto accident. Seymour Cray's admirers speak of him "the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry," and they like to recall the time when upon being told that Steve Jobs bought a CRAY to help design the next Apple, he said, "Funny, I am using an Apple to simulate the CRAY-3." See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471048852/newsscan/ref=nosim/ for Charles J. Murray's "The Supermen: Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy action programs.) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mention of Cray growing up fascinated with electronics reminds me how different it was to educate students majoring in EE in the days when many of them had some previous personal exposure to electronics, e.g. ham radio. And I mean more than their invariably greater comfort in the lab. The educator's always critical responsibility of communicating _why_ the subject matters, not just _what_ it consists of, took the much easier form of building on, of enlarging, a sense of importance they felt already in starting the EE major. These days I often feel I have to create that sense of importantance from the much more abstract or diffuse vocabulary of "solving open-ended problems", of "social impact," of "economic significance," of "personal convenience." In few of these, except the personal convenience, do they have much previous personal investment. And the pervasive and convenient presence of EE, and much other technology, as motivation for studying it, is like trying to interest a "fish" in majoring in "water." --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jul 17 19:37:08 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]NanoThermodynamics Message-ID: Subject: NanoThermodynamics from PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 598 July 17, 2002 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and James Riordon PUSHING THE SECOND LAW TO THE LIMIT. Australian researchers have experimentally shown that microscopic systems (a nano-machine) may spontaneously become more orderly for short periods of time - a development that would be tantamount to violating the second law of thermodynamics, if it happened in a larger system. Don't worry, nature still rigorously enforces the venerable second law in macroscopic systems, but engineers will want to keep limits to the second law in mind when designing nanoscale machines. The new experiment also potentially has important ramifications for an understanding of the mechanics of life on the scale of microbes and cells. There are numerous ways to summarize the second law of thermodynamics. One of the simplest is to note that it's impossible simply to extract the heat energy from some reservoir and use it to do work. Otherwise, machines could run on the energy in a glass of water, for example, by extracting heat and leaving behind a lump of ice. If this were possible, refrigerators and freezers could create electrical power rather that consuming it. The second law typically concerns collections of many trillions of particles - such as the molecules in an iron rod, or a cup of tea, or a helium balloon - and it works well because it is essentially a statistical statement about the collective behavior of countless particles we could never hope to track individually. In systems of only a few particles, the statistics are grainier, and circumstances may arise that would be highly improbable in large systems. Therefore, the second law of thermodynamics is not generally applied to small collections of particles. The experiment at the Australian National University in Canberra and Griffith University in Brisbane (Edith Sevick, sevick@rsc.anu.edu.au, 011+61-2-6125-0508) looks at aspects of thermodynamics in the hazy middle ground between very small and very large systems. The researchers used optical tweezers to grab hold of a micron-sized bead and drag it through water. By measuring the motion of the bead and calculating the minuscule forces on it, the researchers were able to show that the bead was sometimes kicked by the water molecules in such a way that energy was transferred from the water to the bead. In effect, heat energy was extracted from the reservoir and used to do work (helping to move the bead) in apparent violation of the second law. As it turns out, when the bead was briefly moved over short distances, it was almost as likely to extract energy from the water as it was to add energy to the water. But when the bead was moved for more than about 2 seconds at a time, the second law took over again and no useful energy could be extracted from the motion of the water molecules, eliminating the possibility of micron-sized perpetual motion machines that run for more than a few seconds. Nevertheless, many physicists will be surprised to learn that the second law is not entirely valid for systems as large as the bead- and-water experiment, and for periods on the order of seconds. After all, even a cubic micron of water contains about thirty billion molecules. While it's still not possible to do useful work by turning water into ice, the experiment suggests that nanoscale machines may have to deal with phenomena that are more bizarre than most engineers realize. Such tiny devices may even end up running backwards for brief periods due to the counterintuitive energy flow. The research may also be important to biologists because many of the cells and microbes they study comprise systems comparable in size to the bead-and-water experiment.(G.M.Wang et al., Physical Review Letters, 29 July 2002) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Jul 22 14:43:43 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Spectrum Allocation Message-ID: Subject: Spectrum Allocation (from NewsScan Daily, 20 July 2002) WORTH THINKING ABOUT: COMPETING VALUES In his brilliant weekly newsletter, Telecommunications Policy Review (print only), Kenneth G. Robinson comments on competing values in the use of the radio spectrum: "What's more urgently needed? Frequencies to support the next generation of 'smart' bombs, essential to fight wars with Arab and Islamic nations with minimal risk to American lives? Or, frequencies to support the U.S. air traffic control system? Versus more channels to allow cellphone companies to offer full-motion video and audio 'streaming' on special 'third generation' (3G) cellphone handsets? What do you think? National defense, or video phones so your teenaged daughter can see all her friends? 'I mean, like, awesome!' 'Like I think I need a new bolt in my chin, maybe a ring for my eye-lid, it's so cool.' "Once upon a time, Federal radio spectrum managers thought there were competing public values and national demands to be carefully weighed -- the requirements of Government users versus the commercial sector. Over the past decade, however, CTIA [the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, a trade group] and the cellular industry have convinced policy-makers and opinion-leaders in Washington that there's no real choice -- that handing over the resource in support of expanded 'bucket rates' just has to be the best thing. They've shaped the debate almost entirely to their ground and, for them, that's good." Excerpted, with permission, from Telecommunications Policy Review, v. 18 n. 28, July 14, 2002. TPR subscription is by invitation only. 72154.232@compuserve.com. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jul 25 02:50:28 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Honesty & More Women Message-ID: Subject: Honesty & More Women (from INNOVATION, 24 July 2002) BUSINESSES NEED A DOSE OF HONESTY -- AND MORE WOMEN Women are leaving big companies as fast as they can, says author Margaret Heffernan. By 2005, there will be about 4.7 million self-employed women in the United States, up 77% since 1983. The increase for men is just 6%. "As I watch my female colleagues leave traditional business structures, as I see them flourish, as I notice how well networks protect women through a recession and how brutally men suffer from the harsh cutbacks and relentless downsizings that rumble through corporate hierarchies, it strikes me that women are building a parallel business universe," she says. And in the face of recent events at Enron, Andersen, Global Crossing and others, "We had all better hope that this parallel universe is almost complete." Fixing a broken business system begins with honesty, says Heffernan: "Honesty has a way of releasing energy, the kind of energy that business desperately needs to embrace. Time after time, I've witnessed the paralysis that sets in when people are afraid to tell each other the truth. .. The problem isn't that we don't know the truth. The problem is that we're afraid to speak the truth." (Fast Company Aug 2002) http://www.fastcompany.com/online/61/female_ceo.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- It would also be interesting to study any differences in the business language women use. Typical (male) business language is heavily dominated by metaphors of sports (competition) and war (argument), not to speak of exaggeration, evasion and outright lies. About five minutes with google.com lead me to an good article by a woman about business language, not quite what I was looking for, but still a good exposition of how truth gets lost in jargon: http://www.afrboss.com.au/magarticle.asp?doc_id=19476&rgid=2&listed_months=0 --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jul 25 02:58:54 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Bankrupt Networks Message-ID: Subject: Bankrupt Networks (from Edupage, July 24, 2002) CONCERNS GROW OVER POSSIBLE NETWORK DISRUPTIONS Recent troubles, including some high-profile bankruptcies, in the telecommunications industry have caused concern about the viability of high-speed research networks. Two trans-Atlantic circuits between Internet2's Abilene backbone and its European counterpart, Geant, had been provided by KPNQwest, which recently declared bankruptcy. The circuits are still functioning, but it is not clear for how long because no one is maintaining them since KPNQwest's bankruptcy. Replacement circuits have been ordered from Level 3 and Deutsche Telekom, but continued friction among telecoms threatens to delay activation of the new circuits. Instability in the telecom sector poses potential setbacks for other projects, as well, including a planned upgrade of the Abilene backbone by Qwest, a shareholder of KPNQwest. Chronicle of Higher Education, 23 July 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/2002/07/2002072301t.htm KPNQWEST TO SHUT DOWN NETWORK Officials at KPNQwest said they have begun to shut down their network, formerly Europe's largest, handling about half of the region's Internet traffic. KPNQwest declared bankruptcy in May. Since then, court-appointed trustees of the company have kept the network running. Last Friday, however, was the last payday for the staff, who subsequently walked out, leaving the network running but without any support. An official at KPNQwest said that because its customers had time to find other carriers, he expected the impact of the shutdown on Internet traffic to be small. CNET, 24 July 2002 http://news.com.com/2100-1033-946056.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jul 25 09:31:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]McKinsey & Enron Message-ID: Subject: McKinsey & Enron "The Talent Myth" by Malcolm Gladwell http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020722fa_fact Some quotes: "Don't be afraid to promote stars without specifically relevant experience, seemingly over their heads." Success in the modern economy, according to Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and Axelrod, [of McKinsey --pjk] requires "the talent mind-set": the "deep-seated belief that having better talent at all levels is how you outperform your competitors." This "talent mind-set" is the new orthodoxy of American management. It is the intellectual justification for why such a high premium is placed on degrees from first-tier business schools, and why the compensation packages for top executives have become so lavish. None, however, have spread the word quite so ardently as McKinsey, and, of all its clients, one firm took the talent mind-set closest to heart. It was a company where McKinsey conducted twenty separate projects, where McKinsey's billings topped ten million dollars a year, where a McKinsey director regularly attended board meetings, and where the C.E.O. himself was a former McKinsey partner. The company, of course, was Enron. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jul 26 08:38:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Parking Ticket Globalizatio Message-ID: Subject: Parking Ticket Globalization Amusing article about workers in Ghana who process New York parking tickets. They "... also expressed a passionate curiosity about the places and names they see so many times on tickets every day. They seemed particularly intrigued by Queens, because of its royal name and large size." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/22/nyregion/22GHAN.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Jul 30 22:29:51 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Roadside Interviews Message-ID: Subject: Roadside Interviews This came to me via Phil Agre's RRE News service. He says of it "this may be the weirdest item I've ever carried on RRE." I think it's weirder even than that other recent item . So now for something very completely different ... Cops pulling people over at random to conduct a marketing survey http://www.tampatrib.com/MGA5WPU8Z3D.html --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jul 31 16:23:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]UUNet Traffic Message-ID: Subject: UUNet Traffic (from NewsScan Daily, 31 July 2002) GOV'T MOVES TO PREVENT WORLDCOM INTERNET SHUTDOWN After being told that the Federal Communications Commission has no authority to prevent WorldCom from shutting down its UUNet subsidiary's Internet backbone should it choose to do so, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ernest Hollings (D-SC) says he will introduce legislation by year's end to clarify the agency's authority over Internet backbone companies. Currently, the FCC can force WorldCom to continue providing phone services to customers, but if it decided to shut down UUNet in order to save money, there's no government regulation in place to prevent it. Meanwhile, WorldCom CEO John Sidgmore says he has no plans to cut off services for either voice or data customers. In a similar situation last September, the FCC was forced to go to court to prevent Rhythms Communications from closing down its high-speed Internet access for several weeks after the company signaled its intention to do so as part of its bankruptcy proceedings. (Wall Street Journal 31 Jul 2002) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1028040032754153920.djm,00.html (sub req'd) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- According to an article in The Economist (July 27, 2002 issue), the UUNet Internet backbone carries over half of America's Internet traffic. But there is some comfort, as much as can be had at this telecoms industry low point. In announcing WorldCom's bankruptcy filing on July 22nd and their restructuring plans, WorldCom CEO John Sidgmore said he plans to sell some assets, probably MCI (long-distance) and SkyTel (paging services), and refocus the company around UUNet. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jul 31 16:42:23 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Students' Web Habits Message-ID: Subject: Students' Web Habits Dear Colleagues - It is important, I think, to ponder these two items. They have implications about where/how students expect to learn, what they expect a course to put on the Web, and what in turn you can expect by way of classroom attendance. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (from CIT INFOBITS -- July 2002) http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/ HOW COLLEGE STUDENTS USE THE WEB FOR COURSE ASSIGNMENTS The OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., recently commissioned a survey of U.S. college students to see how they use the Web for school-related assignments. The survey questioned 1,050 18-24 year old respondents representing all regions of the U.S. Some of the survey's findings: "Three-out-of-four agree completely that they are successful at finding the information they need for courses and assignments, and seven-in-ten say they are successful at finding what they seek most of the time. The first-choice web resources for most of their assignments are search engines (such as Google or Alta Vista), web portals (such as MSN, AOL or Yahoo!), and course-specific websites. They do not use online study aids or groups, or essay and paper websites." "Nearly two-thirds strongly feel they know best what information to accept from the web. Only 4% think the quality of information they find is not good enough for their assignments." The complete report "OCLC White Paper on the Information Habits of College Students," June 2002, is available online (in PDF format) at http://www2.oclc.org/oclc/pdf/printondemand/informationhabits.pdf OCLC is a nonprofit membership organization serving 41,000 libraries in 82 countries and territories around the world. Its mission is to "further access to the world's information and reduce library costs by offering services for libraries and their users." For more information, contact OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., 6565 Frantz Road, Dublin, OH 43017-3395, USA; tel: 1-800-848-5878; fax: 614-764-6096; email: oclc@oclc.org; Web: http://www.oclc.org/ For a more informal view of this issue, see "Point. Click. Think? As Students Rely on the Internet for Research, Teachers Try to Warn of the Web's Snares" (by Laura Sessions Stepp, THE WASHINGTON POST, 16 July 2002, p. C01). The article can be read online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9729-2002Jul15.html ..................................................................... DO LIBRARIES REALLY NEED BOOKS? Books are taking a back seat to media and computer labs in several U.S. college and university libraries. While most new or renovated libraries still make books and other print materials the centerpiece of their collections, some are moving books into the background. A recent article ("Do Libraries Really Need Books?" by Scott Carlson in THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, July 12, 2002, p. A31; http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i44/44a03101.htm) describes how several universities are saving on library construction costs by storing books offsite or installing storage-and-retrieval systems that change the meaning of "browsing the stacks." In addition to limiting easy access to the books, these libraries may change users' perceptions of books' value in scholarly endeavors. Some professors and librarians are concerned that "[i]f buildings both reflect and influence the ideals of a culture . . . these libraries could tacitly be teaching undergraduate students that if they can't find it online, it doesn't exist or isn't important." However, professors may be helping to foster this belief as well. Library circulation statistics and anecdotal reporting suggests that "students prefer getting their information and their reading materials online. Notes, reference reading, and other materials appear on course Web sites because professors see that as the best way to reach their students." The Chronicle of Higher Education [ISSN 0009-5982] is published weekly by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc., 1255 Twenty-third Street, NW, Washington, DC 20037 USA; tel: 202-466-1000; fax: 202-452-1033; Web: http://chronicle.com/ ...................................................................... From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Aug 2 05:06:56 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]The Valley's Grim Reaper Message-ID: Subject: The Valley's Grim Reaper Differing perspectives on tech recovery. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 1 August 2002) TECH RECOVERY UNDERWAY Data compiled by the Bureau of Economic Analysis suggests that the technology recovery is underway, after hitting its lowest point during last year's fourth quarter. Analysts remain cautious but optimistic, and Richard Carlson of the research firm Spectrum Economics says, "We've clearly bottomed. I'm expecting significant growth next year." (San Jose Mercury News 31 Jul 2002) http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/3776236.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1247408 This article about Marty Pichinson, a quiet low-key Silicon Valley bankruptcy restructuring specialist, makes rather grimmer reading, describing that after the lull that followed the 2001 dot.com carnage, there is now again an upswing in bankruptcies in software, hardware and telecoms services and equipment. The most common reason for failure now is not a flaky business plan, but too much competition, "too much of everything." Mr. Pichinson thinks the tech shakeout has another three years to run. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Aug 3 00:06:25 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]What's New for Aug 02, 2002 Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP What's New for Aug 02, 2002 Another fun "What's New" from Bob Park. --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------- WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 2 Aug 02 Washington, DC 1. ANTI-GRAVITY: A GRAVITY SHIELD WOULD BE VERY NICE, BUT... Never has an idea with no prospect for success so captivated corporate research managers who either never studied or never understood the most basic laws of physics. Both Boeing in the US and BAE Systems, the British aerospace giant, are trying to make the Podkletnov gravity shield work. BAE has already been at it for two years (WN 31 Mar 00), with no success. When NASA couldn't make the Podkletnov shield work, they invested another million dollars (WN 22 Jan 99). When it still didn't work, they decided the tests were "inconclusive" and sank another mil into it (WN 12 Oct 01). I have identified seven warning signs of bad science http://www.bobpark.com. The Podkletnov gravity shield fits all seven. So why would Boeing choose to spend millions to test a ridiculous claim by an obscure Russian physicist that has failed every test and is a physical impossibility to begin with? OK, so the Pentagon is paying for it. But there's also this goofy book by Nick Cook, who writes for Jane's Defense Weekly. 2. BOOK REVIEW: "THE HUNT FOR ZERO POINT," by NICK COOK. If this book is about controlling gravity, what's with the "zero point"? The confusion is natural; both lie within the province of fringe scientists who haven't a clue of where the real world stops and the fantasy world of Atlantis and UFO's begins. Cook is not a scientist of any sort; in his world, these guys are the insiders. Don't look for them in the pages of Phys Rev; they're not a bunch of pointy-headed academics. They are part of the black world of really important top secret stuff like -- well, electrogravitics. So who exactly fed Nick Cook this enormous pile of horse manure? If you're a regular reader of WN, you've already met them all. 3. FRINGE: WHERE EVERYTHING IS SECRET, AND NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE. When Cook set out on his search for "the biggest secret since the atom bomb," he went straight to the Integrity Research Institute, in Washington, DC, where you can buy books and videos with titles like "Holistic Physics and Consciousness" (WN 5 Mar 99). IRI is really Tom Valone, a former patent examiner who lost his job in the fallout from the Conference on Free Energy (WN 21 May 99). He had recruited Paul LaViolette, who claims the B-2 uses anti- gravity, reverse engineered from a crashed flying saucer. He was also fired (WN 18 Aug 00). They sent Cook to the Institute for Advanced Study. Not the one in Princeton; the one in Austin, TX. It consists of Harold Puthoff, who wants to extract energy from the zero point of the vacuum. He used to run the CIA's "remote viewing" program, which was inspired by "Mind Reach," a book he wrote with Russell Targ (WN 11 Mar 94). Finally, Cook sought advice from Charles Platt, founder of CryoCare, a company that keeps human heads bobbing in liquid nitrogen until scientists can figure out how to restart them (WN 21 Jul 00). THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University or the American Physical Society, but they should be. ------------------ RFC822 Header Follows ------------------ Received: by design.eng.yale.edu with SMTP;2 Aug 2002 16:29:12 -0400 Received: (from whatsnew@localhost) by tron.aps.org (8.9.1b+Sun/8.9.1) id QAA06706; Fri, 2 Aug 2002 16:31:16 -0400 (EDT) Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2002 16:31:16 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <200208022031.QAA06706@tron.aps.org> To: pjk@design.eng.yale.edu From: "What's New" Subject: What's New for Aug 02, 2002 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Aug 3 02:09:59 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]DSP/Applets/Robots Message-ID: Subject: DSP/Applets/Robots Free quality resources in the age of $110 course textbooks. There is still altruism on the Web. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from The NDSL Scout Report for Math, Engineering & Technology, August 2, 2002 The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing [.pdf, .zip] http://www.dspguide.com/ Dr. Steve Smith offers his book about digital signal processing (DSP) free, in its entirety, on this site. The DSP guide introduces the reader to the fundamentals, and then delves into digital filters, applications, and complex techniques. All 33 chapters can be downloaded individually or as a whole. The book is quite well written, with plenty of figures, graphs, and illustrations that accompany the text. Smith derives equations for topics such as Fourier and Laplace transforms, and he clearly defines the terms and how to use them. This book is excellent for college students in a DSP or signals communications course. engAPPLETS: Java Applets for Engineering Education http://www.engapplets.vt.edu/ The Java applets presented on this Web site teach concepts that every engineering student will encounter in undergraduate courses. Developed at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute with a grant from the National Science Foundation, the applets fall into three main categories: statics, dynamics, and fluid dynamics. There are several specific topics in each of these sections, which demonstrate principles such as heat conduction, ideal flow, vector algebra, and projectile motion. The applets are easy to use, and a short introduction explains the controls and the important observations. The only problem with the site is a nonworking link to the projectile motion game. Mobile Robot Knowledge Base: Welcome http://robot.spawar.navy.mil/MobileRobotKB/ Part of the robotics division of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (last mentioned in the March 1, 2002 NSDL Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology), the Mobile Robot Knowledge Base is a growing site with some good information for any professional designer or robot hobbyist. Although it is still being developed, there is product information for ground robot GPS navigation systems. Various manufacturers and models are described to help users make informed decisions for choosing their components. Eventually, the database will have profiles for various communication methods, object avoidance technologies, and many other properties for any robot platform. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Aug 3 20:56:27 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]The Right to Tinker Message-ID: Subject: The Right to Tinker [This has been sitting in my EAS-INFO prospects folder for a while, because I have mixed feelings about it. Probably too long and self-indulgent. On the other hand, you're not going to get anything from me for about three weeks now, during which I'll have a technology-free (except for my digital camera) time in the Northwoods of Maine, then followed by catching up with a monster email backlog. So here it is. Have a good rest of the summer. --Peter -------------------------------------------------------------------- | 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 | -------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Colleagues - This mailing could also be called "the changing ways of owning technology" My long-ish, and partly auto-biographical, comments below are prompted by four recent articles. -- "Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton University, argues that the 'freedom to tinker'--the right to understand, repair and modify one's own equipmentÑ-is crucial to innovation, and as valuable to society as the freedom of speech." http://www.economist.com/science/tq/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=1176171 -- Technologies that inhibit end user innovation, starting with digital rights management (further explained next). http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/04/business/04SCEN.html (free sub req'd) -- The scary implications of TCPA and Palladium, by Ross Anderson, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html -- THE AMAZING SHRINKING WARRANTY It's not just your imagination -- planned obsolescence has become a firmly entrenched marketing strategy for most makers of electronic equipment. "We joke that we design landfills," says a senior industrial engineer at Pentagram Design, which builds portable devices and computers for companies like Hewlett-Packard. In the past year Dell Computer has slashed warranty periods from three years to one, and Apple's iPod digital-music player features only a 90-day warranty. Sony requires buyers to fill out a lengthy questionnaire in order to qualify for a full year of support on a Clie organizer -- otherwise they get only 90 days. At the same time, companies are making it more difficult to get items repaired, even if the customer is willing to pay for it. Many PDAs from companies such as Handspring, Palm and HP have built-in rechargeable batteries that generally can't be replaced without shipping the whole unit off to the manufacturer -- a "feature" that lands many of them in the rubbish heap. Part of the problem is a much shorter new-product cycle, which has sharply reduced the amount of time allotted for testing. The result is that things break much more often. Add to that today's much lower prices combined with prohibitively high repair costs, and many customers just opt to replace anything that breaks. (Wall Street Journal 16 Jun 2002) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1026764790637362400.djm,00.html (sub req'd) ------------------------------------------------------------------- Starting around 1962 and until about 14 years ago I would not buy a major piece of technology unless I could also buy a service manual for it. That applied to cars, VCRs, TV and Hifi equipment. (Most kitchen and laundry appliances were then still self-evident enough so that one could figure them out by inspection.) Even oil furnaces came under my purview after a memorable single-digit winter night in 1974, when my house and greenhouse lost the oil furnace's heating because of negligent servicing by a 'professional'. I fixed it that same night and have been doing it ever since. Unless I felt I had the information needed to fix an item myself, or to determine what needed fixing before agreeing to have someone else do it, the terms of ownership were unacceptable to me, akin to another mortgage. Side benefits accrue from really owning something with insistence on a comprehensive understanding of its function. For a start, the purchase is likely to be based on more informed research, and a more perceptive installation will minimize maintenance requirements. And when a washing machine wasn't obliging enough later with a desirable wash/rinse cycle temperature combination, I redesigned it to give it one. Much else in my house is custom-designed or customized for enhanced function and reliability, from the solar hot-water system, to various house automation functions and the electric fence for my wife's garden. Dizzyingly frequent technology upgrade/replacement cycles now distract us from the fact that much technology can have a very long functional life, especially with just a little maintenance. I have an electronic indoor/outdoor thermometer (the "indoor" is the greenhouse) with vacuum-fluorescent display that has been operating continuously since 1975. During that time I replaced one integrated circuit and one capacitor. My stereo system's Quad electrostatic speakers still please me greatly. They were bought in 1969. The solid-state amplifier that drives them is going on 20 years. My list is much longer, but I won't bore you with further details. In short, there is an alternate universe out there, unsuspected by most, where things can last five or even ten times longer under terms of technically informed ownership. Most of the material I see discarded is still completely functional. Maybe a switch needs replacing, or an ego needs to be scaled down to a slower CPU speed. There is also the psychological comfort of not feeling helpless vis-a-vis technical malfunction. For most of my technology, domestic or otherwise, I have "fall-backs," "spares." If our life and work require us to live in machines, we had better understand them. In this story about myself I'm skipping altogether the issues I don't subscribe to, of technology as fashion accessory, as life-style statement. Those are really the biggest reasons for our rapid technology turn-over. It has created an economy that is now addicted to it. So what happend about 14 years ago, as I mentioned at the start? The technology "food chain" had evolved enough to integrate complex technical functions into ever large forms. A clock radio would be embodied mostly by one large integrated circuit. Service manuals, their implications always of service "in the field," replacing the bits that go bad among the bits that are still good, started to become extinct. In the words of the statement intended to keep the uninformed from hurting themselves, for the most part there now were really "no serviceable parts inside." Field service technicians, potentially important partners in the design evolution of products (e.g. see Julian Orr's unique ethnography of Xerox field service technicians "Thinking about Machines") became deskilled in all but instances of the most complex equipment. On the level of consumer goods insides, my sense of technical informedness didn't get me very far any more. It was around 1990 that I last managed to fix a VCR. The good thing about large scale integration was a significant improvement in reliability. Fewer circuit packages means fewer connections in the world of solder joints on circuit boards, fewer discontinuities between materials of different thermal expansion coefficients, fewer things to break. So there is "Intel Inside" not just in computers but even inside some microwave ovens and toasters, but "no serviceable parts." Integrated circuit design was automated, became accessible widely with the advent of Mead and Conway's 1980 "Introduction to VLSI Systems", a sea change was often likened to publishing. The old proprietary ways of designing integrated circuits ("chips") were likened to "only publishers being empowered to write books." The Mead and Conway methodology, and its evolution since, allow engineers to cast their circuits into integrated form in one place, and have another place maybe half-way around the world actually fabricate it on silicon from their recipe. Engineer "authors" are empowered in their own right, it was said, and can chose among multiple "publishers." That beneficent ideal wasn't quite realized that splendidly, but in any case it never included the technically informed consumer as "author." Since then even the automated integrated circuit technology has yielded to a newer form of authorship, via software. Microprocessors can be pervasively applied, in rather standardized form, in a variety of products whose actual function is defined by application-specific microprocessor software. The software may be stored in a separate chip, accessible to a new generation technologically adroit owners, who replace a car's sedate engine control program with one suitable for hotrodding, or reprogram their Furby or Sony's Aibo robotic dog. When I redesigned, "tinkered with," "hacked," my GE washing machine, that was between me and the terms of warranty, not that they even still applied. When someone reprograms Aibo and posts the results on the Web, Sony gets annoyed and may sue. In fact, products made smarter by computing create a new era of higher-profile opportunities for computer-savvy owners. And thus develop the tensions between today's "tinkerers" and manufacturers who are now trying to prevent tinkering by going back to non-reprogrammable "cast in silicon" product implementations. Under what many consider unenlightened business models, those manufacturers feel that tinkering will cost them profits. That, combined with the typical sense of insecurity about technology in organizational contexts, leads to the well-known adage "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft," even if the software doesn't really do what you need. That has become an accepted form of common suffering. But do something more unusual, build your computer from a kit to an even greater extent than Dell's customization, in pursuit of very specific application advantages, and you may have trouble getting funding from institutional sources. In a land of techno-helplessness you may become a leper if you know too much and act on it. So finally on to the three recent articles with which I started this mailing, articles about the contribution of users to innovation. Edward Felten of Princeton is passionate about the freedom to tinker and thus innovate, and spent last academic year at Stanford, working with Lawrence Lessig, the law professor who is equally passionate about the freedom of ideas. (I've mentioned before his recent book "The Future of Ideas".) The NYT article discussed the restrictions manufacturers are planning to build into cell phones, CD players, computers, printers, to keep you ever more captive to their circumstances. In effect they want to license you the use of those products much as the terms of most computer software are only licenses for use, not ownership at all. Finally the TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Alliance) item from Cambridge refers to an Intel-led initiative which will embed Digital Rights Management into your next PC and entertainment electronics. Also named the "Fritz chip" (after Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, who is working tirelessly in Congress to make TCPA a mandatory part of all consumer electronics.) A few quotes illustrate how deeply this could enfringe on your ownership of a device. > The fundamental issue is that whoever controls the Fritz chips will > acquire a huge amount of power. There are many ways in which this > power could be abused, and Intel has refused to answer questions on > the governance of the TCPA consortium. > One of the worries is censorship. An application enabled for TCPA, > such as a media player or word processor, will typically have its > security policy administered remotely by a server. This is so that > content owners can react to new piracy techniques. However, the > mechanisms might also be used for censorship. > For example, the police could get an order against a specific > pornographic picture of a child, and cause the policy servers to > instruct all PCs under their control to search for it and notify > them if it were found. As another example, the scientologists have a > record of getting courts to give them injunctions against their > critics. In future, if they can convince a court that a certain > document should be banned, they might also get an order against a > policy server. As for me, tinkering with software-enabled products, which are becoming the norm, is sadly not my forte. I'm unlikely to modify the operating system of my digital camera. I can only affirm my sense of ownership by adroitly researched initial choice, expectations of reliability (an increasingly troubling area--see the 4th story at the beginning), and a suitably wide range of functions to allow my use to grow. Confining forms of ownership, questionable reliability, restricted "licenses," are situations I will avoid altogether whenever possible. As I mentioned before, in instances where I rely heavily on a technology, I try to have fallbacks, some redundancy, maybe two of them. If I get version n of something, I usually keep (n-1) functional as a fallback. I have different ways of getting email, several different computers (all of which I maintain myself, spare hard drives and modems on hand), I keep my hard drives carefully backed up, etc. And, oh yes, my oil furnace will get its annual service later this summer and run as efficiently as ever. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Aug 4 08:46:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS][RRE]pointers of 8/3 Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP [RRE]pointers of 8/3 Since I'm about to go off-line for a while, as I mentioned, I don't have time to select particularly interesting items for EAS-INFO from Phil Agre's latest RRE mailing. So I'm taking the liberty to show you what his mailings look like. --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 8/3/02 6:24 PM From: Phil Agre Here are some more URL's. Thanks to everyone who contributed. RRE home page: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html Pick Hit: Myra Melford, Dance Beyond the Color Did anybody tape CNN on the morning of 9/11? Can you send me a dub? war Aggressive New Tactics Proposed for Terror War http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38165-2002Aug2?language=printer US Returns to Theory of Iraq Link to September 11th ("despite deep doubts by the CIA and FBI ...") http://www.latimes.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=la%2Dfg%2Diraq2aug02 Mobilizations Hint at Date and Strategy for Iraq War (probably a temporary link) http://www.stratfor.com/fib/topStory_print.php?ID=205579 Rumsfeld's role in dealing with Saddam while Iraq was using chemical weapons http://commondreams.org/views02/0802-01.htm article about bin Laden's relations with the Taliban http://www.msnbc.com/news/788932.asp more on amphetamine use by US fighter pilots (gives new meaning to the phrase "war on drugs") http://makeashorterlink.com/?I53E21D61 Future Combat Systems http://www.boeing.com/fcs/ UN Report on Jenin (in which the PA wrests propaganda defeat from the jaws of victory) http://www.un.org/peace/jenin/ Bush's Support for Reformers Again Backfires in Iran (so, idiot or jerk? I say jerk) http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38398-2002Aug2?language=printer Scientist Says FBI Asked About Setup (it's the Washington Times so who knows, but it sure is weird) http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20020803-26337484.htm Fire Department Lapses on 9/11 Are Cited http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/03/nyregion/03FIRE.html?pagewanted=print New York Plans Code Overhaul for High-Rises http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/nyregion/02CODE.html?pagewanted=print civil liberties and security decision that US courts have no jurisdiction over prisoners at Guantanamo (so the US government can detain anyone and hold them indefinitely w/o trial) http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/rasulvbush073102dsm.pdf Order Directing the Department of Justice to Disclose Identities of Detainees http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/cnssvdoj080202ord.pdf GM Unveiling OnStar Service That Will Automatically Relay Crash Data http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/technology/personal_technology/3774573.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp a lot of big talk about a war between hackers and the FBI http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,766789,00.html Klez Microsoft Worm Tops the Virus Charts (I get several Klez messages a day) http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/26473.html speakers and abstracts from Defcon http://www.defcon.org/dcx-speakers.html New Security Paradigms, Virginia Beach, 23-26 September 2002 http://www.nspw.org/current/ papers from a workshop on "economics and information security" http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/resources/affiliates/workshops/econsecurity/ corruption Florida Recount Funded by Enron/Halliburton http://www.thedailyenron.com/documents/20020730085550-68379.asp http://makeashorterlink.com/?O2EC52D61 Bush-Cheney Recount Fund Filed Disclosure Forms Plagued With Errors http://www.publiccitizen.org/hot_issues/issue.cfm?ID=348 Bush, Cheney Under Fire Over Offshore Subsidiaries http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/07/31/bush.harken.reut/ http://www.nydailynews.com/business/story/7314p-6742c.html http://www.citizenworks.org/admin/press/halliburton-pr.php Bush Admits Offshore Tax Haven Problem (he's sure got a problem) http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=536&e=1&cid=536&u=/ap/20020801/ap_on_go_co/tax_havens_21 Questions on Halliburton Deal Under Cheney (caution, though: it's by Jeff Gerth, chronic recycler of partisan half-truth) http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/01/business/01HALL.html?pagewanted=print Deputy AG Thompson Made Providian Profit ("the stock plummeted when the company surprised investors with problem loans") http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33804-2002Aug1?language=printer summary of Democratic allegations against Bush, Cheney, Thompson, and White (but the important thing isn't crimes but the larger pattern) http://www.house.gov/judiciary_democrats/bushcorpltrattach72402.pdf incredulous chortling as Bill Simon's company is found guilty of fraud (Republican candidate for governor of California) http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-me-simon2aug02005054.story http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-me-support2aug02005054.story fraudulent budget accounting in New Jersey under Whitman (e.g., the lame-duck GOP legislature deliberately ran crippling deficits) http://www.njpp.org/moneyrun.html WorldCom Execs Surrender (okay, they're being handcuffed, good, but what kind of prison are they in?) http://www.msnbc.com/news/788228.asp http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/worldcom/usvsull080102comp.pdf http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1024079088274 More Perp Walks, Please (whatever happened to the Justice Department's Enron investigation?) http://money.cnn.com/2002/08/01/news/perpwalk/index.htm Executives in Top US Collapses Made $3.3bn (and to think there are kids who want to be drug dealers when they grow up) http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1028039797414&p=1027953298906 the accounting accusations against AOL are less serious than others http://slate.msn.com/?id=2068762 SEC Web Site Provides Link to CEO, CFO Certifications of Financial Statements http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2002-115.htm http://www.sec.gov/rules/extra/staff21a1.htm poll of CFO's on pressure to commit fraud http://www.cfo.com/printarticle/0,5317,7502|,00.html Enron Pact Troubled Merrill Employee http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23497-2002Jul30?language=printer http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/business/3769254.htm corporate bankruptcies being filed in New York, allegedly to get better deals http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1024079068893 Another Accounting Issue: Pension Funds and Executive Pay http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/6115/view/print the new business reform law http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/gwbush/sarbanesoxley072302.pdf Legal Reasons to Keep E-Mail, Web Pages and Other Records http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/2000-all/gall-2000-09-all.html Corporate Lawyers Subject to New Reporting Obligations http://radio.weblogs.com/0110692/2002/07/26.html#a31 many facts that I hadn't known about the S&P 500 stock index http://slate.msn.com/?id=2068724 Protesters Say Bill Is Designed to Halt Berlusconi's Trial http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4473291,00.html politics Bill Would Grant Executive Branch Sweeping Authority to Override Federal Laws http://www.cbpp.org/5-13-02tanf.pdf What Is Going On With the Justice Department and Guns? http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1024079069179 Ancient History: The Deficits of the 1980s (except it's not ancient history: we're reliving the 1980s without the growth) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000432.html the sort of person that George Bush thinks should be a judge for life http://writ.news.findlaw.com/lazarus/20020725.html the latest antics of Katherine Harris (what's going *on* down there?) http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-harris3aug03.story http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/national/02HARR.html?pagewanted=print false accusations of media bias are projection (if people can be persuaded to screen out the news, then they'll believe lies) http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh072902.shtml http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh073002.shtml http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh073102.shtml Will Hillary And Bill Clinton Be Reimbursed For Whitewater Legal Fees? ("a pattern in favor of reimbursement of conservatives") http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20020802.html read the first of these letters about the article on the "Left Behind" books (some of the others are interesting too, though I don't endorse them all) http://www.salon.com/books/letters/2002/08/02/aug02/print.html FEC Rules on "Issue Ads" Decried (campaigns are a mess, but those ads are totally protected speech) http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29076-2002Jul31?language=printer intellectual property Digital Library for Nuclear Issues (an actual small example of a digital library) http://alsos.wlu.edu/ death throes of UCITA, once considered unstoppable http://news.com.com/2100-1023-947182.html why starving Zimbabwe is rational to reject US genetically engineered corn (the zealots here are the people using famine to force GE on vulnerable people) http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23728-2002Jul30?language=printer more on the sad life of a Microsoft customer (open source open source open source) http://news.com.com/2100-1001-947164.html article on changing relations between open source and corporate vendors http://www.economist.com/business/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=1251254 Pressplay Revamps Online Music Service (do they have any customers at all?) http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/3777666.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp Save Internet Radio http://www.saveinternetradio.org/ Institutional Repositories' Critical Role in Reforming Scholarly Communication http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=f60 design Don Norman's design columns http://www.jnd.org/ Everything I Need to Know About Usability, I Learned at the Arcade http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/us-cranky17.html tech design and customer support for people with disabilities in US versus EU http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2165893.stm everything else The Impact of State Anti-Spam Laws (with, ahem, "practical tips for companies that want to use e-mail marketing") http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/2002-all/wood-2002-03-all.html http://caag.state.ca.us/_misc/content/spam.htm Social and Ethical Impacts of ICT's, Lisbon, 13-15 November 2002 http://www.ccsr.cse.dmu.ac.uk/conferences/ethicomp2002/ The Digital Divide From an Ethical Viewpoint, Augsburg, 3-5 October 2002 http://www.capurro.de/augsburg2.htm fraud vigilantes on eBay http://www.msnbc.com/news/784132.asp cool online map collection http://www.davidrumsey.com/ GPS Sparks Boundary Wars http://www.msnbc.com/news/789040.asp overview of economists' schools of thought http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/home.htm "the disconnect between trade rules and development" http://www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/070280.html Matthew Jay rtsp://212.135.73.204/matthew_jay/youre_always_going_too_soon.rm end ------------------ RFC822 Header Follows ------------------ Received: by design.eng.yale.edu with SMTP;3 Aug 2002 18:20:40 -0400 Received: from lists.gseis.ucla.edu (lists.gseis.ucla.edu [149.142.5.37]) by vertigo.gseis.ucla.edu (8.11.6/8.11.6/SuSE Linux 0.5) with SMTP id g73M9cU17531; Sat, 3 Aug 2002 15:09:38 -0700 Received: from alpha.ats.ucla.edu by lists.gseis.ucla.edu with SMTP; Sat, 3 Aug 2002 14:07:49 -0700 Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2002 14:07:46 -0700 Message-Id: <200208032107.OAA56530@alpha.ats.ucla.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: alpha.ats.ucla.edu: pagre set sender to pagre@alpha.ats.ucla.edu using -f From: Phil Agre To: "Red Rock Eater News Service" Subject: [RRE]pointers Sender: Precedence: Bulk List-Software: LetterRip Pro 3.0.7 by Fog City Software, Inc. List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-URL: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Aug 28 18:22:06 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Occam's Razor Message-ID: Subject: Occam's Razor Dear EAS-INFO Readers - Well, I'm back from the Maine Northwoods, and some more populous places along the north-east-most Maine coast, the new academic year beckons, as do a number of household repair projects. So maybe it is best to resume these occasional mailings with the subject of simplicity, i.e. with today's John Lienhard "Engines of our Ingenuity" radio spot titled "Occam's Razor," kindly called to my attention by my friend and like-minded colleague Alfred Ganz. http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1470.htm It is terse, as usual. Some favorite quotes > In a really good design you eventually make the very design itself > unnecessary. And that is very hard to do because we like > complication. > ...to take that last step -- to walk the plank from a clever design > to no design at all -- takes nerve as well as imagination. We're so > tempted to look smart by mastering complication instead of > simplicity. And John Lienhard concludes that "Good design exacts a price from our egos, but it really is a gift -- it really is freedom -- to find the simplicity in things and finally to reduce an engineering design down to where it ought to be." And I would go even a little further, and say that the aesthetic calm of simplicity is a little like the sentiment Walt Whitman expressed in his poem "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer." When I heard the learned astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, Till rising and gliding out I wandered off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Looked up in perfect silence at the stars. All the best for the new academic year. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Aug 29 14:55:05 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Earth at Night Message-ID: Subject: Earth at Night http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg more info at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001127.html Thought you might enjoy this NASA photo of lights from earth at night, a man-made "starry sky" we largely owe to Tesla, Siemens, Westinghouse, Steinmetz and others who laid the foundations of AC power transmission. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Aug 30 16:56:42 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]The 24-Hour Professor Message-ID: Subject: The 24-Hour Professor Dear Colleagues - The inevitability of mixed blessings of email and other forms of information technology in teaching and administration is discussed in the CIT INFOBITS item below. Keep in mind, of course, that a new modality has a good chance to be more efficient only in an altered context. If the recipients of a memo distributed by email will likely print it out because of other surviving administrative circumstances, then email may well be the sink for additional time mentioned by Prof. Messing, especially if it is multiple-forwarded scrambled-format. Providing the technology is never enough. There needs to be insightful evolution of its best use by professional collaboration between providers and users. --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from CIT INFOBITS -- August 2002) MORE ON INCREASED FACULTY WORKLOAD AND ONLINE TECHNOLOGIES The CIT Infobits May 2002 article "Online Teaching and the 24-Hour Professor" (http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitmay02.html#1) described how the Internet is changing professors' workdays and workloads. John Messing, Director of the Research Centre for Innovation in Telelearning Environments at Charles Sturt University, continues this topic in "Can Academics Afford to Use E-mail?" (E-JOURNAL OF INSTRUCTIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, vol. 5, no. 2, August 2002). Messing reports on a study that began as "an attempt to quantify what many educators have suspected . . . that the workload associated with the use of online tools is considerably higher than with conventional technologies. In the process of trying to make sense of the data, it became clear that there are a number of issues such as increased expectations on the part of students and the disproportionate load that administrative use of e-mail places on academics that are rarely, if ever, considered as part of the debate." The study analyzed the author's administrative and course-related email messages from 1991-2001. Some of his observations: Regarding course-related email: "While the number of students in [his Graduate Diploma of Applied Science] course has doubled, the volume of communication has increased 11 fold. . . ." Regarding administrative email: "It might take a secretary 10 to 15 minutes to duplicate and distribute meeting papers to 20 people [via email]. If it takes each recipient just 5 minutes to read, extract, print and collect the meeting papers, that represents a total of 100 minutes. The secretary saves 10 minutes but the recipients collectively lose 100 minutes." He concludes, "Just how much extra time an individual is prepared to sacrifice in order to also receive the benefits of the use of such tools is debatable. From a personal perspective, the limit has been reached. With well over 3000 e-mails to contend with in one semester, the system has become a scourge rather than a blessing." The article is available online at http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/Vol6No_1/messing_frame.html (HTML format) and http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/docs/Vol6No_1/Messing%20-%20Final.pdf (PDF format). e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology (e-JIST) is published by the Distance Education Centre, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Queensland 4350, Australia; Web: http://www.usq.edu.au/dec/ Current and back issues of e-JIST are available at no cost at http://www.usq.edu.au/electpub/e-jist/ ----------------------------- As a reward for reading this far, here is a more amusing use of IT (from Edupage, August 30, 2002) DOING LAUNDRY ONLINE New technology from IBM and USA Technologies will allow college students to do laundry without hunting for quarters or sitting around in the laundromat waiting for their clothes to be done. The eSuds system will connect 9,000 washers and dryers at U.S. colleges and universities to the Internet. Students can check a Web site for available machines and add detergent that the machines dispense. When the laundry is done, the machine sends an e-mail notifying the student. Swipe cards are used to pay for the laundry instead of cash, and laundromat owners can use the system to monitor machines and perform limited maintenance. The system might also cut down on vandalism, since cash won't be collected by the machines. Reuters, 29 August 2002 http://news.com.com/2100-1017-955973.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Sep 6 18:44:04 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]It's the Law! Message-ID: Subject: It's the Law! One of the laws of physics, in this case, happily joined by the legal variety. --PJK --------------------------------------------------------------------- (from What's New for Sep 06, 2002) PATENT NONSENSE: COURT DENIES BLACKLIGHT POWER APPEAL. The status of BlackLight Power's intellectual property is fuzzier than ever. BLP was awarded Patent 6,024,935 for "Lower-Energy Hydrogen Methods and Structures," a process for getting hydrogen atoms into a "state below the ground state" (WN 18 Feb 00). You might expect these shrunken hydrogen atoms, called "hydrinos," to have a pretty special chemistry. Do they ever! Indeed, a second patent application titled "Hydride Compounds" had been assigned a number and BLP had paid the fee. Several other patents were in the works. That's when things started heading South. Prompted by an outside inquiry (who would do such a thing?), the patent director became concerned that this hydrino stuff required the orbital electron to behave "contrary to the known laws of physics and chemistry." The Hydride Compounds application was withdrawn for further review and the other patent applications were rejected. Since the one patent already issued involves the same violations of basic laws of physics, there is a cloud over its status as well. BLP filed suit in federal court arguing that it was too late for the Patent Office to change its mind. The court was not impressed, so BLP appealed the decision. In denying the appeal, the court said the Patent Office has a responsibility to take "extraordinary action" to withdraw a questionable patent. The long-awaited IPO may have to wait a little longer. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Sep 11 04:06:40 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]House of Tomorrow Message-ID: Subject: House of Tomorrow (from NewsScan Daily, 10 September 2002) JAPAN'S HIGH-TECH 'HOUSES OF TOMORROW' Japan's houses may be diminutive compared with the typical U.S. spread, but if the country's electronics makers have their way, they'll be significantly smarter. On display at Matsushita Electric's Tokyo showroom are a toilet that analyzes your urine and sends any suspicious results to your doctor via the Internet, and a closet that offers clothing recommendations based on the weather forecast and your selected style (casual, etc.). Between wearings, the wardrobe treats your togs to a steam cleaning. Other gadgets include an all-in-one washer-dryer, a kitchen table with a touch-screen computer built into it that doubles as a flat-screen TV, and a refrigerator with a built-in camera that beams pictures to your mobile phone so you can check if you're low on milk while shopping. And for those who need pampering, there's the Matsushita bathroom sink ensemble, which comes with a mirror that snaps infrared pictures of your hair and skin, and recommends beauty treatments to enhance your features. It even doles out mineral water in varying degrees of acidity to best suit your complexion. (AP 10 Sep 2002) http://apnews.excite.com/article/20020910/D7LUNAU80.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- This strikes me as pretty creepy while it works, and as great comedy when it most likely goes awry, sort of in the Woody Allen "Sleeper" vein. After that it becomes a specialty within liability law. Just imagine to TV commercials: "Did the clothes your closet picked cost you a job promotion, ...?" Apart from the present urgent need to find new markets for electronics technology, the automated house, or automated kitchen, has been an astonishingly enduring theme in technological vision, right back to General Electric's "Magic Kitchen" at the 1939 New York World's Fair. And the results of such automation, assuming it actually works for a while, echo more loudly the words of Lewis Mumford of some 50 years ago: "By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed." --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Sep 14 15:50:35 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]College Rankings Message-ID: Subject: College Rankings The just released annual US News and World Report ranking of colleges will again stir discussion about the method and worth of such rankings. Here is some background. --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- Princeton University Tops New Ranking of Educational Institutions Princeton Again Tops 'US News' http://chronicle.com/free/2002/09/2002091302n.htm National Survey of Student Engagement http://www.indiana.edu/~nsse/ Americas Best Colleges 2003 http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/rankings/rankindex_brief.php College and University Rankings http://www.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rankings.htm A Review of the Methodology for the US News and World Reports Rankings of Undergraduate Colleges and Universities http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/norc.html The Princeton Review: Best 345 College Rankings http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/rankings/rankingCategory.asp?categoryID=1 The US News and World Report released their latest rankings of colleges this Thursday on their Web site. Princeton University was ranked number one in the rankings, followed by Harvard and Yale (who tied for second place), and with five institutions tied for fourth place. The past few years have seen great debates among educators about the validity of these rankings, with some institutions even refusing to release certain data to groups that prepare these rankings. A new aspect has been added to the data collection for this year's US News and World Report rankings with the inclusion of data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, an addition that is hoped will add a new dimension to the results. The first link is to a no-fee article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about the rankings, which includes some reactions from Princeton officials. The second link leads to the National Survey of Student Engagement and contains information about their survey and which colleges and universities participate in their research. The third link goes to the US News and World Report 2003 College Rankings, which was released yesterday on their Web site with partial details. The fourth link is from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and contains a collection of helpful articles about the debates over college rankings and their varying methodologies. The fifth link is to a report prepared several years ago by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago that engages in a critical examination of the methodology deployed by the US News and World Report rankings. Finally, the last link leads to the most recent edition of the Princeton Reviews top 345 college rankings for comparative purposes. Copyright Internet Scout Project, 1994-2002. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Sep 15 16:36:27 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Live Longer Message-ID: Subject: Live Longer LIVE LONGER, THINK POSITIVELY Yale researchers have shown that one's attitude about aging affects longevity. A recent study found that thinking positively about getting older extends one's life by an average of seven-and-one half years, which is more than the longevity gained from low blood pressure or low cholesterol, or from maintaining a healthy weight, abstaining from smoking and exercising regularly. http://www.yale.edu/opa/newsr/02-07-29-01.all.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- I'd really like to believe this, so I hope this study has cause and effect properly sorted out, hard to do in this kind of undertaking. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Sep 25 13:15:51 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Paying the Price Message-ID: Subject: Paying the Price Hmmm..., "airline"-style dynamic pricing for everything? Utilities too? Stockmarket-type scrolling displays at the supermarket? "Milk last sold at $.../gal"? --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 25 September 2002) PRICING PROFESSIONALS We bet you've never heard of "pricing professionals." They're part of a new trend, and here's a whole trade association called the Professional Pricing Society, which says that 19% of its member report directly to senior management (compared to just 9% two years ago). The old way of pricing something was to look at your costs and then mark them up by some percentage to determine a price. Not any more. Now a company's pricing strategy is focused not on what the product cost to make but on what the customer is willing to pay. The unit that figures those issues out is typically called a "tactical pricing group" (or some such name), whose pricing professionals consider all the variables likely to influence a customer's buying decision. At one division of Emerson Electric, a tactical pricing group looked at new piece of equipment which, based on cost, should have been priced at $2,650. But based on its research the group found out that Germans placed no value on the Emerson brand name and wouldn't pay that much (bad news for Emerson), but that (good news for Emerson) customers on both sides of the Atlantic were willing to pay 20% more than Emerson planned to charge. Final price: $3,150. "Market value" is, by definition, what the market will pay, and professional pricing specialists are paid to learn the market, not just to do arithmetic. (Wall Street Journal 18 Sep 2002) http://online.wsj.com/article/0..SB1032298252917585555.djm.00.html PAYING THE OPTIMAL PRICE Meanwhile, retailers are also checking out a new tool called price-optimization software, which is designed to project an ideal price for every item, at each individual store, at any given time. Terry Burnside, COO of Longs Drug Stores, is an optimal pricing convert, having tested a system by DemandTec for the past eight months. Burnside notes that the technology generated a "category-by-category increase in sales and margins," particularly in non-pharmacy sales, which make up most of Longs' profits. Similar results were noted in a recent study by Gartner and Retail Information System News, which found that nearly half of retailers using price-optimization software expect it to bring a payback within 12 months. The software works by plugging in reams of data from checkout scanners, seasonal sales figures, and other information into probability algorithms to develop an individual demand curve for each product in each store. Retailers use that information to adjust prices up or down according to each store's priorities -- profit, revenue or market share -- to achieve a theoretically maximum profit margin for their goals. The most valuable data the software delivers is "the crossover point between driving sales and giving away margin unnecessarily," says Burnside. And while some customers might find it disconcerting to find different prices on the same products at different stores owned by the same retailer, optimal pricing proponents say they're onto something big. "We think the market for price-optimization software could dwarf the market for supply-chain management," says DemandTec CEO Dan Fishback. (Business 2.0 Sep 2002) http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,42875,FF.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Sep 26 15:41:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Revising History Message-ID: Subject: Revising History Dear Colleagues - The Internet archive which Robert Lucky mentioned in his recent talk at Yale, and about which I have written to you in 2001 is not exempt from the editing or rewriting of history, though it is intended to be the history of the Web. E.g. Net Archive Silences Scientology Critic http://news.com.com/2102-1023-959236.html --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Sep 26 15:44:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Sad News from Lucent Message-ID: Subject: Sad News from Lucent PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 606 September 25, 2002 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein, and James Riordon BELL LABS/LUCENT RESEARCHER DID FABRICATE DATA. The committee of independent scientists investigating charges of misconduct in the way certain Lucent experiments were performed or reported in scientific journals issued its report today. The committee asserts that "The evidence that manipulation and misrepresentation of data occurred is compelling." They conclude that Hendrik Schon, but not the co-authors on his many articles, falsified and fabricated data. Lucent press release with links to the committee report: --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Sep 26 20:50:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Past Masters Message-ID: Subject: Past Masters Dear Colleagues - [This applies only to members of the Yale community. I apologize for tantalizing my (inter)national readers, unless they belong to educational institutions that also subscribe to this InteLex database.] This posting on the Yale Library list is a reminder of the great classical resources we have access to at Yale in online form. Surely this is a marvellous manifestation of information technology. In the Past Masters database from is not only the Oxford Classical Dictionary highlighted below, but the works of Darwin, Dewey, Hume, Nietsche, Peirce, Plato, Wittgenstein, and much more. Have a look. I find that I still have classical nerves set tingling by such a resource, tracing way back to the two-year Contemporary Civilization classical core curriculum I had at Columbia. All best, --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- > Message-Id: <4.3.2.7.2.20020916165359.0214ec18@lorimer.mail.yale.edu> > Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 16:58:29 -0400 > To: Yale Library list > From: Suzanne Lorimer > Subject: Oxford Classical Dictionary > Mime-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed > > I'm happy to announce the activation of online access to the Oxford > Classical Dictionary. > > For almost half a century The Oxford Classical Dictionary has been a > distinguished reference work on the Greco-Roman world. Covering > literature, art, philosophy, law, biography, mythology, science, > geography, daily life, and broad cultural and historical trends, > the OCD presents clear, authoritative information on all aspects of > the ancient world. In over six thousand entries ranging from long > articles to brief definitions, the OCD continues its historical > tradition of authoritative, signed articles with bibliographies and > incorporates the insights and interests of a new generation of > classical scholars. There is substantial coverage of women in the > ancient world, sexuality, Asia and the Far East, Jews, and early > Christians. In addition new thematic articles reflect the current > emphasis on multidisciplinary approaches to classical studies. > > The Dictionary is accessible through the Databases & Article > Searching section of the library's home page or directly through > Past Masters at http://library.nlx.com/ (select the title from the > drop-down menu). > > Please share this information with faculty, students, and staff you > think would be interested. > > -Sue Lorimer > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > Suzanne Lorimer > Coordinator of Reference Services > Research Services and Collections Department > 226 Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University > P.O. Box 208240 > 130 Wall Street > New Haven, CT 06520-8240 > (phone) 203-432-8371 (fax) 203-432-8527 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Sep 30 23:02:21 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Pounding the Wireless Beat Message-ID: Subject: Pounding the Wireless Beat (from NewsScan Daily, 30 September 2002) WIRELESS 'WARDRIVING' Secret Service agents in Washington are driving the city's streets (in an effort called "wardriving") to detect security holes in wireless communications systems. Special Agent Wayne Peterson says, "Everybody wants wireless, it's real convenient. Security has always been an afterthought." He regards what he is doing as a normal part of police work, and compares it to a patrolman driving through a neighborhood to make sure everyone is safe. When he or his colleagues find a security gap, they report it to the companies that operate the vulnerable wireless networks, so that the problem can be fixed. The Secret Service calls security holes in wireless communications systems one of the most overlooked threats to computer networks. (AP/San Jose Mercury News 30 Sep 2002) http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4181308.htm (from Edupage, September 30, 2002) SECRET SERVICE EXPOSING UNSECURED WIRELESS NETWORKS In an effort to inform businesses about lax security on their wireless networks, agents from the Secret Service are wandering the streets of Washington, D.C., looking for unprotected wireless networks. Using a laptop, a wireless card, and one of several antennae--one made from a Pringles can--agents drive through city streets, checking for access to networks. Chris McFarland of the Secret Service's Electronic Crimes Task Force said that "people can wreak havoc with [unprotected wireless] systems." Special Agent Wayne Peterson said that on a recent trip down one street, they found more than 20 networks, many without any security at all. Peterson said he sees the work of securing such networks as an important step in preventing crime. Associated Press, 29 September 2002 (registration req'd) http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/555541p-4378549c.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Sep 30 23:32:10 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Is Fair Use Dying? Message-ID: Subject: Is Fair Use Dying? from CIT INFOBITS September 2002 No. 51 ISSN 1521-9275 ...................................................................... IS FAIR USE DYING? "Recent actions by Congress and the federal courts -- and many more all-too-common acts of cowardice by publishers, colleges, developers of search engines, and other concerned parties -- have demonstrated that fair use, while not quite dead, is dying. And everyone who reads, writes, sings, does research, or teaches should be up in arms. The real question is why so few people are complaining." So writes Professor Siva Vaidhyanathan (Department of Culture & Communication, New York University) in his recent opinion piece, "Copyright as Cudgel" (THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, August 2, 2002, p. B7). Vaidhyanathan recounts events, laws, and lawsuits that threaten academe's right to fair use of intellectual property in the U.S. The article is available at http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i47/47b00701.htm The Chronicle of Higher Education [ISSN 0009-5982] is published weekly by The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc., 1255 Twenty-third Street, NW, Washington, DC 20037 USA; tel: 202-466-1000; fax: 202-452-1033; Web: http://chronicle.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------- The academic community's acquiescence to the erosion of fair use has been commented on here before. Perhaps too many are developing their own preoccupations with intellectual property to notice. But even if you don't read Lawrence Lessig's call to arms "The Future of Ideas" you should at least read this Chronicle article. Nothing much is at stake, only the future of academic freedom. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 1 00:05:41 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Scholarly e-Publishing Message-ID: Subject: Scholarly e-Publishing Related to copyright and fair use is scholarly publishing in electronic form. Here is a welcome group of annotated articles about the field, which has much evolved. Some of its aspects offer remedies for the intellectual arteriosclerosis of commercial print journals. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------- from CIT INFOBITS September 2002 No. 51 ISSN 1521-9275 ................................................................ ELECTRONIC SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING ARTICLES Recent articles and papers on the topic of electronic scholarly publishing include: "Talking Past Each Other: Making Sense of the Debate over Electronic Publication" by David J. Solomon FIRST MONDAY, vol. 7, no. 8, August 2002 http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_8/solomon/index.html The paper discusses how electronic dissemination affects the three core functions of the peer-review system for scholarly publications: "the ranking of scholarship, facilitating interactive communication among scholars, and creating a comprehensive archive of scholarly and scientific knowledge." First Monday [ISSN: 1396-0466] is an online, peer-reviewed journal whose aim is to publish original articles about the Internet and the global information infrastructure. It is published in cooperation with the University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago. For more information, contact: First Monday, c/o Edward Valauskas, Chief Editor, PO Box 87636, Chicago IL 60680-0636 USA; email: ejv@uic.edu; Web: http://firstmonday.dk/ --- "The Use of Electronic-Only Journals in Scientific Research" by Richard D. Llewellyn, Lorraine J. Pellack, and Diana D. Shonrock ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY LIBRARIANSHIP, Summer 2002 http://www.istl.org/02-summer/refereed.html The article surveys the state of "e-only" journals and their growing acceptance in the scientific research community. The authors touch upon the perceived impermanence of electronic materials, problems with citing these materials, and considerations, especially for libraries, for further study. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship [ISSN: 1092-1206] covers materials of interest to science and technology librarians. It is published quarterly by the Science & Technology Section of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL). For more information, contact: Andrea L. Duda, Editor; email: aduda@istl.org; Web: http://www.istl.org/ For more information about ACRL, link to http://www.ala.org/acrl/ --- "Scholarly Reviews Through the Web" by Sarah Milstein NEW YORK TIMES, August 12, 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/12/technology/12NECO.html The article describes how publishers of peer-reviewed journals are using the Web to streamline the review process. For more online New York Times articles, link to http://www.nytimes.com/ --- The October 2002 issue of CITES & INSIGHTS: CRAWFORD AT LARGE includes several articles on scholarly publication: "Who's Going to Preserve E-Zine Content?" "Ebooks and Etext" "The Access Puzzle: Notes on Scholarly Communication" The issue is available on the Web (in PDF format) at http://home.att.net/~wcc.techx/civ2i13.pdf Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large [ISSN 1534-0937] is a free, online newsletter self-published by Walt Crawford, a senior analyst at the Research Libraries Group, Inc. Current and back issues are available on the Web at http://home.att.net/~wcc.techx/ For more information contact: Walt Crawford, The Research Libraries Group, Inc., 1200 Villa Street, Mountain View, CA 94041-1100 USA; tel: 650-691-2227; email: wcc@notes.rlg.org; Web: http://walt.crawford.home.att.net/ ...................................................................... also see --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 1 21:56:25 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Bulwer-Lytton Contest Message-ID: Subject: Bulwer-Lytton Contest Dear Colleagues - You've been getting too much serious stuff from me lately, so I though some light relief might be in order. My colleague Jayne Miller today reminded me of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest named after a turgid Victorian novelist. The challenge of the contest is to pen the most atrocious first line of a novel. Sometimes a novel's _last_ line is asked for, sometimes a word limit is imposed. A number of educational institutions now run Bulwer-Lytton contests, but Prof. Scott Rice at San Jose State started it all. The ten items I received today below don't immediatiately match up with any yearly contest known to me, may even contain some apocryphal entries (is that possible?), but are amply in the spirit of the undertaking and won't make you struggle with any lame Web typography. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- Bulwer Lytton winners These are the 10 winners of this year's Bulwer Lytton contest, wherein one writes only the first line of a novel. 10) "As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were ever to break wind in the sound chamber he would never hear the end of it." ====== 9) "Just beyond the Narrows the river widens." ====== 8) "With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned, unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description." ====== 7) "Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his mind as he crept along the east wall: "Andre creep... Andre creep... Andre creep." ====== 6) "Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and soul to a back-alley sex-change surgeon to become the woman he loved." ====== 5) "Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it did not keep her from eking out a living at a local pet store." ====== 4) "Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached, but then penguins often do." ====== 3) "Like an overripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with cottage cheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus lay dead on the hotel floor." ====== 2) "Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who didn't know the meaning of the word "fear," a man who could laugh in the face of danger and spit in the eye of death-in short, a moron with suicidal tendencies." AND THE WINNER IS... 1) "The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with sickly fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder, gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude of the frog's deception, screaming madly, "You lied!" ------------------------------------------------------------------- And a few more, from elsewhere on the Web, where brevity counted: "The night passed like a kidney stone: painfully and with the help of major sedatives." "Jennifer stood there, quietly ovulating." And, lastly: "In 3010, the potatoes triumphed." From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Oct 4 17:07:33 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]MIT's OCW Goes Online Message-ID: Subject: MIT's OCW Goes Online Dear Colleagues - If in response to past EAS-INFO mailings you hesitated over the Delete key in the right instances, you will be aware of MIT's brave, and at a time of intellectual property greed, paradigm-breaking, $20m OpenCourseWare project of putting their courses online for free. E.g. see . Few courses in Engineering are as yet online. But those of my colleagues involved in the ABET accreditation process should note the software engineering lab course whose syllabus has the full ABET-required Objectives and Outcomes statements. Other Engineering courses do not (yet?) have such sections. We're all learning the new ways. --PJK --------------------------------------------------------------------- (from Edupage, October 04, 2002) INITIAL MIT COURSEWORK GOES ONLINE This week MIT began placing courseware online as part of its OpenCourseWare project (http://ocw.mit.edu/). MIT opted not to develop a for-profit learning initiative, as some other colleges and universities have, choosing instead to make its courseware open to the public online. MIT plans to put lecture notes, assignments, syllabi, tutorials, video simulations, and reading lists from over 2,000 courses on the site over the next ten years, though no credit will be offered for those who complete the assignments. Questions remain about technology tools for the site and intellectual property issues, but a representative of the program said that so far the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Critics said the offerings so far are limited and that merely posting such resources online does not substitute for an education at MIT. Officials from OpenCourseWare agreed that the experience of learning at MIT is not replicated by the program, but they hope that it will serve as a model for other institutions to disseminate their own resources. Wired News, 4 October 2002 http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,55507,00.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Oct 5 23:29:57 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Police Cars as Billboards Message-ID: Subject: Police Cars as Billboards You probably thought this pretty weird when I sent it to you in July But the interaction between police and the world of commerce is developing yet newer dimensions. See . > "I really feel we've finally gone completely over the edge of > appropriateness and better judgment into a fuzziness between > commercial and public discourse that is really dangerous," says > Kalle Lasn, author of several books on the rise of advertising and > publisher of Adbusters Magazine. "We've already tracked the rise of > ads into every area of life from urinals to golf holes. I think this > will diminish respect for the whole institution of police," Mr. Lasn > says. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 8 00:57:33 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Suing KaZaA Message-ID: Subject: Suing KaZaA In times digital the media industries have sprung major leaks. Napster may be 'plugged' but others continue to leak. Oh, those golden days of vinyl LPs and laser disks (analog video, digital sound). --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 7 October 2002) HOW DO YOU SUE A COMPANY YOU CAN'T FIND? The Internet music-swapping firm KaZaA, which has assumed the successor role to now-defunct Napster, is being sued in a federal court in Los Angeles by the Recording Industry Association of America for copyright violations, but the RIAA has several problems to overcome. First, there is a question of geography, since KaZaA is everywhere and nowhere: its distributor, Sharman Networks, is incorporated in the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, it is managed from Australia, its computer servers are in Denmark, and its developers can't be found. Second, there is an issue of jurisdiction: Sharman's lawyer says, "What they're asking is for a court to export the strictures of U.S. copyright law worldwide. That's not permitted. These are questions of sovereignty that legislatures and diplomats need to decide." And third, there is the question of whether giving people the tools (KaZaA's service) to break the copyright law is itself a copyright violation, even if KaZaA itself did not misappropriate copyrighted music. (New York Times 7 Oct 2002) http://partners.nytimes.com/2002/10/07/technology/07SWAP.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Oct 10 19:20:36 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Systems on the Edge Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Systems on the Edge Dear Colleagues - With his permission I'm forwarding you a mailing I received from William Dunk, Yale alumnus and faithful EAS-INFO reader. I thought you'd enjoy this humorous and spirited foray into the unreliabilities and obsolescences we tolerate but shouldn't. Not that I haven't been moved to make such comments, e.g. , but William's are more fun. All best, --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 10/10/02 2:51 PM From: William Dunk News from the Global Province (www.globalprovince.com) The marketplace of business ideas--a site for investors, business executives, journalists, and elitists everywhere. See this week's additions below. For subscription information for this free newsletter, see bottom of page. To learn more about William Dunk Partners, visit www.globalprovince.com/williamdunkpartners.htm. The Laws of Lawlessness. Back in the 20th century, when things still seemed to work, we conjured up a number of laws, sometimes humorous, always ironic, that said we were going to hell in a hand basket. Now in the 21st, we're in purgatory, and the laws have all come true. The space program, apparently, gave birth to Murphy's Law: "If anything can go wrong, it will." Augustine's Laws, the title of a book by one-time under-defense secretary and later Martin Marietta head Norm Augustine, more or less said: "As we get more and more money to spend on trinkets, we put more and more electronics in our jet planes, which condemns them to ever-increasing breakdowns and downtime." Best of all and all but forgotten now is Cybernetics (1948), a short, exceedingly provocative work by the brilliant Norbert Weiner, a scientist for all seasons. In it we learned that the second Law of Themodynamics guarantees entropy in all systems. That is, organized things will always fall apart. Or as our good friend Regis C. announced to all with a chortle several years ago after a disruptive incident in the subway: "Well, that equine elimination is just gonna happen." We have abundant laws, written before their time, that underscore the ultimate lawlessness of the universe and the inevitable Decline and Fall of any system you can dream up. The Myth of Robust Systems. Computer people have nattered on about robust systems for half a century. But now that you know that anything complex is subject to the slings and arrows of Weiner's entropy, you can state positively that such assertions simply don't hold water. There's really no such thing as a robust system. And, circa 2002, as we make our systems more and more complex, we're simply experiencing more and more breakdown. Moreover, since our systems are interconnected (your house alarm is linked to an outside monitoring service located 100 miles away, which may call the wrong fire department when something happens), the domino effect comes into play. One bolt of lightening in the wrong place can bring 40 interconnected systems to a standstill. There are all sorts of reasons that systems fall apart. In fact, the chaps at the Sante Fe Institute in New Mexico not only study complexity but stay up nights drumming up ways to make the complex, which is inherently unstable, stay glued together. They, and most of the architects who devise systems, tend to worry about design issues, looking at how systems are wired together. Isn't it ironic that all the people who look at complex phenomena always abide in simple places where the biggest story of the day is that somebody forgot to plug in the coffeepot? Shoddy Merchandise. We mere mortals, well away from the ivory tower, in the more complex world outside Santa Fe, can usually look to something more down to earth if we are out to avoid breakdown. In fact, a software guru from Santa Fe taught us that you can have poorly designed systems that function well, if the systems have lots of redundancy. Are there spare parts in the system, so when one conks out another takes over? Are there enough spare parts on your shelf (don't believe in maintenance schedules or just-in-time delivery) so you can pull a burnt-out part out and plug in another? Systems are put together by people often called integrators who, either through calculation or ignorance, use lousy components in their systems. And they're too vain to acknowledge that even the best of systems (i.e., the systems they have built) will fail often. Simple to say: if you can use great parts, you will have less outages. So this is a warning to us all to watch out for any system that is called "integrated." It rarely has rugged enough components to work, lacks redundancy, and its creators usually over claim what it can do, even in the best of circumstances. This yellow caution light applies to all sorts of systems, not just the wired kind such as computers, electric grids, or management-information systems. As oft as not, systems fail because there's a weak link in the chain. By the way, that certainly accounts for our worst space disasters. For instance, many of the schools your kids go to now have "integrated curriculums" (a.k.a. curricula). That really means that all the courses are loosely knitted together so that your tots can read some colonial literature in Language Arts (an unfortunate euphemism for what we use to call English) while George Washington is bravely losing a battle or two against the French and Indians in a Social Studies course. But you can be sure that many children are not getting the vital, rigorous training they need in grammar, multiplication charts, or periodic tables. In computer training, they're fooling around with elaborate Powerpoints, but never really learning to keyboard (type). The politically correct textbooks they use often border on illiteracy, even if they bear the imprimatur of some university in the Midwest. In other words, the components of these integrated curricula are lousy. According to some federal statistics, 30% of college students will need to take remedial course in reading, writing, and mathematics in order to get the fundamentals they missed growing up. Just as bad is the customer service system at your utility, which lacks real-time data on when the repairs will get done and also lacks the power to send any meaningful data to the repair department so that the right skills are dispatched to do the fix. Their systems lack the correct software, the right training protocols, etc. It's not that there aren't simple systems that work. For instance, back in 1996 or so there was a wonderful bank in Palo Alto called University National Bank. As Chief Executive Carl Schmitt then said, "We're in the put and take business." He took money in and gave money out. He did not offer an endless array of services or contorted product options. He was in the deposit business. The folks who worked there were exceedingly polite; I seem to remember an Oriental rug on the floor; and you did not have to wait in long lines. Carl gave all his customers some Walla Walla onions at Christmas, as a way of saying thanks. He also took great pictures himself for his annual report. Since then, Wells Fargo or one of the huge integrated financial service institutions took it over, and reliability is out the window. There's no longer a great non-integrator at the helm who wants to deliver on a simple idea, using simple, no-nonsense components. Here and there, around the nation you can still find the occasional put-and-take, one horse bank-- these kinds of banks tend to make money year after year. Looking Under the Hood. This world of fragile interdependent systems ultimately means that we will have to know what goes into anything in order to make our lives work. Most systems and processes are invisible now, and even if we get a list of contents, we don't know what to make of them. Eventually we might hope for quality branding, the equivalent of the old Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Just as Intel has gotten computer makers to use "Intel Inside" labels, we are going to need short-hand labels that tell us we are probably getting good goods. This matter of quality contents or components presents incredible opportunities for alert business people who will increasingly grasp that obsolescence is no longer a viable business strategy in a resource-short, environmentally afflicted, stalled market economic environment. We need things that last and work for a long time. But it's hard to build for a 100 years when you're used to trashing everything. Here is an almost shocking business observation: obsolescence is obsolescent. The first hints of making-visible-better-insides are just appearing on the horizon. McDonald's and Frito-Lay are moving to put better oils in their foods, and we expect they will be better able to dramatize the Health Inside than the American Health Association or other non-profits. The air conditioning man (if he is not part of the national chains) is able to describe and install filtration devices that vastly extend the life of the cooling system. UPS and FedEx have made package deliveries transparent to the consumer, so that one can track on the Internet an item's progress to its final destination. A few companies are becoming more agile at making the invisible worlds of systems and services visible to their customers. Any product or service is just part of a system: in a world of breakdown, we need to see whether the system works or does not work. Ask the Repairman. But the insides of systems, products, services, schools, governments, whatever, are generally not transparent. As users, we have two choices. 1. Ask a repairman. He will probably tell you he would prefer to work on a Toyota above all other cars. Or that four TV brands (Sony and a few others) stand out above the pack for reliability and repairability. Repairability often tells you whether you are dealing with a well-wrought system. What we are saying here is that an informed middleman is a way of improving your luck with systems. Japanese manufacturers, similarly, once used middlemen (distributors of products) to find out what Americans wanted in their cars, TVs, power tools, etc. 2. Find some repair data. In a few cases, raw maintenance data of various sorts is available. The government collects on-time and other data on the airlines, which is not always easy to uncover but can be unearthed. Consumer Reports assembles maintenance data on car models that is uncommonly revealing and tells you more than all the testing performed by CR's engineers. In other words, until labeling gets better, you had best find out about the reliability of systems from some sort of repair data. It's the breakdowns that tell you what you are dealing with. Call 911. Remember when the Monday morning quarterbacks told us that Y2K was really a false alarm, and that the world's computer systems did not fall apart despite the fact that computer engineers had not anticipated, way back when, that the year 2000 would ever come to pass. But wait a minute: systems of all kinds post 2000 are breaking down everywhere. There are more power outages with many more to come because we are simply not building new generation capacity. We've been to the very edge of the Dark Ages in our financial markets--more than once. The Cold War is over, but Don Rumsfeld is still using the Spanish Armada to battle unconventional forces and terrorist viruses--the wrong system and wrong weapons to deal with an unseen enemy. Who says Y2K never happened? Chances are you are going to run into total breakdown more and more. Recently a retired physician checked into a hospital north of Boston for surgery. Early one evening he rang for a bedpan, and, no matter how much he rang or shouted, nobody came. The following night, exactly the same thing happened. But he had a Eureka and picked up his cell phone to call 911. The local police were able to rouse the hospital staff and to get him a bedpan in the nick of time. Likewise, Don Imus, the radio talkslash host, was just as ingenious recently. No matter what, he could not get a Time Warner cable repairman to come to his New York apartment. Then he railed about it on his radio/cable show and the minions of TW came running. But, even after repairs, they knocked out the reception on one small TV in his kitchen. The system is so flawed that even the repairmen don't know what to do. And cable is one of the most hated services in the United States. The world of broken systems is also a world of broken communication where citizens will have to be ingenious beyond belief to fight entropy. Broken systems turn ordinary citizens into guerilla fighters. As Norbert Weiner would have said, entropy "subverts the exchange of messages." So you'll just have to learn to beat on your tom-tom. For a description of William Dunk Partners, Inc., see www.globalprovince.com/williamdunkpartners.htm. If you would like to subscribe to the Global Province, please send an email to us at advisors@beecom.net with the subject heading "Subscribe." If you received this message by accident or if you wish to unsubscribe from the newsletter, please simply address an email to us at the same address but with the subject heading "Unsubscribe." From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Oct 11 19:18:32 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Polygraphs Lie (gasp!) Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Polygraphs Lie (gasp!) At first I just wanted to send you the first item. But then I figured the rest might be of interest too. You can subscribe to Robert Park's weekly "What's New" mailings at . --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 10/11/02 4:07 PM From: What's New WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 11 Oct 02 Washington, DC 1. LIAR, LIAR: ACADEMY PANEL DISCOVERS THE POLYGRAPH TELLS LIES. The polygraph looks for abrupt increases in heart rate, blood pressure and perspiration. The polygraph is, therefore, a highly reliable detector of orgasms. But does it detect lies? Only if you're lying about having an orgasm. After a hundred years of exonerating the likes of Aldrich Ames and ruining the careers of nameless thousands, the Wen Ho Lee case led the Administration to call for a huge expansion of polygraph testing. To its credit, the DOE called instead for testing the polygraph. The National Academy of Sciences convened a study panel, and its report was released this week. The report confirms, as WN has maintained, that no spy has ever been caught using the polygraph(WN 05 Apr 02). "Too many loyal employees may be falsely judged deceptive, or too many major security threats could go undetected," the report said, warning against reliance on the tests. The next day, New Mexico senators, Jeff Bingamen (D)and Pete Domenici (R), called on DOE to abolish the tests. And that's no lie. 2. THE PRIZE: OPENING NEW WINDOWS ON THE UNIVERSE. This year's prize went to senior physicists. Riccardo Giaccone, a US citizen who was born in Genoa and studied in Milan, was awarded half the prize for founding X-ray astronomy. He was the first to detect a source of X rays outside the solar system and constructed the first X-ray telescope. He is a Fellow of the APS and President of Associated Universities Inc. The other half of the prize was split between Raymond Davis Jr and Masatoshi Koshiba. Davis was the first to detect solar neutrinos, thus proving that solar energy comes from fusion. A Fellow of the APS, he is Professor Emeritus in the Dept. of Physics and Astronomy at the Univer. of Pennsylvania. Masatoshi Koshiba, a citszen of Japan, confirmed Davis's results, constructing Kamiokande, the world's largest neutrino detector, leading to the field of neutrino astronomy. 3. HERBAL LOW: FDA STOPS SALE OF STREET DRUG SUBSTITUTES. The dietary supplement industry has been almost above the law since passage of the 1994 Dietary Supplement and Health Education Act. The only restriction is that natural substances not be marketed as cures for anything. But the FDA says that herbal substances marketed as street drug alternatives are not meant to supplement the diet. The FDA now says selling a combination of ephedra and caffeine as "herbal ecstacy"(WN 16 Aug 02) is against the law. 4. ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE: IT'S NOT EASY BEING BLUE. When anthrax struck, we were assured AM could help. Short on antibiotics? Take colloidal silver. There are a few teensy side effects: you can develop argyria, a permanent condition that turns your skin blue. The Libertarian Senate candidate in Montana was one of those who turned blue. Oh, and it doesn't prevent infection. THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University or the American Physical Society, but they should be. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Oct 12 10:38:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Biometrics Message-ID: Subject: Biometrics (from The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology October 11, 2002, Volume 1, Number 18) ----------------------------------------------------------------- 1. An Overview of Biometrics http://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/info.html 2. Avanti Knowledge Base http://homepage.ntlworld.com/avanti/frame3.htm 3. University of Cambridge: Computer Laboratory [.pdf] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/jgd1000/ 4. International Biometric Group: The Biometric Industry - One Year After 9/11 http://www.ibgweb.com/9-11.html 5. A Trusted Biometric System [.pdf] http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2002/HPL-2002-185.html 6. Connecticut Department of Social Services: DSS's Biometric ID Project http://www.dss.state.ct.us/digital.htm 7. IEEE Spectrum Online: Who Goes There? http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/sep02/911e.html 8. Scientific American.com: Who's Who http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00077B81-70EB-1D06-8E49809EC588EEDF Biometrics technology can take on many forms, but, in general, it is defined as the automated identification of a person based on physiological or behavioral characteristics. The topic has gained considerable attention lately, because it can be a tool for airport surveillance or national security. To learn the basics of biometrics, try the overview given on a Michigan State University Web site (1). Besides summarizing the characteristics of biometric systems, it explains four different identification methods and how they can be used together. A collection of fifteen papers is presented on this site (2). Each one looks at a particular issue in biometrics and describes it in detail. These papers can be especially useful for anyone designing or working with identity verification systems. The home page of a University of Cambridge professor (3) has many resources for iris recognition. There are many distinguishing characteristics of the iris, and the material ranges from a general introduction to advanced analysis techniques. An article published by the International Biometric Group (4) considers the effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the biometrics industry. The potential applications of biometrics technology and the obstacles to deploying these security measures (such as privacy) are discussed. Researchers at Hewlett-Packard published this technical report about user authentication on distributed computing platforms (5). It describes a trusted biometric system that incorporates smart cards and biometric readers to validate the user's identity. A project in Connecticut uses biometric technology to prevent fraud (6). By scanning the fingers of welfare recipients, no one can attempt to collect multiple welfare checks using different names. An article in the September 2002 issue of IEEE Spectrum (7) discusses advancements in biometrics within the last year. It outlines the benefits of adding biometric information to state driver's licenses, and considers what else needs to be done to increase the nation's security. Lastly, a July 2002 article in Scientific American (8) explains how biometrics can be used to prevent identity theft. This is one of the top consumer complaints and has been increasing dramatically in recent years. An interesting development is a tamperproof ID, which can not be falsified. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 15 17:43:49 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Two from PARC Message-ID: Subject: Two from PARC (from The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology October 11, 2002, Volume 1, Number 18) Modular Robotics [.pdf, QuickTime, .mpg, Java 3D] http://www2.parc.com/spl/projects/modrobots/ The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation. One of its most intriguing areas of study is "modular reconfigurable robotics," which is a technology that allows a robot to take itself apart and put itself back together again in a new form. This lets the robot customize its design for a given task. Several different models of robots have been constructed at the PARC, and this Web site describes how they were built and how they function. There is a large collection of video clips that show each of the robots in operation, including one of a robot riding a tricycle. Two Java simulation programs can be downloaded that demonstrate the control systems of two of the PARC models. A long list of publication titles with abstracts is given, and the full text is available for a few of them. (from NewsScan Daily, 11 October 2002) PARC'S DE KLEER: ALL LEARNING IS SOCIAL In an interview with John Gehl for the ACM online publication Ubiquity, Johan de Kleer of the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) talks about his own experiences at that famed research center: "The biggest thing was coming to PARC and watching how people actually use technology and learning to manage and see how organizations actually function. And discovering that all learning is social. Perhaps now I'm being too social, but you have to balance the two. One without the other gets you nothing... Pure bottom-up approaches have not created the breakthroughs in science, and I do not believe they will succeed in artificial intelligence. Remember, studying feathers and birds did not get us flight." (Ubiquity 11 Oct 2002) http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/interviews/j_dekleer_1.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- See also and --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Oct 16 00:35:53 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Some Watch, Some Forget Message-ID: Subject: Some Watch, Some Forget Two items from NewsScan Daily, 15 October 2002) UK GOVERNMENT PLANS CELL PHONE TOWER TRACKING SYSTEM The government of the U.K. is funding secret radar technology research that uses mobile phone masts to enable security officials to watch vehicles and people in real time almost anywhere in Britain. The Celldar technology, which works wherever there is cell phone coverage, "sees" the shapes made when radio waves emitted by the towers meet an obstruction. Signals bounced back by immobile objects, such as buildings and trees, are filtered out by the receiver, and what's left on the screen are images of anything that moves. When combined with technology that allows individuals to be identified by their mobile phone handsets, the Celldar system would enable security officials to locate and track a specific person from hundreds of miles away. An individual using one type of receiver, a portable unit a little bigger than a laptop, could even create a "personal radar space" around his or her location for security purposes. Researchers are also working on an "X-ray vision" feature that would enable the devices to "see" through walls and look into people's homes. UK Ministry of Defence officials are hoping to introduce the system as soon as resources allow, but civil liberties advocates have been quick to complain: "It's an appalling idea. The government is just capitalizing on current public fears over security to introduce new systems that are neither desirable nor necessary," says Simon Davies, director of Privacy International. (The Observer 13 Oct 2002) http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,811027,00.html ----------------------------------------------------------------- With its fairly long-standing use of surveillance acameras in urban settings, combined with face recognition software, Britain has not been in the vanguard of privacy concerns. This rather fanciful new idea adds to those concerns. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ FORGETFUL BOOMERS SPAWN MARKET FOR MEMORY AIDS A stream of new products is hitting the shelves, aimed at solving one of life's daily annoyances: locating everyday objects such as keys or glasses that always seem to go missing just when you're in a hurry to leave. The products range from a FINDIT keychain that beeps after the user claps three times to the Sharper Image's "Now You Can Find It!" -- a collection of plastic tags that can be attached to potentially elusive items, and then beep when users hit a button on the central device (of course, for it to work, users must make sure not to misplace the central device). The device and tags communicate with each other via radio frequency waves, and require that the user be within several meters of the hidden object's location. A handful of companies are also marketing GPS-enabled "kid finder" watches and pagers, and plans are underway to put homing devices on everything from luggage to pacifiers. Most ambitious of all, perhaps is the DIPO device, made by a French company of the same name, that not only finds an object but notifies the owner if it is about to be left behind. The central device -- the size of a small cell phone -- checks every few seconds to ensure that all tagged objects are within a certain radius -- say, five meters. If it notices that the tag on the Palm Pilot, for instance, has moved outside the radius, it will beep or vibrate to remind the user to take it along. DIPO started out as the brainchild of the company's absent-minded CEO, Bruno Enea, who says, "I kept losing my credit card. I always forgot my passport. I realized I had to do something about this problem." (Wall Street Journal 15 Oct 2002) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1034187143599802356.djm,00.html (sub req'd) ------------------------------------------------------------------ It's amazing what a little more sleep and less multitasking can do for one's memory. But once again mine is the retrograde attitude, entirely unhelpful to economic recovery. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Oct 16 02:11:56 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]No Place to Learn? Message-ID: Subject: No Place to Learn? Dear Colleagues - This forwarding is a good reminder that Rick Reis's "Tomorrow's Professor" list is a source of worthwhile stuff. (Subscription info is at the very end.) But this item also cannot but help make us think of the impending ABET visit on the one hand, and on the other the typical research university joke about tenure deliberations "If they start talking about your teaching, you're in trouble." Research can be a powerful resource for good teaching in a _small_ undergraduate program, if the individual attention that graduate students get is the model for perceptive interactions with undergraduates. Precedents exist. That takes the right kind of caring, a communally aware and responsive kind. It can't be legislated. But without it, teaching opportunities fall short. In the age of the Internet, it seems easier to follow a new research wrinkle by a colleage in a workshop in New Zealand (or to actually go there and leave a class to the teaching assistant) than to know what goes on in the courses students take before and after a given course, and how a department could weave a cohesive educational "narrative" to prepare a student for serious independent research in their senior year capstone project. Designing and refining such a "narrative" is an enjoyable intellectual adventure, and would begin to rectify the orthogonality between teaching and research discussed in what follows. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 10/16/02 12:00 AM From: Rick Reis "This is a sacred belief [that good researchers make good teachers] in academe, but no one has ever demonstrated it; the only evidence for it is anecdotal, the kind that professors reject when it's offered by students." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING http://ctl.stanford.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Folks: The posting below looks at the on-going debate about research and teaching emphasis. It reports on a new book No place to Learn: Why universities aren't working (University of British Columbia Press) by Tom Pocklington and Allan Tupper. The article, by journalist Pobert Fulford first appeared in September 17, 2002 issue of the National Post. http://mirror.nationalpost.com/images/logo_np_news.gif The copyright is now held by the author and the article is reprinted with permission. (My thanks to Bernard Anderson for calling the article to my attention). Regards, Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Conceptualizing Socialization in Graduate and Professional Programs Tomorrow's Research --------------------------------- 895 words -------------------------------- FORGET TEACHING, RESEARCH IS KING Robert Fulford National Post A dangerous contradiction lies at the heart of the university system in North America. The citizens who pay for the great universities believe they exist mainly to teach the young and prepare them for the rest of their lives. People directing universities have other goals. They believe a university fulfills itself when it creates knowledge. Research makes a university legitimate. Administrators adore the term "research university." When you become a research university you enter the big leagues, like the best American schools. Many professors consider teaching at best a secondary activity, at worst a nuisance. That's a big change. Two or three generations ago, great teachers had great reputations, and their students were much envied. Today we rarely hear of such a person. The age of the star teacher has died. I have actually heard one tenured professor say of another, with blithe condescension, "He's not done anything important in years -- the only reason he retains any stature at all is that he's apparently quite a terrific teacher." University administrators will argue in public that they emphasize both teaching and research, more or less equally; but I have not heard anyone say this in private for at least 20 years. Certainly you won't find support for it in No place to learn: Why universities aren't working (University of British Columbia Press) a tough, eloquent book by two political scientists at the University of Alberta, Tom Pocklington and Allan Tupper. How can we be sure that universities no longer take teaching seriously? Pocklington and Tupper answer in one memorable sentence: "To our knowledge, no Canadian university in recent memory has hired a senior professor from another university because of his or her demonstrated teaching skills." (Outraged deans and provosts wishing to dispute this statement will please submit names and dates rather than the usual empty rhetoric.) A national survey by Pocklington and Tupper reveals that professors at all career levels believe hiring, promotion, and salary almost always depend on published research, almost never on teaching. Pocklington and Tupper go so far as to question the principle that research and teaching are interdependent and that good researchers make good teachers. This is a sacred belief in academe, but no one has ever demonstrated it; the only evidence for it is anecdotal, the kind that professors reject when it's offered by students. Anyway, say Pocklington and Tupper, if that idea is valid, why do universities reward good researchers by lightening their "teaching load?" They also argue that professors, driven to justify themselves, often do research of no value to anyone. The conflict between the public's belief in teaching and the academic belief in research makes the central problem of the university unique; there's no other great social institution afflicted by such a radical division between public expectations and professional goals. Can anything be done about it? No Place to Learn says universities must re-establish undergraduate teaching as their first priority and recognize it as "a complex and important activity that demands broad reading, disciplined thought, and great effort." The word "effort" clicks quietly into place in that sentence, but behind it we can glimpse the outline of an embarrassing question: Are established, tenured university professors, as a class, lazy? Pocklington and Tupper say most professors work hard. Yet they note that in the 1990s, when universities complained that reduced government grants were eroding education, "not one of them responded by increasing the teaching obligations of their permanent instructors. In fact, many managed to reduce even further the teaching activities of professors." No Place to Learn has drawn a searching and thoughtful response from Reg Whitaker in the September issue of the Literary Review of Canada. A political science professor, much admired for his writing on subjects ranging from the RCMP to the financing of the Liberal Party, Whitaker mentions in passing that last year, at age 58, he retired from York University -- apparently because he couldn't stand the system any longer. He endorses the conclusions of No Place to Learn and enlarges the debate by discussing a subject that Pocklington and Tupper don't emphasize, the poisoning of university life by rights-seeking groups who insist (Whitaker writes) that academic life is naturally "sexist and racist and can only by kept in check through intensive regulation and control ... Everything that goes on must be monitored and policed." Which, of course, is the opposite of how we expect universities to operate. Whitaker, while favouring equality of treatment, has learned by bitter experience that codifying decency and fairness has created a nightmare. Consider the intense anxiety that afflicts hiring committees, whose members know that every tiny decision may come under the hostile microscope of an "equity officer" or some other licenced busybody. For Whitaker, one great benefit of retirement is that he'll never again have to take part in this charade. Pocklington and Tupper write with clarity and vigour, aiming at a general public. They deserve wide readership, though it's doubtful that a university press can find it for them. They hope to create a debate about universities, which for too long have sailed "on seas of unwarranted deference." But the system may be beyond fixing. Tenure, entrenched labour unions, rampant careerism, uncomprehending politicians, narrow-minded university governors: the obstacles to reform are so intimidating that the possibilities of change appear to be, at this stage, no better than marginal. robert.fulford@utoronto.ca © Copyright 2002 National Post --------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR LISTSERV is a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ The Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL) http://scil.stanford.edu/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to Tomorrows-Professor Listserv by addressing an e-mail message to: Do NOT put anything in the SUBJECT line but in the body of the message type: 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 17 18:07:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Tele-Smell Message-ID: Subject: Tele-Smell (from INNOVATION, 16 October 2002) CELL PHONES THAT MAKE SCENTS Electronic Aromas, based in Inverness, Scotland, is developing technology that will deliver aromas to cell phones. The company is working on a range of smells for a variety of applications, including a rendition of the heathery outdoor scent of the Highlands countryside. The system uses a molecule-packed component that's inserted into the back of the mobile handset. The component is then stimulated each time there's an incoming call from a specific number and emits a pre-coordinated smell. Dr. George Dodd, who heads up Electronic Aromas, says his future plans call for distilling and delivering aromatherapy products via phone. (Ananova 14 Oct 2002) http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_689613.html?menu=news.technology --------------------------------------------------------------------- I can't help being amused by this latest product design venture. Many years ago, one of the techniques used in discovering new product possibilities was "gap analysis", a systematic search for product attributes that haven't been tried before, like wine coolers or time-shared holiday condos. The standard derogatory joke was that gap analysis leads to fish-flavored dog food. Maybe dogs are smarter than people. Phones that smell??? --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Oct 23 15:56:37 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Micro$oft Advertising Message-ID: Subject: Micro$oft Advertising On Microsoft's fake "switch" ad (and their marketing philosophy in general) http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/17/technology/circuits/17POGUE-EMAIL.html?pagewanted=print From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Oct 23 16:32:48 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Post-Tenure Reviews Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Post-Tenure Reviews Dear Colleagues - Tenure usually elevates faculty into the higher levels of governance in their home institution and their world-wide professional peer group. Sometimes they respond with great enthusiasm to this new dimension of political identity and power, this new cherished asset, which they like to show off, to polish, to use to send a message: "Look at me, they say, I've managed to become myself, to be distinct, unique, unlike you." All usually to the detriment of thoughtful intellectual contribution within their institution, especially to the, by then, even more "unlike" undergraduate education aspects. One realizes with wonder the degree to which faculty can live in parallel, largely disconnected, universes within the same institution, even the same department. Such communication as does take place between such universes is a complex polyglotism of several different languages, each useful to transmit a different meaning and to communicate about a different type of specialization. Assessing intellectual contribution _within_ the institution strikes me as one of several good reasons for instituting post-tenure review processes, the subject of this mailing on the Tomorrow's Professor list. --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 10/23/02 5:37 AM From: Rick Reis "...academic departments like to think that they hire well, evaluate well early on, and award tenure to people who will function well to the end of their careers." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING http://ctl.stanford.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Folks: The posting below looks at the development of posttenure review and the many different forms it is now taking. It is from Chapter 1, Why is development of tenured faculty a concern? in Posttenure Faculty Development, Building a System for Faculty Improvement and Appreciation, by Jeffrey W. Alsete. ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report Volume 27. Number 4, Adrianna J. Kezar, series editor. Prepared and published by JOSSEY-BASS, A Wiley Company, San Francisco. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Reprinted with permission. Regards, Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Balancing Teaching and Research Tomorrow's Academia ----------------------------- 1,906 words --------------------------- POSTTENURE REVIEW; THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM Jeffrey W. Alsete pp. 8-11. In 1986, one writer believed that performance evaluation for tenured faculty was so controversial that it could not be discussed openly in most colleges and universities (Reisman, 1986). He compared it with the situation that occurs in psychotherapy when patients ignore a central reality, one that seems obvious and important, in their personal situation; therapists refer to it as "the elephant in the room" (p.73). Although many universities had some form of performance evaluation of faculty-annual reviews for salary increments, students' evaluation of courses, periodic reviews for promotion, for example-only a small number of universities actually had a formal institutional policy. The Association of American Colleges (AAC) and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which sponsored the Commission on Academic Tenure in 1971, recommended corrections for the deficiencies in the tenure system (Bennett and Chater, 1984); several recommendations were related to evaluating tenured faculty members. Posttenure review began to really emerge as an issue in the early 1980s. In 1982, the National Commission on Higher Education Issues identified posttenure review as a major issue facing higher education and recommended that a system of peer review be developed on campuses to help ensure faculty members' competence and to strengthen institutional quality (Licata, 1986). At the urging of the American Council on Education, a Wingspread Conference on periodic evaluation of tenured faculty was held in 1983 in cooperation with the AAUP (Reisman, 1986). The conference invited both proponents and opponents (such as the AAUP) of posttenure review to voice their beliefs. Harold Shapiro, then president of the university of Michigan, pointed out faculty members' fundamental concerns about this issue, noting that tenure is an anchor so ingrained in faculty perceptions of their roles that the academic community would be diminished and even ruptured by posttenure review. In fact, he went so far as to say that it is suspect for a university administrator or trustee to even speculate formally about the subject. Although it appeared that the elephant in the room was still invisible to many attendees at the Wingspread Conference, Shapiro concluded that periodic evaluation of tenured faculty was good personnel policy and can play a nurturing role in faculty development (Reisman, 1986). The awarding of and continued existence of tenure is not really the central issue in the current debates about tenure. The real issues today are honest faculty evaluation, including posttenure review; adequate faculty development, including posttenure development; and termination when appropriate, linked to effective evaluation (Perley, 1995). This monograph includes examples of how posttenure review and faculty development can work together, yet not be formally connected, to improve faculty instruction, intellectual contributions, and service. Professor Charles M. Larsen was actually the one who introduced a "different kind of posttenure review, a system better termed development" (Reisman, 1986, p.76). Larson believed that the focus of such a review would be on the positive goals of faculty support and improvement, not just on the negative procedures designed to weed out individuals who may not be living up to their responsibilities. The concept of using performance evaluation for developmental purposes rather than for decisions about promotion, salary, or termination is not a new concept in the education literature, and the idea of two types of evaluation is discussed in a series of articles appearing in the 1960s (Reisman, 1986, p.77). A distinction can be made between formative evaluation designed to provide useful feedback to guide an ongoing activity designed for improvement and summative evaluation "aimed at answering a question in a final or terminal way" (Geis, 1977, p.25). Similarly, two types of posttenure review have been termed "self evaluation" (formative) and "formal evaluation" (summative (Sullivan, 1977, pp. 130-148). An earlier ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report offered an overview of the factors influencing posttenure review, stated the support and opposition, and gave then current examples at colleges and universities (Licata, 1986). The report concluded that faculty development programs should be linked to a posttenure evaluation system. In other words, the formative should be linked to the summative. This strategy, while logical at first reading, goes against established management theory stating that evaluation should be separate from development (Meyer, Kay, and French, 1965). Research has shown that it is unrealistic to expect a single performance appraisal program to take care of all employee and institutional needs. A linked strategy would force the evaluator into a self-conflicting role as a counselor (trying to help improve faculty performance) while at the same time presiding as a judge over the action to be taken on the same professor's salary. Separating the two functions could also avoid the potential problem with some faculty who may set their professional development goals too low if they know serious consequences would result from not achieving them. A later work also discusses the need for posttenure review and expands the definition to include five different methods: 1. Annual reviews-A short-term performance assessment that is common at many institutions and is often linked to merit pay. In some settings, these reviews are perfunctory and not effective at providing feedback for long-term career development and overall performance. 2. Summative (periodic/consequential)-A comprehensive review of all tenured faculty conducted periodically. Improved plans are used and the results are assessed with consequences for nonperformance. 3. Summative (triggered/consequential)-The comprehensive review of selected tenured faculty that is usually triggered by unsatisfactory performance. 4. Formative (departmental)-A review centering on the establishment of a professional development plan emphasizing the institution's needs and individual faculty members' career interests. Developed with the department head or dean. 5. Formative (individual)-Periodic review of all tenured faculty focusing on specific performance areas and long-term career goals. This option does not question competence and does not include formal personnel action (Licata and Morreale, 1997). According to Licata and Morreale, the most useful system of posttenure review is a combination of Option 2 (summative-periodic/consequential) and Option 4 (formative-departmental) (p.36). Other research has shown that performance evaluation of tenured faculty is perceived (by a survey of department chairs and administrators) to be more effective than reports completed by faculty or departmental reviews, and that developmental reviews are perceived to be more effective than those tied to salary reviews (Reisman, 1986). In addition, faculty performance in scholarship or research is believed to be more easily influenced by development strategies than the teaching or service components of faculty performance, probably because research by its nature can be more easily quantified that the more ambiguous quality assessment of postsecondary teaching and service to the community. Critics of posttenure evaluation and development must understand that it is the performance (usually research, teaching, and service) of the tenured individual under evaluation (or development), not the tenure of the individual (Bennet and Chater, 1984). Although tenure itself is indeed under attack in many ways, it is more often a change or addition to tenure-such as adding posttenure review procedures-that is occurring today. One recent survey of 680 colleges and universities found that 61% of respondents had a posttenure review policy in place and that another 9% had such a policy under development (Harris, 1996). These numbers are not surprising, given the increase in the public's calls for accountability and the decrease in budgets at many state colleges and universities. (Goodman, 1994). In addition, the federally mandated uncapping of the retirement age for college and university faculty that went into effect January 1, 1994, has added to the reasons that posttenure review is becoming more common. Many faculty are understandably worried, for "tenure does not provide an absolute right to continue employment. The periodic review of faculty performance is one manner of addressing the ever present need to ensure excellence in the university" (Olswang and Fantel, 1980, p. 30). Moreover, periodic reviews would not violate academic freedom, despite the pleas of many faculty to keep tenure as it is (Olswang and Fantel, 1980). Nevertheless, a faculty member at Colorado College points out that a system of formal posttenure review would cause the faculty to become angry (Cramer, 1997), believing that tenure review is a very high stress time for individuals and that academic departments like to think that they hire well, evaluate well early on, and award tenure to people who will function well to the end of their careers (see also Brittain, 1992). The AAUP is moving toward a more positive opinion of posttenure review, with faculty development as the primary goal. The association's current policy, adopted in 1983, states that periodic formal evaluation of tenured faculty would bring little benefit and would incur unacceptable costs in money and time, and reduce creativity and collegial relationships (American Association of University Professors, 1997). The association also believes it could threaten academic freedom. A more recent report on the subject, however, issued by the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, admits that posttenure review is rapidly becoming a reality and that the association might as well create a set of guidelines for the establishment of a system for the periodic evaluation of tenured faculty (American Association of University Professors, 1997). The report states that if such a system is designed and implemented by the faculty in a form that properly protects academic freedom and tenure, it could offer a way of evaluating tenured faculty that supports professional development as well as professional responsibility. Subsection IV.B. of "Standards for Good Practice in Post-Tenure Review" suggest that posttenure reviews should be developmental and supported by institutional resources for professional development or a change in career direction (p.11). The AAUP also suggests that if a formal development plan is used instead of posttenure review, the faculty and institution should mutually create the plan. The AAUP seems to support the separation of evaluation and development. It makes sense that a formal system of posttenure review that has strong consequences for nonperformance not be tied to a professional development plan. Thus, faculty could plan high achievement goals with less fear of repercussion if they do not achieve those high goals. As for faculty that are tenured, the continuous review through a formal evaluation and faculty development planning systems could be a constructive way to maintain the vitality of senior professors in a rapidly changing environment (Rice, 1996). It should be a time for feedback and acknowledgement from colleagues, supervisors, and others in a profession that is usually very private. Once a faculty member has achieved tenure and been promoted, fewer regular opportunities may occur for self-analysis. These processes of reviewing senior faculty have "the potential for supporting resilient careers and the adaptability of faculty for what should be the capstone of their professional lives" (p.31). Senior professors are not the only faculty who made need posttenure review and development, however. Relatively younger tenured faculty occasionally may not be interested in research, intellectual contributions, and, in general, changing their professional environment to help improve their performance and the institution-which may be one of the reasons that posttenure review policies are becoming more popular today in different types of institutions (Magner, 1996). Some of the impetus has come from state legislators, board of trustees, and colleges and universities themselves. A common theme in many of the articles, reports, and statements about posttenure review is the importance, when assessing practices of evaluation, of determining a program's outcomes and effectiveness in promoting faculty development and productivity (Licata and Morreale, 1997; Neal, 1988). Clearly, a need exists to look further at the development of responsible and effective faculty evaluation and development systems that consider enhancing the growth of the faculty member (Rifkin, 1995). References available on request. --------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR LISTSERV is a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ The Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL) http://scil.stanford.edu/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to Tomorrows-Professor Listserv by addressing an e-mail message to: Do NOT put anything in the SUBJECT line but in the body of the message type: 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 Fri Oct 25 01:53:30 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Utopias and War Drives Message-ID: Subject: Utopias and War Drives The volume of information I get from the Internet is now usually such that items and their opposites often arrive on the same day, sort of Internet Manichaeism. --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 23 October 2002) THE NEXT GREAT TELECOMMUNICATIONS ADVANCE MAY BE VIRAL Nicholas Negroponte predicts that today's giant telecom behemoths will soon find themselves replaced by micro-operators, millions of which can be woven into a global fabric of broadband connectivity. Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab, notes that while the telecom companies are pushing the introduction of the voice-centric 3G technology, the computer industry has been driving a parallel and seemingly unrelated initiative, 802.11, created to drive wireless LANs. With costs for 802.11 devices dropping precipitously, home wireless networking is becoming viable for more and more people. And 802.11 systems, widely known as Wi-Fi, commonly provide transmission speeds ranging from 11 to 54 megabits -- far greater than the 1 megabit promised by 3G. But most importantly, Wi-Fi doesn't stop at the walls of your home. Each system can reach a range of more than 1,000 feet, depending on the intervening materials. With booster antennas, the range can be increased to 20 kilometers. What that means is that as use of 802.11 grows, people without their own systems can tap into the network around them. The "viral nature of unlicensed telecommunications," writes Negroponte, is poised to become "a major force of human development, transforming everything from education to entertainment, hospitals to hiring halls. And won't that make an astonishing splash." (Wired Oct 2002) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/wireless.html (from Edupage, October 23, 2002) WAR-DRIVING: THE NEW MARKETING TOOL A group of hackers and security consultants will stage a worldwide "war drive" this Saturday in seven countries, and some vendors of security tools are using the event as an opportunity for new sales. War driving involves driving around looking for unprotected wireless networks, typically in urban areas. War drivers will post maps on the Web showing where wireless access was found. Companies including IBM and KPMG hope that the weekend's event will raise awareness of the potential liabilities of insecure networks and will prompt companies to invest in products and services to identify problems and safeguard their networks. A similar war-driving event occurred in August. Wall Street Journal, 23 October 2002 (sub. req'd) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB103531341578332671,00.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Oct 25 01:55:41 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Root Server Attack Message-ID: Subject: Root Server Attack (from Edupage, October 23, 2002) ATTACK TAKES DOWN ROOT SERVERS AND NO ONE NOTICES Monday afternoon a cyberattack took down 9 of the 13 root servers of the Internet, but the attack went unnoticed by the majority of Internet users because of measures taken to address the attack and because of its relatively short duration. Louis Touton, vice president for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, said, "As best we can tell, no user noticed and the attack was dealt with and life goes on." The attack flooded targeted servers with 30 to 40 times the usual amount of traffic, causing seven to fail and two others to fail intermittently. One observer commented that this was the most significant attack of its kind since the Internet began operating. The FBI is investigating the attack, though the source is not yet known. CNN, 23 October 2002 http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/10/23/internet.attack.ap/ ------------------------------------------------------------------ What's a root server, you ask? From e.g. > On the Internet, the root server system is the way that an > authoritative master list of all top-level domain names (such as > com, net, org, and individual country codes) is maintained and made > available to all routers. The system consists of 13 file servers. > The central or "A" server is operated by Network Solutions, Inc., > the company that originally managed all domain name registration, > and the master list of top-level domain (TLD) names is kept on the A > server. On a daily basis, this list is replicated to 12 other > geographically dispersed file servers that are maintained by an > assortment of agencies. The Internet routing system uses the nearest > root server list to update routing tables. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Oct 25 15:55:58 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Solid State Lighting Message-ID: Subject: Solid State Lighting With Prof. Jerry Woodall, of Yale's Electrical Engineering Department, having recently been awarded the National Medal of Technology (by President Bush at the White House) for his pivotal contributions to solid-state opto-electronic technology, this seems a particularly apt item for this list. --PJK --------------------------------------------------------------- from The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering, and Technology October 25, 2002 Volume 1, Number 19 http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/nsdl-reports/met/2002/met-021025.html --------------------------------------------------------------- Solid-State Lighting 1. Solid-State Lighting [.pdf] http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/solidstate/index.htm 2. High Brightness LEDs http://www.compoundsemi.com/hbled/ 3. Visible LEDs: The Trend toward High Power Emitters and Remaining Challenges for Solid State Lighting http://ncem.lbl.gov/team/presentations/Craford/index.htm 4. Energy.gov: Secretarial Speeches http://www.energy.gov/HQDocs/speeches/2002/junss/13thAnnualEnergyEfficiencyForum.html 5. Vision 2020: The Lighting Technology Roadmap [.pdf] http://www.eren.doe.gov/buildings/vision2020/ 6. Illumination with Solid State Lighting Technology [.pdf] http://www.lumileds.com/pdfs/techpaperspres/STEIGERWALD.PDF 7. Cool Tungsten Light Bulb in Future? http://www.lighting.com/index.taf?_UserReference=7AE35DE9B4C882133D9389EA&_sn=content&_pn=story&_op=409 8. Silicon Strategies: Kopin Maintains LED Brightness at Reduced Voltage http://www.siliconstrategies.com/story/OEG20020729S0003 Solid-state lighting is a revolutionary technology that uses semiconducting materials to create light while generating almost no heat. This is extremely energy efficient, but until recently has been impractical due to the small amount of light emitted. New developments in light-emitting diodes (LEDs) have reversed this trend, and strong interest has been shown by the US government and many research bodies. A good introduction to the technology can be found at the Lighting Research Center (1). It has a few presentations that demonstrate the implications of solid-state lighting, as well as highlights of various research projects. The Compound Semiconductors Web site (2) is a good news source to learn about current breakthroughs. Abstracts of tutorials and industry outlooks are provided, which describe pure white light LEDs and other emerging technologies. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has a significant research effort in solid state lighting. This presentation (3), given in August 2002, describes the lab's motivation for advancing the technology. In a speech given by US Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham (4), he emphasizes the importance of solid-state lighting to reduce electricity usage. He describes the relationship between LEDs and conventional fluorescent lighting as similar to that between transistors and vacuum tubes. The Office of Building Technology offers this roadmap of lighting technology (5). The report anticipates advances in the industry over the next twenty years, with specific attention to solid state lighting. Another report is from the IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics (6). The authors discuss current trends in high-power LED development and results of the first solid-state lamp that is as intense as Thomas Edison's twenty watt bulb. A recent accomplishment at Sandia National Laboratories is outlined in this article from Lighting.com (7). The "tungsten photonic lattice" is capable of converting heat to visible light and could improve electrical efficiency by over 50 percent. Another efficiency-related news story comes from researchers from a semiconductor company and North Carolina State University (8). Their product reduces the voltage of a high-brightness LED to less than three volts, which was a long standing scientific hurdle. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Oct 28 03:04:20 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Digital Security Survey Message-ID: Subject: Digital Security Survey Dear Colleagues - http://www.economist.com/surveys/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1389589 Another excellent survey from The Economist's current issue, this one on digital security. Frequently quoted is cyber guru Bruce Schneier, who was the subject of earlier EAS-INFO mailings, e.g. . He has always stressed the point that security is as dependent on human frailties and their management, as on security technology. My favorite quote in this vein in the survey: "Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people." --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Nov 4 22:42:25 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Windows Ban Message-ID: Subject: Windows Ban (from Edupage, November 04, 2002) UC SANTA BARBARA BANS TWO VERSIONS OF WINDOWS Campus officials at the University of California at Santa Barbara issued a policy statement to students banning the use of Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 operating systems on the school's network. The statement blames the two operating systems for "hundreds of problems," some of which required temporarily shutting down the campus network. An official from the university said that most of last year's security lapses were traced to the 200 computers--of a total of 3,800 on the network--that were running Windows 2000. A spokesman from Microsoft said the university's problems stemmed from poor network management rather than any problem with the operating systems. The university will still allow certain systems to run Windows 2000, but only in "controlled" environments where university officials can be certain that the security settings are configured properly. Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 November 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/2002/11/2002110402t.htm -------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Colleagues - I forward this without judgment. It is indeed true that proper network management is paramount to the security of any software, though the choice of software environment must be in sensible equilibrium with attainable and affordable levels of skill. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Nov 7 01:21:09 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Open Source Endorsed Message-ID: Subject: Open Source Endorsed (from Edupage, October 30, 2002) REPORT HAILS OPEN SOURCE, FAULTS DETRACTORS A new report says that because it is free and easily distributed, FOSS (free and open-source software) is already used much more widely in the U.S. Department of Defense than "generally recognized." The report also faults developers of proprietary software for making unfounded claims about the security of FOSS, preventing it from "reaching optimal levels of use." The report was written by Mitre, an engineering and IT nonprofit that works with the federal government. Mitre recommends that the Defense Department compile a "Generally Recognized As Safe" list of software and support a diverse set of applications. ZDNet, 30 October 2002 http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-963869.html The story was also reported in: http://www.internetwk.com/breakingNews/INW20021029S0015 http://www.businessweek.com/technology/cnet/stories/963875.htm ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft has been lobbying the Defense Information Systems Agency and the office of defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld for some time, e.g. . This new Mitre report is the latest salvo in the other direction. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Nov 7 03:21:39 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]What makes a Web Page publi Message-ID: Subject: What makes a Web Page public? (from Edupage, October 28, 2002) LAWSUIT ALLEGES SNOOPING ON PUBLIC WEB PAGES A small technology company in Sweden has filed a lawsuit alleging that Reuters violated the law when it obtained and published information from an earnings report on the Web. The data were on a Web page accessible by anyone who entered the correct URL. The Web page, though, was not linked from elsewhere on the company's site, according to the company. A spokesman from the company said the lawsuit could have important implications about what is considered public versus private information. If the court rules that the information Reuters obtained was public, he said, then potentially everything on a company's Web server could be considered public. Associated Press, 28 October 2002 http://www.nandotimes.com/technology/story/595343p-4624080c.html (from Edupage, November 06, 2002) SECURITY GROUP ACCESSES CLASSIFIED NAVY DATABASES A French security group called Kitetoa was able to access several confidential U.S. Navy databases, prompting the Navy to take down one of its Web sites until the problems are fixed. Members of the group gained access to information about tests and problems with weapons systems, and to a system used to order software and other applications. A spokesman from the Navy said that although the information is not public, none of the exposed data constituted a threat to national security. Antoine Champagne, founder of Kitetoa, noted that a French court recently ruled that users are not in violation of existing laws if they access information that is on the Web but is not protected, even if that information is not intended for public access. Wired News, 6 November 2002 http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,56219,00.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Nov 14 18:23:02 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Moore's "Law" Message-ID: Subject: Moore's "Law" Dear Colleagues - With some deliberate provocation, I have long held that Moore's Law has none of the force of natural law, is rather an indication of economic support for semiconductor technology development by customers with sufficient willingness to buy and renew computers and other high-tech products at a particular rate. Finally, with a slant more complex than mine, there is a seriously researched article on Moore's "Law": http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_11/tuomi/ Another reason that it is good to have a considered article is that exponential growth has consistently led to the utopian prediction of free capacity. E.g. Tesla's "free electricity for everyone", and the nuclear power industry's prediction of "electricity too cheap to meter." As a form of ignorance, such utopianism always "costs" in the end. Now we are saying that "information processing capacity is essentially free and technical possibilities are unlimited." --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACT "The Lives and Death of Moore's Law" by Ilkka Tuomi Moore's Law has been an important benchmark for developments in microelectronics and information processing for over three decades. During this time, its applications and interpretations have proliferated and expanded, often far beyond the validity of the original assumptions made by Moore. Technical considerations of optimal chip manufacturing costs have been expanded to processor performance, economics of computing, and social development. It is therefore useful to review the various interpretations of Moore's Law and empirical evidence that could support them. Such an analysis reveals that semiconductor technology has evolved during the last four decades under very special economic conditions. In particular, the rapid development of microelectronics implies that economic and social demand has played a limited role in this industry. Contrary to popular claims, it appears that the common versions of Moore's Law have not been valid during the last decades. As semiconductors are becoming important in economy and society, Moore's Law is now becoming an increasingly misleading predictor of future developments. http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_11/tuomi/ From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Nov 15 00:47:25 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Science/Engineering Teachin Message-ID: Subject: Science/Engineering Teaching (from Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 14, 2002) Math and Science Professors Are Not Trained to Teach, Report Says By THOMAS BARTLETT Most professors of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics receive little training in how to teach those subjects, according to a new report that encourages universities to value good teaching as highly as good research. The report, released on Wednesday by the National Academies' National Research Council, said that professors in those disciplines should receive more instruction on how to tell if students are learning, as well as how to evaluate their own classroom performance. Currently, however, few programs exist to help professors improve their teaching, the report said. Among other measures, the report suggests that: * Colleagues should observe an instructor's courses and provide feedback on classroom presentation and curriculum. * Administrators should look at such data as how many students drop a particular course and how many go on to take other courses in that discipline to determine teaching effectiveness. * Student evaluations should not be the only source of information about a professor's performance when making decisions about tenure and promotion. Peer reviews and teaching portfolios should also be taken into account. * At least one senior university official should be in charge of encouraging improvement in teaching. * Departments should pay for teaching programs and encourage research that examines student learning. The full report, "Evaluating and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics," can be purchased on the National Academies' Web site . --------------------------------------------------------------------- Also strongly recommended for insights into effective teaching is - Richard Light's book "Making the Most of College" (Harvard University Press, 2001), and - the work of David Hestenes, whose Force Concept Inventory was an eye-opener when I first encountered it in the early '90s. E.g. see references at . --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Nov 16 16:31:26 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Barbie the engineer? Message-ID: Subject: Barbie the engineer? Dear Colleagues - A recent item on the Yale Libraries list brought to my attention that Mattel has started an "I Can Be" series of Barbie dolls. The first two are Doctor and Art Teacher. Currently you can vote at for three choices for Barbie's next career: librarian, architect, policewoman. [Caution: the Web site's pink to cerise color scheme is safer on an empty stomach.] The votes so far, to be found at are from _parents_ 84%, 8% and 6% respectively, and from _kids_ 46%, 23% and 31% respectively. I guess in the age of "Google.com librarianship," kids are less sure of who a librarian is. Since there is no write-in opportunity for engineer, shall we start an email campaign for "engineer"? I've sent in my suggestion at By the way, don't use "Idea" in the Subjet pull-down, as Mattel has a policy against outside submission of ideas. Maybe a tiny step toward getting more women into engineering. [And maybe the percentages on the Mattel Web surveys would add up to 100% more consistently.] All best, --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Nov 21 16:46:26 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Managing Student Teams Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Managing Student Teams Dear Colleagues - With not only ABET, but other good resons of pedagogy, moving us closer to student team work, the issues of how to make such teams work are getting more insistent. This issue of TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR deals with the slackers, potential or actual, that are part of almost any team, and how to manage them. All best, --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING http://ctl.stanford.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Folks: The posting below looks at some very practical ways of dealing with unproductive or disruptive members of learning teams. It is by Barbara Oakley, Assistant Professor of Engineering, Oakland University, Rochester MI, . A longer version of this article, titled "It Takes Two to Tango," will appear in the Journal of Student Centered Learning, Volume 1, Issues 1, 2003, pg 19-28. New Forum Press http://www.newforums.com/news_jccpage.htm Regards, Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Designing and Assessing Course Curricula Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning ------------------------- 1,603 words ---------------------------- COPING WITH HITCHHIKERS AND COUCH POTATOES ON TEAMS BY BARBARA OAKLEY You will usually find your university teammates as interested in learning as you are. Occasionally, however, you may encounter a person who creates difficulties. This handout is meant to give you practical advice for this type of situation. To begin with, let's imagine you have been assigned to a combined homework and lab group this semester with three others: Mary, Henry, and Jack. Mary is okay-she's not good at solving problems, but she tries hard, and she willingly does things like get extra help from the professor. Henry is irritating. He's a nice guy, but he just doesn't put in the effort to do a good job. He'll sheepishly hand over partially worked homework problems and confess to spending the weekend watching TV. Jack, on the other hand, has been nothing but a problem. Here are a few of the things Jack has done: * When you tried to set up meetings at the beginning of the semester, Jack just couldn't meet, because he was too busy. * Jack infrequently turns in his part of the homework. When he does, it's almost always wrong-he obviously spent just enough time to scribble something down that looks like work. * Jack has never answered phone messages. When you confront him, he denies getting any messages. You e-mail him, but he's "too busy to answer." * Jack misses every meeting-he always promises he'll be there, but never shows up. * His writing skills are okay, but he can't seem to do anything right for lab reports. He loses the drafts, doesn't reread his work, leaves out tables, or does something sloppy like write equations by hand. You've stopped assigning him work because you don't want to miss your professor's strict deadlines. * Jack constantly complains about his fifty-hour work weeks, heavy school load, bad textbooks, and terrible teachers. At first you felt sorry for him-but recently you've begun to wonder if Jack is using you. * Jack speaks loudly and self-confidently when you try to discuss his problems-he thinks the problems are everyone else's fault. He is so self-assured that you can't help wondering sometimes if he's right. * Your group finally was so upset they went to discuss the situation with Professor Distracted. He in turn talked, along with the group, to Jack, who in sincere and convincing fashion said he hadn't really understood what everyone wanted him to do. Dr. Distracted said the problem must be the group was not communicating effectively. He noticed you, Mary, and Henry looked angry and agitated, while Jack simply looked bewildered, a little hurt, and not at all guilty. It was easy for Dr. Distracted to conclude this was a dysfunctional group, and everyone was at fault-probably Jack least of all. The bottom line: You and your teammates are left holding the bag. Jack is getting the same good grades as everyone else without doing any work. Oh yes-he managed to make you all look bad while he was at it. What this group did wrong: Absorbing This was an 'absorber' group. From the very beginning they absorbed the problem when Jack did something wrong, and took pride in getting the job done whatever the cost. Hitchhikers count on you to act in a self-sacrificing manner. However, the nicer you are (or the nicer you think you are being), the more the hitchhiker will be able to hitchhike their way through the university-and through life. What this group should have done: Mirroring It's important to reflect back the dysfunctional behavior of the hitchhiker, so the hitchhiker pays the price-not you. Never accept accusations, blame, or criticism from a hitchhiker. Maintain your own sense of reality despite what the hitchhiker says, (easier said than done). Show you have a bottom line: there are limits to the behavior you will accept. Clearly communicate these limits and act consistently on them. For example, here is what the group could have done: * When Jack couldn't find time to meet in his busy schedule, even when alternatives were suggested, you needed to decide whether Jack was a hitchhiker. Was Jack brusque, self-important, and in a hurry to get away? Those are suspicious signs. Someone needed to tell Jack up front to either find time to meet, or talk to the professor. * If Jack turns nothing in, his name does not go on the finished work. (Note: if you know your teammate is generally a contributor, it is appropriate to help if something unexpected arises.) Many professors allow a team to fire a student, so the would-be freeloader has to work alone the rest of the semester. Discuss this option with your instructor if the student has not contributed over the course of an assignment or two. * If Jack turns in poorly prepared homework or lab reports, you must tell him he has not contributed meaningfully, so his name will not go on the submitted work. No matter what Jack says, stick to your guns! If Jack gets abusive, show the professor his work. Do this the first time the junk is submitted, before Jack has taken much advantage-not after a month, when you are really getting frustrated. * Set your limits early and high, because hitchhikers have an uncanny ability to detect just how much they can get away with. * If Jack doesn't respond to e-mails, answer phone messages, or show up for meetings, don't waste more time trying to contact him. * Keep in mind the only one who can handle Jack's problems is Jack. You can't change him-you can only change your own attitude so he no longer takes advantage of you. Only Jack can change Jack-and he will have no incentive to change if you do all his work for him. People like Jack can be skilled manipulators. By the time you find out his problems are never-ending, and he himself is their cause, the semester has ended and he is off to repeat his manipulations on a new, unsuspecting group. Stop allowing these dysfunctional patterns early in the game-before the hitchhiker takes advantage of you and the rest of your team! Henry, the Couch Potato But we haven't discussed Henry yet. Although Henry stood up with the rest of the group to try to battle against Jack's irrational behavior, he hasn't really been pulling his weight. You will find the best way to deal with a couch potato like Henry is the way you deal with a hitchhiker: set firm, explicit expectations-then stick to your guns. Although couch potatoes are not as manipulative as hitchhikers, they will definitely test your limits. If your limits are weak, you then share the blame if you have Henry's work to do as well as your own. But I've Never Liked Telling People What to Do! If you are a nice person who has always avoided confrontation, working with a couch potato or a hitchhiker can help you grow as a person and learn the important character trait of firmness. Just be patient with yourself as you learn. The first few times you try to be firm, you may find yourself thinking-'but now he/she won't like me-it's not worth the pain!' But many people just like you have had exactly the same troubled reaction the first few (or even many) times they tried to be firm. Just keep trying-and stick to your guns! Someday it will seem more natural and you won't feel so guilty about having reasonable expectations for others. In the meantime, you will find you have more time to spend with your family, friends, or schoolwork, because you aren't doing someone else's job along with your own. Common Characteristics that Allow a Hitchhiker or Couch Potato to Take Advantage * Unwillingness to allow a slacker to fail and subsequently learn from their own mistakes. * Devotion to the ideal of 'the good of the team'-without common-sense realization of how this can allow others to take advantage of you. Sometimes you show (and are secretly proud of) irrational loyalty to others. * You like to make others happy even at your own expense. * You always feel you have to do better-your best is never enough. * Your willingness to interpret the slightest contribution by a slacker as 'progress.' * You are willing to make personal sacrifices so as to not abandon a hitchhiker-without realizing you are devaluing yourself in this process. * Long-suffering martyrdom-nobody but you could stand this. * The ability to cooperate but not delegate. * Excessive conscientiousness. * The tendency to feel responsible for others at the expense of being responsible for yourself. A related circumstance: you're doing all the work As soon as you become aware everyone is leaving the work to you-or doing such poor work that you are left doing it all, you need to take action. Many professors allow you the leeway to request a move to another team. (You cannot move to another group on you own.) Your professor will probably ask some questions before taking the appropriate action. Later on-out on the job and in your personal life You will meet couch potatoes and hitchhikers throughout the course of your professional career. Couch potatoes are relatively benign, can often be firmly guided to do reasonably good work, and can even become your friends. However, hitchhikers are completely different people-ones who can work their way into your confidence and then destroy it. Occasionally, a colleague, subordinate, supervisor, friend, or acquaintance could be a hitchhiker. If this is the case, and your personal or professional life is being affected, it will help if you keep in mind the --------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR LISTSERV is a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ The Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL) http://scil.stanford.edu/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to Tomorrows-Professor Listserv by addressing an e-mail message to: Do NOT put anything in the SUBJECT line but in the body of the message type: subscribe tomorrows-professor --------------------------------------------------------------------- To UNSUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor send the following e-mail message to: unsubscribe tomorrows-professor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Nov 22 23:20:37 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Turing Test Message-ID: Subject: Turing Test Dear Colleagues - As man and machine intelligence get closer, with movement on both sides, this test for artificial intelligence grows in interest. Note the Loebner Prize, an annual competition held in October that implements the Turing Test. This years's winner "Ella" can be tried online at . (If you have a slow network connection, use the Loebner version.) --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from http://scout.wisc.edu/nsdl-reports/met/2002/met-021122.html) The Turing Test 1. Alan Mathison Turing http://turnbull.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/%7Ehistory/Mathematicians/Turing.html 2. The Turing Test and Intelligence http://www.abelard.org/turing/tur-hi.htm 3. The Turing Test Page [.pdf, .ps] http://cogsci.ucsd.edu/~asaygin/tt/ttest.html 4. Rules and Technical Specifications http://www.loebner-atlanta.org/loebner_rules.html 5. EllaZ - Artful Intelligence http://www.ellaz.com/ 6. The Blurring Test - Mr. Mind [Flash] http://www.mrmind.com/mrmind3 7. Mind as Space [.pdf] http://www.mindpixel.com/PDF/mindasspace.pdf 8. Acquiring Word-Meaning Mappings for Natural Language Interfaces [.pdf] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ml/papers/wolfie-jair-submitted-02.pdf A man before his time, Alan Mathison Turing is arguably one of the most recognized mathematicians of the 20th century. In 1950, he published a paper that, to this day, sets the standard for artificial intelligence. He proposed a way to determine if a machine has intelligence, and this is now called the Turing Test. In his 41-year life, Turing accomplished a great deal as a mathematician. Bordering on many philosophical issues, his work is recounted in this online biography (1). A very good introduction to the Turing Test is given on this site (2). The text of the original paper written by Turing is provided, as well as an original take on its implications. Another paper about the Turing Test can be downloaded here (3), but it looks at the test from 50 years after it was first published. The author gives an interesting retrospective on what has transpired since Turing formed his ideas and sets the stage for future work. The Loebner Prize is an annual competition that implements the Turing Test. It involves a panel of judges who question an entity over a computer terminal. The entity can be either human or a computer program, and it is up to the judges to decide who is not human. The program that gives the most human-like responses wins the contest. If a program can ever be indistinguishable from a human and manages to trick the judges, a grand prize will be awarded (although this has not yet happened). To read the rules of the competition, visit the Web site of the 2002 Loebner Prize (4), which was held on October 12, 2002. The contest's winning program was dubbed Ella, and an online version of the program can be tried at this site (5). Ella's responses are usually humorous, and it is surprising how realistic they are. A similar interactive utility is called Mr. Mind (6), but it reverses the roles. The user is asked to prove to Mr. Mind that he/she is human. By taking this perspective, it is quickly realized how difficult it must be for a computer to respond like a human. One chapter of a book that is scheduled to be published in 2003 is given on the Mindpixel Web site (7). It argues that a lifetime of human experiences is necessary for a computer to pass the Turing Test, but this can be approximated by a large collection of submissions contributed by the public over the Internet. This, incidentally, is the goal of the Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project. Natural language processing is one important factor for computers to understand, and glean meaning from, human dialog. A research paper that was recently included in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research can be viewed at this site (8). From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Nov 26 15:40:56 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Federal Security Failures Message-ID: Subject: Federal Security Failures (from Edupage, November 20, 2002) HOMELAND SECURITY BILL INCLUDES INTERNET PROVISIONS The bill creating the Department of Homeland Security, which recently passed Congress, includes provisions affecting cybersecurity and tools for enforcing such. The bill expands sentencing for convicted cybercriminals, allowing for sentences of life in prison if an electronic attack causes or attempts to cause death. The bill also adds protections for Internet service providers that turn over subscribers' information to the government "in good faith," even when a warrant has not been issued for that information. Also included in the Homeland Security Bill is a provision that allows the government to trace e-mails and Internet traffic without any court approval if a cyberattack is happening. New York Times, 19 November 2002 (registration req'd) http://www.nytimes.com/pages/technology/text/index.html REPORT GIVES U.S. AGENCIES FAILING GRADE FOR SECURITY A new report from the House Government Reform subcommittee on government efficiency gives failing grades in electronic security to 14 of the 24 largest federal departments and agencies. Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.), who chairs the panel, said that the overall grade is an "F," which it was last year, also. The worst grades were given for the departments of Justice, State, Defense and Transportation, while the Social Security Administration received a "B-," the highest grade of the 24. Robert F. Dacey of the General Accounting Office and author of the report said that the grades do not necessarily indicate that security is getting worse. Rather, the marks indicate that "information security weaknesses are becoming more fully understood," which he called "an important step toward addressing the overall problem." Washington Post, 20 November 2002 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12321-2002Nov19.htmlDear ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Colleagues - Great sources of comfort, both. The admirable statement in the second item > Robert F. Dacey of the General Accounting Office and author of the > report said that the grades do not necessarily indicate that security > is getting worse. Rather, the marks indicate that "information > security weaknesses are becoming more fully understood," which he > called "an important step toward addressing the overall problem." will presumably set the standard for > a provision that allows the government to trace e-mails and Internet > traffic without any court approval in the first item. The full text of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (all 475 pages) is at . In it are not only the provisions that so concern privacy advocates, but also provisions that e.g. absolve drug companies from complications from their vaccines, and undo the legislation passed just last July curbing off-shore corporate tax havens. Somebody ought to read it carefully and do a tally of all the items irrelevant to security, the last-minute post-election favors that were slipped in on behalf of generous corporate political donors. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Nov 26 17:12:41 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Sabbaticals Message-ID: Subject: Sabbaticals (from INNOVATION, 10 July 2002) TIME OUT FOR WORKERS The sabbatical -- once the privileged perk of tenured professors -- is moving from academia into the mainstream as corporate America looks for alternatives to layoffs and ways to avoid employee burnout. According to a recent survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, 15% of the 450 large employers polled offered paid sabbaticals last year, up from 11% in 1998, with an additional 5% considering such a move. "It helps companies cut costs in the short term, and it gives employees the opportunity to go out and try different kinds of things they wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to do," says Accenture HR director Keith Hicks. The practice is especially popular among Generation Xers (born between 1964 and 1978). A 2001 survey by the nonprofit Catalyst group found that 18% of Gen Xers were currently on sabbatical or semi-paid leaves of absence. Meanwhile, a Principal Financial Group study found that more than half the employees in small and midsize companies enthusiastically endorsed the idea of a sabbatical. An additional 47% said they would like to take one but couldn't, due to financial pressures or inflexible employers. Fueling the trend is the ever-present problem of employee burnout, but experts say changing American attitudes about the workplace are also responsible. The dot-com fizzle and the end of the 1990s work-around-the-clock mentality are making timeouts more attractive, and workplace experts say the new "free agent" approach to work lends itself to sabbaticals. "Employees are driving the movement themselves," says Roger Herman, CEO of the futurist consultancy The Herman Group. "They're saying, 'I want control of my career destiny and if I feel like I need a break, I'm going to take one.' If that company wants to support that, fine. If not, goodbye. There's no question Sept. 11 has played a role. People went home from work immediately to be with their families and their loved ones, and there was this sense of, 'Is this really worth it?'" (American Demographics Jun 2002) http://demographics.com/ar/time/index.htm (sub req'd) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Nov 27 10:00:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:22 2006 Subject: [EAS]Good Web Sites Message-ID: Subject: Good Web Sites Dear Colleagues - In the spirit of the holiday that is upon us, I give thanks to the many good Web sites that are a joy to visit. Let me just give three examples here. (No, not technical ones. This is supposed to be a holiday, right?) --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Nov 29 08:54:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Curbing Grade Inflation Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Curbing Grade Inflation Dear Colleagues - Grade inflation, or more accurately, grade compression (where everything collapses into the A to A- range), is a serious problem, and makes engineering and science courses (and majors) be seen as the higher risk educational path by grade-conscious students. This short article from ASEE Prism is more intended as reminder than as a source of novel remedies, though communication within Engineering about grading policies deserves more attention than it has been getting. Beyond that, our grading policies are embedded in the larger institutional context that certainly reflects the article's opening statement (and my own pre-1958 high school days): > In 1966, just over 15 percent of first-year college students carried > "A" averages in high school. By 2001, the portion had jumped to 44 > percent, according to an annual UCLA survey of college freshmen. It almost seems as if it has become politically incorrect to give significantly lower grades for significantly inferior work, as if a B or less opened some Pandora's box of complexities, of extenuating circumstances, potential complaints, and ruined chances for professional school acceptance. Yet it is often the lower grades that have quite simple causes, and the best grades that have the richest complexity of intellectual curiosity, creative and analytical modes of thinking, all those rareties that deserve a more explicit reward structure than a bland A. Sigh. --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 11/28/02 4:51 AM From: Rick Reis "For uniformity and fairness, faculty members should discuss grading and share grade distributions for each course. We know professors who want to give lower grades but don't because they think everyone else is awarding higher grades." --------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING http://ctl.stanford.edu --------------------------------------------------------------------- Folks: The posting below presents some useful suggestions on dealing with grade inflation. It is by Phillip Wankat and Frank Oreovicz, in ASEE Prism, October, 2002, Volume 12, Number 2 . Copyright © 2002 ASEE, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. Phillip Wankat is head of interdisciplinary engineering and the Clifton L. Lovell Distinguished Professor of chemical engineering at Purdue University. Frank Oreovicz is an education communications specialist at Purdue's chemical engineering school. They can be reached by e-mail at purdue@asee.org. Regards, Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: A Collaborative Model for Leading Academic Change Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning ------------------------ 654 words ---------------------------- CURBING GRADE INFLATION Students learn more when the grades they get accurately reflect what they've learned in the course. In 1966, just over 15 percent of first-year college students carried "A" averages in high school. By 2001, the portion had jumped to 44 percent, according to an annual UCLA survey of college freshmen. Ironically, those high grades require few hours of study. Nearly 85 percent of high school seniors spend 10 hours per week or less on homework. Clearly, there is grade inflation in high schools, and students entering college expect to continue getting high marks. And they do. High percentages of college students graduate college with honors these days. Even graduating with a 4.0 is no longer unusual. Yet, according to the National Surveys of Student Engagement, another large study, the amount of time that college students spend hitting the books outside of class doesn't coincide with their good grades. Only 21 percent of college seniors spend more than 20 hours per week preparing for class. We believe that students learn best when grades accurately reflect their achievement. Grade inflation can be controlled by establishing certain procedures, such as a standard grading scale. For example, 90 percent and above is an “A", 80 to 90 percent is a “B", 70 to 80 percent is a “C", and 60 to 70 percent is a “D". For an “A", the work should be outstanding, and to receive a “B", it must be of professional quality. In your syllabus, define your grading scale and refer to it during the semester. Although there shouldn't be much wiggle room, you do have to be flexible when there is good reason. For example, if a majority of students fare poorly on an exam and complain that it was too difficult-which often means they did not have enough time to complete it-you can adjust all the test scores upwards by revamping the grading scale. For instance, if the highest grade in the class was an 88 (out of a possible 100), you might add 12 points to every score. If test averages for the year are between 30 to 50 percent or lower, up to three-quarters of the class could flunk. It is obviously best to give exams that are of reasonable length and difficulty, but final grades can be adjusted to reflect the reasonably achievable score in the course. You can determine this score from the second or third highest grade in the course. Thus, if one outstanding student achieves 882 points during the semester (out of a possible 1000), but the next two highest scores are 698 and 690, use 698. (Give the student with 882 points an “A+" and ask him or her to do a research project with you.) Then award grades based on the grading scale you choose, starting with 698 as the highest achievable score, rather than 1000. For example, if you use a 90-80-70-60 A-B-C-D scale, the lowest passing grade becomes 60 percent of 698 or 419 points. A more generous 80-70-60-50 scale (with the lowest passing grade at 349 points) uses the “50 percent" rule, in which students must earn at least 50 percent of the achievable score to pass the course. For uniformity and fairness, faculty members should discuss grading and share grade distributions for each course. We know professors who want to give lower grades but don't because they think everyone else is awarding higher grades. We should also stop punishing students in departments that control grade inflation. Basing university honors and other awards strictly on GPA puts students in those departments at a disadvantage. Graduate and professional schools and companies that hire new engineers must allow for differences in institutional quality and grading standards when ranking those all-important admissions or hiring decisions. Grade inflation, like inflation in the economy, can be controlled. Perhaps universities need to follow the lead of the Federal Reserve, whose primary function is to keep inflation in check. -------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR LISTSERV is a shared mission partnership with the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) http://www.aahe.org/ The National Teaching and Learning Forum (NT&LF) http://www.ntlf.com/ The Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning (SCIL) http://scil.stanford.edu/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: Anyone can SUBSCRIBE to Tomorrows-Professor Listserv by addressing an e-mail message to: Do NOT put anything in the SUBJECT line but in the body of the message type: subscribe tomorrows-professor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To UNSUBSCRIBE to the Tomorrows-Professor send the following e-mail message to: unsubscribe tomorrows-professor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Dec 10 18:30:01 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]MIT's OpenCourseWare Message-ID: Subject: MIT's OpenCourseWare http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i15/15a03101.htm An update on MIT's OpenCourseWare project , Open Knowledge Initiative with Stanford, and the Hewlett-Packard DSpace electronic archive supporting these efforts, reporting on the early experience with the plan to make freely available on the Web the course materials for MIT's entire curriculum. E.g. practicing engineers are forming study groups around the materials. Other projects that share Course Materials: World Lecture Hall Syllabus Finder --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Dec 10 23:36:06 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Email/TV/Manuals Message-ID: Subject: Email/TV/Manuals Three short items. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 9 December 2002) SURVEY DEBUNKS MYTH OF THE E-MAIL DELUGE The latest study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that reports of massive e-mail volume swamping workers and sapping their productivity are greatly exaggerated: in fact, 60% of Americans who use e-mail at work receive 10 or fewer messages on the average day, and three-quarters reported spending an hour or less daily dealing with e-mail. Only 6% reported receiving more than 50 e-mails a day, and among those, only 11% said the volume posed a problem. Most workers who receive a lot of e-mail have devised ways to manage the load, such as using filters to automatically sort the mail into folders. "All of the anecdotal evidence you hear from people out there is, 'I'm so overwhelmed by the volume of e-mail. The perception comes from the people who are talking most loudly about it, those few who are most overwhelmed," says Pew senior research fellow Deborah Fallows. The pattern is different for power users, typically those in high-level managerial positions at large corporations. Many of them spend at least two hours daily on e-mail, with the task often stretching out to four or more hours. Meanwhile, the study found that younger users (those under 30) are more likely to use e-mail for personal use while at work, often sending gossip, jokes and chain letters while on the job. (AP 8 Dec 2002) http://apnews.excite.com/article/20021208/D7NPSN680.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- This appears to be an emerging theme, helping a languishing economy by legislating the need for more complex technology. --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 3 December 2002) DIGITAL TV MAY NEED A BOOST FROM LAWMAKERS A General Accounting Office report says government regulators may need to force additional action by the cable and TV manufacturing industries to spur the transition from analog to digital television. Possible actions include requiring that all new televisions be digital cable-ready and setting a firm date for the switchover from full carriage of analog signals to full carriage of digital. The FCC should also consider mounting a public-education campaign to inform both consumers and retailers about digital television. "Generally, market-driven adoption of new technologies is considered best, but the current circumstances in the [digital television] transition suggest that it is unrealistic to anticipate that market forces will bring about the completion of the transition within the originally anticipated time frame," said the report. Congress originally had set a 2006 deadline for the changeover, but only if 85% of all television sets were capable of receiving digital signals. Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the House Telecommunications subcommittee, says the GAO's suggested mandates "merit particular attention," and that he plans to draft legislation responding to the report's proposals in the coming weeks. (Wall Street Journal 3 Dec 2002) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1038864410286994953.djm,00.html (sub req'd) -------------------------------------------------------------------- (INNOVATION, 27 November 2002) WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, READ THE MANUAL (ON THE WEB) So -- you've finally decided to tackle the job of programming your VCR or deciphering some of the more arcane symbols on your food processor, but now you can't find the manual. Don't panic -- the answer lies in cyberspace. The first place to start is the manufacturer's Web site, of course, but instructions for older machines often are no longer available. In that case, there's a Web site devoted to just this type of dilemma. Pete Hale's Instruction Manuals Web site (http://www.instructionmanuals.co.uk/) offers a comprehensive listing for online manuals, usually available as PDF files. (BBC News 22 Nov 2002) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2500257.stm From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Dec 12 15:06:27 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Cyberbegging Message-ID: Subject: Cyberbegging Never let it be said that I don't keep you abreast of the latest Internet developments. --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 12 December 2002) CYBER WAYS TO THROW AWAY YOUR MONEY Begging is a booming business. Yahoo is renaming its "begging" category to "e-panhandling," and an increasing number of specialized Web sites have been designed to ask you to give other people your money. Some examples: Karyn Bosnak begged and received $20,000 to pay off her credit card debt; Penny Hawkins is asking for money to finish nursing school and divorce her husband; Rich Schmidt wants money to help him get on the David Letterman show. Let's hear from Schmidt, who is a freelance music marketer: "To me, the Internet is creative anarchy. I just wanted to make my mark. I thought, what if 1% of the Web surfers out there sent me a dollar. That was the impetus for the idea... I get a lot of e-mail from people who really have hardships and are asking for advice. If they think they are going to get rich doing it, they aren't. My goal was to be a guest on the David Letterman show, having gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars. Who knows? I may still get there. ... I think when people come to the site they think, 'I wish I had thought of it,' and in the spirit of that they give me a dollar." ... So you're going to give him a dollar? Really? Then give NewsScan a dollar, so we, too, can get on the Letterman show -- or, failing that, so we can have your dollar. (Reuters/San Jose Mercury News 12 Dec 2002) http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/4724060.htm From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Dec 13 17:52:57 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]WHAT'S NEW--13 Dec 02 Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP WHAT'S NEW--13 Dec 02 Dear Colleagues - I decided to send you this in its entirety, for a moment of reflection on our technologically benighted times. --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 12/13/02 3:43 PM From: opa@aps.org WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 13 Dec 02 Washington, DC 1. MISSILE DEFENSE: TEST FAILS, BUT "SUCCESS RATE" IS UNCHANGED. The "exoatmospheric kill vehicle" failed to separate from the booster in Wednesday's test over the Pacific. "It must be pretty gloomy around the office this morning," I said to my friend Puff Panegyric in the Missile Defense Agency. "Not really," Puff replied, "this one didn't count; it failed to reach the endgame. Our success rate remains at the 88 percent quoted by General Kadish." I did a quick calculation: "But the interceptor only hit the target in 40 percent of the tests." Puff's voice was rising, "You can't include tests that don't reach the endgame; they haven't gotten to the technically challenging part." Then why, I wanted to ask, do they fail? But Puff had hung up. 2. MISSILE DEFENSE II: WE STILL CAN'T SEEM TO STOP SCUDS. The ship had been tracked by the US since leaving North Korea bound for the Middle East. It was stopped and searched before reaching Yeman, and buried under bags of concrete, inspectors found Scud missiles. What would a nation that threatens preemptive nuclear strikes be expected to do next? Citing International Law, the United States allowed the ship to proceed with its cargo. You will recall that during the Gulf War the U.S. claimed to be able to stop 96% of the Scud missiles with the Patriot, but in a careful analysis of actual tapes, MIT physicist Ted Postol showed the actual figure was zero percent (WN 20 Mar 92). A decade later the United States still can't seem to stop scud missiles. 3. GENESIS PROJECT: A REALLY GOOD SCAM CAN BE USED OVER AND OVER. Back in the early '70s, an inventor named Sam Leach claimed to have built a car that used ordinary water as a fuel. The idea was simple: You use electrolysis to decompose the water into oxygen and hydrogen and then use the hydrogen as a fuel to run the engine and generate electricity for the separation. So there you have it: You start with water and end up with water plus work. Scientists scoffed: it would take more energy to decompose the water than you could get from the combustion of hydrogen. Ordinarily yes, Leach agreed, but he had a secret catalyst that reduced the energy of decomposition. The great thing about the First Law of Thermodynamics, however, is that it doesn't care what's in your secret box, it gives you the limit of any process. Leach raised millions from investors and then retired to a seaside villa in California. Who needs a car that runs on water when you have a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce? The rumor spread that he had been bought off by the oil companies. Now something called Genesis World Energy is running the same scam over again. 4. RICHARD MESERVE: BECOMES PRESIDENT OF CARNEGIE INSTITUTION. Meserve, a Democrat, resigned as Chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. A physicist-lawyer, Merserve earned a Physics PhD from Stanford. He was the APS/AIP lawyer during the protracted legal dispute with Gordon and Breach and won in every country in which APS was sued (WN 19 Aug 94). He replaces Maxine Singer, a leading geneticist, who retires after an illustrious career. THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND and THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY. Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the University or the American Physical Society, but they should be. --- Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.aps.org/WN. You are currently subscribed to whatsnew as: To unsubscribe, send a blank e-mail to: To subscribe, send a blank e-mail to: From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Dec 16 14:37:25 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Homeland Security Message-ID: Subject: Homeland Security Sometimes a small vignette is more telling than a larger picture. --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- (from http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0212.html) which also features a longer editorial item on Homeland Security. Interesting article about getting the first step of security completely wrong: not understanding what problem a security system is supposed to solve. After 9/11, Ashcroft began enforcing a rule that required non-U.S. citizens to notify the federal government whenever they move. Change of address cards have been pouring into the government office by the hundreds of thousands. There's no staff to enter the address changes into a computer, and they're sitting in boxes in storage. And even if someone did enter the data, so what? How exactly is this going to solve any security problem? Is a terrorist going to send a card in when he moves? I don't think so. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Dec 18 03:45:41 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Harold Varmus Redux Message-ID: Subject: Harold Varmus Redux Dear Colleagues - http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/science/17JOUR.html?8bhp This NYT article announces an new project, headed by Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate and president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, "the creation of two peer-reviewed online journals on biology and medicine, with the goal of cornering the best scientific papers and immediately depositing them in the public domain." Brave e-publishing undertakings have had advocates for some time, like Stevan Harnad who said in 1995: "If from this day forward, everyone were to make available on the Net, in publicly accessible archives on the World Wide Web, the texts of all their current papers (and whichever past ones are still sitting on their word processors' disks) then the transition to the PostGutenberg Galaxy would happen virtually overnight." Harnad is founder/editor of an electronic preprint archive in the cognitive sciences . And there is of cource the famous Physics preprint archives , founded by the always delightfully outspoken Paul Ginsparg . Apparently Physics and Cognitive Science publishing is not quite the "big bucks" of biology. A previous attempt at a free, searchable biomedical literature server called "E-Biomed" was made by Varmus in 1999, while Director of the National Institutes of Health. The effort was ultimately squashed into a muted form by publishers and scientific societies. Paul Ginsparg's comments about this at . The details of this 'metamorphosis' were studied by Rob Kling et al. in which sheds interesting light on stakeholder politics and personal interests. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Dec 18 18:16:22 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Retro Attitudes Message-ID: Subject: Retro Attitudes (from NewsScan Daily, 18 December 2002) 'THE GAME OF THE NAME' A study by a group of finance professors at Purdue University shows that companies that shed their dot-com names, or some other hip, New Economy variation like E*twoMEDIA, saw their share prices rise 15.8% the day the news hit the market and a total of 21.6% in the 30 days following the switch. "I think we are very firmly stating investors are irrational, and here is one of their biases," says P. Raghavendra Rau, one of the study's authors. The group uncovered a number of companies that had played the dot-com game both ways -- adding it on a couple of years ago to get a boost, and then dropping it recently to get yet another boost. For example, the company formerly known as Publishing Co. of North America changed its name to Attorneys.com in 2000, a move that nearly doubled its share price. A year later, it dropped the dot-com moniker for the more conventional 1-800-Attorney, netting another 40% surge in stock prices. The full study, titled "The Game of the Name: Valuation Effects of Name Changes in a Market Downturn," can be found at www.mgmt.purdue.edu/faculty/rau. (Wall Street Journal 18 Dec 2002) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1040163285667930633.djm,00.html (sub req'd) 'DISTRESSED' RECORDINGS ARE THE LATEST THING Retro is "in" in digital music, with musicians ranging from rapper Eminem to country singer Toby Keith engineering their latest CDs to include the kinds of hissing and popping sounds that marred their vinyl predecessors. Following the lead of furniture makers who hammer away at their products to make them look "distressed" and jeans makers who pre-fade their clothing to save customers the bother, musicians are using computer technology make songs recorded in crystalline pure digital audio sound as if they've been abused by the wear and tear of an overworked turntable at a fraternity free-for-all. "A lot of contemporary recordings can sound very similar," says singer-songwriter Pete Yorn, whose "Life on a Chain" hit starts out sounding like a battered 78-rpm. "So, an old record that's very dirty sounding and all staticky can sound pretty good when you put it on." The trend has its proponents, who say it evokes a bygone era: "It does give you a historical reference and point of view, and it brings back a certain listening experience that you don't get from a CD. I don't think it's necessarily a more desirable sound. It's like the Technicolor film process. It doesn't look more realistic than the color we have today, but it can be more beautiful," says Rick Rubin, head of American Recordings and producer of the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, Johnny Cash, Tom Petty and others. On the other hand, some say getting nostalgic for the crackle of vinyl is akin to pining away for the smoky exhaust of a 1964 Studebaker. "I think it's kind of silly," says Glen Ballard, a Grammy-winning producer, songwriter and arranger who's worked with Michael Jackson, No Doubt, Christina Aguilera and others. "If it's used as a special effect for some real purpose, I think it's fine. But on evoking nostalgia, especially for a lot of listeners who haven't played a vinyl record in their lives, it's sort of two steps removed from any real-world connection." (Los Angeles Times 18 Dec 200) http://shorl.com/hekirujyrori (sub req'd) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Not good news for the proponents of the new proposals for digital AM and FM radio, and for the continuing struggle of HDTV for market share. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Dec 20 15:20:21 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]People and Logic Bombs Message-ID: Subject: People and Logic Bombs (from NewsScan Daily, 20 December 2002) SAFE & SOUND IN THE CYBER AGE: BY CHEY AND STEPHEN COBB In this week's column on computer security issues, Chey and Stephen Cobb discuss what happens... WHEN THE LOGIC BOMBS. . Remember that movie, the one where the computer guy gets mad at the boss, so he quits his job, but not before creating a secret program that later attacks the company¹s computers? In fact, there have been a bunch of movies featuring some variant of this plot, and for good reason: such things actually happen. This week a former system administrator for UBS PaineWebber, Roger Duronio, was arraigned in a New Jersey federal court on charges of sabotaging two-thirds of the company's computer systems. His alleged motive? To undermine the company's stock price and make a bunch of money in the process. He is alleged to have "shorted" over 30,000 shares of UBS stock prior to unleashing his attack which means the potential was there to make 30,000 times the amount by which the stock dropped when the media got wind of the attacks. In the recent stock manipulation case involving Emulex, shares fell 50 percent. Based on the trading range of UBS PaineWebber stock at the time of Duronio's alleged attack, it is reasonable to say his profits could have exceeded half a million dollars. The flaw in Duronio's alleged scheme was the obviously unexpected ability of UBS PaineWebber to prevent news of the attack getting out. This was quite a feat on the company's part because the logic bombs activated on about 1,000 of its nearly 1,500 computers and the malicious programs did actually delete files. Indeed, the company says attack cost it $3 million. These days, newer forms of malicious programming, such as viruses and worms, tend to vie for our attention, but the logic bomb, dormant code that is later activated or triggered by specific circumstances, is one of the oldest forms of computer attack, dating back to mainframe days. For example, in September 1987, Donald Burleson, a programmer at the Fort Worth-based insurance company, USPA, was fired for allegedly being quarrelsome and difficult to work with. Two days later, approximately 168,000 vital records erased themselves from the company's computers. Burleson was caught after investigators went back through several years' worth of system files and found that, two years before he was fired, Burleson had planted a logic bomb that lay dormant until he triggered it on the day of his dismissal. Burleson became the first person in America to be convicted of "harmful access to a computer." This week, the federal grand jury charged Duronio with one count of securities fraud and one count of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. If found guilty, Duronio could be hit with up to 20 years in prison and fines of more than $1.25 million. Earlier this year, Timothy Allen Lloyd was sentenced to 41 months in prison for leaving behind malicious programs that deleted critical data from the servers of Omega Engineering, a high-tech measurement company that claimed the cost of the attack was $10 million. How can companies defend against such attacks? Some executives may bridle at our answer, but we think it is the right one: by hiring the right people and then treating them right. In other words, this is a people problem and so it needs a human solution. All the technology in the world is not going to prevent an insider, with authorized system access and detailed knowledge of the system, from planting a logic bomb. There are some technologies, such as network surveillance and monitoring programs, that might detect attempts to create logic bombs. Integrity checking software might deflect attacks from logic bombs. Properly enforced software development policies and procedures will make it harder for someone to plant a logic bomb. But the bottom line is that a determined insider is almost impossible to stop. On the other hand, it is fairly easy for other humans to spot a disgruntled insider. We've seen numerous cases of insider system abuse where the identity of the culprit came as no surprise, at least to co-workers, if not supervisors or managers (there's a good chance that a supervisor who didn't see it coming wasn't doing his or her job -- especially the "visor" part). So, before your company spends money on technology to cut down on insider system abuse, take a look at morale and working conditions. Talk to the people who have the skills and access to mount this sort of attack. And read the landmark 1993 paper on the subject by our colleague Dr. Mich Kabay: "Psycho-Social Factors in the Implementation of Information Security Policy" (Risks Digest). You may save some money and you may even save the company. [Chey Cobb, the author of Network Security for Dummies, is an independent consultant (www.cheycobb.com) and a former senior technical security advisor to the NRO. She can be reached at chey@patriot.net. Stephen Cobb, the author of Privacy for Business: Web Sites and Email, is Senior VP of Research and Education for ePrivacy Group (www.eprivacygroup.com). He can be reached at scobb@cobb.com.] From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Dec 20 16:29:58 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Undergrad. Education & Rese Message-ID: Subject: Undergrad. Education & Research Dear Colleagues - Maybe the holiday recess can offer some free time for thinking about the future of undergraduate education in a research university, the subject of the original Boyer Commission Report "Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities" . I think I sent out an EAS-INFO mailing about it at the time. The original report, and this follow-up, make very worthwhile reading, even if some of the graphics are a little too cute. Do try to find time to read and reflect. All best, --Peter Kindlmann ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from The Scout Report -- December 20, 2002) Reinventing Undergraduate Education: Three Years After the Boyer Report [.pdf] Originating from the Reinvention Center at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, this 41-page report is a follow-up report to the original Boyer Commission Report on undergraduate education first released in 1998. Following up on the 1998 report, this document examines the progress made by various universities in 10 different aspects of undergraduate educational areas identified by the first report. Beginning with an introduction of the study's survey methods, the report discusses research findings in these 10 areas, including The Freshman Experience, Research-based Learning, Communication Skills, Educating Graduate Students as Apprentice Teachers, and Changing Faculty Reward Systems. In conclusion, the researchers note that, while "every research university is approaching the issues of undergraduate education seriously," many institutions have "not yet fulfilled their ambitions for undergraduate programs, although many offer special opportunities such as research and freshman seminars to the best students." Well-written and honest in its language and about its findings, this paper will be of great interest to anyone interested in the future of undergraduate education. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Dec 21 16:42:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Free Text Books Message-ID: Subject: Free Text Books Dear Colleagues - This is the latest free text book on the Web that has come to my attention. There are quite a few others. You owe it to your students who usually spend well over $100 on a single course text to be aware of appropriate free options when they are available from members of the academic community who believe in sharing. Previous EAS-INFO mailings related to this topic ar http://jove.eng.yale.edu/pipermail/eas-info/2001/000310.html http://www.yale.edu/engineering/eng-info/msg00479.html http://www.yale.edu/engineering/eng-info/msg00722.html All best, --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- (from The NSDL Scout Report -- December 20, 2002) Allen Hatcher [.pdf, .ps] http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/ Allen Hatcher is a professor of mathematics at Cornell University. On his home page, he offers a link to download his book "Algebraic Topology" in its entirety. Published in 2002, the book is over 500 pages in length and is free to anyone wanting a personal copy. In addition to Algebraic Topology, there are three other books that are work-in-progress. Despite being incomplete, they could be useful to students in related classes. Several research papers written by Professor Hatcher are also given on this site. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Dec 22 10:26:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]E-publications I read Message-ID: Subject: E-publications I read Dear Colleagues - Usually after mailing some unusual item, like the one on cyberbegging , I am asked "how do you find these things?" I don't go out and forage for them, nor for the typically more significant items I mail out. Division of labor shouldn't be abandoned in cyberspace, even if you have become your own travel agent. There are many people who apply their skills to sifting information online and in print, who concentrate and then distribute their findings online. Below I list newsletters I find valuable, for reasons professional, and sometimes just personally idiosyncratic. Many EAS-INFO mailings come from these publications (and I always attribute the source.) Have them introduce themselves to you on their Web sites, look at some recent issues, and decide whether they intersect with where you want to position yourself amidst the many "information currents." If you have any questions, just email me . All best, --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- NewsScan Daily INNOVATION Weekly (Individual subscriptions are available at US$18 a year.) See Edupage (3x/week, tends to overlap the better NewsScan Daily) What's New (Weekly) Physics News Update (usually weekly) The Scout Report (weekly, archives with good search engine) The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering & Technology (bi-weekly) (there are other bi-weekly NSDL Scout Reports for Life Sciences and the Physical Sciences) NETFUTURE (nominally monthly, voluntary contribution) RRE News Tomorrow's Professor CIT Infobits (monthly) First Monday (monthly) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Dec 24 11:01:00 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Followups Message-ID: Subject: Followups Reader comments about, and addenda to, recent EAS-INFO mailings. I'm always happy to get feedback from readers, try to respond to them, and mostly succeed. But for once I thought I'd make it more official. My thanks to all who contributed. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- [Let me mention a bug in the URLs within the archived copies I refer to below. Because of an idiosyncratic interaction between my mailer and that of the archiving computer, any "=" sign in a URL has a "3D" added after it. I will try to fix this in the near future, but for now I can only suggest the rather clumsy workaround that if e.g. doesn't work, you need to edit out the "3D" after the "=" and use If you are reading this in the presently archived form, you'll have double trouble with the above. Just get rid of the "3D"s. --PJK] ------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------- FREE TEXT BOOKS --------------- ----------- I imagine you have seen this already. The full-text of Gerry Sussman's and Hal Abelson's "wizard book" for intro CS: This site does not appear to be in Google, and I haven't found out what other books have been released in full-text. Perhaps they list them somewhere in the open course ware web sites. (John Frank) [This site is a nice example of not just a full free text book, but of the whole idea of a Web site supporting a text with additional dimensions, increasingly the case even with not-for-free text books. --PJK] ------------------------------------------------------------------- BARBIE THE ENGINEER? -------------------- I thought this might be supplementally amusing --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- HEATHKITS ----------- [This rather personal 11/29/02 EAS-INFO mailing provoked a number of responses, but didn't make it into the archives because it had an attachment which the archiving computer appeared to dislike. I can send you a copy. Let me know. --PJK] ----------- Heard this on monday and thought you would appreciate it. The monologue discusses how much or our technology today exists as black boxes and the problems associated with this reality. The last paragraph really says it all for me ... "How do we teach our students that the boxes around them aren't Pandora's boxes -- that they can be opened? How do we teach them that what one fool can do, another fool can also do -- that they're smart enough to open anyone else's black box? Students have to know that invention inevitably means working inside black boxes." (Robert Grober) p.s. make sure you scroll down to the end of the page and ponder the picture and its caption. ----------- Your note immediately makes me think of the article by Freeman Dyson in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books. Dyson's take is that the pendulum swings back to the amateurs, possibly with profound consequences. (Richard Lethin) [Cheap computers, digital cameras, etc., all extraordinarily powerful by the standards of just a few years ago, are unique enablements for the dedicated amateur. It is fascinating to speculate about the future prospects, not just in meteorology, the subject of the book Dyson is reviewing, but in biology and other fields. --PJK] ----------- Really enjoyed the Heathkit article. My kids are probably more enthralled by games than anything else I can think of. Even the graphing calculator (TI-83) they got for high school math class accomodates a subculture of down-loadable games, alternative OSs, compression tools, etc. Perhaps there's a niche for a Heathkit-like video game construction kit? There would actually be much more room for innovation than in Heathkits: fill in your own icon here, design a new color scheme, tweak this font, etc. (Andy Bliven) [As an extension of Andy's comments, let me point to the open source toy movement, with numerous facets revealed again by google, e.g. , , , , though not all is sunshine in open toy land, e.g. . --PJK] ----------- This email and accompanying article brought back memories. As recent immigrants to the US, my husband and I were frugal and he believed it would be cheaper (and more fun) to build our own TV from a kit. We lived here for over a year without TV - unthinkable these days. In late 1969 we ordered the kit and I well remember sorting resistors and all kinds of other little parts with my 6 month old son on my lap. Fortunately he was of a philosophical nature and not at all interested in electronics so he didn't try to eat the little pieces. We (mainly my scientist husband) and I were able to put the thing together and it worked well for many, many years. Intriguing that one could build a color TV by following the well written instructions. (Gloria Hardman) ----------- We too had Heathkits. My brother assembled a stereo amplifier, which we used for many years. However, those days are not completely passed. My 10 year old son, and some of his friends, are assembling a robot, whose parts arrive in fortnightly installments at the newsagent. Details are at www.realrobots.com. (Tony Eyers) [To which I would add that there are other kitbuilding opportunities 'afoot' these days, with varying degrees of specialization, e.g. and . A google search will reward you with further finds. --PJK] ------------------------------------------------------------------- PAYING THE PRICE ---------------- ----------- That is really funny, especially the last item. it reminded me of my trip to Tunis this spring. No matter what you wanted to buy (candy, milk, taxi ride, shirt, etc.), it involved a negotiation in which the "optimum" price for both vendor and customer was determined ... sometimes converging to a sale and other times not. (Robert Grober) ----------- And another Business 2.0 article about this was here: (Steve Portigal) [this about the new field of behavioral economics, which skakes up the classical economic assumption about consumers acting in their own best interest. --PJK] ------------------------------------------------------------------- THE VALLEY'S GRIM REAPER ------------------------ ----------- Hmmm. If the government "restates" the recession numbers, do we get to put THEM in jail? I've known that the numbers are science fiction for months. Here's my numbers: 1. Year-to-year 2001 vs 2000, the electronic industry dollar revenue is down 33%. 2. Month-to-month January 2002 vs January 2001, also down 33%. 3. Caltrans says traffic in San Jose was down 32%. 4. says that sales of their chip design tool (which involves a monthly license charge) are down 33%. 5. Unemployment in Silicon Valley went to 20% last July, and stayed at 20% until January 1, 2002. 6. The reason unemployment didn't go to 33% is that 13% of the population of San Jose went back to Boston. 7. Things have been getting better since January, at the rate of 1% per month. 8. The current unemployment rate is 12%. 9. Those other guy's numbers are WAY wrong. (Dave Chapman) ------------------------------------------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Dec 24 18:24:36 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Season's Warmest Wishes! Message-ID: Subject: Season's Warmest Wishes! Dear EAS-INFO Readers - Warmest best wishes to all EAS-INFO subscribers! --Peter Kindlmann (aka --PJK) ---------------------------------------------------------------- DESIDERATA Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let not this blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams; it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy. --- Max Ehrmann, 1927 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Purportedly "found in Old St. Paul's Church, Baltimore, dated 1692." Not surprising, given its modern elements, it was actually written in 1927 by Indiana author, poet and attorney Max Ehrmann (1872 - 1945). The confusion appears to trace to the distribution of the poem to parishioners by the rector of St. Paul's Church, in the 1950s, on church letterhead which gave the church's founding date. E.g. see ------------------------------------------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Dec 30 18:30:39 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]DSpace & e-Publishing Message-ID: Subject: DSpace & e-Publishing (from CIT INFOBITS -- December 2002) ................................................................... MIT LAUNCHES DIGITAL REPOSITORY The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has launched DSpace, an institutional digital repository "that captures, preserves and communicates the intellectual output [preprints, technical reports, working papers, conference papers, images] of MIT's faculty and researchers." DSpace is organized by "communities": academic departments, laboratories, and research centers. Communities can develop their own policies of what is included in the repository and who has access to the materials. At this time, the following communities have been established: -- Center for Technology, Policy, and Industrial Development -- Department of Ocean Engineering -- Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems -- MIT Press Out of Print Books (MIT-only access) -- Sloan School of Management Check out DSpace at http://www.dspace.org/ For more information about DSpace and similar projects, see: "'Superarchives' Could Hold All Scholarly Output" by Jeffrey R. Young THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, July 5, 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i43/43a02901.htm "College Archives 'Dig' Deeper" by Kendra Mayfield WIRED NEWS, August 3, 2002 http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,54229,00.html ................................................................... JOURNAL BOYCOTT GROUP ANNOUNCES ITS NEW PUBLIC JOURNALS A group of scholars who had urged a boycott of expensive scientific journals have formed the Public Library of Science. PLoS is a non-profit organization of scientists "committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource." PLoS announced that they will publish two new online scholarly journals -- PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE BIOLOGY and PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE MEDICINE -- in the second half of 2003. The PLoS journals will be "controlled and run by scientists, and will retain all of the important features of scientific journals, including rigorous peer-review and high editorial and production standards, but will employ a new publishing model that will allow PLoS to make all published works immediately available online, with no charges for access or restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use." For more information, see the PLoS website at http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/ For past Infobits articles on the journal boycott, see: "Online Debate on Scholarly Publishing" CIT Infobits, April 2001 http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitapr01.html#1 "Scholarly Journal Boycott a Bust" CIT Infobits, May 2002 http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitmay02.html#4 Also see: "Scientists Plan 2 Online Journals to Make Articles Available 'Freely and Universally'" by Andrea L. Foster THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, December 18, 2002 http://chronicle.com/free/2002/12/2002121801t.htm .................................................................... COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS TAKES OVER JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING The University of Michigan has published the JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING (JEP) since 1995. JEP will be on hiatus until spring when it will be taken over by Columbia University Press and will feature a new design, augmented content, and enhanced search capabilities. All archives of the journal will be moved to Columbia, and calls to the old URL addresses will be automatically redirected to JEP's new home at Columbia. Articles in the current issue include: "What Are the Alternatives to Peer Review? Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing on the Web" by William Y. Arms "Writing Electronically: The Effects of Computers on Traditional Writing" by Sharmila Pixy Ferris "Locally Controlled Scholarly Publishing via the Internet: The Guild Model" by Rob Kling, Lisa Spector, and Geoff McKim Journal of Electronic Publishing [ISSN 1080-2711] is available online at no cost at its current address of http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/ .................................................................... From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Dec 31 14:44:26 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Chameleon Chips Message-ID: Subject: Chameleon Chips A readable update on the fusion between custom integrated circuits and programmable logic, the reasons and the prospects. > Using custom chips that do one or two things spectacularly, rather > than lots of things averagely, has been a luxury for those needing > performance at any price. Now chips that can be rewired in an instant > promise to bring the benefits of customisation to the mass market It is part of The Economist's last Technology Quarterly for the year, surveys always notable for minimizing the usual news bait items in favor of important lower-profile ones. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Dec 31 18:42:14 2002 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:23 2006 Subject: [EAS]Year-End Humor Message-ID: Subject: Year-End Humor Dear Readers - Now that holiday sentiment is giving way to the challenges of facing another year, some doses of humor might be in order, including research to determine the world's funniest joke. Happy New Year! --Peter Kindlmann ------------------ First, as what should have been part of the recent "Followups" mailing, I point you to a very enjoyable article about Barbie (one last time) It begins > OF ALL the forces against which resistance is futile, Barbie ranks > right up near the top. Any poor innocent who assumed that this piece > of anatomically challenged plastic, devised in 1959, had been left on > the toy shelf beside other relics of the era is evidently not the > parent of a pre-school girl. Cult-like, Barbie draws her flock with a > heady mix of marketing, magic and the colour pink. "So you think that > if you can keep your daughter out of a pink tutu, she'll have more > chance of becoming a brain surgeon? Just try it sometime", wailed the > novelist Allison Pearson recently of her failed effort to withhold the > doll from her daughter. She went on: > "One day, in an attempt to stem the toxic tide, I brought home a > Scandinavian doll which looked like a Barbie designed by a feminist > committee: a wholesome small-breasted individual wearing khaki, she > clearly worked at something useful in developing countries. Alas, this > poor social democrat never got to meet the Barbies. "It's a boy!" my > daughter yelled in horror, before dropping the liberal compromise in > the bucket her baby brother reserved for drowning snails." ------------------ Secondly, let the "Desiderata" Christmas message be amended by its National Lampoon version, brought to my attention by Indy Crowley. > Deteriorata > > Go placidly amid the noise and the waste and remember what comfort > there may be in owning a piece thereof. > > Avoid quiet and passive persons unless you are in need of sleep. > Rotate your tires. Speak glowingly of those greater than yourself and > heed well their advice, even though they be turkeys; know what to > kiss and when. > > Consider that two wrongs never make a right, but that three do. > Wherever possible, put people on hold. Be comforted that in the face > of all aridity and disillusionment and despite the changing fortunes > of time, there is always a big future in computer maintenance. > Remember the Pueblo. Strive at all times to bend, fold, spindle and > mutilate. > > Know yourself; if you need help, call the FBI. Exercise caution in > your daily affairs, especially with those persons closest to you -- > that lemon on your left, for instance. Be assured that a walk through > the ocean of most souls would scarcely get your feet wet. Fall not in > love therefore; it will stick to your face. > > Gracefully surrender the things of youth, birds, clean air, tuna, > Taiwan; and let not the sands of time get in your lunch. Hire people > with hooks. For a good time, call 555-4311; ask for Ken. Take heart > amid the deepening gloom that your dog is finally getting enough > cheese; and reflect that whatever misfortune may be your lot, it > could only be worse in Milwaukee. > > You are a fluke of the universe; you have no right to be here, and > whether you can hear it or not, the universe is laughing behind your > back. > > Therefore make peace with your God whatever you conceive Him to be -- > Hairy Thunderer or Cosmic Muffin. > > With all its hopes, dreams, promises, and urban renewal, the world > continues to deteriorate. Give up. > > by Tony Hendra > performed by National Lampoon > on National Lampoon Radio Dinner LP > (1972 Blue Thumb Records) ------------------ Finally, let me assure you that the subject of humor itself is a subject of deadly serious research, and will likely become even more so. Herewith a British study to identify the world's funniest joke. URLs being fragile things, the first two referred to in that Scout Report item above no longer work. I reproduce the Scout Report item below, with the first URL corrected. The second doesn't have an obvious fix: British Research Leads to World's Funniest Joke The World's Funniest Joke-Official http://in.news.yahoo.com/021003/137/1vx7f.html The British Association for the Advancement of Science http://www.britassoc.org.uk/the-ba/page.asp LaughLab http://www.laughlab.co.uk/ Dr. Richard Wiseman http://phoenix.herts.ac.uk/PWRU/RWhomepage.html Philosophical Humor http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/phil-humor.html The New York Friars Club http://www.friarsclub.org/ Under the direction of Dr. Richard Wiseman at the University of Hertfordshire with assistance from the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's funniest joke was revealed on October 3, 2002. The study, which asked Internet users to submit their favorite jokes and rate the jokes of other contributors, amassed over 40,000 jokes and an amazing 2 million comments. The study also revealed some interesting results, such as regional preferences for certain types of jokes. For example, Americans and Canadians apparently prefer jokes that make others look foolish, whereas persons from the UK and Ireland enjoyed jokes that involved word play. The first link leads to a new story highlighting some of the study's research findings (including the world's funniest joke). The second link will take users to the Web site of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which helped sponsor the research. The third site is a link to LaughLab, the site where the research was conducted, which also contains a variety of information about different data collected during the study. The fourth link leads to Dr. Richard Wiseman's site, the lead researcher on the project. The fifth site is maintained by Professor David Chalmers of the University of Arizona and is devoted to philosophical humor. The sixth and final site leads to that bastion of New York humor, the Friars Club, which features a collection of jokes and a complete listing of Friars Clubs legendary roasts.