From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Feb 4 03:52:14 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Economic Futures? Message-ID: Subject: Economic Futures? Dear Colleagues - Sorry for the long hiatus that makes this the first mailing of 2004. A very, very belated Happy New Year to all EAS-INFO readers. See my comments after the two news items. All best, --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 28 January 2004) COMING UP NEXT: THE MOLECULAR ECONOMY The convergence of nanotech, biotech and accelerated computing will spur the advent of the Molecular Economy, say business trend-watchers Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis in their new book, "It's Alive." Meyer and Davis suggest that just as 20th century research in solid-state physics spawned the transistors, computer chips, lasers and other components that moved the U.S. from an industrial to an information-based economy, in the 21st century biotech, nanotech and materials science will lead the way to a Molecular Economy that will rewrite the rules in manufacturing, health care, education and the way society functions. Manufacturers will turn to "matter compilers" -- devices not unlike the "replicators" in Star Trek -- that can construct end products molecule by molecule, directly from raw materials, at lower cost and using less energy than conventional methods. In home health care, the combination of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will make possible a device that patients can use to continuously monitor their blood pressure, temperature and other vital signs. Doctors will shift their focus from treating the sick to monitoring and maintaining individuals' good health. Lifelong learning will be facilitated through software "agents" or "daemons" that not only search and retrieve on request, but are intelligent enough to anticipate users' needs and supply just-in-time expertise to fit any situation. And the fallout from all this technology? "The key social downside of the industrial economy continues to be the condition of the environment, while that of the information era appears to be privacy. In the coming [molecular] economy, the key issues will be ethical," predict Meyers and Davis. (The Futurist Jan/Feb 2004) http://www.wfs.org/revmeyerdavisjf04.htm EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES THAT COULD CHANGE THE WORLD Imagine an American doctor speaking into a personal digital assistant, "What are your symptoms?" A moment later, the device translates his question into perfect Mandarin Chinese. Such "universal translation" software is currently being developed by IBM computer scientist Yuqing Gao. Unlike systems that translate word by word, Gao's software performs semantic analysis - i.e., it extracts the most likely meaning, stores it in terms of concepts like actions and needs, and then expresses the same idea in another language. For instance, the software translates "I'm not feeling well" by first deciding that the speaker is probably sick, rather than afflicted with faulty nerve endings. Then it produces a sentence about the speaker's health in the target language. Gao's research was recently singled out by Technology Review magazine as one of the "Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World." Elsewhere, Princeton computer engineer Ron Weiss is programming cells as if they were computers. "Synthetic biology" assembles genes into networks designed to direct cells to perform almost any task their programmers conceive. For example, combined with simple bacteria, these networks could advance biosensing, allowing inspectors to pinpoint land mines or biological weapons. "We want to create a set of biological components, DNA cassettes, that are as easy to snap together, as a set of Legos." (Technology Review Feb 2004) http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/emerging0204.asp?p=0 ------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Colleagues - There used to be a time when the extrapolations of science and technology into science fiction fed the imagination and exercised our capacity for wonder. But the real science and technology stayed down to earth, stayed mostly rational in how inquiry was framed and research and development conducted. Now every science and technology projection is ringed with halos of dollar signs, illusions often potent enough to affect the rationality of scientific inquiry and technological development. It is the bane of older age to actually remember previous technological cycles. For instance: In the late 1950's, the days just prior to integrated circuits, when the "tyranny of numbers" of interconnections in complex circuits had become compelling, the military funded research on new types of electronics. In classic fashion, the three services went off in three different directions. The Army funded research in "micro-modules," LEGO-like structures that could be snapped together. The Navy focussed on "thin-film" circuits where components could be printed on a ceramic substrate. The Air Force pursued a dramatically different strategy, that of "molecular electronics" (yes, that's what they called it!) based on the belief that the basic structure of molecules could serve the function of traditional electronic components. As Robert Noyce, co-founder of Intel, later commented "The idea of it was, well, you lay down a layer of this and a layer of that and maybe it will serve some function. It was absolutely the wrong way to solve anything. It wasn't built up from understandable elements. It didn't start with fundamentals because they were rejecting all the fundamentals. It was pretty clearly destined for failure." [quoted in T.R. Reid's book "The Chip," p.148]. And indeed nothing came of the molecular electronics of that day. Instead, the road led to Texas Instruments and their 1958 surprise announcement of an early form of integrated circuit by Jack Kilby, and via the concurrent work at Fairchild to the ultimately economically pivotal planar process of making silicon-based integrated circuits, the success that swept away all else. The maturity of the components for a "molecular electronics"-like interdisciplinarity is surely much greater now, yet the need to understand in fundamentally sound ways the nature of materials, the nature of contacts, the stability of structures and interfaces, has not changed. Just as recent history reminds us, the dot.com boom did not rewrite the premises of economics, nor will nano-research be able to detach itself from the premises of painstaking materials science, any more than in the early days of integrated circuit technology. But that is such an unromantic and economically unexciting way of looking at it. Better to maintain collective excitement with some collective amnesia? All the best, --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Feb 4 19:35:00 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] A Quiet Zone Message-ID: Subject: A Quiet Zone http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/quiet.html The Quiet Zone Cell phones, pagers, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth - the wireless revolution is everywhere. Except here. ------------------------------------------------------------------- My colleague Alfred Ganz pointed me to this article about an "electromagnetic retreat" and what it can teach us about our wireless world. I enjoyed it so much I thought it worth sharing with you. Unique settings like the one described serve as vantage points for larger perspectives on technology that we are usually too busy, too "submerged," to realize. All best, --PJK "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." --Albert Einstein ------------------------------------------------------------------- From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Feb 5 01:06:07 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Real Techno-Trousers Message-ID: Subject: Real Techno-Trousers Techno-Trousers refers to the delightful Wallace & Gromit animation "The Wrong Trousers." If you haven't seen it, seek it out. But in any case, real techno-trousers seem to have arrived, though nothing is said about the power source. --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 4 February 2004) 'POWER PANTS' PROVIDE SUPERHUMAN STRENGTH Researchers at Nagasaki University, working in collaboration with scientists at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the University of California, Irvine, have built a pair of "power pants" that can be strapped on to greatly enhance the wearer's strength. The pants contain computerized sensors that detect how the wearer is moving his or her leg and hip muscles -- doing deep knee bends, for instance -- and tubelike artificial muscles positioned on either side of the knee expand and contract using compressed air flow. A human tester was able to do 90 squats in 90 seconds while holding a 16-kilogram barbell on his shoulders without breaking a sweat. This latest artificial body enhancement is a big improvement on previous versions, says Ephrahim Garcia, a mechanical and aerospace engineer at Cornell University: "This is novel because it's sensing over the entire soft-tissue interface of the body. You need intense amounts of computation to pull it off." The robotic pants are being tested at Nagasaki University for use as a physical therapy tool for bed-ridden patients. Researchers are also testing a mechanical glove that enables the user to pick up a cup of coffee just by tensing his or her upper arm muscles. "We're trying to reduce fatigue and eventually help disabled people," says UC Irvine civil engineer Maria Feng. Widespread testing of the devices is expected in the next two years, with commercial rollout in five to ten years. (Technology Review Feb 2004) http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/innovation40204.asp From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Feb 5 02:56:26 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Thoughts about Grading Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Thoughts about Grading Dear Colleagues - Although the "Tomorrow's Professor" piece to follow below is about paradoxes of standardized testing, the end of last semester is still recent enough to have this piece stir me to more general reflections about tests and grading. Particularly, it puts me in mind of one of my favorite authors, Neil Postman (whose sad passing in October 2003 did not get much public attention). In "Technopoly" (1992) Postman points out how recent the advent of tests and testing really is, and how any technology -- and tests are a 'technical measurement', standardized tests all the more so -- shifts the definition of what is being ascertained by testing. In a moment I'll give you Postman's comments about testing. But let me first explain that the Thamus he refers to is a legendary Egyptian king mentioned in Plato's "Phaedrus" (which you will readily find in the lower-level basement of Yale's Cross Campus library). Socrates tells the story that when the [tellingly one-eyed] Egyptian god Theuth, the inventor of of many things including writing, wanted to make writing available to Egyptians, King Thamus declined, explaining: "Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your offspring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own resources. What you have discovered is a recipe for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society." Postman wrote books, and I've read them and am writing this, so Socrates would not be happy with either of us, unless perhaps after we passed a long thorough oral inquisition. But what Thamus says is a provocative metaphor for the effects of technology. So here then is what Neil Postman said about testing, on pp.13-14 of "Technopoly" (the paragraph breaks are mine, for a little easier reading on a screen): "... It is not always clear, at least in the early stages of a technology's intrusion into a culture, who will gain most by it and who will lose most. This is because the changes wrought by technology are subtle if not downright mysterious, one might even say wildly unpredictable. Among the most unpredictable are those that might be labelled ideological. This is the sort of change Thamus has in mind when he warned that writers will come to rely on external signs instead of their own internal resources, and that they will receive quantities of information without proper instruction. He means that the new technologies will change what we mean by "knowing" and "truth"; they alter those deeply embedded habits of thought which give a culture its sense of what the world is like--a sense of what is the natural order of things, of what is reasonable, of what is necessary, of what is inevitable, of what is real. Since such changes are expressed in changed meanings of old words, I will hold off until later discussing the massive ideological transformation now occurring in the United States. Here I should like to give only one example of how technology creates new conceptions of what is real and, in the process, undermines older conceptions. I refer to the seemingly harmless practice of assigning marks or grades to the answers students give in examinations. This procedure seems so natural to most of us that we are hardly aware of its significance. We may even find it difficult to imagine that the number or letter is a tool or, if you will, a technology; still less that, when we use such a technology to judge someone's behavior, we have done something peculiar. In point of fact, the first instance of grading students' papers occurred at Cambridge University in 1792 at the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish. No one knows much about William Farish; not more than a handful have heard of him. And yet his idea that a quantitative value should be assigned to human thoughts was a major step toward constructing a mathematical concept of reality. If a number can be given to the quality of a thought, then a number can be given to the qualities of mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, intelligence, even sanity itself. When Galileo said that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he did not mean to include human feelings or accomplishment or insight. But most of us are now inclined to make these inclusions. Our psychologists, sociologists, and educators find it quite impossible to do their work without numbers. They believe that without numbers they cannot acquire or express authentic knowledge. I shall not argue here that this is a stupid or dangerous idea, only that it is peculiar. What is even more peculiar is that so many of us do not find the idea peculiar. To say that someone should be doing better work because he has an IQ of 134, or that someone is 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man's essay on the rise of capitalism is an A- and that man's is a C+ would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did. Our understanding of what is real is different. Which is another way of saying that embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another." There is of course much more, but this is getting long. And the technology of computers has engendered an impatience with anything longer than one screen length, if even that. Postman's "Technopoly" is a marvellous book--highly recommended. So finally on to the "Tomorrow's Professor" piece that prompted my ruminations. All best, --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Among the controversies in education and schooling, perhaps nowhere is contradiction more apparent than in tests and testing. Standardized testing has been a part of the American educational and employment scene for almost 100 years. The recent lead article in Time Magazine's Oct. 27, [2003] issue describing some of the most significant changes in the SAT beginning in 2005 has renewed interest in the long debate over the distinction between scholastic aptitude and academic achievement. The article also underscores this nation's continued ambivalence toward tests and testing." ---------------------------------------------------------------------- TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV "desk-top faculty development, one hundred times a year" Over 19,00 subscribers at over 600 academic institutions in 106 countries Sponsored by THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING http://ctl.stanford.edu ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Folks: The posting below is the second in the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. These short commentaries exploring various educational issues are produced by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching <. The Foundation invites your response at: CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org. With respect to the posting below (November, 2003), Carnegie Foundation president, Lee Shulman notes: This month's commentary is written by Lloyd Bond and addresses the complicated topic of standardized testing. Lloyd, who is now a senior scholar with the Carnegie Foundation, has long worked with the College Board and other national organizations seeking to develop fair and valid assessment tools. He was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Pittsburgh before joining Carnegie. This piece takes a personal and honest look at the often contradictory ways in which tests are seen and used. Formulating thoughtful policies about testing, at whatever level, depends on confronting our ambivalence regarding testing and acknowledging both its virtues and its problems. So, welcome once again to a Carnegie perspective Regards, Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Higher Education's Changing Environment Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning ------------------------------ 867 words --------------------------- A Different Way to Think About Testing - The Positive Uses of Contradiction By Lloyd Bond Several years ago the Washington Post featured a story on an African American teenager in one of the D.C. schools who had obtained a perfect 1600 on the SAT. Her teachers and other school officials beamed with pride about what a dedicated, serious, and bright girl this student was. Suddenly the SAT, so much maligned as a biased gatekeeper of the establishment, a proxy for social class and racial privilege with no real value as a predictor of college success, was confirmation of a particular minority student's academic brilliance. I was struck and mildly amused by the contradiction. Upon further reflection, however, I realized that I was guilty of the same inconsistency, and not just on one occasion or two, but over much of my professional life. Like the labor union negotiator who berates management for its mean-spirited stinginess, but tells the rank and file they are the best paid workers in the world with the highest standard of living, I realized that I had been telling contradictory stories about test fairness and bias depending upon my audience. For years I have complained to test development companies that they must do a better job of test construction; that their tests are imperfect and only modestly related to later success; that they must be constantly vigilant to ensure that biases do not burrow their way into the assessments. Being African American, I am often asked to speak to minority students and their parents about testing. When doing so, I have insisted that there is nothing wrong with the SAT, the ACT, and other measures of academic achievement; that they must not kill the messenger but heed the message; that they must knuckle down and study hard. Is this a case of intellectual dishonesty, or is there a deeper, more subtle truth to be found here? To be sure, the labor negotiator and I are not unique. Contradiction seems to inhere in the human social fabric. Anyone searching for clean, simple, and unambiguous solutions to the problems of school quality, religious strife, the environment, affirmative action, homelessness, and a host of other societal problems is in for bitter disappointment. Simple solutions do not exist. Even in a search for guiding principles to live by, one is confronted with contradiction and complexity. "Look before you leap," but "He who hesitates is lost." Indeed, Aristotle's famous prescription for health and longevity, "Moderation in all things," has its polar opposite in the philosophy of the legendary octogenarian Mae West who quipped, "Too much of anything can be wonderful." Among the controversies in education and schooling, perhaps nowhere is contradiction more apparent than in tests and testing. Standardized testing has been a part of the American educational and employment scene for almost 100 years. The recent lead article in Time Magazine's Oct. 27 issue describing some of the most significant changes in the SAT beginning in 2005 has renewed interest in the long debate over the distinction between scholastic aptitude and academic achievement. The article also underscores this nation's continued ambivalence toward tests and testing. We are told by its defenders that the SAT is a superb measure of academic promise, but its detractors insist that it is next to useless in helping colleges and universities select their entering class. Test-driven accountability systems have been criticized as counter-productive, and praised as the best solution yet to failing schools. Teachers insist that externally imposed standardized tests distort instruction, but public officials and policy makers maintain that well-constructed, curriculum-related examinations are the only reliable and valid alternative to inflated grades. Commercial coaching schools, not to mention students and their parents, insist that coaching on admissions tests is highly effective and can raise students' scores by hundreds of points; but test developers maintain that coaching results in only minimal score gains over and above regular instruction in school. Their defenders insist that certification and licensure tests ensure standards of quality and protect the public from incompetent practitioners, but critics insist that performance on such tests is unrelated to professional success and competence. And perhaps most controversial of all, test critics insist that standardized tests are culturally biased against minorities and the poor, while test developers insist that their tests fairly reflect genuine differences in academic preparedness that are the result of unequal educational opportunity. Can any virtue be found in such a morass of contradictions and partial truths? With respect to test bias at least, and perhaps in other controversies as well, I believe so. In telling two different stories to management and to his constituency, the labor leader was attempting to get an agreement, to drive both parties toward each other. In telling different stories to test developers and to African American students and their parents, I was attempting to get both parties on the same page, and to induce in both a certain tension, a sense that they could, in fact, be wrong. Just as an easy complacency on the part of test developers and users is to be discouraged, so also is a defeatist conviction on the part of students that their future is foreclosed, their educational aspirations doomed by implacably biased tests that cannot be mastered, even through hard work and study. _____________________________________________________ We invite you to respond to the author of the piece through CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org If you would like to be removed from this list, please email us at CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org and type "unsubscribe" in the Subject line. For permission to reprint, please contact Gay Clyburn at Clyburn@carnegiefoundation.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/ 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 Feb 26 20:49:47 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Authenticity Message-ID: Subject: Authenticity (from INNOVATION, 25 February 2004) THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING AUTHENTIC There is a great deal of talk these days about authenticity -- but precious little of it to go around. Two years ago, as stories of corporate thievery and malfeasance mounted, people wondered whatever happened to honesty, integrity and ethics -- all hallmarks of authenticity. Now, it may be making a comeback. In his best-selling book "Authentic Leadership," Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic, writes that authenticity isn't just a nice idea, it's a leadership imperative. In simplest terms, being authentic means you stand up for what you believe and you deliver on what you promise. Leaders demonstrate authenticity through their communications styles. Some suggestions for conveying authenticity: set expectations about what you expect -- let your employees know you expect them to be courteous and cooperative with each other; be available -- keep your door open and let people know you want to hear their ideas; listen to people, even the ones who require tremendous patience, and let them know you understand what they've said; and respect people as people -- validate their humanity by speaking to them about what's on their minds, not just about their jobs. (Darwin Magazine Feb 2004) http://www.darwinmag.com/read/020104/authentic.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Colleagues - Another fascinating case of newspeak. In your dictionary, authenticy is "the quality or condition of being authentic, trustworthy, or genuine." That's how CEOs should always have behaved. The underlying values of truth, honesty, sincerity and integrity are making "a comeback" under the label of "authenticity." How nice. Avoiding a direct tie to those underlying values leaves a lot of flexibility in evolving the meaning of "authenticity," such as the qualities of approachability, courtesy and patience you already see above, which liars use often. I hope Geoff Nunberg, the Stanford linguist and frequent NPR commentator, will do one of his "Fresh Air" pieces on this. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Feb 27 03:54:37 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Policy-Making Integrity Message-ID: Subject: Policy-Making Integrity (from APS What's New, by Bob Park) Friday, Feb. 20, 2004) POLITICAL SCIENCE: SCIENTIFIC INTEGRITY IN THE ADMINISTRATION. A statement issued Wednesday by a group of prominent scientists charged the administration with manipulating the science advisory process to support its political objectives: advisory panels are stacked; those that canŐt be stacked are disbanded; reports that donŐt reach the right conclusion are suppressed; and questionable policies are shielded from scientific review. Specific examples are in a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, released at the same time, "Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation into the Bush AdministrationŐs Misuse of Science." The statement was signed by more than 60 prominent scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates. The administration response was to trivialize the issue. "I think there are incidents where people have got their feathers ruffled," sniffed John Marburger, science advisor to the President, quoted by the New York Times. see for the Union of Concerned Scientists report. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Feb 29 16:00:55 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Lise Meitner Message-ID: Subject: Lise Meitner As an Austrian by birth, I could not resist sending this. Besides, it is another instance of a woman making a pivotal scientific contribution, yet not sharing the Nobel Prize for it. When I say that, I have Rosalyn Franklin in mind, who should have shared the Nobel prize awarded to Crick, Watson and Wilkins for the structure of DNA. Sadly, Franklin was no longer alive, so could not share the prize. However, neither Crick nor Watson even mentioned her in their Nobel lectures. To his credit, Wilkins did pay tribute to her contribution. In his Nobel lecture, Hahn does credit Meitner for her collaboration and the term "nuclear fission" (Kernspaltung). As interesting studies in intellectual history and ego, all Nobel lectures are online at . --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from NewsScan Daily, 27 February 2004) HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: LISE MEITNER Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Vienna-born physicist Lise Meitner (1878-1968); she shared the 1966 Enrico Fermi Award with chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann for the joint research that led to the discovery of uranium fission -- thereby laying the theoretical groundwork for the development of the atomic bomb and nuclear power. Coining the term "fission" for the process, Meitner (working in Sweden with her nephew, physicist Otto Frisch) discovered how a uranium atom bombarded with neutrons splits and releases massive quantities of energy. Her discovery was based on a careful re-analysis of the results of nuclear experiments she had conducted in 1930s Germany with her long-time collaborator and close friend, chemist Otto Hahn. Being Jewish, Meitner was forced to flee to Sweden after Hitler invaded Austria in 1938. Hahn sent her the data from their experiments, and in 1939 she published her groundbreaking findings in the journal Nature. Born the daughter of a Viennese doctor, Meitner became interested in atomic physics in 1902 after reading about Marie and Pierre Curie's discovery of radium. In 1906 she became one of the first women to receive a doctorate from the University of Vienna. Moving to Berlin to study with quantum theorist Max Planck, she also began her working association with the radiochemist Otto Hahn, a relationship that lasted 30 years and brought both of them international fame. In 1918 the pair discovered protactinium, (chemical element 91 that occupies the position between thorium and uranium on the periodic table). Meitner spent the World War I years working as an X-ray nurse with the Austrian army. Returning to Germany after the war to work with Hahn, they were at the point of discovering how to split the uranium atom when in 1938 Meitner had to leave for Sweden to escape Nazi persecution. Nine months later Hahn announced his success in splitting the atom. He sent Meitner the results of his experimentation for analysis, providing her with the data she needed to explain the process at work when bombarding one uranium atom with a neutron could release some 200 million electron volts. Despite having come up with the key concept of atomic fission, Meitner was overlooked when the 1944 Nobel Prize was awarded to Hahn for splitting the atom. The Danish physicist Niels Bohr brought Meitner's work on fission to the attention of the scientists in America who were working on the atomic bomb, whose development came as a surprise to Meitner. After the war, she was at pains to note that she had no part in its development, stating that her atomic research was never undertaken with the goal of "producing death-dealing weapons." She remained in Stockholm, working at the Atomic Energy Laboratory, until 1958 when she retired and moved to Cambridge, England. She also broke with Hahn, not because of the Nobel Prize snub, but because he along with other German scientists never stood up to Hitler. See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/081763732X/newsscancom/ref=nos im for Patricia Rife's "Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Mar 8 16:20:59 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] DIY Background Checks Message-ID: Subject: DIY Background Checks (from NewsScan Daily, 8 March 2004) BACKGROUND CHECK-IN-A-BOX ChoicePoint is marketing a new product aimed at security-conscious employers who want to make sure their new hires are trouble-free. Stacked between gallon jars of mayonnaise and office furniture at Sam's Club, the ChoicePoint check-in-a-box package urges shoppers to "make better hiring decisions" by purchasing the $39.77 product, which contains a CD-ROM that allows users to tap into ChoicePoint's online databases. The new marketing effort signals data vendors' shift toward small businesses, which have lagged behind large corporations in conducting criminal background checks when hiring. Privacy advocates warn that such products put too much information at the fingertips of anyone with $40 to spend, and argue that ChoicePoint's requirement that users have a business license provides inadequate safeguard against the product's abuse. "If Joe's Bait Shop... goes out and buys this thing with a business license and then he wants to find out information about a neighbor, then he would be able to essentially do that," says the head of the Georgia Association of Professional Private Investigators. (AP 8 Mar 2004) http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040308/D8166SRG0.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- EAS-INFO readers know that the trend toward ever more diverse access to personal information has been commented on before, e.g. four years ago. The links there still work, but the Forbes article is no longer free. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Mar 8 18:15:30 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] DIY Publishing/Texts Message-ID: Subject: DIY Publishing/Texts (from INNOVATION, 3 March 2004) ON-DEMAND PUBLISHING PICKS UP STEAM For would-be authors, Borders Group is pushing a new option -- in six Philadelphia-area stores customers can send in their manuscripts and a check for $199 and in a month or so receive back 10 copies of their novel, memoir or cookbook. For $499, customers get the upscale "Professional Publication" option, which includes an ISBN number and shelf space in the Philadelphia store for five copies. Print-on-demand ventures have made the rounds at various publishing houses for the past few years, and several companies, including Xlibris, 1stBooks and iUniverse, have built their businesses exclusively on what used to be dismissed as "vanity press." These three companies alone have published a total of more than 45,000 titles so far, charging customers anywhere between $459 to $1,900. "Self-publishing, previously viewed as a last resort, is increasingly seen as a first step," says Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio. (New York Times 1 Mar 2004) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/01/technology/01pod.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- So, not only can you put your thesis or course notes on a bookstore shelf, but you should also be aware of custom aspects of text book publishing, e.g. McGraw-Hill's Primis program, particularly . All major educational publishers are developing similar programs. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Mar 9 17:52:18 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Academic Patent Binge Message-ID: Subject: Academic Patent Binge Are the walls of academia tumbling down? Rearranging the masonry a little may not be all bad, but who's in charge? --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from INNOVATION, 31 December 2003) ACADEMIC PATENT BINGE CHI Research estimates that in 2002, 13 of the top 25 universities in the U.S. increased the number of patents they received by 50% or more over 1997 numbers. The New Jersey research outfit ranks universities by technological strength (a measure derived from the number of patents issued combined with their relevance), and points out that six of the top universities have seen increases of 100% or more in the last five years. The patent boom has spawned a new crop of university-sponsored startups, as well as netted a financial bonanza thanks to patent licensing revenues, according to the Association of University Technology Managers. Income from patents has boosted university revenues to $1.07 billion in 2001, up from $699 million in 1997. The trend has also changed the atmosphere at universities, with professors spending more time away from the lab to consult with fledgling startups and exploit their inventions. "No longer are faculty satisfied with publishing," says Mark Coburn, director of the Office of Technology Transfer at the University of Rochester. "They have the sparkle in their eye to start their own business." (Technology Review Dec 2003/Jan 2004) http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/innovation41203.asp (from INNOVATION, 3 March 2004) ACADEMIC MONEY-GRUBBING Scientific American columnist Gary Stix suggests that a nasty fight over biotech patent rights "demonstrates that a university is as able as any corporation to do anything in its power to continue milking an intellectual-property cash cow. In devising a strategy to maintain a grip on its blockbuster [patent], Columbia may even be able to teach corporate patent holders a few lessons." The battle is between Columbia, on the one side, and prominent U.S. biotech companies over a method for inserting human genes into hamster cells to identify cells that will produce large volumes of proteins from those genes. Stix notes that Columbia received $100 million in revenue from just one year (1999) -- nearly 25% of the university's entire research budget. He continues, "The Columbia patents go to prove that when the stakes are high enough, an institution of 'higher' learning can get down and connive with the best of them." (Scientific American Mar 2004) http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa001&colID=7&articleID=000790A0-C61F-101E-861F83414B7F0000 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Mar 12 14:37:32 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Slicker Resume Fraud Message-ID: Subject: Slicker Resume Fraud (from NewsScan Daily, 10 March 2004) RESUME FRAUD GOES HIGH-TECH As companies ratchet up efforts to detect misrepresentations on job seekers' resumes, resume fraud is jumping to a new level, thanks to operators of Web sites that provide phony degrees and toll-free numbers for employers to call, where they're assured that a job candidate's credentials are valid. Some candidates are even paying hackers to alter class lists at universities they claim to have attended, says Charles Wardell, managing director at Korn/Ferry International. "In the past, people just lied. Now, what they are doing is they are hacking into a class of a university and putting their name on the class list." Wardell says his company has started requesting degrees and, in some cases, even grades from potential job candidates, but such documents are also easily faked, thanks to the ingenuity of Web sites such as easydiploma.com, which offers phony degrees and a verification service. "You can select the parchment paper, the insignia and the type of degree," says the head of a corporate investigation firm's background screening division. Background search firms say these increasingly sophisticated resume fraud schemes are making their jobs more difficult: "A good liar understands that you have to have some basis and facts to pull off a scam. But it's even more dangerous when employers unknowingly hire a fraud, thief or a crook," says the president of Employment Screening Resources. (Reuters 9 Mar 2004) http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=OJNDBKAUN40DSCRBAEOCFFA?type=technologyNews&storyID=4529931 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Sobering quote from the Reuters article: > The background search firm ADP Screening and Selection Services, in > a 2003 study, found that more than 50 percent of the people on whom > it conducted employment and education checks had submitted false > information, compared with about 40 percent in 2002. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Mar 13 16:06:54 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Innovation- What & How? Message-ID: Subject: Innovation: What & How? Dear Colleagues - Regarding the politically hot topic of the outsourcing of jobs, the proponent's standard mantra is that, yes, outsourcing causes short-term dislocation, but long-term it is best for the US. We will retain our primary role as innovator, it is said. What is outsourced represents the "less desirable" jobs. I pause to wonder what defines that process of innovation we expect to retain to our comfort? What makes it so unassailably "American"? A dominant theme of our technology has been automation, replacing much of the "messy inefficiency" of human volition and judgment with the predictably manageable processes of computer modelling. The items below exemplify the application of, or should I say encroachment of, the automation tendencies to innovation. That trend had better not be the entire claim for US advantage in innovation, as the last item below suggests. If we want to be innovative, we better not stop being vigorously messy and human. A timely collection of background articles on "Technology and the Global Economy" can be found at . --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 3 March 2004) SOFTWARE THAT STIMULATES INNOVATION Companies increasingly are turning to technology to automate portions of the innovation process. Environmental scanning, for example, tracks events, trends, and relationships outside your organization's environment, helping top executives identify and understand strategic threats and opportunities. Environmental scanning services like Nexcerpt and CyberAlert use software agents to search online publications, Web sites, newswires, and newsgroups to find information of interest. But they go beyond simple keyword searches, letting you define complex Boolean queries, assign priorities to different information themes, restrict the scope of sources covered, and add content and context to their reports. Businesses often use environmental scanning to underpin competitor intelligence and reputation management initiatives, as well as to monitor megatrends. The information yielded can help develop road maps for your organization or product. Road mapping helps create a combined strategic, product, and marketing perspective, which can drive innovation. Road-mapping software helps define and visualize the route toward a breakthrough product, service, or organizational change. To stimulate creative thinking, many companies use inexpensive software packages like ParaMind and IdeaFisher. Another, IdeaCue, uses an electronic flash card to offer a series of random ideas for improving existing products. IdeaCue's concept scrambler combines multiple ideas; you determine if a particular combination is worth pursuing. (Intelligent Enterprise 7 Feb 2004) http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=17601269 (from INNOVATION, 10 March 2004) 'THOMAS EDISON IN A BOX' Stephen Thaler's Creativity Machine is changing the way the process of invention occurs, says General Dynamics' Rusty Miller, who calls the device "Thomas Edison in a box": "His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information," the official name of the Creativity Machine, says Miller. "His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that." Thaler first conceptualized his invention by studying the "noise" -- random activity -- that neural network connections produce as they're in the process of "dying." "Noise allows neurons to have a little elbow room to dream up new ideas," says Miller. Some biologists have postulated that in the human context, noise is essential for the brain to function properly, providing the variability that allows organisms to adapt to new situations. Thaler has capitalized on that theory by "tickling" the connections just enough to get them thinking. In response, the Creativity Machine has produced the concept that became Oral B's CrossAction toothbrush, has discovered new substances more durable than diamonds, has served as the "brains" of a robotic cockroach, and has been recruited by spy agencies to track the Internet and report unusual activity. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch Jan 25 2004) http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/News/Science+&+Medicine/E981DA33F2CF718986256E250061FFF6?OpenDocument&Headline=Computer+Creativity+Machine+simulates+the+human+brain IDEAL WAYS TO GENERATE IDEAS Good food, plenty of water, lively music and shared laughter are essential for successful innovation sessions, says Lynda Curtin, a specialist in creative and conceptual thinking, referred to as an "ideation facilitator." Ideation, she explains, describes the complete process, from deciding where ideas are needed, to generating and evaluating ideas, to planning and carrying out next steps. Framing innovation in this way is "much more powerful and practical than traditional brainstorming - where anything goes and very often nothing happens as a result," says Curtin. Other practical, matter-of-fact advice: Forget about trying to come up with the one best problem statement -- or the one best solution, for that matter. Instead, generate multiple focus statements, then choose a few to work with during your session. "Go broad. Set yourself up for a wider range of powerful solutions to choose from," she says. Then actively plan for multiple solutions with a "wave of ideas approach" -- as one idea is implemented, the next idea is already well on the way to implementation. To help get a new perspective on familiar problems, invite people outside your area of expertise -- including customers and suppliers -- to your ideation sessions. (Webpronews.com Feb 2004) http://www.webpronews.com/ebusiness/smallbusiness/wpn-2-2004022516EssentialTipsthatLeadtoPowerfulInnovationSessions.html (from NewsScan Daily, 11 March 2004) BRAINSTORMING SOFTWARE New software called "Solutions Genie" from the Indian company DSS Systems & Software Technologies offers tools for brainstorming and allows a facilitator to group, sort, export, import ideas, etc. The software also provides idea ranking/decision making tools, multiple level implementation tools, and network brainstorming and idea filtering, where the facilitator and the team may carry out these exercises from their remote machines on an intranet or the Internet. http://www.brainstormingdss.com From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Mar 15 17:32:41 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Robot Race Flops Message-ID: Subject: Robot Race Flops (from NewsScan Daily, 15 March 2004) ROBOT RACE IS A BUST The highly touted robot race staged by the Pentagon in an effort to boost R&D in driverless vehicles has ended with all 15 self-navigating devices petering out within a few miles of the starting gate -- victims of technical glitches, barbed wire fences and rough terrain. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had spent $13 million on its Grand Challenge, which offered a $1 million prize to the creators of the vehicle that could complete a 150-mile race across the Mojave Desert within 10 hours. Team members were not allowed to touch or steer the vehicles and most of the robots stalled, overturned or ran off the course shortly after taking off. Defense officials foresee using such autonomous robotic vehicles to ferry supplies in war zones. (AP 15 Mar 2004) http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040315/D81AQ3M00.html -------------------------------------------------------------------- Given the success of unmanned (piloted by remote control) aircraft for war time surveillance and more, I'm surprised that an application for ferrying supplies in war zones wasn't envisioned in similar terms. Maybe that's already happening. Autonomy in messy circumstances is hugely challenging and a questionable goal. Klaatu barada nikto. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Mar 18 22:06:29 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Skype Message-ID: Subject: Skype (from NewsScan Daily, 18 March 2004) TELECOM REVOLUTION? Skype, a California start-up created by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (founders of the Internet file-swapping service Kazaa), is developing software to make it possible for free phone calls to be made anywhere in the world. Swedish-born Zennstrom and Friis, a citizen of Finland, decided to adapt peer-to-peer technology to telecommunications: "We sat down and we had talked about this for a long time. Where can we use this technology to solve some real problems and take advantage of the competitive advantages of disruptive technology? With peer-to-peer, whether we have 1 million or 10 million or 100 million users, our cost is pretty much the same. We can provide it for free, because we don't have any costs for it." Venture capitalist Timothy Draper says, "This is a major phenomenon that's going to spread throughout the world," and he predicts that Skype will have "a really tremendous business." Independent telecom analyst Daniel Berning says that "the basic technology that they're applying, that's the way phones will work in the future." (San Jose Mercury News 18 Mar 2004) http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/8215877.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------- The entertainment industry is still trying to "put the toothpaste back into the tube" in the wake of Kazaa and its kin. The Internet will continue to be a disruptive technology, this time in long-distance communications. Do read the story though, because Skype is not on a heads-on collision course with long-distance voice services as we know them now. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Mar 24 18:12:34 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Charles F. Kettering Message-ID: Subject: Charles F. Kettering (from NewsScan Daily, 24 March 2004) "The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life, the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread of the regimented, electronic society." (J. G. Ballard) HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: CHARLES F. KETTERING Today's Honorary Subscriber is the American engineer and inventor Charles Franklin Kettering (1876-1958), who made major contributions to the development of the modern automobile. He collaborated with the chemist Thomas Midgley in the use of tetraethyl lead to eliminate engine knock and the application of quick drying lacquers to automobile finishes. He also played a part in the discovery of Freon and in the modification of the high-speed, two-cycle diesel engine for use in trucks, buses and railroad engines. In 1951 he also developed a revolutionary high-compression automobile engine. Kettering was born in 1876 into a farming family in Loudonville, Ohio. In 1904, after graduating from Ohio State University with a degree in electrical engineering, he began working for the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, where he developed the first electric cash register. He rose to chief of the inventions department before resigning in 1909 to join with Edward A. Deeds to found the Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (Delco) where they went into the business of designing automotive electrical equipment. In 1914 Kettering also founded the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company, which during World War I developed a propeller-driven guided missile with a 200-pound bomb load. Then in 1916 Delco became a subsidiary of United Motors Corporation, later General Motors Corporation (GM). Kettering was vice president and director of research for GM from 1920 until his retirement in 1947. After his retirement Kettering continued to work on automobile related inventions (by the time of his death in 1958, he had acquired over 200 patents), but he also increased his interest in philanthropy, particularly in supporting cancer research. As early as 1927, he had set up the Charles F. Kettering Foundation "to sponsor and carry out scientific research for the benefit of humanity." In 1945, with generous financing from the Sloan Foundation (set up in 1934 by GM CEO Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.), Kettering was instrumental in establishing the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. Located in New York City, the institute conducts research in physical and biological sciences relating to cancer. It also provides graduate instruction through Cornell University and publishes research progress reports. In 1960 the institute was expanded to become the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Kettering's name and memory was more recently honored when the General Motors Institute located in Flint, Michigan, was renamed Kettering University on January 1, 1998. See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587981335/newsscancom/ref=nosim for a biography of Kettering by Thomas Alvin Boye -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.) -------------------------------------------------------------------- Kettering is also the inventor of the automotive ignition system where energy stored in the magnetic flux of the ignition coil is allowed to collapse rapidly, originally by the opening of a contact, the "points", later by a transistor equivalent. The rapid flux collapse generates in a secondary winding the high voltage necessary to reliably generate a spark in the plug, even through the higher dielectric constant compressed fuel mixture. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Mar 25 00:15:28 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] MIT's OpenCourseWare Message-ID: Subject: MIT's OpenCourseWare Dear Colleagues - I've pointed you to this resource before, last in 2002, at , where I also mention other course/syllabus portals. At that time, there weren't a lot of MIT courses online yet, and the feedback I got from some of you doubted the promise of the enterprise. At about 500 courses now, look again: E.g. I find a lot of useful material in my EE area , there are MIT Sloan School courses, and interesting ones in the Science, Technology and Society program where our EE alum David Mindell teaches. In another two years this archive of complete course materials will become a standard by which engineering education is judged. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Mar 29 17:19:59 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Margaret Knight Message-ID: Subject: Margaret Knight Another interesting bio item from NewsScan Daily. This time no book is referenced, so let a google search lead you to many relevant links, such as and a picture of her machine at . The women inventor patent share of annually granted U.S. origin patents rose from 2.6 percent in 1977 to 10.3 percent in 1998. See . "I was called a tomboy, but that made little impression on me. I sighed sometimes because I was not like other girls, but wisely concluded that I couldn't help it, and sought further consolation from my tools." (Margaret Knight) --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------- (from NewsScan Daily, 29 March 2004) HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: MARGARET KNIGHT Today's Honorary Subscriber is the American inventor Margaret Knight (1838-1914), who has been called the Queen of Paper Bags for her invention of a machine that folded and glued paper into the flatbottomed brown bags used by shoppers. Knight first built a wooden model of her bag-making machine, which she brought to a machine shop to produce the working iron model required for a patent. A machinist in the shop appropriated her design and secured a patent in his name, but Knight brought a patent interference lawsuit and succeeded in acquiring the patent in 1870. She set up the Eastern Paper Bag Company and began to earn royalties from her invention. Today Knight's original box-making machine is housed in the Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Museum. The paper bag-folding machine was not Knight's only invention. Besides devices that improved her paper bag machine, her other inventions included a new window frame and sash design, a numbering machine, an automatic boring tool, and a spinning or sewing machine. The total number of her inventions is generally thought to be eighty-nine. They earned her a good deal of money, but when she died in 1914 her fortune had dwindled down to a mere $300. Knight was born in York, Maine in 1838 and came up with her first invention at the age of twelve. After witnessing a worker being struck by a spindle flying off its moorings, she designed a covered shuttle that is still in use today. She was working at the Columbia Paper Bag Company in Massachusetts when she designed her flat-bottomed paper bag machine, replacing the envelope shaped bags then in use. Although Knight was not the first woman to receive a patent, she was among the most prolific of female inventors, having some 27 patents to her credit. Her accomplishments were such that one obituary described her as a "woman Edison." From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Apr 17 02:21:49 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Leisure & Lifestyle Message-ID: Subject: Leisure & Lifestyle (from Edupage, April 16, 2004) STUDENTS CREATE SOFTWARE COMPANION Three British college students have won a Microsoft-sponsored technology competition with their University Leisure and Lifestyle Manager (ULL), a software application designed to aid university students with academic as well as social parts of their lives. Built to run on smartphones or handheld computers, the ULL offers tools such as a service that helps students choose textbooks and a feature to provide feedback on academic work. On the social front, the "Take Me Home, I'm Drunk" feature sends a message to a local taxi service, indicating where the user is located and the user's home address. The ULL also includes a buddy list that can tell users exactly where friends are and a tool that translates languages for foreign students. The students who built the ULL were selected from 4,500 entrants in the competition and will represent the U.K. in Brazil this summer in an international competition. BBC, 16 April 2004 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3623315.stm --------------------------------------------------------------------- Who does it tell us more about, students or Microsoft? --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Apr 21 03:50:08 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Resume Fraud Message-ID: Subject: Resume Fraud from NETFUTURE #156 (See details about the NETFUTURE newsletter at the end.) Re-engineering the Personal Resume ---------------------------------- You can add resume fraud and resume fraud-detection efforts to the various technological arms races spawned by the digital era. Web sites offering fake degrees have been with us for a while, but now some people are paying hackers to enter their names in class-list databases of bona fide universities. But that's a felony and there's no need to go to such extremes. A Reuters story ("Resume Fraud Gets Slicker and Easier", Feb. 9), relates how web sites will not only provide degrees, grades, and transcripts, but now will also give you an 800-number that employers can call to "verify" your education. According to Reuters, The background search firm ADP Screening and Selection Services, in a 2003 study, found that more than 50 percent of the people on whom it conducted employment and education checks had submitted false information, compared with about 40 percent in 2002. If the numbers are sound, that's a 25 percent increase in one year. Not surprisingly, some 80 percent of companies are said to have resorted to counter measures, checking the backgrounds and criminal records of their employees. How could they not? The resume challenge is just another one of the many indications of what happens when social transactions are increasingly mediated by technology. Whether you're talking about privacy invasions and defenses, or censorship and efforts to outflank it, or copyright piracy and its prevention, or commercial assaults against children and the attempts to protect children from them, or plagiarism and plagiarism detection, or the spam and virus wars, or the increasingly automated battles for "mind-share" fought in pop-up windows and other media spaces -- in all these cases the conflict is more and more taking the form of escalating encounters between my technology and yours, software against software, hardware against hardware. Or, which is the same thing: the conflict is less and less a matter of my having anything directly to do with you. So normal social constraints play less and less of an inhibiting role, and the insults to human decency become more extreme every month. The peculiar, non-technological demands placed upon us by this "technologization" of social transactions seem to me the great missed story of the digital era. We can scarcely avoid being caught up in the various technical arms races that are changing the character of modern life. But the clear implication is that the hope for saving human society depends on our complementary advances in the art of being human together whenever and however we can manage it. I have no greater penchant for this work than the next person. But I do know that the opportunity for it exists at every moment, and the first requirement is not for some sort of doing in an external or programmatic sense. Rather, the need is to bring a different, more inner, more attentive, more meditational dimension to whatever else we doing. In the case of an employer evaluating a job applicant and resume, the only ultimate security lies in a practical habit of deep, soul-searching attention and communicative skill that enables one to read the other person (and allows oneself to be read) at a level where deception is nearly impossible. An ambitious goal? Certainly. But it is exactly the kind of goal we are required to pursue if we would, at least with part of ourselves, step outside the ultimately futile terms of those technical arms races. ===================================================================== ABOUT NETFUTURE NetFuture, a freely distributed newsletter on technology and human responsibility, is published by The Nature Institute, 20 May Hill Road, Ghent NY 12075 (tel: 518-672-0116; web: <. Postings occur roughly every four weeks. The editor is Steve Talbott, author of "The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst." Copyright 2004 by The Nature Institute. You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes. You may also redistribute individual articles in their entirety, provided the NetFuture url and this paragraph are attached. NetFuture is supported by freely given reader contributions, and could not survive without them. For details and special offers, see http://www.netfuture.org/support.html>. Current and past issues of NetFuture are available on the Web: http://www.netfuture.org/ To subscribe to NetFuture send the message, "subscribe netfuture yourfirstname yourlastname", to listserv@maelstrom.stjohns.edu . No subject line is needed. To unsubscribe, send the message, "signoff netfuture". If you have problems subscribing or unsubscribing, send mail to: netfuture-request@maelstrom.stjohns.edu . We would like to hear your reactions. Send comments about the publication to Steve Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com). This issue of NetFuture: From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Apr 23 14:40:01 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Engineering Futures Message-ID: Subject: Engineering Futures Dear Colleagues - http://www.asee.org/precollege/ I only just became aware of this, a bit late in the current time window between matriculation and acceptance for for high school seniors. Still, it might be of some use in future. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- Famous Engineers http://www.asee.org/precollege/famous.cfm This website, sponsored by Engineering: Your Future (an effort by the American Society for Engineering Education to increase awareness and interest in the field of engineering also reported on in March 4, 1998 Scout Report for Science and Engineering) highlights "famous people who are also engineers or have an engineering background." The list includes researchers, designers, and inventors, but also artists, Super Bowl winners, astronauts, Olympians, heads of state, and Academy Award recipients. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Apr 25 02:41:19 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Curbing Grade Inflation Message-ID: Subject: Curbing Grade Inflation It ought more properly to be called "grade compression" because everything gets squeezed into the A, A-, B+ range. Allusions to remedying the situation I've heard objected to as "unilateral disarmament." There may finally be a gathering momentum to put more meaning back into grading, led by Princeton . Re. more fundamental limits to the meaning of grades, see my earlier . --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Apr 30 19:43:12 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Faith in Space Message-ID: Subject: Faith in Space (from WHAT'S NEW -- Friday, April 30, 2004) NASA SCIENCE: IS THE SPACE AGENCY BECOMING JUST A THEME PARK? For a million years our species was confronted with a world we could not hope to understand. Now, almost within the span of a single human lifetime, the book of nature has been thrown open. We aspire to solve the great mysteries: dark matter, dark energy, why there is mass, the big bang, and the origin of life. We long to know. Instead, according to the New York Times, experiments to unravel these great mysteries have been assigned low priority, along with anything that has to do with global warming. . This will allow NASA to focus its resources on human exploration, pandering to a public weaned on Star Trek. NASA's priorities will delay real exploration by decades, vastly increase costs, and put lives at risk. You might suppose NASA would hold off until the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond makes its report in June . The Moon/Mars Commission, was apparently mere window dressing. The only appeal open to scientists is to members of Congress. ----------------------------------------------------------------- The planned demise of the Hubble space telescope still appalls me. What is given priority instead are more faith-based initiatives. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue May 4 22:09:39 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] What Matters Now? Message-ID: Subject: What Matters Now? Dear Colleagues - Regular readers of EAS-INFO will recall that I often cited material by Phil Agre at UCLA, a person of unusually wide-ranging interests relevant to this list. At least weekly I would get mailings from Phil's RRE list . Then nothing pretty much all last fall and early 2004. Then he wrote on 3/24/04: > RRE is ten years old. I stopped sending out these links because a > bunch of issues all got stale at once. Like okay, you've probably > got it about Enron, and Microsoft, and cyberspace, and conservative > jargon, etc. So what matters now? We'll have to figure that out. Something of an intellectual "mid-life crisis," one might say. If only more of us thought that deeply in our age of "Whatever else you do, don't stop talking. If you do, you'll cease to exist." He sent some URLs that deal with issues at "the intersection of information technology and more permanent things." All are interesting, many strike me as important, and I reproduce them below. So, I would like to mirror in our EAS-INFO list Phil Agre's quest for "What Matters?" After all, EAS-INFO is about eight years old. What matters most to you? Please send me your thoughts at . Don't put it off while waiting for that tranquil moment of contemplation when you can give me a profound answer. In my experience, life is seldom that kind. Rather, send me something shorter sooner. Thanks, and all best, --PJK -------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 3/24/04 7:05 PM To: pjk From: Phil Agre RRE is ten years old. I stopped sending out these links because a bunch of issues all got stale at once. Like okay, you've probably got it about Enron, and Microsoft, and cyberspace, and conservative jargon, etc. So what matters now? We'll have to figure that out. As a first guess, here are some links that are mostly intelligent academic discussions at the intersection of information technology and more permanent things. Do send links corresponding to your own guesses. RRE home page: http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/rre.html Failure as an Endpoint (anthropology of financial markets) http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/international/asianlaw/content/rilespubFailureasanEndpoint.pdf Liberal Democracy's Time http://www.newschool.edu/gf/news/02-03/polsci_seminar/Scheuerman_paper_2003.pdf Structural Transformation of the University http://www.ssrc.org/programs/calhoun/publications/HigherEd.pdf documents on the US alliance with Saddam in the 1980's http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/press.htm A Handbook for Afghan Journalists http://www.iwpr.net/development/resources/afghanhandbook_english.pdf social aspects of computing Information Technology and the International Public Sphere http://www.ssrc.org/programs/calhoun/publications/infotechandpublicsphere.pdf Social Theoretical Issues in the Design of Collaboratories http://weber.ucsd.edu/~gbowker/collab.pdf The History of Computing in the History of Technology http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/articles/hcht.pdf Privacy, Economics, and Price Discrimination on the Internet http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/privacy.economics.pdf Government Policy Toward Open Source Software http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract.php?pid=296 intelligent discussion of the economics of Microsoft versus Linux http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001190.html technology Reconfigurable Computing and Electronic Nanotechnology http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~mihaib/research/asap03.pdf The Anatomy of the Grid http://www.globus.org/research/papers/anatomy.pdf The Physiology of the Grid http://www.globus.org/research/papers/ogsa.pdf Linux' Journey to the Mainstream Desktop http://www.osafoundation.org/presos/desktop-linux-presentation.pdf syllabus for a course on the semantic web http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/is277.html conferences Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Chicago, 6-10 November 2004 http://www.acm.org/cscw2004/ Designing Interactive Systems, Cambridge, MA, 1-4 August 2004 http://turing.acm.org/sigs/sigchi/dis2004/ Designing Ubiquitous Information Environments, Cleveland, 1-3 August 2005 http://ifip2005.cwru.edu/ more papers by Paul David New Intellectual Property Rights Threaten Global "Open Science" http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/workp/swp00016.pdf Economic Fundamentals of the Knowledge Society http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/workp/swp02003.pdf The Political Economy of Public Science http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/workp/swp99022.pdf General Purpose Technologies and Surges in Productivity http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/workp/swp99026.pdf research papers that might only work from .edu IT and Organizational Change: An Institutionalist Perspective http://fiordiliji.emeraldinsight.com/vl=697727/cl=100/nw=1/rpsv/cgi-bin/linker?ini=emerald&reqidx=/cw/mcb/09593845/v13n4/s1/p234 Institutional Design in Democratic Contexts http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/1467-9760.00032/abs/ article on culture and globalization by Marshall Sahlins http://makeashorterlink.com/?Q2F7227C7 Is Science a Public Good? http://makeashorterlink.com/?C377227C7 ERP Systems and the University as a "Unique" Organisation http://fiordiliji.emeraldinsight.com/vl=954971/cl=36/nw=1/rpsv/cgi-bin/linker?ini=emerald&reqidx=/cw/mcb/09593845/v17n1/s2/p31 Liberal Democracy and the Empire of Speed http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/301/239/47244607w6/5!pdf_imm_a1 end -------------------------------------- Date: 5/4/04 8:06 PM To: pjk 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 research An Entrepreneurial Theory of the Firm http://www.business.auc.dk/druid/conferences/summer1998/conf-papers/casson.pdf The Revival of Economic Sociology http://www.efpu.hr/fet/dokumenti/sociologija/ekonomska_sociologija/neweconomic_chpt1.pdf The Economic Geography of Talent http://www.creativeclass.org/acrobat/AAAG.pdf Citizenship in the Age of the Internet and the Age of Global Capitalism http://www.education.ucsb.edu/~bazerman/page3.html The Anthropology of Online Communities http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~swilson/research/wilson_peterson.pdf Modularity in Technology and Organization http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~langlois/ModularJEBO.pdf Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Product Technologies http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~langlois/ARCHITECTURAL.htm Is Science a Public Good? (a better URL) http://www.compilerpress.atfreeweb.com/Anno%20Callon%20&%20Bowkers%20Is%20Science%20a%20Public%20Good%20STHV%201994.htm IT and Organizational Change: An Institutionalist Perspective (a better URL) http://www.emeraldinsight.com/rpsv/cw/mcb/09593845/v13n4/s1/p234 conferences Open Source and Free Software, Toronto, 9-11 May 2004 http://osconf.kmdi.utoronto.ca/ Appliance Design, Bristol, UK, 11-13 May 2004 http://www.appliancedesign.org/2ad/ Semantics in Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing, New York, 18 May 2004 http://www.isi.edu/~hongsuda/SemPGRID04/ Digital Libraries, Tucson, 7-11 June 2004 http://www.jcdl2004.org/ Participatory Design, Toronto, 27-31 July 2004 http://www.cpsr.org/conferences/pdc2004/ Location Privacy, Maine, 5-7 August 2004 http://locationprivacy.objectis.net/ Digital Libraries, Bath, UK, 12-16 September 2004 http://www.ecdl2004.org/ everything else Semantic Blogging http://dijest.com/aka/2003/08/23.html#a2584 http://jena.hpl.hp.com/~stecay/papers/xmleurope2004/040420_semblog_draft10.html grid-based science in the UK http://www.google.com/search?q=%22e+science%22 Bringing Design to Software (1996) http://hci.stanford.edu/bds/ Philip Mirowski on the history of AI http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m2483/4_24/112314327/print.jhtml The Role of Scientific and Technical Data and Information in the Public Domain http://www.nap.edu/books/030908850X/html/ Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/ American Historical Review http://www.historycooperative.org/ahrindex.html old photographs of Japan http://oldphoto.lb.nagasaki-u.ac.jp/unive/ Project for Public Spaces http://www.pps.org/ A Survey of Nomadic Design Practice http://www.portablefx.com/ early video art journal now online http://www.radicalsoftware.org/ why Los Angeles is a great city http://laweekly.com/ink/04/12/counter-gold.php From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu May 6 03:16:00 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] The Inventor's Comeback? Message-ID: Subject: The Inventor's Comeback? Be sure to read all three items. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 5 May 2004) THE INDEPENDENT INVENTOR MAKES A COMEBACK The number of U.S. patent applications and subsequent awards has more than doubled over the past 15 years, reflecting Americans' never-ending craving to create "bigger, better" versions of just about everything. "This is an extraordinarily inventive age," says Arthur Molella, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. "I think we're feeling changes such as people felt at the beginning of the last century, when they suddenly had the ability to travel all about the world." Indeed, technology is playing a major role in invention today, with nearly half of all patent applications in the electronic- or computer-related fields. And while the corporate labs have been prolific in cranking out inventions, a full 25% of patents granted each year still go to so-called independent inventors, and that percentage may be increasing. "For a long time, industry didn't want anything to do with the independent inventor because they were too unrealistic in their expectations," says Bob Lougher, executive director of the United Inventors Association. "But now, corporate America is reaching out to the independent inventor." (MSNBC 22 Apr 2004) http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4725189/ THE CHANGING FACE OF INNOVATION Big companies in search of the next big blockbuster should set their sights a little lower, says Adrian Slywotzky of Mercer Management Consulting. "In most industries, truly differentiating new-product breakthroughs are becoming increasingly rare." With that in mind, companies have been shifting their R&D efforts away from in-house labs looking for that next "Eureka!" moment (think AT&T's Bell Labs and Xerox PARC), and transforming it into an "internal, bureaucratically driven process," says NYU professor William Baumol. Increasingly, what constitutes innovation in large firms is a series of incremental improvements in daily operational processes. Meanwhile, those companies still looking for the "Big Bang" innovation are buying up small, creative startups, which currently dominate the introduction of new inventions and radical innovations, or even looking to offshore outsourcing for the next big idea. For instance, Wipro, in India, employs 6,500 people in Bangalore to do R&D for Western companies -- including nine out of the world's top ten telecom equipment manufacturers. (The Economist 22 Apr 2004) http://www.economist.com/business/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=2610485 (from INNOVATION, 28 April 2004) WHY STRUGGLE WITH NEW WHEN 'DESIGN-AROUND' WILL DO? Patent attorneys say that increasingly companies are imitating their rivals' products, while tweaking their own versions just enough to avoid a patent infringement suit. The strategy, called "design-around," is gaining popularity as companies shift more manufacturing outside the U.S. in an effort to lower costs. "There's really been a spike in this sort of activity in the last few years," says patent attorney Jack Barufka. "We design around competitor patents on a regular basis," says James O'Shaughnessy, VP and chief intellectual property counsel at Rockwell Automation. "Anybody who is really paying attention to the patent system, who respects it, will still nevertheless try to find ways -- either offshore production or a design-around -- to produce an equivalent product that doesn't infringe." The practice is particularly common among auto parts and semiconductor manufacturers and other large markets where newcomers are seeking a way to gain a foothold. Meanwhile, the trend is pushing up R&D costs as companies that come up with original ideas try to protect their inventions by coming up with a dozen other ways to achieve the same result -- and patent those, too. "A patent is basically worthless if someone else can design around it easily and make a high-performing component for less," says patent attorney Morgan Chu. (Wall Street Journal 19 Apr 2004) http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108233054158486127,00.html (sub req'd) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu May 6 20:16:00 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] The Cheap Revolution Message-ID: Subject: The Cheap Revolution See also http://jove.eng.yale.edu/pipermail/eas-info/2003/000618.html with its reference to --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from NewsScan Daily, 6 May 2004) WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE CHEAP REVOLUTION Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes magazine, writes: "Poke around Google and you sense a clean break from the past, a harbinger of the future. The company's Web site handles about 750 million page views a day and has become the third most visited site in the world. Google performs its Web search miracle with a backroom technology plant consisting of about 100,000 cheap servers -- basically, mail-order PCs without monitors -- that cost about $2,000 apiece. When one of these cheap crunchers goes on the blink, Google junks it like an old razor blade, and slips in a replacement. "Pay attention to the money Google does not spend. No fat service contracts. No bloated in-house 'fix-it' departments. Google's cheap ways save 90 cents on a typical information-technology dollar, according to Mike Nevens, a former head of McKinsey's technology practice. This amazing 90% savings is the key to understanding Google and much, much more about today's economy. I call it the Cheap Revolution, and it's in full swing. All around us, it's pushing costs down -- not down a slope, but over a cliff." *** See http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108371228271802120,00.html?mod=opinion%5Fmain%5Fcommentaries (sub req'd) for Rich Karlgaard's "The Little Search Engine That Could," in the Wall Street Journal 5 May 2004 From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed May 12 17:22:27 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Ellipsoidal Packing Message-ID: Subject: Ellipsoidal Packing Dear Colleagues - Today feels like summer here (with apologies to my Australian readers), the academic year is ending, _and_ I have a weakness for M&Ms (despite growing up amidst more refined chocolate practices in Austria). So I thought this item was worth sending out. All best, --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- from PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 685 May 12, 2004 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein THE BEST PACKING OF M&Ms, filling more than 77% of available volume, has been achieved in a computer simulation performed at Princeton. Actually the new results apply to any ellipsoid object, such as M&M candy, fish eggs, or watermelons. The modern understanding of dense packing might be said to start in 1611, when Johannes Kepler suggested that the most efficient packing of spheres in a container occurred when the spheres were placed in a face-centered cubic arrangement---the way a grocer stacks oranges. "Kepler's conjecture" was proved in 1998 and the filling factor was worked out to be about 74%. Unlike spheres, which still look the same after you rotate them, ellipsoids' oblateness (they are squashed or stretched in at least one direction) give them orientational degrees of freedom that spheres don't have. Consequentially, ellipsoids can be packed more efficiently than spheres. Depending on the aspect ratio of the ellipsoid, the packing density can be anywhere between 74% and 77%. The Princeton research (contact Salvatore Torquato, 609-258-3341, torquato@electron.princeton.edu) has a number of practical implications: it shows that glassy states of matter, in which molecules lie in a disordered arrangement, can have densities almost as high as for crystals; it suggests that because of a high contact number (in the high-density packings ellipsoids can touch 14 of their neighbors) stronger ceramics can be designed); and it encourages researchers to investigate the effect of ellipsoidal shape on evolutionary optimization in fish eggs. (Donev et al., Physical Review Letters, upcoming article) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu May 13 23:44:31 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] "Space Travel" Message-ID: Subject: "Space Travel" (from NewsScan Daily, 13 May 2004) TECHNO-ENTHUSIASTS IN SEARCH OF PEACE AND QUIET A recent gathering of techno-enthusiasts explored ways to overcome information overload and the stress associated with living with 24/7 access to work, friends and sometimes strangers. The meeting's organizer, David Levy, noted he'd imposed a "technology-free" Sabbath, carving out 24 hours in the week when he doesn't log on or answer his cell phone. "It's not about saying 'no' to all these important inventions," says Levy. "Nobody says we shouldn't have e-mail. But how do we come to a kind of balance and accommodation?" Levy, a professor in the information school at the University of Washington and author of "Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in a Digital Age," says the idea for the conference germinated when graduate students complained repeatedly that they felt like technology was taking over their lives. "What I heard from my students was that they didn't feel like they could dig into any subject." However, Levy acknowledges his own struggle with technology: "There is this addictive quality I recognize in myself. As soon as Shabbat is over, I run to check my e-mail." John de Graaf, editor of "Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America," says that Levy's concerns are right on target. "I think this is a huge issue. This is one of the major crises of our society," says de Graaf. (Wired.com 13 May 2004) http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,63434,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_5 WORTH THINKING ABOUT: WHAT KEEPS YOU AWAKE AT NIGHT? In his book, "The Music of the Primes," Marcus du Sautoy reminds us of the question posed by the great mathematician David Hilbert at the time of his death: "One hot and humid morning in August 1900, David Hilbert of the University of Göttingen addressed the International Congress of Mathematicians in a packed lecture hall at the Sorbonne, Paris. Already recognised as one of the greatest mathematicians of the age, Hilbert had prepared a daring lecture. He was going to talk about what was unknown rather than what had already been proved. This went against all the accepted conventions, and the audience could hear the nervousness in Hilbert's voice as he began to lay out his vision for the future of mathematics. 'Who of us would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future lies hidden; to cast a glance at the next advances of our science and at the secrets of its development during future centuries?' To herald the new century, Hilbert challenged the audience with a list of twenty-three problems that he believed should set the course for the mathematical explorers of the twentieth century. "The ensuing decades saw many of the problems answered, and those who discovered the solutions make up an illustrious band of mathematicians known as 'the honours class'. It includes the likes of Kurt Gödel and Henri Poincaré, along with many other pioneers whose ideas have transformed the mathematical landscape. But there was one problem, the eighth on Hilbert's list, which looked as if it would survive the century without a champion: the Riemann Hypothesis. "Of all the challenges that Hilbert had set, the eighth had a special place in his heart. There is a German myth about Frederick Barbarossa, a much-loved German emperor who died during the Third Crusade. A legend grew that he was still alive, asleep in a cavern in the Kyffhäuser Mountains. He would awake only when Germany needed him. Somebody allegedly asked Hilbert, 'If you were to be revived like Barbarossa, after five hundred years, what would you do?' His reply: 'I would ask, 'Has someone proved the Riemann Hypothesis?'" See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060935588/newsscancom/ref=nosim for Marcus du Sautoy's "The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from book recommendations to adult literacy programs.) -------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Colleagues - The juxtaposition of these two items set me musing. 24/7 information overload isn't just a source of injurious stress, but it results in the progressive loss of the habit of reflection. What sort of insight and progress is a bright but frazzled mind capable of? Apparently much of what surrounds us in the name of technological progress, but certainly not a breakthrough in mathematics. The latter is to me most emblematic of those silent and solitary journeys into the remote spaces of the mind, that we have all but erased as a value of our culture. Even when such "space travel" is not done by a Riemann or Hilbert, but by mere mortals, it is an essential part of being productively alive in any human endeavor. For me reflection is nurtured by quiet walks, canoeing on remote lakes, classical music, contemplative photography. The technologies that have enhanced those journeys for me (Kevlar composites, the digital reproduction of sound, and the wonders of digital photography) I hold in particular esteem because they enhance rather than usurp my peace of mind. By the way, for an explanation of the Riemann Hypothesis see e.g. . --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed May 19 04:24:09 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Desolate Places Message-ID: Subject: Desolate Places Dear Colleagues - There are a number of poignant photographic Web sites of ruins, urban, industrial, military, of abandoned insane asylums, orphanages, of large abandoned technology like steel plants, train yards and mines. One such site of high photographic quality is . I might also mention New England Ruins http://photos.dobi.nu/ An abandoned underground missile complex (who knows, perhaps soon to be refurbished) http://triggur.org/silo/ I suppose every age has its fascination with ruins. E.g. the painters Hubert Robert and Caspar Friedrich specialized in romantic ruined buildings in ruined parks or craggy landscapes, dotted with occasional small figures. Hubert went so far as to paint elaborate imaginary views of famous buildings, like the Louvre, in ruins. It created a kind of "instant antiquity," a new romantic perspective, and a thoroughly safe one, on the present. Our modern ruins still have their fascination, but are far less romantic, far more troubling and sometimes highly unsafe. One such record of modern ruin was pointed out to me by my colleague Dr. Maria Gherasimova. It is a series of photographs with text about the dead zone around Chernobyl, compiled by Elena, a young Ukrainian woman who traverses it on her Kawasaki motorcycle. It is a memorable experience. Some quotes from Elena's text: "Radiation sits on the soil, on the grass, in apples and mushrooms. It is not retained by asphalt, which makes rides through this area possible." "The fire engines never returned to their garages, and the firemen never returned to their homes. These fire engines are some of the most radioactive objects in all of Chernobyl. The firemen were the first on the scene, and they thought it was an ordinary fire. No one told them, what they were really dealing with." "We are at the gates of the Ghost Town. It was founded in 1970 and located 4 kms north of the reactor. 48,000 people lived here and loved their town. In 1986, it was a modern, green and cozy place to live." "...this shop was emptied out in a matter of an hour. The police began shooting looters in May, when radioactive TV sets began to appear in the pawn shops of Kiev." "Perhaps future archeologists will compare this town to Pompeii. The Soviet era is forever preserved here - in the radiation that will last for many centuries." "The day after the accident, this place on the bridge provided a good view of the gaping crack in the nuclear containment vessel that was ruptured by the explosion. Many curious people came here to have a look and were bathed in a flood of deadly x-rays emanating directly from the glowing nuclear core." "This sculpture was in the center of the town, it was moved to the nuclear power plant after the accident. It is Prometheus stealing fire from Gods and giving it to the humans..." [The Chernobyl disaster took place on Saturday April 26th, 1986, triggered by an ill-fated test procedures that started Friday evening, and included the disabling of the automatic shutdown safety mechanisms. --PJK] "The Communist government that was in power then kept silent about this accident. In Kiev, they forced people to take part in their preciously stupid labor day parade and it was then that ordinary people began hearing the news of the accident from foreign radio stations and relatives of those who died. The real panic began 7-10 days after accident. Those who were exposed to the exceedingly high levels of nuclear radiation in the first 10 days when it was still a state secret, incuding unsuspecting visitors to the area, either died or have serious health problems." From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu May 27 21:38:27 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Internet is no Library Message-ID: Subject: Internet is no Library (from CIT INFOBITS May 2004 No. 71 ISSN 1521-9275) THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY . . . Published three years ago, Mark Y. Herring's article, "10 Reasons Why the Internet Is No Substitute for a Library" (AMERICAN LIBRARIES, April 2001, pp. 76-78), is uncomfortably relevant today. Many of the Internet problems Herring addressed still trouble us: poor quality control, the absence older materials, incompleteness of so-called full-text sites, and search engine insufficiencies. The article is available online at http://www.ala.org/ala/alonline/selectedarticles/10reasonswhy.htm American Libraries [ISSN 0002-9769] is published eleven times a year by the American Library Association, 50 E. Huron St., Chicago, IL 60611 USA; tel: 800-545-2433; Web: http://www.ala.org/. Subscriptions are included with membership to the ALA. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Colleagues - This is still worth thinking about, not so much because anyone at a university is likely to propose eliminating libraries (as some corporations _have_ done), but because the habits of searching often start and end with google. It is especially important that our students, who are furthest toward the google-only, MacDonaldized form of information gathering, be reminded of the effective and _ordered_ concentration of knowledge a libary represents. See also --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu May 27 21:55:58 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Data Mining Message-ID: Subject: Data Mining (from NewsScan Daily, 21 May 2004) DATABASE CONTRACTOR BOASTED OF HIGH 'TERRORISM QUOTIENT' Florida database contractor Seisint apparently wowed federal officials during a demonstration of its "high terrorism factor" scoring system by flagging the names of 120,000 individuals who showed a statistical likelihood of being terrorists. Impressed by the scoring technology, the Justice Department followed up by investigating numerous people on the list, and ultimately appointed Seisent the sole contractor on the $12-million Matrix (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange) project. Because the Matrix system includes extensive information on people with no criminal record as well as shadier characters, it has sparked criticism from many privacy groups and all but five states have now withdrawn from the program. Matrix claims to have removed the terrorism scoring system from its final product, but was unable to provide any documentation of that when queried by AP. According to documents obtained from Utah, which has since pulled out of the program, Seisent officials said the scoring system was developed by reverse engineering an unnamed "Terrorist Handbook" that describes how terrorists "penetrate and live in our society." The scoring algorithm factored in such data as age, gender, ethnicity, credit history, "investigational data," information about pilot and driver licenses, and connections to "dirty" addresses used by other suspects. (AP 20 May 2004) http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040520/D82MGBU05.html (from NewsScan Daily, 27 May 2004) U.S. GOV'T AGENCIES ENGAGED IN WIDESPREAD 'DATA MINING' A survey of U.S. government agencies has uncovered widespread data mining activities, through more than 120 programs that collect and analyze large amounts of personal data such as names, e-mail addresses, Social Security numbers and driver's license information. The survey, conducted by the General Accounting Office, identified 52 federal agencies that routinely comb through citizens' data, and because the GAO figures exclude most classified projects, the extent of intrusion into personal privacy could be much higher. Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), who requested the report, said: "I am disturbed by the high number of data mining activities in the federal government involving personal information. The government collects and uses Americans' personal information and shares it with other agencies to an astonishing degree, raising serious privacy concerns." An advisory committee to the Pentagon chaired by former FCC chairman Newton Minow, has recommended that federal agencies generally should be required to obtain court approval "before engaging in data mining with personally identifiable information" on U.S. citizens. It also recommended that agencies should, if possible, strip out all personal identifying information before working with such data. (New York Times 27 May 2004) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/27/national/27privacy.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jun 2 18:40:50 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Engineering Boundaries Message-ID: Subject: Engineering Boundaries (from INNOVATION, 2 June 2004) DESIGN: THE NEW LOOK OF MANAGEMENT CONSULTING IDEO and some other design companies are now competing in the management consulting business against such stalwarts as McKinsey, Boston Consulting, and Bain. Instead of looking at business issues as traditional organizational problems, IDEO advises clients by teaching them how to look at the world of their clients and consumers through the eyes of anthropologists, graphic designers, engineers, and psychologists. When a company goes to IDEO about a better product, service or space, IDEO assembles an interdisciplinary team composed of its own experts as well as members from the client company to go out to observe and document the consumer experience (with top executives often playing the roles of their own customers). Then IDEO puts them all in a room for a brainstorming session, after which IDEO designers move to rapid prototyping of some of the best ideas identified by the group, using such tools as iMovies to portray consumer experiences and cheap cardboard to mock up examination rooms or fitting rooms. Often, IDEO clients discover that they are not in the business they thought they were in. Kaiser-Permanente's Adam Nemer says: "IDEO showed us that we are designing human experiences, not buildings. Its recommendations do not require big capital expenditures." Companies often need to borrow new pairs of eyes, so they can see their world as anthropologists, psychologists or designers would see it. (Business Week 17 May 2004) http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_20/b3883001_mz001.htm ------------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Colleagues - This is a time when the boundaries between the facets of designing a technology product are getting ever blurrier. The process has been going on for more than a decade, but its far greater "fluidity" at present is finally catching the awareness of many who hadn't noticed. For the last 10-15 years I have explained to my students in instrumentation and product design that with the growing importance of packaging style in, say, medical products, the industrial design community was becoming a most persuasive force. Large design companies like IDEO were adding full engineering capabilities to their staff, so that they would not only design the outside of a blood analyzer, they would design the complete inside as well. Most people wouldn't be aware of this, because a traditional manufacturer of analytical instruments, IDEO's client, would be seen as the seller. But everything except the marketing was increasingly done and/or coordinated by companies like IDEO. That was ten or more years ago. So it is not surprising that IDEO is now also reaching into the transactions that lie beyond manufacture, as the item above illustrates. Thus the identity of contributors to a product design supply chain is getting very fluid, with engineers ever more deeply submerged inside that flow, and sometimes far removed from the role of highly visible innovator. The opportunity for such visibility only exist in the early stages of a technology, when the resources of the technology are still limited, and the engineer's eagerly awaited results are already clearly understood in their implications. At that early stage the "structure" of product design is dominated by the structure of the technological resources. That was the state of semiconductor technology in the 1960s, '70s and into the '80s. As technology's resources get more diverse and capable, with multiple technical solutions for a given problem, the "structuring" boundary conditions become those of manufacturing at large scales, with economics and reliability issues dominant. This is the structure of a technology's production phase. Lastly, as manufacturing here (and abroad) reaches levels of efficiency that are ample for all likely demands, eg. when in the late '80s and early '90s a company like Daewo in Korea makes 20,000 microwave ovens per day, the boundary conditions shift yet further into the third and last phase. The structure of product design is now dominated by what in my courses I have tended to call the "structure of purpose," the creation of reasons for ownership through marketing, the advocy of ownership through persuasive styling and design, all the psychological aspects that create and define purpose. And then these sometimes leave good technological sense behind, as in those VCRs that only the youngest family members could program. Technology products are now too complicated for informed hard-nosed comparison shopping. Traditional engineers usually contribute nothing to the "structure of purpose" phase, either because they are not educated to do so, or because in cumulative managerial shifts they have been left behind as the "backroom staff" with the technology resources that can satisfy any marketing whim. It is not clear that engineering education has come to terms with any of this. The values of engineering science and reason are indisputable, yet are not the "reason" of marketing or investment thinking. Or only in part. Yet many engineering educators have a strong sense that reason can dream what dreams cannot reason. But they haven't figured out how to sell that to prospective undergraduate engineering majors. Yet it is essential to figure out how to become more convincing, if engineering education is to survive in viable form, retaining its underlying mathematical and scientific reasoning, but made plausible by its application in new contexts such as IDEO is exploring. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jun 9 14:02:37 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] University Inc. Message-ID: Subject: University Inc. The article below is a review by Alice Daniel of the book, "Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education," by University of California professor, David Kirp, Harvard Univ Press; (November 2003) ISBN: 0674011465. It is from the March 2004 issues of ASEE Prism, Volume 13, Number 7. . Copyright Š 2004 ASEE, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission. ------------------------------ UNIVERSITY INCORPORATED By Alice Daniel Before David Kirp became an acting dean in the public policy school at Berkeley, he knew relatively little about the financial operations of the university. When the provost spent half an hour talking about the university seal at a council of deans meeting, Kirp was initially confused because he knew the university's mascot was a bear. Then he realized the discussion had to do with copyright and how to make money from Berkeley's brand. My puzzlement "sounds unbelievable but it's true," says Kirp, a professor of public policy at Berkeley and an author of 14 books on topics ranging from AIDS to housing issues. "I spent lots of years writing, pursuing my bliss, picking topics and stories that really intrigued me and I knew amazingly little about how universities were run. There's a tacit deal [among professors and administrators] in which you leave us alone and we'll leave you alone." His curiosity piqued, Kirp decided the only way to satisfy it was to venture out and learn. The result, Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, is an exploration of how the values of the academy are affected by the rising dominance of the marketplace, a subject of vital interest to anyone in academia. In his latest book, Kirp takes readers from the complex world of Ivy League admissions to for-profit universities that could actually teach the Ivy League a thing or two, from business schools that have sold their soul in the midst of privatizing to high-tech companies that both help and hinder the intellectual strides of the academy. As the book notes, tension has historically existed between the university and its sources of funding, including the church and the crown; however, the controlling factor these days is the corporation. Kirp doesn't deny that schools have to sell themselves, but he believes the demand should be based on something substantive. "Do you know what you're selling and why you're selling? Is there a value to this that makes you proud? That's something that colleges will often forget as they focus on the bottom line. I don't think survival is worth it at any cost," he says. The bottom line has prompted universities to sell courses on the Internet; privatize schools; shrink the liberal arts; hire marketing consultants to provide identity makeovers; and collaborate with industry, which Kirp warns, can restrict freedom of inquiry. Kirp focuses on two of his own university's enterprises to showcase the best and worst of industry alliances. The Gigascale Silicon Research Center-part of a partnership among the federal government, higher education, and a Silicon Valley company known as MARCO, the Microelectronics Advanced Research Corp.-has benefited the university greatly, especially its graduate programs in engineering and computer science. The collaboration is considered a success because it allows world-class researchers from many universities to work together on solutions to high-tech problems while encouraging openness toward knowledge. It is that openness that can be lost, Kirp says, if a university "sells the store," an accusation directed at Berkeley's College of Natural Resources, which signed a five-year contract with the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis in 1998. Because the company owns a huge database of plant genome material, it required confidentiality agreements from faculty working with the database, a smart move for a corporation, but a controversial one for academia, where openness in the public interest is a bedrock principle. Hiring academic superstars at oversized salaries is another risk some universities take in the name of increasing enrollment and, ideally, private funding. Kirp puts the magnifying glass on New York University (NYU), which dramatically reversed its "record of mediocrity" in the 1980s by raising money to bring in star professors. Still, Kirp notes, there is a price to be paid. Faculty stars can create a narrow intellectual agenda for a department, especially if they bring in like-minded colleagues. But more importantly, senior professors often demand modest teaching loads, leaving poorly paid adjuncts and graduate assistants to make up for the shortfall in instruction. At NYU, 2,700 adjuncts teach 70 percent of the undergraduate classes. This is higher than at most universities. Still, teaching has become the responsibility of adjuncts nationwide who, by 2002, accounted for 43 percent of all university faculty. THE TOP 25 School rankings can also drive the marketing efforts of a college. U.S. News World Report's annual survey of "America's Best Colleges" has huge influence in how some colleges make decisions. The guide places great importance on a college's selectivity-the percentage of applicants it admits as well as the percentage of those admitted that enroll-leaving colleges to play the numbers game. Kirp writes: "Admissions officers encourage as many students as possible to apply, knowing that the more applicants the college rejects, the more selective it appears to be. For the same reason-looking good to U.S. News-schools like Emory University and Franklin and Marshall do not accept their very best applicants, because the admissions office believes they won't actually come. By rejecting or wait-listing them, the school makes itself look harder to get into." Meanwhile, students whose families are well-off can afford to play their own admissions game. One company, Ivywise, charges $29,000 to help students get into the college of their dreams. There is even an Ivywise Kids, "geared to the highly competitive process of admission to selective kindergartens and elementary schools. For ambitious parents, it is never too soon to start marketing one's offspring." The battle to maintain scholarly integrity in the face of major financial deficits, decrepit buildings, and too few applications is particularly evident in Kirp's description of the University of Chicago, an institution that prides itself on its intellectual atmosphere. In 1994, the trustees hired Hugo Sonnenschein, a distinguished economist and the provost of Princeton, to save the university. But as soon as his marketing efforts and suggestions of core curriculum reform became apparent, 74 professors sent a letter to the trustees warning that the "intellectual tradition and academic organization of our university are being put at risk by its present leadership." Sonnenschein resigned in 2000, but not before he increased enrollments, added new buildings, and increased the size of some undergraduate classes. The core curriculum, however, remained essentially intact. Kirp writes: "Hugo Sonnenschein may someday be hailed in Hyde Park as a hero, the leader who saved an institution by dragging it into modern times. The ultimate question, though, is whether what the traditionalists refer to as the soul of the institution, its singularity, can withstand this transformation." Ironically, this dilemma occurs across the board, even in the corporate world of Hamburger University, which Kirp can't resist comparing to the University of Chicago, a 30-minute drive away. The faculty and alumni at Hamburger U rebelled against a suggestion to develop regional sites instead of flying McDonald's store managers from around the world to the company's corporate college for training. "The cost-cutters, said one instructor, don't realize that coming together at the flagship campus builds a sense of membership in the enterprise because they can't capture its value in a tidy cost-benefit calculation. As one instructor said, 'They are ignoring the iconic importance of the campus experience.' When Saul Bellow inveighed against the University of Chicago's efforts to reduce the size of its core curriculum, he couldn't have said it any better." That struggle between the forces of the market and the values of the academy is perhaps no more apparent than at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. In 2003, Darden became formally self-sufficient from the University of Virginia (UVA). The pursuit of money, writes Kirp, is Darden's main objective, and one method of bringing in cash is to offer executive education programs, which take faculty energy away from scholarship and research. Darden pays a "franchise fee" to UVA for the "drawing power of the brand," or "the Thomas Jefferson mystique" of the University of Virginia. Otherwise, the school operates as if it were a stand-alone institution. Because of the time it takes to run the executive programs, Darden faculty publish far less than their counterparts at other well-known universities, and that "troubles those who see the creation, not just the transmission, of knowledge as vital at a great university." But Kirp is no knee-jerk reactionist to the marketplace. He recognizes its importance and even applauds it, especially in the case of for-profit DeVry University, an efficient operation that delivers on its limited promises and provides a solid education in a number of fields, including engineering, at 25 campuses. It doesn't offer any illusions of social reform, but what it does it does well, even catering to the specific workforce demands of each community. Still, Kirp concludes, the public at large loses out if the market reigns in general over higher education because the market is not concerned with maintaining communities of scholars or delivering access to students who need financial help. For Kirp, the ultimate question is: "Can the public be persuaded that universities represent something as ineffable as the common good-more specifically, that higher education contributes to the development of knowledgeable and responsible citizens, encourages social cohesion, promotes and spreads knowledge, increases social mobility, and stimulates the economy?" Kirp's work begs the question: "If there is a less dystopian future, one that revives the soul of this old institution, who is to advance it -and if not now, then when?" Alice Daniel is a freelance writer based in Fresno, Calif. * * * * * * * * From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jun 10 02:20:48 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Wicked Innovation Message-ID: Subject: Wicked Innovation (from INNOVATION, 9 June 2004) WICKED INNOVATION Technology journalist Michael Schrage suggests that viruses and worms ("virms," he calls them) offer a superb case study in "wicked innovation" and "innovative wickedness" -- in which cheating is the essence of success. Schrage says there are two kinds of innovators: those who compete with each other and generally respect the rules of the marketplace, and those whose goal is to crush competition. The first kind of innovation is about value creation; the second kind is about value negation. "The compete-against dynamic is an escalating innovation arms race where the economic goal is less to create new value for customers than to defeat or hoodwink the enemy. The conflict is defined by measure vs. countermeasure vs. counter-countermeasure." Wicked innovators "prey upon the fact that in most arenas of technology, security and authenticity are afterthoughts" -- and so (to be honest about it) dishonesty "is often a superb innovation strategy." To defeat them, you have to play their games of deception. Schrage concludes that the lesson pathological innovation teaches is that the economics of cheating play as great a role in defining value as the economics of adoption. (Technology Review Jun 2004) http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/schrage0604.asp (copy of article follows further below) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Michael Schrage's thoughts about competition have cropped up in these mailings before, e.g. regarding his 2002 book "No More Teams" . In the age of "University Inc." it will become a particular administrative challenge to insist on the kind of academic competition that creates larger opportunities for intellectual value rather than crushing them. --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- (from (Technology Review Jun 2004)) Wicked Innovation We can lament the mischief of hackers, thieves, and trickstersŃor we can learn lessons in innovation from them. By Michael Schrage -- Making good ideas matter, June 2004 I love you. I love you with a passion that burns like a white-hot nova. As a digital testament to my love, please put this magazine down and immediately go to iloveyouutterly.com to download a very special "I love you" screen saver. YouŐll love it almost as much as I love you. Are you back? Actually, I donŐt love you. I never did. In fact, IŐd think you were a few bits short of a byte if you ever clicked to such a site or opened an "I love you" e-mail attachment from someone youŐve never met. Nevertheless, millions of PC owners have had their machines brought to their metaphorical knees by viruses and worms (virms?) promising love from strangers, "wicked screen savers," or compromising photos of Anna Kournikova. Lord, what fools we mortals be. But letŐs turn these bugs into a feature. Cold, dispassionate analysis affirms that such "virmen" are among computerdomŐs most successful innovations ever. TheyŐve utterly transformed the network experience. TheyŐre global; theyŐre local; theyŐre persistent; theyŐre pervasive. They cleverly exploit both human and technical weaknesses. They matter. The proliferation and permutation of viruses and worms offers a superb case study in wicked innovation and innovative wickedness. Why do such innovations succeed? What can and should we learn from their continuing success? Just as society better understands health by better understanding disease, markets better appreciate healthy innovation by grasping the dynamics of pathological innovation. Deception is at the dark heart of wicked innovation. Alluringly misrepresented e-mail attachments and "phishing" expeditionsŃthe fraudulent use of corporate names and logos to gather peopleŐs credit card numbersŃare only the most obvious examples. The use of anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, and other illicit performance enhancers in baseball, football, and Olympic sports represents another genre of effectively deceptive innovation. In a field where the price of being found out is high, these "natural" substances give users a competitive edge with a low risk of detection. Precisely because cheating is the essence of wicked innovation, we need to rethink the role of competition in its pathology. Two kinds of innovators stand out. The first are those who "compete with" each other; that is, they respect certain rules in their efforts to succeed in the marketplace. The second are "compete against" innovators whose goal is to spread their own inventions and eliminate their competition, free choice in the marketplace be damned. Compete-with innovation is about value creation; compete-against innovation is about value negation. Microsoft vs. open source is a classic compete-with contest; both sides, for the most part, play fair. World War IIŐs "Battle of the Beams" between German and British engineers trying to coordinateŃand thwartŃelectronic navigation aids for nighttime bombing raids is a perfect example of a compete-against innovation marketplace. The compete-against dynamic is an escalating innovation arms race where the economic goal is less to create new value for customers than to defeat or hoodwink the enemy. The conflict is defined by "measure vs. countermeasure vs. counter-countermeasure." The result? Deceit, deception, and misrepresentation are the mission-critical media for compete-against innovation. Viruses, identity theft, performance-enhancing drugs, phishing, and other compete-against innovations succeed because they so effectively exploit both human virtues and human venality. They alternately appeal to the seven deadly sinsŃvanity, sloth, envy, gluttony, etc.Ńand to our compassion and curiosity. "Social engineering" matters as much as technical engineering. Equally important, wicked innovators prey upon the fact that in most arenas of technology, security and authenticity are afterthoughts. The Internet, for example, was never designed with security in mind; the most important protections have all been retrofits. Neither the Olympics nor Major League Baseball evolved with the expectation that so many world-class athletes would choose to cheat chemically. Pathological innovation has moved cheating from the margins to the mainstream. Should compete-with innovators fight fire with fire and use deception of their own to combat wicked innovators? Should they give their customers and clients better tools to battle pathological innovation? Or should we simply throw up our hands, declare wicked innovation a "public policy" issue, and count on the regulators, courts, and legislators to rescue us? The correct answer, of course, is "all of the above." Honesty compels us to admit that dishonesty is often a superb innovation strategy. Compete-with innovators have little choice but to grow a bit trickier and more deceptive in their own security investments, creating tools such as the online "honey pots" that use dummy credit card data to lure in and trace hackers. Wicked compete-against innovators, ironically and inevitably, will increasingly drive innovation in compete-with markets. The single most important lesson pathological innovation teaches is that the economics of cheating play as great a role in defining value as the economics of adoption. YouŐve got to love that. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A researcher and consultant on innovation economics, Michael Schrage is the author of Serious Play (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). Copyright 2004 Technology Review, Inc. All rights reserved From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jun 11 01:00:00 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Materialistics Message-ID: Subject: Materialistics Edward Miller (former editor of the Harvard Education Letter) was to my knowledge the first to suggest (e.g. see ) that we are no longer teaching the three 'Rs (reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic), and have replaced them with the three 'Ms -- Multi-Tasking, Materialistics, and Mind Management, to meet the challenges of the 21st century. As I've gotten older (in the interest of full disclosure I've just turned 65), I've never had much skill with, or sympathy for, the three 'Ms. Multi-tasking is a form of self-imposed attention deficit disorder. Materialistics, in Miller's words > Materialistics: simply put, people will have to be taught to > distinguish between objects and actions in the material world, which > operate under the old limitations of physics and biology, and those > in the virtual world, which resemble real-world objects and actions > but are limited only by the imagination of their human creators. > Since most aspects of daily life will be lived virtually, schools > will take students on carefully controlled field trips into the > "material environment," that is, the real world. Miller concludes > The solution (to be invented in the year 2037 by the consulting firm > Andersen, Ernst, Coopers, & Waterhouse) will be called Mind > Management, in which children learn to monitor incoming sensory > impressions and to filter out all those that are not immediately > useful, in a task-oriented, value-added sense. Mind Management will > also offer 21st-century educators another benefit: it will prove to > be enormously effective in training children not to ask annoying or > troubling questions about school. I was reminded about all this most recently by the two items below in the last issue of the e-newsletter INNOVATION, from which I've quoted frequently. All best, --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 9 June 2004) IT'S A WONDERFUL (VIRTUAL) LIFE The latest GameCube release doesn't feature endless car chases or threatening monsters. Instead, "Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life" celebrates the personal fulfillment found in milking the cow, feeding the dog, growing crops and making a success of an abandoned family farm. Rather than guns and grenades, the tools at hand are hoes and sickles, and the main character focuses on building lasting and satisfying relationships with work, his wife and his surroundings. There's no specific mission -- each day (measured in about 25-minute increments) is spent exploring, working and watching the clock. Players will need to spend about 18 hours to get through the first year, but reviewer Jason Silverman says it "can become dangerously addictive, especially during the first dozen or so hours. That's not just true for the kiddies who are this game's target audience: Playing 'A Wonderful Life' encourages some deep thinking about being a responsible, well-rounded adult." (Wired.com 1 Jun 2004) http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,63619,00.html CARDBOARD PIANO 'SOUNDS ALMOST LIKE THE REAL THING' Researchers at Swedish packing company SCA have developed a piano made of cardboard with the integrated circuits pressed onto the paper instead of silicon chips or circuit boards. The concept is based on the same technology used for paper products that change color or include RFID tags for inventory control. The cardboard model features all 88 keys -- when one is pressed down, the circuit beneath it sends a signal to an electronic loudspeaker, which plays the appropriate tone. "It sounds almost like the real thing, but it is much cheaper -- and lighter," says Ulf Carlsson, head of SCA's R&D unit. The device is being used to show off the development of next-generation printing techniques. (AP 3 Jun 2004) http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040603/D82VGIF80.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Jun 11 01:20:00 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Creative Noise Message-ID: Subject: Creative Noise (from INNOVATION, 9 June 2004) THOUGHT PARTNERSHIPS In a world where competitors can copy our technologies, clone our trade secrets, and outspend us in the marketplace, our one true competitive advantage is the ability to think well together. We must turn co-workers into co-thinkers, says consultant Daniel Elash, and develop thought "partnerships" -- relationships formed by people working with a common purpose, a shared definition of success. When people think synergistically, they can create a bigger impact than they could on their own, so there's reason to collaborate. Thought partnerships require a familiarity with each other's goals and circumstances. After all, as Elash points out, nobody is as smart as everybody. We must stop competing with other departments, e.g., when the sales force makes promises the production people can't deliver. People worry about making THEIR numbers, instead of OUR numbers, so the whole enterprise is sub-optimized. When things go wrong, we assign blame rather than change our fundamental perspectives. Make smarter thinking a goal, Elash suggests. Develop a common definition of success. Create the expectation of thought partnerships, and cultivate a company culture where it is safe to think aloud, safe to think together. Reward thinking that generates something new, rather than simply looking for what's wrong with someone else's idea. (CEO Refresher Jun 2004) http://www.refresher.com/!ddegetsmart.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- As the economy picks up in some respects, though not in others (EE unemployment keeps rising--now 5.5% according to the IEEE), the business wisdom of our day seems to me remarkably simplistic. That could of course be my cynical response to a return to basic values and common sense. But if it _is_ basic values, then why not simply say it that way? Just as there is no need for endless remakes of old movies, none better than the original, there is no reason why we need pop-sociological remakes of the works of Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" (1937) or Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking" (1952), each constantly republished ever since. These new discoveries of business wisdom are always much more complexly put. Is it the quest for originality, or a loss of longer-term memory? Or is it like those patterns I start seeing if I stare long enough at the overlapping random dots of the old-fashioned linoleum tile pattern on my bathroon floor, and think myself creative for seeing faces, creatures, and all kinds of meaningful patterns in those dots? --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jun 16 14:27:13 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Gradient Detector Message-ID: Subject: Gradient Detector Amidst my typical meditations, here is something astonishingly different. --PJK ---------------------------------------------------------------- from PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 688 June 11, 2004 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein A NEW CHEMOTAXIS ASSAY reveals nerve cells' surprising sensitivity. A new method for studying the guidance (change in direction) of neurons amid a sea of protein molecules shows how sensitive this process is to the surrounding protein gradient. Chemotaxis is the process by which living cells sniff out their local environment and act accordingly, which usually means moving or growing toward higher concentrations of beneficial molecules. In the case of neurons removed from their natural setting and put down on a bed of collagen gel in a dish, growth will follow the increasing gradient of proteins in their vicinity, such as the nerve growth factor (NGF) protein. Neuronal growth, the way in which the long axon bodies of a nerve cells wire themselves into a network, is of great interest since this aids in knowing how brains form. Now a team of scientists at Georgetown University has developed a new method for measuring the gradient of local proteins (which have been fluorescently tagged) and the axon's response. In this case the neural cells come originally from a rat's brain. The Georgetown team of neuroscientists and physicists find that axon growth is sensitive to gradients so small (0.1%) that they correspond to about one additional molecule across the spatial extent of the axon's "growth cone," the sensing device at the tip of the growing axon. This is a remarkable feat considering that, at any one instant, there are large statistical fluctuations in the 1000 or so NGF molecules in the vicinity of the growth cone. The researchers suggest that axons may thus be "nature's most-sensitive gradient detectors." (Rosoff et al., Nature Neuroscicence, June 2004; contact Jeffrey Urbach, urbach@physics.georgetown.edu, 202-687-6594; or Geoffrey Goodhill, geoff@georgetown.edu) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jun 16 16:19:43 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:24 2006 Subject: [EAS] Business.edu Message-ID: Subject: Business.edu Dear Colleagues - A number of writers on business, Charles Handy perhaps most notably, have commented that universities will become more like corporations, and that more corporations will emulate universities. No, not like MacDonald's Hamburger University, more like this item about Google, where the "junior faculty" have a day/week off for "doing their own thing". This then is the antipode to my recent "University, Inc." mailing. --PJK ----------------------------------------------------------------- Administrative Note: Subscriptions to the EAS-INFO mailings are freely available to everyone, inside and outside Yale. For details, see , where you will also find the EAS-INFO archives for the last 8+ years. Tell your friends. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- (from INNOVATION, 16 June 2004) INNOVATION OR EMBELLISHMENT? Randall Stross, an historian of technology, thinks that Google's success in the search business comes largely from its practice of hiring a lot of Ph.D.s, treating them well, integrating them into the general workforce, and encouraging them to use 20% of their time on their own hand-picked projects. In Stross's judgment, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page assembled "the industry's most unorthodox portfolio of human capital" and then organized it "around the insight that top talent likes to work with other top talent, tackling interesting problems of their own choice." Stanford computer science professor Rajeev Motwani comments approvingly: "Good Ph.D. students are extreme in their creativity and self-motivation. Master's students are equally smart but do not have the same drive to create something new." However, by no means do all companies agree with the Google approach; for example, Microsoft's mainstream recruiting remains focused on undergraduates and master's candidates. Chief college recruiting director Kristen Roby says, "We're not heavy into Ph.D. recruiting. We're huge believers in hiring potential." Alluding to the demands imposed by regular software release cycles, Roby says that computer science Ph.D.s are "less likely to find someone with the desire to work on projects that will ship every 24 or 36 months." (New York Times 6 Jun 2004) http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/business/yourmoney/06digi.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jun 23 01:37:26 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] EE Prospects (Industrial) Message-ID: Subject: EE Prospects (Industrial) Dear Colleagues - The prospects for engineering, and in my case that means mostly electrical engineering, have been the subject or undercurrent in many recent EAS-INFO mailings. This mailing is prompted by some of your thoughts and a couple of recent articles that came my way. , the item on IDEO, exemplified a changed roles of engineers. Few of you may have pursued the examples at the IDEO Web site, but they are there to ponder: - Cell phones, an already nearly antediluvian term ("personal network devices" is more progressive), are turning into fashion accessories, cameras, Web browsers. And IDEO is designing them: . This is a very good example of how a product that was earlier thought of as defined in technical terms, now has as much technological meaning to its owners as Armani shoes or a Gucci handbag. - IDEO designed a hand-held remote for Lufthansa - IDEO designed the LifePort Kidney transporter - TiVo Personal Video Recorder These are just four from among hundreds of items in the IDEO portfolio. Look at the "view by client" and "View by category" drop-down menus, e.g. at the top of the Lufthansa page. And when I say "designed", I mean IDEO did _all_ of it. Their client companies then put their name on the design, and had the mass manufacturing done in Asia. The IDEO story is in the "good news" category, because the tight, rapid interplay between IDEO's design teams (look at the Lufthansa item) means it is much more likely to be done in the US. The outsourcing that accounts for much else in electrical engineering continues. Not just manufacturing, but R&D is moving to India and elsewhere. We are left with inaccurate reports about business recovery, e.g. in Silicon Valley, where the semiconductor and IT industries have become the hardest-hit victims of their success. When I prompted him with an item claiming a business upturn in Silicon Valley, one of our EE alumni there sent me this: > I would say that the following article comes close to the truth, > with a few caveats: > > http://www.iht.com/articles/526067.html > > First of all, we did not lose 20% of the jobs. It was 33%. This is > well documented by CalTrans, the SEMI, and others. > > Second, the venture capital firms are irrelevant. Their investment > cycle has no correlation at all with the underlying economic > realities. It is more affected by interest rate cycles and by the > perceived state of the stock market. > > Third, until we fix the immigration problem, there will not be any > incentive for US citizens to major in Engineering or Science. > > Fourth, housing prices continue to go up. Silicon Valley is the > last place I would choose to start a new company, due to the extreme > shortage of housing. And, as all of the ex-Tech workers who now sell > houses are delighted to point out: "The Bastards Can't Import Real > Estate." > > Still, this is the most realistic mainstream media article that I > have seen in years . . . Finally, there is an important article by Stephen Unger of Columbia Univ. in the current (Summer 2004) issue of the IEEE Society and Technology magazine. As he has been for some years, Unger is critical about EE employment practices in the US. Those with tenured comfort in academia should read this article. (I am trying to attach it in .pdf form to this mailing -- my first such try. If it doesn't work, we'll try something else.) As someone who as a consultant has been in touch with industry for some 35 years, I feel a little closer to these realities. The sociology of the present situation is indeed grim. Tradition and loyalty, and hence longer-term predictability, are given little or no value in the corporate profit/loss assessment. I'm planning another mailing about "EE Prospects (Academic)" as the companion to this. Understanding the industrial scene is esssential for educational policy. The future that awaits our "constituents", as ABET would put it, is not what many educators assume. --PJK -------------- next part -------------- Skipped content of type multipart/appledouble From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jun 23 16:33:00 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] New Burgess Shale? Message-ID: Subject: New Burgess Shale? You've been getting some heavy reading from me. I thought you could use some light relief. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from INNOVATION, 23 June 2004) SURF'S UP, INTEL-STYLE Here's the ultimate blend of endless summer and digital chic -- a surfboard that houses a laptop, solar panels, a video camera and a Wi-Fi hookup. The prototype board was commissioned by Intel and will debut at the Intel GoldCoast Oceanfest, demoed by international pro surfer Duncan Scott. "As a professional surfer, explorer, writer, film producer and world traveler, being able to communicate quickly and effectively is critical to my success. In the near future, via wireless real-time streaming, it could be possible that observers will, for the first time, actually be able to 'ride' a wave with the best surfers in the world," says Scott, who assisted in the board's design. (BBC News 18 Jun 2004) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3812357.stm ------------------------------------------------------------------ Isn't it great how the functionally evolved identity of everybody and everything is being 'disassembled' into its component DNA (very popular metaphor, that), and then reassembled into all kinds of strange and wonderful new forms? Will it look to some future paleontologist of technology like the wondrous fossils of the Burgess Shale, made so popular by the late great Stephen Jay Gould? and . --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Jun 23 18:17:00 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Bill Lear Message-ID: Subject: Bill Lear (from NewsScan Daily, 23 June 2004) HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: BILL LEAR Today's Honorary Subscriber is the inventor and entrepreneur William Powell Lear (1902-1978), whose creative genius expressed itself in a remarkable career that included impressive inventions in aviation, communications and navigation. Lear's name is an eponym in the field of corporate aviation, where his Learjet enjoys a dominant commercial presence. Less well known is his invention of the commercially short-lived 8-track tape player. The highly successful Motorola company owes its start to Lear's invention of the car radio, the company's first product and the one from which it took its name as a contraction of "motor" and "victrola." In the short span of twenty years, beginning in 1920, Lear earned over 100 patents for groundbreaking electronic devices in three industries, including the first practical automobile radio, the airplane radio-compass and autopilot, and the now outmoded eight-track tape player. Many of his communication and navigational devices have found worldwide applications in commercial and military aviation. Lear was born in Hannibal, Missouri in 1902. His formal education was minimal, lasting only through the eighth grade in the Chicago public schools. At age 16 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and saw service during the first World War. After the War, having become a competent auto mechanic, ham radio operator, and an aviation mechanic at Chicago's Grant Park Airport, he learned to fly, and began to pursue his interest in electronic technology. At the age of 20, he founded Quincy Radio Laboratory, where he invented the first workable automobile radio, the rights to which he sold in 1924 to Motorola. Lear then turned his attention to airplanes, inventing the first reliable aeronautical radio compass, which led to the development of the "Learmatic Navigator," an automatic pilot system, which kept planes on course by locking into radio broadcast signals. The Learmatic Navigator earned him the prestigious Frank M. Hawks Memorial Award. During World War II, Lear's companies became a major supplier of technological equipment to the Allied forces. After the war, Lear continued to perfect his miniature autopilots for fighter jets, adding a system for fully automatic landings in low visibility conditions. For this work he was awarded the FAA's Collier Trophy, bestowed on him by President Truman in 1950. In 1962, the French government honored Lear for making automatic blind landings possible in passenger airplanes. It was in 1962 also that Lear formed the Learjet Company to meet the emerging market demand for corporate jets. The Learjet was developed in Wichita in 1964, and quickly earned a solid market position. By 1975, over 500 Learjets had been sold, and today the company -- under different management -- remains the world's foremost supplier of corporate jets. In the 1970s Lear busied himself with further small-aircraft design, including the use of new composite materials in their construction. He also became involved in a search for an antipollutant steam engine. Lear died in 1978, and in 1981 he was given a final honor of investiture into the International Aerospace Hall of Fame. See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0395353726/newsscancom/ref=nos im for the biography "Stormy Genius: The Life of Aviation's Maverick Bill Lear" -- or look for it in your favorite library. Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy program.] SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY: To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions of NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages (i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to the addresses shown below: Text version: Send message to NewsScan@NewsScan.com HTML version: Send mail to NewsScan-html@NewsScan.com NewsScan-To-Go: http://www.newsscan.com/handheld/current.html From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Jul 1 18:30:26 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Living with Google Message-ID: Subject: Living with Google As readers of EAS-INFO know from previous mailings, e.g. , (where the brightplanet.com article has moved to ), databased resources with Web access are inaccessible to Google. Both items below are of the "if you can't fight 'em, join 'em" kind, work to make free scholarly resources more accessible to Google, and ways to better understand Google and how to make yourself more prominent there. So where in the "old days" we would compare ourselves to the author biographies at the end of journal publications, now we can also do Google searches on our name to see "how we are doing." All best in the brave new world, --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from CIT INFOBITS -- June 2004) THE AGE OF GOOGLE Love it or hate it, we can't dismiss the influence Google and other commercial search services have had on information searching. Unfortunately, a major problem when relying on these services for scholarly research is the fact that many free scholarly resources are not included in their search results. For example, many universities' online book collections are never indexed by Google because its search engine can't access these databases. According to a recent article, "Libraries Aim to Widen Google's Eyes" (by Jeffrey R. Young, THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, vol. 50, issue 37, May 21, 2004, p. A1), this situation may soon change. Increased competition for market share among search engine providers is spurring increased competition for quality content, and scholars and researchers will be winners in this race to put quality over quantity. The article is available online at http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i37/37a00101.htm (a Chronicle subscription is required for online access). 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/. ----- To maintain its position in the field of Web search engines, the algorithm that Google uses to generate search results is a guarded secret. In "The Nature of Meaning in the Age of Google" (INFORMATION RESEARCH, vol. 9, no. 3, April, 2004), Terrence A. Brooks provides an overview of how Google works, an explanation of why traditional methods of indexing information can be ineffective in the "lawless meaning space of the open Web," and strategies for authors who want to maximize the visibility of their documents. The paper is available online at http://informationr.net/ir/9-3/paper180.html. Information Research [ISSN 1368-1613] is a freely available, international, scholarly journal, dedicated to making accessible the results of research across a wide range of information-related disciplines. It is privately published by Professor T.D. Wilson, Professor Emeritus of the University of Sheffield, with in-kind support from the University and its Department of Information Studies. For more information, contact: Tom Wilson, Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK; tel: +44 (0)114-222-2642; fax: +44 (0)114-278-0300; email: t.d.wilson@shef.ac.uk; Web: http://informationr.net/ir/. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Aug 2 20:26:29 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Professional Evolution Message-ID: Subject: Professional Evolution Dear Colleagues - Having just encountered "Professionalism and the Future of Librarianship" by Andrew Abbott of the University of Chicago , I recommend it as a worthwhile stimulus for thinking about the future of engineering. Numerous parallels between the professions of librarian and engineer appear throughout Abbott's very readable, forceful and surprisingly prescient paper (much of the material is from the mid-90s). The three contexts he addresses as shaping the future of librarianship and engineering alike are the larger social and cultural forces, the context of other competing occupations, and the context of competing organizations and commodities. Engineers seldom think particularly probingly about the future of their profession. Narrow local optimization attempts, usually out of phase, such as engineering shortage/surplus prognostications, underscore that sad reality. It may be said that engineers aren't able to think about their future any more than they have proven able to generate insights about the imperatives of good design and usability. Most of that progress, that allows technological accomplishment to become manifest in safe, practical and productive products, did not come to us from within engineering, but from psychologists like Donald Norman. Perceptive sociologists like Abbott, who study the evolution of professions, provide significant insights about the larger forces and settings within which the profession of engineering evolves. --PJK "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." --Albert Einstein "Today I am more than ever frightened. I wish it would dawn upon engineers that, in order to be an engineer, it is not enough to be an engineer." --Jose Ortega y Gasset, "History as a System" From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Aug 4 23:18:38 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Vocation, Sense of Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Vocation, Sense of Dear Colleagues - Vocation, as in "vocational training" may be a dirty word in academia, but vocation as in "sense of vocation" certainly shouldn't be. It ought to be the "higher ground" on which education relates to life's future purposes, loftier than the usually debated dimensions of "relevance" in economic or industrial terms. Please ponder this interesting item from Stanford's Center for Teaching and Learning that explores the ill-defined role that a sense of vocation has in too many undergraduate curricula. --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 8/4/04 6:35 AM From: Rick Reis "That reaction was a vivid reminder to me, a recent college president and long-time advocate of liberal education, that we need to be much clearer about the relationship among learning, work, and purpose." * * * * * * TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV desk-top faculty development one hundred times a year Over 20,000 subscribers Over 600 academic institutions Over 100 countries Sponsored by THE STANFORD UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING http://ctl.stanford.edu * * * * * * Folks: The posting below is the sixth in the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. These short commentaries exploring various educational issues are produced by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching <. The Foundation invites your response at: CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org. Regards, Rick Reis reis@stanford.edu UP NEXT: Stanford Technology Ventures Program - Educators Corner Tomorrow's Academia ----------------------------------- 1,087 words ------------------------------- VOCATION IS NOT A DIRTY WORD March 2004 By Jamienne S. Studley On Broadway Avenue Q is packing the house with twenty-somethings who laugh ruefully at songs like "What Can You Do With a BA in English?" and "I Wish I Could Go Back to College." As the characters, engaging but floundering puppet/human college graduates, search for jobs that will pay the rent, the notion that what they are really searching for is "purpose" hits them like a thunderbolt. The night I watched, this seemed to be a new thought for many in the audience as well. That reaction was a vivid reminder to me, a recent college president and long-time advocate of liberal education, that we need to be much clearer about the relationship among learning, work, and purpose. Our students want to know how to connect their values and goals, their intellectual passions and capacities, the myriad of learning experiences in which they engage during college, and the work of their lives. Too often students are introduced to the world of work and the process of career planning the same way they learn about sex-on the playground from their peers. The results are often similarly distorted, incomplete, and even risky. As with sex, learning how to connect one's education and life's work is best done thoughtfully and with responsible adult involvement. It's high time for us as educators to think about what that would look like in undergraduate education. College mission statements testify to the integral connection between liberal education and preparation for work, leadership, and service. Lately academia seems to be consciously embracing the importance of integrating all aspects of the undergraduate educational experience, including academic, co-curricular, residential, volunteer, spiritual, and athletic life. But even with this comprehensive vision, the dimension of work, past, present and future, is typically left out of the integrative model. Indeed some institutions and educators treat students' fascination with their future pursuits as irrelevant, a distraction, the province of a few specialized staff. Skilled career services staff offer self-assessment, counseling, and other resources to help students plan outward for career choices and job searches, and faculty are typically happy to let them do it. The problem is that these career development processes are not woven into students' central educational endeavors where they could provide powerful material and expand motivation for learning. Why are vocational and career considerations the Cinderella of the integration ball? One reason is that faculty sometimes recoil from the unfortunate but understandable tide of family anxiety about jobs and pressures for relevance and specific workplace preparation. As one candid colleague put it, "the whiff of vocationalism is downright repulsive to many faculty." Faculty also worry about additional time demands, especially when it is to do work for which they do not feel prepared. They compound the problem by overlooking the potential contributions of career services professionals to effective integration by relegating them to the lower status rungs of the already undervalued student affairs ladder. Finally, higher education called some of this pressure upon ourselves by promoting the worth of college in terms of increased lifetime earnings. That makes it harder now for us to define educational success by such measures as graduates' enhanced intellectual and ethical life and capacity for problem-solving, multicultural understanding, and adaptability, measures that are in fact highly correlated with workplace success. My mother's advice to me for dealing with irritating junior high boys was, "Ignore them and they will go away." That would be a poor strategy for dealing with the hunger for attention to careers. Here the danger to liberal education is that if we ignore students' interest in educational programs that are willing to speak directly to work preparation and options, the students will indeed go away. The solution is not to ignore or stiff-arm students' curiosity and anxiety-nor to overreact in a careerist direction-but rather to use that energy to fuel their educational journeys. Welcoming students' vision, concern, and questions about vocation, work, and careers can reveal their passions and interests and motivate their hunger for further learning. And like parents and mentors willing to talk about sex, those teachers and advisors who are willing to talk about what is on students' minds-in this case "purpose" and work-will invite a new level of engagement and trust. The goal is to broaden students' vision instead of narrowing it and to support their intellectual passions and ambitions. Constructive attention to work and careers can actually liberate students from short-term, "what job can I get with that?" thinking. The rising enrollment in undergraduate business degree programs is driven in large part by students' expectation that jobs in business will be more readily available to business majors than to others. But the best teachers, including in the business department, tell students that it is most important to pursue subjects to which they bring intensity, curiosity, discipline, and a desire to learn, and that students of every subject find rewarding work when they have done their best and developed essential capacities. Offering rich examples of people with liberal educations and satisfying careers is useful. Even more important is to marry academic planning and advising about vocation for fulfilling lives, and then to weave them together into the exploratory and reflective work of college in a thoughtful, systematic, natural fashion. * For example, Colorado College showcases the relationship of liberal education and future careers at the very start of students' journey, with an alumni panel, "The Surprising Lives and Careers of Colorado College Graduates," on Day Two of orientation. The mission of the first and sophomore year advising office reinforces the relationship between academic and life choices: "The advising program assists students in the development of meaningful educational plans that are compatible with their career and life goals." * Grinnell College faculty integrate student advising and mentoring for academic and career choices around the organizing theme of vocation. * The Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning created the Learning Careers Project, which uses a portfolio model and self-coaching process "to support student integration of learning experiences inside and outside the classroom, on-campus and off-campus, in face-to-face and virtual environments, and well beyond the four years the student spends at Stanford." Those of us in midlife know that finding our vocation(s) and meaning in our work, and linking them to our values, knowledge, and capacities, is a lifelong challenge. Understanding that, we should give our students a strong foundation for conducting that process of exploration, reflection, adaptation, and learning-and we should seize the chance to do it as they make the critical early choices of their college years. About the Author Jamienne S. Studley, is a visiting scholar with the Foundation, former president of Skidmore College, and past general counsel at the U.S. Department of Education. Beginning May 1 Jamie will be president of Public Advocates, Inc. As part of a current research project, Jamie is interested in collecting further examples of serious integration of academic and other learning experiences and career development. * * * * * * * * 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 Sep 3 19:54:04 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Newspeak Message-ID: Subject: Newspeak Dear Colleagues - I'm recently back from Northwoods solitude in Maine and find the world I've reentered a rather odd place. In these heady days of political theater I find the following Web site oddly comforting http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ The 20th anniversary of Orwell's book should have been celebrated this week. I'll return to more regular mailings when I get over my vertigo. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 5 19:56:34 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Documents (and Lice) Message-ID: Subject: Documents (and Lice) (from NewsScan Daily, 5 October 2004) WORTH THINKING ABOUT: DOCUMENTS Economist Hernand De Soto suggests that good documentation plays a paramount role in the success of capitalism: "Why does capitalism thrive only in the West, as if enclosed in a bell jar? "The major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. "Most of the poor already possess the assets they need to make a success of capitalism. But they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan, and cannot be used as a share against an investment. "In the West, by contrast, every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment, or store of inventories is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy. Thanks to this representational process, assets can lead an invisible, parallel life alongside their material existence. They can be used as collateral for credit. The single most important source of funds for new businesses in the United States is a mortgage on the entrepreneur's house. These assets can also provide a link to the owner's credit history, an accountable address for the collection of debts and taxes, the basis for the creation of reliable and universal public utilities, and a foundation for the creation of securities (like mortgage-backed bonds) that can then be rediscounted and sold in secondary markets. By this process the West injects life into assets and makes them generate capital." [See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465016154/newsscancom/ref=nosim for Hernando de Soto's "The Mystery Of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else" -- or look for it in your favorite library. Note: We donate all revenue from our book and media recommendations to adult literacy programs.] --------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Colleagues - Documents as an underpinning of capitalism are one of those hidden factors, crucial but forgotten, in Democratization aspirations. I recall a similar sense of startled discovery about a whole new perspective when I read, some 25 years ago, Zinsser's book "Rats, Lice and History" about the (to me then unsuspectedly) major role in history of typhus and other diseases, brought about by lack of hygiene. Many famous battles would have ended differently had not epidemics swept through the military camps of one or the other army - superiority took the form of better sanitary planning. I suspect, though, that de Soto's subject, and writing style, is no match for Zinsser's: ...[I]nfectious disease is merely a disagreeable instance of a widely prevalent tendency of all living creatures to save themselves the bother of building, by their own efforts, the things they require. Whenever they find it possible to take advantage of the constructive labors of others, this is the path of least resistance. The plant does the work with its roots and its green leaves. The cow eats the plant. Man eats both of them; and bacteria eat the man... Zinsser wrote in 1934. Since then the role of disease in history has been taken up by many other authors, such as in McNeill's "Plagues and Peoples." And ten seconds with Google will lead you to e.g.. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Oct 7 04:12:28 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Herding Cattle Message-ID: Subject: Herding Cattle (from INNOVATION, 29 September 2004) HERDING CATTLE FROM HOME A team of researchers at Dartmouth College is developing technology that could enable cowboys to hang up their spurs and join a growing number of telecommuters -- herding their cattle from the comfort of their homes. Using techniques from robot-motion planning, the team is developing software that transmits certain GPS coordinates to collars that the cows wear. "Basically, we download the fences to the cows," says Dartmouth roboticist Zack Butler. The collars, which are equipped with a Wi-Fi networking card, a Zaurus PDA, an eTrex GPS unit and a loudspeaker, emit natural sounds when the cows are moseying in the right direction. When they stray, however, the collars project sounds such as hissing snakes, roaring tigers and barking dogs, which usually convince the wayward cattle to head back the other way. Preliminary testing on a Vermont farm shows that the technology works, but the negative stimulus merely slows the cows rather than deterring them completely. "It's not quite ready for prime-time," says Butler. The team is considering augmenting the threatening sounds with a small electrical shock and are also considering adding sensors to the collars that could monitor the cows' health and radio that data back to the central server. Meanwhile, the concept could be expanded to other purposes, says MIT's Daniela Rus. "We could use this to control crowds, protect wild animals from dangerous areas such as busy roads, and study and model animals that exhibit complex societal behaviors that are currently undocumented." (Pervasive Computing Jul-Sep 2004) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Colleagues - It will hardly surprise you that this not only strikes me as another superfluous exercise in virtual reality, but also something of a metaphor for very troubling herd instincts in the human realm. Public officials can allege, even lie, and the only response by their audience, if there is a response at all, is based on instinct or faith, not on reasoning from evidence. What are minds for? And I'm not talking deep thinking here about epistemology and cause and effect, just something on the level of a good high-school History paper, or college Journalism 101. Even the usually over-the-top columnist Mark Morford was positively 'somber' in yesterday's piece "Why Don't Americans Care?" Then yesterday I also read an article in The New Yorker about eighteenth-century Edinburgh - a century that started as a near-theocracy where an eighteen-year-old student was found guilty of atheism, and hanged, for believing that moral laws are the work of governments and men, and became the century of the Scottish Enlightenment, of David Hume, Adam Smith and others. James Buchan sums up their influence in his recent book about the period "Crowded with Genius": "In demanding that experiment not inherited truth define the business of living, the Edinburgh philosophers stamped the West with its modern scientific and provisional character. They created a world that tended towards the egalitarian and, within reason, the democratic. Their prestige in English-speaking lands was carried on the wave of British and American expansion into every corner of the world." Think about our present situation, and weep. Or at least wince. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 12 02:03:21 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Polling 101 Message-ID: Subject: Polling 101 FYI, in the public interest. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from NSDL Scout Reports October 08, 2004) Roper Center: Polling 101 http://www.ropercenter.uconn.edu/pom/polling101.html The U.S. Presidential election season seems like a good time review the basics on polling. The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut is "the largest library of public opinion data in the world." (See also Scout Report for Social Science, December 1, 1998.) This section of the website gives visitors a short lesson on public opinion polling. The Polling 101 page reviews Sampling, Total Survey Error, Reading Tables, and provides links to other pages with additional information on polling. A final section talks about the Role of Polls in Policymaking based on a 2001 phone survey conducted for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation in collaboration with Public Perspective magazine. Visitors can also browse through the Public Opinion Matters section of the website to view recent polls on economic issues, education, technology, and more. The full database of polls, however, is accessible only through paid membership. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Oct 22 13:41:31 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] TV-B-Gone Message-ID: Subject: TV-B-Gone (from NewsScan Daily, 19 October 2004) TV-B-GONE ZAPS INTRUSIVE BROADCASTS Inventor Mitch Altman has the answer for people in airports, doctors' offices, restaurants and bars that feature blaring television sets as part of the ambiance. The TV-B-Gone is a universal remote disguised as a tiny keychain fob that works on most televisions and comes in two models geared toward European TV sets or Asian-American ones. When activated by pressing a button, the device runs through about 200 different codes that turn off various TV models, starting with the most popular brands and then moving to the more obscure. One TV-B-Gone enthusiast notes, "You've heard about the battle for eyeballs. They're your eyeballs. You should not have your consciousness constantly invaded. Television people are getting better and better at finding ways of roping us into TV where we can't get away." Altman says friends who've heard about the device have approached him about other uses, such as one that could jam cell phones or shut down vehicle subwoofers and car alarms. (Wired.com 19 Oct 2004) ------------------------------------------------------------------- A nice instance of someone inventing something that is wanted. Media attention spread word of this device from 4 websites to almost 4000 in four days. They sold out their entire initial stock of 20,000 in two days, but more are on order. A great present for that person who has everything, except their sanity. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Oct 22 20:50:28 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Outsourcing Privacy Message-ID: Subject: Outsourcing Privacy from WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 22 Oct 04 Washington, DC (Archives of What's New can be found at ) PRIVACY: HAS "TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS" BEEN OUTSOURCED? Remember the Pentagon program to create a data base of personal information? It would record our movements, purchases, who we talk to, what we read. It was the nightmare of the computer age . It still is. Killed by Congress , or so we thought, but it was too bad an idea to be allowed to die. It was privatized and moved offshore, out of reach of U.S. regulators. Bahamas-based Global Information Group Ltd. offers such products as the "Terrorist Risk Identity Assessment." But is it accurate? Hey, war is not pretty; there are always civilian casualties. ----------------------------------------------------------------- A quick look with Google points to other articles on these ever inventive efforts to keep us safe, e.g. . Heck, until recently convicted felons were used to compile profiles of consumer data. E.g. see regarding Beverly Dennis, et al. v. Metromail, et al., No. 96-04451, Travis County, Texas. Just to give you an idea about the amount of available personal information, Metromail had twenty-five pages of personal data on Beverly Dennis, including her income, and information on when she had used hemorrhoid medicine. Inventiveness in pursuit of profit is boundless. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 26 11:52:28 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Saved by Google Message-ID: Subject: Saved by Google (from NewsScan Daily, 21 October 2004) GOOGLE SEARCH HELPS SET KIDNAPPED JOURNALIST FREE Iraqi militants who kidnapped and threatened to kill an Australian journalist did a Google search for his name on the Internet to check his work before releasing him unharmed. John Martinkus, a veteran freelancer who has covered conflicts from East Timor to Iraq, was released Tuesday, a day after he was taken hostage by Sunni militants and ex-Iraqi army officers. Martinkus was filming a report for SBS's Dateline program and was preparing to leave Iraq when he was grabbed outside a hotel popular with foreign correspondents. SBS executive producer Mike Carey today said the journalist's captors had investigated his background online and saw he was harmless. "They Googled him, they checked him out on a popular search engine and got onto his own website or his publisher's website and saw he was a writer and journalist," Carey said. "They had thought he was working for the Americans as an informer." In this case, modern technology probably saved his life, he said. "It certainly did help," Carey said. (The Age 20 Oct 2004) rec'd from John Lamp From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Oct 26 14:54:36 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Pollutant Generation Message-ID: Subject: Pollutant Generation Dear Colleagues - With environmental issues figuring in the current political debates, mostly in "data-free" form, I thought it worthwhile to remind us of this particular data. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News Number 696 August 12, 2004 by Phillip F. Schewe, Ben Stein THE MASSIVE NORTHEAST BLACKOUT of a year ago not only shut off electricity for 50 million people in the US and Canada, but also shut off the pollution coming from fossil-fired turbogenerators in the Ohio Valley. In effect, the power outage was an inadvertent experiment for gauging atmospheric repose with the grid gone for the better part of the day. And the results were impressive. On 15 August 2003, only 24 hours after the blackout, air was cleaner by this amount: SO2 was down 90%, O3 down 50%, and light-scattering particles down 70% over "normal" conditions in the same area. The haze reductions were made by University of Maryland scientists scooping air samples with a light aircraft. The observed pollutant reductions exceeded expectations, causing the authors to suggest that the spectacular overnight improvements in air quality "may result from underestimation of emission from power plants, inaccurate representation of power plant effluent in emission models or unaccounted-for atomospheric chemical reactions." (Marufu et al., Geophysical Research Letters, vol 31, L13106, 2004.) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Oct 27 16:58:51 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] ID Theft Kit Message-ID: Subject: ID Theft Kit (from NewsScan Daily, 27 October 2004) SAFE & SOUND IN THE CYBER AGE: FLORIDA'S ID THEFT KIT (by Chey Cobb & Stephen Cobb) *** A few years ago, when the dot com bubble was still bubbling, legislators in the State of Florida got the 'technology bug' and mandated that all Florida counties put all public records on 'The Web.' We have no idea if the companies that make the hardware and software used to implement the mandate handed out campaign contributions to encourage this technology leap. But a lot of money has been spent on such technology in the years since, from dozens of high speed scanners to terabytes of storage and thousands of lines of Web code. The result? A large group of people, and even the country as a whole, is probably a lot less safe than it used to be. To understand why, take a look at a Web page we have put up to demonstrate: The link on the right shows you a prime example of what can happen when people don't fully grasp the relationship between privacy, technology, and human nature. Anyone on the planet with an Internet connection can now find intensely personal details about individuals who have lived in, or passed through, Florida. One such class of persons is elderly folk whose relatives have filed power of attorney (these records sometimes include banking data along with SSN and signature). Another worrying class of victims is U.S. military personnel. You can find out what their specialties are, their Social Security Numbers, addresses, relatives, signature, and so forth. The example we give is one of these, from Duval County, the most populous county in Florida. What you will see is the record as it appears on the Web, except that we added red ink to blot out key portions of the name of this particular person. If you go to the Duval County Web site, from any country in the world, you can find thousands of records just like this, with the name and SSN in place, NOT crossed out. Many of these people are not Florida residents, they just happen to have left the service while in Florida. The legislators who mandated this state of affairs were not alone in their failure to realize that "The Web" is the same "World Wide Web" you can access from anywhere, from Boca Raton to Bulgaria, Tampa Bay to Turkistan. A number of federal government agencies took the same leap off the cliff of commonsense in their eagerness to save money by automating public access to information. The basic mistake was to think of the Internet as the American public. Perhaps their Internet bubble was a Venn diagram in which the set of all U.S. citizens neatly coincided with the set of all Internet users. In the very early days of the Internet that might have been forgivable, but these days, when the evening news routinely pulls its footage from Islamic fundamentalist Web sites, you would think we'd all be a bit wiser. Apparently not. Consider how you get to these records, many of which are the perfect starting point for the crime of identity theft. You would think that you would need to know a specific person's name to find public records pertaining to them. But no, in Duval County you can simply ask to see all records of a particular type within a valid date range. In other counties you can't browse all records at once, but a very lame search mechanism lets you enter a single letter for a last name, like "A," and thus browse all persons whose name begins with "A," from Aarnem to Aziz. At some sites, including Duval, you don't even need a document viewer like Acrobat because the county provides one for you. Needless to say, we think this type of access to people's private information is wrong. Our government does not have the right to publish to the world our Social Security Numbers, signatures, and other personal details (and this doesn't even get into the whole issue of Florida juvenile records wrongly placed in the public domain). Things need to be changed. If anyone would like to contact us about efforts to effect changes we will try to do what we can to help. What sort of changes are needed? Well, expunging all Social Security Numbers would be a start, but even easier would be the requirement that you need to know the name of the person whose public records you are seeking. And personally, we see no reason for military discharge papers to be made available at the county level. Why not make that a responsibility of the branch of the armed services in which the person served? In the broader scheme of things Americans need to do some serious thinking about what 'public record' means. Stephen is sitting in a bar in Amsterdam right now, looking at military service records of people from Alabama to Wyoming. He's also viewing aerial photographs of properties in our Florida neighborhood, then pulling up the names and addresses of the owners, seeing what they paid for their homes and if their taxes are current. Does he have a right to do that? From there? And what about the fundamentalist who might be sitting next to him in that bar? [Chey Cobb, CISSP, the author of "Cryptography for Dummies" and "Network Security for Dummies," is a former senior technical security advisor to the NRO. Her email is chey at aug dot com. Stephen Cobb, CISSP, is the author of "Privacy for Business" and Chief Security Executive of STSN. His email is scobb at cobb dot com.] ------------------------------------------------------------------- SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY: To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions of NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages (i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to the addresses shown below: Text version: Send message to NewsScan@NewsScan.com HTML version: Send mail to NewsScan-html@NewsScan.com NewsScan-To-Go: From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Nov 4 14:50:59 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Innovators Message-ID: Subject: Innovators (from NewsScan Daily, 4 November 2004) INNOVATORS WHO HELPED SHAPE AMERICA On Monday evening, PBS will begin a four-part television series profiling the innovators written about in "They Made America" -- a new book by Sir Harold Evans. Sir Harold says his main criterion for deciding to select an innovation for his survey was whether it had changed people's lives: "That's why I included the bra" -- an innovation of the 1920s developed by Ida Rosenthal. Other innovators profiled in the book and TV series include: Edwin Armstrong, a radio pioneer; Lewis Tappan, inventor of credit ratings; Georges Doriot, the father of venture capital; Raymond Ingram Smith, the first to recognize gambling as an entirely new market; Samuel Insull, the onetime Edison assistant who turned electricity into a mass-market product; and many others. (USA Today 3 Nov 2004) FLASH CARD "In journalism it is simpler to sound off than it is to find out. It is more elegant to pontificate than it is to sweat." (Harold Evans) WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE RISK-TAKERS Englishman Sir Harold Evans, author of the new book, "They Made America," explains the role America's tradition of innovation plays in making the world a better place: "Here is a curious fact of American culture, supposedly so obsessed with business. The Founding Fathers promised life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and there have been thousands of presidential biographies and histories tracing the political struggles to honor those ideals. But none of the promises could have been honored without the business innovators who have had nothing like the same attention. You cannot much pursue happiness if you are starving, or unable to move your family to a better place, or protect it along the way, or communicate. "Politicians could make promises, but while government could provide the framework of freedom it could not aspire to deliver these necessities. We owe them to men like Cyrus McCormick (the reaper), Robert Fulton (steamboat), Theodore Judah (transcontinental railway), Lewis Tappan (credit rating), Sam Colt (six-gun), and Samuel Morse (telegraph). McCormick's invention, and then his revolutionary buy-on-credit marketing, enabled thousands of farmers to harvest the Great Plains and feed the world. He also freed labor for the industrial revolution and the preservation of the Union. And so has our progress continued down to this day with the founding of the biotech industry by Herbert Boyer and Robert Swanson, and the software industry made possible by the operating system for PCs from the unsung Gary Kildall. "Innovation will continue in America. It is in the nation's DNA. But if the scope of it is not to ebb in the face of global competition -- in large part the consequence of Malcom Maclean's innovation of container shipping -- we must honor more the risk-takers who really get things done." *** [To find a library copy of "The American Century" by Harold Evans visit RLG's RedLightGreen.com: -- or to purchase a copy go to: Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy programs.] SUBSCRIPTION INFO FOR NEWSSCAN DAILY: To subscribe or unsubscribe to the text, html, or handheld versions of NewsScan Daily, send the appropriate subscribe or unsubscribe messages (i.e., with the word 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' in the subject line) to the addresses shown below: Text version: Send message to NewsScan@NewsScan.com HTML version: Send mail to NewsScan-html@NewsScan.com NewsScan-To-Go: From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Nov 9 04:10:37 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Internet and Civics Message-ID: Subject: Internet and Civics As preface to all the detailed links, I recommend an excellent Bill Moyers speech from this summer, that also came to me via the Internet: Web text http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0610-11.htm Bill Moyer's MP3 Audio - High Quality (for high speed connections) http://cdn.moveonpac.org/content/audio/moyer.mp3 Bill Moyer's MP3 Audio - Lower Quality (for dialup connections) http://cdn.moveonpac.org/content/audio/small_moyer.mp3 --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------- (from NSDL Scout Report, November 5, 2004 | Volume 3, Number 23) The Internet and Civic Life First Monday: The Digital Tea Leaves of Election 2000 http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_12/lewicki/index.html Institute for Policy, Democracy and the Internet http://www.ipdi.org/publications/ Wired: Weapons of Mass Mobilization http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/moveon.html Fact Check http://www.factcheck.org/ IT Facts http://www.itfacts.biz/index.php?id=C0_13_1 Pew: Internet and Democratic Debate http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/141/report_display.asp Wikipedia: Political Privacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_privacy How Can Democracy Be Bad? http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/street/pl38/demo.htm After the 2000 election, these two authors predicted that Internet usage would change the way campaigns are run (1). A report posted on this website provides some examples of how the Internet was used in 2004, particularly for posting videos (2). Another feature of this year's campaign is the use of the Internet to organize grassroots activism, as is discussed in this article from Wired (3). By far the most common "political" websites, however, seek to provide information, including this website from Annenberg, (4). This recent report from Pew finds people are using the Internet for political information, and not only to seek information that reinforces their political preferences (5). One concern with this movement to Internet campaigning is that the use of cookies, online donation forms, and political mailing lists to gather information on people has implications for political privacy, an issue which is discussed generally on this website (6). This website from IT Facts (7) provides a variety of statistics on Internet use for further exploration . This final article offers some intriguing thoughts on democracy (8). From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Nov 12 19:40:24 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Our "Knowledge Society"? Message-ID: Subject: Our "Knowledge Society"? (from WHAT'S NEW Robert L. Park Friday, 12 Nov 04 Washington, DC) MORAL VALUES: DARWINISM CONTINUES TO STIR UP THE FAITHFUL. In Cobb County Georgia, a sticker on science textbooks warns that evolution is "a theory, not a fact." It's being challenged in court. The Grantsburg School District in Wisconsin wants "Various theories of origins" (read "intelligent design") taught. The move is overwhelmingly opposed by higher education groups in the state. In Charles County, Maryland, several school board members want creationism on the curriculum and American History to stress our roots as "a Christian nation." They are also considering inviting Gideons to provide each students with a bible. The Washington Post says one board member is a member of Gideons. Another hosts a conservative religious radio talk show. The Raelians http://www.aps.org/WN/WN02/wn122702.cfm note that, "The Theory of Intelligent Design does not lead to a supernatural designer but to an extraterrestrial human- civilization designer." THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND. Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the University of Maryland, but they should be. --- Archives of What's New can be found at http://www.aps.org/WN To subscribe, send a blank e-mail to: ------------------------------------------------------------------ You should also amuse yourself with Mark Morford's last column "Down With Fancy Book Learnin'" ------------------------------------------------------------------ The US status as prime innovator, as the premier "knowledge society," has often been cited, maybe not so much in recent months, as our ticket to international economic competitiveness in the age of outsourcing. But I suppose a vigorous nation should periodically reexamine such concepts as knowledge, reason, evidence, debt and competitiveness. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Nov 12 19:33:49 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Broken Patents Message-ID: Subject: Broken Patents (from INNOVATION, 6 October 2004) PATENT LITIGATION ESCALATING Harvard investment banking professor Josh Lerner and Brandeis economics professor Adam B. Jaffe say two patent-office developments in the last quarter century have done disastrous damage to the nation's traditions of innovation and profess: first, a decision in the early 1980s to let a single federal appeals court hear patent lawsuits (replacing 12 regional appellate courts) and then changing the patent office's financing so the agency could pay for itself with user fees. In their new book, Lerner and Jaffe suggest that under the new rules examiners had to perform quicker reviews, resulting in a degradation in quality of patents issued and encouraging patent disputes: "The ability to litigate and expect to get substantial award from litigation increased. So as a result we've got somewhat of a vicious cycle. Once you get one firm in an industry beginning a strategy of aggressive patent enforcement, it creates an almost inevitable response -- an almost arms-race dynamic -- where everyone else in the industry says, 'We better be doing the same thing.'" Part of their proposed solution is to reverse the trend toward jury trials for patent lawsuits: "Over the last 30 to 40 years, there has been real replacing of judges by juries. Patent disputes by and large tend to be highly technical disputes, and in many cases a lay person without much training in the area is hardly an expert." The book is: "Innovation and Its Discontents: How Our Broken Patent System is Endangering Innovation and Progress, and What To Do About It." (New York Times 27 Sep 2004) From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Nov 20 02:03:12 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Respect = Fee? Message-ID: Subject: Respect = Fee? (from INNOVATION, 17 November 2004) WANT TO GET THEM TO TAKE YOUR ADVICE? MAKE 'EM PAY FOR IT It appears that people really do pay attention to (and act on) advice they pay for. Harvard Business School's Francesca Gino recently completed a report on studies that asked participants to answer different sets of questions about American history. Before answering some of the questions, subjects had the opportunity to get advice on the correct answer, either for free or for a certain monetary fee. In both cases, the advice came from the same source, i.e., subjects were told explicitly that the quality of advice was the same. Results found that the costly advice was given greater weight than the free advice -- significantly greater weight,says Gino. Managers and businesses take note, she says: "It is really important for managers to understand the biases they may fall prey to in either soliciting or taking advice. Just being aware that you may have a tendency to overweigh some kinds of advice, and that this may lead to bad decisions, could be a helpful first step." Remember, too, that costs can include time and effort, as well as money. For consultants: "Fee structures may well influence the extent to which clients respond to the advice they give." (Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge 8 Nov 2004) ------------------------------------------------------------------- The failings of human nature are ample, and always disappointing. In our "information society," where we're more likely to help someone with advice than by giving them home-baked cookies, altruism is getting a bad rap, according to this study. Even though I do work as a consultant, I'm still disappointed. I suspect a number of mingled issues. The age of "spin" has much eroded believability and raised greatly the suspicion that everything free hides ulterior motives and lacks accountability. The failings of education have eroded our basic "journalistic instincts," our ability to ask questions about validity, accuracy, authority, uniqueness and completeness of information. Should I start charging for EAS-INFO? ;-) --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sat Nov 20 14:29:18 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Google Scholar Message-ID: Subject: Google Scholar Dear Colleagues - Called to my attention last week by my colleague Prof. Bob Grober, and the last issues of TOURBUS and NewsScan Daily, is quite an interesting new Google development . Google seems to have penetrated quite deeply into what was formerly called the "deep" or "hidden" Web, on which I commented on EAS-INFO in 2001 at . (Please note that this is a URL in an old archive, the newer one is accessed from the URL at the bottom of this mailing but is off-line for a few days, and that the paper referred to in my 2001 mailing has now moved to .) In pursuing the citations under author:kindlmann, somewhere along the way I seemlessly entered the domain accessible to me only as part of Yale's licensing agreements. Nice for me, but it makes it harder to predict how comprehensively it will work for you outside Yale. Here is what TOURBUS (18 Nov 04) had to say about the new Google service: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Google Scholar -------------- Google released a new search site Wednesday called Google Scholar that lets you search "specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research." You can find Google Scholar at http://scholar.google.com/ Google Scholar supports most of Google's regular query modifiers [for more information about Google query modifiers, check out my free Google 201 PDF handout at http://tinyurl.com/4hhn9 ]. Google Scholar also introduces a new query modifier: author:authorname How do you use the new author: query modifier? Well, here are three examples of it in work: author:stack "The effect of country music on suicide" author:Balasubramaniam "Coordination Modes in the Multisegmental Dynamics of Hula Hooping" author:crispen "Social stress in pregnant squirrel monkeys" Google Scholar is brand new and is still in beta. In other words, the folks at Google are still working out the bugs and the database is kind of small. But from what little I have seen so far, I'm impressed. For more information about Google Scholar, check out http://scholar.google.com/scholar/about.html ------------------------------------------------------------------- and NewsScan Daily, 18 November 2004 ------------------------------------ GOOGLE DEBUTS SCHOLARLY SEARCH SERVICE Google is adding a new search service geared toward the needs of academic and scientific researchers, offering a central starting point for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, books, abstracts and technical reports. The new search tool, accessible at scholar.google.com, is the result of collaboration with a number of scientific and academic publishers, including ACM, Nature, IEEE and OCLC. The new service initially will be advertisement-free, but company executives say that will change. "The commercial reason for doing this is that you can target areas with high-quality, high-payback ads," says John Sack, director of Stanford University's HighWire Press. "An advertisement that goes next to an article on cloning techniques is probably going to be for services that are pretty expensive." SearchEngineWatch editor Danny Sullivan says Google's latest move is "a significant step forward," adding that Google likely will have competition soon from Yahoo and others. "We will continue to see an explosion of vertical search engines like this," he notes, referring to search services that focus on special collections. (New York Times 18 Nov 2004) ------------------------------------------------------------------- Much as it was once fashionable to opine on the likelihood of Amazon.com's demise under the threat of Barnes & Noble Web competition, so the pundits now comment on threats to Google from new Microsoft and Yahoo search services. Don't bet on it. With continuing innovation like , I think Google is still miles ahead. All best, --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Nov 22 14:46:36 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Cut Here Message-ID: Subject: Cut Here (from NewsScan Daily, 22 November 2004) MAKE INCISION HERE: RFID TAG USED IN SURGERY The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved use of radio frequency ID (RFID) tags to ensure that physicians perform the right surgery on the right patient. Manufactured by SurgiChip Inc., the radio tag is encoded with the patient's name and the site, type, and date of the surgery; the patient helps stick the adhesive-backed tag near the site of the surgery and workers in the hospital's operating room scan the tag to compare that information with the patient's chart. (AP/San Jose Merury News 19 Nov 2004) -------------------------------------------------------------------- When a serious but poorly understood problem becomes yet another market for technology, do we all feel safer? --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Nov 29 21:33:20 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Wikipedia Message-ID: Subject: Wikipedia Dear Colleagues - http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html Pointed out by my colleague Liz Shaw, this is a very enjoyable article about Wikipedia, a collaborative open-source encyclopedia. The author is Robert McHenry, former Editor in Chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Wikipedia has its roots in Internet attributes advocated enthusiastically in the Internet's early days, those of "community" and "information wants to be free." We're a little more sober now, but it is still important to think about the attributes of open-source collaborations that in some cases drive the result toward success, e.g. Linux, and in other cases toward mediocrity, like Wikipedia according to Mr. McHenry. One of many reasons to think about these issues is the changing nature of publishing, be it the very successful free unrefereed Los Alamos preprint archives in the professional realm, or in the personal realm the phenomenon of blogging, though blogging is also used professionally, e.g. . That, and much else, is being transformed (dissolved, smoothed, rescaled, ...) by the Internet. Let me mention that the operational context of Wikipedia is the Wiki interactive Web server software (see and ) which has effective uses in design teams, courses with collaborative aspects, informal resource compilation, etc. Look into it and think about it. It may be the most useful consequence of your reading this mailing. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Wed Dec 8 22:43:23 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Smart Cat Message-ID: Subject: Smart Cat There are at least a couple of substantive mailings that I need to find time for, but I thought I'd quickly send you this in case you're wondering whether your EAS-INFO subscription is broken. --PJK ------------------------------------------------------------------ (from Edupage, December 08, 2004) ONLINE UNIVERSITY SUED IN PENNSYLVANIA Kathryn Silcox, deputy attorney general in Pennsylvania, has brought a civil lawsuit against Trinity Southern University, an online university based in Plano, Texas, alleging consumer fraud and illegal e-mail marketing. Silcox brought the suit after her cat received an MBA from the online university. Silcox became involved after Microsoft contacted attorneys general in different states regarding spam messages. She filled out the university's requested self-evaluation and applied for a $299 bachelor's degree using the cat's name. The life experience noted on the form was sufficient not only for a bachelor's degree but also an MBA for an additional $100, according to the university. Silcox paid $99 for a copy of the transcript, which indicated that her cat had taken four semesters' worth of business classes. Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 December 2004 (sub. req'd) http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2004/12/2004120805n.htm From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Sun Dec 12 16:47:13 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Google Scholar article Message-ID: Subject: Google Scholar article Further to my recent mailing , this article by Danny Sullivan "Google Scholar Offers Access To Academic Information" SEARCH ENGINE WATCH, November 18, 2004 http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3437471 adds useful perspectives, caveats and links regarding the use of this new search service. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Fri Dec 17 18:19:35 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Millau Bridge Message-ID: Subject: Millau Bridge Way back around 1960, when I was an undergraduate at Columbia, I was already much involved with the "pieces of electrical engineering," its electronic components. It was a time of a widely shared sense of promise, the beginning of the transition from vacuum tubes to semiconductors, with which we aspired to large contributions. Around that time I took a course in 19th and 20th-century architecture, a subject by its very nature "writ large." I still retain, at a cocktail party discussion level, recollections of Louis Sullivan and his Carson, Pirie & Scott department store, and the pivotal contributions of Frank Lloyd Wright. But my most lasting impressions are of the pioneering virtuosi of reinforced concrete, Pier Luigi Nervi and, most of all, the bridges of Robert Maillart, particularly his Salginatobel bridge of 1930. (With Google image searching it becomes trivial to pull up a couple of examples) It was never given the field of electrical engineering to be able fuse its ingeniously complex ingredients, writ ever smaller on the head of a pin, into a monument like a Maillart bridge made of concrete and steel, fused together subject to elegantly simple concepts. So I remain as always jealous but also deeply admiring, when I see Norman Foster's new bridge in Millau, France. In the present "space race" of bridge design it is a bold new entry. The Scout Report link is itself a guide to further links. --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Mon Dec 20 19:54:07 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Structure of Education Message-ID: Subject: Structure of Education (from NewsScan Daily, 20 December 2004) COMMODORE ON A CHIP A self-taught computer chip designer in rural Oregon has managed to squeeze the entire circuitry of an old Commodore 64 PC onto a single chip, which she has incorporated into a joystick that connects by cable to a TV set, giving users access to 30 vintage video games -- mostly sports, racing and puzzle games from the early '80s. The device requires no separate game cartridges -- all the entertainment is in the joystick. Designer Jeri Ellsworth says her first venture into toy making hasn't made her a mint, "but I'm having fun." Ellsworth's efforts in reverse-engineering old computers and giving them new life through custom chips has generated a cult following among "retro" PC enthusiasts, as well as a number of job offers from people impressed with her passion. "It's possible to get a credential and not have passion," says Rapport Inc. CEO Andrew Singer, who compares her to Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Macintosh designer Burrell Smith, neither of whom had formal training when they made their mark in computer design. The $30 Commodore 64 joystick is being marketed by Mammoth Toys, and has been a big hit on the QVC Web site. (New York Times 20 Dec 2004) ------------------------------------------------------------------- It is a charming story. Not infrequently we hear of such self-taught individuals performing startlingly well in the high-tech world of computers or the Web. I am always delighted to hear of such skilled enthusiasm, but also cannot help wonder about the evolving nature of technical work and the structure of learning that gets people to such skill levels. What does it say about the (presumably) deeper and more structured education available in the engineering curricula of colleges and universities? Even parts of what Ms. Ellsworth has done would be an eminently respectable EE Senior Project. Of course I assume that the typical BS in EE would be much more comprehensive than the skills Ms. Ellsworth needed for her project. And she may be one of those singularly gifted individuals to whom we ought to offer scholarships and degrees. She is also gratifyingly aware of the need to strive for simplicity and historical perspective, values academia sometimes slights: > Recently she interrupted a conversation with a visitor in her home > to hunt in between the scattered circuit boards and components in > her living room for a 1971 volume, "MOS Integrated Circuits," which > she frequently consults. The book concerns an earlier chip > technology based on fewer transistors than are used today. "I look > for older texts," she said. "A real good designer needs to know how > the old stuff works." Do we examine the nature, depth and realm of application of what we teach in engineering curricula often enough, and in adequate proportion to the great expense of typical such educations? --PJK From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Tue Dec 21 20:20:19 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] FWD>CIT INFOBITS 12/04 Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP FWD>CIT INFOBITS 12/04 I'm forwarding this month's issue of CIT INFOBITS because of the interest of its items, and to remind you of this publication. --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 12/20/04 5:31 PM From: kotlas@email.unc.edu CIT INFOBITS December 2004 No. 78 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. ...................................................................... Evolving Technologies Reports Technology and Plagiarism Study Future of E-Research and Research Institutions New Technology Literacy Assessment Service Launched Conference Catch Up ...................................................................... EVOLVING TECHNOLOGIES REPORTS Educause's Evolving Technologies Committee is charged with the "identification of developing technologies and the evaluation of their impact on higher education." Annually, the Committee's work is presented in a collection of white papers. This year's reports cover digital repositories and management of Web content, learning objects, music file sharing, nomadic computing, regional networks, and spam management. You can view all the papers online at http://www.educause.edu/EvolvingTechnologiesReports/869. EDUCAUSE is a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology. For more information, contact: Educause, 4772 Walnut Street, Suite 206, Boulder, CO 80301-2538 USA; tel: 303-449-4430; fax: 303-440-0461; email: info@educause.edu; Web: http://www.educause.edu/. ...................................................................... TECHNOLOGY AND PLAGIARISM STUDY "[I]nstructors typically fall behind their own students in degree of technological sophistication when it comes to matters of cheating. This gap in sophistication between students and their instructors is one of many pressing issues created by the rapid evolution of information technology in the university." In "Technology and Plagiarism in the University: Brief Report of a Trial in Detecting Cheating" (by Diane Johnson, et al., AACE JOURNAL, vol. 12, no. 3, 2004, pp. 281-299) the authors report on a trial set up at the University of California, Santa Barbara to test automated detection of term-paper plagiarism in a large, introductory undergraduate class. Although the study resulted in only a few detected instances of student cheating, the authors speculate that, if extrapolated to all the courses taught at UCSB each year, "in the short run the number of cases of dishonesty caught and prosecuted could easily grow by an order of magnitude were electronic techniques widely used by faculty." The report is available online at http://www.aace.org/pubs/AACEJ/dispart.cfm?paperID=24. AACE Journal [ISSN 1551-3696] is a quarterly journal published online by the Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education. Current and back issues are available at http://www.aace.org/pubs/aacej/. The AACE (founded in 1981) is an "international, educational and professional not-for profit organization dedicated to the advancement of the knowledge, theory, and quality of learning and teaching at all levels with information technology." For more information, contact: AACE, P.O. Box 3728, Norfolk, VA 23514 USA; tel: 757-623-7588; fax: 703-997-8760; email: info@aace.org; Web; http://www.aace.org/. ...................................................................... FUTURE OF E-RESEARCH AND RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS "The role of libraries . . . will shift from primarily acquiring published scholarship to a broader role of managing scholarship in collaboration with the researchers that develop and draw upon it." -- Clifford Lynch, speaking at "E-Research and Supporting Cyberinfrastructure" forum In October 2004, the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) co-sponsored the forum "E-Research and Supporting Cyberinfrastructure: A Forum to Consider the Implications for Research Libraries & Research Institutions." Over 100 educators, librarians, and IT specialists from over 75 organizations met to discuss how changes in the practices of scholarship across all disciplines is affecting the scholarly communication system. Some of the issues that will challenge libraries and research institutions in the years ahead include copyright, funding, collection collaboration, and content archiving. For a report summarizing the forum see "Libraries and Changing Research Practices: A Report of the ARL/CNI Forum on E-Research and Cyberinfrastructure" (ARL BIMONTHLY REPORT 237, December 2004) at http://www.arl.org/newsltr/237/cyberinfra.html. PowerPoint slides from forum speakers are available online at http://www.arl.org/forum04/#proceedings. The Coalition for Networked Information, a program of the Association of Research Libraries and EDUCAUSE, is an organization "designed to advance the transformative promise of networked information technology for the improvement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity." For more information, contact: Coalition for Networked Information, 21 Dupont Circle, Washington, DC 20036 USA; tel: 202-296-5098; fax: 202-872-0884; email: info@cni.org; Web: http://www.cni.org/. The Association of Research Libraries is a not-for-profit membership organization comprising the leading research libraries in North America. "Its mission is to shape and influence forces affecting the future of research libraries in the process of scholarly communication. ARL programs and services promote equitable access to and effective use of recorded knowledge in support of teaching, research, scholarship, and community service." For more information, contact: Association of Research Libraries, 21 Dupont Circle, Suite 800, Washington, DC 20036 USA; tel: 202-296-2296; fax: 202-872-0884; email: arlhq@arl.org; Web: http://www.arl.org/. ...................................................................... NEW TECHNOLOGY LITERACY ASSESSMENT SERVICE LAUNCHED In November 2004, Educational Testing Service (ETS) launched the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Literacy Assessment service. The test "measures postsecondary students' ability to define, access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create, and communicate information in a technological environment." The first trials of the new assessment will take place at seven colleges and universities in Spring 2005. The assessment could help institutions to spot areas where incoming students need more preparation and where the college should focus its resources. You can read more about the ICT Literacy Assessment at http://www.ets.org/news/04110801.html. ETS is a non-profit organization that develops, administers, and scores a variety of tests, include the SAT, GRE, and GMAT. For more information, contact: Educational Testing Service, Rosedale Rd., Princeton, NJ 08541 USA; tel: 609-921-9000; fax: 609-734-5410; Web: http://www.ets.org/. ...................................................................... CONFERENCE CATCH UP Every year dozens of conferences and other professional development opportunities are offered to educators. Many of these events make their proceedings available online so non-attendees can still benefit from the papers and presentations. Here is a sampling of websites that offer proceedings from 2004 events: ED-MEDIA 2004 http://www.aace.org/DL/index.cfm/fuseaction/Awards/j/EDMEDIA/y/2004/issue/null Educause 2004 http://www.educause.edu/e04/conferencepresentationsandresources/5269 CUMREC 2004 http://www.cumrec.org/meeting/proceedings_sessions.asp?meeting=CR04 Syllabus 2004 http://www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=10304 10th Sloan-C International Conference on Asynchronous Learning Networks http://www.sloan-c.org/conference/proceedings/2004/index.asp Computers in Libraries 2004 http://www.infotoday.com/cil2004/presentations/default.shtml American Society for Information Science and Technology 2004 http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM04/program.html Stay informed about technology conferences with the CIT's "Education Technology and Computer-Related Conferences" at http://www.unc.edu/cit/guides/irg-37.html and "Calendar of World-Wide Educational Technology-Related Conferences, Seminars, and Other Events." The calendar is at http://atncalendar.depts.unc.edu:8086/. ...................................................................... To Subscribe CIT INFOBITS is published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS 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 Lemony Snicket or use the web subscription form at http://mail.unc.edu/lists/read/subscribe?name=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 kotlas@email.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. We can announce your conference on our "Calendar of World-Wide Educational Technology-Related Conferences, Seminars, and Other Events" at http://atncalendar.depts.unc.edu:8086/. 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 kotlas@email.unc.edu. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2004, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ITS Center for Instructional Technology. All rights reserved. May be reproduced in any medium for non-commercial purposes. From pjk at design.eng.yale.edu Thu Dec 30 16:02:32 2004 From: pjk at design.eng.yale.edu (pjk) Date: Sun Jun 25 18:53:25 2006 Subject: [EAS] Amazing Ourselves To Death Message-ID: Mail*Link¨ SMTP Amazing Ourselves To Death Dear Colleagues - I can think of no better way to wish you all the best in 2005 than by forwarding this item from my friend and colleague Nathan Price. Happy 2005! --PJK -------------------------------------- Date: 12/30/04 12:00 PM From: Nathan Price Hi all - Here's an excellent article in the Seattle Times about technology, information overload and their effect on our lives. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2004/1128/cover.html This article was referenced on Slashdot, which is how I found it. The title of this email message comes from a Harvard researcher quoted in the article. He says something that is a clever echo of Neil Postman's excellent book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business": "We have so many options, reward centers that we never had before," says John Ratey, who teaches at Harvard and is a psychiatrist specializing in attention deficit disorder. "I think that's why we're seeing more of this. There are more demands on our attention and less training for us to stop and take it all in. We seem to be amazing ourselves to death." Perhaps our first New Year's resolution for 2005 should be to slow down and be a bit less connected... I wish you all health and happiness in the New Year. --Nate