Tuesday 11 September 2007 @8:59
I was in denial about it for as long as possible, but yesterday my classes began. I can’t pretend it’s still summer anymore. Although the summer wasn’t nearly as productive as I planned back in May (I believe in aiming high; realistic goals are for weak minds 
), I did get two papers accepted and I made progress on a new manuscript that I’d like to submit by mid-October.
I also sharpened my tools, battled a web-spam invasion, built a new home computer, and changed my web host. Didn’t travel very far this summer, but we hit Block Island (RI) in May, and Boston and Montréal for a few days each in August. In the coming weeks and months, I plan to finish final revisions on my RNGzip paper for JCP, pound out the new manuscript with Stefan, organize my coursework ideas for AI and write something about that, and, of course, submit my tenure portfolio. Oh, and I’ll be going to Germany for ICFP.
Friday 7 September 2007 @10:00
One (ca. 1988): As a teenager, I believed in ghosts. I was a big fan of the Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown series. Ouija, witchcraft, psychic phenomena — these were themes of my adolescence. One morning following a sleepover, a friend’s father ridiculed us pretty harshly for believing such nonsense. Then later that day he attended mass and professed belief in virgin birth, miraculous resurrection, and divine retribution. Even then, I recognized this as deep hypocrisy.
It’s not that belief in one impossible thing necessitates belief in six more (before breakfast). But when you’ve abandoned objective tests for truth, the distinction between cherished belief and childish myth is arbitrary and personal. So there’s not much point in ridiculing someone whose classifications differ from yours.
Two (ca. 1991): As I went off to college, I read more widely and experienced a wider world. I quickly grew to dislike fantasy novels and started reading popular science, by the likes of Weinberg, Hawking, Sagan, and Dawkins. I gained an appreciation of “god as nature,” a concept that I learned went back to Spinoza (ca. 1670), and was endorsed by Einstein. This is not in any sense a ‘personal’ god; it does not intervene in the world, and does not even receive prayers. In other words, it’s a god even a budding rationalist can believe in.
So for many years, I was happy with Spinoza’s god but agnostic about a personal god. I didn’t really accept the label ‘atheist’ because I thought it implied a certain arrogance: we don’t know everything about the universe, so how can we rule out god?
Three (ca. 1996–7): Gradually I realized that if you define ‘god’ however you want, then claiming belief in it is meaningless. When most people speak of God, they refer to a supernatural creature of some sort that hears prayers and intervenes in the world. If you think this is a falsehood, you’re an atheist. Spinoza’s god is just a philosophical construct; conceiving of god as a set of physical laws and constants does not constitute theism.
Four (ca. 2003) A health issue landed me in the hospital for 3 nights. While not exactly a brush with death, being the youngest patient in the cardiac ward did provide an opportunity to ponder my own mortality. I seriously considered whether I was on the right track, or whether I should maybe loosen up on the rationalism. But I got through it with the help of amazing (but non-miraculous) science and technology. Later I found some thinkers who provide ‘spiritual’ healing and inspiration without the hocus-pocus. Carl Sagan wrote the following as he was dying from cancer. It brings a tear every time:
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
Five (ca. 2006–7) A greater awareness of atheism as a political stance has arisen. Partly inspired by excesses of the Bush administration, I joined the ACLU and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Inspired too by recent books of Dawkins and Dennett, I joined the Council for Secular Humanism and subscribed to Free Inquiry and the Skeptical Inquirer. I regularly listen to the podcasts Point of Inquiry and Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe. If moment #3 was about self-acceptance, then this one is my coming out.
Friday 16 March 2007 @10:27
I’m a latecomer to this fad, but here’s my entry into the transparent screen phenomenon that was all the rage. It’s far from perfect. But it’s true that the final image is not a composite; photoshop trickery is needed only to create the desktop background image. And even that was fairly simple-minded in my case, because I don’t know how to use any of the perspective tools in Gimp. 
This reminds me: I can’t stand when someone observes an act of amateur creativity and says “he has too much time on his hands.” I guess it reflects the Protestant work ethic: idle hands are the devil’s tools and all that. But in my estimation, it tends to be said by people who spend much of their leisure time parked in front of the boob tube. Who are you to judge that reruns of Friends are more worthwhile than making an Earth sandwich? Personally, I want to live in a world where everyone has the time and inclination to pursue whatever creative outlets strike their fancy.
Monday 1 January 2007 @11:41
The holidays were good this year. The fridge is packed with food from last night’s fest. My head is still a little cloudy. I have a stack of new books to read, a new digital SLR camera — maybe I can start posting new photos here more regularly — and several interesting projects to work on before classes begin again in two weeks.
One is the final draft of our paper on type-based compression of XML. It was accepted, so I’ll be going to Utah in March to present. One review in particular was extremely helpful, and I’m looking forward to studying what he/she wrote more closely, and chasing some more references.
I’ll be submitting my tenure portfolio in the Fall of this year. Hard to believe I’m in year 5 already. This past semester was busy as hell — good in some ways, and frustrating in others. There are a few unfinished administrative things — “open loops” in David’s jargon — that are nagging at me. Hopefully I can knock them out of the way and they don’t interfere with the more interesting projects.
And let’s hope that “Web 2.0” (among other things) inspires more students to come back to computing in ’07.
Friday 27 October 2006 @22:39
I had a run-in with a spamcatcher this week. At some point I realized that messages I sent from home into liu.edu were not getting through, and not returning error messages either.
It turned out they were getting caught up in the university’s new spam filtering appliances. Apparently the servers run by my ISP Optimum Online (Cablevision) have some pretty bad scores on some of the black-lists. That really sucks.
It’s a little hard to describe how I felt when I realized that 4–5 days’ worth of messages — to my colleagues, to my dean, to members of the committee that I chair, to the chairs of committees on which I serve — that all of them were lost. It must be something like the “metaphor shear” that Neal Stephenson describes in In the beginning was the command line. Email has become so natural and essential that it really feels now like communication is happening as I write it. To find out days later that the communication never really happened at all is jarring.
And I know it’s not rational — these filters are just computer programs after all — but the thought that kept seeping back into my brain was, “your work isn’t valued.” As if the filters were a collective “talk to the hand” from the university itself. There’s probably something deeper going on there — the brain’s a marvel, ain’t it? — but I’m going to let it slide for the moment.
It’s not clear to me that things are completely resolved, but I’ve been enough of a thorn in the side of our IT folks for now. They’re actually supremely competent. We just have a clear difference of opinion on the tolerance for false positives. 
It seems there’s often some minor tension between computer science faculty and IT staff. Many larger CS departments hire their own system administrators and just ask the campus IT department to carry the bits in and out of the building with no questions asked.
And even then the faculty often dump on the sysadmins. I’ve seen it from both sides. As if the ability to sling some code and prove some theorems makes one well-qualified to provide semi-reliable email service to tens of thousands of needy users.
The admins did put me on a list so that messages addressed to me bypass the filters. That doesn’t help with mail I send to others from off campus, of course. But this morning I managed to get one particular message through, so maybe the black-listing of Optimum Online was a fluke anyway. If not, I guess I can always tunnel onto campus and send to their blessed SMTP servers through the tunnel.
Meanwhile, being left outside the spam wall did cause my junk messages to increase slightly. I had been running my own SpamAssassin installation since before all this began, but it has had trouble keeping up with spammers’ ‘innovations’ in the past 6 months or so. I train the Bayes filters weekly, but it’s not always enough. So I upgraded to the latest and realized that all the network-dependent tests (Razor, Pyzor, etc.) had not been enabled. Since upgrading and reconfiguring SpamAssassin my junk messages have dropped dramatically, and still no false positives yet.
Wednesday 19 July 2006 @18:51
Something has become a bit worrisome in my computing life. Since I got my Powerbook last Fall, I’ve allowed myself to become increasingly dependent on closed software applications.
One of the things I treasure about open standards and simple file formats is that I can still easily read and edit my emails and documents going back to September 1991, to the day I typed my first command at a Unix prompt. That’s nearly 15 years ago!
Many people fret about bit rot: put your newborn’s pictures in some seemingly ‘archival’ format like JPEGs on CD-ROMs, and your ability to revisit them when your kid turns 21 is very much not assured. There are two issues here: the physical media, and the file formats. In the net-centric, GNUish world I first entered as an undergrad, neither issue seems to be much of a problem.
With ‘offline’ physical media — cartridges, cards, disks, etc. — you must be extremely vigilant to copy all your stuff from one dominant form to the next during the narrow window in time when both are available. Copy your stack of 5¼″ floppy disks onto 3½″ disks. Copy those onto Zip disks. Copy those onto CD-RWs. Copy those onto DVD-Rs. Copy those onto external USB-2 hard disks. Copy those onto whatever the hell is next. Who has the patience for all that? But if you get lax and skip a step, you end up with valuable stuff on a 5¼″ floppy but a computer that only supports 3½″ and CD. Now what do you do? (Substitute the latest technologies as needed.)
This is one reason why I never recommend any kind of offline storage medium, including today’s popular USB sticks. Many folks in personal computing thought it was a major coup when Apple released the first home computer with no floppy drive — the iMac in 1998 — but the DECstation 3100s we used at Hopkins had no external storage facility at all, and they were produced in 1989. They had internal hard disks and ethernet, and that’s it. It’s still basically all I need; some of my machines can write CDs or DVDs, but I really hardly ever use that functionality.
So, my strategy for keeping data alive through the years is just to copy it over the network from one Unix machine to the next, whenever I change institutions and workstations. Nowadays, I always keep multiple copies alive (home, work, laptop) as a backup strategy as well. This has the added advantage that whenever you buy a new machine or disk, it generally has 10 times or more the capacity of the previous one. So bringing along all the old stuff every time costs very little space.
Now, as for the file formats themselves, this has until now been very easy as well. On Unix-y systems, the plain text file is still king, and the few binary formats tend to be open, stable, and supported by multiple applications (think JPEG, PS, PDF). There have always been exceptions: xfig is one that I used way back. And with the more desktop-oriented applications of Gnome, KDE, and Mac OS, there are even more exceptions: I currently rely on gnumeric and gnucash. But as long as the apps are portable, open-source, and provide a variety of export formats, I’m not too worried.
Incidentally, XML-based formats are often touted as a solution here, but they only get you so far. Sure, a text-based format is going to be easier to decode than an opaque, arbitrary, binary format. But open up the .apxl (XML) file used by Apple Keynote in your text editor and tell me with a straight face that it would help you reconstruct your presentation if you no longer had access to Keynote.
I started out writing this with the intent to think ‘out loud’ about what Mac applications I’ve come to depend on, and how I might reduce that dependence and transition back to mostly open source stuff. (Then I can make use of my GNU/Linux desktops at home and work again, instead of carrying the Mac laptop back and forth always.) But this post has become long already, and I’m ready to head home and seek out dinner, so maybe it’s best just to publish this and restart that brainstorm another day.
Tuesday 13 June 2006 @1:21
Today (Monday, actually) was the start of the 2006 LIU Teaching with Technology Institute. Unlike many professors, I of course have no problem adapting to new technologies, since I basically invent new technologies for a living. But the reason I like participating in this — and other workshops sponsored by our Teaching and Learning Initiative — is that it’s great to get together with other passionate profs to talk about teaching. Or, more accurately, about “creating effective learning environments.” Or, more pretentiously, about ‘pedagogy.’
You see, as long as I think it will be worth my time, I can quickly master any new language, protocol, tool, or environment that comes down the pike. That’s the advantage of a broad education in computer science. But what I don’t always see immediately is how to make effective pedagogic use of the technology. In my own education, many of my most effective and memorable classes were strictly chalk-and-talk. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But I don’t necessarily know how successful use of technology in learning should look, other than the standard CS fare of downloading handouts from web sites, participating in news groups, and electronic submission of programs. Hardly revolutionary stuff. In class, instructors still mostly wrote programs on the chalkboard in long hand, and explained them using simple diagrams. And perhaps beyond that, you get diminishing returns for the amount of effort expended. Even so, I think it behooves us to continue to research and evaluate new methods; the cost/benefit analyses can change mighty quickly in this field.
Today was mostly about pod-casting. We first heard from Mike Soupios from Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. He gave a very basic overview of the concepts and limitations, and referred to lots of successful uses in Columbia’s schools of medicine and other health sciences. Unfortunately, our time with Mike got compressed a little and most of the examples he had time to go through were about what doesn’t work well. Taping your entire lecture and putting it online makes for a very dreary pod-cast. Go figure. For one thing, we excuse a certain amount of stalling (uh… um… well…) in a live lecture, but in a media ‘product’ we really (quite reasonably) expect more polish and pizzazz.
We spent the rest of the afternoon with Steve Cervera, our local Apple rep. This was more on the technical side: a look at the pod-casting features in the new GarageBand. This could have been rather boring for me — I’m sure I can figure out for myself which buttons to push in GarageBand — but Steve is a talented presenter, and seemed to be able to hold together an audience of profs with wildly varying interests and technical aptitudes. Maybe he can herd cats, too.
The new GarageBand (with iLife ’06) did seem pretty smooth and simple. Unfortunately, I bought my PowerBook last Fall, before the latest iLife was available. I really didn’t see much need to upgrade it, until now. I had tried GarageBand a bit, even got it to gab MIDI with my Yamaha digital piano, so I was able to lay down multiple tracks, edit individual notes, mix, add effects, etc. It worked reasonably well, but some limitations were clear — this isn’t a ‘pro’ tool for sure — and the interface was a little bizarre, maybe because this wasn’t originally an Apple product, but that of some company that Apple acquired.
Anyway, the newer GarageBand seemed nicer than what I was used to, and the ability to create pod-casts with still images or video was fairly compelling. So I decided to upgrade. Also, since some time during this week-long workshop is set aside for faculty to pursue their own projects, I decided that I’d like to upgrade today. Unfortunately, the Apple retail stores do not offer educational discounts on software, only on hardware. So the only way to get the educational price on iLife ’06 (US$59 vs. $79) is to order online and get it Friday or so. I chose to pay the extra $20 and get it today. (I have yet to hear a reasonable explanation for that rule; we also bought new iPod ear buds today, and got a $4 educational discount on those. What’s different about software?)
I do find it a little regressive that, in this broadband age, I would have to get in my car, drive to a store, bring home a cardboard box with a DVD (which itself is not much different than a digital cardboard box, a container for bits) just to have some new software. I mean, the very reason we call it software seems to imply that we shouldn’t have to box it up and ship it around the country in trucks. But I digress…
More from the workshop tomorrow, perhaps.
Wednesday 31 May 2006 @15:24
To me, one of the great things about the explosion of writing on the Internet is that we don’t need to formulate our own opinions on anything anymore. No matter what opinion you’d produce, on any topic, most likely someone out there has already expressed it; all you need do is adopt it.
This leads to a kind of shopping experience: whenever you encounter a new topic of debate, rather than carefully considering the facts and drawing your own conclusions, just Google for others’ opinions and decide who you agree with. Easy peasy!
Take all of the above as facetious, if you prefer. I’m not yet certain how serious I am. (Which reminds me of The Simpsons: in Homerpalooza, one teenager says to another, “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” “I don’t even know anymore.”)
We may think it would be a better world if everyone’s opinions were independently researched and thoroughly considered, but that is unrealistic. And shopping around for opinions from diverse sources is perhaps far better than getting all your opinions from one source, whether it be your church, parents, political party, or home-town newspaper.
Example: I’m basically pro-choice, but mostly because people I trust tend to have that point of view. Personally, I have a hard time caring about the issue much either way. I will never get pregnant because I don’t have the right apparatus. And I will never get anyone pregnant because, well, I’m a Kinsey 6 and in sexual terms, women are about as appealing as Jabba the Hutt. Pretty effective contraceptive, that.
If anything, maybe parents ought to be permitted to extinguish their children until they’re 3 or 4 years old. Ah, but I jest. (I think.) And anyway, many folks who do slaughter their kids appear to be the same brand of fundamentalists who get all huffy over abortion.
This all started with me browsing magazines on amazon.com, and wondering if I am missing anything by relying solely on the Internet and not subscribing to opinions in print. It might be nice to receive some glossy monthly tome packed with various atheist-progressive-rationalist-libertarian-humanist-determinist points of view.
There are a few candidates, but it’s hard to tell which I would like best: Reason, Free Inquiry, Skeptical Inquirer, Skeptic, American Atheist, Mother Jones, Liberty, American Prospect, etc. I should try to skim some of these next time I’m at the book store.
Wednesday 10 May 2006 @11:26
Last week, when I posted to disparage Microsoft PowerPoint, I used the word ‘amateur’, as in “PowerPoint makes you look like a total amateur.” I already regret that word choice; I did not mean to denigrate amateurs!
The word, of course, comes from the Latin amator (lover), so originally it meant someone who pursues something for the love of it, rather than for monetary compensation. My dictionary (New Oxford American, 2e) lists two definitions:
- a person who engages in a pursuit on an unpaid basis
- a person considered contemptibly inept at a particular activity
These meanings are at odds with one another, and I hate that. I have to imagine that the second meaning was promoted by professionals trying to discredit the work of those that were not members of the trade guild.
Today, in many fields, one can find extremely talented amateurs and grossly incompetent professionals. Indeed, I am an amateur photographer and pianist, so I have an interest in protecting the positive definition of the word. People do seek to publish my photographs: just yesterday an English professor from Utah asked to use one of my (fairly abstract) photos for the cover of a book he is editing. (I’ll post something about it in the future.) I usually agree to these things, with little or no pay, because I just don’t take pictures for money. I’m more interested in improving my skills and having my work appreciated and used.
Amateurs and professionals sometimes take on different roles. I’d never agree to be the sole photographer at someone’s wedding. That’s too much pressure; leave that stuff to a professional!
Something similar happens in software development; amateurs (in the first sense) are the basis of the free software movement and the hacker culture. In this case, I’d personally be more likely to hire someone who programs on her own time just because she loves it, rather than someone who pursued a pile of certifications and acronyms (CCNA, MCSE, etc.) Like the trade guilds, certification programs (particularly expensive ones) aim to delegitimize amateurs.
Some of my thinking on this topic is probably thanks to Paul Graham. In his essay What Business Can Learn from Open Source, he writes:
There’s a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology, though it’s staring us in the face. “Amateur” was originally rather a complimentary word. But the thing to be in the twentieth century was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.
That’s why the business world was so surprised by one lesson from open source: that people working for love often surpass those working for money.
Anyway, I’m not going to edit the PowerPoint post to redact the word ‘amateur’. Sometimes I think we have to accept the fact that words have different, even conflicting, meanings. I feel this way when hackers (enthusiastic and skillful computer programmers or users) fume about mentions of hackers (people who use computers to gain unauthorized access to data) in the media. [Definitions from New Oxford American 2e, again.]
Get over it, it means both things now. Rely on the context. (Although I guess I do get upset when people don’t know there is a ‘good’ definition…)
Thursday 4 May 2006 @10:55
Classes ended on Tuesday, and now we’re entering exam week. Pretty soon it will be commencement and the whole thing is over (for me) until September.
After so many years of unstructured grad school, it’s quite strange to be tied to that roller-coaster rhythm of the semester. I feel like an undergrad again. The first few weeks are fresh and exciting, then there’s a settling in to the routine, then the realization that the mid-term is approaching fast. After that, the stress level rises as we notice that we have N weeks left to squeeze in K projects, quizzes, or assignments. Then the last two weeks we just can’t wait for it to be over.
When I was an undergrad, it probably never occurred to me that my professors might be feeling the same kind of pressure I did. After all, aren’t profs the providers of stress, for which students are the recipients?
This is nothing like grad school. There is stress in grad school, of course, but it’s not on a schedule quite like this. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve been a Ph.D. candidate or post-doc who emerges from his/her office in mid-afternoon seeking coffee, notices that campus is maybe a little quieter than usual, but doesn’t realize that it’s spring break until it happens three days in a row! You are clearly not on the rhythm of the semester.
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