technology

Krystal D'Costa (Anthropology in Practice) links to a mini-documentary about the role of social media in the education of "Gen-Y": "Decade 2: Encouraging Educators to Rethink Social Media Strategies in the Classroom."

First, that these subjects are operating in a world that didn't exist five years ago. Some hold job titles like Social Media Strategist, and others are entrepreneurs who can shape their job as they want and need using social tools. These are individuals who have learned early the power of technology and shared communication, and they've harnessed it. Second, they're aware that they have needed to find their way in the dark. Several individuals in the documentary discuss how poorly prepared they feel their education has left them. This is an interesting statement when one considers reports that this not a tech savvy generation. And it prompts one to question whether the educational system can support the changing face of connectedness and business overall.

Are teenagers and college students learning about social media in the same way they learn about the birds and the bees -- mainly from their peers? Only a handful are really learning to control the media in their lives. People who end up in jobs like "Social Media Strategist" are the result of some kind of uncontrolled selection experiment.

Which maybe is as it should be. Uncontrolled selection experiments are pretty much how most successful people get started, I guess.

Coming soon: elderly cyborg farmers?

MANUAL labour is becoming more and more difficult for Japan's aging farmers, prompting a Tokyo professor to devise a high-tech solution: mechanise the bodies of the farmers themselves.

We have a course on the books here called "Human dimensions of robotics." It hasn't been taught for many, many years. I imagine it began as a labor relations course in the 1970s, when robots were becoming a big issue in factory work. Anyway, I've often thought it may be time to revive the title, with a very different focus.

(via Ann Althouse)

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article by Jeffrey Young: "College 2.0: Teachers Without Technology Strike Back."

I think that the article confuses matters by lumping together people with many different aims. Which I guess is sort of the point of all "technology in college" conversations. Different applications require different pedagogical approaches. There's no sense pointing out "Luddites" unless you can show the way that a particular technology would increase their effectiveness. A college's investment in teachers is a whole lot more expensive than the investment in clickers, projectors, online courseware, and the rest.

Nevertheless it's entertaining to see cherry-picked examples of professors proudly rejecting technology:

His professor made students write short papers and then gave extensive feedback, which forced them to hone their arguments and express themselves more clearly. And he made them write out the papers in longhand, in blue books, during class. "There's something about the immediacy or exigency of it," Mr. Leeds said. "When I took those written exams, I found that I made connections that I didn't know I knew—it shook up my brain cells like a supernova."

So today Mr. Leeds requires his students to write short, in-class papers. In blue books. By hand. Just like his favorite professor did.

From the comments:

No wonder some people would rather go to jail than to college.

Many have the same attitude about Powerpoint, I know.

Savage Minds' crew has been discussing the future of publishing in the American Anthropological Association recently. Rex Golub compares Open Folklore to AnthroSource:

How has OpenFolklore gotten on the road to success when AnthroSource has fallen so, so far off of it? To be honest, I don’t know the answer, but I can make several guesses: the association is much smaller, and probably much less controlled by non-academic executive officers. They probably recognize that they are in it for the love it, and that folklore is always going to be a marginal proposition, budget wise. The result is a small, relatively agile, values-driven group run by academics with their heads screwed on straight and willing to get their hands dirty. On other words, very very different from the AAA.

Christopher Kelty points to correspondence of the committee tasked with the future of publications.

One memo stands out though: the one by Kim Fortun, which she wrote as an advisory member and outgoing co-editor of Cultural Anthropology. [Full disclosure: yours truly and the debates on this site are cited several times within. She sent it to me for review, and I've posted it here with her permission]. Kim’s memo could be a handbook for understanding the current crisis and politics of scholarly publishing in general, and the promises, fulfilled and unfulfilled, of the AAA’s union with Wiley Blackwell, in particular. It is incredibly detailed, well-sourced, well organized and throughtful–far beyond the call of duty of a memo. I hope all the section assembly advisors get a chance to read it, as well as all the Section Assembly representatives and as much of the membership as possible.

He links directly to the memo (PDF), which is as he says -- a document that lays out the current problems with academic publishing as applied to the goals of the AAA.

I don't understand why AnthroSource had to be so difficult. Any moderately trafficked blog has much more usage than AnthroSource now has. Savage Minds and I together have more than 50 times the AnthroSource usage.

If you make papers open access, you can forget the rigmarole with logging in users, and then all you need is a search function and download links. Heck, I've got a bibliography of more than 11,000 papers running on the site now! The back-end could be done on a cloud server for less than $100 a month -- maybe a lot less. Same for bandwidth at its present, low level. Replace the dead tree printing of journals and extend open access worldwide, and bandwidth will be higher as will be the journals' reach.

It takes more to run the journals, handle new submissions, and provide editorial services. Some costs can be reduced by requiring every submission to be e-book-ready, plain HTML with PNG images. "Production" should be proofing and posting. It would have the beneficial effect of making articles automatically accessible for the visually-impaired, through screen-reader software. Marketing the journals as e-book subscriptions could recoup these costs at a much lower price than the current membership model.

It may not be the best solution, but anybody who wants to spend a whole lot more needs to show why the benefits justify the cost.

Kent Anderson: "Do you really need all that website?"

We reflect site-centric thinking when we do usability testing, for instance. I’ll bet that most of your usability testing has been about the site, and not about the usability of the complement of information options you use or could use. Did you ask if the email you send is usable and ties nicely with the site? Did you ask if landing on your site from Google made sense? Or were you just testing the usability of your site? If so, that’s site-centric, and potentially part of the trap that keeps us in the rut.

Because of habits of mind like this, we’ve probably over-engineered our site offerings. And with online still severely undervalued as a communication medium, these lavish expenditures may not earn back.

He's focused on scholarly publication, but I'm thinking about all the departmental websites I've seen designed -- heck, I spent one summer designing one! They establish a brand, but have the basic requirements of providing directory and archival documents (e.g., course requirements), while providing accessibility.

I like the essay, full of quotables.

Is there really a premium for “pretty” among scholarly Web sites?

Having just dealt with the forced migration of a journal management system, and terminal stupidity of another one, I wonder why things have to be so complicated!

From Dave Winer's discussion of bootstrapping and Web 2.0 technologies:

One of the spookiest bootstraps is the process of writing a Pascal compiler (or any language, nothing special about Pascal). You start by writing a very simple compiler in assembly language. Get it working with some sample programs, then start writing a new Pascal compiler, in Pascal, and compile it with your compiler written assembly language. Keep working on it until you have enough features to comple the compiler with itself. Then you can throw out the assembly language one. That story really spooks people, but swear to god, that's how compilers are built.

Creepy:

Silk has made its way from the soft curves of the body to the spongy folds of the brain. Engineers have now designed silk-based electronics that stick to the surface of the brain, similar to the way a silk dress clings to the hips.

Not a comment on anyone in particular, but I'm beginning to wonder if some Twitter users are actually robots. I mean, how exactly does one follow thousands of other users?

Tried out an iPad this afternoon. It's a slick little device, very nice looking for games. Some people have commented on iPhone apps looking ugly on the larger screen; it seemed to me that the demo games weren't noticeably pixelated, but maybe that's why they're demos.

The astronomy app had a much nicer interface than Google Sky and I could easily imagine carrying the small device outside for a few hours at night.

They're not trying very hard to sell it to me, though. I wanted to see how well the drawing apps worked -- Sketchbook Pro would be ideal, but I'd settle for trying the feel of any of them. Not a single demo unit in the store had a drawing app on it. Also, weirdly, iBooks wasn't working on the demo units.

The blog looked fine -- welcome all you iPad-enabled readers -- although I can see that a two-column format would be better than three on that size display. I'll have to think about that moving forward. The trend in the early-2000's was always toward bigger and bigger layouts, but now we have to think about mobile devices.

Sophie would very willingly have carried one right out the door. It may be the perfect computing device for 9-year-old girls. Goodwin, on the other hand, was not all that interested. Even the car racing game didn't grab him.

An unexpected source of decompression sickness: the U-2 spy plane.

As the number of flights increases, some of the plane’s 60 pilots have suffered from the same disorienting illness, known as the bends, that afflicts deep-sea divers who ascend too quickly.

Relaxing recently in their clubhouse at Beale Air Force Base near Sacramento, Calif., the U-2’s home base, several pilots said the most common problems are sharp joint pain or a temporary fogginess.

I lecture every year about high-altitude adaptation in humans, but this is a nice example of the opposite!

An article about classical composer David Cope and the AI programs he wrote to make original music. It's not new news, but a nice profile with many "what does it mean to be creative?" moments.

Cope had taken an unconventional approach. Many artificial creativity programs use a more sophisticated version of the method Cope first tried with Bach. It’s called intelligent misuse — they program sets of rules, and then let the computer introduce randomness. Cope, however, had stumbled upon a different way of understanding creativity.

In his view, all music — and, really, any creative pursuit — is largely based on previously created works. Call it standing on the shoulders of giants; call it plagiarism. Everything we create is just a product of recombination.

I'd call it "culture". The long-term direction may look random, but "styles" cohere over time because people take from each other. The article's leitmotif is Cope's near-Quixotic quest to write a truly life-changing piece of music. It's ironic that he discovers how to make music that humans can't tell from yesterday's classics, but tomorrow's classics will be determined by those very same human arbitrers of taste.

After last week's unveiling of Apple's iPad, there has been a quiet current of dismay by people looking for a not-yet piece of hardware. I have some sympathy for the perspective of Mark Pilgrim, in his piece, "Tinkerer's Sunset". It begins:

When DVD Jon was arrested after breaking the CSS encryption algorithm, he was charged with “unauthorized computer trespassing.” That led his lawyers to ask the obvious question, “On whose computer did he trespass?” The prosecutor’s answer: “his own.”

If that doesn’t make your heart skip a beat, you can stop reading now.

Pilgrim goes on to describe a personal history of programming, starting as a kid on the Apple ][e -- a history that basically mirrors my own experiences learning to code. He contrasts this history with the recent trend -- in the iPhone, iPod Touch and now iPad -- to exert more control over the programs that can run on these Apple platforms. Can Pilgrim's kids expect to learn programming with the freely accessible tools that used to exist on every computer?

Well, I'm not as reticent about the iPad development system. For one thing, the entire development kit is available, it's just not free. I don't see how this is really any different than paying for the Pascal compiler I used on the Apple IIgs in 1987, or paying for Microsoft BASIC on the PC. For another thing, today's Macs all come with the Xcode tools free and Python preinstalled. Python is a darned sight better to learn programming than BASIC was, and you can run Python scripts on the iPhone, and presumably the iPad too.

The real concern here is between "cheap" and "cool". The iPad looks like it will be cool; meaning a kid can get lots of nerd cred by doing magical tricks with it. Now, the same kid could use a $150 desktop with Ubuntu and open source compilers to program magical tricks. That would leave $450 left in his pocket, that he saved by not buying the iPad and developer kit. He could use that to pay for three years of hosting his magical trick, or two years with a modest Google ad.

I get that the Ubuntu box isn't as cool. And that many kids are a lot more likely to get a little time on a parent's cool tablet than to get their own $150 box. But does it make sense to say that a new product restricts freedom, when we live in a world now that lacks the product entirely? I'd say it adds a certain kind of freedom, for users who want it, and fails to add others.

Anyway, for a less nuanced critique, I'll link to "iPad Snivelers: Put Up or Shut Up"

The iPad isn't a threat to anything except the success of inferior products. And if anything's dystopian about the future it portends, it's an American copyright system that's been out of whack since 1996.

I'm not sure that's true. The rapid pace of hardware evolution means that software is for all intents and purposes useless after fifteen or twenty years. There might be something in Windows 3.0 or Mac System 7 that would be useful today, but probably not in comparison to open source alternatives. In the software sense it doesn't matter if copyrights expire in 17 years or 95, unless you're a modder who wants to make an iPhone version of old Nintendo ROMs.

Clearly the human non-furry skin phenotype is meant for more efficient heat transfer energy generation:

Vladimir Leonov and Ruud Vullers of the Interuniversity Microelectronics Center have developed power supplies that can run off of your body heat. All you have to do is strap on the blingtastic headband you see here, and you're ready to go.

Your body dissipates anywhere between 60 and 140 watts of waste heat just from staying alive. Of course, evolution has crafted much of your body surface to minimize the heat gradient at the skin-air interface. But there are various warm bumps and nubbins that would allow the generation of several watts. One might imagine a next-generation iPhone with a heads-up display, powered by heat from your temples.

The story discusses military applications, which I can't imagine working very well in many environments, since it's hard to capture energy from waste heat when the ambient temperature exceeds your body temperature.

Via a reader:

Sterkfontein Caves on Street View

It's not there yet, but Google is adding a gaggle of World Heritage Sites to the Street View feature, and Sterkfontein will be among them. An interesting detail:

Where access by car is not possible, Google uses its custom-made 'trike' – a three-wheeled bike mounted with a camera – to take the images. It will soon be used to collect imagery of the Sterkfontein Caves in SA.

Now, if they will just take us into the Silberberg Grotto...

For obscure reasons, I'm installing Windows 7 on one of my MacBooks. The installation has gone pretty smoothly. But the first thing I wanted to do was install Safari -- not because I'm a zealot or anything, but that's what I use on every other computer, and I don't see any sense using a different browser on this one.

So how does Microsoft welcome me back into the fold? Internet Explorer won't load apple.com, or any pages from apple.com. No problem loading any other website -- heck, I've got Firefox downloading now. Nope, just Apple, which loads fine right at this moment on the MacBook I'm typing this on.

Meanwhile, on the TV comes the new "Switchers" commercial, where the PC goes into a time warp of endless promises of stability from the past.

And where the heck is my bash prompt?

UPDATE (2009-11-10): A reader writes to remind me of Cygwin, which installs bash and other Unix utilities on Windows. Oh, it works like a charm. Backslashes have their place, but the file structure is not it.

John Timmer gives a great summary of the new paper in Science covering the Complete Genomics sequencing method.

A surprising (to me, at least) fact:

But, because each of these nanoballs was so small, it's possible to do massive amounts of sequencing in parallel, simply by washing different solutions across the surface they were stuck to. The authors were able to get anywhere from 45- to 87-fold coverage of the genome—meaning that, on average, each base in the genome had been sequenced 45 or 87 times, respectively. That's just an average, of course, as chance will ensure that some sequences are under- or overrepresented. Still, given an algorithm designed to work with these specific results and the reference human genome sequence, Complete Genomics was able to get excellent coverage of the genome.

Oh, yeah -- the lede from the paper:

Validation of one genome data set demonstrates a sequence accuracy of about 1 false variant per 100 kilobases. The high-accuracy, affordable cost of $4,400 for sequencing consumables and scalability of this platform enable complete human genome sequencing for the detection of rare variants in large-scale genetic studies.

The coming trend in e-books: video.

The most obvious way technology has changed the literary world is with electronic books. Over the past year devices like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader have gained in popularity. But the digital editions displayed on these devices remain largely faithful to the traditional idea of a book by using words — and occasional pictures — to tell a story or explain a subject.

The new hybrids add much more. In one of the Simon & Schuster vooks, a fitness and diet title, readers can click on videos that show them how to perform the exercises. A beauty book contains videos that demonstrate how to make homemade skin-care potions.

"Vooks" sounds like there's vampire involvement.

The linked article is about novels, where short videos seem to be included mainly for the imagination-deprived. Textbooks on the other hand seem more promising. How many 1-minute demonstrations, or five-minute interviews would go in a typical textbook chapter? I can imagine casts floating around the page like a "Harry Potter" newspaper.

IBM and Google want students to ditch their laptops and pick up some big iron:

For the most part, university students have used rather modest computing systems to support their studies. They are learning to collect and manipulate information on personal computers or what are known as clusters, where computer servers are cabled together to form a larger computer. But even these machines fail to churn through enough data to really challenge and train a young mind meant to ponder the mega-scale problems of tomorrow.

“If they imprint on these small systems, that becomes their frame of reference and what they’re always thinking about,” said Jim Spohrer, a director at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center.

I love that analogy -- like they're cute little baby ducks learning that their computers are mama.

Meanwhile, this is all about teaching students how to deal with data-mining software. They believe that the future of science is in being able to use these immense datasets, from sources like genomics and high-throughput astronomy.

“It sounds like science fiction, but soon enough, you’ll hand a machine a strand of hair, and a DNA sequence will come out the other side,” said Jimmy Lin, an associate professor at the University of Maryland, during a technology conference held here last week.

The big question is whether the person on the other side of that machine will have the wherewithal to do something interesting with an almost limitless supply of genetic information.

There's some truth to this. On the other hand, I don't see how this explosion of data is going to create a raft of new jobs for scientists. Sure, IBM and Google want to recruit the best, in their position who wouldn't? Maybe we'll need fewer clinicians and techs to prep samples for data analysis, and that will shift some jobs to data analysis. But what they're talking about here are software development jobs to support science, not the science itself.

Yes, geneticists will need to deal with larger datasets, but that means that more instances of small data features will empower them to test certain hypotheses that would have been untestable before. The scientist's job is to think of those hypotheses, work out the logic by which data may refute them, and root the inquiry in existing theory.

There's a practical aspect to this, where working with large datasets helps to train students to think about data and theory. But the tools we're using now to access datasets will be different in four years, and ten years down the line -- the times when today's beginning students will be entering graduate school, or finishing Ph.D.'s Those little ducklings are going to need to swim on their own.

IBM joins the next-gen sequencing race:

The I.B.M. approach is based on what the company describes as a “DNA transistor,” which it hopes will be capable of reading individual nucleotides in a single strand of DNA as it is pulled through an atomic-size hole known as a nanopore. A complete system would consist of two fluid reservoirs separated by a silicon membrane containing an array of up to a million nanopores, making it possible to sequence vast quantities of DNA at once.

Clearly I need hominid casts made of stainless steel:

Shapeways, a company that made its name offering custom 3-D printing in plastic and resin, will now print your designs in stainless steel. All you have to do is upload your brilliant CAD design (or pick from a range of stock items). Shapeways will print it out in cold, shiny steel, and mail it to you.

It ain't cheap -- $10 per cubic centimeter. But I suppose they're dishwasher safe.

Errrgh...I'm beginning to think that there are around five out of print books that I would gladly spring for a Kindle if they were available, because each one used is 80 to 100 bucks. Trouble is, it seems like a lot of professional texts that are on Kindle cost $50 or more.