Computers, Society, and Nature

From the NY Times on student perception versus student reality in universities:

LIKE most large universities, the University of Arizona is a virtual city: 37,000 students and nearly 14,000 employees on a sprawling campus in Tucson of 174 buildings and 11,000 parking spots. Also like most of the country’s colleges and universities, it is not particularly selective. Arizona admits 83 percent of its applicants, although most graduated in the top half of their high school class. They sit in numbing lecture halls with 500 classmates; the only instructor they may know is a teaching assistant, and they are, for all intents and purposes, anonymous.

This is not exactly the popular image of ivy-covered higher education, but it’s the truth of it. Most students do not go to an Amherst or a Williams. They go to enormous public institutions like the Universities of Arizona, Iowa, Connecticut, Minnesota: more than five million undergraduates attend an institution with at least 15,000 students. The freshman class alone exceeds the population of a small town, and the course catalog is the size of a phone book. Mike Morefield, a junior at Arizona, remembers his first year: “It’s like somebody comes along with a pin right after high school, pops your bubble, picks you up, throws you naked into some college, and you’ve got to figure it out.”

…

Even though a university opens the door [by offering extensive advising and counselling], it can’t make an adolescent walk through it. However lost they may be, college students may never seek out an adviser. Intimidated, shy or alienated, they don’t drop in during faculty office hours. Parents out of sight, they struggle with their newfound independence, starting with the freedom not to wake up before midday or to eat pizza any hour of the night – and again for breakfast – or to put off reading assignments until cram time at finals.

McGill University isn’t as anonymous as large state universities. However, it can be very intimidating. So what have been your experiences in university? More important, what are your successful coping skills?

The Palm Beach Post reports on a legislative effort to shut down the online offerings of the National Weather Service.

Do you want a seven-day weather forecast for your ZIP code? Or hour-by-hour predictions of the temperature, wind speed, humidity and chance of rain? Or weather data beamed to your cellphone?

That information is available for free from the National Weather Service.

But under a bill pending in the U.S. Senate, it might all disappear.

The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites.

Supporters say the bill wouldn’t hamper the weather service or the National Hurricane Center from alerting the public to hazards — in fact, it exempts forecasts meant to protect “life and property.”

The logic is simple: The government shouldn’t intrude on existing and potential offerings of the private sector because that could inhibit entrepreneurship. Consider this paragraph:

“The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core mission should be, which is protecting other people’s lives and property,” said [Barry] Myers, whose company, [ AccuWeather] is based in State College, Pa. Instead, he said, “It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of ‘warm and sunny.'”

Aside from the absurdity of this statement that weather reporting and prediction can be separate–I guess the government should just focus on delivering information on the places where hurricanes might occur–, this logic presumes that the private sector would serve the public equally, for example, offering the entire country weather data as opposed to the major metropolitan areas such as NY, Chicago and LA. It also ignores the value-added that companies could offer by repackaging the data or offering specific features, such as weather alerts keyed to travel plans. Public sector initiatives do not exclude business possibilities. The US Census Bureau allows people to download geographic data. That hasn’t stopped Google maps or Mapquest from offering the very same data with different interfaces and features.

Second, there’s no acknowledgement in the bill that, by this logic, the public would be forced to pay twice, once for the initial data collection by the government and again for the private service reporting of the data.

This was my favorite paragraph in the article:

“The weather service proved so instrumental and popular and helpful in the wake of the hurricanes. How can you make an argument that we should pull it off the Net now?” said Nelson’s spokesman, Dan McLaughlin. “What are you going to do, charge hurricane victims to go online, or give them a pop-up ad?”

Earth Day is 35 today.

There is an interesting article by Jill Tarter and Bernard Oliver of the SETI Institute that discusses how long we would have to transmit a signal before we could expect a reply from the far side of the galaxy (assuming anyone replies at all). The time scale is about 140 000 years, minimum. To see what timescales humans are currently thinking about, the authors searched Google using the string “x year plan”, where x varied from 1 year to 100 000 years as both a number or text. They tallied the hits and graphed them. Beyond about 100 years, the hits were dominated by science fiction and religion. There were a few events that caused spikes, like Y2K at 2000 and Yukka Mountain (the proposed US nuclear waste repository) and the Clock of the Long Now at 10 000. As it turns out, environmentalists are planing in the 500 year scale, but few other areas are receiving such long term attention. The authors note that these findings do not indicate any level of proficiency or competancy in the plans, and that these are only plans posted to the web, not filed away in a drawer somewhere.

A Washington Post article points to a growing trend among university professors: replacing the course pack and the textbook with free online journal articles and textbook chapters.

“The use of electronic course materials has soared in recent years, as universities try to cater to a generation of students who grew up using the Internet and are often as comfortable reading words on a screen as on the printed page,” Vara [in the Wall Street Journal] wrote. “But publishers are wary of the practice, particularly as sales growth for textbooks has slowed in the U.S. The Association of American Publishers, a trade group, has sent letters to the University of California questioning the school’s practice of letting students read course material online.”

She cited Shiv Mahajan, a Stanford University freshman who didn’t buy a single textbook for his cognitive science course and has taken out only one book from the library so far this year: “In one recent lecture, he hadn’t finished the assigned reading ahead of time, but skimmed the last few pages on his laptop as the professor talked. ‘I’ve never been much of a book reader,’ he says.”

Publishers are catching on and going after universities, hoping to make an example of one or more of them. They may very well succeed. I suspect the likely outcome will be either a surcharge on online articles to replace the lost revenue, a charge on the online journals for which any one university already pays over $1m, or a return to the written product. In the short-term, it will likely be the third. So much for saving trees, although we have to balance this against royalties for authors and energy for the computers/Internet.

I notice CNN has a new ‘feature’ on Global Warming up.

It presents three sections, Science, Impact, and Policy, and while it generally doesn’t present anything other than a few flash timelines and a collection of articles which have already been published, but its semi-presence is interesting. If you check the CNN entry webpage, it occaisonally appears just below the main headline if you have no cookie set on your machine, but if you’ve chosen the international CNN edition, a different article appears in the same place about e-waste, and the global warming article doesn’t appear at all. I wonder who they’re targeting?

I am guessing it’ll be some time before the FoxNews climate change special comes up.

In this course, and more generally, it has seemed that many people believe that substantial change can be effected simply by providing more information. It is our hope that people will change their behavior when are informed of the terrible consequences their actions are having both on themselves, but also the environment, and others. This is not confined to environmental discussions, but politcal and economic policy as well.

The problem is, this information has, and is, available. Despite the common complaint about the bias, which I notice (for Americans) tends to invoke FoxNews and Rush Limbaugh from the left, and CNN, The New York Times and NPR from the right (I feel an excellent example of how the right has been able to muddy the waters in the past few years), there are still excellent articles written about the climate change, economic violence, and political corruption. However it does not seem that any of this is having any effect except to fuel partisan bickering in the US.

The discussions I watch tend to be on the internet, and occaisonally when I’m around cable TV, on the news networks. And commonly it is like both sides are debating with entirely different sets of facts. I once tried to argue for gay marriage on an online bulletin board, only to have the argument made that downfall of the Roman empire was directly attributable to homosexuality. When I expressed amazement, I was told it was surprising I had not learned about it in high school, as it is apparently common knowledge. I proceeded to look up in various indexes accounts of the fall of the roman empire, and saw no evidence. Evidently this knowledge was in a parallel knowledge universe, which I was simply unable to find.

Undoubtedly in this parallel universe, I would find answers to many baffling questions, what good is restricting the rights of gays, why is having guns a pre-requisite for freedom, why should the lives of people in other countries be worth less?

How can we convince someone of anything political when they believe Vietnam was not only required, its results were positive, that Reagan was singlehandedly responsible for the downfall of the evil empire of the USSR, and that global warming is the creation of alarmist ‘activist’ scientists. It is like trying to talk to aliens, it’s hard to find the common ground.

We need something to fight FoxNews. It sounds elitist, but many right wing issues make considerably nicer sound bites. The elitist intellectualism on the left is alienating to those who can’t decipher it, we’re not going to change the world with Chomsky like treatises, or even with friendly pie charts the only people who would read them are already convinced, and those whom we’re presumably trying to convince would dismiss it faster than we would a Rush Limbaugh explanation of why abortion is evil. The source, and the image, now count for far more than the message. The last US election convinced me that changing the world (in North America at last) depends not on better informing people of the statistics and issues, but by appealing to their ego and sense of being correct. People are not voting for George Bush and Ralph Klein because of their elegant writing or complex grasp of issues. People are doing so because they identify with the constructed personas of those leaders, and believe that they themselves know best.

Good news everyone! The blackberry is being improved… phew! I was getting really tired of dealing with that aging blackberry I don’t have. Wallace wireless is coming out with new capabilities for black berries – instant notification, web cam capability and the like. Personally, I am in no way affected by this news… I wonder how many people are.

Is increasing computer technology just increasing the social divide between the rich and the poor? Not only are the economic disparities already in place but now, these two communities (rich and poor) have even less things that they spend their time thinking about. For instance, at one point maybe both the rich and the poor would have spent a significant amount of time thinking about the value of having a public park in the middle of the city, possible for different reasons, but nonetheless. However, now, the rich – I say this only because they are the ones able to access technology, generally – are spending more and mroe time being wrapped up in thinking about the latest technology to add on to their computer or blackberry or the newest cell phone with the latest features. Is this good for social cohesion amongst communities, is this even good for the social health of the people within one community?

This is my dream blog ! Well… you know. Anyway, this blog is contributed to by avid outdoorspeople, naturalists and adventurers from around the world. Contributors tell stories, discuss natural history and debate identification of sightings, “no! that’s not possible you couldn’t have seen a cougar in nova scotia.”… you get the idea.

An added feature of this blog is that there is sort of a photo journal as well. Users can add pictures from the time spent in the outdoors.. A section of the photo blog is dedicated to animal tracks. There is one photo of heron tracks… who would ever think to look at the tracks of a heron, some people may not even put two and two together and not consciously realize that herons even make tracks! We are always so much more interested in the big, powerful and charismatic – be it the biggest and most powerful computer or the big grizzly bears in the forest! What is wrong with us?

Microsoft has added a new feature to its Encarta encyclopedia software whereby users can suggest changes or improvements. The changes are vetted and approved by the Encarta editors. I think it’s an attempt to win over many wikipedia fans who like the concept of being able to contribute to a communal body of knowledge. There is also the benefit for Microsoft that others will be doing most of their work for them. I wonder now if Encarta is a virtual public space? a virtual community?

There has been a few posts on the blog about wireless networking of whole cities. Montreal is not fully networked yet but most places where I use my computer (university, home, coffee places) are. So basically all the time my computer is open, I am connected to the Internet. Although I initially thought it was a great idea, I’m now starting to have some reserve, because now I get disturbed all the time. Skype messages, email
messages, or just the urge to go check if there is new post on the blog. When I reeeaally have to get the work
done I manage to forget about all that, but when I’m not under some pressure I always manage to get distracted and not being productive. I discussed my problem with my housemates before to find out they had the same problem.
So I started to hunt down coffee places that do not have free wireless Internet so I can work undisturbed.
As wireless Internet as now become a competitive advantage, they are getting rarer and rarer.
All this, just to say that I was wondering if in a fully networked city, we would find “Coldspots”,
(in opposition to “hotspots”) where we are not networked and I can happily work.

Privacy and security on the Internet and with ITC in general are becomming more and more of an issue. However there is already some technologies existing to address some of these issues.

This semester in the CS department we had a talk by a Mcgill adjunct professor who is one of the founders of Credentica, a company specialized in identity and access management. Their technology is quite interesting; it allows for example, multiple parties to exchange information about an individual between parties, but only with the individual concent. They call this non-intrusive identity services. The speaker gave us a hint
that the main reason these kind of technologies are not used much yet in governmental agencies for example are mainly political.

All earthquake recordings today are recorded digitally by digital seismographs. All the records and stored digitally and any warnings issued by earthquake centres are based on digital information. I don’ t know about you, but my computer hasn’t exactly been ms. perfectly faithful during the last few years.. is it not possible that these computers that are used in earthquake science might break down, freak out or freeze up (back to personifying computers!). So while the early warning systems that are in place in some parts of the world may seem like a good idea, it is theoretically possible that they could just stop working – without warning. What would that leave us with? a lot of money spent for no good.