bierfaristo blogs

For years, I've been fascinated by onychophorans -- a kind of evolutionary oddity somewhere between annelids and insects (sort of like tardigrades). They're found pretty much exclusively in the southern hemisphere and look something like caterpillars. I first learned about them in graduate school and wrote a paper about them. For years, I've been trying to find a source to get some to study -- partly thinking that they might be a replacement for the rat-tailed maggots I've used as a first prompt in the writing class. But I had been stymied. You can find some web pages in the UK offering them for sale as pets, but nothing in the US -- even from biological supply companies. Lo and Behold a few weeks ago, it turns out that a local invertebrate enthusiast gave some Peripatus to Al -- our resident herpetologist. He mentioned that they might be parthenogenic and that appears to be true: where there was one, there are now five. So Al gave me one of my own so that I can start trying to raise a brood of my own! My own little Peripatus! I'm so excited!

I read this extremely discouraging article about How to Build a Better Teacher today and was struck, again, by what seems like a commonsense difference between what education reform is trying to do and what we actually need. The focus is on teaching tips about who can make kids perform better on measures rather than looking systemically at why kids think school learning isn't worth doing. The failure of education is about kids being unpersuaded that work in school is worth doing. Someone who can fix *that* will actually transform a kid's outlook about learning for the rest of their life. Someone who uses teaching tips and tricks to get kids to pay attention to the teacher or pass a test has not done anyone any favors. We need students to become self-motivated learners and to develop their own self-regulatory strategies. Nothing in this article shows that anyone is thinking about that at all.

I saw a funny report this morning in about students worrying about becoming one of those iPhone people. I don't worry about that, but my iPod Touch has been helping me understand it. I probably spend too much time looking at computer screens already but, with the iPhone, you can be looking at a computer screen without being at a computer. It's terribly easy to keep up with mail, look stuff up, and keep current with social media -- you don't have to be at a computer anymore.

Speaking of social media, while I reading Inside Higher Ed, I saw this cautionary tale about faculty being surprised when their posts were more public than they had expected. I've been trying to tell everyone who would listen for years that you shouldn't expect privacy if you post stuff electronically. I forwarded the link to the Biology faculty with my admonition: I think the take-home lesson should "you should act as though everything you post online can be read by anybody". I think the wrong message is to tell people to carefully configure their privacy settings to make sure their posts remain private.

One other bright spot recently was reading that Diane Ravitch, one of the architects of the failed so-called "standards based educational reform effort", has woken up to how much damage we're doing to kids with those policies. Better late than never. I've tried to tell people: if you set policy based only on what's easy to measure, you leave out most of what's really important in education.

First post with my new Macbook. I used the Migration Assistant and nearly everything came over perfectly. In point of fact, the new Macbook is nearly the same as my old Macbook -- the processor is marginally newer -- but it has the same amount of RAM, the hard-drive is not really any bigger, the display is about the same, it has the same version of the OS, etc. What it *does* have, is a brighter display, the keyboard actually works, the battery works, the wireless card works. And it has that fresh, new, computer smell. :-)

This morning, I have some extra time to play with my new laptop because the University is operating on a two-hour delay due to a snow storm. In fact, the storm is ongoing and may yet close the University -- the public schools are all closed. I'm hoping we can get our BCRC steering committee meeting in, which has been postponed and rescheduled about 4 times now due to various circumstances.

Today, Karen Searcy and I finished work on a new website: Botanical Collections of William S. Clark and David P. Penhallow. Karen and Lita D'Acunto (a former student of mine) scanned in herbarium cards that William Clark made when he visited Japan in the late 1870s. We built a site in Drupal that let's the public browse thumbnail images and download very, very high resolution images of the herbarium cards. Tom Hoogendyk helped with the theme and a bunch of other folks contributed historical images and checked the identifications. It was a cool and interesting project that has been in the works for a long, long time.

My new Macbook arrived today. I have named it "polpo" so that it sort of goes with the ipod touch (which is named "palpilo"). I'm currently using the migration assistant to move over all my data from my previous laptop (which was named "mopso"). I'm looking forward to having a laptop with a working keyboard, battery, and airport card.

I've been frustrated with not being able to find any instant messaging software for the iPod touch that supports OTR. That seems like a huge gap -- people have been complaining about it for years. Every one of the programs seems to have a thread in their support forum with people pleading for them to add support for OTR.

I'm kind of surprised at how difficult it is to compare apps at the App Store -- all you can get is a big swarm of icons that you then have to look at one at a time. There is very limited tagging, so you can see "Social Networking" apps, but you can't sort easily by price or by ratings or last updated or by any measure of viability. Using iTunes as the interface for the iPod Touch is also quite cumbersome. It feels clunky and not-well-thought-out.

Using the iPod Touch at a meeting yesterday, I was surprised how easy it was to use it unobtrusively for research. Having a laptop open really changes the dynamic with other people. But the iPod Touch doesn't create such a barrier with other people. It felt like a bigger difference than I would have predicted.

When I was hired at UMass, I was largely given carte blanche to do whatever I thought needed to be done to improve how technology and education were implemented in the department. It was very uncomfortable for the first couple of years to be so unaccountable. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop: for someone to tell me I wasn't doing the right things. I did have a steering committee that I could go to for direction, but they ended up seeming more like a "pep squad" than something to be accountable to. My goal has always been to maximize the utility of technology for users: to reduce obstacles and make it easier for people to do what they need to do.

Unfortunately, over the last couple of years, the pressure has been to demonstrate accountability and reduce costs. So, for the past year, I've been putting in place infrastructure that makes the facilities harder to use: you can't just log in and print anymore. Now people have to jump through a series of hoops to see if they have an account and then more hoops every time they want to print. By implementing page quotas on printing and requiring an account to log in, we get much more information about who is using the facility -- and it does provide better service in the sense that we can exclude the freeloading non-biology students that didn't really belong there in the first place. There are fewer lines now and much less wasted printing: people don't print unless they're pretty sure they want it.

There are just two or three more technical hurdles to overcome and almost our whole infrastructure will be able to use the authentication system we've been building. I think it's going to make a huge difference in efficiency in setting up and providing services. But it's a big distraction from the kind of development that I'd really rather being doing.

Toward that end, I'm getting an iPod Touch to start thinking about building cool new educational apps. The Apple guy had me look at the "cool new educational apps" he liked, which were just the typical transmissionist bullshit: transmit some "facts" about a topic and give people a quiz to see if they "got it". Or watch a lecture on your iPod! Sigh... We've had this conversation enough times that he knows I don't like that kind of thing, but he doesn't really get why.

I think the first thing I'll build is my simplified take on the "knowledge broker" idea the physics guys had a couple of years ago. They wanted to be able to ask open-ended questions about reasoning in large classes and have some intelligent system to winnow down the answers into something manageable. I don't want an intelligent system -- I want the intelligence to be in people. I had the idea of letting people enter answers, but also to see a ranked list of answers submitted by other people and to vote for them. Most people would probably not enter anything, but would just vote. In a large class, you'd see enough answers to have an interesting sense of the diversity and the top 5 or 6 would probably capture the sense of the class. (Maybe only let people start voting after you have 5 answers?) Furthermore, you could leave the voting open while you discussed the question and, as various options got eliminated, you could eventually come to consensus on the best answer. I think I could build something like that based on Duck given a long weekend. But it would be coolest to have it on some portable device, like an iphone or ipod touch. Once I get the device, I'll start looking in to building it. It should be fun.

Yesterday in class, I gave pairs of students a data set and asked them to see if the data enabled them to draw and conclusions. The data set showed results for around 50 people, showing gender, GPA, hours studied per week, and hours slept per week. I had, in a fairly simplistic way, salted each dataset to show a unique trend. I had also added some outliers to the data. I had thought this would be a fairly straightforward activity for the students to construct summary tables showing comparisons of mean and/or median values, bar or pie charts, and scatter plots with regression lines. They found the activity to be more difficult than I had expected.

Now, today, I have to read all the rough drafts from their papers and make comments. It's going to be a long day.

Since I arrived at UMass, we haven't had a good mechanism to keep track of who's using the BCRC. There was a practice of having people sign-in on paper sheets, which we continued on inertia, but it was never very satisfactory. People just scribbled whatever. Sometimes sheets weren't available. The sheets got lost. And, in the end, it was not a very useful form for data. At the end of the year, I would sample the data and do an analysis to estimate usage in the BCRC.

I had pushed for years (practically since I arrived) to have student accounts that we could use to have students log into the workstations. But with the technical staff stretched as thin as they are, I could never get the issue high enough on the list of priorities to make it happen. When we began working in the ISB, I finally prevailed on George to let me just build the infrastructure we needed. We did pilot-testing last spring and this spring, we're actually doing the deployment. There's still a lot of work to be done, but finally, we're building accounts in a form that we can use them to have students log into our workstations. The generic login is still available, but soon everyone will be required to use a real account to login.

What we still didn't have was a mechanism to record the login data somehow. I had been thinking about the problem for a while and decided that the easiest thing would be to have each computer use curl to talk to a webpage on the server with the information: all we need is the username and the name of the workstation. That gets all the information to the server, but then how to record it. Writing to a flat file wouldn't work because you'd have multiple apache processes all trying to write the file at the same time. Using a database would be stupid because all you need is to write a stupid log file. Then I remembered that PHP offers an api for talking to syslog!

We set up a log local channel in syslog and I wrote a tiny script that just accepts the data and passes it to syslog. Now we have a log file that shows me each time someone logs in. No more sign-in sheets! At the end of the semester, we should be able to develop much more robust data about who's using the BCRC and all of our computer labs.

When they put Mark's Meadow up against a wall last year, the town just turned the other way while it was killed. Now they think I'm going support an override? Forget it.

I've written a print release system that we're using to manage printing in Biology. We have to run the print release system configured differently between wahoo (in the ISB) and snapper (in Morrill). On snapper it doesn't have Drupal as its parent and on wahoo, we have to have it manage queues on wahoo, but use the database on snapper to maintain page quotas, etc. Trying to keep a common codebase between the two installations is problematic. I'm trying to keep the configuration info separate from the code, but it's not perfect.

Since I last updated the print release system on wahoo, we'd been having odd problems. Occasionally, when you'd load one of the print release system pages, you'd get a weird error out of Drupal in the parent directory. (The error looked like drupal was trying to run as if it was inside the print release folder and it couldn't find its associated files to load). There didn't seem to be any correlation between which action you took and the appearance of the error. I did a lot of experimentation and eventually tracked it down (I think).

In the .htaccess file in the drupal directory, Drupal sets itself up to be the agent responsible for 404 errors. In the css file for the print release system, I was trying to load the background graphic from snapper (a picture of a snapper) instead of for wahoo (a picture of a wahoo). That graphic didn't exist on wahoo, and so it caused a 404 error. And the 404 error would prompt apache to try to invoke Drupal. And Drupal couldn't run in that context. Or something. I still can't figure out why it would only break the thing randomly. But it was a very weird manifestation of a simple, boneheaded problem which I think I have corrected.

One of the challenges that George and I confronted soon after I arrived at UMass was how to provision computer services to students. At the time, the Biology Department had two servers -- a Sparc 10 and a Sparc 20, I think -- and all accounts were built at the comment line manually by George once on each server. The Intro Biology course was among the first that wanted to have accounts and, with a population of 700 - 800 it was going to require some automation.

A brief aside: when I described what we were doing to Jack Wilson, who was then the director of UMass Online, before he became president, he asked why accounts weren't being generated centrally and I explained that there were no central accounts that students could be depended on to have because the fees to support the technology services were optional and some significant fraction of students chose not to pay them. That meant that, as an instructor, if you wanted to be certain students would have a particular resource, you needed to build it yourself. We also didn't have any means of associating student usernames with individuals nor any standard way for us to check students' authentication either. But I digress.

George and I discussed what to do and drew up a plan to synchronize accounts between the two servers and to build student accounts only on the BCRC server. In order to avoid collisions with existing usernames, we added a digit based on the year of enrollment to the end of a username generated by munging first initial and last name together: the system would start out with sensible versions and then try various other permutations until it found one that was unique. Once a username was assigned to a student, they would get the same username from then on. George could then script building accounts and I mostly used imap to let students authenticate against the system.

A key challenge was resetting passwords. We chose to set students' initial passwords to their student number. I wrote a password changing script that used poppassd and we encouraged students to change their password. If a student forgot their password, I would reset it based on email from their @student account or if they visited my office with ID. The whole system was not perfect, but it worked reasonably well.

When we started using smb authentication for shared file space and printing, we had to start setting smbpasswords at the same time as unix passwords. Then, we added a new server in the ISB that needed to have some accounts replicated. Then we started building replacement servers for the Department and BCRC. At that point, I finally prevailed on George that we needed to have a central authentication system to bring some sanity to passwords. It was a constant problem for people to try to figure out which system they were authenticating against to debug problems: "Let's see... This is your smb on wahoo which should be the same as your SMB password on marlin, which might be the same as your email password, but might be different."

Last spring I set up ldap for the first time and we ran a pilot project in the ISB. We built all our usual accounts, but set samba on wahoo to authenticate against ldap. The original plan had been to merge our account generation stuff for undergraduates with the similar efforts in Chemistry. We share so many students and have shared resources in the ISB that it makes sense to merge how we provide authentication. Their system wasn't ready in time to use for last Spring, so we ran our pilot project. Then we were supposed to merge our systems over the summer, but we found at the last minute that we couldn't use their set up (because they hadn't built ldap with crypt or turned on the apple ldap schema we were using), so we postponed and reused the pilot work from the spring. I had hoped to make the merge happen over intersession, but there was another fly in the ointment.

While we had been using the student number as a password, Chemistry had been using it as a username. During security discussions with OIT, they indicated that we probably shouldn't be using the student number at all -- but especially not as the username. OIT does now provide accounts to all students now and furthermore they were willing to give us rosters with student usernames and to open a means for us to check student authentication for the purpose of setting the same username with either the same or different password at the student's choice for our use.

Over break, I set up a new authentication server for ongoing ldap services and build a password setting script that let's students authenticate using pubcookie and sets our ldap password. I had hoped to get the structure consistent with Chemistry but we couldn't get a response from them in time, so we just went forward with the same structure we'd been using for our pilot project. But we also migrated all of our permanent accounts into the system, rebuilt the account generation scripts to use the new roster format (which includes the NetID), modified everything to point at the new ldap server, and built 3750 student accouts. So far, the system is providing authentication for samba file service and printing on two servers, our print-release system, and duck.

There's still more to do: we still have to get shell service on the servers to use the authentication system, and I'm planning that we'll also use it for our course websites and, little by little, pretty much everything else. If we can ever get on the same page with Chemistry, we'll have to go back and tweak everything to use a different DN. Hopefully, we can do that over the summer. But we've made substantial progress in a very short time.

I realize my last post came off a bit snarky, so I wanted to post about the pedagogy meeting with DEGW. We had four groups that each proposed a "class of the future" to talk about space and resource needs. I thought all of the ideas presented were compelling. Each was focused on experiential or situated learning and were driven by interesting, real-world problems. One involved having students design and build an energy-efficient house. That would be really cool! Another proposed having students try to balance the US budget in order to teach economics, to see how changes in one part would affect changes in the other -- that sounded really cool too. Another was about project management and would have students actually conduct the project management for a real project. The course my group proposed was my "think globally, act locally" course, where student groups would be matched up with groups around the world to study some complex-real world issue by investigating it locally and combining it with learning Esperanto in order to exchange results with the other groups around the world. I would love to see all of these classes being taught on campus! Great stuff!

Yesterday, I participated in another two sessions related to developing a master plan for the library. The first was about computing spaces. On their first slide, they had labeled it "OIT Spaces", however, which drew a fairly strong response from the campus CIO and Director of OIT. "I thought this was about the library -- Nobody told me that this was about OIT space." The consultants were abashed and apologized for not using the correct term, but I thought it was a good example of how the upper administration builds processes that are blind to what actually happens on the campus. The announcements of these sessions made it sound like they were "teaching tip" workshops, rather than having anything to do with developing a master plan for campus space. But I digress.

I thought the session had too much "reading of the slides" by the consultants. We can read the slides -- really. You really don't need to read that long list of buzz words.

I said several things that probably made some people angry. In particular, I talked about the fact that the networking business model left 2/3 of the network in the ISB dark. The NSM networking group had tried to get control of the wired network so we could build out gigabit ethernet and make all the jacks live, but we lost that battle and got only 300 jacks turned on. This has resulted in a nightmare where most of the network jacks don't work and the spaces are not reconfigurable. You want to move the printer over there? Sorry -- that's the only place with a network jack. The jacks there, there and there? They're turned off. Their solution is that everyone should use wireless, but that doesn't work for the huge datasets that we have students building. There are jacks in all of the student study areas, but they're all turned off. And even in the labs, half of the jacks are turned off, so it's always a guessing game: does this one work? No. Does this one work? No. And, when the issue was raised the OIT response was that the building was "overwired".

I also gave my speech about what the campus would look like if it were built like "Spark" -- the webct/blackboard CMS. If the campus were like Spark, it would only have one door and you'd have to swipe to get in. When you got inside, you would only be able to see the doors that you're allowed to walk through. Everything else happening at the University would be invisible. MIT has their "open resource" policy: all of the courses at MIT post all of their resources openly. Why does a private university do that and our public university locks everything behind a door. And the campus itself doesn't do that. Did anybody check IDs of people at that meeting? Of course not -- even though I found out that at least one person had crashed the meeting without RSVPing.

One guy who was there was a professor of Computer Science. I wonder if I rubbed him as wrong as he rubbed me. He said that Computer Science didn't maintain its own computer labs anymore because students all just used their own laptops. I pointed out how we monitored our students and were aware that not enough of them had laptops to enable us to do that, but that we also wanted to be sure we could present a consistent and functional environment because the students' computers all had different versions of software where the software was also often broken or misconfigured. "Yeah," he said. "I've spent lab periods where I spent all my time trying to help students who had different versions of things who couldn't find this menu or open a kind of file." I pointed out that one solution was to use open-source software because then every student could install the same version. His eyes turned into big red X's: "Well, I'm a Computer Scientist and I can tell you that you should never trust that Open Source Software -- it's full of bugs and is always broken." I think my mouth must have fallen open. What planet is this guy from?

I did meet the new OIT guy who support's Apple systems. We had a good conversation and then walked over to the ISB so I could show him around and talk about our support structure and issues. He said he'd invite me over to see their enterprise next week.

I also met the new technologist at the library and said I'd give her a tour of Morrill so I could show her some of the best and worst spaces on campus. I also told the DEGW people to visit the Intro Labs in Morrill. We built those a dozen years ago and they've been incredibly successful.

It did show me how insular and lucky we are in the Biology Department: we've had the freedom to build and support great stuff. But it means that we don't always see the culture in other departments, where people take issue with the very idea of "group work". We need a lot more transparency on campus to shine light into the dark corners that are full of dust and cobwebs.

Randy Phillis got a letter published in the Globe today. It's a good letter. In a year where faculty have effectively had their pay cut by thousands of dollars, it's galling that the president would get a $73k salary increase -- an increase nearly equal to the median faculty annual salary. We haven't had a cost-of-living increase that kept pace with inflation for years, we took a zero last year, have gotten zero this year, and they changed the split for our health-insurance, robbing us of thousands of dollars. Sad.

There has been wide consternation in liberal circles over the supreme court overturning the McCain-Feingold limits on political advertising. I agree its a disaster for democracy, but was never very comfortable with the way the limits were implemented anyway. Rather than trying to identify kinds of speech or limit speech, its seemed to me that the real problem has been treating corporations as if they have the same rights as people -- or indeed any rights. I think corporations should be evaluated on a yearly basis and, any corporation that is not demonstrably serving in the public interest, should be dis-incorporated.

After years of living in a kleptocracy, I thought there was real hope that the Democrats would use their opportunity to make real change. I was hoping for a Newt Gingrich like "deal with America". Instead, the Democrats appear to already be owned by the corporations lock, stock, and barrel -- or, at least enough of them, that they're not willing to do anything. I guess now we get to see just how deep the rabbit hole is.