bierfaristo blogs

On Saturday, Lucy and I did our usual routine. I rode my bike into town and met Lucy and Penny at the Farmer's Market. After getting some bread and strawberries, I got a cup of coffee at Amherst Coffee and sat outside with the bike and dog and my new netbook and browsed the web while Lucy went to the library. When she was done, we switched (although she declined to use the netbook). I picked out a new Paul Krugman book and decided to re-read Dune. I must have not read Dune since I was in high school -- it was quite interesting to re-read it: a great story that still holds up well. The most interesting gap is the complete absence of information technology.

Rather than riding straight home, we met again along the Swift Way to collect some cattails for lunch. Cattail flowers, when still green, can be cooked and eaten rather like corn on the cob. We collected maybe 10 or 15 and brought them home to eat. I got Alisa to take a tiny nip, but no-one else was even willing to try them. They're really quite tasty. In a weedy, starchy kinda way.

I bought a netbook for myself for Father's day and I'm using it now. I've wanted to get one for a few months: they're just so cute. I resisted for a long time, telling myself it was stupid to spend money for a computer that would be just like my Macbook only slower and with a smaller screen. But when the wireless card on my Macbook started to fail (I think the antenna is loose or something), I decided I could justify getting myself the netbook so I could have something when I need to take the macbook in.

I looked for a long time trying to find someplace that would sell me one with linux. You can find places to order linux ones online, but it's nearly impossible to find anyplace where you can put your hands on one. No place local that has computers will carry a model with linux: not the campus book store, Best Buy, Staples, or the litt eplace downtown called "Left Click". They seemed like the kind of place that carry something like that -- indeed there's a little place in Nashua, NH that will sell you a netbook configured to dual boot or even triple boot. I thought about driving the two hours to get one, but decided it was just too far away.

Instead, I went to Walmart and I bought a netbook with Windows. I was glad I did it that way, in fact, because the first one I came home with didn't work right: the keyboard wouldn't print k's or v's or a half-dozen other letters. So I exchanged it. They didn't have any more of that model, so I traded up and got a red Acer Aspire One D250. It's not a bad little computer. It's a great little computer for $300. However...

I can date when I started using Linux pretty completely by saying that I pretty nearly hosed my first system trying to update from libc to glibc. That would have been in 1997 or 1998. Since then, I've used linux frequently as a server, sometimes as a desktop, and I've tried 3 times to have a linux-based laptop that I could actually use to get work done. The laptop thing didn't really worked out the times before. I had a tibook with linuxppc and a special kernel that was pretty good. But there were significant limitations. To change my wireless configuration, I had to hand-edit a text file to comment out the name and password of one base-station, uncomment another, and then restart the networking. I also found that it didn't pay to spend much time trying to configure the windowing environment, because one false move and the setting would get borked and you'd have to start over. At least, that seemed to happen to me fairly frequently. For a unix geek, it was perfectly usable, but it was like using a wrench to open a valve and drinking from a hose, rather than having a sink with faucets and glasses -- and maybe even an icecube, like when using a Mac. Don't get me started talking about what it was like trying to use the laptop with a projector.

It's been three or four years since the last time I tried a linux laptop. I had seen that things were better when I went to Libre Graphics. It was a challenge for people to make their laptops work with the projector, but we succeeded nearly every time.

I made an ubuntu netbook remix installation thumbdrive, booted the laptop from it after a couple of tries (trying to figure out the byzantine BIOS interface -- whoever wrote that pile of steaming dog turds ought to be shot), and ran the installer. Half an hour later, I rebooted the machine and logged into my new laptop. Stuff mostly just worked! Mostly.

It turned out that the ethernet card didn't work. Well, that wasn't difficult -- I found a page that said where to download a driver. I downloaded it, compiled it, installed it and, voila, it worked. The same page warned that the microphone wouldn't work either and said where to get drivers that would work. I checked, got the drivers, but they didn't compile cleanly. I searched around, found another page that explained what other packages you needed to install to compile the sound drivers, installed them, compiled, installed. Then there were more pages for the choppy video, etc, etc.

I had forgotten how much time you can spend trying to get a non-macintosh all tuned up. It's actually rather fun -- I remember a TA who complained about Macs because you couldn't do stuff like that to "make them better". I said, "You don't like Macs because they just work?"

It's really quite functional. Just a few things that don't quite work like they're supposed to. And I think I can actually be perfectly productive with this laptop running Ubuntu. I don't really *need* anything else.

I could try installing MacOS on it -- making it a Hackintosh. But I don't really want to bother. If Apple made a netbook that was reasonably priced, I might buy that. But they don't. And I like using Linux. It's fun and cool. But it's not a Mac.

Educational measurement doesn't work and shouldn't be called measurement. The reductionism and worship of quantification in our society is twisting education as a mantra of "improving scores" drives every decision in the schools. We should make decisions about education based on what makes sense, not merely on what improves test scores.

The premise of educational measurement is that, if you can't measure things directly, you can find indicators that vary in the same direction as as what you want to measure and you can aggregate those together in a "construct". In other words, we can't measure how good something is, but we can measure other things that contribute to what make it good and use those together as a measure of quality. The problem is that while these so-called measurements may work reasonably well with a natural population, they don't substitute for a prescription. Let me give you an example.

Let's develop a measure for how good cookies are. Let's say we look at a hundred different kinds of cookies and decide that the biggest and sweetest cookies are the best. We could develop a measure that uses the weight and percent sugar as indicators and aggregate those as our construct. Our construct is simple to apply. It might work great with real cookies. But you could also make cookies with mud and sugar -- they might score really high, but I'll bet they wouldn't taste very good.

What do you do? Well, the standard approach is to try to add more dimensions as part of the index. You can measure fat, starch, hardness, etc, etc. Your measure gets more and more complex to apply. But no matter what you do, you're still not going to have a measure of how good cookies are. For one reason, because it isn't possible to know all of the dimensions that make cookies good. People invent new ways to make cookies good every day. People thought Oreos were good until Doublestuff cookies came out. The second reason is that there's no agreement about what makes a really good cookie. Some people like chocolate chip and others like vanilla wafers: its stupid to argue about which one is better.

Here's the worst problem: Even if you measure a hundred dimensions, it still won't tell people how to make a good cookie. Once you start applying the "instrument" (that's what the educational measurement people call a test) people start using the scores to decide what makes cookies good, rather just trying to make good cookies. This is how disasters like the melamine contamination happen. They were using a test for quality in children's milk that included a test for protein. It turns out that adding melamine to products makes products test higher for protein and is really cheap. When the tests drive school policy, schools are compelled to start look for anything like melamine: something that improves the scores on the tests, regardless of it's actual value.

Just like we all know what a good cookie tastes like, we all know good education when we see it. Education should be about engaging children in interesting work that requires them to construct knowledge in meaningful ways. We need to return to a model that uses common sense to improve education, and not be slaves to measures that don't really measure what we care about.

I sent a quick letter to secretary of the faculty senate and the president of the MSP this morning:

I would like to call your attention to this article which describes how Clemson has been trying to game the rankings (and jumped from 38th to 22nd). It includes such chicanery as artificially limiting class sizes to below 20 (while allowing larger classes to get much larger) -- because "below 20" is a magical cut-off in the rankings. Student admissions are determined by how the SAT numbers will make the institution look. And there was a push to get large numbers of alumni to donate just $5 (because it makes the number of donors look good, even though the money itself is financially insignificant).

This kind of chicanery is exactly what I was warning about in my response to the Chancellor's Framework for Excellence.

These kinds of changes do nothing to actually help the research, service, and teaching of the University. They do not benefit -- and actually undermine -- the students, faculty, and mission of the institution. They represent diversions of funding that could be used to actually advance the institution, but are instead being spent to "influence" the rankings only.

Moreover, whatever benefits might be accrued by such changes in the rankings are bound to be short-lived. The rankings are artificial and contrived -- and will probably be changed as soon as it becomes apparent that institutions are gaming them.

I hope the Faculty Senate and Union will hold the chancellor accountable for his plan and work to ensure that this kind of game doesn't get played here. We need to look critically at our actual needs and devote spending to solve the problems we actually face. We must not engage in magical thinking that by gaming the rankings we can actually improve the institution.

The administration, apparently in conjunction with the faculty senate, decided to construct a survey about reorganization on campus. Unfortunately, the survey didn't ask the questions in a way that will provide much insight into what's actually happening on the campus. I wrote the following comment:

I believe the questions in the survey are not the right ones to ask: The University has embarked on a dramatic reorganization with careful consideration of neither the goals nor the consequences. Reorganization may be one effective means of achieving various goals, but without a thoughtful consideration of the goals and the range of potential ways for achieving the goals, I believe that the institution is lurching erratically into the future, without being unified or deliberative in our actions.

Some of the questions that should have been asked, therefore, are "Do you feel that the process for reorganization has provided enough time to ensure that the university is moving forward appropriately?" and "Do you feel that questions raised by faculty about the reorganization process were answered appropriately or largely ignored?"

I believe these questions would provide a lot more insight into whether we're moving forward together than the questions that have been asked in the survey.

On Thursday and Friday, the content management system selection committee saw two presentations, one from Hannon Hill about their Cascade Server product and the other from Lucidus, a small web development company in New Hampshire about Drupal. I felt that there was greater enthusiasm for Drupal and am cautiously optimistic that drupal will be ultimately chosen.

Cascade Server is a proprietary software product that is a "push server". Essentially, it is a content management system that pushes out static webpages for deployment. Content developers and managers connect to the system and see a file-system like view (in a web browser) with a number of tools to edit pages and workflows for content approval and vetting. The pages that are actually deployed don't have any directly interactive components. Things like RSS feeds and lists of headlines are all pre-generated on the system and posted (e.g. by cron) on the actual site as static pages. This means that if any real interactivity is needed -- ie, any kind of response to user input -- it needs to be accomplished by other kinds of one-off packages or php scripts, rather than being an integral part of the system itself. This seems like a serious shortcoming to me.

Given that we've been working with Drupal, I don't need to describe what Drupal is or how it works. The presenter offered a presentation about Drupal and then showed how it could be used to address the three scenarios that he had been tasked with. There was intense interest on the part of the selection committee and many questions -- many more than when the cascade server was presented.

The presenter for Drupal made a persuasive case that the system selected needs to be able to grow and adapt to the changing needs of the campus. He argued that commercial companies need to focus on the key features that people know they need now, whereas an open source system, by encouraging the participation of the user community, has a "long tail" of additional add-ons and modules that only a small fraction of users want now. Not all of these might be ready or needed immediately, but some of them undoubtedly represented features that the University was going to want in the coming years -- we just don't know it yet. In the end, that was the key difference between the two approaches.

Using the Cascade Server, would be like the Red Queen -- running as fast as we can to stay in the same place. It would allow us to continue building websites as static pages, but would not provide transformational change in the kinds of services nor prepare the campus for the future. Drupal was hands-down the winner if the goal is to revolutionize the kinds of services available to the campus community.

I believe the process still has a couple of steps, including opportunities for the selection committee to actually use the products. The Drupal presenter encouraged the committee to contact a webmaster who had overseen the implementation of the Cascade Server at Plymouth State University (I think), but who was now someplace else in New Hampshire. One got the impression that she would not provide a favorable perspective of the Cascade Server.

In spite of a week of beautiful weather, our cherry tree had been refusing to bloom. The buds opened up several days ago and you can see the pink petals all folded up inside, but the flowers haven't opened. It's supposed to rain for the next few days, which will probably spoil the flowers. Sigh... I had hoped to invite people to drink some sake under the laden boughs. Instead, I just sat under the buds and glowered at the traitorous tree. Zane came to join me and we glowered together.

This is a long weekend due to the Patriot's Day Holiday on Monday. I'll take it. I've been so busy at work -- and on the go with other obligations, like the trip to New York, that I'm ready for a break.

Daniel and I made pizzas this morning. We usually make one meat-only pizza and another that has mushrooms and roasted-red peppers and sometimes black olives too. The pizza tasted fine, but the crust didn't really rise. They didn't have the kind of yeast, I prefer and I suspect there was something wrong with it. it was still tasty, but a bit tough and chewy.

The House budget has proposed to increase the contribution that state employees make to their health insurance from 15% to 30%. I've drafted a letter to my state senator and representative to ask for their support in stopping this from being implemented.

I hope we can count on both of you to oppose the draconian increases currently being proposed to our health insurance. Most faculty at the University have not had their salary keep pace with the rate of inflation for years. A few years ago, I found that the difference between my salary and the salary of a new assistant professor was greater in absolute value then than it had been when I arrived. New faculty get hired in with salaries that are competitive with the rest of the world. With our pay increases consistently running below the rate of inflation (nearly every year I've been here -- this year, our cost-of-living adjustment is "0", you know), the rest of us lose ground every year. I've always felt that one trade-off I could point to was that we were covering less of our health insurance, which has consistently increased faster than inflation.

The same pattern is true of other University benefits. For example, our families don't have to pay tuition, but tuition has stayed nearly constant for a generation and all of the increases have been for fees -- to the point that this benefit is nearly worthless.

I believe the real solution needs to be some kind of single-payer health care. Nickel-and-diming the state employees isn't going to fix the problem -- and, in fact, just masks the symptoms. Instead of covering up the symptoms by reducing the impact of spiraling health-care increases on the budget, we should be trying to fix the core problem. (And this shouldn't be controversial, because I seem to recall that support for single-payer health care is part of the platform of the Massachusetts Democratic Party... Maybe when Democrats control the House, the Senate, and the corner office, we'll finally see that happen. Oh, wait.) In any event, until that happens I would be VERY disappointed not to see my elected officials make EVERY POSSIBLE EFFORT to keep our contributions where they are.

I spent most of the day today relaxing with a smile on my face from the great time I had yesterday. Sally Lawton and I left very early on Saturday, drove to New Haven and took the train into NYC for the day. Everything went about a smoothly as could be imagined and we had a great time. Our train was delayed a bit due to a signaling problem, but that just meant that we met up with Jakobo in Grand Central Station and could share a taxi in the rain to the UEA New York office by the UN. That's where our adventure started.

I think most people in the US would be astonished to discover there was an office at the UN for the World Esperanto Association. It's not much -- just a desk in an office shared with 4 other non-profits. Neil Blonstein has been running the office since the autumn, taking over after the previous person had to step down due to health. We signed the guestbook and looked through the past 30 years of signatures to see what names we recognized -- a who's-who of Esperantism.

After taking a group photo in the office, walked back to Grand Central Station in the rain and got a cup of coffee while we sorted out what to do next. Eventually, we decided to navigate to the place where we were supposed to meet people for lunch. We got to Zaro's a bit early for lunch, but that gave us plenty of time to get situated and chat with folks. There were maybe 12 or 15 of us in all. We had a cheerful lunch chatting happily. Eventually, we decided to push on to the Natural History Museum for a while in the afternoon. There seemed to be big crowds and it took us a long time to navigate there. We walked around for a bit in the museum and eventually ended up having a soda in the food court.

For dinner, we had planned to go to the Esperanto Cafe -- a well-known restaurant in Greenwich Village. We got there in good order, but found it full with no-where to sit. After I looked at the menu, I suggested we go across the street to the Mexican restaurant. They had a fabulous spot right at the front with a two couches right in front of a big window. We could watch people go by, keep on alert for people to arrive at the Esperanto Cafe, and stretch out and relax in comfort and style. We got some margaritas and appetizers. Mauro said he'd never had Mexican food before. I asked him if he knew what a margarita was. He said, "Yes, I know what Margherita is." I pointed out that a margarita was something else.

Eventually, Sally and I got Neil to lead us back to the right subway station and we arrived at Grand Central Station. Checking the departures, it looked like we had missed the earlier train to New Haven, but we rushed to the track anyway just in case. The train was still there and, when we arrived, the conductor said they were pulling out in about 20 seconds. We just made it.

It was a fabulous day in Esperantujo and I've spent the whole following day basking in the good spirits I have from the special connection that Esperanto brings to my life. There's something special about Esperanto. When Jakobo mentioned to folks he was thinking about staying over, one of the other esperantists said, "I'm leaving to spend a few days with my fiancee, but here's my key -- you can just stay at my place." It's really something the invisible bonds that tie people together. They may be invisible, but if you could feel the bonds that Esperanto makes, they'd be warm and fuzzy.

In response to my post about why to participate in the Landa Kongreso, someone asked what it was really like, so I wrote a kind of rant about the Landa Kongreso -- I called it Limako's Guide to the Landa Kongreso.

Everyone is trying to print posters and so today the cutter broke on the poster printer. The guide to the poster printer, of course, doesn't even have the cutter in the index. They have one reference to some manual cutter that other models of printers have. Sigh... We ordered a couple and now have to hope that they'll come with some guide that explains how to install them.

I've been just flat out for the past several days. Lobbying at the State House yesterday. This morning, working in ISB, presentation to sysmanagers, more ISB, then poster printing. But being needed does make me feel appreciated. Lots of people today thanked me for my efforts in helping them make stuff happen.

Great Esperanto meeting tonight. I love having a local group to meet with and chat in Esperanto. It's the best.

I love weekends. If I were a wiser person, I would probably use weekends to do work -- to get ahead of what I know I need to do. I have several things I need to write, a lot of work around the house, and no end of things I ought to be doing. But on the weekends, I have the freedom to leave it all behind and fritter time away like a kid. Today, I played StarCraft with Phil, watched Natsume episodes, went shopping, cooked, and basically frittered away my day accomplishing nothing. Sigh... I wouldn't want to do it everyday, but sometimes it just feels right.

I really enjoyed the road trip to UConn to look at the collections space they have. It was new, beautiful, and well-appointed. I took some pictures (posted at Flickr) and we spent some time grilling them about how they persuaded their campus to dedicate the space to the collections. UMass has never expressed much interest in supporting the collections and some administrators have been downright hostile. I always have loved collections -- it was what got me interested in biology in the first place. And I've spent a lot of time using and contributing to collections: doing a archeological faunal analysis at Michigan State, making herbarium cards for plant systematics, and building an insect collection when I took entomology. Unfortunately, due to the lack of support, we've already lost a number of the collections that got donated away when the people who were supporting them left and could see the collections might just get thrown out, given the lack of support from the administration. With the new construction going on and the proposed college mergers, its a good time to bring all of the natural history collections together and provide for their maintenance. I've started planting seeds and we're talking about developing a proposal to outline what we need.

Being away for a day meant that the first class using the machines I set up on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday had to run without me being here, so I was a little worried coming back that it would have been a catastrophe. But everything went swimmingly and we got a nice thank-you from Kate about how smoothly everything ran. Whew!

I've spent yesterday and today catching up, going to meetings, and wrapping up loose ends. I'm taking tomorrow off, since I worked all last weekend. That will let me go to Esperanto in Northampton, meet with Tom and Zane at Woodstars to work on a paper, and go out for dinner and drinks with Buzz in the evening. I'm definitely in need of some distraction.

I didn't get all 40 hours of work done, but with intense efforts on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I got the machines needed for Tuesday set up and some more besides. I still have a bunch more work to do, but nothing critical.

On Friday, we got the network minimally functional and I set up an assembly line to update laptops. On Saturday, I had three drives that I could use to wipe a laptop and install a stripped down image. Reboot, launch the radmind script and, in about half an hour, the laptop was ready to go. In between, I played some SC with Phil and watched episodes of Natsume Yujincho. I find them charming and heartwarming. I got most of the laptops done.

On Sunday, I came in to finish up the laptops and work on the Kodak Molecular Imaging software. I built a transcript of the package and found that the ownerships were wrong on the server, so I was stuck. I sent a note to the technical staff and used the excuse to take off to see Coraline in 3D with Charlie and Lucy.

On Monday, I opened up the BCRC, made sure things were still working in Morrill, and headed over to the ISB. In between working on the lab, I met with a visiting faculty member from Ohio State who is here observing our use of instructional technologies. I helped him get to Zane's genetics class and then spoke with him for an hour or two during the afternoon. Late in the day, Kate and then George arrived and we finished getting the room set up for class tomorrow.

I will be out of town tomorrow, going on an excursion to UConn to meet with the collections director. So I won't be there if things collapse in the new classroom. But I think things are going to be just fine.

The server is up, but I still can't get any machines in the building to talk to it. Grr... I have 40 hours of work to do this week and only day is left.

I don't normally use Skype, but I've left it on for a few days since Buzz was suggesting that we use Skype while he was in St. Croix. We caught up with him tonight and the boys and I chatted with Buzz and Jonathan sitting outside Caravelle. That was the cottage we rented when we were there last summer. I wish I could have gone this time, but I really felt I needed to stay here and work on getting the labs in the ISB ready to go.

I've been a bit frustrated that the resources I need still aren't set up. I tried to get the server I need moved over on Monday, then Tuesday. We finally got it over there on Tuesday, but it still wasn't functional at the end of the day on Wednesday. I took a couple of pictures of wahoo making the journey. Hopefully tomorrow, it will be working and I can start doing productive work -- I really can't get much done until it's working. At this point, I might as well have gone to St. Croix and spent the week hanging out on the beach.

I don't mean to complain. The technical staff make the work I do possible. If I had to keep the servers going, I wouldn't be able to do much of anything else. I went to a meeting on Friday where representatives of different units on campus met with OIT to describe what functionality they could use in a content management system. It was striking to see that our technical support in 1996 was better than what most of them had today. And I've had 13 years to build on that. We're already better off than they'll be when they get a content management system up and running.

My next fun thing to look forward to is a trip to NYC on April 11. A group of us in Amherst is going to drive to New Haven and catch the train to NYC to spend the day with an esperantist from Rome who's visiting. We're planning to see all the sights. I mentioned at E-USA that we were planning to see the sights of Esperantujo (ie, Esperanto-land). Someone was very excited to hear about that and wanted to know what they were. I pointed out that since we were going to be in Esperantujo, all the sights would be in Esperantujo. He seemed a bit deflated by that line of reasoning and wondered why one needed to even leave home, if that were the case. I pointed out that, for whatever reason, some of the best sights in Esperantujo happened to be in NYC. It should be a lot of fun.