Blogs

Alisa and I were invited to a beer-tasting party at Mary Carey's house and had a nice time. There were around 30 people packed into the dining room. I was pleased to find a spot at the back of the room, where I could sit and chat with people quietly, out of the sturm und drang of the party.

We tasted 11 different kinds of beers, with a winter or holiday theme. A number of them were weird things, with raspberry or chocolate, but a few were just good beer. The Samuel Smith Winter Ale came out on top after the voting. Or some chocolate thing, depending on how you counted the votes, apparently. Alisa rather liked a raspberry lambic beer. It figures.

The unreality of academia always strikes me at the end of the semester. There is a crescendo of frenetic activity of the students that suddenly comes full stop with the end of exam week: the students evaporate, the campus is empty, and everything is quiet. Except for me: I have a million things I need to do and suddenly there's time to do them. Things I've been putting off because of the constant interruptions become possible and there's time -- time! -- again to work on things in solid blocks.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon putting up the videos from the Zamenhof Symposium. The symposium was a positive event: interesting, thoughtful presentations to a surprisingly large and diverse audience. It was a long drive down to the NYC and hard to make the time during finals week, but I was glad I was able to facilitate the trip by our local group, including three students from Hampshire College. And I got to wear my new hat.

I came away with an appreciation for several things I hadn't thought of before. Esther Schor talked about the motives that Zamenhof had -- and how his motivations changed over time. I had always rather simplistically seen Zamenhof as focused on Esperanto as an end. Although I had known of Zamenhof's interests in homaranismo, yiddish, etc, I had never developed a more nuanced perspective of Zamenhof in which Esperanto was a means to other ends in Zamenhof's life or how those might changed over his lifetime. It was also interesting to hear Humphrey Tonkin speak about how Zamenhof is being used today in Bialystok. All of the presentations were good.

Posting the video was a bigger challenge than I had imagined. I had assumed I would just put them up on Youtube, but it turns out you can't post any videos longer than 10 minutes anymore. And all of these were longer (mostly around 25 minutes). So I installed the video module at Esperanto-USA and posted them there. Except the video module wouldn't work. I dug into the code and eventually found that when it called the "theme" function to call the function that would display the video, it wasn't working. So I commented out that line and just called the video display function directly. It's working, but at some point I'll need to go back and sort out the actual problem.

I got a new hat yesterday. It was a gift from my father. He had intended it to arrive before the gala, but the gala happened faster than he'd expected.

It's a really cool hat.

I'm planning to wear it to the Zamenhof Symposium on Tuesday and I'll get my Esperanto friends to get some pictures of me wearing it in NYC. Then I'll post some pictures. But you'll have to wait until then.

The summer after I arrived, there was a visiting faculty member from England -- an evolutionary biologist. I think we were talking about a faculty member that everyone described as being a real pain-in-the-ass -- a real a-hole. But I mentioned that she was always really nice to me. He said, "Well, that's no surprise." Being a new non-tenure system faculty member, I said something self-deprecating about myself and he said, "No, you're the person that nobody *ever* wants to piss off." I was surprised, thinking myself rather low on the totem pole, but he said, "Look. You're the one that can make things happen for people. You're the one that people call on in a pinch, when they're stuck. You're the one that nobody can afford to piss off."

I remember being scandalized at the idea that I would withhold my cooperation from someone...

I participated in an interesting workshop by DEGW, a "strategic consultancy" firm that has evidently been hired by the University to contribute to the design of renovations for the library. It's interesting the things that the University has money for, like high-priced consultants. I have to admit, however, that these consultants are good. Really good. Better than any I've seen at the University so far.

They gave a wonderfully nuanced presentation that laid out the kinds of things that University should be preparing itself for, including project-based learning, large scale simulations, gaming, and other cool stuff. I've been pushing this kind of stuff for a long time, but it's like the rest of the world is starting to catch up. Very encouraging. I would love to see more of this stuff happening on our campus.

I did raise one particular concern: a bunch of their presentation focused on giant corporate solutions. They showed a Cisco "telepresence" solution. When I spoke, I pointed out that I believed the University needed to invest in open-source, grassroots solutions that provided open APIs that we could tie into and adapt for our purpose: buying big corporate packages means we're just deskilled drones acting as consumers of technology, which is not the way to do anything at the cutting edge.

Eventually, we divided into small groups to describe scenarios of how we envisioned the next generation learning environments. In my group, we described the participatory virus simulation proposal I had written. It would be a good fit for exactly the kinds of things we were talking about.

I notice that the DEGW website has a horrible constantly changing graphic on it. The Research Affairs Committee in our department has decided that the Biology Department needs some of those. Personally, I find pages like that completely unusable. I have to close the window instantly -- or hold my hand over the motion until I can find something to click on. Ugh. But my opinion that doesn't count for much against the wishes of the "real" faculty. They've decided that continuous distractions will somehow make people more interested in content in the page.

I've been thinking (not very seriously) about getting a mac mini server. It's a mac mini with two 500gb drives and snow leopard server. I saw a note on macintouch that the mac minis were discounted at Amazon, so I checked. It says "$999.00 -- click to see the price". So I clicked to see the price. It was $993.24 -- you save $5.76! Meh.

Today was the last class of the semester. We ran our poster session and the students presented their finished projects. We were all exhausted. They worked really hard.

We really needed another week. The semester was a week short this year: we only had 13 weeks of class. We really needed one more week to pull everything together. Or maybe I should just drop one of the projects. It's hard to imagine doing that because I somehow need to provide all of the pieces.

When I first taught the class, I didn't have an "observation" project at the beginning, but I found that without it, students were unprepared to do the methods project. But without the methods project, they can't write a proposal. And without a proposal, its hard to choose a Research Project. It's hard to know what to cut.

A student asked me if we were going to do teaching evaluations. I've had students ask me once or twice *if* we're going to do teaching evaluations. I guess there are some people who don't, but the question always makes me feel a bit weird. Of course we're going to do teaching evaluations. I always do teaching evaluations. I used the opportunity to recruit that student to do the teaching evaluations for me and to drop them off at the Chairman's office.

I remember talking to Pop years ago about teaching evaluations. He pointed out that he mostly didn't pay any attention to them because he knew what the students were going to say. He'd arranged the course as well as he could and some of the things they didn't like were intentional and some were just side effects of who he was. I understand his point better now.

I've been enjoying doing more photography with my new little camera. I'm trying to carry it everywhere and to take pictures of everyday things. It's incredible when I download the pictures and find that they don't need any retouching: I look at them and can't find anything to fix. My Pentax can take great pictures, but they nearly always require tweaking. Maybe I could set it so it would be closer to what I want at first pass. But the canon is already like that. It's wonderful for snapshots.

Alisa and I attended the Amherst 250th Gala on Saturday night. It was an amazing event. The organizers had done an outstanding job to create a festive atmosphere in the Campus Center Auditorium: a venue not known for it's native attractiveness (it being a monument to brutalism and all). The lighting and decorations were beautiful.

The most interesting decorations, of course, were the clothes that everyone was wearing. It was a "black tie optional" event and so most of the men were wearing either a tuxedo or a suit and for women fancy dresses were de_rigeur. It's very strange to be in that kind of environment. Some people live in that sort of milieu constantly. I feel rather out of place.

I mostly enjoyed the live music early in the evening. They played a mix of songs from the big-band era through to modern stuff. Later, however, the music was provided by a DJ and it became increasingly loud and obnoxious. Eventually, I had to leave the room because my throat was sore from trying to talk over the noise.

The University had organized two tables of participants and many of the high-level administrators were there: the chancellor, his wife, the CIO, the vice chancellor of A&F, etc. On the whole, I'm glad to see increasing engagement between the university and the town.

Alisa is running for re-election and seemingly knows everyone. It wasn't possible to walk from one place to another without her talking to each person along the way. I remember seeing a seminar once called "working the room like a pro". I think Alisa could teach that now. I enjoyed being able to "participate" in her discussions with other people, because then I didn't have to say anything and could just nod and listen to her. But she succeeded in ditching me for much of the evening and I had to talk to people.

I don't really like talking to people. I can enjoy talking about things I'm interested in, but those areas don't overlap with the general public very often. And it's a minefield to talk with people about anything related to the town or local politics because of Alisa's role. One guy was trying to organize people to pass an override to raise revenues for the school and I said, "But since we've already lost the Mark's Meadow school, what's the point? What's left to save?" I feel like Hagrid: I shouldn't have said that. Many of the people who know Alisa, see her as the only thing we have in common and end up trying to talk to me about her, which is similarly dangerous.

Early in the evening, I (half-heartedly? resignedly?) asked Alisa if she wanted to dance and she said, "No way." Alisa's friend Clare undertook as her special project to make both Alisa and I dance (separately, with her). I have little affinity for the terpsichorean muse, but I did my part, shuffling about and waving my arms like a drunken pelican. Alisa and I even went out later and danced a bit with each other. Clare is very sweet and a good friend.

Finally, at midnight, Alisa relented and we went home. I can't really say I enjoyed it thoroughly -- I just don't like things like that very much. But it was something.

I went down to Holyoke and had a fit: ie had my new suit fitted. The seamstress had an eastern european accent and was rather fierce: "Don't look down! Hands out of the pockets!" It was over in a matter of moments. I have to go down once more on Friday to pick it up. The gala is on Saturday.

For the past few months, I've been disappointed that I can't make myself take more pictures. So I decided to buy a new, small point-and-shoot camera. I got a Cannon SD780 IS. I've only taken a few pictures, but I'm pleased so far. It's a really small camera and, like all the Canons I've had, it takes really good pictures.

I spent much of Thanksgiving day working on a program to generate "dot" files from the raw data from the virus simulation. "Dot" is the language that graphviz uses to build branching diagrams. It's incredibly simple: you basically just define which nodes link to which, and graphviz does the rest. You can specify lots of other stuff and, in particular, you can align nodes into ranks. my program takes any one infection code, creates a time-line with the dates, indicates which nodes go with which date, and then looks up and defines the relationships. The hardest part was reminding myself how to work with arrays in PHP. I knew what I wanted, but I couldn't figure out how to insert the values into the array. I got it wrong about four times before I finally figured out how to do it: it was simple, of course: too simple. I was looking for a function, but you didn't need to use one: you could just use simple assignment.

The patterns in the data are interesting. It's a bit disappointing how little data we actually got: most people who became "infected" did nothing. But that, in itself, is data. I've learned a lot about how to make the simulation work and, next time, I think I'll be able to make it work better.

We launched the virus simulation on Tuesday. It's going, although it hasn't gone as smoothly and as fast as I had hoped it might. I think it will help to have some "incentives" to encourage participation, like an iPod or two and a Macbook. Still, it's going and its useful to know how it works without any incentives.

I spent all morning in the ISB updating software in the labs. I updated MacOS, iLife, and Firefox. To build packages that would install reliably across all the labs in the ISB took several hours. I still have to see if they'll install cleanly in Morrill. I still need to install GraphViz.

GraphViz is cool! I think I had seen it before, but I hadn't taken the time to play with it until now. I'm planning to write an output filter for the virus simulation that will create trees in dot that can be rendered using graphviz to make it easy to compare one virus strain with another. Or just from any particular point forward. Unfortunately, it doesn't look easy to install graphviz on the server. But I can just write a script to ouput a file in dot that students can render on a mac to make graphics they can use in their posters.

I've been making philosraptor pictures to amuse myself. I posted one at E-USA and a couple at Facebook. I also made one for a birthday card. Maybe I'll use it for my Solstice card too. Philosoraptor is cool.

This evening, Charlie made calzones for us! He took a cooking class this trimester and had the idea to cook sometime for dinner. It's kind of late for dinner, but I'm happy to eat anything that someone else cooks for me. Or if they bring me baklava as a peace offering.

The Participatory Virus Infection Simulation is running. I still need to build the reporting tools, but tomorrow I plan to start the infection in my class and we'll see where it goes from there.

Note that you can't sign up for it without a registration code. And hopefully the only way to get a registration code will be through face-to-face infection. (Although I suspect that some people will share them electronically). I'll be interested to see what happens.

There are a bunch of great visualizations that could be built with the data. We need to build maps and graphs and trees and timelines. It's going to be cool.