Screenshot: A Weblog

There have been many, many stories about the demotion of Pluto, but I was interested in this story because it;s about a counter-vote by elementary school students to keep Pluto a planet. Which is very sweet, but it's hard to tell from the story if the students really understood that this wasn't just a decision about Pluto, with the vote slogans being things like "Pluto makes the world go round!" and "Boo Pluto!". The vote was not pro- or anti-Pluto. Pluto is still there, after all.

The question, after all, is what we mean when we say the word "planet". Less well covered than the implications to Pluto were the implications to other celestial bodies to the various definitions proposed. For those students who wanted Pluto to remain a planet, which of those definiteion did they then prefer? Or, as it seems from the article, was that not really the point of the "teachable moment"? I think it's great to tie in actual modern science with a hook that students can get interested in. But I question whether asking students to vote on a topic that they probably don't understand helps support the sciences. I fear they were left with an image of scientists as cold-hearted people who voted poor little Pluto out of the club. Too bad the teachable moment couldn't be that sometimes science has to rule against its preferences, if that is what the data you are faced with requires.

Posted by Amanda at 8:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I had a sense of deja vu watching tonight's episode of Mythbusters (Episode 59: Crimes and Myth-Demeanors 2) where they test the claims that various high tech security systems are intrusion proof - including fingerprint scanners! As I mentioned in my entry earlier this month, my Cyberattacks intersession course tried this same thing, though only with the small computer access scanner, not the major door access scanner Mythbusters featured. They, too, were able to beat the scanners, using more sophisticated techniques, but also being able to use a more plausible method of fingerprint capture. Whereas I like to think that my class and I were testing the myth that these things are vulnerable to spoofs using household materials.

The entire episode is actually worth catching in reruns (which the Discovery channel seem to run constantly) - they came up with some ludicrously simple methods for testing thermal and sonar sensors as well. It's really fairly damning.

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I'll admit up front that I've never been a fan of books of trivia so this discussion of the growing popularity of trivia books was both surprising (there's really interest in those things?) and interesting [via A&L Daily]. The supposition made is that increased interest in trivia is a symptom of an increased desire for information mixing with an increased desire for instant gratification. There is also the suggestion that a focus on trivia reflects a loss of "the patience required to mine the deeper satisfactions of old".

There is no rigorous support for these claims, but they sound plausible to me. I think about the recent fashionability of spelling bees. I have no particular problem with spelling bees, and I certainly value the correct use of language, particularly in formal settings. But they seem like a prime example of extensive memorization being equated with intelligence, at least in their mass marketed presentation. I know that, in order to be competitive at a high level in spelling bees, one needs to know the influence of the etymology of a word on its spelling. But I would be really curious to see statistics on the number of spelling bee participants who go on to become linguists. Because, in the presentations I have seen of bees, there isn't any focus on the deeper understanding of the structure and evolution of language that could be built on top of a comprehensive knowledge of its constituent parts. And that may be due to the bees being presented for a trivia-focused society, but I have suspicions otherwise.

It is interesting to see the article describe trivia books as a offspring of the information age. This is unintuitive to me. As someone who has an always-on internet connection, I cannot imagine buying a trivia book. If there is a tidbit of information I want, I can likely find it on the internet, and if I can't my library's on-line catalog can help me find a credible source that will not only include that fact,but generally also an interpretation of it. And that is, I think, the key to why some people bemoan an interest in trivia. Facts are only interesting when you add interpretation. (Any students who have gone through my Fundamentals of Information Systems course with me are now flashbacking to our inforamtion = data + context forrmula....) Trivia is very carefully written to be striking without much interpretation - my guess is that the strikingness is often related to its ability to give a pat summary to a very complex topic. It doens't invite analysis and can even be phrased to discourage it. The first example in this article says "the first paved road was 7 1/2 miles long and 6 feet wide and was built in Ehypt... 4,600 years ago". After the initial expected response (I imagine) of "wow - that's long, and that's longer ago than one would have thought" the statement gives you nowhere else to go. All of the questions that scream to be answered - why was it built? what was it used for? *how* was it built? how is "paved" being defined? and how do we know this is the first paved road? - just sit there. The shame is that people have gone to the effort to collect all of these facts, but instead of building on the attraction of these nuggets to jump into these more interesting questions, actually stiffle those types of questions by quickly jumping on to the next context-free nugget.

There are obvious educational implications, both for the types of evaluations that we value of our students, and for the expectations of our students for what "learning" means. They reinforce the importance, in our "information age", of teaching students how to process and analyze - how to be active participants in information consumption.

Posted by Amanda at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the further adventures of catching up on book reviews, I give you my review of The Final Solution by Michael Chabon, reproduced below for your convenience.

The Final Solution
by Michael Chabon
Rating: 0

I have a strong weakness for Sherlock Holmes stories and various adaptations of the Holmes universe; I love Laurie King's Mary Russell novels, for example. I also have enjoyed the Chabon novels that I have read. Putting these together, Chabon's very short novel The Final Solution about (one is led to assume, though the name is never used)r Holmes in his reclusive retirement seemed sure to please. However, this is not an homage to the Holmes stories. The Holmes in this story is feeble and tired. He is still clever but only rarely charismatic. It would be a mistake to read this book expecting a modern addition to a set of classic favorites.

Putting those initial preconceptions aside, the book presents an interesting mystery. Holmes spots a young boy and a parrot attempting to cross the train tracks outside his home and after preventing the boy from electricuting himself on the rail finds that while the boy does not speak, the parrot has a habit of repeating strings of numbers in German. The mystery is presented - who is this boy, where are he and his parrot from, and what do the numbers mean? There are, as is expected, additional layers to the mystery, as more people become interested in the parrot's numerical messages.

This is not just a story of deduction, like the old Holmes stories, though. In keeping with Chabon's style, there is at least as much interest in the impact of this boy on the lives of the people who encounter him. While it seems clear that by the time he has met this boy Holmes has fallen out of detecting, as he spends more time with the boy there are glimmers of the classic character. The importance of the mystery doesn't appear to be the ultimate answer, but the utility of the mystery in encouraging those around him to care for the boy and his pet.

Ultimately, while I enjoyed the book as I read it, I couldn't really recommend it. If you want a good mystery, read one of the original Holmes stories (or, as I mentioned above, the modern ones by King). If you want to try out something my Chabon, go with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.

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In the case of the $2.13 million comma, misplaced punctuation in a contract will allow one of the parties to withdraw earlier than intended, as the contract-cancelation clause was inadvertently attached to the entire contract, and not just a restricted time period [via Language Log]. It's a lovely example for use in any course where the instructor might want to justify grammar "counting". I think it also illustrates the value of practicing the skill of proofreading.

Posted by Amanda at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Of course, having decided to try browsing via RSS feeds a few days ago (and, btw, I am loving the convenience of seeing which of the pages I read regularly has new content), Slashdot has to link to a whitepaper describing the security risks in subscribing to RSS and Atom feeds. They're what you would expect - the standard potential for the site owner to insert malicious code in the feed, along with concerns that, because of the ability to put third-party feeds in what might be an otherwise trusted site, feeds allow insertion of exploits into new realms. The advice seems to be to only subscribe to feeds at trustworthy sites, be careful about subscribing to feeds that include third-party content such as comments if they aren't filtered for malicious code, and set your browser preferences to disallow embedded code from running amok on your computer.

I've actually been catching up on my security reading the past week, and it reminded me that I never posted a link here to my write-up of our end-of-the-course project in my Cyberattacks class this past January, where we spoofed an APC and a Microsoft fingerprint scanner using modeling clay, wax, and other household materials. I managed to capture some video of the spoofs working, which is linked on the page, but I also tried to give a fairly detailed description of what did and didn't work.

Posted by Amanda at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

OMG! Google has announced that not only have they been collecting n-gram data from a training corpus they have built from on-line sources of a trillion works, but they're goiing to make the n-gram data available via the UPenn Linguistic Data Consortium in the near future. I don't even have a need for this data at the moment, but I'm drooling over the idea. I'm sure there's some way I can make use of this in my current project...... [via Language Log]

Posted by Amanda at 11:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You're Amazon. You decide to branch into the on-line grocery sales business. It's still an Amazon store, so you show a photo, list product features, and, sure, you allow product reviews. And then, inevitably, people review your milk [via Boing Boing]. And your bananas. And your cucumbers.

By the way, don't ever have dinner over at Amazon - they think that baked "scooped out [cucumbers] halves with buttered break crumbs, top with parmesan cheese makes a great side dish".

Posted by Amanda at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This afternoon I did some behind the scenes tidying around Screenshot-ville. I upgraded from Movable Type 3.2 to 3.3 - amazingly, while I backed things up, it went entirely smoothly and I don't appear to have lost any functionality (let me know if it appears otherwise to you!!!).

I had been getting between 100 and 200 spam comments a day, and while they were mostly getting marked as junk, about 50-60 were coming through as either needing moderation or getting posted outright. I was going to try to install a Captcha plugin, but I noticed that all but a half-dozen of the spam were going to two specific old entries of mine. So, I turned off comments for those entries a couple of days ago and am pretty confident looking at the logs today that, for now at least, this has solved the problem. I'll go the Captcha route if necessary, but I'd rather leave things as open as possible for as long as possible.

I also finally set up an RSS feed reader for myself; I went with the Sage extension for Firefox. I just went through all of my bookmarks that I usually open up in separate tabs at the start of each day and browse through one by one. Now, the ones with feeds are filtered off to a subdirectory and I'm going to try reading them just through the feeds. It's another experiment in more efficient browsing that I'll give a week and then let you know what I think.

The next thing I want to tackle around here is continuing to go back and pull my old archives into the new database....

Posted by Amanda at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It just came to my attention that the summer issue of Knitty is out; they're calling it "the extremities issue", as it is focusing on gloves and socks and the like. This is very sensible for a summer issue - small projects are way more tolerable in this weather than big sweaters and afghans that lay across your lap. (I, of couse, am quite intelligently spending my summer making a beaded mohair shawl....)

Looking at their new pattern offerings, there's a pretty toe-up sock design, Widdershins that I might try, or maybe the longer, lacy Baudelaire pair. The Sock Monkey Hat is adorable. While I am not a legwarmer fan, the Manresa pattern makes some that look really comfy and non-80s-flashback - I could imagine pulling these on for a commute over tights, if one's shoes didn't accomodate bulky wool socks.

Posted by Amanda at 6:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In one of the more bizarre news articles I've seen about robotics lately, a professor's project to substitute an andriod version of himself in his lectures doesn't actually seem to be very positive about the project.[via AI in the News] From the start, the andriod is labeled as looking "creepily like him". Looking at the technology behind the article, there's no intelligence in the system, as the operator wears motion-capture gear and the android reproduces those behaviors. The professor claims he just wanted to eliminate his commute - I would have thought some good videoconferencing equipment would be easier and way less off-putting for the students (there is no indication of whether the android includes microphones so that the professor can hold a discussion). The article's author is also clearly dubious about this development in education, as he speculates that if such devices take off, soon the andriod double of the professor will just be teaching to a room full of android doubles of students.

Posted by Amanda at 1:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)