Probably not. They’re expensive.
But…
The media reader from Belkin is sweet. Plug it into your iPod, and it will copy images off whatever media you use for your digital camera. Thus, your 10GB, 20GB, or 40GB(!) iPod becomes a temporary storage device for digital pictures taken on the road. When you come home… BLAMMO! Everything syncs to it’s proper place.
The iPod is a slick little number.
And it’s official. I should be asleep.
It was a good weekend. Another year passed (“You’re older than you’ve ever been/And now you’re even older/And now you’re even older/And now you’re even older…”, TMBG), but it was a good passing, just the same.
Although I would rather have been in Wales, I think the weekend was good fun. Ed surprised me with an excellent birthday gift: Formula De. Whoo! My housemate Annette surprised me with both a cake and a German phrasebook and CD (she’s from Germany, and teaches German here at Kent). I even received a card from our “neighbor upstairs” (well, she lives in the same house, but… anyway, it’s hard to explain), which was a nice surprise as well. I think everything about the day was just surprising. 
Kent had an Open Day on Saturday, which provides students interested in going to Kent a chance to visit, meet faculty, and ask questions about the programs they’re considering. I was asked (*cough*) to do a LEGO demo, which was good. I brought a bunch of toys for people to play with (robots, pieces, etc.), brought copies of two papers about projects I had done with students for prospectives to take away, and spent most of my time talking with prospectives about what they were interested in, and what they wanted to do with themselves. Really, I played college counsellor more than anything else. It was good fun, though; I hadn’t done “admissions” work for a while, and I enjoyed it.
I trotted home afterwards, hopped a train into London, and caught dinner at some rib joint near Piccadilly Circus with Jim, a high school friend positioned up in Leeds. Jim had spent the day down at the Bletchley Park museum (home of the Enigma project, a significant part of why the Allies won WWII), and being that far in, we decided we could have some fun for the evening. We ended up watching the Red Sox/NY game at the Sports Cafe, met a couple of Brits who loved baseball (?), and crashed by around three in the morning.
I think the most entertaining part of the evening was my mother calling to wish me a happy birthday; here I was, wandering around downtown London, with all it’s chaos, chatting with my mother on a mobile phone. First, I was surprised my parents were able to dial internationally (), and second, I am constantly amazed by the power of a mobile phone—yes, they can be annoying, but also… I mean, I was just wandering around London. And I got a phone call. From Ohio. If you asked me, I’d say the future had arrived…
Three years ago, I couldn’t have predicted that day if I tried. Life, I think, is kinda cool.
This weblog has been getting SPAMmed.
I just don’t get it. I mean, I do get it, but … I just don’t get it.
Jay Allen is, fortunately, releasing an MT plugin that should allow me to filter against a blacklist. Tedious, but I have no real choice here. My weblog is currently in danger of advertising porn sites. It might already be doing so, for all I know…
(Yes, that’s Duncan, the Amazing Porn Dog, who lives in Portland, OR. 
Well, OK, there’s nothing pornographic about Duncan, but… I mean, I just had to have a link in there… )
I saw, and ignored, the story on Slashdot about Alex Halderman and his recommended approach to defeating the copy protection on a CD recently released in the US. However, it is SunnComm’s most recent statement that bothers me (my emphasis):
| SunnComm believes that Halderman has violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by disclosing unpublished MediaMax management files placed on a user’s computer after user approval is granted. Once the file is found and deleted according to the instructions given in the Princeton grad student’s report, the MediaMax copy management system can be bypassed resulting in the copyright protected music being converted or misappropriated for potentially unauthorized and/or illegal use. SunnComm intends to refer this possible felony to authorities having jurisdiction over these matters because: 1. The author admits that he disabled the driver in order to make an unprotected copy of the disc’s contents, and 2. SunnComm believes that the author’s report was “disseminated in a manner which facilitates infringement” in violation of the DMCA or other applicable law. |
When you install the MediaMax software, it places a device driver on your machine. If you disable it, you defeat their copy protection scheme. Disabling it does not require any special skills, nor does it require any particularly secret knowledge: you go into the Windows control panels, and disable the driver.
My mother, if she still used Windows, could do this with the instructions provided by Halderman.
My point? In making it possible to duplicate the CD (which I thought I was allowed to do under fair-use doctrine), it is apparently a violation of the DMCA — a felony, last I checked. And the consequences of being convicted of a felony are pretty grim:
| Felons often receive addition punishments such as the loss of voting rights , exclusion from certain lines of work, and loss of firearm rights (if they ever had any to begin with). In addition, some states consider a felony conviction to be grounds for an uncontested divorce . |
I’m sorry, but the House of Representatives and the Senate have failed the People of the United States in allowing the DMCA to become law; Russ Feingold was one of the only US Senators to stand up to the DMCA when it was going through, and continues to be one of the few (only?) Senators to stand up for the rights of the People.
When I’m committing a felony by removing software installed on my computer by a third party, software that prevents me from duplicating an audio product I purchased in accordance with my fair-use rights, I have to believe something is wrong. And for the dissemination of the information about this process to be considered a felony means that a great deal of my discipline (computer science) is in potential danger. Will analyses of the encryption algorithms used in ATM machines (cashpoints) be considered a felony under the DMCA? What about electronic voting machines?
Money is power, kids, and the media companies have a lot of it. Like the book publishing industry, they’re 10 years behind the curve: big media was not ready for the Internet revolution. So now they’re trying to resist the inevitable technological and social changes that are taking place by bullying laws into place. That will not work; it didn’t work in the Thirteen Colonies, and it won’t work in the World today.
| Concluded Jacobs [CEO of SunnComm], “This cat-and-mouse game that hackers and others like to play with owners of digital property is over. No matter what their credentials or rationale, it is wrong to use one’s knowledge and the cover of academia to facilitate piracy and theft of digital property. SunnComm is taking a stand here because we believe that those who own property, whether physical or digital, have the ultimate authority over how their property is used. Owning copying technology is not an unconditional ‘free pass’ to replicate or distribute protected work.” |
We’re all screwed. Would the real Big Brother please step forward?
Via Brooklyn BloggEd, an article in the Portland Oregonian written by area teacher Jonathan Steinhoff:
| Last year I was a finalist for Teacher of the Year. Last year the National Geographic Society awarded me a $5,000 grant to help build an outdoor classroom with natural materials. Last year the Portland teachers association and school board asked me to mentor new teachers. Last year I trained a group of Portland teachers in the Tribes process, which nurtures supportive classroom communities.
Last week letters went home to the parents of my students telling them I’m not a “highly qualified” teacher. How can I fall so far in one year? Easy. I’ve been afflicted with the No Child Left Behind Curse. |
Excellent read. Too bad The Truth rarely matters in Politics.
I saw a talk today. Once again, a Computer Scientist, who must necessarily play the role of Educator, had a Great Idea about Education:
Let’s make the exams easier to grade. And better yet, let’s get rid of assignments in the process.
In the process of giving his talk, he almost reinvented Bloom’s Taxonomy, which was quite depressing. The purpose for speeding up the marking of exams, largely, was motivated by his desire to have more time to do his research. I love how so many [insert scientific discipline here] faculty think that they know everything about education, and their standard rules of academic rigor don’t apply when they talk about (undisciplined, unresearched, atheoretic) things like teaching and learning.
While a casual Google search for models of assessment may not have turned up Raymond Lister’s paper regarding criterion referenced assessment in CS1, or even his paper entitled First Year Programming: Let All the Flowers Bloom (both co-authored with John Leaney), the speaker should have read both, but would have benefitted from neither. Why? His premise was that 1) grading homework takes too much time (away from research), 2) you’re better off with just one exam at the end of the year, and besides, 3) there’s no way you can inspire and provide a framework for improving all 173 students in a class. If you had a class of five or six, you could help them… but with that many, all you can do is hope they pass.
I’m sorry, but I disagree.
I fell upon Dave Thomas’s weblog this evening (he’s one of the Pragmatic Programmers). In light of the ideas stated in today’s presentation, I want to join two ideas here: one from Raymond, and one from Dave.
From the abstract of Lister and Leaney’s Let all the Flowers Bloom:
| We describe our criterion-referenced grading scheme for a first year programming subject, which has been designed to allow all participating students to achieve their full potential. Traditional norm-referenced grading schemes, where all students work on the same assessment tasks, result in tasks that may be effective for the middle-achieving student, but the tasks do not allow the weakest students to engage effectively, nor do these tasks stretch the strongest students. |
The core idea in the paper is that you set assessments for students to achieve throughout the semester, each a kind of “hurdle” that, after clearing the first, they may attempt the second, and so on. The first hurdle is based on their ability to recall and comprehend information. They then must demonstrate their ability to apply it, and then lastly their ability to use that information in new ways, evaluating it’s new role in new contexts. It gives weaker students clear targets, and has the opportunity (at the far end) to challenge students you would otherwise not know what to do with in the classroom (because they’re just so damn good).
I thought of these papers when I stumbled onto Dave’s weblog, where he presents the idea of code kata. To understand these, it’s good to first understand what a kata is. I searched for a definition for the word kata, and found a pleasing one at 24fightingchickens:
| Kata is a Japanese term meaning mold, model, style, shape, form, or data-type. A karate kata is a set number of basic techniques arranged in order. The closest relatives of the karate kata in other sports are shadow boxing, dancing, and gymnastics floor routines. The karate player begins by standing at attention, bowing, and then by stepping in some particular direction throwing karate techniques. The kata are pretend fights, and yet each is not representative of a single fight. Rather, they are more of a biological data storage method that uses compression and encryption to put as many examples as possible into the smallest amount of human memory possible. |
Dave suggests something similar for programmers:
| How do you get to be a great musician? It helps to know the theory, and to understand the mechanics of your instrument. It helps to have talent. But ultimately, greatness comes [from] practicing; applying the theory over and over again, using feedback to get better every time. |
Kata are critical to the advancement of students in many martial arts traditions. In some respects, they are a criterion referenced marking scheme: you cannot possibly become a black belt without first progressing through all the belts before, and to do that, you must demonstrate your mastery of the techniques at each level previous; in part, you do that by performing kata.
In computer science, we give assignments to our students, and we set exams, but what do they prove? If you have a course (module, whatever) with just one exam, and your students do well, have they demonstrated that they know how to take an exam, or that they’ve mastered the learning outcomes stated for that module? What is the appropriate assessment model for an introductory course in computer science that follows the common and traditional approach of having students program?
If you worked code kata into a criterion referenced marking scheme, would the kata be the same for all programming languages? Why? Why not?
I’ll have to think more about kata; I think there’s something neat at the intersection of these ideas.
Former housemate Robin says via email:
| If you’re really bored (like you’re on hold with your warranty company), I recommend booking a flight at www.skyhighairlines.com. Try it. You’ll like it. |
http://www.skyhighairlines.com/
Flying more. Caring less.
That’s easily the funniest thing that I’ll see all day, methinks.
