megan@elon (Megan Squire)

Computer Engineering Barbie

2010-02-12T15:03:00.004-05:00

Gizmodo covers the new computer engineering Barbie, pictured below:

Link covers more about her clothing ensemble...

at a conference

2010-02-10T11:11:00.001-05:00

The rest of this week (Weds-Fri) I am at this FOSS conference in California.

I've got email though, so if you need to reach me...

Some notes:

The purpose of this conference is to gather ideas from our FOSS research community for a direction and solidification of our research agenda, so that we can tell funding agencies (esp CISE at NSF) that they should prioritize this research.

Quote of the Day: Keeping Perspective

2010-01-30T12:39:00.001-05:00

As seen on KD Nuggets newsletter about knowledge discovery:

Suppose four publishers have rejected the manuscript for your thriller about love, war, and global warming. Your intuition and the bad feeling in the pit of your stomach might say that the rejections by all those publishing experts mean your manuscript is no good. But is your intuition correct?... Could it be that publishing success is so unpredictable that even if our novel is destined for the best-seller list, numerous publishers could miss the point and send those letters that say thanks but no thanks? ...

John Grisham's manuscript for A Time To Kill was rejected by twenty-six publishers... J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter manuscript was rejected by nine...

John Kennedy Toole lost hope of ever getting his novel published and committed suicide. His mother persevered, however, and eleven years later A confederacy of Dunces was published; it won the Pulitzer for Fiction and has sold nearly 2 million copies.

From "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow. Shared by a friend unhappy with recent reviewing experience.

Quote for a new semester

2010-01-20T12:37:00.000-05:00

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka" but "That’s funny..."

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992)

quote of the day

2010-01-13T11:41:00.001-05:00

Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones.
But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.

H. Poincare, 1901 (from Gianotti and Pedreschi)

rethinking science education

2010-01-06T11:24:00.002-05:00

Here is an article from Inside Higher Ed about Rethinking Science Education. The article reports on a recent CIC meeting in which a plenary speaker suggested alternatives to the traditional "intro course" format.

I am particularly interested in the description of a 2-year cross-disciplinary science intro. Fascinating. It would take a lot of cooperation, communication, and trust to pull that off.

Kindle now supports PDF

2009-11-25T08:03:00.001-05:00

Kindle now supports PDF natively. Yay.

Elon Runners

2009-11-23T16:25:00.003-05:00

Elon Runners has started in earnest this fall. Here are some links for the community of Elon and Burlington area runners:

Elon Runners web site
Elon Runners on Facebook

Basically we are running EVERY Wednesday at 6, mileage depends on who shows up but the default is 3m. Each week we'll have some extra runs too, determined by who shows up Wednesday or the chatter on Facebook, etc.

Happy running!!

I heart xkcd

2009-11-13T08:39:00.003-05:00

The guy from xkcd is, once again, inside my head.

Some misinformation in the Pendulum re: Kindles

2009-11-04T08:38:00.002-05:00

For those who read the November 3, 2009 story in the Pendulum (I'm reading it online, so not sure of the print date) called "Elon continues to favor paper to digital", there is some misinformation about the Kindle that I'd like to correct.

The article is about student adoption of Kindles and E-books over paper. Keep in mind I write these items as a Kindle skeptic and a book lover.... but facts are facts. Here's what I noticed about this article:

1. Here is a quote about price payback.

Senior Melanie Johnson recommends the Kindle for students who enjoy technology and who also read a lot.

"The cost of books are $10 each, which is cheaper than in bookstores, but the cost of the Kindle itself is pricey ($300-400)," she said. "So you would have to read a ton of books to ever offset the cost of the Kindle."

Here is a posting I made about EXACTLY when the Kindle "pays off" as a textbook device. There have been many economic analyses of the Kindle and when it would pay off.

2. Here is a quote about the limitations of the Kindle.

"I can foresee the point where a Kindle is light enough, has a long enough battery life, has a color display, allows for highlights and annotation and has the ability to access the Web," he said. "Think of having all your textbooks and reference books, as well as access to the Web, in a lightweight device that you can take notes on."

The Kindle has a two-week battery life. The Kindle does allow for highlights, annotations, and access to the Web currently. These are not hacks or extra features, they come built-in.

3. No one mentioned the REAL problems with the Kindle for academia, which I've outlined in several places.[1][2]

If anyone wants to play with a Kindle and find out about these things for yourself, let me know. I'm happy to talk!

Another academic reviews the Kindle

2009-11-03T08:49:00.003-05:00

He makes some of the same recommendations/comments about the Kindle for academia as I did [1][2]. Here are the parts I agree with most heartily:

Let’s face it: at heart, the Kindle is designed to let you read mystery novels, not academic books.

This is true. He goes on to discuss the size of the device, etc. But I found that the real problem is the lack of page number references, the difficulty in getting to and using the index, and the spotty support for linked references are detriments to the Kindle. (He discusses some of these later on, as well as some aesthetic differences.)

I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from. Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education -- and indeed, just learning how to read closely -- means making your books part of your physical environment. In an era when you thought criminally overpriced textbooks full of uselessly pretty pictures and pre-chewed content was the absolute nadir of education, the Campus Full Of Kindles demonstrates we still have lower to sink. If, that is, the Kindles alienate students from their libraries rather than empowering them to immerse themselves in them.

Agreed. Preach it brother.

Apps for iPhone and Android

2009-11-03T08:45:00.001-05:00

Probably no huge surprises here, but I'll link you to some charts showing the top apps for mobile markets:

O'Reilly: Games top the charts

hardware paradigms

2009-10-14T14:56:00.003-04:00

On a CSC111 (comp sci for non-majors) midterm, 88% of students can identify a picture of "flash memory", whereas only 63% were able to correctly identify a picture of a hard disk, a paltry 43% were able to correctly identify RAM modules, and very surprisingly only 17% were able to recognize a picture of a CPU chip (well at least I got them to quit calling the case the CPU!)

The kicker is this: I showed NOTHING in class that had to do with flash memory, no pictures of it, nothing other than a brief description of how it works in theory and a comparison to related/older technologies. Yet I spent 200 minutes on the OTHER hardware concepts, recognizing the pieces, passing them around the room, taking them apart, watching videos of how they were developed, etc.

They were able to recognize the flash memory based on having bought this themselves and probably installed it in a phone or camera.

I am embarrassed to admit this since it shows the ineffectiveness of the teaching method I chose for hardware components, but I guess it's illustrative of how widespread the mobile paradigm is, and how it has utterly eclipsed the desktop paradigm, at least with this particular batch of students.

I bet nearly every student in this class has a cell phone and knows where the memory goes in it and how to upgrade the memory, but they haven't the first clue what's inside a desktop computer. (They also don't know how flash memory works, or why it's called "flash", but at least they can identify it when shown a picture.)

And even if they do own a computer, it's probably a laptop, and we don't really teach about what hardware inside the laptop looks like because what's the point? The only thing you can change about a laptop is MAYBE the memory, MAYBE the battery, and MAYBE swap out a hard drive. But who does that? The last time I upgraded memory in a laptop was 1997. (Of course, with desktop components now all "onboard" it's getting less and less likely to upgrade or tinker with an actual desktop either. Couple this with the throw-away mentality and planned obsolescence, and I ask you: When was the last time you actually bought something new that required that you open the case?)

The smaller the device, the more difficult it is to take apart, the less likely you are to be able to modify it or fix it yourself, the less likely it is that you can upgrade the hardware. Frankly, it's really interesting to create these small devices, but they're boring as hell to teach because you can't take them apart and it's all solid-state.

So old-school hardware is more interesting to teach but new mobile devices are ubiquitous and relevant.

What about a grant to have enough hardware for each student to build their own PC which they then use in class? It doesn't solve the mobility problem but it would be fun.

Office hours Friday 10/2

2009-09-29T08:21:00.001-04:00

On Friday Oct 2, I will not be able to have office hours at the usual time, as I have a meeting.

I will hold alternative office hours on that day from 1:30-2:30pm.

Explaining the mystery of Craigslist

2009-09-18T12:02:00.002-04:00

Yes, it's ugly, annoying, and mysterious. Refreshing, disturbing, energizing. So of course, I have to love it. Wired delves in:

"Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview."

data gathering on the self

2009-09-16T15:45:00.004-04:00

A few links regarding the collection of personal data on yourself: video, audio, facts

--Exercise Guy, 1 year
--Noah, picture every day for a year
--Same thing, female, 3 years
--Guy who publishes an annual report of himself
--The quantified self (blog)
--Track Your Happiness (service)

Most of the mainstream media have focused on health-related data gathering, i.e. Nike Plus or just running web sites like Map My Run, Daily Burn, etc. Wired July 2009 has a series on this topic. The Cover Story is "Living by Numbers".

language with the happiest users

2009-09-02T08:50:00.002-04:00

This does not surprise me in the least! Perl rocks.

The programming language with the happiest users

Kindle for sheet music

2009-08-26T08:41:00.002-04:00

Another use of the Kindle will be sheet music use, storage, purchase.

New Semester of Campus Rec

2009-08-25T14:20:00.002-04:00

If you've ever wanted an easier way to browse the campus rec offerings, try the Google Calendar I made for them.

This week looks a little boring, but things really pick up around Sept 1.

Two updates: locker/towels are now $20 and group exercise is also now $20. Enjoy!!

Advice to graduates just starting out

2009-07-04T10:03:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago the Sunday New York Times had a collection of wisdom from college commencement speeches. Here's one from John Patrick Shanley, playwright, speaking to the class of 2009 at College of Mount St. Vincent:

Not to bring up something upsetting, but when you leave here today, you may go through a period of unemployment. My suggestion is this: Enjoy the unemployment. Have a second cup of coffee. Go to the park. Read Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman loved being unemployed. I don’t believe he ever did a day’s work in his life. As you may know, he was a poet. If a lot of time goes by and you continue to be unemployed, you may want to consider announcing to all appropriate parties that you have become a poet.

Another dumb idea

2009-06-27T08:54:00.004-04:00

Students, don't waste your time with ideas like this: Corrupted-File.com. What a lame way to get around writing a paper.

(Basically this is a web site that promises to send you a corrupted Word, Excel, or Powerpoint file so that you can send the corrupted file to your insructor and buy yourself a few extra days writing a paper.)

First of all, anyone who needs a few extra days to make a Powerpoint.... ?!?!? I don't know. Second of all, I can't wait to get one of those files sent to me :) I will love to look inside it. Thirdly, I wonder how much they make at $3.95 a pop? Also knowing that there's no recourse if they send you a file that doesn't work, or if you get caught.... geez. What a racket.

Finally, whoops, by publishing this, I guess I'm annoying the owners of the site who say "Keep this site a secret!"

Mechanical Turk

2009-06-18T13:29:00.002-04:00

I have to tell you I feel absolutely fascinated by Mechanical Turk (the original Amazon version and the nascent generic versions), from the perspective of micro-tasks, from a labor perspective, from a computer science perspective. Here's the wrap-up of a recent Mechanical Turk meetup about these topics.

How to be happy in your work

2009-06-18T12:09:00.001-04:00

How to be happy in your work: Memorize this Venn diagram: What we do well - What we can get paid to do - What we want to do

Open Source Conference, Day One

2009-06-04T03:13:00.006-04:00

I'll add to this post as I go through the day.

Where am I? I'm blogging from the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems in Skovde (pronounced HURVdeh), Sweden. I've been to the previous 3 conferences as well, but missed the first year.

Who else is here? After a show of hands, we determined that more people are here from business than government (of course most people are here from academia), and more than half of the people are here for the first time.

What am I doing here? I am presenting a paper called "Using FLOSS project metadata in the undergraduate classroom" that I wrote with my colleague Shannon Duvall at Elon.

Day One:
Women in OSS breakfast 7:30-9:00. We were greeted with a lovely breakfast for everyone, and then there was a separate short meeting with some women interested in OSS. We had a speaker Eliza Roszkowska Öberg, a member of Swedish Parliament, briefly present about what Sweden is doing with e-Government and how open source is involved there.

Keynote speaker: Stormy Peters from Gnome Fndtn is talking about "Open source is changing the way work gets done". Her main points: Collaboration, across companies, history of open source, how to make money on open source a bit.

Session 1: Commercial open source
Session 2: Mining open source
Session 3: Communities of open source

Some notes on talk 3A1: Brooks' Law & open source.
--issues of coordination and early productivity.
--creating graphs of community cohesion based on shared artifacts as the links between people on a project. Take people and artifacts from svn repository (cohesion is average shortest path between people); edges between artifacts are weighted (e.g. people have worked on 8 artifacts together, this is weight); Use Floyd-Warshall to measure shortest paths between nodes; use Kamada-Kawai algorithm to place high edge weights together for viz purposes.

Social event & dinner: informal dress. Not sure where it is yet, but they showed a picture of water, so...?

Note about students working this summer

2009-05-27T18:38:00.001-04:00

E-net posted a little story about some the funding I'll be using this summer to have two students work for me on my open source data collection effort.