Ihnatko: the loony Zune

(Yes, it's a snow day here, and I'm working on the tail end of what might be URI #4 of the season.)

The title above links to a Chicago Sun-Times review by Andy Ihnatko of Microsoft's new Zune device. Summary: Zune isn't just not user-friendly; it's user-hostile. Here are some choice quotes:

The Zune is a square wheel, a product that's so absurd and so obviously immune to success that it evokes something akin to a sense of pity...
The setup process stands among the very worst experiences I've ever had with digital music players...
And why (for the love of God) doesn't it support podcasts? That's pure insanity...
Oh, and the Zune Marketplace doesn't even take real money, proving that on the Zune Planet there's no operation so simple that it can't be turned into a confusing ordeal...
You'll find that the Zune Planet orbits the music industry's Bizarro World, where users aren't allowed to do anything that isn't in the industry's direct interests.

Update: Here's an almost as scathing review from a Windows-dedicated web site.

Acephalous: Measuring The Speed of Meme

Acephalous is doing an experiment to see how fast a "meme" can travel through the blogosphere. If you're reading this (and have a blog), link to the post I've linked from the title above and ping Technorati.

Academic podcasting

I've been interested for a while now in how "distance learning" technology could be used for something a bit more inventive and valuable than just a hyperlinked textbook, self-grading exercises, and canned lectures. Adrian Miles at vlog 3.0 has an interesting post (linked from title above) about educational podcasting, or "profcasting": use an interview, or conversational, model. I like this; one of my favorite podcasts is In Our Time, from BBC Radio 4.

I suppose I could require each student in a class to prepare for and conduct a high-quality interview of me, or do small-group conversations, on a specific topic in the course. I'd of course have to get everyone's written agreement to use recordings beyond the classroom (i.e., non-commercial distribution rights). OK, time to contact the university lawyers (or get someone else to contact them...).

Topics: academia, podcasting.

My alma mater

Yes, the UCLA police repeatedly tasered a UCLA student who forgot his student ID and was a little too slow leaving Powell Library. I used to think that cameras and video capability were superfluous on a cell phone, but this YouTube video has convinced me otherwise. The statement from Acting Chancellor Norman Abrams is noncomittal, as might be expected at this stage. But there should be a policy preventing the use of force, not to mention weapons, when police are not themselves threatened.

Watch the video. A nice touch is when an officer threatens to tase a bystander asking for his badge number.

I'll be sending a letter to Chancellor Abrams today. Other UCLA alumni might consider doing the same, or emailing him at chancellor@conet.ucla.edu.

Update: Here's a May 2005 GAO report on the use of tasers by law enforcement, including policies in selected departments. Referring to Figure 3 on page 8, I would classify the student's actions as "Resistant (passive)," which at almost all of the cited departments would not justify the use of a taser.

Update 2: Apparently, the UCPD's meritorious service award is called the Taser Award.

Sick day blogging

Upper respiratory infection #2 (since this is the Pacific Northwest, I suppose these should be numbered, rather than named) is blowing through the community and our household, just when I thought I was getting over the first one (I was at the "coughing so much I think I jarred my brain loose" stage). A perfect accompaniment to a dark, overcast, rainy day among a long sequence of such days. So, lacking the energy or mental firepower for complex activities, let's see what's happening in Academia, Blogland:

• In Knowing and Doing: When Opportunity Knocks, Eugene Wallingford writes about making CS assignments more interesting and relevant to the real world by being more open to opportunities to do cool, fun stuff in class.
• Michael Bérubé says "I got plenty of nothin'", but I respectfully disagree. What he has is a great post on the value of academic blogs for showing what academics do.
• Love blooms for FemaleCSGradStudent in a seemingly unlikely place.

"79 points actually cost 99 cents"

The title above links to a Wall Street Journal review of Microsoft's new Zune player and music store by Walt Mossberg. What struck me was that store customers must pre-pay, buying points which they then in turn use to purchase songs. And songs cost 79 points, which is equivalent to 99 cents. Exactly why did Microsoft choose an "exchange rate" (99/79) that produces a fraction that doesn't repeat until the 14th decimal place? OK, it's true that 79/99 repeats at the third decimal place. Will Microsoft round the number of points up to the nearest point when customers invariably pre-pay with a whole number of dollars? I assume that this is a mechanism for them to decouple song pricing from their payment system; maybe they think that people will view songs as being cheaper than they are because the number of points is less than the number of cents? I would suggest instead that they use an exchange rate similar to what used to exist between the dollar and the Italian Lira: seeing all those zeros (with, say, 7900 points for a song) will make it seem much more like paying with "play money".

Too bad that they need to get the customer to deposit real money to start.

The price paid for wasted cycles

The title above links to a Linux World article on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. That project aims to produce a laptop that is cheap enough to make its way into the hands of schoolchildren around the world. the biggest obstacle is the insatiable need for computer cycles by today's software. As I've written before, a large chunk of these cycles -- if not most -- are burned to make software more profitable for software companies, not to benefit the user.

The OLPC people seem to agree with me:

Today's laptops have become obese. Two-thirds of their software is used to manage the other third, which mostly does the same functions nine different ways.
     OLPC FAQ

Fast processors and inexpensive memory have made tidy programming a low priority, Gettys [Jim Gettys, vice president, Software Engineering] said. "A lot of people in the past decade or so have gotten quite sloppy."

Change in the weather

With November comes wet and cold (well, at least coolness) here in the Seattle area. Time to pull the last of the dead tomato plants and dahlias, put some collard green plants in, and watch the fava bean seedlings come up.

My Erdös number is at most 5

Daniel Lemire sparked my interest in finding this out. The link above is to a page under the Erdös Number Project. Paul Erdös was a prolific mathematician, and an Erdös number is the number of "degrees of separation" one is away from him. As that site says, the vast majority of mathematicians have an Erdös number less than eight. So, one of his co-authors has an Erdös number of 1, a co-author of a co-author has an Erdös number of 2, etc. See this Wikipedia entry for more. You can use MathSciNet to help you computer your Erdös number, but as it focuses on mathematics publications, it only gives an upper bound (for instance, it gives me an Erdös number of 6, but one of the folks along the pathway, listed as a co-author of my PhD advisor, is also one of my co-authors). I can actually trace multiple paths of length 5 to Paul Erdös. And I don't consider myself a mathematician; I just hang out with the wrong people.

Voting should not be a black box affair

The cliche goes, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". As computer professionals, that means that every problem tends to give us an itch to develop a computer-based solution. This is unfortunate, part of an educational process that emphasizes programming skills, technology, and narrow theory over problem solving. When we're confronted with a problem or process, we first need to concentrate on really understanding the existing situation. What is the current goal? What is the problem? Who are the stakeholders? What aspects of the system are important to the different stakeholders? Only then can we take the first step in solving the problem: identifying the appropriate range of solutions, which may not involve computer technology.

A case in point is our elections system. The problems with electronic voting systems are so rampant that I'll not even bother to link to articles on the web. What are their advantages? According to Wikipedia (not that that's the final source on this matter), the primary advantages of electronic voting systems are saved paper, easier accessibility for people with disabilities, and the possibility of faster counting. Wikipedia also mentions the possibility of cryptographic verification, but so few people understand what that is -- likely, many computer professionals don't -- that I wouldn't consider it a practical advantage. After all, how can you expect someone to consider their vote "verified" if they don't understand the verification process? Verification then becomes another word for "trust us; we're experts" or "the magic box says that everything is fine". There's only one problem with any of the above advantages: they have nothing to do with the most important problems of paper ballots.

A recent talk at my school by Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, I think very clearly pointed out the fallacy of a technological fix to the problems of paper ballots. Ms. Harris is not a technologist, and it behooves us to listen carefully to what people like her have to say. She spent much of her talk discussing one horror story after another related to electronic voting systems: conflicts of interest (putting it in the best light possible) with candidates owning interest in companies that manufacture the machines that count their ballots, lax software development security allowing anyone to access -- or even modify -- voting machine software via the Internet, software with back doors, hardware that allows anyone with a little knowledge to pre-load bogus voting information, etc. Other than ownership of electronic voting equipment manufacturers by governments considered unfriendly, these issues curiously don't seem to concern incumbent politicians that much.

And then she made what was to me an eye-opening statement (which I'll paraphrase because I didn't write it down at the time). The problem with electronic voting systems is that they, on the one hand, lack transparency, and thus make it more difficult to detect fraud, and on the other hand, reduce the number of people needed to commit a fraud. The lack of transparency arises in two ways: only a few people observe even part of the process (much of it is automated, and thus completely unobserved) and only a few people have the expertise to understand the different ways the count could go wrong. Electronic voting systems also make fraud easier, by reducing the number of people who need to be "in the know".

The most important attribute of any voting system is that its users -- the general population -- have confidence in its integrity. All other considerations are secondary. Even the presence of fraud is secondary, because confidence can only flow from ease of true verification, which by definition makes it likely that fraud will be detected. I would assert that electronic voting systems can never engender as much public confidence as paper ballots. Any proposed solution to voting problems must take this into account. That's why I'm especially impressed with Black Box Voting's Citizen's Tool Kit, which empowers "ordinary people" to oversee how their votes are counted, to demand that all methods see the light of day, and to generally make themselves a pain in the rear of anyone in government who would rather that the unwashed masses leave the process to the "professionals".

Some problems do not have technological solutions.

Topics: politics, voting, elections, computer security.

Vanity press

Those WMSCI ("World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics") people seem to be at it early this year, with their solicitations for submissions to their curious conference. Click the title above to learn more about how to save money, your reputation, and put your work in a more useful venue. If you want to feed your vanity, start a blog like everyone else!

Which American President Are You Most Similar To?

Via Living the Scientific Life, the President I'm most like:

You Are Most Like John F. Kennedy

You live a fairy tale life that most people envy. And while you may have a few dark secrets, few people know them.

What Modern US President Are You Most Like?

Studicious

No, it has nothing to do with Congressional Pages. Via Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal comes a early version of a web site (linked from the title above) that allows user to enter and share class notes. It's an interesting idea, and it makes me wonder about the possible uses of collective note-taking. A substitute for taking -- and rewriting, with refinements, while studying -- notes it is not.

Neat mapping tool

I ran across Gmaps Pedometer as a way to measure the length of my bicycle commute from home to work (via bikejournal.com. It combines the Google Maps interface with the ability to double-click on the map to set markers for your route. It also includes the ability to show an elevation profile of your route. So now I know that I have a 20% hill climb near the end of my ride back home (200ft. elevation gain in 1000ft of cycling).

State testers fail math

wasl.png
Sample WASL bar chart, originally uploaded by stiber.

My older daughter just received her results from the WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning), which is this state's test that is actually used to assess schools. I have ethical issues with requiring students to take tests that don't benefit them. In the case of the WASL, all that students receive is their scores; they get no feedback that they could use to identify weaknesses, nor does the score impact their education beyond the requirement that they spend time studying for the test.

But that's not the topic of this post. Instead, I'd like you to look at the sample bar chart, taken from this annotated example. It's not too dissimilar from what we received for our daughter, except for details such as her scores and comparisons with her school, school district, and state averages.

Look at the vertical scale for this bar chart. The first thing we notice is that the Y axis doesn't start at zero, yet there is no indication in the bars that their bottoms are cut off. Maybe we could dismiss this; perhaps the purpose of this graph is to show differences (more obvious in what we got, which has multiple bars). But look at the numbers on the Y axis: each of the four categories takes up the same space on the axis, even though their ranges vary widely, from a minimum of 25 to a maximum of 275!

In other words, the vertical scale provides no useful information, and in fact is misleading in implying that all four categories have similar ranges. Not only that, but by sharing ranges between reading and math, the fact that the ranges for the same categories differ is obscured.

So, the heights of the bars are meaningless. Bars with tops in different categories cannot be compared because of the nonlinear scaling. Bars in different tests cannot be compared. About the only information conveyed by this graph is the category that the student in question's score fell within, and possibly the relative position within that category. This begs the question: if the folks who design the WASL report can produce such a bad graph, how confident can one be in the rest of the testing and scoring process?

Topics: education, testing.