Reading

Guilty Pleasures

During the thesis process I noticed a change in myself. I had less time and patience for many things I previously enjoyed. One such thing was fiction. So naturally I promised myself that I would return to such pleasures once the thesis was put to rest. But I have become largely a restless soul and I am finding fiction difficult to cope with. But this Christmas break a major exception has occurred.

The book I am reading is one that I have been saving for some time. But now I am happily reading Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie. I have been hooked on Rushdie ever since I read his book The Satanic Verses. I did not â??getâ?? the reason for the chaos it created at my first reading. But was hooked by his use of images, stories and language. Already in the beginning you are met with a man (Gibreel) falling through the air after an airplane explosion:

Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity.

The Verses were followed (in order of reading â?? not writing) by his brilliant Midnightâ??s Children and in Grimus where I came across one quote that has never left me: A man is sane only to the extent that he subscribes to a previously-agreed construction of reality.

In The Moorâ??s Last sigh (what a name!) another great quote was:

By embracing the inescapable, I lost my fear of it. Iâ??ll tell you a secret about fear: its an absolutist. With fear, its all or nothing. Either, like any bullying tyrant, it rules your life with a stupid blinding omnipotence, or else you overthrow it, and its power vanishes like a puff of smoke. And another secret: the revolution against fear, the engendering of that tawdry despots fall, has more or less nothing to do with â??courageâ??. It is driven by something much more straightforward: the simple need to get on with your life.

I donâ??t get around to reading as much fiction as I would like but when I do Rushdie is among my most favourite.  So this Christmas I am thoroughly enjoying reading Rushdie â?? its well worth the guilt I am building up by not doing real work.

Posted on by mklang

Christmas Reading

So when you have tired of the good company, food and presents here is a hot tip on what to take a look at. Its a pdf entitled “Best Practice Guide” for “Implementing the EU Copyright Directive in the Digital Age” written by Urs Gasser and Silke Ernst released in December 2006. Here is a short extract from the intro:

At a time where the existing EU copyright framework is under review, this best practice guide seeks to provide a set of specific recommendations for accession states and candidate countries that will or may face the challenge of transposing the EUCD in the near future. It is based on a collaborative effort to take stock of national implementations of the EUCD and builds upon prior studies and reports that analyze the different design choices that Member States have made.

I shall be saving it for Boxing day 🙂

Posted on by mklang

Empty holes in my diary

A diary is a frightening thing. It comes all filled out with days and months and other relevant information. All that is empty is the actual content of your own time. This means that the diary in itself demands that you fill it with relevant personal information.

An empty diary therefore is a failure. You have been unable to fill the little book with things to do. When I started working at university people would ask me if I was available for a meeting or to give a lecture. I would turn to the relevant page on my diary and see that it was empty. Agree to the appointment and fill in the blank space with a sense of accomplishment. I had done something â?? I had filled a void.

What it took time to realize was that the blank spaces in the diary were not really empty â?? they were (and still are) time for work, time for the craft of research. Reading, writing research takes time and requires empty spaces in a diary. Not just the brief moment between two booked meetings â?? but real time. Time to penetrate a subject and develop ideas, time to record these ideas in the correct format (papers, articles & books).

Despite this understanding, blank pages in the diary still stress me out, and cry to be filled but I must do more to guard my productive time. This will be especially true next term when I am literally going to drown in teaching.

These last two years I tested going completely digital. Maintaining my diary only on my computer and syncing it with my telephone and iPod but this has not really worked well. I like the clarity but there are situations where I would prefer not to pull out a gadget to check my time and to fill in an appointment. So next year will be paper based again.

How do you guard your time? Where are you productive? All tips and tricks appreciatedâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Bad Vista

The Free Software Foundation has launched a new campaign called BadVista (www.badvista.org). The campaign has two gaols (1) to expose the harms inflicted on computer users by the new Microsoft Windows Vista and (2) to promote free software alternatives that respect users’ security and privacy rights.

The part about Vista which bugs me is that Microsoft is attempting to sell this as something new. But from the users point of view there is nothing really new here. Vista is actually all about control: firstly, Microsoft’s control over users and secondly, the support department’s control over the customers/clients/users. For the cost at which Microsoft is selling it you would think that Vista would flop. But if you believe that you have forgotten about Microsoft’s tradition of marketing by FUD (playing on the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt of the users).

FSF program administrator John Sullivan writes: “Vista is an upsell masquerading as an upgrade. It is an overall regression when you look at the most important aspect of owning and using a computer: your control over what it does. Obviously MS Windows is already proprietary and very restrictive, and well worth rejecting. But the new ‘features’ in Vista are a Trojan Horse to smuggle in even more restrictions. We’ll be focusing attention on detailing how they work, how to resist them, and why people should care.”

I think that the BadVista campaign will provide interesting reading… for those of you who want to catch up on Vista and its problems here are some related Vista articles

FIN24, Windows Vista: Fact or Fiction, 15 December 2006

eWeek, Vista, why bother?, 14 December 2006

CRN Test Center – CRN, 25 Shortcomings Of Vista , 4 December 2006

Posted on by mklang

Monbiot on Torture

If my conscience were to have a name, then among the choices [for such a name] would be Monbiot. The author George Monbiot regularly publishes articles in The Guardian but even better he often (always?) posts these articles on his blog after a short while.

In his latest post â??The Darkest Corner of the Mindâ?? Monbiot writes about the effects of an innovative form of torture. The use of total sensory deprivation, in many cases, causes what Monbiot calls a social lobotomy. He describes it as the erasing of the human mind.

This â??newâ?? form of torture is practiced widely in larger American prisons and has found new practitioners among the interrogators employed in the war (another malapropism!) on terrorism.

Its chilling reading â?? it should be required reading.

Posted on by mklang

Poisoning Hearts and Minds

You must have seen the books or heard the complaints about the US trying to figure out why they are so disliked (not only in Iraq). The US believed that they were liberators and were surprised how quickly they lost their liberation status. The operation to win the heats and minds of the people of Iraq has not worked and many wonder why.

But reading about the abuses caused by the military makes it easy to understand why the situation is going so badly. OK, so itâ??s a few bad apples you might argue. But unfortunately the few bad apples theory is wrong.

In a recent video posted to YouTube (watch it here) you can watch a scene where soldiers on a truck make children run for a bottle of water.  The scene is being filmed by one of the soldiers on the truck. Both the cameraman and the soldier holding the water are laughing and commenting on how far the children will run for water. Itâ??s a great joke for them.

The soldiers conduct, while not illegal was most definitely immoral and seemingly oblivious to the reality that these children actually live in, a reality that was largely caused by them.

It also yet another severe contradiction to our so called image as “liberators” of the middle east.

The mainstream media has yet to pick up on the story though the Pentagon is investigating the videos and the evidence is in the videos the soldiers posted themselves online that anyone can see, for the time being.

Not only did the soldiers involved behave in an unacceptable manner they thought their conduct was so acceptable and so humorous that they posted it online for the entire world to see.

(Dreams of Liberty)

OK so you still want to claim that it’s a few bad apples. No it is not. The soldiers thought the scene was so funny and that their prank would be appreciated by so many that they posted it on YouTube themselves. This is not a case of people doing something wrong and attempting to hide it.

The poison that is being spread in the minds of these children will not wash away easily. It makes you wonder what their feelings towards the west will be in thirty years from now.

Posted on by mklang

Bug catching day

Fiddling around with code always reveals new problems. Today I seem to have spent way too much time finding, developing and solving little problems. A full day of this and all I can see are the small irritations instead of the accomplishments.

For example after installing new wordpress blog software (version 2.0.5) I got this error every time I tried to do something

Found
The document has moved here.

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Very annoying. First searching then failing. Eventually I found a discussion on this bug which seems to be particularly prevalent among users who have One.com as their ISP (which I do in this case).

Not to worry the solution was here:

Find the file:
wp-includes/pluggable-functions.php

find the line:

> status_header($status);

and change it to

> // status_header($status);

Changed and everything is sortedâ?¦ My day has been full of little bugsâ?¦ Or as LP keeps saying: Maybe you should read the manual.

Read the manual? What? I ask you: What kind of amateur tecchie would stoop to reading manuals?

Posted on by mklang

Do you hand out your handouts?

Powerpoint is my crutch. As a teacher I have long been dependent upon powerpoint*. But I have also been concerned about the way in which it forms the way I teach and the way in which students learn. Increasingly students have an expectation of getting the lecturerâ??s powerpoint slides â?? Preferably in digital form and in advance of the lecture.

Powerpoint Students
What is a lecture? University is filled with them. They are praised by some and reviled by others (this will be the topic for a future post). To the student the lecture almost defines university life. Therefore it is maybe not all good when the lecture has become confined to the square space and bullet point list defined by presentation software.

Most often I do not hand out my handouts, nor do I provide my powerpoint slides in digital or any other form to my students. This is not an attempt to monopolize or capitalize on my knowledge. To understand the purpose of this we must look at the purpose of powerpoint slides.

Slides are used (in my teaching) for two purposes. First, and foremost, the slides are there to keep me on track to help me keep my thoughts in order. Second, the slides are intended to underscore certain more important thoughts or concepts. Thirdly, the slides may provide light entertainment they can help the listeners to keep listening.

As these points show, the slides are not a replacement for the lecture, lecturer, or literature. So in order to make sure that this message gets across: I do not hand out my handouts.

Powerpoint Lecturers
If the student has become used to being fed with powerpoint slides then what about the lecturer. We have (generalization warning!) become dependent upon powerpoint. Planning a lecture begins with the opening of presentation software. The knowledge we want to transfer is confined by our ability to condense it (knowledge) into squares and lists.

By adding features, such as effects, sounds and images we believe that we are somehow helping the students to understand what we have learned through reading, scientific method and experience.

Handicap Warning
Powerpoint can be, for both students and lecturers, an invaluable support. But letâ??s not forget that the same software can be used as a way in which to hide the fact that no transfer of knowledge is taking place. Each student should as him/herself what they hope to see in the handouts and why they are so eager to obtain the handouts â?? at the same time so disinterested in the original.

Lecturers should stop and think before resorting to powerpoint. If powerpoint is necessary then they should stop and think about the content and its presentation. Would the students be equally served by the applying the old adage â??less is moreâ?? to powerpoint?

Did Einstein hand out handouts?

—
* the term powerpoint is intented to refer to a generic set of presentation software. The same results are obtained by Open Office presenter, Macâ??s Keynote, or any other such program.

Humor: The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation: Gettysburg Address as a powerpoint presentation http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

Recommend Reading
Allan M. Jones. The use and abuse of PowerPoint in Teaching and Learning in the Life Sciences: A Personal Overview, BEE-j Volume 2: November 2003 http://bio.ltsn.ac.uk/journal/vol2/beej-2-3.pdf

David B. Daniel. Using Powerpoint to Ruin a Perfectly Good Lecture. Presented to the 1st Biennial SRCD Teaching of Developmental Science Institute 2005. http://www.srcd.org/biennial_archives/atlanta_2005/documents/daniel.pdf

Greg Jaffe. â??Pentagon cracks down on … PowerPointâ??, The Wall Street Journal Online. http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-502314.html

Jens E. Kjeldsen. â??The Rhetoric of PowerPointâ??, Seminar.net – International journal of media, technology and lifelong learning Vol. 2 â?? Issue 1 â?? 2006. http://www.seminar.net/volume2-issue1-2006/the-rhetoric-of-powerpoint

Jeffrey R. Young. â??When Good Technology Means Bad Teaching: Giving professors gadgets without training can do more harm than good in the classroomâ??, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 51, Issue 12, November 12, 2004. http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i12/12a03101.htm

Posted on by mklang

Staff Journal

Nice news today. A short article I wrote (on DRM) was published in the University staff paper. Strange how difficult it was to write when you know that ALL your colleagues might be reading it. It turned out alright. It’s in Swedish over here (with a photo).

Otherwise most of the whole day seems to have been spent re-creating the computer after the crash. Lots of small and large pieces of software to be installed, passwords to be remembered and settings to be restored. Very tiring and annoying but good stuff. Today it works! Better than before. This means that the weekend will be spent doing the work that I should have done this week.

Posted on by mklang

The Unsuggester

LibraryThing has developed an interesting alternative to the recommender system called the Unsuggester. Common recommender systems show you examples of what everyone else is doing or buying. On LibraryThing it works by comparing your book with books others are reading/buying. This results most often in recommendations to books you already have or do not want in your library. OK so sometimes it recommends a book I have never heard of that I want. But most often it recommends the crap I do not want â?? which is the reason why it is not in my library in the first place. This is the flaw of recommender systems.

So now LibraryThing has changed this. Instead of recommending what most other people (except you) already have they bring out a list of the books the least amount of people have in their library.

Therefore if you choose John Rawls â??Theory of Justiceâ?? the old recommender system will notify you of books such as

Anarchy, state, and utopia by Robert Nozick
Political liberalism by John Rawls
Spheres of justice: a defense of pluralism and equality by Michael Walzer
Critique of pure reason by Immanuel Kant
A treatise of human nature by David Hume

Now if â??Theory of Justiceâ?? is an important book for you then most probably you would have a reason for not including these other books in your library â?? so the recommendations fail…

The new system recommends

Confessions of a shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella
The other Boleyn girl: a novel by Philippa Gregory
A million little pieces by James Frey
My sister’s keeper: a novel by Jodi Picoult
Good in bed: a novel by Jennifer Weiner

This at least is a list of recommendations that I have not heard of â?? still useless but definitely more fun!

Posted on by mklang