Category: Links

I got an e-mail from Brenda Chawner at Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Information Management (New Zealand) who sent me this image of how one of her grad students, Timothy Greig, is reading the Participatory Network paper.

I love this!

It’s official, as a college professor who also programs, I have the best job in America:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bestjobs/?cnn=yes

It’s true. Apple announced Boot Camp that allows you to dual boot your Intel base Mac to dual boot to either Mac OS or Windows XP. And it works. I can now boot as a Mac or Windows. And the Windows boot is a real boot. Very very fast, no emulation.

Now before you jump into this (you know, like I did) you should be warned it’s not quite fool proof. The first time I did it I managed to corrupt the Mac partition (it was VERY disturbing to only be able to boot my new Mac laptop into Windows). I think the problem was doing a partition format as part of the Windows install (just choose the Quick Format option). So, make sure you do a good back up before you try this trick. Anyway, the second try worked like a charm and now I can play Star Wars Republic Commando with no problems.

A few notes for the curious:

• This is a dual boot, so you can’t run Mac and Windows simultaneously
• You can access the Windows partition when you are booted in MacOS, but not the other way around
• As part of the process you don’t have to reformat your drive and Boot Camp burns a CD with all the hardware drivers for your Mac hardware
• This only works on the new Intel based Macs

This is very cool, but back up before you procede.

Be afraid, be very afraid. When you’ve gotten me in a conspiratorial mood over the past few months you may have heard me grumbling about how higher education is the next target of the U.S. Department of Education and education reformists. Think of No Child Left Behind days of national testing, “rigorous” academic standards (read national curriculum) and the like but for universities.
No, you say, Higher Education is different! We’re the best in the world…etc.

Here’s the scenario that happened in K-12 education…see if it sounds familiar: a group of concerned business leaders get together and say that the education is failing to prepare the work force for high tech and competitive jobs (anyone heard Bill Gates recently on why they are setting up research centers in India and China). The Department of Education and members of Congress start talking about how these education institutions can be both locally controlled, and more “accountable” (this is a key word in education circles… it is often operationalized as standardized testing and methods for federal control) considering the sizable federal investment. State wide projects are highlighted on how they can improve (it always seems to be Texas). No Child Left Behind gets passed with bipartisan support.

Now…read this ( http://insidehighered.com/news/2005/12/09/commission ):

“Miller sought to shake that complacency from his very first statements at Thursdayâ??s meeting â?? and he even got a head start on that. A profile of him that appeared in Thursdayâ??s edition of USA Today quoted Miller as calling it â??highly probableâ?? that the commission would recommend instituting some kind of national testing to measure college studentsâ?? learning, along the lines of whatâ??s done in elementary and secondary education.”

Then look at the commission set up by the U.S. Department of Education here: http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/hiedfuture/meetings.html

Note this presentation: “A Transparent Approach to Higher Education Accountability: Developed and Implemented by The University of Texas System”
Now listen to this piece from NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5205322

Even if you don’t buy into conspiracy theories, I think it would do us all some good to keep up with the workings of this commission.

Every so often I run across a very elegant piece of hardware. That is a device that is well designed, works easily, and just changes how I do things because it seems so natural (“why didn’t I have this before”). In this category I put the iPod, TiVO, Archos Portable Video Recorder and now, the TomTom Navigator.
This little GPS device works seamlessly with my Treo (palm based cell phone). You turn it on (it has one button and one light that tells you everything you need to know), it connects to the Treo using Bluetooth (no wires) and not only shows you a route to your destination, but tells you how to get there with turn by turn directions. Now I realize that GPS navigator systems have been around for a long time, but this is my first real exposure to it, and I’m hooked. It also gives you walking directions for when I travel. I got the TomTom because my work is increasingly involving GIS systems. In StoryStarters we plotted questions to locations. In my committee work with the Transportation Research Board, GIS is becoming a key technology to organize transportation information.

It seems initially ironic that as the Internet hooks everything together and where information is increasingly irrelevant, the GIS and GPS applications are becoming more prevalent. However, on further thought I get it. More than making information’s location less relevant, the Internet is making is easy to combine all sorts of information. With the interconnection of information large scale organizational schemes start to become more important. What larger scale organizational scheme is there than the earth? While not everything naturally maps to a location, it is amazing how many do.

I’ve put up a guided tour of Story Starters at: http://storystarters.iis.syr.edu/about/sstart/sstart.html Take a look.

I use WordPress. Some might wonder why the StoryStarters decided to start with WordPress integration before other blogging packages. The same reasons apply to why I use it for my personal blog:

Active development community that keeps it secure
Excellent anti-spam features
Excellent blogging features including calendars, search and support of RSS
Open source PHP with an easy to use plugin architecture
I should come clean and admit I donâ??t use WordPressâ?? â??writeâ?? tab that much. I prefer ecto as an authoring package. It integrates with a lot of blogs using XML RPC, and is very mac friendly.
In case you wondering why I am writing this, this is my first official StoryStarters post! Check it out:

http://storystarters.iis.syr.edu