Unboxing

We bought a new TV this week, a 42" Sharp Aquos 1080p LCD. It was delivered today! It had been suggested that at least I wasn't a big enough dork to do an officially documented Unboxing. I am so that big a dork! Here we go!

Unboxing: Before




The empty spot where a TV will be!




First look in the box




The goodies




The stand




The TV itself, hermetically sealed for your protection!




Unboxing: After




It works!

Input from my Mac Mini. So happy!

Assignment

I've been giving writing assignments in my class (4th-year Environmental Microbiology at the University of Waterloo) to help the students with their written communication, leading up to a group term project. Last week, I asked students to choose and summarize a scientific journal article; this week, I asked the class to critique another student's summary. I solicited feedback on the assignment, partly out of fear that the students might see it as being "too high school". I got a great comment on the section of my blog that I provided for this purpose, and I tried to clarify what it is I am trying to accomplish with these assignments. I'm going to provide them here on the front page, to try to get them a little more exposure and maybe solicit further feedback as to whether my experiment in writing skills is a worthwhile one.

Hey Dr. Scott, today's tutorial task was a little annoying. It's not difficult to summarize a summary (though it seems pointless to summarize a summary, but I understand there's a reason why we did that), but to do so in about 30 minutes while you're calling out people's names, people are shuffling around and leaving, and I am trying to understand what somebody else thinks they understand from a primary research article....summarizing a summary becomes quite difficult. Sure it's worth 1% but that makes it even more frustrating because you would think it would take a little less effort to gain the percent. That takes me to my next grievance...

The tasks, as simple as they are and meant to help us, should be worth more than a % each, perhaps 2%. They are easy but time consuming. And though one could argue that they are helping us towards the project which is a big chunk of our final mark, you won't be looking at the 'little' things for the big presentation as closely as you are looking at them now...and that makes me believe that the tasks should be worth more.

Please don't make us do another impromptu task unless everybody in the room is going to be quiet and not start leaving 10 mins into the task. Thank you.

My response:

Thanks, I really appreciate that depth of feedback. I don't have a good solution for handing back assignments - for privacy reasons, I can't put them in the middle of the room and ask people to grab their own, and if you just tell the class to come and pick them up, many people don't bother. Since the most important part of the assignment is the feedback, I want to make sure people get them. I hoped that calling names would be unobtrusive, but I'll try to find a better compromise in the future. There were several logistical issues that I didn't consider ahead of time (what if someone comes in late? what if someone doesn't hand in assignment 2?) that I will need to work out before I try an experiment like this again.

Regarding the effort and the marks, my feeling is that I'm not asking students to do anything they shouldn't be doing already for their group projects. In a perfect world, I wouldn't bother assigning grades for the assignments at all, as I feel the exercise and the feedback from it is the important thing. Besides, if the point of the exercise is to help you improve at something you're not already good at, how can you be expected to get a good mark?

Here's an open secret about teaching: if you want students to take something seriously, you have to assign a grade to it, no matter how small. I want you to do it regardless of how much or how little of your grade it is worth, and you (as a class) won't do it or take it seriously if I don't grade it. Studies have shown that attaching a grade to a task is the (only!) way to assign importance to it, and that's why some classes will assign a trivial grade to things like participation: if you want students to talk, make it worth a mark.

As far as the effect this will have on my grading the final group project: Again, I am asking for things you should be doing anyway, and hopefully giving you feedback to keep you on the right track, as well as practice at writing and communicating effectively. My expectation is that each assignment should require between half an hour and an hour of effort above and beyond what you were already putting in for your group project. You get a mark for completing the assignment and putting the effort into writing clearly, and the real value is the chance to catch mistakes before they become habits. This should result in a final paper that is easier to read and more properly constructed, showing a more polished effort deserving of a higher grade (to say nothing of the effect on my mood while grading it!) On the other hand, if your final project still exhibits these mistakes despite the practice you've had with the assignments, I am going to be far less lenient when grading them.

Ultimately, I would expect that the majority of the class will get full marks on the majority of the assignments, while learning how to write properly and improving everybody's grades not just on the final report, but on the exams as well. If I have to give everybody in the class an A because everybody learned how to do these things properly, I'd imagine I'll find a way to sleep at night.

I don't want to "dispute" your comments and I certainly don't want to discourage anybody else from posting negative comments or constructive criticism. However, I feel that the teacher-student relationship will be beneficial to everybody if the process of teaching is transparent. If some of what I say here helps you to understand why I'm asking you to do these things, then you'll feel better and do better work. If you still think I'm full of it, let me know, and it'll help me to become a better teacher.

Asterisk

The ball that Barry Bonds hit to break Hank Aaron's career home run record was bought by fashion designer Marc Ecko for $752 467 (that's $756 385 Canadian!). On his website, Ecko put to a vote the three fates of the ball: Bestow it to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown; Brand it with a red asterisk, and then donate it to Cooperstown; or Banish it to outer space.

According to an article on MLB.com, the overwhelming result (47%) was to brand the ball. The President of the HoF has stated that the ball will be displayed in whatever state it is presented, asterisk and all.

The asterisk has a controversial history in Major League Baseball, as it was first used to qualify Roger Maris' single-season home run record, in which Maris hit 61 home runs over 162 games, breaking Babe Ruth's record of 60 hit when the season was only 154 games long. The asterisk on Bonds' record-breaking ball is intended to represent the controversy over Bonds' alleged steroid use, in what is quickly becoming known as the "Drug Age" of baseball.

After being called "an idiot" by Bonds for doing this with the ball after spending so much money on it, Ecko said:

"I saw the purchase of the ball as an opportunity to open a national conversation using new media -- the Internet, blogs, videos -- to allow America's oldest sport to have America's most modern conversation. The people should be the arbiters of what is historically significant about this artifact."

For the record, I voted Brand.

Comments

This entry is for my students in Biology 447 to leave anonymous comments regarding the lecture from Sept 24 2007, or any other lecture, really. Thanks for your feedback, guys!

Parity

Image stolen from CBC News.

As of Thursday morning, with the US Dollar continuing to plummet, the Canadian dollar achieved parity with the US greenback for the first time in 30 years.

Now, will this translate into lower prices on goods in Canada? According to analysts (like this one writing for the Globe and Mail) recent appreciation by the Loonie of 15% has been accompanied by only a 6.4% reduction in import prices, all of which has been enjoyed by import and manufacturing companies with little or no passing on of savings to Canadian consumers. Further, we apparently shouldn't expect this to change anytime soon.

Now, I understand that the US market and the Canadian market are distinct. Supply and demand might differ significantly, there might be higher costs to doing business in Canada due to differences in taxes and reduced economy of scale due to our dispersed population and smaller advertising markets.

However, we live in a smaller world now than 30 years ago - it is much easier today to quickly compare prices on identical goods between US and Canadian retailers, which should drive consumers to vote with their wallets by either 1) waiting for the price drop to come or, 2) cross-border shopping.

Some obvious discrepancies that will be difficult to ignore:

- Prices on Amazon.com vs. Amazon.ca. The links are for identical products: the Knocked Up 2-disc set coming out next week. Which is 39.86% more expensive to buy in Canada. Which, what, gets me closer to free shipping faster?

- I was planning to buy that DVD on Tuesday anyway from a brick-and-mortar store. Maybe I'll go to Best Buy, where the difference is only 26.1%?

- Yesterday was New Comic Book Day. US and CDN prices are both included on the cover. Marvel comics are about 25% more expensive in Canada, while DC books are over 33% more expensive. Maybe we have to pay extra to ship comics from the States to Canada - paper is heavy, you know - but both publishers PRINT THEIR COMICS IN CANADA!

To be fair, extending my searches to books on Amazon, I found that William Gibson's Spook Country, while having a higher cover price in Canada, as actually being sold for a lower price here. So I guess there's that. But it now makes sense, for medium-ticket items, to wait until we have an opportunity to cross the border. Even if you declare what you buy, you'll still save - and books and DVDs are no more difficult to sneak across without declaring. iPods are only about 10% more expensive here, but where's the break-even point? Last year, I bought a Mac Mini in Buffalo and, including taxes etc, spent a couple of hundred dollars less than I would have to buy the same machine here, and that was with a Canadian dollar worth less than 90 cents USD. Now, I'm not saying that I crossed the border without declaring a desktop computer (and a printer) but I'm also not saying that they noticed it was there, you know?

Telemarketing

Stolen from Matthew Good's blog.

First!

Stolen from Kung Fu Grippe who stole it from someone else.

Pwned!

Punny

From KXCD.com

I like puns.

Joss speaks

Joss Whedon posted this on the Whedonesque board and it's worth reading by anybody who isn't a raging misogynist. Reprinted without permission, but I don't think he'd mind. (If he is, he can let me know, and that'd be the best thing ever.)


Let's Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death. This is not my blog, but I don’t have a blog, or a space, and I’d like to be heard for a bit.

Last month seventeen year old Dua Khalil was pulled into a crowd of young men, some of them (the instigators) family, who then kicked and stoned her to death. This is an example of the breath-taking oxymoron “honor killing”, in which a family member (almost always female) is murdered for some religious or ethical transgression. Dua Khalil, who was of the Yazidi faith, had been seen in the company of a Sunni Muslim, and possibly suspected of having married him or converted. That she was torturously murdered for this is not, in fact, a particularly uncommon story. But now you can watch the action up close on CNN. Because as the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones.

There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken – by more than one phone – from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool.

I could start a rant about the level to which we have become desensitized to violence, about the evils of the voyeuristic digital world in which everything is shown and everything is game, but honestly, it’s been said. And I certainly have no jingoistic cultural agenda. I like to think that in America this would be considered unbearably appalling, that Kitty Genovese is still remembered, that we are more evolved. But coincidentally, right before I stumbled on this vid I watched the trailer for “Captivity”.

A few of you may know that I took public exception to the billboard campaign for this film, which showed a concise narrative of the kidnapping, torture and murder of a sexy young woman. I wanted to see if the film was perhaps more substantial (especially given the fact that it was directed by “The Killing Fields” Roland Joffe) than the exploitive ad campaign had painted it. The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

“I’m sorry.”

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence -- is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.

It’s safe to say that I’ve snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I’ve looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I’ve shorted out. I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the “women are saints” route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn’t that tradition eventually fall apart? (I was going to use ‘trees’ as my example, but at the rate we’re getting rid of them I’m pretty sure we really do think they’re evil. See how all rants become one?)

Now those of you who frequent this site are, in my wildly biased opinion, fairly evolved. You may hear nothing new here. You may be way ahead of me. But I can’t contain my despair, for Dua Khalil, for humanity, for the world we’re shaping. Those of you who have followed the link I set up know that it doesn’t bring you to a video of a murder. It brings you to a place of sanity, of people who have never stopped asking the question of what is wrong with this world and have set about trying to change the answer. Because it’s no longer enough to be a decent person. It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself. I’ve always had a bent towards apocalyptic fiction, and I’m beginning to understand why. I look and I see the earth in flames. Her face was nothing but red.

All I ask is this: Do something. Try something. Speaking out, showing up, writing a letter, a check, a strongly worded e-mail. Pick a cause – there are few unworthy ones. And nudge yourself past the brink of tacit support to action. Once a month, once a year, or just once. If you can’t think of what to do, there is this handy link. Even just learning enough about a subject so you can speak against an opponent eloquently makes you an unusual personage. Start with that. Any one of you would have cried out, would have intervened, had you been in that crowd in Bashiqa. Well thanks to digital technology, you’re all in it now.

I have never had any faith in humanity. But I will give us props on this: if we can evolve, invent and theorize our way into the technologically magical, culturally diverse and artistically magnificent race we are and still get people to buy the idiotic idea that half of us are inferior, we’re pretty amazing. Let our next sleight of hand be to make that myth disappear.

The sky isn’t evil. Try looking up.

What Colour Are You?

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

How Well Do You Know Me?

Puzzling

I'll tell you what I'm not doing right now, and that's playing Puzzle Quest. Let me explain.

Puzzle Quest is excellent.

Wait, you need more? Puzzle Quest is that special type of excellent that takes somebody who doesn't play a lot of video games, and makes them steal your DS. Maria likes video games fine, but she doesn't have a lot of patience and has never managed to get more than five minutes into an RPG before getting overwhelmed and losing interest.

Puzzle Quest is an RPG, and displays most of the tropes of the RPG genre, but instead of resolving combat through menu items or button mashing, you beat up on opponents by playing Bejeweled. Specifically, matching gems gets you mana that you use to cast your spells. The game has no time limits so you get to play at your own pace. It's super deep, and super fun. And since Friday, Maria and I have been fighting over the DS. If only we could resolve the fights over some Bejeweled...

Content?

So, I was reading somewhere on the Internets that apparently when you have a blog, you need to generate content for it.

Because nobody will read your blog if there's no content.

But if nobody's reading my blog, why should I bother generating content?

It's like a koan. (If you do crossword puzzles, you're going to need that one eventually.)

...

I didn't say it was a good koan.

Anyway, I need some content. Here's the big news recently: Little Stevie Jobs announced that all EMI-published music on the iTunes store will be available in a DRM-free format at a much higher quality, for 30 cents more. You can still buy the DRM-laden songs for 99 cents, and buying entire albums will always give you the premium version at the old price! And for 30 cents a track, you can update any of your previously-purchased songs. I don't think I actually own any iTunes tracks from EMI, but hopefully this will lead to other publishers following suit.

For a good discussion of what DRM is and why you don't want it, I would recommend the website Defective by Design. As Cory Doctorow has been known to put it (and I'll paraphrase here): "Nobody ever wakes up wondering, how can I do less with my music?" If you'd like to truly grok the dangers of DRM and current trends in copyright law, Cory's talk at Olin College gives a really great discussion, starting with a historical overview.

This sounds like it might be a dry subject, but it's fascinating and Cory's talk should be required listening for anybody who's ever listened to an mp3 or, even more relevant today, anybody who's ever enjoyed internet radio, which is now becoming too expensive to be viable for reasons of copyright and royalties - and the only ones hurt are the listeners and the artists.

Grok what now?

I started by trying to grok Twitter. (Don't look that up in the Urban Dictionary, by the way.) Twitter is a service for publishing micro-blogs over an RSS feed - in other words, for allowing others to subscribe to constant updates on the minutiae of your life. Why would anybody want to do that? For that matter, unless you have something specific to say, why would anybody bother to keep a blog? Digg I get, but my Facebook site is sad and unloved, and I don't have any other presence on the Intertubes. Could it be that I'm just not hip enough for the Web 2.0 room?

My last experience with trying to grok the ungrokkable was with Quicksilver for OS X. I couldn't find anybody who could explain to me what it did, but any number of people (okay, mostly just Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders) who could tell me how much it would change my life. All I could do was install it and figure out what I could make it do for me.

So that's my approach to Web 2.0. I'm going to just start using it, and see what I end up using it for. First step: a blog, second step: a Twitter account. I'll install a new hip if I have to - Web 2.0, here I come!