yonkeltron

Palm would benefit from adopting Android for so many reasons!

• Stop funneling profits to Microsoft
• Get enthusiastic Android developers from the community
• Support free software and change the business model enough to ensure future solidity. How long before someone does a *really* good clone of HotSync? Why not just move to an open standard like SyncML and monetize the transition?
• Focus on kickin hardware and stop worrying about the OS. Remember the fiasco with PalmSource?
• Contributing the upcoming Linux-based new Palm OS to the community would be a kickin way to give back, a great PR stunt and it would free up talent assets to work on the coolness that is Android

Just one person’s opinion but I remember my old Palm hardware and wouldn’t think twice before dropping some cash on a Palm device that ran Android.

Erick Schonfeld wrote a positively brilliant piece over at TechCrunch which took one of the best shots so far at detailing some of the major issues. I get This isn’t the first time that the idea of a Digital Bill of Rights has been discussed but it’s good to see another step forward. Also, see the text over at DigitalConsumer.

A recent blog post on TechCrunch discusses their plans to try for the construction of a $200 tablet for light browsing with a modified Firefox 3 (in a special kiosk mode) and VOIP thanks to Skype. Now, we’ve heard rumblings of low-cost, touch-based computing devices before. Remember concept stuff from the XO-2 which was supposed to be the second OLPC? The idea was to have it be an ebook-style device with dual touchscreens and a sub-$100 price tag. Shortly following the announcement by the OLPC guys, some researchers from Maryland and Berkeley showed of a prototype ebook reader that responded to hand-generated movement like opening and closing the leaves to advance the displayed pages.

While the dream of a lightweight, $200 tablet seems a little far-fetched, the blog post does show that some serious thought went into this. They are very insistent that the proposed device run a stripped down version of Linux that will boot right into Firefox instead of a traditional desktop. From there, the plan is to have a special start page with “large buttons for bookmarked services” linking to sites of great interest and/or utility.

With this in mind, it stands to reason that SproutCore would be an excellent way to build this start page. By designing the startup page as a SproutCore application, the whole experience can be constructed in a completely customized way while still maintaining whatever parts of the traditional application experience are desired. Furthermore, SproutCore apps can be cached can be automagically and transparently upgraded as well as cached on the client so that basic functionality can be maintained even in the absence of a WiFi link.

After a little bit of thought, I think that the main interface (with the big buttons) should be a draggable grid of icons so that a user may reposition applications according to their preferences and usage patterns. Additionally, there should be a basic configuration interface allowing users to add or remove sites from the startup page. After that, anything else seems like an added complication even if it’s really, really interesting.

One of the more in-depth papers that I’ve recently encountered is a really cool paper on the many things that go into figuring out and improving upon technology-enhanced learning. It’s really a very good discussion not just on learning, but about educational thought in the context of design, technology and the sciences. The paper, Design approaches in technology enhanced learning is available from the arXiv as well as from Telearn. It was written by Yishay Mor (blog) and Niall Winters who seem to be two very intelligent scholars from the London Knowledge Lab (which has some really cool stuff going on).

The entire piece left me feeling really intrigued by the challenges of effectively integrating technology and education. The paper is very well researched and although I can’t articulate it,  I reached the last page of this paper feeling really good. Maybe it had to do with the enlightened view taken by the authors. Their writing is crisp and their outlook seems appropriately upbeat given the richness of the material and subject matter covered in the paper. The document bursts with elegant and thought-provoking stanzas:

Design based research is a methodology for the study of function. Often referred to as design research or design experiments, it is concerned with the design of learning processes, taking account of the involved complexities, multiple levels and contexts of educational settings. The primary aim is to develop domain-specific theories in order to understand the learning process.

Such succulent gems of insight are plentiful in the opening sections as Mor and Winters set the stage for a comprehensive reflection on the essences of design, science and learning. They are realistic about how “The complexity of classroom situations does not lend itself to the procedures of laboratory research” as they ask “To what extent are we driven by a pure quest for knowledge, and to what extent are we committed to influencing educational practice?”.

The paper continues into a very stimulating overview of design patterns and their application in the many areas of education. Though I have always liked the idea of design patterns in software, I have never been so enthralled by a discussion about the essential elements of design patterns. Also, this is the first time that I’ve heard of design patterns being used as a tool for analysis instead of construction and planning:

An important characteristic of a design pattern is that it has three facets: descriptive, normative, and collaborative. It is an analytic form, used to describe design situations and solutions, a meta-design tool, used to highlight key issues and dictate a valuable method of resolving them, and a communicative tool enabling different communities to discuss design issues and solutions.

The esteemed writers are careful to explain their thought processes without letting their comprehensive coverage become tangential. They expertly work in a mentioning of the political agendas of design pattern construction for city planning and network routing protocols to help illustrate their observations of how values influence design.

This paper is awash in fascinating pointers to further exploration and while I fully intend to follow up on some of their citations, something of immediate interest is a link to a very cool site called the Pedagogical Patterns Project which established a repository of educational design patterns. I need more time to explore but what they have seems to be very cool. It’s clear that I’ll refer back to this paper frequently as I strive to better understand the interactions of education and computing.

Though I haven’t taken that much time to learn about type systems, I have read up a little bit. I devoured Chris Smith’s essay on What To Know Before Debating Type Systems and briefly tinkered around with a typed lambda calculus before trying to really get into some of the heavier stuff that my program covered in a seminar earlier this year. All of this, combined with my personal experiences using dynamically and statically typed languages, gave me just enough of a background to get by when learning or comparing various programming languages.

While I favor dynamically-typed languages (like Lisp, Ruby and Python) as a matter of personal preference, I have tremendous respect for statically-typed languages (like C and Java). In my humble opinion, some of the most interesting languages are those which allow one to switch between the paradigms as need or desire dictates. Take for example, Haskell’s type annotations or Common Lisp’s type specifiers (particularly declare). The former allows one to annotate Haskell function definitions with type information to enforce type constraints while the latter can be used to turn off Lisp’s dynamic typing system when trying to do something special like optimize certain functions.

After I discovered all of this and determined that I think it’s pretty neat but not something I have the time to pursue right now, my interest has been rekindled by a recently delivered presentation entitled Types Considered Harmful. Perhaps it’s also time for me to re-read another famous type-system paper, Java is not type-safe.

In what has to be one of the most philosophical CS papers I have ever encountered, a team of researchers from Brazil and Luxembourg have presented a fascinating overview of many issues surrounding the area of computer-based learning. In their paper, Redesigning Computer-Based Learning Environments: Evaluation as Communication, they make reference to everything from psychology to meta-communication and citing a broad yet well-chosen set of authors from Claude Shannon to Gregory Bateson.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this paper is it’s writing style. These authors have clearly given the subject a great deal of thought and have not been shy about getting philosophical while expressing their opinions. In fact, these authors have gone out of their way to use their variety of interdisciplinary sources to help illustrate the idea that issues in computer-based learning are never purely technical. One of the first communication models they discuss is the well known psychology concept of the double bind. While the concept isn’t worth explaining here (given the ubiquity of detailed explanations), their relation of the concept to educational evaluation is certainly significant.

Evaluation is also trapped in the double bind. Student and teacher or even the other characters such as colleagues and parents exchange many contradictory stimuli about learning. For example: have critical sense versus accept as truth what is in books, express yourself efficiently versus do not talk, concentrate on homework versus play with friends, etc. These situations are inherent to evaluation in the same sense the double bind is part of communication

The tensions described here are all-too-familiar to students, both past and present. Issues such as the ones mentioned in the paper are very real obstacles that must be overcome in classrooms all over while their complexities are only emphasized further by the still-developing experience of computer-based learning.

…the computer-based learning environment must support and, if possible, amplify the expression and the emergence of contradictory relations. These are essential to the evaluation process, since provocative statements may communicate how teacher and colleagues perceive one’s performance and understanding.

With this in mind, they conclude their discussion by explicitly stating the importance of letting real-world factors influence the design of learning systems. This exceptionally well thought-out piece of technical writing should be required reading for any educator considering the deployment of a computer-based learning system or struggling with the design of an alternative assessment mechanism.

Over the past 8 months, I have been trying to eat healthy and be more active. Between rekindling my love for vegetables, subduing my desire for pastry and doing my nightly routine of old-man floor exercises, I’ve lost over 10 kilos. Since getting home, I’m walking to synagogue every morning (someday, I hope to be accepted by the Minyanaires) and bringing my book to the track near my house so that I can read and walk at the same time. While not fanatical, I am certainly pleased with the level of activity in my new routine and it’s my hope that such efforts will please my physician. Though I was never a hulking behemoth of a man, I have certainly noticed the improvement in my body muscle and reduction in my waistline. In fact, I need to find some new clothes…Anyway, though I will never be a body builder and my large frame will always retain some heft, I do feel noticeably better both physically and mentally.

Having said that, imagine my shock when Wired Magazine’s most recent Jargon Watch featured the term “Fatosphere”. I was caught off guard by the number of pro-fat blogs and websites which seem to be part of a developing fat acceptance movement. In addition to the links on the NAAFA website (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance), blogs like Fatosphere, Fat Fu and Big Fat Blog offer a fascinating glimpse into America’s underbelly as activists seek to combat what is perceived to be fat discrimination.

Does my shrinking paunch make me un-trendy?

I just finished reading a fascinating paper on the topic of self organization in Wikipedia. These Dutch researchers put together a very entertaining read for the 2006 WikiSym workshop on Research in Wikipedia where they analyzed the Dutch Wikipedia, as it was in 2005, looking for signs of self organization.

One of the most interesting things that the researchers measured was the degree of article connectedness. They modeled the entire Dutch Wikipedia as a giant graph with each article being a node while measuring the number of articles linking to it (indegree) and a the number of articles it links to (outdegree). The indegree and the outdegree are combined to give you the article’s total degree. In order to classify articles based on degree, the research team coined terminology to describe connectedness. Articles were designated as a guru authority, all-around authority, referring authority or a regular node. For details on the results, you  really must see the paper.

It’s really fascinating to realize that a lack of top-down control can lead to an effective working team. Even more impressive is the sheer scale of Wikipedia’s accomplishments. With 2.3+ million articles in the English Wikipedia, it’s become quite apparent that the community at large is most certainly capable of producing effectively. The specifics of this are made clear by the paper’s discussion of author expertise. Most informative are the histogram plots detailing authoring and edit patterns.

Of course now, after reading this paper, I have a strong desire to download a text dump of the English Wikipedia and crawl it to determine connectedness. Granted I could certainly find a computer capable of holding the the full dump (~3.8 Gb compressed XML) but it would most likely take an eternity to crawl the document Moreover, the resulting data would be particularly unwieldy even if stored in a decent database. Perhaps someday…

No one needs to tell me I’m an exceptionally geeky individual. Once people find out how excited I get over XML collection formats (like Atom) and universal authentication schemes (like OpenID), it’s pretty obvious that I like neat stuff regardless of how computer-centric it is. In many cases, I find myself most attracted to things which could have a positive bearing on computer users everywhere. While some of them are on the surface and easily visible to the average user, others are not so obvious. All too often, people have no idea that these technologies or systems exist!

One such example is the network addressing scheme used by the Internet Protocol (the IP in TCP/IP protocol suite). IP is used to transfer information between machines on a network as well as to assign addresses (ever hear of an IP address?) to enable machines to specify transmission sources and destinations. Currently, we’re using Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) which provides addresses usually written with the instantly recognizable dot-decimal notation. While IPv4 has been very good to us so far, it uses a 32-bit address space which can provide only 4,294,967,296 (2³²) unique addresses. It might seem like a lot, but we’re slowly running out of addresses with the rate of depletion expected to increase as more computers, mobile devices and general users become connected.

While there are several factors currently slowing down the depletion of IPv4 addresses, they are not without their side effects (like NAT). The correct solution, is to make a transition from IPv4 to IPv6, the next version of the Internet Protocol.

In addition to having a 128-bit address space (2¹²⁸ or something ridiculous like 3.4×10³⁸), IPv6 has several other advantages including features like automatic address assignment (SLAAC) and built-in security (IPsec). Basically, IPv6 is pretty rockin. With this in mind, why isn’t IPv6 more widely deployed?

The short answer is that since the entire Internet is already built on top of IPv4, it’s pretty clear at this point that transitioning to IPv6 will be rather painful. Still, there are some signs which indicate improvement. The Linux Kernel has supported IPv6 for ages, Windows Vista has it enabled by default along with Mac OSX and several other Apple devices. In fact, the US Government has mandated that Federal agencies and their network backbones must deploy IPv6 by 2009.

For now, people interested in tinkering with IPv6 must use a service which will provide them with a 6to4 tunnel so they can pass IPv6 data over the IPv4 Internet. Someday, IPv6 will be the default. Until then, feel free to write both your ISP, your Congressmen and your Senators urging them to push for a switch.

Once upon a time, the hip-hop community ignored those who weren’t in the right clique. In fact, for a very long time, the rap community at large didn’t do anything to acknowledge the artistic and cultural contributions of the San Francisco Bay Area. Instead, most focused on the more mainstream hip-hop culture in and around Los Angeles.

The Bay Area hip-hop artists could have responded in any number of ways, many of which might considered poorly-thought-out and generally counter-productive. However, rather than choosing to take an inherently negative approach, the first instinct of this rap community was to create. Instead of making a needless ruckus, rappers in the Bay Area began a movement which has come to be known as Hyphy. This new renaissance has seen artists such as Keak Da Sneak, E-40 and others produce a distinct body of musical content which expresses the unique cultural nuances of the Bay Area.

While this locally-flavored rap scene has many of the same flaws as other rap scenes (drugs and violence), it is certainly worth mentioning the little metropolitan community that managed to take the high road and counter the cold shoulder of others with the warmth of inspired creativity. Society at large could certainly benefit from examining this sentiment in the hopes that people will realize how easy it can be to create for the common good instead of detracting it.

Put your stunna shades up and think about the triumph of the positive muse over negative impulses. It’s not every day that the independent spirit can soar on the winds of creativity. If you need me, I’ll be ghost ridin’ the whip.