Monday, March 8, 2010 16:52 - 0 Comments
INF760 Advanced Informatics Theory, Learning@UNLV, MIS776 Business Intelligence, Rambling on Life, Soapbox

Stupid is as stupid does, and the LVRJ sucks

So in a Saturday, March 6 followup to the first article, the Las Vegas Review-Journal now reports that the Informatics school is the most expensive program at UNLV. Right. Does anyone actually know what Informatics is or question the accuracy of that claim (note that they didn’t say where they got it from)?

I seem to recall a president who went to war after misrepresenting that someone was hiding WMDs and incited a big country to invade a smaller one halfway across the globe, needlessly killing several thousand soldiers and just generally being a retarded jerk.

Okay so maybe this isn’t a war but killing education based on misinformation and misrepresentation is bad enough.  LVRJ forgot to take into account that INF is the fastest growing degree at UNLV (over 200% the current school term), that it is the program that covers little things like cybersecurity (preventing hackerman Chang from getting into DoD computers) and HCI (making sure your iPhone has all those touchy-feely gizmos) and realize that LVRJ is suggesting that we should cut one of the few departments that teach for jobs that are still in demand. Nice. All because of not checking facts.

The University readily publishes current, accurate data.  The Provost’s 2009 Joint Evaluation Taskforce (JET) report on the Engineering program for example, reports “…this program is highly multidisciplinary and has a very high enrollment of women and other underrepresented groups. The program only has 2 tenure-track faculty.”  Furthermore, “[W]hile approved by the Board of Regents as an independent school, the program has no support staff and pays for an administrative assistant through course buyouts.”

Write to LVRJ and demand a retraction, correction and proof! People/colleagues, we are about to die a quick and painful death here and we need to fight. In 2010, informatics is a critical program both for the university as well as Las Vegas and the last thing we need is someone with erroneous information deciding our future!

Below is the comment I submitted to LVRJ (though who knows if it will actually get posted) – I ask and urge and plead for anyone who gives a crap that the paper seems to have it out for programs who make a difference to fight back…

LVRJ misreported that Informatics is the most expensive program – that was the case when it first started but is currently inline with other engineering programs.

It was also highly misrepresented and mischaracterized. The 2009 provost report actually recommends HIRING more staff because it is a fast growing field and covers a wide range of cognate areas, in addition to the extremely high ratio of sponsored research contracts and the awards it has received. The program is still small because it is brand new (started in 2005).

It was reported as “most expensive” because the report was based on 2006’s FTE (full-time enrollment) divided by the cost of faculty. Informatics has a low FTE because a high percentage of the students, especially at the graduate level, are non-traditional students who work full-time jobs like myself and cannot attend school full-time. There are only four tenured staff and the enrollment in the program increased 200% in the last year.

On top of the, the earlier LVRJ article that listed the top 20 most expensive programs had an interesting common thread – they were all engineering and computer based programs – and the ones whose fields still have jobs in demand!

To see more accurate reporting, go to the UNLV Provost Joint Evaluation Team (JET) web page and see the 2009 reports. Shame on LVRJ for the bad reporting.

And don’t get me started on why the state is cutting education funding in the first place. Sure the University can use streamlining, but are we setting up the state to lose what edge it has?

Incidentally, for those of you who don’t know:

The mission of the School of Informatics is to provide an academic path for students who are interested in pursuing a career that combines computing and information technology with another academic discipline. The curriculum is inherently interdisciplinary, and recognizes that the human, information, and technology dimensions of problem solving are equal contributors in advanced informatics applications areas. The School of Informatics will produce graduates that become successful and internationally competitive educators, entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders in the global information economy.

PREVIOUS POSTS

• Hahaha

  Sunday, March 7, 2010 23:55 - 0 Comments
  
  

• More Grumbling on Tumblr

  Friday, March 5, 2010 10:09 - 0 Comments
  

  Just trying things on for size but getting into Tumblr and digging it.  It’s all the posts from here plus several more including short commentaries and reblogs. See it at http://matsays.tumblr.com.

  

• State of Nevada decides stupid is a good thing

  Thursday, March 4, 2010 14:15 - 0 Comments
  

  completely understand when recession hits and states start to look for ways to reduce deficits, it never ceases to amaze me that education is almost inevitably one of the first to be cut. In Nevada, where we are already near the bottom in elementary and secondary education, the University system (UNLV and UNR) have nonetheless continued, despite double digit cuts last year, managed to survive and prosper. But now the State, under the wily direction of Gov. Gibbons (blah) has dictated another $9 million in cuts at UNLV. Amongst the proposed options is to cut the most expensive departments, but if you look at the list of the 20 most expensive departments – they’re the very ones that are in demand right now. Cutting those departments would be tantamount to saying, we can be human but we don’t really need the opposable thumbs.

  Read the rest of my op-ed here…

  

• The main thing is not to install Flash!

  Tuesday, March 2, 2010 9:19 - 0 Comments
  

  [via DownloadSquad by Jay Hathaway]

  With the Pwn2Own hacking contest coming up at Vancouver’s CanSecWest security conference later this month, Italian computer security blog OneITSecurity took some time to interview Charlie Miller. Miller, in case you’re not familiar, is a security expert who has won Pwn2Own two years running by hacking Apple’s Safari browser with incredible speed. Safari isn’t the only target — this year, all major browsers and a selection of mobile operating systems will serve as Pwn2Own challenges – but it’s fair to say that Miller knows a thing or two about keeping your browser secure.

  Here are the highlights from Miller’s interview:

  He thinks Windows 7 will prove more secure than OS X Snow Leopard this year, in part because it doesn’t have Java and Flash enabled by default. Windows’ full ASLR (address space layout randomization) also gives it a security advantage.

  When asked what he thought would make the safest OS and browser combo, he opted for Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7, with no Flash installed, although “there probably isn’t enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about.”

  For my money, the juiciest quote from the interview was “The main thing is not to install Flash!”

  On the mobile side, Miller guessed that the iPhone 3GS would be more easily exploitable than the Motorola Droid, mainly because the iPhone’s been around longer, and has been subjected to more extensive security research.

  You can check out Miller’s full answers (in English or Italian!) at OneITSecurity.

  

• dcurtis Manifesto

  Sunday, February 21, 2010 20:34 - 0 Comments
  

  Well said.  Original here.

  Take everything you know about the internet. Now fucking forget it.

  The internet is an infant. It’s a pile of crap. I’m tempted to call it defective. The W3C is worse than the UN. We need to make progress. We need to push forward. And in order to do that, we need to experiment and search out possibilities for expanding our horizons. We need to step out of the boxes we’ve sealed around us. There’s a world outside the crazy “best practices” created to overcome horrific shortcomings of CSS. We are not confined to the way things are.

  When you start to build something new, think about the what could be, the what may be, and the what will be. Don’t settle, don’t give up, don’t get stuck in a box built by other people’s misguided interaction paradigms. The internet is open and free, and that means there are no rules.

  

• Powered by Google

  Saturday, February 20, 2010 13:34 - 0 Comments
  

  Yesterday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) granted Google Energy’s request to purchase and resell wholesale energy.  Google Energy was formed in December for this purpose.  Google claims that the group was formed to regulate its own energy costs, but with the grant specifically allowing the reselling of purchased bulk energy, it opens the doors for Google to compete in a wholly new market selling to consumers even.

  So now Google is in the data storage, ISP, mobile device, hardware, software, and now the energy market.  For all the resources that Google provides that I use and inasmuch as I like how much they make my life easier, this may have been one step too far.  Any thoughts?

  [more here on CNET]

  

• Lifepix #004

  Friday, February 19, 2010 0:55 - 0 Comments
  

  I told Jen I would make fresh potstickers for dinner on the weekend but she asked me to make this instead. Ever try to roll that rice paper stuff?  Maybe we’ll have to do some Archi’s take out.

  

  Can’t take credit – shot courtesy of FoodPornDaily (rockin’ site I must say)…

  

• The Power of Oranges

  Thursday, February 18, 2010 9:03 - 0 Comments
  

  Marketing and social media firm Imperial Leisure has an advertisement featuring 2380 slices of Jaffa oranges to power an iPhone, to promote the sale of Jaffa oranges. Per TUAWM, “Talk about thinking outside of the box, or in this case, the crate.” And I suppose you wouldn’t get a cold for at least a year after that.

  But I thought you weren’t supposed to mix apples and oranges.

  

  [posts here, here and here]

  

• Buzz and other social intrusions

  Thursday, February 18, 2010 8:22 - 0 Comments
  

  Set aside the fact that there’s already a lawsuit against Google Buzz, but at what point does social networking become just too much? Not being an avid user of Facebook or Twitter, sometimes I give off a pretty negative impression of both and others but I am trying (for Jen’s sake). I don’t use Gmail so I haven’t gotten into the whole Buzz thang – not that I would have anyway. So after much deliberation and thought I came to the conclusion that it’s just me. What my deal is is that I avoid the “friendsy” social networking but I do in fact utilize others – like LinkedIn. I would gather that it’s because it is less socially oriented and more professionally oriented.

  To that end, however, I do wonder how I will deal with this little ditty about Outlook taking in social networks. With iStreamPlanet Boss Mio being such a fan of all things Redmond, of course we use Exchange and Outlook so there’s pretty much no doubt that as soon as Outlook 2010 drops, we’ll have it all at our fingertips.

  

  On the one hand that could be great – not having to log into all the networks each time. But I can also see a real danger in it, both from a productivity as well as a privacy standpoint. In the article, Terrence O’Brien writes “The question is whether or not developers will be able to make the marriage seamless and unobtrusive. Let’s just hope we won’t have to train our spam filters to start blocking Facebook updates.” Touché. Guess I’ll have to download the Outlook Social Connect beta and find out for myself. Speaking of LinkedIn – if anyone knows of a GIS job opening in Honolulu, Denver or Des Moines, shoot me an email (no joke).

  

• A Win for WordPress

  Thursday, February 18, 2010 7:59 - 0 Comments
  

  I think (after four years), that WordPress may have finally won Jen over. While there are many nice things about Blogger, the total UX of the authoring side is just tedious at best, and the tools for image modification never seem to work right. Albeit that there is a direct shot between the Blogger platform and Picasa vis-a-vis Google, which definitely speeds up the uploading process, but double the time to lay it out and for image intensive blogs like MadeByGirl, it’s just wasteful and frustrating. Plus it throws inordinate amounts of unnecessary code (not that WP doesn’t as well, but it’s pretty trimmed down – last night I manually corrected Jen’s post and cut out 20 nested <div>s with identical styling plus another 18 that were there for no apparent reason).

  So I set up a WP instance for her to play around with and it looks like she’s digging it. She’s worried that she’s going to lose some of the benefits of using the Google-based platform but I think that with the stats she has (trust me, she’s way beyond what MatSays will ever do) she doesn’t really need to worry.

  The one downer note – the import function works great but it puts Blogger tags as WP categories so you might have to massage the DB by hand a bit. Wonder if they are aware of that little bug.

  

• World of the Weird: Bananas Fix DVDs

  Friday, February 12, 2010 0:29 - 0 Comments
  

  Crazy and I don’t even want to know how “they” figured this out but I thought it was funny, crazy, interesting and useful enough to bother reposting…from Unplggd’s Home Hacks:

  Scratches on discs happen. After one of our favorite DVDs started to skip after receiving a few too many scratches we started to look for a solution to salvage it. Sure there are DVD scratch removal devices that you can buy, but why waste money when there is a solution to be found right in our own homes? Using toothpaste, a banana, a rag and window cleaner we will show you how to remove scratches from a DVD and with any luck the unplayable will become playable.

  

  What You Need

  Equipment:
  toothpaste
  clean rag
  banana
  window cleaner

  Instructions

  1. The first thing you do is apply toothpaste on the scratched surface of the DVD. Next, rub the toothpaste gently into the DVD using the rag. Let this sit for about a minute.

  2. Remove the toothpaste from the DVD using the rag. Then take the cut banana and in small circular motions rub the banana into the DVD. After you have applied the banana to the DVD, you will then take the peel and use this to rub the DVD in small circular motions.

  3. Clean the DVD using the rag. Make sure to remove all the traces of the banana and peel. Spray window cleaner onto the surface of the DVD and continue cleaning the DVD. If you are lucky, your formerly unplayable DVD has now been salvaged!

  Additional Notes: We experimented with using just toothpaste and just the banana, but we received the best results from using the toothpaste first and following it with the banana.

  

• After a hellish day, the world is all right

  Monday, February 8, 2010 17:29 - 0 Comments
  

  Despite the sprinkles and symbolic logic, sometimes The Strip can be surprisingly beautiful. Shot from north side of SEB at dusk.
  

  

• The Box

  Friday, February 5, 2010 7:04 - 0 Comments
  

  I was reading a blog post last night that was dishing advice for (web) designers on how to find solutions and inspiration when approaching new sites…nothing earth shattering really, all except one. But first, a digression. I work for an unusual company. It’s unusual in that the real value behind our work is the ability to solve somewhat complex problems under severe time constraints with fairly elegant solutions both visually as well as with respect to network and MIS limitations, all with restrictive resources in terms of manpower and horsepower.

  So the real juice behind our success in 9 years is our ability to think outside the box. Honestly I can’t stand that expression but the reason I am not hunting for another metaphor is because everyone understands it. So what am I getting at? Back to the post I was reading.

  The gem from the post was “know what the box is.” It sounds simple enough and certainly something we almost take as a given. But do you really?

  (more…)

  

• A logician I will never be

  Thursday, February 4, 2010 8:49 - 0 Comments
  

  Four weeks into INF760 and it is very apparent that I may be in over my head. Here’s proof (no pun intended) that logic isn’t my strong suit. Ever take a class where you knew from day 1 that you might just fail but were compelled to take it out of the pure challenge of it?

  
  

• When does a device go too far? A cat is not a tiger…

  Thursday, February 4, 2010 8:07 - 0 Comments
  

  In the fallout   advent days since the overhype release of the iDon’tKnowWhatIAmNow, even Google is still chasing after that market with nightly builds of the Chromium UI which appear, for all intensive purposes, poised to take on the Fruit Tablet. But this, frankly, is just getting out of hand.

  

  I’ll give it to the Quince company – they make nice interfaces. Really nice interfaces. Smooth, sleek and all that. But when it comes to devices, it’s sometimes a hit or miss. Google, on the other hand, well…they’re still playing a lot of catch-up. Google is a great big brother data collection/aggregation company but for all the work put into Android, especially into v2, it’s still just not the same.  Jennifer, a long time Mac-head, battled with me for the better part of 11 years.  If you walk into our home/MadeByGirl offices now, however, it’s nothing but one-bite fruit machines all over the place.  And though I hate some things (ok, code-writing is just an abomination and I STILL can’t get used to the command keys, something about Ctrl and Alt just fit my fingers well). And I suspect that the next few objets d’art that materialize will also be sleek and ringing “ta-da” when turned on.

  Take the Kindle.  Now that’s a device with purpose.  Why is it so popular?  Because it has one purpose and one purpose only.  And it does it well.  Hey, if they added on a couple of other features, awesome, but it’s when it becomes overbuilt, that’s when it starts to become pointless.  Just like that, the iPod.  One purpose from inception, super design, awesome and intuitive interface, good UX, sells millions billions.

  My G1, on the other hand, I am quickly learning that I wish it were just a freakin’ phone.  My very first Sprint mobile (circa 1993) was a somewhat bricky Samsung with a rocker switch and I loved it.  Hell, I wish I still had it – the roller switch was just so easy to use (compared to this pinhead sized trackball thing).  And for all the touchscreen love, I still miss that the phone was just to make calls.  Yes, I post from my phone, send text and all that other crap, but at some point I just started deleting apps because there really was no point to it.  Which is my point.

  The iPad brings in a new level of “I really don’t know what I want to be.”  On the one hand, it’s very limited, but at the same time it’s pretty extreme.  I, like a lot of people, don’t seem to know where it will fit in.  Maybe I just need to use one for a while.  Or not use it as it sits idly on my coffee table, eventually becoming a very expensive coaster with a nice user interface.  Jobs had a lot of failures in the past but maybe we just don’t understand the impetus   crazy, drunken idea   motivation business model behind it quite yet (like Lisa).  Maybe the idea behind “just leave them all over like computerized notepads” really does have something behind it.

  So back to Google – are we just plunking that idea on a browser?  As if every time Jennifer tells me to put the freakin laptop away while she’s trying to watch “Millionaire Matchmaker” and share a moment isn’t bad enough, but to have Google in my pocket, on the laptop screen, on my neighborhood gas pump (ok, that hasn’t materialized in my neck of the woods yet), and now on my coffee table too?  Right next to an iPad?  Does this mean that in 5 years, all the books in my custom-made bookshelf will be replaced with digital tablets (that I have to label with a Brother p-Touch – now there’s a device with purpose – one job, one UI, no complications)?

  The age of computerization is nice.  It is.  But put the shit   screen   thing down and pick up a book.  A real book with paper and ink.  Enjoy it…it’s the original UI.

  

• In My Rush Time Got Rushed

  Wednesday, February 3, 2010 7:38 - 0 Comments
  

  Mondays are always hectic for me. I drag my weekend-abused body into the office around 7am, and after a generally difficult start of the week, I head out at 3:30 to my 4pm Advanced Theory of Informatics class at UNLV. The class is 75 minutes of massive note-taking (say 12-13 pages on average with just a few too many proofs for my comfort level). At 5:15pm I dash out the door for a 30 minute battle with traffic to make it down to Art Institute in Green Valley (always 15 minutes late, but I’m sure my students don’t mind) for a 5:30 Dynamic Design class that runs until 10pm, after which I run home and slam through the daily end-of-day MadeByGirl routines to make it to bed so Jen can get up for class early on Tuesdays.

  This past week, I was listening (as always) to a (fantastic) KNPR program by Sean Carroll on the Mysteries of Time. In it, he was describing two schools of thought on the age old question of why it is that as we get older, time seems to pass quicker. The short of it was this:

  One group of researchers says that the speed at which our brain impulses fire and travel slows down as we get older and consequently our impression of time actually slows down. They’ve done several studies, but in a non-empirical study by NPR, several older (over 70 years old) and younger (around 20 years old) were asked to close their eyes and guess when a minute had passed. Interestingly, the younger group was generally spot on – with guesses ranging between 55 and 65 seconds. But the older group was much the opposite – instead their guesses averaged about 90 seconds. Big difference. So researchers say that in the same vein that the brain slows time down, more things happen within that timespan (imaging cars passing and honking each time – since your impression of a minute is longer, you would count more cars passing by within your minute).

  The second group says that your brain is like a hard drive…it only has so much capacity for thought. When we’re younger, we tend to fill up that space with details of every first impression – our first birthday, our first date, etc – and that as we get older we get more efficient at filtering, which is short for not bothering to remember (on a side note, guys, remember this – that’s why you can’t remember what your wife said 10 minutes ago but you can remember the first date). Basically our brains cycle memories – we hit a birthday and your brain tells itself “oh, I remember this from before so I don’t need to bother wasting space again,” and so as we are less able to remember details from a short time ago, our impression is that things have sped up.

  So of course my thought is – it actually must be a little of both. I certainly know that I can’t remember what Jennifer told me (much to her chagrin) 10 minutes ago, but I can remember stupid Jeopardy trivia that I learned in fifth grade reading the Guiness Book of World Records (which I picked up at the dentists office on Monday and was sadly dismayed – not the same book I grew up with – when did it become so picture book dumbed-down). I tested myself a couple of times to guess the minute but I was pretty close – 63 seconds the first time and 61 the second, so maybe it’s less that one.

  But to that I add a third theory – totally not based on science, totally my own humble opinion – but maybe time speeds up because we are afraid. A little secret about me – I actually have only one phobia – getting old. My whole life, I was generally not afraid of very much – I love to fly (planes put me to sleep), heights don’t bother me (will cliff dive on command), and bugs, snakes, creepy critters and the like have no effect on me. But getting old – that’s a whole other story.

  So my thought is that I’d bet many people are like me but don’t admit it, at least not openly. And maybe the time that seems to be speeding up is kind of like being in a movie where a couple of police officers are racing the clock to diffuse a bomb and the situation gets more and more frantic (except in the movies, they always make it). The “theory” is that as we get older, we realize we have less and less time, and in our frantic haste to accomplish more (let’s face it – I realize it would be a little pointless to try and finish my PhD when I am 60 so I am rushing to do it now) we get more and more frazzled, we take in less and less of life, and it just seems to hurtle forward faster and faster, like a missile catapulting to doom.

  The point is that any one of these is just pretty much sad. I guess the slowing neuron activity is one thing but the idea of being able to remember less not because I don’t have the capacity but because my brain is tricking me into not bothering, or feeling that I have less and less time in my life is pretty distressing. So to that I offer the saving grace…it’s old school and it’s hokey but it’s the truth. Enjoy your life – enjoy every minute of every day and make it count. Remember the things that your loved ones tell you, that you do with your family, the things that make you proud of being alive, and how happy waking up to a sunny day makes you. Be thankful, be appreciative, be sharp and mindful of how you contribute to the world and how your life affects others. Know that at the end of the day you made someone else’s life, not just your own, better. And when you start reaching that speeding bullet point in life, just breathe a little and say – at least I got it all in.

  

• WordPress for Android … Finally

  Wednesday, February 3, 2010 6:46 - 0 Comments
  

  Not that wpToGo wasn’t good but I’m relieved that WordPress for Android has finally surfaced.  The interface is obviously similar but for the utilitarian aspect of now being able to change pages as well as posts and approve comments while not at the desk (which I am really trying to do less and less of) is awesome.  Nice going!

  

• Bacon

  Tuesday, February 2, 2010 13:24 - 0 Comments
  

  Life needs a little levity. Matthew Inman – you rock (or at least your warped sense of humor does).

  
  From theoatmeal.com
  

• Google Guys rock

  Thursday, January 28, 2010 13:22 - 0 Comments
  

  I never bothered to repost after the first one but now that they have the sequel…

  The original
  

  The sequel
  

  

• That’s Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V, Idiot

  Thursday, January 28, 2010 7:31 - 0 Comments
  

  [from NYMag by Chris Rozvar, excerpts from Gawker.com]

  Great SOTU speech by the Man last night IMHO.  It was clear, detailed, lucid, and the GOP response was, well, pretty lackluster and inexplicit.  But whatever.  Exactly what O-man said about dropping the partisan issue and changing the way of political thinking…it’ll never happen.  Lobbyists will still continue to bust the hopes of the rest of middle America (amazing, aren’t they American’s too?  Don’t they leave their cushy jobs at night and go back home the same as the rest of us, just with better pay?).

  But I digress, here’s the report…

  It’s a nightmare that anyone with a Twitter account is vaguely afraid of, but no one before the year 2005 would have ever dreamed of having to worry about: Major Garrett, Fox News’ White House correspondent, accidentally tweeted the wrong link to his 13,059 followers. He intended to send out a shortened link to a transcript of last night’s State of the Union address. Instead, the link that went out was one to a Las Vegas call-girl website. Gawker managed to nab the series of tweets before he took them down:

  “To overcome the numbing weight of our politics” and other Obama SOTU excerpts http://bit.ly/d6W Wed 27 Jan 18:22

  Horrified, he deleted and explained:

  I apologize. Bit.ly turned my original link to SOTU excerpts to a soft-porn link. NOT my intention. http://bit.ly/d6WZBu Wed 27 Jan 19:21

  The link just posted works. Any frequent visitor here knows that is not my style. Sorry. Shld have caught it sooner. Wed 27 Jan 19:23

  Enraged, he admonished and ordered:

  For those suckling snide syrup. I publicly acknowledged an innocent mistake and corrected it. If that’s not good enuf, take a hike. Wed 27 Jan 20:18

  As Gawker observes, it’s extremely unlikely that bit.ly would make that kind of error. But why would Washington-based Garrett be looking up a Vegas-based website like that?

  

  If Garrett joins the press corps on Obama’s trip to Vegas later in February, we guess we’ll have an answer.

  Maybe he should re-tweet it – might as well ride the wave, eh!

  

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