a thaumaturgical compendium

One of the students in the summer class pointed out that I had been cited in an article in the local paper this Sunday (Buffalo News – ‘Blogs’ offer personal accounts of life with SARS):

As for the growing popularity of the sites, the reasons vary.

“The Web allows anyone to be a publisher,” said Alexander Halavais, an assistant professor of communication at the University at Buffalo. “It’s not that people are not getting enough news. It’s that they’re looking to connect the facts to a larger culture, to make sense of the news.”

So, even if the Lehrer News Hour doesn’t want me, at least I’m performing my duty as a public intellectual when it comes to the newspapers. I need to remember to write some letters to the editor sometime. You know, old school blog entries.

Scripty snippetness. I wrote a script to help out some of my grad students, and to feed into a larger project. The script checks weblogs.com every 2.5 hours and updates a local copy of an updated blogs list. Not sure why anyone would need this, except maybe to build into a project of some sort.

Normal fair warning: I am a novice programmer for life. I’m sure there is a better way to do all of this. I also might have taken code from elsewhere (though I don’t think so in this case). You may recall that I used this to take a swing at update frequency of the average blog a few weeks back. This is the script I used for that. You can get it here either as source or binaries for Windows.

Also, hats off to Pilgrim’s Dive Into Python, which devotes a chapter to dealing with XML.

OK, I don’t know if being a public intellectual necessitates a cameo in a film (a la McLuhan), but it sure is cool. Cornel West (sans glasses) whom I find to be one of the most engaging writers and speakers in academia, is also a member of the council in Matrix Reloaded. I’m surprised they didn’t take cuts off of his rap album for the soundtrack.

Went through the usual problems with admissions this year, and they once again revolved largely around the GRE. We admitted a couple of folks with GREs well below the average, and some with low GPAs as well. Now, we still admitted less than a fifth of our applicants, but there was a bit of bitterness among the faculty about where exactly to draw the line.

Several faculty members want to de-emphasize the use of the GRE in weighing applicants. It’s difficult for me to argue with this logically. There are good reasons to believe that the GRE is worthless; that is, that it does not predict performance in graduate school beyond the first year (pdf). This would be an especially good time to start ignoring the GRE, since it turns out that the test was compromised in Asia last year.

Unfortunately, grades really are not comparable across universities, and admissions essays are often edited or coached. Ideally, we would like to admit students who really are prepared for graduate school, and who are coming here with open eyes. Dorothea and I don’t agree on many grad school related issues, but it’s hard to take issue with this:

I also think admissions departments ought to select for knowledge of the world and awareness of the grad-school milieu. Quit taking people who are there because they don’t know where else to be. Quit taking people who are there because their parents told them to. Quit taking people who believe in what Joseph Duemer rightly calls Ivory Tower myths. Quit taking people who don’t know what a grad-school B means (it means “wise up, laddie/lassie, you’re in trouble”), or what the academic job market is like, or what the real-world job market is like.

As soon as she tells us how to know, I’m there. As it is, we try to make this clear in our first semester, but by then it is often too late.

Dorothea suggests that real-world experience might be a good indicator. Indeed, I have often preferred to work with students who had some time between their undergraduate and grad degrees. In fact, I usually recommend as much to my best undergrads. But this is also not always the best indicator. I’ve worked with some people who have been very successful outside of the academy who still can’t seem to find their legs in grad school.

Which leaves us with this: we don’t know who will do well in graduate school (or after) until they get here. The question becomes: do we admit anyone who is minimally qualified, then fail early and often (for their benefit as much as ours), or do we admit only a tiny “select” few on what are clearly spurious grounds?

So, having played with Blogshares a bit, and having amassed a tiny fortune (nearly $100K in funny money—too bad Citibank refuses to countenance my imaginary wealth), I got a little creeped out about it. If the web is a gift economy, then a potlatch seemed in order.

Unfortunately, this has proven harder than I thought it would be. First problem: how to get together gifts in large enough chunks to give away. My own shares are fairly worthless—and besides, they would run out too fast. So I’ve been buying high-priced stock and then giving it away—mostly to those on my blogroll who seem to be playing. It seemed like a fun experiment.

The response has been interesting. Today, I got emails from two of the recipients. I read Joshua Farber’s blog fairly regularly, and I think we have linked one another, but we’ve never directly corresponded. He wrote a very nice note in response… not so much to the gift, but this was an overture. I’m also a regular reader of Ross Mayfield’s blog, but I don’t think we’ve even cross-linked (though he is on my blogroll). He wrote a very nice one-line thanks. I sent some to Joi Ito, whose blog I also often read. I certainly don’t expect a thank you—that’s not really the idea of a potlatch, exactly. (Though, perhaps it is indirectly. If you haven’t read Mauss’s The Gift Economy you should!) But is it true that Mr. Ito thinks of it as spam? I have no desire to be linked from his site—I’m certainly not blogging for the glory :)—but I’m surprised he would not take these for what they are, friendly random gifts. You would think, given that he is immersed within a gift-giving culture, this wouldn’t be too much of stretch. I hadn’t thought that people would be suspicious of my motives, but perhaps I should have…

I put up the blog for the capstone seminar for the Masters in Informatics. It’s probably the most amorphous syllabus I’ve ever written, without even a schedule formalized. I know that is a norm for many people, but I have always liked to have my ducks in a row, even when I kicked them around a bit once the semester started. This time we’re going a bit less formal.

Last year, I did an intro to forecasting and futurology, but since most of the readings went unread, this wasn’t particularly useful to them (or to me). So this year we are doing (wait for it) blogs and social software. The catalog description for this course says something about “topics of current interest to the field,” and that seems to match. Since my fall class will also be blog heavy, both the students and I may get sick of this at some point :).

Wow, finally a well-placed piece of journalism that actually has something to say about the dynamics of blogging. That’s not to say everyone has been off-base, it’s just that they seem to overly concerned with defining a revolution, or placing it in a frame that pits blogging against politics- or news-as-usual. A New York Times article entitled Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It looks at blogging as a social phenomenon, and does a pretty neat job of it. It discusses one of the issues that appears regularly on many people’s blogs (including mine); that is, how do bloggers manage the difficult social lines of blogging about their own lives while respecting the privacy of those who are intimately linked to their lives. Deciding on a level of self-disclosure one is comfortable with is the easy part; deciding on how much of your friends’ and family’s (and friends’ families’) lives you report on is much more difficult.