a thaumaturgical compendium

MIT’s open courseware is a godsend, if only as a bold statement about attitude toward education. So, I was perusing the course matierials they have posted, and looked over Judith Donath’s very interesting looking course, Designing Sociable Media. And I notice a very small error.

Donath has her students reading the excellent “Dynamics of Mass Interaction,” my favorite paper from CSCW ‘98 in Seattle. Unfortunately, she has misidentified it as “Dynamics of Mass Communication,” both in the syllabus on OpenCourseWare and in another version of the syllabus online.

This is a meaningless error. Anyone interested in the article will likely click on the link and immediately know the real title (and why it is titled this). It is so small an error, indeed, that I have no motivation to email Prof. Donath and waste her time by letting her know about the error. But I sure wish I could edit the page on which it appears.

This leads to two thought-tracks. First, OpenCourseWare is a great first step, but we need to extend peer review to our teaching. I do not mean in a restrictive way—I think we should have the ability to teach whatever we want to teach—but it would be nice to have the option of having other scholars check our work for accuracy and impact. I have a feeling CommonText may be an interesting move in that direction.

Second, we need to wikify our webs. I would not be comfortable with having people be able to change my blog entries willy-nilly, but I would certainly be appreciative if they could apply their editorial eye to it at some level. I am thinking of editorial changes that the author can choose to ignore or reject. Of course, you can do this in comments, but “you forgot an apostrophe” is a horrid comment to make, and hinders conversation. Simply changing the text, and allowing the author to see the change and use or ignore it, seems like an interesting way of developing more common texts, at least within limited areas.

A new PDA with a Braille “display” is one of the many reasons I want to learn how to read Braille. There are books for sighted Braille students, and even a free online class. But I want to learn it by touch, and I have a feeling (no pun intended) that learning it by sight might actually hurt my ability to learn it by touch. The best way to do this I’ve seen is on halfbakery: adding Braille to your keyboard keys. The flashcards here look like a good start.

Having finished off Philip K. Dick’s Ubik one sleepless evening last month, I found my interest in retropsychokinesis rekindled. One of the characters in the book is able to go back briefly in time to change the outcomes of events. While a staple of science fiction, most find it to be some of the least plausible sort of phenomena—more “fiction” than “science.”

In fact, there are a number of scientists who claim to have shown that psychokinesis does exist; that we are able to affect the outcomes of seemingly random events. These effects are very small, yet statistically highly significant. The size of the effect does something to explain why we haven’t noticed it in everyday life. The reason that Las Vegas is still in business is that these effects are tiny—far smaller than most house margins—and that they probably cancel each other out in many games of chance.

While consciously affecting an unfolding set of events is fantastic enough, the idea of changing previously occurring random events by thinking about them seems beyond the pale. What if you could, simply by thinking, show that you are capable of changing the distribution of a random set of numbers drawn a week or a year ago and sealed in an envelope. If this were the case, we would really have to rethink how we think about the world around us.

Many simply reject out of hand such a suggestion. Of course, rejecting the suggestion out of hand is unscientific. There are studies, and they have been repeated, despite the critics. Skepticism is an important part of scientific progress, but not when it is blind.

The most notorious of the psychokinesis projects are run out of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research group. If you would like to try your hand at retropsychokinesis, you can do so via these online experiments. Those who do this work have co-opted the term “skeptic” for themselves, suggesting that those who question their results without evidence are not skeptics but knee-jerk traditionalists.

No such post could be complete without a link to the widely celebrated “Amazing Randi” who debunks claims of the paranormal. Unfortunately, he does not employ the tools of science to do so, and easily dispatches the existing showmen with a showman’s aplomb. He implies that because so many claims of paranormal phenomena are deceptive, they must all be, which is a very odd claim indeed. I would prefer to leave the option open, since it is potentially a paradigm-shifting set of experiments, and at worst an engaging fiction.

Yesterday, I pulled out of the HICSS conference. After attempting to revise the paper for the conference, and looking over the reviewers’ comments (one in four recommended it be rejected, the other three were guardedly positive), I realized that it just wasn’t ready. I’ve been having trouble with that lately. From now on: I only submit finished—and polished—papers on finished research. I have a course reduction next semester, and I’ve decided that for the first half of 2004, I am not going anywhere. I’m staying in Buffalo and finishing up projects and submitting them for publication.

The same day, I received an email from a researcher I know of, but have never met. He claimed that a figure in the chapter on the Zapatista web Maria Garrido and I just had published was, somehow, taken from the work of one of his colleagues. It was not clear to me what, exactly, the claim was, but the suggestion itself was highly insulting. I wrote what I think was a response that was relatively polite, indicating that his colleague was mistaken and that the figure was original, was created using data we alone collected, and was inspired by nothing more than commonsense visual design. (It’s the figure over on my research page, a page that needs to be rewritten.) I was stewing most of Friday and I’m still stewing. I mentioned it to a colleague here at UB, who said I should pursue it actively: contact the editors of the volume, and the like. After all, reputations are important in the academic world. But I really hate this sort of thing. I would have preferred it just never had been raised, though I suppose I am happy to be aware of what was being said behind my back.

As for the person who raised the claim, he did so in such a way that I am left unsure whether it is his own suggestion or one of his annonymous associate. The tone of the email made it clear that he was not neutral in the matter. At least now I know one person in my field with whom I will avoid working. I wonder if that means I am becoming a more experienced scholar? :)

Oh, and it’s rainy. I need some good news soon.

I have a feeling a lot of people have tread down this path. How far would $87 billion go as a direct grant to the Iraqis? Michael Froomkin asks the question here. Yes, it’s silly on its face. On the other hand, is it really less likely to be successful than our current (non) strategy?

As the New York Times is reporting today, one in every six children in the US lives in poverty. Oh, and they are among the most abused children in the world, as well. Our high school grads are tied for 18th place (last place) in literacy among the richest nations, though by the time they graduate from college, they have struggled up to 10th. The US has the highest rate of unintended pregnancy among developed countries, and the highest number of adolescent pregnancies, about 1/3 of which are aborted. They use contraception at a rate lower than most developed nations, and have less access to “emergency contraception.”

Kids are like frogs in an ecosystem. You can tell how well the society is doing by how well their kids are.

Critics of capitalism are always, forever, looking for scandalous behavior, and defenders of capitalism are always, forever, providing grist for their mill.

– William F. Buckley, Jr.