Swampthing (Lady of the Lake, to her friends) has posted some great info on the mechanics of the vote. Funny thing is that I made an attempt to find some of this info, but gave up quickly. Clearly, my Google-style is no match for her Librarian-Fu.
Especially if this is your first time voting locally, go and check out the post. And remember to think about your blog post when you vote!
The recent semi-backhanded bin Laden endorsement of Bush is hardly a surprise: the president has done more for al Qaeda than bin Laden ever might have hoped. I’ve already written at length about how the real target on September 11 was the American sense of security, our willingness to have an open society, and our steady embrace of the world—a target that has been repeatedly struck by the bin Laden-Bush alliance. Who put these two in charge, anyway?
The events did, however, remind me a bit of another conversation:
MAN IN BLACK: All right: where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right and who is dead.VIZZINI: But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you. Are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet, or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I’m not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool; you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
MIB: You’ve made your decision then7
VIZZINI: Not remotely. Because iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows. And Australia is entirely peopled with criminals. And criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me. So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you.
MIB: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
VIZZINI: Wait till I get going! Where was I?
MIB: Australia.
VIZZINI: Yes—Australia, and you must have suspected I would have known the powder’s origin, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
MIB: You’re just stalling now.
VIZZINI: You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you? You’ve beaten my giant, which means you’re exceptionally strong. So, you could have put the poison in your own goblet, trusting on your strength to save you. So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But, you’ve also bested my Spaniard which means you must have studied. And in studying, you must have learned that man is mortal so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
MIB: You’re trying to trick me into giving away something—it won’t work—
VIZZINI: It has worked—you’ve given everything away—I know where the poison is.
MIB: Then make your choice.
VIZZINI: I will. And I choose—
During a meeting last week in LA, Justin Hall talked a bit about a frontchanneled discussion in a grad seminar. Putting aside the particulars (we don’t have a Zemeckis room :) ), I was intrigued by the idea. Backchanneling refers to the use of multiple channels to communicate among participants and audience members during a discussion. At a basic level, it includes asides and note-passing. More frequently, though, it now refers to IM and IRC messaging using WiFi enabled laptops, or texting using cells or PDAs. Frontchanneling (see the comments here) refers more generally to the process of acknowledging and including such a channel, and specifically of putting that channel up on a data projector where it is more visible to everyone.
I’m excited about making use of frontchanneling in my 400-seat class this spring. There are two things that will have to happen:
First there will need to be some level of penetration among the class participants. I suspect that only between 5% and 10% of class participants will have a WiFi enabled computer that they can use during classes. Power in the large lecture room may be an additional problem. If there is that level of penetration, I will ask those students to contribute to the class by sitting in one part of the room and channeling discussion there. They can then, possibly, coordinate local discussion, and do some other things to make use of the space.
I’d like to use a front-channel that would allow for questions and comments, but I also want to make sure that students are responsible for what they say. Heckling is acceptable, to a certain extent, but even if they don’t want to stand up to do it physically, they need to take ownership for their words. So, I am thinking I will use a whitelist of people who can access the projected chat. Even if they don’t announce their name—I know who they are, and if their contribution isn’t much of a contribution, I can tell them as much. This is harder in IRC, where authentication is a bit more problematical, so I am thinking AIM is the likely candidate.
My thought is that there are a number of potential ways this could be used:
Beyond IM, it would be great if students could mark-up my slides collaboratively: call it WePoint. That is, the slide goes up, with space around it for students to make their own notes. A lot of folks who use slides (which usually means Powerpoint) extensively now hand out or make available printouts of the slides for students to mark up during the presentation. How cool would it be if everyone could share those notes? I don’t think this can be done in, say, AIM. It requires some form of graphical structuring, and a versioning system (so it is easy to get to the original slides), but even for someone who has sworn off of Powerpoint for teaching, I think it’s a neat idea. I have a feeling that it could be cobbled together without a huge amount of work, using the Jabber libraries.
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone collected all of the common similarity metrics in one place, so that they could be easily referenced? Sam Chapman has.
I feel so bad for my poor students who have eagerly awaited comments from the world at large, and have finally gotten them, only to find out that the world wants them to be taking drugs and looking nakid pictures while playing texas holdem. Heck, I feel bad for me deleting dozens of emails telling me about all the spam waiting for my approval. To WordPress’s credit, blacklisting the spam does seem to make it unlikely that it will show up on the blog. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone anticipated the floods of bot-generated spam that would result.
I thought changing the name of the comment handler would cut the spam down to a trickle. Nope. And blocking IP ranges doesn’t seem to help much either. Which leaves me with a captchalike system, similar to the one I had on my last MT blog. I’m not happy with this solution, but I do think it’s likely to work. If you want to use it on your own system, the hack is called blogserver as well.
Alternatively, I may require folks to login before posting. Yes, it’s a pain, but maybe some of the pain would be helped by sxip or the like…
I’d be curious to see what he said to rise to the level of a threat, but one blogger (and he’s probably not the only one) has gotten a knock at the door from the Secret Service for posting things that could be construed as threatening the president. (via Micropersuasion)
For those who are interested, I’m talking to the ABC Radio National’s Breakfast show sometime around 5:30 pm today (GMT-5, I think it’s around 7:30am in Sydney). Don’t tune in to hear me, I’m boring. The other guests are Xeni Jardin and Leonard Kleinrock, and they are not boring. The show is celebrating the 35th anniversary of the internet.