a thaumaturgical compendium

We ended the capstone seminar this year with an Australian Wine Tasting. People teamed up and went in on a bottle of Australian wine, max. US$18, and labelled them with appropriately Australian monikers. My “Crowded House,” a Ringbolt Cab-Sav didn’t do well at all, though I liked it. The winner was a 2001 Greg Norman Estates Merlot/Cabernet blend. Runners up included a Palandri Cab-Sav, a Ninth Island Pinot, and a Wolf Blass Chard.

Having made a decent dent in the wines and cheese, seminar participants gave one last elevator pitch for their projects, and with inhibitions slightly lowered, provide feedback on the program. Some of the suggestions were familiar by now, and happily some of them we have already taken action on. We have been much more picky about our incoming class this year, and that will improve things. We have a plagiarism process and policy in place, and I will reinforce this with the faculty in the coming year. We have made some changes to how we are teaching web development, and a graduating MI student will be teaching for us in this area. And we will be slanting one of the offering to provide a more business take on risk assessment and budgeting. There were other suggestions as well, and although my notes are elliptical, I do think we are moving in the right direction.

Oh, and finally, by request, a quote from one of our very own students, in T-shirt form.

It seems that scientists in Pittsburg are resurecting dead dogs:

US scientists have succeeded in reviving the dogs after three hours of clinical death, paving the way for trials on humans within years.

Pittsburgh’s Safar Centre for Resuscitation Research has developed a technique in which subject’s veins are drained of blood and filled with an ice-cold salt solution.

Human trials, huh? Can’t wait to see the fliers on campus: “Earn $600 for one-day medical research experiment.” While most of us wouldn’t go for the whole frozen exsanguination thing, it’s amazing what some are willing to do for a buck. Actually, if you add a bit of tequila to the saline solution and suggest that you will be mainlining frozen margaritas, I suspect students would line up to volunteer.

(Yes, yes, I know, the first subjects are likely to be severe trauma patients or battlefield casualties from Iraq, Syria, Iran, etc. Makes you wonder—given the problems returning soldiers are already having—whether zombification is really going to be an improvement. It seems unlikely that we will be able to regularly raise the dead without raising some interesting moral, legal, and religious questions.)

Some remaining bits from discussion in class last night:

In class, we had discussed whether executives will blog, or just have convincing ghost writers. Here is a job
that seems to be the latter. They would need to get good people: maybe they should hire me :).

On the mapping front, Google has released Google Earth. Go try it, lots of cool stuff.

I had mentioned my ideal next computing set up. It’s a Vaio U71 with a heads up display, and either a Twiddler (or maybe frogpad or kitty, once I try them out).

As noted in class, the new 2257 guidelines (or see the Fleshbot writeup) are being fought by an adult-industry advocacy group, the Free Speech Coalition. As I noted in class, I do think there is a need for record-keeping, and I think objectives of 2257 require a certain amount of balancing, but it does appear that the new regulations over-reach. A much more sensible process would be to require web producers (“secondary producers”) to keep records of where they got the images, and to provide this electronically on a page on the website.

Brenda, who helped with the cyberporn & society class, emailed asking what the student evaluations ended up looking like. It’s really a mixed lot. I’m not unhappy with the overall evaluations, especially for a class this size.

I know a lot of profs don’t care much for student evaluations, returning to the old “in what other job…” thing. I don’t really hold them in an important position: I would much rather know what they think of the course 5 and 10 years down the line, and whether they learned something valuable from the experience. I suspect most students don’t know what they learned during the last week or two of the classes; they only respond whether they enjoyed the class. And even then: we’ve just moved to online evaluations, and the only people who are likely to respond are those who especially liked or disliked the class. Less than a third of the students bothered to evaluate the class, and only half of these wrote textual comments. I suspect I could teach a class that got much better reviews, but I also suspect I couldn’t live with myself for teaching the class that way.

One of the advantages—the primary one, I think—of student evaluations is that they allow students to know what their peers think of a class or a professor. I have a feeling this isn’t a bad thing. I used to have most of my student reviews up on the site, and I will again at some point. For this class, I end up being… well… about average. Click “more” to see what students thought of the class.

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Kevin blogs about some cool iPod shuffle skins he received from the company after blogging about them. I bring this up because it feeds directly into a discussion we had in the capstone seminar a couple weeks ago. We had talked about whether it was appropriate for bloggers to accept gifts. In this case, and given the nature of Kevin’s blog, it seems pretty clear that they are offered as a way of letting Kevin do a review of the product. Nonetheless, I suspect he will like the company more, given the recent interaction.

Obviously, Kevin has done nothing wrong here, and neither has the company. The issue is, how far do they have to do before they (either Kevin or the company) move from opinion leadership to shilling?

As an aside, I saw one of these on the road last week, and it’s truly a beautiful machine. I wonder how well it holds up over the long run. (Worth a shot, no?)

The next time someone tells me blogs are all about teenage angst or political rants, I’m sending them to this entry, which is neither.

In preparation for talking about mobile technologies, mapping, and locative media on Monday, please take a look at the following:

• TCM Locative Reader – Introduction
• Mousehunter at Banff
• and skim for interesting chunks on these two blogs: Mapping Hacks and the “locative” category from We Make Money Not Art.