So, has this brought on any deep introspection? Well, for a moment I was reminded of an old Steve Martin number, the I’m me song, during which he stops and says “But wait. What if I’m a girl?” I just don’t happen to fit well on their scales. I’ve got very manly spatio-visual awareness, but also, apparently, a colossal corpus callosum, which may or may not, be more prevalent among the ladies.

At any rate, I’m not going to take much stock in it. My hairline suggests that whatever testosterone I may have missed in the womb was more than made up for later on.

Part 1

Angles

This task tested your ability to identify the angle of a line by matching it with its twin. This is a spatial task, which looks at how you picture space.
Your score: 15 out of 20
Average score for men: 15.1 out of 20
Average score for women: 13.3 out of 20

What does your result suggest?

If you scored 13 – 17: You found this test neither hard nor easy. This suggests your brain has male and female traits when it comes to spatial ability.

Interestingly, men’s testosterone levels fluctuate through the seasons and studies have shown that men’s scores are lower in the spring, when their testosterone levels are at their lowest.

Do our cave dwelling ancestors offer us any clues about why men and women score differently on this task? Find out more.

Spot the difference

This task tested your ability to identify which objects changed position. You lost points, if you incorrectly identified objects.
Your score: 93%
Average score for men: 39%
Average score for women: 46%

What does your score suggest?

If you scored between 67 – 100%: Those with a female-type brain generally score in this range. Your ability to remember where objects are may serve as an advantage to you when you’re trying to find your way around places. You’re more capable of recalling landmarks to get from one place to another.

Find out more about our spatial abilities.

Part 2

Hands

You said your left thumb was on top when you clasped your hands together.

Left thumb on top: This suggests the right half of your brain is dominant. Some studies theorise that as a right brain dominant person, you may excel in visual, spatial and intuitive processes.

However, these theories are debatable and leave much to be said about the small percentage of people who are ambidextrous. Find out why right-brained people may be better fighters and artists.

Part 3

Emotions and Systems

This task looked at whether you prefer to empathise or systemise.

Empathising

Your empathy score is: 8 out of 20
Average score for men: 7.9 out of 20
Average score for women: 10.6 out of 20

What does your result suggest?

Empathisers are better at accurately judging other people’s emotions and responding appropriately. If you scored 15 and above, you are very empathic and would be an ideal person to comfort people in a time of crisis. Women in general are better at empathising.

Systemising

Your systemising score is: 19 out of 20
Average score for men: 12.5 out of 20
Average score for women: 8.0 out of 20

What does your result suggest?

Systemisers prefer to investigate how systems work. A system can be a road map, flat pack furniture, or a mathematical equation – anything that follows a set of rules. A score of 15 and above suggests you’re good at analysing or building systems. Men in general are better at systemising.

Scientists are keen to learn more about people who score high or low on both tests. They want to find out whether or not empathising and systemising are linked. Is a possible to make yourself more empathic?

Some scientists claim that our empathy and systemising abilities can be traced all the way back to prehistoric times. Find out more.

Eyes

This task tested your ability to judge people’s emotions.
Your score: 7 out of 10
Average score for men: 6.6 out of 10
Average score for women: 6.6 out of 10

What does your result suggest?

If you scored 7 – 10: Your result suggests you are a good empathiser, sensitive to other people’s emotions. Women generally fall into this category.

Professor Baron-Cohen at the University of Cambridge says that people usually perform better than they expect to on this test.

Men often think a person’s eyes are sending signals of desire when that’s not the case at all. Find out more.

Part 4

Fingers

We asked you to measure your ring and index fingers. Your ratios came to:
Right Hand: 1
Left Hand: 1

Average ratio for men: 0.982
Average ratio for women: 0.991

It’s thought that your ratio is governed by the amount of testosterone you were exposed to in your mother’s womb. The ratio of the length of your index finger to the length of your ring finger is set for life by as early as three months after conception. Even during puberty, when we experience intensive hormonal changes, the ratio stays the same.

Men generally have a ring finger that is longer than their index finger, which gives them a lower ratio than women, whose ring and index fingers are usually of equal length.

Studies have found that men and women with lots of brothers generally have more masculine finger ratios. Find out what other things scientists think our ratios may tell us.

Part 5

Faces

This task looked at how you rate the attractiveness of a series of faces. The images you looked at were digitally altered to create slight differences in masculinity.

Your choices suggest you prefer more feminine faces.

Highly masculinised male faces possess more extreme testosterone markers such as a long, broad and lower jaw, as well as more pronounced brow ridges and cheekbones.

Interestingly, women’s preferences are said to vary across the menstrual phase. A more masculine face is preferred during the 9 days prior to ovulation, when conception is most likely.

A typical ‘attractive’ female face possesses features such as a shorter, narrower, lower jaw, fuller lips and larger eyes than an average face.

Are you surprised at what researchers think they can learn from your answers? Find out more.

Part 6

3D shapes

This task tested your ability to mentally rotate 3D shapes.

Your score: 12 out of 12
Average score for men: 8.2 out of 12
Average score for women: 7.1 out of 12

What does your result suggest?

If you scored 10 – 12: Are you an engineer or do you have a science background? People with these skills tend to score in this range. Past studies have concluded that people in this range have a more male brain.

Nearly a third of men who took this test got full marks, whereas less than 10 per cent of women managed the same. Find out why.

Words

This task looked at your verbal fluency.

Your score: you associated 17 word(s) with grey and you named 12 word(s) that mean happy. We are assuming that all the words you entered are correct.
Average score for men: 11.4 words total
Average score for women: 12.4 words total

What does your result suggest?

If you produced 6 – 10 words: Most people in this range have a female-type brain.

Women are said to use both sides of the brain when doing verbal tasks while men mainly use their left side. Studies have shown that girls develop vocabulary faster than boys. This difference in brain power is caused by levels of pre-natal testosterone. Find out more.

Ultimatum

This task asked you how you would divide money.

If you had to split £50 with someone, you said you would demand £29

So far on the Sex ID test, men have demanded 51.6% (£25.80) of the pot and women have demanded 51.0% (£25.50), on average.

What does your response suggest?

Sex differences are small in this task. Demanding less than 60% of the pot (ie £30) is more typically female. Demanding more than 65% of the pot (ie £32.50) is more typically male.

Scientists believe that people with lower testosterone levels tend to take fewer risks so they are probably more willing to keep less for themselves. Those with higher testosterone levels tend to drive a harder bargain and are less compromising.

Men’s testosterone levels fluctuate over the seasons and are at their lowest levels during the springtime. This is said to influence their bargaining power. Find out more about the role of testosterone.

So, what are the problems? Well: it’s a start-up. Leaving aside the possibility of fraud, it might just end up being mismanaged, and given that they are in a position to deal with a lot of cash flow right out of the gate, this is a problem. Nowhere on the site does it indicate precisely the process by which they are buying fuel. If they get the balance wrong, and don’t hedge fuel prices correctly, there is always the possibility of a graceless exit, leaving consumers holding worthless IOUs.

Also, they determine your purchase price by where you live. I live in Manhattan, but have only purchased fuel here once or twice over the last several years. The closest station is charging $4.33 a gallon for regular, and as you go downtown, the price creeps up toward $4.75. I don’t know if they average by zip or by region, but either way, the price they assess for me is likely to be silly. Across the bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey, regular gasoline is going for $3.95. I usually fill up somewhere in Connecticut, which is between the two in terms of cost. The problem is that if I buy gasoline at Manhattan prices, I’m already paying more of a premium than I would otherwise.

Secondly, while my car is not as much of a fuel hog as some (and yes, I considered a Prius, and it looks like it would have been a wise decision), it does require premium gasoline. The agreement says that they tag on 30 cents a gallon for premium, but it’s not yet clear whether you buy premium gallons, or they make the adjustment when you purchase gas. They apparently make a lot of adjustments when you purchase, according to the type of gas, the locale in which it is purchased, changes in taxes, etc. As a result, it’s difficult to predict exactly what you will be paying for gasoline. If it were a simple matter of five gallons purchased now results in five gallons of gas in six months, that would be great. As it is, there appears to be a lot of wiggle room on their end.

Finally, they are launching at an advantageous time for them. Historically, fuel prices peak around August and then tend to depress through the end of the year. Hard to say, in this overblown market, whether that will have any effect at all.

All that said, it seems unlikely that we will see a long-term drop in gasoline prices. The US has long enjoyed ridiculously low fuel prices, and I suspect that $5 a gallon fuel (or more) is not only inevitable, but here to stay. And I am locked into a six-hundred-mile-a-week (at least) commute. So, all the above caveats aside, I figure I’ll give them a try, and report back here how things go. I won’t see my fuel card from them for several weeks, and I probably will not make my first fuel purchase until September or October, when prices may have dipped a bit.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Give away

I was surprised by the number of books, when faced with a decision, that were not worth selling because they would fetch too little, and not worth the time to scan. These include a lot of large-publication novels and the like. Somehow, a lot of “beach reads” survived beyond the beach. It also includes some odd copies that, like this one have already been scanned by Google and are available for download.

Sell on Amazon

When I moved from Buffalo to New York, I sold a couple of boxes of books to lighten the load a bit, so I had a rough idea of what sort of things sell well. Generally, these are books that have a timelessness to them, started out expensive, and have a rabid fan base of some sort. Both Code Complete and Mythical Man Month sold within hours of my listing them, for example.

There are a lot of hidden costs to selling books on Amazon. Of course, there is the cost of shipping (which may or may not line up with the shipping fee), and the commission Amazon pulls from the sale. There are also packing supplies needed to make sure that your book gets there in one piece. But the biggest expense is time. Listing the books, packing them up, and carting them off to the post office takes a lot of time. If you have a small bookstore, and already have sunk labor costs in the form of a part-timer from the local high school, packaging up books and prepping them for shipping is no big deal. But particularly when selling one or two books, it’s just not worth it unless they are fairly big-ticket items. At least the trips to the post office scale a bit when you are bringing 8 or 10 books at a time, but it is still a large amount of time, for little financial reward.

In the first week of listing, I’ve sold about three dozen books. If experience is a guide, things tend to sell quickly or not at all. I have a number of books still for sale, and will be adding to this list a little. Generally, I probably will only be adding books that I think I can price at over $10, since the $5 mark just doesn’t make sense for the time I’m spending packaging and such. Those books will either be left down in the lobby of my apartment building for others or scanned.

Destructive Scanning

The majority of books probably fall into this category: those that will be ripped from their spines and run through the page-fed scanner. Generally, these are books that I don’t plan to curl up and read again cover-to-cover, but that I keep around for the sake of reference or inspiration. I actually do not mind reading on the screen, and my hope is that I will be able to eventually read these on an eBook reader (Kindle-kin) at some point, though there are hurdles still before that can happen. By OCRing these books, I have a way of doing an index search across my library, which may prove useful. So far, I’ve only scanned a few dozen books; it’s taking longer than I predicted.

Non-Destructive Scanning

There are a number of books that I am not ready to tear apart, for various reasons. Some of them, for example, contain images that need special scanning attention. Some were gifts or otherwise have sentimental value. A number Some (very few) are “grandfathered” because of their age. Some are too big to scan using the current setup. Some are kids books, and story-time just isn’t the same in front of the monitor. A lot of the poetry and fiction will remain bound for the same reasons.

The Amazon sales have already paid for my duplex, sheet-fed scanner. Putting together a scanner that can handle bound materials is going to take a lot longer and cost a lot more.

Many of the people whom I have met who have benefited from an education at an elite school are bright but uninteresting. And they seem to believe that they are brighter and more accomplished than they actually manage to be. As long as I am painting with a stereotypical brush, I’ll note that in my experience, this is particularly true of graduates of Harvard and Yale, and least true of graduates of Princeton and Cornell. The funny thing is that these expectations are often born out.

I didn’t really think much about the Ivy League until I came to Quinnipiac. I attended state schools, and my impression is that there is a lot in common in terms of coursework between a large public school like the University of Indiana, and a large private, like Harvard. But the attitudes that Quinnipiac students hold toward Yalies, and the reverse, has brought into sharp focus the cultural capital held by Yale.

Every couple years, Yale’s student paper publishes a sort of “safari” piece on Quinnipiac students that always manages to set a colonial tone. (The most recent is awed by the fact that in their native habitat, Quinnipiac students seem to spend—gasp!—a great deal of time studying.) I have the feeling that for most Yale students, the experience of Quinnipiac students is utterly beyond their grasp. The gap here is not between the working class and the elite. Quinnipiac students generally come from “new money,” it seems to me: their parents are almost prototypical members of the bourgeoisie, sons and daughters of successful entrepreneurs, lawyers, and stockbrokers. That Yalies consider Quinnipiac students to be heavy partiers suggests they have never visited ASU or SDSU, but there is definitely a difference in what is considered an expected workload. Some of our best students rival the abilities of some of their best students, but our average student seems unsure of why he is in college, and unsure of what he wants to do afterward. (This is new for me: ambition seems more common both among children of the working poor in Buffalo and in a different way, among children of the aristocracy.) I chafe a bit at our emphasis of professional skills, but it seems likely that Yale graduates will be working with Quinnipiac graduates, and our students will probably teaching their students the nuts and bolts of professional practice. That Yale and Quinnipiac students can find so little common ground is an indictment of both institutions.

I think the article overplays this as endemic to the Ivy League. Students at almost every university seem to feel entitled to a high-paying job upon graduation, regardless of what they actually accomplish in school, and grade inflation in our own program rivals Yale’s. But he may be right that the graduate of an Ivy League school has been told so often that he is a member of the elite that he believes this as part of his being. Unfortunately, at least until mellowed a bit after graduation, this makes many students at Ivy League schools fairly insufferable to talk to.

Of course, there are exceptions. Many of my friends are survivors of Ivy League programs, and I don’t hold it against them in the least. Some of them even deign to read my blog ;). But unfortunately, since the Ivies tend to set the cadence for “aspirant” institutions, the problems outlined in this article seem to trickle down. When this is compounded with the fact that our political leaders are disproportionately products of these schools, it seems clear that an adjustment is needed.

He didn’t read Wikipedia for our show, but Wikipedia and the Macintosh played a central role. He also did a bit on religion, intelligent design, and evolution (including a bit on Darwin’s famous book Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, Monkey, You! We are at the tail end of the tour (headed to the west coast from here), but if you get a chance to see it, definitely go.

Is it at all ironic that a conference on decentralized and networked government is in-person, expensive, and in New York City?

On re-reading my chapter, I’m not as thrilled as I might be. It’s clear I was writing it while thinking about the book I’ve been working on, but the argument comes out more muddled than it needs to be. Wish I’d focussed things down a bit more, but that’s water under the bridge. Glancing through some of the other articles, I see a lot of ideas similar to mine better expressed. There’s a nice group of authors there, and I’m lucky and honored to be in the same volume with them.

Normally I wouldn’t be so base as to suggest you “order yours soon!” but it looks like Amazon is running short on stock, so you might want to :). Of course, you can also order it directly from U of Michigan Press (for a bit more), and they have the table of contents and other information on their site.

To the caller, when I first answer, I am the inanimate Barbie. They do not know what I look like, who I am or how I feel. They can only imagine. It is my job to indulge their fantasies, to convince them that I am not a doll. I am their dream turned real. I view every question the caller asks me as a command for me to transform. If the ask if I am blonde, I become a blonde. If they ask how wet I am, I tell them that my panties are drenched. I respond to every sound the caller makes with an affirmation, I encourage them, I breathe life into their fantasy, I carve the doll out of flesh. I do not view myself as this doll, as the commodity. I am the manufacturer who creates her from the blueprint that the caller provides me. When the caller comes, it is positive feedback. Like an architect patting his contractor on the back.

And to make sure that you scofflaws out there who aren’t reporting your online purchases don’t keep doing so, a new law actually makes retailers charge the tax. So when you buy from Amazon, you get sales tax tagged on your purchase. Amazon has sued the state over this tax (saying that it is a regulation of interstate commerce), but for now, I have a more practical issue. There’s nothing that says I can’t go over to Jersey or Connecticut to do my shopping, and no reason I wouldn’t have things delivered there. Indeed, for Amazon, it makes sense for books to go to my office (in Connecticut) rather than my home (in New York). But what happens if I then bring one of those books home?

Or, what about those who do not have a legitimate address in Connecticut? Can they have their orders sent to a rented address (Mail Boxes, etc., etc.) and pick it up once a month. This certainly makes sense to me: the sale occurred “in” Connecticut, and you carried goods you own back to New York. The lines of cars with New York plates at gas stations Fort Lee suggest that many people engage in interstate arbitrage. I’m reminded of the tax hole that exists (existed?) in Portland, Oregon, which is just across the border from Vancouver, Washington. One state is sales-tax-free, the other is income-tax-free, making for an interesting cross-border flow. Yet, there are indications that any such workaround may not be legal.

So, next question. Would it be legal to set up a reshipping service in one of these neighboring states? Could I set up an operation that picks up goods from Newegg’s Edison, NJ warehouse and delivers things around New York City if I wasn’t Newegg. In other words, rather than buying goods delivered from Newegg, I purchase them undelivered (EXW, as it were), and then contract a separate entity to pick them up and deliver them to me in New York. That just feels wrong to me—it seems like it is a fairly direct an obvious attempt to evade a tax by decoupling the purchase and the shipping. And yet, if I hire a taxi to take me from New York City out to an address in New Jersey where I had something delivered, that doesn’t seem that strange, and on a large enough purchase—say, a television or a diamond ring—it would save a great deal in tax. That holds even when it is a question of choosing a sales tax in White Plains (7.88%) or Paramus, NJ (6%, or free for clothing) over that in New York City (8.38%), leaving aside the online issue.

Or, is your tax home determined by where you actually claim residence? That was the case when we bought our car in New Jersey. Because we lived in New York City, we were required to pay NYC tax. But this seems to be specific to automotive purchases.

Anyway, I find the whole thing too confusing. Do I have to worry now that by having books delivered to my office from Amazon, I’m illegally evading tax? Or, should I start having all my friends’ books delivered to my office and charge a “handling fee”? And we haven’t even touched eBay yet.

As an aside, I don’t think that online sales tax is necessarily a bad thing, but requiring online retailers or consumers to keep track of the tax policies of states and municipalities around the world is just stupid. If this is the way we are going, we need a federal “online sales tax”—or better yet, a federal “VAT” for all sales.

Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.

Someone sent me a note asking for my opinion on this. I’m not sure that I have a considered opinion. The descriptions of the images seem to be far worse than the images themselves. Two of the images described in the LA Times article appear here (NSFW), in a compilation of putatively humorous images that is not safe for work. Which gives rise to the question of that term: Not Safe for Work. Should a judge be judged by a standard different from the standards by which we judge any other citizen. Bear in mind that he has been accused of circulating distasteful images, not illegal images. I don’t think anyone would suggest that a subscription to Hustler should disqualify someone from the bench.

I can see getting fired for viewing these kind of images at work, particularly if it resulted in co-workers seeing them. I can even see getting fired for intentionally publishing this sort of material on a personal site, if your work found out about it and you were in an industry sensitive to public opinion (as most are). But there was no such intent here. It’s not like he’s been secretive about it; as he admits here, he maintains a “gag list,” from which he sends out “dirty jokes.” (There is more in this interview that seems a bit risque in retrospect.) The question is whether this should impact his role as a judge. I don’t see why it should. Given how few people we have at the appellate level that have even a basic understanding of the online world, it would seem a particularly unfortunate

At worst, I think he can be blamed for a lack of political acumen, and arguably (since it always is) questionable taste. Perhaps he should add “keeping a careful lid on your personal interests” to his advice for aspiring federal judges. And though he’s not a fan of bloggers, this serves as a great example to those who are bloggers of how personal web publishing (by you or your kids) can come back to bite you.

If you haven’t already, register to vote.

(via Sivacracy)

CDs and Tapes

The earliest step of this process, I completed many years ago: cutting my Audio CDs over to MP3s. For years, I kept the physical CDs around, as a backup in better audio quality. When I got rid of them, I kept the jackets, for lyrics and album art. But under the principle that not touching something for a year or more probably means you don’t need it, I finally got rid of them as well, years ago.

More recently, I’ve freed myself from all tape. I went through boxes of video cassettes and cut over anything I wanted to keep to my DVR. I did the same thing for some of the old audio cassettes my wife had collected, a recordings of her grandfather that had deteriorated on audio cassette.

The machines that supported these formats are also gone. I am gradually disassembling them, recycling the interesting bits into my “junk” files; consumer electronics from an era not so long ago when they contained lasers, electric motors, switches, knobs, and connectors.

Bills, Correspondence, Manuals

I am nearly through the next part of the process, working my way through several drawers of a file cabinet, scanning bills, letters, forms, receipts, various manuals, appraisals, health records, contracts, and the like. Incoming mail is now opened and either scanned or shredded. After some hunting, comparisons, and advice from others, I ended up getting a ScanSnap S510. It was an expensive purchase, but well worth the satisfaction of being able to drop in a document and have it quickly turned into a PDF on my hard drive, findable without taking up space.

The final step will be to scan the majority of my library. It took me some years to decide to do this, but I think that most of it will be scanned “destructively,” using this sheet-fed scanner. The result will be more space in my home office, which I’ll be sharing soon, but it will be strange to be without those pages around me.

Of course, I have already run into things that have a particular “aura,” that makes them especially difficult to part with. Anything hand-written to me by my partner, no matter how trivial, is impossible to throw away. And I don’t think things like my passport or birth certificate will do me much good in electronic form alone.

Services I Maybe Should Have Used

Some lessons learned? If I were to do this again, I might try a couple of services I now know about. I would use a service like Ship’N’Shred which will pick up a 30 lb box of paper and shred it for $30. Yes, I only paid a little more for my own shredder, but hand feeding paper into it and constantly emptying it is a pain. Obviously, I’ll shred my own stuff going forward, but for the massive one-time effort, it probably would have been easier to box it and send it off for shredding.

When I decided to cut my CDs over to MP3 many years ago, I sat in front of the computer feeding them in one-by-one. I was a starving student then, and a starving professor now, and don’t think I can shell out the $299 for a week’s rental of ripping machine that will transfer over a stack of CDs. Since a number of my CDs were imports, or strange, or both, and didn’t have CDDC, which apparently means their system wouldn’t work.

What about dealing with the incoming mail? For now, at least, it is not worth the $120 a year to get someone to do that processing for me, though that would be far more enticing if I were still nomadic. Being able to have a stable mailing address every time you move is almost worth it in itself.

I’ll write a bit more about this process, if I get the chance, detailing some of my decisions in scanning and some of the things I find out about during the process.

I wrote the following email to Rob Bishop, president of Binkley Custom Products, who hosts the site, and presumably produces the doll.

Dear Mr. Bishop,

I am writing regarding “The Sock Obama” that your company produces and sells. Although the site purports to be in support of Mr. Obama, I find it difficult to believe that you can be unaware of the long history of associating African-Americans with monkeys as a way of demeaning them. It is, in short, a racist depiction of a candidate for president.

I am writing in the hope that you have offered this product unaware of that long history, or deceived by whomever asked you to produce it. I hope, and expect, that you will remove the product now that you have been made aware of the racist statement you are making.

Sincerely,

Alex Halavais

Update: Both of the email addresses I have for Rob Bishop are bouncing, so I’ll have to send snail mail.

They begin with “ownership,” which, they are at pains to explain, has nothing to do with property. I believe they are trying for something more like “stewardship.” In any case, their claim is that because they are willing to “stand behind” the product they release, it will be stronger for it. In other words, we can trust their encyclopedia, because we trust them.

There is something to this. I trust my doctor because of where he went to school, where he practices, and in this case, where he teaches. Yes, I also checked his performance, as best I could, but I accept that institutions invest reputation in the people that they choose to affiliate with. This doesn’t mean that reputation is always strong: just because Microsoft “stands behind” or “takes ownership” of WindowsMe doesn’t make it a better product than Ubuntu, which (arguably!) is a product of people standing around together instead. So, basically they are making an appeal to traditional authority: we’ve done well in the past, and we will continue to do well. Wikipedia asks you to trust in the process, not in the producers.

Second, Britannica claims they are different because they value experts. What are experts? That is a really good question.

The plan for the new site goes to great lengths to increase the relationships we have with thousands of our current contributors as well as with new experts recommended or identified by the user community. We are calling this larger group our new “community of scholars.”

Second, it is worth noting that Wikipedia draws on expertise as well, basically piggybacking on structures of peer-review and expertise vetting in the real world, by requiring citation. It is, in practice, a site for summarizing expertise that has already been expressed in the world. This is at least one definition of what an encyclopedia should do. Is there really a need for experts if the work is essentially summarizing existing publications?

Finally, they attack what I think is probably one of the week points of Wikipedia, its NPOV standard, and propose an even worse one: “objectivity.” I wonder if they considered chatting with their “experts” before making this claim. Experts take on an informed and experienced view, but there is rarely a claim that this is somehow an “unbiased” view. To quote from the Britannica article on biology:

This emerging social and political role of the biologist and all other scientists requires a weighing of values that cannot be done with the accuracy or the objectivity of a laboratory balance. As a member of society, it is necessary for a biologist now to redefine his social obligations and his functions, particularly in the realm of making judgments about such ethical problems as man’s control of his environment or his manipulation of genes to direct further evolutionary development.

Unfortunately, and like Wikipedia in some ways, it is not clear which experts are writing the articles, since the “ownership” is by EB, and not the expert, these days. Particularly, for some articles—say, for example, on “chiropractic” or on “abortion”—if they are providing an objective commentator, I really want to know who that commentator is. Transparency, here, is a friend of evaluation.

In sum, if I understand correctly, Britannica is adopting the plan that Nupedia had, lo, so many years ago. Maybe they will be able to make that work, and as Weinberger suggests, it can’t hurt to have a variety of different approaches in play.

I’m also wondering about the loss of creative instrumentation. If virtuosi performers on traditional instruments (not that electric guitar is “traditional,” but it is far more traditional than a desktop computer) become more rare, will there still be people who develop instruments like this?

Finally, there are lots of people inventing musical instruments: a kind of makers’ market of such beasts, both using electronics (including circuit bending), and using either constructed or found physical objects (like buildings!). With rare exceptions, these tend to be played only by their inventors, since the sunk cost in learning to play a new instrument requires some common cultural value that can be exchanged. By evolving an existing instrument that is widely known into something that produces a different musical effect, does this encourage greater diffusion? I think the answer is clearly “yes.”

Update: And here is a short outline of tips I handed around:
phases.

You want me to teach what?

In the first of these, Joan van Hise and Dawn Massey addressed the question of what to do when you are faced with teaching a course with content or delivery that is unfamiliar. They brought Smarties and Dum-dums to throw at participants.

When pressed into a course you are unfamiliar with, you look for others as models. If there are no models, try professional organizations, other disciplines, and working profession as a source of information.

Past these sources, two approaches:

Plan A: Amass adequate technical training. Read the literature. Go to conferences and pre-conferences and training. Make contacts. Adopt a research agenda related to the area.

Plan B: Bring in an expert. Have them do guest lectures, provide case studies, have them help with course materials, team teaching, or have the expert observe your teaching.

While this is stressful, it provides a great opportunity for learning and developing as a professional.

Getting students to learn from their mistakes

Vera Cherepinsky presented some ideas on getting students in their introductory math courses to use graded exams to study. She provides students a chance to correct problems that had some error in the solution. They are required to find the errors, decide whether it is major or minor (and explain why), and then explain how to fix it. Seems like a substantial time investment, though it’s clear it helps students to learn.

Capturing Shakespeare classes with Apple Podcast Producer

Richard Regan presented his experience with capturing audio for a course on Shakespeare. The Apple Podcast Producer provides a way of streamlining the production of podcasts, providing for a pretty much immediate upload of lectures recorded using an iPod. He records directly into Producer (using a Blue Snowflake, and the system immediately uploads to iTunes University. It’s pretty much one-click, making it easy for non-techies.

They are looking to move to having audio servers in four classrooms, with microphones in the room, that would record the conversation in the room on built-in Mac Minis and upload it automatically to iTunes U. They are also looking at doing video in much the same way.

When college writing gets personal

Peter Witkowsky, from Mount Saint Mary College, talked about ways of using new media to encourage writing, and negotiating “academic” and “personal” writing styles. Says that freshmen tend to fall into two models: Elinor or Marianne: “Neither of us have anything to tell. I because I conceal nothing and you because you communicate nothing.” He says that he finds the polarization between these extremes is increasing.

Suggests that we encourage, rather than discourage, the use of web-based resources. He provides the example of using blogrunner to track on the decision about the making US currency accessible to the blind. By looking through this stuff, you provide an example of assessing information online.