Getting back to speed

Today was my first full day digging through old articles again, trying to remember just what exactly the proposal was supposed to be about. That sounds vague, but a real proposal is a razor-sharp slice through a body of literature, not a few ax-whacks at some vague topic. And it's always good not to miss...
But, I'm tired, running on about 3 hours of sleep, and just watched House.

In a way, I hit the dissertation topic lottery. Public transportation is getting really hot now that we're looking at a future of $4+ gas. Everyone is interested. The down side is that everyone thinks they know what needs to be done, by virtue of having thought about it a lot for the past few weeks. (Um..., I started looking at this whole topic in 1994.)

That aside, I'm still finding really interesting, new, innovative stuff I've never seen before, published more than 5 years ago. Think that's good? It sucks. That means I'm nowhere near the end of my literature review- more like the beginning. Every time you find some brand new ideas, you have to scale up your search, maybe change course and investigate a new line of research.

Initially, it felt like an exploration, like a "stranger in a strange land" experience. Later, more like a "search and rescue", trying to find new papers to throw into my stack of articles to digest. Now, it's starting to feel more like a "search and destroy", or making sure there are no viable ideas left uncovered, because I just want to wrap up what I have and just nail the lid down on the thing so I can proceed with my proposal. Ideally, your defenses are unassailable. In practice, you just hope nobody notices the gaping holes.

(Wow, I should really put away the "Lord of the Rings" DVD while I'm at it.)

Back to research...

I'm about wrapped up with grading, taking a break from a no-longer-endless parade of Freshman student essays. I'm ahead of the game-- planning to turn in the remainder of the grades Friday morning instead of Monday, the last possible hour they'll take them. But during my new ritual of an evening walk, I started thinking about student transportation again.

I met the Mayor yesterday at the neighborhood association meeting. I asked about transportation, working with the local bus providers to improve service, creating safer walkways and bikeways in the city to make those options more appealing. I got the usual banalities about how society has to get out of cars and embrace more environmentally-friendly transportation, about $7/gallon gas in the forecasts, etc., etc.

But then it hit me: we're not really doing anything about transportation at all. We've gotten as far as to say that we ought to think about it, rather than actually thinking about it. At $7 a gallon, we're complaining, but we're not really doing anything about it. Why not? The alternatives are going to just plain suck. Period.

Why does driving with $4/gallon gas still suck less than walking and taking the bus? There are a whole bunch of problems, but I still think it's mostly an information problem. We don't have the information readily available to do anything different without a whole lot of effort. I'm a computer science professor now, and I had a heck of a time getting my GPS to work easily-- basic stuff like finding shortcuts, etc. (I finally returned the damn thing when it almost killed me.)

I still have trouble with Google Maps in finding things like mutually convenient places to eat lunch, when discussing them over the phone with my wife (which means we end up eating at the same so-so diner every time.) Sorry, I still don't know the Capital District very well...

So the point of all this? The only solution I can think of is this: a massive information infrastructure has to be developed to support an alternative to excessive driving and single-occupant-vehicles. And we're not anywhere near there yet. What I think is going to help is better use of cell phones for starters, since that's the surviving implementation of mobile computing after the near-extinction of the PDA.

AFAIK, it's relying on the simultaneous emergence of a communication infrastructure, common hardware platforms, and coherent data interchange formats. And problems that are going to be unique to a distributed, asynchronous, mobile environment of ubiquitous computing. (Like synchronizing concurrent changes without a "master" copy.) And the way I read it, location awareness, movement, and by extension, transportation, is going to be at the very heart of mobile and ubiquitous computing.

There are no dominant players, and no emerging standards other than something vaguely "XML"-ish. But that's always been the same as calling ASCII a data standard. We're back in the 80's again, with a mishmash of hardware and software platforms, on devices with, if anything, dial-up access to proprietary services and arcane business models. The power problem is a major limitation, but eventually, somebody will get it right. And they'll end up eating Google's lunch.

Coffee only keeps me awake when I'm trying to sleep

It's definitely the end of grading season- 2 days left before the first batch of final grades is due. This weekend is the Tulip Festival in Albany. I already took the kids for a couple of hours this morning, before it got too crowded. Then, back to wrapping up final grades...

It's going to be so nice to kick around this summer and just do research. It'll be my first summer off from work since I was 15. It'll be a good time to start writing again.

Last minute grading - it's not just me

In my new favorite blog about an anonymous community college dean, he discusses the hell of end-of-semester grading. It's left me mostly without words. My shoulder and wrist hurt from the friggin' mouse. Blackboard sucks for grading, but it still beats handling all the paper it replaced. I'm a bit down from grading-- am I this bad an instructor? I'm distressed from some of the papers I've graded, over material I've covered more times than I care to think about.

But I'm tired and heading to bed in a minute. It's late and time to just get ready for my last day of teaching this semester.

Let's all back up for a minute, here....

We throw out our sports bottles that hold water for a few hours, because the plastic is toxic. But water cooler bottles made of the same stuff, containing water for maybe weeks at a time, is not banned. Transporting water by truck uses a lot of fuel. It's not like you can just pipe the stuff directly into people's houses or anything...

We're still holding Congressional inquiries into the price of gas. Why aren't we asking whether we should be using petroleum-based fertilizer to grow corn to turn into ethanol, now that we're facing food shortages? Of course, nobody's selling "organic ethanol"... yet.

Weren't we running out of clean water as underground aquifers start running dry? Should we really be using scarce drinking water to grow corn that uses petroleum fertilizers to produce ethanol for our cars at a time when we're having food shortages?

And why does MSN Money advise consumers to respond to global food shortages by "clipping coupons" and buying in bulk? Doesn't this also go back to crazy hoarding behaviors that helped drive up prices and create shortages in the first place? After all, the more you have of anything, the less efficiently you use it-- I think they called it "declining marginal utility" or something like that in economics class. You end up wasting a lot of what you're hoarding.

(Disclaimer: I studied economics, and energy policy as an undergrad and grad student.)

So rather than "helping" consumers by ending the gas tax at a time when we're running enormous budget deficits at the county, state, and Federal levels, shouldn't we be taxing the hell out of carbon-based fuels and using the revenues to build alternative energy sources, public transportation that works, and overall lowering our carbon footprint?

It's not like the ice caps are melting or anything...