TV is bad for carpooling?

That's pretty much the conclusion after doing some quick research into Social Capital, mostly in the context of why Americans aren't involved with their communities anymore. One Political Science article, "Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America", is a a bit chatty by Information Science standards. But it walks through the usual suspects, dismissing all of them except for one: television.

So why do I care about social capital? It's the source of carpooling, for starters, and maybe even helps overcome barriers to taking the bus. The development of social capital is tied to social networks and the formation of trust-- repeated, reciprocal interactions we have with each other. Which, I might add, is lacking more at community colleges and less so at large public universities. And in turn, the lack of social networks- social capital by extension, is a root cause of dropping out of college, particularly among commuters and especially community college students.

So what's the complaint about TV? It forces people inward, encourages passivity, reduces community involvement. We have fewer social connections. I've reached some conclusions for my dissertation proposal, but that'll have to wait until I've worked through the reasoning a bit more- somehow I have a gut feeling that there's a critical logic error behind this.

Writer's block again

I'm giving myself a week and a half to finish my dissertation proposal, which by all purposes is about 1/4 done after about a month. This isn't looking very promising.
Of course, time isn't a linear measure of progress, as much as project management thinking would like us all to believe- the reality is that "90%" completion takes half of the actual expenditures on a project, whereas the other half goes into actually finishing the job. Woe be to the project worker who sees "90%" as being almost done... But project scheduling (whether managing them or otherwise completing them, one box at a time) was more than a decade of my professional life.
Academics hardly seems any different/better, and maybe even worse, since a few academics who never ventured into the dreadful "real world" still seem to cling to the student fallacy that any task can be completed in an all-nighter with enough cans of Red Bull...
Ugh, maybe getting that out of my system will help me develop a coherent conceptual framework I can articulate in this f-ing paper. On the bright side, most of the papers I read relating to college student transportation are written by university community planners who merely formalize the same eyeball observations of too many cars chasing too few spots. And the transit side of it is largely written by civil engineers. And nobody cites the same things, just a series of vaguely peripheral studies out of engineering literature. After all, the whole point of progress is building on what's already been done, not reinventing the same wheel for the nth time.
So at the end of the day, I can picture the next few papers that'll come out of this one, like a real literature review that actually combines these papers, stuff like that. But, that'll be after I finally manage to write this one.

Literature Review

The literature review just continues forever, or so it would seem. I was asked at my local coffee shop (where I can usually rely on cranking out a page or two over a cup) how long a dissertation takes. I just mentioned that it doesn't end until I finish- but probably a minimum of a year. I guess in theory I've been working on it for a year, though in practice I was reading some of the source articles more than 5 years ago, though for a very different purpose.
There was a program I wrote in 1999 and 2000 that will form the basis of what I'm going to generate for the experimental part of the dissertation.
No, I'm not almost done yet.
I don't know where I am in the process, other than to vaguely call it "the middle" of my proposal, or "early" in my dissertation progress. I've got almost 20 pages written of what I roughly called a 40-page proposal. I haven't covered a lot of stuff yet. I'm sure it'll go on quite a bit longer, though I think I shouldn't exceed 50 clean pages- meaning tossing out some of the 20 pages I've written, or writing 60, 70, or more, and cutting back or recycling the discards for the full paper. But I don't think I have any rocket science to invent here, just a full rehashing of the stacks of papers in front of me.
I'm trying to steer clear of the literature review as a tiresome compilation of little book reports. That might just have to be condensed quite a bit down the road. Just makes me wonder how many pages of a 200-page dissertation were written and then thrown out...

The mark of Zotero

A couple of months into using Zotero, and I'm content with the plug-in. I'd like it to do more (what else is new) , like somehow plug into my PBWiki account or sync between multiple machines (and in a perfect world, my PDA), or at the very least, back itself up on a USB drive, memory stick, or whatever, in an XML file I can parse for other purposes.

But I started using it as a way to impose coherence on my growing collection of bookmarks and PDF files. I've discovered that a lot of pages have a link that downloads the matching citation directly into Zotero, sparing a tedious minute of data entry.

And the proposal is moving along, like a steamroller, only easily stopped and minus any real substance behind it.

Mad math

My kids are safely settled in Tokyo for the summer and already attending local public school. My daughter is by far the tallest in her class- attending her same grade level, and one day in, the fastest at math- in Japanese, no less.

My son, in Kindergarten, hasn't yet had time to shine academically, but apparently already has a girlfriend. But he has stopped saying "mad" so far, since he has to speak Japanese and there is no translation.

But all is well so far, though I'll be watching fireworks without them this year. But they're heading to Tokyo Disneyland in a couple of days, so will be having fun there.

MUD Carpools

After a week of getting the family ready for a month-long trip to Japan (which I'm going to skip this year) and my niece's wedding (both in the same weekend), I'm sitting in a coffee shop trying to get back into gear on my disseratation proposal. I'm working on an Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS) system for college student transportation, using comparative populations from community, state, and private colleges. Basically, I'm looking at three basic combinations of requirements, and a system that addresses each. But carpooling is playing an increasing part of the mix.

I'm a bit struck by a line in one of the articles I've read-- the "problem" of too many student-owned bicycles "chained to anything that will not move". Umm, isn't this really a measure of success, rather than a problem? I think one place to start is building more bike racks, rather than discouraging their use-- racks are a whole lot cheaper than paving more parking spots.

Just a weird thought hit me while going through my del.ici.ous account- what if I looked at the whole thing as a game- a massively multi-player game. After all, there are lots of generic frameworks out there... and it's a framework more accessible to students. "Players" would be students, with shifting resources, points awarded, etc. Incentives can be quantified and tracked. And I don't think anyone is doing it, or at least not visible to Google.

Wow, this is just about crazy enough to work. Ideally, I'd keep it secret, but will do the second best thing, which is publish it on a blog nobody ever reads. :) After all, this is turning into just another one of my research notebooks.