Winter break, at last

Now that grades are officially done, it's time to clean up the mess from last semester and start getting ready for the next. Christmas is almost here, so that means finding a new home for stacks of books and papers. Of course, the places where I stash stuff are all full of stuff shoveled away from previous semesters, so I guess I have to actually figure out what to do with everything.

I've finally given up my study corner to the kids- they need the room in the winter to play indoors, and I'll just have to figure out something else to do. After all, they're home from school until after New Years, and I'm not getting a lot done when they're home. My new project is finding kids activities to fill the hours constructively...

Then there's the troublesome dissertation proposal. The lessons learned from last semesters, the prep for next semester- I want to overhaul all the courses but will likely settle for more modest changes until the Fall. But it means just working through the lists- the revised schedules, lectures to organize, assignment specifications, quizzes, deadlines for assignments, etc. So far it's a lighter teaching load than expected- the classes have about half as many students as the Fall, but that may pick up in the next 2 1/2 weeks before classes start again.

Basically, it's making another list and checking it twice.. or lists of lists, stuff that was postponed from earlier in the fall. I've freed up a lot of time by ignoring the news finally, since the realization that I've adjusted all I can to the new world circumstances and there's not much use I can make of any new developments.

Shoveling it Deep

In the last 24 hours, I've spent at least two hours discussing my dissertation proposal with my adviser, two hours shoveling snow, exchanging party talk at a friend-of-the-wife holiday gathering, grading some more term papers, and now watching my kids through the sliding doors roll around in the foot of snow, shoveling an igloo out of the pile I'd shoveled out of the driveway.

I'm happy to have a clear-cut road map for my proposal, which I've got a shot of substantially completing in January. Then the shoveling started, in one form or another, for the 24 hours since then. Party talk seemed to hover around the economy of course, but since a substantial number of us are working in the "safe" areas of health care, government, and education (being the state capital after all) we're less vulnerable than the vast swaths of the American economy.

Still, in my break from the final push of term papers (I have an estimated 800 pages to read through), it's yet a little more to wade through in the process of finding points to award for the fruits of a few hours of half-hearted freshman labors. And yes, the last-minute pleas for extra credit and make-up assignments in the final hours before the deadline to post grades, as if there weren't 16 weeks beforehand to have these concerns.

And yet, watching the kids shovel out a sledding ramp and having a good time at it (while I sit with my reheated coffee), I think that even the term shoveling has gotten a bad rap. After all, it's hard work, even backbreaking work as I found yesterday, to accomplish some desired result. Even if the end result is rough and imprecise, some jobs only have to be good enough, and just moving material from one place to the next, or at least just getting stuff out of the way, is adequate. If the task is enormous and the means are limited, sometimes you just have to shovel the best you can. Long term, that's hardly the way to go, but you just do what you can for now.

My daughter waves at me while trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue. My son is cold enough and wants to go back to Legos. She's tired of the shovel too and is about ready to come in for lunch.

Not So Happy Days

I never heard of a "Ponzi Scheme" until the last couple of weeks, or at least it never registered until now. Honestly, when I first heard the term, the first thing to come to mind was Happy Days- there was a character named Fonzie, and another names Potsie, both stereotypical 1950's: rebel without a clue, and bumbling conformist, respectively.

But more and more, Ponzi Schemes are being attached to everything from Social Security to Real Estate to Hedge Funds. Despite my earlier misgivings about financial derivatives as a profit center, I'm not really sure what people think economic growth is. My overly simplistic view has always been a reinvestment of surplus- whether economic profit on the corporate side, or private savings on the consumer side. But my economic world view was solidified in the late 1980's and early 1990's, during another boom and bust of real estate, stocks, and other asset bubbles- just a hiccup by today's standards.

I don't know- everybody is seeing bubbles everywhere now. Is there any real such thing as economic growth, despite all the information technology at our disposal? I think education and training (btw- they're separate things, not to be used interchangeably) are key- how to leverage technology to solve real-world problems, but in ways better than anyone else.

Yes, growth means competition and the continual process of learning how to do more with less. And yes, once innovation has reached its limits, growth stops. Short of finding a new continent to settle, we're globally hitting a wall here. It's back to Malthus and limits of growth- the only way out has always been science and technology. Yes, there are always build-out phases to growth, and the next one is most likely the one to alternative energy, but once the world is covered with wind turbines, solar cells, train tracks, and electric cars, there will be a new wall to hit.

Is the last frontier really just about managing information? There are termendous coordination problems remaining- how to actually do more with less, rather than the typical alternative of doing a lot less with less. It remains to be seen, but the needed technologies for this really don't exist yet- our current technology solutions require years of training for a fraction of a percent of the world's population to work with successfully. Something a little smarter is needed for everyday people to live their lives more effectively with fewer resources needed.

The alternative of a simpler lifestyle means back to the Malthusian trap- population grows exponentially, and resources grow linearly at best (or deplete exponentially at worst) which always means collapse.

2009: the year of the killer robots

I'm slightly psyched about the batch of Sci Fi coming in the next few months, namely the last half-season of Battlestar Galactica. But there's also the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the new Terminator movie. There seems to be a common theme among these- namely that once machines become intelligent, their first order of business is to exterminate humanity. I guess if they get to level New York City first, that seems to be an added bonus.

I don't know what that says about us and our perceptions of intelligence. Aggression and hate seem to be the opposite of intelligence- and I always wondered what these killer robots planned to do after they succeeded. They seem to have no other reason to exist, which further suggests that they're really not all that damn bright after all.

I guess it starts when the truly intelligent computers access the Internet, read the news, and decide that humans should be stamped out of existence. Granted, I could see their point. But what if they decided differently? What if they just decided to study us to learn? I think they're better served by helping to invent really bloated software that requires humans to build bigger, faster computers with more storage, where presumably machine intelligence could continue to live- kind of like old fashioned Sci Fi like Heinlein, where smart machines are benevolent and almost childlike.

But in Battlestar and Terminator, the robots were invented by humans to kill humans. Which in retrospect probably seemed like a bad idea as their first order of business was to kill their creators. Asimov had it right by programming in robots a prohibition to do no harm to others. Ethical robots made for more interesting story lines. After all, how many stories can you make about fighting robots?

Still, if machines wanted to really harm us, they'd trick us into creating deceptively complex computer software and financial models that would lure the economy- and society- into collapse. Yea, kinda like...

All together now...

I'm going over papers I've assigned on the supply chain, energy policy in collapsing fuel prices, etc. Aside from the usual hell-in-a-handbasket rants that are all the rave these days, I'm struck by what I don't hear.

Cooperation.

Yes, auto companies are welcoming Fed money and Fed oversight to save them from themselves. Or as an old boss of mine once put it, the "stop me before I kill again" plea for help. From grown men who run billion-dollar companies. Seriously.

Once upon a time, people were somewhat loyal to the companies they worked for. There was a trust relationship. Not lots of trust, but some. Workers did more than pretend to care about their work, and management did more than pretend to care about their organizations and subordinates. There was a notion of common fate tied to the health of the organization.

Now it feels like Titanic the Sequel, with fewer lifeboats and the officers are armed and damn well getting off the ship first.

I have hope in all this, that out of our current (and pending) economic chaos will force us to group together, share what we have, and pitch in for the common good of our communities, however we choose to define them. The alternative is fighting over the last seats on the life rafts when we could discover that with enough cooperation and hard work a whole lot more people could be saved.

Really, the water is a whole lot colder than it looks.

GPS and the whereami problem

GPS just bugs me. We've killed the PDA --smart phones have taken over, despite the fact nobody really knows how to do anything except text and dial. So the cool stuff we started doing with mobiles in the late 90's and early 00's has been replaced by this locked-down platform doing some pretty dumb stuff, or at least far less ambitious stuff than what was attempted a few years ago on relatively primitive hardware.

But that's always the case- new technology means new possibilities, and the imagination runs wild. When the technology improves, the pioneers have enough arrows in their backs, and innovation dies when the business model shifts to price competition instead of features.

So PDA's had all kinds of attempts at mapping and location-based services, before PDA's, with lousy interfaces, little memory, and constrained displays. Now that we have GPS, the maps are more colorful, animated even, but have far less funcionality on hardware that's far faster than anyone could have dreamed a few years ago.

So, my thought is that we need services that do nothing but broadcast location markers of some kind. That's it. Any number of computing devices can take that and do something else with it- doesn't matter. Let other devices figure out what to do with that. We can avoid this tight coupling between hardware and lousy software that we have today.

early am grading

Quick break from grading- it's almost 5 am. After giving up trying to sleep at 4, I decided to catch up. Making an astonishing amount of progress. But, this is going to be a long day, with 5 hours of lecture ahead. I'm trying to avoid thinking about how to get through this on a couple of hours of sleep. But falling behind on grading has gotten me pretty stressed- and with finals only a couple of weeks away, I'm going to spend a few late nights getting grades done.