First Class Service from a Classless Medium

Posted: November 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The summary of today’s post is that I’m not a fan of curve grading. If you’ve read enough from me about this before, feel free to skip this post. 🙂 Now, I should note that a lot of what is in here is based on my observations of Facebook from the outside – there may be technical stuff that I’m missing because I haven’t had the time to dig down. Clarifications and corrections are welcome.

If you read yesterday’s post, you’ll see a lot of discussion about how people use (or misuse) Facebook but one thing that is becomingly increasingly apparent is that Facebook is trying to do a very difficult thing: offer different tiers of service on a system that is fundamentally not tiered. If you’ve been on a plane recently, you’ll know that you all get to the destination at the same time, regardless of how much you paid. The fundamental service of the airlines, getting you from A to B in a giant metal tube, is such that passengers on the same plane will all have the same experience in terms of travel time. This is, of course, why the differentiators in service revolve around the overall pleasure and comfort of the experience. Flying long-haul economy is a transport miracle but, that aside, it’s not a very pleasant experience. The seats are cramped, you’ll get at least a stiff neck and most likely ballooned legs from being jammed into the seated position for hours. Up in Premium, Business and First, passengers are stretching out, getting more food, have a higher ratio of staff to passenger and enjoy more access to much nicer toilets. But where did all of that extra space and service come from? Here’s a hint: the next time you’re in economy and wonder why you can’t stretch your legs, it’s because someone is paying more to enjoy some of that space up the front of the plane.

Facebook is, at its core, really simple. You create an account. People who are your ‘friends’ decide to monitor the things that you type. You monitor theirs. If you have an interest in a group or page, you’ll ask to see their updates as well. Updates can be displayed in date/time order (newest first) or by level of interest (how many people are talking about it). Well, it was that simple. Now, as you will know, there is an ongoing move towards restricting the degree to which information naturally flows from one person to another. Now, my friends will see most of my posts (unless they take some steps to change the way that they view me) and if I happen to watch a page from a business, the business needs to pay some money to FB to ensure that all of their followers receive all of their updates.

Facebook, in its simplest form, sends updates to interested people but, as the Facebook people have worked out, this does not allow you to easily impose a premium service over the top. You have a free water fountain that serves chilled water. Why would you buy a bottle of water from the guy standing next to the fountain? In this case, the guy owns the fountain and he decides that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. Want to guarantee that you’ll never go thirsty? Better buy my water.

I wouldn’t have a problem with any of this if the base service was kept at a reasonable standard. I’m looking to shift my frequent flyer status for airlines to one of Air New Zealand or Singapore because, in all my experiences, their economy experience is absolutely fine. Plane goes from A to B. Seat is comfortable enough for 15 hours. Staff are nice. Food is fine. On my usual carrier, which shall remain nameless, it takes me longer to recover from the cramped conditions of their economy and aggravates my surgically altered left knee. (For the record, I’m 5’11” and about 190lbs so I should fit into a seat without too much fuss.) Having flown premium and business on nameless airways, I can tell you that it’s fantastic but we have flipped from a below acceptable standard to above acceptable standard (in fact, the food in Business is excessive and gluttonous, in my opinion) without ever having settled on the minimum standard of acceptability for what is, ultimately, all of us flying together in the same metal tube.

Facebook used to have a base, acceptable service, that revolved around reliably showing me things from my friends. Where do sponsored links fit into this? They don’t, unless FB can inject unasked for content into my stream when someone pays them to. So, now, I am reading things from people who are not my friends, that I cannot control, because someone else is paying for it. Of course, the kicker on this is ‘why would you pay FB to do this?’ and the answer is ‘Only if FB would not guarantee universal delivery if you didn’t’. Now, people being people, if FB said “Hey, commercial accounts have to pay this but private individuals wouldn’t” then there would be a surprisingly large number of ‘private individuals’ trying to sell you stuff. So, because of human nature, when FB cuts down on people seeing everything that you post (requiring sponsorship to push ideas or to guarantee universal subscription) this is going to apply pretty much across the board.

Now, I am not paying for Facebook but it is becomingly apparent that I am being sold by Facebook because all of the downgrades that I am seeing are intended to provide a reason for people to pay to reach me as a consumer. My problem is, free or not, the way that Facebook is altering the service to make me as a product more attractive to a consumer is affecting my experience. They are forcing a vast majority of people into a second-class experience in order to be able to sell the default set-up as a first-class experience. There always will be some kind of load filtering on a system like this but this one, so blatantly and explicitly linked to selling reach, really makes you wonder what their long term plans are for their community.

Now, you’ll either be agreeing with me or disagreeing with me by now, as if you stopped reading out of boredom you won’t see this! So let me give you a first/second-class analogy from education: curve grading. If I have a fixed number of A slots in my class then, by extension, anyone extra who would have got an A MUST get a B in order to be able to grant the A’s to other people. Yes, we’ve sorted them by degree of A but, under our original terms, the student has done A-level work, we’re just not giving it to him or her because someone else is being prioritised up and, to preserve the experience of the A people, someone has to get Bs. More insidiously, somebody has to fail. We’ve now gone further than the airline or Facebook examples, because now the people in Business can require that someone be kicked off the plane. You don’t click on enough sponsored links, your login is rescinded and you have to leave Facebook. You may not care about air travel and, let’s be honest, it’s a giant privilege in any way you look at it. You might think “Hey, FB isn’t my life and it’s not like I’m paying for it” and that’s very true.

But carving out a new ‘premium’ experience that is the old ‘fair and general’ experience and doing so by forcing other people into a second-class experience is a pretty lousy way to treat people and, in my opinion, it’s worse when those people are your students and you make them competitive through an artificial resource scarcity, based around some mistaken notion that this is a reasonable thing to do. You don’t have to think hard to come up with examples that quickly demonstrate how broken this kind of system is. Facebook bugs me but it won’t cause me too much grief if it goes away tomorrow. A student’s academic progress, GPA and their own confidence? All too important to put into an artificially imposed additional classification scheme that forces classes where they may not belong.

Official plans for this blog: 2012/2013

Posted: November 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking about how I’m going to go forward after my year long commitment to daily blog updates and I have settled on the decision that the 1st of January, 2013 (Yes, yes, it originally said 2012), at 4:00am Adelaide time, will mark the last of the ‘daily’ posting commitments. From that point on, I will post as things interest me and when I have the time to deliver a good, sound and useful post. I have been concerned for some time that the quality has been sacrificed to get something out and this is not what I set out to do. Two days I sat down to write the blog and stared at the screen for 15 minutes before I sighed, gave up and decided to come back the next day. I then went on, the next day, to post a heap of stuff because I was refreshed. But, frankly, I’m busy enough without adding too many more hoops, bells and whistles to my life. (Unless it’s the circus from Madagascar 3, in which case sign me up!)

Polka dot, polka dot, polka dot, afro!

I do not, for a single moment, regret the commitment because now I know I can do it and it has definitely transformed the way I think about many important things. However, this structure has served its purpose and, once I’ve completed the commitment, I’ll be happy to take a more freeform approach. Now, I’m not saying that I will post more or less, what I am saying is that I will post with less regularity from January 1st and, more importantly, I will have the ability to take some time off if I need to concentrate on projects or work that may then lead to some far more interesting blog posts.

I will still be posting on the daily cycle until then and I thank everyone for continuing to read!

Ethics and Opinion: Please Stop Confusing My Students

Posted: November 14, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

One of the sadly rather expected side benefits of the recent re-election of President Obama has been the predictable outpouring of racist sentiment. Of course, to listen to the people uttering racial slurs and unpleasant requests, they are not actually racists, they are just expressing their opinion. You know?

They’re just sayin’.

A woman is currently being investigated by the Secret Service for Tweeting a heavily charged racial epithet against the President, wrapped up in a paraphrased death threat, and appears puzzled about all of the fuss. After all, it’s just what she thinks and she’s not a racist. Australian former cricketer Greg Ritchie recently uttered some serious racial slurs that are highly inflammatory towards South Africans and can’t see what the big deal is either. He also managed to get in a joke about Muslims. When asked, however, Ritchie had this to say:

“If they take offence that’s their choice.”

His joke, involving Muslims, is in his own words “just a little humourous joke to indicate that they’re not my favourite people of my choice.” Hey, Greg, guess what, when you’re trying to defend yourself against charges of discrimination, perhaps it’s best to do so in a way that is not actually discriminatory? Of course, we’ve been tolerating Ritchie’s antics for years, so it’s not surprising that he is now confused that we don’t find him funny. He, in blackface as pseudo-Indian Mahatma Coate, was a regular on the Australian Rules Football sports variety show “The Footy Show” for years. And, thus we crawl, inexorably, towards my point.

If you’re opinion is actually racism, then it’s a racist opinion. I can completely understand why people don’t want to be labelled as racists because we all know that’s bad but, and here’s the tricky thing, racists are people who believe and say racist things or act in a manner than discriminates against people based on their race. Calling someone a racial epithet because of the race that they belong to counts here and, before we get all ‘classification theory’ about this, there is a world of difference between any classifications of ethnicity that are scientific in nature and slurs. There is also a great deal of difference in how we use this information. The moment that you start saying things like “they’re not my favourite people of choice”, you are saying that you don’t like an entire group that is defined by a given characteristic and, wow, it’s not hard to see where that leads. (Now, no doubt, there is someone who is itching to leap and tell me that ‘aha – Muslims are not a race’. Spare me the sophistry, especially where the Muslims that appear to catch the most problems here are (surprise!) not Caucasian.)

Whenever anyone leaps in and says “statement – I’m just sayin'” or “statement that challenges movements that are egalitarian – playing devil’s advocate” then I really must wonder ‘why?’ I have heard a number of people trying to sneak in sexist comments based on poor evidence or by playing the “Devil’s Advocate” card. “Wow, but what if women aren’t as good at X as men, playing Devil’s advocate/just sayin’/just askin’.” You know, that’s a good question. But it’s not the one that you’re asking. The question that I’m hearing (and I apologise because I have weird ears) is “How can I make a sexist statement with plausible deniability because I am not yet convinced that women are equal?”

This is about fundamental human rights, not an opinion on whether Picard or Kirk would win in a jello-wrestling competition. The questions that we ask, however they are framed, reveal what it is that we believe to be true. And right. And, by extension, what we consider false or wrong.

My real problem with all of this is that my students are like big mobile sponges. They hear a whole heap of stuff before they come to me and, if most of it is opinionated nonsense that magically escapes classification, they will learn that this is how the world works and come to me with a head full of garbage. They’ll recite rubbish at me that they’ve picked up from the world, politics, media, television and their own families that has no place in a University environment. I don’t give a hoot how entitled you feel to have a racist, sexist or discriminatory opinion, it’s going to get called as one and you can argue until you’re blue in the face that saying discriminatory things doesn’t make you discriminatory but, important point, you are almost never as ironically funny as you think you are. (And, yes, we all have to be aware of that. To my shame, I have occasionally gone too far in trying to mock discrimination and I apologetically confess that I have on occasion been less than funny and just plain dumb.) The important thing to ask is why are you trying to set up the situation in the first place?

My students have to think about these things all the time. They cannot guess how people will react to their dumb jokes and supposed ‘irony’. Worse, as people who have had the benefits of more education, other people will look to them (explicitly or not) as thought leaders and the best of my students will have a very wide-ranging impact. I can’t stop people saying silly and hurtful things, but let’s stop the pretence that there are special “get out of jail free” textual containers that allow people to utter the phrasings of discrimination and, yet, mysteriously escape being labelled as such.

(And, for the record, the Internet indicates that Picard would most likely take the match, given that he has mud wrestling experience.)

The Hips Don’t Lie – Assuming That By Hips You Mean Numbers

Posted: November 12, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

For those who missed it, the United States went to the polls to elect a new President. Some people were surprised by the outcome.

Even Benedict Cumberbatch, seen here between takes on Sherlock Series 3.

Some people were not, including the new King of Quants, Nate Silver. Silver studied economics at the University of Chicago but really came to prominence in his predictions of baseball outcomes, based on his analysis of the associated statistics and sabermetrics. He correctly predicted, back in 2008, what would happen between Obama and Clinton, and he predicted, to the state, what the outcome would be in this year’s election, even in the notoriously fickle swing states. Silver’s approach isn’t secret. He looks at all of the polls and then generates a weighted average of them (very, very simplified) in order to value certain polls over others. You rerun some of the models, change some parameters, look at it all again and work out what the most likely scenario is. Nate’s been publishing this regularly on his FiveThirtyEight blog (that’s the number of electors in the electoral college, by the way, and I had to look that up because I am not an American) which is now a feature of the New York Times.

So, throughout the entire election, as journalists and the official voices have been ranting and railing, predicting victory for this candidate or that candidate, Nate’s been looking at the polls, adjusting his model and publishing his predictions. Understandably, when someone is predicting a Democratic victory, the opposing party is going to jump up and down a bit and accusing Nate of some pretty serious bias and poll fixing. However, unless young Mr Silver has powers beyond those of mortal men, fixing all 538 electors in order to ensure an exact match to his predictions does seem to be taking fixing to a new level – and, of course, we’re joking because Nate Silver was right. Why was he right? Because he worked out a correct mathematical model and  method that took into account how accurate each poll was likely to be in predicting the final voter behaviour and that reliable, scientific and analytic approach allowed him to make a pretty conclusive set of predictions.

There are notorious examples of what happens when you listen to the wrong set of polls, or poll in the wrong areas, or carry out a phone poll at a time when (a) only rich people have phones or (b) only older people have landlines. Any information you get from such biased polls has to be taken with a grain of salt and weighted to reduce a skewing impact, but you have to be smart in how you weight things. Plain averaging most definitely does not work because this assumes equal sized populations or that (mysteriously) each poll should be treated as having equal weight. Here’s the other thing, though, ignoring the numbers is not going to help you if those same numbers are going to count against you.

Example: You’re a student and you do a mock exam. You get 30% because you didn’t study. You assume that the main exam will be really different. You go along. It’s not. In fact, it’s the same exam. You get 35%. You ignored the feedback that you should have used to predict what your final numbers were going to be. The big difference here is that a student can change their destiny through their own efforts. Changing the mind of the American people from June to November (Nate published his first predictions in June) is going to be nearly impossible so you’re left with one option, apparently, and that’s to pretend that it’s not happening.

I can pretend that my car isn’t running out of gas but, if the gauge is even vaguely accurate, somewhere along the way the car is going to stop. Ignoring Nate’s indications of what the final result would be was only ever going to work if his model was absolutely terrible but, of course, it was based on the polling data and the people being polled were voters. Assuming that there was any accuracy to the polls, then it’s the combination of the polls that was very clever and that’s all down to careful thought and good modelling. There is no doubt that a vast amount of work has gone into producing such a good model because you have to carefully work out how much each vote is worth in which context. Someone in a blue-skewed poll votes blue? Not as important as an increasing number of blue voters in a red-skewed polling area. One hundred people polled in a group to be weighted differently from three thousand people in another – and the absence of certain outliers possibly just down to having too small a sample population. Then, just to make it more difficult, you have to work out how these voting patterns are going to turn into electoral college votes. Now you have one vote that doesn’t mean the difference between having Idaho and not having Idaho, you have a vote that means the difference between “Hail to the Chief” and “Former Presidential Candidate and Your Host Tonight”.

Nate Silver’s work has brought a very important issue to light. The numbers, when you are thorough, don’t lie. He didn’t create the President’s re-election, he merely told everyone that, according to the American people, this was what was going to happen. What is astounding to me, and really shouldn’t be, is how many commentators and politicians seemed to take Silver’s predictions personally, as if he was trying to change reality by lying about the numbers. Well, someone was trying to change public perception of reality by talking about numbers, but I don’t think it was Nate Silver.

This is, fundamentally, a victory for science, thinking and solid statistics. Nate put up his predictions in a public space and said “Well, let’s see” and, with a small margin for error in terms of the final percentages, he got it right. That’s how science is supposed to work. Look at stuff, work out what’s going on, make predictions, see if you’re right, modify model as required and repeat until you have worked out how it really works. There is no shortage of Monday morning quarterbacks who can tell you in great detail why something happened a certain way when the game is over. Thanks, Nate, for giving me something to show my students to say “This is what it looks like when you get data science right.”

Remind me, however, never to bet against you at a sporting event!

Schopenhauer is Bogarting the Chopstick: Resource Scarcity in a Time of Sufficiency.

Posted: November 11, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Schopenhauer holding invisible chopstick and waiting for Heidegger to put his down.

There’s a classic problem in Computer Science called the Dining Philosophers’ problem and I’m going to introduce it here for those who haven’t heard it before. The original formulation (Tony Hoare after Dijkstra’s basic problem) used forks and spaghetti. I’m Australian so I’m going bow to the delight of fusion cuisine and use chopsticks and rice (I didn’t invent this, let me hasten to add, this has been a common restatement for years now). For those who don’t know, to pick anything up, you need two chopsticks. Here’s the problem:

Five philosophers are sitting around a circular table, silently, with a chopstick between each pair of philosophers. There is a bowl of rice on that table that every philosopher can reach (or they each have a bowl, it doesn’t matter, the rice is infinite but cannot be consumed without chopsticks). These philosophers aren’t talking: they either think (silently) or eat. If they wish to eat they need to pick up the chopsticks on either side of them. A philosopher will eat for a while, then stop and put down the chopsticks on the table. A philosopher can pick up the chopsticks separately or at the same time, as long as they are on the table. He or she cannot start eating without having both chopsticks.

The problem that is presented in terms of philosophers who think or eat, in a world of rice and chopsticks, is actually a very good example of competing access to shared resources and it very neatly and quickly identifies how such a simpler set-up can quickly fail if we don’t think carefully about how we control access. What we want is way that the philosophers can behave that allows them all to eat and think alternately without having to provide some sort of fixed schedule or perfect knowledge of what every other philosopher is going to do.

There are enough chopsticks for at most two philosophers to eat at the same time (there must be five chopsticks and we need two to eat) so we know that it is possible that the philosophers can eat, given how the chopsticks are arranged. (If we had stated the problem the same way but included only 1 chopstick, or 2 in a way that no philosopher could grab both, then we could determine that everyone would starve.) What might be less obvious is that it is possible to enter a state called deadlock, where our system reaches a state where no progress is possible. What would happen, for example, if after a period of thinking, every philosopher decided to pick up their left hand chopstick, pausing before picking up the right? In this case, every philosopher holds one chopstick, which is not enough to allow eating, but now there are none left on the table! If we have not thought about how we will give that resource back then we are at risk of leaving the system in that state. If, more subtly, we haven’t thought about the possibility that we can’t start eating (and we know that eating has a duration), then we will wait indefinitely for a second chopstick that will never come, because we didn’t consider that waiting for a chopstick could also have a finite duration.

Of course, just putting in a time interval that we wait before putting the fork down is not necessarily going to work either. If all philosophers pick up their left chopstick at the same time, but put it down after 10 minutes, then this behaviour will cycle forever – now we’re seeing livelock. (I won’t go into the technical detail but the key difference between deadlock and live lock is that deadlock sticks in one state, where livelock switches between states but still makes no progress in this transition. Deadlock is a brick wall in the corridor, livelock is the dance between you and a coworker as you try to sidestep each other in the same corridor until you both die of politeness.)

This problem is at the core of Computer Science and Operating Systems, in particular, as modern systems are made up of lots and lots of activity being conducted over one set of resources. There are several very interesting solutions to these types of problems and it illustrates one very important point in communicating ideas to students: the analogy that we use (if we use one) has to be familiar to the students and robust enough to correctly demonstrate the idea.

The original version of the problem, as I heard it as well, involved forks and spaghetti. Philosophers needed two forks to eat. That’s fine, but most of my students then say “but I only need one fork to eat spaghetti” and you then have the choice of saying “Ah, but you need two forks to lift spaghetti” or you start making the model arbitrarily fixed (“you just need two in this case”). If you make it a knife and a fork, which is how many people eat, then you immediately have a problem as you cannot require a knife and a fork pair and expect anything sensible to happen with an odd number. For an odd number of pieces of cutlery, one philosopher is sitting there with either two forks (default problem) or two knives (and commits seppuku rather than wait to die a slow longer death of starvation).

The other interesting thing that we lead into, when we present this problem, is that we can talk about two very important ideas: safety and liveness. Safety constraints stop anything bad from happening and are sometimes placed on to systems to protect them (from us, or us from them). Liveness goals require us to try and make something good happen whenever we can do so, so that we may make as much progress as possible towards our goal. Adding these two new considerations adds new dimensions to our original problem, which amounted to “let the philosophers think and eat without starving”. Now we have to think about how to potentially protect the philosophers from each other and from themselves but this is balanced against a requirement to ensure that we actually allow the philosophers to make as much progress as possible.

In discussing “Dining Philosophers” and the reason that we might use chopsticks, we immediately start to get the students thinking about what they do, with an example that matches what the real experience is. Of course, in Australia, we use chopsticks a lot. The restatement (which is both commonly used and effectively global) takes a good abstraction that conceals some clever thinking and makes it even better. Like many things that start well, more thought and the involvement of more people can often be beneficial. Of course, many of my students ask “why can’t they just speak to each other?’ which is a perfectly reasonable question but then requires co-ordination and communication burden – but it’s worth noting that the Chandy / Ayushi solution does add that as well! This question gives us a way to talk about how the real systems work in more detail but, more subtly, it’s a question and that means that someone is potentially interested in the answer, even if they thought they were being flippant.

Seriously? Victimising Other Students is Not Letting Your Hair Down

Posted: November 10, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

The Sun-Herald newspaper has a column called “The Loaded Dog” that allows readers to explore the controversial (‘explosive’) issues of the week. Given that scandal that is still ongoing involving St John’s college, this is their question:

Does the university college system need a complete overhaul or should young people be allowed to be let their hair down in peace?

For the love of all that is good and educational, could there be a more disingenuous framing of a serious incident that has had and continues to have a major impact on young people? This is an ugly and false dichotomy that is yet more of the nonsensical victim blaming that is often used by bullies and their supporters. “Can’t you take a joke?” “I didn’t mean anything by it.” “You’ve got no sense of humour (,love)” “They’re just letting off steam.” and, my favourite piece of rank and festering non-contribution to any discussion that involves the male gender acting atrociously:

“Boys will be boys.”

No, rapists will be rapists. Thugs will be thugs. Bullies need victims but, of course, many people who are bullies don’t like to be called bullies and, especially when their own glittering futures may be at stake, they most certainly don’t want it recorded anywhere that their actions may be down to anything other than “they were asking for it” or, perhaps, “we’ve always done it this way.” Don’t say “Boys will be boys” to excuse the bad behaviour of yourself, your friends or your relatives. It’s a lie that we need to leave behind.

There is nothing about what happened at St John’s College that was even vaguely on the scale of “letting one’s hair down”. If an individual student drank too much and threw up on a tram – eh. It’s not attractive but that’s a dumb thing people do. If two students are caught having consensual sex on the statue of the (insert statue’s name here), well I hope that they practised safe sex, but that’s pretty much their business when they’re of age.

When over 30 students stand around kneeling people and coerce them into drinking something that is deliberately disgusting, to punish them, we are seeing abuse. When furniture is burned on campus, it is a message of defiant and repellant strength – tyranny signalled by flaming Ikea. This is about the victimisation of the weak. People do not “let their hair down” by organising gang rape or the Jonestown massacre. “Letting your hair down” is about you, not how you abuse other people.

Let’s not forget that the victims, like most abused, are more likely to inflict the same thing on the people that they gain control over. For the rest of their lives. This is never what we want for our children, our students or our citizens. Let’s be honest about violence, intimidation and thuggery. Let’s stop blaming the victims. ‘Let their hair down in peace?’ – for shame, Kate Cox, to put your name to such weasel words. Let me rewrite the sentence for you:

“Does the university college system need a complete overhaul or are the actions allegedly carried out at St John’s College an acceptable and expected part of University Life?”

I cannot quite believe how much writing I’ve managed to do on something that should have been a complete no-brainer. Students were identified as taking part in a heinous act, part of a series, that nearly killed someone. Why are we still talking about this in terms other than “the matter has been addressed, the victims are safe and we have changed the situation so that this cannot happen again.” I’ve got to the stage where I’ve realised that claiming that you can’t make punishments stick because you can’t identify the ringleader is very, very weak beer as an argument.

You lead when you step up and take control of a situation. If you hang back when something bad is happening and you could have acted to stop it, or withdrawn your participation, then you are complicit. If you were bullied or coerced into doing something then I have sympathy for you (obviously, or my anti-bullying stance makes no sense) but the students who have continued the acts of vandalism and anti-social behaviour at St John’s, and are proudly wearing t-shirts celebrating their acts,  are either some of the most effectively brainwashed people on the planet or they are active participants.

The Vice Chancellor the University associated with St John’s has already taken the slightly unprecedented step of contacting all of the students to reassure them and ask if any of them need help. Well, that’s nice and obviously well worth while but how could a College so closely associated with the University have been allowed to get to the point of this year’s activities in the first place? If I genuinely thought a student was at risk, you’d have a difficult time shutting me up. My academic freedom comes with a cost, that it must be exercised in the interests of my students, my colleagues and the truth. Let’s hope that this is the last that I have to write on this except for solid positive developments in the near future.

The Limits of Time

Posted: November 9, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m writing this on Monday (and Thursday night), after being on the road for teaching, and I’ve been picking up the pieces of a hard drive replacement (under warranty) compounded by the subsequent discovery that at least one of my backups is corrupted. This has taken what should have been a catch-up day and turned it into a “juggle recovery/repair disk/work on secondary machine” day but, hey, I’m not complaining too much – at least I have two machines and took the trouble to keep them synchronised with each other. The worst outcome of today’s little backup issue is that I have a relatively long reinstallation process ahead of me, because I haven’t actually lost anything yet except the convenient arrangement of all of my stuff.

It does, however, reinforce one of the lessons that it took me years to learn. If you have an hour, you can do an hour’s worth of work. I know, that sounds a little ‘aw shucks’ but some things just take time to do and you have to have the time to do them. My machine recovery was scheduled to take about four hours. When it had gone for five, I clicked on it to discover that it had stopped on detecting the bad backup. I couldn’t have done that at the 30 minute mark. Maybe I could have tried to wake it up at the 2 hour mark, and maybe I would have hit the error earlier, but, in reality that wasn’t going to happen because I was doing other work.

Why is this important? Because I am going to get 1, maybe 2, attempts per day to restore this machine until it finally works. It takes hours to do it and there’s nothing I can do to make it faster. (You’ll see down the bottom that this particular prediction came true because the backup restoration has now turned out to have some fundamental problems).

When students first learn about computers, they don’t really have an idea about how long things take and how important it is to make their programs work quickly. Computational complexity describes how we expect programs to behave when we change the amount of data that they’re working on, either in terms of how much space they take up or how long they take to compute. The choice of approach can lead to massive differences in performance. Something that takes 60 seconds on one approach can take an hour on another. Scale up the size of data you’re looking at and the difference is between ‘will complete this week’ and ‘I am not going to live that long’.

When you look at a computing problem, and the resources that you have, a back of an envelope calculation will very rapidly tell you how long it will take (with a bit of testing and trial and error in some cases). If you don’t allow this much time for the solution, you probably won’t get it. Worse case is that you start something running and then you stop it, thinking it’s not going to finish, but you actually stopped it just before it was going to finish. Time estimation is important. A lot of students won’t really learn this, however, until it comes back and bites them when they overshoot. With any luck, and let’s devote some effort so it’s not just luck, they learn what to look for when they’re estimating how long things actually take.

I wasn’t expecting to have my main machine back up in time to do any work on it today, because I’ve done this dance before, but I was hoping to have it ready for tomorrow. Now, I have to plan around not having it for tomorrow either (and, as it turns out, it won’t be back before the weekend). Worst case is that I will have to put enough time aside to do a complete rebuild. However, to rebuild it will take some serious time. There’s no point setting aside the rebuild as something that I devote my time or weekend to, because it doesn’t require that much attention and I can happily work around the major copies in hour-long blocks to get useful work done.

When you know how long something takes and you plan around that, even those long boring blocks of time become something that can be done in parallel, around the work that also must happen. I see a lot of students who sit around doing something that’s not actually work while they wait for computation or big software builds to finish. Hey, if you’ve got nothing else to do then feel free to do nothing or surf the web. The only problem is that very few of us ever have nothing else to do but, by realising that something that takes a long time will take a long time, we can use filler tasks to drag down the number of things that we still have left to do.

This is being challenged at the moment because the restoration is resolutely failing and, regrettably, I am now having to get actively involved because the ‘fix the backup’ regime requires me to try things, and then try other things, in order to get it working. The good news is I still have large blocks of time – the bad news is that I’m doing all of this on a secondary machine that doesn’t have the same screen real estate. (What a first world problem!)

What a fantastic opportunity to eat my own dog food. 🙂 Tonight, I’m sitting down to plan out how I can recover from this and be back up to date on Monday, with at least one fully working system and access to all of my files. I still need to allow for the occasional ‘try this on the backup’ and then wait several hours, but I need to make sure that this becomes a low priority tasks that I schedule, rather than one that interrupts me and becomes a primary focus. We’ll see how well that goes.

The St John’s Incident: The Shaking of the Stones

Posted: November 8, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I recently wrote of a New South Wales University-affliated college where hazing had reached dangerous and thuglike levels. It now appears that the publicity that these events have been granted in some parts of the media (I say some because the ‘Australian’ main news site, news.com.au, is carrying very little on this, and almost all of this is coming via the Sydney Morning Herald) is now having a desirable effect upon those who can change the College’s direction. Both the Archbishop of Sydney and the Premier (State government leader) of New South Wales have come out swinging. Cardinal Pell has requested that all of the Catholic priests associated with the College council resign their positions, leaving the council unable to function, and the Premier has made some (what must be very ominous) statements to the effect that the government may consider changing the acts that define and control the College.

Remember that incident I mentioned where the teenage girl had to be hospitalised? The 33 students who were directly involved were originally assigned community service, suspension and were barred from holding committee positions or offices for the rest of the term. After a rather interesting appeals process, most of these requirements were quashed, including the “no office” requirement. Of course, now this means that seven of the nine members of the student house committee will come from the 33 students who nearly killed a girl by intimidating her into drinking a rather unpleasant cocktail of things designed to make someone sick. I should mention, however, that this drinking incident was seen as ‘justice’ for the terrible crime that this girl, and four others, had committed.

Her crime? She had walked forwards at a time when she should have been walking backwards. That is, of course, worth public degradation and a night in the hospital!

One of the other Council members, Roslyn Arnold, resigned her position earlier this year, in disgust at the actions she was seeing and the way that the council was not acting to address the issue. In this article, she says, quite sensibly, that the current toxicity of the student environment at the College is nothing that a sane parent would wish on their children. But it’s also about stretngth of leadership and having the guts to say when something is wrong. As she says in the article:

“In whatever sphere of influence you function, part of the price of being a truly good leader is speaking out.”

One of the less pleasant things that has emerged from all of this is that the culture of initiation and inappropriate behaviour at St John’s has apparently been going on for many years. The Honourable Joe Hockey, MP, a federally elected politician and the Shadow Treasurer, is a Johnsman (a previous college attendee) and he had this to say, in this article, after confirming that rituals had been in place when he was at St John’s:

”Let’s not gild the lily on this sort of stuff,” he said.

”I think if you open the lid on colleges and campuses and frat houses right around the world … by the general standard of behaviour, it would be deemed to be pretty lewd and inappropriate.”

Hang on – everyone’s doing it so it’s ok? No wonder there’s a discipline problem at St John’s, if the likely outcome of involving previous alumni is that they are so convinced that ritual abuse if just something that happens around the world. I should note that another article, found here, registers Mr Hockey’s support for the clean-up, although he ducks the issue as to whether he was ever directly involved in initiation. As he coyly puts it, “I’ve been initiated in the school of life”. Funny, but a simple “No” would have cleared that question up, wouldn’t it? Is this the real power of St John’s? You can no longer answer a simple yes/no question because you would either be complicit in vile and questionable acts, or you might just possibly offend your old school chums by saying “no” as if you disapproved of something? Excuse me for putting words in the Minister’s mouth but he seems to have left the answer hanging.

No wonder the Premier is looking at this because, right now, it appears that anyone who has been through St John’s may just not have the right level of objectivity to deal with it. Before you accuse me of overreacting on the basis of a single comment from Joe Hockey, I am looking at this in the light of the actions of those alumni who have already reduced the penalties against the 33 students from earlier and who continue to erode the “pro reform” approach that the new Rector is taking. I read an interesting comment from a former Johnsman who claimed that he left the college before third year so that he wouldn’t have to take part in inflicting the bastardisation.

Are we in any doubt the victimisation and intimidation are bad? That producing hierarchies out of fear form the imagination crippling extrinsic cages that we all know just don’t work for cognitive activities? That people who are abused tend to become abusers?

To be honest, it’s a little late for people to discover how bad this is, as Roslyn Arnold quickly realised when she left a poisonous culture and was told that she was overreacting. (Good to see that gaslighting is still going strong!) But a strong statement from the associated Church and Government are the first part of what is required to restore confidence that children and students are safe from harm when in our schools, Universities and associated institutions. The second part is real, lasting change to stamp out these activities and send the message that the people who do these things are not guardians of tradition or, in any way, to be respected.

Thugs are thugs. The sooner that the defenders of ritual humiliation and intimidation realise this, grow up and let it go, the sooner we can get back to education and building something better. I would apologise for lecturing on this subject except that, as Professor Arnold reminds us, part of being a good leader of any kind is speaking out, supporting those who oppose stupidity such as this, and taking a stand for something better. Be in no doubt, we need something better than this!

Planning Spontaneity

Posted: November 5, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Whenever I teach an intensive mode class, as I’ve just finished doing, I have to face the fact that I just don’t have the same level of ‘slack’ time between classes that I’m used to. In a traditional model of 2-3 lectures a week, I usually get a break of up to 5 or so days between each teaching activity to make changes based on student feedback, to rehearse and to plan. When you’re teaching 3 hours on Friday, 6 hours on Saturday and 7 hours on Sunday, and adding a good hour of extra time per session on for student questions, you have no slack.

I like to able to take the class in a wide range of directions, where student questions and comments allow the exploration of the knowledge in a way that recognises how the students appear to be engaging with it. I still get all of the same content across (and it’s in the notes and probably podcasts as well) but we may meander a fair bit on our path through it. I learned, very early on, that being able to be spontaneous like this and still cover everyone was not something that I could achieve without planning.

The New Caledonian Crow can spontaneously solve problems without planning. I’m guessing that this doesn’t include teaching Computer Networks to humans.

If I don’t ask students any questions, or they don’t ask me any, then I can predict how the lecture will roll out. I can also predict that most students will end up asleep and that they will learn very little. Not a good solution. I like to be able to try different things, other activities, focus on issues of direct concern to the students but, given that I have almost no reaction time in a tight teaching mode like this, how can I do it? Here are five things that I’ve found are useful. There are more but these are my top five and I hope that they’re helpful – there’s nothing really earth-shattering here but there’s a tweak here and there.

  1. Get any early indications you can of what students are interested in. Use this to identify areas that might get explored more.

    Have you set an assignment on ‘subject X’? Students will be interested in subject X. Has something been in the news? Is there something on the student’s mind? In the previous post, I used a question board to find out what each student was really curious about. A quick scan of that every now and then gave me an idea of what the students would talk about, ask questions about and care about. It also allowed me to do some quick looking up to confirm areas that weren’t on the traditional course that could add more interest.

  2. Review the course and know what can be dropped. Plan not to but have it as a safety valve.

    Ok, this is Teaching 101, but it’s essential in an intensive course. Once it’s over, you’ve missed the chance to add new content and you only have 2.5 days to get it across. I know which areas I can reduce depth on if we’ve gone deep elsewhere but, sometimes, I’m in a section where nothing can be dropped. Therefore I use that knowledge to say “I can’t drop anything” so I have to use a different strategy like…

  3. Have a really good idea of how long everything will take. Be prepared to hold to time if you have to.

    If you run 10 minutes over in a traditional lecture, the next lecturer will grumble, the students will grumble, but the end of the day resets the problem. Do that in intensive mode and you lose an hour for every six lectures. On the course I just did, you’d lose nearly three lectures (worst case). Yes, yes, we’re all rehearsing our content and re-reading it before we present, but intensive mode students have different demands, and may keep asking you questions because they know this is one of their few chances to talk to you face-to-face, which brings me to…

  4. Understand your students.

    My intensive students have full-time jobs when they’re not in my classroom. They’re so dedicated to their studies that they work 5 days, spend Friday night with me, work Saturday morning, and then spend Saturday and Sunday afternoon with me. What does this mean? It means that I can’t just run over on Friday night because I feel like it. I need to respect the demands on their time. Some of them might be late because of public transport or work running over and things like that – because we’re all jamming stuff in. I don’t condone students not caring about things but I do try to understand my students and respect the amount of effort they’re putting in. What else does this mean? I have to be very interesting and very clear in my explanations on Sunday, preferably with lots of interactive activities of one form or another, because everyone is really, really tired by then.

  5. Understand yourself.

    The whole reason I plan really carefully for these activities is that, by Sunday, I’m pretty tired myself. University courses do not usually run at this pace and this is not my usual approach. I’m rounding out a 10 day week at a pace that’s faster than usual. While I will still be quite happily able to teach, interact and work with my students, there’s no way that I’m going to be very creative. If I want to support interesting activities on Sunday, I need to plan them early and identify their feasibility on Friday and Saturday. However, I plan with the assumption that it will go ahead.

This Sunday I ran a collaborative activity that I had planned earlier, foreshadowed to the students and used as a driver for thinking about certain parts of the course. It ran, and ran well, but there’s no way that I could have carried it out ‘off the cuff’ and everything good that happened on Sunday had been planned at least a few days in advance, with some of it planned weeks before.

I love being spontaneous in the classroom but it has taken me years to realise that the best opportunities for the kind of spontaneity that builds useful knowledge are almost always very carefully planned.

 

Wall of Questions – Simple Student Involvement

Posted: November 4, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Teaching an intensive mode class can be challenging. Talking to anyone for 6 hours in a row (however you try and break it up) requires you to try and maintain engagement with student, but the student has to want to become and stay engaged! We’re humans so we’re always more interested in things when it is relevant to our interests – the question now becomes “How can I make students care about what I’m teaching because it is relevant to them?”

I’ve learned a lot from looking at the great work coming out of CS Unplugged, so I decided to take a low-tech approach to getting the students involved in the knowledge construction in the course.

On the Friday night of teaching, I gave my students a simple homework question: “What is your big question about networking?” This could be technical, social or crystal-ball gazing. The next morning, I handed out some large sticky notes in a variety of garish colours and asked them to write their questions on the notes and stick them on the board. This is what it looked like this morning (after about 6 hours of teaching).

The Big Network Question Board

The blue, orange and pink rectangles are questions. The ones on the left are yet to be answered. The ones on the right have been answered. (The green post-its are 2D bit parity as an audience participation magic trick.)

I’ve been answering these questions as fill-ins, where I have gaps, but a lot of them address issues that I was planning to cover anyway. The range is, however, far wider than I would have thought of but it’s given me a chance to address the applications and implications of networking, to directly answer questions that are of interest to the students.

Here are some (not verbatim) examples: What happened to the versions of the Internet Protocol that aren’t 4 or 6? What would happen if we had a human colony on Mars in terms of network implications? Was the IPv4 allocation ‘fair’ in terms of all countries? Could you run WiFi in the underground train network and, if so, what is the impact of the speed of the train? Will increased WiFi coverage give us cancer?

Every student has a question on the board and, now, every student is (at least to a slight degree) involved in the course. A lot of the questions that are left are security questions, and I’ll answer them as part of my security lectures this afternoon.

If you like this, and want to try it, then I am not claiming any originality for this but I can offer some suggestions:

  1. Give the students a little time to think about the question. It’s a good homework assignment.
  2. Get them to fill out the notes in class. As they finish their notes and pop them up to the board, it appears to encourage other people to finish their own notes to get them up. The notes are also shorter because the students want to get it done quickly.
  3. Once the notes are up, quickly review them to see how you can use them and where they fit into your teaching.
  4. When you can, group the notes by theme based on what you are teaching. I left them unordered for a while and I kept having to exhaustively search them, which is irritating.
  5. Be bold and prominent – the board is an eye-catcher and it clearly says “We have questions!” It’s also dynamic because I can easily rearrange it, move it or regroup the notes.

I’m still thinking about what to do with the notes next. I am planning to keep them but am unsure as to whether I want to ‘capture’ answers to this as I may have a knock-on effect for the next offering of this course.

What pleased me was the students who recognised their own question, because their faces lit up as I spoke to their concern. For a relatively low effort investment, that’s a great reward.

Could I have used an electronic forum? Yes, but then the focus isn’t in the classroom. The board, and your question, are in the classroom. You can go up and look at anyone else’s to see if it’s interesting. Rather than taking the application focus out of the classroom, we’re bringing in the realities and the answers as I go through the teaching.

Is there a risk that they’ll ask something I don’t know? No more than usual, and now I can sneak off and look it up before I answer, because it’s on the board. Being an honest man, I would of course have to say “I had to look this up” but I did warn them that this might happen. If a student can ask a question that has me scratching my head but I can develop an answer, I think that’s a very valuable example and it’s probably a nice moment for the student too.

I’ll certainly be doing this again!

 

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