The BFC Computing Weblog

I went to a SwANH seminar a few weeks back which was quite good. One thing I didn’t realize was that SwANH was going to give my e-mail address to the event sponsor as part of the deal. I just found this out as I received a product advertisement from them to the address I provided to SwANH.

I understand the need for sponsors, and perhaps ‘to sweeten the pot’, but I might have provided a better address had I known. File under ‘for future reference’.

Last week I attended and presented at FOSSVT, a conference focused on Open Source in Education. Organized by the National Center for Open Source in Education, FOSSVT, at Lake Morey Resort in Fairlee, VT, was attended by over a hundred educators and technology specialists.

Executive Director Bryant Patten did yeoman’s work organizing the inaugural event, arguably the most successful Open Source event in Northern New England in recent memory. Kudos to Bryant.

I presented “Taking Control of Your Network Using FLOSS Software”, a talk about why it’s important to have a well-regulated network, and a whirlwind tour of a bunch of Free (Libré) Open Source Software (FLOSS) tools that could be useful for educators and technologists looking to take control of a school network. We covered some concepts, troubleshooting techniques, and resources available for further study.

As promised here are the slides . (3.3MB PDF)

I previously wrote some thoughts on the Trustees Decision of 2007, which for those who haven’t read them, it basically boils down to “it sucks, but it won’t last.” But I didn’t specify any mechanisms by which change would be effected.

Since I wrote last I’ve done some more reading on the roles of the Trustees, the Charter, the Alumni Constitution, and who has power and authority over what. I doubt any lawsuits are going to change the current situation - I think the AoA has been mortally wounded. “I’m not Dead Yet!” is only worth something until the undertaker’s club meets its target, but go ahead and prove me wrong on these points, I want to be wrong.

The debate is certainly rancorous and many of the discussion boards have descended into acrimonious anonymous postings, debasing the reputation of all Alumni. I suspect this is a bit of ridicule on the part of those defeated in recent elections and a feeling of helplessness, betrayal even, by those on the other side. Emotions run high and it serves none well.

So, this is here to declare the situation not helpless. Now I do believe it is futile for anonymous posters to whine, “fine, I’m not sending my yearly contribution” online, but the power of the Alumni *is* in those contributions, both large and small. When the question is asked, “what right do Alumni think they have to have a say in how the College is run?” the answer is, “the College couldn’t run without their support.” I can’t exactly say to what degree that’s true - if somebody can tease apart the annual report and find that number, please post a comment.

We can also figure out what percentage of the alumni voted for the ‘insurgent’ candidates but I’m not sure anybody on the outside can tell what percentage of giving that group represents. This would be very handy to know.

So, what choice do they have? Stop giving to the College they love and thus weaken it? Give anyway, and just accept that the Alumni shall have no real control over the College’s destiny? No, as I wrote earlier, the Alumni derive power not just through their contributions (which isn’t remarkably different today than in the past), but through their ability to organize (that’s what’s new and deeply troubling to the status quo). So, this needs to be applied to the cynical version of the Golden Rule.

Alumni Investment Corporation. As of this writing the term has no hits on Google. Maybe it exists by another name - somebody educate me, I am not expert in the ways of educational fundraising, though I’ve never heard of this idea before. But here’s the basic idea: form an investment vehicle for like-minded Alumni to donate funds into in lieu of making donations directly to the College. The corporation would have to have a clear set of principles, by-laws, etc. so contributors know where their money is going. Being an investment vehicle, the investors would be issued shares and thus be able to pull their money out should the governance of the fund go astray. Changes to the fund’s policies would be done though a shareholder vote (stop me if you’ve heard this before) and there’d be nothing to stop competing funds, should they become necessary (though a proliferation of funds would incur weakness to each). The fund would need to be well-managed, so that it grows safely over time, and it would probably have to do the same kinds of fundraising (or smarter) that the College does. It would disperse funds to the College on its own terms, with strings attached. If the College were uncooperative, the fund would instead grow, until such time as the College were willing to accept the money.

There isn’t much here that’s new - there are mutual funds that organize to effect social change - the twist here is a select set of potential contributors and a very specific set of potential beneficiaries. The fund would have to be properly organized to garner a charity status so it would be as attractive a donation target under our Federal Income Tax regime. Obviously, profits from shareholder withdrawals would be taxable.

This arrangement leverages the two powers the Alumni really have and largely ignores the one that has been or can be abrogated from it. It allows the disaffected Alumni to continue to donate to the College, but in a manner they find morally acceptable and fiscally prudent.

Now, I have no idea how to organize this nor the time or expertise to manage it (I’m busy trying to get a startup funded), so somebody take the ball and run with it. I might even donate.

Things change.

Sometimes there’s something you can do do stop it. And sometimes there’s not, but you try anyway.

On Saturday, the Dartmouth Board of Trustees enacted changes to the Dartmouth Constitution, last modified over a century ago, to change the balance of power from 50/50 alumni-voted/administration-appointed to a 33/66 split, in favor of the administration. They fancy to implement a model closer to Harvard’s, which isn’t all that well regarded by folks who aren’t in the habit of appointing trustees. Much more info on what happened and why can be found at Dartblog.

The strategy isn’t even all that creative - Roosevelt tried this in 1939 when the Supreme Court wasn’t voting the way he expected it should, and it’s seen as the most egregious political blunder of his Presidency (quite the curious model to emulate). Just as that move enraged the other three branches of government, this has sparked talk about getting big name law firms involved in the process. It’s even brought ridicule from the non-academic intellectuals - the Wall Street Journal gave the idea a good dressing down. A shame, but this will passs.

What won’t pass is the surge in Alumni participation in governance in the College, and that’s why this article appears on my blog. It’s about the Internet.

10 years ago, Dartmouth offered its alumni (n.b.: this blog is in English, not Latin) a lifetime e-mail account. Then it added some alumni services websites, access to the Library, online voting, social networking, etc. The idea was to keep the Alumni closer to the College. And guess what? It worked.

But rather than just fondly fire up BlitzMail and think, “boy, I think I’ll send those guys $100 today,” they also thought, “where’s that money going … what are these guys up to?” And so they checked in and the majority didn’t like what they saw.

So, they organized websites, campaigns, analysis sites, and decided to set out to change things, in the liberal democratic fashion set out for them in the Constitution.

Now, these alumni didn’t share the same values and plans that the incumbents shared, and they were batting a thousand. The Trustees weren’t used to the Alumni exercising their rights as laid forth in the Constitution. So “something had to be done”. And it was. But it won’t last.

You see, the Internet isn’t going away. The power of Alumni to communicate and collaborate is only going to get stronger over time. They can look in whenever they want, even if they can’t get up to Hanover, or to the U.S., even.

Just as Linux (the poster-boy for all of Open Source Software) appeared just as soon as there was an Internet to support its development, Alumni Governance will come to be seen as an emergent property of Alumni linked together with the ability to easily cooperate. It’s no mystery that all of this happened just as soon as it was feasible - what’s mysterious is that some think they can hold back the sea.

Jessica Hagy has a blog called Indexed where she posts philosophical ideas as images drawn on index cards using set theory, Venn diagrams, and the like. Witty, clever, original, and frequently profound. We’re All Going to Hell is among her most popular. Tell your favorite math teacher!

Make her teach! The Valley News has the story of Dartmouth Professor Mara Sabinson who “alleges that after she refused to quit, college administrators punished her by assigning her to teach freshman writing seminars.” When I toured Dartmouth, their big selling point was that the professors are really engaged in teaching, not “I’ll teach the postdocs and have grad students teach the undergrads,” so this is exactly the wrong kind of press for the Marketing Department.

The attitude that teaching freshmen is punishment is hardly hidden by these professors, and the students aren’t so dumb as to not understand what’s going on. Those who would take a professorship and not love teaching should go out and get a job in industry. Those who would eschew the industry route in favor of the safety of the tenure track while still despising teaching have no place in higher education, and are a threat to the competitiveness of the U.S. .

DOAJ lists journals that have an Open Access policy, in this link in the Computer Science field.

I’ve been doing some more computer science research lately, and have been continually frustrated by the prevelance of pay-per-article research on the web. In fact, most research in Computer Science seems to be published under contractual obligations to the Journal doing the publishing with the author signing away rights to his own work.

What’s worse is much of this research is paid for by the Federal Government. So, I’ve paid for the research and now I have to pay again to view it. The fees to view the research range from moderate to expensive, for me, but for someone in a third world country the fees are simply prohibitive.

In researching this topic I’ve found some scholarly articles showing that Open Access research has more of an impact on the scientific community because it’s more available. As a scientist you’d want to have more of an impact rather than less, right? Well, no, apparently you’d rather be published in a more prestigious journal than anything else since that helps with tenure, and it’s those prestigious journals that are most adverse to Open Access since they have the most to lose. That is, their jetset ways, looker assistants, and arbiter-of-all-that-is-good status.

So, if you’re going to publish an article and you’re not on a tenure track (or if you are and have some valor) do it in an Open Access journal.

Now, beyond that, what does the Internet mean for journals? Let’s ask ourselves why journals exist. At one time there needed to be a central clearing house for research. Authors could only send off so many copies to so many people and only so many reviewers could be attached to any one journal.

All those barriers are gone on the Internet. Any author can afford to have n number of people download his PDF (his institution will typically pay for the bandwidth) and anybody can be a reviewer. But what of qualifications? That’s what credibility ratings are for, and they work all over the Internet from Google PageRank to Slashdot Karma. It won’t be long before there’s a website where researchers can get an RSS feed of the best new research, relevance ranked, and rated by reviewers with ranks weighted by the reviewer’s credibility.

Journals are a relic of the pre-Internet era - they raise the bar to publication, introduce inefficiences into the system and keep researchers from getting to papers they want to read. They can chose to evolve or be out-competed.

Larry Lessig has a presentation on his website exploring the threats we face today as a free culture. It’s an ~20 minute Flash of slides and voice-over.

This is a couple years old, but still completely relevant and highly recommended.

If anybody knows how to convert a Flash to DV using OSS tools let me know so I can send some DVD’s to our congresscritters. Quicktime Player falls down dead on synchronization.

You can use secure IMAP to read your Dartmouth Alumni e-mail, though the pages on the alumni website don’t tell you how to do it (they limit instructions to the insecure POP3 protocol).

• First, lookup the name of your mailserver here. Mine is newsneezy.dartmouth.org - yours may be different or change some day.
• Configure your IMAP server to use SSL for connections and to connect to the mailserver you found above. In AppleMail this is called ‘Incoming Mail Server’ and ‘Use SSL’ is a checkbox on the ‘Secure’ tab (in the account preferences).
• For a username, you have to use your full name and class year. For instance, mine is William_P._McGonigle_95 - watch the periods and underscores. Your password is your password. Thanks to SSL that password is being sent encrypted.
• Finally you want to configure an outgoing SMTP server. BlitzMail allows you to send through it if you’ve recently read your mail. So configure the same server name as you did before, but don’t turn on SSL or specify a username or password. Unfortunately this means your outgoing mail is sent unencrypted. Also, if you try to send before doing a ‘Get Mail’ you might get a ‘Relaying Denied’ message. Click ‘Get Mail’, even if you have no new mail, and then it will recognize you and let you send.

An Australian Math Professor, NJ Wildberger, has developed a new approach to Trigonometry that eliminates the need for classical sine and cosine functions. In his book he claims the approach is more accurate and more rational.

Certainly, any time we can get rid of constants we’re improving our understanding of Nature.