February 5, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

Sometimes I find lazy spam unintentionally funny:

%TO_CC_DEFAULT_HANDLER
Subject: %SUBJECT
Sender: "%FROM_NAME" <%FROM_EMAIL>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Date: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME

%MESSAGE_BODY

Ok, that’s really effective.

Meanwhile, I’m a Mac lover and love this Mac-hating rant.

Posted in werid | No Comments »

February 5, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

This is an argument I’ve gone around with other people about over on TerraNova, and other places. Why are language and text still important? Spinning off a question over at the O’Reilly Mac blog questioning why programmer’s love editors if typing is such a barrier to thinking and problem solving.

My answer to the question is that language and text are still important because they are cognitive alchemy.

Language is critical because it is one of the ways in which human beings communicate about the real world using abstractions. We appear to be hard-wired for language, with the process of learning language starting before birth and a large chunk of the actual (as opposed to the written formal) grammar mastered before we go to school. Advocates of “post-literacy” will of course point out that we have equal cognitive facility with graphics, and can communicate other things graphically. I won’t disagree, but will point out that visual literacy is different from linguistic literacy and have different powers.

Encoding language onto some sort of a persistent medium provides a different type of power. You can now start linking short utterances together into more complicated structures: sentences, paragraphs, stanzas, chapters, and books. You can use this persistent text to make arguments and claims that are difficult to convey in a single conversation and lecture. For better or for worse, you have created a record of that thought process that does not depend on a shared and reasonably quiet location in space and time.

I think this explains both programmer’s love of editors, and the persistence of asynchronous text messaging systems over long periods of time. The ability to copy and paste paragraphs or portions of code is the ability to change the basic logical concepts expressed. Asynchronous messaging systems such as mail and bulletin-boards create knowledge that can be reviewed and revised at a later date.

Posted in edtech, opinion | No Comments »

February 3, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

The procrastination exercise for today involved converting my thesis into a more readable form than requested by the graduate school. I find double-spaced text and narrow margins to be rather irritating to read. And the surprising lesson of the exercise was that good typography and margins does not necessarily save you much in paper. What you save by single-spacing is lost to the sensible margins. (I could go even more sensible, but I really don’t want to plow through and reformat all the tables and graphics.)

In the process I found TeXniscope which is a nice pdf/dvi viewer for OS X. It automatically reloads changed pdf files, an issue that drove me crazy with OS X Preview, and it has functions that allow to click on a section of a PDF document and automatically open the LaTeX source file. There is also a function that will automatically open a PDF file to the proper section from an Emacs LaTeX buffer. Unfortunately this doesn’t quite work out of the box with Aquamacs. I hacked together an alternative configuration file (11KB zip) that should do the trick. Unzip and follow the directions in the txs-search.el header.

Posted in software, geekstuff, the dissertation | No Comments »

January 31, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

At the moment, reading a fair quantity of the web chatter regarding the newly running Democratic presidential candidates, I’m picking up on a disturbing thread going around. Equal marriage rights (often framed as “gay marriage”) is a “wedge” issue exploited by Republicans to shock people away from voting for Democrats. Therefore, Democratic candidates should avoid taking a position on that issue. After all it’s an issue that only affects a small minority compared to health care or the Iraq War.

Or is it?

I suggest that equal marriage rights is a wedge issue in more ways than one. The “wedge strategy” was admitted by groups advocating Intelligent Design instruction in schools. Once the tip of the wedge, intelligent design, created a crack in public education, it would be easier to press more faith-based curriculum into public schools. ID advocacy groups have neither been adept at hiding this agenda, nor shy about it either.

Likewise, the goal of legislation and constitutional amendments ostensibly intended to hold the line at “gay marriage,” is to open a wedge for challenging a wide variety of case law and policy regarding families, privacy, medical care and insurance. It is foolish to believe that constitutional language that privileges heterosexual marriage will not be used in court cases regarding divorce, private sexual behavior, child custody, contraception and discrimination. Non-discrimination laws and policies could come under attack, as well as education and support services at public schools and universities. Just at with ID advocacy, “marriage defenders” have not been shy about having a more sweeping agenda.

The pressure to roll the clock back is not going to go away, and the effects of these initiatives on family and privacy law are too sweeping to ignore. I don’t expect Democratic candidates to have the moral courage to take on the irrational knee-jerk reactions that surround the word “marriage.” If Edwards, Clinton or Obama want to use “unions not marriage” language, I’m willing to compromise. I do expect Democrats to stand fast against legislation and constitutional initiatives that have the potential to undermine current rights for all families, gay and straight. I do expect the Democrats to stand fast against initiatives that could hinder private and public institutions from setting their own non-discrimination, benefit, and support policies.

Posted in opinion, Uncategorized | No Comments »

January 26, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

A while ago I switched my email over to Apple’s creatively named Mail.app to take advantage of applescript integration with other software packages. One of my frustrations with it though was the poor performance of the default junk mail filter. Over the last two weeks, JunkMatcher has proven to be an effective bit of software for catching those unwanted spam messages. I am also interested in the fact that it’s developed using PyObjC which builds applications with the Macintosh look and feel in Python. I’ve been wanting to get into Macintosh GUI programming but have not wanted to learn yet another language to do it.

Another bit of freeware/donationware I’m experimenting with is RPN Calculator which is purely a geek thing. It is a nicely well-designed cross-platform Reverse Polish Notation calculator which will probably be very handy when I start my taxes.

Posted in software, geekstuff | No Comments »

January 17, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

I’ve not been watching too many movies lately, primarily because of lack of funds, but also a lack of interest in what’s been playing.

But, I needed to get out of the house, so Curse of the Golden Flower worked its way to the top of the heap. Curse can be called a melodrama or tragedy. It’s fairly obvious that like a good Shakespeare play, all but a few characters will die as a result of their own machinations and failings in a creative orgy of blood and schadenfreude. And throughout much of this movie, I was left wondering if I didn’t miss something in translation.

The film opens shortly before the annual Chrysanthemum festival celebrating the stability of the Imperial family. The Empress resentfully takes the medication mandated by her husband every two hours. Her stepson, Crown Prince Xiang resents the liberties she takes with him. Meanwhile, the Emperor challenges his warrior son Jie to a duel. The Emperor prophetically warns, “Do not attempt to take by force, what I do not offer to you.” Third son Cheng cheerfully interrupts quietly whispered plots.

The Imperial family are seething cauldrons of chaos in the midst of a vast human machine played by a literal cast of thousands. The film opens not on the main characters, but on dozens of female servants dressing with drill team precision led by supervisors marking time with percussive blows on a woodblock. Outside of the forbidden city, a slightly less organized but still disciplined group of soldiers rides to their destination. Four servants deliver the medicine that becomes a symbol for the conflict within the court. That conflict involves maintaining the orderly function of the court, ves the demands of justice.

The court and army of China exist to serve the whims of the Imperial family. But there is a sense that the family are also cogs in the machine. Unlike Marie Antoinette the movie offers no hint of impending revolution. The cataclysm triggered by the family involves thousands of solders, but is quickly cleaned up by thousands of servants in a scene that is even more ominous than the preceding violence.

Director Yimou Zhang’s trademark use of color deeply saturates the court in iridescent golds, reds, and purples, and then contrasts that with the greys of the outside world. The opulence of the Imperial apartments borders on gaudy, and the overal saturation of the film might turn some people off.

But as I said earlier, I wonder if I missed something in translation. To me, the scale of the film came at the expense of intimacy and empathy with the characters. The script telegraphs the “big reveal” so far in advance that it didn’t shock, and the reactions of key characters seemed unintentionally funny as a result. I found it a really beautiful film, a really stunning film, but not so much an emotionally effective film for me.

Posted in movies | No Comments »

January 17, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

…like APA citations with 10 co-authors.

I really can’t claim much credit for this. But a book chapter based on a presentation from a few years ago is certainly welcome. This is mostly Sasha, Hakan and Taylor’s show.

Barab, S., Dodge, T., Tuzun, H., Job-Sluder, K., Jackson, C., Arici, A., Job-Sluder, L., Carteaux, R., Jr., Gilbertson, J., & Heiselt, C. (in press). The Quest Atlantis Project: A socially-responsive play space for learning. In B. E. Shelton & D. Wiley (Eds.), The Educational Design and Use of Simulation Computer Games. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers.

The Quest Atlantis Project: A Socially Responsive Play Space for Learning (604KB pdf)

Posted in publications, edtech | No Comments »

January 8, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

My complaints about Microsoft Word are rather legendary among my friends. I use Microsoft Word when required by clients or contacts. But I find it doesn’t well support my needs as a writer, often gets in my way, produces documents in formats that are unusable by the rest of my system, and is overkill for many of my needs.

About once a year, I go looking for a possible alternative or replacement. For compatibility openoffice.org and the OS X version NeoOffice provide the ability to import and export many MSWord documents and also export to the OASIS open document format (ODF). However, the openoffice and NeoOffice writing environment brings with it much of the frustrations I have with MSWord. NeoOffice also opens and runs sluggish on every system I have used it.

I craft my dissertation using LaTeX. LaTeX supports a number of critical itches I have. First, focus on the words and structure of a document rather than the appearance. Second, push off the final decisions about appearance to the stylesheet. Third, offer rich support for bibliographic citations, endnotes, indexing, floating diagrams and cross references. Fourth, output beautiful well-formatted PDF.

LaTeX fails though when it comes to the ability to convert between different document types. Existing document conversion tools such as tex4ht cannot handle the stylesheet I use for my dissertation, and the conversion process of LaTeX to MSWord or ODF is going to be painful. Ideally, something like DocBook is going to be a good solution but it’s not quite there either.

Once upon a time, I was a big fan of Nisus. Nisus just announced Nisus Writer Pro which might be worth trying when it is released. Another alternative I look at now and then is Mellel which offers better structured writing support.

Still however, it seems that the best workflow for now is to use a text editor such as emacs and deal with the formatting later.

Posted in creative process, geekstuff | 1 Comment »

January 8, 2007 by kirkjobsluder.

One of the problems with reading Usenet is that I find myself tracking down the solutions to problems. It must be my experience working on an email helpdesk. But the problem of the other day is how do you import words from an article into an aspell personal dictionary. Here is my command-line solution.

#back up your dictionary
cp .aspell.en.pws .aspell.en.pws.old
#dump new words onto the end of your personal dictionary
aspell -H list < Article.html >> ~/.aspell.en.pws

This does of course assume that you trust the copy-editor of the article.

Posted in geekstuff | No Comments »

December 30, 2006 by kirkjobsluder.

I suspect that one of the things that really hinders politics on the left is the endless sniping of so-called “pragmatists” against what they identify as “radical” or “revolutionary.” A recent example came to my attention in the form of a diary entry over at Daily Kos which is just plain muddled in its mangling of philosophy, history and politics to explain why “revolutionaries” are just plain wrong.

To start with, it’s fairly obvious that Dracowyrm is not talking about Pragmatism in the sense of John Dewey’s vision of participatory democracy, and certainly not Cornel West’s prophetic pragmatism which explores the ways in which expressions of radical Utopian vision have contributed to American politics. And it’s also unclear as to whether the “revolutionism” really represents actual groups, or is just an invention.

Dracowyrm: Pragmatism, as I would define it, seeks incremental change in a positive direction by charting a course which consistently pursues outcomes which are achievable and, while somewhat ambitious, are not so wildly so that they are unlikely to be accomplished. After each such outcome is achieved, conditions are reassessed and another step forward is charted. Pragmatism’s hallmarks, therefore, are positive change over time, taking smaller, more conservative steps than are pursued by revolutionists.

Revolutionism swings for the stands. It pursues great leaps of positive change in a minimal number of steps–often, a single radical change– arguing that pragmatism doesn’t do enough, or that moral imperatives such as injustice obligate pursuit of fundamental or radical shifts in politics, however unlikely they may be to be achieved. Moral imperative is often argued by revolutionists: we have no choice but to stand for this–anything less would be moral failure.

He then goes on to talk about the effects of these two different approaches, arguing that “pragmatic” battles lead to progress, while “revolutionist” battles lead to totalitarianism.

Dracowyrm: What progressives have accomplished in this country has come through incremental cultural shift. Civil rights activism on the part of African-Americans had been going on for nearly 150 years before the desegregation of the military and Brown v. the Board of Education. Enough Americans knew that racism was wrong by the time those steps had been taken that those who did not were in the minority.

Likewise the women’s movement. The failure of the ERA ended up not mattering, because its principles were rapidly taking root in the culture. Likewise environmentalism: advances in law came as a result of growing awareness of the need for it. Likewise labor law.

The problem is that this doesn’t stand up to closer scrutiny. Somehow progressive revisionism has made MLK into a warm and fuzzy incrementalist. However, MLK’s writings contain some of the most beloved and wonderful statements of American radicalism. In his “I Have a Dream” address, MLK prophesies (in the Cornel West pragmatic sense) that his cause will never be satisfied until full equality is reached. His benchmarks for that equality are rather lofty:

MLK (I Have a Dream): I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

MLK advocated radical direct action in Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and dismissed the notion of holding off on making strong demands until some sort of critical consensus is reached.

MLK (Letter from a Birmingham Jail): We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”

MLK’s role in the civil rights movement involved forcing the consensus by demonstrating that the injustices of segregation and discrimination were so severe, they justified civil disobedience by otherwise law-abiding citizens. MLK invoked traditions from the American Revolution and the Bible as justification for direct action tactics. Before MLK came Ida Wells and the NAACP.

The women’s movement, labor law, and environmentalism were also built in a large part by people who forced the issue by expressing an underlying moral cause and principle. They may have accepted incremental change as positive steps forward, but they never shirked from making statements that absolute and full social justice is the only acceptable end goal.

Dracowyrm is specifically talking about the impeachment of Bush. Personally, I have no stake in that because I don’t believe that the Democrats have the moral authority to do so after having enabled him for 6 years. Impeachment doesn’t particularly strike me as revolutionary. The threat or use of impeachment has not fundamentally changed party politics when invoked. But Dracowyrm is making a broader statement.

Dracowyrm: The core of my argument is that you cannot achieve lasting results if you try to push the people farther than they are willing to go. You haven’t addressed that, and that’s the heart of it.

Which misses the whole point of MLK’s activism. This is completely wrong in regards to LGBT rights which were won because LGBTs were willing to push the envelope by announcing, “we’re here, we’re queer get used to it.” The vote for women was won by women taking to the streets. Labor battles were won by workers on the picket lines. You don’t achieve lasting results by staying well within th comfort-zone of contemporary politics. Civil rights activists in the United States spent two centuries pushing whites further than they wanted to go. And they still need to do it.

One difference that I see between radicals and progressives here is that radicals see small steps as a means to an end, while progressives are mired in gaming the electoral politics. The radical approach to strategic voting is to hold our noses and make the least noxious choices, while the progressive approach is to push key issues back into the closet during an election. Radicals often serve as the moral consience of left-wing politics by refusing to talk about issues such as social justice, and refusing to pretend that candidates are not often lacking in some areas.

Which brings me back to my previous post. Something I feel that is missing at the moment in regards to LGBT rights is a similar statement to that of MLK that nothing less than complete equality will be ultimately acceptable.

Posted in opinion | No Comments »