hudebnik

Thanks to osewalrus, Eben Moglen's keynote address at Freedom To Connect 2012:



The whole video is about an hour and a half -- an hour of prepared talk and half an hour of Q&A -- but to whet your appetite, here are some excerpts:

( excerpts )

So shalmestere and I saw the movie this afternoon, after having read the book a week or two ago.

They did a good job, all things considered. Both District Twelve and the Capitol looked pretty much the way I imagined them: parts of District Twelve were location-shot in North Carolina, with ramshackle Depression-era houses and appropriately Appalachian topography and vegetation, while the Capitol was appropriately colorful, high-tech, fantastic, and shallow. The Arena was also shot in North Carolina (convenient for Katniss that things are basically familiar).

( omissions and additions )

With "The Hunger Games" coming out in theaters this weekend, shalmestere and I got a copy of the book and read it. It's a good read, with characters one cares about, and it looks as though it would lend itself reasonably well to movie treatment (handling the internal monologue with a combination of voice-over narration and flashbacks).

[VERY MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW]

But I have to wonder: has author Suzanne Collins ever shot an arrow from a bow? Significant parts of the plot involve the protagonist's acquisition and use of a bow and arrows. I don't object to the shooting -- everything Katniss does in that realm could be done by a very good archer, which she is. There is no mention of ever stringing or un-stringing the bow, but that may not be a problem: I've never hunted with a bow, and I don't know how long it's practical to carry a strung bow before the constant tension starts damaging the bow. What bothered me was the references to putting down and picking up a "loaded bow". First, that's strange terminology... but more importantly, in my experience, if you put down a "loaded bow", the arrow falls off the string and it is no longer a "loaded bow". As shalmestere points out, those passages might make sense if it were a cross bow, but a crossbow would be more complicated to build in the wilds (as Katniss's father has evidently done a number of times, and as it is suggested early on that Katniss might need to do).

The wilderness-survival parts are no "My Side of the Mountain", but (as a not-particularly-experienced wilderness-survival type myself) I didn't see any howlers.

Anyway, I think it'll probably be a decent movie.


Then last night, wandering around the satellite-dish menu at random, we decided on a lark to watch "The Big Bang Theory", which several people we know have raved about. I don't know: maybe this was a particularly bad episode, but neither of us felt any need to ever see it again.

Before this morning's class, two students in the front row had a bizarre disagreement over pronunciation: is the first syllable of "waterfall" more similar to the "o" in "otter", or to the "a" in "father" (although they didn't put it that way)? After listening to a minute or two of this, I brought in the whole class and got into a discussion of language: different pronunciations, different word choices, and what they tell people about you. Is your soft drink a "soda", a "pop", a "coke", or something else? I asked how many students had ever seen the movie "My Fair Lady": zero (although one student had read the play "Pygmalion"). I asked how many had ever heard the song "On the Street Where You Live": nobody. So I sang the first few lines, and one student (not the same one) recognized it. Wow.

Then I went around the room and asked each student to describe, in a minute or so, what topic (s)he was working on for the research paper, and why the rest of us should be interested. Somewhere in the course of this, I mentioned this talk (which none of them had attended), and said something about how Dr. Bauerlein's hand-copying exercises might sound sadistic and Luddite -- wait, does anybody in the room know the word "Luddite"? No, not one. Anybody familiar with the "Ballad of John Henry"? One. So I summarized John Henry's story, and how he won by a nose, but then "lay down his hammer and he died," and suggested that technology putting people out of work isn't just a 19th-century phenomenon. Which led us back to the ostensible topic of the course, which is computer technology and its effects on people's lives. Not only costing them jobs, but changing the way they learn and remember things, hence the hand-copying exercise.

I just attended a talk by Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation and other works exploring the effects of digital media on thinking.

In 1910 (he says), about 10% of the high-school-age population in the U.S. were actually in high school, and 1% of the college-age population were in college. The remaining 90% and 99%, respectively, worked under the supervision of adults. They spent very little time in the company of other teenagers. As a result, there was no such thing as "youth culture", no "peer pressure" (because they seldom interacted with age-group peers), no "generation gap" (because there was more intergenerational than intragenerational communication).

By the 1950's, however, teens and twentysomethings spent much of their time with their age group, and one could talk about "teen music", "teen literature", "teen movies", as opposed to their "old-fogey" analogues. In 2012, teenagers exchange an average of 3500 text messages and hundreds of phone calls per month, almost entirely with their age group; they're unaccustomed to talking with old people (i.e. over 30). In addition, since social media tend to create homogeneous communities that confirm rather than challenge one's beliefs, they're unaccustomed to talking with people who disagree with them.

Information technology makes it extremely easy to find, quickly and efficiently, exactly the facts you're looking for, without distracting you with "other books nearby on the shelf", or the font in which a newspaper was printed, or something jotted in the margins by a previous reader. When you want information retrieval, it's great -- but learning is not information retrieval. Sometimes the branches along the way are more interesting than exactly what you started out looking for.

Bauerlein sometimes assigns his students to look up some definitions and turn them in -- written in longhand, with a pen or pencil. This not only prevents simple copy-and-paste, but forces students to spend at least a second or two on each word, and it adds some haptic feedback, all of which increases the likelihood that it'll stick. Likewise, he sometimes assigns students to transcribe a chapter of Walden, in longhand, to get the rhythm and style of Thoreau's words into their heads. It reminded me of the "slow food" and "mindful eating" movements.

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see this post comparing Rick Santorum's policies with those of a radical leftist agitator named Jesus.

Following up on this post...

Nobody in Monday's or Wednesday's class complained at all about doing the assignment in Scheme. In fact, they've finally buckled down to actually work on the problem, which was due two weeks ago. (This course isn't a prerequisite for anything else, so I can let deadlines slide if necessary to make sure everybody actually "gets it".)

I've put the lectures and new material on hold, and have been mostly just helping students get their programs working. One team realized, by the time they had passed one particular tricky test case, that they had used three higher-order functions in four lines; doing the same thing in Java or C++ would have been probably fifty lines of code.

I attended a live-webcast-seminar on dealing with Asperger's syndrome at the college level. I went into it thinking "I have an unfair advantage, because Aspergerish behavior is almost normal in my field; what's to deal with?" But I figured there would be some useful tips for recognition, accommodation, and referral.

On recognition: one slide showed kids fighting with boffer swords and shields; another showed a table of the Klingon alphabet; another mentioned odd clothing "such as a cape, elaborate jewelry, scarves or embroidery"; D&D, WoW, LARP, and anime were mentioned by name, as were "odd interests" such as car motors, Victorian door hinges or vintage toys. The presenter hastened to point out that not ALL Aspergerians do these things, and some are offended by being lumped in with those people. Notable by its absence was any suggestion that not ALL people who do those things have Asperger's.

[I'm trying to think of people I know who don't do any of these things....]

On accommodation: six slides in a row on being clear, concise, and consistent. Each slide was illustrated with a "do" statement of 5-10 words, and a "don't" statement of 40-60 that said the same thing wrapped in a lot of qualifiers and softening particles. Seriously, would anybody prefer the latter? I guess this is the old tact-filter phenomenon again.

We're past the one-hour mark, I can't think of anything substantial I've learned yet, and I have to catch a train. I guess I'll have to skip the "referral" section.

On my feedback form I expressed a wish that the webinar itself had been more clear, concise, and consistent. :-)

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The students in my Principles of Programming Languages course have been kvetching because I asked them to do their interpreter project in Scheme. They only learned Scheme last semester, and they already know it's not a "real" language, so it's outrageous and arbitrary of me to ask them to write something substantial in it. I had pointed out that it makes parts of the assignment easier, and they replied (reasonably enough) "but if it takes more work to learn the language, we haven't really saved anything."

So yesterday in class I said "OK, I give in. This course isn't about Scheme, it's about interpreters and language features, so you're welcome to do this assignment in whatever language you like. Would you like to do it in Java?" Massive acclaim. "Let's work through Version 1 of the assignment [which they had all already done in Scheme] together in Java; once we've got that working, you can do all the subsequent versions on your own." I opened Version 1 in Scheme for reference, and started translating at the board.

The first datatype definition wasn't too hard. The 6 lines of Scheme code became 70 lines of Java, not counting blank lines and comments, but the Java code was mostly very familiar boilerplate, so that's not too bad. (Had to write constructors, getters, toString() methods, and equals() methods. Technically, should have overridden hashCode() too, but these students have never heard of hashCode().)

Then we got to a part of the Scheme code that relied on Scheme's built-in lists, which can contain anything, including other lists. Java has ArrayLists, but it's sort of a pain to work with heterogeneous and nested ArrayLists, so we started building a Java datatype to correspond to Scheme lists. That took about 90 lines of Java code, not counting comments, blank lines, and test cases. Except that the constructor wasn't very convenient to use: the students all agreed it really should take in a string of the form "(3 + (4 / 5))" or something like that. At which point the class ended.

These students haven't taken compiler construction. They've never written a lexical scanner, much less a hierarchical parser, so it didn't occur to them that this constructor, which approximates the functionality of Scheme's built-in "read" function, might be non-trivial. I just wrote it myself outside class, trying to keep things short, simple and clean: it took 88 lines for the reader itself, plus 87 for supporting data structures and 171 for test cases. (The reader is complicated enough that I really needed all those test cases, and many of them failed at least once.)

Anyway, we've just added 265 lines to the Java program to duplicate functionality that came for free in Scheme. Now we can get back to the original problem....

This will probably delay the course by a couple of days (especially if I don't give them my reader code), but if it conveys the lesson that sometimes it IS worth learning a new language in order to make the program easier, it'll be worth it.

[Followup Feb. 10:] At the beginning of class today, at least one student was already saying "let's go back to the Scheme version." I didn't; I wanted to use this program to motivate and illustrate a couple of Java programming patterns. So we got this minimal interpreter working (using the reader I had written), but we'll be back to Scheme on Monday.

For a very thoughtful take on the current issue and how we got here, please read this post, in which cellio refers to the events of 1994. For those of you who weren't around at the time, let me tell you a story....

In 1994, the SCA's Board of Directors announced abruptly that, due to serious financial shortfalls at the Corporation, paid membership would henceforth be required in order to attend any event. There was a firestorm on the Rialto (an on-line discussion group, back when there could be a single on-line discussion group that included most of the Net-enabled members of the SCA). Some people pointed out that, since most of their groups' events were in public parks, they legally could not exclude anybody from attending such an event, nor could they legally charge admission. Others objected that requiring paid membership to attend even a first event would damage the SCA's reputation for openness, and make it look like a money-making cult (which some in the public already feared it was). Some were offended that the Board had issued this edict without even asking its thousands of members for voluntary help in its hour of need. Some pointed out that the Corporation provides services that benefit everybody at an event, so everybody should be expected to pay for those services.

I and others analyzed the Corporation's published financial reports to see why the Corporation was in such bad shape. Several people (including cellio, if I remember right) requested more-detailed financial reports from the Corporation, were refused, and sued the Board to open its books; the Board chose to spend some of its scant assets fighting this lawsuit rather than opening the books to its own members.

Several of us -- I think it was Arval, Cariadoc, and me -- suggested that instead of requiring membership to attend any event, the Corporation institute a "non-member surcharge" to cover what non-members actually cost the corporation -- which we estimated at perhaps 50c for a typical one-day event. The Board eventually decided to do this, but they set the non-member surcharge at $3-5 instead, clearly intending not merely to cover their expenses but to discourage people from participating without being paid members. Because you know, more paid members means more revenue, which is obviously good, right?

Many people (I think this started with Cariadoc, too) observed a distinction between the Society and the Corporation: the Society runs events and dance practices and calligraphy workshops and fighter practices and things like that, while the Corporation prints membership cards and magazines, pays the expenses of its Board of Directors, buys insurance that covers its Board of Directors and its bank account, keeps track of who's a paid member, hires lawyers to protect its Board of Directors and its bank account, etc. The Society runs on massive amounts of volunteer labor; the Corporation runs on dues checks and the volunteer labor of about a dozen people. It seemed that much of the money we paid in membership dues went to either keep track of membership dues or protect the accounts holding those dues. As the old saying goes, "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy."

And many people, most notably Cariadoc, pointed out that the more assets the Corporation held, the more-attractive a target it would present to lawsuits. There have been a number of lawsuits over the years, but I believe the Schragger case is the most damaging and expensive to date. There will be more, of course. Every time we create a new Official Office In Charge of Fnord-Twergling, we have made a legally binding commitment that fnords will be twergled properly, and the next time a fnord is mis-twergled, the Corporation and all the local officers will be liable again. What if fnord-twergling were handled between individuals instead, with no Corporate imprimatur and therefore no Corporate liability?

Once you've imagined that, let's imagine a step farther. What if there were no SCA, Inc. at all? What if there were no such thing as an SCA membership card? What if you could subscribe to a Kingdom newsletter by writing a check to the Kingdom for the cost of the newsletter -- or not, if you didn't want to subscribe to a Kingdom newsletter? How much would this impede our ability to run events, dance practices, calligraphy workshops, fighter practices, etc? If the Corporation ceased to exist, how much effect would it have on the Society?