Let me know if you want to see the pretty graphs that Google generates on our behalf.

City of Iowa City – Volunteer Log of Hours Worked

Tags: flood2008, iowa city, iowa, volunteer

The redesigned the layout of the MIE pages to fit with the College of Engineering’s design, but they didn’t change much of the content.  Why am I still on the front page of IE?  Get some new pictures!

10:00
Broke into discussion groups.  Discussed how SN tools support and
enhance teaching. and what can UI do to use SN tools.   Many of the
groups identified the need for some type of decision support system for
faculty to help them decide which tool could be used to address
different types of learning objectives. 

12ish: Lunch.  Very
yummy.  I spent much of it talking with a professor from the Spanish
Dept, who had questions about types of technology she could use NOW.

1ish:
Broke into separate sessions that went into more depth on specific
technologies – wikis, Second Life, podcasting.  Ok, I went back to my
lab for this part of the day.

2:30: Overview of Personal Response Systems, or “Clickers,” which are used to get real-time responses from lecture students.

I
was struck by the range of perception of and experience with different
social network technologies.  Some people had never heard of some of
the tools, some had heard of them but never seen them, some had seen
them and were not clear why they would use them in class, and some
(few) had used them in class and research.  It was good for me because
it challenged many of the assumptions and ideas that I have come to
take for granted in my social network research.

Access to the technical skills and resources to build and use social network sites was an issue for some departments.

We raised some of the obvious issues of privacy, data mining, and UI
social network policies.  One professor, for example, recently started
a Facebook profile.  She only allows her students to see a limited
portion of her profile, and asks her students to limit her access to
their profile.  She wants to keep a teacher-student relationship, and
doesn’t want to see their party pictures.  Another person suggested
that it may be proper not to Facebook-friend people while you are
teaching class, but you can be friends after.  It will be interesting
to see how institutional policies evolve in this area.

Because
of the range of experiences, I think they could have done a better job
at introducing and organizing the social networking arena to the many
newbies in the group.  The first speaker did a great job of showing
some of the social network sites like Facebook, myspace, youtube, etc,
and even showed some examples of how they are being used in education. 
But I think this group needed to take a step back from specific tools. 
For example, I think social network technologies are good at 1)
locating and connecting people with similar interests, 2) enabling
asyncronous communcation and collaboration, 3) enabling reuse/mashups
of existing content and 4) aggregating many opinions or viewpoints
about a particular resource.  It may have been helpful to introduce
social networking by saying, “here are 4 uses for social networking
technologies, and here are particular examples of these uses.”  This
would have helped people to separate concepts about social networking
in general from the specific implementations you see in Facebook,
Second Life, etc.  Second, introducing social networking concepts
instead of specific tools may have helped people identify how these
tools could be used in their work and teaching.

Also, I think you should have to get a license to use the rm -rf * command (recursively remove everything, forcibly without confirmation) in unix.

Basically, in my never ending quest to be useful, I thought I would upgrade to the latest version of wordpress mu, the software behind our site.   I was too lazy to follow the backup instruction. I thought, I’ve done this a million times (really, I’ve done this once, for wordpress, not for mu).     I backed up the whole public_html directory with tar -cvf public_html html_backup.   I even checked the file to be sure I had a good copy.
Then I started playing with the new installation.   At some point in the playing around, I messed things up so badly I thought, I’ll just wipe it clean and start again.

rm -rf *

tar -xvf backup public_html

That didn’t go so well.   When I went to restore with tar -xvf html_backup, I didn’t get anything except the a few flotsam and jetsome files that were still lingering after the rm -rf *.

I panicked.

In a flurry of rapid checking I decided that my backup was fatally flawed and incomplete.   Why hadn’t I noticed that before?   I sent an email to customer service: “Save me, I’ve lost my website.”   I went to bed.   Got up.   Sent another email:   “Save me, I’ve lost my website and my domain is groklab.org (I had forgotten to mention that).”

A fitful night.

This morning I have this lovely note from customer service:

Hello,

I’ve copied a backup from the ShadowDrive on your server to your home
directory:

~gthomas/restore.20071215

If you have any other questions, please let us know.

Thank you,
Russ W.
pair Networks

I restored the directory and all is well.

In writing this note, I went to check my backup file to see exactly what’s wrong.

It’s fine.   Everything is there.   It was always fine.   I was just agitated, tired and not thinking straight.   I’m glad I went to bed.   I could have made things a lot worse in that mood.

I should remember the instructions on the cover of the Encyclopedic Guide to the Universe:

“Twenty-seven percent of respondents reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy. Only 3 percent stated that social media have little or no value to their communications initiatives. Respondents believe that social media is most effective for the following sectors: arts, entertainment and recreation; communications; computer hardware; and education.”

“Now we want to accelerate the development of robots that make a contribution to society, drawing on our knowledge and innovation in the field of automobiles.”

Honda is also interested in partnering with Universities to continue to improve robotics.

I’m not good at literary criticism, but I think it is safe to say that the book deals with the limitations of pursuing scientific thought and scientific questions for their own sake, and that real wisdom is more likely to come from a more humanitarian view of the world. Basically, the book wonders what the point of scientific truth is, if it doesn’t really improve the human condition. A damn good question.
It also has a few witty things to say about human nature. Here’s a few more snippets that caught my fancy this time:

A poem:
Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?”

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”

The last rites of the Bokonon:
God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”

“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”

And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God!
Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I meet!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait To find out for certain what my wampeter was …
And who was in my karass

And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.

“I’m thinking of calling a general strike of all writers until all mankind finally comes to its senses. Would you support it?”

“Do writers have a right to strike? That would be like the police or the firemen walking out.”

“Or the college professors.”

“Or the college professors,” I agreed. I shook my head. “No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,” Bokonon tell us. “He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”

“All of the true things that I’m about to tell you are shameless lies.”

and

“‘Dr. Breed keeps telling me the main thing with Dr. Hoenikker was truth.’

‘You don’t seem to agree.’

‘I don’t know whether I agree or not.   I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.’”

and

“Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”

and

“There was a sign hung around my dead cat’s neck.   It said, ‘meow.’ …. Somebody or something did not wish me to be a nihilist.   It was Krebb’s mission, whether he knew it or not, to disenchant me with that philosophy.   Well, done, Mr. Krebbs, welll done.”

Good stuff, even if it is a bunch of shameless lies.

I can’t wait to get started!

Also, installed a CAPTCHA service to hopefully reduce the amount of spam.

In this competition, teams will be required to demonstrate a robot
that has the ability to:

1. Autonomously connect to the Internet and build an object
   classification database sufficient to identify a number of objects
   found on a textual list.
2. Use this classification database to autonomously search an indoor
   environment for the objects in its list.

Integrating a mobile robot with the vision research adds another
interesting layer of complexity that would not ordinarily be available
in a purely computer vision competition. Semantic understanding of
the objects could also be expanded to scene understanding as well.
Thus, scene context can be used to guide the search for objects in
areas which make the most sense for them to be found (e.g. a stapler
is usually found on a desk rather than on the floor or on a wall).

The Semantic Robotic Vision Challenge

Technorati Tags: robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence