Education versus the Internet

I am a fan of Bob Cringely’s Pulpit. He is one of those guys who were blogging years before blogs, and his IT industry column is always fascinating and amusing. His latest column is very scary for an academic to read. Its about the impact of information technology on education. Most arguments on this take one of two positions; either that IT is a great opportunity we must seize, or that it is a threat that stops students concentrating. Cringely suggests that the search-and-graze style associated with the Google era will eventually be seen to be good for education per se, but that it will destroy the traditional institutions that get paid to deliver it. College not needed.

If this depresses you too much, head over to the latest xkcd cartoon. (Thanks to Dave Pearson).

World Wide Telescope : coming soon

At a TED conference in Monterrey, Roy Gould from the Science Education Department of CfA just gave a glitzy talk plugging Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope software. This is Jim Gray’s legacy, following on from his work with Alex Szalay and Sky Server. It sounds like its going to be very nice, maybe smoother and faster than Google Sky. But you can’t get it yet .. its promised for “Spring 2008″. When it is ready, it will be downloadable from the worldwidetelescope web site. Meanwhile that web site has pix of kids gawping cutely etc.

Apparently its so good it made Robert Scoble cry.

vo-joke.xml

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<vor:Resource created=”2008-02-25″ status=”active” updated=”2008-02-25″ xmlns=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOResource/v0.10″ xmlns:jok=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/JOK/v0.8″ xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOJokeService/v0.8″>
<title xmlns=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOResource/v0.10″>XML and Violence Joke</title>
<shortName xmlns=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOResource/v0.10″>XML-Violence</shortName>
<identifier xmlns=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOResource/v0.10″>ivo://wfau.roe/XML-JOK1</identifier>
<curation xmlns=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOResource/v0.10″>
<publisher ivo-id=”ivo://wfau.roe/JOKES”>Andy Lawrence</publisher>
<creator>
<name>Duncan Law-Green, Leicester</name>
</creator>
<contributor>keith Noddle, Leicester</contributor>
<version>1</version>
<contact>
<name>Andy Lawrence</name>
<email>al@roe.ac.uk</email>
</contact>
</curation>
<content xmlns=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOResource/v0.10″>
<subject>XML</subject>
<subject>Humour</subject>
<description>XML is like violence. If its not working for you, you are not using enough of it.</description>
<referenceURL>http://andyxl.wordpress.com</referenceURL>
<type>Geek Joke</type>
<contentLevel>Research</contentLevel>
</content>
<vr:interface qtype=”GET” xmlns:vr=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VOResource/v0.10″ xsi:type=”vs:ParamHTTP”>
<vr:accessURL use=”base”>http://andyxl.wordpress.com/this post/</vr:accessURL>
<vs:resultType xmlns:vs=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VODataService/v0.5″>laughter</vs:resultType>
</vr:interface>
<vs:facility xmlns:vs=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VODataService/v0.5″>Leicester XML Factory</vs:facility>
<vs:instrument xmlns:vs=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VODataService/v0.5″>multi-channel joke generator</vs:instrument>
<coverage xmlns=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/VODataService/v0.5″>
<spatial>
<region xsi:type=”vs:AllSky”/>
<regionOfRegard>0.14</regionOfRegard>
</spatial>
<spectral>
<waveband>Blue</waveband>
</spectral>
<temporal>
<startTime>Big Bang</startTime>
<endTime>Big Crunch</endTime>
</temporal>
</coverage>
<cs:capability xmlns:cs=”http://www.ivoa.net/xml/JokeSearch/v0.3″>
<cs:maxSR>1</cs:maxSR>
<cs:maxRecords>1000</cs:maxRecords>
<cs:verbosity>false</cs:verbosity>
</cs:capability>
</vor:Resource>

Jim Gray tribute meeting

Tony Linde just emailed me to bring to my attention a Tribute to Honour Jim Gray, on May 31st in Berkeley.

Jim was a giant of the database world, and a good friend to the Virtual Observatory world in general, and Johns Hopkins and the SDSS archive in particular. He also helped us here in Edinburgh in our development of the WFCAM science archive, which is based on Microsoft SQL Server.

In January 2007, he disappeared without trace while on a sailing trip off the Californian coast. This was one of my own posts about Jim.

e-Science good, Grid bad

Today I have been at an “e-Science Think Tank”, run by our very own e-Science Institute here in Edinburgh. A theme of the day has been debating whether the whole e-Science thing has been a success or not, and where to go next. Two particularly interesting points. Point-1. Nearly everybody agreed that pull is better than push … that is, all the successful examples have been driven by specific disciplines (biology, climate science, astronomy, etc). The alternative - that computer scientists can design generic solutions for grateful application scientists to implement - doesn’t seem to work. Point-2. “The Grid” in the pure sense of Globus-driven CPU-cycle pooling, has not really taken off.

These two points are really the same. Going back to 2001, the Globus-SRB “Grid” thing was a computer-science agenda driven by two specific US labs, and given impetus by a very successful particle physics community campaign. Gradually everybody else realised it wasn’t quite what they wanted, discovered industry standard technology like XML and web services, and worked their own standards. There two really good things about “The Grid”. One was that it rescued LHC computing. The second was that it was a banner under which we marched to the Government Feeding Troughs. The bad thing was the rigidity produced, which thankfully gradually subsided as the more general idea of e-Science emerged.

Before Ian Foster discovers this blog and gets cross with me, I should stress that his vision of “The Grid”, as opposed to the Globus software, was much broader and more general, and quite like what we now mean by e-Science and Web 2.0 - it was about transparency, ubiquitous computing, collaboration, participation, and democracy. Spot on.

Transparency is the key word. HTML/HTTP is all about transparency of documents; XML and SOAP is all about transparency of data; in principle Globus is all about transparency of processing. But possibly transparency of processing is a chimera, for technical reasons ..

I would explain but I am off now to get my free hot dinner, just to annoy Rick Nowell.

tag spam

I have had some odd comment spam recently. I don’t mean Laurel Kornfeld spraying paranoia all over my Pluto posts. She’s most welcome. Its just that I know she puts comments in so many people’s blogs, its almost like spam. Her output isn’t humanly possible. Possibly she is a kind of collective, like Bourbaki, or maybe some kind of cyborg built in a secret lab by planetary astronomers.

On WordPress the floodwaters of advertising are held back by the barrier that is Akismet, but every so often a splosh gets over and wets my blog. What gets me is that along with the list of links to cheap ringtones or penis expanders or whatever there is always a line that says “Great blog ! Keep up the good work !” Why ? Am I really going to read this and think “oh hang on, this must be a real comment, he’s read my blog !”

Comment spam seems to be random scattershot stuff. But this evening I got some targeted spam. Its about cremation urns. Here it is, following a post called “A sandwich at the end of the Universe“. Well I did use “cremation” as a tag.. So is targetted spam new, or I have just started getting it cos I only just started using tags ?? (I reto-tagged everything.) I guess urns are good business. The only reliable things in life are death, taxes, and comments by laurel kornfeld.

Then a couple of comments have just been hard to decide. I got one that just said “Physics rocks !”. Well right on, man. This was just about relevant to the post. The link is to a site called “blog 4 rock”. Clearly not auto-spam or regular advertising. Just hand-crafted self promotion ? But I guess thats no different from the regular game of commenting on other people’s blogs. Click on me ! me ! me !

A wee while back I got a comment in Italian, on my very first Pluto post. Again, it doesn’t look like spam, but my Italian is close to non-existent, so how would I know ?

Feeds, Readers, and Feedburner

I finally got round to figuring out how Feedburner works, and have added a subscription button (”chicklet”) to my sidebar. Now you can read me three ways. (1) Just drop in every so often; (2) Read the content through your favourite feedreader; (3) Get an email when I post something new. Some of you are already subscribed to me through some feedreader or other. I can’t easily get the stats on these; but if you unsubscribe and then re-subscribe (using your same favourite feedreader) then you will get the same stuff routed through the feedburner server, and I will know you are there ! (For bloggers who run the WP software themselves, feeds can be automatically re-directed, but for blogs hosted at wordpress.com you can’t do this - see below).

I have cleared my head by explaining below what I now understand… hope it helps somebody else !

What is a feed ?

I know that I have geeky readers who will say “you are explaining what a feed is ? why ?“, and other readers who will say “eh wot pardon ?” - so this is for them.

Its like Reuters for the Web. Modern web pages can change quite often. Its annoying to have to keep checking whats new. This is true of blogs a fortiori of course. So the technique is to collect new material and make it available (syndication) through a standardised document (feed) ; an application (feedreader) can then subscribe to the feed and display for you. Your reader can collect lots of different feeds in one place (aggregation) and so you can check all your favourites for updates in one visit rather than forty.

The syndication stage is done automatically for me by the WordPress software. (Many other types of software, like Wikis for example, also automatically construct a feed.) The feed itself is an XML document that is basically a set of links to material, plus typically some extracts from the material. There are (sigh) at least two standards for the format - RSS and Atom - but luckily the feedreaders usually figure this out. You can learn more about all that at this wikipedia article, and at this O’Reilly article. (There is nice general article by mezzoblue here.) For my blog, at http://andyxl.wordpress.com, the standard feed document provided by WP is at

http://andyxl.wordpress.com/feed

and my new Feedburner feed document is at

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheE-astronomer.

You can click on these to take a look, and do “view source” to see how the XML works.

So how do you set about subscribing and reading ?

First, you can just read feeds in a standard web-browser like Firefox and IE - they understand the XML. “Subscribing” is just a matter of collecting the bookmarks as usual. Often (but not always), FF or IE knows when a website contains a feed and adds a wee symbol in the address bar. If you click on this, you can see the feed and bookmark it; but you may also be given a list of web services through which you can subscribe to the feed. (Depends how your browser is set up)

Second, you can register with a web service, like Bloglines or Newsgator or Google Reader. You subscribe to each feed you want, their server trawls the feed docs, and you read them at their web site. I use Bloglines myself.

Third, you can install a client application on your own PC, like NewzCrawler or FeedDemon . These work like Outlook Express - they suck down the new stuff from your subscribed feeds, and save it on your hard disk for reading at your leisure.

There is friendly explanation of this stuff in a BBC news site article.

Why this change to feedburner now ?

Until some months back, WordPress used to provide stats on how often your blog was read through a feedreader, rather than by viewing the actual page - but they withdrew this, for reasons I never quite understood. As a result its quite hard to know what one’s actual readership is. From the old stats, it looked like I was getting roughly equal numbers of feed reads and page reads. Of course some of those page views were people clicking through to the real thing if something looked interesting (I do this all the time), and the feed-reads were just the services collecting updates, which doesn’t prove anybody read them (likewise, guilty). But even this dodgy info disappeared when WP withdrew the FeedStats feature.

From the point of view of the reader, Feed Burner is just the same as using the original feed. (If you compare the feed docs linked above you can see they are the same; its just that one is sitting on the WP server and one on the FB server.) But the publisher gets the stats; and because it is all routed through the FB server regardless of which reading method your readers are using, you don’t miss anything.

Sounds fun, how do I do this too ?

I won’t wade through this in detail, but rather point you at some other web pages I found handy.

If you want to just put an icon on your blog linking to your regular WP feed, this is explained in the WP FAQ on this page.

I found a general article article about setting up FeedBurner by Marshall Kirkpatrick, and another specifically about Feedburner and WP blogs by HarisTV; however FeedBurner itself has a very clear Word Press Quick Start page.

Key issue that I gradually realised : there are two types of WordPress blog. You can install the WP software on your own server (self-hosted) or you can set up and run your blog using the WP server and its interface (WP-hosted). Some things can only be done for self-hosted blogs. Example one is improved auto-discovery - at the moment Firefox seems to know my feed exists, but IE doesn’t. You can fix this by putting some extra lines of code in your blog template, which FB give you. But if you are WP-hosted, you can’t edit your blog template. Example two is automatic re-direction. As I explained earlier, new subscribers will be routed through Feedburner whichever reader they use, but Feedburner won’t know about people who already subscribed to my existing WP feed. However, somebody terribly clever called Steve Smith wrote a plug-in which would automatically re-direct readers. This has now been officially absorbed by Feedburner and called FeedSmith. However, once again this works by plonking the right bit of code in your WP installation - so can’t be done by WP-hosted bloggers.

Phew. Think I am done.

And in closing…

As John Ebdon used to say, if you have been, thanks for listening.

Google Sky : gateway drug

I just came back from the twice yearly Virtual Observatory Geeks meeting, otherwise known as the IVOA interoperability workshop. I am on the Exec, which means of course other people do the work and we pontificate a lot. We approved eight standards. Progress ! In an “Applications Showcase” session there were several talks on Google Sky and its possibilities, including one from Ryan Scranton, who created the beast together with Andy Connolly, while on special leave from Pittsburgh U. where they worked on a NASA predecessor called “NASA Worldwind“.

Obviously Google Sky is wonderful fun for Joe Public, and kinda cool for many amateur astronomers, but is it of any interest to professional astronomers ? Ryan thought yes - he said he thought of it as a cannabis-like “gateway drug” which many pros would play with, and then find themselves sucked into the crack-cocaine world of cone-searches, ADQL queries, workflows and so on. So where is the link ? Well several other VO stalwarts have already found ways to do VO-Google-Sky mashups of various kinds.

Example One is VOEvent. This is an IVOA protocol which gives a standard way to pass round messages from alerts made by gamma ray burst satellites, NEOs spotted by small telescopes, etc. There is a service run out of Caltech called “VO event net” which feeds these messages in various formats. Roy Williams showed they can be spat out as KML and so appear as push pins on your Google Sky.

Example Two is the PLASTIC Hub. This is a method which allows VO tools to interoperate, so that for example when you have found an image using Astroscope (from AstroGrid) you can pass it straight to Aladin (from CDS). Alasdair Allan showed how you can PLASTICise Google Sky, so that if you select a flagged object it will automatically move the cursor to the right place in the image you have open in Aladin, or whatever.

This is all very cute but I am still sure how useful it is. And as Bob Hanisch stressed a couple of times, Google Sky starts to get very confusing, and ambiguous, once you have a lot of stuff overlaid. Does this matter, if it is primarily fun for families, or Ryan’s gateway drug ? Well maybe suggested Bob, as high school teachers and kids are likely to start relying heavily on Google Sky.

By the way, there are alternatives, present or imminent. Wiki Sky performs a similar function, and is very good. ESO have a plan to use the excellent Stellarium planetarium software as a front end for VO tools. And Microsoft have been working for ages on a Google Sky equivalent, called the World Wide Telescope. Its one of the things Jim Gray was working on before he disappeared. I would never have guessed this a few years back, but I am starting to feel almost sorry for Microsoft. They have had a Google Earth equivalent for ages but it just hasn’t had the PR success of Google Earth. It was launched as “Virtual Earth” but then last year re-branded as part of “Live Search“. Its fast as well as well designed, and has an optional 3D interface.

New theme, de-tagging, tiddlers

Obviously going through a mid-blog crisis. Decided to have a makeover. Luckily here at WordPress Central, this is a drink on a stick, as they have a whole bunch of pre-made themes to pick from. This one is called “Contempt”. This ought to be the name of a theme used by an arrogant twenty something, but it looks ok, so it is being put into action by your friendly neighbourhood fifty something. If you spot me doing that comb-over thing, please take me out and shoot me.

Next up is de-tagging, or rather de-categorisation. A short while back I whinged about bloggers overtagging. Now those nice WordPress folk have admitted they had confused tags and categories, and actually we can have both. (I do like Matt’s Hat.) Sooooo….. I guess I am going to go back over all my posts and categorise them properly into a mere handful of categories, and also add free-form tags. Life will be briefly a pain in the arse and then will make more sense.

I would have done this yesterday, but spent the whole evening playing with TiddlyWiki. This is absolutely fantastic. Its one of of a new breed of “personal wikis” which run on the client rather than a server, and so can be used as an interlinked note taking system. It is entirely self contained inside a single html file, containing the javascript to make it work as well as the user content, and so only needs a standard web browser to work. You can even take your wiki with you on your USB stick, plug it into the nearest PC, and carry on working. Finally, rather than being made up of several pages, it is made up of distinct snippets called “tiddlers”, which are assembled on a single page which grows and shrinks as you open and close the tiddlers. Its very intuitive. Basically its Hypercard for the web. Brilliant. Furthermore there are lots of examples on the web, which you download as templates and just start editing. I have been using “Twiddly Wiki for the rest of us“

Yes I know trendy young things have known about this for two years, but hey I still got my own teeth.

Liveblog : Death of the Library ?

I am attending a two day workshop called “Sustaining the Digital Library“, one of a handful of tame academics in a room full of librarians and IT folks. In an hour or so I will be sitting on an “Academic Panel” along with a chemist, a lawyer, and a Professor of Italian. (This sounds like the start of a joke … “there were these four academics sitting on a panel, and the first one says..”). We are supposed to tell them what life is like at the coalface, and what we really want.

For years, university libraries all paid huge sums to big publishing houses (Elsevier, McMillan, Springer etc) to buy scientific journals. Many librarians, and and many researchers, saw this as money for old rope. As the online world grew, and the idea of open access publishing developed, it looked like the academic publishing business would collapse.

This hasn’t happened. The publishers have got their act together, providing some very nice online journals, and getting together as a cartel to define an industry-standard way of referring to any digital object - the DOI system. Our libraries now pay huge amounts of money for online susbscriptions. Meanwhile of course everybody is asking “why are we taking up all this real estate with useless old books ?” and suddenly its the libraries that look under threat rather then the publishers..

The library fight back involves the idea of establishing Institutional Repositories - publish your paper in the University Library system … Today, John Houghton from Victoria University in Melbourne reported an economic study which suggests that such repositories, assuming open access, make economic sense, as companies and government departments will find it easier to get at what they want. There are now many such Institutional Repositories in place, but the problem is scientists don’t use them. Why would I do that ? Who will read it ? I’ll try to get it in Nature, thank you very much.

Peter Bunemann suggested another future for the library - hosting, curating, preserving, and marketing databases. Not the ginormous sky surveys that I love, let alone the humongous particle physics type databases, but the hundreds of wee collections that academics love to make, and that are becoming increasingly important in research. Now that sounds good. But maybe Elsevier will get there first and make us an offer …