A View from the Crease

A quick reminder that today, October 6, is the last day to register to vote for the November 4 election. There are various groups doing this around the HUB. You could also go to the Elections Office in Bellefonte. For more information go to VotesPA.com. You can use that site to determine where you are supposed to vote.

I suppose that should be "Two guy of whom I'm proud" but does anyone really say that?

I've been coaching ice hockey for about 16 years now and I've coached the State College Varsity team for about six. Tonight I'm going to watch two guys participate in their first Penn State Blue/White Hockey Game. Kurt Collins played for me for 3 years, then played some Junior Hockey (or "Played Junior" as we say up North) and made the team this year. Dan Petrick went a less traditional route going from high school right to the Penn State Icers. Both of these first year guys will be in action along with State College alum and Penn State senior Andrew Magulick tonight at 9:15 at the Penn State Ice Rink. Dan and Kurt will be filling the gap left by State College's own (by way of Minnesota) Keith Jordan who finished his career with the Icers last year.

Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of most of the guys who have played for me over the years, but it's great to see our local guys playing at the next level.

Good Luck Dan, Kurt, and Andrew. I'll see you tonight!

Tomorrow, September 10, 2008, the first beam of protons will travel around the 27 kilometer circular tunnel which is part of the latest, largest particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located at CERN on the Swiss/French border. This will be the first full test of the controlling strength of the 1232 superconducting magnets which run the length of the tunnel. Just as astronomers call the first test of a telescope, "First Light," high energy physicists are calling this "First Beam."

I'm very interested in this as a physicist, but LHC also interests me as a physicist who happens to do IT. With its 15 petabyte/year (a petabyte is a million gigabytes) needs, LHC has been viewed as the harbinger of a new era of data acquisition and storage. LHC will not only advance particle physics, but storage, networking, and information science. Scientific American has an article about this including the last time CERN revolutionized information science (i.e. the World Wide Web). Wired Magazine devoted its July Issue to The Petabyte Age and the journal Nature just published a special section on "Big Data."

LHC is only the first in a new generation of petabyte devices which will strain our ability as IT professionals to support them. This growing list includes a few experiments/devices which involve Penn State faculty for example Advanced LIGO, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), and the new generation of medial imaging devices. Supporting these devices will require the coordinated efforts of ITS, Penn State Research, the University Libraries, and subject specialists.

We're at the beginning of a very long journey, but this is why I remain enthusiastic about my job and about Penn State.

I think there are few people as paranoid as I am about which Web cookies are being placed in my browser. On most of my browsers, I have it set to accept only cookies from the domain I'm connecting to and allow me to review all cookies before I accept them. There are problems with this. To quote from Wikipedia's article on HTTP cookies:

Cookies have some important implications on the privacy and anonymity of Web users. While cookies are only sent to the server setting them or one in the same Internet domain, a Web page may contain images or other components stored on servers in other domains. Cookies that are set during retrieval of these components are called third-party cookies.

[...]

Advertising companies use third-party cookies to track a user across multiple sites. In particular, an advertising company can track a user across all pages where it has placed advertising images or web bugs. Knowledge of the pages visited by a user allows the advertisement company to target advertisement to the user's presumed preferences.

This is a nice synopsis. According to this explanation and conventional thinking, you should just not allow third-party cookies and your privacy will be intact (or at least better protected).

Enter Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a Web tracking software which Google offers free of charge to customers. Again, Wikipedia has a pretty good article about how it works. As a GA user, one adds a little piece of "hidden" Javascript on a Web page and as people visit your Web site, cookies are placed in the visitor's browser to keep track of them as they move from page to page. GA keeps track of timestamps, IP addresses, referrers, browser type, etc. A GA customer gets access to a dashboard which tells him useful statistics about his Web site. GA has the ability to drill down to specific pages, do time analysis, do geographic distributions, and generate a variety of reports. Don't get me wrong, the "good" part of Google Analytics is the ability for marketers, and those without access to traditional Web logs (or a good analysis program) to get quality Web analytic data about their sites.

Let's get to the "bad" part. In fact, it's not only bad, it's insidious. I'll explain. Since GA cookies come from the "originating" Web site rather than from Google, they are NOT third-party cookies, but they behave much like them. They allow the local GA user to track his Web site, but in order to make the report, that information also goes to Google. As more and more sites use GA, as users use Google Apps (and therefore identify themselves and their current location on the Internet to Google), it becomes possible for one company to track the nearly complete on-line behavior of a typical Internet user. That company is of course Google, by virtue of making life easier for their GA customers. It helps them better target on-line ads and AdWords to me and my typical use of the Web. Google Analytics is both brilliant and scary at the same time.

The way I battle GA is to deny GA Web cookies while still allowing cookies which the originating site requires to do business with me. This is sometime problematic. The previous version of GA required me to block at least 4 cookies per page. Sometimes pages included multiple elements that each had their own GA javascript in them. Sites like the RealAge site which Professor Chris Long blogged about require so many cookies for so many elements that it is literally impossible to take the RealAge quiz without allowing all cookies (including many, many GA cookies). I just gave up...

The new version of Google Analytics tries to place 11 cookies/per instance of GA javascript in a Web page. This is getting ridiculous. Why not just "deny all" cookies for these sites? That, of course, works for some sites (e.g. The College of Education, Penn State Live, and various blogs by my ITS colleagues), but there are many sites using them (e.g. The Penn State Office of Human Resources) where I do need to interact with the site to do my job (as supervisor, as employer, etc.). Right now, most of these sites only use the 4 cookie version of GA. What happens when they start using the 11 cookie version? Will I persist or just give up?

As an exercise in my growing pain, browse the sites you normally would first thing in the morning, but do them with the "ask me every time" flag set on "Accept Cookies?" If you really want to see something, delete all the stored cookies in your browser and all of the sites you have told your browser to "always allow/block cookies" from. (Hint: the ones that look like "_utm"something are GA cookies -- look at your cookie cache before your delete it, do you have any?)

What can be done?

• One of the things I'm thinking about is a Firefox plug-in to intercept and deny all GA type cookies. I know there are ones which put incorrect information in the GA cookies and yield an incorrect report, but I think "poisoning" the information is wrong.
• You as a GA customer can stop using it.
• Penn State could issue a policy against the use of GA on Penn State Web sites as CIC peer The University of Indiana has.

The last suggestion is worth thinking about, but I think we can't do it unless we have an alternative -- a Penn State Web statistics/analytics service which any of us can use (regardless of "official" nature of the Web site). As far I know, Indiana does not provide a centrally supported alternative.

Should I learn to stop worrying and love Google Analytics, or should I continue my Pyrrhic battle to keep my browser GA cookie free?

It's enough to make you lose your cookies...

I feel my quadrennial bout of (Summer) 'Lympic Fever coming on. I absolutely love the Olympic Games and I'm looking forward to the spectacle of China hosting these games. I'm also preparing myself for the quadrennial disappointment of bad TV coverage. I know that NBC using their seven or so channels (CNBC, MSNBC, USA Network, NBCU, Telemundo, Oxygen, and of course good ol' NBC) claims that this will be the most coverage of any Olympic Games. I have no doubt that that's true, but I do have a few pieces of advice:

As some of you found out yesterday, our friends in the Microsoft e-mail department "blacklisted" Penn State e-mail. This that e-mail to recipients with .live.com or .hotmail.com addresses was blocked by Microsoft's incoming e-mail servers. The stated reason was too much SPAM originating from .psu.edu to those e-mail addresses.

Here's the irony. Most of that SPAM is due to "phished" Penn State e-mail accounts, where our account holders are asked to verify their userid and password and reply with them in e-mail (By the way... WE WILL NEVER ASK YOU TO DO THIS!). In many cases, the replies go to what I'd call loosely vetted, ephemeral addresses. By "loosely-vetted" I mean identities which may be obtained quite easily without much proof of identity (e.g. login or sign-up here...). Examples of these types of addresses are GMail, live.com, Yahoo!, Hotmail accounts. By "ephemeral" I mean that once the "phish" replies start coming in, the provider is notified and the accounts are terminated. Of course, our "phish"ers ("phishermen?") obtain another account tomorrow from these same providers. In the meantime they have access to a whole new set of IDs and passwords to SPAM and carry out further "phishing" schemes.

From what I've seen, GMail doesn't do this blocking because they know they are part of the problem. The other loosely-vetted, ephemeral e-mail providers don't seem to see it that way. A group that I belong to, the Higher Ed e-mail Administrators list, has a project to keep track of these addresses and leverage the "Wisdom of the Crowds." I think it's a good effort and those who subscribe to these lists often save themselves a world of hurt by heading the scam off early.

If you look at phishing attempts at all (I get 20-40 per day), take a survey of where the "Reply-to:" address is pointed. If it's hotmail or live.com, I think I know where I'm going to send those from now on.

Of course, I might not be able to get through...

This week was NASA's 50th birthday. Actually it's been 50 years since President Eisenhower approved the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, but NASA didn't start operations until October 1, 1958. I'm sure there will be much bigger celebrations then.

This anniversary combined with Randy Pausch's death makes me consider what inspired me as a kid, particularly what inspired me to pursue the current course of my life. NASA as you can probably guess was a huge part of it. As a kid, I distinctly remember Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon as well as the Apollo 13 mission (although I must admit that my memories are probably augmented by the movie). As a scientist, I worked on several NASA grants for astronomy and Mission to Planet Earth. I'm still very inspired by NASA images and missions.

If I take a look back at the last 50 years (only some of which I've been alive for -- OK most), I think NASA's unmanned missions have been a spectacular success particularly for astronomy and Earth science. The manned missions have fallen on hard times in the last few decades due in part to two shuttle disasters, but also due to budget cuts. The budget cuts are unfortunate because I believe that NASA in the 60's and 70's led to a whole generation of scientists and engineers. That's good for the economy in the long run. Like the Olympics, NASA also inspired national pride -- we might not have put the first human in space, but we "won" the race to the moon. Senator and former astronaut John Glenn used to say that for every one dollar spent on the Apollo program, seven dollars were returned to the U.S. economy. Many of the advances in miniaturization, electronics, computing, and yes even food science (can you still buy Tang?) were driven by NASA and NASA contractors.

I only hope that the new Congress and the new Administration will fund NASA at levels which will continue to inspire future generations of Americans and particularly American engineers and scientists.

I've been reading two books about risk and decision making. The first is Predictably Irrational : The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely and the second is Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear by Dan Gardner. Both cite study after study from behavioral economics and psychology which tell us that most people make decisions based on intuition and often that "stone aged hard-wiring" is wrong. Gardner talks of "Gut" and "Head" and shows how when it comes to risk assessment, "Gut" tends to overestimate it when recent events or hard-wired aversions skew the perception or probability of a of a problem.

Gardner says this:

The first step in correcting our mistakes of intuition has to be a healthy respect for the scientific process. Scientists have their biases, but, the the whole point of science is that as evidence accumulates, scientists argue among themselves based on the whole body of evidence, not just bits and pieces. Eventually, the majority tentatively decides in one direction or the other. It's not a perfect process, by any means; it's frustratingly slow and it can make mistakes. But it's vastly better than any other method humans have used to understand reality.

I was going to write about this anyway, but two activities this weekend started me thinking about how important teaching "a healthy respect for the scientific process" is.

On Saturday's C-SPAN Washington Journal program, Alden Myer, Union of Concerned Scientists, Policy & Strategy Director discussed "this week's decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to hold off from regulating greenhouse gas emissions."

Mr. Myer briefly explained the issue and then took calls. Needless to say, the calls showed a complete lack of understanding of the scientific process and science in general. At one point, I thought a woman had nailed one of the issues, but then she said something like, "well the polar caps aren't melting because of global warming, they are melting because of Jesus..." In addition to outright denials (by callers) of the greenhouse effect (how do you think greenhouses work, sir?), one gem was that the only way we could control climate would be to turn the Sun off and on. I guess that would work...

You can doubt that we are experiencing "global warming," but the consensus of atmospheric scientists, physicists, and meteorologists would tell you that we are experiencing a period of climate change exacerbated by anthropogenic (human caused) processes. Contrary to the scientific consensus, the opinions expressed by almost everyone who called that show on Saturday showed a tremendous lack of understanding of basic physical processes. We, the scientific community, have failed those callers.

[As an aside, I do believe that the people who watch the Washington Journal are more intelligent and more knowledgeable regarding politics and policy than your average American. If, however, I go by the consensus of people calling into the show, presumptive GOP nominee, Ron Paul, would soon be replacing President Alan Keyes after what would assuredly be an easy victory over Democratic nominee, Dennis Kucinich.]

The other thing I did this weekend was attend AstroFest on Saturday night. In recent years, the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics has really improved this activity with full time faculty involvement and a variety of talks and demonstrations which kept the hoards of kids interested even on a cloudy night. It was great to see the enthusiasm. I often observe how interested elementary school children are in science. I think we lose much of this in middle school and high school and therefore we lose many would be scientists.

Which brings me to my point -- Why do we teach science in college to non-science students? I would often have this argument with my fellow graduate teaching assistants and colleagues in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Some would teach the introductory astronomy lectures and labs as if we expected all the students to become professional astronomers as a result of going to our classes (forget Wall Street, I want to study pulsars!). I'd poll my classes and about 90% of them would admit that they took astronomy because they had to -- it was a BDR (that's Baccalaureate Degree Requirement, what we now call the General Education courses).

So given that this is the case, why do we teach science and what should our teaching outcomes be? As Dan Gardner says we need to teach a "healthy respect for the scientific process." Whether we teach "Stars for Studs," "Rocks for Jocks," or "Physics for Poets," we need to impress upon college students that science is a process. It can sometimes be wrong and all scientists speak in the language of uncertainty. We scientists are comfortable in gray areas and try to assess certainty, probability, and risk without regard to "Gut." Does this always work? Probably not, but I agree with Dan Gardner that we, as informed citizens, need to understand science and the process of science every bit as much as we need to be able to communicate, write, and understand history as a successful college graduate and citizen.

Oh, and as I always told my students, we also teach astronomy, so that some night when you're out in that field with that special someone, you can find the Big Dipper (Ursa Major), follow the "pointer stars" to the North Star (Polaris) and the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor), and "follow the arc to Arcturus and drive a spike to Spica."

per aspera ad astra

Jim Hooper convened the Case Studies portion of the Face-to-Face. It consisted of three presentations by three institutions on how their IT Architecture groups work.

Mark McCahill and Kevin Miller, Duke University

Tech Architecture Group (TAG) at Duke

* identify and track Emerging Technologies (policy issues for CIO)
* review major decisions -- tech resource for sr OIT leadership (2nd opinion)
* champion appropriate technologies
* pay attention to OIT efforts

created in 5/2007

Curret issues:

Identify and track: IPv6 , load/perfom metrics, Exhcange

review decisions: Campus event cal, storage/SAN, Pinnacle,

integrated into proj man lifecycle

champion appropriate tech -- issue reviews, arch principles

Why principles?

yardstick for tech system decision making
tool for strategic leadership
catalyst for setting cultural norms
align w/ Dukes mission
sustainable tech for current and future infrastructure

principles address 4 areas:

data:
infra:
services:
support:

Five Principles:

1. Robust, secure systems
2. Link, don't duplicate (systems of record, modular systems)
3. Design for scalability
4. Design for information lifecycles
5. Adapt to realities of people and technology

Principle Development process

* TAG drafted
* focus groups refined
* OIT-wide staff survey
* evangelism via communications plan
* practical application via case studies

http://www.oit.duke.edu/tag/

TAG's onging work

tech review/accept from major projects
continuing influence on OIT culture

case studies
ongoing eval
ongoing communication
technical advocacy

Michael Enstrom -- UW-Milwaukee

Enterprise Arch group.

Focus on:

-- Academic excellence
-- Research excellence
-- Administrative excellence

Unit technolgy reps and unit business reps

Finding Common ground with decentralized IT

Providing a solid base for planning.

How EA team formed

* aquire/repurpose staff w/ EA experience
* define scope
* analyze current state with strongest focus on developing our future state
* Plan EA team strat.

EA TEam

* Chief Process arch
* Enterp data arch
* Operations arch
* Application inte
* Security
* Network tech arch
* Web arch
* Deputy CIO

Foundations

commitment from CIO/Provost
straddle "IT space" and "End User space"

Developed guiding principles

Focus on Business , data, application, technology principles

Early discoveries:

Even if all stars align solution only as good as depteh of our understanding
most common problem has been misalign with common solution.

root cause is rigorous requirements.

Initiatives:

* BPI methodology development
* Process Management office
* IIBA requirements managment (see their website) training for both IT staff and business-unit stakeholders (develop common language)
* Adapting to "emerging/accepted/best practice" approach.

iIn house process dev vs. best practice

Project Management (PMI)
Program management (PMI/PgMgmt)
Requirements and practices (IIBA)

Using COBIT possess o

Successes

Facility services doing BPI
enrollment management PMI
Security team doing requirements based approach

Challenges

Number of newly-implemented shadow systems is decreasing
still need to implement Business Analysis staffing trainig

"Governance" will become sig initiative. Integrate "future state" arch
across HR, Finance, Student Admin, and Research Systems.

On radar for next year:

PeopleSoft HRIS implementation
Upgrade PS Student
future PS Financials

major expansion of campus
2 new schools pub heath , fresh water sciences
formalize EA processes and documentation methodology
Data Warehousing/BI planning

FYI: just hired director for research computing.

Jim Hooper -- U St. Louis

Enterprise Architecture at SLU

Part 1: Where we were:

A few good successes

Recent network redesign
Billiken info shield (that's their mascot -- the St. Louis Billikens)
IP allocation
Banner upgrade

Part 2: Birth of EA:

Show me ROI
mitigate risk
accounting requirements

Approach

show some quick results
build value
Establish governance
get ITS house in order

Purpose of EA

Set up some governance with Architecture review board
aggressive timeline to insert ourselves into key projects

Part 3: What worked

people, processes technology,..

The PIM (see earlier blog on tools)

IT Business Office relationship
ex-officio ARB seats
EIWG -- Ent Infrastructure WG
Training Vendor relationship

Procurement -- Saving Money

RFI/RFP for servers and storage
standards/eCommerece for commodity servers
host review problem survey/approvals
build permit before procurement

Persuasion:
* James Madison story (behind the scenes at creation of country)
* Leveraging Across Projects
* Strategic Planning Task Force

Part 4: Where do we go from here?

* Architecture gaps
* Governance gaps
* Executive buy-in
* organizational placement

I watched an interesting show last week. I saw the build-up for the pilot episode of Swingtown and I said, "Well this is a nine-week summer wonder." I actually watched the show last week. It's typical of the 10-11pm TV drama genre where there are about six story threads going on at the same time. A couple of the threads made me think of the pre-disco, bicentennial 1970s. I'm not necessarily promoting the show, in fact after only watching 2/3s of an episode, I don't even know if I like it. I do however love two things about it. The soundtrack is amazing (yes the '70s was more than disco) and it's available on last.fm. The soundtrack reminded me of a great piece in Newsweek in 2005 titled, "I Can't Live Without My Darling iPod" by Caroline Gong. In it she says:

My husband realized long ago (to his eternal financial relief) that I am not a jewelry-wearing kind of wife. For my 43rd birthday, he came through with the gift of my dreams: a gorgeous gem of modern audio technology. Accessorize myself? I'd rather accessorize my iPod. This little treasure has enabled me to revisit my past and groove to the present; it has provided me with an ever-evolving soundtrack for my life.

The last.fm tie in is the really interesting part. I'm not a member, but I like the ideas behind it. last.fm calls itself:

Last.fm connects you with your favorite music, and uses your unique taste to find new music, people, and concerts you'll like.

It's music-based social networking. It allows you to pay attention to what you like (via last.fm "myware"), find people with similar musical tastes, and share playlists with those folks. There's a fairly short "IT Conversation" with last.fm co-founder Felix Miller which explains last.fm and myware.

The Swingtown last.fm site allows you to listen to the music from last week's show. As I said, I do like the soundtrack. last.fm also has a group called Swingtowners (one hopes it's a group for fans of the show rather than the lifestyle). You can listen to the sounds of the 1970s which they like in last.fm shuffle mode (without signing up or registering). I've been doing this for a few days now. The only downside is that I've been getting unusual earworms. The other day I was in a meeting with a software solutions vendor and "I am Woman" by Helen Reddy, featured in last week's episode, was stuck. That can be a little distracting when you're talking Ts & Cs. Today, it's the much cooler, "The Night Chicago Died" by Paperlace.

You know, "When a man named Al Capone tried to make that town his own..."

Ah, the soundtrack of my life...