A View from the Crease

Last week I gave a talk for the Penn State User Services Conference.  The talk was part of a larger "ITS Road Map" presentation.  Since I'm in Emerging Technologies, I decided to think about "The Future of 'Help!'"  Fortunately, as I was preparing the talk, Cole Camplese blogged some preliminary results of the annual FACAC Student Survey.  It further reinforced my thesis that the "Future of 'Help!'" is being able to support commercial and community "sourced" products as well as our own.  I took a hand poll of how many folks were using various social media and collaborative software and it certainly didn't mirror what our Student Survey was telling us.

In many ways the Student Survey tells us where the students are, and more importantly where we need to be in order to better support them.  Today's undergraduates and graduate students are tomorrow's faculty members.  It will no longer be good enough to say, "We didn't write it, so we don't support it."  We have a little time to catch up; let's not squander it.  Get out there and become the future of "Help!"

I had a whirlwind trip to Michigan State University and East Lansing, Michigan for the CIC CIO TechForum (The Big 10 is the athletic arm of the CIC). Because of local commitments I had to miss the first day of the conference, but I made it in time to for the second day.  This was particularly good because I was speaking on the second day.

The morning started with a talk about Shared IT Leadership by Ann Hill Duin and Steve Cawley, the Associate CIO and  CIO, respectively, of the University of Minnesota.  It had a good deal of research and case studies.  Anyone who has done the IT Leadership Program (ITLP) will recognize some of the statements and conclusions of the report.  To summarize, our institutions are large and IT is distributed.  In order to work across IT at an individual institution or the CIC, it is necessary to develop relationships, credibility, and eventually trust between IT groups.  A shared leadership approach is necessary for this.

The report was followed by a panel of four CIOs who responded to this.  One thing which resonated with me was what UIUC CIO Sally Jackson had to say.  She is in charge of the central academic computing arm of UIUC.  She spoke about a concept she calls "IT Illinois" which is the whole of IT at University of Illinois (and not just the U-C campus).  I think "IT Penn State" is moving in this direction with groups like our College IT Directors and Campus IT Directors. Again, it will take relationships, shared experiences, and eventually trust to create this reality.  If you're in any IT job at Penn State, it's worth looking at their presentation.

I was part of a set of three presentations in the "Nuts and Bolts" track.  Jim Green presented on how MSU uses Shibboleth.  Something which struck me was how their directory gets populated by multiple sources including the Registrar's Office, which does it via XML representations of course memberships using Internet2's eduCourse specification (I did say this was "Nuts and Bolts" didn't I?). Using this method, course information is not copied from the source, but the source which is responsible for the information (and the FERPA privacy of it) directly communicates with the (LDAP) directory.

I spoke next about work that Chris Hubing, some of our Internet2 colleagues, and very minimally I have done regarding a collaboration framework known as COmanage.  One of Chris's innovations is the ability to put a COmanage instance along with some collaborative applications which use COmanage into a Amazon Web Services Image (AMI).  Using this, AWS users can locate the image, and have COmanage working in a very short amount of time.  It's sort of like "COmanage in a box" and allows one to very easily try COmanage without using any of their own hardware of software. It's really very creative.  Our presentation is on-line at the CIC TechForum site. It was very helpful that we followed Jim Green because he covered Shibboleth and federated identity so we didn't have to.

The final presentation in our group was by Nick Roy from University of Iowa on their Metabot. Nick's presentation was the most technical.  Metabot is a provisioning and updating engine which uses a Web Services model to interact with existing administrative and student systems at Iowa. While their world is mostly Microsoft based, we should be looking carefully at the model for mediating communication between disparate systems (Do we have disparate systems at Penn State?).  This was a  very nice bit of work.

The final session was by MSU Head Basketball coach, Tom Izzo.  It was very good.  He started his presentation, by telling us how much he hates IT people. He told a great story about team chemistry when he was an assistant coach for Jud Heathcote at MSU.  One of the final things he said was, "Our jobs do have one thing in common: 80% of the people who talk to me think they can do my job better than I can -- and don't hesitate to tell me."  Most people wouldn't make that connection.  The choice of Tom Izzo for a speaker at an IT meeting was truly inspired.

It's sort of become an annual ritual within the Emerging Technologies Group, but I usually send a reminder this time of year. Sometimes it gets picked up and forwarded on by others.  I call it the Annual "Be Nice!" Message.  It goes something like this:

As we approach "arrival" weekend this year, please go out of your way to help folks who look like they're lost, frustrated, or getting a run-around.  Every little bit helps.

I know it goes without saying, but "Be Nice!"  A little effort on your part will make a lasting impression upon our visitors, new students, and parents of new students.

Be Nice!

If we have a clear sky, the annual Perseid meteor shower should be pretty good tonight.  The best times will be between midnight and 5am (EDT) Wednesday morning.  It may be hampered some by the glow of the third quarter moon, so stand behind a house or a tree which blocks the moon out.

NASA has a really good article relating bugs "splatting" on a car windshield to why we have meteor showers the same time every year.  The Perseids is usually one of the best shows of the year. Forecasters think this year could be very good.

Pull up a lawn chair and a blanket, stay warm, and enjoy the show!

 

A couple of things caught my attention this week in a week of media distraction (Was anyone as disappointed as I when CNN didn't broadcast the Karl Malden memorial service live?). 

Pandora and net radio -- mostly good news on this front.  On July 7th, SoundExchange agreed to a 40-50% reduction on "per song" listener rates.  There is a catch, however, Pandora users will pay a "freemium" (see next item), if they desire to listen for more than 40 hours per month.  The decision doesn't only apply to Pandora, but many of the net radio services.  It should be pointed out that these rates are higher than most other non-Internet based services pay "per song."  Hopefully, we'll be working with a few of these for an on-campus solution this fall.  I am pleased that this is finally resolved. To quote Pandora's press release, "Still, the unresolved licensing issues have hung over us like a dark cloud for two years. It's a great feeling to have the road cleared of that obstacle."  TechCrunch explains the agreement a little better than I have.

Free: The Future of a Radical Price -- I heard a good interview with Wired Magazine editor, Chris Anderson about his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.  He discusses the history of and how to make money with "free."  I really enjoyed his last book, The Long Tail and I'm looking forward to reading this one.

ChromeOS? -- Just a few weeks after Microsoft announced its decision/search engine, Bing, Google picked up the gauntlet by announcing its own OS, "ChromeOS."  Let me remind the folks at Google, a similar move was the beginning of the end for Netscape.  For now, ChromeOS is vaporware. Google says it will be based on the Chrome browser and the initial market will be netbooks.  I like their phone OS, Android, but I know that it's based upon Linux.  Will ChromeOS really be revolutionary? Maybe it will be based on Plan9 from Bell Labs -- now that would be revolutionary.

I've written about using the latent, distributed computing power of the Internet to solve problems.  Today brought a news of a new success story.  A project called GIMPS -- the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search reported that it found the 47th known Mersenne prime number. A Mersenne prime number is one which can be expressed as 2ⁿ - 1 where n is also a prime number.  Examples include 7 which can be expressed as 2³ - 1 and 31 which is 2⁵ - 1.

The 47th Mersenne prime number was found by Odd Magnar Strindmo from Norway on April 12th, but not verified until June 12th.  According to the GIMPS project, Odd has been with the project since 1996 and tested over 1400 candidates.  This might not seem like many candidates in 13 years, but the 47th known Mersenne prime is a 12,837,064 digit number and expressed as 2^42,643,801 - 1.

It is interesting to note that the 47th known Mersenne prime is not the largest known Mersenne prime (which was also found by the GIMPS project).  That distinction goes to 2^43,112,609 - 1 which was found last fall.  All in all, the GIMPS project has found 13 Mersenne primes in its 13 year history.

Lately, I've been talking to quite a few people about math and math curricula.  I contend that one of the reasons we study math, when we don't intend to have a career in mathematics, is to be "numerate."  When used as an adjective, numerate is used to describe someone who has the capacity for quantitative thought and expression.  John Allen Paulos has written several books on mathematics in everyday life and likened "innumeracy" to illiteracy.  My favorite Paulos book is A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper which looks at typical newspaper stories and why a knowledge of math either contradicts what everyone thinks or supports what many would consider a controversial conclusion.

This was a week where it helps to be "numerate."  Earlier this week, President Obama nominated Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor to fill the Supreme Court vacancy created by the resignation of David Souter.  Almost immediately, the campaign against her began.

Wendy Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, claimed that Sotomayor "has an extremely high rate of her decisions being reversed, indicating that she is far more of a liberal activist than even the current liberal activist Supreme Court."

"Her high reversal rate alone should be enough for us to pause and take a good look at her record. Frankly, it is the Senates duty to do so," said Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America.

What these two women were talking about is that The Supreme Court has reversed three of the five decisions in which Judge Sotomayor was in the majority for a 60% reversal rate.  Many speculate that there will likely be a fourth as Ricci v. DeStefano is pending before The Supreme Court.  Are these numbers enough to doom Judge Sotomayor's nomination?  Are these folks lying?  What should a numerate person ask?

First of all, neither person is lying; these numbers are a matter of public record.  Perhaps, they are not telling "the whole truth and nothing but the truth."  If there is a failure, however, it is whether the media outlets should have published quotes like this without giving them meaning or context.

A numerate person should ask what the reversal rate is for the average Circuit Court of Appeals judge, and where Judge Sotomayor stands on that scale.  What was the reversal rate of current Supreme Court justices?  How does Judge Sotomayor compare to those numbers?

According to SCOTUSblog's SCOTUSwiki, the reversal rate for Circuit Court for the last five Supreme Court sessions (up until April 2009) is 73%.  It would be nice to see a distribution, but it's clear that Judge Sotomayor is below the mean (and being "below average" in this case is a good thing).  The most recent appointee, Justice Sam Alito was reversed on two of two occasions in which his majority decisions were reviewed.  Sam Alito's reversal rate was 100%. Should that number have given the Senate "pause?"  [Homework: Is that number significant?]

There was a good quote in The Wall Street Journal by Circuit Court Judge Guido Calabresi who said, "such reversals are typical. It's standard for what we do because most of the cases that go up [to the Supreme Court] are difficult." (source MediaMatters for quotes and numbers)

What might matter more is how many of Judge Sotomayor's majority decisions were allowed to stand by The Supreme Court.  Again, two sets of numbers might apply.  She was in the majority of the court for 380 decisions, of which she wrote 150 of them.  So one could say that the reversal rate was 3 out of 380 (<1%) or 3 out of 150 (or 2%).  Either way, those seem to be good numbers.  No surprise, The White House used the former to state its case.

When speaking of statistics, many people quote Benjamin Disraeli's, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."  I prefer another attributed to Aaron Levenstein, "Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."

All is looking well for the launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 at 2:01 Eastern Time today.  My classmate, Col. Mike Good (USAF) is one the mission specialists on this mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).  The mission like previous missions to the Hubble will replace some of the guidance and communication systems.  In addition the crew of STS-125 will replace two failed instruments and remove the corrective optics and replace it with another scientific instrument.  The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) will probe the origins of the universe.  The new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) will replace the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 ("WiffPic2").  WFP3 will work with Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) in the visible and UV wavelenghts.  These elements were not designed as field replaceable units (FRUs) so as one of the mission specialists said, "It's like doing brain surgery on the Hubble."

Good luck Col. Good and Godspeed to STS-125.  I'll see you at the reunion, Mike.

Last Wednesday the Nittany Hockey League (aka Geriatric Hockey) paid tribute to NHL Commissioner Ron "The Commish" Weis on the occasion of his 70th birthday.  A few of weeks ago, Ron was lamenting that he wasn't going to be on the ice for his 70th birthday, so a couple of the guys rented the ice for a "Weezers vs. Geezers" game and held a party for him afterward. Ron has done great things for the Centre County ice hockey community, growing the league from 3 teams to nine.  The current league has about 180 participants.  In addition, we have the over 35 "Weezers vs. Geezers" game on Tuesday nights.

Thanks to Jay Horgas for coming up with the idea and Joe Battista for getting some press coverage and a congratulations letter from AD Tim Curley.

Wishing you many more years, "Commish!"

Over the weekend I attended a memorial service for Dr. Bill Peterson, the former Director of the Earth System Science Center Computing Facility.  Bill hired me out of graduate school in 1991 and got me involved in IT and computational science.  Bill died back in October and his memorial service was held at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.  Bill earned his Ph.D. in Physical Oceanography from RSMAS.

When I saw the invitation to Bill's memorial service it made me laugh.  There right on the top was a starfish.  I think of starfish every time I remember Bill.

A starfish is a remarkable creature, with its organs distributed throughout.  If you cut a starfish, each part can grow into a new starfish.  Lately business gurus have used a starfish to describe agile organizations, with business knowledge distributed throughout.  But business gurus and agile organizations don't make me think of Bill...

There's a story of an older gentleman who is walking along the beach the morning after a particularly rough storm.  There are countless starfish scattered on the sand drying out in the heat of the Sun.  As the older gentleman walks down the beach he sees a young boy, picking up starfish and throwing them back into the water where they'll be carried back to the sea.

As he comes up to the boy, he says, "Hey kid, there must be hundreds even thousands of starfish drying up on this beach and beaches like this all down the coast.  Don't you know you can't save them all."

The boy flings another into the sea and says, "No, sir, I can't, but I just made a big difference to that one."

I picture that older gentleman as Bill and I see him getting that look on his face where he furls his brow and grabs his beard and says, "You know, kid, you're right."  Then he starts to throw some back in himself.

You see Bill knew he couldn't save the world, but I think he must have come to realize that he could save one career, one life at a time.  There was a time when I was "drying out on the beach" and Bill picked me up and threw me back in.  I don't know when he started doing this, but I know many of the Penn State guys he hired over the years were the beneficiaries of Bill's mentoring.

Long ago I decided I couldn't pay him back.  How can you?  How can anyone?

I decided instead that I should pay it forward.  That's how we should remember Dr. Bill Peterson -- as a friend, a boss, a second dad, a leader, a visionary, but most of all as a mentor.

Remember Bill and pay it forward.