Month: December 2006

Categories
Environment

Speaking of Taum Sauk

DNR came out with its proposed settlement package for the Taum Sauk dam collapse. Black River News has more links on the story.

One of the settlement items was DNR’s proposal for Ameren to donate Church Mountain or the Rock Island Railroad corridor, the latter specifically to be converted into a bike/hike trail to potentially meet with the Katy Trail. I find this a little odd, considering the ongoing dispute between the state Attorney General and the DNR as regards the Boonville Bridge. In this incident, the outgoing DNR chief before Childers moved to preserve the Boonville Bridge as part of a historical landmark, as well as part of the Katy Trail. Childers and Blunt, instead, decided to give the bridge to the Union Pacific railroad, so it could use it as scrap steel.

This puts the Katy Trail in a vulnerable state, because the only way that the Rails-to-Trails program works in this country, is that the trails must intersect working railroad lines, so that they can be converted back to railroads, if necessary in the national interest. Removing the Boonville Bridge removes one of only two rail connections to the Katy Trail–the other of which, at St. Charles, is vulnerable to natural disaster.

However, if the Rock Island Railroad corridor is used as the final connection between Katy and Kansas City, extending the trail completely across the state, this might lessen the vulnerability of the trail overall, potentially removing one concern about giving the Boonville Bridge back to the Union Pacific.

As for the deal, Nixon, our State Attorney General, responded with:

While these projects put forth by DNR that are as far as 200 miles from Taum Sauk may be interesting and worthy, this wish list from bureaucrats at this time complicates matters and does not address adequate compensation for those who live and work closest to where the disaster occurred.

Nixon is not in these particular negotiations, as he was ‘fired’ as representative for the DNR because Childers felt Nixon was compromised since Ameren indirectly donated 19,000 dollars to his campaign fund; regardless of the fact that the money was returned to Ameren, and regardless of the fact that Ameren donated at least 17,000 dollars to the re-election campaign for Governor Blunt’s House of Representatives father, none other than the minority whip, Roy Blunt.

However, Nixon’s office hasn’t been all that forthcoming for what’s happening between it and DNR, though it has responded to Lee Farber at Black River News that it would post proposals for how to spend the five million (well, four million plus change) in fines levied by the federal government (which managed to wrangle for itself ten million dollars in fines, regardless of the fact that the agency who levied the fine, FERC, is the same agency whose inspectors had approved the safety of the dam just days before the dam broke).

In the meantime, no, work is not progressing in the cleanup, contrary to what the St. Louis Today article states.

Have I lost you yet? There’s wheels turning within wheels with this situation, and I’m concerned that the state is going to be paying a heavy price when it comes to our natural and civic resources because of the campaign for governor between Blunt and Nixon. We in Missouri are not being served.

Categories
Diversity Technology

Breaking eggs

The discussion associated with the last post, on the display of a pornographic image at a tech conference, has really been civil and engaged. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a discussion of this nature where many of the concerns aren’t rejected almost out of hand. It’s actually rather refreshing.

One person did bring up the long hours and raising babies, but that’s been almost universally rejected in the comments. As women enter into, and even begin to dominate, other fields that require a strong commitment on time, such as medicine and law, this no longer makes sense as a ‘reason’. In particular, as more men become involved with their children, and reject the so-called ‘horrendous’ hours of IT, it makes less so as time goes on.

No, there’s more here than first meets the eye. I’ve had some ideas on this score for a while now, and when I’m not heavily involved in writing on my books and my Missouri site, I’ve also been researching what I can see of the tech industry: specifically the computer science degree programs.

As I wrote in comments at the site, the tech industry is broken. This state isn’t reflected just in the lack of women–it’s programs like agile computing, which are trying to compensate for behavioral characteristics that we’re finding out, now, cause more harm than good. Yet, the colleges gear their programs to people with these same behavioral characteristics. That’s where we need to start. We need to completely change the curriculum of computer science in school. In fact, we need to eliminate computer science as a separate field.

I wrote in comments:

I’m incredibly behind a book, too much so to be able to spend the time responding as I would really like.

I think we need to go beyond looking at a few classes, or behaviors in school. I think we need to completely challenge how the computer science programs are designed.

It’s not that these programs are antagonistic to women, but they’re also antagonistic to many men. These programs are geared to a specific behavior, as much as they are focused at an interest.

I have met many women who have ended in technology but not through the computer science programs. They come in through psychology, music, business, library science, biology, and so on. That’s what we need to look at doing — removing computer science as this isolated, odd field (what other field focuses purely on the tools?) and split it into other departments, as an option.

Take the data portion of the computer science degree, and put this is as part of a library science program focused on data and organization of such.

Do the same with psychology, business, accounting, and so on–degrees in these fields with emphasis on computing.

Not only would we get more women, we’d get a strong computing community. People grounded in fields of interest beyond just computing.

The computer science programs are padded with so many inconsequential classes to make up a full degree. Who really needs assembly language now? And we have a class in Pascal one day, and databases the next — without any rhyme or reason how these interface into the real world.

We’ve already seen the ‘bleed’ of the computer science classes into the other disciplines. Let’s finish the job.

Let’s break this stranglehold of the aloof, obsessed ‘geek’. Let’s remove computer science out of engineering, where it never really belonged. Let’s stop isolating IT, and bring it into the other fields, where it should have been in the first place.

Our programs are stuck in a time when computers filled rooms, and only an elite few had access. This is just not a viable approach any more.

This is just a start, and I don’t have time to do more than toss a few disjointed sentences out.

I do know that the programs to ‘encourage’ girls to take computer science classes are failing. Probably because the entire field is biased–predetermined to a specific gender and mindset.

The tech field is broken. Only drastic means can fix it.

I checked out the computer science program at Missouri and it looks little different than when I tool computer science almost 25 years ago. Oh, there’s new languages, and more on the web, and a focus more on Java and the like rather than Pascal, but the concepts are the same. We have classes in assembly language, algorithms like our friend the bubble sort, disjointed offerings on database management and OO programming with C+. We also have several requirements for analytical geometry and calculus. Perhaps a class on Unix or graphics, and so on.

We spend our entire time focusing on the tools, rather than the application of the technology. We’re still teaching computer science, as if no one has access to computers because they’re still room sized and only available to an elite few.

Computer Science is still too heavily associated with either the math or the engineering departments, neither of which reflects how computers are used today. Computers are used in business and in social sciences, in psychology, medicine, history, and on and on. We associate computer science with calculus, when something like the library sciences would provide more useful integration, with its better understanding of the gathering and categorizing of data.

We didn’t know how to deal with computers and how to integrate into our school systems decades ago, and so we bunged them in, established a ‘core’ curricula and then stuck with it, like flies caught in amber.

I look at the computer science programs now in most schools and frankly, with today’s technology, they’re dull as dishwater. There’s no connection with what’s happening in the world. There’s nothing more than a desperate attempt to hold on to what’s familiar. Unfortunately, though, the side effect is that the programs attract a certain type of person, and frankly, discourage others who could and would add much to the field.

The most difficult step to take to ‘fixing’ why there’s too few women in IT is first by recognizing IT is broken. In our society, where we supposedly encourage women to go into field, and explore any profession, any such that has this few women in it, is broken. No, we don’t need to encourage women, we don’t need to make men realize that showing porn images at a professional conference is inappropriate. It goes far beyond just these simple acts: the field is broken, and how it is taught in university only encourages the flaws that break it.

Categories
RDF

May the source be with you

Danny, suffering from a cold leading to procrastinitis (I hear you on this one), hooked on a port of the WP 2813 theme to MT, LiveJournal, and Typepad to create an XSLT transform of the stylehseet items into RDF. This is based on the continuing effort to add more microformat labeling of page contents in order to enhance discoverability.

It’s a nice bit of code, but it strikes me as less than an efficient method when it comes to providing semantic information about the contents of the page.

The same processes that deliver the page for human consumption are also the same processes that provide the same data for syndication. It’s only a small step to then take the same information and provide this in an already formatted RDF format, accessible just by tacking on either /rdf or /meta at the end of the document.

If the issue is then one of static pages, such as those provided by Movable Type, couldn’t one generate static meta pages, as easily?

I’m not pushing against microformats. To me it makes sense to use ‘intelligent’ CSS class names for the different constructs contained within the page, because it’s more consistent and makes it easier to move templates between tools. Besides, might as well start smart than dumb.

But shouldn’t the approach be to generate all the content–human readable content using semantic markup and smart CSS labels, syndication feeds, and RDF–dynamically? Rather than generate one and then use XSLT to ‘transform’ to the other? Or is the bigger issue: let’s all start being consistent with our CSS–make it do double duty. Start bringing presentation, format, layout, and semantics into a cohesive whole.

Of course, I could have completely misread Danny’s intentions, too.

Regardless, I need to clean up my own CSS files. After I finish the Adding Ajax book, first.

Categories
Technology

The Dell workaround

A Dell customer, unhappy with the company’s response to his complaints, sued the company. However, rather than having the papers delivered to the company headquarters, he had them delivered to a Dell Kiosk in a shopping mall. When the court date came, Dell wasn’t represented and the customer won the case.

What’s particularly interesting with this, is a constrast between it and a case in Illinois where Dell was being sued in a class action lawsuit. Purchasers of Dell computers sued the company because it claimed a specific chip was the ‘fastest’, and they disputed this claim after getting their computers.

In the Illinois case, Dell filed a motion to stay the proceedings based on the fact that the Terms and Conditions of the computer sale contained an arbitration clause. Since the buyers completed the purchase, the buyers agreed to the T & C, including the use of arbitration in any and all disputes between them and the company.

The lower courts denied the motion, but Dell won on appeal and the case was remanded to arbitration. (See more details in the Internet Cases weblog.)

On appeal, the court held that the plaintiffs were properly made aware of the terms and conditions. The hyperlinks appearing on the web pages made the pages “the same as a multipage written paper contract. The blue hyperlink simply takes a person to another page of the contract, similar to turning the page of a written paper contract.” The contrasting blue color of the hyperlink served to make it conspicuous. Finally, the court noted that because the plaintiffs were purchasing computers online, they were not novices, and should have known that more information would have been available by clicking on the link.

(emph.mine)

If the customer in the first story had filed with the agent on record for the company in his state, his lawsuit would have been squashed, and he would have been forced into arbitration.

Why is this not necessarily in the best interest of the customer? Why did the plaintiffs in the Illinois case fight this move to arbitration? Let’s just say that little people seldom win against Big People in arbitration. In a story the Washington Post ran in 2000, it found that for the National Arbitration Forum, one corporate client won over individuals in arbitration, 99.6% of the time. More importantly, there is no transparency in arbitration: most of the actions are secret; whatever rights we have during the arbitration process are given at the discretion of the arbitration company and not mandated by law; and the decisions lack verifiability. It has, however, become a billion dollar industry, and new darling of the corporates.

Personally, I’ve had nothing but good service from Dell, so I’m not picking on the company just to pick on the company. However, before you make your online purchases this year, read the Terms and Conditions and look for an arbitration clause. If you find one, consider if you really want to enter into an agreement to arbitrate if a problem occurs.

Oh, and I’ve checked: so far as I can see, Apple has not inserted a mandatory/binding arbitration clause into it’s Terms and Conditions.

Categories
Political

Nuclear proliferation

If you had signed up to get feeds of your congressional representative votes, you would have seen several having to do with a new nuclear deal with India. Time and again, any attempt to put any safeguards and restrictions on what could be given or sold to India was voted down, and now we have a ‘bi-partisan’ bill giving India the green light to develop bombs, as well as plants.

Do I think this is a good deal? No.

We made this deal based on economic self-interest. if another country wishes to do the same, say Russia supply Iran, or China supply Syria, we have lost the right to cry foul. Why? Because we’re the ones that started this new nuclear race — we, and our Wal-Marts, and our Boeings, and our Microsofts.

Welcome to a brave new world, and the best little Congress money can buy.

Do Nothing Congress is right. According to this St. Lou Today article, the typical work week for this last congress was from Tuesday morning to Thursday afternoon.

Hell of a job if you can get it.