Day: February 10, 2007

Categories
Diversity

Good news, typical reaction

The next president of Harvard is going to be Drew Gilpin Faust, respected Historian and currently Dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.

She’ll be participating in a growing change in today’s universities, becoming one of the 23% of college presidents who are women. Considering that women make up over 50% of college attendance, I would say this is a healthy trend. From the many sources on the story, the reason she was picked was less that she was a woman and more that she’s a consensus builder; not following in the footsteps of Summers, who was aggressively competitive and whose tenure one person said was a “…wasted five years”. According to the New York Times:

Faculty members and officials familiar with the search said Dr. Faust’s leadership style — her collaborative approach and considerable people skills — would be vital for soothing a campus ripped apart by the battles over Dr. Summers, whom many accused of having an abrasive, confrontational style.

“She combines outstanding scholarship with an uncanny ability to administer both well and with a heart,” said Judith Rodin, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Most of the weblogging commentary so far is among the Righteous Right, who clamor about feminism and shake their heads at the decline of civilization as they know it, but you know something? No one really cares what they have to say.

I see this as a good step forward: for Harvard, for women, for all of us.

Categories
Technology

Pipe me up, Scotty

While I don’t share Tim O’Reilly’s enthusiastic belief that Yahoo!’s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet, it is an interesting modern day implementation of an old and reliable Unix construct. The premise is that web services produce syndication feeds, which can then be modified as queries for other web services. Considering the openness of web services, the standardization of data structure, and the ubiquitous nature of syndication feeds, it is a concept whose time has come.

Yahoo’s* Pipes is a way for non-programmers to create a means of taking the output of a feed or group of feeds and transmitting them to or ‘piping’ them to another service or services. It doesn’t require programming language, but it does require understanding of programming constructs, such as For Each, filters, as well as understanding what each web service requires as to parameters. I would say its a long way from being the way of enabling mash-ups for everyone, but it’s a good step in the right direction.

I played around with it this morning and could get some pipes to work, but not others, even though I more or less re-created pipes examples like those given as examples. The alpha state of this tool was demonstrated by the fact that a pipe would work one moment, and then stop working the next. I would also say that the application isn’t as intuitive as it would first seem, and the promised tutorials will be needed for programmers and non-programmers alike. However, if you use the debugger, your job is immeasurably simplified.

Danny Ayers mentions about pipes only supporting RSS 2.0 feeds, but I was able to get an Atom feed to work. I agree with him that the pipes metaphore is near perfect on the concept, and the UI is rather nice. However, The UI is also something that works when browsers support a common graphical API, such as SVG, or at a minimum, the Canvas object. You can do almost anything in a web page browser once we have universal agreement on one or the other, or both. It does work in IE, so I would say the application is making use of the SVG/VML plug-in from Adobe. Whatever you do, don’t use Firebug in Firefox on the Mac, to try and peek into the innards, because you’ll crash your browser.

The major area of failure with this example is it utilizes a graphical interface when it doesn’t require a graphical interface. The ability to create a pipe between applications could be managed using traditional forms or even a text editor. Expanding the interface would enable this application to be open to all people, rather than just those with scripting turned on and working eyes, working arms, fingers to push mouse buttons, and so on. We have to separate the concept from the ‘coolness’ of the UI: if we marry the two, we’re heading down the wrong path.

One other area where the example is limited is that it does go to the original source for the feeds, when it would be better if it had the ability to store feed requests in a ‘cloud’ for each use of the tool, and then check the cloud, first, before going directly to the source. That way the application doesn’t unduly hammer endpoints.

A last area of improvement is to provide an API to access that content analysis module. I haven’t worked with Yahoo’s APIs over much (I have the UI objects), and perhaps this already exists? All the other components are ones that we can implement ourselves, but that Yahoo content analysis seems like its a direct shot into the Yahoo search engine functionality.

Yahoo is to be commended for dancing nicely on the edge. Once we’re past the alpha state, and hopefully once we’re past the accessibility problems, it will be interesting to see if the only people who use the service are programmers, or if it will reach a more general audience. I’d like to see this extended to a more distributed solution that’s not dependent on one service.

I look for a hook-in into this from Flickr, which is Yahoo’s naive user test bed. All of us interested in the semantic web should get some real insights into how non-techs ‘mash-up’ data.

update

Yup it’s using the canvas object, and Google’s open source Explorer Canvas work around for IE.

*I don’t use Yahoo! anymore because the exclamation point irritates me.

Categories
Just Shelley Legal, Laws, and Regs

Hanging up the keys

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

A few weeks back, an 84 year old woman drove her car through a grade school lunchroom, killing an 8 year old. They haven’t come out with the specifics of what happened, but it was broad daylight, good weather, and the school was a distance off the road.

This led to more discussion about when people should hang up their keys. After this weekend, I’m even more acutely aware of this as an issue.

Yesterday, driving through a parking lot, a women coming in from a side road just pulled out in front of me, without looking, forcing me to slam on my brakes. I was lucky, and I didn’t hit her. Today another young woman wasn’t as lucky.

I had to go to the Radio Shack, at the mall near my house. The mall’s parking lot is typical for the area: a line of shops with a road in front and parking on the other side of the road. The only cross walks were in front of the all-you-can eat buffet and the department store.

I was standing by the side of the road, waiting for a break in the traffic to cross, when one person stopped for me to my left, and a woman to my right slowed down to stop. She stopped right in front of a lane leading into the road, in the lane closest to the shops. As I started across, I noticed another woman pulling out in the lane, right at the woman who was stopped. I yelled and waved my arms; the lady who was stopped was pretty limited on what she could do with a pedestrian, me, in the road and a car behind her.

We both watched as this woman just drove into the side of her car. Bright sunshine, 100% visibility, the bloody car is right in front of her. She wasn’t looking to the front, though. Nor did she look to the left, either. She was looking to the right, and didn’t once look anywhere else. In fact, if the car to the left hadn’t stopped for me, it probably would have hit her, or she would have hit it.

I checked to make sure the woman who was hit was OK, and she was fine, suffering only a combination of being rattled and astonished. I then went over to the older woman to see if she was fine, and she said, “Oh, I’ll pay for the damage. Just have her contact me,” and then started to pull away.

I put my hand on her car, and told her, “Ma’am, you can’t go. You have to exchange insurance cards.” As she was blocking the lane, I mentioned she needed to pull over out of the way. Again, she started pulling forward without even looking, this time right at an SUV. I stopped her, and signaled the other horrified driver to go. Didn’t have to signal that driver more than once–she was out of there.

I got the older woman parked finally, and she got out. Sweetest thing you’ve ever seen. The younger woman was, also — more concerned that the other wasn’t hurt. Though this was a parking lot accident, she called the police and though they can’t cite anyone in a parking lot accident, I think she wanted the police to check out the older woman.

Bluntly, this woman did not belong behind the wheels of a car. She was easily confused, extremely malleable, and did not once properly check before making any moves. Not even completely aware of what she needed to do after an accident.

Hanging up the keys. For many, it means losing independence. For this older woman, it probably means not meeting her friends at that all-you-can-eat buffet, a favorite place for the seniors. For others, it means not taking off for the trails, not shopping, having to depend on others, trying to depend on public transportation, which is still quite poor in most communities.

I only just started driving in my 40’s, and I love to drive. I shudder at the thought of the time when I’ll have to give up my wheels. I hope I make that decision before it’s too late.

My Dad gave up driving at about 75, because he had arthritis in his back and neck, and it was too hard for him to look around for cars when he wanted to change lanes. It was tough for him to quite, because he was then dependent on family or whatever public transportation existed. Luckily, in Seattle, and then later in Bloomington, he did have access to public transportation.

One of the reasons he made this decision is because, long ago when he was a Washington state Patrolman, he was racing about 70 MPH to an accident scene, lights and sirens on, when a elderly man pulled right out in front of him. The man and his wife were killed, and Dad was in the hospital for three months.

Statistically, the most dangerous drivers are under 24, but the people who get involved in more accidents in ratio to how much they drive, are over 70. The AARP recognizes this and provides special driving classes for folks over 65.

In our state, once you hit 70, you have to get your license renewed every three years, rather than six. In Illinois, there are more restrictions, including driving tests every two years after you hit 80.

When is the time to quit? There are people capable of driving into their 90’s, but others suffering vision or other problems who should quit in their 50’s, or sooner. We’d like to leave this up to the individual, but as this woman today demonstrated, as the woman who killed the child, or the man who drove out in front of my father, people don’t always make the right decisions.

The day when I have to hang up my keys is far off, I hope. May I have enough wisdom to know when it’s time. I can’t help thinking, though, that the day I can’t drive anymore will be the beginning of the end for me.