Spinning Yarns

Now is a time for the turning of wheels. Late in the evening of Wednesday, February 21st, 2007, Mary Kochiss, my last living grandparent, died. Born in May of 1910, Grammy grew up in a world far different from the one I have known—one in which gasoline-powered automobiles were still rare, and she lived much of her youth during the hard times of the Great Depression. After the death of her husband Steven in an automobile accident, she was left to raise her three daughters, including my mother, by her own hard work. But a hard life never hardened her heart—she was one of the kindest people I have ever had the privilege of knowing.

I can hardly hope to express in words all that Grammy was. She was the matriarch of three generations of our family, and among the countless aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins, in-laws and outlaws of our varied clan, I cannot think of a single one of us who held even a scrap of ill-will toward her: She was ever the most respected and beloved of us all. Skilled in many crafts, she kept her grandchildren warm with hand-crocheted blankets, decorated our homes with beautiful needlework and paintings, and taught me a great deal of what I know about navigating around a kitchen. Yet all of this is both wide and short of the mark.

Although I have never shared her faith in God, I hope that in the event there is something besides eternal silence beyond the unknowable veil of death, that she goes now to a better place, wherein she may at last have peace from the tribulations of the world.

Everything has an appointed season, and there is a time for every matter under the heaven:

A time to give birth and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot that which is planted. A time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break and a time to build. A time to weep and a time to laugh; a time of wailing and a time of dancing. A time to cast stones and a time to gather stones; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to seek and a time to lose; a time to keep and a time to cast away. A time to rend and a time to sew; a time to be silent and a time to speak. A time to love and a time to hate; a time for war and a time for peace.

What profit has the one who works in that which he toils? I have seen the occupation that God gave to the sons of men with which to occupy themselves. He has made everything beautiful in its time; also the wisdom of the world He put into their hearts, save that man should not find the deed which God did, from beginning to end.

I knew that there is nothing better for them but to rejoice and to do good during his lifetime.

Goodbye, Grammy. We shall mourn you, and we shall miss you, but we will never forget you. Sleep now in peace, and know that we are grateful for all that you have given us.

Filed by Michael at 00:39 under Personal
Comments Off

With less than two years remaining till the next Presidential election here in the United States, and a wildly unpopular President currently in office, a surprisingly large number of candidates have stepped forward and announced their candidacy—or, at the very least, their intent to consider the possibility of announcing their candidacy at some future point in time, should the mood be right. Naturally, in addition to attracting an inordinate amount of media attention, the kickoff of campaign season re-ignites the usual debates surrounding how political campaigns get funded, particularly those for the office of President. One option, of course, is to accept public funding from the Federal Election Commission. However, it seems that most candidates, even the ones who think public funding is a good idea in the abstract, are unwilling to accept the limitations that go with public campaign financing.

For years now, there have been countless attempts to “reform” the campaign finance system, which has traditionally permitted businesses, unions, and individuals to donate more or less as much money as they wanted to politicians and political campaigns. This has led to a kind of funding arms race, and raises some interesting questions about whom the eventual winner winds up owing his or her allegiance. Laws like the McCain-Feingold-Cochran bill attempt to fix this problem by limiting the amounts that can be donated by corporations and so-called “wealthy individuals,” but of course we have all seen how effective the big donors have been at finding clever loopholes in the election regulations. Besides, trying to get Congress to enact truly substantive campaign finance regulations is like assigning the fox to guard the henhouse, even if we assume a legislative regulatory solution were the best way to approach the problem.*

* I am fairly certain it’s not.

Ultimately, I think that efforts to “fix” the campaign funding arms race by regulating contributions are doomed to fail, for a couple of reasons. The first is that wealthy contributors can always afford to pay clever people to find the loopholes in the regulations, and still have plenty of cash left over to buy sleazy and disingenuous (if not outrightly slanderous) attack advertisements on behalf of their favourite candidates. Second, and perhaps even more important, is the fact that mounting a successful nationwide political campaign is just too damned expensive to succeed under the public funding restrictions, even with the cost-of-living adjustments supposedly taken into account by the Federal Election Campaign Act. I believe that if we truly want to stop the arms race, we are going to have to do it by addressing the problem on the cost side of the equation.**

** There is also the serious question of how far you can go in regulating contributions before you start treading on the First Amendment, which is in my view a dangerous place to walk around with a loaded bill in hand.

On the surface, that seems like an impossible task. The costs of advertising, paying campaign workers, conducting polls, paying the innumerable usurous taxes and fees associated with establishing campaign offices and getting your name listed on the ballots in various states, all add up to a very fat bill. And that’s even after we assume that you’ve won the primary elections, which themselves take up a fair chunk of time and attention on the part of both the candidates and their potential electorate. We could try to regulate the cost of buying time for political advertisements in the media, but I don’t believe that’s any of the government’s business; free speech is a public right, but use of the media is not.

I think there’s a better solution, and one that would be better not only for the candidates, but also for the quality of the electoral outcome in general—and that solution is called Approval Voting. Basically, my thesis is this: Right now, candidates for the major parties waste a lot of time, energy, money, and political capital bashing each other over the head during the primaries, just so they can figure out who is going to run for their party. The result can leave voters irritated and disillusioned with the whole process long before the real election takes place, and what’s worse, it means the candidates who do make it have already exposed their weak points to the opposing team, and spent a fair chunk of their war-chests trying to defeat people who should, in other circumstances, be their allies. The only reason we really need primary elections at all is because under our present plurality voting system, it is electoral suicide for a party to run a slate of multiple candidates for a single office against a smaller slate on the opposing side.

If we used Approval Voting instead, we could eliminate this entire problem at a single stroke: Any political party could, with impunity, endorse as many candidates for the office as it wanted, and all of those candidates could run in the regular election. The effect would be more or less like combining the primaries with the general election, in that voters who still wanted to vote along party lines could choose to vote only for members of their favourite party, but they could pick and choose among those candidates for their own reasons. Eliminating separate primaries would reduce the overall costs associated with campaigning, and would cut down the counterproductive infighting within the parties that leads to sub-optimal candidates being promoted as the “party favourite” simply because they are the least controversial choice.

Another nice consequence of Approval Voting is that it would permit third parties to get on the map without drawing fire for “splitting the vote,” as the Ralph Nader campaign was accused of doing in the 2000 Presidential elections. Nader knew he had no chance of winning the general election, but hoped to acquire enough votes that the Green Party, under whose aegis he was running, could obtain their 5% and qualify for Federal public election funds. Under the current voting system, this cut the margins on an already extremely narrowly divided electorate even finer than usual, and resulted in a statistically insignificant majority that led to all kinds of stupid bickering over the counting of votes in Florida. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have counted all the votes—but I suspect that even the 2.74% that Nader did attract might well have swung the pendulum more firmly to one side or another in other states, and rendered the Floridian outcome moot.

A lot of people, myself included, like to talk about how terrible the mathematical properties of Plurality Voting are, and you could make a strong case for Approval Voting on that basis alone! But I think the campaign finance argument is potentially a better political argument in favour of changing the voting system, since it gives a more concrete illustration of the advantages. Mind you, I would have thought the fact that Plurality Voting can elect a candidate who is detested by nearly 2/3 of a voting population would have been concrete enough, but it’s hard to find real examples of elections in which that happens. So, maybe this is a better way to make the case for a different kind of reformation, both of campaign finance and of electoral mechanics.

Filed by Michael at 01:22 under Political
7 Comments

When I was an undergraduate, I was one of the first kids in my classes who started regularly bringing a laptop to lectures. At that point, laptops weren’t even all that commonplace among the students, though their numbers were growing rapidly, and you certainly did not find a lot of people trying to take notes on them. Often, it was quite difficult to take good notes on a computer, especially for professors who drew a lot of diagrams or wrote a lot of complex mathematical notation; but I got a lot of practise trying to keep up with Linguistics and Theory of Computation classes, and I eventually became quite adept at switching back and forth between a word-processor and a graphics program* in real time.

* Full disclosure: I first started taking electronic notes in 1995, and at the time I was using Microsoft Word and SuperPaint, both running on my bright new PowerBook 520C.

At first, both professors and other students were skeptical about the idea of having laptops in the classroom. I was careful to ask my professors if they minded me taking notes this way, and though some of them were reluctant at first, most of them warmed to the idea once I showed them the finished product — it was always legible, could easily be updated and reorganized, and was trivial to print out or e-mail to others, and they seemed to like that. The principal complaints I received were from other students, who didn’t like the clicking of keys; but these were rare, and since I usually sat right up in the front row (next to the power outlets), most of my neighbors were of the diligent note-taking variety themselves, and did not object.

Over time, more and more laptops began showing up in classes all over campus. Not only are they good for taking notes, but they also provide a convenient source of distraction from boring lectures — and I was hardly the only person to have noticed this convenient combination! But it’s hard to get away with that sort of thing if you are sitting in the front row, because everybody can see what you’re doing. One person quietly playing a game will almost never disturb a lecture, but when everybody else starts watching over his shoulder, there’s a kind of ripple effect that spreads out through the classroom, and a teacher would have to be dumb as a post not to notice it, and localize the source by following the trail of glazed eyeballs back to its origin. Most laptop users quickly gravitated toward the back of the classroom, where nobody could see what they were doing.

Fast-forward a few years to find me standing at the front of the classroom, with my laptop hooked into the projection system instead of sitting in my lap. By the time I started teaching classes on my own in 2001, I think the majority of the undergraduates owned laptops of some variety, and plenty of them were bringing their machines to class, though even in computer science classes today only a minority do this. There was one major change, however, that made an enormous difference in the way laptops affect the classroom experience, and that is wireless networking. If I wanted to check my e-mail during class in 1995, I had to whip out an Ethernet cable and plug into the wall. If I had managed to do this discreetly at the start of class, that was fine; but otherwise, it was pretty obvious what was going on. Today, anybody can hook up to the campus network from virtually anywhere, at virtually any time. This means that any student with a laptop could, at a moment’s notice, be checking e-mail, downloading music, surfing the web, exchanging instant messages with their friends and family, playing an MMORPG, or any of a countless number of other distractions from paying attention and taking notes.

I suppose I could take offense at such distractions, but as long as the distraction is confined to the person wielding the computer, I don’t really mind. After all, they’re the ones who bought my time, and if that’s how they want to use it, who am I to complain? But the amusing thing is that you can almost always tell the difference between a student who’s using the computer to take notes, and one who is goofing off in some other way. Some typical patterns of behaviour recur throughout the population:

Game playing (puzzle or falling-blocks type games)

Symptoms: Intense concentration on the screen, but without eye movement to suggest that the person is reading. Repeatedly tapping a small handful of keys, or clicking the mouse a lot. Really intense players will sometimes forget themselves and twist their shoulders or make a face when they screw up. If they wear glasses, you can often see the game reflected in the glass.

Game playing (FPS, RTS, or RPG)

This is actually pretty rare; students usually go in for more self-contained games; but I have caught a couple of students playing a game of Unreal Tournament with the sound turned off. Symptoms: Intense concentration on the screen; rapid eye movements from point to point, but not scanning like a person reading. Lip biting is common, and if the other player is in the classroom, meaningful glares or glances may be exchanged.

Instant Messaging & E-Mail

Symptoms: Intermittent screen focus, punctuated by short bursts of typing. That in itself does not preclude note-taking, but usually IM is also accompanied by smiles and nods while looking in the direction of the screen, and occasional quiet laughter or other expressions of emotion. It is often difficult to distinguish IM from E-mail, when seen indirectly like this.

Web surfing

Symptoms: Little or no keyboard use, apart from short (10-20 keystroke) bursts sufficient to generate a Google query or fill in a password. Web use is characterized by large quantities of mouse usage, clicking and dragging and fingers moving on the scroll regions of trackpads (a distinctive motion, when seen from slightly above). One really strong giveaway for web usage is a series of rapid changes in the brightness of the light reflected on the user’s clothing from the LCD, as they go from page to page.

Unfortunately, it is still far too easy for others to be distracted by these activities, and the effect of a particularly juicy web page on the attention focus of a class is similar to the result of putting an electromagnet next to a compass. Such a distraction can really throw a teacher off his rhythm, and getting the class’s attention back can sometimes be tricky. Still, I try to be as sympathetic about it as I can, when it occurs. Happily, it seems that I am either interesting enough (which I hope) or confusing enough (which I suspect) that I don’t see this behaviour all that frequently.

Nevertheless, I was not surprised at all to read, as The Winnipeg Free Press is now reporting, that laptops may well be doing more harm than good for the students who are using them. You should read the whole article (and keep your eyes peeled for the full results in a forthcoming edition of Computers & Education), but a few quotations from the summary rang particularly true to me:

“Instead of zeroing in on the lecture, students who brought laptops to class spent considerable time e-mailing, surfing the Internet and playing games[...]. Further, the study found a relationship between laptop use in class and a weaker understanding of course material and a lower overall course performance[...].

Checking e-mail during the lectures was the most common distraction; 81 per cent admitted to this transgression compared to 68 per cent reporting that they used instant messaging. Forty-three per cent reported surfing the Internet, while 25 per cent reported playing games, the study found.”

When you also take into account the fact that these are self-report data (“The laptop users reported in weekly surveys[...]”), it seems likely that the true figures are even higher — that is to say, worse.

So what should be done about this? Is this an epidemic that threatens the very fabric of the academic world? Should we, as the University of Victoria has done, ban the use of laptops in the classroom? Should we take legislative action? Call in the Marines? Hold a rally?

Nah.

I think not: In fact, I think the correct response to this problem is to do nothing whatseover, unless in direct response to complaints from other students in the class. At private universities, the students are our paying customers, and if they want to decrease their grades by an average of five percent, who are we to say no? In the words of a good friend of mine, who is also in the teaching profession:

“Education is strange. Where else does the consumer try to get as little as possible for his money?”

But as strange as it may be, they are the customers, and as long as they are not harming other customers by doing so, I see no reason to interfere. If other students were to complain, my first solution would be to ask the laptop users to sit in the very back of the classroom, so that nobody else would see what they’re doing. That would probably be the first time a teacher had specifically asked a student to sit in the back, unless we count the whole dunce-cap and switching crowd from the early days of American public education, but it ought to fix the problem quite neatly.**

Meanwhile, it seems as if we’re more or less back where we started, before laptops became a regular fixture of collegiate lecture halls: There are some students who pay attention and take notes, and others who snooze, or stare off into space, or play around on their laptops. Heck, I know plenty of faculty members who do the same thing during colloquium talks. So, unless we want to risk the cardinal sin of hypocrisy, this is one of those matters upon which I figure it’s better to live, and let live. The economics of education will work out just fine in the long run.

Besides, isn’t Free Cell better than snoring?

** And if, in the future, the laptop-users outnumber the non-laptop users, you could just reverse the polarity of the request and reserve the front row or two for the traditionalists.

Filed by Michael at 21:04 under Academic, Didaxis
2 Comments