The Global Voices Online site has a story on Part-time Lecturers and Suicide that matters. A number of humanities lecturers have committed suicide after spending years in part-time sessional work with no promise of a professorship. Would we know if we had a similar situation here in Canada? Increasingly we are dependent on sessional teaching to cover courses as we handle budget cuts by not hiring tenure-track or even just contract faculty. My guess is that a few departments may get to 50% of their teaching being done by part-timers. Why is this? Sessionals, hired one course at a time, are a cheap way to get quality teaching, especially if the sessionals are led to believe they might eventually get the coveted positions. Full time faculty benefit because we can keep our research positions while letting help for a fraction of our salary. At what point should we be honest with ourselves and admit that a university cannot afford tenure track faculty for teaching and deal with the effects by creating teaching positions that have some stability instead of stringing on recent graduates. Is Korea ahead of us in confronting the desperation of part-time faculty? Will it take a suicide for anyone to notice here?
Dreyfus: Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence
Willard in Humanist pointed us towards an interesting RAND Paper by Hubert L. Drefus from 1965, Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence which suggests that artificial intelligence research is like alchemy – initial success has led to it being oversold when the fundamental paradigm is wrong.
Alchemists were so successful in distilling quicksilver from what seemed to be diret, that after several hundred years of fruitless effort to convert lead into gold they still refused to believe that on the chemical level one cannot transmute metals. To avoid the fate of the alchemists, it is time we asked where we stand. Now, before we invest more time and money on the information-processing level, we should ask whether the protocols of human subjects suggest that comptuer language is appropriate for analyzing human behaviour. Is an exhaustive analysis of human intelligent behavior into discrete and determinate operations possible? Is an approximate analysis of human intelligent behavior in such digital terms probable? The answer to both these questions seems to be, “No.”
In this paper Dreyfus leverages the lack of progress after people like H. A. Simon in 1957 predicted the extraordinary. Dreyfus does more than make fun of the hype, he uses it to question what AI research might achieve at all and to think about intelligence.
Now that we are 50 years after Simon’s predictions things are more complicated. We do have chess playing machines that are better players than humans. (Drefus points out how the early machines being hyped were really stupid chess players.) We do have machines that can recognize complex patterns and recognize speech. We do have better machine translation. It may be going slowly, but research is moving forward. Perhaps the paradigm of the mind as a machine is wrong, but thinking about it that way and trying to model intelligent behaviour is getting results. What then do we make of the alchemical insult. Is it too easy to call magical thinking those projects that are ambitious and make the mistake of predicting success? Having recently read Siegried Zielinski’s Deep Time of the Media, I’m finding myself more sympathetic of magical projects that promise to transmute data into intelligence. Impossible … probably, but that is no reason not to try.
To paraphrase the third of (recently died) Arthur C. Clarke’s three laws of prediction:
“Any sufficiently magical proposal should be indistinguishable from research.”
This obviously applies to grant proposals.
Gaming, Learning, and Libraries
It won’t come as a surprise that libraries are getting into gaming, whether to support game studies by making games available as they do books, or using games to teach information literacy. I came across na nice conference video report by Tom Peters of the American Libraries Association (ALA) TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium in 2007. I like how the video report is edited. It is a bit short of content, but it shows the atmosphere and people.
I’m less convinced by games to teach library and information skills. Here are some I’ve found:
Quarantined: Axl Wise and the Information Outbreak is from Arizona State and lets you play a student, Axl, who works for the student newspaper and who has to figure out why the university is quarantined. It seems rather a lot of irrelevant puzzles for a little bit of simulating searching for information, but could be fun enough.
I’ll Get It and Within Range are two games from Carnegie Mellon, neither of which are much fun, but that may not be the point.
I’ve been talking with Kevin Kee at Brock about the logic of serious games or educational games. I’m tempted to say that games can’t by definition be both playful and serious. I gave a paper to that effect at Playing the Gallery, but Kevin is convincing me that games are sophisticated enough a phenomenon that there can be all sorts of planned learning. I think the National Film Board The Cyber-Terrorism Crisis site (which Kevin was involved in) might be a good example of a playful web site for learning, though parts of it are no longer working. I’m certainly convinced that designing games can be serious work through which learning happens. I also accept that there are things one learns through playing like “problem solving”. I just find games created to teach certain skills, like how to file books, are neither games nor particularly good at teaching.
Stay tuned, Kevin and I are writing a dialogue where I will get to be a curmudgeon on this issue.
Addiction to internet ‘is an illness’
According to an article in the Guardian Observer, Addiction to internet ‘is an illness’ (David Smith, Sunday March 23 2008). The story mentions research by Dr. Jerald Block and case studies from South Korea. Internet addiction has these components:
- Excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives;
- Withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible;
- The need for better computers, more software, or more hours of use;
- Negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation and fatigue.
Is blogging an addiction?
FlowingData: 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe
Peter sent me to a neat blog, FlowingData that is partly about visualization. Nathan, the author, posts longish notes like 17 Ways to Visualize the Twitter Universe. He also has a good one on 21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox which has some creative ways to handle spam like Alex Dragulescu’s Spam Architecture that takes spam and generates “three-dimensional modeling gestures”! (I want to be a 3D modeling gesture!)
Top 100 Tools for Learning, 2008
Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008 is a list tools ranked by 135 “learning professionals (from both education and workplace learning)”. The top 10 tools are, del.icio.us, Firefox, Skype, Google Reader, Google Search, WordPress, Powerpoint, Google Docs, Audacity, and Gmail.
Photos: Mexican Grave
I finally got around to putting up a photoset on Flickr of some of the best pictures I took at a graveyard in Playa del Carmen, Mexico – Mexican Grave.
Ross Scaife (1960-2008)
Dot Porter has written a caring obituary for Ross Scaife (1960-2008) who was behind the Stoa project and Suda Online, one of the first social network – collaborative projects I came across in the digital humanities. The comments to the obit bring out how gentle and caring Ross was – we will all miss him.
Ong: Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism
Wandering some more through the Notes from the Walter Ong Collection blog I came across an intriguing note on Revising Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism. The Walter J. Ong Collection at Saint Louis University has PDFs of lectures including one on Secondary Orality and Secondary Visualism (PDF). In the lecture Ong seems to be thinking about virtual reality as a form of secondary visuality just as radio and television are a secondary orality. If secondary orality is orality which is scripted (while appearing spontaneous like the oral), secondary visuality would be planned while being visually spontaneous. Perhaps the scripting or planning in this case would be the code that makes virtual spaces available rather than the scripting of the humans in the space.
Secondary visuality might be like the VRML Dream – a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that was streamed over the Internet with VRML. According to a student who participated when he was younger, they had two sets of performers – the voice actors in one room and the VRML body actors in another. Or secondary visuality could be visualizations that transcode data from one sensory modality to another (from text to the visual.)
The Progress & Freedom Foundation: Digital Economy Factbook 2007
Thanks to jill/text I discoverd The Progress and Freedom Foundation’s Digital Economy Factbook, Ninth Ed. (PDF) on their Issues & Publications page. The Factbook is full of facts and graphs for everything from Internet hosts to spam. From the PFF blog I also found a compilation of media metrics charts on Flickr like this one of Information Creation and Available Storage:
As jill/text (where I read about this) reminds us, we have to be careful with this Factbook – it is put out by an industry advocacy group with a lot of powerful sponsors from Google to AT&T. They have an agenda to advocate for protection of digital content.