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I just completed two years at Wellesley. I can’t believe how fast the time has gone by.
There are certain things that you always remember no matter what. One of them is my first Thanksgiving. I had arrived in NY during early September in 1978 to do my graduate work at Hunter College. I knew the exact area where I wanted to do my work, so I had written to Prof David Beveridge there and he had accepted me into his group. So, right from the get go, I was part of his group. He invited the group to his house in Westport. It was barely two months after I arrived here. Deeply homesick and highly suspicious of the so-called vegetarian choices, I joined others for a ride to CT. Prof Beveridge and his wife had cooked up a storm and had plenty of vegetarian choices. We had a good time walking outside the house. Coming from a small basement apartment in Queens, the backyard looked so beautiful and vast! We had a great time, lots of stories and good food. The Turkey (picture on the left is from Wikipedia) looked foreign to me at that time and I took a seat far away from it. I may have nibbled on some of the food, but what I remember is living that evening on delicious apples!
I always say how thankful I am to Prof Beveridge. He is the reason why I came to this country and he has been a true mentor all along. He is the reason why we moved to Wesleyan, which, we consider to be the best move we made. We are still connected to them and meet up for dinners.
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EDUCAUSE is one conference that I have attended for the last several years. I was not happy that this year’s conference was was scheduled to start on Election Day. I went to our home in CT on Tuesday night and watched the results with my wife, who was pretty nervous, while I was not. As I tweeted that night, In NATE SILVER we trust. It was amazing how close his predictions were to the real results. After listening to the concession speech by Mitt Romney, I went to bed around 1:30 PM. I listened to the fantastic acceptance speech by President Obama only later. The reason I had to go to bed was that I needed to leave home by 3:30 AM to catch my flight to Denver, so I can get there on time to attend a good chunk of the conference. I arrived in Denver to 70 degree weather, while leaving the east coast where it was cold and snowy. The electoral college weighted map of the USA (a cartogram where the scaling is based on different criteria, in this case the electoral college votes) from Mark Newman is on your left. For those of us who are election stats junkies, these kinds of representations are real fun.
I enjoyed the conference very well. Connecting with other colleagues and some vendors was very useful, but the presentations were below par, with the exception of the general sessions. While talking to the colleagues, I felt very good about the various things we are doing at Wellesley.
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Can’t wait for next Tuesday. I want all the election commercials to be over. They are mostly lies and misinterpretations and sometimes outright silly, childish and stupid. Whereas the election season helps the the mass media and several local economies in the battleground states, the scale of it (about a billion dollars for presidential election alone) is repulsive. I don’t see this improving. In other words, I don’t see this election bubble bursting any point soon. I will be watching the results on Tuesday night and catching a 5:30 AM flight to Denver to attend the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. Depending on how close the election is, I may or may not get any sleep Tuesday night. I wonder if any economist has bothered to calculate the productivity loss during the presidential election year.
On the other hand, we know that a ballpark estimate for the cost of Hurricane, SuperStorm or FrankenStorm Sandy (The picture on the left is from: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hurricanes/archives/2012/h2012_Sandy.html) is $20-$60 Billion. It was amazing to watch it unfold on TV. Here is a case where the science is really making a difference – well, up to a point. Knowing about it ahead of time, modeling its path etc. have come a long way and predictions about Sandy were extremely good. This of course helped with the evacuations, cancellations of NY City Subway etc. etc. However, there was nothing anyone could do to reduce or stop the devastation that Sandy caused. The sheer power of nature unfolded right before our eyes and ears and even the politicians took a pause. In NJ, at least for a short moment, it appeared that the NJ Governor, a Republican, and the President came together. Of course, the skeptics see some hidden agenda here.
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Final presidential debate is over and done with and the San Francisco Giants quietly came from behind to beat the Cardinals and the World Series is all set. Whether it is the debates or the Yankees losing to the Tigers, there is a lot of spinning going on. In case of politics, the spin rooms are there for this purpose. In sports, it is always the bad calls or the injuries; I guess you can throw money at acquiring all the talented players but you can’t buy their well being and health. I am sure we will all be watching the different polls and other sources such as Intrade during the next few days while also checking the World Series. When I was growing up, the election seasons in Sri Lanka and India were so much fun. There were so many outdoor events where the politicians came and gave fiery speeches, with a lot of warm up acts including music and dance. Finally, when the time came to announce the results, we were up all night listening to the short wave radio, sipping on coffee or chai (which was a predictor of which side you were on!), screaming hard when our parties won a seat and waking up all the neighbors. It was a lot of fun.
I continue to watch Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight (I should say that I loved it much better the way it was before NY Times took over), Real Clear Politics and Intrade. I check these along with Facebook and Twitter before I even check my emails in the morning. Email is for the older people 🙂 I get so much out of my social media connections. As I have said before, those who I follow have already filtered the news for me so that when I get up, the virtual newspaper is waiting for me from all over the world. It is this concept that is also helping drive the online courses. So, I decided to go back to school to check ’em out.
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It was such a gorgeous day on thursday, Oct 11, 2012 & I took a short walk around Lake Waban. It was so refreshing. I counted the time towards Wellesley’s Walktober. Unfortunately we found out that only three of us signed up for our team and a team means 4 to 10 people. So, I can count the walking towards my personal commitment only and not towards a team competition. Since I don’t need this as a personal nudge (I am pretty diligent about my exercise anyways), I am not going to keep the Walktober data up to date.
Enjoyed watching the vice presidential debate last night and may end up watching the Orioles vs Yankees this evening. It was amazing to see Twitter and Facebook filled with instant feedback from so many people during the debate. Whereas it is great to see how these technologies are helping such instant feedback, most data are rather predictable. What is great is how you instantly see how many others independently are posting similar feelings towards what is said or done.
As I was walking around the lake yesterday, I was beginning to think about all the different things that are going on in LTS. Despite the fact that we wanted this year to be a year of stability because we had gone through significant changes during the past year, I am simply amazed at all the things that are going on. I will stick to my practice of not naming individuals in the descriptions below 🙂
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We have been traveling a fair amount during the past couple of weeks – once to Chicago to visit my son and then to Charlotte and Greensboro, NC where my wife is participating in a conference. I have been meeting up with a good friend in Charlotte and playing golf. I drove two hours each way twice to play. Yup, it is crazy. Yesterday, after getting up at 5 AM and driving down for a 7:30 AM tee time, I almost began doubting weather.com. As you can see in the picture on the left, at 7:30 AM, this is how the golf course looked and we could hear a distant thunder or two and see lightening. However, as predicted, the storm passed quickly and we ended up playing in 50 deg weather on a soggy course.
After my friend introduced me to his other friends and they ask me what I do, the discussion predictably turned to why Higher Ed costs so much. A few of them, like us, have one or more children in College and it is hard on everyone who has to pay what we all have to pay. Since I know a thing or two about the financials of the institutions I have worked in, I tried to explain how, as a non-profit organization, the Higher Ed institutions have worked extremely hard to reduce the budgets and it is very hard to look for where to cut more. Of course, they don’t buy it. I also pointed to the fact that we all have choices when it comes to where we want to send our children to school based on costs, but we all value education so much that this is one area where we are probably not going to make hard choices or take chances.
This topic of increasing cost of higher education is a hot topic and technology is predicted to be a savior! There are all sorts of futuristic arguments on how technology can help reduce the costs and increase productivity, but specifics are lacking. Frankly, if technology could actually help curb the cost of Higher Ed, with the advances we have seen in the recent past, why has this not happened?
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There is simply too much going on. There have been several days of back to back meetings, some exciting software development and some minor crisis management and course corrections to a major project – the usual stuff that a CIO has to deal with. Talking about course correction, we had installed a SMART board in one of our classrooms (we planned four this semester) which was interfering with the use of the chalk board. This was not caught earlier because of some minor communications issues. We needed to do something quick, so we scrambled to move it to a mobile stand. One of our staff found a stand available in eBay, bid and won the bid. Of course, not many all over the world are waiting in line for a Mobile stand for a SMART Board, but still, it was fun. As a backup we also ordered the “real thing”, which apparently is manufactured or assembled only on demand. In the end, the eBay version had some missing parts and could not be used and the “real thing” came, but scheduling human resources to put it together took time, but finally it is done. The board itself weighs about 500 pounds and the stand another 200. I am being told that it was manageable to move short distances. The board’s movement up and down is done with a switch. Though this has been delayed, the faculty who were planning on using it have been very understanding, so all is well.
Professor Jay Turner from Environmental Studies asked if I would like to join a reading group of students and faculty (Jay, Kristina Jones and Alden Griffith) discussing Technology and Environmental Sustainability this semester. This week’s topic of life-cycle of digital electronics and solar panels was interesting, so I decided to go. I took some time to read through the assigned readings – Paper vs Digital, Solar Panels, and Chapter 2 from the book “High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health” by Elizabeth Grossman. They are all excellent reads and I especially recommend the last one. I think many of us who are technologists have no clue about what is the real environmental cost of making digital devices. We all know that it is pretty high, but I doubt very much that anyone knows that mining for 1 ton of copper results in 310 tons of waste in terms of rocks and ore. This is huge. But like everything else, there is a lot more to it. For example, base metals like copper are also easily recyclable – whether they get recycled at a rate that is high and desirable is a whole another question. What follows is a short collection of a wide ranging set of topics discussed during the class without particular attribution to who said what.
Disclaimer: It is highly possible that my interpretations of a few things discussed may not be accurate, so feel free to comment on them or send me the corrections!
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The new academic year began last week and the College is full of activity. The Clapp Library is looking busy and alive. One knows how busy the Library is just as you enter – the exterior door has some issue (wear and tear) and the next set of doors are typically left open (patrons are too busy to close them; they really think that they are swing doors that should close automatically, but they don’t!). Sorry, the doors are my pet peeve and my attempts to get them fixed permanently have always resulted in the answer of how costly it would be! I even suggested an old style cord of sorts for the interior door that the student or the staff at the service desk can pull to shut them. But then we have insurance liability to worry about because some may trip over the cord. All kidding aside, we are on a mission to get these fixed soon (Hope is everything)!
There are some days that you never forget – the landing on the moon (I was here listening to tamil translation of a BBC broadcast on radio), the Challenger disaster (Watching TV here ) and of course 9/11 (I was at work at Wesleyan where we all gathered to watch the horrible scenes on TV). I found this op-ed in NY Times on 9/11/2012 to be interesting (though we have heard many of these before, when you look at it collectively, it sheds a different light on the problem). Of course, this is just one version of the events preceding the horrible tragedy. Hearing some of the survivors of the tragedy recount their loved ones even now makes one feel so sad. On to other things.
We are in the process of developing a short term strategic plan. One question we are interested in the question is the future of networking. It is the most fundamental technology we rely on 24/7/365 (or 366 every four years) and take for granted. Whether it is cloud computing or Mobile First, all of which we will incorporate, having a reliable and fast network infrastructure is critical. Note that I said reliable first! (more…)
Yesterday, Orientation ’12 began and the class of 2016 and their proud parents could be seen all around campus. I made a brief visit to the “Welcome Wagon”. LTS staff were busy helping the students by excluding their PDAs from Cisco NAC. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of these devices that I saw. I also saw one student proudly declaring that she took care of the exclusion “first thing”. It would be interesting to study how the student behavior during the start of their College years translate to their ongoing academic work 🙂 Are those who filled out the checklist first, chose the Writing courses and first year seminars early the ones that are also submitting their assignments early? OK, just kidding and be assured that we are not tracking such data. I have two data points (our two boys) and I can tell you that there was absolutely no correlation between the initial enthusiasm and afterwards.
Olympics is over and the presidential elections are in full swing. As always, there are way too many things on the web to follow. I have restricted mine to a select few. I have many who I follow on twitter whose posts provide me a great list of filtered information. I have added Google Politics & Elections to one of my Circles in Google Plus. I also follow Real Clear Politics and Five Thirty Eight by Nate Silver. I should say that Five Thirty Eight has become a bit more guarded and less exciting after it moved to NY Times. In 2008 it was a bit more exciting. Actually, in 2008, everything was exciting, especially around this time. Our older son decided to work for the Obama campaign and started in late August.
I am sure that last Friday’s verdict in favor of Apple and against Samsung would have been far more in the front pages, if it is not for the Republican National Convention and Hurricane Isaac. Frankly I was very surprised by the verdict on many counts. As has been discussed numerous times, many experts blame the patent law for this mess. For eg. Apple having a patent on rectangular phone is beyond ridicule. Would you buy a phone that is not rectangular? Does this mean that only Apple can make mobile phones or as a monopoly on rectangular phones, Apple can dictate what the license fee that the other manufacturers have to pay to Apple (and therefore pass it on to us the customers)? This article provides a balanced view of the possible long term outcomes. Intellectual property & patents is a hot topic beyond this and the confusing laws in the US and lack of international standards makes it extremely hard to operate.
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The summer is winding down and we are all getting ready for the start of yet another academic year. As always, there are noticeable changes that will affect our faculty and students when they get back. Some will see them as welcome changes whereas others will see them as annoyances. In a few cases, the changes we have to make are out of our control, but the users don’t necessarily care. We are getting ready to communicate these changes.
I attended a day long meeting last Monday in Northampton organized by NERCOMP. The program committee which plans the annual conference met in the morning and I was assigned to one of the most boring tracks – Policy, Regulations and Security. We were a fun group so it was OK. One of our tasks was also to come up with the theme and suggestions for keynote speakers for the upcoming conference. Because of the topics I suggested, I may have earned a nickname “The Disruptive Technologist”. No, I was not disrupting the proceedings, but earned the title based on the topics I was suggesting.
During the subsequent discussions, I heard more than once, “Working in Higher Ed is not what it used to be”. I have a feeling that some of what I was proposing prompted the others to mention this to me. I was stressing on the urgency for us to realize that we cannot get too comfortable with what we do, instead, we need to be extremely agile and develop constantly in new areas. I totally agree with this statement. In fact, who wouldn’t? More importantly, isn’t this true everywhere we look? Isn’t it also true that it has always been this way, it is just that it has been accelerating more recently?
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I just completed two years at Wellesley. I can’t believe how fast the time has gone by.
