Author Archive
I spent most of the weekend catching up on the MOOC that I am registered for – The Secret of Life. We are learning about cloning and it is fascinating. The acceleration in discoveries and innovations has gotten up to a point where the “tools” of cloning are now available in a catalog – you can order the “cloning vectors” (“Plasmids“). We are also learning how the scientists have been unraveling the “secret of life”. It is mind boggling to hear how there is always an enzyme that assists a specific chemical reaction, which led the professor to quip that “there is always an app for that”! It is pretty amazing how all of these have to come together in particular sequence (no pun intended) and at particular times for everything to work just right. No wonder it took several million years to perfect this….
Whereas this course is teaching us the intricacies of formation of life, I was so sad to see many lives lost in the Philippines due to super typhoon Haiyan. I sure hope that they get the help they need and recover quickly. We were relieved to hear how technology, combined with the government machinery, helped evacuate 800,000 people from somewhat a smaller Typhoon that hit Eastern India a few weeks ago. I still vividly remember the 1964 cyclone (cyclone, hurricane, typhoon – they are all similar) that destroyed a bridge in South India (called the Pamban Palam) connecting an island called Dhanushkodi. My cousin was coming back to Sri Lanka after a trip to India around that time and it took us several days to know that he luckily skipped the train that submerged in the waters. Communication was pretty bad in those days!
I was talking to a colleague last week about a proposal to collaborate and we were both fretting how hard it has become to collaborate. We also were wondering aloud as to “what is collaboration?” One can look for its definition in dictionaries, but I think this definition in Wikipedia captures the essence well “Collaboration is working with each other to do a task and to achieve shared goals. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals”. The key is “working together”, “shared goals” and “recursive process”. Too often, in our interest to collaborate, we lose sight of these key things.
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I heard a very interesting & timely piece on NPR this evening – “The Most Secure Password In The World Might Be You” I strongly encourage you to listen to it or read about it. It is a quick review of how some big tech firms are predicting that the passwords are dead and biometrics are the way to go. The proliferation of systems that requires us to authenticate and the hodgepodge of rules for strong passwords have created a nightmare. Most users have the same password for accessing everything and worse, it is also an easily guessable password. Biometrics on the other hand relies on you as a person to do something to identify yourself to the systems – either a finger swipe, or retinal scan or a voice recognition system along with a pass phrase. Just the same way the passwords has weaknesses, each of these also have weaknesses, but they certainly have clear advantages. One of them is that you don’t need to maintain multiple passwords! Each of the biometric methods exploit the fact that they are unique to the person. One of the arguments made in favor of biometrics is that stealing the info is not scalable. That is, whereas millions of passwords stored on a server can be hacked and unencrypted in hours or days, it is hard to imagine stealing fingerprints and retinas on that scale, especially anonymously! However, some form of fingerprints and retinal scans must be saved somewhere in order to verify that it is yours. It is quite possible that these can be hacked and transmitted in some fashion to fool the system. This is pure speculation on my part, of course! If you ask me, I would like to see the passwords dead in favor of a more reliable and easy to use authentication system, but I don’t think passwords will be die that soon.
Clayton Christensen reminded yet again in NY Times this past weekend about the disruptions taking place in Higher Ed – “Innovations Imperative: Change Everything“. Thunderbird School of Management merging with Laureate Education, for example. Is this just the start of something bigger to come?
We are trying very hard to be tuned into major advances and disruptions that are taking place. The Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policies (ACLTP) has begun an overview of Library trends in order to understand disruptions in managing Collections and understand what services we should be prepared to provide. We are excited because such collaborative planning for the future always pays hefty dividends.
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Long couple of nights, but then a relatively early finish last night by the Red Sox. Hopefully they will wrap up with a victory in Game 6 on Wednesday. It is also the halloween season. We vividly remember the days when our boys were little. In the last minute, they used to come up with ideas for costumes that simply didn’t exist in stores that you could buy. My wife used to work her magic to make them happen. The happiness in them for the few hours that they wore the custom costumes were priceless! It is like the customization that we are asked to do at work on a regular basis. No, I am not saying that our collaborators are like children!
At the entrance to Clapp library you will see the “Halloween Desk” inviting you check out one of the thrilling books. I saw them setting this up yesterday evening. The work we do every day is “thrilling” in some sense. The excitement as well as anxiety associated with any project rollout is amazing. The thrill comes from the fact that we have collaborated and contributed to something that is typically exciting. But the anxiety is real – “How well is this going to go?”. In case you have not heard about a couple of recent technical debacles, such as the rollout of signing up for the affordable care act, you must be living in some other planet. You can view the Saturday Night Live version of this here. In some sense, all of us in this business worry about issues such as the website performance for Obamacare in a much smaller scale. This is why comprehensive testing is critical. You have heard me say this several times before – that it is impossible to predict all the variations in the theme up front even if you do comprehensive testing, but that does not mean you shouldn’t test. In other words, no matter how comprehensive a test you perform, you will always encounter issues. You want to make sure that these issues are more of an outlier than the norm and that you have a plan/strategy for handling the outliers.
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I am so busy with things that I am embedding images of my tweets instead of finding the appropriate plugin to do this. My apologies. Here are most of my tweets during EDUCAUSE Annual conference in Anaheim, CA. I really enjoyed the two keynote talks as well as meeting with several colleagues. Learned a few things, which I will talk about in some of my future posts. If you are interested in getting to this as a feed with clickable links etc. click here.
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I went to bed last night around 11:30 when Red Sox took the lead, but I was unable to sleep. Reminded of the hard loss the night before, I had to watch till the end. Of course, I was up until 12:40 and I will pay for it today! It is the Nobel Prize season and this morning we found out that the prize for Chemistry went to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel. As they say, it is about time that the importance of computer simulations in understanding large biological molecules is recognized. Needless to say that as someone who did my graduate work and postdoctoral work in the mid-80’s these very familiar names. My thesis mentor Prof David Beveridge knew them all, so we have had the fortune to meet them and hear them talk in several occasions. As early users of a software called CHARMM that was developed in Karplus lab, we have met him and his group a few times.
We have tried to keep the community informed of the accomplishments of LTS staff through the annual report. This year we wanted to try something different. We have used infographics to convey some key points. You can view the entire report here. But, I have attached a few highlights below. Whereas the annual report celebrates some of the key achievements, it sometimes fails to capture all of the hard work that goes on behind the scenes. So we always have to make some judgement call on what to present.
This semester is off to a rocky start and it is an unsettling feeling. We have identified some network issues (relating to Macs and broadcasts) that affected the classroom connectivity and wireless issues in certain dorms. For those affected by these issues, many questions remain and they want the problems resolved quickly. We have been trying very hard and have many of the issues under control. It is frustrating all around, but we will keep at it until the issues are resolved. Of course, then something else will pop up.
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I can’t believe that today is the last day of September! Where does the time go? It was approximately 35 years ago that I came to this country. I arrived in JFK on Sunday, Sep 10th, totally lost. When I was about to leave, a relative of mine asked where in NY I was going to “is it Manhattan island?”. Of course, I knew my Chemistry and Math really well, but not geography! I had no clue. I was waiting at the airport for an Indian grad student from Hunter College to pick me up, except no one was seeking me. After a long wait and nervousness, another Indian person looking for someone else from my flight asked if I saw “a dark Indian guy with glasses”. I said to myself, “that would be three quarters of all Indians in the flight”. Then he asked me who I was waiting for and when I told him, he could not stop laughing “Vasu is happily watching football in his apartment!”. It turns out that the telegram I sent before I left, which was strategically sent just a couple of hours before my flight on Saturday, was addressed to his Hunter College address on a wekend. I later found out that telegrams were not as reliable here as they were in India! Of course, now those who arrive from India are so savvy that they become my GPS! Sometimes I get irritated (sorry) and take an alternate route.
Before I get carried too far… As you may know, Wellesley’s first ever MOOC, Introduction to Human Evolution, taught by Adam van Arsdale, opened last Wednesday, September 25th. It is an important step for our grand experiment. Adam worked extremely hard to make this happen and edX staff keep telling us how he is a natural and this is one of the courses that have gone through very smoothly, including the opening day. Many of us have been watching some of the early discussions with enthusiasm. I have watched several of the videos and looked at the problem sets etc. They are really cool! The diversity of students in terms of the many dimensions of the data collected – gender, highest degree, the location etc – are fascinating. There will be more to come…
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In case you have not heard yet, we released “Wellesley’s Quick College Cost Estimator” on Wednesday morning. This is the brainchild of Professor Phillip Levine in Econ department. With just six fairly simple and straightforward questions, you get a good first approximation for the best estimate of what a student’s family is expected to pay to go to Wellesley. Though we don’t have a daughter, I could not resist the urge to check it out and as a parent of two sons (one is still a senior in College), I was pleasantly surprised to see the expected family contributions for various combination of the numbers. Of course, this is due to Wellesley’s generous Financial Aid policy. I strongly urge you to check this out.
This is a collaboration project that we can all be proud of. Yes, it had the usual pain points of meetings, revisions after revisions, and last minute integration of design and programming. But all these don’t matter, because, you forget all of that when you look at the final product, how much it is being used, all the press we have gotten so far and the feedback. Here are some viewpoints from the press:
There are many more, but these give you enough viewpoints.
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Though we had an excellent start of the semester, there were two nagging issues we needed to solve. One had to do with the print management software called Papercut and the other had to with Macs in classrooms. The first issue was related to one of the unusually busy printing season – first two weeks of the semester. In addition, we are now using multi function devices for printing and in order to support them, we needed to move the print server to Windows server, the only supported platform. The Mac issue had to do with the way we have been reusing the computer names and how this “confuses” the active directory, resulting in the users not be able to login to the domain. Notice that both of these problems are related to Microsoft backend technologies. Just sayin’…
Thanks to the teamwork by LTS staff and their hard work, both of these problems seem to be under control. Another case that illustrates that no matter how hard you work to avoid these problems, the real field testing happens only when our faculty and students are here. This is why the best strategies are one that allows us to be prepared and solve the problems quickly. We can never rest saying “we have tested everything and they work”. No, they don’t, sorry!
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Yesterday (Sep 3) was the first day of classes at Wellesley. As far as LTS is concerned, we seem to be off to another good start. We have been able to see that most of the students have connected their computers to the network. Our students brought more Macs than Windows machines – 67% Macs 33% Windows so far. We also should have a pretty good handle on the Smartphones that they are bringing in. My guess is that the Droids will be more than iPhones based on what I saw during the orientation. No, I was not spying on them – we exempt them from Cisco NAC, so the students were bringing theirs in for that!
Some of us also met with the new faculty and presented to them the range of services we support and fielded a lot of questions. They were duly impressed and a couple compared our support to the institutions they come from & mentioned how impressed they were about our faculty support. I also heard from two parents who mentioned how clear all instructions were on LTS website! LTS staff should consider this as an endorsement of the hard and creative work that they do! Way to go!
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During this fall, some of our early applications (such as Tanner) will be used for a third time. Thankfully, they seem to be running fine with just some minor tweaks. Many more will be run for the second time, such as the hugely successful checklist. One component of the checklist is the assignment of a first year seminar and a writing class for the first years. This went through a major rewrite this year based on what we learned from the way placement was done last year. Since we retain historical data in these apps, we can analyze, re-simulate, and achieve better results. One more that we did this year is the automated assignment of classrooms based on faculty preferences. Went extremely well and based on the feedback we receive, we will keep refining the apps. In the meantime, we keep getting a lot of requests and we are moving along…
Let us get on to email attachments! I don’t know if you are one of those who began using email before attachments were implemented in early 1990’s. I was one of them. You needed to run an external program such as BinHex on the file to be sent, copy and paste it to the text of the email. Then instruct the recipient on how to unwind it and hope they have the program that you used. Many of us also belonged to BITNET at that point in time and it provided a relatively easy way to “SHIP” a file, which was considered easier. But then came the Internet, the availability of easy to use mail clients such as Eudora and the implementation of MIME for exchanging images, files etc. These additional entities are the “Attachments”. However, technology has improved tremendously in the meantime and it is time to rethink attachments.
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Whereas this course is teaching us the intricacies of formation of life, I was so sad to see many lives lost in the Philippines due to super typhoon Haiyan. I sure hope that they get the help they need and recover quickly. We were relieved to hear how technology, combined with the government machinery, helped evacuate 800,000 people from somewhat a smaller Typhoon that hit Eastern India a few weeks ago. I still vividly remember the 1964 cyclone (cyclone, hurricane, typhoon – they are all similar) that destroyed a bridge in South India (called the Pamban Palam) connecting an island called Dhanushkodi. My cousin was coming back to Sri Lanka after a trip to India around that time and it took us several days to know that he luckily skipped the train that submerged in the waters. Communication was pretty bad in those days!