Ravi's Blog – Page 21 – Ravi Ravishanker, Wellesley College

29
Oct
2013

Testing is critical to success!

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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22
Oct
2013

EDUCAUSE Annual Conference

categories: Uncategorized

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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09
Oct
2013

LTS Annual Report

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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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30
Sep
2013

Here a MOOC, there a MOOC, everywhere a MOOC, MOOC

categories: Uncategorized

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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20
Sep
2013

An internal collaboration that we can be proud of

categories: Uncategorized

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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11
Sep
2013

Changes – no end in sight!

categories: Uncategorized

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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04
Sep
2013

Another Year Starts…

categories: Uncategorized

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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20
Aug
2013

Attachment Addiction

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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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14
Aug
2013

The Complexities of a “Project”

categories: Uncategorized

I was out playing golf at the Nehoiden golf club yesterday evening with my son and a fellow golfer yet again reminded us of how humbling a game golf is. In theory, many of us who have played the game for several years, know what to do – stretch, the grip, the setup, placement of the ball, keep your head down, keep your head down, keep your head down…, practice swing, club face, back swing, read the green, so on and so forth. However, execution is a whole different thing and concentration is a big factor. For the undisciplined person like me, that last email that I just read messes up my execution. And then, I read research papers like “Rotational biomechanics of the elite golf swing: benchmarks for amateurs” (bad idea) and start worrying about how I am doing relative to best practices mentioned there. I need to meditate and do yoga to learn mind control & have a flexible body to be a good golfer!

We, in LTS, are engaged in a lot of “projects” and they pose the same challenges as a golf swing. There are umpteen variables that all need to line up for a successful execution. Just the way that the ball does not land most of the time exactly where you want to, projects also don’t end up where one originally intended. Sometimes, the ball lands in a sand trap and getting it out is not clean and you need to rake the sand to make the trap appear undisturbed – in several projects such mishits and cleanups are necessary.

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07
Aug
2013

Information Security – Everyone is responsible!

categories: Uncategorized

Summer is winding down and we have already begun seeing increased activity in the College, preparations are underway for the orientation for students and new faculty. Several of us have been in conversations with some of the new faculty. They are some of the most technologically savvy and need computing power beyond the usual laptops. It is encouraging to see that there is no longer a discipline dependency to high end technology requirement. Faculty from all disciplines seem to need them.

In a shameless self promotion, please watch my participation in a discussion about MOOCs with the Chairman of edX Anant Agarwal on NECN CEO Corner.

I am sure you that many of read this in NY Times -“Universities Face a Rising Barrage of Cyberattacks“. If you haven’t, you must read this. In the early stages of internet, the technologies were also evolving and all of us faced attacks, our networks were penetrated and were used for activities such as storing and sharing large image and video files. Warez was one such common activity. I distinctly remember watching a perpetrator’s every keystroke when we were trying to track down what was going on. It was from Australia and I called the ISP who basically told me that they are helpless to do anything but temporarily suspend the account. Of course, in the heat of the moment, I was asking a lot more of them! As soon as I put the phone down, the keystrokes disappeared!

These problems have gotten much worse and far more serious than stealing file storage. Trying to guard information has become expensive. But most importantly, IT professionals alone cannot be responsible for information security.

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