megan@elon (Megan Squire)

Advice to graduates just starting out

2009-07-04T10:03:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago the Sunday New York Times had a collection of wisdom from college commencement speeches. Here's one from John Patrick Shanley, playwright, speaking to the class of 2009 at College of Mount St. Vincent:

Not to bring up something upsetting, but when you leave here today, you may go through a period of unemployment. My suggestion is this: Enjoy the unemployment. Have a second cup of coffee. Go to the park. Read Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman loved being unemployed. I don’t believe he ever did a day’s work in his life. As you may know, he was a poet. If a lot of time goes by and you continue to be unemployed, you may want to consider announcing to all appropriate parties that you have become a poet.

Another dumb idea

2009-06-27T08:54:00.004-04:00

Students, don't waste your time with ideas like this: Corrupted-File.com. What a lame way to get around writing a paper.

(Basically this is a web site that promises to send you a corrupted Word, Excel, or Powerpoint file so that you can send the corrupted file to your insructor and buy yourself a few extra days writing a paper.)

First of all, anyone who needs a few extra days to make a Powerpoint.... ?!?!? I don't know. Second of all, I can't wait to get one of those files sent to me :) I will love to look inside it. Thirdly, I wonder how much they make at $3.95 a pop? Also knowing that there's no recourse if they send you a file that doesn't work, or if you get caught.... geez. What a racket.

Finally, whoops, by publishing this, I guess I'm annoying the owners of the site who say "Keep this site a secret!"

Mechanical Turk

2009-06-18T13:29:00.002-04:00

I have to tell you I feel absolutely fascinated by Mechanical Turk (the original Amazon version and the nascent generic versions), from the perspective of micro-tasks, from a labor perspective, from a computer science perspective. Here's the wrap-up of a recent Mechanical Turk meetup about these topics.

How to be happy in your work

2009-06-18T12:09:00.001-04:00

How to be happy in your work: Memorize this Venn diagram: What we do well - What we can get paid to do - What we want to do

Open Source Conference, Day One

2009-06-04T03:13:00.006-04:00

I'll add to this post as I go through the day.

Where am I? I'm blogging from the 5th International Conference on Open Source Systems in Skovde (pronounced HURVdeh), Sweden. I've been to the previous 3 conferences as well, but missed the first year.

Who else is here? After a show of hands, we determined that more people are here from business than government (of course most people are here from academia), and more than half of the people are here for the first time.

What am I doing here? I am presenting a paper called "Using FLOSS project metadata in the undergraduate classroom" that I wrote with my colleague Shannon Duvall at Elon.

Day One:
Women in OSS breakfast 7:30-9:00. We were greeted with a lovely breakfast for everyone, and then there was a separate short meeting with some women interested in OSS. We had a speaker Eliza Roszkowska Öberg, a member of Swedish Parliament, briefly present about what Sweden is doing with e-Government and how open source is involved there.

Keynote speaker: Stormy Peters from Gnome Fndtn is talking about "Open source is changing the way work gets done". Her main points: Collaboration, across companies, history of open source, how to make money on open source a bit.

Session 1: Commercial open source
Session 2: Mining open source
Session 3: Communities of open source

Some notes on talk 3A1: Brooks' Law & open source.
--issues of coordination and early productivity.
--creating graphs of community cohesion based on shared artifacts as the links between people on a project. Take people and artifacts from svn repository (cohesion is average shortest path between people); edges between artifacts are weighted (e.g. people have worked on 8 artifacts together, this is weight); Use Floyd-Warshall to measure shortest paths between nodes; use Kamada-Kawai algorithm to place high edge weights together for viz purposes.

Social event & dinner: informal dress. Not sure where it is yet, but they showed a picture of water, so...?

Note about students working this summer

2009-05-27T18:38:00.001-04:00

E-net posted a little story about some the funding I'll be using this summer to have two students work for me on my open source data collection effort.

office hours moved today

2009-05-11T09:22:00.000-04:00

I'll be having office hours from 2-3 today (Monday) instead of from 10:45-11:45.

free software foundation INTERNSHIPS

2009-05-08T19:36:00.000-04:00

The Free Software Foundation is offering internships for summer, fall, or spring.

This looks like a great opportunity. It's not just programming either, so if you have interest in any of the related areas, please apply.

Impressions of the Kindle, part two

2009-04-30T09:10:00.002-04:00

First, a report that (and I quote) Old People Love the Kindle. Well, maybe I am getting older. And I wouldn't say "love" as much as "am fascinated by".

Anyway, second impressions of the Kindle are as follows. Not all books are welcome in the Kindle format. I see two main problems:

1. PAGE NUMBER CONCERNS

First, any book in which you need to know the page numbers will not work on Kindle 2 (or, the Kindle as I have it today). So, think about the following scenarios:

a. Assigning a textbook where half the class (and the instructor) has a Kindle and half the class has a paper copy. No more "ok, class, I need you to read pages 38-46, but you can skip page 40." Pages don't exist on the Kindle, so how to navigate this situation? What about even a book club? ("I loved that line on page 56 where the guy says..." you can't say that anymore unless everyone has the same version, either book or Kindle. Even if a book club is reading different versions of the same material, the page numbers are more likely to be close to each other. You can at least flip around to the right area of the book.) The Kindle concept of a "location" won't translate to paper, and Kindle search won't translate to paper either. This 'location' and 'search' is a definite strong suit of Kindle, I get that, but how to mediate between multiple groups!? Has someone built a web site to translate Kindle locations to paper pages yet? What about the other way 'round?

b. Citations become difficult (for example, giving the page number in a bibliography) unless there is a new APA/IEEE/MLA/whatever citation style that includes Kindle locations. I am not aware of how to do this. I should look this up to see if electronic books have been explained yet, probably have, and how the Kindle is affected.

2. FORMATTING CONCERNS

Any book that relies heavily on non-linear, tabular, or graphical objects is automatically not optimized for Kindle 2. Examples: programming books with large chunks of code to be studied, rock climbing books that show maps of routes, fitness books that show tables of exercises or foods, or sports books that show different pictures of people doing exercises. In the case of rock climbing, for instance, the different symbols used on the maps are critically important, and if the pictures aren't able to be "blown up" (enlarged) in the Kindle, then what's the point really?

I had one book that was so badly formatted that it permanently locked up my Kindle and I had to send it back and get a new one. It took 3 days to track down the problem. Amazon finally tracked the problem to a badly formatted Appendix in a book called The Portable Personal Trainer, that included a table on the glycemic indexes of common foods.

In addition, any book that relies on "as you can see from the discussion previously on page 138..." well there is no page 138. It's up to the publisher before publishing the Kindle version to insert URLs (hyperlinks) between locations, so the Kindle user can move the pointer to the hyperlink that says "page 138" and click to go to that place on the Kindle version.

Which brings me to my real concern here. The Kindle 2 has a lot of potential for things like this, URL hyperlinking and enlarged detailed images. BUT. The publishers aren't using the features. They aren't inserting these features into the "formatted" books. They're doing the bare minimum of formatting, basically running some software to turn whatever format their books are in into an .azw file, making a quick table of contents, and collecting their $9.99.

The real challenge in choosing an e-book therefore seems to be with being able to discern whether a publisher has formatted the book well before buying. Also, if the book is in multiple versions, such as public domain versions, then the user has to be able to choose the BEST formatted version. Amazon currently allows the user to download the first chapter or a sample chapter of many books available for purchase. I've found that this is helpful with choosing between public domain versions (should I buy the $0.99 version or the $0.00 version? What am I getting for my $0.99?), but it's less helpful with new books or with books that have these tricky graphical features that will be spread throughout the book, not just in the first chapter.

Amazon reviews are fairly worthless for discerning the well-formatted from the poorly-formatted. Amazon reviews allow everything from people whining about not receiving their used copies from some 3rd party seller ("One star! I never got my book in the mail!") to plot reviews ("Five stars! I love vampires!"), to opinion pieces about the cover art or the paper content of the book ("One star! Buy the other edition, this one has cheap paper!")

What we need is a comprehensive review site for discussing the formatting of e-books, or at the very least, we need the ability to search and group Amazon reviews by whether they explicitly discuss the Kindle/e-book formatting issues. I understand that Amazon has tagging, but it's not used well and it not scaling to the number of reviews they have posted.

If anyone has any ideas about how to handle these concerns, I'd be interested in hearing.

More O'Reilly books now available for Kindle

2009-04-19T20:52:00.003-04:00

The number of O'Reilly books available on the Kindle was painfully small, but here is an improvement with 160 books now available. This posting explains ther decision to release these books and why they have not released more. Interesting.

Impressions of the Kindle, part one

2009-04-15T11:30:00.002-04:00

So I got a Kindle as part of our department's initiative into investigating wireless and mobile computing platforms. I've been using it for nearly a month. Here are some of my immediate impressions of it. I'll post more substantive critique of some of its flaws and promise later.

1. The movement controls are not web-like. Unlike on the web, the primary movement is not scroll up, scroll down. Here, your primary navigation technique is "next page" and "previous page". This takes some getting used to.

2. The e-ink technology means that you have a very long battery life, and you can read in the bright sunlight outdoors with no eye fatigue. This is very different than most other devices I've seen.

3. The lack of backlighting also means that you can't read in the dark. Just like a "real" book, you'll need a book light to illuminate the screen.

4. Unlike other digital interfaces, most of the screen does not refresh after it has been drawn. This means that seemingly "obvious" items (like a clock for example) are not displayed on the device. Instead, a clock is shown if you click into a menu. The only items that seem to be redrawn are the wireless "bars" and the Kindle's equivalent of an hourglass.

5. Nearly any book available on the Kindle has a free sample (usually the first chapter) that you can download and read immediately before buying. This is useful both for previewing the content, and also for checking the book to see if you like the way the author/publisher has formatted the book. There are multiple versions of many public domain books (think: Works of Shakespeare or the like) and you may prefer the way one publisher has formatted these words over the method chosen by another publisher.

More detailed critique to come... I'll discuss the issues of formatting in greater detail, especially the notion of "locations", linking, indexing, and publisher errors in formatting.

What to call your professor

2009-04-08T11:57:00.001-04:00

What to call your professor, a flowchart, in case you were ever wondering. :) (Hat tip to Eric Fink.)

How to make your life easier with Gmail

2009-04-08T10:05:00.002-04:00

I have 5 email accounts that I wanted to be able to answer from a single email client. I had run a mashed-up email scenario successfully in the past using Thunderbird, but I was getting tired of the giant size of my email files being stored on my local drive, and using IMAP only solves one of my email account problems, since it's not available for all my accounts. I also wanted to be able to send and receive email on my phone and other devices, from the instructor workstation in my classroom (such as right now while students are taking an exam), and have access to all my old mail during all these times. Finally, I wanted to be able to switch the "send as" address in my client so that mail could appear to be coming from any of my 5 email addresses.

Enter Gmail.

Here's what to do to get your mail to bend to your will.

1. Create a Gmail account
2. Under "settings | accounts" set up all your other accounts that you want Gmail to check. It will send an email to each of these places making sure that you actually own these accounts.
3. Set Gmail to fetch the email from these places. Leave "leave a copy on server" UNchecked.
4. Set up your return address that you want to be the default, and set up your "reply to" addresses. This is all in "settings".

Note that this is not a forwarding arrangement. No mail is being "forwarded" anywhere. It's just that Gmail is fetching your mail for you from multiple places.

The ONLY thing I don't like about this Gmail setup is that you can't configure gmail to check your mail at a specific interval. No more "check for new mail every ___ minutes". So, there is sometimes a short delay between when the mail comes into the account, and when Gmail finally goes to get it. Google says they use some sort of sophisticated algorithm to determine when to go get my mail based on how often I've gotten new mail in the past. I haven't noticed this to be the case. It seems like they check every 30-45 minutes or so, and a deluge of mail on one or two pickups doesn't seem to affect this timing. Maybe I'm just not noticing the sophistication here, ha ha.

I've been using this setup since August and I like it a lot.

Elon ponders its role at Kannapolis

2009-04-07T09:37:00.001-04:00

A nice article about Elon's possible role(s) in the new Research Campus at Kannapolis

Make your own font

2009-03-16T11:24:00.002-04:00

Here's something I've been wanting to do with my web/graphic design students for a while now, and finally got around to doing: make your own font. It's free, easy, and fun. I think the students had a good time with this on Thursday.

Things Elon Needs

2009-03-11T15:24:00.003-04:00

Here's my list of things Elon, or the surrounding town, needs:

1. Trails through woods for running (closer then Cedarock and longer/more challenging/more interesting than the .9 mile mulch "trail" at Beth Schmidt park)
2. A rock wall (closer than Tumblebees)
3. Ice Skating (closer than Ice House)
4. A co-op grocery store (we're working on this at Company Shops Market but it's nowhere near ready to right now)
5. A vintage clothing store, or at least a thrift store on the west side of town
6. A children's museum
7. A sidewalk that goes all the way up Haggard from Elon to Cook Rd., around the corner and over to the Beth Schmidt park. (Fantasy: then pave a sidewalk down Williamson from Sunset to Ball Park Rd and down the firehouse fields.)

...to be continued...

...there is even discussion...

2009-03-11T11:10:00.003-04:00

So the other day I rode my bike over to the new C&R Outdoors store on Haggard in Elon. It's in the new Timberline strip mall. I wanted to check on the ski packages, and I'd heard good things about the Hillsborough store. I didn't end up going on a ski trip, but I talked to the guy there about what he planned for the summer months.

I looked up at the rather tall walls (20-foot?) in the store, and I said, "You guys should build a rock wall in here. Students drive 20 miles every Friday to Greensboro to climb. It's a built-in revenue stream and you can sell the equipment and the trips to go with climbing."

The kid looked at me and said, "That's a really good idea."

I said, "I know!" I talked a bit more about what it would entail, the equipment, etc.

And then I left.

Today in the Pendulum here's an article on Timberline Station. It talks about the C&R store, and at the end it says, "Forrest [the owner] is open to any students suggestions for how the store can improve, and there is even discussion of building a rock wall in the future."

Excellent. I hope it gets past the discussion stage.

Should you go to grad school in a recession?

2009-03-03T14:13:00.001-05:00

Many students are contemplating going to grad school rather than getting a job in tough economic times. See what the economists have to say about this topic.

Let's blame math for our financial ruin

2009-02-24T11:23:00.001-05:00

Boing Boing summarizes a Wired article about how we can conveniently blame math for America's financial woes. Turns out this guy made a magic formula and everyone started using it to predict how to buy and sell. Guy gets Nobel prize. Whoops, there's no such thing as "magic". American economy in tank, Nobel revoked. Hilarity ensues.

Lovely Charts

2009-02-10T16:15:00.001-05:00

Lovely Charts is an online chart-drawing application, free. It doesn't have ERD symbols (yet?) but it's got flowcharting and network diagrams.

Spring 2009 Group Exercise Calendar

2009-02-03T11:01:00.001-05:00

Here is the Elon Campus Rec Group Exercise calendar rendered into Google Calendar.

Elon Campus Rec Group Exercise Calendar -- Spring 2009

Kickboxing! Power Yoga! Namaste Cycle!

The strange cost of a google search

2009-01-12T13:28:00.002-05:00

Researcher Claims 2 Google Searches Produces the Same C02 as boiling water for some tea.

Google disputes these figures. (More at the link.)

I guess the bottom line here is that the energy used to run these machines is not cheap, and is not without cost.

Marathon practice, or long bike ride

2008-12-27T22:35:00.002-05:00

Here is a nice 26-mile loop for anyone looking for some exercise this holiday break: Follow the Burlington Park-Way Bike Trail. Here is a map of the whole route, it is about 23-24 miles. You can bike it easily (lots of good coasting hills) or use it for long runs (marathon training?)

You start the route at JD Park in West Burlington, and it ends at Town and Country Park in East Burlington. This is a lovely little piece of woods in the middle of the city!

The trail is well-marked, and has signs all along it so you can't get lost.

a great time to be a college grad

2008-12-05T11:32:00.002-05:00

Soon-to-be college grads: I know you're all getting excited to take those big fancy offers from internationally known companies with big client portfolios.

But hear me out. I want to present you with an alternative plan - just think about it for a second, and ask yourself if it's truly exciting to you to work in a cubicle farm for The Man, or if something about this other life might appeal to you. Just hear me out. (Psst, I might be the only person in your life to ever counsel you this way, so you should listen, if for no other reason than the pure freakiness of it all.)

Start your own company.

Seriously.

You could be the next Google guys.

Why not?

Paul Graham has an article this month on why startups are no longer relying so heavily on venture capitalists:

The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. There are four main reasons: Moore's law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller.

Now is your time to do the startup thing. Seriously. We'll probably never have another crazy tech bubble (thank $deity) so jump on this train now. Being a part of something like this will change your life, tell you who you are, and make your later adventures all the sweeter.

Kindle for college students

2008-11-24T10:13:00.003-05:00

Is the Kindle a wise investment for college students?

Here's a very good economic analysis of whether the Kindle is a good investment for college students, based on textbook purchase costs.

This came out to an average cost of $438.23 per semester if they bought the new books on Amazon (which is cheaper than what most universities charge for new books) or at $295.13 per semester used. However, a more realistic scenario would be a blended cost, with half new and half used, at $366.00 per semester. If they had purchased all of the books on the Kindle, they would have spent $234.00, or a savings of $132.00 per semester. Over a period of 8 semesters, that’s $1056.00, which if you subtract the cost of the Kindle at current prices, we’re talking about a net savings of $700.86 over four years, which is not insignificant. To put this another way, if college students had the ability to buy all their textbooks on Kindles, they could wipe out the cost of a Kindle with their savings over printed books in 3 semesters, or a year and a half.

A significant "yeah but" to this analysis, which the author does mention in the article, is that many textbooks are not available on Amazon yet for the Kindle.