Jun

27

Goonies of the Caribbean

Filed Under Humor / Weird | Leave a Comment

Watch the Goonies of the Caribbean trailer.

Jun

26

Obscurity Obsolescence

Filed Under Conferences, University | Leave a Comment

Along the same lines as Lacey’s Travel and Usability post, libraries are not really designed to be very usable. Well… unless you think like a librarian. Who gets a MLIS degree in order to use a library. Okay… I would… bad example.

The below article’s Digital Natives are kids who have played video games all their lives. Its reporting on a talk given at an ALA conference that librarians should redesign libraries to be friendlier to these Digital Natives (aka more like video games). The strawman argument:

When ‘Digital Natives’ Go to the Library :: Inside Higher Ed:

“The librarian as information priest is as dead as Elvis,” Needham said. The whole “gestalt” of the academic library has been set up like a church, he said, with various parts of a reading room acting like “the stations of the cross,” all leading up to the “altar of the reference desk,” where “you make supplication and if you are found worthy, you will be helped.”

This similie is warped in my experience. When I worked the reference desk, I didn’t so much bestow books upon supplicants and demonstrate how to use the tools. In essence, it was like explaining to a friend who is stuck how to play the game. I had heard of libraries in which non-library employees are not allowed access to the stacks, but I thought them rare.

Maybe instead of librarians playing more video games, students who play video games should actually use those skills when they go to the library? They can master a university library by spending a couple hours a week for a month browsing, identifying patterns, and enjoying the fruits of their efforts: interesting books. For me, “research” meant skimming all books and articles on a topic and tangents to the topic. I could spend a year absorbing knowledge in a good library. Working in the library explosed me to such an enormous wealth of knowledge free for the asking.

Instead, students typically go into a library to find a list of books or articles. They want to spend the minimum amount of effort to accomplish the goal. This certainly is not how they approach video games.

Jun

22

Open Letter RE: Bug Fixes

Filed Under Computers, Corporations, Work | Leave a Comment

Dear computer software companies,

Its a waste of my time and yours to bring to your attention a bug in your code of which you are already aware. Several of you are good about disclosure. Several of you really annoy me.

You know who you are.

Ezra

Jun

18

Hacking the Test

Filed Under University | 1 Comment

In college, I had a professor who gave “Multiple Guess” tests. One of my less than clued classmates asked why he called them such. hahaha I knew, as usually when I took a test I knew less than half the answers outright. He had almost made me conisder studying. Yeah, almost. In The Fallacy of Hard Tests, Al Feldzamen explains how very hard tests expand the guessing window so that students have to guess more which gives less prepared students a shot of making up ground on their better prepared peers.

My skills at guessing the correct answer made me appear really intelligent on standardized and non-standardized tests. On relatively easy MC tests where an average student who studied for 5 hours should know all the answers, I’d do just good enough to pass. On harder MC tests where an average student who studied for 5 hours might not know all the answers, I’d do much better.

I probably acquired these abilities from being around teachers. In socializing with K-12 educational professionals, I found they taught my methods to students. I’d been using it for over a decade and didn’t know it was standard test taking tactics. Probably my peers had only thought it applicable to certain tests and not every MC test. The SAT penalizes students for wrong answers, so some guessing is good, but you have to know when to do it.

I so need to take the GRE.

Jun

17

RIP Yahoo! Photos

Filed Under Interweb | Leave a Comment

Yahoo To Shut Down Yahoo Photos In Favor Of Flickr

You have until September to move all your photos.

UPDATE 17-JUN-2007: I have imported 511 pictures at Yahoo! Photos to my Flickr account. The migration tool was kind enough to mark all of them as private. However, though untagged. :( I’m working through them, updating the titles and descriptions and tags. Some are being made public, some friends only, and duplicates deleted. Its over 500 pictures, so… don’t expect miracles! BTW, friends should sign up for an account so you can see the hidden 10%.

UPDATE 23-JUN-2007: I am tagging these as “Migrated from Yahoo! Photos” so they will be fairly easy to find. About half so far are remaining under the Friends and/or Family permission.

Jun

17

Happy Father’s Day

Filed Under Personal / Relationships | Leave a Comment

No matter the amount of contributions of nature or nurture, my father contributed significantly to who I am today. How to think and solve my way through problems was something he was always encouraging (or forcing) me to do. He gave me deep books to read.

Hearing him tell me how proud he is of me means more to me than hearing the same from anyone (other than my mother).

Jun

16

False Positives

Filed Under Philosophy, Science, Work | Leave a Comment

It’s often argued that the high false positive rate proves the system is poorly run or even useless. This is not necessarily the case. In running a system like this, we necessarily trade off false positives against false negatives. We can lower either kind of error, but doing so will increase the other kind. The optimal policy will balance the harm from false positives against the harm from false negatives, to minimize total harm. If the consequences of a false positive are relatively minor…, but the consequences of a false negative are much worse…, then the optimal choice is to accept many false positives in order to drive the false negative rate way down. In other words, a high false positive rate is not by itself a sign of bad policy or bad management. You can argue that the consequences of error are not really so unbalanced, or that the tradeoff is being made poorly, but your argument can’t rely only on the false positive rate.
– Ed Felton — Why So Many False Positives on the No-Fly List?
(Bolding my own.)

This quote is really about the No Fly List whose purpose is to help the airlines identify who is not allowed to fly. False positives have come up at work lately in the context of catching “bad people”. In our case, great differences of opinion exist about whether the false positives are relatively minor. We all do agree that false negatives are very bad.

A concern about the false positives, is a lot of time an resources are spent looking at the possibles only to determine they are not really a “bad person”. The more false positives we get, the more we doubt the usefulness of the tools we have to identify “bad people”.

Jun

16

Consolidation

Filed Under Interweb | Leave a Comment

Everything is miscellaneous, right? Well, my categories in this blog were quite numerous and growing all the time with subcategories. They got to the point my desktop client, Deepest Sender, had more than a screen’s height of categories. The side bar required over a whole screen height on my 20″ monitor to display. Unmangeable….

So, I’ve consolidated by moving posts up a level from the subcategories and removing the now empty ones. My goal is organization by reducing complexity.

Jun

15

Open letter - VM

Filed Under Humor / Weird | Leave a Comment

Dear whomever left me a voicemail of your typing,

Ummmm… Thanks?

Ez

Jun

12

I’ve been tagged

Filed Under About Me, Personal / Relationships | 4 Comments

By George [here] to post seven facts about me.

  1. I am the product of miscegenation.
  2. I read when I eat alone.
  3. There are 455 contacts in my instant messenger.
  4. Three of my four grandparents died before the age of 55.
  5. My height is 191.5 cm.
  6. No one else has my name in Google. (First entry not me is on page 3. HowManyOfMe.com says I should not exist.)
  7. I am a “second generation” Baha’i.

I am tagging: Amy, Bernie, Britt, Michelle, Michelle, Nicole, Sarah

tag: , , , ,

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