New name, new host, new software.

I've moved this site to the following address:

http://ruixue.cogsci.uiuc.edu/mt/snowtime/

It now runs on my desktop computer (Windows XP, Apache server, ActiveState Perl) under Movable Type. So far, I'm quite pleased with the new setup.

As a college student many years, I vividly remember sitting in a meeting at a Quaker conference and heard a man (I think we as an administrator at Indiana University) describe spiritual life as a matter of learning, forgetting, relearning, forgetting again (and you get the picture). That was one of the most depressing things I could imagine hearing, in large part because it sounded true.

It's amazing to me how much of life seems to involve learning the same thing over and over again. This is clearest, for me, in the domain of exercize and health, and is prominently in my mind as a I get ready to run this year's marathon (the Twin Cities
Marathon on October 5 -- http://twincitiesmarathon.org/). Marathons serve as good indices of my physical health, and it's interesting that my performance is as variable as it is. It certainly does get harder as I get older to get in shape and the consequences of mistakes loom larger. This year, for example, I broke my little toe walking around barefoot at home. Not a big deal, although it was surprisingly painful. But then I altered my running style enough that I was getting quite a lot of pain in other parts of my leg (something called the periformis muscle). Stretching helps -- http://www.halhigdon.com/15Ktraining/Stretch.htm, but I just recently discovered that using a Nordic trak doesn't require the movement that causes pain later on. That's great, and it's wonderful to be able to exercize for a long time without feeling it later on, but the really sad part is that isn't as though I haven't figured this all out before.

Perhaps by posting here I'll have something to look back on later and feel even more stupid, or just recognize that there seem to be rhythms to learning and forgetting just as there to everything else in life.

I heard some of an interview with Donald Rumsfeld by Jim Lehrer a few days ago (the Pentagon has the transcript online here: http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030911-secdef0665.html)

Rumsfeld has a distinctive way of doing interviews, where he asks most of the questions and answers them as well, but he must have a very commanding presence given the way no one seems to call him on some of the odd things he says. I was particularly struck by this interchange:

Q:  Let's cut to the crunch on this question.  If in fact this team does not find any weapons of mass destruction, do you believe that would do serious harm to the credibility of the president and this administration and particularly on the -- in the long run and when history looks back on this?

 

Rumsfeld:  I mean, the intelligence that our country had – has -- was over a sustained period of time, it was validated by other intelligence services.  I have to believe it was reasonably correct -- obviously not perfect.  No intelligence is ever perfect.  And that as the reports come out, they will find evidence of the kinds of programs that Secretary Powell presented to the United Nations.  That's my -- yes, I mean that's what I believe.

 

Q:  But if they don't?  Is that a problem?

 

Rumsfeld:  I don't do hypotheticals.

I think the fact that Rumsfeld and his crew "don't do hypotheticals" is at the heart of the mess we're in in Iraq. It is very clear from all that I read while this was going on, and sense, that they not only failed to consider what would happen if things didn't go their way, but actively refused to listen, fired, or forced to retire people who were in a position to know what they were getting into.

This is a belated picture from the Urbana Sweet Corn festival, which includes an eerie illuminated ear of corn over Main Street.

Lots to do this week, including giving a lecture on Research Methods in Psychology 216, a big team-taught introduction to developmental psychology. One aspect of the course that I've found frustrating is a set of students who attend class regularly, write down everything the instructor says, and then do extremely badly on the exams. I'm convinced that the problem is that they have trouble thinking about how the information they read is going to be turned into questions that they'll be expected to answer. If I felt that they were figuring out what the material might mean to them and their own interests and concerns, I wouldn't feel quite as bad about the situation, but my impression is that it isn't getting digested at all. Also, the state of Illinois is dramatically cutting aid to the university while limiting our ability to raise tuition. The upshot is that large lecture courses with multiple-choice exams are increasingly going to be the lot of our students. So this is a nut they need to crack.

With this in mind, I'm going to ask students to make up their own multiple choice exam questions from the chapter and lecture and post them on the course Blackboard web site. I'll comment on the questions, and I'll hope to pick a question from the set and include it on the exam. I'll reward whoever comes up with a question I can use with a gift certificate to our local coffee shop. So it won't affect their grades, but there will be some material reward as well as whatever educational gain comes from taking this stance on the material they read.

Of course, I expect that the same thing will happen that occurred when I gave an extra workshop on note-taking for this class a few years ago, that the students who participated were exactly the ones who appeared not to need it. But, particularly in a huge course taught in a large lecture hall where there's a big gulf between students and instructors, there may be some merit in making clear that exam questions come from a cognitive process rather than descending from on high.

We're also using a new book this year, Siegler, Deloache, & Rosenberg (2003), How children develop -- http://www.palgrave.com/catalogue/catalogue.asp?Title_Id=1572592494, so I need to finish revising my lecture so that I can post the pdf note-taking file.

I'm going to resume using Radio Userland to continue my weblog experiments. I lost quite a few postings on the way back from Beijing when my Toshiba Satellite Pro died again. It seems to be work now, after the main board was replaced. My theory is that the underlying problem was a failure of the temperature regulation system, which caused various parts to fail. Certainly Toshiba can't have made a profit on this computer, but I don't think I'll trust it for another trip.

I was able to replace it with a truly wonderful computer, an IBM Thinkpad T40 model. (http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/20030418/).

 It's much lighter than the Toshiba, faster, cooler (in both senses), and has wonderful wireless sensitivity. The only ways in which it's worse are that it lacks Toshiba's analog volume control dial on the side of the computer, and the screen resolution is slightly worse (1400 x 1050 for the IBM vs. p to 1600 x 1200 for the Toshiba).

At school, I use a cheap 2-port KVM switch from IOGear (http://www.iogear.com/products/product.php?Item=GCS62) to switch one of my external monitors between the desktop computer and laptop machine, so I can have a two-screen setup on whichever computer I'm using.

The Thinkpad also has a number of very nice IBM touches for switching screen displays and setting up other options quickly, and all in all it's been a wonderful machine in the month or so that I've had it.

(For the title reference, see: http://www.doctorjazz.freeserve.co.uk/page17.html and see the paragraph right after the picture of Jelly Roll Morton).

One of my discoveries this trip is Yunnan Coffee, packaged by the Yunnan Coffee company (http://www.sinohost.com/yncoffee/) and sold in the large supermarkets in Beijing that sell exotic foreign goods like paper towels. They sell vacuum-packed bags of ground coffee; I've only gotten the espresso roast and made it in a French press coffee-maker, but it's really good. To my taste, it's better than the coffee beans you can buy from Starbucks (probably because it's fresher), and about half the cost. I'll have to get a picture of one of the bags, which are very attractive as well.

I was hoping to travel back to Yunnan province in June. Since I can't do that, this will have to serve as  vicarious tourism.

The picture below comes from the May 25th Self-esteem holiday, something that's less popular than the May 1 Workers' Day or the June 1 Children's Day holidays.

The sign says: May 25, University psychological health holiday group counseling recruiting

I saw a videotape of the activity itself, although I didn't see it in person. Faculty and groups of students sat at tables along the main street students pass to go to meals or the post office. I'm not completely clear on what they were doing, although a great deal of paperwork was involved.

The choice of date is significant. May 25, or "5-2-5" is pronounced "wu3  er4 wu3" which is somewhat close to "wo3 ai4 wo3" or "I love me." So it's a good day for a self-esteem holiday.

In the U.S., the "self-esteem movement" has been blamed for narcissism and pretty much all of the ways that the current generation doesn't live up to the high standards set by their forebears. Bill Damon presents one of the best cases for this point of view: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684825058/002-8791970-2877636?vi=glance

That's not to say that a self-esteem movement isn't a good idea for Chinese college students; I just don't know. It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out, though.

Below is the cover of a magazine I bought a few years ago in Changsha, Hunan. It's a good example of malicious translation (the Chinese title means something like "Weekend Literature Collection" or more colloquially, "Readers Digest", although that name might be taken).

I use that image in a slide in courses where I talk to students about plagiarism. I've recently discovered that it's easy to use Google to search for someone else's Powerpoint slides on a given topic, by including "ppt" with a set of search terms. But I haven't figured out a simple or consistent way to attribute the help I get that way, which is something that could lead to trouble some day.

Cutting and pasting and the informal posting of material online has led to some new issues with plagiarism. A colleague was recently accused of "self-plagiarism" by a reviewer, which seemed particularly absurd given that related to the methods section of an article (which basically functions as a recipe to enable someone else to replicate what you've done, and hence has limited scope for creativity). In the evanescent world of the web, finding a way back to document sources of material, particularly for something as informal as a talk or class, is not completely straightforward, but it's something I need to figure out how to do.

One problem with email is that it's *too* fast. Chris Sells describes how to set up an automatic pause before email is sent (e.g., 1 or more minutes), which is pretty straightforward (http://www.sellsbrothers.com/spout/#savingYourCareer)

If you use Outlook XP, the procedure works like this: