Brendan O'Connor: February 2008 Archives

So it's been awhile since I last posted, mostly because of a rush of work. As I write this, I'm sitting on an Amtrak train to New Haven, CT, as I'm going to visit Quinlan at Yale. I can't post from the train, unfortunately-- while I'm eyeing the Sprint wireless broadband dongle of the person next  to me, I doubt he'd be willing to share. This last week, in addition to finishing a variety of homework (some of it interesting, all of it required, unfortunately), I was also asked by my nominal boss, Dr. Houlahan, to teach the Java lecture, as she was sick. This was all sorts of fun for me; while I have taught a lab section for three semesters now, teaching the lecture is ordinarily not possible (both because Hopkins forbids TAs from teaching under normal circumstances, and because Dr. Houlahan likes teaching). So finally, I get to talk to all the students, and make them really learn, right? Well, after teaching two classes, I have to hand it to the real professors; it's hard to keep yourself upbeat, looking out at a lecture hall filled with scared kids. No, my students weren't bored; I was that entertaining, at least (being able and willing to explain language features in depth, including some fairly amusing history of computing, kept them interested, it would seem-- or at least, my willingness to admit that certain language vagaries of Java were made radically inconsistent with either logic or good sense). However, since all my public speaking training is in debate, it's tough to have no reaction from an audience. In APDA (the style of debate I did earlier in college), it's a wild ride; people yell out praise (or criticism) in the middle of your speech, your friends pound on their tables to applaud you, and your enemies whistle or cry "for shame!" when you blow it. Even in the more-sedate NFL format (National Forensics League, not some football thing; the high school debate league), you still get reactions from your audience. By contrast, most of the time, the Java babies appeared to be frightened, or at least too jaded to talk back. Maybe I'm too used to my upper-level courses (where there's a 10-1 student-faculty ratio, or less), but aren't you supposed to participate in your education? I found it difficult to keep going, and ever-more-radical thoughts popped into my head.

• "Pick the most-scared looking student and throw candy at them."
• |Call out 'Can I get an AMEN for the POWER of the LOOP? AMEN!'"
• "Improv a song on control structures in Java."

And so on. I didn't actually *do* any of those things (I was really tempted to do the Baptist preacher one, but lacking a backup choir, I decided against it), but it was frustrating, not being able to get students to react. I'd much prefer they say something, even something drastically wrong, than say nothing at all, and stare back at me like I'm some Rodin they don't really get. I did have lots of positive comments after the class, though; many students said it was the most interesting Java class they've had. "So why didn't you speak, when I asked for a comment?" "Oh... I don't really do that." Is that common, I wonder-- and is it college as a whole that makes students sit down and be quiet? Is it the frightening breadth of their professors' knowledge and experience? Or are most Hopkins people really just this quiet, not to say boring? I hope not. In the meantime, though, I'll go on making a ruckus in my classes-- and I hope that my professors appreciate it, not as disruption, but as my attempt to bring some life to education. Update: Now at Yale, in my brother's dorm room; this is a happening place!

"Nice-- now I don't ever have to talk to you to see what you are doing." This was the comment from my (otherwise) dear, sweet girlfriend, upon seeing my new "Web Log." I think she was joking. (She does, at least, still talk to me despite the website, so I guess it hasn't worked out too badly on that front.) Anyway, after my last post, I did go ahead and set up an entirely new front page for USSJoin.com, based on the Action Streams plugin for Movable Type. As a side note-- this was the first time I've used Movable Type, and it's quite well-done. In general, it's set up to do the opposite of WordPress' code style; where WordPress, by default, dynamically generates your whole website as needed, Movable Type regenerates the static pages of your website when you change them. While I fought for awhile with Movable Type's templating system (as it turns out, it only generates pages for which it has templates-- so if you apply an incomplete template set, some pages might not exist that you've created. For instance, the example Action Streams template set doesn't include a "Post" template, so the static pages I usually have, for things like my GPG key and Resume, weren't being generated no matter how hard I tried; an error message when I created them would have saved me a few hours), the whole thing works quite well, I find, and I'm very impressed with the speed-- not just of the static pages (being static, they're fast to load), but of the whole system. So then, some first thoughts on Action Streams. AS has a list of services that it's configured to accept; at the moment, I haven't explored adding ones not on its list, but I'm told it is possible. In any case, one hardly needs to; the list is a survey of the Web 2.0 universe, complete with far fewer vowels than really make sense. Not all the profiles AS accepts actually have streams of data coming from them-- for instance, my LinkedIn profile doesn't broadcast information for AS to take. However, all the services are linked with XFN data, so people crawling the web looking for sites that are also me have much more data to work with (for instance, Google's Social Graph API, which Six Apart has some privacy qualms about). Something I realized, as I looked through this list, is that I have a *lot* of accounts everywhere that claim to be me. This is something I expected, but it's pretty shocking to see 12 websites all of which have some claim on "me" as the Internet perceives me. I'd forgotten about several of them-- leaving them with data I a) no longer wanted public, b) filled with holes that I would have rather filled with public data, or c) that was out of date-- not to mention option D, the empty profile that seems a waste of web space. Even setting this thing up has led me to update my profiles at a lot of places, which is a good thing, and one kind of the control over my Internet persona I was looking for. So then, what's the next step? Well, one thing that several of my friends have pointed out is that this is only actions on Internet web sites-- it doesn't, for instance, aggregate my network locations to see if I'm hanging out at Starbucks, sitting in class, or working at my Star Trek-sized console in my apartment. (At the moment, actually, I'm in my apartment-- which is interesting only in that this is the first blog in a while I haven't written from my OLPC, which is currently finishing being charged for class.) If I really wanted to toss my privacy out the window, that's probably where I'd start (as it's easier than buying a GPS unit to do the same thing). Several more sane options present themselves, of course, but I think what I'll actually do now is learn about how to mine all this XFN data (through Google's API, or otherwise)-- something that's likely to come up soon in my Information Retrieval class as well. Oh, and at some point in there, I need to do homework. Actually, I should probably do that first.

While browsing through Twitter messages a week or two ago, I encountered a message from David, pointing me to his new website. Go check it out for a minute, then come back. ... Did you look at it? Good. Now consider this for a moment. Action Streams, a new Movable Type plugin, is a great new creation that allows you to combine all the little feeds from many of the activities you do on the internet-- say, links from Digg and Ma.Gnolia, photos from Flickr, blog posts from Vox or LiveJournal or wherever-- into one continuous feed that will be very familiar to users of, for instance, Facebook; they call it a newsfeed. So I saw David's webpage, and found myself completely shocked-- for many different reasons. First, of course, this is a great achievement-- we can see every action David (or any other user) is taking across the internet. If I want to see what he's up to, I just need to go to his homepage, and it will tell me what he's doing-- no need to subscribe to 20 different feeds, or visit 20 different sites. On the other hand, did you actually read what I just said? I can go to a website and see everything David is doing, anywhere on the internet. Wait-- isn't that a massive, massive violation of privacy? I find myself very torn on this. Obviously David consented-- he replaced his old website (which was only slightly less boring than mine currently is) with this plugin, so he obviously wants it all collected. But think if I was simply stalking him-- look at how much information I can get! Or in the slightly less creepy case, if I'm an employer/parent/whatever, think how I can use this to say "no you weren't working at 6PM, you were reading Slashdot! I have the record right here!" (Obviously they don't understand multitasking-- I, for one, often browse random websites while thinking about hard problems, which helps me work better. But I digress.) On the other hand, it lets anyone quickly get a sense of who David is, what sorts of things he does/reads/takes pictures of/watches/etc., which might be nice. And it provides one central repository for him to contain all those profiles, from all those websites-- so if people want to know how to find him on a certain service, they can just go check his website. With all the concern about employers not hiring people based on their Facebook profiles, however, I can't help but wonder if this sort of thing will be harmful in the long run. It is, however, extraordinarily cool-- and, to me, quite tempting, to just put everything I'm doing out there, so that I have *control* of it all. If I see what these applications are exposing about me, then maybe I can truly get privacy-- because if there's something I *don't* want exposed, I have a quick way to check if it's being broadcast or not. Is this, perhaps, a new way of thinking about privacy? In the discussions I've read on blogs, the OpenID lists, and the Identity Gang list, people seem concerned most with user control-- and perhaps this new technology is an attempt to show that control does *not* only mean hiding data, but allowing us to marshal and display the data. Six Apart's corporate blog mentions some of these issues as well (as well as many of the other interesting steps 6A is taking in this field). I'm fascinated by the idea-- and I might even try it out as well. If any employers decide not to employ me because I'm a liberal who thinks that free speech and cryptography are fundamental human rights-- well, you probably could have gotten that from my blog, or just asking. :-) And if anyone *does* decide not to employ me on that basis, please let me know! Always curious to hear; gives me a good idea of what places I wouldn't like anyway.