Jon Pipitone (a graduate student in our department) recently blogged about PowerShift Canada, a youth conference on climate change taking place October 23-26 in Ottawa. He’d like to know who you’d like to hear speak—if you have ideas, please drop him a line.
As reported two weeks ago, MSNBC has acquired EveryBlock, a web-based tool that aggregates crime data, restaurant reviews, health inspections, local news and more. Adrian Holovaty, its creator, is one of the driving forces behind Django, and has promised that the open-sourced EveryBlock code will stay that way. Would this be a good platform on which to build apps for the City of Toronto? This NOW magazine article from 2008 asked that same question; maybe 2009 will be the year it happens.
And while we’re on the subject, take a look at Iain Grant’s directory of Toronto Twitter feeds, or his tofire.ca site. Neat!
I just finished reading Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. It’s a rare thing: deeply reactionary, yet (mostly) well argued. Here’s its central complaint:
We in the West have arranged our institutions to prevent the concentration of political power… But we have failed utterly to prevent the concentration of economic power, or take account of how such concentration damages the conditions under which full human flourishing becomes possible… Too often, the defenders of free markets forget that what we really want is free men.
Crawford’s believes that removing the experience of working with things from everyday life hasn’t just deskilled us; it has demoralized us. The modern knowledge worker is just as alienated from his or her labor as any other assembly line worker; the gradual substitution of algorithm for judgment may increase profit, but only if pride in one’s work and connection with one’s peers is left out of the equation.
Crawford is most definitely not playing the “dignity of manual labor” horn once blown by the Arts & Crafts or back-to-the-land bands: he is coolly scathing when discussing their cuddly inanity. Nor is he any kind of leftist: he views big government and big education as equally complicit with big business in sucking the meaning out of everyday work. Just to take one example, Chapter 6, “The Contradictions of the Cubicle”, is a brilliant deconstruction of how the ever-provisional nature of right and wrong in modern management has turned managers into ersatz therapists. Here is its take on higher education (Crawford himself has a Ph.D.):
Maybe we can say, after all, that higher education is indispensible to prepare students for the jobs of the information economy. Not for the usual reasons given, namely, that there is ever-increasing demand for workers with more powerful minds, but in this perverse sense: college habituates young people to accept as the normal course of things a mismatch between form and content, official representation and reality. This cannot be called cynicism if it is indispensible to survival in the contemporary office, as it was in the old Soviet Union.
Like all reactionaries, he does tend to idealize the days of yore: his description of the pride a Rolls Royce panel beater of the 1970s took in producing something distinctively English bears little relation to the reality of the day. But he makes a convincing case that skilled trades are not only better paid and steadier occupations these days than most so-called “knowledge work”, they also demand more intellectually, and are more personally rewarding.
Crawford’s emphasis on self-reliance, and his love of all things automative, doom him to being labeled a conservative. He isn’t, at least not as that word is currently used in English-speaking countries. Like Andrew Bacevich (whose The Limits of Power I discussed briefly back in June), he thinks we have taken a wrong turn, and need to back up before we can move forward. He doesn’t pretend to know how to do this, but I defy anyone to come away from this book believing that we shouldn’t try.
Later: see also this CBC story by Richard Handler, which includes a link to a video interview with Crawford.
Last year, Jordi Cabot and I interviewed the creators of several web-based software project management portals to find out whose needs they were trying to meet and how. Getting the results published academically has turned out to be harder and slower than we expected; since we’re both moving on to other things, we thought we’d put our findings out on the web in the hopes that others would find them useful. The abstract of our paper is below; you can find the whole thing online at http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~gvwilson/articles/portals.html, and Jordi has a post about its conclusions up on his blog. We’d welcome your comments.
Web-based project portals are at the heart of modern software development, but have been studied much less than individual-oriented desktop tools like integrated development environments. In July to September 2008, we compared several popular portals and interviewed their developers in order to find out what needs they were intended to satisfy, how their feature sets had been chosen, and how they were likely both to evolve and to shape the evolution of distributed software development. Our key findings are that (1) most portals are strongly biased toward agile methods (and in fact may primarily exist in order to support agile development in geographically distributed teams), (2) the teams building these portals do not use agile methodologies themselves, but instead rely on informal collections of best practices, (3) as elsewhere, there is a clear trend toward hosted services, and (4) none of the portals studied provided any kind of support for modeling or user experience design, and only one directly supported test management.
I had a couple of good meetings this week with Jane Zhang, Julia Smith, and Mark Kuznicki, who have kindly agreed to help steer the “Government 2.0″ prjoects we’re doing this fall. We still don’t know what those projects are, but that’s OK—figuring out what can and should be built, for whom, is a big part of any entrepreneur’s life, so doing it in a sandbox will be an excellent educational experience 
.
Coincidentally, this morning brought three interesting links that I’ll point students at:
30 students are now signed up for cross-country capstone projects this fall from a bunch o’ schools:
and we’re hoping for more in the next couple of weeks from:
The list of projects has grown as well:
It’s going to be a busy (but fun) term—please follow along at the UCOSP blog.
Dear Lazyweb,
I now have slides from the symposium on Science 2.0 that ran as part of the Software Carpentry course last month. I also have video in .flv and .mov formats. I’d like to stitch the two together somehow, since the video only shows the speakers, not their slides. What’s the least-effort way to do this? (Note: I have a small budget, but no experience in A/V editing, and no time to learn myself.)
Thanks,
Me
Andrew Petersen, a lecturer in computer science at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, has posted a description of a system a summer intern built to anonymize student data. Basically, this system allows instructors to ask questions like, “Is success in the first-year calculus course a predictor of performance in a second-year algorithms course?” without giving them access to information about individual students. It’s a good example of what Bruce Schneier, Latanya Sweeney, and many others are trying to figure out how to do in general: give those who need it access to information in general, while not compromising any one individual’s privacy.
This paper from Microsoft Research is yet another sign that intelligent after-the-fact search is becoming more important in software engineering:
This paper presents the design, implementation and experience from such a search tool called DebugAdvisor…The context of a bug includes all the information a programmer has about the bug, including natural language text, textual rendering of core dumps, debugger output etc…Our key insight is to allow the programmer to collate this entire context as a query to search for related information. Thus, DebugAdvisor allows the programmer to search using a fat query, which could be kilobytes of structured and unstructured data describing the contextual information for the current bug.
From Lambda the Ultimate to Phil Wadler’s blog to a link that was working yesterday, but is 404′ing this morning: a workshop on evaluation and usability of programming languages and tools, to be held at OOPSLA in late October. Scope includes:
Long overdue, and very welcome.
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