Hike in the woods

Sister Suzy gave us pedometers for Christmas and so far I have kept up with at least 10,000 steps a day -- see the meter to the right. This has involved some commitment and some ingenuity and it's definitely helped that we've been on vacation. Tomorrow, back to work.

Today's ingenuity took the form of exploring some space alongside the Chattahoochee River near the Bull Sluice Lake. I had seen the area on google maps and it looked big so researched a bit this morning. It is big -- 385 acres with more than 7 miles of trails. So, after picking up my new iPhone (thank you, Alan!) at Perimeter Mall, we headed over. It was a great find -- beautiful woods and lots of round to cover. We covered more than we might have since about a mile in, we discovered someone's cell phone and keys in the leaves by the side of the trail. It looked like they had taken a spill and accidentally lost the contents of their pockets. We picked it up, figuring that they might call, which they did, necessitating a trip back to the parking lot where we transferred the property back to a sheepish teenager. It was a bit odd, picking up the phone call and asking "Um, is this your phone?" Truly, he was lucky -- a few feet further and his things would have been floating in the Hooch.


Definitely, we will be back.

Tonight we're trying out some of Alan's Christmas presents -- maple planked salmon and his new super grill mitts. Guaranteed to save the hands and also black and washable. Unfortunately, my yellow William and Sonoma mitts will never be the same but at least I can now replace them!


View Larger Map

Tomato recap

Before I forget everything from this summer....let me record for history's sake the failures and successes of the great tomato adventure. About half the plants died -- the Yellow Pear, the Golden Jubilee (after giving us a couple of lovely yellow tomatoes), the Big Boy.

The grape tomato in the upside down container produced well and all summer. Tasty, too. The Better Boy, out front where there was more sun, produced a lot of tomatoes but their flavor and texture were less than ideal. The Celebrity in the self watering container produced a lot of tomatoes and they were very juicy and flavorful. The Celebrity in the ground didn't get enough sun and produced just one fruit, late in the season. The heirlooms (Brandywine and Cherokee Purple) didn't produce much but got to be 15' tall -- they were in the back, just reaching for the sun. The Mr Stripey produced a little but not much.

One other plant whose name I forget lived but never fruited.

Next year, more Celebrity plants!

It is such a beautiful time of year and we're having especially beautiful foliage this year. Lots of yellows and reds--the dogwoods turn this deep ruby that is quite beautiful. Last weekend, Thomas and I took a hike at Sweetwater Creek State Park, which is just a short ride west of Atlanta. I hadn't been there in about five years and Thomas had never been there. We did a hike along the creek that I have done before. It looks like there have been a couple of other trails added, and a new education center, since I was there before so I'll have to go back.

Today, Alan and I took a walk through our neighborhood, doing a big loop that took us south on Briarcliff (no sidewalk -- boo!), west on East Rock Springs Rd, north on Beech Valley Rd, through Johnson Park, north on Johnson Rd, cut through some streets back to Briarcliff (no sidewalks -- boo!) and then home. It took us about an hour and fifteen minutes, has a good deal of terrain change, and definitely stretched the legs. Now onto split pea soup for dinner!

Interesting presentation

Well, we're back in Atlanta safe and sound, looking forward to a weekend in our own house. LB celebrated our time away by shredding an entire roll of paper towels, in several rooms. A very determined effort, to be sure.

I wanted to post a link to this slideshow which we found very interesting.

Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: depression recession)

Educause 2002: Digging Deep with P2P

Understanding Students' Media Habits
# Warren S. Arbogast, Founder & President, Boulder Management Group, LLC
# David Greenfield, Director, Student Technology, Illinois State University
# Alexandre M. Mateus, PhD Candidate, Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University
# Mark S. Walbert, Associate Vice President, Academic Information Technology, Illinois State University

Illinois state

20,265 students

How different today than 2005? Bigger problem today

What hasn't changed is that industry doesn't understand higher ed and vice versa

Digital Citizen Project

Mark: Not much literature, especially with data on what students are doing with p2p with numbers
--started a dialogue with RIAA, both sides learned
--worked with IRB since analyzing click stream, plus legal, provost, president

Surveyed incoming students -- what were their digital media habits; now they have 3 years of data
2008:
--97% of students watch movies/TV/video on computer
--93% mp3 player; 82% ipod
--where get music: iTunes, CDs, Limewire, downloading (iTunes growth over time)
--movies: DVD, YouTube, iTunes, internet, download
--P2P sware: limewire, facebook, myspace, aim (confusion over p2p)
Confusion over what is legal, what is p2p, how is p2p related to social network sites
--they don't want to purchase by subscription

Studied using packeteer and audible magic april 2007:
51% on campus detected p2p users
42% detected DATCoM users
each student transferred 6 copyrighted files per week
more than half of the students doing p2p transferred more than 5 titles per week
10% transferred more than 35 titles per week
--spread out across all demographics (gender, age, class year)

Audible Magic doesn't detect as much as Packeteer
--if traffic encrypted, can't detect if its p2p
--after a few weeks, it detected most people that transferred copyrighted content

DPI effective in detecting users over time -- useful for a tool to warn users
DPI is less effective if coupled with punishment
--misses encrypted traffic
--encryption available in most p2p clients -- don't motivate them to do it

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~peha/dimensions_of_piracy.pdf

What they did:

Pilot this spring with Audible Magic and a response system -- warning students if they were identified as exchanging p2p

Met with students, academic senate, legal counsel, president, provost -- in June, had four constraints (gen counsel raised questions about peering into pipe, president did not want students getting notices/subpoenas, concern over $$ -- spend it on wireless, classrooms, hiring freeze)

Accidentally left of packeteer for a period -- 7fold increase in outbound and 3fold increase in inbound

Aug 08 -- created a p2p permission form for resnet -- permission granted no questions asked
--targeting residence halls, wireless,
--not using packeteer b/c it was on the WAN (?)

students responded positively -- glad not to be turned over to riaa
faculty okay b/c not on academic network






http://www.digitalcitizen.ilstu.edu/

Educause 2008: Optimizing IT for Optimal Value

Optimizing IT for Optimal Value

* Fred Brittain, U Maine, Farmington

* Nicole Broyles, Director, IT Business Services, University of Houston
* Diane M. Dagefoerde, Director of Technology, Arts & Sciences, The Ohio State University
* Veronica Longenecker, Director of Computing and Support Services, Millersville University of Pennsylvania
* MaryBeth Stuenkel, Manager of Groupware Services, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor


We already do IT governance.

Desires -- cut costs; more, better, faster; unfunded mandate

Governance: process; roles, responsibilities, inputs and outputs
--outputs: a.) what IT should work on; b.) how IT should do it
-- budget the thing that links them

3 ITG Models:
Locally (decentralized)
Local/Central Collaboration (hybrid or federated)
Centrally (centralized)

V: Talking about a cycle where IT needs were met in a decentralized level, then taken back to central, and now the faculty are taking it back themselves (using google docs, etc.)

MB: in central IT--itself decentralized--schools work in their own interest, distributed decision making; Novell and AD; units ran Exchange -- didn't need to do so, asked central IT to take over
--centralized provision but collaborative governance
--now looking at shared desktop image

ITG Maturity Model
Nonexistent
Initial
Repeatable
Defined
Managed
Optimized

There is a relationship btw the innovation life cycle and the ITG maturity model.

D: Ohio State governance grew out of PS governance; picked desktop standards and bundled with vendor (computer hardware strategic plan)

{might be interesting to speak with her}

{it would be so helpful if they would depict their org charts while they were talking -- I guess those are the slides that they skipped over, but it is still annoying}

There was cultural resistance to rolling out governance for all projects and then all executive leadership left. But with new leadership, efforts to try again.


{ok, I'm outta here}

Educause 2008: BB and open source

Panel discussion on BB and open source.

# Michael L. Chasen, President & CEO, Blackboard, Inc.
# Serge J. Goldstein, Associate CIO and Director of Academic Services, Princeton University
# Charles Severance, Developer Network Coordinator, IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc.

Calls for open APIs more than source code access.

Question asked by panelists about whether you could unpack a BB export and use APIs to move into Moodle or Sakai.

BB: We can't put forward a universal statement that addressed all circumstances.

We would never do anything to prevent faculty and schools from extending elearning.

Sakai: People dismayed about the patent environment.

{This is turning into a put BB on the spot session}

BB defending their intellectual investment. Need to have some legal structures to be able to work against nefarious sorts (against best interest of education community).

How to balance need for resources for development (BB gets paid) and desire for openness.

There's nothing automatically good about releasing source code in the open. Distinguish btw open source and getting what you need to get done
--flow btw apache fdn and public is so open

Q: Problem of publishers with proprietary LMS's -- how can these LMS's be more open?

Chuck: this is a chicken/egg thing

Michael (not chasen): he's been pretty consistently advocating one place to go, systems interoperable, incl publishers; sakai connector just the beginning

Mchasen: BB wanting to dev facebook API, bb for iphone, bb for igoogle; we heard very strong views on both sides

{wonder why there isn't a history function on tweets}

Serge: the difficulty of localized problem solving introducing balkanization of data

Mchasen: moving from open APIs to web services approach to be more live and free flowing

Chuck: IMS learner information services, this standard undergone mjr rework, led by oracle, open philosophy (v open src). LIS designed to solve the fundamental problems; lite version purely rest based working with small company (School???)

Serge: web svcs terrific; let's you write php code rather than heavy weight java code; web services allows us to treat BB as a academic infrastructure system; we can build tools in PHP to add onto the LMS

Chuck: web services: moddle embarking on dev of web services (moodle hard to add modules now); LMS becoming a SOA that's becoming enterprise information, not a place to put your syllabus

In 2 years:

mchasen: opening up your LMS to where students are; trend around cloud computing (safe assign leverages cloud computing (everyone using safeassign); but admits that it probably violates FERPA to put all data up in the cloud; envision a day when a school will pick and choose some bb modules, some others

chuck: echoing chasen

good session