Re: The New College Try
In Monday's New York Times, Jerome Karabel of UC-Berkeley contributed an interesting Op-Ed piece called "The New College Try." In it, Karabel rails against the top tier universities in the country (and the systems that support them) for failing to provide access for low income students. As an Alumni Schools Committee co-chair, I spend quite a bit of time thinking about college admissions and even talking with high school seniors during their application process. At the June meeting of ASC chairs, I was disappointed to witness some of the privilege perpetuation that Karabel describes. The University of Chicago provides some advantage for the children of graduates, and probably of big donors, but it is working to provide some admissions (and tuition payment) advantages for lower income applicants as well. I'm anxious to see if those efforts are fruitful. Karabel recommends a lottery system for 5-10% of an entering class where applicants who met some high academic threshold would then be selected at random. Schools could then compare those students' performance to the other 90-95% to see if their admissions processes were good predictors of academic success. That certainly sounds like an interesting study to me.
While I recognize that there's a problem of access for low income students to top tier universities, focusing on the problems at that point obscures a greater problem - impoverished academic opportunities throughout their school lives for low income students. I'd probably add rural students to the mix too, given the shared problems of securing funding and attracting the best teachers that low income urban schools and rural schools share. Without opportunities during elementary and secondary school to discover their academic interests and strengths, students will not be able to compete come time to apply for college. Poor schools - those that don't challenge students, that have deteriorating physical resources, that have no community support, etc. - are likely to produce poor students. I wish I had solutions to that particular problem, but I don't. Perhaps Karabel's column and its challenges to top tier schools will help remind readers and others who can make a difference that the problems of access are central to our problems of education.
Good question, Dan
A reporter from the Chronicle of Higher Education covered the NSF Symposium about which I complained in Argh. Again., and you can read his story online - What's So Super About Supercomputers, Anyway?
His story doesn't answer the question, but it does get some computer scientists on record saying essentially that CS isn't the be-all end-all some might have us think. "Computing is a means to an end." Well said, Clas Jacobsen. Well, to many ends, maybe.
SpinVox or Voice to Text Fanciness
I can't believe I haven't posted explaining why I love SpinVox, a remarkable service that has nearly eliminated my voicemail headaches. Those of you who call me know that I often just don't pick up. It's nothing personal; I just don't love talking on the phone. SpinVox converts my voicemails into text messages and emails, and I've saved hours reading those and calling back instead of waiting through painful voicemail menus. SpinVox even saves the audio version of all my voicemails so that if it gets the transcription wrong, or I want to hear, say, my friends singing me "Happy Birthday," then I can still listen to the original.
You may remember that I left T-Mobile (foolishly!) for a couple weeks in May, and I was so upset that Sprint doesn't allow users to change the forwarding number for unanswered calls that I nearly cried. T-Mobile is happy to let me forward my unanswered calls to the number SpinVox provided. T-Mobile loves me and wants me to be happy.
Unfortunately, SpinVox is no longer accepting new U.S. customers - at least not individuals. I think they're targeting carriers and trying to get them to offer SpinVox services as part of wireless bundles. So, maybe pestering your wireless carrier will help? Maybe there's another voice-to-text service out there that could save you hours of listening to voicemail menus too. I see I missed out on SpinVox for Blackberry, another probably rockin' service that had a limited introductory period. Well, at least I can read my voicemails while I wait for that to hit the larger, open market. I hope you iPhone users are enjoying visual voicemail, but even that has nothing on SpinVox's free pricetag and not-tied-to-a-handset feature.
New technologies often make me cranky or leave me unimpressed. SpinVox is a rare exception, and I love it. I don't need perfect transcription of my voicemails, and I don't need to listen to them in real-time. They've managed to take an imperfect technology (voice recognition) and solve a real problem. Well done, SpinVox, and thanks for letting me into your beta!
Just one more class
I couldn't help myself from signing up for another class this term. Technically I don't need to take any more classes, but by the time one reaches a PhD program, is one really taking classes because she needs to? I think not.
So, what class could I not resist? Video Ethnography! We had our first session on Tuesday, and I am so glad I decided to enroll. I’ve found a room full of people (I think) who want to start with hunches that something interesting is happening rather than with some abstracted research question. To you, this may sound insignificant or even backwards, but I AM SO EXCITED! I would love to start from “hm, that’s interesting” rather than, “I hypothesize that,” and now I’m not alone. Yes, I realize I’ve probably not been alone all along, but that’s not the issue right now.
Curtis LeBaron is teaching the class and visiting at Michigan for I think just this term. Normally, you can find him at BYU.
Taking the video ethnography class allows me to learn a new method, hopefully one that I can use for my own research, and to spend some serious quality time with other qualitative researchers. Especially after two days surrounded by computer scientists, that will be a welcome change. The "scientific method" slide I saw yesterday made me sad. It perpetuates the myths that science is a straightforward endeavor and that there is one best way to go about "doing science." You know better.
On a happier note…
Dude, honeycrisps!
slog says honeycrisps are in stores!
Yes, they are that good, and man, I hope they're at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market on Saturday. I know I will be.
Argh. Again.
I’m having trouble convincing myself that staying involved in big science projects is a tenable arrangement for me. Big science drives a lot of SI’s money, and I’m starting to feel a bit like a puppet. Sure, I think big science is interesting and valuable. Who doesn’t want an anthrax vaccine or concrete that bends? I just don’t want to spend all my intellectual time and energy watching people make those vaccines or bend that concrete. I’m tempted, again, to leave big science collaboration studies to someone who cares more about technology. After spending a couple days at an NSF symposium ostensibly about cyber-enabled discovery and innovation, I am even more convinced that NSF and its CISE program are not the place for me to make my splash. Sure, NSF money is nice in that it’s often big and makes work possible. But do I want to do that work? I don’t think so. This symposium has served very effectively to convince me, at least for now, that my summer enthusiasm about using these big science collaborations as cases for a general study of collaboration was foolish. Right now, there are equations being projected. Equations. I came to Troy, NY to wave the sociotechnical banner and learn about physics, apparently. I think I’d rather dump the banner and put my “social” t-shirt back on.
So now I'm done presenting, and I feel a little better. Perhaps some of my earlier crankiness was due to my stress over having not finished my presentation to include said crankiness. In the end, I got to wave the sociotechnical banner and ask for funding to support social science enabled by computation. Not bad for a day's work.
Before I hit "Publish," let me mention one more battle raging at this symposium. Gender. I was the second woman to present in as many days. We've seen a new presentation about every 20 minutes. This is not only shocking and accurate, it's unacceptable.
Sociotechnical Road Show
I'm off to Troy, NY tonight to wave the sociotechnical banner at an NSF workshop. I'll be giving a short (~10 minutes) talk on Thursday afternoon, and I'm working on my talk notes. Some of you already know I like to give a different kind of talk - minimalist slides, helpful pictures and videos, lots of movement - but I'm not sure how such a talk with fly at this workshop. I chickened out in 2005 when I gave a talk about RideNow at the GROUP Conference, but I'm going for gold this week. The role of graduate students in these workshops is unclear to me, but it's obvious that I have an audience I wouldn't normally encounter.
Here's the white paper I submitted. One of the organizers must have liked it because they invited me to come and talk during the doctoral student forum. I'll be talking about how the data generated by wireless sensing technology may be used/studied for understanding the structural health of our civil infrastructure (think bridges). Real-time data about the health of a structure could be immensely useful for engineers monitoring its needs for repair, for rescue workers responding to a fire or other calamity, and researchers looking for ways to improve structures (and wireless sensing, for that matter). It's pretty easy for me to get excited about studying how first responders and rescue workers would use such data and the information flows it produces, but I think I need to stay closer to engineers in this talk. We'll see though, I guess.
I admit, I'm nervous about the workshop. Every list of invitees or participants that I've seen is incredibly male- and computer science-dominated. I'd rather not deal with gender and disciplinary politics at every turn, but such is life. I'll try not to let the various layers of politics derail me this week. I've been given an interesting opportunity in being invited, but I'm not quite sure what that opportunity offers. I'll follow up from Troy later this week.