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From Linux to Mac: Days 3-4

During the weekend I managed to start using iPhoto and iTunes. Very impressive pieces of software, I must say. No wonder so many people use iTunes. I did import most of my music and photo collections into the applications. There are some aspects where I’d like more control over how they operate, but I guess I’ll just try them out for a while.

I also installed MacFuse so I can mount files over ssh. Didn’t have time to test it out, though.

After some tweaking I also turned off FileVault – it was just too cumbersome to move files around, and with the ultra-slow (and ultra-secure, I guess) deletion logouts were a bit of a pain. After all, I do open source work, and publications, and such, so there are no classified secrets on my machine.

The Finnish keyboard layout is a bit of a hack. Important special characters needed in shells, like “|”, “@” or “$” were a bit difficult to find, but at least they are accessible. Special characters in file names are also a bit problematic. Apparently Mac uses UTF-8, but the Terminal, of course, cannot handle unicode. So I need to find another terminal for that.

Of course, the Ubuntu Linuxes I’ve installed work quite nicely. I’m starting to think that VMWare has handled Linux support better than Parallels. On the Windows side there isn’t much difference. I’ll post the details later when I’ve gone through all combinations extensively.

From Linux to Mac: Day 2

Restoring the contents of my previous laptop’s hard drive was a bit more complicated than I thought. I got a firewire/usb box I could stick the hard drive into, and Mac OS X easily showed the FAT partitions of the drive when I plugged it in using firewire. However, there was no way to make that firewire drive visible inside VMWare or Parallels to actually access the Linux partitions. An attempt with USB failed because USB doesn’t provide enough power to the drive, and of course the external power source was nowhere to be found, since “firewire is superior”. OK, today I got a new box with two USB connections, one to just provide extra power. Excellent! Now when I plugged it in, Mac OS X showed me the FAT partitions. I unmounted them (dragging them to Trash, which currently is clever enough to look like an eject button when you’re dragging a drive into it), then in the settings of my VMWare’d Ubuntu, selected the USB drive and checked “connect”. Click on Apply, and lo and behold, Ubuntu started mounting the partitions and opening them for me.

OK, nearly there. However, I was using LVM2 on most of the partitions, so I needed something else. Specifically this:
vgscan lvmscan vgchange -a y
Then I could just mount all of my logical volumes, and start moving the data to my new laptop.

Meanwhile, I installed NeoOffice, Transmission and Kiiboard. KeyJNote is distributed in source form, so I’m still figuring that out – seems I need to install quite a bit of Python using MacPorts.

From Linux to Mac: Day 1

I’ve been a happy penguin for years now, but my personal laptop (Asus M3000N) died last thursday. Took it for a checkup, and the motherboard is busted. It’s nearly 3 years old, so no point in getting it fixed. Happily, I was promised a new laptop by my employer, MediaLab of UIAH. MediaLab is full of designers and new media professionals, and virtually everyone here uses a Mac. So I was given a brand new MacBook: 2.16GHz, 2GB, 140GB, DVD-RW, WLAN, Bluetooth, IR remote, iSight, and the works.

Obviously, since I’ve worked for years on Linux using ion, I wasn’t going to be very happy with a track pad and a conventional windowing environment, even if it was designed by people who understand something about usability. So my first tasks were to build ways of running Linux on the machine.

What I’ve seen of Macs, they have remarkable energy saving capabilities, plus they plug into practically any peripherals out there. So I figured that at least for now, I’d be happy running Mac OS X natively, and then Linux as my working GUI in a virtual machine. So I went ahead and downloaded and installed the preview versions of both VMWare and Parallels.

Here are the tips I got from experienced Mac users at MediaLab:

Do not pay for a .mac account, but get the free account anyway. That way you’ll get an account for iChat, and it doesn’t matter that the .mac account expires in 60 days.
Use two fingers on the track pad to scroll.
Get a developer account at connect.apple.com. It will allow you to download XCode and other beta and preview software. And you should install XCode and MacPorts, which will allow installation of POSIX software onto the Mac.
For installing software, remember to drag-and-drop.

The last piece of advice was maybe the most important one. Basically most Mac software comes in a dmg file, which is a disk image. It will be mounted automatically if you use Safari, and it will usually contain an icon of the software, plus some graphics that apparently are meant to tell you that you should drag the icon into your Applications folder. Right. Well, the first application that I happened to download had some extra magic in it, so it was enough to just drag the icon on top of an installation action to the right of it. This confused me quite a bit, since no other software did that – they had similar graphics with arrows and symbols, but nothing happened no matter where in the area I dragged the icon. Double-clicking on the icon just ran the software, so it wasn’t immediately apparent whether or not the software was installed. OK, so here are the different installation scenarios:

dmg with a drag’n'drop application icon in it: either run it directly to evaluate it, or drag’n'drop it to Applications
dmg with pkg in it, or a pkg file: double-click the pkg, it will run an installation wizard. Just keep pressing Continue.
zip file: it will open semi-automatically, and usually contains a pkg file (double-click that) or a simple application that you drag’n'drop onto Applications
tar.gz file: will contain source code for a program – no idea how to handle this, yet.

Well, I managed to install Firefox, VMWare Fusion Beta, Parallels for Mac, OnyX, XCode Tools and MacPorts. I also installed both Ubuntu and Windows XP Professional onto both of the virtual machines, so I can start testing how they perform.

At the end of the day, I installed BootCamp which allowed me to repartition the hard drive and make room for Windows XP. I might be able to use that space for a stand-alone Linux later on.

The final challenge for the day was getting the data from my old laptop’s hard drive, which I’ll write about tomorrow.

Join the Ripple effect, or do something Kiva

People following my recent del.icio.us links may have noticed my tendency towards trying to keep this planet of ours in a good condition. In addition to climate change and peak oil, there’s of course the whole of human suffering that is mainly caused by the uneven distribution of wealth. In the last 100 years the rich countries have become richer, while the poor have become poorer. The ratio has grown from 30:1 to 85:1.

Two things that I’ve done to help make a difference were joining Kiva and Ripple. Kiva is a microloan service that allows you to loan money, starting from $25, to someone in need, and get paid back when the loan (usually under or around a year) terminates. I’d warmly recommend everyone to participate in a few microloans – the risk is quite small, but the benefits are remarkable.

Using Ripple is even simpler – they provide a clickable banner which I’ve added to my blog, which anyone can use to support charity – with no cost! You just get to see an advertisement, and the revenue from that ad view is funnelled to a charitable cause. I’ve actually disabled by AdBlock extension for the www.ripple.org domain so I see the ads. You can add the banner to your site, or just replace your normal Google search page (or search bar) with Ripple, which makes sure that all ad revenue that your googling generates will go to charity.

And yes, this is related to psychology and technology: We can use new technologies such as these to alleviate the psychological suffering in the world. If you want to “fight terrorism”, help balance the scales. It’s people being exploited that get mad. Buy some fair trade bananas or coffee, if nothing else.

Open educational content – possible future prediction by David Wiley

David has published an intriguing draft of a possible book chapter, written in the form of a historical review at a future date, looking at the 2005 – 2010 OpenCourseWars. As one commenter already pointed out, this form of fictive, entertaining writing probably helps to communicate the difficult issues of the Creative Commons NC (Non-Commercial) clause better than any number of scientific publications. The main message (which I agree with fully) is that NC is bad – it does not work, it is ambiguous, and problematic. For educational content, the SA (Share-Alike) clause provides enough protection to content authors.

This is the stance that our research group has taken when we’ve designed and developed the LeMill system for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources. We use CC BY-SA exclusively, and as part of the EU-wide consortium involved in the CALIBRATE project are giving our best effort to helping both teachers and educational policy makers in the EU understand this issue. And we’re having some success, I’d say. At least the consortium is still allowing us to proceed with the development of our fully free and open collaborative authoring system with the CC BY-SA license enforced, and we’re actually getting excellent reviews from both official and unofficial sources. (Hmm, now I’m thinking I should have posted this in our group’s blog, since I got so involved with our work. Oh well…)

I have just one question to David: I find it odd that I cannot see any license information on your blog or in your writings section, considering the huge contributions you’ve made in the field of open licenses. I’d like to paste your chapter draft into LeMill, and possibly translate it to Finnish. But can I do that? I see no license information, so I assume you’re using POC (plain-old-copyright), and therefore my possibilities for using this excellent article to educate others on the threat of NC are quite limited. If I’m wrong, please let me know.

Update: Well, David replied quite quickly (kudos to David’s ability to follow the blogosphere) and his Creative Commons plugin had just been broken with the WordPress upgrade, but was quickly restored. And of course the article as well as other David’s writing are licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Global warming problematic for Westinghouse time capsule's 5000 year time travel attempt

You just gotta laugh… I noticed a story about the Westinghouse time capsule in New York from BoingBoing. So they placed a special container in 1939 50 feet into the ground in New York, and it’s supposed to be opened in 5939. The book that details the process is online and is an interesting read.

They did take quite a bit of precautions, so kudos to the people working on the project. However, this in the book caught my eye:

Another question often discussed is whether, 5,000 years from now, the coast will have sunk so far as to drown the area. Consultation with geologists and the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey indicate that there is probably no foundation for the common notion that the East Coast is sinking. Surveys extending over the last 40 years show that if there is any sinking at all, the rate is so slow that the change in level in 5,000 years would be only a few feet. The elevation at the site of the Time Capsule is about 20 feet above sea level.

Yes, very well. The coast isn’t sinking too fast so after 5000 years you’re still 16-17 feet above sea level, dry and clean. Excellent. Except that the current climate predictions on global warming throw a new spanner in the works: the sea level is most likely rising (see Al Gore’s entertaining TED talk on the issue). Estimates range from 0.1 meters by 2100 to 10-16 meters in just a few decades. The argumentation for the more drastic estimate is that as we know from studies of previous ice ages, when huge ice mantles start receding, there’s a very powerful current of melt water churning underneath them. And now that the polar ice caps have started to shrink, there is the distinct possibility that the currents underneath them will function as a water slide, letting a continent-sized chunk of ice drop into the sea. The north cap alone would raise sea levels by 10 meters, the western shelf of Antarctica another 6 meters, and the eastern shelf another whopping 60 meters! But of course in this case the immediate danger would come from the mega-tsunami that would most likely traverse the globe and devastate anything within some 100 kilometers from coastal sea areas. So the time capsule might need to withstand 4800 years of its 5000 year time trip in swampy ground that’s under water. Good luck with that.

Here’s images of what the coastline would look like with 17 and 170 foot sea level rises. If anyone has links to other map services or similar kind, I’d appreciate a link.

Update: Some new information on the huge lakes beneath the polar ice caps that may hasten their meltdown by some orders of magnitude.

Update 2: Nasa’s IceSat satellite has confirmed a huge subclacial network of lakes and rivers under the Antarctic. The change in the amount of water has been estimated to be as much as 2 cubic kilometers in 3 years in one lake (approximately the same amount that Los Angeles uses). And yes, the more water, the faster the ice moves towards the sea. Scientists really cannot predict what is going to happen. Ouch…

Psychology of fetuses

I attended a nice Siltamat lecture at the Psychology department of the University of Helsinki. Here’s a summary.

Sensory development

Sense of touch starts working at 8 weeks, muscular response to touch at 12 weeks. Pain is felt.

Sense of smell and taste is very accurate. Babies can identify their own mother’s milk even after a 3 month pause. The sense gets accustomed to all the smells and tastes that are delivered to the baby from the mother. So eating garlic during pregnancy means the baby will prefer garlic as well. Fetuses also swallow, and the rate of swallowing can be used to detect how much they like a certain flavour (girtls like sweet more than boys).

Sense of hearings starts working at 18 weeks. The fetus hears the body sounds of his mother, and his mother’s voice quite accurately. From the outside world he can hear many sounds, and can discern between different vowels and different pronounciation. During the last 12 weeks, the baby learns and remembers the sounds, music, and speech he hears.

A newly-born baby prefers heart beats, talking, and other familiar sounds. He will prefer talk over talk-like sounds, his own mother’s voice over that of others, and his mother’s language over others. The distinction is based on the prosody of the talk (melody and rythm). The baby will also prefer music his mother listened to during pregnancy over other music, songs sung by his mother over other songs, and his mother’s singing voice over that of others. The baby uses the sounds he already knows (and their emotional content) to match with visual impressions of facial expressions to learn what they mean.

Birth weight and cognitive development

The optimal birth size in BPM (height divided by weight cubed) is 29 or more. Shortened pregnancy will cause babies to be born underweight, but that is not as problematic as a baby that is full term, but still births underweight. Low birth weight can be caused by the smallness of the mother, smoking, and stress.

Low birth weight will correlate with:

increased risk of type II diabetes
tendencies of fearfulness, sadness, frustration, and ADHD
cognitive skills (also height and head circumference are connected)

Even a single extremely traumatic event (like an earthquake) can shorten the length of pregnancy. Short pregnancy is also connected with heightened risk of depression at older age. And malnutrition during the first trimester is correlated with higher risk for schitzofrenic symptoms.

The health effects of these physiological factors are stronger in boys than in girls, but cognitive effects show no bias. All effect can be altered by the positive influence of the parents and the environment.

Final note: Smoking at the rate of 10 cigarettes / day even before the pregnancy will cause a significant drop in the IQ scores of the child at the age of 56 months.

List of interesting blogs on learning

Couldn’t get any sleep tonight (yet), so I decided to go through a bunch of learning and teaching related blogs and pick up any that interest me. Mainly I used the controversial top 100 educational blogs list and the Edublog 2006 awards basically opening all (well, at the time of this post, not all of them yet) of the blogs up, and reading through what they have on their front page. If they got my interest, I subscribed them to my blogroll in Bloglines (I use a web service for my blogroll since I use several computers and it’s a headache trying to sync Firefox livebookmarks on several instances).

Here’s a javascript thingie that lists the current contents of my Learning folder in my blogroll. But first the disclaimer: these aren’t necessarily the best blogs in the world. But they’re the ones that I’ve found most interesting to me. But I’m a techie as well as a psychologist, so my tastes may be a bit different from yours.

And since this is a javascript thingie, it’s unbloglike in the sense that it will change according to what I have in my Learning folder in Bloglines, and not stay what it was when I posted this note.

Thinking about the users

Kathy Sierra is one of the bloggers at Creating Passionate Users, which I already had on my Bloglines subscription, but ran into again in an IT-Conversations podcast, where she had some good insight on thinking about users. Here I’ll summarize those insights and combine them with other ideas I’ve gleaned from other places.

Her main argument was that in order to have users that are passionate about your site, they need to get past the “suck” phase. If you suck at something, then you won’t be passionate about it. OK, I can conceed that having some level of competence on a theme is a, but not the only requirement. So the first step is to analyze why people would want to use your service in the first place – what kind of new skills they will need to gain to use it fully? And why would they do that learning (5 why’s)? An example she uses is a Nikon photography guide site, that made her buy a better camera in order to take better shots.

The road to mastery of a skill is a long one, so most people need intermediate milestones. So it’s a good idea to show the vision of what mastery will give to them, but also make it clear that there are smaller steps to be taken, and each step does also produce some added value to the user. These visions could be communicated via images, or verbally (“wouldn’t it be cool if you could…”).

To get people to learn something voluntarily, you should aim for the flow experience. This means providing a challenge that is interesting enough, but not too hard for their current skills. Boredom and frustration are the alternatives to a flow experience if the situation is not balanced correctly.

For keeping up the motivation that users have initially gained, Kathy Sierra mentions levels in games. Gaining new levels of expertise give you new “superpowers”, that should be visibly demonstrated to the users. This is one very good idea, and more ideas about keeping users addicted to your service are in my previous blog post.

One important factor often neglected (or just done poorly) is user documentation. A technical, logically structured doument may be understandable to the designers of the system, but hardly so for the newbie user. The documentation should use conversational style (because the brain is more interested in conversations than monologues), and provide a story or stories (because the episodic memory of the brain is otherwise unused). Fun stuff should also be included (because fun equals play equals learning opportunity for the brain). And showing pictures of puppies and kittens (or snakes and spiders) also lights up additional areas of the brain. Leaving some things obscure or unclear or mysterious is also a good way to keep users interested.

Finally, featuritis is a good way to kill user enthusiasm and make them feel guilty for not understanding the whole system. Having good documentation, a user community for peer support, and of course, KISS (keep it simple, stupid!) are good ways of avoiding this.

Getting people addicted to your web site

I listened to an IT-Coversations podcast from SuperNova 2006 a few days ago about games and education. The most interesting part of the podcast were the notes by Amy Jo Kim describing how games get their players addicted to them, and how those techniques could be applied to learning environments or any systems. In the social web the largest challenge usually is starting a new community. Adding the “game appeal” of the site may help.

The main appeal-increasing features seen in games and many social software applications as well are:

Collecting stuff: Items in WoW, links in del.icio.us, connections in LinkedId, furniture in Habbo Hotel… Allowing users to collect various things into their virtual environment will appeal to many collector-minded people, and will increase their tendency to continue using the system.
Earning points: The old wisdom is that any visible meter becomes a goal to people, so it is important to carefully design those meters. Earning points can be based on some rules in the system (WoW experience levels), or they can be social in nature (LinkedIn recommendations, Ebay ratings).
Feedback: Feedback on the progress on any meter should be provided multimodally (visual, auditive, tactile?), often, and in interesting ways. This keeps people going with the system.
Social exchanges: The visibility of the community and people is important. It is also important to allow the community members to communicate. Exchanging any kind of communications or tokens (blog comments, eBay ratings, Habbo Hotel presents, WoW chats) is essential for a community to flourish.
Customization: Making the environment look like you want is an important way to add a feeling of ownership to the user. Customization of the user interface is an easy way of doing that. Also customizing your character (WoW avatar, community profile) and tailoring how things work and optimizing the things you see are also important affordances.
Allow for emergence: Do not overdesign the system and force people to work in a certain way. Most communities will surprise the original designers of the system. So make the system open enough to allow emerging behaviour, and be ready to modify your system to better support these emerging patterns.