In the lees of Tuesday’s mumblings about ‘literacy’, [Link] I happened to listen to a Future Tense podcast on computer literacy, [Link] that led me finally to this web page, [Link] which is an article by a journalist on computer literacy – computate in my terminology.

As is almost always the case with these articles on computer literacy its nutmeat is a list of specific tasks, terms, and activities. As a result it lack any sort of rigor in the same way that human resource people confuse job qualifications with a list of tasks that they demand be listed for the position even when the position is not task stationary. This list is composed by selecting from requirements proposed by respondents on the journalist’s blog.[1] As such is is indistinguishable except for multiplicity from any blot. That a media article was based on such is indicative of the rot of journalism as responsible information provider.

It may be recalled that the definition of literacy, from our precious electronic copy of the Tenth COD, is simply expressed as ‘able to read and write.’ If one cannot read, learning is severely compromised and limited to other modes of information transfer. If one cannot write then communication and ideation are both severely compromised. In combination, illiteracy is a handicap; the illiterate individual is crippled.

In analogy, computate – computer literacy is reading and writing computer. A necessary part of that is code. To be computer literate one must be able to write and read programs. That does not mean one has to be fluent in C or JAVA; any computer language including macros or LaTeX is good enough, but the knowledge of it must be enough to read critically what other have written and write meaningful compositions of one’s own.

If one can do this, a simple criterion of necessity and sufficiency is satisfied, a well define, fairly rigorous criterion sufficiently broad as to not discriminate except in the relevant channels. And the list from the journalist is satisfied trivially as things one has to know to be able to read and write code.

If anything the greatest difficulty with this criterion is that it flies in the face of most large organizations that are MegaHard serfdoms. That is not necessarily bad. Humans need to realize when they are being subjugated and decide whether they want to be humans or slime.

[1] I shall slide for now over the question of whether a professional journalist can actually have a blog. There is, fundamentally compromising, the remuneration aspect.

Observed on television while pedaling stationary bicycle: commercial for Columbia College [Link] – closed caption

“I share my porn with you”

Courtesy of Reynard News network.

And from the Guardian’s interview with A. C. Grayling it seems that we have to the list:

• illiterate – 1 unable to read or write, 2 ignorant of what has been written; not read;
• acalculate – 1 unable to do or use maths, 2 ignorant of what maths is and does;
• acomputate – 1 unable to use a computer, ignorant of computer programming and/or information manipulation and storage;

to add:

• asciate – 1 unable to do or know science, 2 ignorant of what science is and does.

Rather makes you wonder how humans deserve the sapiens tag doesn’t it? Or at least how many are asapient?

In the wake of all the news about other hominids, could it be that the next step in the evolution of intelligence is human organization? If so, the Roman Catholic church would seem to be the archetype if not the dinosaur.

Why is incest taboo present in Star Wars?

I have no covertness about listening to Jesse Brown’s “Search Engine” on Thursdays,[Link] along with Melvyn, Lord Bragg’s “In Our Time”. And as a result I have heard lots of murmuring and moaning about the sorry state of copyright. I also subscribe to a couple of other information sources that are concerned with copyright.

And I am convinced that they are all futzed.

The approach all of these folks take is that copyright is too strong for the corporate oligarchs that have come to use copyright to oppress the downtrodden masses. And so there needs to be some act of rebellion to reduce those corporate oligarchs to twitching corpses next to the information equivalent of a guillotine.

Sorry. Great Uncle George told me two useful things about fights:

1. Never take just a knife to a gun fight. Take two guns. And maybe a honking big missile as well.
2. Never pick a fight with an organization. They have neither morality nor honor.

Instead, I would offer that copyright needs to be balanced with something I am going to call “Accessleft” even though that is too klutzy a name to adhere.

What Accessleft entails is that so long as a piece of information is available, any copyright on that information is valid. But once the information ceases to be available, copyright ceases forever on that information. Anyone who has a paid for copy of that information may then reproduce it with let or constraint.

Not a complete solution but it does restore a balance.

Humans, who are basically bags of water with lots of impurities, have a love-hate relationship with water. Not enough will kill you. Too much will kill you. And this morning we got an addendum of just right.

Contrary to what the weather beavers said last evening on the electro-optical audio-visual imager/announcer, Greater Metropolitan Arab did indeed get a slight dusting of that most wonderful of solid phases of dihydrogen oxide.

The picture above is from my backyard. It shows a squirrel, scourius carolensis I believe, sitting on a stump consuming seed, squirrel, for the consumption of. The white stuff in the picture is dihydrogen oxide in one of its water phases, the hexagonal in the main but possibly with some of the triangal mixed in.

Nasty stuff to be out in, lovely to look at as long as it stays in that phase. And doesn’t get dirty. Or icy.

It will not last long. The roads are clear and the ground quite warm so as soon as the Solar photons reach adequate transmission through the atmosphere (adequate insolation) it will go away.

But a nice thing to rise to.

And I shan’t say a word about global climate change altering the variance of weather conditions. It might be considered to be a conspiracy, or I might be deemed a one man cabal.

Yesterday I ran across an article in the feeds of some research done at U Haifa and U Michigan.[Link] The research used some standardized methods to estimate the competitiveness among students taking tests. The primary variable was the size of the group locally taking the test. The surprising – according to the media representation – result was that the degree of competitiveness decreased with increasing group population.

To illustrate the difference between a physicist and a social scientist, the physicist would have immediately wanted to know what the functional relationship was. In particular, is there some sort of conservation relationship

f(C,P)=K,

where:

• C = (mean?) competitiveness;
• P = local population of test takers;
• K = a constant, “C” number if you will; [1] and
• f = a function.

In particular, we should like to know if

CP = K,

which is the simplest such functional relationship and says (for the benefit of the acalculate out there) that the total competitiveness in any group is a fixed quantity.

I mention this because the latter part of the article is a tortuous attempt to express this very idea without the benefit of maths. And it does so in the same dismal fashion that it always does, disgusting and alienating both the intelligent and the doltish. My experience in taking standardized tests in high school is that it does not matter how many people are in the room but rather how many of them you will compare, in a social network sense, grades with. The latter refers to not only the people you directly compare grades with but the people they have compared with and cite. Sort of a degrees of connection thing. So the population needs to be some sort of average over social network not the nose count in the testing room. IMHO.

The tenor of the discussion is that if one wants students to get high marks on standardized tests then they need to take the tests in small groups. I suspect this is a bit farcical based on my own personal anecdotal observations, which, of course, are statistically and scientifically meaningless except that they are probably accurate.[2]

While I am revisiting my misspent youth, I may as well complain a bit more. It is not at all clear to me that this sort of false competitiveness has any merit at all. Of course in the modern secondary shul environment of Every Child Left Behind whipping up artificial competitiveness in standardized testing has the merit of increasing the pay of some so-called teachers, the ones most adept at exploiting this effect. But on a realistic basis, it is not at all clear that such testing is of benefit to either students or society. If competitiveness really is conserved in this fashion, then perhaps using competitiveness in artificial situations such as testing wastes it from being used in situations actually beneficial to individuals and society?

I recall in undergraduate shul, largely because in graduate shul the classes were smaller that it was easier to excel in large classes than small because it was simply too hard for people to knock against each other. This is sort of the opposite of competitiveness but it illustrates the false benefits of such. If the purpose of courses is actual learning, education even, then wasting time and effort in interpersonal friction is counterproductive. In effect, such competitiveness tends to reduce the classes to rote training since the measure of goodness is not what has been learned but how well one scores on exams. Hence, missed by the researchers, is that this research demonstrates that artificial competitiveness and standardized testing are detrimental and damaging to society and individuals.

[1] Yes, I know that is a pun, and a good one from a physics standpoint. Think BRACKET. And I know today is Saturday but I didn’t get to use a pun yesterday, so this is just conservation of pun.

[2] This is commonly known in the fields of theoretical physics and marital survival as the I-told-you-so condensation. Everyone has encountered situations where their best estimation of how to act under some conditions is abysmally wrong and a colleague/spouse/significant other/boss/employee/archvillan who has observed this points out that your assessment is opposite to theirs. Usually unintentionally in the most shattering fashion attainable, hence the condensation appellation.

In the vein of the previous blot and considering the various types of users, the question arises of how comfortable chairs in a library should be?

The definition of what comfortable should be is a bit ambiguous, varying with the individual user. One possible metric is the mean time to being uncomfortable. This will permit leveling between those people who think an absolute absence of resistive support is necessary, the couch potatoes of football fanaticism, who do occasionally, almost always only as students driven to the library as an economic means of not spending money on textbooks that could ‘better’ be spent on beer and snacks, and those who need an absolutely rigid surface. Both extremes, notably, cause severe cramps and aches if sat in too long, hence, the mean time, and possibly standard deviation, of time to individual discomfort. The individuality bridges over the occasionall princess (as in pea) and the rock beings from the original Star Trek.

In this environment, we may project that the right magnitude of mean time to discomfort should be a few hours. More than this and people will remain sedentary too long, less than this and inadequate work will be performed. The question then is whether that few is one hour or six?

Most student libraries seem to opt for the lower number. It is unclear whether this is to thwart over llong seatsteading or just natural academic sadism. After all, learning cannot be too difficult or painful. This also explains why one so often finds students napping in the stacks or under tables and not in chairs.

Researchers on the other hand would generally opt for a longer time although again it seems that library administrators view this as a waste of money. The fundamental paradox of libraries is that if too many people use it too long then it will be hard to deny funding based on inadequate use. hence, serious researchers must be encouraged to depart in search of linament and/or heating. I know from personal experience of one particular library that inadvertantly purchased rather long time chairs and had to obtain a special donative to replace them with uncomfortable chairs before they were overwhelmed with sedentary lemmings.

I notice in the student newspaper of the campus of the Boneyard discontent with the hours of operation of the campus libraries. [Link] Given my long term relationship with libraries, this is provocative of contemplation of consideration.

Libraries are wonderful places, serving multiple functions almost all of which are misunderstood or under-appreciated by those who pay for libraries. This is sufficient to permit the economics of libraries to be described quite adequately by the ‘Cat Food Model’ that I have commented on previously. Other, important aspects of libraries can be described as ‘womb-like’. Libraries are usually quiet places where one may go to be separate from the hustle and bustle of life. Hence one of the relatively regular components of library usage are people who go to library to hide.

The users of libraries themselves are a spectrum ranging from the folks who take refuge in library from the stress and din of life and those who want to amuse and titillate their imaginations to students and researchers. I have previously commented on the nature of researchers, but have paid scant attention to students other than my own piggyback experiences with research. Researchers tend to come to library for two reasons, to read journals on a regular basis and to look up articles and subjects on an irregular basis. Happily if the population of researchers is large enough the irregularity gets spread fairly uniformly over time and a fairly consistent level of usage results.

The student situation is less so, albeit similar. Students come to library to research by direction. They have a term paper or other project and the subject of that project has been channeled by the courses they take. But students also come to library to study for those courses, usually around exam time. Hence the discontent expressed in the newspaper article.

My personal experience coming on forty years ago is that student usage is scant at the beginning of term and peaks at end of term. Usage is greater in spring than fall, perhaps due to the decrease in social activities, such as football. Interestingly, [2] the quietness of library is inversely proportional to the density of use, so the more students seeking quiet in library, the less quiet the library is. But this impinges on the economic side in that because the demand is cyclic, or variable, at least, the non-users of library who pay for library want a compromise of costs – hours of operation and staffing – to bridge the variation. Hence, at beginning of semester libraries are empty for long hours and staff looks for things to do wile at end of semester library hours are inadequate and librarians are unavailable to help.

Hence, users bitch and moan at end of semester whereas the non-user governors of libraries bitch and moan all the time by conveniently ignoring the mechanics of library usage. Tyranny in action, governance at its epitome, a defamation of human intelligence and worth. Perhaps the most useful lesson students can learn in college, that the organization does not care about them?

[2] OK, sorta the “I” word.

It has been raining, not hard, but steadily, since dusk yesterday. I just got back from visiting the Yankee government postal office here in Greater Metropolitan Arab. I waited this late to (a) get there after the postal boxes have been serviced, and (b) a bit later to get past the rush caused by the former.

As it was I was under guidance from FD SCP to purchase additional first class postage so I also had to go into the sales area and queue up. The queue was short and jerky. As I got to the front of the queue I discovered why. A large but ad hoc sign announced that the credit/debit card server was off line due to weather. The largeness was such that one had no problem reading the sign from the front of the queue but not from the back. Hence a lot of folks were getting to the front, seeing the sign, and stomping out in disgust, not a few with words that could get them criminal charges for profanity. [1]

Anyway, my purpose is not to complain about poor administrative practice; this is, after all, the post office. My purpose is to note that this is supposedly the era when we are ceasing to use paper and metal images of discorporated caucasian politicians and transacting money conveyance for goods and services via electronic means. Except when the means don’t work because of the weather. So much for eCommerce! At least in Greater Metropolitan Arab! Or any place in the hinterland!

I stepped to the sales desk. announced my requirement, and presented portraiture. Then gather my box mail, and motored back here chuckling under my breath all the way.

[1] Yes, I know. As a manager working for the Yankee government I had to know about such things. It’s not just the post office, its any Yankee government location. It’s not enforced often; the last time I noticed was in one of the national parks when there was some gathering of boy scouts and it was necessary to maintain good order and decorum.