Slightly Surreal Weekend

Attended an academic conference in Kananaskis this weekend, where my wife and I presented a paper & poster session (on an analysis of the functions of stakeholder advisory committees in government). The venue was a smart move on the part of the UofL organizers, because the locale attracted delegates from as far away as India and Australia and the Canary Islands, where I somehow doubt that Lethbridge would have had the same drawing power.

Unfortunately, the scenery was largely wasted on my wife and I, since our ten month old is still too young (i.e., still nursing) to be left behind, so we had our kids with us. Consequently, aside from our own presentation, when we arranged for a sitter, and one or two presentations we desperately wanted to take in and had the other parent cover for us, we basically had to spend all our time parenting. While our colleagues were out hiking the trails or horseback riding or etc., we were dealing with a sick baby (third virus since starting day care three weeks ago) and a bored six year old.

Coping with a crying baby in a single hotel room at 3 AM is not fun. At home, we often switch off responsibilities, with one parent sleeping soundly in the spare room while the other takes a shift on duty pacing with the baby. But what do you do in a hotel room when the baby is keeping the whole floor awake, let alone both parents and her older sister?

So I found myself walking with Kasia through the halls late Saturday night, trying to give my wife time to get the six year old settled and asleep. As I stood window shopping in the hotel's mall, a tiny, aging Japanese woman walked down the hall, so stooped over that I wondered how she could manage without a cane. But she took one look at Kasia in my arms, and came over and began bowing deeply to her while speaking to me in Japanese.

Now, I am fairly use to strangers complimenting us on our baby, and I certainly agree that Kasia is pretty adorable (see photos in previous postings) but this woman was really bowing. I know enough about Japanese culture to know that the deeper the bow, the greater the respect being shown, and this was way beyond "your baby is cute" adorable, to "your child is the second coming" adorable. You know? I kept thinking of that case where a group of monks showed up on the lawn of an unsuspecting couple in California and told them their child was the next incarnation of some revered religious figure. Nice and flattering and kind of surreal at the same time...

Once the elderly woman had moved on, a second group of Japanese tourists came by, and immediately came over and politely asked if they could have their picture taken with Kasia. They seemed a nice enough family group, so okay, but as they are madly clicking away, I am bemused by the celebrity status Kasia and I have suddenly acquired that everyone wants their picture taken with us. The experience is repeated again and again as (I presume) a busload or two of Japanese settle into the hotel for the night.

When I get back to our room and relate the experience to my wife, her first response is, "But you're in you're in your pajamas!" But that doesn't really bother me in this context, because in Japan, it is not only acceptable but actually expected that patrons wear pjs in the hotel lobby -- the hotels provide robes for this purpose (as did ours, obviously used to dealing with Japanese.) So to the folks back home viewing their friend's slides, the guy in pjs makes perfect sense. But it is still a bit surreal to think of all those folks admiring my baby as one of the wonders of their trip...

Collapse of Charter Schools

Interesting story in NY Times on collapse of Charter Schools. Of course, as any sociologist could have told you, publicly funded but privately run schools represent the importation of private sector logic into the public sector and is therefore essentially inherently contradictory. So no surprises here! But it is validating, if slightly depressing, to have my predictions proved correct once again. Too bad no one ever listens to us before the disaster hits....

Self-sustaining Robots

Here is a story link that has some interesting long term implications... Once robots become self-sustaining, they come close to being their own lifeform.

My students are trying to learn how to teach today's kids, but by the time my daughter (grade 1) is in high school, the world we are in will be significantly different. What prepares my students to be teachers in that world? Preoccupied with mastering the skills necessary to be successful teachers today, how can they even begin to keep track of how the world is changing, to prepare themselves for the future world their career will span?

Waffle on a Stick

Took the family to the local Exhibition today. My wife always complains how cheesy it is compared to say the PNE or the Calgary Stampede, but I grew up in Edmonton when the population was not much larger than Lethbridge is today, and I find the small scale, slightly grubby rides of the second string exhibitors oddly comfortable.

Tigana (my six year old) was obviously thrilled to have the opportunity to spend $4 for the 60 seconds ot took to walk through "the Crystal Palace Hall of Mirrors"; or to slide down the two story slide of "Raiders" (repainted in a Spiderman motif to update a reference the current generation of kids could no longer related to, though the jungle walkways and cave decorations and the lights all still say "Raiders"); or to twirl around in a giant berry as it makes her nearly dizzy enough to throw up. I had not appreciated previously how nostalgic it is for parents to not only watch their kids scream on rides they themselves used to ride (before age and gravity got the upper hand), but to watch the child's disillusionment and disappointment as the realization that one has just spent a week's allowance on a really lame exhibit suddenly sinks in. Oh, to be young and naive again...!

But the highlight of the exhibition for me this year was the new and unique concession of "Stick with Waffles". (The original slogan, the owner/inventor told me, was to have been, "Forget pancakes, stick with waffles" but he had to shorten it for the van/T-Shirt logo.) The concept is frightenly simple and innovative: bake a waffle with a popsicle stick sticking out the side, provide a choice of maple or strawberry butter (to avoid that whole sticky issue of how to handle the syrup) and voila, the perfect midway snack. It is so dumb, it's brilliant, and Tigana ate her's up with great relish, voting it her favorite food of the midway. Sadly, there seemed few other takers for the three hours we were there, and the proprietor told us he was plagued by the general perception that waffles are just for breakfast, but once that prejudice is overcome (as is certainly the case whenever we give Tigana the choice, waffles being her idea of a staple food equalled only by Kraft Dinner) the franchise is obviously going to take off!

A fun link

From Randy Reichardt's blog The Pod bay door comes this great link.

Ask your Mamma!

This is a new one on me, but looks promising: A meta-search engine called Mamma.

Kasia is now fully mobile...as I discovered when I took her with me to the washroom and watched her crawl away under the stalls...

Word Count

Word Count (http://www.wordcount.org/) is a fascinating site. It lists the 86,000 most popular words in the English language in rank order. (See if you can guess, say, the top ten, before visiting the site.) You can follow the list from #1 using the "next word", or type in a word to find where it ranks.

I figure this site a useful resource for language teachers...if I'm going to help my six year old learn to read, I should probably teach her the top 25 or 50 words by sight, eh? Spelling, too. And it is probably a useful resource for writers, too, especially if their audience is new readers or second language learners.

Speaking of language learning, my 9 month old has started calling "Dada" when I am out of sight, and "Mama" when Mom can't be seen, and both emerged the same week. She is also signing for "hungry", "thirsty", and "up" (as in "lift me up out of this high chair") since we are teaching her baby sign language. So that's five words she knows for sure.

Sleep deprivation continues for my wife and I. My wife forgot pans on the stove long enough to burn, almost long enough to catch fire. (That was my stick with our first child...almost set the house on fire three times in first two months from forgetting bottles sterilizing on the stove...) And I am so tired I keep forgetting where I am supposed to be driving and end up taking the wrong turn. And I can'tremember what I am saying to my students half the time. I'll start saying something, then go blank as I forget the word or name I was going to say next: "guy with a beard? Studied with Hegal? Lived in Germany? Oh, I can see his face so clearly..."

"Do you mean Marx, Sir?"

"Yeah, that's it. So anyway, what Marx said was..."


As with our first child, I figure I lose a word for every word my kid learns one. Keeps the balance in the universe somehow, I guess.

Blogging and Readership

I installed Extreme tracker in May to see how many people were actually reading my blog and why they came.

At first I was very pleased to find that over 700 (to give the current figure) different readers have come to my blog. I thought, "Hey, I'm doing pretty good for a new and infrequent blog!" Then I went to the breakdown for a friend's blog and discovered that he had had over 20,000 unique visitors. Okay I'm still in the minor leagues, I thought, but 700 people! That's still good!

Then I started looking a little closer at those figures and realized that most of those people (80%) were one time visitors coming in response to a particular entry or google search and not regular readers at all. Ok, but that means 20% are reloads, or returning readers, so that's about 180, so that's still okay!

But then I realize that the reloads include each time the person comes 'round, so divide 180 by the number of weeks I've been doing the blog and...well it looks like I might have eight to ten regular readers. *Sigh*

But wait, there are still 700 people who dropped by to read a particular entry, right? Other bloggers must have recommended some insight or comment I'd made that others were dropping by to check out. So I've still reached 700 readers with at least one entry, eh? That's still good!

But then I looked closer and saw that most of my traffic has been arriving by mistake! There were only 84 people referred by other bloggers, the rest came from Google (and similar) searches. For example, one guy typed in "Boring Family Photos" and my site came up because it has "boring" in the title and I have a "Family Photo" in one entry. I mean, maybe he did find what he was looking for, but it's not exactly about reading what I wrote, you know? I get a lot of searches with "Not boring" in them. (Someone needs to be teaching the public better search skills.) So it's not even like people are interested in my topics. Not really.

But it gets worse. When I actually looked at what words were most frequently pulling Google referals, it was "torture", "rape", "castration" and etc. I eventually figured out that these words were coming up in Dem's excellent guest editorial on the Iraq photos, but do I really want the people interested in these topics coming to my site? I mean, if they were looking for an editorial on the Iraq photos, all well and good, but I suspect most of these guys were looking for "rape photos" and got here by mistake. Eek, I suddenly feel creepy and need a shower.

Oh well, new term starts in a couple of weeks and I will get another batch of students, at least some of whom will figure out that reading my blog might give them some insight into where I'm coming from, thus driving up my readership figures....

...always assuming of course that universdity students still read any more...

Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).

The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet. (Permalink: http://novaspivack.typepad.com/nova_spivacks_weblog/2004/08/a_sonar_ping_of.html) --- results and comments about the experiment appear at that location.

Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate -- the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of blogspace and the propagation of memes across blogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e (Note: this replaces the longer, original GUID -- listed below -- which didn't format nicely in narrow column layouts. Those sites still using the longer GUID will still be found in the data set).

The above GUID enables anyone to easily search Google or other search engines for all blogs that participate in this experiment, once they have indexed the sites that participate, which may take several days or weeks. To locate the full data set, just search for the any sites that contain either the short GUID (above) or the long GUID (for your reference, the long GUID is a single 72 character string comprised of the following segments put together with the white-spaces removed:
as098398298250swg9e 98929872525389t9987 898tq98wteqtgaq6201 0920352598gawst -- they are listed here as different segments so that they will format better in narrow column layouts.)

Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post (see URL above). (Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.)

INSTRUCTIONS

To add your blog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your blog, and then answer the questions below, substituting your own information, below, where appropriate. Other than answering the questions below, please do not alter the information, layout or format of this post in order to preserve the integrity of the data in this experiment (this will make it easier for searchers and automated bots to find and analyze the results later).

REQUIRED FIELDS (Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

(1) I found this experiment at URL: http://www.podbaydoor.com/

(2) I found it via "Newsreader Software" or "Browsing the Web" or "Searching the Web" or "An E-Mail Message": Browsing the Web

(3) I posted this experiment at URL: http://runte/blogspot.com/

(4) I posted this on date (day/month/year): 03/09/04

(5) I posted this at time (24 hour time): 04:35

(6) My posting location is (city, state, country): Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada

OPTIONAL SURVEY FIELDS (Replace the answers below with your own answers):

(7) My blog is hosted by: Blogger

(8) My age is: 52

(9) My gender is: Male

(10) My occupation is: Associate Professor

(11) I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: none

(12) I use the following software to post to my blog: Blogger

(13) I have been blogging since (day, month, year): 15/01/2003

(14) My web browser is: IE 5.2 for the Mac

(15) My operating system is: MacOS 10.2

I Robot

Guest Review by Den Valdron

My impression of 'I Robot' is that I began to forget it as I was watching it.   It was a teflon coated, industrial robotic production film, so refined and economical, that there was no place for an original idea, or for that matter, an idea of any sort to attach itself.
 
It's plot and pace functioned with metronomic precision, every beat dictated by formula.  Instead of a heart, it simply had a clockwork mechanism powered by quartz crystal.
 
What were we talking about again?

The Status of TV Writers

Caught a rerun of the last episode of Friends the other night, and was struck by an ominous omission. Amid all the self-congratulatory goodbyes and "thank you"s to fellow cast memers, the crew, and of course the viewing audience, there was absolutely no mention of the writers. As far as the viewing audience was concerned, the actors who played the Friends must have been ad libbing the whole time. The discussion was about how these beloeved characters over time, but it was as if the actors were responsible for the characer development. There did not seem to be any recognition that somewhere in the backroom there was a team of writers building characters, developing plots, and writing the gags. I mean, if they are going to thank the camera man, should there be at least a tip of the hat to the contributio of the writers?

Three funny bits

Here's a funny bit on American election

and another on Homeland Security

and a website on chicken archeologists

Off to SCOS conference

I'm off to Halifax for the SCOS (Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism), followed by a couple of weeks holiday so may not be able to blog for a bit, depending on whether conference has internet facilities available.

In the meantime, here is a photo of our seven-month-old, with whom we are travelling -- should make for an interesting conference!

Two great links

Two great links, both from Cold Ground one of the few blogs I read regularly:

bungled hold up caught on film.

Interactive Alice in wonderland.

Baby got your tongue?