• The Author – Bart Busschots

  

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So, I got my very shinny new PowerMac (dual 2.0Ghz G5 with 2GB RAM) today and I’m just blown away by just about everything about it (it’s FAST, the Apple Cinema Display ROCKS) but one thing has proved a real disappointment, the Mighty Mouse that came free with it.

I have been playing with the settings for ages and all I can’t get the right "button" to do ctrl+click (right click to non-mac users) like any PC mouse will do when plugged into a mac. I can get it to do "Button 2" which is ctrl+click sometimes but only sometimes! The side buttons are useless and the only thing I can see them doing is giving people RSI! "Just squeeze" is what Apple say, gimme a bloody vice and I might have a chance! I don’t have particularly big hands and I can tell you now I’d do myself an injury if I had to use that "button" a lot.

Thank heavens there is a Logitech Comfort Cordless Desktop winging it’s way towards me as I type!

Tagged with: mouse • hardware • review • Apple

I’d read some good things about the Breezy Badger release of Ubuntu on Planet MiNDS> so I figured I’d give it a go. Simply put, I’m not impressed. Things started off bad when the installer messed up because it made retarded assumptions and now that it’s up and running it is still causing me trouble.

Why the Breezy Badger Install sucks

Firstly, the installer made two assumptions that resulted in me having to intervene and switch to a terminal to sort it out. That’s all well and good for seasoned Linux Users but is totally un-acceptable for a distro that makes a big deal out of being "Linux for Human beings".

Firstly, I find it retarded that the installer even tries to go online, but it does. Fair enough. Where things get really retarded is when it tries to go online WITHOUT ASKING IF YOU NEED TO USE A PROXY! It just sat there. I figured it would time out ….. 5 minutes pass ….. another 5 minutes pass …. I give up and switch to a terminal and kill the process. The installer recovers but skips some setup steps. It was all recoverable later but only with some vi editing and farting round on the command line. Again, no problem at all for a seasoned Linux user but a really big deal for Human Being like my mother!

Secondly Breezy decided that after it had detected my graphics card it should set the resolution, not to a safe number like Windows or OS X would do nor did it ask me what I wanted like Fedora does, nope, it just decided to set the resolution as high as the graphics card can go. Thing is my monitor can’t go as high as my graphics card so as soon as my machine re-booted after the install I got a blank screen when X started and a message from my monitor telling me it couldn’t handle what it was being fed. I fixed it by firing up a terminal and editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf but again, no average user is going to be able, or willing, to do that!

In summation, the installer could have saved me a lot of bother and made the whole experience more pleasant by asking me two simple questions:

• Do you use a proxy and if so where is it?
• What resolution would you like from this list your graphics card can handle?

These are simple things that would have made a huge difference and that the Fedora installer lets you do in a nice GUI. When it comes to installers, KUbuntu is FAR behind Fedora as far as the average user is concerned.

After the Installation

There are also two things that are really annoying me now that the system is installed. Firstly, I installed both FireFox and Thunderbird with apt yet when I try to open a link from within Thunderbird NOTHING happens. It’s not that it uses the wrong browser, it just doesn’t use ANY browser! I’ve been copying and pasting links all day and quite frankly it’s a real PITA!

Secondly, I can’t get the MS fonts from apt like I could on the previous release of KUbuntu. I’ve enabled all the repositories and I’ve tried every apt-cache search permutation I can think of and still no joy. It says there is a package that other packages refer to that does what I need but it can’t find the blooming thing!

On a less important note, Niall gave me exceptionally high hopes on the shinneyness of the GUI describing it as "OSX shinny" in his recent post about Breezy, but I was disappointed. It’s nice, very nice even and certainly nicer than the previous KUbuntu or the latest Fedora but it’s still far from OS X shinny I’m afraid.

Conclusion

If you are a Human Being and you want to use Linux, use Fedora!

Links

• Ubuntu – www.ubuntulinux.org
• Fedora – www.fedora.redhat.com

Tagged with: Ubuntu • operating system • Linux • open source • review

From myself and Des’ posts on the matter and the comments both posts have recieved, it would seem fair to say that people agree that academic standards are on a slide. I’ve been pondering this for a while now and I’ve decided to summarise my views on why standards here in NUI Maynooth have been sliding from direct experience during my 8 years here in this article. These views are based directly on my experiences from a 4 year Double Honours degree in Science (Experimental Physic and Computer Science), 4 years of study for my PhD, 5 years of demonstrating in Computer Science laboratories and 3 years of lecturing to Computer Science students (Information Processing to 2nd Arts & HDipIT students).

In this article I will discuss one by one the factors I believe have been responsible for the falling standards in the Science Faculty at NUI Maynooth.

The abolition of the BSc General

The first time I started thinking about standards and worrying about standards falling was when I heard that the BSc general was to be abolished in the final year of my degree. Up to that point about 80% of students doing science degrees did the three-year General degree and only the top 20% or so went into the 4th year for an honours degree. The entry into honours was governed by your 2nd year marks and you had to get over 55% to be admitted into honours stream. In my year there were 12 honours Experimental Physics students and 20 honours Computer Science students.

There was a very good reason for the minimum requirement for honours, the honours course was tough going! When the general degree was abolished all students were automatically entered into the honours stream without any need to meet a minimum requirement apart from passing second year (i.e. 40%). It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that one of two things could happen here, either the failure rate would rocket up or the standards would plummet. As you can guess it was the latter as courses started being scaled down or dropped completely in third and fourth year to ensure that the students who should have been in the now non-existent general stream still passed in the honours stream.

The reduction of first year courses by 25%

The next major change was the reduction by a whopping 25% of lecture hours for all first year science students. In my first year we had 16 lecture hours a week (as well as labs and tutorials of course), four per subject per week. After I graduated that was reduced to just three per subject per week. This meant that a quarter of the modules once thought in first year had to go. Most of these modules were pre-requisites for modules in later years so they could not be dropped but had to be pushed back to second year, in turn pushing second year modules back to third year, third year modules to 4th year and 4th year modules out of existence altogether. By loosing an entire quarter of a year in one fell swoop there was no way standards could not drop.

A pre-occupation with pass rates

This was discussed in detail by Des so I’m not going to dwell on this. Basically pressure was applied on departments by the University administrators to pass more students. This resulted in modules being simplified and more difficult modules disappearing all together. Weak students were being let into second year when they were simply not fit for second year so second year had to be toned down for them and that effect just rippled up the years. I’ll give two examples of this.

Firstly, courses in Perl and Matlab have now completely disappeared from the Computer Science and Software Engineering degree. I used to demonstrate both these modules and was exceptionally disappointed to see them go.

Secondly, I think Data Structures and Algorithms demonstrates really well how courses get diluted. In my second year Data Structures and Algorithms started off with the basics of stacks, queues, linked lists and trees and then went on to go into their applications including implementing a binary search tree, implementing node balancing with both AVL and Red-Black tress and culminating in the implementation of the Huffman Encoding algorithm for data compression in C++. The course also went into searching and sorting algorithms in great detail culminating in an implementation in C++ of the recursive quick-sort algorithm. Now students don’t even learn about Huffman encoding let alone implement it, they also don’t implement AVL trees, red black trees or even simple binary search trees. Basically students learn about these data structures but not their applications and they certainly don’t have to program even the half of what we had to do. This was brought into stark contrast when I was talking to a 4th year who did Data Structure and Algorithms two years ago. He said it was useless theory with no application in the real world. I was shocked so I explained what WE did in DaA in my second year and his jaw dropped. He had only done about half of what I’d done and was exceptionally annoyed to have been deprived of a proper DaA course. Why was he deprived of this course? Because the standards were dropped to up the pass rate.

A change in student attitudes

I have noticed over my time demonstrating in labs and lecturing that there has been a steady change in students attitudes. I call it the rise of the secondary school mentality in university. Students expect to be given everything on a plate, to never have to do any independent work and want to pass with the absolute minimum of effort. There are also more and more students in college against their will. They are not there because they want to be but because their parents made them go, just like you get in secondary schools.

There are many theories on why there is this change in attitude. Darragh suggested it was because everyone can go to college for free so they don’t value it. I think it has a lot to do with parents molly-coddling children further and further into adulthood and basically making their decisions for them. In reality it’s probably a little of both.

The effect of this however is that if students are not spoon-fed information they will simply not learn it. When I was an undergraduate it was not un-known for us to be told to research a topic or to go read a book in our own time and then to be examined on that topic. That just doesn’t happen anymore in the science faculty. A worse effect of this is that if something is challenging students just don’t bother with it. They then do poorly in the exam and because of the pressure to keep pass rates up the challenging stuff is just removed from the courses.

This however has an immensely negative effect on the good students in the class because they go un-challenged, get bored and either under achieve or transfer somewhere they won’t be bored or worse still, drop out.

Conclusion

When you consider that everyone is being forced through what used to be the elite honours course without weak students being failed, that 25% of first year has disappeared into the ether and the pressure on departments is to pass pass pass students, how could standards NOT plummet!

Links

• Is a CS Degree actually WORTH anything?
• Students are the only bottom line that matters

For the second time in less than a week the North Campus of NUI Maynooth was plunged into darkness at around 5pm. We still don’t know what caused the last cut but it was apparently “an ESB fault”. I wonder what we’ll be told about this one. My money is on another “ESB fault”. This level of service is just not acceptable. All CS department servers including our public web page were down for a whole night. I couldn’t work on my PhD stuff and I couldn’t find an email address for a lecturer in Physics I needed to contact. MiNDS> was un-available again too and basically this is the second night I’ve been majorly inconvenienced in less than a week by the apparent incompetence of our national electricity supply board. This level of un-planned service disruption is un-acceptable and I believe the university need to at the very least threaten legal action against the ESB to impress upon them that this third-world level of service is just not on in 21^st century Ireland!

It was both frosty and foggy last night so there were a lot of ice-crystals in the air. I saw one of the most impressive moon Halo’s I’ve ever seen. The inner circle went right in to the moon and was very bright, then there was a bright redish fringe followed by a dark fringe and then another bright fringe. For more information on Lunar Halo’s have a look here: http://www.sundog.clara.co.uk/droplets/cormoon.htm.

I had a look tonight because the weather is similar but th fog is just too thick to see any interesting phenomena.

Tagged with: astronomy • atmospheric optics • observation log • Moon

On the one hand I should be ecstatic, having just suffered a disk failure on a production server I have all services restored and no data has been lost. However, I’m quite grumpy because the one thing I didn’t backup were my custom backup scripts that did me such sterling service! I now have to start from scratch and all I remember about the old scripts was that they were a massive PITA to write. This is one mistake I won’t be making again in a hurry!

If you have multiple machines on your desk and you are fed up of having a mess of keyboards and mice all over the place then Synergy is just the thing you need. What makes Synergy even better is that it works cross-platform so you can share a single keyboard and mouse between Linux, OS X, any Unix and even crappy old Windows!

To find out more about installing synergy on non-OS X platforms or
about the practicalities of setting up a Synergy server checkout
Synergy’s home page: http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/

The synergy home page allows you to download binaries for OS X but that package literally gives you just the executable file for the server and client and nothing more. If you want Synergy to be easier to use and install on OS X don’t get it from the Synergy website, get Synergy KM instead.

SynergyKM gives you a nice Synergy icon on the Menu Bar to allow you to easily see and change Synergy’s state (see screen first shot below). SynergyKM also adds an extra panel to your System Preferences to allow you to configure Synergy both as a client and a server (see second screen shot).

You can get SynergyKM here: http://software.landryhetu.com/synergy/

Addendum – 24-11-05

For some reason when you are using Synergy to connect your Mac to another keyboard and mouse and you have a hot-corner set up to lock the screen it doesn’t work while Synergy is on. If you turn-off synergy it works fine. for the last week I’ve been turning off Synergy each time I wanted to lock my computer and that’s just not ideal at all so I did some Googling on the matter and found a good solution.

You can get a padlock icon to appear in your Menu Bar and when you click on that one of the options in the menu is "Lock Screen" (see first figure below). This will allow you to lock your screen even while using Synergy. Getting this padlock is a little counter intuative but here goes:

1. Open the "Keychain Access" program in your Applications/Utilities folder
2. Open the prefferences for this app (Keychain Access -> Preferences)
3. I nthe "General" pane check the checkbox labled "Show Status in Menu Bar"

Simple as that!

Tagged with: utility • tutorial • open source • software • review • OS X

Astro2 had a talk today on the subject "Science, on a collision course with reality". The talk had two halves. The first half was directly related to the title and was given by Catherine Ansbro of Space Exploration Ltd., the second half was technically a "surprise" and was given by Dr. Massimo Teodorani, a scientist from Italy who gave a very interesting talk on his work in SETI (in particular OSETI and SETV). There was a loose link between the two halves of the talk in that during the first half some of the difficulties faced by scientists working at the edges of the accepted boundaries of science were discussed and Dr. Teodorani could be considered to be one of the scientists working at that ‘bleeding edge’. I will discuss the second half of the talk at the end of my article but I want to concentrate mainly on the issues raised in the first half of the talk because that is what really got me thinking about what science really is, what the issues are facing science and why science is special.

Firstly I should point out that the main speaker should consider herself to have been successful in one of the stated aims of her talk, to make people stop and think. The very existence of this article is evidence that at least one person stopped and thought after going to the talk!

The central point of Ms Ansbro’s talk was that science needs to be taken down off it’s pedestal. I strongly disagree with this despite the fact that I agree with her about all the problems she pointed out in our implementation of science today. I agree that our attempt at carrying out science is not perfect but that is no reason to lessen the ideal of science. We should leave science on it’s pedestal, not because it is perfect but because all scientists should be constantly stretching up to try achieve the perfection that is the concept of science.

What is the scientific ideal?

What is it we should all be striving for? The discovery of the objective truths about our universe. To achieve that we must be free from prejudices, pre-conceptions and pride. This is where the practice of science today fails. We do not always want to know the real truth! True science is noble and altruistic and each and every scientist should be striving to help bring us closer to the truth about our universe, regardless of what that truth is.

So why are we falling short of the ideal?

This is exceptionally simple to answer, we are human! Whether we know it or not we all have our biases on how we think the universe should work and when science starts to look like it’s heading in the opposite direction we inevitably fight against that. Adults are generally not naturally objective. I believe that children may well start out being objective but I think that by the time we reach adulthood that objectivity is gone because we all pick up baggage on our journey to adulthood. An example from my personal experience is that as a young teenager I felt that everything in nature should form a cycle so I adopted the pulsating universe model (big bang – big crush, big bang – big crush ……….) and clung to it. As the evidence began to mount against that model I just refused to believe it and ignored the evidence. Eventually I realised that you cannot be a scientist if you stick your head in the sand every time the Universe gives you information you don’t like. That is a prejudice I know I have and that I have put aside, thing is, I probably have many more I’m not aware of and so does every scientist!

Another human shortcoming that really detracts from science is greed. Greed often manifests itself in special interest groups who have an agenda to push for the personal gain of their members. These interest groups turn to science, not to find out the truth but to seek legitimacy for what they want to be the truth. This is exceptionally dangerous and results in really bad science and real harm to society as a whole. A wonderful example of the threat posed by special interest groups is the Tobacco lobby who suppressed the truth about the dangers of Tobacco for decades and in so doing killed millions of people for their own gain. Currently I believe the oil companies are doing similar with regard to the vitally important question of climate change.

Science is slow to react and reluctant to change

I’m in two minds as to whether or not this is a strength or a weakness. On the one hand this reluctance to accept change ensures that science remains on a very solid footing because it means new ideas need to be really well thought out with lots and lots of evidence before they become accepted, on the other hand, this reluctance to change also has many negative effects as it can stifle the work of free thinkers and many good ideas get stone-walled out of existence. It could be argued that truly great ideas, no matter how bizarre, do make it into science because good ideas just never die. That may be so but the life of a scientist ‘on the edge’ is not a pleasant one! Again, I think balance is needed and I don’t think we getting that balance at the momnt. There are just too many people with vested interests in the status quo, too many egos and big business is directing research too much to the point that it has become very difficult to do "blue skies" work at all.

Strangulation by Purse Strings

Pure science, i.e. science for the sake of knowing, is not really acceptable in the modern academic environment. If you can’t promise any concrete deliverables no one wants to know you when you come looking for support or funding. If you don’t believe me try to get funding for research that has no marketable deliverable. The people with the purse strings are increasingly being controlled by big business and other vested interest groups because that’s where the money for research is coming from more and more. I am not saying for one moment that there should not be targeted research. The vast sums of money being pumped into the explicit target of curing cancer are most certainly not a bad thing! However, great leaps forward don’t tend to come from work directly targeted at tangible deliverables. Truly great leaps tend to come from pure science, from people seeing something that we don’t understand and trying to understand it. Funding ONLY this kind of science would be insane but NOT funding this kind of research is equally insane and exceptionally short sighted. Thankfully the value of pure science is beginning to dawn on people and companies like Google are starting to really value so called "blue skies" projects. Hopefully more companies and governments will start to see the intrinsic value of science for the sake of understanding as well as science for the sake of the bank balance and science for the sake of solving specific problems.

What Makes Science Special?

The point at which myself and Ms Ansbro really parted ways was when Ms Ansbro claimed that scientific knowledge is no different to other kinds of knowledge like intuition, spiritual knowledge and knowledge from a perceived ‘sixth sense’. Although these other kinds of knowledge can feed into science in very important ways they are fundamentally different to scientific knowledge. All these other forms of knowledge are SUBJECTIVE, science is OBJECTIVE. One’s spirituality is deeply personal and although it can be vital in helping us understand our personal view of the universe it does not tell us about the objective universe that we all share with each other.

What makes science different is that scientific knowledge can be verified and tested by anyone. If you are not convinced of Galileo’s laws regarding pendulums you can hang up a pendulum and re-do his experiments to see for yourself. It is this repeatability and verifiability that makes scientific knowledge special. You don’t have to take anyone’s word for anything, it can all be independently verified, if it can’t then it isn’t science!

However, science without other forms of knowing like intuition or spirituality would not get very far. It would be mechanical and boring and would lack the spark to drive it on. Afterall, what is science without inspiration!? However, that does not mean that scientific knowledge is the same as these other forms of knowledge. Each scientific experiment we do tells us something real and objective about the universe, that makes it special.

SETI and SETV

I will now move on to the second half of the talk presented by Dr. Massimo Teodorani. I found this absolutely fascinating. Dr. Teodorani explained the way mainstream SETI operates and then pointed out a distinct weakness in the way it operates, it is ONLY looking for stationary transmissions and not moving transmissions. Dr. Teodorani believes that it is realistic to assume that alien technology could be very advanced and as such could have mastered inter-stellar travel, hence there could be alien technology in our solar system. He has devised a number of techniques for searching for such visiting technology. This field of research is referred to as SETV (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Visitations) and is a classic example of science on the edge. Many people do not take this kind of research seriously because they are afraid of crackpots, however, what really impressed me about Dr. Teodorani was his insistence that this field needs to be taken on by rigorous scientists who apply real science to the problem before the field gets lost in a sea of pseudo science. He does not expect anyone to believe that there is alien technology here unless there is proper scientific evidence presented.

Hessdalen

For details on the bizarre and un-explained happenings in Hessdalen checkout the Project Hessdalen web site. Basically there are odd lights that occur in the sky in this area and no one has a clue what they are. Dr. Teodorani believes they may be caused by Extra-terrestrial technology entering our atmosphere but they may also be natural phenomena that we simply don’t understand. Either way we should be researching these things to figure out what the hell they are but finding funding for this research is exceptionally difficult. Dr. Teodorani has worked out exactly what equipment he would need to properly study these phenomena but he can’t get the money to do the work. What really puts it all into perspective is that he believes he could solve the mystery with the price of just one cruise missile.

My view on Hessdalen is that I am very sceptical that the mystery lights are evidence of alien visitations but since we have no scientific explanation for the scientifically recorded phenomena that occur in Hessdalen (and other places around the world) we must study them to find out what is going on. I think we will discover a new natural process that we are not aware of at the moment but it would be rather cool of we did discover ET!

When I nipped out to the shop this afternoon I noticed an exceptionally bright sundog to the right of the sun. It was so bright it actually hurt to look at it and there was even a hint of the rainbow colours in it. There was no sign of anything on the other side of the sun.

Tagged with: atmospheric optics • observation log

I was delighted today to learn that the Vatican had strongly re-stated their very sensible line on Evolution, that it is not against the bible and that the creation myth in Genesis should not be interpreted literally. This is very re-assuring to see and is yet another kick in the teeth for Intelligent Design advocates.

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