Italy conference (pre)

Next week I'll be at this conference: Second International Open Source Conference in Lake Como, Italy.

I'll be doing the following:

(1) presenting a paper entitled Beyond Low-Hanging Fruit: Seeking the Next Generation in FLOSS Data Mining. This paper is my attempt to establish a survey of the "state of the art" in FLOSS data mining and show where we might go next.

(2) co-chairing a workshop called WoPDaSD Workshop on Public Data about Software Engineering in which we'll hopefully get people to discuss their current work in mining FLOSS public data (or making FLOSS data public), as well as future wishes/trends in FLOSS data mining.

(3) enjoying Italy! I am very excited to be going on such a nice trip. I haven't had much time for international travel and I'm very much looking forward to this adventure. Geek moment: I am especially looking forward to seeing two things: the Tempio Volta in Lake Como, which is a museum dedicated to Volta, the inventor of the battery, and the Leonardo da Vinci museum in Milan, dedicated to the intrepid polymath himself.

In preparation for seeing the battery museum, I've been reading up on electricity (coulombs, anyone?) and if I really get my act together this week, I might build a small wet battery before we go, in honor of Volta. This is going to be so fun!

Exhaustion

After my very first day in the classroom at Elon, I came home and told my husband that I felt tired, like I had just performed in a stage show. Now Inside Higher Ed has an interesting editorial about The Exhausting Job of Teaching:

One colleague told me that she now understands the life of a comedian. After grueling preparation, they go onstage, deliver what they have, look for feedback, and then slink back to a dressing room to either drink, sleep, or cry. Instruction is not so different.

I think this is why we need a summer break. Hats off to my colleagues who teach during the summer. I don't know how you do it!

The Seven Deadly Sins

The 7 Deadly Sins of Students and The 7 Deadly Sins of Professors are both interesting reading.

Heralds of Resource Sharing

I was going through my "to do" list today and found this old documentary that I had been meaning to watch for a while now. "Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing" is a 1972 documentary about the beginnings of the ARPAnet. It has vintage nerds in full color describing (very well, I might add) how the network was designed to work, and what they viewed would be the purpose of such a network at that time. It does a very good job of "rationalizing" to a non-technical audience why a computer network would be a good idea.

(One particularly perplexing moment comes when a scientist is explaining why some people might NOT want electronic bank records. He says "a husband might not want his wife to know how much money he makes". What an interesting piece of cultural history - and an interesting intersection of culture and science that will seem foreign to us today.)

Robert Kahn's lecture at 4 minutes into the film is fabulous. IMO, it's 2 great minutes of lecture.

The link below is to google video, so pretty poor quality, and it was made in the 70s, so it's not particularly glitzy in any way....... but I couldn't help but get excited to have this bit of "original footage".

Link here: Google Video

And here is the associated wikipedia entry.

Techie Clothing

I was reading this totally unrelated article about Web 2.0, when this statement about clothing caught my eye:

Judging by the people I met and the dress standards I would judge the audience as 1/3rd Business-VC (suit and tie) 1/3rd Techie (Jeans and T-Shirt) and 1/3rd Professional Technologist (Suit but no tie).

Old habits die hard. I'm wearing jeans today. I know I'm probably supposed to be dressing nicer, but it seems like every day I wear a skirt or khaki pants, that's the day I have to rummage around on the floor messing with network cables or the like.