Can data be real? (Dilbert) [Dados podem ser de verdade?]

[Post com versão em PT, mais abaixo]

Scott Adams captures the essence of corporate pickpocketing

I have long been a fan of Dilbert, whose cartoons are always at the bottom of this blog. They are always good, sometimes great, but this Wednesday, August 11^th, 2010, I think Scott Adams have captured the essence of corporate pickpocketing - that kind of small robbery in large scale that (it seems like) all big businesses do these days. Banks send credit cards and charge "account insurance" you didn't ask for, telecoms invent charges and so on - all in a clear, calculated strategy of robbing millions and losing a little money to only a few who sue them competently.

Well, enough of this boring reality that everyone knows... More than the essence of corporate pickpocketing, the cartoon captures the essence of our (big business) times. See the cartoon:

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Scott Adams captura a essência do estelionato pequeno em larga escala pelas grandes empresas

Sou fã do Dilbert há décadas. Os cartuns diários do Scott Adams estão sempre no rodapé deste blog. São sempre bons, às vezes excelentes, mas nesta quarta, 11/8/2010, acho que Adams capturou com a maior concisão possível o espírito atual de tantas grandes empresas - de roubar pouco de muitos, numa estratégia fria e calculista que considera que vão perder algumas poucas ações na justiça mas o roubo vale a pena - coisas como: bancos que cobram "seguro de conta corrente" e mandam cartões de créditos não solicitados (cobrando anuidade), teleestelionatocoms que inventam despesas inexistentes...

Mas chega de papo chato - todo mundo tem sua experiência com essas empresas. Mais que a essência do pequeno estelionato em larga escala, é a essência dos tempos atuais (pelo menos em termos de grandes empresas que atendem a muitos consumidores). Eis o cartum:

#1 [Dilbert]: Nós criamos um novo teste de desempenho [para nosso produto], mas descobrimos que esse teste é furado.

#2: Agora nosso produto é reprovado em nosso próprio teste e os clientes querem ver os resultados.

#3[Dilbert]: Tenho autorização para inventar dados [que façam nosso produto passar no teste]? [Chefe]: Eu nem sabia que dados podiam ser de verdade.

Animations are as great as these talks at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce

The first animation I've got to see by RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) came to me through a tweet by @renatalemos (thanks, Renata!). It was "Smile or Die", a critical reflection by Barbara Ehrenreich about positive thinking (or willful ignorance). I found it to be a piece of rare, straight, realist thinking (video below).

Another thought-provoking talk and animation is this: "Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us". Food for thought for whoever is in Social Web:

In "The Secret Powers of Time", "professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world". The second half of the talk will appeal deeply to educators:

... and there are many others - animations or plain talks (but the animation is definitely a plus). You might want to check other RSA short films in their YouTube channel. RSA, together with TED, is a great source of interesting stuff on the Web.

Among the non-animation talks, I choose to point to one still to happen (July 13, 2010) at the time of this post: "The Woolwich Model - How citizens can tackle anti-social behaviour". Are your executive/representative candidate dealing with this issue? (Are you?) (An initiative worth mentioning in Brazil regarding this is WikiCrimes).

Cognitive surplus: the very idea (useful to approach the K-Society blind) [Excedente cognitivo: a grande idéia (p/ ceguinhos da Soc. do Conhecimento)]

[Post com versão em PT, mais abaixo]

Yet another so worth spreading idea from TED Talks: Clay Shirky discusses what he calls "cognitive surplus" - the free [brain] time available in the world, once destined to waste in sofa surfing (or, at best, to enrich someone's own culture in reading or other positive use of time). Now, with the social web, cognitive surplus is being seen as what it is: an untapped resource (the simplistic view) and a fundament for civism and activism (the more enlightened, encompassing view).

So now you can say to that someone who just can't grasp the reality that knowledge society is here: "Hey, T-Rex! Some folks got filthy rich using free cognitive surplus - Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc." - if money is still the only thing T-Rex understands. Then, if T-Rex falls for that, you can say "See, complex systems are different from what you are familiar with. Shirky talks about this study in daycare centers in which they established a fine for late pick-ups and what happened? Late pick-ups grew, not declined. Not that things are always the opposite you expect, but in a complex world you must be prepared to get answers opposite to your expectation."

That would be a good start. But wait!... if T-Rex is in government, you better forget it. S(He) either already got it or will never get. Well... maybe just send him/her the link to Clay Shirky's TED Talk (below, after Portuguese version):

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Eis outra idéia que vale muito espalhar: Clay Shirky discute o que chama de "excedente cognitivo" - o tempo [cerebral] livre disponível no mundo, antigamente destinado ao desperdício surfando (ou babando) no sofá (ou, no melhor dos casos, ao aprimoramento cultural de alguém na leitura ou outra atividade enriquecedora individualmente). Agora, com a Web social, o excedente cognitivo está sendo visto como o que é: um recurso imenso e não usado (numa visão simplista) e um fundamento do civismo e do ativismo (numa visão mais esclarecida e abrangente).

Então agora dá para dizer: "Ei! Dinossauro, uns caras ficaram podres de ricos usando o excedente cognitivo grátis - Google, YouTube, Twitter etc." (se dinheiro for a única coisa que o troglodita entende). Daí, se o dinossauro cair nessa cantada, dá para emendar: "Olha só: os sistemas complexos são diferentes das coisas que você está acostumado a entender. O Shirky falou de um estudo em creches, no qual criaram uma multa para pais que pegam seus filhos com atraso e o que aconteceu? Os atrasos aumentaram, não diminuíram. Não que as coisas vão ser sempre assim, mas num mundo complexo você precisa estar preparado para ter resultados opostos aos que você esperava".

Isso seria um bom início. Mas... espera! Se o dinossauro for gestor público, esqueça. Ou ele/a já entende a sociedade do conhecimento, ou não vai entender nunca. Bem... talvez, pelo menos, mande para ele/a o link da palestra do Clay Shirky nas TED Talks (sempre leva um tempo para aparecer a tradução em legendas, meu chute é que em 10/07/2010 já se possa acompanhar com legendas em português):

A word about complex systems

Just wanted to blog about this citation made by John D. Sterman (Business Dynamics, 2000, p. 8):

When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you’re dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping. This realization is one of the sore discouragements of our century . . . You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn’t counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obliged to understand. . . the whole system. . . Intervening is a way of causing trouble. (L. Thomas, Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, 1974, p. 90)

No further comments as for now. My reading was caused by the bringing of System Dynamics into the Systems Modeling classes at EGC/UFSC. Doctorate candidate Maurício Uriona is the guy behind it. By the way, we're approaching systems modeling with Mario Bunge's CESM model (composition-environment-structure-mechanism) and system dynamics came to help in the study of mechanisms.

Power to the kids[Crianças infectadas com o vírus do poder]

[Post com versão em PT, mais abaixo]

Real political activism instilled in children. 'Learning embedded in real-world context'. From 'the teacher told me' to 'I am doing it'. Kids rolling incense sticks for 8 hours to get a sense of what it is like to be a child laborer - and then going to the streets to end the problem.

In a word: 'Wow!'. Kiran Bir Sethi has become an instant member of my pantheon of teachers and professors (including living heroes such as herself and Michael Wesch, about whom I've blogged twice). From TED Talks, see the video below (9:32). Moving, inspiring, uplifting.

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Não, não falo da conotação usual da palavra ('pudê'), mas de poder de verdade. Este vídeo de TED Talks (9:32) tem o título timidamente traduzido como "Kiran Bir Sethi ensina crianças a se encarregarem", mas mostra uma professora e diretora que põe fogo na vontade e capacidade das crianças que recebe em sua escola, com 'aprendizagem inserida na vida real'. Mas não só nas 'suas' crianças - também nas de sua cidade e em milhares e milhares pela Índia.

Ah, e as notas não são ruins - pelo contrário, estão entre as melhores do país (não, formar um "ser humano completo" não implica bloquear a capacidade cognitiva - talvez essa falácia nem tenha chegado à Índia ). Kiran já está no panteão dos meus heróis - professores, vivos inclusive, alguns famosos como Michael Wesch (sobre quem bloguei 2 vezes), outros conhecidos apenas por mim e mais algumas poucas centenas ou milhares de felizardos.

Ouvi-la falar dá alegria, esperança, confiança. Para ver com legendas em português, clique em "View subtitles" e selecione "Portuguese (Brazil)". Também vale ocupar a tela inteira, clicando no ícone no canto superior direito.

Don't understand philosophy? Monty Python explains [dedicated to EGC freshmen]

This is dedicated to the students at EGC/UFSC (especially those from an Engineering or IT background) who have been fighting to put together ideas and to build an understanding of worldviews and wide methodological approaches. Why especially Eng-IT? Because we (yes, myself included) were never informed that there are worldviews (and that ours is ontologically positivist-individualist, leading to cartesian thinking. Of course this is kind of embarrassing, but that's the way one finally finds out, after bragging about the existential pleasures of engineering, that engineering is not THE (only) thing and that there's important stuff missing in our education...).

In 2009, all freshmen at EGC attended the new mandatory course on the scientific method and underlying philosophy. And everyone must rapidly get a firm grasp of all that, enough to undertake interdisciplinary research with awareness of the differences among quite diverse ontologies (interpretivism, complexity, realism in its various flavors such as positivism and systemism, ...) - since EGC has 'knowledge as a production factor' as its research object. Too interdisciplinary?

But stumble no more! Your problems are over! For you and for anyone struggling to understand all those philosophical issues, here's "Monty Python Football" (with transcripts below obtained from here, here, and here):

International Philosophy
The (first) sketch:

Football commentator: Michael Palin

Football Commentator:
Good afternoon, and welcome to a packed Olympic Stadium, München for the second leg of this exciting final.
And here come the Germans now, led by their skipper, "Nobby" Hegel. They must surely start favourites this afternoon; they've certainly attracted the most attention from the press with their team problems. And let's now see their line-up.

Football Commentator:
The Germans playing 4-2-4, Leibniz in goal, back four Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Schelling, front-runners Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Heidegger, and the mid-field duo of Beckenbauer and Jaspers. Beckenbauer obviously a bit of a surprise there.

Football Commentator:
And here come the Greeks, led out by their veteran centre-half, Heraclitus.
Let's look at their team. As you'd expect, it's a much more defensive line-up. Plato's in goal, Socrates a front-runner there, and Aristotle as sweeper, Aristotle very much the man in form. One surprise is the inclusion of Archimedes.

Football Commentator:
Well here comes the referee, K'ung fu-tsze (Confucius), and his two linesmen, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas.
[Referee spots the ball and the captains shake hands.]
And as the two skippers come together to shake hands, we're ready for the start of this very exciting final. The referee Mr Confucius checks his sand and... [referee blows his whistle] they're off!

[The Germans immediately turn away from the ball, hands on chins in deep contemplation.]
Nietzsche and Hegel there. Karl Jaspers number seven on the outside, Wittgenstein there with him. There's Beckenbauer. Schelling's in there, Heidegger covering. Schopenhauer.
[Pan to the other end, the Greeks also thinking deeply, occasionally gesticulating.]
And now it's the Greeks, Epicurus, Plotinus number six. Aristotle. Empedocles of Acragus and Democratus with him. There's Archimedes. Socrates, there he is, Socrates. Socrates there, going through.
[The camera follows Socrates past the ball, still on the centre spot.]
There's the ball! There's the ball. And Nietzsche there. Nietzsche, number ten in this German side.

Caption: DEUTSCHLAND - GRIECHENLAND 0 : 0
Football Commentator:
Kant moving up on the outside. Schlegel's on the left, the Germans moving very well in these opening moments.

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This is the joining of the two-half sketches...

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The (second) sketch:

The cast:
Anchorman: John Cleese
Football Commentator: Michael Palin
Archimedes: John Cleese

Caption: Sports Update

Anchorman:
Well right now we're going back to the Olympic stadium for the closing minutes of the Philosophy Final, and I understand that there's still no score.

Football Commentator:
Well there may be no score, but there's certainly no lack of excitement here. As you can see, Nietzsche has just been booked for arguing with the referee.
He accused Confucius of having no free will, and Confucius he say, "Name go in book".
And this is Nietzsche's third booking in four games.

[We see a bearded figure in a track-suit is warming up on the touch-line.]
And who's that? It's Karl Marx, Karl Marx is warming up.
It looks as though there's going to be a substitution in the German side.

[Marx removes the track-suit, under which he is wearing a suit.]
Obviously the manager Martin Luther has decided on all-out attack, as indeed he must with only two minutes of the match to go.
And the big question is, who is he going to replace, who's going to come off?
It could be Jaspers, Hegel or Schopenhauer, but it's Wittgenstein! Wittgenstein, who saw his aunty only last week, and here's Marx.

[Marx begins some energetic knees-up running about.]
Let's see it he can put some life into this German attack.
[The referee blows his whistle; Marx stops and begins contemplating like the rest.]
Evidently not. What a shame.
Well now, with just over a minute left, a replay on Tuesday looks absolutely vital.
There's Archimedes, and I think he's had an idea.

Archimedes:
Eureka!
[He runs towards the ball and kicks it.]

Football Commentator:
Archimedes out to Socrates, Socrates back to Archimedes, Archimedes out to Heraclitus, he beats Hegel [who, like all the Germans, is still thinking].
Heraclitus a little flick, here he comes on the far post, Socrates is there, Socrates heads it in!
Socrates has scored!

The Greeks are going mad, the Greeks are going mad!
Socrates scores, got a beautiful cross from Archimedes.

The Germans are disputing it.
Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.

But Confucius has answered them with the final whistle!
It's all over! Germany, having trounced England's famous midfield trio of Bentham, Locke and Hobbes in the semi-final, have been beaten by the odd goal, and let's see it again.

[Replay viewed from behind the goal.]
There it is, Socrates, Socrates heads in and Leibnitz doesn't have a chance.
And just look at those delighted Greeks.

[The Greeks jog delightedly, holding a cup aloft.]
There they are, "Chopper" Sophocles, Empedocles of Acragus, what a game he had. And Epicurus is there, and Socrates the captain who scored what was probably the most important goal of his career.

Natural gestures, wearable sixth sense - now that's knowledge media[Gestos e 6o sentido para vestir - isso é que é mídia do conhecimento]

[Post com versão em PT, mais abaixo]

"Ideas worth spreading" is the motto of TED Talks. Well, instead of talking about it, I better direct you to "Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense" (8:45, see embedded video below). Just like "Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's minds" (16:54, about MRI-ing moral judgements), it is a new technology received with both awe and apocalyptical remarks (because we advance in technology keeping the same moral challenges and dilemmas from Plato's time and before - look's like there is room for new "moral technology"). Some inspiration for us at EGC/UFSC (Graduate Program in Knowledge Engineering and Management), in which "knowledge media" is one of the research areas.

O lema de TED Talks é "Idéias que valem espalhar". Melhor do que me delongar em comentários é apontar para "Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense" (8:45, vídeo clicável abaixo - se preferir, clique em "View subtitles" e assista com legendas em português). De forma semelhante ao que vemos em "Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's minds" (16:54, sobre analisar julgamentos morais usando ressonância magnética), é uma nova tecnologia recebida com tanto fascínio quanto horror apocalíptico (porque o fato é que avançamos na tecnologia, mas os desafios e dilemas morais são os mesmos de tempos imemoriais, sem grandes avanços na "tecnologia moral"). Uma inspiração e tanto para nós do EGC/UFSC, que tem a Mídia do Conhecimento como uma das áreas de concentração.

Funny witty story that made me think about this persisting educational trend toward exalting mediocrity

"Professor" and "inspiration" are kin words (or at least they should be). Every word tells in this funny, inspiring speech by professor Yale Patt (Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Texas at Austin; see old photo from his homepage), at the IEEE 60^th anniversary celebration in San Juan (Puerto Rico, 2006). It is called "The future of Computer * (Are we in serious trouble?)", the "*" meaning Science, Engineering, Architecture... you pick it.

It is very well worth its 44 min (plus 16 of question answering), but don't take my word for it: even if you're not into computer architecture or if you think you can't afford to watch the whole video, try this short story inbetween 39:24 and 42:16, in which professor Patt describes his old man's reaction to his winning a medal for losing.

I don't want to spoil the story, but if we had more people speaking out like this maybe we could get back on track in education, helping students to "get it" instead of helping them "feeling good about themselves" (or trying to, since it doesn't work). "You get a medal when you win; you don't get a medal when you lose". Professor Patt also talks about computer architectures, Moore's Law (on doubling chips' capacity), education in Computing, ..., quantum computing, NP-completeness, ..., marriage, cellphones, "football" (the one played with the hands), etc. in a very enthusiastic way.

A week at the World Conference on Computers in Education (ppts & preprints available)

WCCE dates approaching, swine flu notwithstanding. I hope the flu doesn't prevent anyone from coming to Bento Gonçalves-RS (Brazil) next week (July 27-31, 2009). Let me tweet about the papers I will be presenting:

• Kern VM, Possamai O, Selig PM, Pacheco RCS, Souza GC, Rautenberg S, Lemos RTS: Growing a Peer Review Culture among Graduate Students (preprint here, slides below).
  Thursday 30th, 15:30-17:00, Aud. 3, 2nd paper of 3 (30-min presentation).
  Session NET 3.3, Network and Collaboration 3.3


• Kern VM, Saraiva LM, Braz ERC: Emergo: Academic Performance Assessment and Planning with a Data Mart (preprint here, slides below).
  Monday 27th, 11:45-12:45, Aud. 2, 2nd paper of 4 (15-min presentation).
  Session INNO 1.1, Innovation and creativity in schools 1.1

Hopefully there will be intense feedback in the sessions I'll present or attend to. Excellent opportunity. Slides of my presentations were uploaded to SlideShare, so here they are:

Emergo: Academic Performance Assessment and Planning with a Data Mart (WCCE 2009)

View more presentations from vmkern.

Growing a Peer Review Culture among Graduate Students (WCCE 2009)

View more presentations from vmkern.

Off-topic update: It was very nice to visit the Guarani indians (from Viamão, near Porto Alegre-RS) booth at the conference site. They have a project and a blog (Jaikuaa - means "to pay attention", "to listen") coordinated by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in which Guarani youngsters work with camera obscura and production of pinhole photography.

They also play with regular (digital) photo and video cameras. The blog is in Portuguese, with some text in Guarani and in English. And there I am, visiting:

Wesch "The machine is us/ing us" strikes again: World Simulation

Anthropologist Michael Wesch (from Kansas State University, author of "The machine is us/ing us") gives away another awesome lesson: a YouTube report on the World Simulation conducted with his students, with the help of Twitter (ok, I tweet) and Jott (don't know) through the cellphone.

They've created a fake world with lands and peoples and developed a whole history, with commerce, wars, domination from colonization to core-periphery dynamic etc. The fake world evolution described in the video is interspersed with real-world facts, for instance, about diamonds in Africa, the wars around it, the (little little) money made by extractors and cutters (25 cents per diamond cut; many sharp-eyed cutters are children in India)... Makes you wonder how can there be any glamour around diamonds.

It looks like that War (board) game but much enlarged and enriched. It is, indeed, a "radical experiment in education" that I praise and recommend watching (4:40 - be ready to stop the presentation as the captions flash in unreadable intervals). It is an inspiration for me as a professor (I've been trying things of this sort with peer review in education and concurrency control learning games) and for anyone pursuing real educational systems.

Dr. Wesch ends by quoting the cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead (1901-1978): "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." This prompted a Text Comment from kdcruz75: "never doubt that a small group of thoughtless, powerful committed hidden elite can control the human populace. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has". Well... the discussion catches on as the view count soars. See the video:

Science of happiness at TED Talks

Okay, this might be waaay outdated, but there must be others who are not really aware about TED Talks as I wasn't (had heard about it, never went for it). And those who know Ted Talks but not this talk I'm mentioning. Thanks due to Andréa Bordin for sharing this.

I went there, saw the mosaic of speeches and begun with Nancy Etcoff on the surprising science of happiness. There is a lot of other seemingly excellent stuff.

So this is only a tweet to those who didn't know: Yes, Ted Talks is true to its subtitle: "Ideas worth spreading". Etcoff's talk end with this simple yet effective and excessively forgotten idea from Epictetus: "First, say to yourself what you would be. Then do what you have to do".

Nielsen's speech on Extreme thinking

Michael A. Nielsen is an accomplished physicist in Australia. It is a great thing that there is the web and that he blogged the text of his speech at the “Tough Learning” conference in Brisbane, Australia, 2003.

He addresses 3 fundamental principles critical to success in tough learning. So inspirational that I've changed my Bunge citation e-mail footer to this one from Emerson: "It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."

It's a 15-30 min read. Here's the text in Nielsen's blog. Another thing I've learned from his blog is that there is a "Science YouTube", SciVee.

Discovering Michael Wesch, the Digital Ethnography Working Group, and a drop more about 2.0

It's a brave new world. And it's such a huge amount of good ideas and information that I better don't try to explain much, but only link, recommend, and comment on my standing on it. As so many people, yes, I had already seen the famous video "The machine is us/ing us" (4:33 - here's a chance to see it if you are not among the 10+ million - by June, 2009 - who did):

What I didn't know is that its author is a professor of Anthropology at Kansas State University named Michael Wesch, who has a group called the Digital Ethnography Working Group. These guys are really into this Web 2.0 thing. If you are so much into it too, you should watch this 55:33 (I'm warning...) video from Dr. Wesch's speech at the Library of Congress in June 23, 2008 (An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube):

As to my standing on the subject, let me just say that I've arrived at those videos from a tweet of a former student (@savi). Unlike Obama ;) (who follows and is followed by millions), I'm only following a few dozen people on twitter so I can occasionally learn something from them (I mean individually; of course Obama learns from the millions ;).

Another thing I didn't know is that Dr. Wesch received the U.S. Professor of the Year award. In this beautiful short speech (8:05 with an introduction from a student) he says things about the role of a professor that makes me recommend watching it:

Mike's 'Goodbye, stranger' video gift for us at Instituto Stela

What a superb gift and what a great musical taste. Canadian Mike McNulty stayed with us at Instituto Stela for 6 months as an intern through the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). Mike worked closely with business leaders at Stela toward Sustainability Intelligence software using our technology. He also taught us important things about Canadians - for instance, that they do not live in iglus :). His presentations in our short Show & Tell sessions attracted big audiences both live and in SlideShare.

We 'stelars' appreciated very much this goodbye gift with the Supertramp soundtrack 'Goodbye stranger'. Thanks, Mike! You are a great person and I hope we keep in touch and meet again lots of times. Mike is back to his home in Ottawa. See the video in his blog or here:

NYT points the finger at 'dragon killing schools'

I've heard it before, in Brazil (from Rubem Alves, but I can't quite recollect), as the story of dragon killers who decide, upon the extinction of dragons, to open a dragon killing school and carry on with it, no matter what. See what says Mark C. Taylor from Columbia University in "End the University as We Know It":

"The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors."

He compares the current graduate education system to Detroit (i.e. the obsolete auto industry that had to be changed). He also defends that "responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural" while pointing scandalous misses and oversights of disciplinarity (the skewed, biased specialization).

Abolish departments, increase collaboration, restructure the curriculum, he says. But then what would dragon killing instructors do? (But, hey, this is the United States. Brazilian dragon killing schools are doing just fine, although some impertinent folks like ourselves at the Graduate Program in Knowledge Engineering and Management insist on interdisciplinarity and interaction with industry.)

ACM women's newsletter on the old, 'intriguing' lack of women in Computing

The last issue of acm-w [1(4), Spring 2009] is out. Since I always sensed (in my experience as CS professor) women presence in class as very beneficial, here are some notes:

• Most articles approach the decreasing number of women in Computing.
• In an interview, 25-year career professor Gloria Childress Townsend says the decline is unnatural, due to "artificial and unfair 'requirements' (or the perception of the requirements)".
• David Klappholz criticizes the "programming-first approach to computing education" that "turns off far more scientifically- and mathematically-talented middle/high school girls and college age young women than it turns on". He reports on a study that reveals that women prefer "organic" careers (med, vet, biology, psychology...) that emphasize the very same skills that are lacking in the real Computing business (to which women didn't come), which is not so much about programming, but mainly about requirements. He then describes a project aimed at recruiting women for Computing based on the real Computing business, not the oligophrenic programming-only Computing (my adjective).
• Former president of SBC (Brazilian Computing Society) Claudia Bauzer Medeiros reports on "Women at the Brazil National Database Conference" (SBBD). Good news that girls are getting together. Funny that the pictures show as many women being portrayed as men taking pictures.
• "Ada Lovelace Day" column gives some background information on Ada's life. Good things to learn.

I´ve said it before but never in writing, so here it goes: to me, the whole problem with Computing begun right after the Eniac project was over. Eniac had a female-only programming team. Then men came and it is a long story for a blog entry... My summary is: the world was taken by hordes of irrationalists-intuitionists who are enemies of thinking, but can hammer a keyboard (until some time, some day the compilation will "pass"). The rest is our daily experience with "software" (the thing that you swear at) and "hardware" (the thing that you kick).

Two papers accepted at the World Conference on Computers in Education (preprints available)

These two papers were recently accepted for presentation/publication at the IFIP World Conference on Computers in Education, in Bento Gonçalves-RS, Brazil, July 27-31, 2009:

• Kern VM, Possamai O, Selig PM, Pacheco RCS, Souza GC, Rautenberg S, Lemos RTS. Growing a Peer Review Culture among Graduate Students. Full paper (10 p.)
  Abstract: Usual processes for pursuing education excellence in a graduate program are candidate selection, coursework, research, and thesis defense. In this paper, we present a complementary approach: the growing of a peer review culture among graduate students. We instruct first-year masters’ and doctoral students on principles for preparing a thesis proposal. Students present their proposals in collective discussion sessions with feedback from professors. The students then submit their proposals through a web interface and are instructed on the role they will play next – of anonymous referees of their peers’ proposals. The referee reports and general statistics are made available to all participating students and advisors. Updated proposals are submitted to an annual workshop open to all participating students and advisors. About 60 students take part in this annual series of seminars with peer review and workshop, generating 60 theses proposals and about 180 referee reports, 3 for each proposal. Students and their advisors receive detailed feedback on individual participation as author and referee. The main strength of the experience is the opportunity to assimilate the techniques of objective criticism and to reflect about the quality of own and others’ work. The paper also outlines research and development issues related to our effort to enhance the peer review culture among graduate students.
  
• Kern VM, Saraiva LM, Braz ERC. Emergo: Academic Performance Assessment and Planning with a Data Mart. Short paper (5 p.)
  Abstract: National-level, objective assessment in higher education has been a practice in Brazil since 1996, surviving political shifts that frequently dismantle public policies. This paper presents the Emergo Project – the assessment of Psychology students using a data mart with multiple-choice questions from national exams and students’ answers. We run two annual examinations, giving individual feedback and discussing aggregate results with faculty and students. We identified patterns for the evolution of correct answers across semester enrolled – Growing, Decreasing, Peak, Constant, and Other. Actual results in the national exam suggest that the feedback and discussions might have helped achieving superior performance standards.

The first one discusses our approach of first-year masters and doctorate students peer review of thesis proposals at EGC/UFSC. The second is an account of a project conducted at Univali (Biguaçu-SC), in which Psychology students were assessed using questions from national exams, with a strong participation of students and professors in discussions about aggregate results.

Both versions are preprints - the final version will probably contain edits (and might be copyrighted).