Web services at Arizona State and Northwestern

Universities are growing rapidly and per-student budgets are falling. Arizona State University is using Gmail and other Google services to cope with this dilemma. In doing so, they hope to exploit Google's accelerating IT technology improvement trajectory and the increasing efficiency of the Internet as an application platform.

For more on the Arizona State project see:

• Economist article
• Launch and rationale
• Core vs. context.
  
• Strategic technology alliance.
  

Northwestern has also gone with Gmail and Google Apps for students.

Should our university be utilizing Google services? For what applications? What other services might we use to advantage?

Student skills at Arizona State University -- create content and collaborate

Arizona State was a pioneer in "cloud computing" by and for students. They were early adopters of Google Apps and cloud computing.

That was four years ago, and they are now graduating their first "cloud class."

They consider the move a success.

Sam DiGangi, ASU's associate vice president of university technology and an associate professor of education says:

I think this is the first generation that will graduate with a foundation not only in knowledge and expertise of a specific content area, but also in tool skills--the ability to collaborate, to edit, to revise one's work, to dynamically incorporate input in writing and in designing.

.

Mass-produced propaganda -- a Cuban example

An "author" named Admin posted over 1,000
articles in seven languages in two weeks.

Earlier this month, Google sent me several notifications for an article entitled "The Internet Is Widely Accessible in Cuba. Why Is the US Insisting It Isn’t?" I checked it out and found that Reese Erlich had posted it on Truthout.org, a left-leaning Web site, on February 12. On the 13th, Cabasi.com published a shortened version of the article and Salon.com published the original version on the 17th. These were all in English and both Salon and Cubasi credited Truthout.

I also received notification of an article entitled "Internet es ampliamente accesible en Cuba. ¿Por qué Estados Unidos insiste en que no lo es?" that was published February 13 at DiarioDeLatinos.com.

It turns out that DiarioDeLatinos also published English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian versions of the same article on the 13th. The seven versions of the article were all written by the same author, Admin, with a little help from Google Translate, which rendered "New York Times" as "New York Instances" in the first paragraph. Admin is prolific -- he or she had posted 1,072 articles on DiarioDeLatinos.com as of the morning of February 18th and DiarioDeLatinos.com was registered on February 4th. The registrant organization is Domains By Proxy, LLC, which is located at the GoDaddy Headquarters building in Scottsdale, Arizona:

Registry Registrant ID: Not Available From Registry
Registrant Name: Registration Private
Registrant Organization: Domains By Proxy, LLC
Registrant Street: DomainsByProxy.com
Registrant Street: 14455 N. Hayden Road
Registrant City: Scottsdale
Registrant State/Province: Arizona
Registrant Postal Code: 85260
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Phone: +1.4806242599
Registrant Phone Ext:
Registrant Fax: +1.4806242598
Registrant Fax Ext:
Registrant Email: diariodelatinos.com@domainsbyproxy.com
Registry Admin ID: Not Available From Registry
Admin Name: Registration Private

Private domain registration is reminiscent of banks facilitating money laundering. I wonder what else Domains By Proxy is hiding.

Finally, I took a look at what the censors at Cubasi deleted when they edited the original article. They cut mention of tools like the Signal encrypted messaging app and VPNs, the fact that Cubans can download El Nuevo Herald, and Cuba’s blocking of Web sites. They also deleted references to dissidents like Yoani Sanchez or Ladies in White and admissions that only 38 percent of Cubans are connected to the web compared to 70 percent for all of Latin America, 3G wireless is being installed in Cuba while much of the world is switching over to 5G, Cuba lacks convertible currency, Cubans don’t have the bandwidth to stream video and El Paquete is “by far” the most popular technology for Cubans.

This was not Cuba's first foray into online propaganda. In 2013, Eliécer Ávila described Operation Truth in which 1,000 university students were writing social media posts favoring the government and working as "trolls," disrupting discussion and attacking those who question the government and last month Granma posted a propaganda/conspiracy article about US subversion.

I wonder how much Internet propaganda the Cuban government sponsored between 2013 and 2020 and I worry about the fact that any government could do the same.

Update 2/26/2020

A reader sent me a link to a claim of sock-puppet trolls working for the Cuban government and another pointed out that the term of art is "Ciberclaria" and if you Google that term, you will find more examples like this or this.


(This post is mirrored on my blog on the Cuban Internet).

Chromecast -- the $35 decision support room in your office

In an earlier post, I discovered that my old laptop was too slow to cast video to my TV set, but it worked well when displaying still images like a PowerPoint presentation on a TV set equipped with Google Chromecast.

It not only works for a presentation by one person to an audience -- several people in a room can actively share a heads-up display. Augmented meeting rooms in which participants have connected computers at their fingertips, were invented by Doug Engelbart in the 1960s envisioned and invented much of what we use today during the 1960s.

In the 1980s, local area networks became common, and the University of Arizona, Xerox Palo Alto Research center and others began experimenting with augmented meeting rooms with shared displays. Meeting participants could brainstorm ideas, rearrange document outlines, edit documents, vote and conduct polls, etc. and companies like Groupsystems marketed upscale decision support rooms like this one.

Those rooms cost a fortune and were used as corporate boardrooms, but interest in them has waned.

A large TV set with a Chromecast dongle is not as powerful or opulent as a decision support room, but for $35 it might become the decision support room for (small groups of) the rest of us. Below you see a simple test in which two users are editing the same Google Drive document with the result displayed on a TV set.

This sort of setup would allow several people in a room to share a heads-up display. I tested it with a simple Google doc, but one can imagine using it with the kinds of software found in expensive decision support rooms -- software with modules for voting, brainstorming, outlining, writing, etc. and features like selective anonymity and podium passing. We may find Chromecast displays next to those whiteboards in our offices in the future.

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Update 10/2/2013

Commenter Martyn Williams noted that the Chromecast will work with an HDMI-equipped projector, which would enable larger displays in your office or conference room.

Commenter Roger Jennings suggested that the Chromecast could save bandwith in casting pages if it had more "intelligence" -- for example being able to display PDF, Excel, Powerpoint, and Word files.

Together, these comments suggest a future where we have dumb displays with upgradeable, external intelligence. I have changed the TV set in my den 3 times in the last 35 years, but change computers every couple of years. I don't want a smart TV set, I want a dumb display with an upgradeable "chromecast."

Microsoft's answer to Google Apps for education

We have seen that universities like Northwestern, Arizona State and Abilene Christian have adopted Google Apps and Mail.

Microsoft's answer to Google is their Live@Edu program, and they have just entered into a long term agreement with the University System of Ohio for "cloud" services.

Why I signed a petition to name Susan Crawford next head of the FCC

I just electronically signed the Whitehouse.gov petition to appoint Susan Crawford as the next head of the Federal Communications Commission. Let me tell you why.

The Internet was invented and deployed in the US. At one time, nearly all international traffic flowed through our National Science Foundation network. Today, our Internet is mediocre by the standards of developing nations and slipping.

In a recent interview by Bill Moyers, Crawford says U.S. Internet access is slow, costly and unfair and tells how we got in this fix. (The video is embedded below).

Here are a few quotes from the interview:

"What's happened is that these enormous telecommunications companies, Comcast and Time Warner on the wired side, Verizon and AT&T on the wireless side, have divided up markets, put themselves in the position where they're subject to no competition and no oversight from any regulatory authority. And they're charging us a lot for internet access and giving us second class access."

"So there's been a division. Cable takes wired, Verizon/AT&T take wireless. They're actually cooperating."

"In almost 20 states in America it's either illegal or very difficult for municipalities to make this decision for themselves."

"This is a moment when we have to separate out content from conduit. It should not be possible for a local cable actor or any distributor to withhold programming based on volume ...Everybody should get access to the same stuff at the same price and they should be announced prices."

"Michael Powell, who served as F.C.C. chairman for four years in the mid-2000s, is now the cable and telecom industry's top D.C. lobbyist."

"Meredith Attwell Baker who was one of the F.C.C. commissioners who approved Comcast's merger with NBCUniversal, left the agency four months later to join Comcast as a highly paid lobbyist."

Further reading:

Dan Gillmor, director of the Knight center for digital media entrepreneurship at Arizona State University, explains why Susan Crawford should be the next head of the Federal Communications Commission (http://bit.ly/XjaNEm).

Cory Doctorow, Internet activist, journalist and science fiction, agrees that Crawford should run the FCC ( http://bit.ly/WYv8fm).

I searched for a rebuttal -- someone arguing against Crawford's appointment -- but was unable to find one. Please let me know if you know of one.
-----

Update 1/28/2014

How cable companies "compete" -- dividing up the cable market

Comcast is near a deal to buy New York City, North Carolina and New England cable assets from Charter Communications Inc., but that sale is contingent upon shareholders approving Charter’s takeover bid for Time Warner Cable. Since Comcast would no longer be in the running for Time Warner Cable, they will probably accept Charter's offer.

This trading of monopoly territory reminds me of the way rival drug gangs divide up corners and housing projects -- I wonder if these guys watch "The Wire."

Outsourcing applications -- a university example

The Economist published an article on corporate use of consumer and other services. One example they cite is Arizona State University, which is using Google Mail and plans to use other Google services.

I create list servers for the students in my classes. Last semester, 3 out of 60 students used their CSUDH email addresses. This suggests that we are spending a lot to offer a service that only a few students value.

But, should CSUDH outsource our email and other applications? We cannot run servers as efficiently as folks like Google or Amazon, but, even if a service provider is cheaper and more reliable, can we depend upon them? This is a business and contractual decision as much as a technical and cost decision. I listed a few pros and cons in this teaching note.

Who will provide entry-level and continuing vocational education?

Universities are doing an increasingly poor job of entry-level training -- will industry take over?

My first job after college was with IBM. As soon as I was hired, I was sent to San Francisco for an eight-week training course in which I was introduced to the organization and its culture and taught to wire the control panels of unit-record machines and design unit-record systems. After that phase one training, I worked for a while, then went to a second and later a third class.

In those days, IBM hired people regardless of their major in school, based on an aptitude test and interviews. (The most senior technical person in our office and my first mentor was an English major). IBM assumed the responsibility of training entry-level employees.

A few decades later, universities were expected to finance entry-level training. Companies wanted new hires who were productive on day one. That worked pretty well as long as the cost of education was reasonable. (My tuition at UCLA was $76 per semester).

But, that system has broken down -- society has cut support for universities and, to be honest, IBM did a better job of entry-level training than many of our universities. As we see below, today's students often borrow large sums to pay for their college education and many end up in dead-end jobs.

Percent of graduates in jobs not requiring a degree
College graduates: age 22-65 with a bachelor's degree or higher
Recent graduates: age 22-27 with a bachelor's degree or higher
Shaded areas designate recessions.

Good non-college jobs: at least $45,000 a year
low-wage jobs: $25,000 a year or less
Shaded areas designate recessions.

It is way too soon to call it a trend, but the Internet may be taking us back toward industry-financed entry-level job training. The most IBM-like example is AT&T's sponsorship of the development of an online masters degree in computer science at Georgia Tech. The first semester of that program has been completed and the students are satisfied and the administration is optimistic, but not declaring victory yet.

Yesterday, AT&T (and others) announced that they would be participating in the development of tech-oriented "nanodegrees" on the Udacity platform. (Udacity also hosts the Georgia Tech MS).

IBM may not be offering the same 3-phase training that I had as a new hire, but they are offering MOOCs at universities through their Academic Initiative and have recently agreed to partner with 28 business schools and universities on developing data science curriculum and programs.

The Georgia Tech MS degree will cost students $7,000 and a Udacity nanodegree will cost approximately $2,400 -- about $200 per month for 12 months. AT&T is sponsoring some of their employees in the masters program and will offer internships to 100 nanodegree graduates.

Online education has also reduced the cost of tuition reimbursement benefits for employers. Starbucks is offering tuition reimbursement for employees who complete an online bachelor’s degree at Arizona State University.

Online education has boomed with the spread of Massive open online courses (MOOCs). MOOCs have had successes and failures, but the infusion of capital and interest has triggered a wave of innovation in technology and pedagogy. New media often mimic and substitute for old media. We first saw MOOCs as a replacement for university education, but it may be that their major impact will be on vocational training.

Udacity has pivoted from university education to lifelong vocational training and the deal looks good enough to induce companies like AT&T and Starbucks to cover part of the cost.

What might it mean if employer-subsidized vocational training catches on?

Traditional universities will lose students. The majority of students see a degree as a path to a job, and universities control certification. If a $2,400 nanodegree gets one a good entry-level job, many students will skip the university.

University education is much more common today than it was when I started at IBM. Universities, like many other organizations, typically try to grow, leading to aggressive marketing programs and lowered admission standards. While a university might have an incentive to admit and retain poorly qualified students, an employer does not. The company personnel department may replace the university admission committee as the gatekeeper to the middle class.

That might be efficient, but tying education to employment has a downside. Consider the effect of tying medical insurance to employment -- it is an important part of an employee's benefits, but it discourages mobility, harming both the economy and the individual.

The courses I have mentioned here are not typical MOOCs, but they are compatible with MOOCs. For example, Udacity has not spelled out the details, but a nanodegree will involve testing for certification and, no doubt, more personal interaction with instructors than today's MOOCs. However, they also intend to make the teaching material available as a MOOC. Self-study students will not get credit or personal attention, but they will have access to the same material as paying students. The material will be a fringe benefit for society and an advertisement for Udacity.

As Steve Jobs used to say -- one more thing. I've been talking about vocational training, but I think there is also demand for curiosity-driven, non-degree, lifelong edcuation -- edutainment if you will. That may be the way those nanodegree graduates round out their education.

-----
Update 9/19/2014

At a lower level, we are also seeing online trade schools. For example, Open Colleges in Australia. They claim to have over 700,000 students and offer trade school courses in these areas:

That sounds good, but digging a bit deeper I became skeptical. The site reminded me of a TV ad for a trade school -- lots of rosy career promises, special offers and testimonials from students. I tried to find the cost of their classes or career preparation programs, but did not find a way to get the cost without starting to enroll. I did, however, learn that I could pay by the month or fortnight and would get a discount if I paid up front for the entire course.

With my skepticism aroused, I took their multiple choice test of my language, literacy and numeracy skills and learned that I was skillful enough to be admitted to their Certificate III and IV level courses. I was not qualified for their Diploma level courses. Did I mention that I gave random answers to the questions? Just lucky I guess.

I did not spend much time on their site and they may do a great job of training and finding employment for their students, but whether they do or do not, there may be room for MOOC-like trade schools.

-----
Update 6/1/2015

Google wants more Android developers so Udacity has added an Android Development nanodegree.

Business use of consumer services

The Economist has an article on business use of consumer services. One could argue that consumer products and applications, not military or business, are now driving technological innovation.

One example cited in the article is Arizona State University which is now using Gmail and plans to use other Google services. ASU IT director Adrian Sannier explains why he made that choice in this blog entry.

RAND Corporation's contributions to computer science

What comes to mind when you hear the word Rand? Ayn Rand? Rand Paul? For me, it is the RAND Corporation. Project RAND (research and development) was housed at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, California immediately after World War II, and became an independent, nonprofit organization in 1948. Perhaps the first "think tank," they spun off their development work, creating the System Development Corporation (SDC) in 1957.

I don't know how one ranks research institutions, but, for me, RAND ranks right up there with Bell Labs, IBM Research, and newcomers Microsoft and Google Research. The following are summaries of some of the computer science advances made by RAND researchers and consultants.

Communication satellites: Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clark outlined the vision of geostationary communication satellites in a short article published in October 1945. Five months later, Frank Collbohm and James Lipp published a comprehensive engineering study on a "Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship."

Arthur C. Clarke's vision (left) and RAND's design 

Artificial intelligence: Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, and Cliff Shaw did early work on artificial intelligence at RAND and Carnegie Tech. They asked people to talk out loud while proving theorems and noted that their strategy was to apply operations that reduced the differences between the current state of the proof and the theorem they were trying to prove. Their programs, Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver did the same -- and so does this pigeon:

A pigeon solves Wolfgang Kohler's box-and-banana
problem by applying the Box Move operator.

Operations research: George Dantzig and Richard Bellman invented mathematical techniques for finding optimal or near-optimal solutions to complex, but well-defined problems. This work has applications in network design, and you use Dantzig's simplex algorithm whenever you build an Excel spreadsheet to solve a linear programming problem.

SIMSCRIPT: Harry Markowitz and Bernard Hausner invented the SIMSCRIPT programming language for simulating systems like customers moving through checkout stands at a market. SIMSCRIPT was an early object-oriented language in that it modeled the world as sets of entities and their attributes. Entities could be created and destroyed and their attribute values and set memberships changed when events in simulated time occurred. (SIMSCRIPT is close to my heart because it was the subject of the first class I ever taught. Unfortunately, my wife threw out my SIMSCRIPT t-shirt years ago).

T-shirt -- Entities, Attributes and Sets

An early research computer: Early computers were built as research projects at universities. You can recognize them by their names ending in "AC" for automatic calculator. RAND's JOHNNIAC (named in honor of mathematician and computer architect John von Neumann) was a stored program computer. It was used for applications including the early artificial intelligence research and operations research mentioned above.

JOHNNIAC

Timesharing: Terminals and drum storage were added to the JOHNNIAC, enabling Cliff Shaw to create JOSS (JOHNNIAC Open Shop System), one of the first interactive time-sharing systems. JOSS was an "open shop" in that users interacted directly with the computer rather than dropping off jobs to be run at a later time by a computer operator. I was fortunate to see demonstrations of both JOSS and QUICKTRAN, an interactive FORTRAN interpreter built by John Morrisey of IBM. The advantage of these systems over batch processing was immediately and strikingly apparent. This led me to SDC (mentioned above), which by then had a more advanced time-sharing system that I used for my dissertation research on man-machine data analysis.

Programmer at a JOSS terminal

The RAND tablet: The RAND Tablet, the great grandfather of the iPad, was built by Tom Ellis and his colleagues. Their GRAIL (graphical input language) software featured object-oriented drawing and character recognition. Their publications are some of the earliest work on human-computer interaction -- GRAIL was the great grandfather of Macdraw. (The following video clip is narrated by Alan Kay of Dynabook fame).

Object-oriented drawing and character recognition on the RAND tablet

Large, packet-switching networks: I've saved the best for last. Paul Baran published a series of eleven reports on Distributed Communications Networks in 1964. In Volume 2, he described the network architecture:

Traffic to be transmitted is first chopped into small blocks, called Message Blocks or simply messages. These messages are then relayed from station to station through the network with each station acting as a small "post office" connected to adjacent "post offices."

After simulating this system and considering the technology of the day, Baran concluded in Volume 11 that

It appears theoretically possible to build large networks able to withstand heavy damage whether caused by unreliability of components or by enemy attack.

He was right!

Paul Baran's distributed network architecture

In the following video, Baran reviews RAND's work on distributed networks and packet switching -- from early concern over the possibility of a nuclear attack disrupting military communications through skepticism about packet switching and the creation of the ARPANet. (Since the ARPANet was just a research project, they did not need to bother with security and encryption).

Paul Baran on distributed networks and packet switching (38 minutes plus Q&A)

Two of the people cited here went on to win Nobel prizes. Harry Markowitz received the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on portfolio theory -- perhaps not tied to his work on digital simulation.

Herbert Simon also received the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making. He noted that we do not make optimal decisions when choosing among alternatives because information about outcomes is incomplete, gathering more information has a cost, and outcomes are multidimensional. In real life we make satisfatory decisions. This realization no doubt guided his studies of the thought processes of chess players and theorem provers and therefore his work on artificial intelligence.

(A personal note: I took a class from Professor Simon as an undergrad. All I recall was that I liked him a lot and he told us about the chess game his "computer" -- whatever that was -- was playing with a computer in Arizona. I also met him much later, and he was modest and helpful -- told me he stored most of what he knew in his friend's heads).

You can learn more about any of this work on Wikipedia or using Google, but -- better yet -- download the historic reports by these researchers from the RAND Web site.

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Update 11/29/2014

As noted above, RAND spun off its development work in 1957 when SDC was set up to build the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) air defense system, designed to defend the U.S. against nuclear attack.

SAGE was the first computer network and the project trained most of the computer programmers in the US at the time. The project also produced many innovations in programming and programming project management.

After SAGE, SDC built an advanced general-purpose time-sharing and software development system on an AN/FSQ-32 (Army Navy Fixed Special eQuipment) computer built by IBM. The Q-32 was used for ARPA-sponsored research projects in man-machine interaction -- including my dissertation project. More on SDC in a forthcoming post.

The AN/FSQ-32 supported research on man-machine systems.