I’ve had occasion over the last couple of days to upgrade our WPMU install from version 1.3 to 1.5.1 and the process was remarkably painless. It took a bit of time to get everything lined up and ready to go but the actual switch over was smooth and easy.

Largely, I followed the guidelines most helpfully shared on Robert Mao’s blog about his upgrade to v1.3. The only onerous parts were getting the DB backed up before I did anything and then getting privs to do the file-system work I needed to do.

Overall, my process was:

1. Make a backup of the whole database - there are a number of ways to do that. I used the DB copy feature in phpMyAdmin. There’s also a handy little DB backup script posted on the wordpress codex, but it didn’t work for me because the account we’re using didn’t have appropriate privileges.
2. Download the latest WPMU package
3. Unpack it at the same level as the current WPMU install. E.g. if your current install in in /web/blogs/ then unpack the latest version to /web/wordpress-new/
4. Copy form the current install into the new install:
   • wp-config.php : e.g.
     cp blogs/wp-config.php wordpress-new/wp-config.php
   • .htaccess : e.g.
     cp blogs/.htaccess wordpress-new/.htaccess
   • wp-content : e.g.
     cp -r blogs/wp-content/* wordpress-new/wp-content/
   • any custom, support directories / tools : e.g.
     cp -r blogs/latexrender wordpress-new/
5. change directory names so the new version is live:
   mv blogs blogs_orig; mv wordpress-new blogs
6. Go to your blog site and log in as the admin
7. Click on Site Admin (far right), then Upgrade (rightmost on the sub-menu), then the Upgrade Site button
8. Once the upgrades finish running check your blogs to make sure everything is running OK

I didn’t have to do any special plugin treatment or anything, but I don’t have many to worry about, and the ones I have are pretty simple. The process if problems do arise is to deactivate all of then and then re-activate them one at a time until you find the problem ones. Fixing plugin problems is left as an exercise for the reader :P

I just lead a small discussion for a few faculty and instructional technologists today over lunch about lecture capture what what would need to happen to get people to try it at Williams. I lead off with a quick slide show to define some terms and to provide some seed questions, then we just talked for about 30 minutes.  Here are the major points I took away from it:

• to make this work we need some way of recording stuff written on a board (we could maybe emulate that with a tablet, sympodium, or smart board, but that’s not ideal)
• the audio is important, but not the video of the talking head; point the camera somewhere more useful
• look into dual-camera systems instead of just camera-projector systems
• the non-fixed installation is better thought of as temporary / movable rather than truly mobile / portable (and, in general we need to find out more about the movable systems)
• some faculty are probably willing to try it at some point
• it might be a really good fit with tutorials for letting different sections see each other’s discussions
• the ability to jump to / find particular points in a lecture is very important and maybe needs to be improved
• some concern about students spending limited time re-listening to lectures rather than doing other course work

One of the big selling points seemed to be that people at other institutions were trying it and finding it useful. Here’s a set of links to some public info I found about that:

• http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/News/lecturecapturing.html
• http://www.wpi.edu/Academics/ATC/Collaboratory/News/NERCOMPHandout.pdf
• http://www.echo360.tv/customers/umass.asp
• http://campustechnology.com/articles/52017/
• http://www.dartmouth.edu/~create/
• http://edc.carleton.ca/blog/index.php/2008/02/12/enhanced-lecture-podcasting-benefits/
• http://insidedigitalmedia.com/how-students-use-video-recordings-of-college-lectures-part-1-of-2/
• http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/LectureCaptureWhatCanBeAu/40028

The short summary of all those is:

• faculty and students who have tried a lecture capture system have liked it.
• students self-report that it helps their learning
• it has a positive impact on student grades, primarily helping the C and D students (it’s especially good for those who want to learn but are having difficulty with the material)
• there’s little solid data about attendance rates, but anecdotal observation and self-reporting suggest that, counter-intuitively, it’s largely or completely unaffected

We (Williams) have been experimenting lately with ‘automated’ classroom lecture capture, using the Echo360 tools. Lecture capture in this case means recording audio, video, and projected data of a presentation. The word automated is in quotes because it’s only automated from the perspective of the presenter. This system, like most (all?) others actually requires a fair bit of human work on the back end to make it seem automatic to the person actually giving the lecture. A person has to manually schedule the event and send that schedule to the machines that do the actual recording.

The Echo360 system has actually worked well, better than expected even. There are a lot of pieces in the process, and thus a lot of points of potential failure. Capture a single presentation involves these component all working correctly on their own and in conjunction with each other:

• manual scheduling (software and process)
• wireless, clip-on microphone
• video camera
• capture station - a special computer that does the actual recording and sends the result to the content manager
• content manager - a special server that manages the capture lectures
• Blackboard - our course system, on which recorded lectures are posted

That’s all in addition to the standard classroom technology (projector, speakers, lectern computers, media players). Even given all that, it works reliably fairly well for us (though it took a couple of months to smooth out the bugs). We’re now at a point where if we’re told someone wants to record a presentation in one of our three equipped rooms, we can make it happen and the resulting recording will posted to the appropriate course in Blackboard. From a technical standpoint, classroom capture is a success.

The only real problem we have with it at the moment is that none of the professors actually want to use it. There are three main objections that are raised. First, professors are concerned that if the lectures are recorded then students won’t bother actually showing up to class. Second, professors don’t like the idea of being recorded - it makes them uncomfortable. Third, professors don’t want to change their lecture styles to work better with the recording system - the video camera has a fixed mount, which means if the presenter wants to be recorded there’s a limited area they can use, and the camera is of a limited enough resolution that text written on a board is difficult to read (info sent through the projector works fine, but not everyone uses that).

I have no doubt that over time people will decide they do want to take advantage of this kind of system. Experience at other schools suggests that students, on the whole, do still come to class, and also get a lot out of the recordings. It’s especially useful in situations where the student is still struggling with the language being used to teach (either a foreign student, or a class taught in a different language). It’s also a handy way an instructor can see themselves teach - it provides a useful, objective feedback mechanism.

If anyone else is thinking about implementing such a system my advice is to get people committed to using it, at least some of the time, before going through the time and effort and expense of installing it. If anyone’s interested I can provide more detailed information about our install process and the parts and skills needed to make it all work.

My old work desktop is dying a slow and halting death, so about a week ago I got our friendly desktop services folks to order a new machine for me. This time it’s a laptop (though I have to admit that with a background in the world of startup companies I still feel a little sheepish requesting something as “extravagant” as a laptop). So, for the past couple of days a large part of my work has been setting up the new machine and making the slow transition from the old one to the new one. With the solstice nigh upon us it’s an appropriate time for cleaning house and making new beginnings, and despite the work it’s nice to be able to start with a clean slate. I thought it might be useful to share a bit of the setup process and the tools and such I put on a new machine.

First off, it’s a Windows machine. Powerbooks are more appealing than they used to be since Linux underpins the OS now, but I have some serious issues with the machine and UI design (all of which boil down to sacrificing usability for style). Putting some flavor of Linux on the machine is occasionally tempting, but a) this is a work machine and so it needs to be compatible with what the institution typically uses and supports, and b) though I can hack my way through sysadmin-y tasks I dislike that kind of work. So, despite its many faults, Windows it is. On to the configuration…

Uninstall Outlook Express, through Add/Remove Programs - the system considers it a Windows component rather than an application. Whatever mail client I use, it won’t be Outlook Express.

Install all the windows updates - various important pieces (like the browser) didn’t even work until I’d run Windows Update and installed everything it wanted.

Now that IE works, the top priority is installing some kind of anti-virus protection (Williams uses Sophos, and I’ve found it works quite well). I’ll be downloading a bunch of stuff from the net, so some kind of protection is essential.

Get and install Firefox; IE 7 is better than IE 6, but I still find it a bit obnoxious. No doubt that’s partly out of habit. However, even if they were equally effective I’d still prefer the open source one. That Firefox installs easily, is standards compliant, is safer, and gives me more and better control over its behavior makes the choice easy. I also like a lot of the extensions available for Firefox (IE may have decent ones as well, but I’m not familiar with them).

NOTE: If you do any web development you’ll probably want to activate the DOM Inspector. It’s a part of the Mozilla framework and lets you see structure and properties of a window and its contents. However, you need to activate it during the installation - it can’t be added later as an extension.
The extensions I use (and recommend) are:
* Adblock Plus : hide ads
* Adblock Filterset.G Updater : Synchronizes Adblock with Filterset.G
* ColorfulTabs : colors every tab in a different color
- CustomizeGoogle : Enhance Google results and remove ads and spam.
- Extension List Dumper : list all installed extensions.
- Greasemonkey : A User Script Manager for Firefox
* PDF Download : choose what you want to do with a PDF file
- Tab Scope : Preview and navigate tab contents through popups.
- Tabs Menu : Adds a drop-down list of tabs to the main menu bar.
- Text Link : double click text URLs to load them
For web development I also install (and also recommend) these:
- InspectorWidget : handy interface to the DOM inspector (requires that you have that component installed)
- JavaScript Debugger : JavaScript debugger and profiler
- JSView 1.5 : easily see external stylesheets and javascripts.
- Total Validator : validates web pages in numerous ways
* View Source Chart : Draws A Color-Coded Chart of a Web Page’s Source Code.
- Web Developer : a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
A few of all those extensions need some individual configuration, but the defaults are generally acceptable. Also, set the homepage, bookmark Google, and bookmark about:config (the interface to the nitty-gritty of Firefox configuration - I primarily use it for altering browser-tab behavior, but occasionally want it for other things as well).

Next there a a bunch of free programs I get from the internet. Many of them are specific to my work, but others are of more general use. I’m putting them in order here from most generally appealing/useful to most specific.
- JDK & JRE : everyone will need the JRE (java runtime environment), programmers will also want the JDK. And, if you’re programming, might as well grab
- NetBeans IDE : a decent, free, open source IDE for a java, ruby, C/C++. You can get it bundled with the JDK from Sun, but I prefer the separate install, so I can choose which IDE version I like.
- TextPad : a good plain text editor, with decent syntax highlighting
- Notepad++ : another good plain text editor, slightly more programming oriented, with many useful plugins (as well as syntax highlighting)
- 7-zip : a great utility for handling archives / compressed files of all sorts.
- TweakUI : a great tool to adjust the windows user interface
- Virtual Desktop Manager : manage up to four desktops from the Windows taskbar
- WinGrep : a much better search tool than the one built in to Windows
- Acrobat Reader : I tend to dislike PDF docs, but they’re everywhere.
- TortoiseSVN : THE windows client for Subversion source control (everyone should use source control for any significant project (e.g. writing), not just programmers. You can designate a local folder as a repository even if you don’t have a separate Subversion server set up)
- Gimp, and the help files (separate download): an open source image tool analogous to Photoshop
- Google SketchUp : great tool for lightweight 3D modeling
- Putty et al : ssh, scp, ftp, etc.; a suite of network communication tools
- Google Earth : great light-to-middle weight GIS tool, and fun too
- DOSBox : run old DOS programs (largely useful for games, but some ‘legitimate’ uses too)
- Activestate Perl : Perl for Windows
- xampp : a complete local PHP development system
- InstantRails : a complete local Ruby on Rails development system
+ RMagick : image manipulation package for Ruby on Rails
- TOAD : a good general SQL / Database Management client
- DJ Java Decompiler : turn compiled Java back into source code
Also, some kind of backup software. We use a number of things at Williams, but one recent one I’ve been very happy with is LiveBackup by Atempo.

Then some suite of office tools. Open Office is generally fine, but I installed Microsoft Office since part of my job is being able to help / teach others and I need to use what they use. I’m annoyed that the interface to Office2007 is so different than the previous version, but I expect I’ll get used to it eventually.

For email I’ve been using Thunderbird and been reasonably happy with it. However, I’m trying switching to Outlook on the new machine because it has much better integration to the calendar/scheduling tools that Williams uses. I’ve found it a bit frustrating so far (WAY too many places that configuration stuff is hiding) and may eventually switch back to Thunderbird.

One of the big things that bothered me about Outlook was that it only displayed emails in HTML format. However, there’s a registry hack to get it to display everything as plain text.

Caveat: this post is the result of game design, market discussion, the late hour, and a midori seltzer. It is no doubt less profound than it seems to me right now, but I expect that even in the cold light of day it’s at least interesting.

Game theory (and economic models based thereon) assume/define that involved agents are rational. This works fairly well for some things, but is hard to apply for others. Specifically, They (of the infamous Them) have to go through all kinds of contortions to attempt explaining things like altruism as any kind of rational.

When difficulties arise they tend to be explained as
- alternate modes of valuation (e.g. the ‘makes you feel good’ metric)
- projected iteration (e.g. in prisoner’s dilemma)
- relative position (e.g. in the money bowl game*)
- people are irrational

I think there’s a much simpler, better explanation. A rational agent usually means one that seeks to maximize its welfare (of the utility of its position, or however you want to describe it). In such a case it’s hard to label an agent that engages in altruistic behavior as rational. However, it makes much more sense if the definition of rational is changed. There are two reasonable alternatives that spring mind. First, rather than maximizing welfare a rational agent might seek to minimize loss. However, I’m not wholly convinced that is actually different, so I’m ignoring it for now.

Second, rather than aiming for maximum welfare a rational agent aims for sufficient welfare, and each agent may put ’sufficient’ at different levels. I think it more accurately models human agents, at the least. It easily accounts for altruism (at least for simple forms of it - still have to jump through hoops in the case of self-destructive altruism). It handles the prisoner’s dilemma well (strict maximization produces weird, counter-intuitive results for various penalty/reward values). It covers the money bowl game well (some one grabs the bowl when it reaches enough and they can thereby guarantee a sufficient result rather than risking a null result). Finally, it doesn’t resort to the idea that people are irrational when the models don’t match real-world behavior.

Maximization works OK in some models because they’re so restricted / simple. As complexity increases maximization of multiple axes becomes incomputeable and/or impossible. As such, aiming for maximization in the complicated environment of the real world is unrealistic, perhaps even irrational. As such an economic actor seeking maximization disregards non-monetary axes as a way to simplify the system to the point where a ‘rational’ choice is at least theoretically possible.

However, it is reasonable to aim for given, non-maximum levels on many different axes (it’s still hard with many intertwined axes, but possible). Sufficiency makes real-world problems tractable not by pruning the problem space (dangerous in the real world, where things like the environment, or getting enough sleep, can get chopped out) but by drastically increasing the range of acceptable solutions.

I suspect, though I can’t in anyway back it up, that the widespread conflation of rationality with maximization arose during a time of drastic increase in humanity’s ability to understand and intentionally affect the world, or at least the common perception thereof. I’m guessing late 1800s or early 1900s, in the pre-Einstein era of science.

That’s probably enough rambling for now….

* the money bowl is a simple game, run in real life and as thought experiments. Put a 10 people in a room, with an empty bowl in the center. Explain that you’ll be putting $10 in the bowl once every 30 secs for the next 10 minutes. Anyone can claim the bowl at any time, thus getting all the cash and leaving none for anyone else. However, if the game goes th full 10 minutes and no one has claimed the bowl, then EACH PLAYER gets $200. The game never runs the full 10 minutes - someone always takes the bowl before it’s full. The usual explanation is that the person who takes the bowl is attempting to maximize their relative position, but it gets really complicated to try to apply that explanation when you run multiple instances of the experiment at the same time (or even just say you’re doing so).