This post attempts to summarize some things about social media for the uninitiated. I will talk about social media in general, and focus on the different ways people use Twitter.
Of course, other people have already done most of the footwork. Please check out this post by Fred Cavazza, paying particular attention to the image of his taxonomy. Also note this essay by Paul Graham, which highlights the role of social media in the lives of those who use it.
I haven’t posted anything in a while. Part of this is, “If you don’t have anything awesome to say, don’t say anything at all”. But also I’ve been very busy. You can follow my day-to-day on Twitter, but here are some general things you might be interested in:
I’m working on a review of Moral Machines for the journal Minds and Machines. Wallach and Allen have a book-related blog. My deadline is like, today or something.
I had the chance to talk to Scaz about my research. It was awesome. I can’t post a transcript here due to my university’s ridiculous views on privacy and human research ethics, but I’ll probably talk about it soon.
I will be giving a guest lecture for the SCSU Philosophy Dept this coming Tuesday (March 10) at 3:15 PM. The topic is going to be robots, more specifically the inevitability of a robot uprising. Hope to see you there.
The folks who do Overcoming Bias have a new site called Less Wrong, which is reddit-てき. You should go there if only to check out the site design. It’s pretty neat. I post as thomblake.
EDIT: fixed date for SCSU talk
Averaging student grades doesn’t make much sense to me. A lot could be seriously written on the subject, but this post will just be a little rantish. (Note: A lot of my specific arguments here are inspired by Ken Gatzke)
Let us suppose that your class has 5 graded papers, all of approximately the same length and importance. Now consider 2 students, Andy and Ben. Andy gets the grades A B C D F on his papers, while Ben gets the grades F D C B A. If you average their grades, they will roughly come out to a C (assuming the F was within a reasonable range). However, the grades tell entirely different stories about the two students. While there’s no necessary connection between a set of grades and a particular story, let me stipulate some stories to drive home the point.
Andy did well in his previous class in the subject and understood the introductory material very well. However, he gained absolutely nothing from the experience of this class. The further the material drifted from what he already understood, the worse he did. Ben, on the other hand, started out with no background in the subject whatsoever. However, over the course of the semester through hard work and perseverance he came to understand the subject completely.
Now, what would be the justification for giving each of these students a C? It seems to me that by these accounts, Andy deserves an F and Ben an A. And while these are not the stories of most students, Andy and Ben are sure to eventually fall victim to this unjust grading scheme if it persists.
Obviously, resolving this problem would require examining what grades are supposed to do, as well as how to make them do that. As that would be a much longer rant, I’ll do the usual philosophical thing and leave the reader with a criticism and some questions - answers are left as an exercise.
This post is a follow-up to my previous post, Video Games Encourage Concern For Your Character in which I challenge Don Gotterbarn’s Ethicomp 2008 abstract. As I noted before, this isn’t exactly fair, as abstracts are often written without much of an editorial process, and (Don has since confirmed) the paper was not yet written at that time. So I endeavor here to provide a more thorough appraisal of the full paper, conveniently available in the proceedings of Ethicomp(1).
As some of you may have already heard, Christalee and I are now married. Hooray!
We got married in Verona, Italy this past week (September 23rd).
We’ll be having a wedding reception in probably about a month. Feel free to shower us with monetary gifts!
For those who don’t know, I’ll be presenting next week at ETHICOMP2008 at the University of Pavia in Mantua (Mantova) Italy.
My paper looks at CFAI and evaluates it as a basis for creating ethical robots. Punchline: CFAI is no good; virtue ethics is better.
I’ll post more about the paper soon.
The public debate over abortion rights has a long history, with seemingly intractable differences. Some of the most common arguments on both sides have obvious flaws that I won’t belabor here. However, once we get past the bad arguments, there are still two points of view that deserve defending, and there are good arguments for both points of view:
1. Abortion is bad (wrong / immoral), therefore one shouldn’t have an abortion.
2. Abortion is permissible (my choice / none of your business), therefore abortion should be legal.
From the form of this, it should be apparent that there is no contradiction here. Consider:
congypsy.com until recently had a single validation error (XHTML 1.0 strict), and I can’t stand for that sort of thing on a site I work on. The source was the “Latest updates on Twitter” section; I was using Twitter’s pregenerated code bits with just a little modification, and their script expects the <ul> it uses to have a particular ID. The problem came in when I had two of them on a page; obviously, you can’t have two objects with the same ID on one page! But to my surprise, everything worked as expected in Firefox, so I left it alone for a while. (Fail)
So then I realized I could just download the script from the Twitter site, modify it slightly, and free myself from the horror of invalid XHTML. UnFail.
As some of you may know, I make chainmail. This weekend, I was at ConnectiCon 2008 at the ConGypsy.com table. Some of my work is now up on my flikr account, and will be added to my deviantart shortly.
A con report will be up on ConGypsy.com soon.
I work primarily in bright aluminum since I like the way it feels and sparkles, and I prefer to use 5/16″ ID 16 gauge rings.
I don’t tend to like short posts here, but I must announce A List Apart’s annual survey for web professional type folks:
