Not to be a shameless fanboy, but I really love Woot Shirt. I am a night owl, so I have no problem whatsoever checking this site all the time. There are at least a few decent ones per week, and $10 for a decent t-shirt with shipping included is hard to argue with. Since all the designs are done by random people, and there are random contests to decide some. I have definitely purchased quite a few of these. Anyways, its worth a look or two if you haven’t already seen it.

While browsing the UChicago Law School’s website tonight, I noticed that the there was a podcast of the keynote address given by Cindy Cohn, legal director of the EFF, at a recent symposium held at the Law School. I had the privilege of attending; it was a really enjoyable talk. I thought the crowd was kind of funny when I attended; I noticed that most of the law students were dressed more formally than Cindy Cohn, but I won in the informal dress category with shorts (yes, the talk was in November in Chicago), sandals, a t-shirt, and a hoodie. Different cultures I suppose. The talk was definitely more for lawyers than anyone else, but I still learned quite a bit about the EFF’s recent dealing, and the current state of the law and the Internet. See: Post on Law School site MP3 File

I have had quite a busy week! Last Thursday, I went to another panel that I helped run. Fortunately, I only had to make the poster for this one, so I was able to escape any stress yesterday. We had funding from Campus Progress, so we could afford decent advertising, hence the colorful posters. We covered the campus, but mostly people who came did so because they were members of the ACLUofC or were friends of members. It was an interesting panel, so the low attendance really was a shame. I guess advertising can only go so far with these things.

The panel featured Wendy Doniger, Lauren Berlant, and Richard Shweder. For the ACM AI panel, we spent a decent amount of time hammering out the format, so I thought it was pretty funny when the panelists for this event just worked everything out themselves five minutes before the panel. I guess the general format of an informal panel is not that different from most classes in the humanities.

There were a few points I found really interesting. Shweder discussed institutional neutrality for a while. As he discussed, the motivations behind the principle are very similar to those behind the first amendment. Apparently, a first amendment scholar was the principle’s primary architect. Basically, the principle creates an autonomy between the university and the students and faculty; the university refuses to take any political stances so that no one is ever silenced within the university community on any issue. The primary goal of the institution of a university is to promote free academic inquiry in general among its community and to support This principle came up most recently with the university’s decision not to remove its investments in Petrochina, which has questionable ties to Sudan, despite the efforts of student groups like STAND (see the Maroon articles “Divestment decision to come next week” and “University’s divestment decision has major holes”). Shweder agreed with the university’s decision, affirming that a university should only look at financial factors when making decisions about its investments. He went on to bring up the issue of how a department should decide how it allocates rooms. Apparently, there was some incident some time ago where some group at Northwestern invited the head of the US Nazi party, and the president refused to let him speak on campus. A group at U of C then invited him to speak. It is not that many people agree with him here, but there are many who would be interested in someone with such an extreme view. The one thing that I found a little odd was his dislike of IRBs, since they give institutions the power to limit what members of its community can do. He said that he has examined the facts behind some of the infamous experiments that lead to the the creation of IRBs, such as the Milgram experiment and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and found that the horrors of these experiments are not actually that horrible. I find that hard to believe, but I still think that IRBs have some merit. In terms of research studies, people are an asset, so it is in the institutions interest to protect its merits within these communities. Studies that get bad press harm everyone within the institution; appearance matters. This discussion raises the unfortunate difference between policies like institutional neutrality and the first amendment as idealized freedoms and the enforcement of them given financial realities. Cindy Cohn, legal director of the EFF, raised this same point when she spoke at the law school.

Lauren Berlant made a few points that stood out to me. She talked about how her and other professor’s goal in discussion classes is to cause people to disagree and to discuss. Since she teaches gender studies classes, there is often an expectation that everyone is going to take a liberal stance, so students are wary to take anything but a standardized liberal viewpoint, even if they are not aware they are doing so. She wants to create controversy, even if it means arguing a stance that she doesn’t agree with. She also shared an interesting observation during the panel about students at the U of C: no one asks questions. I have observed this phenomenon and know it quite well. She said that first years can’t stop speaking in classes usually, but most students by first year barely say anything for fear that they will say something that sounds dumb. It can really be painful here. I don’t think some degree of self-censorship is bad; I remember hating my humanities class first precisely because so many people just talked about absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, I, and I guess others too, feel the lesson taught is to just shut up and listen. I wish there was a happier medium.

See Also

• ACLU Academic Freedom Poster - Poster for the event. Graphically, I was quite pleased with this posters turnout.

Jeff, one of my co-workers in the Maclab, had this cake made; it didn’t taste too great, but it was a fun cake. For those of you who have played the game Portal, this cake should be of great humor. It was one sweet paradox (hahahaha). Apparently, he asked whoever decorated this thing to make a blue and an orange portal; the ovals on the side are the result. The flowers are just random.

Last night, the UofC ACM held its first major event, an interdisciplinary panel on artificial intelligence. Since Cord and I took over as co-chairs of the chapter, we have been fighting to get things happening in the CS department, which hasn’t been easy. The Facebook event had about 25 confirmed guests and 40 maybes, so we were a little nervous about turn out. The fliers and e-mails we sent seemed to pay off as we had about 60 attend. We were pretty happy.

For our first big event, we felt it went pretty well. The panel had David McAllester, John Goldsmith, Terry Regier, and Philip Ulinski. The majority of the panel were basically computer and linguistics people, so it definitely skewed, but we ended up discussing AI in a pretty broad way. Really, the panel was too broad. For the most part, the discussion was guided mostly by the audience, which made it pretty disorganized. I felt like I didn’t come away with a greater understanding of AI. Really, many of the AI-related questions I have pondered (which others asked) were answered, but I have yet to really process the answers. I have been thinking most about the singularity, which McAllester wanted to talk about, but we didn’t really stay on the subject much. Overall, it was a really enjoyable panel, and it was a pretty awesome thing to help organize. Borja said there was a food spread for another talk that was supposed to be at the same time that the CS department got hundreds of cookies for that only a few people went to. Future panels should be even more of a success.

See Also

• Page on the ACM Site for Event

To further my addiction to gadgets, I have purchased the Archos PMA430. Every mp3 player I have owned (that is, things I got as mp3 players) has been an Archos thus far. To put it quite simply, Archos does what I want; I don’t have to use any particular media player or operating system to transfer data (has always worked as a USB mass storage device), I can record stuff, and there are usually a few more features. I got this one because my archos gmini 200 is starting to show it physical and technological age (because 3-4 years is somehow old). Anyways, I saw this thing for sale for $200 off something on dealhack and decided to go for it. Enough with the brutal details.

What I find curious about it is the price I got. Obviously, I did some reading first. cNet called it the “holy grail” of whatever the hell you call this class of devices. The main problem they raised was price. When it came out in 2005, this thing cost something like $800. I wouldn’t pay $800, but I would pay a decent amount for a Linux-based mp3/video player/recorder, with wi-fi, and a slue of other crap from a brand I trust. I just don’t get how they make money. They don’t have a page on their site anymore for this thing; they have pawned it off to second-sellers at this point. Every time I have gotten something from them, I have been amazed out how far ahead of Apple they always are. Perhaps Archos moves too fast for the general public, but I tend to think that they just market badly and don’t have the best hardware designers out there (that is, design of appearance). I just don’t get it.

Anyways, this thing has been added to my daily device set. Currently, this set is my cellphone, this thing now, and my nokia n800. As of one day of use, it looks like I should have some fun with this thing. One thing I will miss is that I got to a point with my gmini where I could operate it almost fully without looking at it. I can’t do that with this thing, so I am going to have to start using things like playlists. I also have an Archos something 700, which has a huge screen and many of the same features, but it not at all portable. I think I am going to start using the DVR functions on these things a lot more. Transfer is easy as those two can act as hosts to other USB things. The main problems I read about involved the wi-fi, and battery life. I haven’t had troubles with the wi-fi, but I don’t think I will really ever use it since I have the n800, which already serves the purpose better than thing could so it is not really a problem. I haven’t really been able to test battery too much, but I it needs a lot of juice for video, so music time benefits a lot. We will see how it works out….

I have always thought that the social dynamics of digg were a little odd to say the least, but I have never been able to put my finger on it. I don’t know quite why I even browse digg, but I do; at least some of the posted stories are interesting or useful. Digg is one of the few high traffic sites I have seen where headings like “BREAKING,” “AMAZING,” or some other word in all caps is somehow considered acceptable. I guess the most noticeable dynamic though is the pure sensationalism. It is hard to believe half of the stories posted. Sure, the Internet is famous for bullshit, but “web 2.0″ + pure bullshit seems to be in a category of its own. Perhaps digg is simply the combined expression of Internet culture, but I believe it is a force far darker.

So, here is the problem. I want to be able to get the source for a page after it has been rendered by Firefox (that is, loading javascript manipulations have been made, etc…). In other words, I want to be able to serialize the DOM in Firefox, from the command-line. Essentially, I am trying to write a massive hack. There are few problems that need to be overcome first. For one, Firefox requires some display. Since I only really care about Linux/BSD/Sun systems, I have to go through X11 (speaking of massive hacks…). Basically, I need a dummy X11 session. I don’t care what is displayed, I just want to send it somewhere. VNC, fortunately, provides this interface. It is worth noting at some point that I have not fully written this yet (laziness + hard-ass school = project stagnation), but I have a very good idea of what it will do. Anyways, the display is one small part of the problem; the trick here is getting the DOM out. I had some fun here. Unfortunately, DOM serialization must be done through javascript. Gecko provides a really nice little tool: XMLSerializer. I am not aware of anything like it in another browser, which just further supports my belief that Firefox/anything Gecko-based is simply the lesser of evils (bad design being evil of course). Why Mozilla decided the mix of XUL (an xml format Mozilla came up to design interfaces) and javascript would be sensible things to build a browser around, I don’t know, but it is useful here. The normal browser interface can be found at chrome://browser/content/browser.xul. You can have a lot of fun loading lots of these inside each other (see image). If you load browser.xul with firebug, you can play around with all of Firefox’s standard functions, which is always fun.

If you are creating a tradition extension, I suppose you would want to look at this stuff as well, but it is especially helpful here. Once this set of deep Firefox functions has been revealed, the actual loading of page is rather trivial. The real problem is I/O. I need to be able to pass firefox the link I want to open from the command-line, and write it to a specified location. Fortunately, there is JSLib, which provides things like I/O in javascript. From here, the solution is simple. I just want to make a copy of browser.xul, and add a few scripts into it. I then want to parse GET arguments on this file when loaded, since I can pass these to Firefox from the command-line. I would want one for the url, and one for the output path. Of course, these would have to be escaped before they could actually be passed to Firefox. That’s it! I was planning on calling it FireScraper. Hopefully I can finish it soon.