Port 80

Last week, I received a broadcast e-mail from the UD administration calling for student input on a
“Strategic Academic Plan” for the future of UD. The request is for a one page proposal, outlining input
for a follow-on plan to the current Vision 2005 plan. Of course,
as an unorthodox student who enjoys doing things the hard way, I had to go and write up a proposal. The final
draft is due on Monday, but I’m going to put up a rough d raft here for comments. The basic subject matter of the
paper (interdisciplinary learning) isn’t going to change, but if you have any ideas on implementation, specifics,
points I left out, or just wording, send them to me. Thanks in advance to
anyone who reads through this.

In Vision 2005, the University declared that it would undertake a “bold
transformation” which included a strong emphasis on “Connected Learning and Scholarship”. The
University’s drive towards connected learning is being re alized in such projects as the New Engineer Program and the
Learning Village concept (particularly the ArtStreet project). With these and other projects underway, the
University’s strategic vision must look beyond the completion of these projects, and re cognize that the original
reasons for implementing the Connected Learning strategy are still as valid as they were when Vision 2005 was
developed. Rather than envisioning the Connected Learning initiative as the final solution to these challenges, the
University must view this initiative as the beginning of a larger shift towards a more integrated educational
philosophy. One of the primary concerns of the University in implementing the new strategic academic plan must be to
plan the follow-on strategy to Connected Learning, one that takes the successes of Connected Learning and expands
upon it.

The first step of this strategy must be to review the successes and failures of current Connected Learning
programs in order to apply the most successful practices of these programs on a large scale. One excellent example
is the New Engineer program, which currently involves a small segment of the engineering students at the University
of Dayton. It may be desirable to implement some of the strategies of this program (such as case studies of notable
engineering projects) across the entire engineering curriculum.

However, it is vital that the University continue to address the challenges that spurred the Connected Learning
initiative by moving forward from a strategy of Connected Learning to a strategy of Integrated Learning. The
existing Connected Learning progr ams will be vital as a testbed for new and innovative projects that will seek not
only to connect different disciplines on a foundational level, as does the current general education program, but to
truly integrate different disciplines, striving to forge links between them at advanced levels of study. This new
program should be attempt to be both pervasive and flexible. The program should be pervasive in
that links between disciplines are forged in many courses, instead of a select ed few “interdisciplinary”
classes. Likewise, the program should be flexible in that talented and enthusiastic students are encouraged
to work with faculty to develop new and innovative programs of study which still uphold the high sta ndard of
education that the University maintains.

The University must strive in the coming years to solidify and expand upon current successes, and to innovate for
the future. By producing graduates who can successfully integrate knowledge between disciplines, the University
produces graduates who can serve their communities in dealing with new and unforeseen challenges and
opportunities.

Regards,
Zachary Heaton

Again, if you have any comments, e-mail away.

One student laid it wide open when she said with complete candor, “Of course you can’t
eliminate the degree and grading system. After all, that’s what we’re here for.” - Robert Pirsig, Zen and
the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance

This weekend, I got the chance to read through In Code: A Young Woman’s Mathematical Journey. The book is the autobiographical story of Sarah Flannery, an Irish secondary school student who won international acclaim (and the 1999 Young Scientist Award) for her research into public key cryptography. After more than a year of research, she devised a cryptographic system that was substantially faster than the standard RSA method. Although the system eventually proved vulnerable to attack, her research was impressive, to say the least.

Throughout the entire book, Flannery remains professionally modest, giving credit to those who inspired her and downplaying her own abilities:

I have no doubt that I am not a genius. I am not being falsely modest. Through my father’s classes I have seen examples of true genius, and I know that I do not possess that “insight” that distinguishes geniuses from those regarded as merely intelligent.

Sarah Flannery, In Code, page 243

This modesty and lack of pretension stands in sharp contrast to another book I read this weekend, namely Stupid White Men by Michael Moore. Although Moore is clearly a man of intelligence, he is certainly not a man of modesty. (In fact, intellectual honestly isn’t one of Moore’s strong points, either.) Throughout Stupid White Men, Moore portrays himself as unmasking conspiracies that involve countless parties, including, but not limited to:

• The Bush family
• Haliburton and Enron
• Florida election commissions
• The Miami Herald
• The United States Supreme Court
• The entire Republican party
• Most of the Democratic party (for knuckling under to Republicans)
• The entire Caucasian race (except for Michael Moore)

At first glance, this list appears to be the work of a delusional paranoid, not an Oscar-winning director. If one switches races and political parties in the above list, one could accurately describe a member of the Aryan Nation or the Klu Klux Klan. Is Moore really this vitriolic, biased, or simply out of touch with reality?

(more…)

Another reason to use Macintosh: Free, fully native, computational fluid dynamics software from NASA. This isn’t just any free CFD software: it’s been used on everything from the Mars Airplane project to the Joint Strike Fighter. Of course, having up to 14.4 GB of RAM free may help.

… Navier–Stokes for free.

Bill Amend, in one of his occasional internet-oriented installations of FoxTrot, paints a chilling prophecy of the playground taunts of tomorrow. Read, and wonder at the depths of PageRank’s inhumanity to man.

And people wonder why I don’t particularly care for Microsoft. I mean, buffer overflows I can understand, but resetting passwords by setting the option “emailpwdreset”? Why not just set it to “hackmeplease” and save everyone a little bit of trouble?

Update: For comparison, 2.2 trillion is about the same as the entire United States budget. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Microsoft to write a check for this one.

That’s the stupidest combination I’ve ever heard in my life! That’s the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage! — Dark Helmet, Spaceballs

That’s amazing! I’ve got the same combination on my luggage! — President Skroob, Spaceballs

I apologize for the light blogging - I have been home from college, and have been busy overthe past week. However, I have at least one more back entry to catch up on. I recently read through the book Bushido: The Warrior’s Code by Inazo Nitobe, and enjoyed it soimmensely that I felt it required some comment here.

Bushido was written in 1899, and is a mere 112 pages long in my paperback edition, including the completely superfluous summaries that preface every one of its short chapters. That said, reading one chapter a day during lunch got me through the book in about two weeks. (A side note for those on or near the UD campus: The fountain near Marycrest is an excellent spot to read and enjoy lunch, and tends to be grossly underpopulated during lunch hours.)

It is perhaps just as well that it took me a while to work through the book, for while this book is short, it is anything but easy. In the book, Nitobe is writing an extended persuasive essay, attempting to explain the system of Bushido to someone who is utterly unfamiliar with it, exploring its role in turn-of-the-century Japanese society, and examining the prospects for Bushido in the future. This is not a light read – although written in a conversational tone, it is also written with all the Victorian eloquence that Mr. Nitobe can give it. (Despite his statement that “one who speaks in a borrowed tongue should be thankful if he can just make himself intelligible”, Nitobe’s command of the English language is formidable.) The work also contains more than a few attempts to combat misunderstandings of the Japanese culture that Nitobe encountered at the time by explaining the reasoning behind those cultural practices that Westerners found difficult to grasp, and more than once chiding some Westerners for their willingness to offer a “solution” without actually understanding the purported problem.

Another “awfully funny” custom is dictated by our canons of Politeness … In America, when you make a gift, you sing the praises to the recipient; in Japan we depreciate or slander it. The underlying idea with you is, “This is a n ice gift: if it were not nice I would not dare give it to you; for it will be an insult to give you anything but what is nice.” In contrast to this, our logic runs: “You are a nice person, and no gift is nice enough for you. You will not accept anything I can lay at your feet except as a token of my good will; so accept this, not for its intrinsic value, but as a token. It will be an insult to your worth to call the best gift good enough for you.“ Place the two ideas side by side, and we see that the ultimate idea is one and the same. Neither is “awfully funny”.

This personal tone, the note of someone who earnestly wishes to make himself fully understood to the reader, is what makes this book so intensely fascinating. In a sense, it is the same sort of narrative philosophy found in another favorite book of mine, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. However, while Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the tale of one man discussing himself, Bushido is the formal dissertation of one man attempting to represent his entire nation to the outside world.

About ten years ago, while spending a few days under the hospitable roof of the distinguished Belgian jurist, the lamented M. de Laveleye, our conversation turned during one of our rambles to the subject of religion. “Do you mean to say,” asked the venerable professor, “that you have no religious instruction in your schools?” On my replying in the negative he suddenly halted in astonishment, and in a voice which I shall not easily forget, he repeated “No religion! How do you impart moral education?” — Inazo Nitobe, introduction to Bushido: The Warrior’s Code

LawMeme ran an interesting story a while back on the implications of distributed information spread. In ot her words, how is it possible to control information flow on a truly peer-to-peer network without a centralized structure? The author discusses this in terms of controlling the flow of private e-mails, but there are other examples as well. Take GlobalSecurity as one such case: Thanks to the reality of commercial satellite imagery, they purchase photographs of strategically interesting areas and distribute them for free. This sort of resource, which used to be co ntrolled by nation-states, is now available to all. Or, just consider the RIAA’s unsuccessful attempts to crack down on peer-to-peer file sharing. This is the ultimate implication of the Internet, in my opinion - once a single person has a piece of inform ation, everyone with a modem can have it a stunningly short time, whether that information is a satellite photo, a pirated song, or (in the case of the LawMeme story) a private letter.

The means by which enlightened rulers and sagacious generals moved and conquered others, that their achievements surpassed the masses, was advance knowledge. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War