AI

As a new semester begins in my business communication class, I wonder where we stand in the world of artificial intelligence. I had a great discussion with some of the other faculty members about how it is important to figure out where to go with AI engines that can write better essays than students can. At what point will students be able to simply input a few facts or even questions and have the technology instantly spit out something that they could hand in and get a better grade than if they took the time to write it themselves.

We briefly discussed the possible copyright or other IP ownership issues of using AI tools. Does ownership go to the person who programmed the AI or to the person who entered some text and hit a button?

Is there a way we can use this technology to improve writing but not completely replace the humans in the process? There has to be.

The two main tools from OpenAI right now ChatGPT for text and Dall-E 2 for images.

Ignoring it and hoping it won't go away is not really an option, but how can we use these tools to our advantage and not to the detriment of students? At the end of the day, they're just tools.

Color Differences

My mom has long wondered what my brother and I see, due to curiosity and potentially some latent guilt from passing along the color blind deficiency genes to us.  I don't feel bad about it, other than possibly knowing that I might not get the full effect of the fall colors in the canyon, but then again, I don't know what I'm missing.

I've written elsewhere about interesting conversations arising from my colorblindness, as well as the importance of colors and symbols.  Because I'm missing something, I notice things others often don't, like that in the board game Ticket to Ride, there are symbols along with each color to help distinguish the different lines.  They aren't just decorations to make the cards look pretty.  Go look real quick; I'll wait.

When I went to get tickets to Les Miserables, I had checked out what seats were available online and knew the row and seat numbers I wanted.  I went to the theater to buy the tickets instead of paying the online service fee, because we all know it's cheaper to perform a transaction with a real person than an automated system.  Of course, when I got there, those seats were no longer available.  The girl asked me what other seat I might like as she turned her screen to me.  The color scheme online to show which seats were or were not available was great - high contrast and easy to tell the difference.  Her screen looked all the same.  Every seat was the same color.  I just told her I couldn't tell from the colors which were available or not, and she had a look on her face that showed she obviously couldn't comprehend that someone couldn't tell the difference.  There was a little bit of a glare that may have contributed to making it difficult to tell.  I just had to ask for something close to the middle and trust her judgment.  Why the system at the theater used a different color scheme than the one online, I have no idea.  Better yet, put a big, high-contrast X in the middle of the ones that are not available or put them in a very light gray.

So for my mom, movie theater girl, and anyone else who has asked repeatedly what color I think everything in the room is, you can now see what I see.  Actually, I have two things for you.  The first is based on this graphic that was making the social media rounds recently on the differences in how women and men see colors, which I've included right here.

Then there's a spinoff on the differences in how dogs and developers see colors.  So I thought I'd take the men vs. women one and replace the generic guy on the right with me.  I only thought just now that as long as I was editing it, I should have actually put a picture of myself over there.  Oh well.  Pretend it's me, except that my shirt is blue, instead of the red one he is wearing.  I'm kidding; I know it's green.

So there you go.  Of course, just reading what I call the colors doesn't really mean you actually see the same thing.  Deep down inside you actually think I'm making it up.  Or that if you talk louder, you can get me to understand that you want me to squint and look harder and then I'll see the same thing you do.

Well, you're in luck, because there's a second way, where you can actually see the same thing, not just read what I say about what I see.  The Huffington Post was kind enough to put up some examples and link to the Colour Blind Simulator used to create the examples.  I assume it works, because the original and processed images I uploaded looked the same to me, and when my second grader said the colors of the two pictures were totally different, I made fun of him and said he needed to squint and look harder, and then he'd see they were the same.

Web Design Workshop

One week summer workshops are a great option to take an intense, short-term class that teaches you some real skills to begin putting into place immediately.

They've changed a little, as they're now taught throughout the summer, where they used to be taught during a workshop week between two of the four week terms. I guess that would be nice if you wanted to go through more than one workshop.

Looking at their current offerings, they have workshops related to using Photoshop, creating a resume and portfolio, sign language, understanding the history of China, and appreciating fantasy fiction. Okay, maybe all of those might not be immediately useful.

The summer workshop I went through was about using Dreamweaver and Fireworks. This was over a dozen years ago, well before Adobe bought out Macromedia, and the web still had a bit of a wild west feel to it. Sites were simple, designs were kitschy, and digital cameras were low-res and high-priced. I actually borrowed a digital camera from my department to do a couple websites after the workshop, and it totally reminded me of Luke Skywalker's binoculars.

It looked like his binoculars, and the quality probably wasn't much better. Of course at that time, you couldn't print digital photos anyway, and monitor resolutions on those fat old CRTs weren't good enough to be able to tell that the quality was low. About the best you could do on old CRTs to make them half decent was to crank up the refresh rate so they didn't flicker. You wanted something higher than 60 Hz so the flicker wasn't visible, but if you went too high, you could damage the monitor, so you had to decide how much you wanted to gamble. It was always fun degaussing old CRTs as well.

Here's a photo I actually took at the time. Note the little border I added around the edge for no good reason. Then there's all the dirty noise that almost gives it an instagrammy feel. I think most people taking photos on all but the nicest cell phones these days could just upload as is and say they used an instagram filter. That's probably why people like instagram, because it makes their phone photos look like they're supposed to be old and dirty. Someone recently sent out a photo from a major work event, of over 100 posed people. It looked awful - faces all blurry and washed out. I looked at the picture's metadata, and sure enough, it was taken on an iPhone4. Why someone would waste the time of that many people to get them all posed and then just take their photo with a camera phone, I don't think I'll ever understand. We have nice cameras now - use them.

The workshop was a fun one. It was one week, several hours in the morning and afternoon, every day. We even got brownies each day during an afternoon break. We each made a personal site and showed it off to everyone. They were all terrible, I'm sure. We learned the basics of using tables, lists, font formatting options, frames (I know), linking, creating buttons that changed when you moused over or clicked on them, etc. I figured out some basic JavaScript that randomly picked a different picture to show on the home page each time it loaded. Several of us used AnimationFactory, which is surprisingly still around, to find 3D-ish animated gifs to put on our sites. I remember after showing off our sites, we sat around watching random videos. In particular, I remember showing Weird Al's music video The Saga Begins (American Pie). Still a great video.

The most important part of the workshop is that I now had a few days' worth of exposure to Dreamweaver and thus could add it to put something on my resume. The resume with that skill listed got me a job on campus at Career Services. They had various IT-related tasks that needed to be done around the office, but the biggest one was launching a new website. Don't get me wrong - I'd been making notepad websites for several years at that point, but they wanted the site done in Dreamweaver, and I was the man to do it. That job was a really fun one and a great career starter. I used it as an internship, so I'll write more about it when I discuss the internship class.

Jersey Strong

From Paul Kiesche, a friend I grew up with in New Jersey:

Proud to be Jersey Strong, our design company, Paul Kiesche Design, LLC. created this logo. It’s just one more thing we can do to help. By working together, New Jersey will come back stronger than ever.

This logo is completely free to use, print or share. If we get enough likes, comments or interest, we will make and sell t-shirts, stickers and possibly more. Then, we’ll donate all the money we make after expenses to help the relief efforts for this disaster and future disasters.

Here are the rights-free logo files if anyone wants it to print for any reason.

Pass it around, and let @pkieschedesign know if you're interested in shirts, stickers, etc., but of course you're free to print your own if you'd like as well. You also might comment on Paul's blog.

Political Pumpkin Walk

The North Logan Pumpkin Walk is a fun family tradition. Each year they have all the scenes made from pumpkins by anyone who volunteers to create one, and then you generally end up in a kind of current events scene. A few years ago, for example, they had a scene entitled "Martha Stewart Living in Jail" that was a great hit.

This year's culminating scene was a political one, presented without comment.

July 2, 1986

A photo from 25 years ago, remembering the sad events of 10 years ago.

Expectations of Quality

Behold the smartness of Logan City road crews:

zoom in if you don't see it
We all make mistakes, and some like the one above are more easily corrected than others.

It makes me wonder what kind of expectations of quality the road crews have of themselves. We would all do well to think about the expectations we have of our employees, coworkers, and bosses, not to mention the expectations they have of us. If everyone does not set the bar at the same level, the tension can build quickly. Having a work environment where it's safe to fail, balanced with high expectations of each other, will lead to learning experiences. Ultimately the learning experiences will lead to higher quality outcomes if the team can stay in sync. Set the bar too low or get out of sync of the expectations of others, and you end up with the stereotypical "government job" and results like the above.

Negative Space

In art, negative space is an important yet occasionally overlooked concept. There are a couple different types of negative space. If you google the term, the results are mostly all types of silhouettes, where an object doesn't actually appear in the image at all. What is missing is what you're supposed to actually see. An example of this is the arrow in the FedEx logo. What arrow, you ask? Well, go look real quick, and then come back. ... Pretty cool, eh? The silhouette walking across the street here is another more obvious example.

The other type of negative space is a type of balance or contrast to the focus of the piece, also apparent in the photo of the sign pictured above (which iboy_daniel was so gracious to share with an open license). The same picture taken head on would simply not be as interesting. Negative space used this way adds a level of depth that is missing otherwise. The divine proportion and rule of thirds are related to the concept of negative space.

In images with a lot going on, photographers will often use a large aperture, resulting in a shallow depth of field, meaning that only a small range of the picture is in focus. This artistic blurring of the foreground and background is negative space that makes the pieces that are in focus almost pop out at the viewer. The out of focus elements are important because of the context they provide to the in focus elements.

In a recent conversation with a former employee of mine, we got to talking about the importance of negative space in the workplace, although we didn't call it that at the time. It's the idea that time spent sitting around talking, grabbing a cup of coffee, running to the break room to play ping pong, going to lunch together, or otherwise spending time together not immediately engaged in "work" is an important aspect of the workplace.

An article in the paper about a team running the Ragnar Wasatch Back Relay, which happens to have started today, points out this same concept. A business sponsored a team a few years ago for the 200 mile 12 person relay race through the mountains and found clear benefits in the way of increased collaboration and connections among employees back at the office long after the race ended, so they've continued doing it.

Being able to step away momentarily from the task at hand to do something that doesn't really matter helps increase focus on important issues upon returning to work. These important issues are often lost if taken on too directly with nowhere to allow the eyes or mind to rest. Of course unrealistic deadlines, high travel costs, juggling multiple projects, and other factors can make such downtime seemingly difficult to fit in. It doesn't have to be huge, though, and probably shouldn't be. Care does need to be taken to ensure the focus isn't moved off what is important and onto elements that should be in the background.

In virtual teams, instant messaging can provide some of the same downtime to a limited extent, but getting together in the same physical location occasionally can do wonders to reinvigorate a project or team that is suffering from lack of contact. Whether or not the in-person time is "productive", it can help remind everyone of the importance of their piece in relation to the big goal and that there are real people receiving their submissions on the other end of the line.

I often practice a negative space technique when working on a paper or presentation. A month or two out I'll review the requirements and read some related articles or books but not write anything. A week or two goes by, and I'll put together a basic outline of what I'm going to write or talk about. I'll sit on it for another week, while in the back of my mind I'm thinking of stories, articles, events, theories, videos, and all sorts of related issues. This cycle progresses until it's relatively close to the time of submission/presentation, depending on its size and importance. When I do sit down to knock it out, the whole thing flows from my fingertips in a way that was not possible the month or two prior, because of the downtime I'd had to process it.

I always did like it at the moving company I used to work for when the person over our crew on any given day was a smoker; it meant we would get a 10 minute break every hour instead of one 15 minute break every four hours. The focus there was always on when the next break was coming. Everyone filed out of the warehouse like kids following an ice cream truck when the snack truck would pull into the parking lot every morning and save us all if he was ever late. At a physically demanding job, that negative space is closely guarded and for good reason, but at white collar jobs it can be easy to forget or to spend your downtime alone.

So be positive. But don't forget about the negative.

16 Free Tools to Create Media in eLearning

From a presentation at eLearning DevCon 2011 by Jeff Batt, a trainer with Rapid Intake.

• Video
  
  • JayCut - Online video editor
    
  • Video Spin - Desktop video editor
    
• Video Converter
  
  • Any Video Converter - Desktop video converter (batch convert, resize, etc.)
    
• Audio
  
  • Audacity - Desktop audio editor (don't forget the LAME mp3 encoder so you can export to mp3)
    
  • Aviary Myna - Online audio editor
    
  • Aviary Roc - Online music creator
    
• Images
  
  • GIMP - Desktop image editor
    
  • Aviary Phoenix - Online image editor
    
  • Sumo Paint - Online image editor (my addition, which actually bumps the list up to 17)
    
• Image Capture
  
  • Jing - Desktop image/video capture
    
  • Aviary Talon - Online image capture
    
• Animation
  
  • Vectorian - Desktop animation (Flash) editor
    
• Vector Images
  
  • Inkscape - Desktop vector image editor
    
  • Aviary Raven - Online vector image editor
    
• Color Schemes
  
  • Kuler - Online or desktop color theme picker
    
  • Aviary Toucan - Online color theme picker
    
• Course Analytics
  
  • enspark enfuse - Web analytics tool

I can vouch for Audacity, GIMP, Kuler (my new blog colors are from the Retro Package color scheme), and obviously Sumo Paint.

Now start creating!

Travel Dichotomy

I traveled to a conference in Las Vegas a couple weeks ago. It was interesting to reflect on the atmosphere in my hometown vs. that of the conference venue. Isn't it great how even though it's annoying to stand in security lines at the airport, modern technology lets us go to such extremes as these within the course of one day:

Leaving in this morning, this was the view.


This was the view mid-afternoon.

And then that evening.


This guy was pretty good with the spray paint.

Above Fremont Street, just outside the hotel I was staying at, they have a TV that spans four blocks, with music videos and other stuff playing throughout the night. (Fast forward to 1:40 for Break on Through.)

Not the brightest

I was at the store looking at some LED lights to replace our current energy-sucking conventional C9 lights. They are more expensive than regular lights. I overheard an employee explaining to a customer that, "they are more expensive because they last longer." That's just dumb. The fact that they last longer, combined with the energy savings, mitigates the fact that they cost more; however, just lasting longer is not justification for charging more. It may be that they cost more to make, which is fine, but that's not how she explained it. Chances are neither the employee nor the customer would have even understood the difference between what she said and reality, though, so maybe it doesn't matter.

Combine the savings mentioned above with Logan City rebates of $5 per string of old lights that you turn in, and it makes sense to go LED, right?

Well, I can't get a good photo that really shows how bad the LED lights are, but they're a weird color and not very bright. So much for trying to go green, as an extra trip to the store is now in order to return the new lights, plus any future temptation to purchase LED lights will be met with skepticism.

It did give me an excuse to play around with the shutter speed setting on my camera that I've never had a reason to learn how to use before. The bottom shot was the longest exposure. It's not as obvious as seeing it in person, but you can tell that the mini incandescent lights are brighter than the C9 LED lights.

Pumpkin Walk 2008

This year's North Logan Pumpkin Walk was made all the better by excellent weather. Bob Marley made an appearance again this year, like he did last year. This year's theme was Calling All Heroes.

It is fitting that one of the first scenes included the all-time greatest hero, Batman:

The following is the left side of a scene honoring local hero Brent Carpenter. It's easy to notice the first funny thing about the picture, which is my son posing in the scene right behind the sign that says to stay out of the scenes. Did you notice the other thing that's out of place? The school bus is driving on the wrong side of the road:

Every child of the 80's hero, Mr. T, reminding us to stay in school:

This is supposed to be Mr. Beutler, on whose farm the first Pumpkin Walk took place. For some reason, he reminded me of Boss Godfrey in Cool Hand Luke:

They always have a scene near the end relating to something currently going on. A few years ago, there was a scene titled Martha Stewart Living in Jail. This year, it was a political scene, with the too old and too young candidates rocking back and forth:

There were also some neat paintings. Several caught my eye, but I particularly liked this one:

Let the wild rumpus start!

Camp is Open

Our Troop had planned on going to Camp Loll, right up by Yellowstone the last week of June into July, but while I was out of town the week before at a family reunion, I got a call to let me know that Loll was still under several feet of snow. We had to either switch to a different week or go to Camp New Fork instead. After my Assistant Scoutmaster called around to all the boys, we figured that no matter when we go, someone can't make it, so we might as well go the week we had originally planned.

I had wanted to go to Loll or New Fork, since I hadn't been to those camps before and had heard they were nice. Both camps are in Wyoming, a few hours apart. But I was scared of New Fork.

The problem was that New Fork runs an open program. That is, instead of signing up for classes that you attend at a certain time, you don't really sign up for most things. There were still a few classes that they taught at certain days and times, but most merit badges and activities are just whenever you want to do them. As a Scoutmaster that wanted to relax at camp while the boys head off to their classes, this scared me. As a constructivist and a firm believer that the boys need to run their own program and learn to be leaders through a combination of their own successes and failures, this should have been the ultimate camp. But I was scared nonetheless, which was why we picked Loll. I picked Loll.

Well, I have to say that it worked out rather well. I would even go so far as to say New Fork was one of my favorite camps. I imagine there would be some groups of Scouts for whom New Fork would not have ideal. We had it good, since we had all first year campers who worked on all the same merit badges, so my ASM and I went around with them to all their classes. If they'd all been at different classes they might have had a harder time staying on task without our gentle reminders. It also helped that the dad of one of the boys and the former Scoutmaster who was up the first couple days with us told the boys he'd take anyone to dinner if they earned 7 merit badges. So they were motivated by a reward and were lacking the influence of older boys who might have taught them some of bad habits that are sometimes learned at camp, like skipping classes.

We pretty much did all of the canoeing merit badge by ourselves the first day, with just a few things that I didn't know so we had to follow up with the waterfront staff later. We also worked on a couple other merit badges in camp ourselves. For the ones they worked on with the camp staff, they just pretty much showed up and worked on things and signed off each requirement for the merit badges as they completed them with what I'd call a junior counselor. When all the requirements were completed for a given award, they'd go to the adult over that area, who would then sign off the whole thing after doing a quick review of what they had already passed off.

Normal merit badge classes at other camps go the whole week or sometimes half the week, and if you attend every day (even if you're not paying attention), you earn it. The problem with that is if you already have done much of it or are quick at completing things, you still have to wait the whole week. With the open system, if you finish something in one day, you can start something else without missing out on what they did the first day in the other class.

Part of the benefit was kind of a psychological thing. At regular camps, usually kids will sign up for 3 or 4 classes and attend those classes in the morning each day. Then they will have free time for a few hours in the afternoon. There are merit badges that can be earned in free time, and some kids take advantage of those to earn several more on top of the classes they signed up for. However, most kids want to play during free time. It's free time. Come on, we should play, go swimming, take the boats out, carve spears, burn stuff, etc. The difference with the open system is that there is no separate class time and free time, just program time. So not having a designated free time (even though it was really all like a regular camp's free time), there was less feeling of entitlement to a break, since it was all program time.

There were a few things I didn't like, such as the junior staff not being empowered to do anything out of the ordinary - almost every question or request I had was answered with a referral to the area director. Also, there were several merit badges that they didn't have all the materials needed to complete it at camp, so the kids had to take a partial home to finish up. I should also mention the freezing cold water, but there's not much they can do about that one.

As we talked about where the boys want to go next year, they all wanted to come back, since none of them wants to have to sit through a boring class. So they worked harder than they would have sitting through boring classes and enjoyed doing it. I like trying new things, so I may pick Loll again next year, but it really is the boys' program, so if they can put together a cohesive argument, it may be New Fork again.

Our troop, the troop from Salt Lake we shared our campsite with, and our troop friend.

A Call for Mashups

Greg called for some lighthearted and creative mashups to celebrate Wiley's 10th birthday. Here's to 10 more years!


Original photo by jylcat
I should have mentioned, but didn't, that the picture in my last posting was dedicated to Erik.

Great Men

At the North Logan Pumpkin Walk, the theme this year was "Those Were the Days." Here's a picture of one of the scenes, with some great men in history: Martin Luther King Jr., George Washington, Albert Einstein, and ... Bob Marley.