Spot that Dick(head) - my dream app

Will Spotted Dick be the cyclist's answer to buzzword bingo?

As a regular and long-time  commuter and leisure cyclist, I have become a big fan of the CTC app fill that hole. 

and, as a regular and long time commuter and leisure cyclist I am regularly enraged by the inconsiderate behaviour of fellow road users - and very occasionally pleasantly surprised by acts of consideration and kindness (thank you to the driver who collected a dropped item and drove to return it to me just yesterday)

However… back to 'spot that dick'

"Spot that Dick' This is my dream app which will work in a manner very similar to fill that hole (with a nod of recognition to UK Snow).

When cyclists are subjected to inconsiderate (and very often potentially injurious) behaviour, what better way to deal with it than to record said activity, post an update on Facebook or twitter and log it on a web site with relevant data.

The complete specification is a work in progress, but I am more than happy to explain the rationale 

In the course of the average day, across the uk incidents occur which which will typically evoke the response - ' what a dick!' (well actually typically rather more offensive than that, but I had to be realistic when choosing a name for my dream app.

What sort of things am I talking about - I am talking about the behaviours of drivers as follows

• drivers consistently stopping taxis and busses in cycle advance areas at junctions
• drivers paring taxis and cars  in cycle lanes
• drivers parking their vehicles so they obstruct access/transitions from roads to cycle lanes
• drivers who steer their vehicles so close to cyclists that they clip them with their wing mirrors as they pass
• drivers who make cyclists and their bikes unstable because they drive their vehicles within a couple of feet of the cyclist at speed 
• drivers who decide to accelerate their vehicles past a cyclist and then immediately turn across their path
• drivers who purposefully use their vehicles as weapons to 'bump' cycles at junctions whist waiting for lights to turn from red to green
• drivers and occupants of vehicles who shout or scream on purpose to surprise and  'spook' cyclists at junctions
• occupants of vehicles who throw eggs at cyclists
• stop suddenly
• open doors

Is this some wild flight of imagination where I am just fantasising about these behaviours? no - they are all behaviours to which I have been subjected over the past couple of years.

 

What sort of people think that this type of behaviour is acceptable? in a (mildly abusive) word 'Dickheads'

 

So I decided that what better repost than to play 'spot that dick' the joy being that when a 'repeat offender' is identified, the cyclist can shout the triumphal claim 'spotted dick'

 

I can see a whole industry emerging,

• the app
• the logo (a steaming spotted dick)
• the cycling vest with slogan 'I am a dick spotter'
• the sticker to place of vehicles - announcing publicly that their driver/owner has been 'spotted' as a 'dick'

Now perhaps you ar thinking, at this point that I am one of those out of touch, ageing hippy cyclists, who doesn't understand the real world, and who does not understand exactly what threat cyclists and their offensive cycling behaviour poses to upstanding members of the public.

 

The thing is, I think there are very good reasons for encouraging cycling, and raising the general awareness of the public of what constitutes acceptable behaviour between cyclists, drivers and the walking public 

• encouraging and supporting cycling can form a key part of an integrated transport policy
• supporting individuals to use a bike in preference to a car for short journeys can ease congestion and have a positive environmental impact
• by reducing the total number of cars of the road around towns, increased cycling can make a city quieter, cleaner and more pleasant for the whole community
• quieter roads are more welcoming and less intimidating to the novice cyclist
• parents can realistically cycle their children to school (or encourage them to join a cycling 'school bus') when they are reassured of quiet roads and respectful considerate motorists
• car free streets and public spaces generate relaxed city centres where pedestrians and cyclists can mix amicably, with mutual respect
• regular cycling over short distances helps people become more active as an everyday part of life

Are there other reasons/arguments which can be put forward?

 

 CTC have their safety in numbers campaign http://www.ctc.org.uk/desktopdefault.aspx?tabid=5225

 

I had originally planned to write this post today - when I dreamed up the idea of my app earlier in the week. This morning, in response to the labour win of Southampton City Council, I posted a tweet

 

I was disappointed to receive one of the all too predictable responses - explaining to me how many dangerous cyclists an individual had seen that week, fast cycling on pavements, ignoring lights, lack of awareness and signals …"accidents waiting to happen"

 

Lets look at the evidence

 

 

opening doors

 

International Women's Day - and (pink) princesses and princes

"Pink Stinks" its not just a website, its also statement which describes a phenomenon which has been troubling me for many years; International Women's day seems to provide a suitable prompt to make me voice my concerns so that they can be discussed and considered.

Much as I despise the abuse of the English language, so too do I despise the 'pinkification' - or rather colour categorisation of young women.

I am saddened and distressed to see girls dressed in pink, but more so when there are few colours to choose from apart from pink. I am saddened and distressed to see girls choosing to dress in pink (and not being ironic about it), and I  am saddened and distressed  when I hear young girls being referred to as princesses - this linguistic categorisation is as offensive to my ears as the rather more easily recognised (yet still not sufficiently challenged) 'tradition' of female genital mutilation.

I find myself half remembering Orwell's essays on the English Language, and wondering at the paralleled unconsidered acts of disempowerment committed as part of our daily ritual. I cannot celebrate any (unconscious) act of cultural disempowerment.

I believe that each child who is made a princess (or prince) is being denied those fundamental human rights of passage which step by step help us make the change from child to self-sufficient adult.

I believe the prince or princess who is adored, protected and idolised is also systematically being denied the everyday lessons and interactions which enable us to function as compassionate, caring, and sentient human beings.

The systematic (unconscious) categorisation and declaration of young females as 'princesses' is in effect a systematic act of disempowerment. Boys too are made into princes, and those individuals also are systematically disempowered.

I am troubled. We do not enter this world fully formed, we learn bit by bit to interact, to crawl, to walk, to utter, to converse. We learn - if we are lucky, that we are equal, and that every one of us is entitled to equal respect… or am I misguided???

I don't know by what miracle I came to adulthood owning such audacious thoughts. Perhaps it was a lucky accident brought about because my parents were children of a wartime era, which had no option but recognise the equal value of each individual, irrespective of social class or gender. Perhaps is was because I had a mother raised in the school of hard knocks, for whom the idea of daughter as princess was as unlikely as the prospect of wealth and lifelong happiness.

Perhaps it was this foundation combined with an adolescent reading list which was accidentally  literate, intellectual and left wing.

Perhaps it was an inevitable impact of the disadvantage of my mother's upbringing from a perspective of poverty recast into the perspective of the feminists and socialists of the early nineteen seventies. Whatever it was, there is something in my very being which believes that we *are* all equal. And I am troubled. Because when I see little girls being dressed in pink, and little buys being dressed in blue, I cannot think that for one it is no different than having a star tattooed into their flesh. And when the dressing continues into a colour coding through childhood and adolescence, I am still more troubled.

Simone de Beavoir spoke eloquently of the 'other', but her story of the 'other' was one which engendered respect.

I am troubled, when I see reported a family who have 'lost their princess' or see a little girl scooped up and forgiven the ordinary manners and social norms of every day life with an en-compassing 'my princess' I am troubled. I fear for the future of that small girl, I fear for the future of our society. Perhaps I will be dismissed - with another cliché - a middle aged women, a granny, an ageing hippy, what do I know of the modern world, or the ways things are. It was ever thus.  Move over and make way for the next generation.  But I am troubled….

I look at the few young women who come into computer science and I wonder why. I look at the female participation in higher education and I am impressed. I look at female achievement in schools and I see that they out perform young men. And then I look at the average salary after graduation and I see that women earn less. I look at the number of women in technical roles and they are under-represented. I look for women in executive roles and they are under-represented. And I am troubled….

And I want to do more analysis. Perhaps those clever women who go to uni, who come into computer science, who get jobs in business make choices, perhaps  they opt out, perhaps they understand that there is something valuable in the work life balance… but then would you not expect some young men to come to similar conclusions...

I am troubled.

Science Fiction in Computer Science Education - or "Do you know what 42 is?"

another wip page - better to post than just save!

Becky Bates, Judy Goldsmith, Valerie Summit, Nanette Veilleux

interesting discussion on how SCiFi can contribute to CS Edu

Valerie Summit Emory University

- first year seminar class

 

Robots and Robotic - what can robots and robotics do?

Moxon's Master by Ambrose Bierce (1909) - in Can Such Things be - available for free download via amazon for Kindle, also available on Project Guttenberg

A logic named joe Leinster (1946)

 

Nanette Veilleux - Simmons College in Boston

We were out of our minds with joy David Marusek (1995)

read short stories/novel/articles and discuss

Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart

http://supersadtruelovestory.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'not your father's science fiction'

journal article - talks about social capital (relevant to ash)

ambient stereotype threat

 

Judy Goldsmith University of Kentucky

ai - read research papers do survey, implement, read scifi book or game review

can write short stories

minority report - emerging sci...

reviewing the reality of the technology

list of options given to student - about half the list is female authors

 

Rosalyn Berne University of Virginia

nano talk - conversation with scientists and engineers about ethics, meaning and belief in the development of nanotechnology

Humanities/ethics specialist working in university of virginia, engineering and applied science

example of minority report as an ethical novel - in a computer context

 

Diamond Age

 

Becky Bates - Minnesota State

quwetions which you can ask which arise from science fiction

what is sentience

are the repilcants sentient

do the human charachters

 

the computer wore tennis shoes - 1969  cf space odessy

who owns my info?

william gibson pattern recognition, war games neal stephenson, snow crash, super sad love story

intellectual property

ironman 2, counting heads

did hal commit murder? daniel dennet

identify types of agents and explain your decisions THX1138 - film show after star wars

 

if you want to encode emotions what would you do - star trek - data

Tron, MCP just a greedy growing algorithm

- opportunity for creativity in computer science - opening the mind for learning

 

http://bates.cs.mnsu.edu/scifi.html will have a lot of this information

questions and comments

this was a popular and engaged session which gendered debate, questions and suggestions

 

 

observation seems as if it could be a really good agent for crowd sourcing

OU got a scifi author to write censored - cory doctorow -

read the machine stops - E M Forster T100 my digital life <follow up>

Moon - as alternative to 2001

short stories out of I Robot

 

robopocolypse - what happens if every car in NYC becomes controlled by evil robot?

bicentennial man - disney version of IRobot

what do you think would happen if robots took over the world, no jobs etc etc

see conflict - the last story in IRobot

Iain M Banks books

Monkey Huts Kurt Vennegurt -

SIGCSE 2012 - another outing for the Web Science Curriculum

Web Science (and me) are going to SIGCSE 2012

There is quite a bit of Web Science in the conference this year - although it is hardly taking centre stage.

This blog will be refined over the next couple of days but here we are for starters...

ACM SIGCSE is the Special Interest Croup for Computer Sciecne Education - so as someone who is working in computer science, teaching and researching in computer science and web science, and particularly interested in computer science education and the web science curriculum, you can understand that I would be pitching up to take the pulse of the community.

On top of that, I am able to present the paper which I co-wrote with Michalis Vafopoulos - now of the university of central greece, titled

Web Science: expanding the notion of Computer Science - the paper is in ECS eprints http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22710/ and will also be in the ACM conference proceedings.

This paper develops further some of the ideas expressed in our highly commended paper presented at the 2011 Web Science Conference in Koblenz last year  Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum through Shared Educational Artefacts which is also available from ECS  sprints  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22141/ , direct from the Web Science Trust,  http://journal.webscience.org/439/ or via the ACM digital library.

Web Science Perspectives

Pre-conference

Open Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Computers and Society (SIGCAS)

This session is hosted by the current char and the immediate past chair of the ACM Computers and Society Special Interest Group. With the interdisciplinary nature of web science it is always interesting to see how different people are talking about changes. I am hoping to have some time catching up with these folks

SIGCAS is the ACM Special Interest Group that addresses the social and ethical consequences of widespread computer usage. SIGCAS' main goals are to raise awareness about the impact that technology has on society, and to support and advance the efforts of those who are involved in this important work.

Our members are computer professionals from both industry and academia, as well as ethicists, psychologists, sociologists and others. We welcome students from a variety of disciplines. Our areas of involvement include computer ethics, universal access to computer technology, security, privacy, and reliability. We collaborate with other ACM bodies that are engaged in related work, such as USACM, SIGITE and SIGCSE.

Ben Schneiderman provides a testimonial for the group on its web site http://www.sigcas.org/ which is also testament in a way that Web Science definitely belongs in the SIGCAS community, since probably the first time that the ACM community go a formal heads up on the emerging importance of web science and its implications for the broader computer science community was in the paper in CACM which Ben published in 2007 titled Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science.

Main Program(me) - a timeline view

 

Thursday:

Plenary Session
Keynote Speaker: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. - I have a doctoral student (Jian Shi)  looking at students learning programming - so this is really relevant to his area of study

this presentation took the perspective of designing learning rather than delivering teaching, and there was a lot of emphasis on reframing the learning experience - for example flipping the classroom, and critique approaches.

some time was spent talking about team software engineering projects, and various items of advice on how to run sessions - allocating peer marks from a budget, advertising to get external clients - keeping team sizes at 3,4 and 5 with  preference for 4 team memnberts

recommended book to emerge Peopleware by Decosta - have put it on my Kindle Wishlist! should also put time to read on my wish list ;-)

 

Computer Science Curriculum 2013 – Reviewing the Strawman Report from the ACM/IEEE-CS Task Force

This is really relevant to the pitch we are making in our paper, so should be interesting.

http://cs2013.org/

presenters of a very useful (and well attended) session were Mehran Sahami (stanford) Steve Roach (U Texas at El Paso, Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas, San Pablo Catholic University, David Reed Creigton University

The Strawman report - http://ai.stanford.edu/users/sahami/CS2013/strawman-draft/cs2013-strawman.pdf

There was an introduction from Sahami, followed by a presentation of the Body of Knowledge by David Reed

The body of knowledge is chapter 5 in the Strawman report

The consultation on this has been widely representative of different sizes and types of institution, but entirely US centric.

this may not be true as far as the external reviewers were concerned.

main points which came up - revision of BOK, there is a move away from programming to principles to software development fundamentals which is independent of paradigm

seeks to broaden thinking away from equating programming fundamental with introductory programming courses

information assurance and security

parallel and districted computing

networking and comms - replaces net-centric

platform based development (elective only)

curriculum organisation

there tiered classification of BOK units

 

 

 

 

 

for each of the content areas, the topics are listed  and there is an expectation of certain learning outcomes classed under three broad categories

 

 

 

 

special note of interest - software developed by  Ernesto Cuadros-Vargas at San Pablo Catholic University for evaluating existing curricula against the recommended curricula

Friday

 

 

Saturday

 

General Perspectives

Other stuff of interest

Teaching Ethics in Computer Science: Active Learning - workshop

 

THINGS TO FOLLOW UP

Kent state uni are running a digital sciences interdisciplinary bachelors which may be of interest

refs

Shneiderman, B. 2007. Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science. Communications of the ACM, 50 (6), 25-27.

Vafopoulos, M. Web Science Subject Categorization (WSSC) Web Science Trust http://webscience.org/2010/wssc.html

Vafopoulos, M. May 16-18 2011. The Web Science Subject Categorization (WSSC). In Proceedings of the ACM WebSci '11, (Koblenz, Germany).

White, S., Croitoru, M., Bazan, S., Cerri, S., Davis, H. C., Jonquet, C., Prini, G., Scharffe, F., Staab, S., Tiropanis, T. and Vafopoulos, M. May 16-18 2011. Negotiating the Web Science Curriculum Development through Shared Educational Artefacts. In Proceedings of the ACM WebSci '11, (Koblenz, Germany).

White, S. and Vafopoulos, M.N. 2012. Web Science: expanding the notion of Computer Science. 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 28th February-3rd March 2012 (Rayleigh, NC, 2012).

 

How we apply sloppy thinking to other people

I am frequently disappointed to learn of ways which people get labelled. As a short, small, woman, who does social science in a computer science department I get to experience what I imaging are the consequences of such labelling.  Of course we can't disown our cultural heritage ( I would be a real 'girls blouse' if I did ;-) There are cultural traditions, sometimes assumptions, sometimes unwritten rules, other time written rules which categorise individuals by their outward appearances rather than the use of actual evidence or clear logical thinking.

Sloppy thinking leads to decisions like the (now overturned) thinking of the International Association of Federations' ruling that Paula Radcliffe's women's world marathon record could not stand because she was 'paced' by a MAN!

Having heard of female students who have been told by their male colleagues that girl's can't program, I thought this illustration from the fabulous xkcd was just the ticket

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/how_it_works.png

 

Young People and the Internet

I am highly sceptical of the so called phenomena of 'digital native'. I also think that pundits, commentators, academics and researchers should beware of generalising from the leisure habits of teenagers. For that reason, those who are about to engage in future gazing, and the debate about young people's use of the internet and new media might want to familiarise themselves with some existing investigations of web and internet use.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_problem_with_wikipedia.png

Take a look at the Pew Foundation:

The Pew foundation in the US funds a lot of research into (North American) young people's use of the internet and social media, mostly just usage figures. Worth browsing their archives e.g. http://web.pewinternet.org/~/media/Files/Reports/2010/PIP_Social_Media_and_Young_Adults_Report_Final_with_toplines.pdf

FutureLab has funded a few studies in the UK, and have a slightly more qualitative bias.

 

David Gauntlet published and researches some interesting stuff on identity and the Internet, see for example

Identity in Cyberspace

http://ccit205.wikispaces.com/Identity+In+Cyberspace

Danah Boyd:Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics

 

Computer Science Conferences and Deadlines

note for ref - review

January

• ITICSE deadline
• Australasian Computing Education Conference (Jan/Feb)
• FIE Abstract Deadline

 

February

March

• SIGCSE (US, Feb/Mar)

April

ICER deadline

May

June

• ITICSE (Europe)
• Koli Calling Deadline

July

August

• Australasian Computing Education Conference deadline

September

• SIGCSE Deadline
• ICER (date and location varies - May-Sept)

October

• FIE (North America - mostly US)

November

• Koli Calling (Finland)

December