There are two or three who come more than once a day.  These are the very bottom students in my course.  One of them is a repeater from last year.  They come with the most basic questions about things that I have showed them and explained in class and that they have practiced in labs.   It’s pretty damning when in Week 11 of their second programming course, when told that in order to insert a record into the database they need to call the Insert method (something which is itself so blindingly obvious they shouldn’t need to be told), they reply ‘How do I call a method?’.   How can you get past the stage 1 course without knowing how to call a method?

There are several others who insist on doing things differently to the way I taught them.  One of the requirements is for a persistent to-do list, that users can log back into and update at any time.  A student implemented this by storing all the information in a cookie and then asked me if it was acceptable.   Excluding issues of cookie size, I explained that it didn’t really meet the persistence requirement, as the user could only retrieve their items if they logged in from the same browser on the same computer and if they didn’t have a plug-in that deleted cookies on logout.   She got a bit huffy at that and made a big production of saying how she’d have to go and re-implement everything based on the lab ‘on top of all the work I’ve already done’.

I also have students who are trying to take the easy way out but in the process are making things more difficult for themselves.  I told them they should use strongly typed DataSets for their database connections.  You can generate all of the SQL queries you need to connect to the database very easily.  Basic select, insert, update an delete are created for you, and you can modify these for other scenarios either by direct editing or using a query builder.  Then, most binding can be done without procedural code.  Things like inserting, deleting in code only require two lines of code.    However, quite a few of these students seemed to think this was too much effort, and decided to try and find the code on the internet. As a result I have students coming to see me with three screenfuls of code that is trying to load data from a database and create a grid, and they tell me they’ve spent hours getting it to work and it just doesn’t.   I ask them why they didn’t do it the way I showed them, and usually do it in front of them in about two minutes.  They mutter something about thinking it would be easier their way. 

I console myself with the fact that the majority of the class have actually figured out how to do it properly with little interaction with me.  The lectures & labs gave them all the tools they needed – they just had to apply it to a different situation. Most of them seem to have done that very well.  It’s just because I’m constantly interacting with the C students that I start despairing about either my teaching ability or the quality of the students (depending on the mood I’m in).

The problems faced in developing countries are quite different from most of the western world.   More than half of the people born in the poorest countries will die before the age of 5.  The root cause of most of these deaths is poverty.  Most people do not even have clean water to drink or adequate shelter, never mind things like vaccinations, antibiotics and medical care.   Malnutrition is  a huge problem, with the WHO pinpointing it as the single gravest threat to public health.  Malnutrition is the biggest contributing factor to child mortality.

There are many charities working on various health problems faced in developing countries: providing measles vaccinations, malaria nets, cheap antibiotics and anti-retrovirals.  Other groups try to provide clean water and sewerage systems to try and reduce water-borne infectious diseases, or to provide medical clinics with trained doctors and nurses to try to improve public heath.  Other charities take an education approach, particularly health education.  With low literacy rates impeding the transmission of information, many segments of the population in developing countries don’t know basic useful information like mosquitoes cause malaria, or washing hands before handling food cuts down on food-borne illnesses, or that HIV is sexually transmitted.

But what if these groups succeed?  What if we vaccinate against all the infectious diseases, eliminate malaria, get HIV under control and reduce the incidence of water-borne diseases?  What if most of those children who currently die before the age of 5 survive until adulthood?   If malnutrition is currently such a big problem, how much worse will it get if we find solutions to all the other causes of death?  How will we feed everyone?

There is an oft-repeated statistic about how the world’s annual food production is sufficient to feed the entire world.  However, the world has not solved the systemic logistical problem of distributing that food so that everyone gets it.  If we solve (or even partially solve) the other health issues without making enough progress on the hunger front, things are just going to get worse rather than better.

Solving the hunger problem helps the other health issues as well, since malnutrition makes people more susceptible to diseases.  But there are two ways to solve the hunger problem. One is to improve the quantity/distribution of food.  The other is to reduce the number of people.

Now, I’m not talking about killing people, or even letting people die.  But what about preventing so many people being born in the first place.  For instance, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the average woman has more than 6 children, and 3 of them die before the age of five.   There is a 10% HIV rate in the Congo, with HIV now being one of the leading causes of death of people who reach adulthood.   I’m sure that at least some of the women, if they had the knowledge and access to them, would choose to use condoms both to prevent HIV infections and to prevent pregnancy.  If you can’t even feed the children you currently have, wouldn’t you choose to not get pregnant again, given that the chances are high that the result of the pregnancy will be that you have to watch your child die?

To follow this line of thought to its conclusion, the two best forms of charity we can give to developing countries are:

1. Supporting the distribution of condoms and education people about their use
2. Supporting the systematic improvement in food production and distribution (rather than one-off transfers of food aid)

Some charities operate locally, some nationally and some internationally.  The adage ‘charity begins at home’ would suggest starting with local charities.  But even the worst-off people in New Zealand have a standard of living that is astronomically higher than millions of people in third world countries.  The same amount of money could potentially make a much larger difference overseas.   

And then there is the question of what type of charity to give to.  Charities usually work in a small niche:

• Health:  breast cancer, child cancer, cancer, heart disease, asthma, haemophilia, MS, deafness, blindness, diabetes, AIDS,  Alzheimer’s, arthritis as well as various hospitals and hospices
• Victims of crime: Sexual Abuse Help, Rape Crisis, Victim Support
• Children: Kids First, Starship, Barnados, Make A Wish, Books in Homes, Plunket, La Leche League
• Old people: Grey Power, Age Concern, Meals on Wheels
• Animals: Anti-vivisection, SPCA, Project Jonah, and various specific charities devoted to helping particular endangered species
• Human rights: Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders, Human Rights Watch
• Social stuff: Rescue helicopter, St John Ambulance, Surf Lifesaving, Coastguard, Search & Rescue, Citizens Advice Bureau, Habitat for Humanity, Safer Streets, Youth Suicide prevention
• Poverty: World Vision, Unicef, Make Poverty History, TearFund, Christian Children’s Fund, Oxfam, Red Cross
• Environmental: Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd, WWF, Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society

While obviously all of these charities do good work and are important to the people they affect, there is clearly a big difference in the type of impact they can make.  $2000 given to the Make A Wish foundation can help a terminally ill child (who has had the best medical care available) go to Disneyland before they die.   It could provide a tenth of the cost of training a guide dog so a blind person can have independence and a higher quality of life.   But that same amount of money spent on vaccines, antibiotics, malaria nets or even food, could probably save the lives of multiple people.

The effectiveness of the charity should be a consideration.  Some charities spend most of the money they raise on administration and fundraising costs, with very little of the money actually being put to a useful purpose.  These costs are necessary to enable the charity to do anything, but ideally, I’d want most of the money to actually be used to do good.

My final consideration are the ‘side effects’ of the charity.  For instance, PETA funds the Animal Liberation Front, which is committed to using violence to advance the cause of animal liberation.  Greenpeace sometimes goes over the line with dangerous and violent tactics to stop whaling and logging operations.  And many charities provide services with religious overtones.  The help they give people comes with the attached string of having to convert to a different religion.  And even where that isn’t required, many are doing immense harm by spreading misinformation about HIV and condom use and by preventing access to any form of birth control.

How do you balance all these tensions?  Which charities do you support?

When an academic submits a conference paper, it is anonymized.  They don’t put their name on it, and they are supposed to remove anything that might identify them.  The programme chair (or track chair in a larger multi-track conference) sends out the papers to be reviewed.  The reviewers are recruited from anyone who has submitted a paper this year, was accepted last year, and any colleagues or students of the organizer.   Each paper is reviewed by three or more reviewers, who submit comments about the paper to go to the authors and make a recommendation about whether the paper should be accepted.   The programme chair then assesses all the reviews and decides who gets accepted and who doesn’t.  Regardless of whether they were accepted, the authors get to see what the reviewers wrote, but they never find out who their reviewers were.

For CHINZ 2009, we have now received all the reviews and are in the process of deciding who gets accepted and who doesn’t.  When there is unanimous agreement from the reviews to either accept or reject, the decision is easy.  The more difficult cases fall into two categories.  The first is when all of the reviewers rated a paper as fairly average.  Because the ratings are a fairly coarse scale, it’s hard to determine where to draw the line.   We can only accept a finite number of papers, and trying to find a clear separation between the ones we accept and the ones we reject is not always easy.

The other difficult cases are whether the reviewers wildly diverge.  For instance, two reviews say the paper is a ‘Clear accept’ while the third says it is a ‘Clear reject’ or vice versa.  In those cases, we have to look at the reviews and decide how much weight to accord each reviewer.  Sometimes a reviewer might not be very familiar with the topic and therefore have low confidence in their review and so you can put less emphasis on their recommendation.  And some people just seem to be either excessively harsh or excessively generous.  One person recommended every paper they reviewed as a ‘clear accept’, even when the other reviewers thought it was a load of rubbish.

It never really occurred to me that the people making these kind of margin calls were just academics like me.  I guess like many other things in life, I’ve always thought the people making the decisions were vastly more knowledgeable than myself.

Tonight’s class seems a huge step up from the previous level.  The tutor spoke in Spanish almost the entire time, and there were lots of things that other students seemed to know that I’d never come across before (like words for animals and fabrics).  However, I’m not too badly off – there were a few others there who seemed to know even less than I do.

Tonight was mostly about reviewing the basics – greetings, numbers and letters, introductions and basic personal information, the verb ‘to be’ and conjugations for a few of the most common regular and irregular verbs.  At one point, we were going around the class describing our personalities and one guy says ‘Soy caliente’.  Caliente means hot in Spanish.  He was trying to say he’s hot-headed and impulsive but we laughed a bit because we thought he was saying that he’s hot (as in attractive).  Turns out that if you use caliente in that context, it actually means ‘I’m horny’.  The tutor was too embarrassed to translate it out loud but he wrote some of the letters on the board until we got the idea.

Then he was talking about how someone would refer to themselves as being hot, as in attractive, and made me rate the guy as to how attractive he was, asking if he was a 60 or an 85 and saying he wouldn’t move on with the class until I’d given him a rating.   I said cien (100) and everyone laughed and the guy made a great show of thanking me.  When it came my turn, I described myself as optimistic, and everyone laughed when the tutor said that my rating the guy 100 was an example of that.

We have to do a regular writing exercise to practice our sentence composition skills.  Currently we only know how to speak in present tense, so we have to keep a diary describing our daily activities in present tense only.  Here’s my first week’s exercise (I have no guarantee that this is in any way correct):

Yo vivo en un apartamento en el centro.  Me levanto a las siete y media todos los días.  Mi trabajo es muy cerca de mi apartamento.  Por la mañana enseño en la universidad.  Hay ochenta y ocho estudiantes in mi clase.  Por la tarde trabajo en mi computadora.  Por la noche, mis amigos y yo bebemos tequila.

My intended translation is this:

I live in an apartment in the city centre.  I get up at 7:30 every day. My work is very close to my apartment.  In the morning I teach in the university.  There are 88 students in my class.  In the afternoon, I work at my computer.  In the evening, my friends and I drink tequila.

My love of tequila is a running joke in the Spanish class, and the tutor makes frequent reference to it.  Another student is travelling to South America to meet girls, and so the tutor often makes reference to him being sad because he’s single and mentioning him finding a girlfriend.

(And in light of yesterday’s post, if you’re wondering how I could possibly find time, it’s because I finished all my overdue marking about 9pm tonight and just couldn’t face doing any more coding stuff today.)

So far, it seems pretty good.  It’s picked up all my categories and tags from Wordpress, and even has a perfect preview with all of my blog styles.  It has spell-check just like in Word, and I can easily switch to HTML view if I want to do anything a bit unusual.  The HTML it generates looks very nice and clean – it’s definitely not the hideous mess that is WordHTML.

I inserted the image above in Live Writer. It gave me the options of showing a thumbnail and linking to the full version or just showing the image.  There were also a range of image effects available – hopefully it magically displays with a drop shadow.

Anyway, this is my first test post with Live Writer, but so far, I’m surprisingly impressed.  I’ll stick with it for a bit and see how it goes.

At the moment, I’m working between 12 and 16 hours a day. A fairly typical day has me arriving at work about 8:30am and getting get home around 10pm. Weekends I usually average about 6-8 hours a day. I haven’t been to the gym in months and I haven’t cooked a meal in months. It’s not a very healthy (or cheap) way to live.
We are currently in Week 9 of the semester and I have lectures prepared for tomorrow. Tomorrow when I’m not lecturing, I’ll prepare lectures for Wednesday and labs for Friday. On Thursday, I’ll prepare Friday’s lectures. On the weekend, I’ll make the two tests my students just sat and the assignment they handed in two weeks ago.
With a bit of luck, things will improve.
At any rate, I only have 3 and a half weeks left to survive this semester. And never again will I redesign two courses at once.

Well, here’s my list of excuses:

I’ve been redeveloping both of my courses this semester. My windows applications development course has changed from VB, Windows Forms 2.0 and ADO.NET 2.0 to C#, WPF and the entity framework. That’s a lot of new stuff for me to master. Also, my web applications development course has been upgraded to include more web design content and also to use the ASP.NET entity framework.

I’ve started writing not one, but two textbooks – one for each of the courses I teach. They’ve both got about 10 chapters each so far. I’ve been giving them out to the students as notes as I finish each chapter.

I’ve been helping to organize a conference, which turns out to me more work than I thought it was going to be.

I’ve been working on getting some conference papers submitted, and have more upcoming deadlines for that.

I’ve been invited onto the curriculum committee in my department, and we are reviewing and revising our entire curriculum, which is a lot of work

I’ve been taking introductory spanish classes.
I’ve been doing social stuff, like inviting people over and going to hens nights and weddings and suchlike.

And, saving the best for last, I submitted my thesis! I handed it in to the graduate center on Thursday morning. It has now been sent out to the (anonymous) examiners, and I’ll get called in for the oral examination in July. Until then, I don’t have to worry about it at all!

I’m sure I’ll find plenty of other things to procrastinate about now though, starting with the conference paper I have to submit in two weeks.

Next they advice the wannabe apologist never to agree to debate terms that leave the bible out of the discussion. They liken this to a soldier agreeing to fight without weapons or body armour, a tacit admission that in fact there is no evidence for creation to be found outside the bible.

The main body of the article details how creationists should argue with evolutionists by reinterpreting any facts in a way that is consistent with the bible, giving a few examples of how to do they. It laments the fact that some christians have been led away from young earth creationism by blindly accepting secular interpretations of evidence rather than reinterpreting everything in the light of the bible. “If only they would start with the presupposition that God’s Word is true, they would find that they could then correctly interpret the evidence of the present and show overwhelmingly that observational science repeatedly confirms such interpretations.”

They finish with a summary of the process of
“The next time evolutionists use what seem to be convincing facts for evolution, try to determine the presuppositions they have used to interpret these facts. Then, beginning with the big picture of history from the Bible, look at the same facts through these biblical glasses and interpret them differently. Next, using the real science of the present that an evolutionist also uses, see if that science, when properly understood, confirms (by being consistent with) the interpretation based on the Bible. You will find over and over again that the Bible is confirmed by real science.”

Or, put another way:
1. Evolutionists present some facts
2. Get the bible
3. Using the bible, reinterpret the facts in a way that is consistent with the bible
4. Show that the reinterpreted facts are consistent with the bible
5. Conclude that the bible is true

Nowhere did they actually provide any proof of creation whatsoever.

Here are my current system spec:

• Cheap mid-tower black case with blue LED case fan
• Pentium 4 CPU, 3.0Ghz with Zalman AlCu Blue LED flower CPU fan
• CoolerMaster Real Power 450W power supply (with blue LED)
• 1GB RAM
• 2x 160GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
• GeForce FX5200 GPU with 128MB
• Leadtek WinFast PVR2000 Tv Tuner Card
• CD Writer
• DVD Writer

It’s not bad for my normal everyday stuff (30+ browsing tabs, multiple msn windows, a couple of notepad instances, maybe a Word or Excel or MS Money or so), but sometimes has trouble playing higher quality videos and some games, and it takes ages to compile a Visual Studio application. Plus, it’s too noisy to sleep in the same room with it on.

I have upgraded my monitor to a Dell UltraSharp 22inch already, and have awesome Altec Lansing speakers and a Microsoft Natural Multimedia Keyboard, so basically all I need is a completely new box. The only thing in the new system that I would consider keeping is the power supply, DVD writer and perhaps the TV tuner card. Everything else needs an upgrade. However, I’m probably going to sell it, so it will be easier to leave it intact and buy an entirely new system.

My primary considerations are that I want a PC that is quiet and fast. Even though I upgraded my current CPU fan, power supply and case fan with quietness in mind, the cheap case with lack of soft hard drive mounting means that there is quite a bit of vibration noise. Now that I have the computer in my bedroom, quietness is a priority.

Obviously, price is also a factor. I was kinda hoping for around about $1200 or so, no more than that. However, my first wishlist was significantly higher than that…

Higher-spec system (with indicative pricing from PriceSpy):

• Antec P182 Quiet ATX Mid Tower Case, Black ($300)
• Zalman ZM500-HP, Ultra-Quiet, 500W ATX PSU, Active PFC, SLI Ready modular Power Supply ($140)
• Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0Ghz, 1333Mhz FSB, Socket 775 ($340)
• Asus P5Q SE/R Motherboard, Socket 775, 1600MHz FSB, 4xDIMM DDR2, PCIe-16, 3xPCI, 2xPCIe-1, 12xUSB2, Audio, ATA, RAID, ATX ($200)
• Gigabyte GV-NX96T512HP NVidia GeForce 9600GT Heat Pipe Turbo Force 512MB DDR3 PCI-E ($260)
• G.Skill 2×2GB DDR2-1066 8500 ($135)
• Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1500HLFS Hard Disk Drive, 150GB, 10000rpm, 16384KB Cache, SATA-2 ($335)
• Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EACS Hard Disk Drive, 1000GB, 7200rpm, 16384KB Cache, SATA-2 ($200)
• Asus DRW-20B1LT DVD Writer, DVD 16R/20W/8RW, CD 40R/48W/32RW, Internal, SATA, Black, Retail, LightScribe ($45)

Total cost: $1,955

Lower-spec system (with indicative pricing from PriceSpy):

• Antec SOLO Quiet ATX Mid Tower Case, Silver/Black ($160)
• Antec NeoPower 500, 500W ATX PSU, Active PFC, SLI Ready, Gun Metal Grey, Retail ($130)
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 3.0 GHz, Socket AM2, Retail pack with fan ($195)
• Gigabyte GA-MA770-DS3 Motherboard, Socket AM2+, 2000MHz FSB, 4xDIMM, DDR2, PCIe-16, 2xPCI, 4xPCIe-1, 10xUSB2 ($155)
• Galaxy GF9600GT Silent Heatpipe with XTREME Tuner Video Card, GeForce 9600 GT, 512MB, DDR3, PCIe-16, TV out, DVI, HDTV, SLI ready, Silent Heatpipe ($209)
• Corsair XMS2, TWIN2X4096-6400C5, 2×2GB, DDR2-800, PC2-6400, CL5, DIMM ($122)
• Western Digital VelociRaptor WD750HLFS Hard Disk Drive, 75GB, 10000rpm, 16384KB Cache, SATA-2 ($235)
• [No second hard drive - will keep my old 160GB for now and upgrade later]
• Asus DRW-20B1LT DVD Writer, DVD 16R/20W/8RW, CD 40R/48W/32RW, Internal, SATA, Black, Retail, LightScribe ($45)

Total Cost: $1,251

I know the 10,000rpm VelociRaptor drive is a bit pricey, but by all accounts, having a fast drive as a boot drive makes a huge difference. It doesn’t actually need to be big as it will just house the OS and apps, all data will be on a second drive, so my compromise is a smaller drive rather than switch to a cheaper 7,200rmp drive.

As an alternative to building my own, I can get a Dell Inspiron Desktop with the Intel E8400 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB Ram, 250GB HDD, DVD burner & ATI Radeon HD 4670 512MB GPU for about $1400. It comes with an unnecessary version of Vista, and I’d want to put a VelociRaptor drive in it for an extra $230.

Does anyone who knows something about this want to comment on these systems?  Are my specs OK?  Which things should I compromise on and which should I go with the higher spec? Is the Intel really $200 better than AMD? Should I bother building my own at all?