Identity theft on Facebook?

I’m a little surprised you don’t hear about this sort of thing happening more often: 

A Roncalli High School administrator is asking a judge to force the Internet site Facebook to identify the pranksters who hijacked his identity for a phony Webpage.

Tim Puntarelli, Roncalli [High School]’s dean of students, and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese is suing Facebook and the anonymous creators of the false Webpage the suit claims contained false, embarrassing, and defaming information about Puntarelli and Roncalli High School.

The page creators used the Facebook page to pose as Puntarelli and send emails to Roncalli students, according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Marion Superior Court.

Facebook officials removed the page when they were notified of the site on April 18, but refused to disclose the identity of the creators without a court order, according to the lawsuit.

Puntarelli and the Archdiocese are asking a judge to order Facebook to identify the creators of the page. The suit indicates they want the pranksters to pay triple the attorney fees and court costs.

I’m also somewhat surprised that Facebook is so reluctant to hand over the identity of the kids (presumably kids, at least) who set up this phony web page when they freely admit that the page is phony and the administrator’s identity was hijacked. Why should you need a court order for this? 

Tagged!

Dana Huff tagged me with a meme, and that’s a lot more fun than closing out a semester and prepping for finals, so I’ll play along. Here are the rules: 

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5-6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read the player’s blog.
4. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

What were you doing ten years ago?

I was closing out the first year of my first professor gig. It was probably the most tumultuous year of my life. I had moved to northern Indiana from Tennessee, where I had lived my whole life up to that point. I was in shock at the reality of teaching in a third-tier small college, having gone through 4-5 years of dreamy idealism about what being a professor was going to be like. I had more grading and prepping than I thought possible. Oh, and I was trying to get my dissertation published, while at the same time my knowledge of generalized homology theory was decaying exponentially from not having any time to keep up with it. 

What are five things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order)

1. Draft a proposal for a faculty meeting tomorrow. 
2. Grade a couple of differential equations homework sets. 
3. Grade a calculus assignment for one guy who had to turn it in late (for a legit excuse). 
4. Do my GTD weekly review, which I am usually doing this time of the week, but instead I am writing this blog post!
5. Start grading the test that my linear algebra class took on Monday. 

What are some snacks I enjoy?

• Cereal, right out of the box. No particular brand preference. 
• Baked Cheetos. My girls started liking these, and I’ve found myself scarfing down half a bag myself before I even knew what I was doing. 
• English muffins. There’s a honey-wheat variety they sell at the local Marsh that is almost like eating a dessert pastry. 

What would I do if I were a billionaire?   

• Pay off the rest of my family’s debts. We’ve been working on that a lot this year already. 
• Store away enough money for college and grad school for my two daughters. 
• Give about $10 million or so to endow my 4-year old’s Montessori preschool, which does an amazing job with the kids but is perpetually on the brink of bankruptcy. 
• Finish off the list of stuff we want to do to the house — finish the basement, put in new kitchen countertops, etc. 
• Store away enough money to take the family to China for 2-3 months once the girls are teenagers. 
• I’d seriously consider opening my own university.  It would be a Great Books school with an emphasis on math and science. $100 million or so would be way more than enough for a decent endowment.

What are three of my bad habits?   

• Burping out loud. (That’s not necessarily bad if you live by yourself, but if you have a 4- and 2-year old living with you who you want to have good habits…)
• Blogging or web surfing when there’s work to get done. (Oops.) 
• Talking to myself. 

What are five places where you have lived?   

1. White Bluff, TN. 
2. A cheap guest house in the ritzy Whitland Avenue neighborhood of Nashville, TN. I lived there in graduate school for five years. Lamar Alexander was my neighbor two doors up and Al Gore was just around the corner. 
3. Cookeville, TN 
4. Mishawaka, IN
5. Bargersville, IN

What are five jobs I have had?

1. Professor at a small liberal arts college. 
2. Adjunct professor at a large urban community college. 
3. Math tutor at a private educational service. 
4. Baker/jack-of-all-trades at a mom & pop donut shop. Still possibly my favorite job I’ve ever had. If could have earned more than $30K a year and gotten benefits there, I’d never have left. 
5. Librarian assistant at the Vanderbilt University Biomedical Library. I started out just as grunt labor, reshelving books and journals and changing paper in the copiers and so on; but eventually I worked the circulation desk and helped the reference librarians do technical search work. I’ve always thought that was a cool job, working in a high-powered specialized research library, and if I ever changed careers, that would be one I’d consider. 

Now it’s time to tag five people. Apologies if the following have already done this, but: 

• Scott Franklin at Natural Blogarithms. 
• Shelby Berg, a friend from my grad school days who co-writes a blog with her husband about their incredibly cute 1-year old son. 
• Julia at Intelligent Dissent, who is probably way too busy thinking about really cool and important ideas to do something so pedestrian as a meme, but I’m tagging her anyway. 
• Isabel at God Plays Dice. 
• Suzi at My Own Thoughts. 

 

 

 

Deconstructing dx

Asking the following question may make me less of a mathematician in some people’s eyes, and I’m fine with that, but: How do you explain the meaning of the differential dx inside an integral? And more importantly, how do you treat the dx in an integral so that, when you get to u-substitutions, all the substituting with du and dx and so on means more than just a mindless crunching of symbols? 

Here’s how Stewart’s Calculus does it: 

• In the section introducing the definite integral and its notation, it says: “The symbol dx has no official meaning by itself; is all one symbol.” (What kind of statement is that? If dx has “no official meaning”, then why is it there at all?) 
• In the section on Indefinite Integrals and the Net Change Theorem, there is a note — almost an afterthought — on units at the very end, where there is an implied connection between in the Riemann sum and dt in the integral, in the context of determining the units of an integral. But no explicit connection, such as “dx is the limit of as n increases without bound” or something like that. 
• Then we get to the section on u-substitution, which opens with considering the calculation of (labelled as (1) in the book). We get this, er, explanation: 

Suppose that we let u be the quantity under the root sign in (1),  . Then the differential of u is du = 2x dx. Notice that if the dx in the notation for an integral were to be interpreted as a differential, then the differential 2x dx would occur in  (1), and, so, formally, without justifying our calculation, we could write …

So, according to Stewart, dx has “no official meaning”. But if we were to interpret dx as a differential — he makes it sound like we have a choice! — then using purely formal calculations which we will not stoop to justify, we could write the du in terms of dx. That is, integrals contain these meaningless symbols which, although they have no meaning, we must give them some meaning — and in one particular way — or else we can’t solve the integral using these purely formal and highly subjunctive symbolic manipulations that end up getting the right answer. 

Er, right. 

To be fair, my usual way of handling things isn’t much better. I start by reminding students of the Leibniz notation for differentiation, i.e. the derivative of y with respect to x is dy/dx. Then I say that, although that notation is not really a fraction, it comes from a fraction — and that much is true, since dy/dx is the limit of as the interval length goes to 0 — and so we can treat it like a fraction in the sense that, say, if then and so, “multiplying by dx”, we get . But that’s not much less hand-wavy than Stewart. 

Can somebody offer up an explanation of the manipulation of dx that makes sense to a freshman, works, and has the added benefit of actually being true? 

Update on my “super powers”

So yes, I did actually go see a doctor this afternoon to see if my blurry-vision incident might be something serious. It wasn’t a TIA or a stroke, because apparently a TIA lasts for 30 minutes or so and includes all the symptoms of a stroke — slurred speech, immobility on one side of the body, and so on. This only lasted a few seconds and was just blurry vision. In fact nobody knows what might have caused that to happen; possibly a small blood clot or just a muscle spasm in my eye. 

But I just wanted everyone to know I did get it checked out. Especially virusdoc, whose comment got me to Google “TIA” which then put the fear of God into me and then got me to the ER — where I ended up in room 14, although I was really hoping for room 16 just to make the whole powers-of-2 thing complete. 

(Super-)Powers of 2

Driving in to work this morning, I suddenly felt my vision go blurry to the point where I literally couldn’t see anything. Fortunately, I was able to pull off the road into the parking lot of a small office building before causing an accident. After I stopped and waited for the blurriness to subside, the first thing I saw was the mailbox for the office building, which had a street number of: 2048. Rather than wonder what the crap was wrong with my eyesight, or frantically try to decide whether to go see a doctor on the spot, instead the first thing I thought was hey: That’s . 

Then, after making it to work with no more blurry vision attacks, I walked up to my office — the same office I have been entering and exiting since summer 2001 — and looked at the office number and saw it: room 128. Of course, I’ve never had a problem remembering my office number But for the first time in seven years, I noticed, hey: that’s . 

So, maybe the blurry vision attack was me suddenly gaining the superhero power of being able to recognize powers of 2 with lightning quickness. If so, I somehow don’t see the Justice League of America saving me a seat anytime soon. 

Actual research on tech literacy!

Finally, a professional sociologist has done some actual research on the concept of the digital native. Her view is a little more measured than others‘. From this interview: 

Q. Why do people think young people are so Web-wise?

A. I think the assumption is that if it was available from a young age for them, then they can use it better. Also, the people who tend to comment about technology use tend to be either academics or journalists or techies, and these three groups tend to understand some of these new developments better than the average person. Ask your average 18-year-old: Does he know what RSS means? And he won’t.

The importance of having empirical findings about digital literacy among young people — as opposed to anecdotes and assumptions that tend to affirm what we want to believe — is that the more we assume, the less we teach. As Prof. Hargittai puts it: 

Q. Are there implications for workplace readiness?

A. There are positive outcomes for those who know how to work and employ tech information, and those who lack information will confront a different situation. In terms of a link with demographic differences, those people who seem to be more savvy are the ones who tend to be in more-privileged positions. There will be an increase in social inequality if this divergence continues this way.

I’m not a fan of the concept of “privilege”, but it’s plain to see that some demographics have better access to technology than others. And it’s all fun to suppose that students these days are technologically literate and then craft way-cool tech-centered curricula around that assumption. But the problem is that the students who are not technologically savvy — whom Prof. Hargittai identifies as “Women, students of Hispanic origin, African-American students, and students whose parents have lower levels of education”, which is to say, an awfully big percentage of the people we teach — end up getting left behind while we have our fun. 

Friedman gets a pie in the face

Seems like it’s been ages since we’ve heard of crazed left-wing university students throwing pies at speakers, so I’m almost nostalgic about this:

Brown University is condemning the actions of two people — at least one of whom is a student — who threw a pie-like substance Tuesday night at Thomas Friedman, a columnist for The New York Times who was speaking on the campus. Friedman took a few minutes to clean himself up, but continued his talk. Michael Chapman, vice president for public affairs and university relations, issued a statement in which he said: “Freedom of speech is prized on a university campus. While Brown students are encouraged to express their opinions on any subject and in a variety of forums, the university does not tolerate such assaults against a speaker or disrupting the right of others to hear a speaker’s perspectives.” The statement said that one of those involved was apprehended and identified as a student. “The university will review this incident through its non-academic disciplinary system to determine the appropriate response.”

This is the same Thomas Friedman, by the way, who wrote The World is Flat, the seminal work for much of today’s edublogging. More: 

The Providence Journal reported that the incident involved paper plates with shamrock-colored whipped cream. After they were thrown at Friedman, one of those protesting threw in the air leaflets that criticized Friedman, saying: “Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face because of his sickeningly cheery applause for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet, for telling the world that the free market and techno fixes can save us from climate change. From carbon trading to biofuels, these distractions are dangerous in and of themselves, while encouraging inaction with respect to the true problems at hand.”

These morons have just enough intellect and courage to hit somebody in the face with a pie and then run away, trailing badly-written quasi-philosophical leaflets in their wake; but not enough to actually write real books and give public lectures about the issues. Here’s hoping Brown acts with some toughness on this. 

What are the “great books” of mathematics?

I was looking at the web sites of a few colleges the other day which use a “Great Books” curriculum. This is an approach to a core curriculum in which students work their way through a listing of the great books from the past, across a variety of disciplines. Here’s an example from Thomas Aquinas College, a highly-regarded Catholic liberal arts college in Santa Paula, California. St. John’s College is probably the best-known example; I remember getting a mailer from them when I was a senior in high school, and I was fascinated by the idea of attending a Great Books university at the time.  There are also a few public universities which offer a great books curriculum as an option within the larger curricular structure of the university, for example as part of an honors program. 

Apparently Mortimer Adler is credited with coining the concept of the Great Books, and he gives three criteria for a book to be a Great Book (taken from the Wikipedia article): 

• the book has contemporary significance; that is, it has relevance to the problems and issues of our times;
• the book is inexhaustible; it can be read again and again with benefit;
• the book is relevant to a large number of the great ideas and great issues that have occupied the minds of thinking individuals for the last 25 centuries.

I am fairly interested in this concept of the Great Books for the same reason I am interested in the concept of having no textbooks whatsoever, or free textbooks, or cheap textbooks from a better time — Great Books appear to provide an affordable, strongly intellectual alternative to overpriced, bloated modern textbooks which have an increasingly low signal-to-noise ratio in their contents. But one of the things I’ve seen lacking in a lot of the “Great Books” universities’ curricula is mathematical content. St. John’s College has students reading Euclid’s Elements as well as Descartes’ Geometry and Discourse on Method, Pascal’s Conic Sections, Newton’s Principia Mathematica (!), some philosophical essays by Leibniz (does that count as math?), Dedekind’s Essay on the Theory of Numbers, and several papers by Einstein in which students are required to work through the math. But St. John’s appears to be by a very great margin the most mathematically-inclined of the Great Books crowd; most such universities have students reading the Elements and that’s it.  

What do you think are the Great Books of mathematics? If you were to build a mathematics major around a Great Books framework, what would you include and at what level (freshman, etc.) would you have students encounter them? I think articles and monographs could be considered “great books” as well. 

Stupidest online poll of the week

From the Indianapolis Star online: 

It’s apropos of this story about how a court ruled that a teacher who allegedly slapped a student while trying to restore order in a gym class was protected from battery charges under the state’s corporal punishment laws. Saying that what the teacher did — and it’s not obvious that anybody got actually slapped in this incident — under duress is protected under law, and saying that teachers “should” slap students — as if it were a first line of defense — are, of course, very different things. But I guess the interns writing the poll don’t really grasp that.  (The headline at the link Sun-Times article is almost as badly off.) 

The scary thing is that the voting is currently 51%/49% in favor of slapping as a classroom management technique.  

What’s shakin’?

UPDATE and bumped: 20 minutes ago there was an aftershock from the quake this morning, magnitude 4.2 4.5. Here’s the USGS map from 10 minutes ago:

I didn’t feel the one from this morning, but I was (still am, for 15 minutes more) giving a test in a computer lab on the third floor of our library, when the floor started to undulate and the computer monitors started to sway back and forth. It lasted all of 4-5 seconds, but everybody definitely felt it. A few moments of near-panic as I contemplate what I ought to do when I’m on the third floor of an already-old building and the ground starts swaying under my feet!

I’ll keep updating if anything else happens.

——

Answer: Apparently most of southern Illinois and a good portion of central Indiana this morning from a 5.2 earthquake centered in Mount Carmel, Illinois. That’s about 100 miles from where I sit, and according to the CNN report the control tower at Indianapolis International Airport was evacuated for an hour after the quake. This happened at 5:30 AM, and I was in the shower and didn’t feel a thing. The first I heard of it, I was dropping my 4-year old off at preschool and her teacher asked me, “Did you feel it?” I replied, “Feel what?”

But apparently there was some minor damage in houses around here — dishes falling off the shelves and so forth — and when I get home I’m going to check the basement to make sure nothing fell down and that the foundation of the house is OK. Also, the epicenter of the quake is very close to where my mother-in-law lives, but I haven’t had time to check to see what might have happened out their way.

It’s easy to forget that there’s a major faultline that runs right up through the midwest until something like this happens.