The Rogue Scholar

Tech-Terrified Teachers

Marisa Kaplan writes a little about the subtle (and not so subtle) bouts of technophobia some teachers feel from time to time, and offers these five workarounds:

1. Remember, it’s not about you! Your discomfort with technology impacts your students’ futures. Teachers need to be preparing students for the world we live in today. So many jobs are dependent on a basic understanding of technology. Always ask yourself, “am I teaching something that is obsolete, or something that will help my students in the future that lies ahead?”
2. Don’t resist your tech guru teacher-friend: It is difficult to ask for help but partnering up with a tech guru teacher-friend can provide a support system that can help ease your transition from tech terrified to tech curious.
3. Realize it’s okay if you are not in control: In reflection, I realize that a major reason that I resisted tech for so long is because I feared what would happen if I was no longer in control…but it is okay if the tech malfunctions. In fact it can lead to some pretty teachable moments.
4. Let your students teach you something: Newsflash – if you think you are the omnipotent force in your classroom, think again! Kids know a lot these days and it can boost their confidence and engagement if you call on students for support.
5. If you find a product you like, ask someone from the company to come visit – Tech startups want you to use their products so most likely if you send an email, they will answer any questions you have or maybe even come visit your school to teach you how to use their product.

It's good advice, and it's worth it to read the entire article.

Enjoy!

University of Minnesota Pays Professors to Use Open-Source Textbooks

The University of Minnesota wants to save money for their students by making open-source textbooks available to the student body by way of its Open Access textbook catalog. As textbooks are obscenely overpriced already, this is a good thing.

The university however, is also willing to pay its faculty to "review and adopt" the new open access books:

“High textbook costs are one of the many factors that are contributing to the increasing financial burden that students are facing,” said Lizzy Shay, U of M undergraduate student body president. “Affordable open textbooks would go a long way in relieving that burden.”

The catalog currently lists 84 open textbooks that are in use in classrooms across the country. Over the next year, CEHD will work with U of M faculty to review the texts in this collection, making it easier for users to judge textbook quality. CEHD will support faculty who choose to review and adopt open textbooks with $500-$1,000 stipends.

I share a problem with all academic librarians, namely, the promise of new technology if only the faculty would embrace it. Not all faculty do for a number of reasons. The younger ones tend to be adjuncts and even if they like the new tech, don't have the pull with the Deans or full-time faculty to advocate for it. The faculty are frequently nervous about any change to the status quo, and many don't even understand how the library works or why we develop technology policies. And the Deans are administrators more often than not. A given technology's promise to them is how much money it can bring into the corporate coffers and how quickly. Obviously, free on-line textbooks don't measure up to that ideal, at least, not yet.

So, in that context, I can see why providing a stipend for the review and use of such things would be warranted. Nothing opens the eyes and loosens the tongue like silver in one's palm. At the same time, I would expect that once the University of Minnesota completes its catalog, it will stop paying out to promote its electronic wares. What happens then?

We shall see.

 

Google Docs Research Tool Needs Work

Amanda French wrote a guest post for the Prof. Hacker column in the Chronicle of Higher Education describing her experience with Google Doc's new research tool, subtly and accurately called Research Tool.

I'm not going to rehash what she wrote as the whole thing is very much worth reading in its entirety, but one bit about the tool's apparently schizophrenic treatment of citations caught my eye:

Anything that encourages people to cite their sources properly is inarguably a Good Thing, in my professorial opinion, so I’m a fan of this feature and plan to make sure that all my students know about it. Users of Zotero or other bibliographic software (and every single student or faculty member who writes research papers should be a user of some kind of bibliographic software) will know the insane glee that comes from being able to insert a properly formatted citation with just a click or two instead of having to type the whole thing in, so I do think that having this feature in Google Docs will increase students’ willingness to cite.

However, there are a few equally inarguable limitations on this Good Thing. By far the most worrying such limitation is that what Google calls “Research” is what we professors call “a Google search.” Not the same thing, from our point of view. The search will bring up maps and images, but, if you’ll pardon my French, big freaking deal: many of the results are not good sources for “research” at all. I wish very much that Google had seen fit to allow users to choose to confine their search to Google Scholar and/or Google Books results — so much do I wish it that I asked for this feature on the Google Docs forums. The only ways to “narrow your search” currently available are to “Everything,” “Images,” and “Quotes,” none of which are very useful for academic purposes.

I like citations; we all do. Hell, librarians, writers, and researches need their citations if they expect to be taken seriously. Including a citation feature is therefore (as she notes) A Very Big Deal. It's rather less of one when those citations can't conform to any recognizable style. You'd do just as well to type the whole thing out, a slog that this feature is clearly meant to alleviate the need for. 

I think French's criticism of Google's non-differentiation between scholarly (or at least academic) sources in Google Books and Google Scholar and everything else is a good one. If Google's wizards can't figure out that academics make use of their product and point millions of students all over the world to it, then, sorry, Google, but what is the point of us using you? None.

So, Google's Research Tool has promise, but like all works in progress needs  . . . work.

 

"A Novel About an Electronic Book in an Electronic Format That Pretends to be a Paperback"

Ben Cameron at the Huffington Post has noted an essential difference between print volumes and their electronic versions: rules of process, i.e., how they get used by readers.

In his introduction to the 2009 edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Doctor Who writer Russell T Davies praises the tattered old paperback copy of Douglas Adams' sci-fi classic that he carried around in his back pocket in his school days. I had one too and I loved it just as much.

Davies ends his introduction with, "Maybe ebooks are going to take over one day, but not until those wizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or two and allow the plastic tablet to fall open at a favourite page."

In a word, it's the experience incurred in one's use of a thing that defines its substance.  And it gets worse:

There are two ironies at work here. First, I read that introduction on the ebook version on my Kindle, which the publisher digitised straight from the print version of the book without a second thought. And second, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the book that Adams' book is about, is an ebook. Here is how Adams describes The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "...a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press-buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million 'pages' could be summoned at a moment's notice."

He has just described my Kindle.

Ironies aside, Cameron actually does an enormous service in thinking about his paperback turned e-book this way. He informs us that E-Books have rules of engagement that print volumes don't.

The rule of process for a paperback are easy:

Step 1: Pick up.

Step 2: Open.

Step 3: Read.

Step 4: Close when finished (Optional).

Step 5: Place in a secure location (Recommended).

The rules of process for an E-Book are rather more complicated:

At the moment publishers are quickly churning out ebook versions of the mainstays of their print backlists. But more often than not they are doing so without giving a moment's thought to making even the simplest of changes to the printed book. So we end up with an introduction to an ebook that sings the praises of paperbacks or ebook cover images taken straight from printed books that boast of illustrations - when the illustrations have been stripped from the ebook editions.

Rule 1: the contents do not always reflect reality.

That's a cheap shot--there are plenty of print volumes that don't reflect reality due to their age, the limitations of the author, or the fact that they're not meant to inform as much as propogandize--but it bears thinking about. A more precise statement would be that the contents of an E-Book does not always reflect the medium. Part of that is human nature. It's just plain impossible to keep with with every new thing that presents itself and very little of the new apps, coding languages, or gadgets take advantage of how people think or behave. We adopt to the tech, not the other way around. Meanwhile a publisher needs to make money now, not lay the groundwork for what will be happening in five or ten (or fifteen or twenty) years. Shortcuts are taken, expediency wins over c0ntext. That thirty year old introduction is taken verbatim from the print edition and slapped into the electronic version. Stuff happens.

Rule 2: E-Books are naturally fragile.

I think that Russell T. Davies said this better in the above quote than I could. Print books don't break when you drop them, short out when you spill coffee on  them, or disappear into the ether when a publisher stops producton. E-Books (and their readers) are known to do all that. Show me a Kindle that has survived as well as the Edwin Smith Papyrus and I'll rethink my position.

Rule 3: E-Books are often published as afterthoughts.

This is starting to change as publishers and editors who are used to working primarily with electronic editions come into their own. That said, when the big five publishers and their subsidiaries try to do this, the results are rather like what Cameron describes in the case of Douglas Adams: a direct port into a what is essentiqally a giant PDF. At the moment, small press publishers and writers who write for niche markets have a real advantage over the giant. Want the really cool electronic titles? Keep an eye on that space.

Cameron concludes by noting what should be obvious to us to live and breathe among these gadgets:

Certainly Douglas Adams was a pioneer of computerised content including game versions of THG2TG, so my guess is that he would have been pushing forward the boundaries of book technology - a fact that should play to his publishers' strengths. By and large publishers are creative people. Creativity is what they do well and enjoy. And with creative publishers technology can be used in ways that expand traditionally printed books. The app version of Stephen Fry's Chronicles, My Fry, was a great example of this. Recognising that it was a book for dipping in and out of, Penguin Books created an electronic version that emphasised the index so that readers could move about the book in a non-linear, topic based way.

So, with all that technology has to offer now, why am I reading a science-fiction novel about an electronic book in an electronic format that pretends to be a paperback?

Solid question.

 

SOPA & PIPA: The Basics

SOPA/PIPA: What You Need to Know, from Political Hotsheet.

That is all.

Rich White Guy To Poor Black Kid: Get Technical

Gene Marks, a contributor to Forbes Magazine, (herein known by the phrase Rich White Guy, or RWG) offered some advice to an archtypical Poor Black Kid (PBK) last week regarding how to educate himself out of the ghetto by means of modern technology.  I'm not going to discuss his qualifications for giving advice of this type (none), nor the possibility that he has no idea what he's talking about (significant), nor the barely concealed privilege and racism of his remarks. That's been done very well elsewhere.

I want to talk about his advice to "get technical."

If I was a poor black kid I would get technical.  I would learn software.  I would learn how to write code.  I would seek out courses in my high school that teaches these skills or figure out where to learn more online.  I would study on my own.  I would make sure my writing and communication skills stay polished.

Okay. That's a pretty general account of technical work. I'm not sure what "learning software" means: Learning to use Office 2010 well? Learning to write HTML? XML? Perl? Javascript? C++?  All have different applications, and learning to code competently in one won't necessarily help you with the others. High school (and college) classes in these subjects are limited by the quality of the slowest student--I found that out for myself studying XML at Queens College while pursuing my MLS. I got the concepts and the structure, but many of my classmates didn't. We stopped well short of where I'd hoped we'd be and I finished the studying on my own outside of class.

So, Poor Black Kid (PBK) will need textbooks and a lot of time to sit down in a quiet place where he won't be interrupted to study. That such places in urban settings can be few and far between doesn't seem to have occurred to RWG. The same goes for PBK's polishing his written communication skills. Want to learn to write well? Read several hundred books, several thousand articles, and write a thousand words or more a day for a year. That's how it's done. Time, space, and solitude are what's needed. Public libraries would be good spaces to do this in if they weren't being de-funded left and right.

Part the second:

And I would use the technology available to me as a student.  I know a few school teachers and they tell me that many inner city parents usually have or can afford cheap computers and internet service nowadays.  That because (and sadly) it’s oftentimes a necessary thing to keep their kids safe at home than on the streets.  And libraries and schools have computers available too.  Computers can be purchased cheaply at outlets like TigerDirect and Dell’s Outlet.  Professional organizations like accountants and architects often offer used computers from their members, sometimes at no cost at all.

At first glance this is not bad advice, but again, it misses the point. Three things stand out to me as a guy who sold computers and the components that went into them for years. First, schools and libraries (not to mention school libraries) in neighborhoods where Poor Black Kids go to school are likely to be poorly funded, staffed and maintained. The value of the equipment they have is directly proportional to the amount of money spent, which, as I said, is not likely to be high. So the equipment this kid is meant to educate himself on is likely to be old and semi-functional, or non-functional at least part of the time.

Second, what he calls "cheap" computers generally don't last more than a couple of years. That's why they are cheap. If you spent several thousand dollars at Dell to get the good stuff, then pay for a top-tier service contract on top of that, you get real customer service. If you didn't, you get sent to Dell Hell where you get to spend a fortune in phone charges listening to some guy with an ESL accent insist that you should turn your PC off and then on again. Third, yes, professional organizations often offer perks to their members but Poor Black Kid is obviously not a member of these fraternities yet, so this tidbit falls a bit flat.

If I was a poor black kid I’d use the free technology available to help me study.  I’d become expert at Google Scholar.   I’d visit study sites like SparkNotes and CliffsNotes to help me understand books.  I’d watch relevant teachings on Academic Earth, TED and the Khan Academy.  (I say relevant because some of these lectures may not be related to my work or too advanced for my age. But there are plenty of videos on these sites that are suitable to my studies and would help me stand out.)  I would also, when possible, get my books for free at Project Gutenberg and learn how to do research at the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia to help me with my studies.

Now we get serious. It's time for Tech Talk.

"Free" is a relative term. Air and water are free until you need someone (say, the government) to guarantee it's safe to breathe and drink, or unless you want to take it with you in a big tank. That takes money. Technology in all its myriad forms, applications, and performances, takes real money to make happen. What RWG doesn't seem to get is this: what he calls free technology is only available because thousands of people who produce it worked long hours with no pay then made a conscious choice to give it away it for free. Textbooks--the mainstay of higher education in the industrialized world--are never free, and they are what the education industry thrives on: text book sales. (Forbes, being a publisher of some note, surely understands this.)

So. Does PBK have to pay for the software? No. But will he have to scrape up $80 for a 6-inch Kindle or more for a Netbook or laptop to make use of this online material? You bet your booty.

Anyway, here's an experiment for you: send your application to harvard with the words "Self educated by means of free technology" scrawled on it instead of a high school transcript, and then call them a week later and see how you did. If you're accepted, I'll eat a bug.

 I don't have a problem with Google Scholar per se (I'm unsure if it will ever live up to the hype but that's another post), but in my experience both as a teacher and student, services like Spark Notes and Cliff Notes do more to wreck kids' ability to read a book than anything else. You won't understand the book any better, you just get exposed to a slim cross-section of it. That's not reading. That's cramming for an exam. Not a habit PBK should be cultivating this early in his academic career. Sources like TED and KhanAcademy are worthwhile, or one could be really ambitious and take a look at MIT's Open Courseware website.

I love Project Gutenberg. How can you not like a source of 36,000 free ebooks for download to a PC or portable device? The books are high-quality items all produced by bona fide publishers, and are made available through the effort of thousands of volunteers. The trouble is that these books are not generally textbooks. Classics, yes, and lots of them (here's the top 100 titles by download), but Business, Science, and Math classes don't use the classics. They use textbooks. Those are expensive and not generally available on line except in the most expensive universities.

The CIA World Fact Book, also isn't a bad resource. It's not the most easily accessible almanac in the world but, yes, it is complete, as long as you remember that its data are limited to descriptions of countries. Wikipedia, on the other hand is not a primary resource. For anything. Ever. Why? It's written and edited by absolutely everyone regardless of background, education, or research. Some articles are clearly better (or worse) than others, but using Wikipedia as a primary source is a sure ticket to an F from any competent teacher.

That said, one thing Wikipedia can be extremely useful for is to show you where else to look for source material. Scan the article, then go to the reference links. Those will lead you to better sources.

I would use homework tools like Backpack, and Diigo to help me store and share my work with other classmates.  I would use Skype to study with other students who also want to do well in my school.  I would take advantage of study websites like Evernote, Study Rails, Flashcard Machine, Quizlet, and free online calculators.

I won't argue with any of this on a point-for-point basis, as they are good suggestions for people who make continual and substantive use of online files. But--and you knew there'd be a but--Diigo,  Backpack, Evernote and all those other good suggestions require all participants to have a PC of his or her own. In poor families, you're more likely to see one device shared among several people, or none at all. Again, Poor Black Kid is more likely to be relying on crappy equipment and spotty online access than not. These well-meant ideas don't work so well under those conditions.

I don't know what exactly our Rich White Guy thought he was thinking when he wrote this. None of it this is bad advice as far as it goes. But it seems inappropriate to me. It assumes that Poor Black Kids go to schools that are equally well funded and equipped as Rich White Kids' schools. That is not the case. It hasn't been the case for decades. Up to date textbooks, equipment, competent and well-paid teachers, and the time and opportunity to study are what make mediocre students into good ones and good students into great ones.

So . . . yes. Medicore White Guy is technically correct even as he misses (or obfuscates) the larger point: Poor Black Kid can use technology to help educate himself out of the inner city. Possibly even into a job in Big White Sky Building. But the tech he probably has access to will break often, take a lot longer to work, and the experience will suck.

But hey, at least it's possible, right?

If We Maintain/Build/Rennovate It, They Will Come

  . . . and they will bring toys!

 Maybe I'm being unfair here by calling Kindles, iPads, and Nooks "toys." Or maybe not. I own an iPad and while I absolutely love it, I had to talk one of our students out of using her new iPad to write her thesis. And maybe that was presumptive. After all, who am I to tell anyone how to write anything, or which equipment they should use to do so?

I told her what I knew: it was an amazing device to scan web pages, e-books, PDFs and such, but in terms of writing what is expected to be a 70+ page dissertation, I prefer t0 use a laptop or desktop if only because the formatting features of Office are more complete than those found in Pages.

It doesn't matter. Writers write and will always discover the best tools for them after a bit of searching and experimentation (I did.) Readers will do the same, and often you'll find that writers and readers are the same people. They all know what they want to do, the problem lies in finding the right tools to maximize productive activity. E-books readers are becoming essential tools for readers and writers alike.

More frequently, the question that we hear is not "Should I buy a thing to read e-books?" but "Which thing should I buy?" And libraries both public and academic are on board--the question we ask at MCNY is often not "Should we make e-books available to our students?" but "How do we make more e-books available for them?" It's a very Big Deal.

Spending money on materials, staff and access is how you make a top-notch library, folks. I doubt anyone reading this is unaware of this position. So it should come as no surprise whatsoever when the headlines announce that "New, Rennovated SF Libraries Are Thriving":

In the past six years, nearly two dozen new and renovated branch libraries throughout the city have opened their doors. With three more to go, the largest capital improvement project in the library's history is coming to an end. And a happy ending seems sure: Checked-out materials and visits, already in the millions, are on the rise.

Elsewhere, shrinking budgets mean libraries are closing the books on better days. All 18 of San Jose's branches are in danger of closing. Oakland considered shuttering 14 libraries this summer. Santa Clara County now offers library cards to nonresidents - for $80.

But San Francisco's libraries are doing well for a number of reasons, including their widespread presence in community life and a fundraising arm that can both generate money and lobby for the city agency.

"We like to think of it as a rebirth or a renaissance," said City Librarian Luis Herrera.

Regardless of what supposedly fiscally-minded people tell you, the decision to close a library is never inevitable when budgetary woes arise:

The recession has hit libraries hard nationwide, said Marcia Warner, president of the Public Library Association. While voters generally back library bond measures, shrinking budgets make libraries "easy targets," she said.

"If I have to choose between taking police and fire down or taking libraries down, on the surface of it, it seems like, 'Oh, no big deal, we have to have these safety things,' " Warner said. "But then you begin to realize that libraries are at the core of a city's or a community's education."

Education is a life-long process, folks. We all learn, we all benefit, we all need libraries.

America Chooses the Lesser Path

Shuttle Mission STS-135 is officially over. Space Shuttle Atlantis is home. She and her sisters are now grounded. We are done.

I've read a few counter-arguments to that position, but they all fall short of convincing me this is not the end. NASA isn't dead, they say . . . they've just shut down what is arguably the most successful manned space program in history. Humans will still travel to Mars and beyond . . . in 20 or 30 years. Cargo will still be lifted into orbit . . . by private corporations and other nations. Fine. That's not the point.

 NASA TV is now broadcasting landing replays and will most likely have extensive shuttle history coverage for today and the next few days, interspersed with astronaut and flight crew interviews and press conferences, if you're interested or if you want to catch up on anything you may have missed. That's not the point, either, although it is fascinating stuff.

The point is this: for the first time in my life I feel like a member of a dying civilization. For the first time I feel as if the American people have actually chosen to melt down the keys to the universe that they spent half a century collecting. As if we decided that it was just too much trouble to keep going. As if we have chosen the lesser path.

I'm not going to even dwell on the obvious practical shortcomings on this decision. NASA no longer has room to employ over 8,000 people, and they're going to get their pink slips and hearty handshakes and go off to do . . . something productive, I hope. These are 8,000 of the most dedicated, highly trained, talented individuals our society has produced. Letting them go is wrong. It's worse than wrong, it's cutting our entire society's nose off to spite its face. Those people are some of the best trained in the physical sciences in the world. If nothing else they need to be sent into other jobs where they can employ their engineering, design, organization, and technical acumen.

I'm not even going to mention the five hundred or so individuals who have bled, sweat, and died to earn the title astronaut. I don't think I have to. When I was in grade school, if you didn't want to grow up to be an astronaut at some point, there was something wrong with you. Granted, the reality was quite different--astronauts were chosen to be human Guinea pigs, TV celebrities and PR tokens as much as crew*--but we were kids, and we all dreamed of going into space on holiday some day, even as we knew that other future-dreams like teleportation and flying cars were just silly.

We have chosen ignorance over knowledge, consumption over production, banality over creativity. Worse, we have chosen to integrate the lesson that anything we aren't already doing cannot be done, when even a cursory examination of our history tells us exactly the opposite.

I don't know what happens after this. I have a vague sense that someone else will pick up where we chose to leave off, and I wish whomever does so all the luck in the universe. And why not? It will be theirs for the taking.

 

*Susan Faludi documents these aspects of the Gemini and Apollo programs in her book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man.

Some Free Equipment Advice

Nobody likes Mondays. Identified by the International Standards organization as the first day of the work week, named for the influence of the Moon on our body's chemistry and mood, Monday is the least enjoyable day of the week, right up to the fact that you're statistically more likely to drop dead or try to kill yourself on a Monday than any of the other six days of the week. So Mondays already get a bad rap.

Some days, though, I wonder if the bad news vibe of the day isn't genuinely warranted. I'll explain more fully: today, all of the printing equipment broke down. All of it. The three printers refused to print, the two copiers were in slightly differing states of disrepair, and Monday is our most busy, most crowded day in the library. Students complain when they don't have the tools they need to finish their assignments, and rightly so. Some of our students are in the habit of complaining about relatively minor details. Not today. Today they all had every right to scream.

I'm not going to dwell on this but I do have one bit of advice for anyone who happens to be in a position to affect the development of their own libraries. Here it is: buy the best equipment you can afford.

See? Simple. At least, it sounds simple. It should be simple. Buy the best equipment you can afford. Quality is expensive. I get that. But failure is more expensive in the long term.

Yes, budgets are tight. But come on, how difficult, how eminently reasonable is it to pick up the phone and call a vendor with a suitable reputation for excellence (I'm thinking of Hewlett-Packard here but substitute your preference) and say something to a sales rep on the order of, "Look, here's the deal. I'm buying a new printer for my library. We go through two and a half million sheets of printed paper a year . . . yes . . . I know it's ridiculous, but bear with me . . . and we have about a thousand students, almost all of whom will spend at least some time in the library. They're going to bang on the printers, open and close paper drawers, mess with the settings, all of that. No, it's not the way I'd like it to go, but we're under-staffed and these are aggressive kids. Anyway, here's my budget, what's the toughest machine you can recommend, including service options?"

It goes from there. It's that simple. Get a robust printer or copier* and see what kind of service options are available, because like all machines, it will break down at some point. You don't want to be stuck wondering who to call for help when it does.

Believe me, folks, this advice is worth every penny you're paying for it.

 

*I know that there are copiers which print and printers which copy. Do not combine these functions in a single unit. Better to have some students pissed off because the printer is temporarily down than to have all your students annoyed because your printer died and took the only copier with it as a result. Resource management is about limiting the possible points of failure.

What Are Little Robots Made of?

I anthropomorphise my stuff.

I talk to my car, a 10 year old Nissan Sentra named "Melanie."  She's named after Melanie Griffith, has a bitchy temper, and very badly wants us to trade her in for a Toyota Highlander Hybrid SUV when winter ends. These are elements the entire family agrees on, not just me. So if I'm nuts, my wife, sister, brother-in law, and niece and nephew are all on the same page of the DSM-IV-R.

I talk to my computer at work, and the laptop at home. I talk to them a lot.  Good things, usually; exhortations to run apps just a little faster, asking them what the trouble is while I go about my attempts to diagnose anything that seems out of order, that sort of thing. When I was a kid, I was pretty sure that these weird  metal and plastic boxes that could follow clever and precise instructions were not actually alive--pretty sure--and I'm still confident about that. But there are times when I wonder.

I also wonder about the people who invented Roxxxy the Sexbot, and the folks who comprise the market that "she" is intended for. I know that given the mental states of those who invent--born tinkerers the lot of them--combined with the pressures of the marketplace and the allure a sexbot would have on the desperate or kinked, that this sort of thing was inevitable.

I'm not going to criticize these people because I'm never positive that I don't share their peculiar ailment (if that's what it is, and not just a wacky coping mechanism.) We've been waiting for robot butlers and servants for a couple of generations now, and items like the Roomba, while cool, just don't stand up to those high expectations.

Roxxxy doesn't squick me particularly because she seems pretty limited in what she can do--she's basically a sex doll with an iPod grafted into her head. A complicated and expensive sex toy is one thing, but a humanoid machine that acts in a truly life-like manner is something quite different. We're very unlikely to see that for a lousy $9,000.

What does squick me is the fact that Roxxxy's inventor seems intent on selling her as a replacement for a human being. I understand that you need to market your product in a way that has a hope in hell of selling it, but might not a better market be individuals with with money to burn and a penchant for weird sex toys? And I know the object is to sell the  sizzle, not the steak, but in this case I think a tiny bit more honesty is called for: market the 'bot for what she is, not for what you think some impossibly lonely guy might be willing to pay to get some.

My heebie-jeebies go beyond that because intelligence--even pseudo-intelligent or purposeful action that suggests a self-programming ability--is not didactic. It's an emergent property of a extremely complex system of neurons. You can't sit down and write a program for self-learning. The closest non-laboratory based research to it I have found is Steve Grand's baby orangutan, Lucy. After years of work and experimentation, Grand got Lucy "smart" enough for her to observe a scene before her and raise her arm to point at a banana. That's already smarter than Roxxxy--although if the sexbot can actually point to a particularly small penis and laugh, then I will happily change my opinion.

And while I'm good with machines I'm nowhere near smart enough to even imagine the intricacies constructing an actual thinking mechanism would require, but I have learned one thing in particular about the machines that run most of our lives at one level or another: they are extremely complex systems. One characteristic of ECS's which I have observed is that they're prone to moods. They have good days and bad days. They respond to different people in distinct ways. They are not alive but they can seem damned life-like at times.

What I have decided over the years is this: I'm sure that none of these creations are alive in any meaningful sense: to me, calling a mechanism alive means assigning it the capacity to be a person rather than a mere device. It needs to respond to appropriate social context, it needs to have a sense of humor and/or horror, and it needs to be able to learn from past experience. If all these tests are met, I'll make the leap and call it a person rather than a thing.

Until then, let's call Roxxxy a pricey sex toy and leave it at that.