Ah Yes, This Is What Academic Freedom Is All About!

From the March 3, 2011 Chicago Tribune;

Northwestern University, fielding a torrent of criticism after a professor allowed students to view a live sex demonstration after his Human Sexuality class, is now grappling over the long cherished tenets of academic freedom and its boundaries.

The university initially supported the actions of psychology professor J. Michael Bailey, saying in a statement released Wednesday that, "the university supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge." But by Thursday morning, Northwestern President Morton Schapiro announced that the school would investigate amid an unfolding scandal.

I'm not going to quote exactly what happened--you can click over for all the prurient details. 

I'm a firm believer in academic freedom, because there is an enormous level of disparity in what constitutes offensive, and reality is sometimes offensive.  I will be teaching about the rise of Islam this coming week, and I am not going to shy away from some of the less pleasant aspects of shariah.  I do not shy away from the Inquisition's use of torture, either. 

I have had college students cover their eyes to avoid seeing Botticelli's Birth of Venus when we reached the Renaissance.  (Okay, not many.)  There does come a moment where you find yourself saying, "What made you think something like this was appropriate in a classroom?"

UPDATE: By the way, as a commenter points out, Bailey is not going to win any awards from the sexually correct crowd.  He has published quite a bit of research, it appears, that attempts to understand homosexuality and bisexuality based on evidence, rather than starting from the Articles of the True Faith that dominate so much of the academic community on this subject.  I notice that some of those intent on seeing the 21st century equivalent of an auto da fe for Bailey have published extensively with titles suggesting their alternative sexual orientation.

This doesn't excuse his actions.  It does mean that along with legitimate upset about this inappropriate action, there may well be some other motivations for going after him.

A Really Specialized Job Requirement

Basque Speaking - Localization Tester (Boise, ID)

I Wish Them Luck

I would love to see some lawyers at Righthaven sitting in a prison cell for fraud.  The March 4, 2011 Las Vegas Sun reports:

New evidence surfaced Friday in the Righthaven LLC lawsuits that attorneys say could undermine Righthaven’s entire copyright infringement lawsuit campaign over Las Vegas Review-Journal stories.

...


But in the counterclaim, EFF/Democratic Underground attorneys charged Righthaven and Stephens Media have been abusing copyright law and that “Righthaven does not rightfully own the copyright in question, in that the assignment was a sham designed solely to pursue litigation with rights being retained by Stephens Media.”

In Friday’s court filing, EFF attorneys suggested documents recently turned over to the EFF by Stephens Media back up their claim about the “sham” copyright assignment.

There was so much clearly improper about the Righthaven suits--clearly in violation of champerty doctrine (which is alive and kicking in Nevada, even in federal courts)--that I do not find it unlikely that Righthaven's little pack of lawyers will eventually end up in a heap of trouble.  But as with anything involving lawyers, it will cost a pile of money and heartache to their victims.

There are clearly days when the social costs of lawyers so exceed the social benefits that it seems clear that it is a profession that needs to be outlawed.  Require everyone to sue or defend themselves on their behalf.  If corporations had to send their CEO out to fight every legal battle, it could only be good.  I think you would be amazed how many sensible solutions would happen if the lawyers were simply removed from the mix.  Credit card companies would not be so willing to extend credit to people with bad credit histories, for example.

Making SQL Tolerable

I am still not particularly wild about SQL (or at least the Informix dialect of it), but at my suggestion, my employer recently upgraded our licenses for Server Studio 8.0 to the Suite edition, which includes an SPL debugger.  (SPL is Stored Programming Language, a series of extensions to SQL intended to make it easier to do complex database operations from a real programming language.)

And my, what a difference!  Debugging SPLs until now has required using the TRACE facility, which produces a pile of log messages--and no way to control it.  Now I can step through, line by line and inspect variables.  That does not sound particularly impressive, and it isn't.  But compared to what I have been having to do to debug this crud?  It's heaven!

There are so many aspects to SQL that are just so 20th century--and not even late 20th century.  For example, I was writing some SPL that was supposed gather up information out of a number of rows of a table, and concatenate these strings (Idaho Code sections) into a single row for output.  For no reason that I could see, it just was not working.  I would get the first row, and nothing more.

It turned out that the problem was that the variable was declared as CHAR(60), and I forgot (or perhaps never knew) that when you set a variable in SQL to a particular string, it pads that string on the right with blanks.  When I tried to concatenate the next string onto this, it said, "Oh, I already have this CHAR(60) full--I cannot add anything more to it."  But it only talks to itself under those conditions--no warnings, no messages.  At least with this SPL debugger, I eventually figured out that I needed to run TRIM on the variable before concatenating another string.

What I am working on at the moment involves quite a bit of processing of what is called the Pre-Sentence Investigation--the enormous pile of paperwork that the courts and Corrections do between the time a person is convicted of a felony, and the time that they go to prison.  We have a rather complicated but not particularly sensible strategy for mapping PSI's internal offense code system to the actual statutes that the offender violated.  (And it is not a one-to-one mapping, which is part of the complexity.)

Anyway, I sat in a meeting a couple of days ago with people from various departments outside of IT, and we went over the list of criminal statutes that appear in our database.  I've mentioned before my amusement at the Burglary With Explosives statute.  The other day I saw one that I hope never requires prosecution here: 18-5003, Cannibalism.

Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS

I installed it dual boot on the older Compaq NC6000 that I have--and unlike the painful experience of trying to run it on the really old HP Pavilion desktop, this actually works pretty darn well!  Performance is pretty snappy, and so far, stuff works about the way that I expect.  I installed Eclipse, which is the open source version of the integrated development environment that I use at work (My Eclipse), and I was able to quickly write a trivial Java application using it.

Overall performance is roughly comparable to running Windows XP Pro on the same box.  I can run multiple applications at once with quite acceptable performance, and of course, with the multiple screen switching capability of Gnome.  (I think it is Gnome.)

All in all, there is much to be said for this version of Ubuntu Linux.  I have not tried getting Samba working yet, but most everything else, while it works differently from Windows, generally works as seamlessly and with as little computer geek knowledge required as Windows.

The only unpleasant surprise turned out not to be Linux related at all.  To reduce the number of keyboards, monitors, mice, etc. on my desk, I use a KVM switch box to share the peripherals.  I was using a very old HP keyboard--old enough that it would not work through the KVM switch to the Compaq NC6000--although it worked fine through the even older HP Pavilion.  On the good side, I was able to find a perfectly nice Kensington Keyboard for Life (which I gather has a lifetime warranty on it) from Newegg.com for about $20.  It also has a smaller footprint on my desk, which is always a good thing, especially if you saw the state of my desk.

One more virtue of having a Linux box available--it reminds me that yes, I am a software engineer!  Doing stuff in c-shell may be primitive compared to an IDE like My Eclipse or Visual Studio--but there are some things that are just so much easier to do with csh, perl, sed, grep--something that a younger generation of developers do not fully appreciate, I think.  Sometimes when I talk to my co-workers who have never developed under any flavor of Unix, it gives me an appreciation for what the Microsoft view of the universe has taken away. 

Boise County Bankruptcy

It is not very often (ever?) that Boise County makes Drudge Report--but our county is filing bankruptcy under Chapter 9.  Wall Street Journal gave the sad details today.  Regular readers may recall that I vigorously supported building of the Alamar Ranch project.  Boise County's refusal to allow the project to go forward is what led to the lawsuit that provoked the bankruptcy.  I warned them.  But no one listens to me in this county.

On the plus side, it did provide an especially good example for my U.S. History class of the dangers of runaway democracy, and how it led to the calling of the Philadelphia Convention.

Gun Smuggling Into Mexico

I guess that this is now too big a story for the leftist news media to ignore.  March 3, 2011 CBS News is reporting about the guns being smuggled into Mexico--and ATF was ordered to let them go to the drug cartels.  At least one of these guns was used to murder a Border Patrol agent.