I confess to being thoroughly confused. The revealed wisdom in US higher ed has been that we are simply not producing enough grads in the STEM area, and we need to do more to attract folks to sciences/engineering/IT etc. The National Academy of Sciences weighed in on this as well. We certainly keep hearing that here in our department, with exhortations to increase enrollment.

However, the Urban institute folks (Lowell and Salzman) claim that not only is the US not lagging behind other nations in the quality of STEM education at the school level, it in fact overproduced STEM grads (three times as many as the net growth in jobs) in the period from 1985 to 2000. So not enough or too many STEM grads — which is it ?

This of course further muddies the immigration/ H1B debates. The IT industry claims that there is a shortage of IT grads, and so they need to be able to hire more from overseas. The “Immigration Restrictionists” of various flavors, and the Programmers Guild like organizations, argue that this is just a part of plan by corporations to keep the wages in the IT sector depressed. Many of them have blogged about this new Urban Institute study, offering it as proof that the H1B type programs can be scrapped.

However, if the primary push behind lobbying for increased skilled immigration/H1 workers was depressing (or at least not increasing) the wages, then a factor of three overproduction within the US should take care of this, right ? In other words, all the folks in STEM fields who weren’t getting jobs in their area would sign up for short MSCE/CCNA type courses (or AAs in IT) and then get hired. I presume Bill Gates or others don’t particularly like foreigners enough to go through and pay for the H1B/Green card process when they would achieve the same wage depressing affects by hiring US citizens retrained in IT areas from the oversupply in the overall STEM areas?  On the other hand, there is  a recent statement by Fed chief Bernanke doing rounds of the blogosphere that a non increase in STEM wages would indicate that there wasn’t a shortage in the area. 

Net result, I am not sure what to believe anymore.  In admissions events, I dutifully present data from CRA (which in turn got it from BLS)  that seems to indicate that within the wider STEM areas, IT (strictly, Mathematical and Computer Sciences) would be the subfield where the total production of degrees would fall short of the projected job openings, even factoring in all the outsourcing.

The well known Labor Economist visited UMBC last week to give a lecture in our humanities series. Borjas is very well known in political circles for his economic analysis of immigration. More importantly, not only does he write scholarly papers, he actually blogs in a way that folks like me who haven’t even done ECON 101 can understand his points. I haven’t read any of his papers to see what they look like, but in his blogs he is fairly clear about his opinions on various issues related to immigration. See for instance this interesting post about “protectionism” on broadway! I don’t always agree with what he has to say, but it is always a pleasure to read well written posts that say something reasonable backed with some data and analytic rigor.

So I went to the lecture with great anticipation. I reached a few minutes late, and the room was already full. The presentation itself was good, but a bit of a letdown. Perhaps because he didn’t want to be too controversial in a “distinguished lecture” type setting ? He presented data (increase in immigration since 1964, concentration of that immigration in select areas making the effect local, confounding factors when you try to analyze wage effects of immigrants, the fact that the wage depressing effects of immigration have most hurt the lower strata of society, the fact that an average immigrant today earns less than the native born, which is a change from the 60s and so on). However, he didn’t go much further by saying something which is both true and a copout — namely that what policy implications you derive from this data will depend on what your objective function is. He joked about letting everyone in if the goal was to alleviate world poverty or somesuch.

I also noticed that he did not split his data into effects of legal and illegal immigration. It would be interesting to know if there are differences ? Amongst legal immigrants, does employment based versus family based immigration make a difference ? Especially when one of the things that the now dead “comprehensive immigration reform” bill was discussing was a points based system for immigration.

Sigh….

At the end of last week we had a catastrophic failure that resulted in our losing most of our posts. We had a security problem where someone had managed to compromise one of our blog accounts with administrative privileges. Some of the files were modified. We noticed it right away and decided to restore the site files and database from our nightly dump.

However … it turned out that when we did a major Wordpress update back in February 2006, we created a new database but failed to update our backup script. So, for the past 19 months, it’s been creating a nightly backup of the old database. Restoring the old database not only resulted in loosing 19 months worth of posts, but also left the database out of sync with the current Wordpress version.

One of our former students (thanks Filip!) wrote a script to recover the old posts from Google’s cache and reinsert them into the database. it was a tour de force demonstration of quick programming skill. There are still some problems that we’ll need to attend to — we’ve lost all of the new categories that we’ve added since 2/2006, the ‘related posts’ plugin is no longer working, I think the feed links aren’t all right, etc. But we recovered the posts.

We’ve tightened up our security but continue to see lots of malicious visitors knocking on the door and checking the locks.

It’s a jungle out there.

UC Berkeley is posting full lecture videos on YouTube at http://youtube.com/ucberkeley. This includes basic courses on Biology, Chemistry, Literature and Engineering as well as specialized lectures like one by Sergey Brin for SIMS 141 on Search, Google, and Life. If this is part of a new trend, it will definitely help flatten out the academic world. Check out the SIMS 141 schedule for more videos which have not yet been uploaded to Youtube. (link)

A good read at http://stopbadware.org, it seems to be a MEGA campaign by Google, Levono and Sun Microsystems.

“Several academic institutions and major tech companies have teamed up to thwart ‘badware’, a phrase they have coined that encompasses spyware and adware. The new website, StopBadware.org, is promoted as a “Neighborhood Watch” campaign and seeks to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. We want to work with both experts and the broader internet community (.orgs and .edus) to define and understand the problem.”

I promised my programming languages class that we’d look at Ruby before the semester is over and now it’s time to deliver. I made this promise partly to force myself to learn more about Ruby and Rails. As it’s often the case, the instructor ends up learning much more than the students. Ruby sure looks interesting, fun and useful. We have a highly functional, semantic-web enabled site built with php and mysql, but the innards are complex and hard to understand. I’m sure that a rails implementation would be much simpler and easier to maintain and extend. I found a long and thoughtful blog post by Eric Kidd comparing Ruby and Lisp.

“Years ago, I looked at Ruby and decided to ignore it. Ruby wasn’t as popular as Python, and it wasn’t as powerful as LISP. So why should I bother?

Of course, we could turn those criteria around. What if Ruby were more popular than LISP, and more powerful than Python? Would that be enough to make Ruby interesting?

Before answering this question, we should decide what makes LISP so powerful. Paul Graham has written eloquently about LISP’s virtues. But, for the sake of argument, I’d like to boil them down to two things:

1. LISP is a dense functional language.
2. LISP has programmatic macros.

As it turns out, Ruby compares well as a functional language, and it fakes macros better than I’d thought.”

Ruby even has continuations, which, as Mikael Brockman shows in his entertaining post continuations on the web, simplify web programming.

Finally, if you want to check out Ruby for the first time, try why the luck stiff’s Interactive Ruby tutorial.

The Workshop on Models of Trust for the Web (MTW’06) will be a one-day workshop held on May 22 or 23, 2006 in Edinburgh in conjunction with the 15th International World Wide Web Conference. Tentative deadlines are January 10 for paper submission and February 1 for acceptance notification.

“There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and facts found on the Web.” — anon

“As it gets easier to add information to the web via html pages, wikis, blogs, and other documents, it gets tougher to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate or untrustworthy information. A search engine query usually results in several hits that are outdated and/or from unreliable sources and the user is forced to go through the results and pick what she/he considers the most reliable information based on her/his trust requirements. With the introduction of web services, the problem is further exacerbated as users have to come up with a new set of requirements for trusting web services and web services themselves require a more automated way of trusting each other. Apart from inaccurate or outdated information, we also need to anticipate Semantic Web Spam (SWAM) — where spammers publish false facts and scams to deliberately mislead users. This workshop is interested in all aspects of enabling trust on the web.”

UMBC is searching for a new Dean of its College of Engineering and Information Technology — see the UMBC Dean of the College of Engineering and Information Technology search site. I am happy to field questions from or talk to anyone who might be interested in applying for the position or nominating a colleague. It’s a great opportunity for someone who wants to help shape and guide a strong College that wants toward biger and better things.

The Semantic Web and Policy Workshop (SWPW) held at ISWC had some great presentations and discussions on policy-based frameworks for security, privacy, trust, information filtering, accountability, etc. The SWPW web site has the proceedings, papers, presentations and some pictures. Watch for announcements about a related workshop on Models of Trust for the Web that will be held at WWW2006.

A while back I wrote a blog that reports my user experience with SemanticWorks 2006. In my blog, I claimed that the software doesn’t seem to support the use of owl:imports when editing an OWL ontology.

Today an anonymous person is kindly enough to inform me that I was wrong — see my blog’s comment section. I took this person’s advise and try the software again. This time I’m able to use owl:imports when editing an ontology.

The following shows I successfully defined an ontology that imports SOUPA Document ontology, and which in turn imports SOUPA Person and SOUPA Time ontologies:

Screenshot-1

The following shows the class view of all classes that are imported from different ontology documents:

Screenshot-2

The following shows the property view of all properties that are imported from different ontology documents:

Screenshot-3

Should you have other comments, drop me message.

CMU roboticist Daniel Wilson has apparently flipped and gone over to the other side. His new book reveals all:

Daniel H. Wilson, How To Survive a Robot Uprising : Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion, 1 November 2005, Bloomsbury.

Wilson says “Any machine could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator.”

Here’s a story on Wilson and the book.

Lisp500 is a 500-line implementation of an interpreter for an informally specified dialect of Lisp. Be forewarned that one reason it’s only 500 is that there are neither comments nor blank lines. It has a goodly number of Common Lisp features, though.