Twenty university and high school students got a tour of the JavaOne show floor last week with James Gosling, the Father of Java. Read all about it On the Record.
Two of the students had driven 17 hours to attend the show. That's dedication!
First Burma, now China. I logged on this morning to devastating news about the 7.9-magnitude earthquake that hit central China. Especially heartbreaking to this mom is the news about the 900 students buried under rubble.
Larry Nelson, Sun's Director of Global Community Development, directed me to the Sun Microsystems Foundation's blog and the Sun online disaster relief drive. I was able to go online and instantly donate clean drinking water. (I'll probably also make a donation to the International Red Cross.)
Doesn't feel like I'm doing enough, but it's something.
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Boy, if that title doesn't grab your attention, nothing will. Yes, after a looooong hiatus (in blogosphere terms), I'm baaaaaaccck. All four of my readers will be totally psyched. The reason I haven't posted in a while is because I was working on Sun's 2008 Worldwide Education & Research Conference (also known in these parts as the WWERC), which was last week in San Francisco. For three months, this event consumed almost all of my free time.
But it was worth it. Especially when Scott McNealy offered me potty training tips.
First, the WWERC. One of the coolest things about this event was that we had five of our Campus Ambassadors acting as "roving reporters." (Campus Ambassador are students we've hired to talk to their fellow students about Sun technology on campus.) These very nice young gentlemen not only blogged about the event, but they also took pictures and video. Much better pictures than I did, as I'll prove in a moment. (This blog is all about anticipation.) Check out their WWERC group blog. Or you can read their individual blogs: there's Ezequiel Singer from Argentina; Greg Corbin from the U.S.; Kumar Abhishek from India; Vincent Ding from China; and Sergey Pisarenko from Sweden. Give them some blog-love, folks.
Here they are with Sun Chairman Scott McNealy at our press conference on Wednesday, February 27. (At this point, Scott had only hinted at his potty training tips. He had not yet dispensed his wisdom.)
Sun Campus Ambassadors with Scott McNealy
I also got a chance to meet a real-life astronaut, Kathryn Sullivan. She was the first American woman to walk in space. Her NASA bio makes me feel like a complete slacker. Dr. Sullivan now serves as Director for The Ohio State University's Battelle Center for Mathematics and Science Education Policy and as a volunteer science advisor to the COSI Columbus, an interactive science center in Columbus, Ohio.
So it was two days chock-full of interesting keynotes. Barry Libert, author of We Are Smarter Than Me, talked about building communities. Neil Howe, author of Millenials Rising, talked about the new generation of students. I found out during Howe's presentation that I'm not a Baby Boomer. I'm actually part of Generation X. That's a relief.
During the various keynotes, I tried to take pictures with my Blackberry. That was a disaster, photographically speaking. Here's my career-limiting photo of my boss (actually my boss' boss), Joe Hartley, Sun VP of Global Government, Education and Healthcare:
And here's the photo taken by the professional photographer hired by our PR person:
Yeah. I don't think any paparazzi are losing any sleep. Now, guess the identities of these three Sun executives (without mocking my blog layout skills, thankyouverymuch):
|  Is he standing on that pitcher of water? |
 If only he had held still for oh, 5 minutes, this would have been a good action shot. |
Yeah, that last one is Scott McNealy, Sun's founder and chairman. Here, for comparison, is the professional photo:
I think he's about to announce the collaboration agreement between Sun and China's Ministry of Education.
So, speaking of Scott...what about those potty training tips? So on the day of his keynote at the WWERC, I go to meet Scott and his PR person in the lobby of the Westin St. Francis to escort them to a customer meeting and then make sure they get to the main ballroom where Scott's giving his speech. (I'm sure he could have found it himself, but I get a little nervous/controlling when it comes to executives and big events, knowing as I do the truth of Murphy's Law.) We're walking down the hall when I decide to make small talk.
"How are the kids?" I ask, knowing that Scott, impressively, has four. I wonder if he sleeps.
"They're great."
"I have a two-and-a-half-year-old," I volunteer.
He stops in his tracks. "Have you started potty training?"
"Uh, no."
"Let me know when you do. I potty trained my youngest in one day."
Later, as I'm walking him to another meeting, he does tell me the story. And then swears me to secrecy. (Sorry! Sorry! If he reads this blog and says it's OK to tell you, I will!) I can tell you that it was both creative and effective, and involved the Great Outdoors. Let me just say this: kids learn fast.
And maybe that was the message of this conference. College students today do learn fast when it comes to the latest technology (as hopefully most of them are beyond the potty training stage), and the great thing is that they're using it to connect with each other and build communities. As our Argentinian Campus Ambassador, Ezequiel Singer, said, "Any time I have a question, I can put it out to the community of 500 campus ambassadors, and I'll get an answer right away. Somewhere in the world, a Sun campus ambassador is awake!"
Not to be all corny, but that really is the power of communities.
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Wow. This article in Campus Technology is a bummer.
Women are falling further behind in information technology and computer science, according to a new report released by the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). The study, the NCWIT Scorecard, compiled data on girls and women in computer science and IT as students at the K-12 and post-secondary levels, as well as women working as professionals in IT and as faculty in computer science in higher education. It painted a fairly bleak picture of the situation in the United States, where women make up the drastic minority of participants in science- and technology-related studies and where that minority shrinks further the higher one looks up the academic and corporate ladder.
The sad thing is that, according to the article and the study, girls in the K-12 grades actually have an advantage in terms of match and engineering coursework, but:
...only 1 percent of females taking the SATs in 2006 indicated an interest in pursuing computer and information sciences as an intended major.
If we're worried about our competitiveness in math and science, it seems to me that we should be putting some effort toward encouraging a demographic that makes up "about 60 percent of all degrees awarded by colleges and universities in the United States in the 2005/2006 school year."
My own experience with math class might illustrate the problem. A reader (and writer) from a very young age, somehow I got the message that I was "bad in math." I don't think it was from my mom, who was actually good in math and science. Anyway, imagine my shock when, during my senior year, I got an A in Calculus. Why? I had a good teacher. Hmm.
Bottom line: If we in the high-tech industry are looking for innovative minds, we can't look for them in one gender. But we have to start looking early.
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The Ohio Education Assocation recently warned teachers not to join MySpace or Facebook, and even suggested that teachers take down existing profiles, reports eSchool News. The teacher's union sent educators a memo last month advising members "...not to join [these sites], and for existing users to complete the steps involved in removing their profiles. While this advice might seem extreme, the dangers of participating in these two sites outweigh the benefits."
Well, yeah, this advice does seem extreme. Until you read a little further. It turns out that the Columbus Dispatch found some teacher MySpace profiles that give new meaning to the phrase, "career-limiting move" (or CLM, as we like to call it). The profile of one woman says that she's "taken drugs and likes to party." Others...well, I don't really want to quote them on a blog owned by my employer.
These teachers (if they really are teachers, and I certainly don't think they're representative of most educators) seemed to have failed the main principle of Social Networking Sites 101: when it comes to Web 2.0, there is no longer any separation between your personal life and your professional life.
I'll cite my own experience with Facebook. When I first joined, I thought it was a cool way to keep friends and family up to date on what I was doing, as well as to promote the books that I've written in my "other" (personal) life and link to my personal blog. But then one of my co-workers asked to add me as a friend. And then another. And soon I realized that I had to make a choice between sharing personal information that defines who I really am (and what I care about), and protecting some of that information from people who (let's be honest) might use it against me.
We all want to be known for who we really are--or at least, for who we'd like people to think we are. But we may not want to be known for all of who we really are, by everybody. Social networking sites force us to make some decisions about our privacy. Especially if we're teachers, and we have kids looking up to us.
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SunGard Higher Education, one of the biggest software vendors in higher education, just announced the creation of a state-of-the-art Unified Digital Campus Test Center (UDC Test Center) to simulate customers’ real-world technology environments and use of the Banner Unified Digital Campus. SunGard selected Dell and Sun Microsystems to help establish the reference platforms that will be used to optimize the applications, technology configurations, and hardware associated with the Banner Unified Digital Campus and to help deliver the lowest possible total cost of ownership (TCO) for customers.
This is great news, because it means that SunGard's applications will be tested, tuned and optimized on Sun before being released to customers, thereby not only speeding time to deployment, but also ensuring optimized configurations for higher education customers. Good stuff.
Sun and several other companies have donated more than $420 million in hardware and software to the University of Cincinnati. It's the largest donation in the school's history.
The donation was made by Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education (PACE). It will fund a new program combining UC's College of Engineering and its College of Design, Art, Architecture and Planning. Possible projects include the design of new brake systems for hybrid cars. Cool.
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Yesterday, Sun and several leading libraries announced the formation of the Sun Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG). Founding members include The Alberta Library, The British Library, Johns Hopkins University, University of Oxford, Stanford University and The Texas Digital Library.
Why is this group so important? Let me bring it home to you. Since my son's birth in 2005, my husband has probably amassed several gigabytes of digital photos on his computer. Given my spouse's questionable filing skills, if I wanted to find a particular photo, I would have no idea where to start. And God forbid that something ever happen to that hard drive. I know he backs it up regularly, but still.
Now that's just a personal archive, of no interest to anyone but my immediate family. My father, however, was a prominent architect in 1960s and 1970s San Diego (as was my grandfather in the early part of the century).
My father, Richard George Wheeler (left), in 1965. Photo courtesy of ModernSanDiego.com.
Believe it or not, my mother occasionally gets requests from academics to look at his drawings and papers. Which are all stuck in drawers and closets throughout her house.
The house where I grew up, circa 1960. Photo courtesy of ModernSanDiego.com.
How should we preserve these materials for students and researchers who might one day want to study early- or mid-20th century California architecture? (We probably need to donate them to a member of the PASIG, for one thing.)
Circle Arts Theater, 1961 (demolished). Photo courtesy of ModernSanDiego.com.
This is the challenge faced by libraries around the world. Even content saved to digital format decays, hence the piquant term "bit rot." The University of Oxford is trying to figure how to manage a million 19th-century books digitized the Bodleian Library as part of the Google Books Library Project. To preserve materials like this for generations to come, they're using a digital asset management system (DAMS) collection based on Sun's storage technologies.
As a graduate student in creative writing, I once took a class on the origins of the novel. Our professor assigned us a project where we actually had to visit the library (in person!) to do research from original source materials. I remember the thrill of holding a 150-year-old book in my hands. I also remember how exciting it was when I discovered that I could look at original books at libraries on the other side of the world.
So while "preservation and archiving" may sound like a less than glamourous topic, it couldn't be more important. Whether it's that snapshot of a son's first bath, or the original plans for the house a father designed for himself in 1960, or that war footage that Ken Burns included in his amazing documentary "THE WAR," we need ways to preserve our history, both personal and shared.
Because, in the end, it's the record of what we experience, what we think, and what we believe. It's the record of who we are.
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I really enjoyed the recent opinion piece by Terry Calhoun, "Strained Relations: Reconciling Software Incompatibilities," in a recent issue of Campus Technology. In it, Calhoun—who is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society of College and University Planning (SCUP)—talks about the document incompatibility issues he's faced when dealing with co-workers who have updated to Windows Vista.
These problems led him to think of "IT functionalities as having personalities." (Yup. I've often thought that my PC is possessed.) For example:
Back to Calhoun's article. He saves his best for Word, to whom he has been "unhappily married" for years: "I simply have to live with Word, even though she seems to not care very much about me." Sounds like Word comes from the same family as the ISP I use for my personal Web site.
Calhoun goes on to describe the specter of students sharing incompatible files with their professors. This made me flashback to my senior year of college, when I borrowed a friend's IBM PC to write my honors essay. These were the days of floppy disks that stored, oh, maybe 3KB. I didn't realize their...um...storage limitations. And well, I ended up having to tell my professor that, essentially, the computer ate my homework. So I'm imaging legions of clever students buying themselves a little more time on that term paper using the "I-sent-it-to-you-it's-not-my-fault-you-can't-open-it" excuse. Fun times ahead.
I haven't seen any of the dreaded ".docx" files he mentions, nor had any issues sharing Word files from people using Vista—yet. Here at Sun, we use StarOffice, and I haven't had any real problems sending people files in OpenOffice format (.ods) or opening .doc or .xls files. But maybe that's going to change as more people start to use Vista.
To stretch Calhoun's metaphor a little further, that could be one uncomfortable family dinner.
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Breaking news: In a press release and audiocast, Microsoft and Sun today announced that Sun has signed on as a Windows Server OEM. Sun and Microsoft are also going to collaborate to further enable deployment of Windows Server on Sun x64 systems.
Here's what John Fowler, EVP of Sun's Systems Group, says it means for Sun:
"Sun is now a single source for today's leading operating systems - Solaris and Windows - on the industry's most innovative x64 systems and storage products. Customers can now take advantage of the virtualization benefits of Windows and Solaris on Sun's energy efficient x64 systems. Microsoft's recognition of our x64 systems and storage systems is a testament to the superior system design at the heart of our product portfolio."
Wow. Still digesting this. Stay tuned.
Nice story today on Sun.com. Groups of high school students recently visited Sun campuses in Menlo Park, California, and Somerset, N.J. through Project Open Doors.
I almost got a little choked up reading some of the comments from students. One said, "Today's given me insight — [you can] actually make a living at doing what you enjoy."
Added another student from Oakland, "It's given me ideas — I could possibly do something like this, with a
good environment like this."
Project Open Doors started four years ago in Sao Paulo, when Sun employees in Brazil opened the company's facilities after hours to young people from poor communities.
Just goes to show you that we don't always need fancy technology to help young people learn. Sometimes we just have to clear some time on our calendars, and open our doors.
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As a working parent, I've learned to accept help wherever I can get it. So yesterday, as temperatures hovered around 90 degrees, I gratefully let the nice bagger at the local Nob Hill carry my groceries to the car.
As we walked cross the parking lot, we chatted about the weather. He told me about the sweltering conditions in his classes at a nearby high school. Some of the classsrooms had air conditioning, but many didn't. The temperature in the computer lab had been especially bad, he said. “All those PCs,” I said. “Yeah,” he answered, nodding vigorously.
Groceries loaded, I drove away—and nearly got into an accident as I began kicking myself for missing a golden opportunity to tell him about Sun Rays.
A Sun Ray 2 typically consumes only 4 watts of power. PCs operate on 80 watts or more. Imagine how much a school could save in hourly costs per kilowatt (kWh) by replacing PCs with Sun Ray clients. Sun's Open Work program has saved the company more than $2.8 million in electric power costs, for example.
This isn't trivial. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency:
“...the annual energy bill to run America’s primary and secondary schools is a staggering $6 billion — more than is spent on textbooks and computers combined.”
I'm sorry, but that's just criminal. Our schools shouldn't be spending more on AC than they are on school supplies.
The California Energy Commission is trying to do something about the problem with its Bright Schools Program, which focuses on lighting and HVAC (although not on reducing the heat coming from computers). Wisconsin has its K-12 Energy Education Program and the Focus on Energy Schools Program. And of course, the EPA has its ENERGY STAR program for K-12 school districts.
But it seems to me that we shouldn't just be focusing on making HVAC equipment and lighting more energy efficient. We also need to find ways to reduce the heat coming from the equipment inside the classrooms. And maybe thin clients like Sun Rays are part of the answer.
Project Blackbox is getting more press than Lindsay Lohan these days. (OK, maybe not quite, but I bet I'm the first person to work LiLo into a Sun blog.)
InformationWeek just ran an article about how the Stanford Linear Acclerator Center is using its Blackbox (a prefabricated shipping container filled with Sun servers) to add more computing power without adding buildings.
Randy Melen, the head of high-performance storage and computing for Stanford's department of Scientific Computing and Computing Services, tells InformationWeek:
"We needed to expand quickly this fiscal year, but solving the cooling and power challenges for the building takes longer. We worked with Sun to answer the question, 'How do you extend your data center without too much pain?'"
I'll try to post some pictures soon. Heck, SLAC is almost in Sun's backyard. I could run over there on my lunch hour.
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Sun Campus Ambassador Teera Kanokkanjanarat (Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada) just posted his JavaOne interview with Sang Shin, Sun technology architect, consultant and evangelist. They talked about Sang's career, technology evangelism, Web 3.0, the Participation Age and how Sang masters just about anything there is to master in Java (check out how many courses he teaches at Javapassion.com).
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Back from a two-week vacation. I didn't check my work email once. It felt a little strange, but it actually made me look forward to coming back to work. And look at all I missed! For example:
Dinesh Bahal, Sun VP, Web 2.0 Industry Practice, and four Sun Campus Ambassadors from New Jersey, China, Russia and Brazil—Kira Morrow, Rita Zhang, Filipp Shubin and Rafael Vanoni—met with Mary Grush of Campus Technology recently for an exclusive story on Sun's Campus Ambassador Program. The article was the main story on the C&T website on July 2.
Other Sun Campus Ambassadors are working to make a difference in the world. One of them, Nitin Rao, a student at the National Institute of Technology, Suratkal, was recently chosen to participate in a Global Institute for Social Innovation fellowship program organized by StartingBloc and the London Business School. (I'm a little embarrassed to say what I used to do on my college summer vacations, i.e., not much. But that was a long, long time ago.)
Congratulations, Kira, Rita, Filipp, Rafael and Nitin!
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Sure, there's soft focus, but this is ridiculous.
I had a 23 hour trip to get to the JavaOne. Too ba...