On a lark, I checked my briefly-used GMail account to see what it had accrued in my absence. Of those unfiltered, what I noticed were a large number of spams that followed this general formula:

did you hear abot that little device for decoding all the channels that Myles got last week he says it works real good and he is watching all thes ppv movies and sporting events for nothin…LOL…i thought ya right but it actually does work. check it out if you want at this place [link] but if you dont want thats fine as you can stop by and tell us to not tell you anymore [link]

To be fair to Google, I had deliberately seeded that address to fish for 419ers, the baiting of whom was a hobby I briefly considered engaging in. Several ‘dead’ address books were signed as a wealthy Australian surgeon, with a fat portfolio ready for his retirement.

Myles And His TV For Nothin

So… I never knew anyone named Myles, and neither did my Australian alter ego. It’s an interesting approach to spam, because not only does it appear to be in compliance with the CANSPAM regulations, by including unsubscription verbiage, but it’s also actively attempting to defeat statistical analysis without including an obvious body of ‘innocent words’.

Phrases like “last week”, “real good”, and “stop by” probably give this message the green light under current filtering schemes. And frankly, I’m not sure if I want messages that look like [block of informal text + link] to be filtered, because I get a lot of those.

The Final Spam Filter

What does the Ultimate Iron-Clad Spam Filter look like? I think what it does is crawl the email for links, visit those sites, and then analyse them for spamminess. Probably even keep a certral index of ’sites that spams link to’, the inclusion of a link to which is the ultimate damnation for a message.

As I’ve written previously, blocking spams by source-IP is not an acceptable solution. However, I think blocking them by destination may just be the silver bullet. Yes, a spammer can buy up 200 domains to rotate through his spams, but when the first couple folks report the mail as junk, they’ll be quickly flagged. And that assumes that the actual text of the site is clean enough to not get flagged by the content-based filter.

Paul Graham suggested that the spam of the future would look like “Hey, check this out: [link]“, but it’s interesting to see that they’re actually beyond that; they’re using harmless language in the actual body of the message in order to couteract the inherent spammyness of including a link.

And Over on Stage Left

There may be radically other solutions in the pipe, however, such as the vicious Project Honeypot, which I’m a participant in, having donated a subdomain and installed a honeypot here. Spammers must have nightmares about their harvest bots going awry and scooping up those innocent looking honeypot addresses.

Mike

Any web-standards person will tell you that CSS is better than tables, for laying out a site. This site uses CSS instead of tables. They’ll probably also tell you that as powerful as they are, some CSS techniques are just barely worth the effort.

If you’re well familar with positioning and floating already, you’ll want to skip these bits. Read on…

I went on a tour of the Cambridge Toyota plant today, where they manufacture the Corolla, Solara, and the Lexus SUV.

I had known going in the field of Mechatronics Engineering that a huge part of commercial robotics is the automotive and aerospace industries. But it was amazing to actually see it — see fifteen welders spring into action and dive on the ghostly shell of a future vehicle. And then, 56 seconds later, see it slide to the next station and a new one load into place. I could have watched them all day.

Unfortunately the tour was fairly rushed. I could have sat there for an hour watching them. I highly recommend this to anyone who’s even remotely interested. It’s a mind-numbing experience to realise that from sheet metal to the final car is just twelve hours of continuous surgery, and that even includes the painting.

It really was amazing.

One of the most eye-opening things for me was to witness the changing role of human personelle in the factory. Where the old system had workers working and checking the work of the prior person, here, the robots did 95% of the labour, and after every step there were meticulous human QA checks that made sure the robotic labour was up to snuff.

And for my Mechatronics homies who did the line-following project: They even had a few automated carts that rolled along following red lines painted on the floor. Most of the robots were either gargantuan fixed beasts or on tracks of some kind. But these coat-rack part carriers seemed to just roll free, following their painted courses.

Mike

I’m a licensed owner of Windows XP. It didn’t come with my box, I actually went to a store and bought it. At the time, I was developing a project in Visual Basic, and complete compatibility with XP was one of the design requirements. Win98 and I had good times, but the relationship just couldn’t last. Read on…

I’ve always felt that the burden of ‘making a subject interesting’ should be on the instructor. As a student, it’s impossible to raise this without sounding pompous and ungrateful. But it’s a fact that a learner will perform poorly when they’re bored by a topic. Some, obviously, are beyond help. But for the rest, it’s part of the teacher’s job to make a subject exciting.

As a co-op student at a local highschool last year, I had a chance to try this philosophy out.

Teaching Computer Science

Admittedly, computer science is a more exciting subject than say, English, but nevertheless, it was a good exercise. And for me, it paid off. Why struggle against the students, cramming pointers and linked lists down their throats, when you can spend two weeks teaching animation and graphics, and then introduce linked lists as a good structure for managing sprites and particles? Why not help out the Math teachers by demonstrating that arctangent, sine, and cosine are the mechanisms for switching between angle-velocity and x-vel, y-vel movement systems?

Of course, many history teachers will demonstrate that the subjects that fascinate a professor are not always of interest to the students. But it’s still a valid starting point, and is much better than trying to bring one’s elevated intellectual status down to the lowest possible denominator and use that caricature to determine how to ‘reach’ the students.

Psychology

I recently encountered a fervent believer in Bloom’s Taxonomy. Bloom describes six levels from which is made up the learning process: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation. Of all the sciences, psychology is the one that I become skeptical of the most quickly. I suppose this statement alone may slot me into a negative personality type, but it’s important to see the danger of over-applying a theory like this, as correct as it is in its analysis: In the wrong hands it completely loses sight of its students.

In a zealous attempt to see that the bases of Knowledge and Comprehension are covered, it’s possible to delay reaching Analysis so long that students have lost interest by the time it arrives. And after all, nothing cements an understanding of something better than to discuss it (Analysis) and actually use it for something (Application).

The view that the method is more important than the students moves the burden of ‘interest’ from the teacher to the students. Since the teacher is seeing that the correct method is followed, it’s up to the students to do supplemental work in order to motivate themselves.

What Method to Use?

Both, really. Although my students in Grade 12 were excited for their topic, it’s definitely the case that for some of them, the jump from knowledge (my lectures) to application (their assignments) was too sudden. Were they able to catch up? Yes. Were there some that required special tutoring afterwards? Yes also.

A teacher is like a performer balancing spinning plates. The most important plate is the motivation one. Forget carrots and sticks. Just make them want to learn it.

If you feel so inclined today, I’d appreciate if you could pray or rub crystals together or do whatever it is you do to plead with the Powers That Be on behalf of another human. I need a healthy dose of level-headedness with a side-order of professionalism.

So… what is PDEng? If you’re curious, the best place to read it is right from the source. I won’t try to explain, in this space, what it is.

It’s unfortunate that I’m one of the very few first-year Engineering students still in town this term, and it’s fallen to me to have a meeting with the directors of PDEng to discuss the collective concerns of a small body of students from my class.

I’m just compiling notes now, printing emails, surfing the old discussion threads, discarding the worthless gripes and harvesting the meaningful suggestions for improvement. Some of it is just people coming off a PDEng Module and venting, and that’s always the most amusing to read. It would never fly as an argument, and most is too lurid to be pasted into this space, but some little gems are terrific:

I mean honestly, learning style quizzes and reading journals of kids who can neither formulate grammatically error-free sentences, nor distinguish fantasy from reality? Come on! I mean, imagination is great, everyone should have one, but what person writes their ACTUAL logs like a spaceship commander?

This is with reference to the journals such as this one from which ethical dilemmas are the source of a number of essay questions throughout the course. (UW: If the picture is a violation of intellectual property, contact me and I’ll remove it)

Anyhow, if you’re a student in the program with suggestions, the best place to send them is your Assigned Mentor within the program itself. Failing that, contact the director or assistent director. If you’re not a student, but you have questions, you could email the Director, or you could join the public area of our class forum and ask the students.

Mike