New Florence. New Renaissance.

Technology and Student Life at U. of Florida campus

We have started the campus-visit tour for my daughter as she prepares to go to college in Fall of 2010.

The first campus we visited was that of U. of Florida at Gainesville. Home of "The Swamp". "Gator Country". I also dragged my son there even though he has 2 additional years to prepare

4 Gators from different disciplines, some freshmen, some seniors gave us a really nice tour of the sprawling campus, including a mandatory visit to Ben Hill Griffin stadium - home of the national Football champions.

I started to hear enough about how much technology has permeated campus life, that I requested Sunny Davis, one of the guides to rack her brain and identify everything she could on how tech helps make life on campus better, safer.

Here's her list.

1. Wi-Fi on most of the campus. (The campus has plenty of land and lakes in its 2,000 acres for its agricultural and recreation programs which do not obviously have hotspots)  
2. "Clicker quizzes" in class
3. Swipe cards for restricted access to residence halls and specific floors 
4. Separation of accounts through your student ID (students may take their ID to Wachovia/Wells Fargo and activate it as a debit card. The "Vending Account" allows students to use their IDs to do laundry and use the vending machines)
5. Integrated Student Information System –ISIS – for various administrative tasks such as Bill pay, record retrieval etc. 
6. Selected lectures taped and uploaded on electronic platform
7. Fully functioning projector system in every classroom
8. On-line lottery to ration tickets to popular football and basketball games ( for other sports, the demand usually is close to supply, but every home football game has been sold out for the last 20 years) 
9. Listserves (supervised by the Center for Student Involvement, organizations are grouped in listserves to be reached conveniently)
10. "Chat with the Librarian" or "Chat with a Housing Officer" (Instant messaging with the Librarian or Housing officer through their website)
11. Mass text messaging system through the administration office to all students in case of emergencies and lockdowns
12. Look up books through the library website and text message the reference number to your phone.

Thanks, Sunny. Also, thanks for impressing both my kids. Yes, even my tough-to-impress son who was barely awake when the tour started :)

Guest Column: Technology and Soccer Coaching

This continues a new category of posts: Guest columns where friends and readers share how technology is reshaping their hobby – fishing, basket weaving, rugby – whatever.

This time it is good friend and client, Christian Schuh (at the newly privatized Siemens Enterprise Communications Group) about his weekend passion – coaching and refereeing weekend soccer.

“They say we are born with footballs in our cribs in Germany. No, not what we in the US, my adopted country, call football. Real football – soccer. I love the sport, live for the periodic World and European Cups and Olympics – and try to get to as many of those tournaments as I can. But who can wait every few years?

I get a steady diet of my sport via my son and the next generation of soccer players. Just about every other weekend I am with them at a league match or tournament somewhere in the country.

Soccer itself prides itself at sheer ability and has been shy unlike American football to bring too much technology into the sport.

But as IT manager I am glad much of the soccer worlds tournament and league administration has become automated.  Pre-tournament activities such as team registrations, publishing of tournament rules, team hotel info, etc all are routinely found on the web. Then the acceptance into a tournament comes vie email or SMS to a cell-phone. No paper or phone calls.

During a tournament, team managers and coaches must remain connected, since all data like scores, standings, who moves on to the quarter- or semifinals is posted on websites that keep getting more and more elaborate. And unlike the on-premise software I deal with in my day job, I like the fact that all the soccer stuff is SaaS. 

Services like GotSoccer.com and Soccer In College permit teams to maintain rosters, and individual players can maintain detailed bio-graphical info online, which these tournaments then use to attract college coaches to attend tournaments. Bit of an eHarmony to match coaches and players.

Yes, my weekend passion takes a lot of time and effort, but as payback, it is great to see my son, Patrick, 18 (in the picture) being recruited by a number of colleges for their soccer programs. 

I also have a feeling that Patrick and his contemporaries will allow more technology to enter the sport. After all, they all play FIFA 09, where they can make up their own teams, trade and manage players (they know all of them from watching countless international matches on satellite channels that broadcast the worlds game 24x7), play in any big league of the world... they even bring the games to the hotels, hook them to the TVs in rooms and play in between games at tournaments.

So long as they don’t yell Hut Hut at every snap, I mean pass, or start having TV-timeouts every couple of minutes, I am ok with the encroaching technology :)”

Technology and the 2009 Oscars

As we get ready for tonight's broadcast, here are some ways technology plays a role:

• iPhone applications
• Aerial Surveillance by police
• StarTracker surveillance by media
• The "prediction markets"
• Technology in the movies themselves as this slide show covers
• The Sci-Tech awards are traditionally given out in a previous ceremony. This year's coverage

Official Poster of this year's Oscar ceremony via ImageVenue

The Queen's revised website

"First launched in 1997, the British queen's purple-toned site provides pictures, news and background on the monarch and her family. Officials said the improved site will now have a direct link to the videos carried on YouTube's royal channel, integration with Google Maps, and a new section on the queen's pets.

Those interested in seeing her majesty up close will have the chance to submit their job applications to Buckingham Palace and book interviews over the Internet."

MSNBC

Across the ocean in a pedal-powered submarine

"SOME men mark their 40th birthday by buying a flashy new car, changing jobs or finally getting started on that novel. Ted Ciamillo decided he would pedal across the Atlantic in a one-man submarine he has designed and built himself.

It may sound like a crazy stunt dreamed up by an adrenalin junkie, but the plan, dubbed the "Subhuman project", has attracted serious attention from marine biologists. That's because the sub, when it takes to the seas later this year, could for the first time allow them to explore the upper layers of the ocean silently and unobtrusively, revealing marine life as it has never been seen before."

New Scientist

Guest Column: Technology and Tinkering with Cars

This continues a new category of posts: Guest columns where friends and readers share how technology is reshaping their hobby – fishing, basket weaving, rugby – whatever.

This time it is my frequent partner-in-crime, Brian Sommer. The picture is of the Sommer family - dad, brother and him - scavenging a car.

Here he is on how tech has helped - and hurt - his hobby of tinkering with cars. Actually he does more than tinker...read on

"I don't 'restore' cars - I resuscitate them. I give them a new lease on life. I take vehicles with a major component failure and make them live again. Along the way, I've rebuilt 27 engines: 2 for Corvettes, piles of VW Beetle engines, an Opel Isuzu and even my Dad's '64 Ford pickup. I've put wrecked cars back together and I'm quite at home in a junkyard.

Technology has been good/bad for my hobby. I'm really glad to see innovations like electronic ignition, fuel injection, etc. and I even marvel at the elegance of new technologies like electronically controlled variable transmission (ECTV). The latter is this super simple replacement for a transmission that has the effect of giving you an infinite mix of gears and great fuel economy. Computers started showing up in cars in the 1970s. These early 'brains' were the electronic control modules that controlled when the spark should fire for each cylinder. Like laptops today, those babies got really hot under the hood of some cars and the circuitry wouldn't work again unless you put a big bag of ice on them. A hot Texas summer drive may have required the car owner to buy a couple of bags of ice just to get back home.

I like the new technology. It means I don't have to do a tune-up for 100,000 miles. I used to replace the points on my older cars every 3,000 miles. Newer cars get far better horsepower and fuel economy because of the uncanny precision possible from the on-board ignition computer and the array of sensors that provide it excellent feedback. Your car 'knows' if your fuel is watery or low on octane and adjusts for it. It can detect the impact of altitude changes and make adjustments that a carburetor can't. Now, most cars can provide diagnostic codes to you or your mechanic and give you clues as to why your car is misbehaving.

Today's cars now possess at least six processor units and some have many, many, more. Mechanics don't diagnose much anymore. They don't need to. They don't need to listen to the engine, feel for unusual vibrations, etc. Their diagnostic tools tell them what's right and wrong. Even if a mechanic wanted to fix a car the old school way, they're really limited unless they have some big money to buy the diagnostic tools new cars need. SOA hasn't hit the auto industry yet as standards for many of these diagnostic aids are vehicle or brand specific.

Newer cars need newer tools to service them. My old air conditioning tools worked on an older generation of refrigerant. Many parts are not designed to be repaired. Mechanics today replace sub-assemblies like headlight housings, throttle-bodies, etc. These sub-assemblies come with all of the wiring, lights, sensors, etc. already in them. Sub-assemblies are fast to install but very expensive. One headlight housing for our old Volvo cost more than the last Beetle I bought. There's something wrong when I can buy a truck for less than the price to replace the clutch within it.

A few months ago, I got to help my best friend pull the motor on a kit car of his and replace the clutch. Man, did I miss the simplicity of machines like that. We had the motor out in 15 minutes and the clutch changed in 5 more. We were done in an hour and hadn't spend hardly any money. We didn't even get real greasy either. Last week, I contemplated pulling the motor out of one of our cars. I wanted to re-ring the engine and get the heads machined. Technically, I know I can do it. But, when I called my brother, he told me to walk away from that idea. He correctly reminded me that I'd only fix one issue on a car that is developing problems on a daily basis. Plus, that engine rebuild is a killer. He was right. I don't have the time, space and money to rebuild an engine in car that that is barely worth what the rebuild would cost.

Yes, new car tech makes cars run better, deliver more horsepower, operate more efficiently but it also makes these cars a lot harder for car owners to service.

I miss the old tech."

Most innovative companies in sports

Fast Company highlights companies which build stadiums, broadcast games, cater to games, cater to athlete's needs and more

• New England Sports Ventures
• Nike
• Andrews Sports Medicine
• ESPN
• Speedo
• HOK Sport
• NHL.com
• AEG
• Levy Restaurants
• Ultimate Fighting Championship

Microsoft Mobile Momentum

Several announcements by Microsoft in Barcelona - via USA Today

"The new Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system is more attractive and, on the surface, easier to use.  I got a sneak peek of its home screen dashboard on a prototype HTC touch-screen handset last week. Information — email, calendar entries, texts, etc. — is presented at a glance...

Microsoft also announced a new My Phone service that will let you synchronize contacts, photos, videos and messages from a phone to a password-protected web site, thus the data is securely backed up....

Microsoft will upgrade Marketplace as well, where users with Windows phones running 6.5 will be able to purchase and download custom mobile applications, directly on the phone or via the Web...

Also new is a voice search technology called Microsoft Recite, which lets users leave, search for and retrieve voice notes and reminders."

"Hackers in Uniform"

BBC on NATO's Cyber-defense unit.

"We have [about] 100 sensors at the moment deployed at something close to 30 different sites across the Nato countries... one of these sensors could be on the east coast of the United States, one could be in London, one could be in Iraq and a number of them could be in Afghanistan. All that information is simultaneously feeding back to us at the centre here."

Der Speigel on a "still secret" German unit. 

Guest Column: Technology Luddites and Hobbies

This continues a new category of posts: Guest columns where friends and readers share how technology is reshaping their hobby – fishing, basket weaving, rugby – whatever.

This time it is my friend Josh Greenbaum with an contrarian, anti-technology POV. Josh, of course, is not a tech Luddite in his day job - he has been covering the enterprise software market longer than anyone else I know.

But when it comes to his hobbies....

"Reflecting on how technology has changed or enhanced my hobbies has been an interesting exercise – first, as my children are now doing things like sleeping through the night and running off to playdates, I’m beginning to enjoy hobbying again after a five year hiatus. The second reason this is so interesting is that I have taken a solemn vow never to take leisure time for granted again, and having taken that vow, I look at my time off and my hobbies with a new sense of their value and meaning in my life.The third realization is that my hobbies are not only extremely tech-free, but are studiously, almost religiously so.

With one notable exception. So let’s start with that.  Music is a real passion for me: if I had to do it all over again I would have been a (most likely) starving musician and composer. One of the most notable changes to my relationship with music came with my first Ipod:  I suddenly had access to my music in the car, on an airplane (especially once I got my noise-canceling headphones), and even at home in a way that was simpler, more convenient, and more compact than I had ever imagined. This love affair is about to get juiced with the imminent arrival of 30 gigs of music, all of which a friend digitized from our collections of vinyl records. (Yep, I hung on to all the vinyl all these years, and am thrilled that I did.) It just doesn’t get better than this.

But other than music listening, I have an almost anti-technology bend to my other hobbies. I do play a 12-year old electronic keyboard, having decided that headphones are an amazing way to keep anyone else from hearing all the mistakes I’m making as I’m making music. But I’ve never hooked up a computer to the midi interface of my keyboard, never used ProTools or any other composition software, never done more than recorded my songs on tape (though, now that I’m back into this hobby, I may actually start recording using my Ipod).

I think this luddite position dates from my 20s, when I was a much more avid musician and a much harder-working programmer who often spent 10+ hours a day in front of a computer. With that much screen time in my day job, I just couldn’t get excited about spending even more screen time in pursuit of post-work happiness. It just seemed like adding tech to the mix (pun intended) would make it more work than play. At the time, I had a lovely Yamaha acoustic upright, and the analog experience of playing real keys and hearing real strings resonate was all I needed.

Music is definitely as close as I get to technology in my hobbies. My others are biking (no speedometer), hiking (no GPS), backpacking and camping (no satellite phone), discussing politics and society (no tweeting), doing the NYT crossword puzzle (paper and pen), reading newspapers and novels (paper, no Kindle), and generally trying to be outside and away from technology as much as possible. (I probably should add at this juncture that we don’t have cable TV, but you may have figured that out by now.) I used to say, pre-kids, that vacation could only start once we had arrived at a location where all the bars were gone from the cell phone. No more, but it’s still the overriding definition of leisure for me.

That separation of technology and leisure has sort of become thematic in my life, and may be why I don’t jump on new trends like Twitter as quickly as others: I’m not interested in new techy toys, I have as many toys as I need. But as soon as it becomes a genuine business tool, I’ll get on board. Until then, I’d rather take a hike."