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Archives for September 2015

Anatomy of the Harreld Hire

September 13, 2015 By Mark 4 Comments

As an alumnus of the University of Iowa, the recent hiring of J. Bruce Harreld to be the new president of my alma mater gives me pause. In the aftermath of that hire there has been an outpouring of frustration about the hiring process and selection, voiced immediately through votes of no-confidence in the Iowa Board of Regents by both the faculty and students. Chief among the complaints seems to be that the hire may have been a backroom deal brokered by a malevolent force on the Board of Regents, who is disinterested in whether the university can meet its core responsibilities as an institution of higher learning.

While I sympathize with anyone’s frustration in trying to get the truth out of a politically appointed bureaucrat, plausible deniability is a cornerstone of all political chicanery, and can at times approach high art. So the idea that a smoking gun might suddenly appear and reveal the entire hiring process to have been deliberate fraud is unlikely at best. In fact, attacking the regents would only play to the board’s strengths given their control of the hiring process, their secrecy, and particularly their institutional ability to deny and delay until everyone just runs out of indignation.

From time to time, however, bureaucrats — and particularly politically appointed bureaucrats — forget that while they’re cooking the books or lying to the people they purportedly serve they’re still obligated to meet a minimum standard of competence. They don’t have to be rocket scientists, or even rock scientists, but they do have to meet basic tests of accountability, particularly when working in government.

In questioning the mechanics of how Harreld was hired, a crime is being alleged. It may be that an actual crime took place, having to do with hiring practices and government regulations and things I know nothing about, or that the crime was metaphorical. It is frustrating that we will probably never have access to the information that would allow us to determine who, specifically, engineered such a crime, but we don’t have to know whodunnit to know that a crime took place.

The Board of Regents unanimously agreed to hire Harreld at a salary of $600,000 for each of five years, plus $1,000,000 in deferred compensation, meaning Harreld will be paid a minimum of $4,000,000 under the current contract. What makes that particularly remarkable, and factors into the outrage at his hiring, is that J. Bruce Harreld is demonstrably unqualified for the job. That the Iowa Board of Regents insisted, unanimously, on hiring him anyway, obviously calls their own competence into question.

The usual bureaucratic dodge is to say that there was ample opportunity to ask questions and raise objections during the hiring process, that the decision has been made, that it will not be reversed, and that it is now incumbent on everyone to move past any sour grapes and work together as professionals to make the University of Iowa great. As a factual matter, the four finalists for the position did each appear in an open forum and answer questions from stakeholders, and those forums did take place before the regents came to their unanimous determination. If people wanted to raise objections so the regents would factor those concerns into their own decision-making process, they should have made their voices heard.

Preliminary results from the AAUP survey show Ohio State University Provost Joseph Steinmetz with the most support and J. Bruce Harreld, former IBM, Boston Market Company, and Kraft General Foods executive, with the least support.

Of the more than 440 UI faculty members who responded to the AAUP survey — a voluntary poll conducted online that asked the same 10 questions for each candidate — 98 percent said they believe Steinmetz is qualified to be UI president.

Among faculty, only about 3 percent thought Harreld is qualified. The other two candidates — Oberlin College President Marvin Krislov and Tulane University Provost Michael Bernstein — also received high marks from the faculty, with about 94 percent calling Bernstein qualified for the job and 91 percent saying so of Krislov.

Of the 230-plus students, staff, and community members who responded to the AAUP poll, about 95 percent said they thought Steinmetz is qualified for the job, followed by Krislov at 84 percent, Bernstein at 80 percent, and Harreld at 4 percent.

Fair enough. Rather than dwell on the past we will look to the future, and in particular the future graduates of the University of Iowa who are now being led by a man who was not simply the least qualified of the final four candidates vying for president, but unqualified for the position. Because in insisting that they had the right to hire whomever they want, the Board or Regents has not only undercut the very premise of the institution that Harreld now leads, they have eviscerated the criteria by which the students at that institution are judged on a daily basis.

[ Read more ]

Filed Under: Non Sequiturs Tagged With: Harreld

WordPress Editor Jump Fix

September 8, 2015 By Mark 105 Comments

For the past six months or so I’ve been bedeviled by an intermittent problem in WordPress that has made me insane. Until today I was unable to figure out what was causing it or how to stop it, but I believe I have the fix if you’re bedeviled too.

The problem only happened on longer posts, but not consistently so. I would be typing and editing as usual, then suddenly the cursor would jump one line higher than the editing window, meaning I could no longer see what I was typing. I could confirm that the cursor was in that location by scrolling up a line, but if I edited any text it would jump up again, making it impossible to see the line I was working on. (This happened using the text editor in both normal and distraction-free modes, and the visual editor.)

My memory is that the problem began when WP changed its default settings to accommodate mobile screens and tablets. One key feature of that change was dumbing down the interface and slaving the scroll bar and mouse wheel to the post as a whole, instead of assigning functions depending on the location of the cursor, as had been the case.

If you are having this problem, click on SCREEN OPTIONS at the top of the WP screen while editing a post. A settings menu will drop down, at the bottom of which you will find a checkbox, checked, and beside it the following ironic text: Enable full-height editor and distraction-free functionality.

For real distraction-free functionality, uncheck that checkbox.

Not only should that solve the jumping problem, but if you work on a desktop it will give you back scroll-wheel control of the editing window when the cursor is in that space, instead of defaulting to scroll the whole page. (The scroll wheel will still move the whole page when you move the cursor outside the editing window.)

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: tools, Wordpress

Boot Hill: Origin of the Deathmatch

September 6, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

The other day I ran across mention of yet another Western-themed game, which prompted me to once again think back to the earliest days of the pencil-and-paper RPG, and a truly great Western-themed game that I played on numerous occasions. As was always the case, however, I couldn’t find any mention of it online, because it turns out I was misremembering the name.

The game that I thought was called Gunfighter was in fact called Boot Hill, and if you played it even once you’ll remember. Unlike any other pencil-and-paper game of its time, Boot Hill was about unrelenting action. You looked at a map of a small frontier town, the DM gave you an area to start from, you made your choice, the other players made theirs, and the clock started ticking.

An entire game might last a half-hour, or maybe an hour at most if players were extremely cautious, but in game-time each battle was often a matter of only seconds, maybe a few minutes at most. And it was riveting. Even today I still carry memories of the imagined places and battles in my mind, and they all took place forty years ago.

I don’t know if anyone has ever connected the dots, but I’m willing to bet that Boot Hill was one of the earliest — if not the earliest — deathmatch games, albeit in paper-and-pencil form. If you enjoy pencil-and-paper gaming and can find it, preferably in one of its earlier incarnations, you might enjoy it for its ease of access and relatively short duration. Or you can just keep playing over and over until the sun comes up.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Interactive

The User Experience as a Service

September 3, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

Reading up on the latest tech news during the Windows 10 rollout and the launch of Intel’s Skylake processors reminded me just how far we’ve come in ceding control of our online lives to a few self-interested corporations. If I hadn’t lived through it I might be shocked, but it’s still pretty disquieting.

Now, the internet being its usual binary self, raising questions about privacy in the digital age is seen by many as equivalent to donning a tinfoil hat, but I don’t agree. Being naive about or flagrantly irresponsible with your rights is your business, but acting as if what’s happening at a cultural level is inevitable or even healthy is itself an indicator of insanity. Particularly with regard to children, and how few protections seem to be in place to allow them to have an online life that is not personally identifiable in perpetuity.

The marketing aspect of all this invasive technology is pretty straightforward. If a company talks about improving the user experience, what they mean is that the changes they’re making are for the express purpose of data rape. Likewise, when a company talks about a product as a service, what they mean is that you’re going to keep paying for the same thing over and over but never actually own anything. The Windows operating system is now a service, but because it was given to many users as a free upgrade the ongoing costs will be derived from improving the user experience — meaning harvesting massive amounts of user data, some of which may never have been available before because that data originates at the level of the operating system.

A few days ago I said I thought Microsoft might get into anti-trust trouble with the government after goading by Google or Amazon or some other miffed data scraper, but in the intervening days I’ve revised that opinion. The information grab that Microsoft is attempting is so unprecedented, and penetrates not just into the homes but the psyches of the individuals who use Microsoft’s products, that I think the federal government will be forced to intervene.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Non Sequiturs Tagged With: Microsoft

UX Design is the New SEO

September 1, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

If you spend even a little time reading about tech you know there are always trendy buzzwords skulking around, looking to leech money out of naive or desperate pockets. Six months ago, after having my head in the sand for the better part of a year, I belatedly noticed a big push to extol the virtues of UX Design (aka User eXperience Design), which currently seems to be the focus of a number of companies that service the technology industry.

What is UX Design, or UXD, or UX, or Design? Well, that’s a good question. The broad answer is that it’s the art and quasi-science of how users interact with whatever you’ve got, though these days it’s primarily discussed in terms of software. If you have a product, and it can be used — or even just experienced — then by definition there are design elements intrinsic to that relationship whether you have paid much attention to them or not. If you make your living based on the effectiveness of that relationship, then UX Design is critical to your lifeblood. Or so the argument goes.

If that also sounds like a bunch of conceptual hooey I wouldn’t disagree, but don’t take it from me. Here’s the ISO explaining what the user experience encompasses.

According to the ISO definition, user experience includes all the users’ emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviors and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use.

As you can see, UX Design can cover just about anything you want it to cover, meaning it’s a wonderfully pliable concept if you’re trying to terrorize people into hiring you to solve all those UX problems they didn’t know they had. In that sense UXD is the new SEO because it can be used to instill fear, particularly in the hearts of people who don’t understand it. (And just in time, too, given that SEO seems to have run its cash-cow course.)  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Interactive

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