Dear Commons Community,

We spent the day in Helsinki and had a rather short tour and decided to walk around the city as much as possible by ourselves.  Like Sweden, Finland has tens of thousands of lakes and islands.  Helsinki has a good deal of water in and around it plus a number of parks that were deep green at this time of year.   It is also an incredibly clean city with lots of trolley cars.

Perhaps one interesting aspect of Helsinki is a lack of historic areas and/or buildings and monuments.  The tour guide explained that it has one main historic plaza, the Senate Square that contains three buildings: the Senate Building, the Senate Cathedral and the main building of the University of Helsinki.  When asked why only one such square, the tour director mentioned two reasons.  One was that the Finnish people built everything with wood that just did not last through the centuries.   The second reason was that for much of its existence, Finland has been occupied, at war or otherwise controlled by either Sweden or Russia and Helsinki has seen a lot of destruction.   However, in the entrance to the Senate Square is a lone huge statue of the Russian Czar Alexander II.  When asked why his statue so dominated this square, the tour director said because he was the only czar who treated the Finns fairly and who gave them a certain amount of self-rule including allowing them to establish schools for their children.

We also visited a park with a magnificent sculpture in honor of the composer Jean Sibelius.

Lastly, at this time of year, the Finnish people are getting ready to celebrate the Midsummer Night Festival (Weekend of June 23-24^th), during which there will be light throughout the day so much so that you can read book outside at 12:00 midnight.

We will be traveling tomorrow to St. Petersburg!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Sweden is made up of more than 30,000 islands.  Stockholm is a city of islands and you cannot travel around it without regularly going over bridges many of which are quite small.  We visited the City Hall where the Nobel Prize banquet is held,  Stockholm Cathedral, the Vasa Museum, and had lunch in the main plaza of the old part of the city.   The Vasa Museum houses a must see completely intact 1628 ship, the Vasa, the only one of its kind in the world from that that era of sailing ships. The museum actually was built around the ship which was lifted from Stockholm Harbor and restored.

The Nobel Prizes are named as most of us know for Alfred Nobel, the inventor and manufacturer of TNT (dynamite).  Never married and without children, he left much of his fortune as an endowment for funding the prizes that bear his name.  One story and only a story has it that he had a brother who died several years before him but one newspaper mistakenly wrote an obituary about Alfred.  The obituary focused on his association with dynamite and upon reading it, Alfred realized that his legacy was tied almost entirely to the development of the material used extensively for war and destruction.  To change his legacy, he established the Nobel Peace Prize.

All in all a fine day of touring a beautiful city of archipelagos, lakes, and locks.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I am trying to catch up on some of the news especially my favorite columnists.  Maureen Dowd had a column on Sunday comparing George Herbert Walker (Poppy) and his son, George W. Bush.  She is kind in her praise of her father and not so much for the son but this is territory that has been covered many times.  Here is a samle:

“It made me sad to see him (George Senior)  in a wheelchair, his lower legs weakened by Parkinsonitis. He had once been so kinetic that the Chinese press described him as “ants on a hot pan.”

“A new CNN/ORC International poll found that Bush the senior is far more respected than Bush the junior, who is the least popular among the living ex-presidents.”

“Poppy had to watch W. distance himself, run as the heir to Ronald Reagan and then tar the family name by governing destructively, egged on by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (41’s old nemesis).”

“Because his son tacked so much farther right into crazy neocon bellicosity, Poppy … is now nostalgically viewed as an emblem of lost bipartisanship and centrism.”

“Poppy spoke fondly of his new pal, Bill Clinton, and highly of President Obama. (His only tart word was reserved for Donald Trump, the birther agitator.)

Bush [Senior] is so reluctant to use “the big I,” as his mother called displays of ego, that he never even cashed in with a proper presidential memoir. It would have required a sustained first-person singular.”

She concludes by quoting Bush Senior’s Pulitzer Prize winning biographer, Jon Meacham:   “He’s a really important historical guy.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday we spent the entire day traveling due north in the Baltic Sea from Copenhagen to Stockholm.  Sunset is now at about 10:35 pm and sunrise is at 3:30 am.  I attended three lectures to prepare us for our upcoming ports (Stockholm, Helsinki, St. Petersburg, and Tallin (Estonia)).   The lectures were given by an historian, a tour director and a young graduate art student.  All were interesting in sharing their knowledge about this part of the world.  The historian focused on the wars of the 20^th century and the devastation to these cities and how they had to be rebuilt and restored.  The tour director spoke of the natural and man-made beauty of these cities.

I particularly liked the young art student who was born in St. Petersburg in the 1980s and described what it was like growing up under Soviet rule.  Her grandmother or babushka lived her entire life in St. Petersburg and saw the name changed to Leningrad after the revolution in 1917, to Petrograd and back again to St. Petersburg.   The student mentioned how religion was not only frowned upon but repressed.   She attended summer camps where she was taught why atheism was good for her and beneficial to the state.  Magnificent churches built over the centuries were closed down or converted to warehouses, ice skating rinks and swimming pools.  She also provided a good deal of background on the czars and czarinas both good and bad.   Another excellent history lesson.

As I write this I am looking at the entrance to Stockholm with its thousands of islands.

More later!

Tony

Stockholm

Dear Commons Community,

Randall Stross, professor of business at San Jose State University, had a piece in yesterday’s New York Times on computer  scoring of essays specifically of the kind that are used on  the standardized tests in K-12 schools.  He described:

“This spring, the William and Flora Hewlitt Foundation sponsored a competition to see how well algorithms submitted by professional data scientists and amateur statistics wizards could predict the scores assigned by human graders. The winners were announced last month — and the predictive algorithms were eerily accurate.

The competition was hosted by Kaggle, a Web site that runs predictive-modeling contests for client organizations — thus giving them the benefit of a global crowd of data scientists working on their behalf…

The essay-scoring competition that just concluded offered $60,000 as a first prize and drew 159 teams. At the same time, the Hewlett Foundation sponsored a study of automated essay-scoring engines now offered by commercial vendors. The researchers found that these produced scores effectively identical to those of human graders.

Barbara Chow, education program director at the Hewlett Foundation, says: “We had heard the claim that the machine algorithms are as good as human graders, but we wanted to create a neutral and fair platform to assess the various claims of the vendors. It turns out the claims are not hype.”

If the thought of an algorithm replacing a human causes queasiness, consider this: In states’ standardized tests, each essay is typically scored by two human graders; machine scoring could replace one of the two. And humans are not necessarily ideal graders: they provide an average of only three minutes of attention per essay.  Ms. Chow says.

We are talking here about providing a very rough kind of measurement, the assignment of a single summary score on, say, a seventh grader’s essay, not commentary on the use of metaphor in a college senior’s creative writing seminar.”

The article goes on to make the case that if for nothing else the software could be used as a cost-effective way of scoring these types of essays by eliminating at least one of the human scorers.

Tony

Copenhagen

Dear Commons Community,

Arrived in Copenhagen this morning.  We took a tour of the City and visited a number of sights (Little Mermaid, Queen’s Palace, Tivoli Gardens).  All were impressive and interesting.

We also took the advice of our friend, David Podell (Marymount Manhattan and CSI) and took our own walk to the old part of Copenhagen.   Several large pedestrian malls crisscross this part of the city.  Very charming and fun.  The two most impressive visits were to the “Old” University of Copenhagen and the Synagogue of Copenhagen.  The Old University houses a huge beautiful library as well as busts of some of its luminaries including the physicist Niels Bohr.  Fine tribute to its faculty.

The Synagogue of Copenhagen is historic because it was its rabbi just before World War II who alerted the Jewish community that the occupying German forces were getting ready to round them up and send them to concentration camps.  Most of this community was able to escape to the country side where they were hidden by the Danish underground.  Great history.

Fine Visit!

Tony

Copenhagen

Dear Commons Community,

Because of the poor Internet connection on board the ship, I am a bit cut-off from my normal news resources.  I attended a lecture yesterday by an historian, Charles Carlton.  The lecture was on the Baltics, much of it to do with World War I and World War II.  He did this while we were passing near the area of the World War I Battle of Jutland in the North Sea.  Pretty interesting.  He also told the following story of Winston Churchill.

In the early 1950s, Churchill was introduced to give a short talk by a stiff upper-lip teetotaler as someone who had consumed a good deal of alcohol during his life (Churchill was a well-known drinker).    To make the point, the teetotaler indicated that if you could measure how much alcohol Churchill had consumed over the course of his lifetime, you would be able to fill much of the room in which they were situated.  Churchill came to the podium and asked how much of the room would be filled with alcohol and the teetotaler pointed to a spot about three-quarters up on the wall.  Churchill went to the wall and then looked to the spot and said:

“So much more to do and so little time to do it!!”

More later!

Tony

North Sea

Dear Commons Community,

I am on a ship in the North Sea on the way to Copenhagen with a very poor Internet connection. I had hoped to continue to blog on my trip but not sure I will be able to.   This simple message had to be reposted two times.

Tony

North Sea

Dear Commons Community,

Here is an audio interview conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education with Charles Severance, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, who helped start Sakai, the  open-source alternative to Blackboard’s course-management software. Blackboard hired Mr. Severance this Spring as a consultant to lead its bid to support the open-source software. He talks about Blackboard, Sakai and the future of open source in higher education.  Lots of food for thought for those of us who question Blackboard’s monopolistic tendencies and who want to move beyond Blackboard for our online teaching.

Tony

London

Dear Commons Community,

Richard D. Kahlenberg, author and senior fellow at The Century Foundation, in his weekly blog post for the Chronicle of Higher Education, comments on the failure of organized labor and the Democratic Party on Tuesday to recall Governor Scott Thomas.  He makes two key observations/recommendations.

“First, the public sector needs a strong private-sector union movement to survive. For years, the public sector has been the bright spot in an otherwise declining labor movement…While private-sector unions declined, public-sector unions flourished, to the point where unions in the public sector now represent more members that unions in the much larger private-sector economy…

Second, the Wisconsin vote underlines the need for unions to energize fellow progressives to understand what is at stake in the attack on organized labor. According to exit polls, labor did a good job of turning out members of union households. In the 2010 election between Walker and Barrett, union households constituted 26 percent of voters, but in yesterday’s recall, they constituted 33 percent of the vote. But Democrats generally were not similarly energized and actually declined slightly as a percentage of voters from 37 percent in 2010 to 34 percent yesterday. President Barack Obama, although traveling in the Midwest before the vote, chose not to put his moral authority behind collective bargaining, which may help explain why 18 percent of voters who said they supported Obama nevertheless voted for Walker.”

In sum, the public unions will continue to lose influence and more without a strong private sector labor movement and the Democratic Party needs to put its weight behind organized labor.  The Democratic Party leadership including President Obama should especially take note of the latter otherwise it might be a very sad November.

Tony

London