Ye Olde iPhone Backup Server

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Toolboth Tavern 04 by Shadowgate, on FlickrDo you have an old smart phone, tablet, or computer in a drawer or a closet somewhere that you never got around to selling or giving away? You might consider setting it up as a development server as Jason describes here. You can also set it up to act as an extra layer in your backup strategy.

This is what I decided to do with an old iPhone 3GS that still worked, except a testy headphone connection, that had a nice 32GB of space on it. I wanted an extra place to backup my mail and dump larger files quickly for transfer to other devices that might connect to my local network (including guests who visit). While I won’t go into all the steps in complete detail, here is basically what was required to get this up and running (I’m writing here from perspective of using an iPhone and connecting to it from other OS X devices):

  1. If you have an iPhone or iPad (rather than an Android or other mobile operating system) you will need to first Jailbreak it in order to allow it to perform its new duties. Amy Cavender and Ethan Watrall have written more about what that means here at ProfHacker here and here. Depending on your version of iOS and which device you have, this may take a little googling about how to download the necessary software and perform the jailbreak.
  2. Once your device is jailbroken, you will likely have to install one of the standard “Networking” packages in Cydia called “OpenSSH.”
  3. Plug your old device in and leave it somewhere with a good connection to your local home network.
  4. Find out the IP address of your device. You will use this to connect to your device and copy files. On the iPhone or iPad go into “Settings > wifi > your connection” and look under the IP address listed there.
  5. Now you should be able to connect to your device with SSH or SFTP. Use an FTP application (such as cross-platform FileZilla, or Fetch and CyberDuck on OS X), configure it to use SFTP, and connect to your device with the IP address you took note of. Your main user on the iPhone should be the “root” account so use that for username (any tips out there for best way of creating new users on a jailbroken iPhone to use instead?) and the default password is “alpine.” This absolutely must be changed to stand any chance at security. To change it, connect via SSH connect to the phone and change the password of root to something else. You may wish to look into further ways to restrict access to the machine to only other computers on the local network.

Optional: If you know you will be connecting a lot to your backup server from various applications, it can be annoying to remember the IP address. You can call it something else by modifying a kind of a personal phone book called your “hosts” file. Editing this file you can, for example, change the less than memorable 10.0.1.16 to something like “oldman.” Then, when you connect to it, you need only enter the latter into the server address.

Bonus: In OS X can also connect to your phone directly from the Finder if you install one of various packages for jailbroken phones that enable connections through “AFP.”

For More Seasoned Hackers: Get lighthttpd or Apache web server up and running on your iPhone to use it as a kind of home network home page, serving information to your guests about their home or a standard set of files (“house-FAQ.pdf” or “guide-to-getting-shower-temperature-just-right.pdf” anyone?). Or, get standard development tools and languages running on the iPhone. As with hosting any web servers or servers on a local machine, this comes with additional security risks so be sure to keep this in mind and learn about how you can restrict access and “harden” your installations.

Gold Hacker Medal: Replace iOS completely with Linux and give your iPhone a new life.

Has anyone else found useful things to do with old smartphones and tablets they have?

Creative Commons licensed photo by Shadowgate

The Up Goer Five Text Editor

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No matter how regular your writing practice, it’s possible to get stuck. When you’re stuck, sometimes what’s helpful is not motivation, but just a change in perspective. And what could offer a bigger change in perspective from the complexity of most academic writing than a text editor that restricts you to the thousand most common words in English?

As with most great things, the idea originated with an xkcd strip by Randall Munroe, “Up Goer Five” (Click for full size):

The Up-Goer Five

The idea, then, is to describe complex ideas or projects only using the “ten hundred” most common words in English.

Theo Sanderson realized that this might be a fun way to think about one’s own writing, so he created The Up-Goer Five Text Editor, which checks your prose against a list of the thousand most commonly-used words. As Sanderson explains, the list is Wiktionary’s index of word frequency in contemporary fiction.

As you can imagine, people have started describing all kinds of things using The Up-Goer Five Text Editor, from parliamentary democracy to the moons of Saturn. There’s even a tumblr devoted to scientific explanations, Ten Hundred Words of Science. On Twitter, there’s also the excellent hashtag, #UpGoerFive.

There’s already an Up-Goer 6, which will color-code your text based on how common the words are.

As the comic makes clear, it’s pretty hard to imagine a situation where one would actually want to use text written in the Up-Goer Five Text Editor. On the other hand, the challenge it offers (which as Jim Dalrymple notes, can be incredibly frustrating) can help you think about your writing in a new way, especially if you’re stuck.

Do you have a toy or game that you use to help with your writing? Let us know in comments!

Photo “Saturn V Rocket” by Flickr user / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

 

Your Voice: How Much Math Proficiency is Needed to Succeed in STEM?

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survey
This post is a little different than our usual tips and reflections about the professoriate. But at the heart of ProfHacker is an emphasis on the power of technologies such as social media to spread information about the good work being done in academia. We think that a project being conducted by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) matches that heart, and so we share the following with you.

The WCER is currently conducting a study that asks one simple question: What level of math proficiency do STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) faculty consider a good indication that a student is likely to succeed in a STEM major? The study, entitled called “Talking about Leaving, Revisited: Exploring Current Patterns of Undergraduate Persistence in the Sciences,” is a follow-up to Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt’s original study and book 15 years ago. For that work, Elaine and Nancy asked faculty what minimum SAT math score would be an indicator of sufficient math readiness for an undergraduate to succeed in a STEM major. The answer in 1997: 650. For the follow-up study, they are using a very short two-item survey to see whether this indicator has changed.

Mark and his team would love to see the input of ProfHacker readers in their survey results, and so they encourage you to answer the two very short questions.

Social media is gaining some leverage in the STEM world, and it is hoped that by sharing the survey with ProfHacker readers it will get a bigger audience. Along those lines, physics blogger Rhett Allain posted a recent reflection of the role of Twitter in the recent Winter American Association of Physics Teachers conference, which could perhaps serve as more fodder for considering the role of social media in STEM. 

Have you had any success in leveraging social media to assist you in the work of improving STEM education? Let us know in the comments.

[Image Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user Sean MacEntee]

Digital Distractions: The Grading Game

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Exam resultsGiven the popularity of phrases like “grading jail” to describe the stress of the competing demands to offer meaningful feedback in the shortest amount of time possible, it seems unlikely that there’s any fun to be had in grading papers as part of a game, but that is the wager of The Grading Game, by modes of expression.

The Grading Game (iOS) makes you the TA of Dr. Snerpus, the meanest faculty member on campus, who demands that you flunk students for saying mean things about him on social media. You are then presented with a variety of papers with typographical and grammatical errors, and your job is to find them in a given amount of time. If you succeed, you will be able to pay off your (virtual) student loans. Game mechanics couldn’t be simpler: your finger is the red pen, and you tap errors to fix them. Beware, though: if you fat-finger the wrong line, or otherwise tap a correct word, you get a time penalty. And the pressure is on: If you don’t deliver average student grades in the C range or below, you don’t get paid!

Here’s what it looks like:

Screenshot of the Grading Game

Although they are very short and not very well-written, the essays are arguably the best part of this game, as they draw facts from reddit’s page of especially interesting Wikipedia entries (how can you not love this speech by Soggy Sweat, Jr.?) According the game designers, the typos and grammatical errors are randomly generated from lists of the most statistically common such errors.

The literal-minded might object to several aspects of the game, such as the fact that it imagines a world where TAs are paid by the error, where it’s possible to earn more than $1000 for correcting a three-sentence essay, and where grading is fundamentally a hunt-the-typo enterprise. And there’s no doubt that for people who actually do grading, it’s a bit disorienting to shut down your normal grading instincts and focus only on typos and obvious grammatical errors. (For example, errors of citation–leaving out quotation marks around quotations, for example, are not recognized by the game. Similarly, writing that is awkward or vague or misleading, but not outright ungrammatical, is fine.)

I also would have to agree with Phil Scuderi‘s observation that the game isn’t really about either grading or grammar, but is rather about tricking your brain to see what is actually on the screen, rather than seeing the correct grammar that it expects. And it’s also true that there’s not a ton of variety in the game: it offers you one trick, and you either enjoy it or not.

But I will say that The Grading Game makes proofreading surprisingly engaging. By organizing each challenge into three 30-second increments, the game is a fun way to kill little pockets of time. While it’s no Kingdom Rush, It’s currently priced at $0.99, and there’s also a free version that lets you play a few levels before you plunk down your dollar.

(I learned about The Grading Game via “The Fiver, which is The Guardian‘s daily tea time e-mail rounding up news, commentary, and videos about soccer football, and which is a fine digital distraction in its own right.)

Do you have a mobile game you’re enjoying at the moment? Why not share in comments?

Photo “Project 365 #231: 190810 The Proof of the Pudding” by Flickr user Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

 

Open Thread Wednesday: Do You Use Shame in Your Work?

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An illustration of a pig with staring eyesRecently, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about shame. Some of this comes from the Freakonomics podcast, which I’ve become enamored of. (If you’re looking for something to listen to, ProfHacker readers have previously chimed in about their favorite podcasts.) An episode from January 2012 discussed the problem of hand-washing among doctors who—contrary to what one might guess—tend to have the worst hand hygiene practices at hospitals. The solution to the problem: shame. Public announcements of those who have not been following hand sanitation procedures at staff meetings led to a dramatic increase of hand-washing at L.A.’s Cedars Sinai Medical Center. Shame, as the Freakonomics team likes to point out, is a tremendous incentive to change behavior.

Changing behavior is also something that my wife and I have been thinking about: specifically that of our children during dinner time. When placed at a table and served food, each of our three kids has one or more tendencies that we would like to eradicate before they be seen too often in public. We have tried numerous approaches, but we recently came up with something that works: the Shame Pig.

The Shame Pig (SP)—which you can see in my lead image—is a little cardboard stand-up that we made with some cardboard, construction paper, and a Google image search. If you misbehave during dinner, the Shame Pig comes and sits in front of you. The Pig will move if someone else commits an act of brazen rudery. Not only does he look at you with those baleful eyes (and as Bethany Nowviskie tweeted, the eyes make a difference) but whoever ends the meal with the SP in front of him or her has the responsibility of clearing and washing the table and loading the dishwasher. We have found that the Shame Pig has resulted in immediate shifts in behaviors of our kids (and ourselves, I must confess). We all have a visual reminder of the standards of manners and there is immediate feedback when an infraction has occurred. The kids actually kind of love the schadenfreude of the SP and are on the lookout to catch others—especially their parents.

When I shared the idea of the Shame Pig a few weeks ago with Jason, Kathleen, Bethany and some other friends of ProfHacker, Jason immediately suggested that there might be some pedagogical applications of the Shame Pig. [NB: Jason remembers this conversation differently, and is pretty sure he thought that this would get a phone call from a crabby dean or provost.--The Editors.] In particular, Jason opined that  a “Participation Pig” could be put in front of the student who enthusiastically talks so much in class that his peers don’t have a chance to get a word in edgewise. (Confession: I was / am this student.) [That really *was* Jason's idea.--ibid.] I really like this idea, and if I was teaching this semester, I would put it to use. I’d also work to encourage my students to place the Pig in front of me if I talked for more than 3 minutes at a time. (I’ve thought about using a chess clock for this too.)

Now. There are clearly some important reasons to think carefully about how to use shame productively in our careers. But I also think it’s an idea with some merit to it. Jason has more or less made this argument when he wrote about how “bad meetings are your fault.” And Dan Cohen’s terrific post yesterday about open access and the tragic death of Aaron Swartz suggests that we should employ shame as one incentive for academics who do not make their work publicly accessible.

So I’d like to turn the question to you, ProfHackers: what role can you see for shame in your work? Could you use it to improve your teaching? Your meetings? Your commitment to write those next three pages? Let us know in the comments!

Lead image: shame pig2 / Brian Croxall / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/