Another ALM thesis is progress

If you want to see what an early-stage ALM thesis research project looks like, you should check out the "Mission Control" blog that an ALM/Government concentrator operates over on the Harvard Law School blogging engine.

The last two entries -- Learning from others - read the theses in Grossman and First Thesis Writers Group Meeting -- remind me so much of what I was dealing with 18 months ago. This ALM student has some solid advice for anyone else getting ready to launch their thesis research, or for anyone interested in researching the use of military contractors/hired guns in Iraq -- a particularly hot topic considering the horrific incident involving Blackwater a few weeks ago.

Harvard's Office of Career Services finally opens up to the Extension School

The Harvard Extension School's Career and Academic Resource Center (CARC) has scored a few wins for HES students, judging by the contents of an email that was sent out a few days ago:

Office of Career Services at Harvard (OCS)

OCS is now offering a variety of career services to all Harvard Extension School degree and certificate candidates and alumni, such as access to the reading room, University Career Action Network (a database of internship listings), Crimson Compass (a database of Harvard alumni who have volunteered to talk about their career experiences with students and other alumni), and CareerBeam (a comprehensive online career research and resource tool). Visit the OCS website, for more information about the career services, http://www.ocs.fas.harvard.edu/students/dce-students.htm. ...

In addition, candidates and alumni can meet with Assistant Director Linda Spencer on a referral basis. Individual career counseling services can include Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (a personality assessment tool), resume/cover letter critiques, and mock video interviews. To schedule an appointment, download the OCS Information and Referral form, under CARC forms (available online at http://www.extension.harvard.edu/2007-08/forms/) and fax it to the Undergraduate Degree Office.

I highlight this news about the OCS, because until relatively recently this important FAS office only serviced students from Harvard College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Even though the Extension School also falls under the FAS umbrella, its students were not welcome to take advantages of the many services available there. I sent the OCS an email asking about this policy a few years ago and never even received a reply.

However, I must note that the OCS has not completely opened up to the Extension School community; besides the limited access to Linda Spencer, the CARC email notes "Due to specific funding regulations, OCS is NOT able to offer DCE students on-campus recruiting services."

Still, it's a start.

Incidentally, the CARC email has a lot of information about other HES/DCE workshops and activities that fall outside of the OCS services. You can learn about them on the CARC website.

Tool, math rock, and the Fibonacci Sequence

Courtesy of Daniel Miessler's blog comes this YouTube video, featuring the music of one of my favorite heavy rock bands, Tool, and a suggestion that the one of the tracks on Lateralus was composed with the Fibonacci Sequence in mind:

The author of the YouTube video is not the first person to make this connection. I never thought about the meter used in the lyrics, but I have heard the band's music called "math rock" before. I first started getting into Tool about seven or eight years ago, and I probably conducted half of my thesis research while listening to Lateralus and 10,000 Days. At 10:30 in the evening, when I was plowing through scores of database searches and manually updating my spreadsheets, having Tool playing in the background could keep me going for another hour or two. The music was methodical, ethereal, and strangely comforting. The ritual I developed required me to keep studying until the last song on the album (either Faaip De Oaid on Lateralus or Viginti Tres on 10,000 Days) had faded. Then I could shut down the computer and go to sleep ... or put on some classical music and keep going.

While I'm on the topic, here's a playlist of the albums I regularly listened to while working on the thesis -- as well as music that I found impossible to study to.

John Harvard gets a Halo

I've been following the Halo 3 hype through my Computerworld blog, but never expected something like this:

Crave and Joystiq have more.

It's not the first time something like this has happened to poor old John Harvard. The MIT/Harvard rivalry goes back decades, but unfortunately the MIT kids always seem to think up the best pranks, which sometimes even manage to draw Yale into the fray.

Thesis update: Done!

I can't believe it. I'm done. Done! Here's how it went down. My thesis director, Professor Alastair Iain Johnston, signed off in the late spring. I then had to go through a few formatting revisions with my Extension School research advisor, Dr. Donald Ostrowski. That took the better part of the summer, in part because he has a lot of other work to do, and I was in Asia for State of Play and a family trip to Taiwan for two weeks in August. Finally, I got back the paper drafts at the beginning of September. I input the few remaining corrections -- adding a few missing periods in footnotes, and correcting some minor spacing issues -- and then sent the PDF file to Wells Bindery in Waltham, one of the binderies that Harvard uses for thesis and dissertation work. The hard copies won't be ready for a few weeks, but the content is final. Here's the complete text of the final grade report, written by Prof. Johnston:

This is a first-rate thesis. Lamont worked extraordinarily hard to develop a range of sophisticated quantitative content analysis methods in order to test their usefulness in adjudicated academic debates about the nature of Chinese foreign policy. In particular he used these methods to test whether Chinese diplomacy toward Vietnam from the late 1970s to the end of the Cold War was based on anti-Soviet motivations or based on distinct concerns about Vietnamese influence in Southeast Asia. Lamont did an excellent job of seeking out and using information about content analysis techniques from a number of top experts on content analysis at Harvard and elsewhere. he showed a great deal of creativity in playing around and perfecting the methods and he also demonstrated acute sensitivity to the analytical downsides of these methods.

I've temporarily archived it at the following location: Making a Case for Quantitative Research in the Study of Modern Chinese History: The New China News Agency and Chinese Policy Views of Vietnam, 1977-1993 I hope to identify a permanent electronic archiving solution in the next few months (Update: The thesis is now available through UMI/ProQuest). A bound copy will be sent to the Extension School as well, and I assume it will either be filed in Grossman Library or the Archives. There are a lot of people who I'd like to acknowledge here, in addition to Prof. Johnston and Dr. Ostrowski. Here are some brief summaries of how they contributed to my research: Drs. Doug and Joe Bond of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs: The "Bond brothers" taught my graduate proseminar in 2003, and introduced me to modern mass media content analysis techniques. Sally Hadden, Associate Professor of History and Courtesy Professor of Law at Florida State University and a Harvard Summer School instructor in the history of the Old South: She taught me how to prepare high-quality précis, which have been hugely useful in documenting the literature used in my research and cited in my thesis. Philip Kuhn, the Francis Lee Higginson Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations: I took two classes with Prof. Kuhn that relate to modern Chinese history (China in Modern Times in 2003, and Modern Chinese Emigration in 2005), and he was the first Harvard instructor to evaluate a CCA that I had designed on my own based on NCNA/Xinhua data. Will Lowe, formerly of the Weatherhead Institute's Identity Project, and now of the University of Nottingham: I never spoke with Will in person, but I have communicated with him by email several times. His free, open-source text analysis program, Yoshikoder, was one of the three software tools that proved instrumental to my research (the others were Excel and LexisNexis Academic, but I don't know who to thank for those!) There are two other constituencies I'd like to thank here. One is my family, including my parents. But my wife deserves an extra-special thanks. I'll excerpt from the dedication that appears on page viii of my thesis, which sums up the sense of appreciation -- and love -- I have for her:

I would like to thank my wife Nicole, who has been the most patient and supportive witness to my academic journey over the past four years. There have been hundreds of nights and weekends that I have spent in my study, conducting research or writing, time that I otherwise could have spent with her and our two small children, yet she never once protested. I hope that I can reciprocate some day, but in the meantime, I would like to dedicate this thesis to her.

Lastly, I'd like to thank all of you. When I started Harvard Extended back in May of 2005, I had no idea that it would attract so much interest: The hundreds of pages on this blog have been viewed more than 100,000 times (my counter reads 85,891, but I didn't activate it until April 2006, nearly one year after I started it). Thousands of people have seen it. Many have been drive-bys or lurkers, but some of you have left comments or sent emails to give support. I've even met a few of you in person. The words of encouragement have been important, but knowing that I have had this audience has been a strong motivator as well. I would have done the thesis without the blog, but I probably would have been much slower if it hadn't been for all of you looking over my virtual shoulder. Regular updates were required, and this really forced me to consider the progress of my thesis and research on a weekly or monthly basis, and plan the next steps, even if I wanted to procrastinate or take a break from my studies. So thank you, thank you, thank you! I'll continue to maintain this blog for my next (and last) Extension School class: Survey of Publishing: From Text to Hypertext. It starts tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Soccer balls and cultural misunderstandings

Maybe handing out soccer balls is the wrong approach to winning hearts and minds in Iraq. Wired's Danger Room blog filed this entry from Fallujah:

The first thing Mac [McCallister, an academic working as a consultant for the Marines] tells military leaders coming into the area is to focus on shame and honor, not hearts and minds.

“I, as an individual, may want that kid to have a soccer ball. But consider the effect, okay?” he says.

Shame and honor are “limited resources,” Mac explains. “They’re exchanged like currency. And it’s a zero sum game. If I embarrass you, I take some of your honor, and you give me some of your shame. Now you want to do something to get it back.

“The father, off to the side, is thinking, ‘Hey, that’s my job.’ So you’ve shamed him. He might also know that the kid doesn’t deserve it. Shamed him again. And if you give the ball to the little kid, he could get beat up, since the bigger ones prey on the littler ones. More shame. So does that father grab an Ak-47 and do a drive-by, to get back some of his honor?”

Cultural gaffes committed by foreigners visiting a new territory are nothing new -- in China and Taiwan, some basic ones include not understanding "face" or guanxi. What's surprising about this (if it's an accurate assessment) is we don't have a handle on this aspect of tribal culture after four years of occupation -- and it's a life or death situation.

Pulling the plug on the Chinese Internet

Yesterday on Computerworld, I blogged about China's latest preemptive Internet damage-control mechanism: Pulling the plug on entire data centers. Here's what I had to say about the episode, and its causes:

Despite regularly updating and strengthening the rules that govern the press and Internet communications, free-wheeling discussion on a wide range of topics continues to flourish.

Until now. Authorities in China have done something which I previously considered very unlikely: They are actually pulling the plug on the Internet. Or at least parts of it -- the troublesome parts. Data centers are literally being taken offline, because "inappropriate content" has been found on some servers hosted in them. Of course, such actions affect other Websites whose servers are hosted in these facilities, and irritate Chinese users.

Inappropriate content is nothing new to the Chinese Internet. This begs the question: Why are Chinese authorities taking such drastic steps to remove this content from the Internet? The reason is the upcoming Communist Party Congress in Beijing, which, according to China's official news agency, is slated to "mobilize the entire Party and the people of all ethnic groups to emancipate their minds, stick to the reform and opening up, advance scientific development, promote social harmony and strive together for a new victory over the building of a well-off society in an all-round way and the new development of building socialism with Chinese characteristics." Some highlights of the event include electing a new "Central Commission for Discipline Inspection," listening to endless speeches, joining banquets, and doing whatever else senior Party members like to do when they get together. While undoubtedly extremely boring, it's not that much different than what usually happens at these gatherings, which take place every five years.

Except for one thing: The Internet in China is not just an irritant anymore. It's a force to be reckoned with. There are more than 100 million additional Chinese Internet users in 2007 than there were during the last Party congress in 2002, and this population is far more comfortable using blogs, forums, and other tools (ranging from poems delivered by mobile phones to online games) to protest various domestic and international issues.

Beijing is not taking any chances. The government has the authority and the will to pull the plug on the Internet, even if it means angering their own people and upsetting 'Net businesses across China.

This type of heavy-handed approach can't be used whenever China gets nervous about discussion and criticism of the Party and state -- it will only frustrate more people, and make the government look even worse. Nevertheless, we may see similar actions next year. That's because the Chinese propaganda apparatus has another major event to worry about -- the 2008 Beijing Olympics -- and they don't want negative public buzz marring the competition. China is trying to clean up the city in time for the arrival of hordes of foreigners and the international media, but they will have a much tougher time cleaning up the Internet.

Iraq war blogs: Another ALM thesis blog, and Deeper Than War

There's a new ALM thesis blog in town: International Security. It's written by an ALM Government concentrator who is in the early stages of thesis preparation -- namely, gathering research. I've been there, and it's tough, but if you're enthusiastic about your topic, ready to do a lot of reading, and organized, you'll do well.

From reading the entries on the blog, it's clear that this candidate is very seriously exploring how private security firms operate in Iraq -- there are entries about connecting with a former CENTCOM general, attending a RAND conference, and lists of online and print references.

One online resource that I recommended to this candidate was a blog called Deeper Than War. It was a surprise for me to learn about this blog a few weeks ago -- it's written by a high school buddy, Tyler Boudreau, who I haven't seen for years. He complete a combat tour in Iraq, and he's been blogging about it, and the aftermath.

A little backstory: Like a lot of guys in our group, he was interested in the military. Almost all of us were Boy Scouts. We obsessed about Vietnam. Five or six eventually enlisted and/or became police officers, including Tyler, who joined the Marine Corps. He rose through the ranks, and was prepared to turn the Marines into a career.

But then he went to Iraq. And it was disturbing. He left the Marines after his tour, and is still coming to grips with what he experienced:

My heart pumps out a lot of rage since coming home from war, and I ride the rapid blood streams like a lone paddler, thrashing desperately to stay afloat. Sometimes I spew a head full of turmoil at the passing scenery, and sometimes I manage a little stoicism, but I’m angry all the time, and what I’ve found most frustrating is that I don’t know who I should be angry at.

Later in the same post:

... You can’t have swords without bad guys. You can’t have dress blues. You can’t have valor. You can’t have medals. You can’t have sacrifice in battle. You can’t have armies. You can’t have patriotism. You can’t have any of it without bad guys. We need bad guys. The preservation of an age-old, time-honored, sacred institution depends on it. We love this institution more than we love our own freedom. This institution is war. So who are the bad guys?

Tyler is an amazing writer -- reading his posts, I was immediately reminded of Chickenhawk and The Things They Carried. He has a lot to say about military life, readjusting to civilian life, and the policies of our government and military commanders -- issues that everyone should be concerned with, considering the terrible toll this war has wrought.

An ALM student in Africa: A visit to the Intel School in Moshi, Kilimanjaro

I take for granted that Harvard Extended readers have a basic understanding of computing technologies, own their own computers, and have some form of home Internet access. It can therefore be quite sobering when you read about the relatively limited impact of computers in parts of the developing world, despite the intense desire of the people there to learn more about them. Rick, the ALM Management student who maintains the "Once More Unto The Breach" blog, has shared a few observations about African computer use based on his travels around East Africa, and his visit to a private university, the Intel School in Moshi, Kilimanjaro:

Half the reason I was asked to come though was because the students and staff really wanted to see an actual Macintosh. They had all heard of them and wanted to learn about them, but they have never seen one and have no way to acquire one. I spent the last hour of class doing tricks on my Macbook Pro. It was amazing. This computer impresses people back home, so you can imagine the reactions I got here. Every time I clicked on something, ten people would go "oooooh!"

After class, they were so enthusiastic that they were following me out the door asking me questions. One really smart man who asked a lot of questions even got my e-mail address as I was walking out. He doesn't have internet. He's getting my address so he can pay to be at an internet cafe just to ask me questions through e-mail.

Stories like this make me think that the One Laptop Per Child project can potentially have an enormous impact in rural Africa and other parts of the world where electricity, Internet communications, and access to computers is limited.

Quick Yoshikoder/General Inquirer update

In August, I described how I was constructing a modified General Inquirer negative dictionary to use with Yoshikoder, in order to perform a computer content analysis of press coverage of Second Life. I actually published the results on one of my other blogs, I, Lamont:

So, what does the data mean? The BW articles that were published in the latter part of 2006 generally had a lower percentage of negative terms than those published in the first four months of 2007. This agrees with the anecdotal observations by myself and a few other sources that BW hyped Second Life in late 2006.

However, the negative rates from the early part of 2006 were surprisingly high. In May 2006, the rate approached 5%, and that was the same month BusinessWeek made the famous pronouncement that "Virtual worlds abound in useful business applications." The analysis suggests that there was actually a stronger negative thread running through the BW coverage during this time, although that apparently dropped away during the summer, when the negative rate dipped to about 2.5% in August.

There are more data points, an Excel chart, and some notes about why I think the quality of the Yoshikoder-derived data quality is suspect over on my other blog.

Back from State of Play V: Conference recap

For the past two weeks, I've been meaning to write about the State of Play V conference in Singapore. I gave a brief report about the opening night's entertainment (a documentary about Second Life) but I also wanted to talk about what happened over the following two days of the conference. It was the first time I attended State of Play, and it really was an eye-opening experience for me.

I only become aware of the extensive academic interest in virtual worlds relatively recently, through my Terra Nova experience, and reading Edward Castronova's Synthetic Worlds, R.L. Taylor's Play Between Worlds, and Nick Yee's MMORPG research. Many virtual world researchers were on hand to discuss their work in Singapore. My panel included Henrik Bennetsen, a Stanford researcher who has spent the better part of six months inside Second Life; Aleks Krotoski, a Guardian columnist and University of Surrey PhD candidate who is studying social networks and online social influence; and anthropologist Thomas Malaby, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who is in the midst of writing an ethnography of Linden Lab and its relationship to Second Life. I also met Ted Tschang, a Singapore Management University professor who has conducted some very interesting research into video game development.

The panel went well. It was entitled "Understanding Virtual World Inhabitants", and was described as follows:

As the virtual world landscape matures, industry and academic researchers are developing systematic methods of measuring user behaviors and understanding resident attitudes. This panel explores the value of quantitative and qualitative approaches to such investigations.

SoP V co-organizer Dan Hunter led the panel, which was in presentation format with a Q&A at the end. The others gave recaps of their respective research methodologies. I talked about the qualitative and quantitative approaches used by journalists, speaking from my perspective as a Computerworld editor and graduate student conducting media-related research at the Harvard Extension School. My main points: There is some stellar coverage relating to virtual worlds in the popular press and industry publications (I pointed to Wired and the New Yorker's Will Wright interview), but for the most part, journalists are quite limited in terms of the amount of time they can spend conducting research, restrictions relating to length and editorial focus, and problems finding and using quantitative research. Sensationalism, generalization, and poor use of statistical data are problems in many countries. I was able to give several examples from the American, Chinese, and Taiwanese media.

I concluded that the news media will play a major role in shaping the attitudes and understanding of the 90+ percent of the world's population that currently has no concept of social or gaming virtual worlds. I also revealed the results of some database searches I conducted, which support this conclusion: According to LexisNexis Academic, the number of references to "virtual world" or "virtual worlds" in "major US and world publications" (consisting of English-language newspapers and magazines from all parts of the world) has trended as follows, over the last three years:

July 2005: 45 results
July 2006: 81 results
July 2007: 199 results

I also searched Factiva for 虚拟世界 (xu1ni3shi4jie4), the simplified Chinese for "virtual world") in all languages, all companies, and all regions (which indexed results from publications in China, plus a few in Hong Kong and Singapore), and came up with the following numbers:

All of 2004: 271 results
All of 2005: 553 results
All of 2006: 624 results
2007 to June 30: 472 results

Assuming that the higher numbers reflect increased coverage, as opposed to the databases including more news sources, the data indicates that more people are indeed being exposed to virtual world-related concepts through the mass media. It will be interesting to see how their perspectives of virtual worlds and acceptable behavior in these worlds is shaped by what they see in the news in the years to come.

Besides the academics, State of Play V had large legal and industry contingents. The legal focus should come as no surprise, considering the history of the conference and its organizers, which include the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center, Yale Law School, and New York Law School. The industry representation was dominated by people and companies working with social virtual worlds -- Second Life, There.com, HiPihi -- as well as several marketing and consulting firms. I've already talked about There.com on Computerworld, and hope to discuss HiPiHi on a later post here or on my Computerworld blog.

There are also supposed to be "video timecapsules" posted to the SoP V website at some future date. Henrik and I taped an interesting, half-hour discussion about Second Life, emerging software and hardware technologies, and issues relating to media coverage of virtual worlds. I'll post a link when it goes online.

Many thanks to Dan Hunter, Aaron Delwiche, and the staff of Harvard's Berkman Center for making my trip to Singapore possible!