Sixth Sakai Notes – Introducing Sakai, by Anthony Whyte

This is one of a series of posts about the sessions I attended at the Sixth Sakai Conference. See Conference Schedule, which has links to the individual presentations. Many of the sessions were recorded, and most of the presentations can be found online.

Here are my notes/impressions for the talk Introducing Sakai by Anthony White, presented Tuesday, 10:45AM.

The presentation can be found in PowerPoinf format here.

I didn’t take detailed notes. Whyte followed the prepared presentation fairly closely. Here are a few observations, with S-3 denoting Slide 3, etc.

S-4: Praxis, “100+ volunteers representing 30+ academic institutions active in test and development”. This is a large community

S-5: 4-6 staffers, Sakai Foundation Annual Budget $1M. Note this is several times the budget of the Apache Software Foundation

NET: :C

S-7: License. Using ECL (Education Common License), OSI-approved, Apache-like.

S-9: “Community Source,” Like Apache, but based on joint collaboration between orgs, companies, institutions.
“Sakai is a hybrid model that relies on the interplay between academic institutions, commercial enterprises, other open-source initiatives and standards organizations to stimulate software innovation and ensure sustainability.”

S-12: Predecessor project. 2003-2005. U Mich, Indiana, Stanford + uPortal and Oki. $4.4M shared staff, $2.7M funding from Mellon (most) + Hewlett grants

S-14: About 100 developers. Strong QA effort.

S-16: Multiple installations, some quite large (Indianca, 100K+ users)

S17 – ff: Future plans, some examples. See charts for details.

Net: Clearly a serious project, well-established, large developer community, many deployments, multiple institutions involved.

o-frindle education: words in a classroom

This is a post of several mini-posts about education, words in a classroom, and the sounds of words in a classroom.

I spent some time yesterday morning visiting one of my wife’s classrooms. She is a special reading teacher and goes to several schools every day. This class was for students who are very bright but for various reasons have difficulty functioning in a traditional classroom.

My wife had said this was a very special classroom. The teacher was one of the best she had ever seen. My wife introduced me to the teacher, the students, and the aides who were in the class. Then she went off to work with a student in a corner of the room, and I sat down nearby on the other side of a partition, to watch the class at work.

The first and most striking impression was the sound, the sound of education. I heard words being spoken quietly in various parts of the room. An aide was working with a small group, my wife was working with one student, and the teacher was working quietly at a terminal.

Soon after I arrived someone came in with a potential new student. The student was introduced to the class with a minimum of fuss, and the education continued without interruption.

A few minutes later I saw an aide working quietly at a table across the room, probably preparing for the next part of the day. A few minutes I saw her at work at the board, putting up some magnetic markers next to a list of the student’s names. (My wife said later this was used to reward good behavior).

Shortly thereafter a woman came into the room and introduced herself. Turns out she is one of the speech language pathologists who, like my wife, travels from school to school. She said this was a truly remarkable class, in that the teacher was able to maintain such order with a group of students who were believed to have great problems working in a group setting.

Watching the people come and go, the work being done, all the time hearing the quiet sounds of voices as the education proceeded, was like a form of carefully choreagraphed ballet. Every movement and every sound had a purpose.

And hearing all this brought home that while open-source may be a big help in improving education, it will do so not by replacing traditional forms of education, but I expect by freeing up resources so teachers and professors can deploy their valuable talents where it really counts, working and talking with students.

During this time I leafed through a few of the books that were carefully arranged nearby, grouped by author. I thought of spending a few minutes with my old friend Ramona Quimby, but instead glanced through a book by Jean George. I picked her because I know she happens to live in the same town I do, Chappaqua. The book had a forward by Robert Kennedy, Jr., recounting how he had learned to raise and train falcons as a young boy in part because of this book, and continued to work with birds to this day. This was a valuable reminder of the power of children’s literature.

I then spent a few minutes reading a book by Andrew Clements with illustrations by Brian Selznick, Frindle. It is about a boy named Nick Allen and his experiences in the fifth grade. Chapter Two, “Mrs. Granger,” begins as follows:

Fifth grade was different. That was the year to get ready for middle school. Fifth grade meant pasing classes. It meant no more morning recesse. It mean real letter grades on your report cars. But most of all, it meant Mrs. Granger.

There were about 150 kid in fifth grade. And there were seven fifth-grade teachers: two math, two science, two social studies, but only one language arts teacher. In language arts, Mrs. Granger had a monopoly — and a reputation.

I was hooked — what wonderful writing. Don’t we all remember a teacher like that?

I showed the book to the speech teacher. She said it was really great and that I should read it through to the end. So I took it with me and finished it last night.

“Frindle” is a made-up word that stands for “pen.” Hence the title of this post, “o-frindle education” for “o-pen education,” or “open education.” [1] To learn why it was made up and what happend when it was you will have to get a copy of the book for yourself.

Writing this reminded me of the recent story of Matthew LaClair and his experiences with the words utters in a high-school class in Kearny, NJ, taught by David Paszkiewicz, as reported in numerour stories, including Talk in Class Turns to God, Setting Off Public Debate on Rights.

It appears the teacher has strong religious views, and may have crossed the line in some statements in his class. Mr. LaClair, the student, had some concerns, and taped some of the classes to make sure he had an accurate record.

I write this not to take sides. This is clearly the kind of story that raises strong emotions, and in these days of the blogosphere and the 24-hour news cycle emotions may well grow stronger soon. Indeed, the Times story reports there have even been death threats against Mr. LaClair.

I write this to applaud Mr. LaClair. The article mentions Mr. LaClair was raised in the Ethical Culture Society, a group I have mentioned in earlier post. But I’m not writing because of this but because back when I was in high school I had a similar experience.

While schools function best when all one can hear is the quiet sound of words in a classroom as teachers educate their students, schools also have great authority, and any authority, even one entrusted to school administrators, can be abused.

I came across this in my senior year in high school. I was one of about ten students in a special, “advanced” course in Western Civilization. The teacher told us he would be teaching the course at the college level as though it were a seminar, to help get us ready for working in college. The first few lectures were fine.

And then we had our first text. It was a short quiz, in multiple-choice format. But the questions were ludicrous, at the sixth-grade level. Some of us, including myself, took offense, and responded with what we thought we equally ludicrous answers, and added some comments about the test.

The teacher blew up. He accused us on not respecting him, not doing the work, and so forth. To be fair, perhaps we did cross a line ourselves, but then he really crossed the line.

He said that he was so disgusted by our behavior that he was going to write letters to all the colleges to which we had applied, saying we were unfit to attend college.

And if I had been the only student singled so out I might not have gotten into Caltech. But I was lucky. Though my mother was but a secretary, the other students in the class had parents much more powerful than mine. For example, one father was the chairman of the English Department at the University of New Mexico, two fathers were very prominent local attorneys, and another was a physician with an international reputation. (I learned all this only after they became involved to help us.)

Things did quiet down. No letters were sent, and we even managed to struggle to the end of the semester, though I can’t say any education was accomplished during that time.

And that’s why I wanted to mention Mr. LaClair, and to honor him. Because what he did took guts. It was not an easy thing for him, or his parents, to do. We all should all admire them for standing up for what they think important — applying the words Mr. LaClair heard spoken earlier in other classrooms — especially in a situation that can be subject to the whims of an arbitrary process.

Notes.

1. Puns are allowed in the fifth grade, Mrs. Granger notwithstanding.

Trading Places

The movie Trading Places relates how two men trade places and what happens when they do. One is black and the other is white, though the movie is more about class differences than about racial differences. But the story does revolve around financial markets, so let’s explore ways to associate a dollar amount with possible trades.

The idea for this post comes from a colleague of mine who belongs to the small circle of folks who both have a Ph.D. in Computer Science and have been stopped by the police for the non-crime of Driving While Black.

He mentioned he had once read a paper, or perhaps even a book, that tried to assign a monetary value to racial prejudice, using an approach along the following lines. (A similar approach applies to other minorities such as women.)

Let’s assume we have a large amount of money at hand and set up an organization called the “Trading Places Fund” (TPF).

TPF also has special powers that lets it level the field and so is able to approach two individuals, A and B, who are quite similar but differ only in one key factor such as race. TPF picks an amount N and makes the following offer to each:

A: If I give you N dollars, will you trade places with B?
B: If I give you N dollars, will you trade places with A?

By “level field” I mean for example that both A and B would have the same life span independent of whether or not they accept the offer.

It’s easy to imagine cases where one would accept the offer.

For example, if I am A and I live in New York City, while B lives in Philadelphia, and you offer me a million dollars to move to Philadelphia, then I, as would W. C. Fields, reply, I would rather be living in Philadelphia..

Now suppose A is white and B is black. More precisely, suppose you are A. How much would TPF have to pay you to assume the burden of being black?

Suppose I’m the B waiting for you as A to make your decision. I would make the counter-offer to TPF:

You don’t have to pay me to be white. Indeed I’ll give you all my money just to have a chance to start over, but with all the advantages of being white.

That illustrates another way to assign the value to the trade. What fraction of your net-worth would you be willing to give to make the trade? All, nothing, or somewhere in between?

While this example speaks to the future, others have looked into similar approaches to redress the wrongs of the past. See for example, Suit seeks billions in slave reparations.

There is another way to redress past wrongs, affirmative action. I certainly favor that over payment in dollars, as such payments are a one-time thing, while affirmative action seeks to create a new environment in which racial prejudice will find it harder to survive.

One of the problems with affirmative action is that those who are disfavored by its use see it as a breach of their own right to equal treatment. These arguments have the form, “Yes, it would be good to have more black lawyers. But as a white person I have as much a right to get into law school as anyone else, so why should I suffer for past wrongs?”

If I had my way, I would like to see us try a societal-wide form of affirmative action, a true trading of places. It’s impossible, just a dream, but it’s worth thinking about what might happen were we be able to carry out the experiment.

We’ve spent almost four centuries discriminating against blacks in this county. So let’s change the laws for just forty years, one-tenth of that time, in such a way that white s will suffer, by force of law, similar discrimination.

That would take just about two generations. I think it would be more than enough time to bring us much closer to a state of true equality.

Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches

Today’s Science Section of the NY Times has an article by Cornelia Dean, Women in Science: The Battle Moves to the Trenches:

Since the 1970s, women have surged into science and engineering classes in larger and larger numbers, even at top-tier institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where half the undergraduate science majors and more than a third of the engineering students are women. Half of the nation’s medical students are women, and for decades the numbers have been rising similarly in disciplines like biology and mathematics.

Yet studies show that women in science still routinely receive less research support than their male colleagues, and they have not reached the top academic ranks in numbers anything like their growing presence would suggest.

For example, at top-tier institutions only about 15 percent of full professors in social, behavioral or life sciences are women, “and these are the only fields in science and engineering where the proportion of women reaches into the double digits,” an expert panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences reported in September. And at each step on the academic ladder, more women than men leave science and engineering.

So in government agencies, at scientific organizations and on university campuses, female scientists are asking why, and wondering what they can do about it.

The article later goes on:

“The reality is there are barriers that women face,” said Kathleen S. Matthews, the dean of natural sciences at Rice, who spoke at the meeting’s opening dinner. “There are circles and communities of engagement where women are by and large not included.”

Organizers of these events dismiss the idea voiced in 2005 by Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, that women over all are handicapped as scientists because as a group they are somehow innately deficient in mathematics. The organizers point to ample evidence that any performance gap between men and women is changeable and is shrinking to the vanishing point.

Instead, they talk about what they have to know and do to get ahead. They talk about unspoken, even unconscious sexism that means they must be better than men to be thought as good — that they must, as one Rice participant put it, literally and figuratively wear a suit and heels, while men can relax in jeans.

They muse on the importance of mentoring and other professional support and talk about ways women can provide it for each other if they do not receive it from their professors or advisers.

Soon thereafter follows a crucial observation:

And they obsess about what they call “the two body problem,” the extreme difficulty of reconciling a demanding career in science with marriage and a family — especially, as is more often the case for women than men in science, when the spouse also has scientific ambitions.

This is the heart of the issue: to do scientific research at the highest level is completely consuming, so much so that for a woman to take off a few years to start a family may cause her to fall irretrievably behind.

It’s an issue we must all address. A scientific establishment that does not allow a woman to raise a family is an establishment in distress. Finding workable solutions will be difficult, but at the least recognizing the importance of this issue will start the process of remediation.

And of course there is the constant problem of having to deal with stereotyping:

Evelynn Hammonds, a historian of science who heads a Harvard diversity effort started after Dr. Summers’s remarks, recalled when, as an aspiring engineer, she was advised that her neat handwriting might mean she would be a good secretary. Instead, she earned a degree in electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a master’s in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate at Harvard.

Among other things, she said, universities should be asking whether a career in science demands 70-hour work weeks “at every point in time,” or whether people should be able to step in and out of academia, as family demands change.

and

Answering the aggressiveness question correctly can be a key to obtaining the financial resources (like laboratory space or stipends for graduate students) and the social capital (like collaboration and sharing) that are essential for success in science, he said. But, he told his mostly female audience, “the band of acceptable behavior for women is narrower than it is for men.”

Women who assert themselves “may be derogated,” he said, and, possibly as a result, women are less likely to recognize negotiating opportunities, and may beapprehensive about negotiating for resources when opportunities arise. That is a problem, he said, because even small differences in resources can “accumulate over a career to lead to significant differences in outcomes.”

For example, as the National Academy of Sciences noted in its report, women who are scientists publish somewhat less over all than their male colleagues — but if surveys control for the amount of support researchers receive, women publish as often as men, the report said.

Another speaker at the Columbia conference, Madeline Heilman, a psychologist at New York University, said clear and explicit evaluation criteria are essential.

Even today, Dr. Heilman said, the idea that women are somehow unsuited to science is widespread and tenacious. Because people judge others in terms of these unconscious prejudices, she said, the same behavior that would suggest a man is collaborative, judicious or flexible would mark a woman as needy, timid or flighty.

And because science is still widely viewed as “a male arena,” she said, a woman who succeeds may be viewed as “selfish, manipulative, bitter, untrustworthy, conniving and cold.”

“Women in science are in a double bind,” Dr. Heilman said. “When not clearly successful, they are presumed to be incompetent. When they are successful, they are not liked.”

Women do better, she said, in environments where they are judged on grants obtained, prizes won, findings cited by other experts, or other explicit criteria, rather than on whether they are, say, “cutting edge.” “There has to be very little room for ambiguity,” Dr. Heilman said. “Otherwise, expectations swoop in to fill the vacuum.”

Some women even acknowledge they have fallen victim to the gender trap:

But there is evidence that women do not receive this support to the degree men do.

Dr. Steitz cited a study of letters of recommendation written for men and women seeking academic appointments. Though all the applicants were successful, she said, and though the letters were written by men and women, the study found that the applicant’s personal life was mentioned six times more often if the letter was about a woman.

Also, Dr. Steitz said, “For women, the things that were talked about more frequently were how well they were trained, what good teachers they were and how well their applications were put together.” When the subject of the letter was male, she said, the big topics were research skills and success in the lab.

“Ever since I read this paper and I sit down to write a letter of recommendation,” Dr. Steitz said, “I think, ‘Oh, have I fallen into this trap?’ ”

If mentors don’t present themselves, women may have to create them, Dr. Steitz said.

The article does report on progress, as did a recent segment on the Charlie Rose show in which Eric Kandel, a Nobel prize-winning scientist, brought along four women active in the field of brain research. All were quite eloquent and clearly dedicated to research in this the perhaps most challenging area of research today.

The issue to be faced is much more than correcting past wrongs.

For if we don’t make scientific research an enterprise more open to women, then in the future women scientists, and all the rest of of us, will pay the price of discoveries not made, or made later than they could have been.

It’s a price we can ill afford to pay.

Sic transit gloria mundi

I just noticed I’m no longer WordPress’s Featured Open-Source Blogger. That honor now goes to Tuxicity’s source.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Best wishes to the folks in TuxiCity. This blog is in instance of what I term a “delicious blog” in that there is little original content. Almost all the posts are quite short, consisting of a few words followed by a link to a recent posting by someone else, typically to a news post.

The same effect could be achieved by judicious tagging using del.icio.us, but then again doing it this way gives one a shot at being a Featured Blogger.

Best wishes, TuxiCity. Keep those posts coming.

A less-animated world: On the passing of Joseph Barbera and Chris Hayward

Today’s New York Times brought to the sad news of the deaths of two men who had some fun in their lives making our lives more fun.

Joseph Barbera, Half of Cartoon Duo, Dies at 95:

Joseph Barbera, an innovator of animation who teamed with William Hanna to give generations of young television viewers a pantheon of beloved characters, including Tom and Jerry, Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and the Flintstones, died yesterday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95.

Mr. Barbera and the studio he founded with Mr. Hanna, Hanna-Barbera Productions, became synonymous with television animation, yielding more than 100 cartoon series over four decades, including “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?,” “Jonny Quest” and “The Smurfs.”

On signature televisions shows like “The Flintstones” and “The Jetsons,” the two men developed a cartoon style that combined colorful, simply drawn characters (often based on other recognizable pop-culture personalities) with the narrative structures and joke-telling techniques of traditional live-action sitcoms. They were television’s first animated comedy programs.

Over the next 17 years, the occasionally sadistic antics that Mr. Barbera and Mr. Hanna devised for their anthropomorphic rivals — rechristened Tom and Jerry — would earn MGM another 13 Oscar nominations and seven statuettes.

Chris Hayward, 81, TV Writer and a Creator of ‘Munsters,’ Is Dead

Chris Hayward, an Emmy-winning writer for television whose work was once banned in Canada because of the painful inadequacies of one of its leading men — the righteous, square-jawed and stupendously slow-witted Mountie Dudley Do-Right — died on Nov. 20 at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif. Mr. Hayward, who was also a creator of “The Munsters,” was 81.

Mr. Hayward was for many years a writer for Jay Ward Productions, creators of the subversive animated cartoons starring Rocky the flying squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose. Originally broadcast on ABC in 1959 as “Rocky and His Friends,” the program, renamed “The Bullwinkle Show,” moved to NBC in 1961; it returned to ABC from 1964 to 1973.

A sophisticated cold war spoof (moose and squirrel are locked in endless battle with the perfidious Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale), the show attracted an ardent cult following and has been blessed with eternal life in syndication. It comprised various segments, including “Fractured Fairy Tales,” narrated by Edward Everett Horton, and “Peabody’s Improbable History,” starring a cerebral dog.

Mr. Hayward worked on all the segments but was most closely associated with “The Adventures of Dudley Do-Right,” which followed the hapless royal Canadian Mountie in his ceaseless pursuit of Snidely Whiplash, a very naughty man.

Because the Dudley Do-Right segments were deemed harmful to the national esteem, the Rocky and Bullwinkle shows were initially not broadcast in Canada.

With Allan Burns, Mr. Hayward also conceived of “The Munsters.” The show, which chronicled the twisted fortunes of a family of ghouls, was broadcast on CBS from 1964 to 1966. At first, the two men received no credit for creating it. Only after the Writers Guild of America took up their case with the producer, Universal Studios, were they awarded credit and financial compensation.

uring the 1950’s, he worked for Mr. Ward on the animated series “Crusader Rabbit.”

But no subsequent job could match the peculiar charms of working for Jay Ward, a rogue cartoon producer famous for his economy. Jay Ward Productions was no Hanna-Barbera: Mr. Hayward often worked in a freezing basement, for little compensation beyond the joy of writing deliciously bad puns for the masses.

“The pay was low and the insecurity great,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “Jay felt the writers should pay him. His theory was ‘Never show a profit or else you’ll have to pay people.’ ”

I remember the Flintstones and Yogi Bear quite well. I had lots of fun watching those cartoons.

But I have even fonder memories of Crusader Rabbit and especially Dudley Do-Right, himself the subject of a recent post DUDley Snideley on Software – shutdown shot down.

One of my favorite films is Sullivan’s Travels by Preston Sturges. It’s about a successful film director who wants to make a film about poverty, but he is told no because he doesn’t know enough about poverty. So he takes to the road and encounters numerous adventures, the most memorable of which result in his winding up in a labor camp watching a cartoon with his fellow prisoners. His hearing their laughter and seeing the joy on their faces makes him realize that comedy is important — what better gift than to make another person laugh?

Sullivan was played by Joel McCrea, one of my favorite actors ever. I probably first saw him in Four Faces West, but I most enjoyed his radio series, Tales of the Texas Rangers; I listened to it every week. My mother worked the the theater company in Albuquerque and once, when she noted he was taking the train from his home to Texas to Los Angeles, she arranged for me to meet him and shake his had when the train stopped in Albuquerque. (She also arranged for me to meet both Dwight Eisenower and Adlai Stevenson during the 1956 campain. She said it was hilarious in that as you saw them going down the line of well-wishers, each had to bend down noticeably to shake the hand of young Master Shields.)

Joseph Barbera, Chris Hayward — may their memories be a blessing, as well as Preston Sturges and Joel McCrea.

Yogi Yarns – “If you come to a foot in your mouth, take it out.”

We continue our occasional series based on the sayings, real or — as in this post — imagined, of Yogi Berra. Were we to consult Yogi on veterinary problems such as Foot-and-mouth disease, I am confident his advice would be simple: “If you come to a foot in your mouth, take it out.”

Recent news reports show that two well-known folks would do well to heed this advice.

The Business Section of the New York Times for December 18 has a column by Dan Mitchell, What’s Online: The Economist on ‘Fair Trade’ . It contains a section titled “The Power of Heresy” that says

In 2004, the development chief of Microsoft Windows, Jim Allchin, wrote in an e-mail message to the chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, and the chairman, Bill Gates, that he would buy a Mac if he weren’t working for Microsoft. “In my view we’ve lost our way,” he wrote, listing areas in which the company had “lost sight” of its customers’ needs.

The message was presented as evidence in the Iowa antitrust trial Comes v. Microsoft. Groklaw.net posted it last week.

Mr. Allchin responded on his blog this week that the e-mail “is nearly 3 years old, and I was being purposefully dramatic in order to drive home a point.”

His aim was to spur the company to improve, he wrote, and improve it did: Windows new operating system, Vista, is “better than any other OS we’ve ever built and far, far better than any other software available today” windowsvistablog.com/blogs.

See Setting The Record Straight for Mr. Allchin’s referenced post.

Vista “better than any other software available today!” Mr. Allchin, give me a break. Are you saying that Vista is better than Linux? In your dreams, Mr. Allchin, not in reality.

I suggest you take your foot out of your mouth so you can reach your terminal and start writing some code to make Vista better. There’s lots to be done.

Our current VP would also do well to consult Mr. Berra. As reported in the news and in blogs, during the celebration of the retirement of Don Rumsfeld as U.S. Secretary of Defense, Mr. Cheney is reported to have said:

In his regard for our people in uniform, in his unwavering strength through unprecedented challenges, in his example of leadership and patriotic service, I believe the record speaks for itself: Don Rumsfeld is the finest Secretary of Defense this nation has ever had.

I beg to differ, and submit the name of General of the Army George Catlett Marshall. General Marshall not only served as Secretary of Defense, he was also the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army during World War II, during a global war fought on two major fronts.

General Marshall enjoyed greater success. The U.S. won wars under General Marshall’s leadership, while Mr. Rumsfeld’s record as Secretary of Defense shows little hope of yielding any meaningful victory.

Mobile Phones and Brain Shields

I’ve just learned via Mobile Phones & Brain Shields that my brain is the subject of a patent (emphasis added in bold)

A few weeks ago there were reports in the newspaper that the Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola, the three largest manufacturers of mobile phones had patented brain-shields to protect their consumers from radiations emitted from mobile phones. This created panic among consumers as it meant an indirect acceptance by mobile phone manufacturers that mobile phone devices did in fact have some adverse effect on the users against which they needed protection.

This Dave Shields uses a mobile phone and still has a brain, though the matter is being hotly debated by those folks who read my blog regularly.

But you may want to follow the blog more closely, as my brain may be the subject of further intense investigation due the crucial role it plays in cell phones, a technology that some — including my IBM colleague Sam Ruby — argue rivals the personal computer in its importance, Does cell phone’s impact outweigh PC’s?.

Don’t worry, Sam. I won’t let it get personal. I’ll keep on computing.

I now have more sympathy for those who argue that software patents are bad. But is the patent on my brain for software, hardware, or a business process, or some combination thereof? Is there prior art on my brain? Is my brain a novel invention? Much work remains to be done.

I do hope the patent won’t be challenged, as my brain may not be up to that challenge. If the patent is challened I will seek help from the brain of Eben Moglen, an expert in this area, as noted in The Blackboard Jungle. If this comes to pass, I will pass on the news via a post to be titled, “The Brain Shields Jungle.”

I will do what I can using my Brain Shields (BS) to shield your brain from cellphone radiation. As a first step, I suggest that you stop using cell phones as much as possible and spend the time gained studying my blog. In return, I’m confident you’ll find lots of evidence of BS in forthcoming posts.

dave “the brain” shields