Last week I traveled to Paris for CHI 2013 to speak on a panel about online education.

I’m getting to do that a lot these days, and while the travel can be tiring, it’s certainly more fun when I get the chance to meet up with MOOC students face to face!

In a previous post I described my experience meeting up with two students in Singapore and Indonesia.  This time around I got to meet Julien Coupez (left) and Daniel Kindler (back, second from left) the evening I arrived in Paris.  We had a round of drinks near the Place de Clichy with my colleague Prof. Marti Hearst (right), an accomplished researcher in human-computer interaction and information sciences at Berkeley with whom I’m co-advising graduate research on learning in MOOCs.

It was fun to hear about how Julien’s “social bookmarking” startup NexBoo already uses some of the Agile techniques covered in CS 169.1x, while Daniel wanted to learn about software practices that are not widely used by his current employer (a large financial services company).

As always, connecting with colleagues around the world is a way of reminding myself that at some level we’re all playing on the same team.  Thanks to Daniel and Julien for making the time to get together, and for making this visit to one of my favorite cities even more enjoyable!

À bientôt, folks!

Since I periodically receive nice emails from students in our BerkeleyX MOOC on Software-as-a-Service, in a fit of inspiration while traveling,  I wondered if any of those students might live in Jakarta or Singapore, two unfamiliar cities where we had stopovers.  With EdX’s help, I sent an email to the MOOC students, and I was pleased to receive numerous replies!

In Singapore, I met Tony Luong (left) and Hung Mai (right), Vietnamese nationals currently living and working for IBM in Singapore.  We had a nice sushi dinner with them (at Sushi Tei in the City Square shopping center near Little India, if you know Singapore), during which we talked about the differences between living and working in IT in the USA vs. Asia, professional plans for the future (Hung is coming to the US to work soon!), software engineering, and life.

In Jakarta, I was greeted at the airport by Reza Anwar and his wife Tanti Ruwani.  Both are Indonesian nationals who had had part of their higher education in the West, so they spoke perfect English and were lovely hosts, giving us a brief driving tour of downtown Jakarta and a wonderful traditional Indonesian dinner at a very nice restaurant housed in a former Dutch-colonial mansion.  Trading stories about life, business, and career aspirations with students from other countries was inspiring.

I’m keenly aware of my role as an ambassador not only of Berkeley, and not only of the USA, but of higher education in general when doing visits like this.  I was very fortunate to get in touch with students who had enjoyed taking my course (and had very kind things to say about it) and I’m now thinking I’ll try to find students to connect with whenever I travel abroad!  It’s one more way to realize that despite whatever other differences people may have, at some level, we are all indeed in this together.

Thanks to Tony, Hung, Reza, and Tanti for turning what could have been unremarkable stopovers into a rewarding social and professional experience!

What MOOCs have I taught?

I split our 15-week on-campus software engineering course into two pieces, an “introduction” and “advanced” MOOC.  The Intro MOOC was offered three times on Coursera and is now in its second offering on EdX, with whom UC Berkeley has an institutional partnership.  The Advanced MOOC has been offered just once so far on EdX.  (The course number is CS 169.1x for the Intro and Cs 169.2x for Advanced.)

What was it like to adapt the campus course?

It has been a lot of work, but it has greatly improved the on-campus course as well as making it available worldwide.

Because of high enrollment demand in the on-campus course, we had already started thinking about automatic grading of programming assignments.  We and our on-campus TAs spent hundreds of engineer-hours creating sophisticated automatic graders for programming assignments since we believed neither MOOC nor on-campus students would be well served by a software engineering course whose assessments were based solely on multiple choice or short-answer questions.

While this was grueling, the autograders are reusable and customizable, and have graded hundreds of thousands of assignments so far, which would require an army of TAs to do manually.  Thus it helped us expand access to the course on-campus as well as online.

I also reorganized my 90-minute lectures into 8-12 minute “lecturelets”, each covering a specific topic and accompanied by self-check questions.  Our colleagues, the founders of Coursera, suggested this format worked well for MOOCs, but we found that it also made the on-campus lectures livelier and better-attended.

We live-captured our lectures and postprocessed them afterward.  In general, we were unwilling to spend time on the MOOC that would not also improve the on-campus course.  My teaching ratings and the on-campus course’s ratings (given anonymously by the students) both went up when the MOOC technology was integrated.

What worked well?

The automatic grading allowed vastly more students to practice the material, and modulo some glitches, was widely praised.

The online students took the same quizzes and did the same programming assignments as the Berkeley students, on comparable deadlines, and the best of them did just as well.

Intelligence is uniformly distributed worldwide: students from 130 countries enrolled, and thanks to lecture subtitling provided by EdX, were able to follow the lectures despite not being native English speakers.

More important than the number of students reached was the smaller number (hundreds) of truly motivated students to whom we were able to give an opportunity otherwise unavailable to them, such as a student in the Gaza Strip who only received 6 hours of electricity each day and used part of it to complete our course.

What challenges did you encounter?

This is an enormous amount of work.  We did it on our own time and without extra compensation, but not all instructors will have that luxury.  We also had discretionary money we used to pay TAs to help support the online course; there will have to be more systematic sources for those funds eventually.

Online students don’t get face-to-face time with instructors and TAs, as on-campus students do.  The discussion forums work pretty well, but despite being monitored by TAs, they’re basically self-service.

The on-campus students get to do team projects in small groups working with external customers.  In their evaluations they indicated this was the most valuable aspect of the course.  Yet the online students don’t get to do this part, as we haven’t figured out how to scale up the process of forming project teams and matching them up with external customers.

Discussion-oriented learning doesn’t work well at large scale.  Some parts of our course dont’ require it, but for the parts that do, such as office hours and TA design reviews of team projects, there was no way to give the online students this experience.

Nonetheless, our goal was not to replicate every aspect of the on-campus course, but rather to identify which aspects, if converted to MOOC format, would work well for both online and on-campus students and focus on making those things great.

There is lots of cheating in MOOCs.  We have hard as well as anecdotal evidence from our courses and colleagues’ courses.  But since no credit is offered, we’ve chosen to focus on improving the course for the vast majority of honest students rather than try to catch the cheaters.

A very small fraction of MOOC students are vocal jerks or have a disproportionate sense of entitlement about everything being free.

Would you do it again?

Absolutely, I’m planning to.  And as I develop new on-campus courses, I’ll be blending in MOOC technology, such as shorter lectures with self-check questions and extensive autograding.  That allows the TAs and me to shift our scarce on-campus student contact time from a lower-value activity (repeating the same lectures) to a higher-value activity (face time with students who’ve watched lectures and/or done the prep work using MOOC resources).

I’m astounded by the ideological rigidity that has apparently so immobilized some people—including some I normally think of as perceptive and intelligent—that prevents them from seeing what is obvious to so many of us: the US needs tighter gun control laws.

Disclaimer: Some of the following arguments are so intellectually vacuous that you might think they are “straw man” arguments designed to be shot down, but sadly, every one of them was proposed by someone personally known to me.  (Not all by the same person, though.  That would be tragic indeed.)

“If you ban guns because of mass shooters, you’d have to ban jet planes because of 9/11.” Don’t laugh, someone actually made this comparison through what I assume was a fog of ideology.  First, airplanes are primarily designed to transport people and things, but were tragically misused for an evil purpose; killing someone by beating them with a brick doesn’t mean we should ban bricks.  In contrast, killing someone is the sole purpose for which a gun is designed.  This is even more true of semiautomatic assault weapons, which are optimized to cause the maximum amount of damage with the minimum amount of time, effort and risk to the shooter.  Second, while 9/11 resulted in swift (and sometimes ill-advised) changes in airport security, at least there was a response.  In contrast, despite Columbine, Virginia Tech, Portland, and now Newtown, there’s been no change whatsoever in gun policy, and indeed there have been public officials whose first reaction is apparently to ensure that such events aren’t used as a pretext for making any such changes.  There was even legislation that just went into effect in Michigan allowing concealed weapons in schools, on the pretext that “armed teachers could have minimized the damage” in such a mass shooting.

“If you ban guns because of mass shooters, you’d have to ban cars because of drunk drivers.” Bzzzt, wrong.  Besides the fact that the same argument applies—drunk drivers are misusing a technology whose primary purpose is generally beneficent and completely unrelated to killing people—the rules for getting and keeping a drivers’ license are actually stricter than the gun laws in most states, including Connecticut, whose gun laws are considered among the toughest.  To operate a motor vehicle, you must take an eye exam, a written test, and a road test, and at least the first two must be repeated every few years.  In contrast, we don’t even have a national registry of gun ownership because of the patchwork of (largely permissive) state laws that often don’t require registration.

“You won’t eliminate guns by banning them.” True, but you will greatly reduce them.  And as the NIH and others have reported, gun homicide rates monotonically track gun ownership across the US already, with people in “high gun ownership” states being 2.5 times more likely to be homicide victims than those in “low gun ownership” states.  Similarly, tougher DUI laws and safety laws have not eliminated vehicular deaths, but they have reduced them by 90% (per mile driven) since the 1950s when no such laws were in place.

“You shouldn’t infringe on the right of law-abiding people to own a firearm of their choice.” Sorry, but yes you should.  Just because I am interested in, say, chemical weapons doesn’t mean I should be allowed to own them.  The Second Amendment is erroneously interpreted as enshrining all firearms past and future, when in fact it was written when the state-of-the-art firearm took nearly a minute to reload between shots rather than an automated technology designed for rapid and efficient mass slaughter.  And as everyone knows (or should), the Constitution and its Amendments are not absolute but rather subject to specific limitations.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” The statement “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is false on both counts: guns do kill people—in fact that’s all they are designed to do—and people kill more people with the help of advanced killing technology than without it.

“We need to focus on the root problem of identifying and helping the mentally ill.” While I’m all in favor of helping the mentally ill, this statement is usually used as a dressed-up version of the previous tired cliché.  First, while the most horrific mass shootings recently have been committed by such people, these represent an insignificantly tiny fraction of all US gun homicides.  Second, in case we don’t identify someone’s mental illness in time or help him or her quickly enough, it should be really, really hard for them to get their hands on technology that amplifies their rage or illness.

“We tried banning alcohol during Prohibition, and it didn’t work.” Alcohol doesn’t give me the immediate means to mow down 20 kids in minutes with minimal physical risk to myself.

“If [teachers, citizens, etc.] armed themselves as is their right, they could mitigate the damage caused by [mass shooters, loonies, etc.]” This is the “mutual assured destruction” stance: in the limit, everyone is visibly armed to the teeth, so no one dares actually use their firearms for fear of immediate and devastating retaliation.  Setting aside the question of who would actually want to live in such a society, it doesn’t work: especially in the case of recent mass shootings and many assassinations, the killer frequently takes his own life or is taken down by law enforcement, after the damage has been done.  (The same people who talk about “helping the mentally ill” also trot out this argument, apparently not realizing they are barking up two mutually contradictory trees in so doing.  In the recent shootings, the mentally ill shooter didn’t  exactly give a lot of heads up before opening fire.)

But all of the legalistic arguments pale in comparison to a simple moral truth: automatic weapons designed solely to kill large numbers of people in short amounts of time simply have no fitting role in civilized society. If you don’t believe that, I’m afraid you are just on the wrong side of history.

Viewpoint: MOOC Mythbusting

[1] The Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) are standardized tests that are part of most students’ applications to American graduate and undergraduate programs respectively.
[2] Lawley, D., Estimation of factor loadings by the method of maximum likelihood.  Proc. Royal Soc. Edinburgh, 60A, 1940.
[3] Lord, F.M. Applications of item response theory to practical testing problems. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1980.
[4] Davis, Barbara Gross.  Tools for Teaching.  Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2009.
[5] Hollingsworth, J.  Automatic graders for programming classes.  CACM 3(10), Oct. 1960

Four years ago Tonia and I acquired Pogo, a not-yet-weaned keel-billed toucan.  We lost her yesterday in a freak accident, and it’s a bit too close and too painful to include a photo of her here, but she’s in my Facebook photo and she’s the GitHub avatar for the ’saasbook’ organization, so you’ve probably seen her even if you never met her in person.  (And if you had met her in person, you’d remember.)

In the four years she lived with us, we quickly learned that in order to steward a toucan you have to learn to be one, since toucans are not domesticated and haven’t developed the ability to tune in to human behaviors.  (She announced this the first morning we had her at home by pooping in our bed, a remarkable foreshadowing of much pooping to come and that we’d spend much of our time cleaning up after it.  Later that evening, in the TV room, she got nervous about something and tried to fly around, knocking over a glass of red wine.)

So we became toucans.  Through trial and error, we learned that passing food back and forth is an important social bonding ritual, at least as important as eating.  We learned that you can never turn your back on a toucan: Pogo was “always on”, and when she was awake she was constantly getting into everything, looking for trouble.  That’s the nature of the toucan, we learned: she was inquisitive and curious about everything all the time.  We learned that although she would wake at the crack of dawn and start croaking loudly, that was just her “contact call” trying to locate the flock; once we figured that out, we started bringing her into the dark bedroom in the morning to sleep in with us.  She would take a food pellet and hop into bed to perform the all-important exchange ritual to confirm she was with the right flock, then would doze with us for an hour or two or even three before becoming hyperactive again.  We learned that certain footwear sets off aggressive reactions, though we could never fully figure out why or what specific characteristics would trigger it, though it appeared to be related to jealousy.  We learned that by making a gesture with our fingers like a beak opening and closing, we got pecked less often because apparently she interpreted the gesture as an overture to social contact rather than as a threat.  As she learned her way around the house and we became more confident she wouldn’t do something foolish, we stopped trimming her flight feathers so she could be fully flighted around the house, and she learned many paths through the house and flew around with relish thereafter.

We got used to a repertoire of unusual sounds and behaviors. When we left the house to go to work, or had to put her in her house and got out of view, she would start her “contact call” (croak croak croak croak croak) for quite awhile to see if she could locate us.  If we had to intervene to stop an undesirable behavior—move her to a different perch, move her away from food she wasn’t supposed to be eating, or take something away from her that we were afraid she’d swallow—she’d point her beak up in the air and begin a defiant protest (CAW CAW CAW CAW CAW) to express her clear displeasure.  If one of us came home from work after the other of us had already gotten home and let her out, she would hear the front door and quickly hop down the few steps to the upper landing of our staircase, and stand there to see who was coming in.  (hop hop hop hop THUMP)  Sometimes, especially if it was me, her chosen “mate”, she would wait for me to sit on the steps, creating a cavity between my body and the wall; she would then gleefully hop down the rest of the stairs, slap her beak against the floor, and then try to wiggle into the cavity, purring excitedly.  (hop hop hop hop slap slap slap RATTLE RATTLE RATTLE)  If we came home after dark and she was already asleep on her perch in her house, she’d wake up and briefly ruffle her feathers,  often bonking her head on the eave of her house in the process (flap flap flap flap flap BONK flap flap flap) before settling back to sleep, curled up like a football with beak tucked against her back and tail flipped forward over her head.

Once in while, most commonly during the midmorning hours, she’d keep me company while I worked at home, sitting on the back of my chair and preening her feathers.  These morning constitutionals didn’t last long and usually devolved into hyperactivity shortly after, but during the hour or two that she was doing her personal grooming, it was fun to have her supervise my work and just sit close by.

And during very special (and rare) moments, when she was in just the right mood, she would allow us to help preen her feathers and rub her beak.  She would respond either enthusiastically with the same excited loud rattling, or sometimes, if she was very relaxed with me, with an almost intimate very low rattling.  On the latter occasions, she would partially or fully close her eyes while being petted, as I alternated between grooming her feathers, rubbing her beak and rubbing her blue feet.  Those episodes were rare but very special, as it was a moment of actual communing with a very different species.  Those moments remind us that however different we look, we all ultimately come from the same genetic stock and our primitive cerebrums share a common set of motivations: we all seek comfort and safety, we occupy social roles, we all want food and warmth and contentment and a sense of fulfillment in our social groups.  Amazingly, as maddeningly difficult as it often was to learn Pogo’s body language or behavior patterns, it was easy to identify when she felt safe and happy.

We will miss her very much, but her legacy will have been to remind us that although we might never have been ideal toucans, there are things deep in our shared DNA that let us build occasional bridges with the unlikeliest of species.  My wife has always known this, but Pogo was a particularly striking example.

Goodbye, bird love.  We both knew you wouldn’t last forever but we lost you before your time.  Yes, perhaps it wasn’t in your nature to be a “good bird”, but we know you tried as hard as you could, just as we tried as hard as we could to be effective toucan companions and to indulge “the essence of the toucan” whenever possible rather than trying to project our own expectations onto you.  Yes, you were pecky and exasperating at least as often as you were gentle and loving, but you were always amusing and you always found some trouble to get into that we’d never thought of—sorting the compost, learning to let yourself out of your house, eating things you really shouldn’t, or requiring us to rethink placement of food and other items in the kitchen to put them out of your reach, lest you attempt to sample them by beaking each one. When we wondered how such a creature could exist—not the fastest flyer, awkward on land, brightly colored, no natural defense mechanisms, impudent and inquisitive to the point of foolhardy—you reminded us that some creatures get to exist simply because there’s room for them in their ecosystem.

The flock is smaller by one today, but it’s still a good flock.  We will always remember you and we’re grateful to have had the opportunity, for a few years at least, to try to be part of your unusual world and to try to rise to the challenge of seeing it through your eyes and understanding your behaviors.

Advice: have a plan for proofreading and errata. I’ve never had a publisher, and I’m a stickler for writing, so proofreading with a fine tooth comb is something I do anyway. But if it’s not something you do, you won’t have a publisher to help with that.  Dozens of minor errata were reported by readers; we used a Google Form (HTML form backed up by a Google Docs spreadsheet) to collect them.  This has been challenging, because Amazon has their own mechanism that allows readers of Kindle books to report errors.  However, the information reported through that mechanism is relayed sporadically and not sanity-checked; factually incorrect “corrections” from readers are passed straight through, as are complaints from readers who aren’t sophisticated enough to operate their ebook reader devices.  However, those people are Amazon’s customers (and as an author, you are not), so we just have to learn to deal with this.

Advice: set your expectations for “service”. One thing a publisher normally handles is distribution. Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing handles that for the Kindle book, but until recently, their service & support for publishers was terrible. (Note that I don’t call it “customer service”. People who buy books are Amazon’s customers. Authors are not.) Recently, though, because of the highly visible success of our MOOC, which uses both the Kindle book and Amazon Web Services infrastructure, Amazon has become much more interested in speaking about strategic things with us, and has given us the level of support usually given to real publishers. We just made our book available on the Nook store and expect to sell it via Google Books starting next month; I’ll report back on whether they are any more responsive to indie authors.

Advice: tell your purchasers to follow you or otherwise let you notify them of updates. A key reason we wanted to do an ebook was the ability to get bug fixes and new content into readers’ hands quickly.  Each release of the book has a version number, starting from 0.8.0 in January 2012 up to 0.8.5 in May 2012.  We applied the errata fixes ourselves, using GitHub to track all book content and tagging the releases as we would with code, and every erratum has a corresponding version number.  Amazon initially told us they’d notify purchasers and allow them to re-download updated versions of the ebook, but they waffled.  (This is now fixed, but only by Amazon’s decision to give us special treatment.)  Without that support, I’m not sure we’d be able to get updates into readers’ hands.  Even so, while readers can now re-download updated versions of our book, it’s up to us (not Amazon) to notify readers when new versions are available.  We can use the MOOC registration email lists to hit many of those people, but others will have to find out for themselves.  We’re now encouraging readers to follow us on Twitter, and we’ll put that text into the next release of the book.

Advice: have a plan for spreading the word via professional forums.  We had already been spreading the word about our course—we had presented posters or talks at CSEET, SIGCSE and ICSE, wrote an op-ed for CACM espousing the teaching of software engineering using SaaS+Agile, and so on.  We’d been collecting names of people who might be interested in trying out our ideas, so naturally we told them about the book too, and offered most of them complimentary copies.  (Unlike with a publisher, the cost of the comp copies comes out of pocket for us, though the print-on-demand house we use, CreateSpace, allows authors to purchase author copies at a price lower than list.)

Advice: be prepared to do your own feet-on-the-ground marketing and publicity.  My marketing experience as a nonprofit theater Board member came in handy.  Following the pattern I’ve used in that world, we designed a postcard and had it printed and direct-mailed by PSPrint to a mailing list we purchased (~600 software engineering professors). The list was ad hoc and included few top-tier departments; in retrospect I’m not sure it was worth the roughly $500 we paid. Successful practice in arts marketing is to follow the postcard with an email reminder a week or two later, but the firm that sold  us the list wouldn’t sell us the corresponding email list, so we paid people to scrape the Web to get them manually (I know, we could’ve Turked it). Then we found out we couldn’t import those addresses into an email list manager such as the excellent MailChimp or ConstantContact, since due to CAN-SPAM laws you may only import email addresses of people who have directly opted in via your own website.  (There’s now an area on our book’s website where you can express interest in the beta program that uses the book.)  So we sent one-on-one emails to just about all those people (600 or so in all).  We also personally reached out to colleagues in top-25 departments with whom we had good personal relationships.  It wasn’t a huge amount of work but it was time not spent on writing.

Instead:

1.  Get a Clipper card, a debit farecard that works on almost all transit systems in the Bay Area.  Ideally, order one online to be mailed to you (takes 5-7 business days), and you can immediately set up Autoload, which reloads your card from a credit card or bank account so you can “set and forget”.  Unused value never expires (though you cannot get it back as cash).  If you don’t have 5-7 days of lead time, you can buy this card at Walgreens drugstores anywhere in the Bay Area, or at the Muni vending machines in the underground stations at Embarcadero, Montgomery, Powell or Civic Center.  Unfortunately you can’t yet buy them at the airports.  Once you have the card, put some money on it at any Add Value machine in the underground stations or at any Walgreens.  Both methods let you use credit cards or cash.  When your trip is over, keep the card for your next visit.  (You’ll surely want to come back.)

Various separate agencies run Bay Area transit, but the Clipper card works on all of them.  BART runs fast trains that connect San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and the outlying suburbs.  Muni runs the buses, trolleys, and “Metro” streetcar/subways in SF.  Other agencies run buses in other counties.

2.  If you have a smart phone (iPhone, Android, …) bookmark NextBus.com, which provides real-time bus arrivals for most Bay Area agencies based on transceivers mounted in the buses.  It uses GPS to detect where you are and give you departures of nearby buses, or you can select a specific route, stop and direction.

3.  Use Google Maps (or the built-in Maps app on the iPhone) to get public transit directions between any two points.  The route and connection info is accurate, but the specific connection times often aren’t because buses may be delayed during peak hours, etc.  The ideal app would combine the directions from Google Maps with bus departure times from NextBus, but as far as I know that app doesn’t exist yet.

4.  Become a member of Zipcar or CityCarShare, both of which have rent-by-the-hour stations all over the Bay Area.  If you’re already a member, everything should just work.

Tips on seeing specific things:

The best way to see the Golden Gate Bridge is to bike across, and take the ferry back from Sausalito or Tiburon.  Bike rentals are available next to the Hyatt Embarcadero Center hotel at the Embarcadero BART station and various locations along the Embarcadero between the Ferry Building and Fishermans Wharf.  The rentals include helmets, locks, and excellent maps.  If you don’t want to bike the bridge, the next best way to see it is to get to the bridge plaza on Golden Gate Transit bus 10 or 70, which is a lot faster than getting there on Muni since the GG Transit buses make very few stops in SF.

The Ferry Building (just outside Embaracadero BART station) was beautifully restored in the early 2000s and now hosts an urban-agriculture farmers market several days/evenings a week.  It is well worth a visit.  Ferries do still sail from here; if the weather is nice, you can joyride the Alameda-Oakland Ferry, which makes a stop at Oakland Jack London Square and another in Alameda before returning to the Ferry Building (whole trip takes about an hour and you get great views of the Bay Bridge and the lay of the land).

Locals tend to steer clear of Fishermans Wharf, but it does have those fascinating sea lions, and other things in its general vicinity are worth visiting, like the Musée Mécanique containing hundreds of really old (some from early 1900s) mechanical amusement devices, the USS Pampanito, Fort Mason Park, the Maritime Museum, the recently-restored Crissy Field, and the Municipal Pier.  Traffic is awful around there, so either bike there from the bike rental at Embarcadero, walk there from the Embarcadero BART (~20 minutes), or take the F-Market aboveground streetcar from in front of the Ferry Building.

The Ferry Building itself, at Embarcadero and Market St. (outside Embarcadero BART and near Transbay bus terminal), is well worth a visit and hosts a local farmers market 4 times a week, at which all products must originate within 150 miles of the building.  Mmmm, fresh.

Outside of SF, Berkeley is well worth a visit, for both the campus and the vaguely funky Telegraph Avenue area just south of the campus’s Sather Gate.  The best way to get there is to take BART to Downtown Berkeley station.

The best way to visit Golden Gate Park or Dolores Park/Mission Dolores is Muni. The Muni “Metro” trams (on rails) serve both—the N-Judah runs the length of the southern edge of Golden Gate Park, the J-Church passes by Dolores Park.  All the tram lines converge on Market St.

According to articles in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, it sounds like you should make your displeasure known to Reliance Entertainment, a media company largely controlled by media mogul Anil Ambani.

Other news sources report that some ISPs are still allowing Vimeo and Pastebin through, and that proxies and VPNs can be used to circumvent the blockage.

We don’t plan to move our content, and we’re confident the world’s largest democracy will respond appropriately to what amounts to censorship, as we said in our SaaS TV Chat this week.

• Wifi advertised as a connectivity option, but doesn’t work, works flakily, or works for printing but not scanning (and you can’t activate both wifi and USB at once without redoing factory setup)
• Gobbles ink, perhaps deliberately, and/or refuses to print or do ANYTHING when ANY of the ink cartridges is low; and increasingly, they can’t be refilled because they are chipped
• Printing quality sucks

I’m looking for an all-in-one that has the following properties.  If I end up buying the one you recommend, I’ll send you a $5 Amazon gift card.

MUST HAVE features:

• Works seamlessly with a Mac, without having to install obtrusive vendor software, which is usually among the worst quality software out there (we have 3rd-party scanning software such as VueScan already)
• Can function with OS 10.5.x (doesn’t require ?10.6)
• Ink consumption isn’t deliberately rapacious and eco-hostile (can’t refill cartridges, can’t print at all when printer decides cartridges are low)
• Decent print quality for photos—consumer grade is fine

HIGHLY DESIRABLE but not dealbreaker if absent:

• Wifi connectivity that actually works and can be setup by mere mortals
• AirPrint (print photos directly from iOS devices)