No Sound on Ubuntu 9.10 and VMware Workstation 7 (again!)

I was running Windows XP Pro in virtual machines (VMs) within VMware Workstation 7 on a 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) host.  I had repeatedly had problems with no audio in earlier versions of Workstation (e.g., 6.5.2).  Various fixes, reboots, and other efforts had randomly gotten the audio working again within one or more VMs.

Now I had a new situation:  there was no audio in any VM and, when I checked, I found there was also no sound in Ubuntu itself.  Once again, I ran various searches and began trying various suggestions.  I came across an Ubuntu Community Documentation page on Sound, which led me to another Community page on Sound Troubleshooting Procedure.  Step 1 in that procedure led me to Stéphane Gaudreault's long, step-by-step procedure on upgrading the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) (1.0.22.1) on Karmic.  (On WinXP, using another computer, Stéphane's page loaded in Internet Explorer, but not in Firefox.  It loaded slowly in Firefox in Ubuntu.)  I closed Workstation, and then copied and pasted each line of that procedure into Terminal.  (It was possible to copy and paste multiple lines at once, including line ends; they would run one after another.)  One exception:  as far as I could tell, I did not get the "panelw library not found" error he described, so as he advised, I skipped the "symbolic links" part of his instructions.  Everything seemed to go smoothly until his very last command (sudo alsaconf), which opened the ALSA Configurator.  After clicking OK, the Configurator said, "Searching sound cards," and then gave me this error:

No supported PnP or PCI card found.

Would you like to probe legacy ISA sound cards/chips?

So it seemed that possibly I did not need to go through Stéphane's procedure, though I did appreciate how perfectly it went.  I might have just run "sudo alsaconf" in the first place, assuming I already had some version of ALSA loaded on my computer; doing so might have given me this same hardware-related error notice -- unless Stéphane's procedure was its cause.  That seemed possible; maybe my ALSA was now so new that Ubuntu had not yet caught up.  I tried listening to a WAV file, just in case, but no, sure enough, still no sound.  I ran a search for that error message.  This led to a VIA Technologies Release Note (oddly, not found on the VIA website) that said,

When installing driver, if the ALSA Configurator reminds that "No supported PnP or PCI card found", it means the kernel cannot find the pci audio device. Select "No" to exit the installation and uninstall the driver. Please read Notes b des-cription to resolve the problem.

Exiting the Configurator did not seem to uninstall anything, so I interpreted that part of the Release Note to mean that I was supposed to uninstall the driver myself, somehow.  Notes, point b, in that document said this:

Before installation, make sure your linux kernel can find the pci audio device first. If your kernel can not find any pci device with command 'lspci', you'd better add an option in /boot/grub/menu.1st file. At the end of line with "kernel /boot/vmlinuz-xxxx", xxxx is the kernel version, add the following:

pci=conf1

This information appeared to mean that I should have done this before going through Stéphane's procedure.  I didn't know how to undo that procedure, so I decided to poke around a bit more, in search of other possibilities.  I started back at the Sound Troubleshooting Procedures (STP) page.  It gave me several commands to copy and paste into Terminal.  This gave me a link to Stephen Olesen's Pastebin website, where all kinds of information about my system was automatically posted for other people to see and, presumably, help me with.  The last message produced by those commands I cut and pasted was, "Please inform the person helping you."  So apparently I could post a question in a forum somewhere, and include the Pastebin address instead of cluttering up the forum with all that information about my system.

Anyway, the STP page said that the Pastebin file should contain some indication of the "Driver version," the "Library version," and the "Utilities version."  I tried searching the Pastebin file for "Driver version" and, sure enough, there it was, not far from the top.  It said this:

ALSA Version
------------
Driver version: 1.0.22.1
Library version: 1.0.22
Utilities version: 1.0.22

That didn't look like an exact match.  I wasn't sure if 1.0.22.1 was close enough to the others.  The STP page said the numbers needed to be equal.  If they weren't, then (a) one of the ALSA components was not successfully upgraded (which I didn't think was the problem, as I had seen no error messages), or (b) I booted an older kernel version (which wasn't the case either).  Anyway, there seemed to be a mismatch between my ALSA version and my Ubuntu kernel.  So it still looked like I would need to reinstall ALSA.  But then it occurred to me that I hadn't run the lspci command, as suggested by the Release Note (above), to see if my kernel could find a PCI device.  It found a bunch of PCI devices, including "MCP61 High Definition Audio."  Hmm.  Puzzling!

OK, well, the STP page had one more, very long line to copy and paste into Terminal.  If my driver version numbers (above) were acceptably similar to one another, maybe this was all I needed to do.  So I tried that.  It ran, but I couldn't tell for sure if it was happy.  I tried "sudo alsaconf" again.  Still the same result.  Mark Rijckenberg suggested, to someone having a similar problem, that they either revert to an earlier version of ALSA (which hadn't been working for me) or else consider switching from x64 back to 32-bit Ubuntu.  Having had many problems with 64-bit Ubuntu -- orphan problems, especially, that almost nobody else seemed to be having -- and having wrestled with the sound problem repeatedly for the past year, I decided to try my luck with 32-bit Karmic.  I describe the downgrading process in a separate post.

Ubuntu 9.10: Downgrading from 64-bit to 32-bit Karmic Koala

As indicated by numerous posts in this blog over the past couple of years, I had a number of problems with 64-bit Ubuntu installations -- orphan problems, especially, that almost nobody else seemed to be having.  I finally decided to try replacing 64-bit with 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10.  This post describes the steps I took to install and configure the downgrade.

First, I made an Acronis TrueImage backup of my current installation, so that I could quickly restore the 64-bit installation if it turned out that downgrading to a 32-bit system wasn't paying off.  Next, I looked into the possibility of downgrading without doing a complete reinstallation, but the consensus
appeared to be that I would have to completely wipe the 64-bit installation and start from scratch, using 32-bit applications.

A tip from Benjamin Lowenstein led me to a quick method of listing and restoring my installed applications.  First, I typed "dpkg --get-selections > installed-software."  This created a file called "installed-software" in my Home folder.  The contents of that file looked like this:

acpi-support                         install
acpid                                    install
adduser                                install

In my case, there were hundreds of them.  Some that I had installed specially (i.e., outside of Synaptic Package Manager), such as VMware Workstation, were not on the list.  Otherwise, though, I would later be able to use this list to restore the large majority of my programs automatically.  Quite an improvement over Windows!

But first, I had some housekeeping to do.  For one thing, the dpkg command put that "installed-software" file into my Home directory; and since I was in the habit of installing all of my Ubuntu folders into a single partition, I assumed that my Home directory would be wiped out during the 32-bit installation.  So I moved the installed-software file to a different partition.  I already had my other data files, virtual machine folders, etc. on other partitions, with one exception:  my Thunderbird e-mail data was in /home/ray/.mozilla-thunderbird, so I had to copy that over to another drive as well.  My Firefox extensions and settings were backed up to that other partition by the FEBE add-on, so I expected the Firefox part of my reinstallation to go smoothly.

Meanwhile, I was downloading the current version of 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10.  When it finished, I burned it to a CD, inserted the CD in the target machine, and rebooted.  The basic installation did not go too smoothly, though.  For some reason, the newly burned CD booted only once in the target machine.  On later reboots, the machine did not boot from the CD, but instead went on to boot from the hard drive.  I tried booting from the CD with a different program, and in that case the machine booted from the CD as expected.  So I switched to an older Karmic 32-bit CD I found lying around.  That booted without a problem.  But then the system seemed to have gotten confused from the previous efforts, and that installation got hung up and took a long time to get past the partitioning step.  The hard drive was still going, according to the activity light; it was just not going anywhere in particular.

At about the same time, the Internet connection on my secondary computer began acting up.  Suddenly, without warning, I wasn't able to go online.  I decided to try installing 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10 there too, using the newly burned CD.  That installation went fine.  And then it was time to work through a 32-bit version of my typical installation steps, following the process described in my previous posts on installing 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10.

I started by running System > Administration > Update Manager to update the programs installed by the CD.  Then I went into Applications > Ubuntu Software Center > Get Free Software > search for "restricted extras" > Ubuntu restricted extras > Install.  Next, System > Administration > Hardware Drivers searched for available drivers and, for my machine, found NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 185) (because I had an NVIDIA video card) > Activate.  This gave me an error:

SystemError:  Failed to lock /var/cache/apt/archives/lock

I wondered if this was because I had not yet rebooted the machine after downloading and installing the initial batch of updates. A reboot got me past that error, but now I had a new one:

SystemError: installArchives() failed.

I tried installing the older (version 173) driver instead.   That seemed to go OK.  It said, "You need to restart the computer to activate this driver," but meanwhile I had gotten started on the next step, so again I deferred rebooting.  That next step was System > Administration > Software Sources > Ubuntu Software tab > Download From > Other > Select Best Server > Choose Server (whichever one it highlights) > Close > Reload.  Then I went back into Software Sources > Other Software tab > select the two entries that are already there > Add.  To get the APT line it was requesting, I opened Firefox and went to the X-Updates website, clicked on "Technical details about this PPA," specified Karmic, and copied the two deb lines there, one at a time, into the APT line, clicking "Add Source" after each.  Next, on that same webpage, below the deb lines, I found the "Signing Key."  In this case, it was "1024R/AF1CDFA9."  I copied the portion after the slash (i.e., AF1CDFA9) and entered it into Terminal at the end of a one-line command, as follows:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys AF1CDFA9

This gave me this output in Terminal:

gpg: key AF1CDFA9: "Launchpad PPA for Ubuntu-X" not changed
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: unchanged: 1

I suspected this meant that one or more of my steps had accomplished nothing.  Then I clicked Close > Reload.  (From a previous installation, I had a note to myself:  If you don't get a "Reload" option when you click Close, go back into Third-Party Software and unclick and then re-click some item and try again.  That step was not needed this time.)  Also, by typing "sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list," I was able to verify that there were no hash marks in front of the lines for the Universe and Multiverse repositories, which apparently meant they were already available.  The other repository I wanted was the Medibuntu, which I added by using these three commands:

sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get --quiet update

sudo apt-get --yes install app-install-data-medibuntu apport-hooks-medibuntu

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

After installing the Medibuntu repository, I realized that possibly my only reason for having it had been an attempt to make some things work on my 64-bit installation.  But soon I was to discover that I could use it to install Google Earth too.

The next step was to try the other half of the tip mentioned above.  I copied the  "installed-software" file back to my Home folder and maneuvered the Terminal cursor to that location (cd /home/ray) and then entered the needed commands:

    sudo dpkg --set-selections < installed-software

    sudo apt-get install dselect

    sudo dselect

This started dselect.  There, I went into Access and selected APT Acquisition.  It asked whether I wanted to overwrite the sources list mentioned above.  I said no.  This put me back at the next item on the menu, Update; and when I went with that, it updated something and then put me to the next item, Select.  Here, I paged through thousands of packages, not sure of what I was looking for, not seeing anything marked with boldface or "Y" instead of "n."  I bailed out of that -- it wasn't easy, but I used some uncertain combination of Esc, Q, X, space, and Enter -- and that took me to the Install menu option.  This appeared to be what I was looking for.  When I chose this one, it said it was going to get 390MB of archives and use 924MB of additional disk space, which sounded like a lot of installing and updating.  The first couple of items that it seemed to be downloading did appear on the installed-software list, so it all looked good.  But then my network connection died, so I had to start dselect again.  This time, I went directly to the Install option.  It seemed to resume where it left off, and after a while it finished downloading and began adding and removing stuff.   Then it wanted to reboot, and that was fine with me.

Previously, when I had installed 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10, I had manually added a number of programs through System > Administration > Synaptic, including particularly these:  boinc; boinc-manager; dvgrab; fdutils; gparted; mplayer; ntfs-config; ntfsprogs; p7zip-full; sysinfo; and webhttrack.  Now I checked Synaptic to see which of those had been reinstalled through the dselect process. Well, it had worked.  Every one of them had been reinstalled.  I tried System > Administration > Update Manager > Check.  It confirmed it:  everything was up to date.  That dselect process was one smooth play.  What a remarkable improvement over the Windows reinstallation process!

While I was in Synaptic, I installed googleearth (already mentioned above).  I also kept Thunderbird on only one computer because, for the time being, I didn't want to worry about keeping Address Books and Inboxes synchronized across multiple computers.  Also, after I later installed AutoFsck from a .deb download, I discovered that it, too, was in Synaptic.

Next, I installed FEBE and used it to restore my previous Firefox setup.  Unlike my previous attempt, this time I did succeed in using a FEBE backup from Windows XP to restore my Firefox add-ons and settings in Ubuntu.  I installed Google Chrome, checked to verify that Opera was still not available through Synaptic, downloaded it from its website, and double-clicked on the .deb download to install it.

I had just sent an e-mail to VMware, asking if they would allow me to downgrade my recently purchased 64-bit Workstation 7 license into a 32-bit Workstation license.  Hoping to receive a favorable answer from them, whenever they would get back to me, I went ahead and installed the 32-bit version for at least their 30-day trial period. Workstation 7 came as a .bundle file, which required the same installation steps as .bin files.  In Terminal, I navigated to the folder where I had put the download, and then typed these two commands:

sudo chmod +x VMware-Workstation-Full-7.0.1-227600.i386.bundle 

sudo ./VMware-Workstation-Full-7.0.1-227600.i386.bundle

Next, to set up my partitions so that they would be mounted automatically, I used these commands:

sudo ntfs-config
sudo gedit /etc/fstab
sudo gparted [entered in a separate Terminal session]
sudo blkid [entered in a separate Terminal session]

The first one, "sudo ntfs-config," would open a dialog offering to let me include any partitions that were not presently mounted.  It also offered write support for both internal and external devices, which I accepted, and then it modified the fstab file to include lines for ntfs partitions.  The next command, "sudo gedit /etc/fstab," opened the fstab file for manual adjustment.  Then "sudo gparted" opened the GParted program so that I could see what partitions existed, in case I wanted to add any more partitions to fstab, and "sudo blkid" told me what their UUIDs were.  This information resulted in arrangements and additions to fstab so that my partitions were in an order I liked, with explanatory comments (preceded by #), using UUIDs rather than partition names where possible, so that the fstab commands would still work if I renamed the partitions.  Examples of the results looked like this:

# Entry for /dev/sdb2 [a Linux ext3 partition] :

UUID=9cec5b4d-7e72-42a9-86ee-b59c16e6410f /media/VMS ext3 defaults 0 0

# Entry for /dev/sdb3 [a Windows partition] :

UUID=5B56363D59D5E95C /media/CURRENT ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.UTF-8 0 0

Next, I did some configuring.  I went into Nautilus > Edit > Preferences and made changes there.  To prevent icons for mounted drives from appearing on the desktop, I typed "gconf-editor" and went into apps/nautilus/desktop, unclicked volumes_visible, and closed Configuration Editor.

In System > Preferences > Startup Applications, I added Chrome, Firefox, and VMware Workstation.  To get the necessary information for that, I right-clicked on the top panel near "Applications" and chose Edit Menus, then selected the item in question and right-clicked for its Properties.  To configure boinc, I went to Applications > System Tools > BOINC Manager > Next and, in the Choose a Project window, I typed in the URL (in my case, http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/).  (I had already gone to that site and set up an account.)  Then I logged in, and back in the BOINC Manager I adjusted my preferences.

I wanted Grub2 to boot up whatever operating system I had used last, instead of always defaulting to Ubuntu, so I typed "sudo gedit /etc/default/grub"; I changed one line to say GRUB_DEFAULT=saved instead of GRUB_DEFAULT=0; I saved and closed that file; and then I typed "sudo update-grub."

Reviewing my previous post on scheduling things, I wanted gedit to be my default crontab editor, so I typed "gedit /home/ray/.bashrc" and, at the end of that file, I added a new line that said "export EDITOR=gedit" and then saved and closed .bashrc.  I had developed scripts that I wanted to run on regular occasions, so I put those in a folder on a partition that would not be wiped out if I reinstalled Ubuntu.  Then I set up recurrent entries in Applications > System Tools > Scheduled Tasks.

Among the partitions listed in fstab, I wanted some to be available to ordinary mortals (namely, me) instead of having to become root (i.e., use sudo) to mount and access them.  To do this, I typed "sudo mount -a."  This gave me an error for one partition:  "mount point /media/[partition name] does not exist."  It was an ext3 partition so, in fstab, I changed its options to be like those shown for the VMS partition (above) and then typed the following three lines (using the CURRENT partition as an example):

sudo mkdir /media /CURRENT

sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/sda3 /media/CURRENT

sudo chmod 777 /media/CURRENT

To configure VMware Workstation, I typed "sudo vmware" and went into Edit > Preferences and set as many settings as possible. I verified that the 32-bit version of Workstation was able to open the VMs I had created in the 64-bit version.  I changed Settings for each VM as needed.  (I had to resume and then shut down those VMs that had been merely suspended.)  The 32-bit version of Workstation would allow a maximum of only about 3GB of RAM.  I had hoped that meant "per session," but, alas, that was not the case; the 32-bit operating system was able to recognize only about 3GB total, even though I had considerably more than that in the system.  Within Workstation's Edit > Preferences > Memory, the maximum available for VMs seemed to be 2966MB, and I had set Workstation to use 2500MB, so as to keep some RAM available for processes in Ubuntu.  I preferred to set my VMs not to swap, for speed -- that is, to keep everything in RAM.  So when I opened one VM with 1504MB allotted to it, and then started another session of Workstation and tried to open a VM that needed 1024MB, the second one told me that only 536MB was available.  This suggested that, of the 2500MB I had made available to Workstation, about 2040MB was available for VMs.  So there seemed to be an overhead of about 230MB per VM.  I set each VM to use 1000MB and was able to open two at once.

I then exited that root session of Workstation, restarted Workstation from Applications > System Tools > VMware Workstation, and verified that the VMs worked properly for the ordinary user.  One of the things I had to adjust, in the VMs, was that audio volume was low; I had to turn it up in Ubuntu first, and then adjust it in the Windows XP VM.  I was pleased to see that the stuttering problem I had had in 64-bit Workstation was gone, though there was some undesirable static.  Also, a renamed partition was no longer shared; I had to remove the old one from VM > Settings and add the one with the new name, and then reboot the VM.  I had to change the Network Connection from Bridged to NAT.  Inside the VM, I right-clicked on each partition name to change it from the long form (e.g., "Vms on 'vmware-host\Shared Folders'") to the short form (e.g., VMs).

It seemed likely that I would be continuing to tweak and refine the setup, but for now, this appeared to give me a good working situation.  It seemed that the 32-bit downgrade had been a good idea; I really hadn't encountered any of the strange things that had complicated life in the 64-bit world.

Installing 32-bit Ubuntu 9.10 -- Additional Tweaks

In a previous post (and in a couple of comments after it), I described the steps I took to downgrade from 64-bit (x64) to 32-bit (x32) Ubuntu 9.10 (a/k/a Karmic Koala), including installation of VMware Workstation 7 and other programs.  This post describes further installation and adjustment steps that I took as time went by.

To make more vertical space, I moved Ubuntu's top panel to the left side of the screen.  To do this, I right-clicked on the panel and went to Properties > General tab > Orientation.  While I was there, I also unchecked Expand and checked Autohide and Show hide buttons.  In previous installations, I had found that sometimes a panel would misbehave on startup.  To fix that, I would just come back to these options and check and then uncheck Expand.  (To get to these options on the revised left panel, I would right-click the Hide button at the top of the panel.)  I had experimented with moving the bottom panel to the right side of the screen, but there were some panel items (e.g., date, weather) that required reading, and reading was easier when I left them on the bottom.  I made the bottom panel more consistent with Windows XP by moving the shutoff button to the bottom left corner, from its original location on the top right corner, and also by moving the date to the bottom right corner.  To move these items from the (formerly top) left panel, I right-clicked on them and chose Remove From Panel.  Then I went to the bottom panel and used right-click > Add to Panel and selected Clock and Shut Down.  To relocate them on the bottom panel, I used right-click > Move, and then put the hand on the part of the panel where I wanted them to be and clicked again. To move items that were already on a panel, I had to right-click > uncheck Lock to Panel, then move the hand to the panel location where I wanted the item, click there, and go back in and Lock to Panel again.  To move some items, I had to look for the icon consisting of three tiny grey marks and right-click on that.  That included, on the bottom panel, the entire set of buttons for currently open programs.

While I was revising panels, I added Drawer to the left panel.  Then I right-clicked on Drawer and chose Add to Drawer.  This was for infrequently used items that needed to be horizontal (for reading), and that therefore belonged in a Drawer on the left rather than bottom panel.  For now, the only such item was Character Palette.  On the rough principle that the left panel was for applications and the bottom panel was for WinXP imitation and for everything else, I also added Force Quit to the left panel.  To the bottom, I added Disk Mounter (in a Drawer), Lock Screen, Sticky Notes, and Weather Report.  For some of these items, there were Preferences that could be adjusted. There were some items that could not be added to panels in the normal way.  Specifically, I wanted a copy of the Places > Computer icon on the left panel.  To get it there, I went to Places > Computer and click-dragged the icon to the panel.

I ran into a problem with VMware Workstation 7 performance.  I had downgraded to the 32-bit of Workstation, so that it would run on 32-bit Ubuntu.  It seemed that the lower RAM capacity of 32-bit operating systems might be to blame.  I worked through that problem in a separate post.  The solution was to use a PAE kernel, which can recognize more RAM.  Otherwise, the next major step in this process was to upgrade, some months later, to Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx).

Critique of Friedman & Currall on E-mail

Article Reviewed

Friedman, R. A., & Currall, S. C. (2003). Conflict escalation: Dispute exacerbating elements of e-mail communication. Human Relations, 56(11), 1325-1347.

Summary of the Article

Friedman and Currall (2003, p. 1327) discuss situations in which exchanges of e-mail messages exacerbate conflict.  The topic arises because of their experiences and observations of instances in which a disagreement that seemed minor and manageable escalated, via e-mail, into serious conflict, to the point of ending relationships.  They ask:  “[I]f e-mail communications that exhibited conflict escalation had occurred by phone or in person, would they have ended as they did?”  This question is important because, they say, “as the number of workplace relationships managed by e-mail increases, the implications of e-mail escalation will grow exponentially.”

The authors explain this escalation in terms of their “dispute-exacerbating model of e-mail” (DEME) (p. 1325).  Their explanation is apparently a “model” in the sense that it is “a description or analogy used to help visualize something (as an atom) that cannot be directly observed” (Merriam-Webster Online, 2010).  In this case, the model seems to consist simply of elaboration upon the view that e-mail can exacerbate disputes.  The discussion here will thus tend to refer to this as simply a view or an idea, rather than as a formal model.

Friedman and Currall identify four dispute-exacerbating characteristics of e-mail:  it provides diminished feedback, it provides diminished social cues, it can be lengthy, and it can attract excess attention from the parties.  The first two of these four seem more or less identical:  as the authors explain, e-mail does not provide an opportunity for the kinds of clues that people tend to give each other when they are conversing face-to-face or by phone.  Because of this dearth of feedback, people are more likely to misconstrue one another’s views and perceptions, especially in the direction of perceiving that the other party is behaving aggressively.  E-mail does not give people the same opportunities to understand and get to know one another, and to emphasize the importance of openness and cooperation in their interactions.  Other people are depersonalized and more easily seen as oppositional.  E-mail also provides less information about social status, along with “weak cooperative norms and weak restraint against using aggressive tactics” (p. 1336).

The authors’ third identified dispute-exacerbating characteristic of e-mail is that the ability to go on at length, in an e-mail message, carries a risk of provoking unnecessary misunderstanding and disagreement.  Long messages can be seen as rude and overwhelming.  They may result in responses that address only a few points, which may then be seen as dismissive.  Moreover, the authors say, attention may go especially to the most negative arguments, and compounded misunderstandings in an exchange of e-mails make it “harder to unravel the differences between the parties” (p. 1338).  The fourth dispute-exacerbating characteristic, excess attention, again seems to make a similar point:  people can be drawn too far into an e-mail exchange, resulting in the production of long replies and/or excessive rumination on what has been said:  “Thus, having the opportunity to focus a great deal of time on a received message may not be productive” (p. 1339).  Likewise, the opportunity to spend more time on the first message in an exchange means that one is more likely to become convinced of its truth and less likely to compromise; and the recipient is said to be more likely to assume that the sender has indeed made use of the opportunity to devote time to the message, so that its misstatements tend to be received as final statements of the sender’s firm intentions, as distinct from mere slips of the tongue.

In their conclusory section, the authors offer some advice for managing disputes.  First, they say, this is better done by phone or face-to-face than by e-mail.  If conflict management is done by e-mail, they recommend awareness to the foregoing conflict-aggravating characteristics of e-mail.  In the case of lengthy e-mails, for example, they suggest breaking the discussion down into multiple short messages, “generating as much interaction back and forth as possible” (p. 1342).  In their recommendations, they include considerations that were not, but perhaps should have been, added to the four dispute-exacerbating aspects mentioned above, especially focusing on the relationship rather than the message and avoiding “hyper-rationality” by remembering that “differences occur, and are resolved, through appropriate emotion not solely logical argument” (p. 1342).

Finally, the authors provide some caveats.  They say (p. 1344),

There are probably additional technologies that we have not covered (e.g., chat rooms), other effects of e-mail that we have not considered (e.g., the long-term impact of having written records), and other conditions that we have not explored (e.g., number of parties involved in the conflict).

They also acknowledge that e-mail is “extremely useful” and “does not turn all communications into escalated conflicts” (p. 1342), and “perhaps – over time – most people may become more skilled in e-mail” (p. 1343). 

Critique

While the authors make a number of valid points, I find that they neglect some important characteristics of e-mail in conflictual situations.  The following paragraph address those characteristics briefly.

First, a bit about my perspective.  I started using RSTS e-mail at Columbia in the late 1970s, and continued with CompuServe and other e-mail services in the 1980s and thereafter.  In the early 1990s, I worked at a federal agency that utilized e-mail to connect people in a half-dozen regional offices around the country.  Later that decade, I was active on Usenet newsgroups via Deja News and otherwise.  This background means that I have had many opportunities to make the sorts of mistakes that Friedman and Currall describe, and also to be on the receiving end when others have done likewise.  So when I review this article, I have reactions on both sides of the matter.

A basic assumption in this article is that the conflict, whatever it is, should be resolved rather than exacerbated.  Resolution, for Friedman and Currall, seems to mean softening and downplaying, with the aid of social norms and cues, so that a person will not say something via e-mail that s/he would not have said in person.  This makes sense in the context of an example like the one with which they begin the article, where a conflict unnecessarily spiraled out of control to the point of terminating a relationship.  But it also raises a number of questions.

One question is why the relationship in that instance was terminated.  The relationship in question apparently involved an editor of a scholarly journal and a writer who had submitted an article.  The conflict seems to have involved revisions requested by the editor.  According to the authors (p. 1326), “Each side had been presenting arguments back and forth until the editor . . . e-mailed that he was ‘ending our relationship.’”  In that instance, e-mail seems to have been facilitated the exchange of views between people who disagreed.  Should the parties have attempted to conduct that exchange via telephone?  Friedman and Currall are probably correct in implying that it would not have continued for long via phone – but why not?  The answer is, surely, that the editor occupied a position of power vis-à-vis the writer, and in a spoken conversation the writer would have received cues that the editor was displeased.  Being a sensible person, the writer would have had to take a submissive posture and allow the editor to have his/her way.  Instead, what may have happened was that the writer’s opportunity to think about and express his/her arguments via e-mail produced some conviction that those arguments had merit, and the editor was simply not willing to acknowledge his/her error.

This example provides a dubious guide for social workers.  First, it is not at all clear that social workers should invariably take a submissive posture when they confront people in positions of power about matters in disagreement.  Moreover, the opportunity to articulate and present one’s concerns can be enormously empowering, especially when one would be afraid to do so in conversation, or would simply lack any opportunity to do so because of cultural or organizational barriers.  For example, an e-mail may get forwarded to a top executive in instances when the writer him/herself would not be invited to speak to that executive.

Friedman and Currall (p. 1331) say that e-mail will escalate the level of conflict if it encourages the use of more aggressive tactics, produces a change in one’s view of the other, weakens interpersonal bonds, or makes problems more difficult to resolve.  This is precisely what e-mail does, they say, via the dispute-exacerbating characteristics cited above:  diminished feedback and social cues, and excessive verbosity and attention to detail.  But there is a straw man here.  These remarks assume a quality of face-to-face interaction that is often nonexistent.  There are people who dislike one another, who are bullied, or who for other reasons find it unpleasant to interact with another person face-to-face.  There are jealousies and unintended as well as intended offenses in remarks that people make to one another.  It can be harder to save face and maintain self-respect when an aggressor chooses to deliver such remarks in a context where the recipient has no opportunity to respond.  Again, contrary to what these authors say, interruption and denying the other person a chance to explain him/herself is more likely in face-to-face interaction than in e-mail, where one generally has at least the possibility of expressing oneself.

What seems to happen is not that e-mail somehow unmasks an evil side within each of us.  The more likely scenario is that, when there is a disagreement, it is attributable – as Friedman and Currall say – to a departure from a social norm.  But social norms are not intrinsically good.  They can easily incorporate or support aggression, prejudice, violence, and other types of dysfunctionality.  Much of what the authors say about e-mail is compatible with the possibility that e-mail permits people to present their concerns in ways that some such norms suppress.

One important assumption in the argument presented by Friedman and Currall is that social norms are restricted to face-to-face interactions.  But there has not been, in fact, the nationwide escalation of e-mail-based conflict the authors seem to fear.  People have become accustomed to e-mail and have developed new norms around it.  Sitting at a keyboard does not liberate one from social norms; more likely, it just invokes an adapted set of norms.  As in other kinds of interactions, these norms are not homogeneous:  some people will say things that others would not, each for reasons of self-protection, articulation, comity, or whatever they consider important in the particular situation.  These choices seem to reflect what people have found feasible and appropriate in their use of e-mail.

There is also a collective aspect to conflict, insofar as the straightforward presentation of concerns by one person may strain relations between the sender and the recipient, but may also nudge the recipient toward being more receptive when others present similar concerns.  In this case, to put the shoe on the other foot, perhaps the writer finds it difficult to learn from editorial criticism.  If so, the experience of running full-tilt into several brick walls may provoke some salutary reflection and growth, where the experience of simply giving in to the person with superior power may leave him/her muttering under his/her breath, ready to make the same mistakes in his/her next editorial interaction.  Conflict can be instructive.  Even in work contexts, and even when it leads to ruptures, it is not always a bad thing.

There is also an efficiency concern.  Editors frequently disagree with writers on various points.  The anecdote would have been more telling if it had been provided along with information about the larger context.  If the editor handles a hundred authors within a certain timeframe, perhaps a small percentage of those will carry disputes to an extreme, but most presumably do not, else editors would probably not use e-mail.  In the anecdotal situation, the editor probably did not need that particular author very badly, given that journal editors tend to be buried in article submissions.  What the writer apparently did not keep in mind, as s/he was crafting his/her replies, was that s/he was dispensable in this particular arrangement.

These observations highlight the educational aspect of e-mail conflict.  Turnage (2008) lists characteristics of e-mail messages that are highly likely to be considered “flaming.”  These characteristics include angry uses of profanity, all capital letters, and excessive exclamation points or question marks.  As suggested by the foregoing remarks about social norms, people tend to learn that these sorts of messages are ineffective if not counterproductive.  As users have become more familiar with flaming, they seem to have become more individually and collectively resistant to it.  In online discussion forums, for example, disputes featuring such behaviors tend to be abandoned by people who have no strong interest in either side of the argument, leaving those who do, along with those who would mediate – which may be an entirely appropriate outcome, especially if it does facilitate interaction among people of opposing who would otherwise be preaching to their own respective choirs.

I’ll rest that line of argument with the general statement that e-mail conflict management is more nuanced and valuable than the authors allow.  On a different level, it seems important to report the results of a bit of fact-checking.  I looked into a 1991 article by Clark and Brennan entitled “Grounding in Communication.”  Friedman and Currall cite this article for the view that grounding is the process in which parties to an interaction develop shared senses of understanding and participation, and “this is important because ‘speech is evanescent’” (p. 1328, quoting Clark & Brennan, p. 128).  This, it turns out, is not an accurate report of the earlier article.  Contra Friedman and Currall, the 1991 article states, not that there are “six tools for grounding” (F&C, p. 1328), but, rather, that there are eight constraints that a medium may impose upon people (C&B, p. 140).

Friedman and Currall do acknowledge that e-mail has an advantage in the last two of those eight, reviewability and revisability, but they don't make clear that Clark and Brennan differentiated “grounding in conversation” (p. 128) from grounding in other sorts of communications.  Clark and Brennan cite the “keyboard teleconferencing” of their time as an example where grounding was indeed attainable, although acknowledgments were more “costly” because they would take more effort (because, in their era, “it is difficult to time an acknowledgment precisely, and trying to do so may interrupt the other typist”) (p. 140).  That is still a problem in chat, but much less so, because chat is very fast now, and its users tend to become used to it.  At any rate, acknowledgment is probably less of a problem in e-mail than in face-to-face conversation, where people often do not show that they have even heard, much less comprehended, what the other party has said.

On the fact-checking level, it also seemed to me that Friedman and Currall somewhat distort the matter when they criticize e-mail for permitting the use of certain “tactics” that are not available in ordinary face-to-face communications.  One is what they call “argument bundling,” where “e-mail comments can be very long and include multiple points . . . . without the receiver having the opportunity to respond or clarify” (p. 1329).  Of course, speakers at conferences and rallies have been doing this for millenia.  It is not a tactic; like e-mail, it is simply a mode of communication, with its own significant advantages for some purposes.  The difference is not its one-sidedness; it is that recipients tend to be self-selected to agree in the public meeting context.  That difference is important and interesting, but it is not explored in this article.

Actually, recipients of long e-mail messages do have opportunities to respond in ways of their preference.  For instance, they can break long messages into smaller pieces and explain that, for lack of time or interest, they are responding, but for now, as a courtesy, will respond at least to the first several sentences or paragraph of the message they received.

One final fact-oriented rejoinder:  e-mail, according to Friedman and Currall, is “profoundly asocial” (p. 1329).  Were this true, social media would have been stillborn.  The more accurate statement, I suggest, is that e-mail is social in ways that are unfamiliar to those who have not yet added it to their repertoire.  One thing the authors consider particularly asocial about e-mail is that “E-mails are typically received and written while the writer is in isolation, staring at a computer screen – perhaps for hours at a time, so that awareness of the humanness of the counterpart may be diminished” (p. 1329).  This is not necessarily true; e-mails are typically written in a variety of situations and, when they involve the workplace setting that the article sometimes cites as its focus, isolation is atypical.  Staring at a computer screen may or may not have the effect of diminishing awareness of the humanness of others; but if it does, this problem goes well beyond e-mail to the entire arrangement and even the viability of many contemporary, computer-dependent workplaces.  Indeed, if awareness of humanness is to be prioritized, it is not clear that the coldly efficient market economy itself can survive.

The article by Friedman and Currall turns out to have been interesting but unidimensional.  Email and other electronic communications do have drawbacks in conflict management situations.  There will be conflicts that go bad in e-mail, that would have turned out better in other media.  This is true of all forms and styles of communication and interaction.  People are best advised, not to run pell-mell away from e-mail when conflict emerges, but rather to become more familiar with its advantages and to implement strategies that help them to minimize its drawbacks.

Ubuntu 9.10, VMware Workstation 7: Failed to Open Sound Device (Workaround)

In previous posts, I tried fixing error messages that I was getting in a Windows XP virtual machine (VM) running on VMware Workstation 6.5.2 on Ubuntu Linux, version 9.04.  I didn't know, at that time, whether some of my problems stemmed from having done an upgrade rather than a clean install of Ubuntu.  Now I found myself facing the same problem again, after a clean install of both Ubuntu 9.10 (Jaunty Jackalope) and VMware Workstation 7.

The problem was as follows:  if I checked the "Connect at power on" option, then audio would not run in the VM until (in full screen mode) I went into VM > Removable Devices > Sound Card > Connect; but when I did that, I would get this error message:

Failed to open sound device /dev/audio: Device or resource busy.  Failed to connect virtual device sound.

One recent discussion seemed to suggest that the problem was that Flash Player and/or Alsa audio.  I suspended my VMs and rebooted the computer.  When it rebooted, I made sure that Firefox was not running.  I resumed the VM and audio played OK in IrfanView.  I started Firefox inside the VM (i.e., in Windows XP) and played a YouTube video.  The audio was still OK in IrfanView.  I started a second session of Workstation and resumed a different VM in that session.  The manual sound card connection went OK; and there, too, I could play audio without stuttering.  The audio in the second VM was not as good; it had some static.

With those two VMs open, I started Firefox in Ubuntu (i.e., not in a WinXP VM).  I played another YouTube video.  Now I got an error message, and audio would not play in IrfanView within the VM.  I tried the other VM; same thing.  The error message was "Failed to open sound device /dev/audio: Device or resource busy.  Sound will be disconnected."  I went back to Ubuntu and killed Firefox.  Now I was able to connect the sound card and play audio inside the two VMs, same as before, complete with mini-stutters in the second one.  I started Firefox again in Ubuntu.  The audio was still OK inside the VM.  If I was playing audio in IrfanView in the VM and then went into a YouTube page in Firefox, the audio would not play in the latter.  I had to restart Firefox to get its YouTube audio to play, and then, as before, I was not able to hear audio inside the VM.  It worked the same way if I played a YouTube video in Opera rather than in Firefox.  So it seemed that the problem (which has apparently been around for years) continued to be within VMware Workstation.

For the time being, the solution seems to be either (a) to watch videos and other webpages that use Flash, do it in a browser session that is running inside your VM, not in a browser running in Ubuntu, or (b) after watching a video or otherwise using Flash in Ubuntu, kill the program that used it (e.g., Firefox) and manually reconnect with your sound card inside the VM.

Error While Resizing Vista NTFS Partition with GParted

I was using the GParted 0.5.1 live CD to resize an NTFS partition.  (I had already backed up the data on the partition.)  When I tried to resize in GParted, I got an error:

An error occurred while applying the operations

See the details for more information.

IMPORTANT
if you want support, you need to provide the saved details!
See http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/tips/
save_details.htm for more information

I clicked OK.  Unfortunately, the details did not explain what had gone wrong.  I rebooted into Vista and then did a complete shutdown.  (Previously, I had just hibernated the system.)  I allowed a minute or so for the memory to clear, and then rebooted with the GParted live CD.  This time, it worked.  The problem was that I had hibernated instead of completely shutting down Vista before using GParted.

Plugins Needed in Ubuntu 9.10

I was trying to play a .wav file in 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).  (This was a compressed .wav in 4-bit 22 kHz IMA ADPCM format.)  I double-clicked on it in Nautilus.  Movie Player opened up and gave me this message:

Search for suitable plugin?

The required software to play this file is not installed.  You need to install suitable plugins to play media files.  Do you want to search for a plugin that supports the selected file?

The search will also include software which is not officially supported.

I went with that.  Unfortunately, the next message said this:

No packages with the requested plugins found.

The requested plugins are:

image/vnd.microsoft.icon decoder

I clicked OK.  That gave me another message:

An error occurred

The playback of this movie requires a image/vnd.microsoft.icon decoder plugin which is not installed.

A search for relevant terms led to a thread in which someone asked whether the user had "the w32codecs" installed.  I didn't see that package in Synaptic.  But then someone else in that thread said maybe I wouldn't need it for my 64-bit Ubuntu.  One person pointed toward an extended tutorial in setting up multimedia in Ubuntu.  There was some discussion on whether 32-bit codecs (e.g., w32codecs) were necessary in a 64-bit system; the consensus (supported, of course, by the actual error message on my system) was that they might well be.  The same opinion emerged in another discussion.  The way to get those 32-bit codecs seemed to be, first, to add the Medibuntu repository to my Ubuntu installation.  The simple way to do this was to cut and paste this command into Terminal:

sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get --quiet update

all on one line.  For additional multimedia options and capabilities and such, it was also recommended that I enter these commands:

sudo apt-get --yes install app-install-data-medibuntu apport-hooks-medibuntu

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

sudo apt-get install w64codecs

So I did that.  This all went smoothly.  I was now able to play other .wav files, but I was not able to play that particular one.  I tried playing it in Windows, using IrfanView, and got these error messages:

[filename]:  Can't read file header !

Unknown file format or file not found !

IrfanView: i_view32.exe - Corrupt File

The file or directory [filename] is corrupt and unreadable.  Please run the Chkdsk utility.

So possibly that was why Ubuntu had been unable to play it.  I had checked its properties in Ubuntu, but had not seen any such message.

Configuring 64-Bit Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala)

In a previous post, I described the steps I followed in setting up x64 Ubuntu 9.04 (as refined in a later post).  This post does the same for Ubuntu 9.10.  I won't re-describe steps that are already spelled out in some detail in that previous post and in the other webpages to which it refers.  I'll still provide most of the details here, just not as much in-depth explanation.

Deciding on a Clean Install.  I was installing on a machine where I had previously been running 9.04.  I installed 9.04 on top of 8.10 on that machine, and this seemed to lead to some unusual problems -- you know, the kind of issue that brings up almost nothing in a Google search.  The better approach was apparently to do a clean install.  So now it was time to do that, replacing 9.04 with 9.10.

My first question was, what should I preserve from my previous setup, and how can I preserve it?  One suggestion was to try this:

tar cf /media/[backup drive]/[backup folder]/[backup filename].tar /etc /home

That didn't work for me, as my /home directory contained 32GB.  Another post in that same thread suggested installing your stuff to a separate /home partition, so that your settings wouldn't be wiped out by future clean installations.  I found a guide to moving the /home partition.  I started to use GParted to make a 50GB /home partition.  I chose ext3 because ext4 still seemed to have some issues.  I discovered that Ubuntu's manual installer has an option not to format the partition you're installing to, so as to preserve your old settings.  I decided against both of these approaches because I did want to wipe out my old /home partition, with its mistakes and assorted junk.  So I installed Ubuntu as described in the previous post, working from a CD.  I went into System > Administration > Update Manager > Check.  This gave me 184 updates and a reboot.

Software Sources.  Next, I went into Applications > Ubuntu Software Center > Get Free Software > search for "restricted extras" > select Ubuntu restricted extras > Install.  Next, System > Administration > Hardware Drivers > NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (version 185) (because I had an NVIDIA video card) > Activate > Close.  Next, System > Administration > Software Sources > Ubuntu Software tab > Download From > Other > Select Best Server > Choose Server (whichever one it highlights) > Close.  Also, in Software Sources, go to the Other Software tab, select the two entries that are already there, and click Add to add more.  The additional lines come from the X-Updates website.  There, click on "Technical details about this PPA," specify Karmic, and copy the two deb lines there, one at a time, into the APT line, clicking "Add Source" after each.  Next, on that same webpage, follow the Signing Key instructions, just below the deb lines.  Click Close.  This will bring up "The information about available software is out-of-date."  Click Reload.  If you don't get a "Reload" option when you click Close, go back into Third-Party Software and unclick and then re-click some item and try again.

Synaptic.  I had read an upgrade tip that said I could automatically reinstall my installed Synaptic applications by using System > Administration Synaptic Package Manager > File > Save Markings As > Save full state and then, after the upgrade, use Synaptic > File > Read Markings.  I had saved as advised; now I tried the read (restore) step.  It did not work well for me.  After this and a few more misadventures, I wound up reinstalling Ubuntu from scratch.  For posterity, the next few paragraphs describe the failed approach.  After that, I describe the alternate approach, the one that I had used in previous installations. 


To try the Read Markings approach, I started by going to Places > Computer and double-clicking on the drive where I had saved the backup.  Then Apply.  But that gave me an error:  "Could not apply changes!  Fix broken packages first."  So I went into Synaptic > Edit > Fix broken packages.  That, in turn, generated this message:  "An error occurred.  The following details are provided:  E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages."  Adapting some older advice, I closed Synaptic and then typed this:

sudo -i
apt-get clean
apt-get autoclean
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

Now I tried Synaptic again.  The steps just taken did not seem to change anything; but after tinkering with the same options, Edit > Fix broken packages seemed to work, and Apply proceeded to download 259 files.  Since the more automated Markings approach seemed to work, the advice for the next installation would be to uninstall any unwanted packages before running the Save Markings step.

Instead of all that, on the second installation I selected and installed these packages from within Synaptic:  boinc; boinc-manager; fdutils (if you expect to be using a floppy drive); gparted; ntfs-config; ntfsprogs; p7zip-full; sysinfo; and webhttrack. (If numerous items come up in response to your search, click on the Package heading to sort them alphabetically. Also install other related packages, if given the option.) (If some of my later descriptions don't work for you, it may be because you didn't install one of these.)  For my e-mail, I preferred thunderbird, so I added that, and uninstalled evolution.  Some of these may ask if you want to "Mark additional required changes?" Click "Mark" and go on to the next one. Then click Apply. Some of these programs may already be shown as being installed on your system. If so, no problem.

Other Programs.  To install Google Earth, I didn't use a previous download (see above). Instead, I typed these two lines:  First, "wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/current/GoogleEarthLinux.bin," and then "sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin" (as always, without quotation marks).

I didn't have to install Firefox -- it came installed with Karmic -- but, as in the past, I hoped to speed up my customization by using the FEBE add-in.  I had made a FEBE backup before this reinstallation.  Now, to restore my previous settings, I installed FEBE.  Unfortunately, Firefox did not seem to be functioning properly. I address this set of problems in a separate post.  (I think the problem may have been that I tried to use a FEBE backup of a Windows XP Firefox installation.  Firefox on Ubuntu does not use the same add-ons.)  To have a browser, I downloaded 64-bit Opera.  (At this point, 64-bit Google Chrome was apparently unstable.)  Opera came as a .deb file, so I just double-clicked to install it.  On the reinstall, I didn't even bother with FEBE at this point; for the time being, I just used Opera in its basic form.

VMware Workstation 7 came as a .bundle file, which required the same installation steps as .bin files.  First, I typed "chmod +x" [filename] and then "./"[filename]. I designated "/home/[username]" as the installation directory.  (In all cases, fill in the bracketed names with your actual names.)

I didn't have any .tar files to install at this point.  If I had, my notes said I should have used tar -vxf filename.tar.gz (or possibly tar xvfz instead), tar xvf filename.tar, and tar yxf filename.tar.bz2.

Drive Automount.  I wanted some partitions to be mounted automatically at startup.  In the past, I had manually edited /etc/fstab to do this.  This time, I decided to try PySDM, which was apparently short for Python Storage Device Manager (System > Administration > Storage Device Manager).  Unfortunately, my efforts suggested there were serious bugs in PySDM, so I uninstalled it and edited fstab manually.  I began by typing "sudo ntfs-config" and then "sudo gedit /etc/fstab."  I also ran System > Administration > GParted for a GUI reference, to help me see what I was supposed to be doing.  I plugged in all of my USB drives, typed "sudo blkid" to get the universal identifier (UUID) for each partition, and copied and pasted that into fstab.  I refreshed GParted (Ctrl-R) and created a comment line for each partition shown in GParted.  This was about the point when things seemed so grotesquely screwed up (because of PySDM, it seemed) as to warrant a complete reinstallation.  When I rebooted, it looked like everything was getting automatically booted without a problem.  I saved a copy of my resulting fstab in case I had to reinstall again.  I noticed that the booted partitions were all represented by icons on the desktop.  I wanted to remove those, so I typed "gconf-editor" and went into apps/nautilus/desktop, unnclicked volumes_visible, and closed the Configuration Editor, and the icons were gone.



Miscellany.  Ubuntu 9.10 used Grub2, which no longer used menu.lst.  I heard it was no longer possible to edit the Grub menu to remove entries for older kernels; instead, you had to remove the whole kernel, and then the menu entry would go away too.  ||  In System > Preferences > Startup Applications, I added Thunderbird, Firefox, and VMware Workstation.

The next steps are going to be to restore my Thunderbird profile backup and finish the automation of the rsync scripts I have been playing with for some months now.  But those steps will have to come later.

PsYDM in Ubuntu -- A Bust

I had installed 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10.   I wanted to configure several partitions to open automatically.  For this purpose, I tried using PySDM instead of editing /etc/fstab as root.

PySDM didn't show the names I had given my partitions, so as a guide I also started GParted (System > Administration > GParted, previously known as Partition Editor).  I used the names from GParted in the Name fields on PySDM.  Go by the names under the Partition List at the left side of PySDM.)  For Options, in place of the original "defaults" entry, I followed the advice to enter this for ntfs partitions:

auto,users,uid=1000,gid=1000,utf8,dmask=027,fmask=137

But then I found that the Assistant button in PySDM would allow me to set these options by clicking check boxes that would explain what I was doing, except that the Owner UID was still obscure.  I changed one or two options in Assistant.  This changed "auto" (in my case) to nls=iso8856-1.  The rest of the line (after "auto") was also changed to this:  users,umask=000,utf8,gid=1000,user,owner,uid=1000.  For drive C in a dual-boot Windows XP system, I wound up with this instead:  nls=iso8859-1,users,noauto,umask=000,utf8,gid=1000,user,owner,uid=1000.

For ext3 partitions, the advice on what to enter varied, according to the type of partition:

root partition ( / ): relatime,errors=remount-ro
home partition (/home): nodev,nosuid,relatime
other partitions (aside from swap): defaults,users

But when I tried entering "defaults,users" for one such partition, PySDM just shortened it to "users."  I didn't have a separate /home partition.  For all ext3 partitions other than root, I wound up using this instead:  "owner,check,errors=remount-ro,users,user."  I clicked Apply after entering the information for each partition.

PySDM seemed to be confused in some regards.  Some of this confusion disappeared when I unplugged USB flash drives and clicked Refresh.  That is, it seemed to work best with partitions on internal SATA drives.  But it was still linking two separate partitions:  when I would make a change in one, it would make the same change in the other.  So I seemed to have two partitions with the same name.  I tried uninstalling and reinstalling PySDM in Synaptic.  (I think I had already tried closing and reopening the program.)  Eventually, I decided there are serious bugs in PySDM, so I uninstalled it and edited fstab manually.

Firefox and FEBE Problems in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic)

As noted in a previous post, I was having problems with using FEBE to restore a profile with all of my settings and add-ons preset.  This post describes the steps I took in a failed effort to fix that problem.

I completely uninstalled Firefox, first, by searching for it in Synaptic and marking it (3.5.7) for complete removal and clicking Apply, and then by navigating to Home in Nautilus and deleting the .mozilla/firefox folder.  It was a hidden folder, so in Nautilus I had to set View > Show Hidden Files to see it.  Then I reinstalled Firefox 3.5.7 in Synaptic and reinstalled FEBE.  To run FEBE in Firefox, I selected Tools > FEBE > Restore Profile (kill the pop-up reminders) > Create new profile (I called mine Working).  This gave me a box that offered to let me name a new profile, but that was not taking any text input.

With the aid of the tutorial, I discovered that closing Firefox would actually not close the Restore Profile window.  Now I was able to create my new profile and then Start Profile Restore.  Again, it did what it did before:  "Profile restore in progress ... Please wait" continued for much longer than the "minute or two" recommended by the tutorial, and the hard drive light was not running. I killed FEBE and restarted Firefox.  It did not show FEBE as being installed.  It did show other extensions (Tools > Add-ons) that it had not shown previously.

I installed FEBE again, this time from within the Add-ons window instead of from the Mozilla webpage, and again restarted Firefox.  Now Firefox showed only the two add-ons (FEBE 6.3.2 and Ubuntu Firefox Modifications 0.8) that it had shown at the start.  I went through the profile restore steps again.  To get the "Start profile restore" button to light up, I had to switch back and forth between the default and Working profiles.  Then I started the restore again.  Again, no action.  After a minute or two, I killed it and tried restoring a different profile.  Still nothing.

Another flaky thing that Firefox was doing:  it was opening a tiny window sometimes.  This little window could be expanded, but there was nothing in it.  In Synaptic, I did a Quick Search for Firefox and uninstalled all versions that were installed.  I then reinstalled 3.5.7 and tried again in FEBE.  Still no profile restore.  At this point, I gave up and reinstalled.

American Community Survey: 2008 Update: Defining Disability

In previous posts, I have looked into the prevalence of disabilities in the United States, as measured especially by the American Community Survey (ACS), especially in 2003. This post takes a first step toward updating the ACS measurement of disabilities, in light of changes made between 2003 and 2008.  The focus here is on the definition of disability under the 2008 ACS.

As of 2008, the ACS 2008 Subject Definitions (p. 38) defined disability as “the restriction in participation that results from a lack of fit between the individual’s functional limitations and the characteristics of the physical and social environment.” The Census Bureau asserts that “disability is not seen as intrinsic to the individual”; nonetheless, the Bureau also identifies “four basic areas of functioning” in which respondents might have “serious difficulty.” In that sense, the language still seems to reflect an impression that disabilities are the individual’s problem, rather than a mutual “lack of fit.” For instance, one might expect a different outcome if respondents were presented with a broader inquiry into functional limitations perceived either by themselves or by others in their lives (e.g., employers, neighbors, family members).

In what the Subject Definitions (p. 38) describe as “a conceptual and empirical break from earlier years,” the 2008 ACS still had six questions about disabilities, but now sought to identify “serious difficulty in four basic areas of functioning: vision, hearing, ambulation, and cognition,” and also included “two questions to identify people with difficulties that might impact their ability to live independently.”

These changes followed from a 2006 American Community Survey Content Test, whose results in the area of disability were written up by Brault and Stern (2007) in an Evaluation Report Covering Disability. The 2006 Content Test was driven by a concern with improved reliability in survey results (Brault & Stern, p. 9), not by a concern with capturing the full numbers of people with disabilities. To the contrary, Brault & Stern admit that some of the changes in the ACS disability questions tend to reduce reported prevalence (p. 8) and that the 2006 Content Test used data collection modes that contained “inherent barriers to collecting disability data” (p. 15). The latter point is important because the regular ACS appears to use essentially the same methods.

In a separate report attached as Appendix B to the Brault and Stern (2007) report (above) (i.e., beginning at page 33 of that PDF), Miller and DeMaio (2006) indicated that, for purposes of consistency with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), an unspecified ACS subcommittee determined that disability would be defined as “a mental or physical impairment that substantially limits at least one major life activity” (p. B-2).  That subcommittee appears to have approached that question by exploring “domains of limitation” or “limitation domains” (pp. B-2, B-3), instead of taking the seemingly obvious step of deciding what counts as a major life activity.

To cite some rather choice examples, Miller and DeMaio did not indicate that the subcommittee considered sleep, sex, or socializing to be major life activities.  All three of those examples seem to involve the Census Bureau’s alleged orientation toward the two-sided question of fit between person and society.  It is society that supplies the people, the stresses, and other key components and determinants of sleep, sex, and socializing.  One would expect, in other words, that these three would be prime candidates for inclusion in the list of major life activities, or as essential contributors thereto.  For instance, there is evidence that sleep deprivation significantly interferes with work and other major daily activities of tens of millions of Americans (Baxter & Kroll-Smith, 2005, p. 39), that it results in substantial numbers of injuries and deaths (e.g., Lyznicki, Doege, Davis, & Williams, 1998), and that one-third of Americans take naps on a typical day (Taylor, 2009).  Although it is presumably not necessary to do so here, one certainly could develop a more extensive argument for sleep, and could make similar arguments for the inclusion of sex, socializing, and other activities that the subcommittee somehow considered not to be "major" for purposes of detecting the existence of a disability.

The subcommittee's decisions in this regard might have been more defensible if the ADA had been construed as taking an interest in major productive activities.  Viewed that way, the subcommittee could reasonably conclude (especially in a traditional industrial economy) that it is all right if workers are tired, as long as they keep working.  Likewise, if industrial-type productivity were the stated focus, attention to sex and socializing would probably seem humorously superfluous.  The full list of impairments that mattered to the subcommittee -- involving vision, hearing, lower body mobility, cognition, activities of daily living (ADLs), instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), and work (Miller & DeMaio, 2006, p. B-3) would then make sense.  ADLs “generally include self-care type activities such as bathing and dressing,” and IADLs are activities often associated with independent living such as going out alone to shop or visit a doctor’s office” (Brault & Stern, 2007, p. 4), all of which align with an emphasis upon the worker's functionality and his/her ability to remain functional.

Ironically, contrary to the apparent purpose of the ADA, a functional orientation can reinforce stereotyping and exclusionism.  If the majority defines functionality in terms of what the majority can do, then those in the minority will tend to occupy an inferior role.  It will be newsworthy when technology enables them to overcome – say, to run faster than those who began with what was, by definition, a functional advantage (e.g., Christie, 2009).  In reality, there may be many ways (involving e.g., sleep, sex, or socializing) in which many putatively high-functioning people are experiencing profound limitations in major life activities; but that will not be recognized in the ACS until a standard other than industrial-type functionality is used to guide disability determinations.  There would seem to be a number of good, currently relevant candidates for such a standard – ranging from “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to social capital to adjustment to or satisfaction with life – that could be used alone or in combination for that purpose.

The apparent functional orientation was not the only way in which the 2008 ACS reduced the count of disabilities even below what one might have expected from the subcommittee’s own stated concept. The survey discarded the subcommittee’s broad interest in mental and physical impairments, in favor of very limited kinds of difficulties. The survey’s only questions about mental disabilities were as follows:

18a. Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does this person have serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions?

19. Because of a physical, mental, or emotional condition, does this person have difficulty doing errands alone such as visiting a doctor’s office or shopping?

Bizarrely, the 2008 ACS no longer has even the question about work disability (Brault & Stern, 2007, p. 7). That is, there is no question about the presence of a physical, mental, or emotional condition that would limit the kind or amount of work a person can do. So if someone has no problem concentrating etc. (Question 18a), and does not have difficulty doing errands alone (Question 19), it seems s/he would not have a work disability even if s/he spent the workday standing on his/her desk and screaming.

Apparently the question about work disability was deleted because Miller and DeMaio (2006, p. B-32) claimed there was an “excessive extent of misinterpretation and misreporting in this question.” One objection Miller and DeMaio cited had to do with vagueness in the word “work.” Some people reportedly took it to include work around the house. That raised interesting questions in itself, but in any event one version of the test question specified work “at a job or business” (p. B-31). Despite the alleged breadth and complexity of the work construct, Miller and DeMaio devoted only about 1.5 pages to the question of work before recommending its deletion.  (While I did not think that disabilities should be defined exclusively in work-related terms, it did seem obvious that inability to work would be an important indicator of disability.)  That is, Miller and DeMaio did not seriously wrestle with the matter; yet they also did not claim that the question of work-related disability is unimportant.

Bear in mind that Miller and DeMaio (2006), who balked at what they consider excessive vagueness in the work construct, were the same researchers who pointed out that “Respondents’ answers to survey questions are necessarily based on personal experience and perceptions of that experience” (p. B-3), that “it is unfeasible to develop questions that yield a perfect measure of disability” (p. B-4), and that, in connection with a question that was retained in the survey, respondents were being required “to discern a clear line of yes or no in a reality that, for them, was essentially grey and multi-dimensional” (p. B-7). All of these remarks seem to suggest that Miller and DeMaio were generally comfortable with the hard decisions that arise in the process of quantifying experience – including work experience.

Under such circumstances, one might be forgiven for asking whether political considerations during the Bush Administration had any influence upon the choice of researchers and/or the recommendations they made in such regards. In a report on changes to measurement of disability in the 2008 American Community Survey that was produced after Obama’s election, Brault (2009, p. 5) seems to indicate that the previous administration had not prioritized the ACS generally. He says that, “due to budgetary issues, FEFU [i.e., Failed Edit Follow-Up] operations were scaled back from April through September” of 2008.

In his 2009 report, Brault states that the net effect of the changes in questions on the 2008 ACS, including the deletion of the work disability question, resulted in a marked drop in the estimated number of Americans with a disability, from 41.2 million (2007) to 35.9 million (2008). “Given the differences in the questionnaire,” Brault says, “one should not interpret these changes as real differences in the number or percent of people with disabilities” (p. 16).  Brault emphasizes that ACS disability data from 2008 are not comparable with ACS disability data from prior years.

This is not to say that the 2008 ACS is useless for all disability-related purposes. Brault (2008, p. 8) suggests, for example, that the ACS is more likely to capture instances of hearing difficulty than is the Survey for Income and Program Participation (SIPP), because the SIPP excludes hearing difficulties that are corrected by hearing aids. That particular example is not necessarily good or bad in itself, but it does suggest that the ACS may sometimes provide a useful alternate picture on the prevalence of some kinds of disabilities.

There are some other limitations on ACS data.  First, ACS data of all sorts are not yet available for geographic areas with populations of less than 20,000.  In late 2010, according to the Census Bureau, data will be released “for areas as small as census tracts and block groups, nationwide. For very small towns, 2010 will be the first time that ACS data are published. These data products, referred to as 5-year multiyear estimates, will be based on the data accumulated during the 2005-2009 time period.”  The Bureau also says that information on demographic, socioeconomic and housing characteristics will thereafter be available annually for all areas.  These include annual estimates for all areas of 65,000+ population, three-year averages for all areas of 20,000+ population, and five-year averages for census tracts and block groups.  Note also that, starting in 2006, the ACS did begin to include data for the group quarters population.  These data were not available, however, in 15 states that had a total group quarters population of less than 45,000.

Because of the change in the operational definition of disability in the 2008 ACS, the Census Bureau will not be able to provide three-year estimates for disabilities until the 2008-2010 ACS 3-year estimates are released in 2011.  That is, the change in definitions means that users should not compare disability data from 2008 and afterwards to any year before 2008.

Recap So Far

In this series of posts on the prevalence of disabilities in the U.S., I have been moving toward an estimate of disabilities on the local level.  It seemed logical to begin by choosing a national-level survey that would provide local-level data, and then to understand that survey and, on that basis, to interpret its local data.  Preliminarily, the ACS seemed far superior to other federal surveys, in terms of its penetration to the local level.  It did not define disabilities as comprehensively as some other surveys, but it seemed that it might be possible to adjust its reported prevalence rates upwards by some plausible percentage, so as to reach a defensible ballpark figure for actual local disability prevalence.

Unfortunately, this post's critique of the definition of disabilities, and of its operationalization in the 2008 ACS, suggests that the ACS does not provide accurate data on the prevalence of disabilities.  Hence, before conducting further research into federal disability statistics, it presently seems advisable to pursue some other routes.  Several such routes come to mind.  First, there is surely a great deal of relevant third-party literature on the ACS, as distinct from the literature provided by the Census Bureau itself.  Second, there may be good local-level research on the prevalence of disabilities in various types of cities and counties, sufficient to inform an educated guess on prevalence in other similar local areas.  Third, on a more theoretical level, there is no doubt much to learn about the conceptualization of disability -- on, for example, the validity of viewpoints suggested in this post.  Since the conceptualization seemed likely to influence the interpretation of research, my next step in this investigation moved in the conceptual direction.

American Community Survey (2003): Disabilities on the State Level

In a previous post, I examined some statistics provided by the American Community Survey (ACS) for 2003, regarding the prevalence of certain kinds of disabilities on the national level.  Now I turn to the interpretation of the ACS on the state level.

Generally, as a Census Bureau methodological report explains, state population estimates are obtained by adding up the estimated numbers of people in each county.  The calculation of county population begins with the decennial census.  At present, that is the census taken in 2000, but of course there will be a new one this year (2010).  The Bureau makes adjustments from the previous year based on a variety of county-level sources, including tax records, estimates of migration, and registered births and deaths.  Previous years' estimates are revised as new information sheds light on actual developments.

State totals are not added up to produce the national population, however.  Instead, national totals are developed independently, and are used as a check upon county-level calculations.  Roughly speaking, if the sum of all state totals (that is, the sum of all county totals) were to exceed the independently developed national population estimate by 3%, then the population estimates for all counties would be reduced by 3% so that the state totals would match the national estimate.

Given this information, a lay reader might suggest that a parallel method of estimating the prevalence of disabilities within a county -- and thus within a state -- would supplement the ACS questionnaire by investigating actual records of disabilities, from such sources as hospital and school records, handicap-plate motor vehicle registrations, and Social Security records.  Presumably the efforts of researchers have uncovered shortcomings in decennial censuses; one might expect that these sorts of disability-related investigations would exert a similar beneficial influence on ACS disability estimates.

According to Weathers (2005, p. 61), the Census Bureau does investigate ways in which its statistical processes may produce errors.  Errors may be random, in which case statistical adjustments can be made or estimates of error can be produced.  Errors may also be nonrandom.  Nonrandom errors are also called systematic errors.  These occur, not because (for example) a predictable percentage of statistical typists will make a predictable percentage of typographical errors as they enter the data, but because some kind of atypical distortion occurs with respect to some particular kind of person or situation.  If, for example, followers of a certain religion were concentrated in a particular county, and if their religion taught that it was wrong to respond to surveys, then there could be a pronounced systematic, nonrandom undercounting of people in that county.  Along these lines, it would certainly seem that people who have physical disabilities that make every task a chore, or mental disabilities that discourage cooperation with governmental surveys they perceive as suspicious, could be systematically undercounted.

Weathers (2005, p. 61) indicates that the Census Bureau maintains information on identified systematic errors in the ACS at a page on its website.  A quick search of that webpage finds, at present, no entries pertaining to disabilities.  Weathers (pp. 68-70) does note certain regards, however, in which a redesign of the ACS disability questions resulted in dramatic and potentially erroneous declines in reported disabilities in 2003.  There have been substantial changes in the ACS measurement of disabilities since then.  A subsequent post will discuss those changes.  First, however, the following paragraphs explore the 2003 ACS in light of Weathers's comments, many of which are still applicable and/or have not yet been revisited.

ACS 2003 state-by-state disability prevalence rates (Weathers, 2005, pp. 45-46) raised questions of consistency in data collection procedures.  In the Midwest, for example, most states were fairly similar to one another:  overall disability rates were between 11.2 and 13.3 in Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska.  Indeed, without Indiana and Ohio, the range among those states would have been in the narrow band of 11.2 to 12.4.  Yet somehow, in the middle of those states, Illinois – right next to Indiana (13.3) – somehow produced a rate of 9.2.  Certainly it is plausible that a city like Chicago would manage to accommodate its persons with disabilities better than a more rural state; but why the presence of a large city would affect disability prevalence itself is not intuitively obvious.  If population density itself were a positive factor, Rhode Island (12.0) would not have had a rate considerably higher than those of its neighbors Connecticut (9.2) and Massachusetts (9.7).

Certainly the 2003 ACS state-level data are interesting.  Weathers (2005, pp. 23-24) compares states in terms of the levels of employment, poverty, and household income experienced by persons with disabilities.  His tables 7-9 (pp. 47-52) also provide relative comparisons of the experiences of people with and without disabilities in those several regards.  Thus, for example, whatever the rate of unemployment in West Virginia as a whole, the data reveal that that state’s people with disabilities are employed at only about one-third (35.8%) the rate of its people without disabilities -- as compared to Wyoming, on the opposite extreme among the lower 49 states, where the rate is more like two-thirds (65.5%).  Among the midwestern states just listed (including Illinois), that relative rate ranges from 48.4% (Michigan and Ohio) to 55.8% (Nebraska).

According to Weathers (2005), the relative experience of poverty for people with disabilities, like their relative level of employment, varies considerably among states.  At the low end, people with disabilities in Utah are only 2.1 times as likely to fall below the povety line as are people without disabilities.  At the high end, people in Nebraska are 4.9 times as likely to do so.  Nebraska aside, the midwestern states listed above are within the range of 3.4 (Illinois) to 3.8 (Kansas).

As with some of the other values discussed here, relative household incomes contrast western states against southern states.  Utah leads with a value of 75.9% – that is, the median household income of a person with disabilities in Utah is 75.9% of the median household income of a person without disabilities – and Louisiana (49.6%) and Alabama (50.4%) are beaten at the bottom end only by Delaware (which, with the slightly lower value of 48.3%, is an outlier in regional terms by several of these measures).  The midwestern range is from 54.2% (Ohio) to 62.3% (Wisconsin).  Relatively large differences among these states’ neighbors (e.g., 61.9% in Indiana, 56.4% in Michigan) raise the question of how state-level policies impact these numbers.

Some caveats are in order.  First, as with most of the observations in this post, it remains to be seen how these data have changed since 2003.  Note, too, that the foregoing analyses provided by Weathers (2005, p. 19) are focused upon the working-age population, ages 25-61.  Also, the ACS presents values on employment and poverty that are in some regards markedly divergent from those reported by most other national studies cited in a previous post in this series (Weathers, p. 29).

Across all age groups, Weathers (2005, pp. 20-21), notes that national counts of disabilities may be influenced by race, culture, gender, and education.  Black people comprise 13.8% of people with disabilities, as compared to 11.7% of the population without disabilities.  Hispanic people comprise 14.0% of the population without disabilities, but only 9.6% of the reported population with disabilities.  Women constitute 52.8% of the population with disabilities (versus 51% without), and are especially highly represented in disabilities involving self-care (58.9%) and going outside the home (63.6%).  People with less than a high school education account for 11.6% of people without a disability, but they account for 25.0% of people with a disability.  Disability rates may be correspondingly affected, in states that vary from the mean in any of these demographic regards.

Having provided an introduction to state-level measurement of disabilities through the ACS in 2003, largely as interpreted by Weathers (2005), the next step is to examine how ACS federal- and state-level measurements and results were changed in 2008.