Archive for December, 2006
A few days after writing this post, I’ve found some great short papers: How To Be a Good Graduate Student, How To Do Research In the MIT AI Lab, and an old favorite of mine, a speech by Hamming (yes, that Hamming) entitled You and Your Research. Grad school, how I look forward to thee. I’m getting ready, and I’ll be there someday.
In other news, Chandra, Eric Munsing, and Jon Tse have all confirmed (over pizza) the existence of the following behavior pattern.
The Wise Fool Phenomenon: The probability that you will ask unashamed intelligent questions about a topic is inversely proportional to the amount you believe you are supposed to know about that topic.
For instance, I’m much more likely to ask about mechanical engineering topics unashamedly, without fear of “looking stupid,” than I am about electrical engineering ones. Ironically, this means I learn about mechanical engineering more rapidly when I decide to learn something about it. I recognize this is a stupid thing to do, and I’m trying to change it. It’s one of the (many) reasons I don’t do well in classes.
The best explanation Chandra and I could come up for this is that you think you’re already “supposed to have learned it,” and that you are therefore being stupid (and will appear as such) and wasting everyone’s time by having them explain things you should already know. If you aren’t “supposed” to know it, your questioning (for some reason) provides amusement/insight/warm fuzzy feelings for the people you’re asking questions of… and besides they can always say no, because you don’t “have to know it” anyway. When it seems like you should already have something in your cup, it’s very hard to empty it.
Corollary: You are more likely to exceed expectations when you don’t know what they are. This assumes you’ve got an initial interest/aptitude in the subject and are pursuing it. If you’re told to go to height H, you tend to go to H (or a bit higher if you want to look especially impressive), and then stop because you’ve “succeeded.” If you can’t make it to H, you “fail.” On the other hand, If you aren’t told a set height to reach, you just climb, and as long as you like it, you just… keep going.
There is a certain height at which it’s reassuring to have someone look up and exclaim in amazement at how far you’ve gone, but usually by this point you’re well past any H they would ever have set. If you don’t make it far, that’s okay; you haven’t “failed,” just chosen not to continue. Besides, at some point, the folks who advance any field must tread places nobody has ever gone before; why not start the process of trusting your own learning earlier?
There’s a flip side to both of these as well. An initial goal or requirement can help you discover that something’s there to learn, and give you a starting point at which to look. Lack of useful metrics makes it more difficult to reflect on your own learning. One reasonable balance is the idea of minimum and maximum deliverables (as Allen Downey calls them; Rob Martello calls them “circles”) where you set an easily-achievable bar as an absolute goal but also toss out, as a tentative target, the bluest-sky dream you could ever imagine reaching. That way you get something done, but have freedom to do more (and a vague starting point to head towards if you haven’t found something more agreeable by that time).
But that’s getting off track. As far as I can tell, you can take advantage of Wise Fool Phenomenon by:
- Learning things “before you’re supposed to know them” (the reason I used to do ridiculously well in math classes; I’d already read books and asked lots of stupid questions about the stuff before we got to it in class).
- Beginning a learning endeavor by making the big disclaimer that you know nothing and will be asking lots of stupid questions.
- Actually asking lots of “stupid questions.”
It’s the last one that gets me. I don’t feel like I’ve got the right to ask “stupid questions” unless I’ve been working hard and doing my utmost to keep up - I feel like I’ve got to go as far as possible by myself before calling for help. This works really well in the cases where I actually take the time to go as far as possible by myself before calling for help.
Unfortunately, “as far as possible by myself” is pretty far, so I usually don’t get there. This means I often consider myself to not have “gone far enough.” When I fall behind in classes this leads to “but I can’t ask for help because I haven’t worked hard enough” syndrome, which leads to me putting off talking to my prof until I’ve caught up on my own to “prove myself worthy,” but I can’t catch up right away because I’m already behind, which leads to me putting off asking for help even more…
Lynn says I need to be less afraid of wasting people’s time, and the very fact that I’m afraid of it means that I typically don’t do it. To that, I’d add that being afraid of wasting their time in the beginning can also lead to wasting more of their time at the end when I mess up because I didn’t ask first, so ignoring the Wise Fool mandate is just a really stupid thing for me to do.
This has been Exhibit A in the “Why Mel Isn’t Ready For Grad School Yet” series.
Thursday, December 14th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
This is me trying to pin down my thoughts on this matter; coherence may not be high. You may recognize these as the ramblings of a bewildered young person who’s (still) going through the whole “know thyself” transformation known as the dreaded Growing Up.
First: I am going to grad school someday. Even with the inherent unpredictability of the future, this is one of the events that has the highest probability of happening at some point in my life (pretty much the only other thing with higher certainty is the item “Mel dies.”) This will probably be in engineering, and I want to become a professor someday. I will probably also at some point work in industry in some capacity, but as a way of gaining a better perspective for what I should be doing in academia. End statistical disclaimers here.
However, over the last year and a half or so I have been steadily realizing that now is not the time for me to go there. I’m not academically mature enough to be a graduate student; although intellectually I believe I can handle the material (I’ve been devouring research papers and graduate textbooks for fun for over 3 years with no trouble), I don’t have the ability to focus on a research topic (or even know what I want to focus on!), work constructively in a lab for a long period of time, or manage my time on independent projects. I need to learn how to handle responsibility, and I need a broader perspective; in short, I’m not going to be ready to go to grad school by the end of May. (Nor am I sure that I am mature enough to go immediately in to industry. I’m pretty much not ready for “the real world.”)
I could probably fake it. I’ve been fortunate to have access to great classes and teachers, awesome libraries and information sources, and a brain that’s quick enough on the uptake to fudge my way through things without developing much intellectual maturity. (Y’know, study skills, on-timeness, scheduling, actually preparing for things ahead of time instead of wandering to the whiteboard without a clue of what the lecture’s been on…) I think a lot of Olin and IMSA kids did this through middle and/or high school; I’ve also been doing it through Olin and have so far been passing classes and all that other stuff because I can improvise and am shameless enough to do so.
However, without developing self-discipline and maturity, I’m not going to do anything close to what I could do if I was able to responsibly manage my time. This phrase is too common: “man, Mel can do all these things when she’s distracted… imagine what would happen if she focused!” I want to learn how to focus because I do want to find out what happens. I don’t want to waste any potential I could have to do good. (I don’t think I have that much potential, or no more than anyone else - but what I do have, I want to use right.)
I’ll be taking a “year off” right after graduation to travel, volunteer, and work on an independent project in engineering education that I really should describe here at some point. I’ve spent the last 9 years cramming content into my little skull at top speed, and this is the first real chance I’ve gotten to step back and take a breather, really reflect. I’ve got time and space to grow, and the willingness to do it.
What do you think are the most important things an incoming grad student (or adult in general) should know or have, and how did you obtain them? I’m not too worried about learning specific types of content, although if you have a favorite textbook or want to say “Learn Linux and LinAlg! It’s EVERYWHERE!” that’s cool too. I’m really worried about… well, maturity. Responsibility. Being an adult that can handle those things instead of an arrogant cocky punk kid who pretends to try, but in reality thinks that everything is a fun game. (This is my attitude towards the world; it’s a lot of fun, but it leads to me blowing stuff off that should not be trivialized, and that needs to change.)
I realize that this is something that will happen anyway; maturity comes with experience, which comes with time. I’d like to hear your thoughts, thoug h, O People who art Far More Wise than I.
Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
Hey, look - the original paper about Competencies from the start of its implementation! This was also published in an IEEE transactions.
There are great Olin documents all over the place that provide insights into the original design of… well, just about everything - and I feel there should be an archive, a repository, of all these important things. I’m sure they’re kept somewhere, but I don’t know where.
I’m going to talk to Ann Schaffner about this. If no such thing exists, it will soon.
Monday, December 11th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
The Olin Curriculum: Thinking Towards The Future is a paper written in Feb. of last year by a lot of professors and administrators here about - well, the Olin curriculum. It covers briefly where it’s come from and where it might be going. Since it is an IEEE publication, it focuses on the ECE curriculum on the last page, but the rest is general Olin and should be of interest to all majors.
It’s amusing to see some hints of the future - for instance, the conclusion suggests the possibility of expansion into the biology realm - and some artifacts from the past, such as sophomore integrated course blocks. It is amazing how much a school can change in less than 2 years.
Another section outlines Olin’s curricular objectives and goals. Here’s my take on how well we’re accomplishing them (Miks, I’m procrastinating on my IS deliverable here and still owe you a good post). The standard disclaimer applies: this is in no way representative of anything Olin-official, and is based entirely off my own biased views and experiences.
- The curriculum should motivate students and help them to cultivate a lifelong love of learning. I think that we generally attempt to provide this in the execution of classes, but the structure within which those classes are placed (that is, the overarching curriculum) could be better designed to promote lifelong learning and love thereof. Yes, it’s very possible for students to pursue their passions if they push hard enough, but that’s true of any place; with its many independent studies, cocurriculars, and passionate pursuits, Olin is a much easier place to do this than most. But we can do better. In particular, it is difficult to cultivate a lifelong love of learning when you’re trying to overload knowledge into your brain at such high velocity that it is no longer enjoyable.
- The curriculum should include design throughout, from the day students arrive on campus to the day they graduate. Day students arrive on campus: Candidates’ Weekend, check. Day they graduate: SCOPE projects, check. Well, close enough. Olin has an amazing design component for an engineering school. Olin has an amazing design component for any school, design schools included. I’m not talking about the studio art skills (and if you say we don’t have any you haven’t taken Prof. Donis-Keller’s classes), but the teaching of what it means to think like a designer. I do think that our design foundations, namely Design Nature and UOCD, could use revision; they’re arriving at the point where I’m afraid that if we run them the same way another year or two, they’re going to become habits.
- The culmination of the curriculum should be a senior capstone that is authentic, ambitious, and representative of professional practice. SCOPE, check. Ambitious, yes. Authentic and representative of professional practice? Closer than pretty much anything other than a co-op could be. We’ve got our own budget, office space, minimal guidance, and a problem. However, we’re still very much “not real-world workers” in that we’ve still got classes and finals and can’t work on the project anywhere near full-time.
- Students should gain experience working as an individual, as a member of a team, and as a leader of a team. Everyone will get lots of experience with the first two, although individual work is less often project-based, which I can see leading to problems later in life when I have to build things all by myself. I’ve been lucky and gotten a chance to do this, but not everyone gets to have experience working as a leader of a team. This is compounded by the twin facts that (1) teams usually want to do well and (2) the first time someone leads something they’ll be quite uncomfortable and mess up a lot. I’m not sure how to get over this. Perhaps learning leadership should be built more explicitly into the curriculum, and people who normally don’t take leadership roles should be given more low-committment, short-term, low-stakes chances to try it out and encouraged to do so.
- Students should learn to communicate logically and persuasively in spoken, written, numerical, and visual forms. Some Olin students are very good at this, some are not. I would love to see a higher standard required of all Olin students in this regard, but recognize there probably isn’t time to cram more of this into our already packed learning schedules.
- The curriculum should include space for a true international/intercultural immersion experience. Study Away, check. I would love to travel with a professor or two, or a group of Olin students on a semi-academic excursion. (By the way, I’ll be travelling a lot for the year after graduation; let me know if you’d like to join me in any leg of the journey. More details to come.)
- The goal is to graduate self-sufficient, motivated individuals able to articulate and activate a vision and bring it to fruition. An education that prepares students only to turn problem statements into proposed solutions is inadequate; education must also prepare students to recognize problems and to convince others to adopt solutions.
It’s a little soon to tell for the last one, but we can hope. I think we’re very good at spotting opportunities, but less so at filtering out the good ones, which leads to the perpetual Olin Overload. (oLoad?) To be fair, some students are very good at managing oLoad; many more of us are not. I don’t know that there is a better way to learn what you can’t handle than by trying to handle it and failing, though. As Chandra pointed out, at some point we’re going to have to learn how to be in charge of what we do with our own lives, and the earlier you mess up and learn that, the better; the process takes a lifetime.
Sunday, December 10th, 2006 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
I’ve been marginally productive this weekend, but am ramping up (finally) - some drafts of my artist’s statements for Prof. Donis-Kellers class. The first is a sketchy, draftlike hack of me looking all over the place, and the second is an empty expanse of gray paper with a few charcoal keys hanging from thumbtacks driven into the wall.
Self portrait: But it’s shiny over there
All right. Mel, you like books, you like studying, so you’re just going to sit down and read, and I’m going to draw you. There we go… and just hold that.
Hey, you gotta stay still. How am I supposed to draw when you keep moving? See what happened there? I’m going to go back and fix it, but I need you to stay still. Just focus, all right? That’s good. That’s a good girl. I know there’s a lot of interesting things out there, but you can’t do ‘em all at once. You know that, right? Right. Good.
What’s that? Wait, no - don’t - hey, what are you doing? Don’t stand up! Just - sit down, get back here! I’m not done yet! You’re not done yet!
Habitat: BISY BACKSON (from this)
They said you might be looking for me.
I’m not usually anywhere in particular. Most mornings I grab my keys off the wall and run; when I get tired I come back to my room to collapse, and that’s a day. I couldn’t tell you in advance where I’ll be in between. As long as I’ve got access to a flow of information, I’m plugged into the world, and it’s good.
I’m a wanderer. It’s when I’m not home that I feel most at home; it’s when I’m in someone else’s place that I feel I’m filling mine. My room is where I hang my keys and nothing more. It’s not a place you’ll find me if you look.
Sunday, December 10th, 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Because I’m learning a lot of fun random things for no particular reason. Here are three things that made me grin today. (I really want to write a good response to Miks’ excellent response to my last poorly written post, but will have to wait until I am less pwned to do it justice.)
- Noise colors actually match up (roughly) with color-colors! If you played white light as music, it would sound like white noise (evenly distributed throughout all frequencies). Same with blue noise (high frequencies), pink noise (low frequencies), and… well, the analogy mostly falls apart with say, brown noise, but this just didn’t cross my mind before; I’d assumed they were arbitrary names but apparently the actual visual colors are what they were named for.
- Wavelets are cute. They’re little peeping things that pop up - PIP! and then decay out real fast - POP! - they’re tiny little waves that you can string together to make bigger, more complicated waveforms (yes, it’s another one of those orthogonal basis things like the Fourier and Laplace transforms), and in my head all these tiny wavelets start pipping and popping in and out like popcorn - pippippippoppoppippoppippippitypip! So cool.
- I ran across this in the book Noise and can’t find another citation of this, but apparently “bell curve” doesn’t always refer to the normal distribution. There’s other kinds, like Rayleigh and Rice, and - hey, we didn’t learn this stuff in ProbStat! This plus reading educational research papers where they’re talking about crazy statistical manipulation of student data make me wish I could learn advanced statistics someday. (I’m aware there’s an independent study going on next term, and I should probably talk to those people about getting their book list after graduation.)
And if you’re laughing at how silly some of these things are, remember that I used to be the little kid who didn’t believe babies were delivered by flying storks… it wasn’t aerodynamically possible. The storks had to have airplanes. (It was another year before I realized that the invention of babies significantly predated the invention of airplanes; that made me really confused as to how babies actually occured.) Point being that I’m sometimes very locally geeky and sometimes don’t back up to look at the big picture of whether things make sense (or whether everyone else already knows them). At any rate, These three things are three things that amused the Mel today.
Thursday, December 7th, 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
(Disclosure: I am a young minority female hacker who’s actively working towards running a startup as a future career. I’m trying very hard not to be biased as I write this, and am trying to exclude my personal experiences as much as possible, but ultimately that view’s going to leak through in some way no matter how much I try.)
I don’t usually go for the “rah rah rah gender” stuff, but this was interesting. I came across this snippet today while I was in the middle of researching for my DED paper (on technologies for distributed communication). Is the new era of collaborative technology on the internet repeating the same old cycle of empowerment based on some gender or cultural bias or difference?
It is no accident that the example innovators here [both old-school radio technology and the new web 2.0 startup rush] are all educated white boys (not girls) from middle-class or better backgrounds. There’s nothing wrong with being excited about the possibilities of new technologies, but it is important to see that new media don’t allow “anyone” to make software and content.
It’s interesting to note that this statement would appear to be backed up by, for instance, the population distribution of Y Combinator founders. Data’s sketchy and anecdotal here with insanely small sample sizes, but still - in what is currently four rounds of funding for multiple companies, each with multiple founders, we still see lots of young… white… males. This isn’t to say that I think the hackers there shouldn’t have been; all the folks I know (8 Oliners and counting!) who have founded startups with these people are fantastic engineers, very, very good hackers, and great people. If I was the one betting on bright young startups, I wouldn’t hesitate before giving these people lots and lots and lots of money.
However. Again, anecdotal evidence and n=1, but if Miks (a phenomenal engineer and roboticist - would that I had half her skill) gets this reception in a room full of startup geeks, what does it mean? (Statistically speaking, nothing.) When looking at hackstars, the question isn’t “why these people?” They’re at the top because they’re good at what they do. The question is “why not these other ones?”
Is there something dissuading females and minorities from pursuing web startups (and in a broader picture, empowerment via the technology of the internet)? In this day and age, we’d like to think that it’s not that we think these folks are less competent hackers, it’s just that they don’t… stand… out as much. (Why?) And the few of them who do are taken as relative rarities, exceptions who prove the rule. “Your position in the technical meritocracy is correlated with such an unusual identifier that I’m going to call attention to it in my identification of you.”
I was going to write something here about my own experiences, but realized that was what I was trying to avoid. Instead, I’ll list some possible boilerplate reasons for this phenomena.
- Females and minorities just aren’t good at “this kind of stuff.” This is the horribly politically incorrect viewpoint, and not a whole lot of folks will have it (or at least admit to it).
- They’re not interested. Are they interested but can’t find a way in? Are they disinterested because the world’s set such high barriers and anti-expectations against them doing this that the activation energy becomes sufficiently high enough to dissuade folks that otherwise would have gone for it?
- This is an extension of the current math/science/tech imbalance. Fewer females and minorities (for instance) learning to code as a kid means there’s fewer ready in their late teens to take the “next step” towards hackstardom.
- They tend not to pursue areas that they don’t think they can change the world with. In a field dominated by people unlike you, making changes is tough. Also, how much good will web startup companies actually do? Maybe they’re contributing in more productive areas than making shiny webpages. On the other hand, the internet is a tremendous tool with the potential to provide information access to lots of people who didn’t have it before, and knowledge is power - couldn’t this very easily be used to change the world, if you had the right goals at the outset?
- We’ve got too small a sample size and it’s too early to tell. The small sample size appears to be indicative of a potential imbalance, though.
Now, I don’t think we should go out and riot “ZOMG discouraging underrepresented groups MUST COMPENSATE!” because that’s an overcorrection that ultimately causes bitterness-causing oscillations in the system by setting up a double standard, even if it does some good. (See: affirmative action.) But what is the solution? Is there even a problem in the ‘net startup domain? We’re seeing the rise of so many female and minority owned startups in this day and age… or is this due again to disproportionate press coverage of such startups?
My thoughts have turned into incoherence and I should get back to that paper, so I’d like to throw this open for discussion. I’d especially like to hear the thoughts of those folks who have already gone the startup route on this. Do you think this is something we should be looking at, or is the playing field already as even as it gets and there’s no need for worry?
Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 | Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
Futurist Seely Brown talks about the shift in education from “open head, insert content” and the view of student as blank receptacle to recieve teacher’s knowledge into a more apprenticeship-like participatory activity.
Schools can teach essential knowledge and critical thinking through somewhat traditional means. But they should complement that teaching with what Seely Brown called “passion-based learning” that focuses on getting students more engaged with topic experts.
In this new world, technology is essential because it provides every student with the means to experiment with building their own things. In the old-school apprenticeship model, the kid would enter the shop and (after sweeping the floor and such for a while) get their own hammer, paintbrush, or whatever it was to start playing with. You had reasonably easy access to the careers that were available to you; each town needed a smithy, you could count on an artist’s guild in every major city, and so forth. Right, so your career options weren’t terribly open (”Howdy, I’m Joe Peasant… I’d like to become a scholar” would have just gotten you clubbed upside the head) but learning was highly participatory; you didn’t take Farming 101, you just… farmed.
Industrialization took that away for a while; how the heck do you give a kid their own factory to play with? When all the guns in the region are being mass-produced by a factory in a different state and your own town is the center of production for corn and only for corn, how do you gain exposure to a diverse set of careers? Technology allows us to give each kid simulations of many different complex systems (think SimCity and ZooTycoon) and access and exposure to experts from many different areas they might be interested in.
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
There’s a saying that runs “If you want something done, ask the busiest person you know.” I’ve dissented with this saying until I ran across this post from John Maeda and realized exactly why I disagreed.
The more you overcommit, the more that procrastination becomes intolerably expensive to engage … yet it is when procrastination becomes exceedingly costly to do, it is then that extreme creativity emerges. In the impossible moment, miracles tend to happen. “Necessary procrastination” is a prime factor in the creative process. When the cost of procrastination increases, the probability for radical new thoughts to emerge increases as well.
If you want something particular done, asking the busiest person you know is no guarantee. But if you want something done, ask the busiest person you know. Something will happen - perhaps not what you originally intended, but something.
This may be the source behind my drive to overcommit, which I know is shared by plenty of other Oliners and IMSAns. Squeezing in heartfelt late night conversations between overdue problem sets makes them that much more costly, and therefore much more meaningful. Side projects smuggled in the back of lectures mean they’ve got to be worth your time enough to pursue despite the cost of missing information. It’s a natural pressure cooker to inspire and winnow out the extraordinary.
Friday, December 1st, 2006 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Vote: Should I go to the SAC Winter Formal? I ain’t much for formal occasions, I hate dresses, and $25 is a lot when money is tight, but on the other hand ODP will be DJing a room with blues and swing and other good dance music.
Anyway: interdisciplinary thinking rocks. I just read a paper titled “Data Crystallization Applied for Designing New Products” by Horie, Maeno, and Ohsawa that describes a data analysis tool that (among other things) algorithmically detects and graphically displays “meaning clusters” and connections between them in text. The on-screen graphics of ideas and their relationships look like little molecules bouncing around.
When they were talking about how they modified the display to make it easier to understand, they described how they were inspired by the “molecular” look to take on a “crystallization”metaphor. Idea clusters are like snow falling from the sky, with a few key words acting like “dust motes,” nucleation points that cause other words to cluster around them. In order to make the clusters larger (and thus fewer in number and easier to understand), they decreased the “temperature,” making it easier for the ideas to clump. Increasing “temperature” yields a more dynamic and complex picture of thoughts bouncing all over the place.
I realize this is mathematically, computationally, and chemically inaccurate - plenty gets lost in the cross-discipline bridging - but that the essence of ideas can make their way across boundaries like that is pretty awesome. Incidentally, the tool described in the paper just mentioned is great for picking out interesting connections between idea clusters thought to be previously unconnected.
Man, academia is cool.
Friday, December 1st, 2006 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »