[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og - Braindump of the Mel. Seek coherency and relevance at your own risk.

I got six hours of sleep last night. SIX HOURS! It was great. I feel all refreshed now.



Today was data entry day. After a trip to Olin to drop off checks (I need to get over my fear of handling sums over $100; in some respects it’s a lot of money, in some respects it isn’t, but it’s just money. That’s all.) SJ and I went back to the OLPC office and I typed up the surveys from yesterday’s Game Jam tests. The results left me wondering how children find 3-5 hours a day to play video games. Probably the same way the average American finds over 4 hours a day to watch TV.



As a side note, the OLPC office is not unlike Gill’s lab; open tables, people grabbing space to work… it’s a little cleaner and doesn’t have snakes or a Wii, and the age distribution of the people present is much broader than 18-22, but the atmosphere feels similar. I like it. I need to find another OLPC project to work on, because…



…the Jam is beginning to reach done-ness. It is slowly moving off my shelf to be replaced as alpha project by my research proposal - beta project is now my financial infrastructure, which I really need a Crunch Day for, with company. Something about moving thousands of dollars between accounts makes me much more nervous than it should, so I’ve been doing research and research and putting it off. I need company to help motivate/compete/guilt me into getting my finances set up already, slacker! If you’re in the Boston area and want to do this, email me.



The hunt for the replacement of my Dell continues. Omar had a lovely, lovely IBM tablet at the Jam this weekend. SJ as a shiny IBM X60. They are both expensive… but not as expensive as EmpororLinux’s Raven tablet (over $3k). That’s right, folks; they got the handwriting rec and the fingerprint scanner working. They are shiny, tiny, and I would greatly like one. However, I still have no reliable source of income, so until then, I hope my Dell doesn’t fall apart.



Finally, Gloria wrote a beautiful article on women in technical communities. If you are interested in technology or gender equity, please give it a read; I’m curious to hear what folks think and also whether similar behaviors are exhibited within other minorities-in-technology or minorities-in-<field> groups (as in, is this a “women in tech” thing, a “women in X” thing, a “minorities in tech” thing?)



One of the smaller sections at the end describes the practice of writing under a male pseudonym. I actually don’t go by Mel because it’s a male pseudonym. It was a nickname I chose for myself when I was 7 (”Mallory” was too long, “Mal” meant “bad,” and “Mol/Mil/Mul” just sounded weird) without knowing it was a male/unisex name. That having been said, it’s rather convenient. I don’t hide the fact that I’m female, but people online will usually assume I’m a guy (giving me more “credibility”) unless I’ve been introduced to them through someone else (which gives me “credibility” too). However, I’m also moderately blunt, less apologetic, and in speech/interests/manner more “stereotypically male-like” than most females I know. So there’s a particular little experiment I have in mind to run sometime, just to see what happens.

Woke up this morning to find the Jam in the Boston Globe. One thing I’m learning: I was a very slow-paced reporter. I like to get to know my interview subjects and ask them what they’d like to share, but being interviewed for this one was like WHAM! Call me asap. WHAM! Busy, call back. WHAM! Question question question thank you DONE. The other reporters took more time, but I’m still reeling from how fast they go. Maybe I’m more of an anthropologist than a journalist; people are a lot more than sources of information. Also got interviewed (on-camera this time) this afternoon so we’ll see how that goes.



We have… working… games. They’re demoing at the midway check-in right now, and we’ve got a memory game, an Incredible-Machine-like physics simulation, an Abalone board, a flower breeding game, Reversi… and the games that were working last night (along with more that are very, very close to playable). (3D-pong just got a rousing round of applause - the levels have different-shaped paddles, gravity going down, sideways…)



Lunch was an adventure. Yifan, Bryce, Jessi, Boris, and I sliced and diced our way through obscene amounts of lettuce, tomatoes, onions, and bell peppers - and even more obscene amounts of bread - to make sandwiches to feed a small army, wrapping them in loads of paper towels (with scrawled marker letters indicating which ones were sundried-tomato-beef-cheese-onion and which were honey-mustard-ham-lettuce-pepper-mayo or whatever other permutation we could find), wrapped those in clean garbage bags, and trundled them in a rickety cart through three buildings, an elevator, and rain… and rain… and rain. When Yifan and Boris began unwrapping the sandwiches, there was a collective murmur of “ohmigod” at the sheer volume. We had perhaps 10 cubic feet of sandwich. Probably more. Dinner involved the largest pot of spaghetti I have ever cooked, along with the realization that with said spaghetti one could feed an entire conference for a little over $1 a head.



Judging tomorrow. Whee!

So far, so good. Folks came, we had food and soda (had to order a 2nd round of pizza, but eh) and now we have code cranking, amazing music and graphics, games working (or at least functional - they’ll respond to things you do with them). I’ve seen at least two playable games - Kuku Anakula (Number Munchers with a chicken) and 3D Pong.



My feet are sore from walking most of the day in not-entirely-broken-in shoes. My camera is being exercised regularly. The blackboards have a few square feet of clear space left. I was supposed to draw a background for Team Minuteman, but my computer is rebelling right now so it’s still in B&W - need to color it tomorrow. And can I just mention again how incredibly talented our full-time musician (Matt Myers) and artist (Roberto Christen) are? I thought I could arrange and draw reasonably fast, but seeing them in action is something else entirely.



Jessi, Nick, and Molly have been working tirelessly getting food, getting people online, manning the registration table (armed only with vague directions from an intermittently present organizer), and driving hither and yon. The entire Quirk family showed up to both coordinate and code, getting many of the XOs up and running and helping folks out with Pygame. Noah (coderanger) gave a fantastic pygame crash-course, Darius gave an intro to Jamming, Omar and his mother have been setting up our open discussions and acting as a bridge between code and education, and SJ is holding it all together and keeping us (especially me) from going insane.



And the laptops! XOs scattered around the room, icons popping up
everywhere - you can actually see other people on the network. It’s a
friendly feeling. I can’t wait until our judges (ages 3.5 to 11, so far) arrive on Sunday afternoon.



A bundle of sheets is lying in my temporary EH dorm room still wrapped in plastic as I’m taking the night watch and fighting off sleepiness with adrenaline. I’m hoping to be in bed before the sun comes up, but as that’s in about an hour I had best hop to it (there are still teams awake coding, hence I’m awake writing this as my laptop is being too finicky today to do much else).

Jon tells me I should post this to a wider audience, so here goes (about 4 weeks later). I wrote this letter to Jon and Debbie (two of our profs at Olin) the day after a meeting for the Task Force on Pedagogical Innovation (TFPI) where Jon mentioned that some people say that Olin students are slackers.

Dear Jon and Debbie,

I was sitting in anthro thinking about what Jon mentioned at TFPI (because as an Olin student I of course am lazy and never pay attention to classwork, especially when I’m studying unimportant topics outside of engineering), and was struck with the sudden realization that - well, they were right. We’re completely unprepared, terrible engineers with bad attitudes, and it’s going to cause a lot of trouble later on.

Olin students are slackers. We only do work when we absolutely have to, and even then we don’t necessarily do it at all. Instead of studying for a bio exam, we take off early on Friday afternoons and drive to Hyde Park to coach a high school robotics team. Sometimes we’ll stumble into math class bleary-eyed after staying up late the night before arguing about topology or something else that wasn’t even taught in class and won’t ever be on the test (what a waste of time). We start renewable energy businesses instead of turning in our papers free from typos. We have the nerve to walk into our professor’s office even after we’ve failed a physics exam in order to talk - not about the exam, but about life and random topics we’re interested in, for no good reason whatsoever.

Clearly we have no sense of priority - if we did, we’d be preparing for our futures by turning in clearly written, well-done assignments for assessment so that we can be certified as initiative-taking, independent-spirited engineers who will lead big changes in the future. How else will people know we can start wonderful things if we don’t get certified to do so?

Olin students don’t know what the outside world looks like. We live in a bubble and only leave campus to work, go to classes, dance, socialize, present at conferences, attend meetings, negotiate with investors, volunteer, and sometimes just for fun (we’re slackers, you see). At the start of our projects, we spend a lot of time quietly watching and learning from people who are able to do things we don’t understand, wasting valuable time we could be using to start solving the problem. We astonish customers by conversing articulately with them about their situation - this isn’t what engineers are supposed to do, that’s not what they hire us for. We’ve obviously been trained to do the wrong things.

In fact, we’re ruined for life. We’ve lost the ability to lock ourselves up in a windowless room and produce technology unconstrained by the many contradictory needs of the people in this world. We even have the nerve to claim that not all problems are best solved through technology. We’re engineers! Why are we proposing curricula, documentary films, business plans, and even the removal of technology from locations that are clearly spending a large amount of time and effort (and money) using them?

This can be traced back to the terrible idea of giving teenagers the freedom to design their own learning experiences; kids have no idea what they want to do or what they need to learn. Without proper guidance as to what real engineers do, we’ve steered ourselves down the wrong paths.

We insist on being able to make our own mistakes and pursue our own interests regardless of whether the syllabus covers it or not. Such blatant disrespect for authority will cause tremendous upheaval in the organizations we enter after graduation (assuming any of them will even want to hire us at all).

Olin students don’t have solid engineering backgrounds. We’re unable to rattle off the wave equation from memory and don’t know the the mass of a silicon atom or the date the steam engine was invented, vital information that all engineers must know. Ask us what our area of focus is, and you’ll often get disclaimers that we’re interested in other things as well. Ask us if we know how to read a spectrogram, wire a power supply, or code in C, and you’ll get the disturbingly noncommittal answer of “we can learn” instead of the course number where that topic was on the syllabus; we can’t possibly have learned it unless we’ve taken a class. Because we spend our days engaged in intense play, we have done too few problem sets and listened to too few lectures to truly learn anything the correct way.

Raise this reasonable concern to students, and they’ll dismiss it with an “Oh, but we can look that up!” We plunge irresponsibly into things without taking the time to amass the necessary background training first, cockily assuming we can handle whatever comes up. We can’t! We fail at a tremendous percentage of the things we try, but even with that, we don’t realize this is an indication we should change - instead, we call them “learning experiences,” pick ourselves up, and launch into the next overambitious plan.

Olin students are coddled. We enjoy posh dormitories, excellent food, and an overly permissive community that allows us to monitor and discipline ourselves when we step out of line. We encourage wild projects and thoughts that have no hope of converging upon the correct answers. We support nonacademic pursuits such as fire juggling and voice lessons at the expense of more vital pursuits such as the study of thermodynamics and signal processing (although students will, with typical impudence and disciplinary inappropriateness, claim that fire juggling is thermodynamics and that singing into a microphone constitutes a signal processing system).

It’s no wonder our faculty are burnt out; they are in the terrible position of having to deal with such students in such an environment and simply cannot teach things the proper way. These students are wasting the time of some of the smartest people in the world. Instead of absorbing in the most efficient manner the factual knowledge these brilliant minds contain and thereby aspiring to imitate their success, students have the arrogance to tell their professors what they want to learn. We are unable to simply accept the authority of those with more experience.

Who would ever want their students to be as lazy, clueless, unschooled, and spoiled as Olin students are?

My brother Jason graduated from high school yesterday, leading to the looking-back-now-I-can-laugh-at-it picture of me in an unkempt academic robe, hood sliding off one shoulder, (parents wanted a picture of both of us in grad gear), mortarboard in one hand and typing with the other fielding phone calls and chats for the Game Jam while intermittently dashing away to take family pictures.



The speeches were interesting, if somewhat predictable. The alumna speaker talked about how much more fortunate we were than the students in Africa that she works with, which was nice - but I grinned when she told the students they could be anything they wanted to be, like “a doctor, or a lawyer…” We live in an upper-class suburb indeed.



The other thing that struck me was how much the ceremony was like an assembly line. A huge, government-funded, 12-year, 700-kid assembly line.



Step 1: Reader calls the kid’s name with the Graduation Intonation (TM) - first-name? middle-name? last-NAME. Since this is Glenview, home to the upper-class which includes plenty of Asians, we had a steady stream of “dah-dah? dah-dah? CHANG.”, “dah-dah? dah-dah! LEE.” and “dah-dah? dah-dah? PARK.”s in the lineup. I thought we would never run out of Parks. (I wonder if any are going to school in Boston so we can tell them “Pahk, your cah’s in Hahvahd yahd.”)



Step 2: Kid stands next to the podium in dark blue gown and mortarboard and smiles for the camera. Acceptable variants include mortarboard upright on head or pinned back nearly perpendicular to the ground; honors sash or Glenbrook-scholar hood (visual distinctions based on GPA - I don’t agree with this practice, but there it is), and sheepish/proud/I-know-you’re-taking-my-picture smile.



Optional: For a few kids, family members or friends will whoop and cheer in the background as step 2 occurs (despite the request to refrain until all students have received their diplomas) followed by a muttered grumble of annoyance rippling through the audience



Step 3-7: Kid rotates 90 degrees clockwise, walks across the stage, shakes hand, gets diploma, shakes another hand, takes picture, joins long line of marching blue-robed students shuffling back to seat. Basically, step up, here? is? your? NAME. rotate, walk, shake, take, shake, picture, shuffle, shuffle, sit. Like boxes being packed and processed (with the Glorious Rewards of KNOLLIDJ, no less).



It was a long ceremony. They looped Pomp and Circumstance more times than I’d care to remember. “Some people need ceremony,” my dad said on the way to the theatre. “I don’t.” “So why are we going?” I asked him. “Because we have to.” Afterwards we went to dinner with one of my mom’s old classmates and her husband, and then Jason went off to some graduation party which he came back from at 5am, proceeding then to sleep for 12 hours (he called from his cell phone upstairs to complain that I was playing piano at 3pm. “Why didn’t you walk downstairs and tell me?” I asked. “I’m lazy,” he said.”)



Happy graduation, dorkboy. Wake up already so I can play piano.