Archive for January, 2009
Some folks have heard the news about OLPC’s 50% staff reduction, particularly in engineering, and have asked me how I’m doing. Here’s the short version:
- I’m happily running around with contagious enthusiasm in the engineering/education/OSS-hat directions, as normal.
- Tomorrow is my last day at OLPC as an employee.
- Tomorrow is my first day back at OLPC as a volunteer. (Hey, I’ve been a volunteer for over 2 years, an employee for 3.8 months; I haven’t forgotten how to Get Things Done in the former capacity… Uni chapters, Jams, Summer of Content, etc. are all things that I did as a volunteer.) In particular, I will be continuing to manage testing for the 8.2.1 release, and also now have More Time to hang out and help at Sugar Labs. Woo!
Many thanks to all the friends, teammates, coworkers, and family members who’ve been so supportive in helping me think and work through things in the last few weeks, especially the last few days – and if you have any ideas for shiny projects that might be interested in a Mel, do let me know. I’m young, foolish, and relocatable. ;-)
Whee! Much to do now to wrap up, more updates coming when I have a breather – in the meantime, have an old post I’ve been forgetting to put up (next post, in just a moment… note that it won’t show up on Planet {Laptop, Sugar Labs} because it’ll be in not-my-special-feed-for-that, but you can click through to the actual blog if you’d like to read.)
*up up and awayyyyy*
Thursday, January 8th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else, olin, olpc, sugar | 4 Comments »
I have to write a little bit before I start the day, because these are the things I want to think about right now:
A lovely post on Bill Watterson, growing up, and keeping a sense of wonder. (It’s in a different tone than what I’d write, of course – much angrier – but pointing out that a grown man still (Edit: not even “still,” as if this were unusual. He did.) managed to capture that sense of childhood – yes.)
“Do not ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman
And finally, I am – right now, as of this morning – sitting in the Hacker Amoeba in the garden at 1cc, the place where the OLPC developers sit. My friends and coworkers cleared a desk here for me last night (I should have asked much earlier). I remember starting to volunteer a few years back, looking at the group on this end of the office, hoping that someday I would be cool enough to sit there, with some of the most wonderful engineers and makers I love and admire most in all the world. Now I am here.
In this, I am content.
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 4 Comments »
Raymond’s latest post on trust and credibility is… perfect reading for me right now. Also, I’m setting my I’m postponing the necessary in order to do the important. Recognizing. Fixing. Sigh. I need to be a better version of myself.
At least Yifan and Scott and the IMSA team are all set for running on their own now, so I have all of tonight to work (and rest, hang out with Sumana, then sleep, then rest, then work again). I’ve finally made it through reading all the updates/links on webpages that I had to catch up on; now I have a backlog of 205 work-related emails. (Fortunately, with Inbox Zero, I now have lots of practice getting through a backlog of that size. Should take a day.)
Also, when meeting notes start including action items like this, you know you have (1) awesome teammates and (2) a potential problem:
Mel to sleep at night. She was falling asleep in the middle of the conversation and almost derailed Marco plans to finish in one hour.
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
My use of italics has dramatically increased during a recent yet deliberately* undefined time period.
*I’m lazy and want to leave this as a vague and uncontested claim.
These are notes from my senior year of college, from my first sociology class. I may have posted them before. Each time I run across things from that single class – which technically I never even took, or should have been able to attend, as it was an upper level graduate course in a field I had never heard of before in a school I didn’t go to – I light on fire inside, and go “oh! this is what I am supposed to do” – in a way that, weirdly enough, does not involve my turbo-hyperactivity button on. It’s a much deeper kind of… match… than that.
It sometimes makes me wonder why I’m not working on this stuff more directly/actively. I thought I had a plan for how the things I’m doing now help me learn how to do that better – I think I do, at least. And then sometimes I’m not quite sure.
I should start a collection of writings I admire.
I write like an engineer – lots of detail, not much emotion. (2009: This has since changed. I do remember being struck that same year while grading papers for an intro engineering class I’d TA’d before; my previous group had been all engineering students, and this year’s group was the first group of nonengineering students to take the course. I went to some of my Olin professors in bewilderment – “Look, look! Engineers and liberal arts majors write differently!” and they laughed kindly and said (basically) “Of course they do!” and I suddenly got the concept of ‘disciplinary lens,’ which I’d only intellectually grasped in the past…)
Can we use qualitative research methods (of data gathering and analysis) to help interviewees get a better sense of themselves, or as an educational tool?
ALL MODELS ARE BROKEN. ALL MODELS ARE BROKEN.
Fragment: The unintended consequences of purported social actions. (What did I mean by that?)
“The study of narrative does not fit neatly within the boundaries of any single scholarly field.”
Define: Postpositionist “There is no hard distinction in postpositionist resarch between fact and interpretation.”
I should find Crispin Miller’s thesis.
[Ethnography] adopted research methods from the natural sciences, which require stepping outside and looking objectively at data – does this work with narrative? Narrative and storytelling is about creation of a structure to understand your experiences with.
Comparative studies. They’re important.
- How do engineering professors learn to teach?
- How do engineering students learn to learn?
- [As a researcher], when I come across what appears to be ineffective or damaging classroom practices, do I intervene?
- How can I criticize organizations and people who are helping me?
What educational theories and pedagogical methods do engineering professors use in their classrooms? How do students perceive and respond and feel about their effectiveness? Are these conscious [on the part of both students and profs]? How are these theories and habits acquired by profs – how do they “learn to teach”?
Becker: “Any good study will make somebody mad.”
- I am naive and unaware of potential conflicts.
- I am unqualified – will not be “researching” – but still, I am going into work I don’t fully understand.
- How much do I “help?”
- Is this an imperialistic crusade to spread my favorite theories? How do I (do I?) talk about “cultural sensitivity”?
- How can I speak ill of those who help me?
- Politics – prof/students/admin – how to deal with?
Book to read: “Time farming” (on field experiments)
Intuitive qualitative research methods… about best judgment. How is he or she self aware of their context? (Not sure what I meant by that…)
2×2 matrix: Overt/covert, active/passive(re: involvement). Overt/Active = member (me), overt/passive = fan, covert/active = spy, covert/passive = voyeur. How much time am I spending within each quadrant?
The rest of these are book notes from a book that I’ve forgotten but should find again. I take book notes by marking them as Q(uote), P(araphrase), R(esource I should look up), etc. and then the page number, then the note.
Q, 2 – The purpose is to see how respondents in interviews impose order on the flow of experience to make sense of events and actions in their lives… we ask, why was the story told that way?
P, 2 – Identities are constructed through the telling of stories. You write your own character.
R, 4 – The Chicago school tradition – Shaw, 1938 (Jack Poller) + Whyte, 1943 (Doc) are two things to look up.
R, 5 – Look up “social constructionism” (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Gerger 1985)
R, 5 – “narrative analysis”
N, 5 – Narrative analysis is good for studies of identity.
Q, 15 – Ultimately, it is unclear who really authors a text, although western texts come with individual authors’ names penned to them.
R, 18 – Labov’s structural approach
R, 19 – Burke’s “classic method of analyzing language” (dramatism?)
R, 19 – Gee (1986) attends to how a story is said.
Q, 22 – When people tell stories, they’re not necessarily narrating “fact,” but they are telling the truth of their experience.
Q, 25 – 1. How is [fact? task? farh? can't read] transformed into a written text and how are narrative segments determined? 2. What aspects of the narrative constitute the basis for interpretation? 3. Who determines who the narrative means and are alternative readings
possible?
R, 27 – Life story method (Botax + Kohli, 1984)
N, 55 – There eare different forms of interview instruments – some are very open-ended (“can you tell me about…”) and others give respondents a suggested preset structure (which they sometimes don’t stick to).
N, 59 – Labov’s framework: numbered lines. For example, 30 blah blah (p) (I:yak yak) [o] linenumber text (pause) (Interviewer: what you say) [type] where [type] includes
- a – provide abstract
- o – orient listener
- ca – caring action
- e – evaluating meaning
- r – resolve action
N, 66 – It’s important to give information back to your interview subject. Make sure they say their stories are okay to release, their ID details are sufficiently hidden, etc. – also, they can make use of it [the story they tell].
R: Campbell “Hero with a thousand faces”, Vogler “The writer’s journey”
R: Creative interviewing (Ken Metzler), Interviewing America’s Top Interviewers (Huber, Diggles), Interviewing: Art and skill (Barone, Switzer)
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Marathon road has come upon an unexpected washed-out bridge. Adjusting accordingly and scrambling not to stumble on slippery stones. Still fine, but painfully aware I’m sprinting on a knife’s edge here. Exhilarating, but I’m also surprisingly calm (I’m proud of myself – I’ve been resisting the turbo button so far and doing ok!)
Also, I’m going to have to look into the differences between problem based vs project based learning soon.
Sunday, January 4th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
Slept on a squishy foam-air folding bed in the Farrington* last night after Thai food and a good long talk with Scott. Yifan and I are chaperoning an intersession group from IMSA (our high school) – some of the students from the OLPC chapter are here to work with local deployments. I am… stunned**. They’re driven, they’re self-motivated, they’re soaking up knowledge and new skills like sponges, and they’re doing things. “Smart and gets things done.” Luke and Ian would get along with them, I think.
*The Farrington is where the ILXO folks stayed for the first part of the summer while we were in Boston (in the “apartment” portion). Now the IMSA group is staying in the “hostel” portion for the week; I much prefer the “hostel” half. (Please note that I didn’t make these reservations / choose this lodging.)
**I’m not stunned that young people are capable of doing amazing things. I’m stunned that the adults around them are recognizing and encouraging it – not even “allowing” it, because they’ve realized that this isn’t something they can allow or disallow. (“Wow. Grownups who don’t dismiss us automatically. When did this happen?”)
Sumana comes tomorrow, yay!
I want to be fluent enough in music to express myself in it when words don’t come. Words come pretty easy, but sometimes they don’t suffice, and I want to be more articulate – with the piano, with drawing, with dance – to capture those. And I know the reason why I talk and write about these things so much – what I call “whining that doesn’t sound like whining,” what my father complains is me being “all talk and no action” – is a prerequisite to action, for me. I have to get something incorporated into my thoughts and my being before I can swiftly act on it; sometimes there’s something I have to become before I can effectively do things.
There are tons of books that talk about the importance of visualization for performance (sports, whatever). You have to have a clear, persistent image/vision of something in your minds eye to be able to get it to happen. I don’t see myself as a musician, so I’m trying to fold that into part of who I am so that I can’t help but to be one, to spend more hours at the piano and have it feel unforced – to get to the point where of course the natural thing to do would be to sit down and play. I know I have to continue forcing myself to practice (and I am practicing), and that it will be uncomfortable and awkward at first (it is), but I need to have a goal of moving past that into… not just stringing memorized words together, but actually having fluency. Like Mike said when he was teaching me how to punch: “Think about how easy it can be.”
I’ve done this before. When I was 10, I started consciously trying to see myself as Not A Handicapped Kid. Not broken. It took a long time (maybe it started working a bit by the time I was 16, really solidified by age 20, it’s pretty good now but something I’ll have to watch for the rest of my life). When I was 15 and was exposed to open source for the first time, it was something foreign to me but something I wanted to be a part of, but it took 5 more years – ’till I was 20 – of mostly consciously seeding my subconscious so that I could flow into becoming an open-source hacker. And even then I had to ease into it from the non-development angle. And I’ve barely begun to actually learn how to be an open-source developer. I also didn’t realize it until the very end, but my 4 years at Olin were about getting myself to see myself as an engineer. Folks like Eric Gallimore who came in thinking of themselves as engineers could take off – I needed to fight the “…but I’m not a real engineer, I’m totally a fake, I can’t actually do this” feeling each step of the way. It’s almost gone now. But the shift took a bit over 4 years.
Changing who you are – really changing who you are, shaping it so that you don’t have to fake it, making yourself become the person that you want to be – it’s difficult. It’s difficult because you can’t pour effort into it; if you fight for it, that makes it more difficult to happen. It has to be a percolation. It’s a particularly difficult (but important) skill to develop when you’re surrounded by a world that sees you “the other way” – when you’re not in an environment that nurtures and supports you changing. (The reason I could switch comparatively fast into being an engineer – less than 5 years compared with at least 7 years, or upwards of a decade, for the rest – is that this is what the world of Olin is built for. Creating and supporting people who want to become engineers – not just “learn about,” but truly “learn to be.”)
It’s been tough, and it’s been worth doing. And now I want to be a musician and a martial artist. So… slow shifting. It’s begun, months ago. Years ago, in some cases. But more consciously several months ago.
From a thank-you letter to a mentor, from a few years back, and advice I should heed once more now. (I think I am always going to think that I used to be smarter in some ways when I was younger – and in other ways, I get smarter as I get older.)
Thanks for talking to me last night. A couple hours afterwards I realized that the reason for my frustration was that I was hoping that you’d tell me what to do, and you were refusing to give me easy answers. Thanks for doing that, and sorry it took so long to sink into my thick skull…
I’ll keep hacking, turn my attention from angsty theoretical indecision to trying out lots of tiny concrete things, have more horribly disorienting discussions with people whose worldviews are drastically different from my own, and see where things go from there. I’ll keep you posted.
Back to work. A pile of stuff-to-do awaits…
Sunday, January 4th, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
From an email to friends 2 years or so ago after Chris Morse’s talk on math skills being correlated with chemistry performance, and a subsequent animated discussion wherein some of my (engineering student) buddies expressed frustration and dislike for the study of math. I love math. You could say that it was puppy love (I was around 10-11 when I first really got into abstract math), one of my first serious relationships* with an academic discipline, with an amiable breakup in mid-high-school when I realized this wasn’t what I was meant to spend the rest of my life with. I’ll never be a professional mathematician; my talents and my passions lie in other (but closely related) realms, but math and I will always be good friends.
*Most teenagers date other teenagers. I dated math, physics, and creative writing, flirted with computer science, and occasionally got set up on blind dates with theater tech and improv.
Uh… moving on.
Making sandwiches is a limiting reagent problem. Splitting worms is an acid-base problem. Another way to say “applications to real life” is “isomorphism to ,” and that to me is what math is all about; finding patterns, finding connections, finding what things that are really weirdly different are, on the other side of the equals sign, actually the same. If you learn how to see that a donut is actually a coffee cup (topology), then maybe it will help you discover that… a coffee cup is really an insulator, or cardboard is a construction material, or this tiny circuit is equivalent to this big ugly one.
So it’s concrete and it’s not concrete. It’s immediately applicable and it’s just kind of fun. Math is a formal statement of what human beings do naturally; find patterns and equivalences. Learning how to read math, speak math, think math, and play in a mature way with the material is important for our growth as expressive, creative human beings. Why does Rob Martello deconstruct and then reconstruct our essays? We can write, we can talk, we do this communication thing already. But understanding it, studying it, and getting to that depth in it helps us do it so much more effectively.
J. Random Blogger “who rites about lol dosnt this sux” is not as effective a communicator as Noam Chomsky criticizing the same thing fluently. And it’s not that Chomsky is merely expressing the same thoughts in a better way than J. Random. Because he’s studied writing (among many other things), he has a better mental toolset for thinking and developing those thoughts in the first place. Part of this toolset is drawing, part is linguistics, part psychology, part history… and part math.
This doesn’t say anything about who we should teach what math to how (and quite honestly, we don’t have the right to determine that for anyone but ourselves and perhaps our children), but I do math because it brings me moments of small joy. I do it for the tiny, lovely little connections where things click together; I’m sure you’ve experienced this in other disciplines (a line makes a drawing fall into place, one word in a business plan suddenly opens up possibilities for a whole new enterprise, a subtle guitar passage sends a shiver through your spine).
Last night I wrote about wavelets. I looked at the formula which was full of Greek letters that would probably cause most people to shut it out immediately. They see indecipherable scribbly lines. I see tiny dancing waves, tiny waves bobbing up and down on the surface of a sound or an ocean, massing together and combining their sameness to make something different. Ben talks about modular arithmetic; I see transparent colored blocks raining down in circles, clicking into place and falling down together in chunks like Tetris every time you match n of them together. It’s pretty.
It is easy to look at a bunch of lines and think it’s weird, it’s hard, it has no relevance. But if you know Japanese, you can see that oh, it is a poem about the moon rippling through the pond. Haiku is always better in the original Japanese. I can explain wavelets to you without formulas, but it will never be the same.
I won’t use most of the math I learned here when I graduate. Heck, I’ve forgotten all the formulas already. What I will use is the way of thinking about problems that I’ve learned from the math I learned here. As others have pointed out, college (and to some degree life) is about learning how to learn. Math is one way of thinking that is important to learn. I can honestly say that my comfort with math has opened many doors to me; it was because of math that I got into computer science and by extension programming and being comfy with code and chips, which in turn led me to electrical engineering.
It was math (graph and information theory) that gave me a handle on signals and systems, which in turn led me to a deeper intuitive understanding of how feedback works between organizations and people at Olin. It’s math that is behind my artistic ability, even – I can render three-dimensional organic shapes because I can render three-dimensional nonorganic ones because I worked on a 3d graphics engine in high school because I was learning linear algebra. I’m sad to say that math has given me a leg up and helps me stand out, because I honestly wish that more people could see this.
If you don’t know what you will come across in the real world (and for the most part, we don’t; we are still very young and very, very green) then math is one of the best investments you can make in terms of learning. I’m not talking about plug n’ chug memorization; that’s crap. But a deep understanding of how to find patterns and connections, and how to formally and unambiguously express, manipulate, and model those patterns and connections so that others can understand them – well, that’s universal. And that is the math I know and love.
I need to write about math the same way Alan Lightman (Einstein’s Dreams) writes about physics. In fact, you’ll all probably appreciate Lightman’s work; go to the library and get either Einstein’s Dreams or Good Bonito, and read one of the short stories. He shows as much of the beauty of formulas in words as I think is humanly possible without seeing the formulae themselves.
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions – for me, they’re often promises I don’t know enough about to promise, and will therefore break, and so I don’t make them. (This means I greatly admire people who can make and keep them.) Three things I am continuing to work on, though.
- Develop my ability to turn that super-turbo-hyperactive button off.
- Constrain my whining in the form of overthinking things the same way I constrain my whining-like whining. (“I’m going to whine and vent for 5 minutes to get it out of my system, and then I’m going to stop, and then I’m going to do stuff.“)
- The anti-flakiness campaign – becoming more reliable. Too often I genuinely want my word to be my bond, and then forget. My word should be my bond, period, full stop. Dramatic progress has been made on this in the last 2 months especially, but I still need to strengthen my followup-fu.
Yifan, Scott, and the IMSA crew arrive tomorrow; I’m looking forward to them being here in Boston for a week. The “interesting!” and “full of eustress!” life-o-meters are surging and spiking dramatically (yay!) – Yifan, in particular, has been an absolute lifesaver. I’ll likely be telling more of this story as the week goes by.
So, today was my only real day of vacation – my day, my schedule, my projects, my extended rest period (I went to bed a bit before 10am and didn’t get up until 2pm – for me, that is extended). It was very, very good. Tonight I’ll sleep more. Hopefully 6+ hours; I will need the buffer.
The (metaphorical, not actual running) marathon I talked about? It starts tomorrow morning. I’ll be running it in a series of sprints, and I’m ready for it to take its toll, with recovery stations on standby along the road. I’m going to be enjoying the journey. I have to; I don’t know what the destination’s going to be.
Bed.
Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Sacha uses her notebooks almost exactly like I use mine. One thing she mentioned was finding a way to keep her pen/pencil with the notebook. Here’s my favorite solution. Duct and gaffer tape look best.
When I have cheap/slim pens with clips, thin notebooks with flexible covers (now: moleskine cahier), and don’t mind looking a little scruffy, I use the pen’s clip like a paper clip between the page I’m on and whichever cover is nearest. It makes for the fastest notebook opening time ever.
Friday, January 2nd, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
And now, a distraction. My brother introduced me to kinetic typography. I like it. The subtitles are the movie, so I don’t miss anything at all. Favorites:
Along the way, I found some videos (short, long) of an artist who drew with a typewriter. I wonder what people said when he started. “Why are you wasting your time? You have spastic CP; you can’t be an artist if you can’t control your muscles.” I wonder if his early works were any good, how long he had to spend before he developed a technique that worked for him. I have a fascination with the notion of ‘improbable mastery,’ and disabled people succeeding at things related to their handicaps (i.e. runner without legs, yes – mathematician without legs, not as relevant) are a very small, but very visible, subset of that.
But how improbable is that mastery, really? It frustrates me when people say things like “look at accomplished person with disability X. Imagine how much more they could have done without X!” I mean, maybe typewriter art was his thing – maybe he would have been an okay painter (because really, if you can draw on not-a-typewriter, you’d probably try that first) and never stand out, or maybe he’d have become a decent guitarist and never even think of spending time on art at all. Or maybe he’s the kind of person that, no matter what circumstances were, would have to do art, and this is just the only way that it could be expressed. Another what-if does this in reverse – what if Yo-Yo Ma grew up deaf? Would he still be a cellist? A musican?
I realize I’m projecting a lot of myself onto this, because I’ve been the subject of those kinds of statements for most of my life. My point is that when you say “imagine how much more…” – that’s all it is, imagining. Sometimes it’s a useful mental exercise, but things happened the way they happened, and this is the reality, and wishing the past had been different won’t change it. You can’t change the past. You can’t predict the future. You can shape the present – and knowing and acknowledging what the present reality actually is tends to help with that a lot.
Friday, January 2nd, 2009 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 5 Comments »