Posts that are Didn’t fit anywhere else-ish
On Wednesday, I finally got to start geeking out about hearing aids with an audiologist and a hearing aid researcher in the way I’ve been dreaming about for decades. (Literally. I remember getting in trouble at age 6 for disassembling my first pair.) Thanks to everyone for the thoughts and recommendations — and yes, there were a ton of questions asked.
Background reading: “Frequency-Lowering Devices for Managing High-Frequency Hearing Loss: A Review” by Andrea Simpson, published in Volume 3 Number 2 of “Trends in Amplification” in 2009. Let me try to give a summary of the options, which all involve taking high frequencies (which I can’t hear) and moving or smooshing them into low frequencies (which I can).
- Vocoding – I’ll let Wikipedia explain it. Makes people sound like robots (or Daft Punk).
- Slow playback – What it sounds like. Makes everyone sound like goofy baritone cartoon characters. Also takes longer to play back than the actual speech sound, so you end up lagging more and more as the conversation goes on.
- Transposition – take the high frequency spectrum, shift it down, and copy-paste it on top of the low-frequency spectrum. This is the equivalent of playing piano while shifting your right hand two octaves down so it literally overlaps the left hand. Like the piano analogy, the trouble here is that your “high frequency info” ends up slamming over the low-frequency one.
- Nonlinear frequency compression – take the normal speech spectrum and squeeeeeeze it into the lower portion I can hear – nothing overlaps, the musical notes just get closer together. The “nonlinear” part comes from squeezing the high frequencies more than the low ones so the low frequencies get less distorted. Problem: can you imagine how awful music sounds like this?
- Frequency shifting – just move everything down. Makes everyone sound like Darth Vader.
These are all extreme oversimplifications, of course. The other bit I noticed is that there wasn’t much aural rehabilitation done in the experiments covered by the meta-study. Most people simply aren’t willing to put up with the cognitive discomfort and time needed to significantly retrain their brains to hear; they want to understand speech now because they’re having difficulty and falling behind.
But I’m an odd case. I understand speech and have coping mechanisms sufficient to let me keep up with what I need to keep up with, unamplified. I have a long time horizon; I want to understand speech better 5 years from now, and am willing to pass through extreme amounts of masochism between now and then. I have a high tolerance for cognitive discomfort and like stretching my brain into unfamiliar shapes (see: graduate school, foreign languages, etc).
So I am completely fine with the idea that my amplified speech comprehension might drop for years before my brain retrains enough to climb back up — it’s the equivalent of learning dvorak (or steno) for typing when you already know qwerty. Yes, you’re slower at first… but theoretically, once you climb the learning curve, you can blow past your prior performance. I want to see if the same might happen here.
So they said all right, maybe we might want to look at this spectral IQ technology – let’s contact the manfuacturer, find out more details. From what I gather, this thing…
- is constantly working in the background to detect high-frequency speech sounds for instance, an “sh”
- when, and only when, it detects those sounds, it plays a lower-frequency sound that is not a transposition — so not a low-frequency version of “sh” that occludes speech sounds within my hearing range, but rather a made-up sound that interferes less with the speech sounds I can hear. I would then train my brain to associate that made-up sound with “sh.”
- aside from this, the original sound signal remains largely untouched; there’s far, far less narrowing of bandwidth than with other techniques.
The concern here, I think, is that my hearing loss remains severe enough at low enough frequencies that this technology might not work. We’ll check in again in two weeks and see where we stand, if we’ve heard back from the manufacturer yet, and so forth.
Friday, February 24th, 2012 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
This feeling is a large portion of the criteria I use for choosing places to work, study, and otherwise spend my time.
The joy of working in a university… [is] about being in the company of people who are smarter than I am… I don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room. I don’t want to rank any higher than about tenth. Being in the company of people who outshine me intellectually doesn’t just challenge and improve me, it gives me pleasure… Befuddlement is nature’s way of telling you that you are learning. You ought to find your university buzzing with ideas that seem intriguing but not (yet) quite within your grasp. If you have all necessary prerequisites and understand everything you hear each week, you cheated yourself. You didn’t pick a good enough college. –Geoffrey Pullum
Now for the random things.
There is, apparently, an Edward Tufte / Richard Feynman LaTeX package. Yes, you too can typeset documents like the masters!
I’ve been meaning to try a number of open source drawing programs – the kind that let you turn your tablet computer or tablet input device into a sketchpad, complete with fake charcoal, pencils, watercolors, and the like. I’ve had these tabs open for weeks, but never got around to trying them, so let me list them here in the hopes the public declaration of interest will further lower my activation energy on this.
Friday, February 10th, 2012 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 3 Comments »
Had visits to both Vocational Rehabilitation (Voc Rehab) and the Disability Resource Center (DRC) today. Brave new world! It’s been a great experience so far, which is important; I have so much anxiety and emotional wobbliness around the topic of my hearing that I’m not sure I’d be able to handle it otherwise. I need to feel like I’m going through this gracefully, need to feel like I’m beyond reproach… I carry around this huge desire to prove myself an equal, regardless of how much I rationally know I do not need to.
Honestly, I’m not sure if I could have done it earlier. Because right now, I have the following sources of strength and privilege, of “proof” that I’m not broken:
- I’m on a doctoral fellowship.
- At Purdue, which is a fantastic research institution.
- In Engineering Education, for which Purdue has one of the best programs in the world.
- With a 4.0 GPA.
- And existing conference presentations and publications – as a first-year grad student.
- And an undergraduate degree from Olin, which is an excellent engineering school.
- And an incredible work history for someone my age, with some high-profile projects and companies, and international speaking experience, and…
- And…
I hate this. I should not need that – nothing out there requires that I prove myself. But I need that security of competence-perception for myself, for whatever reason. I’m doing well in my classes, and I don’t need help right now – which is what enables me to go in and say “okay, maybe I should try this out in case I want it later.” No matter what, I save face – I’m coming from a place of strength.
Before I had enough things on my resume to “prove” to any other observers that I wasn’t broken, I… couldn’t bring myself to do this. The word “disabled” carries such a giant wave of assumptions with it that I needed other huge landmark criteria to make people do a double-take and actually look at me as a person instead of automatically washing my Mel-hood out with stereotypes. Or at least that’s what I thought, and how I still feel.
It is strange to feel (relatively) free to wander around and explore these things, now that so many outside forces and pressures I’ve dealt with for so long have been… dampened. My parents aren’t pressuring me to do this. I don’t need to do it to keep up with academics. My classmates, friends, colleagues, and teachers already see me as a bright and capable person. I’ve accomplished enough that other markers have become salient and my deafness has become a dim background note – nobody points me out as “the kid with the hearing aids” any more. Instead, I’m Mel, who researches open source and education. Or Mel, who cooks a fantastic quinoa salad. Or Mel, who proofread my conference paper, or set up my website, or finished her German final project on week 5 of the semester (that was fun – I’m systematically going through my classes and finishing all the work for the semester, one by one, so that by the end of term I only need to relax, proofread, and do some minor formatting).
And there’s some interesting stuff out there. Look, look, a hearing aid that can stand up to dust and water! One of the (many) reasons I didn’t wear hearing aids was because I’m a very spontaneous person, and I do things like running out into the rain in glee, jumping in the ocean in New Zealand on a whim, drilling 2x4s for a play set and getting sawdust everywhere… and assistive devices and services add these subtle bits of inertia to your life that sometimes make you feel a bit less free. Ironic, when the real end goal of assistive services is to give you more independence and freedom.
Thursday, February 9th, 2012 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
40 years ago, some folks at Stanford conducted an interesting experiment with preschoolers:
A marshmallow was offered to each child. If the child could resist eating the marshmallow, he was promised two instead of one. The scientists analyzed how long each child resisted the temptation of eating the marshmallow, and whether or not doing so had an effect on their future success. (Source: Wikipedia)
Short answer: yes.
Greg and I were talking about the difference between production and production capacity a few days ago, and the importance of balancing the two. It’s not a hard concept; we do this all the time when we play video games. When you play Monopoly, you build houses and hotels because you know that’s going to give you the strong resource and financial base you need to wipe the board with everyone else at the end; when you sit down for Settlers of Catan, you build cities – you don’t just start hurtling roads out there, right? You want that grain, that ore, those bricks. You want that power at your fingertips, so you Do The Marshmallow – you focus on building that power, even if it means not using all the little bits of power you have right then. Less shiny now, more shiny later.
What does this have to do with FOSS? Well, I’m reminded of the Marshmallow Experiment every time I see something like this:
“Linux geeks not caring about noobs is the main reason Windows is so popular.” –Chris Watkins
That’s my friend Chris, from Appropedia. Chris is a technical guy who loves the Free world; he’s an engineer working on disseminating open-licensed appropriate technology information to grassroots communities of hackers in the developing world using an entirely open-source software stack to do so. His statement reads to me like a bug report on FOSS’s ability to build production capacity in its communities. (We’ve gotten better, thanks to tons of long, hard work by many different groups and people – but there’s still a long way to go.)
I am also reminded of the Marshmallow Experiment every time I see something like this:
I just think it’s bizarre. “We need more people! Lets try to recruit those with this particular type of sex organs!” –from a GNOME Women comment thread
Dude. Do you want to curse the darkness? Or do you want to light some candles? Because what you did right there is called “cursing the people who are lighting candles.” When you see someone trying to improve the capacity of a community you care about, try helping them. Constructive criticism is helpful; however, the above comment is a good example of destructive criticism. Here’s how to tell the difference.
These comments are, in different ways, both about building production capacity in FOSS communities. In a world where software is considered obsolete after a year or two, where 6-month releases are built in no small part upon the outputs of 48-hour hackfests, where there are so many compelling reasons to focus on the now – what does your project do to look into the future? (Does it?) Could you see those two scenarios above applying to the communities you work within?
Sunday, February 5th, 2012 | Didn't fit anywhere else, fedora | 2 Comments »
From Katie, regarding admissions – she’s talking specifically about our alma mater, Olin, but I think it applies to any school (or company) that wants to chart their own path.
I’m afraid that if we publicize ourselves as seeking to select the “best” students for admission, we will get… more box-tickers. Fewer lifelong learners. More obedient queuers. Fewer spontaneous beekeepers. More people aiming to graduate and be named “exceptional” for doing so. Fewer people aiming to shape the school that will (sometimes just barely) graduate them, and who actually do all the revolutionary rule-breaking that “exceptional” implies. (emphasis mine)
To this I say amen.
This weekend will be devoted to getting my life in order for the storm of travel that is to come between next week and the beginning of April. Once I get on my first plane, I believe there will be a grand total of 5 days where I’m not traveling. Amazingly enough, I managed to arrange my schedule so I’ll miss a grand total of one class – which is having an exam that day that I’ll simply take early.
Time management for this semester has not been perfect (it never will be), but it’s been amazingly good. The secret? Waking up early. Very, very, very early. And sleeping early – and adequately – and eating well, which sometimes for me means not guilting out over spending $3.50 on a large soup for lunch when I forget to pack the homemade meal I made the night before. Doing work at the office and being focused about it, and trying not to bring work home.
And that is how I juggle 4 graduate classes plus an independent study plus research on three days a week – I do that Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday, and freelance and do my own reading (and some of my own research) Thursday-Friday. I have breaks, I take walks, I hang out with classmates, I spend entire days doing things other than work; I sleep, I eat, I go to random movie showings and talks and other campus events, I audit German 201 when I can and work my way through my grammar book when I can’t, and I spend time doing things like “let’s explore the hearing thing!” (read: go see audiologist, drive back and forth across town figuring out how Vocational Rehabilitation state services work, etc.)
It helps a lot that grad school classes for me have been heavily reading-based so far, and I’m a fast reader; one professor dumps about 300 pages of dense developmental psychology on us every week, and I usually read it after dinner on the evening it’s assigned. In fact, I try to do all my work for a class on the day of that class – a week before it’s due, that is, not the morning-of. And I do all of my meeting/workgroup followup immediately after the meeting (if I can) or that same day (if I can’t). This means I have some very, very long Mondays – 3 of my 4 classes meet on Mondays – but I know that when I’m done, I’m really done. It’s amazing how wonderful it feels to know it’s not possible for you to be forgetting something.
Again, it’s not perfect. I slip. I slip a lot. But it feels like I’m using my time more effectively this semester than I have in… any other semester I have ever been at school, so something’s working. And I’m letting myself do that – I’m trying hard things, it’s ok if I fail, I recalibrate and get back on track and readjust the track instead of beating myself up… which takes a lot of willpower, because it’s the intellectual-rational part of my brain that needs to keep on shouting “IT’S OKAY DON’T BEAT YOURSELF UP” when I… beat myself up. (Instinct! It’s hard to fight that habit!) But progress is being made!
It helps to have something you really want to do. And it helps to make yourself focus on several things you want to do, and to turn down stuff, or keep extra stuff optional, so you don’t end up with towering piles of obligation. I suppose I would summarize my strategy this term as “when you take on an obligation, do it immediately, thus acquiring no obligation backlog whatsoever.”
I’d like to get better at regular exercise, which is something I’m still experimenting with – none of my lifehack attempts so far have gotten me to exercise regularly this semester, so I’ve decided that I’ll take advantage of Purdue’s cheap ($45 for the semester!) group fitness classes. Sure, maybe I should be able to do pushups on the floor of my own apartment. But I’m still new enough to the whole “fitness” thing that having structure, company, and people to nag me about my form is not a bad idea – and then maybe I’ll do pushups at home to practice outside of class. Who knows?
Friday, February 3rd, 2012 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
As you can tell from my posts today – my brain is overflowing, and I’m trying to get it out so I can process it all. It’s nearly 9pm and I should go home, eat dinner, work on a side project, sleep… but it feels good to have my mind clear, my plate clear, to not worry that I won’t remember something later. Clearly I need to balance out this tradeoff more, but… I’m not in a bad place right now. I’m actually in a pretty good one. The trick, as always, is to see what happens when the pace picks up.
Had one of those “wait, how did 4 hours pass, and is it really 3am now?” conversations with Mark last night; there’s something satisfying in the sort of friendship where you can go months without contact and still know you’ll be slugging it out, no-holds-barred, over your new ideas and directions within a few minutes of starting to talk again. I give him shit, he gives me shit, and we thereby keep each other honest.
Sebastian sent me “WAT,” a brilliant 5-minute lightning talk on programming languages that left me howling with laughter. Via Karl Wurst came an insightful blog post on defaulting to closed and Macneil Shonle’s “Why I Will Randomly Assign Students in Group Projects.” Fellow Olin alum Katie Rivard pointed me to Up The Ivy, an old satire of academic culture.
And now it’s time for coffeehouse decompression with Velvet and Nikitha. Mmm… quiet time.
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
Shannon asked me to keep track of the “moments of disjointedness” I came across as an engineering (education) student in an art and design (research methods) class, so here’s the starter list:
- IRB. “Wait. Not only do you not do IRB, you don’t even know what it is?” (Not Shannon – she trained as a sociologist. I meant the art/design students.)
- How we describe ourselves. We had to write artist/designer statements for ourselves and for somebody else. An artist/designer statement by an artist or designer reads sort of like… philosophy. An engineer’s “artist/designer statement” reads like a resume parsed as a technical specification. (There’s another engineering education student in the class.)
- What we need to justify. I showed Shannon the abstract I was working on and braced for questions on my (fuzzy and emergent) methodology – but she took one look and nodded – “ah yes, grounded theory!” – and said it looked good. “Wait. You… didn’t ask me to justify this? It looks okay? But it-” …is much more normal to be things-other-than-positivist in social science research. Yes. Forgot about that.
- Thesis work. Art and engineering students tend to produce their Masters’ theses in two parts: a Thing and a Paper. In Engineering,the Paper is about the Thing. It describes the Thing, how made the Thing, how the thing Works. The Paper About The Thing is the Thesis. In contrast, art students are specifically not supposed to write their Paper about their Thing. They are not to explain their Thing. Instead, the Paper is a separate work that complements the Thing – I am not sure what that means yet – and the two together form the Thesis. I… am still trying to figure this one out. And don’t even ask me what a PhD in art looks like!
There are, I realize, huge differences between art and design – I’m not yet attuned to what those differences are (Shannon explained a few to me – department cultures, the objective/subjective balance in their work, individual vs collective shows, and so forth). So that’s something for more exploration later.
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 2 Comments »
I went to see the University’s nutritionist today. I wanted to learn how to experiment more rigorously with my diet in order to increase cognitive function. Specifically, over the past few years I’ve noticed these foods have some effect on my ability to think clearly:
- Gluten.
- Lactose. (Yogurt/kefir/cheese seem to be fine as long as I don’t go nuts.)
- Meat. (Red meat more than white meat, white meat more than seafood.)
I’m not allergic to any of these, but I do appear to be sensitive – it’s almost as if those three substances each has a slowly-draining reservoir (for engineers: look, it’s an integrator! For Oliners: look, it’s a bathtub!) somewhere inside me, and if I “fill” the reservoir by eating that substance faster than it can drain, my brain starts doing funky things. Actually, it’s not “as if” there were a reservoir – there is. It’s called my bloodstream.
The usual procedure for an experiment goes something like this:
- Reset environment to known control state.
- Introduce the intervention.
- Record results.
The human body’s a funky thing, though. It depends on your mood, how much sleep you’re getting, how dehydrated (or not) you are, whether you had a big paper due that week, if you exercised, whether it’s cold outside… and there’s no reboot button. So finally we ended up with this little guide to food challenges – that’s what they’re called, “food challenges.” Sounds like a reality TV show! Anyway:
Reset environment to known control state. Have a “safe food diet” – a bunch of dishes that I like to eat, are nutritionally balanced (protein, carbs, fat, vegetables, fiber, all the stuff your mom told you when you were small), and don’t contain any of the stuff I’m trying to test for. So for me, a bowl of rice and black bean chili works – or curry over quinoa, or… you get the idea. Eat this for long enough that your system “clears out” whatever substances you’re testing; in allergy/immunization studies, this is usually 1-2 weeks. (Allergy and immunology journals, by the way, are nice sources of procedures for experimental setup; check out PubMed if you have access.) I’m going for 2 weeks, which lets me set approximately one food experiment up per month.
Introduce the intervention. In other words, “eat gluten, lactose, and/or meat,” while making sure my meals remain nutritionally balanced (so that any effects won’t be the results of, say, not eating fiber). In controlled doses, depending on what I want to test. Also, watch out for the placebo effect. Nutrition and food science journals are most useful as models for this segment of the study.
For instance, I think I have some gluten sensitivity; if I eat bread at every meal, my brain goes fuzzy. But if I’m on a gluten-free (or, since gluten is everywhere and I’m not vigilant enough about it, almost gluten-free) diet and have a slice of bread, I’m fine. So what’s the tipping point – how do I get a better model of that reservoir? How big is it (3 bread-slices?) and how fast does it drain (1 bread-slice per day, meaning that I could eat 2 slices of bread today and 1 tomorrow and be fine, but not 3 today?)
Record results. Since I’m looking at my brain state here – neurochemical changes, in other words -I want to look at how other researchers have measured “effects on thinking.” I tend to notice effects commonly associated with ADHD (yep, I have that too) – lack of focus, physical restlessness – so things like the Conner Scale or Hyperscheme (another scale) might be worth looking into; PubMed has plenty more that I don’t know about just yet. Again, watch for the placebo effect. Whenever possible, I’ll try to measure things somewhat less subjective than my opinion… but sometimes you just have to use your thoughts as an imperfect, messy instrument because that’s all you’ve got.
Neurochemical changes can happen fast. Stomach-brain communication is pretty quick – the “I’m full, stop being hungry!” signal takes maybe 20-30 minutes. So it’s possible I may be able to record these things during the meal – or at the very least, at the end of the day. Some food effects can take as long as 3 days to show up… but for mental-performance tracking, I’m likely looking at a shorter scale.
So that’s my lifehacking braindump for the day. Hopefully it’ll be useful to others experimenting with similar stuff (I’m looking at you, Matt Ritter). And many thanks to Dr. Annie Mahon for helping me geek out with her this morning!
Also, I need a lot more calcium than I’m getting. As a fairly skinny Asian woman who’s not big on lactose (milk), I’m at risk for osteoporosis; I eat yogurt on some days, but at best that gets me about 500mg of the stuff, and I need 1000. But you can only absorb 500mg at a time, and shouldn’t go over 2500mg in a day. No problem; I’ll just get a supplement in 500mg increments and pop one during lunch if I have yogurt for breakfast, and pop one during breakfast and one during lunch if I go yogurtless for the day. Must build strong bones! Do weight-bearing exercises! Mel smash!
I’ve decided to think of my life as a 125-year project. (Because I think medical science makes it feasible – and also because I like cube numbers.) The plans you make for the future look way different when you think of it as “wow, 100 years to go.”
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 4 Comments »
It’s been a weird day so far this morning. Trying to stay atop work, trying to breathe, trying not to drop things, trying to balance…
This morning, TuxRadar ran my piece on open source education in Europe (many thanks to Dave Neary for the pointers). I’m also now officially a piece of Purdue propaganda – my work with open source and education was featured in a “5 students who are example makers” profile by Sue Ferringer and also got picked up in the (Purdue) Presidents’ Newsletter. This was, to employ a generic and overused phrase, “really cool.” It also threw me off equilibrium a little bit (though in a positive way, I think) – I’m not used to that kind of attention.
I love how the photographer managed to capture me in can’t-sit-still mode. But it’s still a little weird to look at the website and go “wait, is that me?” It’s fascinating to see how much gravitas a shiny website, good photos, and snappy text can add. I’m desperately learning how to combat impostor syndrome; I still get overwhelmed, confused, lost, tired – but I am doing awesome things, and I shouldn’t forget that side either. The challenge is to keep my eye on what’s important, following my own internal compass towards learning and doing excellent work, regardless of the circumstances. The more I charge forth into the world, the more important being grounded becomes; I’m trying to build a foundation of being centered and taking time to rest and renew and recalibrate.
And so I read, I stretch, I take the time to cook and eat good food. I’m about to do lunch in a moment, but before doing that, here’s something else that gave me pause today – some folks made a couple comic strips about Hobbes (from Calvin & Hobbes) and Bacon (daughter of Calvin and Susie, named after the philosopher). It’s a beautiful homage. This post has links to all four strips (use the alternate links), and NPR has commentary on them as well as a pointer to Gerry Canavan’s collection of Calvin-as-a-grownup drawings from multiple artists (one is PG-13 NSFW, though if you get depressed at the last strip do see the sequel halfway down the thread here).
I loved Calvin & Hobbes as a child. I still do. And found reading the Hobbes & Bacon strips to be a lovely, bittersweet moment; time moves on and life moves on, and we see others walk the paths we once trod. I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately, and how perpetual adolescence is no longer such a central part of my identity – I’m no longer everyone’s kid sister, I’m taking on more complex roles. And that is strange and new, budding and unfamiliar – and wonderful. It’s amazing how much you can grow when you feel safe, and when you channel your energy towards learning (and the associated discomfort) instead of defense mechanisms. Crazy.
To the people, places, and communities who make me feel safe and grounded, and give me a solid place to fly from and to come back to: thank you.
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012 | Didn't fit anywhere else | 1 Comment »
From today’s “Engineering Thinking and Development” class on nature vs. nurture. I was nominated as my group’s scribe, where by “scribe” I mean “comic artist.”
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012 | Didn't fit anywhere else | No Comments »
