In Short
Brevity
"What do you feel is your strength as a writer?"
"Brevity"
"Brevity? In a 600+ page novel?"
http://www.sffworld.com/interview/224p0.html
Unfortunately, there is no such brevity in this verbose letter.
Wow, spring quarter was busy, and I'm already several months behind. Thus, parts of spring quarter (ie, my classes) and parts of winter quarter (ie, talks) will be released as part 2.
Classes
Designing your Life made me realize why these letters are so long: the unlived life is not worth examining!
Sleep and Dreams gives extra credit for falling asleep in class. If you ever feel tired or have trouble sleeping, there are some tips in that section that might help you.
Urban Studies 132 taught me everything that I needed to know to run a social enterprise (now it should be easy, right?). In the class, I compared bicycle helmets to condoms. I'll be TAing it next year.
In CS140, I made an operating system. Intense.
In Biomedical Ontologies, I didn't learn that much, but Randall Munroe made an XKCD about biocomputation: http://xkcd.com/938/
Extracurriculars
I gave high schoolers internet access at the Stanford debate tournament, and they pirated songs.
As a computer science section leader, I made instructional videos to supplement the lectures and autograders to make grading easier. One of my debaters also gave a tech talk at Stanford's ACM.
I designed and taught a class called CS1U: Practical Unix. Someone even called me "Professor King." All of the lectures are available online: check out cs1u.stanford.edu.
In Queer Straight Alliance, we put on a drag ball, and some of the frosh in my dorm made be pretty.
Art, Culture, and Musings
My new favorite book (after The Plague) is Patrick Rothfuss' "Name of the Wind." Someone must have heard that I like stories because it's a story about a storyteller telling stories about people telling stories. It is the most epic page-turning book that I have ever read.
I suffered through 1600 pages between "World War Z," "Lies of Locke Lamora," and "Game of Thrones" (all perfectly good books) before realizing that I don't like books with too many points of view.
"Good Omens," "Man in the High Castle," "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," and "Dresden Files" were all pretty good.
I saw Matt Nathanson twice and many other concerts, but I did not see The Decemberists at Outside Lands.
I saw blue men spit up gumballs into a woman's purse.
I saw a long Daft Punk music video and some other movies.
I played Nietzsche themed video games and games where praying to the gods makes the monsters harder. I'm not sure that the two concepts are related.
There is a whistle around my neck.
Unlike Michelle Bachman, I don't think that "submissive" means respect. I think that "utilitarianism" means "respect."
Life
I went to the Dominican Republic and discovered that I can actually speak Spanish well enough to communicate. I also did not get sued.
I got my wisdom teeth out without becoming a chipmunk (just a miso-vore). The most painful part of the process involved my wallet.
I never got chicken pox as a kid (guess how I found out!).
My dorm voted me most likely to contact aliens. Little do they know, I already have!
Looking Forward
The next verbose letter will include a description of working at Google.org over the summer and being an SCA at a Sophomore College (the one that I took as a sophomore -- check out my 2010-01 verbose letter: http://stanford.edu/~samking/personal/verbose-2010-01/)
I was accepted into Stanford's Coterminal Masters program in Computer Science.
I might go to business school in the future.
Contents
Circadian Rhythm + Entrainment
Adversary Model + Circadian Timing
Objective Measures of Tiredness
URBANST132 - Running a Nonprofit
Social Entrepreneurship + Intro
Section Leading Introductory CS Classes
Name of the Wind + Wise Man's Fear
The Lies we Tell Ourselves to Get to Sleep
Matt Nathanson + OneRepublic Concerts
No Exit (Sartre Play) with SLE 4/9
Ethics: Shop Talk / Shop Think
Straw Person Utilitarianism: it has a brain after all!
TAing Urban Studies 130 Series
Winter Classes
ME104B - Design your Life
Intro
I took Design Your Life because I heard good things about it and have tried to take classes with cool people. I was very pleased.
The class was part of the Design School, also called the d.school. The d.school has a way to institutionalize creativity (in Soviet Russia, creativity institutionalizes you!), and this class shared a lot of those tips. The point of the class was to apply them to your life and career, which I didn't find the most useful, but the class inspired me to take more classes on design.
In an early class, the teacher asked what we did when we felt stuck (had a creative block). I don't experience a feeling of stuckness, so the teacher didn't believe my answer.
Brainstorming
One part of the design methodology is brainstorming, or "ideation." This involves a whiteboard and a lot of sticky notes. The rules are spelled out here: http://tomwillerer.com/post/145531080/the-seven-rules-of-brainstorming-from-ideo.
My teacher in Transformative Design says that "defer judgment" should really be "gleeful acceptance" -- deferring judgment means that you hold your judgment in until later and brood on it. Like a permanent dark, ominous storm cast over all ideas, you will prevent growth and flourishing, only allowing the weeds to thrive. With gleeful acceptance of other ideas, you allow them to build off of one another, to the benefit of all. One can imagine that this is how Oprah works: "I want to give people prizes." "How about a car for everyone!"
"Encourage Wild Ideas" also got a special place in the class. When some people were getting stuck brainstorming how to use a ruler to get a ping pong ball out of a hole, the professor took their ruler, broke it apart, and informed them that they now had even more tools to use. We also had a reading about a similar challenge, and the solution that it espoused was to pee in the hole so that the ping pong ball floats up.
The overall idea is that you're going for a quantity of okay ideas, and you can figure out which ones are good later. Thus, you still try to build off of other ideas, and you try to be visual (because those are the sticky notes that persist), and you try to stay focused and have one conversation at a time, but really what you care about is going for quantity.
Other Stuff + Bits of Wisdom
"These are the best years of your life" implies "It's all downhill after college!" But it isn't.
Don't worry about preparing for your "career." Most people have tons of jobs and two careers in their lives.
In the first class, there was an activity to balance a marshmallow on a spaghetti tower. My group did second best in the class. Apparently, this has been studied, and some groups do better than others in building big towers. In order from best to worst:
Engineers
CEOs with their secretaries
Kindergardeners
CEOs without their secretaries
Lots of other groups
MBA students
The design process is Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test. It also has a bias towards action, collaboration, prototyping, reframing problems, being human centered, synthesizing, cultivating curiosity, acceptance, and "if you can't fix it, feature it!" (in other words, when you discover that you can't maximize windows, replace the battery, or use the F keys in a Mac, you say "It's not a bug; it's a feature!")
Marketing: "Giving the truth the best possible chance of being heard"
"Your generation is running out of oil and climate, so there is great opportunity!"
There are different categories of success, including production, experience, character, and relationships.
People experience choice overload: with 4 free 'designer' jam samples, 90% try and 80% of those buy; with 10 samples, half as many try and even less buy. The moral: don't worry about throwing away opportunities!
You can't buy creativity: when doing the same task, people are more creative and effective if unpaid than paid. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose lead to performance and self-satisfaction.
"Ask for 100% of what you want 100% of the time"
"The unexamined life is not worth living? The unlived life is not worth examining!"
Mentoring does not mean giving advice. "If I were you" really means "If you were me."
My annotations on the course topics:
Do good here and now, work with cool people, accept difference, challenge yourself, and do what you like.
Philosophy
We were assigned to write a short world view and work view.
Workview:
I am defined by my actions, and my work is a significant part of my actions. Work, like other parts of my life, develops who I am. Thus, work is unimportant, but good work, work that surrounds me with good people and makes the world a better place (for some individuals, at least), is important.
There isn't a strong distinction between work and other parts of my life. People pay me for things that I think are meaningful, but money doesn't cause me to do something that I wouldn't do otherwise, and a lack of money doesn't cause me to turn down an opportunity that I would enjoy.
A lack of experience shouldn't get in the way of doing good work. I've heard too many failed utopian dreams of making money or gaining power or being selfish in the interim and then doing good later to believe in that strategy. No one is too much of a novice to help others, and even without utopia, doing good work now is both necessary and sufficient to save the world.
This is of primary importance because the importance of work does not rely on other philosophical premises. It is evident that people are suffering, and it is evident that I am lucky enough to be able to change that. As Camus said, "For the moment I know this; there are sick people and they need curing."
Worldview:
If humans are here for a reason, I don't know it. For the time being, I know that people suffer, and I can stop it.
Life doesn't have an intrinsic meaning, and the meaning that I have chosen is to help others.
People are social animals. Even though I'm introverted, I'm happiest when I'm with people.
Helping others is good. Doing what makes you happy even if it doesn't help others is still worthwhile. Being nice is important.
I don't think there is a higher power worthy of worship. If there were a god that was not omnipotent, then why call it a god? Obama is also much more powerful than me, but I wouldn't call him a god. If there were a god that was omnipotent but cruel, I would not call that entity a god; I would call that entity a tyrant and rebel against it. If there were a god that was omnipotent and benevolent, then why do innocents suffer? Humans didn't cause malaria or malnourishment, so "free will" isn't a good answer.
The distinction between productive and unproductive games is more important than between finite and infinite games.
Etc:
There was also some philosophy that the course exposed us to. There's a book called "Flow" that says that people are happy when they're doing something challenging that they can succeed at. I do think that there is a cultural element to that (I think that there are people who see beauty in simplicity rather than in always doing something challenging), but I agree with it for me. I'm not sure that I would call constantly challenging yourself "going with the flow" though!
There's a book (article?) about Finite and Infinite games that says that finite games have a winner, a loser, and an objective, whereas infinite games like life don't. I don't think that this is a useful distinction because there are many very important games that are neither finite nor infinite. The goal of global eradication of malaria has a clear objective, so it is not infinite, but it is not a competitive goal with a winner and a loser, so it is not finite.
Midway through the course, we had an exercise to write down things that we learned in the course and things that we unlearned. Because I'm stubborn, I don't really think that I unlearned anything.
Career Prep
The class was advertised as a career preparation class, but that was my least favorite part.
A lot of it ended up being cool. The workview stuff discussed in the Philosophy section was one part of career preparation -- how might we get a career that matters to us -- but there was also more traditional stuff.
We practiced elevator pitches for ourselves. An elevator pitch is a 30 second pitch for something, and the medium can apply for pretty much anything ("you should go out with me for these three reasons" probably doesn't work so well). However, I'm good at talking, and I am confident that I would be good at anything (regardless of whether or not that is true), so I don't really need to practice an elevator pitch.
I also don't think that their advice to focus on the elevator pitch over the cover letter and resume was good. As a computer scientist, the people that I talk to at the career fair will probably be recruiters rather than people making a hiring decision. As a reasonably qualified Stanford computer scientist, there is a very slim chance that my resume won't make it to the eyes of an engineer. At that point, my ability to convey my technical prowess and interest in a cover letter, a resume, or a technical interview are more important. Even if I were interviewing for a non-technical position, I feel confident that I can get a full-fledged interview.
We were assigned to go to the liberal arts career fair. I stopped by towards the end, and by that time, all of the organizations that I might have been interested in had left. Then again, I already had summer plans, so I wasn't too sad. I saw one of my friends, and he commented, "What are you doing here? You're a computer scientist -- you don't need these jobs. Get away!" It was slightly amusing.
Someone from the Career Development Center talked about Stanford Alumni Mentoring, an opportunity for undergraduates to connect with an alumni to ask them about their career path. With an acronym like that, how can I say no?
Personality Test
We also did a personality test ("Strengths Quest"). Here is what I wrote about it for class:
One thing we did in ME104B was take a Strengths Quest survey. It was a generic personality test that then reported a few strengths. It said that I was analytical, a learner, an achiever, an includer, and self-assured. In other words, it told me that I think analytically, enjoy learning, am a workaholic, think that people are important, and that I am confident. I bet you never would have guessed.
The problem with Strengths Quest is that it doesn't give any attention to synergy. I'm a workaholic because I care about people. I'm self-assured because I work to help people and because of what I know. The other problem is that it only gives 5 categories, even though at least a dozen of their categories apply to me. Thus, the level of detail was shallow: the survey told me things that I already knew about myself.
I'll talk about the includer trait and synergies therein.
One suggestion is to realize that people will relate to each other through me because I'm a conduit for information. Part of this stems from my role as an includer: I find it hard to dislike people, and I am put off when one group trash talks another group. That also comes from my workaholicness. I often know someone in that other group because I'm often a part of that other group. Wearing a lot of different hats means that I'm more likely to think about the different roles that people have and value their inclusion. It also means that a lot of people know me for different reasons. My focus in each area gets my foot in the door with people; my focus in each other area means that I can give those people big-picture knowledge.
For instance, there are a lot of gender biases in the computer science community, but as someone who is also a leader in the queer community, I can speak authoritatively about how some discourse leads to exclusion. Because I'm dedicated to social sector work but am in the computer science community, people interested in social change ask me questions about how to best incorporate computer science into their social mission or about service opportunities within computer science. I connect people, and I provide a big picture.
One part of being an includer is that I believe in cooperation. I like computer science and social entrepreneurship because those fields teach me how to solve problems and build things. Everyone can agree that we need problems solved and things built. No one has to be excluded. No one has to be beaten. We can, in fact, all work together.
That is to say, I don't believe in competition. Interesting thing for a debate coach to say, eh? When I think competitively, achieving a goal is only instrumental to winning. When I think cooperatively, the goal is paramount. In debate, a team must construct a strategy that makes them marginally better than their opponents. A team must find a way to disprove arguments that they agree with (unless the only statement they agree with is "we are the best debaters and should win." Then, they're set!). A team must construct arguments that are not only good, but that put their opponents at a disadvantage.
That isn't how the real world works. If you try to be marginally better than someone else, you're setting yourself up for a downfall, and you aren't challenging yourself. Put in other words, when my goal was to beat other debaters, I might have worked 60-80 hours per week on school and debate; now that my goal is to end injustice in the world, I work 80-100 hours per week doing exclusively things that I enjoy and that better the world. The latter goal definitely merits the extra 20 hours per week. If you try to disprove your opponents as a method of achieving truth, then you will gain a good approximation of the truth, but why does the truth matter anyways? We already know what must be done. The problem isn't in theory. The problem is in putting words into practice. If you try to disadvantage your opponents, you're wasting your time. Imagine what society would look like if every act of destruction were an act of creation. Innovation would abound. The world becomes a lot simpler when you're trying to help your neighbor rather than beat them at an inconsequential game. In other words, I don't see myself as a debate coach; I see myself as an educator.
Career Paths
We did informational interviews. I didn't end up asking anyone to sit down with me for the express purpose of having an informational interview, but I did ask people about career paths. Here are some of the ideas that I have gleaned from many sources over the past three years (and the great thing about this course is that even though I didn't do the assignment in the way it was asked, no one cares!):
Overall:
The path that I want to go on has not been paved, but there are certainly lots of little trails going in the same direction. In other words, there are some proven methods, and there's a lot that's just trying hard.
There are opportunities for me everywhere since I work hard, have good liberal arts skills (communication, empathy, organization, logic, being a nice person), and have computer science skills. Also, everyone cares about helping people (even if they don't devote most of their time to those endeavors), so it is easy to get a helping hand to do what I want to do. Some of those people are already my friends, and some haven't met me yet.
My work will have a positive impact on the world. That is my declaration and commitment to the world. Thus spake Samuel Joshua.
Different Paths:
If you have an elected position, you have to spend all of your effort fundraising. If you are working in a for-profit, even if you are in the social-good sector of that for-profit, you have to make profit. Nonprofits need to get funding somehow. Social movements are a whole different story.
There are a lot of unhappy lawyers. Dean Spade, the first out trans law school professor at Seattle U, tells people not to go to law school if they're interested in social change. Stan Christensen, the professor of Negotiation at Stanford, said that when he was thinking of becoming a lawyer, the ones that he talked to didn't seem happy. That isn't to say that there aren't happy lawyers and lawyers that create value, but I will say that after having a lawyer threaten to sue me when I was acting in good faith, I can see what Spade meant about law school teaching people to think and talk confrontationally rather than cooperatively. On the other hand, one of my old debate coaches does very cool and cooperative labor arbitration stuff that people use instead of suing one another.
Working in international development can be hard because many of the problems that people are trying to address with international development programs are superficial, and the root problem is a culture that might include a corrupt government, no government, war, ethnic conflict, etc. In other words, the problems are cultural, social, and massively political. Silver bullets are hard to find. Working in international development might feel like chipping away at a massive iceberg. It might also be what needs to be done. And there are tons of opportunities.
I think that starting an organization to address a big need can have a big impact.
Things I Enjoy:
I should try out CS research or CS in a university context to see if I'm interested in it.
I enjoy teaching, but it's a lot of work for any age group.
I enjoy coding, but I don't enjoy coding in Ruby.
Networking is natural for me when I have something to talk about (ie, Code the Change). I have gotten over being afraid of cold calling people.
I enjoy working, but I need to make sure to set limits for myself to have time for family.
I enjoy seeing different cultures. Traveling around as part of my job would be cool.
I don't care about location, but I can't work in a hot climate (Cambodia).
I want to work with people. Doing software engineering full time doesn't have enough working with people even though I do enjoy it and even in the perfect environment (Google).
I want to do lots of different things - I enjoy having a schedule that gets me to switch between coding and organizing and classes and such. I need to try out more of a management role.
Future Plans
We were assigned to make an "Odyssey Plan." An Odyssey Plan is a plan for living your Odyssey Years (the 5 or 10 years after college).
My Odyssey plan saw several prototypes. At first I was structuring it like a powerpoint and photoshopping together corny graphics. Then, I re-read the part that said that we shouldn't use their graphics and should, instead, use some that are genuine to me. That was when I realized that my career plan on coming into Stanford was saving the world, not making power points. I am a debate coach, a computer scientist, and a teacher. The debate coach part means that I think verbally, not graphically. The CS part means that I think in structured data, not in slides. The teacher part means that my preferred medium for turning data into communication is a whiteboard and marker. Because I chose a medium that worked for me, I didn't end up with 10 mediocre slides, 3 prototypes, and one plan. Instead, I ended up with 6 fully completed 10 year plans.
The below table (if you got the crazy idea to print this out, the table probably will look horrible) lists a few top career plans and what I like and don't like about each of them. I made it in winter quarter, but it's still mostly good information. I want to try out teaching and managing something, and it would be cool to travel.
To present this without slides, I brought in a tangible symbol of each path. For biocomputation research, I brought a shirt from BCATS, a Biocomputation conference at Stanford. For Google, I brought my Google umbrella. For labor policy, I brought a Union Label shirt. For travel, I brought a shirt from Cambodia. For Code the Change, I brought an old hackathon shirt. For teaching, I brought a computer science section leading shirt.
I told people that originally I had only thought about research, industry, and a startup (because that's what computer scientists are told exists), but towards the end I thought that teaching, travel, and startup were my best options. That is, doing this exercise helped me think about my future.
|
Tagline |
Plan-Short |
Impact |
Symbol |
Resources |
I Like People |
I Like High Magnitude Impact |
I Like Direct High Probability Impact |
Confidence |
Coherence |
me |
community |
world |
milestones |
support-requirements |
why-not? |
why? |
|
Teach |
Lecture at Stanford, teach younger kids, coach debate, and make Khan Academy style videos |
Education is accessible to everyone in the world |
Video |
Totally |
I like helping kids. |
Videos are scalable, and education is important. Everyone has the internet. Everyone can make a living as a programmer. |
Directly fulfilling |
Easy |
Definitely |
I will stay around Stanford. I will continue to be able to go to talks. I will learn how to help people understand things. I will learn how to make videos. I will learn computer science topics to teach them to the world. I will be able to have a lot of side projects, so I will stay busy. |
I will keep my current community and more deeply integrate myself into a community of educators |
I will help thousands of people in developing nations become computer scientists and bring their communities out of poverty |
CS1U done; lecturer position; CS106A rough draft; institutional support for CS106A; full CS core developed |
job offer at Stanford |
it feels like the same thing that I've been doing. It isn't very risky, and now is my opportunity to do risky things. |
it lets me continue to do startups, travel, and social justice stuff. Lecturing provides financial security, and Khan Academy style stuff provides high impact with high probability. |
|
Startup |
Make Hackathon into a nonprofit |
Public service is an essential part of CS culture; nonprofits don't lack programmers |
Hammer |
Totally |
I have already met a ton of cool people |
Cool and impactful |
Probably |
Probably |
It's what I do |
I will learn how to run an organization. This will enable me to start more organizations in the long term. I will also have 80+ hour weeks for the rest of my life. I will also learn about what a bunch of nonprofits are doing. I will learn web dev stuff. |
I will meet entrepreneurial and nonprofit movers and shakers. I might have a friend or two working with me, and will be able to bring people back, but I might have to live fairly independentnly. |
I will activate hundreds of computer scientists to do good |
4-5 hackathons per year; institutional model; spread to one other school; spread to 5 other schools; get someone else who can continue running the organization; transition power |
someone to pay me for doing hackathon; interested people at other universities |
risky - could be without money, independent, and without a successful organization |
high impact and good preparation for future high impact work |
|
Travel |
Get international CS jobs with nonprofits |
I help organizations and learn about global cultures |
Cell Phone |
Totally |
I like seeing new cultures |
Probably not |
Probably |
My grasp isn't too long |
Yeah... But maybe not enough oomph. |
I will learn about different cultures and different development models. I will learn about different nonprofits. I will learn different languages. I will continue learning about different programming models. |
I will have the time to develop relationships in each nonprofit that I work with. I will form a global community. |
I will make marginal impacts in many places |
at least 5 companies in different cultures, at least 1 in Africa |
job offer at places around the world |
probably not massively high impact. Away from all of my family and friends. Vegetarian food. |
I want to see the world |
|
Public Policy |
IWW, AFL-CIO, or UN |
A social movement improves the culture; people start to look for the Union Label again. |
Fist |
Mostly |
Cool people, probably |
Maybe |
I'm the son of a union man! |
Probably |
I would enjoy this |
I will reconnect with the labor movement. I will feel proud of the people that I work for. |
I have no idea what kind of people I'll work with |
I will make sure that people look for the union label. |
get a college student campaign approved; prototype the campaign at local colleges; spread it nationally; add in other demographics |
meaningful job offer at labor organization |
I'm not sure I would succeed, and I don't know what the organizations are like |
I am enamored with the movement |
|
Industry |
|
Massive infrastructure to leverage during my 20% time |
Computer |
Totally |
Cool people, but same old |
Maybe |
Heh... Maybe |
Easy |
Internally consistent, but not direct enough. No oomph. |
I will learn about CS |
I will meet cool computer scientists, and I will form a community with google.org folks |
I will tackle a project that will use massive computational power to help people |
meet tons of people at google.org; find a cool project; contribute |
job offer at Google |
My job wouldn't be to make a difference; my 20% time would be to make a difference. |
Cool organization with good infrastructure |
|
Research |
Get a PhD in biocomputation |
Breakthrough in metagenomics or viral understanding that leads to eradication of a disease |
DNA |
Totally |
Locking myself in a room doing research? |
Definitely |
hahaha - Yeah right! |
Probably not |
If only I thought I would succeed... |
I will learn about CS + Bio |
I will be working with research academics |
I will make a breakthrough in global infectious disease research |
find research group; learn how they do things; find a potential way to utilize viruses or metagenomics to heal people; research it |
phd acceptance; continued motivation; a biocomputation lab interested in metagenomics or viruses; luck |
chances are good that I won't make a breakthrough that will end a disease. Chances are good that it will be a decade before I find anything that will make any kind of difference |
I enjoy thinking about biocomputation, and it could be high impact |
|
Misc |
Journalism; start a social movement; travel without a day job; work in a campaign against war or genocide; work to get stable, non corrupt states with public education and free speech; work on international agriculture policy and education; international public health like clean water or a global campaign to eradicate tb or malaria; open culture IPR stuff; work against copyrights on living beings (GMO IPR) |
|||||||||||||||
|
General |
I want enough money to be comfortable ( = cost of food, shelter, internet, computer, transport, community, and philanthropy). I want to keep gaining new skills, even if they are unrelated to my work. I want to stay disciplined regarding finances, verbose letters, and moral consistency. |
I want to visit my family at least once or twice per year and to keep in touch with them at least once a week or once a month. I want a relationship with them. I want to stay in touch with my close friends and stay in contact with my other acquaintances. If I don't have a family, I want a relationship with someone with whom I could start a family. I'll start working on this harder if I'm still in the same place at age 25 that I am now. |
That's the point of my job. |
|||||||||||||
PSYCH135 - Sleep and Dreams
Intro
Sleep and Dreams is a famous class, taught by Dr. Dement, the person who discovered REM sleep. I went to his talk when I was a prospective frosh. His tagline is "Drowsiness is Red Alert": when a student falls asleep in class, they are woken up with a squirt gun, and they have to shout "Drowsiness is Red Alert" to the whole class. Then they get extra credit. The motivation is that lots of people die every year due to drowsiness, and a large amount of car accidents and deaths are caused by people falling asleep at the wheel. Being sleep deprived is roughly equivalent to being drunk in terms of alertness.
This year, Dr. Dement was recovering from a stairs related injury for most of the quarter, so he didn't end up lecturing. We had a few lectures from another professor on sleep medicine that will be taking over for Dr. Dement at some point, and we had a bunch of guest lectures.
If you're interested in learning more or learning about a specific topic, check out http://www.end-your-sleep-deprivation.com/, the course website. It also has a free ebook (shorter than this verbose letter!) about the absolute essentials of sleep medicine.
Course Work
In this course, there were lectures, exams, a sleep journal, and a final project.
The lectures were cool and educational. Some of the stuff that I learned is in Facts about Sleep.
The exams were different than I expected. Some questions were "did you attend lecture?" So, for instance, there was one question about the name of one of the guest lecturers' dogs ("Bear"), and there was another question about what he did to the dog to induce its narcolepsy (feed it). There were also a lot of questions that weren't really covered in the lectures, probably because there were so many guest lectures.
We were required to keep a daily sleep journal. That consisted of saying how much we slept on any given day, our alertness throughout the day, and some other stuff. I discovered that I averaged 7 hours of sleep per night, including naps, throughout the quarter. Or, in other words, I fell 90 hours behind on sleep throughout the quarter. This solidified some things about the class -- the circadian clock thing makes sense; there is an afternoon dip in alertness -- and it was overall a good experience. It did take time to think about, though, and I didn't continue the practice after the end of the class.
For the final project, a preeminent friend and I made an application to let people keep their sleep journals online rather than in an excel document. My friend did most of the work.
Important Stuff about Sleep
Why do we need sleep?
What we know: without sleep, we get tired. There are also lots of things that happen during sleep (ie, growth, memory), but if we were built differently, they could probably happen while we're awake.
Stages of Sleep
There are four stages of non-REM sleep, and there's REM sleep. REM stands for Rapid Eye Movement, and that's the stage of sleep when people are dreaming.
Slow wave sleep is NREM stages 3 and 4. That's deep sleep. It's also when growth hormone is released. Sleep deprived people like college students skip NREM 1 and 2 and go directly to NREM 3 and 4 and REM sleep to compensate for less overall time sleeping. However, our bodies probably have a reason for needing NREM 1 and 2 sleep, so it probably isn't healthy.
Sleep cycles are about 90 minutes. That means that between the start of NREM and the end of REM will take 90 minutes. These cycles get faster throughout the night. There is an idea that if you sleep for a multiple of 90 minutes, it's better for you. I think that this is where that idea comes from. However, I believe that that only pertains to the minute or two of grogginess that you might experience after waking, not to how well rested you feel during the day. Also, based on the class, I think that it's wrong that a cycle will end at 7.5hrs and 9hrs but not 8hrs: see, for instance, the graphic at http://www.end-your-sleep-deprivation.com/stages-of-sleep.html.
In babies, it's called active sleep and quiet sleep. Active is the name for REM because babies can't walk yet, so they don't need sleep paralysis. They start out in REM rather than in NREM sleep.
Sleep Debt
People have different baseline needs for sleep. If my baseline is 8 hours and I get 7 hours of sleep for one night, then I get one hour of sleep debt. If I get 7 hours of sleep for 10 nights, then I have 10 hours of sleep debt. If I get 7 hours of sleep for a year and then get 10 hours of sleep for a month, then I have 305 hours of sleep debt.
More sleep debt makes you worse at pretty much everything, including staying awake! It also makes you worse at most other physical tasks and mental tasks. That means that getting 10 hours of sleep after a lot of sleep deprivation still leaves you un-alert.
Circadian Rhythm + Entrainment
Everybody has a biological clock. That clock thinks of a day as 24 hours and 12 minutes. Sunlight adjusts the clock (it's called "entrainment"; other things can entrain you, but they don't work nearly as well as sunlight). This corrects for the extra 12 minutes. It can correct for up to about 3 hours per day if you time everything right. That's why you can get jetlag if you travel across the world.
Your body entrains by seeing the light through your eyes. If you're blind, you can still entrain because there are still light sensors in your eyes. If you have your eyes removed, you can't entrain, and you'll probably sleep poorly.
Adversary Model + Circadian Timing
Whenever I'm awake, I'm getting more sleep deprived. That's called the "homeostatic" sleep drive. Then why aren't I more tired at 8pm than at 10am? Because my body knows that it's 8pm by looking at my circadian clock, and it knows that I am sleep deprived, so it "alerts" me to keep me awake. As the day goes on, your homeostatic drive for sleep increases, but clock dependent alerting also increases to combat that.
When you take your homeostatic drive and subtract your alerting, you get your tiredness at a given time. Alerting doesn't increase at the same rate throughout the day, which is why people get tired in the afternoon (it isn't, primarily, because of lunch!).
What Is Sleep?
Characteristics of Sleep
Sleep: little movement (though there is still a considerable amount, which you probably know if you have slept with a partner or a roommate), stereotypic posture, reduced responsiveness, reversible ("I'll sleep when I'm dead" doesn't meet this criteria), and homeostatically regulated (that means that your body knows that you need sleep).
We measure sleep with an EEG (an electro encephalogram measures brain waves). Also helpful to tell apart different types of sleep are electromyograms (which can help you notice that people in REM have their body muscles paralysed) and electrooculograms (which help you notice that people in REM have rapid eye movement, though you probably would have never guessed that).
Objective Measures of Tiredness
Since yawning apparently isn't objective, to test how tired someone is, researchers use "Sleep Latency," the time it takes a person to fall asleep when they're put in a quiet, dark place (I don't think that these studies examined the back of lecture halls, but they fit the bill well enough). A good sleep latency is 20 minutes. An average college student is 8 minutes. A sleep deprived person will have less than 5 minutes of sleep latency.
Sleep Inertia
If you are woken up in the middle of REM sleep, you suffer from grogginess called sleep inertia. If you take a nap, it's best to nap for 20-40 minutes so that you don't go into REM sleep and suffer from sleep inertia. This is also why people claim that sleeping for increments of 90 minutes is better -- it isn't that you'll feel better throughout the day, but you will feel less groggy.
Retrograde Amnesia
People can't remember the few minutes before they fall asleep. It's called "retrograde amnesia." This is why if you wake someone up in the middle of the night and talk to them for a few minutes but they don't get out of bed, they probably won't remember it. This is also why we don't remember the fact that we wake up every 90 minutes when sleeping and why people with sleep apnea don't remember that they wake up gasping because they can't breathe hundreds of times per night (200-1000 times).
Sleep in Animals
The way that humans sleep isn't the only way.
Honeybees have inactivity, but we can't measure brainwaves, so it's hard to tell if they're sleeping. Cockroaches have a circadian rhythm. Drosophila (flies) meet all of the conditions. When we give them caffeine, they sleep less. Insomniac flies live shorter lives (60 days versus 80 days) but have more waking hours of life. Some folks think that sleep is a placeholder for life (more waking hours brings you closer to death, so sleep lets you live for more years. It's like if you don't ever use your phone or computer, you probably won't drop it and break it.).
Some animals hibernate. Hibernation is evolutionarily related to NREM sleep. In hibernation, REM sleep disappears. After waking up from hibernation, an animal will be very tired from not having much REM sleep, so they'll go to sleep for a long time to catch up. Hibernation makes animals lose some of their memory (maybe because their brain gets too cold), but not the important parts. In other words, when squirrels get done hibernating, they remember their family and where their nuts are, but they don't remember their friends.
Some animals only turn off half of their brain while sleeping. This is particularly true in aquatic mammals that need to keep moving since they need to go around and breathe. They never stop moving in their entire life. However, some of these animals turn both hemispheres on when they go up to breathe, so it isn't just for breathing.
Elephant seals, on the other hand, take a deep breath, then sleep, then wake up, float up and resurface to breathe again.
Some animals can go without sleep for a long while. Migratory birds don't sleep at night during migration season, and they aren't sleep deprived (their mental function is fine). Newborn orcas don't sleep at all for their first month or so of life. Neither do their moms (though, from what I hear, that happens in human parents too).
Thermoregulation
During REM sleep, your body doesn't regulate heat (ie, sweating/shivering). That's why you can't leave an infant in a hot or cold place: infants get a lot of REM sleep.
Also, during NREM sleep, our temperature goes down by a degree to conserve energy. It's like how energy saving advocates suggest turning your air conditioner up by two degrees and your heater down by two degrees -- it's not enough to make you uncomfortable, but the savings add up.
There are lots of other physiological changes, too.
Tiredness + Sleep Schedules
The School Day
Suppose a kid stays up until midnight and gets up for school at 6am (hey, in high school, I got plenty of sleep!). About two hours before their body thinks they'll wake up (as determined by their circadian clock), it starts to get their body energized and ready to wake up. If they get up at 6 instead of 8, then they won't start waking up until they're already awake, which means that they'll be tired for the school day. Thus, people who know about sleep are pushing for a later start to the school day.
A lot of kids fall asleep in class, and things that are diagnosed as learning disabilities are often just poor sleep.
Shift Work
In shift work, sometimes people will work a consistent shift that is not during daytime hours (ie, a graveyard shift). This is actually okay because a circadian rhythm doesn't care what the external time is.
The problem comes when it isn't consistent. For instance, if someone working a graveyard shift switches to a 'normal' schedule on the weekends, then they'll move their sleep schedules by 3 hours on Friday, 3 hours on Saturday, then back three hours on Sunday, and back three hours on Monday. So, for four days of the week, they'll be out of sync with their circadian rhythm.
This gets worse when the shifts move. Many shift schedules rotate the shifts every few weeks. Then, sometimes you're on graveyard, sometimes you're on swing, and sometimes you're normal. Then, you're forced to change your schedule. However, there are better and worse ways to do this. It's harder to fall asleep an hour before you normally do than to stay up an hour later, so it's generally best to move sleep time eight hours forward than eight hours back. Unfortunately, many shift rotations move shifts backwards rather than forwards. See, for instance, http://warrensilverman.com/powerpoint/shiftwork.ppt
Some schedules are just impossible. For instance, on nuclear submarines, they had an 18 hour day, which is impossible to entrain to. Thus, the people with their fingers on the button who had to make very important decisions were being chronically sleep deprived (fortunately, I don’t think that 'the button' was literally a button. Otherwise, might not be here today!).
Pilots + Doctors
They took anesthesiologists after being on call and measured alertness. 100% of them said that they were awake for the entire duration of the test. Over 70% had nodded off.
Pilots are more modest. 70-80% of them admit having nodded off during a flight. Even the ones that aren't fully nodding off are in the grey zone between sleep and wakefulness. This gets worse the longer they stay up, so right before landing, they have the least alertness. In a study, there were 120 "microsleeps," where the brain waves look similar to sleeping people and alertness is compromised, in the few minutes before landing.
They piloted a program (see what I did there?) to have planned naps for pilots. The nap group improved performance by 34%, improved alertness by 54%, and maintained their performance throughout the flight. There was some opposition: "you're suggesting that we pay them to sleep?" However, they saw reason: "I'm suggesting that you pay them for taking naps when it's safe rather than paying them to nod off and crash."
Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome
Alerting is strongest right before you normally go to sleep because that's when it needs to be strongest. If I normally go to sleep at 10pm to get up at 6am for school, but I go to bed at midnight during on Friday and Saturday, then it will be hard for me to fall asleep at 10pm on Sunday because my alerting will be strong then. This is called "Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome," and it's particularly bad in teenagers (25% of high school kids fall asleep in class on any given week).
In delayed sleep phase syndrome, there is a late (but consistent) time of sleep onset, and they will sleep fine when on their own (vacation) schedule.
The treatment: set the bed time at the time the kid falls asleep at and the waking time at the time they need to wake up at (which will deprive them of sleep for a few nights). These times must be strictly adhered to. Then, gradually move back the bedtime. Also, less artificial light at night, bright light in the morning, and regular meal times are key.
One successful addition: tell the kids that they can play video games for as long as they want in the morning. That way, the earlier they get up, the more video games they can play. They are also exposed to plenty of morning light.
The opposite of this is Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome, where you fall asleep too early and get up too early. This is seen more in older people. The treatment is also the opposite -- bright lights in the evening, and reduced light at night.
Conditions of Good Sleep
To get good sleep, you need a strong sleep drive, correct circadian placement, and low arousal.
To get a strong sleep drive, you can either deprive yourself of sleep like me or you can avoid taking naps or drinking caffeine shortly before bed.
I already discussed circadian rhythms. Basically, it means that you should go to bed at the same time every night.
To get low arousal, you should reserve the bed for sleep and sex. Doing things like watching TV or talking with people or thinking while in bed will make the bed a place of high arousal for you, so your brain won't associate the bed with sleep. Thus, if you're having a hard time getting to sleep, you should get out of bed until you feel tired.
Despite the phrase, "I slept like a baby," babies don't sleep very well. 8 or 9 year olds are the best sleepers. You don't have anything to worry about, your parents set your bedtime and you're okay with it, and you wake up feeling refreshed. You have energy all day and don't take naps. You even get up early on the weekends to watch Saturday morning cartoons. Plus, people haven't started calling you an ugly teenager yet.
Treating Bad Sleep
General sleep treatment, distinct from treating a particular sleep disorder like apnea, is a mixed bag. General psychotherapy is ineffective. Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Insomnia, CBTI, does work. First, it's specialized for sleep. Second, people associate improvements in their sleep with an action that they incorporate into their daily routine, which means that the results continue indefinitely, whereas with a drug, people associate their success with the drug, so when they go off of the drug, they often regress.
Sleep Restriction Therapy is also a cool idea. They measure how much an insomniac sleeps in a night (say, 6 hours). Then, they keep the insomniac up and only let them sleep for 6 hours. Then, they gradually add on time until they're sleeping 8.
Sleep Disorders
Apnea
Your tongue and throat are too big for your airway, so you choke while sleeping. You wake up 200-1000 times per night gasping for air. You can't get good sleep. Your lungs need to suck in harder to get the air. That stretches out your heart, which tells your heart that it has too much blood, so it sends the signal to make more urine. It also creates a positive force on the abdomen and bladder. So on top of the fact then sleeping makes you feel more tired, you wet the bed. In other words, sleep apnea is horrible.
When you have a restricted airway, you snore. Snoring isn't normal; it's just an easy way for Hollywood to show that someone is sleeping, so we all think that it's normal. Snoring is a minor form of sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea is very easy and cheap to treat. You can get a Positive Airway Pressure machine that makes it easier to breath, and the problem will disappear when you're using it. You can get a part of your tongue surgically removed. They even have a new laser procedure that doesn't even require surgery or staying the night at the hospital.
This is true in kids, too. A lot of cases of "ADHD" are, in fact, sleep deprivation. Kids that snore in preschool have a 4 times higher incidence of ADHD. Kids that get their tonsils taken out (which frees up room in the airway just like removing part of the tongue) start getting better grades, better test results, and higher IQs because they no longer suffer from apnea. That's also why getting tonsils taken out cures bedwetting.
Apnea also causes a slew of other problems, including brain disease and heart attack.
Narcolepsy
The one definitive way to diagnose narcolepsy is if a person has cataplexy. Cataplexy means that happiness or emotional excitement leads to paralysis for a few seconds or a few minutes. Narcolepsy will probably also make you very tired.
The prevalence is 1/2000, onset between age 15 and 25. It's an autoimmune disease. The most common time for someone to develop the disease is 6 weeks after flu season: infection, flu, or strep will trigger the autoimmune response that gives you the disease. There is a genetic component, but that's not all (1/4 of twins of narcoleptics have narcolepsy).
Dr. Dement has spent a lot of time with narcoleptic dogs. You can find videos of them on YouTube. Our guest lecturer also brought in his narcoleptic dog. He triggered narcolepsy in class by giving the dog food. The dog got excited, so he got paralyzed for a few seconds. It was pretty cute.
Parasomnias
1-2% of kids have sleep terrors. These usually happen in the first third of the night. Other people can get them also. They're more likely with sleep deprivation and alcohol.
Every year, the British Travelodge has 400 sleepwalking naked men.
Sleepwalkers sometimes die by walking out into the snow. They are anesthetized from sleep, so they don't notice that they're freezing.
There are also more specialized forms. For instance, there is sleep related eating disorder and sleep sex.
And there are less common disorders. For instance, rhythmic movement disorders cause a person to rhythmically move throughout the night (imagine someone head banging like at a rock concert in their sleep). There are some funny YouTube videos of them, but I imagine it's actually a very serious issue.
Restless Leg Syndrome
Peoples' legs move such that they can't sleep. This is particularly bad among anemic people and on long flights.
Dreams + Etc
Dreams
Dreams are perception unconstrained by sensory input. Perception is dreaming constrained by sensory input. That is, our brains are still on when we're dreaming. We're still conscious. The difference is that, when awake, the real world comes in through our senses. Wakefulness is like a shared dream because other people sense the same things that you sense, so they are not free to perceive anything. Dreams happen during REM sleep. Nocturnal erections (in both men and women) also happen during REM, but I'm not sure that they're related to dreams.
Sleep Paralysis
It would probably be bad if people acted out all of their dreams (I can't actually fly). The solution to that is sleep paralysis. Someone who is in REM sleep (where dreams occur) can't move their body, except for breathing. That way, even though you think you're moving in your dreams so your brain is firing all of the signals that would make you move, you don't move.
There are sleep disorders where people don't experience sleep paralysis. They actually act out their dreams. It would be funny (you can see some examples on youtube), but people experience rather serious injuries. Some people run into the wall and hurt themselves. Some people walk outside in freezing weather and get frostbite. Some people walk out of second story windows.
On the other hand, some people have sleep paralysis even after waking up. They are conscious, but they can't move. They also often have hallucinations.
Lucid Dreams
A lucid dreamer is someone who dreams and is aware that they are dreaming. Since they aren't constrained by sensory input, they can do whatever they want.
Lucid dreaming is verifiable. When dreaming, a person's body experiences sleep paralysis, but their head does not. That's why people can talk during their sleep and why people's eyes move in their dreams. A lucid dreamer can say, while awake, "I'm going to move my eyes left, then right, then left when I realize that I'm dreaming," and ocular sensors can verify that that happens.
We got our lectures on lucid dreaming by someone from Inception.
Learning to Lucid Dream
Many people will occasionally have lucid dreams, but if you want to work at it, you can have a lucid dream every night.
First, go into it with the intention of having a lucid dream. Remind yourself of it before you go to sleep.
Second, check if you're dreaming or not every once in a while. In dreams, we can 'read,' but it won't be the same the next time that you read it. So, if I look at my watch and it's 9am and then I look again and it's 3pm, then I'm probably sleeping.
Third, don't give up right away. It takes practice.
Etc
Hypnosis
Apparently, hypnosis isn't just hocus pocus.
Some people are more hypnotizable than others. People with active imaginations or who can suspend disbelief in a movie are more hypnotizable. 15% of the population is highly hypnotizable, 2/3 is at least somewhat hypnotizable, and 1/3 is not hypnotizable. When we did hypnosis in class, I was unaffected. While little kids are easy to hypnotize, that stabilizes by college age. Hypnotizability is also genetic.
Basically, hypnosis is focusing your attention. This has plenty of uses. You can focus your attention away from pain to a great enough extent that hypnosis has worked as a surgical anesthesia and for chronic pain conditions.
When a kid gets a surgical procedure, it's often annoying for the physician and the kid. Hypnotizing the kid makes both parties like the experience more.
Someone came to the lecturer with their hand like a claw because of a work related injury. All of his previous doctors told him for years that it was incurable. However, after a few months of doing self-hypnosis exercises to try to increase his blood flow to his hand, he could move his hand again.
Economics of Sleep
People not getting enough sleep costs billions of dollars every year in lost work, not to mention the healthcare costs, car crashes, and catastrophes (ie, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Exxon Oil Spill).
Governments are subsidizing cervical cancer vaccinations, which cost $40,000 per quality adjusted year of life that they save (which is a fancy way of saying that it takes $40,000 of vaccinations to save a life from cervical cancer for one year). For insomnia, it only costs $5000 to save a life. For sleep apnea, it only costs $300 to save a year of life. Yet insurers don't pay and doctors don't know.
URBANST132 - Running a Nonprofit
Social Entrepreneurship + Intro
An acquaintance said that Urban Studies 132 was the best class that he had taken at Stanford, so I had to take it. It lived up to expectations. It taught a lot of valuable skills. Professor Litvak is the former CFO of CREDO Mobile, a social justice oriented cell phone company. He also has plenty of other qualifications in the social sector.
It has been described as all of business school compressed into one quarter (that could be a good name for a band... all of X in one quarter. For some values of X, at least). The class is about social enterprises. A social enterprise is an organization (for-profit or non-profit) that tries to help the world and that thinks big. I think of social entrepreneurship as scalable social good. In other words, it combines the business skills of the for-profit sector with the values of the non-profit sector.
People in social entrepreneurship were often idealists in college, worked in traditional for profit jobs for a few years, and started an organization doing something cool. They usually see "social entrepreneur" as something that they identify with after the fact rather than as something that they studied or read about beforehand. It is a new (and thus poorly defined) space, but it has some good players. Echoing Green and Draper Richards support early stage social entrepreneurs (they're like the venture capitalists). Ashoka supports middle-stage social entrepreneurs. Skoll helps late-stage social entrepreneurs scale up. Now, there are also other organizations involved in supporting social entrepreneurs. Plus the entrepreneurs themselves.
The Social Sector
There are many causes of market failure, but what is common about them is that a profit motive won't solve them. The social sector exists to provide solutions to some of those problems. Social sector organizations are primarily oriented towards social values (things like justice and shaving the whales) rather than private value (money).
The Ecosystem
The theory of social impact is our value proposition. The operating model is how we produce value. The resource strategy is how we get resources to do what we need to. The operating environment is everything else.
The business model connects the operating model and the resource strategy. A personal fit connects the business model with the social impact. Everything is in the operating environment.
Regular organizations without people or the environment at their hearts also play a part in this ecosystem. That's why "social intrapreneurship," or going into an organization and helping to bring out social impact from within its other activities, can be good. This can include encouraging an organization to be more philanthropic, helping the organization to make its business practices better for the world (ie, Wal Mart using lighter packing materials or Pepsi locally sourcing its ingredients), or investing skills into the world (ie, Google.org or Salesforce).
Organizational Logic
The "why" of the organization consists of the core purpose (mission and vision) and core values. The purpose should be short and sweet. It should fit on a bumper sticker ("honk if you like justice" doesn't count). Having a clear mission and vision helps decision-making in the organization because a person can if a policy or project is in line with them.
Google's mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Witness' vision is "a just and equitable world where all individuals are able to defend and uphold their human rights." Values are things that are important for the organizational culture but might not be specific to the organization. For instance, one of Facebook's values is "Move fast; break things" (though some may argue that broken things is inseparable from the Facebook experience). All of these help keep the organization on track with the big picture rather than getting bogged down in the details.
The "what" of the organization consists of Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (BHAGs -- actually a term of art with its own Wikipedia page!) and a vivid description.
This is what the world will look like as a result your organization's existence. For Microsoft, this goal might be "a personal computer on every desk and in every home." A BHAG is a concrete vision of what you're working for during the next 10 or 30 years. A mission and vision should stay the same, but a BHAG or vivid description can change every once in a while.
The "how" of the organization consists of an intended impact and theory of change.
The theory of change can inform organizational strategy and keep things in perspective by helping an organization realize who it needs to partner with to meet its goals and what early outputs it needs to measure for its outcomes and impacts. It also provides a sanity check -- putting how an organization is supposed to work on paper lets you verify that your organizational model is plausible (if not feasible and tested).
Some archetypal theories of change include diffusion of innovation, gradual change, people in the streets, enlightened elites, setting a good example or proof of concept, system shock, consciousness raising, democracy, and randomness.
Strategy
Business Model Generation has a template (http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/downloads/business_model_canvas_poster.pdf) for organizational strategy that identifies 9 components of an organization.
The "value proposition" (the cool thing that you do that makes your organization valuable) is at the middle. What is its scope? What is its competitive advantage? What is the logic that goes into it?
To achieve your value, you need to do "key activities," which require "key resources" and "key partnerships." All of that has a price, which you account for in your "cost structure."
On the people side of things, you have "customer segments." You have "customer relationships" to keep them satisfied and "channels" of communication to reach them. If our customers are satisfied, then they might pay the organization, which figures into the "revenue streams."
Inside this ecosystem, there are also competitors, new entrants, suppliers, substitutes, and customers.
Needs Finding
There was a lecture on needs finding. For more on that subject, Engineering 231 in spring quarter was basically a whole class on needs finding (and user centered design).
The basic idea is to identify your stakeholders and customer segments, figure out what they need, and create a value proposition for them (how you uniquely bring value to that group).
Also, test early, and test often (it's like voting!). That way, you can avoid investing resources into something that isn't useful. You can use focus groups to figure out the issues. You can ask people to sign a 'letter of intent' to get an idea of whether or not they'll actually use your service. You can survey to get numbers. You can observe customers, look at competitors, and do market testing.
Even for international development, going to the target community is important. It helps show respect, helps incorporate the local community, and it helps you know how much of the money is going to the beneficiaries rather than everyone else on the supply line.
Messaging
Cialdini found 6 principles of persuasion, and they apply to nonprofits and fundraising also.
1. Reciprocity - point out how your service helps them, or give them something small so they give you a donation in return (ie, Hari Krishnas give you their book and don't accept it back; many people mail trinkets). Alternately, make a concession, so they make a concession in return.
2. Scarcity - how are we unique? If we're the only ones who can do something, we're scarce, and thus valuable. Also, saying 'by not donating, you'll lose X' rather than 'by donating, you'll gain X' makes it seem more scarce -- but people eventually realize that the implied threat won't happen.
3. Authority - people defer to experts or people who seem powerful. Wear a suit and tie (if someone with a suit and tie jaywalks into dangerous traffic that no sane person would walk into, people are 6 times more likely to follow them in than if they weren't wearing a suit and tie). Mention credentials. You should also be trustworthy -- say something that seems contrary to your interests (ie, mention a competitor has a good product).
4. Consistency - people feel pressured to behave consistently with their previous actions. If you get a public commitment, then people might follow through. Un-coerced, public, and put in ink commitments are best. If I call and ask people whether or not they would volunteer (without asking them to volunteer), most people say yes. Then, if someone else calls 3 days later, people are 700% more likely to volunteer than if they weren't primed earlier.
5. Social Proof - monkey see, monkey do. A behavior is correct if others do it (so yes, if everyone else jumped off a cliff, I would too, thank you very much). If you hear 20 other people pledge donations, you might. Or, if someone on the phone tells you that the last person they called donated a large amount, you're likely to donate more.
6. Liking - if I know and like someone, I'll say yes to them. Be charismatic and likable. Easy, right?
SUCCES principles from "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Lessons from Urban Legends)":
· Simple - Use analogies. People can only remember 7 pieces of information. Like a phone number. Avoid having 70 pages of information.
· Unexpected - Unexpected things create a short circuit between two mental frames. For instance, my shirt that declares, "I'm a vegetarian because I HATE VEGETABLES" (http://breadpig.com/2010/06/11/new-shirt-vegetarian-because-i-hate-vegetables/) is fairly memorable.
· Concrete - People can visualize specific language, details, and concrete nouns (avocado) more easily than abstract principles (justice).
· Credible - People will believe something more if there is a credible authority or, better yet, if they can do something to verify for themselves. Thus, a lot of urban legends will mention an easily verifiable truth as justification for the (unrelated) conclusion to make it more believable. For instance, "The Secret" says "athletes visualize, and then they perform better" which is true and easily verifiable to justify mumbo jumbo about thinking good thoughts reshaping the world (yes, good thoughts have numerous psychological benefits. No, thinking good thoughts does not directly affect the outside world).
· Emotion-Evoking - "Don't Mess with Texas" was an anti-littering campaign in Texas. It evoked people's pride in their state, so it is a slogan that has stuck. And it reduced litter.
· Story (tell one) - When 200 MBAs make a short presentation, one out of ten tells a story (the rest use statistics). When people are asked to remember stories, two out of every three remember the stories and one out of every twenty remembers the statistics. Did you notice that I told a story there instead of just cutting to the punch line that stories are 118 times as memorable as statistics?
"Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes" is an excellent reading (free online: http://www.agoodmanonline.com/bad_ads_good_causes/index.html) on basic graphic design. It also has funny quotes: "Half of my advertising dollars are wasted -- I just can't figure out which half!"
1. Capture the reader's attention like a stop sign and direct it like a road map.
a. People start at the most interesting part of a picture. If nothing directs them elsewhere, they go down until they go off the page or hit a border. Then, they don't go back.
b. Thus, don't use borders unless you want people to stop at one.
c. Don't put something important above or to the right of the most interesting point unless you have something to direct attention at it.
d. A good template is a picture at the top, a headline below it, text below that, and the contact information at the bottom right.
2. Make an emotional connection before attempting to convey information.
a. Leave the reader room to insert their own emotion by asking a question rather than stating your emotions.
b. Stories and pictures can evoke emotions.
c. Fear and shame are overused. Try joy and love (or sorrow and hate... it's not that negative emotions are bad, just that fear and shame are overused)
3. Write headlines that offer a reason to read more.
a. Don't split the headline up between two places.
b. Include a call to action or ask a question.
c. Do one of three things:
i. Appeal to self interest by offering a clear benefit
ii. Arouse curiosity that will be satisfied by reading more
iii. Break news that will spur the reader to delve into text
d. 5/6 readers only read the headline. That means you need a headline.
e. 9 words or fewer (unless it needs to be more)
f. Interact with the picture. If the picture follows from the headline, put the headline above the picture; if the headline follows from the picture, put the headline below the picture.
g. If the picture contains the information, it should take up 80% of the page. If the headline contains the information, the picture should only take up 25% of the page.
4. Use pictures to attract and convince.
a. Color pulls. Black and white explains. Monochrome (ie, a color picture printed in blue ink) does neither. That said, people like blue and green, so you should feature them. If cost isn't an issue, use color.
b. Don't cut off part of a person's face. This is especially true if you use kids or babies: babies are eye magnets, but you can't cut off any of the baby (the baby also must be happy and healthy. Negative baby imagery is a big no no).
c. The picture needs to have an apparent meaning.
d. Eye contact is good.
e. Avoid placing text over pictures. Readable text is important.
f. The picture can direct the eyes to an action
5. If you want people to read your text, then make it readable.
a. Different font sizes are bad.
b. You can only use long text (more than 100 words) if the headline and photo get people interested.
c. Columns and segments and borders are bad. When you hit a border, you turn the page.
d. Sans serif fonts are bad in printed copy text (headlines are okay).
e. Copy text should use regular sentence capitalization, not all caps.
f. The left margin should be justified. Otherwise, the text is unreadable.
g. The right margin should not be justified. I have heard different justifications (get it?) for this (the jagged edge on the right makes things more readable and the rivers of whitespace that go through text are either good or bad).
h. Short paragraphs are good.
i. Subheadings are good.
j. There should be several points of entry into the text.
k. Interesting is good. If "May we send you $700" aren't the first five words, they won't read word six.
l. Black on white is better than white on black for printed text.
6. Test before; measure after.
a. Low budget: ask your friends
b. You can test concepts, messages, or ads.
c. Ask the art department of the organization that's publishing you.
d. You can use unique phone extensions, web pages, or coupon codes to measure the result of a particular ad.
7. When everyone zigs, it's time to zag.
Pricing
Traditionally, a for-profit company will price something to maximize profit. They will identify customer segments and charge different amounts and examine customer prices. Thus, even when something costs nothing to reproduce, such as a 50 year old book or song, it might cost a lot. A social impact based organization might not want to do this because the most profitable price for bed nets might not be the price that saves the most people from getting malaria.
Zero pricing is stereotypically nonprofit, but not necessarily. For instance, Google gives away most of their products for free. It just means that the company needs another way to get money. When a nonprofit does this, they need a non-price way to allocate their goods such as an eligibility requirement or a waiting list.
Social pricing is a hybrid model that prices to maximize the social impact. You might price below market rates for some segments and above for others. I have seen a lot of social entrepreneurs that use this model, typically with three different cost tiers (one tier to make money, one tier to help poor people, and one tier so that there's a nice three tiers).
There are reasons why a nonprofit, even one that can afford to give something away for free, might want to put a price on it (and not for greed, either!).
Giving stuff away can negatively impact the supply chain. The US gives food aid to parts of Africa. Even though this food aid is very low quality, it still prevents African farmers from selling their goods, which leads to sustainable economic development, reduces costs, and does a host of other good things.
If you pay money for something, you value it more, and you try to get your money's worth. Similarly, when I go in and build wells for free, those wells will probably break in a few months, and the community won't know how to fix them. If I put in 70% of the funds and help the community raise money for the rest, then they'll be able to buy replacement parts and will make sure that while we build the wells the first time, they know how to maintain them. I know a lot of successful social entrepreneurs that charge money (even if it's only a little and they work with the beneficiaries to raise the rest) for this reason.
There are a lot of different effects on future demand from giving something away. The entitlement effect: if I get something free, I feel entitled to it, so I won't pay in the future. On the other hand is the positive experience effect: if I see how amazing the free trial is, then I'll pay to get the full version ("I love gmail, but I have 13GB worth of emails, so even though it's free, I'll pay for storage!"). There is the effect of social learning: if all of my friends are using something, then I'll want to use it whether or not it's free. Also, there's the income effect: if a (free) product helps me earn money, then I'll have more money to buy the product (or donate) in the future ("I made my millions thanks to Stanford, so I'll donate a building").
There are also signaling effects. Charging money might signal to a donor that an organization is sustainable (and thus effective) or that it's successful (and thus doesn't need money). It can signal to the staff that they should relate to beneficiaries as customers, which means that if we don't serve all of their needs, we won't be in business (instead of thinking of beneficiaries in a paternalistic manner where, even if we aren't giving out a great service, it's free and it might be useful). It can also signal to the customer that the service is valuable and that they shouldn't treat it as free (and waste the organization's time by putting a halfhearted effort into it).
Fund Raising Models
There are 10 nonprofit funding models that empirically work. Check out http://www.opportunitycollaboration.net/userimages/file/Fellowship%20Ten%20Nonprofit%20Funding%20Models.pdf
1. Heartfelt Connector - broad, simple social appeal (ie, Save the Children)
2. Beneficiary Builder - give people a service, and they give back (ie, universities)
3. Member Motivator - get money from community - (ie, churches or NPR)
4. Big Bettor - solve a big problem; get a few big donors (ie, Stanley Medical Research Institute)
5. Public Provider - solve government contracts. From administrative agencies (ie, Family Health International).
6. Policy Innovator - solve government projects. Use policymaker earmarks or appropriations (ie, HELP USA).
7. Beneficiary Broker - get reimbursement from the government for providing a service (ie, Metropolitan Boston Housing Partnership)
8. Resource Recycler - use goods that for profits don't care about (ie, SIRUM - https://sirum.org/)
9. Market Maker - some entity could go into for profit, but it would be unseemly or illegal (ie, organ donations)
10. Local Nationalizer - solve a little problem in a gazillion places (ie, Teach for America)
There are 6 behavioral donor segments. Know who you are targeting before you make your pitch. Check out http://www.hopeconsulting.us/pdf/Money%20for%20Good_Final.pdf
1. Repayer (I donate to Stanford because they gave me an education and big scholarships for 4 years)
2. Casual Giver (I donate to established, well respected organizations through a payroll deduction)
3. Faith Based (I donate to my church)
4. See the Difference (I donate to a local charity because they're small, and my small donation will make a difference that I can see)
5. High Impact (I donate to Oxfam because they have data proving that they prevent people from starving to death and lift people out of poverty for only a few dollars)
6. Personal Ties (I donate to Code the Change because I know Sam and want to support him or because one of my friends asked me to)
Measuring Performance
A first step in measuring performance is knowing what you are measuring (the alternative is knowing everything, but not every organization can pull that off). Having a theory of change can help with this. By examining the big picture, you can figure out which of your direct actions might lead to which positive impacts and measure actions and impacts accordingly.
It was suggested that we further annotate a theory of change with a "logic model," which has inputs that the organization uses as resources, outputs that are the direct, tangible results of organizational activities, outcomes that are the less tangible effects, and impacts that are the end goals.
Another thing to think about is how much effort is being put in to creating effective measurements. Between assuming that something works and having rigorous proof that it works is: cherished theory, apparent effectiveness, demonstrated effectiveness, and proven effectiveness.
Scaling
Scaling means increasing the effectiveness of an organization to better match the extent or nature of the problem that it's trying to address. That is, if there is a problem with education across America, scaling might mean growing to be a national organization. Or, if you're Nike, scaling might mean paving the way for sweatshops across the world in order to maximize profits on swooshes.
There are three general schemes for scaling: dissemination, affiliation, and branching. Dissemination means giving organizational or technical assistance to bring innovation. Affiliation means a formal relationship. Branching means local sites of a larger organization (franchises).
There are also three things that you might want to scale: ideas and principles, a program, or an organizational model. Principles are guidelines on how to serve a purpose. Programs are actions on how to serve a purpose. An organizational model is a model to serve that purpose.
The spread of ideas on how to have a nonviolent revolution was an example of dissemination of principles from Gene Sharp to Tunisia to Egypt. Teach for America is an example of sharing its program with affiliate schools. BRAC (http://www.brac.net/) has tight control over its satellite programs, so it branches its organizational model.
To think about a scaling approach, think about the five Rs: readiness (are you ready to scale?), resources (can you get resources to scale?), receptivity (are other communities receptive to you scaling?), risk (what if your scaling doesn't work?), and return (what do you gain from scaling?).
Legal Structure
Some social enterprises are for profit corporations. Some are nonprofit corporations. Some have a hybrid model (ie, a for-profit arm that feeds money or goods into a nonprofit arm). Being a for-profit or a nonprofit doesn't make a whole lot of difference (but tell that to the IRS!).
Profit is not the same thing as money. You get revenue (grants, membership fees, service fees, selling goods, smiling for photos...) and you spend it on expenses (salary, office space, stuff to perform services, stuff to make into goods, stuff to keep the company dog happy). Whatever is left over can either be invested back into the company or can be called "profit." If it is profit, then it is split between the shareholders.
For-profit corporations are allowed to sell shares of their company and distribute profits to shareholders. Nonprofit corporations are not allowed to do that.
Being for-profit can make it easier to raise capital (capital is not the same as money either. Capital is more like an investment -- something that you need in order to get work done. People are human capital. A tractor is another form of capital. Fertilizer is a less attractive form of capital, but capital nonetheless) because you can sell a large part of your company to a venture capitalist. Then, they will help you succeed by giving you money and advice, and they will make money when your organization succeeds. Nonprofits can't do this because they don't have profits or shares -- they aren't allowed to sell their company. If you're a private corporation, then you have very little regulation. If you're a publicly traded corporation (shares of your stock are traded at a place like the New York Stock Exchange), then you have some regulations (ie, posting your finances openly).
Being a nonprofit makes it easier to get donations. If you're a 501c3 nonprofit (a charitable organization recognized by the IRS), then donations to you are tax deductible. If you're a 501c4 nonprofit (a political or lobbying organization), then donations aren't tax deductible, but you still get other benefits. Also, many foundations will only give grants to nonprofits, and being a nonprofit can give more legitimacy to you when you assert that you are charitable. Nonprofits are regulated by a board of directors.
In other words, being a privately traded corporation gives you the most freedom, you might have to become publicly traded if you want venture capital, and it's easier to get donations and grants if you're a non-profit. There isn't much of a difference otherwise. Nonprofits still make money and pay salaries just like everyone else.
Thus, I'm of the "legal shmegal" school of thought (once again, that is a term of art discussed in the readings) -- a good social enterprise can probably succeed as either a for-profit or nonprofit organization.
Some considerations in whether to be a for-profit or a nonprofit: are you primarily in it for the money or the social good? Is the organization profitable? Do the stake holders in the project or the founders care one way or another? Do the people running the organization have more skills in the for-profit or nonprofit sector? How fast can you scale up as a for-profit or a nonprofit, and what types of investment do you want in order to do that? Might you want to switch later (it's easy to switch from a privately traded for-profit corporation to a nonprofit corporation, but it's hard to change from a nonprofit or publicly traded corporation. A related question: are you afraid of commitment?)? Is the business model in line with the legal structure?
We got a guest lecture from Ben Binswanger at the Skoll Foundation, and he talked about the differences between the for-profit, nonprofit, and government (and he said that social movements are completely different) sectors. When he worked at a for-profit, he did work to help people, but even though he was in charge of philanthropy, he still always had to think about profit rather than social good. When he worked for a politician that did good work, he could see the massive change that a good policy can make, but it was slow: he had to spend so much time fundraising and campaigning, and even then, he had to spend years convincing people just to get one policy through, but that was a very good policy. He's happy working at a non-profit because social good is all that he has to worry about. That made sense to me and reinforced my desire to go into the non-profit sector.
Finances
Cash Flow Statement: I need to know how much money I have available to pay the bills. The cash flow statement is a measure of liquidity. It will have inflows (deposits into the bank) and outflows (checks that you write). The cash flow statement is over a period of time -- it not only answers the question "how much money is in the bank?" but "how has that number changed in the past year?"
Income Statement: I need to know how well my company is doing. An income statement is a measure of net income (also called net earnings or net profit, depending on the context), which is revenue minus expenses. For nonprofits, the income statement is sometimes called the "statement of activities." The income statement also is over a period, and it can include non-cash revenue
Gross Profit = Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold
Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization = Gross Profit - Selling, General, and Administrative Expenses
EBIT = EBITDA - Depreciation and Amortization
EBT = EBIT - Interest Expenses
Net Income = EBT - Tax Expenses
Balance Sheet: I need to know how much equity I have. A balance sheet compares assets to liabilities. Instead of just looking at cash and liquid assets, a balance sheet looks at everything that you have that is worth money. In other words, if I spend $5000 on raw materials, then that would make the cash flow statement go down, but it would have no effect on the balance sheet. If I make those raw materials into doodads that are worth $6000, then my balance sheet went up. If I sell those doodads and get $6000 of cash, then my balance sheet stayed the same.
Equity: Equity = Net Assets - Liability. Equity is the amount of ownership that you have of the company.
Time Value of Money: I can earn interest, so money is worth more to me now than later. It's good to take out a 5% loan if I can make 6% on that money.
Future Value = Present Value * (1 + Interest Rate) ^ (Number of Years in the Future)
Present Value = SUM from t=0 to n of Future Value at Year T / (1 + Interest Rate) ^ T
Break Even: In order to break even, my revenue has to at least equal my costs. This can help me figure out how much I'll have to sell (at given prices and given costs) in order to stay in business.
Fixed Costs + Cost / Unit * Units = Fixed Revenue + Revenue / Unit * Units
Current: a current asset is an asset that can be converted to cash within a year (leave it to finance to call next year's assets "current"!). A current liability is a liability that has to be paid within a year. The current ratio is current assets / current liabilities. Current liabilities are similar to accounts payable and current assets are similar to accounts receivable.
Solvency: do current assets exceed current liabilities? In other words, is the current ratio greater than 1? If so, then you can pay the bills.
Leverage: If assets are greater than liabilities, you gain equity. Financial Leverage = Total Assets / Owner's Equity. Financial Leverage is a measure of how in debt you are. A lower number for financial leverage is better because you are able to take on more debt if you need to.
You can leverage equity by borrowing money to get capital rather than selling equity, which means you get more of the profits. You can leverage revenue by buying fixed assets (assets that don't cost more the more you sell), so if revenue increases, expenses won't increase as much.
Profit: profit margin = net profit before tax / revenue. Net profit before tax is EBT in the income statement. A high profit margin means represents a stable company. A low profit margin means that a small decrease in revenue or increase in expenses could make the company unprofitable.
Financing: for a startup, equity is often best. For other companies, debt is generally best. Short term debt is better for short term investments like inventory and current assets. Long term debt is better for long term investments. Secured debt is good if you're using the debt to buy something that you can put up as collateral.
Stock: there are different types of stock -- common and preferred. If a company goes bankrupt, they pay out to preferred stockholders before common stockholders. Common stock often lets you vote on company policy and pays even better (outside of bankruptcy).
Persuasion Project
One important part of any organization is getting a message out. Thus, we had a 'persuasion project' where we made a print advertisement for something with a social theme. I worked with Ana Diaz-Hernandez, my roommate in Terra for spring quarter of last year, on my persuasion project.
Ana and I noticed that we both wore bike helmets, so we decided to do a bicycle helmet campaign flier. We brainstormed ideas. I thought of shampoo commercials: "We could have someone wearing a bike helmet in the shower!" Then, once we were thinking about sex, we thought about condom commercials -- it's interesting that it's normal to wear a condom to protect yourself but weird to wear a bike helmet to protect yourself.
Our top two slogans: "Helmets. Get some." (like the double entendre?) and "it ain't rubber... but it still protects your head"
We had a photo shoot of two shirtless guys wearing bright helmets spooning. Needless to say, this was intended for a liberal college context.
We wanted to make it provocative (both making it about sex and making it two guys) because countless people have made the pragmatic appeal to wear helmets and there is no compelling reason not to aside from the geekiness factor. Thus, while sex sells just about anything, getting two attractive people to make helmets look sexy is exactly what the campus needs to get more people to wear helmets.
Guest Lectures
We had a guest lecture from Elizabeth Scharpf, the Chief Instigating Officer of SHE, Sustainable Health Enterprises. SHE makes affordable menstrual pads for women in developing country. The motivation was that women who can't afford pads use rags, bark, and mud and miss 50 days of work or school per year.
Scharpf talked about a lot of things that she learned along the way. The team is important. Play to people's strengths. Know how to tailor your message to different people. Do what you're passionate about. Make sure that your goal is solid but your theory of change is flexible. Always be in a place where you're learning and doing cool things.
Ben Binswanger from the Skoll Foundation also talked with us. The biggest thing that I got from his talk was his discussion of different work cultures (see the Legal Structure section). He also advised that, while it's easy to spend 14 hours working every day, you'll probably still get a lot done if you only spend 11 hours every day, and then you'll have some time to spend with your family.
CS140 - Operating Systems
What We Did
CS140 was intense -- which is why I took it. It used to be a required part of the CS major. Now, it doesn't even count for my undergraduate major since I'm doing biocomputation, so it's just a rite of passage.
In CS140, we implement large parts of an operating system called PintOS (if all operating systems had names like that, maybe GLaDOS wouldn't be so lonely). PintOS is loosely based on older versions of Linux or BSD, I believe. All of the work was in groups, so I worked with Cliff Crosland and Josh Wang. The parts of the OS that we implemented:
Threads:
-sleeping (no, implementing sleeping does not mean I slept enough)
-scheduling: priority, priority donation for locks, dynamic adjustments of priority based on usage, yielding when blocked on a lock or I/O
-synchronization: locks, semaphores, and condition variables
-fixed point arithmetic so to avoid time consuming floating point arithmetic for scheduling
User Programs:
-processes
-allocating memory for the stack
-command line argument passing for program execution
-killing user processes that try to access kernel memory or invalid memory (we had a lot of kill functions. We had some or_die functions to do important things. We may have had a kill_or_die function for sufficiently important killing)
-manual (assembly) argument passing for system calls (since the compiler can't do it automatically like normal due to the switch from user to kernel context)
-the following system calls (including the synchronization and memory management therein): halt, exit, exec, wait, create, remove, open, filesize, read, write, seek, tell, close
-denying writes to executables
Virtual Memory:
-supplemental page table for page fault handling
-frame table for evicting memory when more is needed
-swap table
-memory mapped files
-stack growth
-page reclamation
-safe memory access
-everything working in parallel
File System:
-indexed and extensible files (rather than files with size fixed on creation)
-subdirectories with a hierarchical name space
-system calls: chdir, mkdir, readdir, isdir, inumber
-everything working in parallel
-buffer cache
The Rest of the Course
It seemed like there were lectures on everything. Virtual machines, security schemes, network file systems, regular file systems, input/output devices, virtual memory, the heap, locks, scheduling, and processes.
Most of that was descriptive of what had been implemented in existing software. The last lecture was from a Googler working on Belay, which was in development. Belay seems like a better user interface on top of OAuth (but it isn't. And that's also an oversimplification). It allows finer grained control of permissions. I can drag a little icon from my photo application to a social application to give the social application the ability to share my photos, for instance, rather than having to give the social application to my entire hard drive. Also, you can revoke permissions easily at any time, give unique permissions to different applications, and other cool things. It seems like a good system. Soon enough, it might be replacing things like cookies and passwords.
The first exam was very difficult. As I reflect on the course, I can see that most of the difficult things that we did involved making sure that everything was synchronized, but there were only one or two lectures on synchronization. Despite that, 6/8 questions on the first exam were about synchronization, including some where we implemented a low level lock and analyzed it.
After that, I was surprised how easy the final was. There were three hours for the final, and I think that I finished in about an hour. Several of the questions were directly from the practice final that they let us review with.
The lectures were pretty cool. They didn't help with the assignments very much, but they did teach important things.
CS270 - Biomedical Ontologies
The class was about ontologies, which are ways of structuring information, and applications to medicine. The word "ontology" comes from the philosophical study of being, and philosophically ontological questions discuss what the nature of a thing is (thus, the question "what is ontology" is mildly funny in its self-referentiality).
I didn't get a clear answer to "what is ontology" in this class, which is slightly problematic since they asked it of us on a problem set. I think that in the context of this class, an ontology has to provide a framework to define things and to define relationships between things. The view promoted was very similar to object oriented programming: there are classes of things (ie, homo sapien) and instances of things (ie, Sam); instances can have some properties which directly pertain to them (ie, my height is 5' 8" or so) and some properties that refer to other instances (ie, my dad is Michael, another instance of homo sapien); some properties are true of all instances of a class and sometimes that also means that it's true of all subclasses (ie, mammals are warm blooded, so homo sapiens are warm blooded).
The class wasn't very work intensive. There were problem sets and a midterm that were pretty basic. They asked questions like "what is ontology," and they had us draw painstakingly large pictures to represent ontologies. I don't feel like I learned a lot from them (aside from how to draw painstaking ontological pictures). There was also a final project. Ours was the Psychiatric Intervention Search System.
We put research comparing psychiatric treatments into an ontology, and I made a program to search over them. That way, if you want to find all of the studies talking about Prozac versus Placebo or all of the studies comparing SSRIs to TCA Inhibitors, you can. As the name may indicate, we didn't get a ton out of the project.
What I like about computer science (and engineering and the design school) is that it is focused on ways to get things done. The main problem that I had about the class is that it had all of the abstract philosophical hair splitting that alienated me from many circles within the humanities and social sciences. The focus seemed to be on getting terms right more so than ideas, and the applications to getting stuff done weren't apparent.
Work / Extracurriculars
Debate Coaching
Debate coaching was about the same as ever. These quarters, I went with them to Golden Desert, in Vegas (2/4-2/6) and Cal (2/19-2/21). They also had Stanford (2/11-2/13), but that was the same time as the Dance Marathon Hackathon, so I couldn't coach them then, and Nate Munger, an alumni, helped them out for Stanford. Interspersed throughout was a slew of persuasive tournaments, culminating in placing in the top 10 in the state.
I, once again, set up internet access at the Stanford tournament. This time, I got a DMCA (digital millennium copyright act; the thing that lets lots of barbaric things happen around copyright in the US, like fining old people who have unsecured wifi because one of their neighbors pirated something) notice because one of the Stanford tournament people pirated an All American Rejects song. Thankfully, I made sure that every account was unique to an individual and I warned them beforehand that the RIAA and MPAA police college networks regarding piracy and that I would turn them over, so I didn't get in trouble.
When I talked to the information security person at Stanford, he asked me why I didn't set up a conference wifi account. Last year, I had tried to do that, and I asked the Stanford help system if such a system existed, and I was told that it didn't. He had been pushing for conference wifi stuff, but apparently no one saw the need for it. He was pleased that I wanted such a system to exist.
One of the debate rounds that I judged featured some kids who were arguing for Dada. That is, ridiculing culture as protest against militarism. In the debate round, they ridiculed the norms of debate to criticize support of militarism within debate. They had a good performance in the sense that their ridicule was funny. However, I'm not sure that they really got the critical angle. The other team complained about the Dadaists not following debate norms. In response, the Dadaists played a YouTube video where a bullied gay kid stood up for himself and said "don't call me a homo." They characterized the kid as whiny and said that, by analogy, the other team was whiny. It seems a little bit ironic that a debate team standing up for a philosophy that is opposed to the institutionalized harming of other people would play a part of such a hegemonic ideal as homophobia.
In other news, you can see the back of my head in the Palo Alto Weekly with the caption "policy debate coach Sam King helps Gregory Dunn and fellow debaters take down notes during a practice debate at Palo Alto High School": http://www.paloaltoonline.com/weekly/morguepdf/2011/2011_01_28.paw.section2.pdf
Section Leading Introductory CS Classes
In fall quarter, I made autograders as a senior section leader. In winter quarter, I made the autograder for Chess, a new assignment designed to replace Yahtzee. I also made three videos on debugging under the guidance of Steve Cooper, who taught CS106A for the first time during winter. His teaching it for the first time was one of the reasons that I wanted to section lead in 106A this quarter -- I wanted to help him out. I also learned a lot from him. He taught for a long time and was at the National Science Foundation before coming to Stanford, so he knows a lot about teaching computer science. He had me redo the debugging videos after my first draft, and his tips helped them a lot ("don't make something so long... split it up!"). Also, watching how he deals with students was good -- the way that he talks, the examples that he uses, the things that he does behind the scenes (like emailing the kids that are struggling halfway through the quarter to make sure that they know that they can get extra help). It's good to have him on the team!
In spring quarter, I taught CS1U for the first time, so even though I still maintained a presence in the section leading community, I didn't lead a section. Also, more significantly, I didn't have to spend 10 hours per week grading.
One thing that I did for the first time in winter quarter was Pointer Pointee. In computer science, pointers are a way of referencing data. In section leading culture, a pointer is an experienced section leader that gives tips to a pointee who is section leading for the first time. Emin, one of my friends, was section leading for the first time this quarter, so I wanted to do pointer/pointee with him, but our schedules conflicted. When I was a first time section leader, I had a horribly busy quarter, so I never went to watch my pointer's section, and he never went to watch mine. I had a good experience with it this time, though. He noticed a lot of things that I did well in my section and he was very receptive with my tips for his section. Also, having a peer watching me inspired me to section lead a little bit better.
Even though I wasn't section leading in spring quarter, I was still helping out Matt Plant, one of my high school debaters who is a programming super star. He wrote his own programming language, FACT (Functions Are Classes Too), available at https://github.com/rookieMP/FACT. He wanted to get the word out, so I got him set up to give a tech talk about his programming language at Stanford ACM. I was proud of him. It was like the culmination of the past year of his programming work.
His style was a little bit rough. He hadn't watched any of the ACM tech talks before, so he didn't know exactly how they were usually structured. Most of them are just big highlights on some cool stuff rather than technical details, and his involved a lot of technical details. However, he had a very good sense of humor, and that managed to bring some grace to his presentation. Also, he, as a sophomore in high school, had undertaken a more significant programming project than many of the college juniors in the audience, so people were sufficiently impressed and willing to accept a slightly different presentation style than they were used to.
I think that it was good for his confidence also. I kept telling him that he was way ahead of the curve, but he still thinks of himself more as a high schooler than as someone who wrote his own programming language. I think that the reception during and after his talk was enough to give him some confidence, though. He got a summer internship offer and an offer to take a summer programming course at Stanford that one of my friends was teaching.
CS1U
Spring quarter, I taught CS1U, Practical Unix (cs1u.stanford.edu), for the first time. Since summer 2010, I had been designing the course, and then I hit the ground running in teaching it.
As described in the last verbose letter, we taught the course online to allow anyone to benefit from the lessons at any time, so that people who already knew some topics didn't have to relearn the same thing, and so that people can learn on their own time, and to free up class time for projects and personal interaction ("what, you're not replacing personal interaction too?").
About 100 students stayed with it for the entire quarter. The rooms that we had for the course started out too small and crowded, but as people dropped the course and got settled into their schedules, everything settled down to a good level.
Throughout the quarter, I continued recording videos. I had enough videos for about the first half of the quarter, but then I needed to record a few for each lab after that. The work load wasn't too bad, though. Since CS1U is a one unit class, we don't have to put as much effort into grading, so even though I had four two-hour labs in addition to recording videos and figuring out the material for the next week's lab, it wasn't much more time than section leading.
We hosted our videos on OpenClassroom and had the students watch a few videos related to one theme in each lab, and there would be an assignment to apply the contents of the video during lab. I was fairly hands-off during lab, just walking around, answering questions, and giving advice. The majority of the questions that I would get probably weren't about the particular lab, but just about systems programming in general. They would ask about random parts of how the internet or an operating system works. I was actually able to answer almost all of them. It was very satisfying. I think that I made a good impression on them.
I'm fairly satisfied with the material that I picked out for the course, too. There are a few other things that I think we'll add for future iterations of the course, but people seemed to get a lot out of the things that we did include.
Emin agreed to help me out with teaching it in the fall, which will help me out a lot.
Queer Straight Alliance
Our main event in winter quarter was Queer Formal. I didn't attend because it was at the same time as a debate tournament.
Our main event in spring quarter was Genderfuk, Stanford's annual drag ball. One of the frosh dressed me up after I sent an email to our dorm list with the subject "Make me pretty."
We continued with Queer Coalition, the process where different queer student organizations endorse student government candidates. This time, I got other people as involved as I am, which means that I'll be able to step back next year.
One thing that we added was a movie series. It went really well -- we brought a lot of different people together and saw some cool movies. We saw La Mission (1/19), Love of Siam (2/16), Robin's Hood (3/2), Dangerous Living - Coming Out in the Developing World (4/6), and The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros (4/20). I really liked Love of Siam -- it was sweet.
We also cosponsored a bunch of events. We're the only queer student group that receives annual funding, and it's nice to support other groups. Especially Stanford Students for Queer Liberation, which really took off and put on a lot of events. We helped fund events analyzing criminal queers and feminist and queer porn; the Vagina Monologues; Queer Horizons, a conference on queer studies; Camp Wellstone, a social activism workshop; and Intersections, a lecture series on intersectional identity.
Arts and Culture
Books
Good Omens
I finished up "Good Omens," by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, at the start of winter quarter. "Good Omens" is apocalyptic humor (what could be funnier?). The book's theme is that humans, above all, are not good or evil, but human, with varied desires and moral codes, and that's okay. Social change is not the result of top down impositions, but of efforts to change human consciousness. Or, to put it in other words, the whales won't stop dying until people stop killing them.
As I have discussed before, I agree with the authors' basic idea that attempts to isolate one fixed human nature are flawed. However, there is an overly individualist undertone that gets in the way. Yes, individuals are varied, but that opens up the possibility for social change, it doesn't close the possibility. "Good Omens" seems to argue that individuals can choose to be kind or cruel, so therefore we should focus on choice. That overlooks the many ways that institutions and other power structures influence those choices.
Also, they take an elitist view of suffering. At the end of the book, one of the protagonists has the equivalent of a magic wand that he could use to help (or hurt) the world in any way, but he declines to use it because of the individualism described earlier. No attention is paid to the suffering of the third world. Even if humans will be humans, there is no reason that children must die of malaria.
Man in the High Castle
Per the recommendations of my former debate coach, I read Philip K. Dick's "Man in the High Castle" about what the world would look like if the axis won World War 2. It was written during the cold war, and in the book, the Nazis and Japan split up the world. Japan takes the place of the west, with free markets and freedom. The Nazis exterminate the continent of Africa. The Japanese "never put people in ovens." There are still strong elements of a social caste system, though.
The Man in the High Castle is a character in "The Man in the High Castle" and the man wrote a book about what would have happened if the West won World War 2 (a book within the book), and throughout the book, people discuss that book.
If nothing else, it made me appreciate the world we live in today. There are lots of horrible things happening, but there is at least the presumption of freedom and equality, and there is a constant striving for a better world.
Name of the Wind + Wise Man's Fear
Intro
Nick and Emin managed to convince me to read Patrick Rothfuss' "Name of the Wind" in spring quarter. That and its sequel, "Wise Man's Fear," each caused a week of work to disappear. Those two books and an unreleased sequel comprise Kvothe's story of his life. Kvothe is a famous wizard who grew up in a travelling troupe and, thus, has an appreciation for putting on a good show. In other words, it is a story about a storyteller, a story with an emphasis on stories. Needless to say, it is told well.
The Lies we Tell Ourselves to Get to Sleep
I like that there is an emphasis on constructing reality. There are facts about the world, but there are also the lies that we tell ourselves and make true. As a kid, he stands by in hiding while a group beats up another child. Talking about that experience, he says, "That is why I became the Kvothe that they tell stories about. I still remember it. I made my choice, and I still regret it." With his regret, he thinks of himself as the type of person who does intervene for others, and he thinks of it as a common duty. As a result, after running through an inferno to save someone that he barely knows, he says that "Anyone would have done that."
I have experienced the same myself. My first step to becoming vegetarian actually didn't involve any deeper ethical understanding. In fifth grade, there was something called Taste Sensation, where we would eat a different food each week. We had rattlesnake and frog legs (yum on both accounts). We had snail (I kind of puked after eating it). But I didn't want to eat spam, so I got out of it by saying that I didn't eat red meat (lying). However, I don't think of myself as someone who lies. So after that, I didn't eat red meat (except for that one time that I didn't know that "pancetta" is Italian for "seasoned bacon" even than "pan" is Spanish for "bread").
That is, perhaps, why I am less hard on hypocrisy than some other people. I don't think of a hypocrite as someone who is living in contradiction with themselves. I think of a hypocrite as someone whose reach exceeds their grasp today and whose grasp might extend tomorrow.
When presented with the Peter Singer Solution to World Poverty (people should donate their money until they hit the $40,000 per year line, since at that level they definitely have everything you need to survive and thrive, and $200 can save a life), I agreed with it. He makes his case off of simple utilitarian philosophy, and I agree with utilitarianism and with his logic. However, at that point, I didn't donate all of my surplus money, and I still don't. But I've gradually gotten more generous, and now I donate about $200 per month to charitable organizations.
This internal desire for consistency is one of Cialdini's principles of persuasions that I learned about in Urban Studies 132 and in Transformative Design. If a person commits to something, especially if they commit to it in a public way, they are much more likely to follow through with it.
Heroism
The self-fulfilling nature of stories is as true with regard to external perceptions of a person as it is for internal values. Kvothe puts a lot of effort into building his reputation as a superhuman hero, and the books about Kvothe are him telling the real story behind the heroic stories that others tell of him. In a way, these verbose letters are my own way of telling my store, though I am nowhere near as heroic as Kvothe.
He spends his time at the University, dwelling place of the most talented people of his time. To get in requires high education, and to stay there requires steep costs in tuition and supplies. Kvothe, an independently financed orphan, manages to become one of the most famous people in the world because he begins constructing the image of himself as famous early on, and he doesn't stop constructing it or attempting to live up to it.
He doesn't even attempt to live up to all of his stories. He intentionally spreads enough rumors about himself that people can't always tell truth from fiction. What he does live up to is the persona. He was enamored, as a child, by fairy tales of great wizards with command over the elements, who can "call down fire and lightning" on his enemies. He spends much of the series trying to gain this power, but he spends as much time making it seem like he already has the power.
As a result, he shares his glory and hides his grief. He can never ask anyone for help except for his small, trusted circle. When he wins a contest by pushing himself nearly to the point of collapse, he has to go into the hallway to compose himself. In order to pay for his tuition, he has to ask for money from a dangerous moneylender to avoid asking his friends. No one sees his weakness, and as a result, he is famous. He is not the best wizard (though he is always among the best), but he appears that way.
With the "Mask of Masculinity," my culture has helped me along that path too. The most obvious way might be my academic persona. The shadow that I cast works nonstop, tirelessly, and exclusively for causes related to social change. Not only that, but everything comes easy to that shadow. I study biocomputation, so my shadow is an expert in computer science and natural science; I study human computer interaction and design, so my shadow is an expert in working with user needs; I lead organizations and study social entrepreneurship, so my shadow is an excellent leader; and I did debate, so my shadow is an expert in the social sciences and humanities.
But again, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I am not my shadow, but I can only stray so far from it while still casting it as it is. In high school, the people on my debate team thought that I did so much work, and they thought that my partner did less work, but I always thought that my partners contributed as much as me (and I said as much, but the persona stayed). They probably didn't think that I spent as much time watching TV or playing video games as I did. As a result, I had to spend a little more time working to keep up with my image, and I always followed through on my outward commitments.
In college, that has continued. My persona doesn't play video games as much as I do. As a result, in public situations, I am unlikely to be seen playing video games except with my friends. My persona does have about twice as many commitments as the average Stanford student and succeeds at them all. But success isn't enough, so I also make cookies to demonstrate the ease with which I do everything. In work situations, I may not be the most skilled, but I can succeed independently or with other people, and I'm usually among the first in and last out of the office.
I was surprised to learn that it even extends to physical feats. At the beginning of high school, I was still scrawny (now I'm only scrawny by comparison to my friends that remind some of hulks), but I never shrugged the burden of carrying my tubs of debate evidence or doing physical work. I was walking with someone around the dish (a hilly area that has Stanford's research dish: see http://dish.stanford.edu/) the other day, and she commented that I was the one doing all of the talking, and yet I wasn't even panting. In fact, I was exerted, and if I wasn't panting, it was a matter of composure, not a matter of physical fitness.
Independence also. After I started doing debate in high school, I was away from my home and family for the first time over weekends, and I was fine. Not only that, but I was superbly prepared. I prided myself on having all of the office supplies (or snacks, or bandaids, or anything else) that any of my teammates would need. Debate camp was my first time away from my family for more than a weekend, and I made myself seem as comfortable there as anywhere even though I would be away for a month or two and I was suffering homesickness.
As a result, when I went to college, I didn't suffer the same difficulties that some of my peers did. I could independently manage my life. Even though I had never been abroad, I was comfortable traveling on my own to program in Cambodia for a summer. The way that I am independent has changed, though. Where in my childhood, I was independent through preparation, now I am independent through demeanor, which is to say that now I pack light where before I packed heavy. I am now very much a nomad: Given no more than what I can carry in my backpack and on my person, I am comfortable staying in any city in the world for any amount of time with as little preparation as is necessary.
In my class on Transformative Design, one thing that I learned was that a powerful way to build loyalty is through identity. Apple has created a cult of people who buy their products because they identify as Apple people and, thus, will buy a closed-down and overpriced product because it has an apple on it. Buying Apple products is a part of their identity. Kvothe follows a similar path. He sees the world a certain way. He sees his own place in that world, and that is his identity. He wears it as his skin. It is bound just as tightly to him, as is mine to me.
On the subject of CS1U, the class that I taught this past spring, Julie Zelenski, the professor who was helping me with it, said that I was a finisher. That is to say, when I commit to something, it is a part of me, and it will be finished. My identity as an independent, fit, public servant at the forefront of design and computer science may be a shadow, but come rain or shine, hell or high water, I have my identity, and it is the most important thing that I have.
Reluctant Fundamentalist
SLE was reading "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" instead of "Seasons of Migration to the North." Since I enjoyed "Seasons of Migration" a lot when I read it over the summer in Cambodia, I thought I might enjoy the book that filled its slot.
It was interesting. The book is an extended monologue, where the narrator and protagonist tells his life's story to a stranger. It's similar to Camus' "The Fall" in that sense. It was also similarly jarring.
The protagonist goes to Princeton and the financial industry, but he is uncomfortable with how the financial industry furthers racist and colonial interests. He is also in love with a woman who can't love him because she is trapped in the past. His fundamentalism is manifest by becoming a professor who teaches the tools of finance and nonviolent political organizing to students in his home country.
The author's explanation of the book (ie, http://www.harcourtbooks.com/Reluctant_Fundamentalist/interview.asp) is that it hopes to inspire empathy and cross cultural dialog. I can understand that. I really don't get the ending, though.
World War Z
"World War Z" is about the human reaction to the zombie apocalypse. It remints the stereotypic zombie story from one of individual horror to one of society and politics. As such, one of my friends was taking a class on terror, and their final novel of the quarter wasn't about Al Qaida, but about zombies.
The book is organized chronologically. The start of the infection was mildly interesting. The voluntary quarantine made sense. Selling fake pharmaceuticals to profit off of the apocalypse made me angry. The things that people did to survive were disgusting. Reconquering the world was inspiring.
It was moderately interesting, but it was not the best book that I've read.
Lies of Locke Lamora
Emin and Nick both liked "Lies of Locke Lamora." It's about Locke Lamora, a very good thief and liar.
The first two thirds of the book didn't engage me. I can accept a protagonist that is less than heroic, but there wasn't much to compel me. Yes, he's tricking people, but why do I care? It's not like I'm profiting from it! There just wasn't very much emotion. The author didn't get me inside of Locke's head or heart. The author described the world and Locke's plots; the author did not describe Locke's psychology, emotions, or cares.
The last third of the book turned up. People finally started messing with Locke, so there was more discussion of revenge, which is composed of a good deal of emotion and trickery that has more action in it.
The other thing that I didn't like about the book is that there was a lot of delayed gratification, which is to say that it wasn't a page turner. Whenever I want to turn the page to find out what happens next, the author seems to realize that he won't be able to keep it up, and he inserts a bland flashback. There are also a lot of extended descriptions early on in the book that don't matter at all until much later.
That is to say, I prefer a different style of writing.
Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin was giving an Authors@Google talk on 7/28, so I figured that I would read his book.
I disliked "Game of Thrones" for similar reasons to "World War Z" and "Lies of Locke Lamora," and I finally figured out what that reason was (and it only took me hundreds and hundreds of pages). The book does not have one consistent point of view.
In "World War Z" there were dozens of points of view. In "Locke Lamora" and "Game of Thrones" there were only a few. However, it was still enough to disrupt the flow. By the time they would return to a point of view, I would already have stopped caring about it. By the time I get excited about one point of view, it switches to another.
If you don't mind that, the book is fine. The title "Game of Thrones" is very fitting. Imagine the US was a medieval monarchy and there were half a dozen political parties slinging mud (and poison and swords) at each other for control of the throne. Throw in some evil ghosts in Canada and some tribal regimes in the Middle East that are not friendly to the US and that the CIA tried to assassinate, and you have Martin's world. There are very few characters that I don't despise by the end.
Also, if the first chapter of the book didn't make it clear, Martin's talk (and reading the book) made it clear that he kills off characters with abandon.
I didn't get a ton out of the talk. There was a lot of stuff about the book and the HBO series that you can see for yourself if you're interested (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTTW8M_etko).
Dresden Files
Once I told Nick my revelation about disliking multiple points of view, he recommended Jim Butcher's series "The Dresden Files" about a professional wizard in modern Chicago.
I finished the first three books in the series in roughly the time it took me to read "Game of Thrones."
I liked them. I could get behind the protagonist. The magic and magical creatures are fairly interesting. There is human interest and relationships.
The books are a little bit modular. Murder happens. Harry Dresden investigates against massively powerful magical beings. He has no idea who or what they are, but he gets closer. From about the first third of the book on, he is beaten, bloody, and can barely cast a spell because he had to use all of his magic to stay alive, but he keeps on going (and going and going), repeatedly recognizing that he is very nearly dead. He defeats the bad guys (and friends that turned against him) at the end with quick thought, deft maneuvering, and neatly placed wizardry.
Then again, I once read that there are only 12 stories, so I won't fault Butcher for following with them since I enjoy his writing. I do fault him for the repeated recognition of very near deadness (then again, I am an existentialist).
It isn't quite the uninterrupted glory that Name of the Wind is, but it is still very good.
Music
Stuff I've Been Listening To
I've been getting into The Decemberists. I heard some of their music through Pandora and have really liked it. I bought their newest album, "The King is Dead," and it has a nice, communal, folksy feel. After that, I bought "Castaways and Cutouts," "Her Majesty the Decemberists," and "Picaresque" also. I like that they integrate social issues into their songs and manage to deal with sad topics in many different ways.
Blue Scholars came out with their first new album in forever, "Cinemetropolis." There were one or two cool songs, but I wasn't that impressed. I didn't like it as much as "Bayani" or "Oof!"
I'm astounded that I found Ratatat off of my Decemberists Pandora station because the music isn't very similar. They have a lot of electronic songs that I had heard before.
Death Cab for Cutie came out with two albums that I hadn't yet heard of, "Open Door" and "Codes and Keys" (once again, discovered on Pandora... what a great service).
Also, Pandora came out with a new user interface, which is amazing. It's done in HTML5 and is very smooth and streamlined.
Broken Social Scene Concert
On April 21, Broken Social Scene came to play at Stanford. I didn't know who they were, but I discovered halfway through that they are a meta-group composed of, among others, Modest Mouse. I hadn't heard a lot of the songs that they played, though.
Matt Nathanson + OneRepublic Concerts
On June 26, there was a free concert in Golden Gate Park put on by Alice, a radio station. Matt Nathanson and OneRepublic were playing. I had never listened to Matt Nathanson much, but then he played at a free concert at Google on July 7, and since there were fewer than 20,000 people at that concert, I could actually hear him. He's very good live. He cracked jokes for two or three minutes in between each song (you should hear him talk about "Laid"!), and he got us all to sing along. Also, when I was getting my picture taken with him, he asked about my whistle and commented on the plight of child soldiers in the congo.
San Francisco Orchestra
The SF City Orchestra played a free concert in Golden Gate Park on 7/10.
They were good.
In other news, I lack aptitude at critiquing or commenting on classical music.
Owl City Concert
On 7/19, there was an Owl City concert in San Francisco. I rushed to get over to The Warfield Theatre, but the first accompanying act wasn't that great.
Next up was mat Kearney. They made a lot of famous songs like Undeniable, but I hadn't listened to them much. They were very good.
Owl City was a little bit flashy. That is to say, they heavily used the lights. When performing "Technicolor Phase," whenever they said a color, the lighting on the stage would change. I was sitting in the nosebleed seats, which means that the lights were right in my eyes for half of the time. It was slightly blinding.
Seeing them was a little weird. Even live, they do a lot of electronic voice modification stuff (I think), so I spent the first few minutes wondering, "Is that really his voice?" It sounds much younger than the singer. That's probably intended -- he also wears a sweater vest + bowtie, which makes him seem young. And there were a lot of kids in the audience.
There wasn't too much of a value add from the live performance. Matt Nathanson is good live because he cracks a lot of jokes with the audience. OneRepublic is good live because they have a ton of energy. Owl City wasn't terribly compelling.
Thao and Mirah
Thao and Mirah played at Google on 7/26. I had never heard them before, but they were pretty good. My sister had heard of them because they do social justice stuff.
Performances
No Exit (Sartre Play) with SLE 4/9
SLE alumnis get to go to free plays in San Francisco. We went to "No Exit." That's where "Hell is other people" comes from (for existentialism, I prefer "Hell is other people's code." Also, "The Myth of Livelock" instead of "The Myth of Sisyphus").
I hadn't read the play. This production seemed pretty cool, though. They had some non-verbal literary criticism interspersed in it. Specifically, the bellhop held up some signs throughout that basically said "if you believe in their hopeless words, then I'm trapped here; you are my way out of here," and at the end, they started the first scene of the play over again to demonstrate that there was a new chance.
The way that they did it was cool too. The characters are trapped in a room for the whole play, and they actually had the room offstage, and they displayed the room on video, with one screen per character.
I think that I prefer Camus to Sartre. The biggest problem that I have with "No Exit" is that the premise of the play is removed from the world. There are only two others in the room, and you can't see the other denizens of hell. By removing the world from the setting, Sartre also removes a discussion of ethics from the setting: the characters might discuss the things that got them in hell, but they cannot act on a duty to society without the ability to interact with society. Since I mean "the philosophy of how people should act" by ethics, a philosophical discussion of hell removed from ethics is not very meaningful.
After the play, I talked with Greg Watkins, my spring quarter frosh year SLE teacher, about Camus and Sartre. He agrees with me about Sartre versus Camus. He also helped me understand some Camus stuff.
In "The Plague," one thing that I didn't understand was Tarrou and Rioux's conversation when Tarrou says that he strives to be a saint, Rioux says that he prefers being a man, and Tarrou replies that they are both after the same thing, but that Tarrou is less ambitious. Greg's interpretation was that they are both talking about the same thing -- service to others, healing the world, whatever you want to call it -- but that Rieux just doesn't think that a person deserves extraordinary accolades as a "saint" for doing what every person should do.
Rennie Harris - PureMovement
On Jan 22, there was a hip hop performance at Memorial Auditorium. Little did I know, this was hip hop dance, not hip hop music. There were feats of acrobatics like extremely long jumps. They also had some political and anti-war stuff, which I liked.
Misanthrope - SLE Play
On March 3, SLE put on their production of "Misanthrope." It was good, like all SLE plays, and very humorous. It played on SLE and IHUM as two warring sides. I had to skip out halfway through for some commitment or other.
Ask Tell
On March 4, Stanford Theatre Activist Mobilization Project (STAMP) put on "Ask Tell," a play featuring student narratives about queer identity and experience (the name comes from the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy). There were some opinions experiences that I hadn't seen, including some asexual people. The panel afterwards was also good -- it had a lot of different identities represented.
College Humor + ProFro
On April 10, I had a prospective frosh staying with me. The admitted students weekend was at the end of the month (I also had a ProFro then), but he couldn't make it that weekend.
Among other things, I took him to a College Humor show. College Humor is a website that humorous videos made to appeal to middle school through college students. Some of their stuff is a little low brow, but they also have good clean fun like Minesweeper: The Movie.
Apparently, they also have stand-up comedians. I wasn't very impressed. There wasn't any smart or creative humor. It was mostly low brow, including a few rape jokes.
Blue Man Group
On 6/19, I saw the Blue Man Group in San Francisco. They were very cool. Before seeing them, I thought that their only antic was being blue. Little did I realize that most of their show involves antics.
They started out by putting some neon paint on the drums and playing the drums, causing the paint to splatter up as they played. They used this to paint a canvas.
One person caught gumballs (or something similar) in his mouth. I lost count after he caught about 30. I have no idea how he fit them all in there. At the end, he spit them up into a massive sculpture-like monstrosity (you know how after you chew gum, if you put several pieces in your mouth, they all become one massive glob? That's what it was like). One audience member presented her purse to the Blue Men, and they gave her the monstrosity.
They took another audience volunteer, gave them a set of overalls that covered everything, hooked them up to a mini-crane, and then used them as a human paintbrush.
They had a few other awesome things also. I highly recommend seeing them if you get the chance!
Assassins: The Musical
On 6/25, I saw a musical about US presidential assassinations and attempted assassinations. I'm not sure what the point was. And there wasn't enough music to make up for that, though one person did have a good voice.
Movies
Tron Legacy - 3D
Over winter break, I saw Tron in 3D. Well, the movie theatre said it was in 3D, and they gave me 3D glasses. I didn't notice much 3D. It was a little underwhelming, along with the movie. The plot was fairly thin, and the action sequences weren't particularly captivating.
However, as one YouTube commenter says, it's probably better not to think of Tron Legacy as a movie, but as a 2 hour Daft Punk music video, and from that point of view, it was wonderful.
Kung Fu Panda 2 - 3D
In the week between the end of school at Stanford and the start of my Google.org internship, I saw Kung Fu Pando 2 in 3D. The 3D was very good. In Tron, there was little 3D. In Avatar, the 3D was good, but it felt like it was used sparingly and deliberately -- the first scene pretty much tells the audience "yes, this movie is in 3D," and a few later on only seem lightly 3D. However, with Kung Fu Panda, the whole thing seemed very 3D.
I imagine that there isn't too much additional work for a computer generated animation studio to export their video to 3D since you can still model everything the same way and the only difference is in the rendering, whereas in live action, you need to adapt to a new camera setup and, possibly, do a lot of manual retuning. That's just speculation, though. Regardless of the cause, I was very happy with the path of 3D video storytelling.
Transformers 3 (2D)
At the start of July, I was between apartments, and the friend that I was staying with was seeing Transformers 3, so I tagged along. We saw the 2D version even though there was a 3D showing at the same time. I have no idea why.
I wasn't impressed. For a plot-lite action movie, there wasn't really enough action.
Harry Potter 7 Part 2
I saw the end of Harry Potter. I liked the ending better than the one in the books. It seemed less cheesy. Or, maybe, I just like live action cheesiness. I think that there were also a few things that I understood in the movie that I completely missed in the book.
I saw it at the Kabuki Theatre, which happened to be the closest one to my apartment in San Francisco in addition to a very cool theatre.
Captain America
Even though it was a pro-war movie, Captain America was pretty good. Though it glorifies fighting, it starts with a scrawny kid who doesn't want to hurt anyone and who wants to protect others, even at great personal sacrifice. Though he fights, his weapon is a shield.
Yes, it was made to glorify the war effort, but I think that I'm mostly okay with glorifying the effort of the allies in World War 2.
The problem is when people make the extrapolation from "WW2 was a just war" to "US engagements are just wars" and from "soldiers are heroic" to "the military as an institution is heroic" (it certainly does heroic things, as it did in Haiti, but it also encourages some bad stuff).
Cowboys and Aliens
After Cowboys and Aliens, my roommates talked all kinds of trash. However, the movie was advertised as an action movie about cowboys and aliens, and when I watched it, I got an action movie about cowboys and aliens. It didn't advertise, I didn't expect, and I didn't get a stellar plot or wonderful character development. That's not really the point, though.
Yes, it's wonderful when an action movie is artistic (ie, Kill Bill) is more dramatic than action oriented (ie, Inside Man) or interesting (ie, The Usual Suspects). But when an action movie knows that it's an action movie (ie, Taken), that's fine too.
Video Games
Beyond Good and Evil
Beyond Good and Evil is a video game. It has nothing to do with Nietzsche. It got good reviews, but it didn't sell well. Some reviews of the game say that the only bad thing about the game is its name. I liked the name. Also, reviews compared it to Planescape: Torment, which is among my favorite games ever, so I had to try it out.
It was good. My favorite part is that the protagonist is a journalist. The point of the game isn't to win through violent aggression; the point of the game is to get pictures of the bad guys kidnapping people so that you can incite change.
It's frustrating that even games that I philosophically agree with cast violence as the means of social change. That's one thing that I like about Planescape: combat is easy; there is no penalty for losing a fight; the interesting part of the game is dialog; most challenges in the game are about developing the plot and only feature combat tangentially. The prime challenge is not to kill anyone, but to discover your identity.
I wouldn't say that video games are making kids violent, but video games could inspire kids to become doctors or scientists or teachers or, yes, journalists, and I don't think that a game about someone with a sword saving the world by stabbing the villain is going to do that.
Assassin's Creed
Speaking of games where social change comes about by stabbing the bad guy who wants to take away everyone's freedom, I played Assassin's Creed!
The gameplay starts out pretty good, but it isn't dynamic, so it gets very repetitive. The second one, which I'm playing now, gets better.
The story is fairly interesting. There are Templars that try to create an ordered world by controlling people, and there are "Assassins" that believe in freedom. The plot doesn't get much more sophisticated than that, but it is interesting to see the debate between the two sides.
Assassin's Creed 2 is fairly similar.
Magicka
In Magicka, you are a wizard who can cast magick. It's an adventure game, and as the difficulty ramps up, there is very little character progression. The game is all about combining the 8 elements into interesting combinations to counter the strengths of your enemy. The game is all about split-second reactions.
It was good on its own, but I think that it would be extremely good with friends.
Limbo
Limbo is an indie game that was just released on Steam. The plot: you're in limbo, and you need to find your sister.
The game is macabre, but very artistic and enjoyable. It's a physics-based platformer, and from the start to the end, each of the challenges is unique. You die a lot (because the puzzles are hard), but that's expected, so there are frequent respawn points.
It's very immersive. The controls are simple (arrow keys plus a "do stuff" button), and the full screen black and white art and subtle sounds let you get into the game.
Bastion
Bastion is also an indie game on steam. It's an action RPG rather than a platformer, though. The plot: a calamity struck, destroying much of the world around you. You go to the Bastion, a safe haven, and collect artifacts from the world in an attempt to reconstruct it.
Structurally, the game is a lot like Legend of Mana (an action adventure RPG where you rebuild the world by searching for mana artifacts). It differs with its focus on narration. Legend of Mana was a quiet game, whereas Bastion has a narrator speaking for pretty much the whole time. The things that he says depend on your actions (ie, if you defeat all of the monsters in an area, he says something different from if you only defeat some of them). The focus of the game is the narration and figuring out what happened to the world by advancing the story.
The game is difficult enough to be challenging but easy enough not to get in the way of the story. Also, each of the different weapons that you can use are different enough from one another that combat stays interesting. By the end, my favorite was the pike (it has an amazing reach and pierces armor) and the rocket launcher (it's a rocket launcher in a fantasy setting).
There are gods that you can worship to make combat more difficult and an area that you can go to test your combat skills with 20 fights in a row. The first time, these areas are hard enough on their own, but once you get the hang of your favorite weapon combo and get a few levels, it isn't hard to do even with all of the gods.
Also, there is a leaderboard with how well people do in these areas, and it's sorted on which gods you complete the challenge with. In other words, there are a bunch of people who have all completed it with the same difficulty. It's unclear how it's sorted after that. There were a few hundred people who had already finished with all of the gods by the time I completed it, but I still managed to get to #6 on the leaderboard.
Musings
Video Games and CS
A friend who is teaching kids asked me about using video games to get kids interested in programming. I told her about my experiences:
Some games let you go into the guts of the code. This probably isn't the case with most proprietary / mainstream games. With these, the sky is the limit. I don't think that I've ever done this.
Some games let you code plugins. For instance, there was a Civ 4 RPG style plugin (don't remember what it's called. If it's important, I can look up Soren Johnson's lecture from SLE). This involves a lot of programming, but the limits are well bounded as to what you can do. I don't think that I've ever done this.
Some games provide a development environment. For instance, in Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind, the game developers made a graphical development environment and then they made the content of the game using that. You make quests by dragging over dialog options and quest state; you make landscapes by dragging over trees and bushes and monsters; etc. This involves no programming, but does allow for design and, depending on the framework, designing quests or scripted actions can teach the same systematic thinking as programming. I did this in middle or high school without external help, but I didn't do any quest scripting or anything complicated. Some of my friends did, though.
Some games have config files. With these, if you have a problem and the graphical configuration dialog doesn't work, you can often fix a problem by manually editing the .ini or whatever it is. This can teach you some stuff (that's how I learned that you edit code in notepad rather than MS word because of hidden characters), but it is usually done with rote copying, so it doesn't teach that much. I did this in middle school because someone told me what to do; I imagine that this is what most of your middle schoolers are talking about.
Offline games store saves on your computer. Usually, the saves are binary files that have all of your data for a game. Sometimes, they're in a compressed or archive format, which means that they would have to open it in 7zip first. Once they have the regular binary, they can open it in a hex editor and play around. This teaches you a lot about problem solving and debugging. For instance, when I played Summoner, I wanted to figure out how to give myself more XP. So, I saved my game, got some more xp, and saved again, hoping that I didn't change too much else. I searched for the old value and the new value, and the address in the binary that contained one value in one file and the other in the other file, and I found the place that I would have to edit to give myself more XP. Then, I changed that value and verified that my XP went up in game. I did this in middle school without external help.
Some games don't provide you with any interface for messing with it unless you spend a lot time decompiling it and such. For these, you can use an external program like AutoHotkey to macro things. For instance, I was playing FF9 on an emulator. I didn't have the gameshark plugin (and I didn't want to cheat, anyways ;)), and manually editing a save could have been a pain, but I wanted to level up, and doing it manually was tedious. I made an AutoHotkey script that would make me press one key and it would, in response, press the dozen or so keys necessary to finish a battle. On another occasion, I made an AutoHotkey script to basically keep running into monsters and killing them -- this lets you do what the 'turbo controllers' have done in the past. This can teach you a lot because AutoHotkey is a full fledged programming environment, but it's also easy enough to learn even if you don't know anything about programming. I started writing scripts in AutoHotkey in 11th or 12th grade without any external help aside from the AutoHotkey documentation.
Some games have data stored about them in non-human-readable formats. For instance, Everquest, the first popular MMORPG, has been studied by a lot of people with packet sniffers in an effort to make an open source everquest server (so that you can play everquest without paying a monthly fee to Sony; people have done the same thing with WoW and other games). As a result, Project EQ has a .sql database file available that has all of the information about how Everquest works with the numbers that are actually used by the servers. A lot of Everquest involves trying to find the right monster or the right merchant, and they could be in a lot of different places. I set up a local MySQL server, loaded in the PEQ .sql file, put on PHPMyAdmin so that I could have a graphical frontend, and I was able to say, "Okay, this monster spawns in these three locations every 40 minutes and has a 30% chance of dropping the item that I want." This saved me a lot of pain. I did this in my sophomore year of college, following the guide on PEQ's website. This is the only one that I had only done after learning how to program.
Wearing Justice
Ads are valuable, and I don't just say that because I'm interning at Google. That's why it always surprises me to see someone wearing a shirt that says "Abercrombie" on it. That means that a person is paying a premium to be a walking advertisement for a company that probably uses sweatshop labor.
Also, it might just be the individualist culture that we live in, but everyone gets an article of clothing from an event, I always shy away from wearing it for a while because I know that it won't be making a unique (and thus impactful) statement. On the other hand, wearing a shirt for an event, such as wearing the Google Android Pride shirt (http://www.googlestore.com/Wearables/Android+Pride+T-Shirt+-+Black.axd) when marching in San Francisco Pride, can show unity.
Recently, I found two companies that sew justice into their clothes. Liberation Ink (http://liberationink.org/) and Rise Up International (http://riseupinternational.com/) both make shirts with social justice themes, and the organizations are communally run and donate proceeds to the developing world, respectively.
At an event on conflict minerals in the Congo, Omekongo, a Congolese spoken word artist and activist, wore a whistle around his neck. When a child too young to hold a gun is abducted and forced to be a child soldier, they are given a whistle and put on the front lines so that they can make noise and take the first round of bullets. When we buy high tech things, including computers, phones, monitors, and game consoles, it funds the warlords that kidnap these children. Falling Whistles (http://www.fallingwhistles.com/main/) raises awareness about and advocates for child soldiers in the Congo by selling whistles. Now I wear a whistle around my neck.
Ethics: Shop Talk / Shop Think
Talking Shop
To talk shop means to use a particular set of jargon. For instance, if I were to say, "a program that does nothing more than iterate through all numbers from 1 to n does not have constant memory usage; its memory usage is O(log(n))," that would be computer science shop talk (to the computer scientists in the audience: it's also true. Ask me why!). I have no problem with that.
Some people disagree with the current political system because it objectifies some groups of people for the ends of those in power. What I find worrying is that the people who campaign for the rights of those objectified groups often speak the same way as the people who do the objectifying. These people, before a meeting, will begin to 'talk shop' the same way that high powered politicians will.
I was with some friends before a meeting, and they began talking shop. It wasn't anything bad or demeaning, but it was very strategic. And tone of voice may not come across well in text, but imagine that I slightly crinkled my nose on the "eeeeee" syllable of "strategic." That is to say, while they did not speak ill of any person, they did speak of the instrumental value of some people as more important than their intrinsic value. Or, in English, the focus was on people as a means to an end (a good end that helps people!) rather than people as an end in and of themselves.
Straw Person Utilitarianism: it has a brain after all!
To be clear, I am a utilitarian, which means that I believe that describing an action as "good" is the same as describing that action as "ethical," which is the same as saying that the action achieves the greatest good for the greatest number. However, despite some people trying to pigeonhole utilitarian thought as overly simplistic, black and white, or as instrumental, I don't think that it is "good" to think of people as a means to an end. My overheard conversation helped me come to this conclusion.
Many people, in ethical philosophy and other pursuits, make simplifying assumptions. "Suppose you have a train carrying an elephant of negligible weight on frictionless train tracks. The elephant is about to tip over and fall onto ten people. However, you could push the elephant such that it would fall on one different person instead of the ten. Do you push it over? And what if one of those people is a baby that will grow up to be a brain-eating zombie?"
I don't like the assumption of certainty. Certainty is very rarely true, so if it is a foundational assumption in a philosophy, that philosophy will probably only be useful in very rare occasions. People subconsciously take this into account when arguing against utilitarianism. They describe a utilitarian that is certain about the way the world works but is wrong. In other words, they don't attack utilitarianism, but straw-person utilitarianism. Their answer to my philosophy is "but what if you're wrong?"
Of course, there is a philosophically sound answer to utilitarianism relevant to this discussion: instrumental rationality is intrinsically immoral. It is evil to treat people as a means to an end. If a person treats others as an end in and of themselves, and if that leads to a world with more suffering, we should not describe that world as "worse" or "bad" or "unethical." It is a better world because people are treating each other with agency, and the good is determined by how people act, not how people are.
But I don't believe in that because I refuse to accept that a world where innocent children are suffering could be better than a world where they are not, and I think that a person who believes that allowing suffering to exist is immoral is a utilitarian.
Because I hope that my utilitarianism is not made of straw, I also have an answer to the critique of certainty. Utilitarianism, as a philosophy, is defined in a certain world to make the definition easier. That is, it is easy to say that an action that saves ten lives at the expense of one life is sound in a utilitarian philosophy (if you have a hard time accepting that, consider an action that saves the earth from certain extinction at the expense of one life), so the philosophy is discussed in those terms, but it need not be. The intuition about why actions like those are bad (it is bad to torture one person to save one thousand people) happens because the world is not certain, and human biology evolved certain heuristics like compassion to deal with the impossibility of certainty or rationality. As a utilitarian, I argue that it is wrong to torture one person to save a thousand people, not because it is intrinsically immoral to treat people as instrumental, but because it won't save a thousand lives.
"But what if you had numbers," my imaginary critics might argue, "that say that there is a 10% chance that torturing 1 person will save 1000 lives. Then, probabilistically, you are saving 0.1 * 1000 = 100 lives." No, I would still not believe in torture because I question those numbers. Many sufficiently important numbers are written on the back of envelopes (or napkins, as the case may be). They come from subjective beliefs about the world that are colored by urgency, stereotypes, love, and many other things. In scenarios like the one that I just outlined, the scenario is not, "Someone constructed an empirical study where we captured suspected terrorists that had information that would lead to saving lives. We repeated this experiment 10,000 times, so with certainty greater than 95%, we can say that torturing an individual that matches the test subjects in our experiment will yield true information 70% of the time, the person that you torture will have the information that you're seeking 40% of the time, and your estimates about the number of lives that this information will save will be correct 80% of the time." In other words, a good utilitarian will take into consideration the possibility that their numbers are wrong.
In a scenario where I was certain that my numbers were correct, then I would treat people instrumentally. However, short of that, I think that the heuristic of "be the change that you wish to see in the world" is as good as any numbers on the back of an envelope in terms of empirically testable utilitarian results. That is, people who treat others well tend to save more lives than people who are cold. As a result, I believe that it is utilitarian to treat people nicely.
To be fair to my critics, that doesn't come from within utilitarianism. It requires a combination of philosophy and philanthropy; a love of wisdom with a love of people. A dispassionate utilitarian might simply stick to best-guess numbers regardless of the cost. After all, I haven't conducted any rigorous empirical studies on my heuristics.
However, to be fair to me, I call myself a utilitarian because the criticisms of utilitarianism also don't come from within utilitarianism. It simply happens to be the case that I am a philanthroper in addition to a philosopher. I wouldn't describe utilitarianism as missing my probabilistic analysis any more than I would describe my hand as missing a glove. The two complement each other perfectly, but they are each also independent wholes.
The Straight and Narrow
Back to the discussion at hand, I believe that the instrumental rationality embodied in talking shop about politics is bad because talking shop leads to thinking shop. My worry is that speaking in instrumental terms about other people will become natural, which will lead to focusing on one's own goals at the expense of other people, which will lead to things like corruption and other things that are paved with good intentions.
As someone who did policy debate for 6 years and continues to coach it, I realize that people are not rational. I was interested to learn about Cialdini's Six Principles of Persuasion in Urban Studies 132 and in Transformative Design. I don't think that there's anything wrong with speaking persuasively to people -- and "speaking persuasively" is a nice way of saying "manipulating."
The difference is in the ethical agent's thoughts. Do you go into the conversation thinking about how you can use the other person for your own ends ("if I persuade them, then I'll get to eat pizza!"), or do you go in thinking about how you can both benefit from talking ("if I persuade them, then we'll get to enjoy pizza together!")? Do you come in with a genuine desire to help them? Are you thankful at them for taking time out of their schedule to meet with you? Do you appreciate them as a person? Are you concerned, not with your own goals, but with your shared goals to help the world? I think that things will turn out well for the world if we focus on respect for one another's common humanity.
It is thoughts like that that keep me on the straight and narrow path. One of the lecturers in Urban Studies 133 said that she became comfortable fundraising when she stopped thinking of it as begging for money and realized that philanthropists want opportunities to use their money to have a high impact in helping the world and that she had such a program. She wasn't begging; she was giving them an opportunity to radically change people's lives. The former thought is aimed at competing for money; the latter is aimed at collaborating with others, realizing that you both have something to bring to the table, and realizing that the funder, as a good and autonomous person, is making a choice about where to spend their money most effectively. The same conversation with the same principles of persuasion has shifted to a much more cooperative tone with respect for all people. In other words, the straight and narrow is not about what you do (well, as long as you're well intentioned and doing good stuff), but about how you do it.
When I am uncomfortable with institutions or with people, it is very often for the reason that they don't seem to care about respecting people. As much as I believe in law and business as means of social change, I am hesitant to go to business school because of my stereotypes of the type of communication that it teaches. Read up on "nonviolent communication" for more on this subject.
For instance, in policy debate, there is no room for two sides to both be correct because, at the end of the round, the judge must decide a winner and a loser. Thus, there is a zero sum conflict with no room for cooperation. I believe wholeheartedly that debate was a good tool to help me think about, research, and discuss ideas, to more effectively question the validity of my own thoughts, and to be confident and organized. However, I also think that I am a better person for having stopped debating because it's hard to spend half of my mind playing a competitive game like debate and the other half trying to help the world by cooperating with people.
Academic Literature
I read an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Ed Dante, a professional essay writer, on essay writing services (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/). It's a good read; you should check it out.
He talks about helping cheaters in all walks of life. There are students trying to get into college, generic college essays, and complete PhD dissertations. Among the worst, he says, are nurses and people in education (that is, the teachers and principals are the biggest cheaters).
One of the things that was alienating or enlightening, depending on how you look at it, about debate is discovering that the better debater usually won -- the particular argument didn't really matter. Half the time, the affirmative wins, and half the time the negative wins. Outside of math and the scientific method, persuasiveness is what counts.
Ed Dante isn't actually an expert on all of the subjects on which he writes dissertations, but he is persuasive. He knows how to assemble an argument. He knows how to write well and write quickly, much like a debater.
That's what frustrates me about literary criticism. There isn't a clear metric for what is good or what constitutes producing knowledge (much less useful knowledge), and there's nothing to root out things like the Sokal Affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair).
This is a problem because the humanities are important.
Ways of Thinking
The way that I think thoughts has changed over time.
Before I did debate, my thinking was less sophisticated. I would think by verbalizing my thoughts in my head, or I would just accept what was around me. That is to say, I didn't have a lot of critical thinking.
For debate, I needed to think more, faster, and harder. I learned how to think quietly, reaching conclusions without verbalizing thoughts. When I heard an idea, I would instantly think of a rebuttal. I also learned how to move my thoughts forward -- my thoughts no longer got stuck on anything.
Since then, I have gained extra processing steps. I automatically rebut my own ideas and add in empathy with the other side to prevent myself from rushing headfirst where I don't need to go. I learned that logic wasn't everything: reasonability, feelings, and obstinacy all have their places, as do practicability and ease of implementation. I also learned how to use my visual processing abilities (particularly necessary when there are roughly 3 metaphors within metaphors per sentence, as is sometimes the case in postmodern literature).
Nuclear Risk
Hellman continued doing Nuclear Risk events. I didn't take an active role, but I did help him set his roots in FloMo, and he has been pretty successful there: no nuclear attacks yet!
Life
Dominican Republic
In winter, some people from the Dominican Republic's Millennium Development Goals organization recruited me to work on a social change CS project in the Dominican Republic.
They bought me plane tickets on 3/18 at 8pm for a plane that left on 3/19 at 6am.
My roommate drove me to the airport, and we discovered ice on the 280.
My experiences in the Dominican Republic were interesting. Like Cambodia, they have plenty of vegetarian food, but not many vegetarians. When I arrived, my hosts offered me an apple from the United States. My irony sense tingled.
I saw rural, urban, and touristy parts of the country. My reactions to them are more or less the same as my reactions to similar places in Cambodia. The touristy places in the Dominican Republic seemed different than when I went to touristy places in Cambodia, though. Maybe the people who tour a temple in Cambodia are slightly different from the people who tour a beach in the Dominican Republic? Either way, it seemed very unreal.
It was my first time in a Spanish speaking country. I discovered that I know enough to converse, which is much easier than reading Spanish literature, writing in Spanish, or talking in a classroom setting. It was a little hard, though, because Dominican Spanish leaves out many syllables and treats most s's as silent. That is to say, I could converse when someone was talking to me, but if two people were talking with each other, they would go much too fast for me. I got a lot of practice talking with their driver. He only spoke Spanish, and I spent quite a bit of time with him. He was probably my favorite person that I met there.
One historic area in Santo Domingo is the Colonial Zone. It houses a lot of relics and buildings from the Spanish colonial period. One place had memorials for all of the people that they put on their money. It wasn't as restrictive as the people that the US honors on its money. For instance, there were educators rather than mostly presidents, and there were women rather than only men (though there are obvious exceptions).
After I got back to the US, their lawyer implied that they would take legal action against me. I didn't violate any contracts, and the person that I signed a contract with didn't want to sue me (he apologized for the whole affair, in fact). However, I was still put off, and I decided not to work with them.
Wisdom Teeth
Sufficient people around me had gotten their wisdom teeth out that I decided to get my teeth checked out. On the first week of spring quarter, I made a dentist appointment at a place on campus, and they told me that I only had three, not four, wisdom teeth (apparently, this doesn't make me a mutant, either!), and that they were impacted, which means that they would grow into other teeth and not go fully through the gum, which would mean that food and bacteria could get on the tooth under the gum, which is bad. So, on the second week of spring quarter, I got my wisdom teeth out.
The process was painless. I arrived. I paid (the most painful part of the process!). I was taken to a room. I was put under. I awoke several hours later on a couch under some blankets with my friends in the other room. I was sleep deprived, so the time when I was under general anesthesia was a welcome nap, and I awoke completely alert and with a numb mouth. I even could have operated heavy machinery if anyone let me (they didn't). I began texting my friends as soon as I awoke, then we got my medications, got some ice cream and yogurt, and went home.
I stayed up for another hour or two and then took a nap. By the time I awoke, the local anesthetic was wearing off a little bit, so I took an ibuprofen. That also meant that I could talk, which was welcome. Even though I wasn't supposed to, I was back in the normal flow of things, talking, going to classes, etc.
After the first day or two, there was no pain at all, and I didn't end up taking very many ibuprofen. The only thing that was at all disruptive (aside from the local anesthetic preventing me from talking for four or five hours) was the diet. I only ate soup and yogurt for a day or two, and then I slowly upgraded to more solid foods. I probably could have advanced sooner, but all was well. Also, I needed to put gauze or tea bags in my toothless holes to absorb the blood and help with the healing.
Everything got better soon, though. Within a week, my top toothless hole was completely healed. Within another few days, my other two toothless holes were better. For a while, they still felt a little bit weird if I paid attention to them -- the ridges on the gums around there felt a little bit different than other places -- but my mouth feels normal again.
At no point in my whole experience did I experience any swelling. All in all, everything went well in my first surgical experience.
Chicken Pox
When I was a young kid, my family said that I had chicken pox. I never believed them. I always imagined, as a kid, that chicken pox gave you some form of pock marks ("pox"), whereas I didn't get much of anything except maybe a mild fever when my parents said that I had chicken pox. Well, I got tested when I was getting vaccines for the Dominican Republic, and I was right -- I never had chicken pox! I took care of my vaccinations during spring quarter.
Yoga
I continued with the weekly yoga sessions in FloMo. I got a lot better over time. I remember that at the start, the pose that was supposed to be a resting pose was debilitating, and the neutral transitioning pose was too much for my arm muscles. By the end of spring quarter, I was on to fancy variations of those poses.
Faisan Superlatives
At Faisan superlatives, I won most likely to contact aliens. Again.
Ike's + Sandwiches
My dad always asks me about the sandwiches at Stanford since he read about Ike's Sandwich Shop in the Stanford Magazine. They make good vegan sandwiches, including the appropriately named "Sometimes I'm a Vegan." They also had a "Sometimes I'm a Vegetarian," but I'm always a vegetarian, so I didn't get that.
ProMo Panels and Tours
I continued sitting on college panels and giving tours for Project Motivation, which tries to motivate underrepresented middle and high schoolers to go to college. They were the same as ever.
Packing Last Last Last Minute
The week before I went back home, I realized that I hadn't arranged to store my stuff over the summer. Thankfully, Nick, from Chile, gave me his graces to store my stuff at his place. Nick's parents and brothers were also wonderfully helpful in letting me store stuff in their attic. I got the stuff over the evening before I left. Then, I finished packing the rest of my stuff to go home a few hours before my plane took off. I also managed to donate some of my unneeded stuff that I had accumulated to my dorm mates ("Free ____!" is generally well appreciated). All went well.
Looking Forward (well...)
Google.org over the Summer
In fall quarter, I told my Google recruiter who was working with me last year that I was interested in Google for summer 2011.
At the start of spring, I still didn't have a project, and I felt slightly irked.
However, I remember walking out of a class in the design school and returning a call to her and learning that she was talking with several Google.org teams that had openings, and it had taken her a few months to get back to me with a project because she was getting me my dream job.
At that point, I felt very good about the summer!
I had a phone conversation with Lee Schumacher and Ka-Ping Yee the weekend after that, and we chatted about what I would be doing over the summer. The same day I got that squared away, I was at the CGIU conference, and I got an email from the professor teaching Beyond Bits and Atoms that I got in to the class. So many good things in one day!
SoCo SCA
The summer before my sophomore year, I took a Sophomore College course with Mehran Sahami. Now, I'll be SCAing (it's like TAing and RAing) for that course. It should be a great time!
Life in Branner
I'll be living in Branner with Nick, Emin, Brennan, Ted, and Danielle, which means that our hall will pretty much all be from Cardenal in our frosh year. Branner used to be an all frosh dorm, the one that I stayed it during admit weekend in fact, but it is now four-class, and it is getting a new dining hall that is somehow award winning before anyone has eaten there. It will be fun!
Coterminal Master's
After taking the GREs over winter break, I applied to get a coterminal master's degree, a coterm, in winter quarter. A coterm means that I can take classes and choose to count them for either my undergraduate or my graduate degree, and I count as both an undergraduate and a graduate student (depending on how I feel in a given day).
I was originally planning on focusing on biocomputation for my coterm, but Transformative Design made me see the wonders of user centered design, and I decided to focus on Human Computer Interaction. The classes in the HCI focus were almost all ones that I wanted to take.
Some students try to finish their coterm in 4 years -- that is, I started in 2008, and I would get a BS and an MS in computer science in 2012 -- but I'm in no hurry. There are still a lot of classes that I want to take in computer science, design, business, and Stanford in general. I'll probably finish in either 2013 or 2014.
Financially, it should be fine. The computer science department has TAships that pay for you in full, and I expect to get one when I need one.
Business School
My Urban Studies 133 professor encouraged me to think about applying to business school to further my entrepreneurial capabilities. It seems like a lot of programs have loan forgiveness for people who go into nonprofit work, and there are some programs, like Harvard's 2+2 program, that let you apply right out of college. I'm going to get my CS MS first, but I'm definitely considering going to business school after.
TAing Urban Studies 130 Series
Professor Litvak, from Urban Studies 132, asked me to be his TA this coming winter, and I accepted. Also, Professor Scher, from Urban Studies 133, recommended me as a TA for Urban Studies 133 in the fall (she only teaches in the spring), and if that professor asks me, I'll probably help them out.
I said "yes" because the 130 series helped me a lot with Code the Change, and I think that without it I would be on a different path than I am now. I want to give back and help other students find their passion. This program inspired me to think of myself as a man, and I think that it can help others grow into adults.
Conclusion
Since this letter is an incomplete "part 1," I feel even less obliged to provide a conclusion than usual.