Verbose Letter - 2012/07
Verbose Letter - 2012 07
After a 6 month delay, here is my newest verbose letter! This brings my classes up to date through Fall 2011-2012, musings, culture, and life up to date through now, and random talks and events not up to date at all. Send me an email! Keep in touch!
Class
I took a class on nutrition and learned that meat and milk give people Alzheimers. I also learned that veggies, water, snacks, and plant oils are good and that animal fats are bad. 0 calorie sweeteners aren't actually 0 calorie. Trans fats are extremely bad, and even if something says it has 0g trans fat PER SERVING, it still has trans fat if there are partially hydrogenated oils in the ingredients (they're allowed to round down). Soy is pretty much the healthiest source of protein, and it doesn't cause breast cancer (unless it's charred). Anything charred causes cancer. Mercury in fish is bad. Fruit juice is as bad as soda. Overcooking stuff reduces its nutrition. Sustainable produce is healthier. Fad diets like Atkins mostly don't work. Babies like sugar more than their mothers' milk. Bad diets lead to stupidity. If you don't read the whole section on this class (which you should), just read the headings – they tell you what you need to know (they just don't tell the why or give as much depth).
Stan Christensen, who had negotiated in a zillion countries on labor disputes, hostage and crisis situations, and tons of other things teaches a class on negotiation. The main takeaway was principled negotiation, which has 7 components. Be ready to walk away and know what you're walking away to. Be open about your interests (why you want what you want) rather than just focusing on one set of numbers. Those interests should be based on objective criteria like what is fair. You should brainstorm ideas on how to achieve both sides' interests and meet both sides' criteria. Listen. Make the relationship better. And, when you have an agreement, make sure that it is an operational commitment and has the details ironed out.
I was a star student in the computer ethics class, and I made a proposal for a social change computer science concentration.
I made an Android phone app that helps people learn programming in my design class. I also learned a ton of useful tidbits about design, and the examples were good. For instance, did you know that Tic Tac Toe is a really complicated game?
There were a lot of cool lectures about liberation technology and human computer interactions. For instance, video games can teach kids math in 20 minutes rather than 2 weeks, and they can also lead to brand recognition!
Code the Change
I'm Sam King, and I run Code the Change, which helps computer scientists use their skills for social change. This is probably the most significant and time consuming part of my life. I started out running our events that connect computer scientists with nonprofits, but now I spend more of my time thinking about organizational strategy and vision, talking up the organization to anyone who spends more than 5 minutes with me, and connecting people.
Never mind my Bar Mitzvah; I have now committed myself to something meaningful, so I am now a man.
Culture
I read about one book every other week for the past year (not including school stuff). I learned that being nice and honest is How to Win Friends and Influence People. "Slaughterhouse Five" was meaningless (and that's a compliment). "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" wasn't about the economics of the mob (it was about the mob of economics), but it was extremely good anyways. I agree that our education system is flawed, but I don't quite agree with Seth Godin in "Stop Stealing Dreams."
Most of what I read was fantasy. I very much enjoyed "The Dresden Files." I read so much of it that I'm on inauspicious book number 13 in the series. "The Last Unicorn" wasn't quite as enjoyable, but that's partly because it was so interesting.
I saw a lot of old movies and a few new ones. I only saw 11 angry people in "12 Angry Men." I liked "Children of Men" for its strong, dutiful protagonist. I liked "Hugo" for its overall quality and artisticness, though its social critique could have been much better. I liked "The Avengers" because it had little to distract from epic superhero fights. Neither "Thor" nor "Chronicle" had enough action to be good action movies. "21 Jump Street" was hilarious. "American Beauty" was thought provoking. The rest of the movies I saw were just weird.
After much prodding, I finally watched "Battlestar Galactica." As a computer scientist, I had to suspend disbelief more watching BSG than for any other show. A while back, I watched "Avatar: The Last Airbender," which is now one of my favorite TV shows for its seamless integration of values into its characters. The sequel to Avatar isn't quite as good.
I played a lot of indie video games. "VVVVVV" is a platformer (a game genre about jumping between platforms, like Mario) where you can't jump, and it's one of my favorites in the genre. Another great platformer is "Braid," which introduces a bunch of mechanics and involves more thought than jumping skill. "Terraria" is an action adventure RPG sandbox where you mine in the earth, forge yourself better equipment, and kill evil stuff. It's the type of game that you can pour a ton of time into. Speaking of time consuming games, I will say that I spent under 100 hours on Avernum, but I think that it was a near thing.
I started listening to chiptune music, which makes me feel like I'm playing a video game while working, and dubstep music, which makes me feel like I'm rocking out while working. I have expanded my folk interest from The Decemberists to Iron and Wine and Mumford and Sons (and and?). Florence and the Machine is also pretty good.
I hadn't visited Stanford's cactus garden until Kawa showed it to me. I saw a skinless giraffe in Portland. While touring the Smithsonian museums, I saw a titanoboa, a pangolin, and some Google technology. My favorite was the American Indian museum, where I saw the quote, "Great nations, like great [people], should keep their word."
First World Problems
I'm against quick fixes and a quick fix society. If you want a quick fix for health problems for the rest of your life, though, read my section on ergonomics to learn how you should tweak your chair, desk, and computer!
I bought a netbook (a small computer with good battery) for taking notes in class and donated a commensurate amount to charity because the purchase was unnecessary.
Online backup services like Ubuntu One make backup very easy. In addition to buying peace of mind in case my computer ever dies, it also lets me access my stuff from any computer.
I finally have a wrist watch again! I no longer feel naked!
After getting my first electric razor, I stopped shaving and haven't shaved since. I also haven't cut my hair since I stopped shaving. I'm waiting until I look like Chewbacca.
My computer was having problems, so I destroyed everything and installed Ubuntu Linux. Windows wasn't to blame (it was my RAM slot), but Ubuntu is better anyways: both Ubuntu and Linux in general have extremely cute mascots like precise pangolins and penguins!
Teaching
A bike seat cover made me proud of my debaters at Palo Alto High School. CS1U and section leading went much the same as they did in the past. I helped lead my Sophomore College students on a tour of Google for my birthday. I got an opportunity to share my love of Stanford with some prospective students, but at least one of them decided to go elsewhere. Since I'm a one track record, I also gave a lot of talks about computer science and social change.
Musings, Life, Etc
I got an award from Bill Clinton for Code the Change. I was also named one of Stanford's top 5 computer scientists. There were some other awards, too.
Lifehackers ask how they can "hack" life to get the most out of it and be successful. My secret? Work hard, be genuine with yourself, be nice to others, and get lucky,
I'm very happy with my time so far at Stanford. It helped me work about as hard as I physically can, taught me practical skills,made me more ethical, made me more confident, and made me more confident in my ethics. No compromises on the straight and narrow.
William Dereciewicz thinks that the internet is making people speak in impersonal sound bytes. Read on for my 80 page response! For those of you who have encouraged me to write in a shorter format and to abandon verbose letters, Dereciewicz' idea of Faux Friendships is one of the reasons that I find this format superior.
Before graduation, I got my first fortune cookie with no fortune in it. I can think of no more perfect day to receive such a fortune.
I prefer books that are unspoilable because, like life, any story worth telling is worth telling even when you know how it ends.
For the first time in my life, I got someone a good birthday present.
The End
This might be the end of verbosity as you know it!
Contents
Fall Quarter Class
Athletic190 - Nutrition
Intro
This course taught me what my body does when I put food in it. It's one of those extremely useful classes that everyone should take. The professor, Dr. Clyde Wilson, is extremely intelligent, and I wouldn't be surprised if he knew more about nutrition than most nutritionists and doctors in the world.
Most of the facts that I present here are mostly true (which is to say that stuff is a little bit more complicated, but these should give the right idea).
In a Nutshell
When you eat something, it goes to either fat or muscle. If food goes to muscle, it will keep you energized. If food goes to fat, it will make you tired (food coma) and fat. Food tries to go to muscle, and it will unless you eat too much at once or have too much animal fat.
Your muscles need energy fast, so if you reduce your calories, then your muscles will eat themselves (not fat).
Vegetables slow down your uptake of food, which makes more of it go to muscles. Vegetables also reduce your cancer and disease risk. Eating a variety of whole, less-cooked veggies is better than eating a lot of processed, cooked veggies.
Drink more water.
Alcohol makes you short, fat, and weak.
All diets that work are the same: they reduce your glycemic load (the amount of sugar that your muscles have to deal with all at once).
You will eat healthier if you think about what, when, and water. What are you eating? When are you eating it? Are you drinking enough water? Even if you don't go on a "diet," thinking about that will make you healthier.
Carbohydrates
Intro to Carbs
Our muscles need energy from carbohydrates, so cutting out carbs probably isn't good. If you have a lot of simple carbohydrates and don't have much veggies, it will be bad for you.
Carbs can be harmful if you go overboard with them. When you eat carbs, they will either go to your muscles to give you energy, or they will go to fat. If your muscles can't accept carbs, then they will make you fat. Because carbs bring so much water with them, your muscles would explode if your muscles took on too many carbs, so when your blood sugar is too high (because you had too much sugar at once), your insulin gets bound (insulin lets muscles accept carbs; bound insulin means muscles can't take more carbs). Insulin can stay bound for hours, so if you have too much sugar at breakfast, then it messes up your lunch. In other words, sugar cereal for breakfast is roughly as nutritional as starvation for breakfast.
Complex Carbs, Veggies, and Glycemic Index
A lot of people talk about whole grains and complex carbohydrates as being good because your body takes longer to break them down, which means they won't spike your blood sugar all at once. Processed foods, simple sugars, and grains that are finely ground take your body less time to break down, which means that they do spike your blood sugar all at once, make you insulin resistant, and make everything you eat go to fat.
The scientific way of measuring that is the glycemic index. A high glycemic index means that sugar comes fast; a low glycemic index means that sugar comes slow. The difference between whole wheat bread and white bread is only 10%. The difference between white bread and white bread with a raw veggie is 80%. In other words, eating vegetables has a much more significant impact on your glycemic index than eating complex carbohydrates.
The best vegetables in terms of reducing your glycemic index are cruciferous veggies like broccoli and kale. The thing that reduces your glycemic index is the coarseness (the fiber) of these veggies, so if you overcook them, it defeats much of the purpose of eating them in the first place. You should have one cup of veggies per every 100 calories of starch.
Fiber can't slow down liquid calories, though, so a supersized coke will spike your blood sugar no matter what you do.
Fake Sugar + Diet Soda
If you want to reduce your carbohydrate intake by drinking diet soda, beware the cancer. Cyclamate, the first artificial sweetener, was banned because it had cancer risk, but subsequent sweeteners that have higher cancer risk have not been banned. The studies that caused cancer in mice found that 20mg / kg of body weight (which would be like a 120 pound person drinking four 12 ounce sodas) was very carcinogenic. Artificial sweeteners also look, chemically, like pesticides and cause aggression and reduced brain function.
Fun fact: artificial sweeteners usually aren't really 0 calories; they just get the serving size low enough they can round 5 calories down to 0 calories. That's why you always need to put in 2 or 3 packets of fake sugar.
Dietary Fat
Intro
If you eat twice as much plant fat as animal fat, and if you have some omega 3s, then you're good.
There are 3 types of fat: saturated fat, unsaturated fat, and omega 3. Saturated fat typically means fat that comes from animals, unsaturated typically comes from plants, and omega 3 can come from fish or flax. "Plant" and "animal" are more relevant than "unsaturated" and "saturated," though, saturated fat from coconuts are about as healthy as unsaturated fats from other plants.
Getting the right kinds of fat is important because calories that you eat go to either muscles or fat, and if they can't go to muscles, they'll go to fat. If you have too much saturated fat, then it makes your muscles insulin resistant. Insulin is what lets your muscles take in calories, so if your muscles resist insulin, then your calories all go to fat.
Yet another reason to go vegetarian!
You Need Two Parts Plant Oil Per Part Animal Fat
If you have two times as much plant fat as animal fat, and if you have some omega 3, then it counteracts most of the bad effects of saturated fats. If 1/3 of your fats are omega 3, then you can get 40% of your total calories from fat, and you'll be fine. Moving 10% of your calories from animal fat to plant fat can mean a difference of one pound of weight every ten days. This unsaturated / saturated balance doesn't have to be in every meal -- fats take 4-6 hours to get into your bloodstream, so as long as you have the right ratios in a given day, everything is okay.
If you eat meat, then there is better and worse meat. Just like processed food is bad for humans, it is also bad for other animals. Grass fed cows have half as much omega 3 fatty acids as fish. Corn fed cows have an order of magnitude less omega 3. The problem comes when humans that don't move much eat cows that don't move much and eat corn.
Omega 3 is Good and in Lots of Things
Fish and flax have a lot of omega 3s. It's very good for you.
A lot of other plants (like canola and soy oil) have omega 3, but if you buy oil from those plants, the omega 3 will be rancid (which means that the omega 3 already reacted with oxygen and was denatured by heat, so it isn't good for you any more) because the oil was old and processed.
Also, because canola and soy oil have a strong smell, they process that out ("deodorizing"), which also gets rid of the omega 3. Deodorized oils are even worse than hydrogenating oils. If you're using a vegetable oil that doesn't have a smell, that means that all of the good stuff in it was processed out. If your oil has a weak smell like olive oil, it's okay. If it has a strong smell like unprocessed canola oil, it's extremely good for you. If it has no smell, it's bad for you. Omega 3 is healthy because it's so reactive and has a smell, which means that the oils that are healthiest for you in nature are least healthy for you after they go through industrial food processes.
Omega 3 fats, in addition to neutralizing the bad effects of saturated fats, are also important for things like brain function and your immune system. Fats in general are also key to things like brain function.
Omega 3s and unsaturated fats also increase the rate at which your body burns fat, and omega 3s reduce the amount of fat that your liver produces from carbohydrates.
Trans Fat is Bad
Trans fats are what happens when science goes wrong. Anything with "partically hydrogenated" in the ingredients has trans fat in it even if the label says that it has 0 grams of trans fat. Avoid all trans fats. They're really bad. If 10% of your diet is trans fats for a month, then your blood flow will be reduced to two thirds. In a single month. Trans fats are worse than any other source of calories.
When you have real food, it will go bad after a few days. In the context of unsaturated (plant) fats, they go rancid when chemical double bonds in the fat react with oxygen (the fat "oxidizes").
Some food scientists thought "wouldn't it be great if we got rid of those double bonds so that all of that evil oxygen couldn't make the fat rancid and we could let the fat sit in a vat for days and days in McDonalds without it going bad?" Their solution was to "hydrogenate" the fat, or slam lots of hydrogen at the double bonds so that they react with hydrogen (which is okay) rather than oxygen (which is bad). However, this doesn't completely work, and there are still some double bonds at the end. And because the process is so messed up, we mess up those bonds such that the hydrogens are on opposite sides ("trans" means on opposite sides), which doesn't happen in nature and which is really bad for you.
There are some trans fats in nature, but they're conjugated trans fats, which are okay for you. However, corn fed cows have a lot of trans fats, and there haven't been studies on the trans-fat effects of corn-fed versus grass-fed cows.
There are a lot of foods that have 0g trans fats on the label but have partially hydrogenated oils on their labels. This is because the FDA lets companies round down and choose their own serving sizes. In other words, if there is half a gram of trans fat in every 5 cookies, then I can say that one serving is 4 cookies and then say that I have 0 grams of trans fat.
Your Body
Fat
Your body converts fat into energy (ATP) three times slower than sugar (carbohydrates). Thus, if you need energy quickly, your body will use carbohydrates and not fat. If you want to burn fat, a brisk walk is more effective than a run. This also means that you need to eat carbohydrates to burn fat.
Appearing fat isn't unhealthy. There are two types of fat: subcutaneous fat (fat under your skin that people can see) and visceral fat (fat on your organs). Subcutaneous fat makes you look fat, but it doesn't negatively impact your health. Visceral fat negatively impacts your health, but you can't see it. Some cultural diets (ie, Inuit diets) lead to high subcutaneous fat and low visceral fat, and they're still very healthy.
Dietary fat intake has less of an effect on body fat than dietary carbohydrate intake.
Muscles
Your muscles are the only things that can deal with calories. Thus, if you have more muscles (with more mitochondria eating up energy), then you can eat more. As you age, your mitochondria will die off, so you can't eat as poorly as you did as a child.
After a workout, your muscles are drained of energy. If you don't get them energy quickly, they will get damaged, so you should eat after exercising.
Your muscles need sugar at all times or they'll start eating themselves. If you eat carbohydrates, it takes them 4 hours to burn. If you eat protein, it takes 8 hours to burn. Thus, if you don't have some protein before you go to bed, your muscles will be eating themselves by the time you wake up. It's okay to be at a 100 calorie deficit, but if you're at a 200 calorie deficit for a few hours, your muscles will break down. Yes, you will break down some fat, but you will break down four times as much muscle as fat. In other words, a starvation diet is bad for you and won't help you lose weight effectively.
Protein
Eat Complete Proteins
Our muscles can utilize protein better if the amino acids in the protein look like the amino acids in our muscles. Animals, tofu, tempeh, and seitan have amino acids in similar proportions to our muscles. Otherwise, you'll need to get proteins from a few sources (like beans and rice) to make sure that you have all of the amino acids you need.
If you don't have complementary proteins and just have, for instance, lentils, peanuts, or wheat, then you'll need to eat twice as much to get your protein. Kidney beans and rye are a little better. However, with any of these, they aren't 100% protein, and they also have carbohydrates and fat, so, for instance, you would need to eat 2600 calories of whole wheat to get your daily dose of protein. You would need 1500 calories of amaranth or quinoa, and 1000 calories of cheese. If you want to get it from fruits or veggies, you would need 30 cups of broccoli, kale, or cherries, 60 cups of cabbage, 30 bananas, or 60 pears.
When trying to build muscles, having protein right after a workout won't do much. You need protein 2-3 days after a hard workout because that's when your body is removing the muscle that was broken down during the workout.
Eat Protein at Every Meal
You need to eat protein at least every 5 or 6 hours that you're awake (including after you wake up and before you go to sleep) to avoid breaking down any muscles. The Institutes of Medicine recommend 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. Since there are 2.2 pounds per kilogram and 4 calories per gram of protein, a 120 pound person needs 180 calories of protein per day or 60 calories of protein per meal.
Soy Doesn't Cause Cancer. Protein Doesn't Either.
There has been a lot of hype about soy causing breast cancer. A meta-study (a study that took data from every other study and re-ran the numbers) found that soy decreased breast cancer risk. Soy does have high manganese, though, which is bad for infants (soy products that are marketed to infants should have the manganese extracted from it). If an adult stays under 9oz per day of soy, they should be fine.
There has been some hype that protein in general causes cancer. The studies that showed this were garbage.
Smoked and Charred Meat Causes Cancer. Nitrate Preservatives Do Too.
The cooking and preparation of meat often does cause colo-rectal cancer. Browned steak increases rectal cancer risk by a factor of 6. When you smoke cigarettes, you put carbon in your lungs and get lung cancer; when you smoke your meat, you put carbon in your colon and get colon cancer. Using nitrates as preservatives for meat also causes cancer.
Beef and Milk Cause Alzheimer's
Meat and milk cause Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. It's similar to Mad Cow. Mad Cow takes 2 years to show symptoms in a cow, and we're using steroids on cows to grow them up and eat them before they turn 2, so we never see the symptoms. However, they are still infected (the meat and milk has prions in it), and they can spread mental diseases to humans. 20-40% of the milk and meat that we have is infected.
Mercury and Farmed Fish are Bad
Be careful of mercury in fish, too. One tenth of one part per million translates to 7 micrograms of mercury, which is 10 times what you want if you're being safe. This is particularly bad for kids. Clams, shrimp, ocean perch, whiting, and wild canned salmon don't have mercury. Tilapia, oyster, hake, and wild non-canned salmon are okay to have once per week.
Fish in farms aren't any better. They don't have mercury, but they do have 10 times as much of carcinogens.
Water
Drink lots of water
When we wake up, we're dehydrated by 12-24 oz. Thus, it's important to drink water after waking. If you also want to improve your sleep, keep a water bottle by your bed and take a drink when you wake up in the middle of the night.
Infants should drink 1L of water; toddlers should drink 2L; women 3L; men 4L. In general, you need 1L of water per 1000 calories in your diet plus more for exercise and perspiration.
When we eat, we need water to process the food. In other words, eating dehydrates us. Thus, unless you begin a meal dehydrated, it's better to drink water after your meal rather than during or before your meal. If you begin your meal dehydrated and then eat, the food you just ate will make you dehydrated again.
Water drives growth similar to how testosterone drives growth. Incidentally, water increases your testosterone by 10%. Alcohol drops your testosterone by 10%. I guess that makes me manlier since I don't drink?
When Exercising, Drink Electrolyte Water
Drinking pure water is okay when you aren't exercising. When exercising, you need electrolytes (salts) in your water because your kidneys don't process water when exercising, so you get lots of pure water and no salt, which means that your muscles can't use salt to signal, so you collapse.
When you sweat, the salt concentration in your blood increases. That prevents potassium from moving out, which inhibits signaling and causes a cramp. Some people take potassium supplements (which hurt your heart) or magnesium supplements to fix this, which are both wrong. The correct solution is to drink water.
Juice, Milk and Soda Don't Count
Because some of the water in juice, milk, and soda is bound up to calories, they're only half as hydrating as water. Since an 8oz juice is 100 calories (and 4oz of useful water), if you eat 500 calories at a meal, you would need to drink 500 calories (40 oz) of juice in order to get enough water. That's probably not good.
Alcohol Especially Doesn't Count
Alcohol, in addition to having lots of calories, forces fat production and inhibits fat burning. Plus it does other things like inhibit growth (you have 1/3 the growth hormone after 3 drinks and no growth hormone after 6 drinks). 1-2 drinks increases circulatory system health, but even half a glass of wine increases breast cancer risk.
Fruits and Veggies
Getting a Mix of Lots of Veggies is Good
Veggies reduce the glycemic index of food, which means that we can eat more without getting fat. They also stop cancer.
There are two types of nutrients: primary nutrients, which are called vitamins, and phytonutrients. What's the scientific difference between them? Well, vitamins are the ones that were discovered earlier, and phytonutrients are the ones that were discovered later. There isn't really a difference. All of them fight different types of diseases.
Mixing your veggies (and fruits) is best. If you have a ton of wheatgrass or pomegranate, you might get a lot of nutrients, but your body can only use some of them, and the rest will pass through your body unused.
Sustainable Produce is Best
When there are more nutrients in the soil, fruits and veggies will have more nutrients, which means that they're better for us. Some studies have shown that organics have 30% higher nutrients than conventional veggies, but most of the benefit from that probably came from the fact that they were grown on small farms, which have more soil nutrients. When Dole does organic, their soil quality is still very poor, so it's basically as unhealthy as gross pesticide laden junk.
Whole Dark Produce with Skin is Best
Darker veggies have more nutrients. So, red grapes are better than green grapes.
Most of the nutrients in veggies that help us fight diseases are the same ones that help them fight diseases. They need to prevent diseases from penetrating their skin, so fruits and veggies have more nutrients in the skin. Thus, the banana peel, while disgusting, has 50 times the nutritional value of the insides. The same is true pretty much across the board: potato skins are the best parts of potatoes; pulp and zest from citrus fruits are the most nutritional parts of them; etc. 2/3 of the nutrients in veggies are in the skin.
Juice doesn't have any of the skin or the real stuff from veggies or fruits. If your juice is old, then it won't even have the 1/3 that fresh juice with pulp would have. Thus, they lose most of their nutritional value, and they're pretty much the same as soda. Eating the whole fruit is much healthier. If you do have juice, drink juice with stuff (pulp, film, etc) in it. Clear apple juice has half the nutritional value of cloudy apple juice.
Light Cooking is Okay; Overcooking is Bad; Drying is Worse
Cooking veggies gets rid of half of their nutrients (in addition to reducing the coarseness of the fiber, which means that you lose some of the glycemic index benefits). Drying gets rid of 3/4 of their nutrients (or, in the case of raisins, drying gets rid of 90% of the nutrients). Eating something frozen has the same nutrients as eating it fresh. Cooking also helps your body access the nutrients that are there. Cooking something lightly is good.
Diets
Advice
A summary of the advice from diets that work:
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Protein: plant protein and fish are good, poultry and eggs are neutral, and red meat, processed meat, and high fat dairy are bad.
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Produce: more veggies are important. Veggies are more important than fruit. Potatoes don't count as veggies.
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Dietary fat: mono unsaturated fat from veggie oils, nuts, and seeds are good. Fast from fish are good. Margarine, butter, and animal fat are bad.
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Starch: legumes (lentils, beans) and whole grains (cereal, bread) are good. Refined grains, sweets, and fries are bad.
Epidemiological Diets
The USDA food pyramid classifies potatoes as vegetables, so it's mostly useless. The CDC Diet Quality Index and the National Cancer Institute Recommended Food Scoring System are based on the USDA food pyramid, so they're mostly useless too. The best US dietary guideline is the Alternative Healthy Eating Index.
The Mediterranean Diet Score is very good: they interviewed healthy people in the Mediterranean and asked them what they ate, so it has an empirical basis, and it gets good results. The Modified Mediterranean Diet replaced olive oil with unsaturated fat, so it works less well because beef has a mixture of saturated and unsaturated fat, so it's rewarded like a vegetable. The European Recommended Food System works better.
Carb / Protein Diets (Atkins)
Low carb diets aren't as effective as high carb diets for 90% of Americans. For the other 10%, after a few weeks of a low carb diet, they start needing a high carb diet too.
Our muscles need energy. If we have 2000 calories per day and there are 4 calories per gram of carbohydrate, then we have about a pound of carbohydrates giving our muscles energy. Every pound of carbohydrates carries 4 pounds of water with it. When a person goes on a low-carb diet like Atkins, their muscles will very quickly lose those 4 pounds of water. Thus, the scale goes down and the fat stays up.
Also, while protein does help for when you're trying to build muscles, high protein diets, which mean low carb diets, cause you to lose muscle mass because your muscles need sugar, and if they don't get any, they will eat themselves.
Some of the reasons that low carb / high protein diets yield weight loss, aside from the initial 5 pound loss of weight from water, are that high protein diets make your body temperature go up (so your body spends calories making you hot) and your appetite is reduced.
Whether a high carb or a high protein diet is better for you depends on how insulin sensitive you are. If you are insulin sensitive (you have a high metabolism and can send energy to your muscles), then you will lose twice as much weight on a high carb diet than on a low carb diet (recall that carbohydrates help you burn fat). If you're insulin resistant, then carbs make you fat because none of the carbs will go to your muscles. However, "metabolic typing" is a hoax because metabolism is not fixed at birth.
The people who are insulin resistant are the most morbidly obese people in the world. Most other people benefit from a high carb diet. The reason that there are a bunch of studies showing that high protein diets are good is because those studies are on the most obese people in America, and even in those studies, the half of those people that are slightly less morbidly obese benefits from a high carb diet. Also, when the 10% of people who are most obese eat healthily for a few weeks, they no longer benefit from a high protein diet and they start benefitting from a high carb diet -- weight loss on high protein diets is insignificant after 6 months.
High protein diets have other bad effects in the long term. Many people on high protein diets get their protein from meat, and that leads to a high amount of bad cholesterol, high blood pressure, low vitamins and minerals, increased heart disease risk, and plenty of other bad stuff.
Fun Facts
When studied, the control group (the group that doesn't change their diet) loses half as much weight as the group that actually goes on the diet. It's because they know they're being studied and think about it. Thus, if you go on a diet and lose weight at the start, you might lose as much weight even if you didn't go on that diet but just pretended to think about dieting without making any changes.
Taste isn't personal preference; it's evolution. Babies like sugar more than their mother's milk. We're addicted to sugar.
The solution to binge eating is to eat the desired food a little bit every day in small doses. Then, you'll eventually get tired of it. When we crave a food but don't allow ourselves to eat it, the craving builds up dopamine (pleasure) for when we finally binge, which creates an association between a lot of pleasure and the food. That is what creates the food addiction.
There's a worksheet on portions at
http://www.menloschool.org/parents/pec/Clyde_Wilson_Handout_2011.pdf.
If your diet is bad, then your IQ decreases 10-15% faster with age.
A lot of baby formulas have high fructose in them. That's pretty much equivalent to giving your baby soda.
Fruit juice is also more or less similar to soda since it doesn't have all of the good stuff that whole fruits have. Kids who drink 12oz of fruit juice per day are shorter and fatter than other kids.
For 1/4 of people, genetics has a big effect on their weight. Eating a good diet is more important in this group than in any other group. Or, to put it in other words, if you already have a disadvantage, eating a bad diet will have an even worse effect.
Eating more veggies has the biggest effect on people who are most obese.
If you want to have a successful diet, you need an emotional reaction to where you are in life (ie, if an aisle in the store is too small for you to shop there) and you need to be able to visualize yourself having changed.
You know how you aren't supposed to microwave plastic because it leeches carcinogens out of the plastic? Well, that doesn't have anything to do with microwaves -- it just has to do with heat. Leaving your water bottle in the sun or reusing it for several weeks will have the same effect.
Trying to get your nutrients in pill form is a recipe for failure. Remember how drying veggies makes them lose 3/4 of their nutrients? Well, pill-nutrients are not only heated, but they're pulverized and left on the shelf for months on end. During all of that time, the nutrients are reacting with oxygen, which is getting rid of their nutritional value. No one has done a study showing health benefits from phytonutrient supplements.
Undernutrition without malnutrition makes you live longer. That is, if I eat enough but am a little bit hungry, it's actually healthy. For instance, there are groups in Okinawa that only eat until they're 80% full, and they live longer. Calorie restriction is, however, bad for your bones, and it's really bad if you starve yourself! To avoid going overboard, you need to eat a lot of veggies or non-dense foods like soups.
In a lot of poor areas, 1/3 to 1/2 of hospitalized patients are malnourished. They get better because the hospital feeds them. Then they leave and get worse. Malnutrition results in longer hospital stays, 3 times higher mortality, and all sorts of other bad things.
Yes, sprouted grains do have more nutrients than normal bread, but cooking the sprouted grains in bread form kills off most of the extra nutrients.
Peanuts are bad for you because our industrial food processes are stupid, not because peanuts are bad. There is a bacteria that grows on damp stuff. It's the same one that Saddam grew on rice to poison people. It can cause liver cancer in a month. That same bacteria can grow on peanuts that are kept in silos for months on end. If the people who owned these silos were smart, they would keep cycling through peanuts so that the peanuts never got very old. However, they don't, so the peanut silos are perfect for bacteria. Other types of nuts have smaller silos, so they don't have these problems.
CEE151 – Negotiation
Intro
The Negotiation professor was Stan Christensen, who went from Wall Street to Harvard Business School before doing conflict negation in 75 countries (guerrillas, terrorists, hostage-takers, labor disputes... the list goes on). Now, he directs Arbor Advisors, an investment bank that he founded, and he teaches at Stanford.
The class had readings, lectures, and negotiations. The two course books were “Getting to Yes” and “Difficult Conversations,” both from the Harvard Negotiation Project. Both were very good. “Getting to Yes” went over most of the concepts that I'll describe in this section. “Difficult Conversations” was mostly about empathy and listening, and I felt like the covering of those subjects when I took a class on peer counseling was more in depth.
The lectures were mostly about Stan's past negotiation experiences. Unsurprisingly, he's very charismatic. In the negotiations, two students in the class would be paired together in different roles and we would have to come to an agreement (or walk away).
The 7 Components of Principled Negotiation
BATNA: Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement
If I want to sell a house and I have someone offering $100k for it, then if someone else offers me $90k, I probably shouldn't accept it. If they offer me $110k, I might accept it.
The Zone of Potential Agreement is the range of possible agreements that satisfy both party's BATNAs. For instance, if the other party has someone else who is offering to sell them a house for $200k, then the ZOPA is between $100k and $200k -- anywhere in that range, the negotiation is mutually agreeable.
In a negotiation, it often comes off as aggressive to tell the other party your BATNA. Thus, do so with care. If the other side aggressively does this, then you can deflate their aggression by pointing out holes in their BATNA and by pointing out that they came to negotiate with you for a reason.
You should prepare so that you know what your BATNA is. For instance, if you really want a job at Google, it might be a good idea to talk with Yahoo! or Facebook first so that you know what your next best offer is.
Interests
A negotiation should satisfy both sides' interests.
The first step in satisfying interests is knowing what those interests are. After you break the ice in a negotiation, you should focus on learning a lot about each other's interests.
You should be transparent about your own interests. What do you want and why? Keeping that hidden won't help you get what you want. That doesn't mean you need to give them a ranking of relative importance or the exact magnitude of importance.
Keep in mind that interests are not the same as positions. You shouldn't say, "I want $50k per year and two weeks of vacation." Those are just positions that you think will get you what you really want. Instead, say something like, "My family is important to me, and I'll need a living wage to support them and the ability to be with my kids at significant events in their life." The former is instantly competitive, and it doesn't reveal what really matters to you. The latter helps the other party consider how to get you what you want -- for instance, they might not be able to offer $50k, but they might have daycare, which would be just as valuable to you.
You should also ask the other party what matters to them. Listening to them is pretty important, too.
When people don't do principled negotiation, they often think that their interests are getting the other side to concede. That probably isn't a good way to go forward.
Options
Once you have figured out some of the interests at stake, try to come up with many options.
Don't constrain yourself to just two options. There are often creative solutions.
Invite the other party to brainstorm with you!
Separate judgment from brainstorming. That is, when someone comes up with a stupid idea, don't say that it's stupid. Write it down and keep brainstorming. If you shoot down their idea, they will be less likely to come up with other, better ideas in the future. Instead of saying "Yes, but..." say "Yes, and!"
Crazy ideas are encouraged! They encourage creativity.
Build off of other people's ideas!
Visual ideas are good. Draw a picture.
Objective Criteria
Don't negotiate about positions until the very end. Instead, after you have figured out some options and interests, consider objective criteria for evaluating competing interests. People can talk about objective criteria in terms of fairness rather than getting instantly competitive. Once you agree on criteria, then a mutually agreeable solution should arise.
If you're applying for a job, for instance, a very common objective criteria is free market rates. If a starting employee at every other Silicon Valley high tech company pays $40 per hour, then you probably will want $40 per hour, but that doesn't mean that you should say "I want $40 per hour." You should say, "I think that a good criteria for a fair starting wage is the free market wage," which is much easier to get agreement on. Or, they might respond, "We typically pay under market, but we have better benefits, perks, and opportunities for advancement," all of which is stuff that you can discuss.
In general, if it has numbers in it, it is a bad criteria. If it is something that someone who wasn't involved would agree was a fair standard in a general circumstance, it might be a good objective criteria. Or, more pertinently, if it's something that the other side should agree with, that makes it a good objective criteria.
While doing this, you should keep in mind reciprocity, and you should be open to their criteria rather than just holding on to yours.
Operational Commitment
A lot of times, a negotiation will go great, but the results are poor because the negotiation was incomplete. A negotiation needs to pay attention to implementation.
The first part of making a commitment operational is actually making a commitment. Often, the person you're negotiating with won't have the authority to commit, which makes the negotiation moderately pointless. For instance, if you're talking with a car sales person, and you come to an agreement, and they go to their manager and tell you "sorry, I actually can't," then you just wasted a lot of time. You should figure out the other party's ability to commit at the start and, if you want to get to a deal but they can't, ask to talk to someone who can.
After that (ie, if you talk with a decision maker and have a contract), you need to make sure that the relevant details are all there. A lot of times, company acquisitions fail because the acquisition contract (and negotiation) don't have enough detail about how the acquisition will work. How will leadership structures change or not? What about compensation? What about company culture? There are a lot of questions to deal with.
Communication, Listening, Emotions
I discussed listening skills in the 2009/06 verbose letter, when I took a peer counseling class. Basically, realize that there is a person at the other end of the negotiation. Emotions, listening, and appreciating subjectivity are important.
Some extra lessons from this class about communication:
Be hard on the problem, not on the people. Make sure to distinguish correctness of a viewpoint from worth as a person. "You're stupid" is different from "that idea is bad."
Speak for yourself, not them. Use "I" statements, not "you" statements.
Apologize! People don't apologize enough, and it completely disarms the situation. Plus, it's the nice thing to do.
People want to feel heard. Thus, consulting someone before negotiating can help.
Come in hoping to listen and learn.
Be conscious of your own emotions. Think before responding in the heat of the moment.
Speak simply. Be polite.
Don't act like you know or understand their feelings. People often want to feel unique and want to tell you their own story and their own emotions. Let them vent.
Mirroring stuff back at people (repeating parts of what they said back at them) is an effective tool of active listening.
If the other person did something that might be against their image, help them save face.
Relationship
Negotiation is about relationships. Most negotiations happen in the context of a longer relationship. They aren't one-shot car price negotiations. If people trust you, your negotiations with them will go smoother.
A good negotiation should improve the relationship between the negotiators. Thus, don't threaten, posture, use your leverage in the relationship, lie, or deceive. Do focus on the long term relationship.
Being aggressive and getting a deal that makes you feel good and the other side feel bad might be good in the short term, but it will reduce your success in the long term.
Tell the Truth
Bad Reasons to Lie
- people think that negotiations are static, but they are ongoing relationships, and lying will make it worse in the long term.
- people think that what is measure now is more important than long term value
- people think that trust is easy to reestablish, but it's very hard
- people think that it's best not to expose your interests, but people will like you more if you expose what you want
- people think that the other party lying justifies their lying, but two wrongs probably don't make a right
- people think that they can selectively decide when to tell the truth, but that's a slippery slope, it's hard to be a good liar, and people value consistency
- people think that lying is just a part of negotiation, but it isn't a part of principled negotiation
- people think that as long as it's legal, it isn't lying, but the law is a fairly low bar for ethics, and relationships are the key to success
Confronting a Liar
If the other side does lie, let them save face. If you call them a liar, they'll deny it. Ask to help you understand their reasoning; tell them your own understanding of the situation; say that it surprises you.
Fraud
Many business ethicists say something to the effect of "lying in business should be illegal" under the assumption that there are very few things that it's illegal to lie about. In fact, most of the things they say should be illegal are illegal. Fraud in business is when a speaker makes a knowing misrepresentation of a material fact on which the victim reasonably relies and which causes damages.
"Knowing" means that the speaker knows something is false. However, making a reckless statement, which is a conscious disregard for truth, can also be fraudulent. That is, if you have one quarter of good earnings and then you tell your financial officer not to tell you this quarter's earnings because you're about to negotiate, that doesn't get you off the hook. An innocent or negligent misstatement isn't fraud, though.
"Misrepresentation" means that the speaker makes a positive misstatement. Silence is not fraudulent. However, there are some instances when you have an obligation to disclose. If you make a partial disclosure that later becomes misleading, you are obliged to disclose (ie, if I tell someone that I'm profitable and the next day learn that I'm not, I have to tell them that I'm not profitable). When there is a fiduciary relationship between the two players, they have to disclose. When one party has superior information vital to the transaction that is not accessible to the other side (ie, if you were in their shoes, would you feel cheated that the disclosure wasn't made?). There are other special situations, also.
"Material" means that even though you're allowed to exaggerate your own needs, you aren't allowed to embellish them with anything material. For instance, I can't say that I have had an offer of $50k if I haven't.
"Fact" often means objective fact, but concealing the nature of the proposal is more important. Opinion, prediction, and statements of intention are often not considered facts unless they're egregious. Misstating an intention can be promisory fraud, but that has higher burdens of proof (ie, proof that the speaker know they would not live up to their promise). Opinions can be fraudulent if they conceal facts.
"Reliance" and "causation" mean that, in some cases, the facts being obvious (such that the other party shouldn't have relied on them) can get a fraud case thrown out. But the victim being lazy or foolish doesn't absolve fraud. If I make an oral promise, and later I give a written contract, they should be relying on the contract, not the oral negotiation, so that isn't fraud. However, if the contract only makes vague claims and the oral negotiation had a more specific promise, then the person was using the oral claims to interpret the vague contract, so it is fraud.
Also, while pursuing a negotiation in bad faith isn't fraud, it can be fraud if you use negotiation to get information like trade secrets when you never intend to go through with it. That's called "implied fraud."
Job Negotiation
Choose a Job that You'll Enjoy
Your job isn't permanent, but it is a big part of you. Pick a job that you will enjoy, and leave if it is bad.
Do your homework! Do informational interviews.
Explore! Explore a lot of options. You don't need to know what you want to do with your life.
Don't do things that are just stepping stones or that you don't enjoy.
Some (potentially) Important Things
Balance (doing different types of things)
Geography (do you want to travel overseas?)
Dynamism (you can change your role)
Growth (there will be new responsibilities)
Learning (what will you learn?)
People (would I enjoy being with these people for half of my waking hours?)
Stories (what will I tell around the dinner table?)
Money
Money isn't the most important part of your job. It's probably bad if you work horrible hours and never see your family. It's probably bad if you take a job and say "this organization has a bunch of people whose values I disagree with, but I won't be like that" because you will become a tool. Your colleagues will rub off on you.
Don't worry about the money for your first job -- the difference in pay at the start will only be $5k or so, and pushing hard can hurt the relationship. Don't worry if you're in debt; think of it in terms of your debt/equity ratio. Since you just got a lot of education, you have a lot of equity, too. Remuneration follows performance, so you probably will get promoted if you do a very good job.
Even for a particular job, non-money parts of the package matter. For instance, time off, roles and responsibilities, the group that you're in, the management, and the start date all matter.
To get money, though, bring objective criteria to the table. For instance, payment in similar roles and at other companies. Know your BATNA. Negotiate with the person that actually has the authority to give you that salary, not a HR person that doesn't have that authority. Get it in writing.
Interesting Tidbits
Tips and reasons that negotiation is important: wade through the bureaucracy, being nice to people, managing relationships for when people call your references, working with difficult people (which will become a big part of your job), get performance reviews throughout rather than just at review time, thinking about your BATNA, thinking about your personal operating plan (what do I want to accomplish in the first 6 months here?), figuring out the balance between individual and company loyalty, solve problems rather than observing them, establish integrity and trust, have fun now, keep moving. When you want to move on, talk with people, give them advanced notice, and ask what you can do to make the transition better. Also, ask for an exit interview and take those lessons to your next job.
Regardless of how much they are offered, men ask for more money 60% of the time and women only 10% of the time. Men also get paid more.
Qualifications don't matter for business positions.
General Principles
Negotiation is how things get done. It is ubiquitous. It happens whenever two people talk and aren't completely on the same page. Thinking of negotiation as what you do with a car sales person is the wrong idea.
Most things are negotiable. For instance, often when you apply to a job, there will be a deadline to accept. If you don't want to make a decision by that deadline, then tell them that you need more time. There are very few exploding offers.
Most conflicts are resolvable and are not zero sum. That is, there is usually a mutually beneficial agreement if both sides will talk about it.
Getting more information is good. Don't commit too quickly. Don't operate under time constraints. Longer negotiations are usually worth it.
When we negotiate, it's very easy to focus on your position (ie, "I deserve a $50k salary"), which is a nonproductive way to negotiate, and no one is happy at the end. That's also bad for the relationship. It's better to focus on values and standards of fairness. If you can agree on a standard of fairness or two, then a mutually agreeable solution can arise.
Recognize and analyze your assumptions.
Prepare!
Be dynamic: negotiations are a chance to learn!
Other people often wait for you to frame the negotiation. You can set the frame to be cooperative, using principled negotiation, rather than aggressive or competitive.
If the other person has their own non-principled frame for negotiation, you need to change the game. Name the game that they're playing, and tell them that you want to do things in a principled way. Or, just try doing principled negotiation. If that doesn't work, then you might have to change the players.
People tend to follow through on their commitments. The following works as the start to a hostage negotiation: "Do you want me to lie to you or tell the truth?" Truth. "If you want me to tell you the truth, then you might hear things that you don't want to hear. If that happens, you have to agree not to hurt anyone." This gets them to start agreeing with you, and it gets them to make a promise.
Other tidbits from hostage negotiations: don't let them talk to a priest because that means they might be looking for closure and thinking about suicide. Talking on the phone can be good because it makes both sides feel safer. Using a team can be good: one person negotiates, one person 'commands' so that the negotiator doesn't have the authority to make decisions, one person gives moral support and backup, one person is a gopher / information gatherer, and one person is a scribe so that you don't forget important things like their name.
Most law schools don't teach principled negotiation. If you have a lawyer, you'll have to manage them and use them sparingly to avoid regressing into an aggressive negotiation. They should be there for the legal counsel to the negotiator, not to do the negotiation themselves.
It's important to talk about the facts of the situation. People tend to believe that they are right, and people have different experiences. We are interested in different things, collect evidence to support prior views, and ignore or dismiss nonconforming data. We selectively filter incoming data and selectively remember data. Thus, it's reasonable to think that people will disagree.
CS181 - Computers, Ethics, and Public Policy
Intro
CS181 was about ethical issues in computer science, and Steve Cooper, a new CS professor that I had worked with in the past, was teaching it. I had already thought about a lot of the issues in the class, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
There were two papers in the class. They weren't too difficult since I had debate experience. There was also a debate about patents, which was fairly easy since I had debate experience. There were an odd number of people in the class and the debates were in teams of two, so I volunteered to go maverick, which is always an interesting experience. The final assignment was to explore some aspect of ethics in CS. I wrote a proposal for a social change concentration in the Stanford CS major (I also went solo on this). You can read it at
http://codethechange.org/static/cs-social-change-track-proposal-2011-12-05.pdf.
Tidbits
One of the questions of the course was why study ethics in computing rather than just general ethics or ethics in engineering? One answer was that in CS, a very small cause can have a very big effect, and errors are accepted and acceptable because there is so much emphasis on getting a product shipped (imperfect medical software might be better than no medical software).
There is high variance in programming productivity. Some programmers create 100x as much value as average programmers. There is also a digital divide, where some people (women, ethnic minorities, people from areas without fast internet) aren't getting as involved with computers or computer science as others.
Software needs attention to interfaces, the possibility of bugs, follow through on reports, documentation, realistic assessments, simple designs, software audit trails, and multiple points of failure.
Viruses can live in different places: boot sector (a virus that runs when you turn the computer on) viruses are powerful but easy to catch now. Executable (programs that you run normally) and macro (ie, Microsoft Word viruses) viruses are common. To hide themselves, some viruses stay in memory even after the program is closed, but that makes them easier to catch. Other viruses might change their own code, but this is hard to do. Some viruses replicate themselves (worms). Some viruses hide their malicious behavior (trojans).
Cyberlibertarians say that the government should stay out of regulating the internet and talk about it as a big corporate success even though the internet was created with massive government funding.
There was one very disturbing reading called "A Rape in Cyberspace" (
http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/) about a virtual rape that occurred in an online game called LambdaMOO and about the community response.
We talked about some controversial issues regarding online free speech. There's a documentary called hate.com about online hate speech. Many online hate groups encourage people to be lone wolves to act on their own to take violent action so that the hate group isn't liable.
We also talked about a lot of things that I already knew like ethical theories, tragedy of the commons, prisoner's dilemma, and offshoring.
Information Security
A lot of the class focused on applications to information security.
Desirable Characteristics
Confidentiality: other people can't see my data.
Integrity: my data gets from point A to point B, and no one can tamper with it.
Authenticity: my computer knows that I am me.
Availability: I can access my data.
Non-repudiation: the sender can't deny having sent data and the receiver can't deny having received the data.
Goals
Prevention: people can't violate any of the above desirable characteristics.
Detection: when people do violate something, I know that it happened.
Recovery: I should be able to undo any damage that happens.
Intellectual Property
Copyright protects the copying of creative works. There haven't been any interesting copyright supreme court cases recently because everyone uses patents now. Also, when something is sold, you have the right of first sale, which lets you resell it. That's why software products, and now books, are licensed rather than sold. So that you can't give other people your books.
Patents protect useful, novel, non-obvious inventions and processes. Patents don't apply to outer space, so space research is not patentable.
There are also trademarks, which I find completely reasonable since they just prevent fraud, and trade secrets.
Monopolies
No one likes monopolies, and many industries tend toward monopolies absent regulation. There were 5 depressions almost as bad as the Great Depression between 1870 and 1890 due to rapid industrialization and monopolization. Then, the Sherman and Clayton acts came and made things a little better.
The DOJ opened an antitrust case against Microsoft and ordered them to break up into an applications company and an operating system company because they were using their OS monopoly to unfairly compete in applications. They were also accused of:
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•Tying - forcing OEMs to buy another product if they wanted to buy one
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•Bundling - forcing people to have Internet Explorer if they have Windows
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•Predatory Pricing - companies that agreed to only sell Windows got better prices than ones that sold Windows and other operating systems
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•Refusing to Deal
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•Making proprietary APIs unavailable to third parties (only some people could use some of the programming functionality on Windows)
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•Issuing vaporware announcements - if someone claims that they're coming out with a product, Windows would announce that it was coming out with the same product. That prevented the new company from succeeding because everyone thought that consumers would just use the Microsoft version. Then, Microsoft would buy the company.
Then Bush got elected, and the case was dropped.
The EU still has a case against Microsoft for bundling Windows Media Player and Internet Explorer. For years, they just accepted the hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. In 2008, the EU added a 1.25 billion dollar fine and said that if they didn't comply, they couldn't sell Windows in Europe. Then, Windows added a menu of browsers and media players.
Some people say that Google has a monopoly, too, but who would think a silly thing like that?
Anonymity
Anonymity is another controversial issue. Anonymity might be necessary to guarantee freedom of speech. But it also conflicts with security. Technology that ensures anonymity is pretty good and widely available. But it's also available to terrorists and narcotraffickers.
We can't rely on fingerprints to track people because 3% of people have unusable fingerprints (either from working in abrasive environments or from dipping their fingers in battery acid), and if I can get someone's finger prints, I can create fake fingers to plant their fingerprints everywhere.
People think that the NSA can track everything even though that would be infeasible. For instance, what about people talking in coded language? What about people using the padding and future-use bits on TCP traffic? What about sending messages using highway tollbooth transponders? There are lots of ways to communicate.
There are some weird laws out there. For instance, if I want someone's computer, I can file a civil (not criminal) lawsuit against John Doe for a crime. Then, I go to a court clerk and ask for a subpoena against a specific individual saying that this may help in the John Doe suit. The court clerk can do this with no judge involvement. Or, in Virginia, it's a criminal offense to hide your IP address even though NATs, which everyone uses without even knowing it, do that.
Privacy
Privacy is very vague. It isn't protected in the constitution, so it doesn't have a legal definition. 45 states each have individual, uncoordinated privacy laws with different definitions. A bunch of acts have something relevant to some aspect of privacy (FOIA, Privacy Act, FERPA, HIPAA, Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act, USA PATRIOT Act, and the CAN-SPAM Act), but we really need some comprehensive federal rules.
Individuals don't have a good definition of privacy either.
There is a lot of data out there. Facebook photos, Google Street View, Britain's CCTV cameras, chemical sensors in airports, RFIDs in passports, credit card swipes, doors that you enter, mobile phones and GPSs, public court records, plus online monitoring and third parties tracking you at websites.
In general, online tracking should follow user expectations. If a user knows something, then they can change their behavior if they need to. There's a big Do Not Track movement which prevents web sites from doing third party tracking (ie, if I go to one website and someone from another company tracks what I'm doing for the sake of behavioral ads). Only 5% of ads online use that kind of behavior information, but a lot of companies still do third party tracking.
CS147 - Intro to Human Computer Interaction
Intro
Human Computer Interaction is basically designing computers and computer programs so that people can use them well. HCI has existed for a long time (ie, consider the invention of the mouse).
HCI classes at Stanford have a strong connection to the design school, so a lot of the lessons in this class were repeats from previous classes that I have taken such as Transformative Design. For instance, talk with people, observe what they do, talk to extreme users rather than just average users, ask open ended questions, observe thoughtless acts that people do ask workarounds for everyday problems, do prototyping and storyboarding, ask "how might we" statements, etc.
The lectures were good, but the section and assignments weren't very well integrated into the class.
Throughout the quarter, we worked on one mobile web design project. I wanted to do something that connected computer science and social change, so I convinced my group to go along with it. We worked on a project to do computer science education on the phone. At our website, csedu.phpfogapp.com, you can point an Android phone to it, program on your phone, and see the results there. It was my first time doing anything significant in PHP, which was useful, and I enjoyed helping my other group members learn some of the web programming principles that I have learned over the years.
Design Principles
There were also interesting principles applied specifically to computers. In a computer interface, many of the big design questions relate to how a person learns, what is natural, and where errors come from. As a result, some fundamental principles of user interface design are: a UI should be visible, provide feedback, be consistent with the user's mental model, allow exploration through non-destructive operations, make features discoverable through exploration, and work reliably. In general, you should change as little as possible about what the user expects.
Direct manipulation, manipulating a model, and metaphor do well on the fundamental principles. Direct manipulation means that when I drag something, it moves. Manipulating a model means that you have a little thing that represents a bigger thing (like how there are thumbnails of every page on the left side of many PDF readers, and you can click on one of those to bring you somewhere in the document itself). Metaphor includes thinking of a recycling bin in your computer or thinking of a desktop in your computer.
The class also talked a lot about non-computational design problems. For instance, to discuss why getting a user interface right is important, we discussed the butterfly ballots in the 2000 election and how that led to many people voting for a candidate they didn't mean to.
Evaluation and Testing
There are a lot of heuristics that we can use to evaluate designs. Some of these heuristics include:
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•user control and freedom
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•flexibility and ease of use
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•aesthetic and minimalist design
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•consistency and standards
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•recognition rather than recall
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•visibility of system status
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•match between system and real world -- metaphors
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•error prevention
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•help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
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•help and documentation is in the mind of the user. also, app is self documenting.
Data driven design is another method of evaluation. Places that are very data driven like Google will do A/B testing where they make two (or two hundred) designs and see which one the users like best.
Even when you're getting people to individually evaluate a design, it's often good to have a point of comparison such that two designs are presented next to each other.
Sometimes, lab experiments are good because you can bring people into a controlled setting and you can ask them about any hang ups they have with the design; sometimes field studies are useful because you can see what people would actually good.
Internal validity tests whether or not your study was precise. If you ran it again, would you get similar results? External validity tests accuracy. Will the study will generalize?
A between subjects test means that half of the test subjects use one design and the other half use the other. A within subjects design means that everyone uses both interfaces, but some of them will use the first interface first and some will use the other interface first. Between subjects requires more subjects to get good results, but you don't have to deal with the ordering effect.
In a study, you can have users think out loud so that you can get their thoughts while they use your product.
Beware Simpson's Paradox! Make sure that you don't get weird effects from combining separate groups together.
Beware Twyman's Law (if it looks interesting, it must be wrong)! For instance, on any website that collects your age, there will be a lot of people who were born 18 years ago because young folks lie about their age.
When you do test groups, have consistent assignment (I shouldn't be in the control group on one computer and the test group on another) that is durable over time (I shouldn't be in the control group one day and the test group in another day), and assignment to multiple experiments should
You can use crowdsourcing tools like Mechanical Turk (plus a Qualtrics survey and images hosted on Dropbox) to do a bunch of small evaluations.
Input / Output
Input devices enable new types of thought. In a computer where the only input is plugging wires together, it's much harder to think about documents than in a computer with a keyboard.
You can think of input in a layered model. There is a device abstraction (a keyboard), a transformation (the characters that you type), signal coding (the scan codes, which are the electrical representation of keys), sensing (switches that respond to typing), physical properties (the keys), and user interaction (typing).
Humans have an input/output asymmetry: we can take in a lot of information but output a little.
Embedding the input on the output (like a touchscreen) is useful. Embedding the input in context, like having a separate Google Maps search, is useful because information from the context means you don't need to type as much, and the program can infer that you probably are referring to a location.
There are lots of other cool input devices too: laser drawn keyboard, Nanotouch, Suunto watch, Skinput, Thinsight, Proteus ingestible networked pill, etc. There is more coming!
We can measure human capabilities with regard to input. Fitts' Law says that the time to move from point A to point B is proportional to the distance and the size of point B. That is, if I have a huge button, it's easy to move my cursor there (which means that things in the corner of the screen, like the start menu on Windows, are very easy to mouse to because corners are functionally infinitely big), and if I want to move somewhere close, it's also easy.
Different human organs have different bandwidths. Researchers claim that the finger has 38 bits per second of bandwidth, the arm has 9.5 bits per second, the wrist has 23 bits per second, and the neck has 4 bits per second. Thus, using your neck as an input device will be extremely ineffective. The mouse probably won't get much better than it is because mouse technology can utilize the information processing capabilities of the human hand, so if we improved a mouse, we would have to improve humans too.
Similar deal with the keyboard. There are some trendy innovations like laser-drawn keyboards, but people like feedback when typing. That's why keyboards that "click" down are better than soft keyboards and why things like the vibrate on keypress functionality on Android phones is good.
However, these numbers seem extremely low to me, and other biological bandwidths also seem low to me. 4 bits per second for the neck would mean that my neck can only do 16 different things in any given seconds. I, personally, can move my neck 4 times to any of 8 locations in one second, which would require at least 5 bits per second of information, disproving the research.
Representation
The way that you represent a problem matters. For instance, there is a game: two players take turns choosing numbers between 1 and 9. When one player chooses a number, the other player cannot choose it. To win, a player has to be the first one with three numbers that add to 15 (ie, 1, 9, and 5). This game is hard to play because you need to do a lot of math in your head. Another way to represent this same game is Tic Tac Toe.
|
8 |
1 |
6 |
|
3 |
5 |
7 |
|
4 |
9 |
2 |
You can see another discussion of representation with regard to Roman numerals from when I took Beyond Bits and Atoms.
This is a difference in working memory. Humans are bad at remembering a lot of things at once. Some people estimate that people can remember 7 things, which might be why phone numbers are 7 digits. You should avoid having to remember a lot of things and let the representation remember them for you. "Getting Things Done" uses the same principle.
To aid this, the properties of the representation should match the thing being represented. For instance, in the Montesorri style of education, you can learn to add and multiply by taking a string of beads and stacking them together.
Also, a good representation will show all of the relevant information and nothing else. For instance, the London subway maps are not drawn to scale because the actual distances aren't relevant.
Representations should also go off of what users are good at. People are good at telling between light and dark, but they aren't good at telling the gradual difference between hues. Thus, if you want to do an altitude heatmap, it might be better to just use one color going from light to dark or to use two colors, one for above ground and one for below ground.
Visual Design and Typesetting
Use whitespace to make grouping obvious.
Use bold, color, or size to emphasize important information.
A lot goes into typesetting. When you want to figure out a good font, if you don't know much about fonts, try looking for other people that evoke the ideas that you want to evoke and see what font they use.
Serif fonts evoke older times (romanticism, wealth); sans serif fonts evoke newer times (modernism, simplicity).
CAPITALS jump out. If you don't want to shout but need to use capitals for an acronym, you can use small caps.
Whitespace in books is good so that you won't get distracted by the stuff behind the book.
Text is faster for beginners; icons are faster for experts.
Experts learn to chunk visual stimuli. Expert chess players are very good at remembering chess boards. However, if you put the board in a condition that it couldn't get into, experts will do as poorly as normal chess players. Interfaces can be chunked too -- dragging and dropping is one chunked operation rather than the several operations it would take to copy and paste.
Ems are a useful unit of measure when designing things.
Information Design
Make the scale of the axis meaningful. If you zoom in, you can make a one degree change in temperature look significant even when it isn't.
When it's relevant, present outliers.
Small Multiples: present many designs or graphs next to each other. Then, you can easily see the similarities, and the differences will be very pronounced.
How do people read online? They don't. Thus, highlight keywords, add meaningful subheadings, organize text into bulleted lists, shorten text so that each paragraph has only one idea, use the journalistic inverted pyramid (present the whole idea in the title, then present the whole idea in one paragraph, then present the full article), and use objective rather than flowery language.
Use speaking block navigation rather than low scent navigation: expose the submenus rather than hiding them with a mouseover. Make it easy to click on the most important things. It's okay to violate consistency to present the most important information where it needs to be.
Don't use technology centered colors (ie, the color 00FF00): use colors that have human relevance. The Munsell color space is perceptually based, and the Pantone color space is functionally based. Either can be good.
Having a standard color scheme can be good.
To do color right, start in grayscale, and keep the luminance values when you move to color. Also, don't rely on hues to tell the difference between elements.
Tidbits
Paradox of choice: when you present more choices, people are dissuaded and might choose none. Thus, giving more options isn't always better.
Designs should work in diverse contexts. A desktop web browser has a lot of space, whereas a mobile browser is small, so you need to figure out the important information and just present that. Humans operate in diverse contexts, too.
There are viewers that are site agnostic such that every site would look the same.
There is a psychological principle of commitment escalation. People don't want to sign up for a big commitment (like making a monetary donation) all at once. But they might click on "learn more." This goes along with Cialdini's principles of persuasion that I have discussed before.
CS546 - Liberation Technology Lecture Series
Andrew McLoughlin - Cybersecurity, Free Speech, and Sovereignty
Andrew McLoughlin talked about a lot of insecurities on the internet. The three insecure protocols that he discussed were DNS, inter-ISP routing (BGP), and certificate authorities (used in public key encryption).
DNS, which translates names like google.com into internet protocol (IP) addresses like 74.125.224.71, is insecure because everything is transmitted in the clear, so it's vulnerable to a man in the middle attack where someone listens to your DNS request and fakes a response (so that you would get an IP address for the hacker's server rather than Google's server). The solution is DNSSEC, which encrypts stuff.
BGP is how different ISPs figure out how to get your internet traffic from point A to point B in the fastest way possible. It's insecure because it's trust based. If I say "I can get to Google's servers really fast," then every other ISP is going to try to route their traffic through me to get to Google. Pakistan tried to block YouTube by having their ISP advertise, "I can get to YouTube instantly" and then just ignoring any traffic that tried to go to YouTube. As a result, for 8 hours, much of the world tried to route all YouTube traffic through that one ISP in Pakistan. China has also done some similarly sketchy stuff. The solution is Registry PKI, which cryptographically signs all IP addresses.
Certificate Authorities determine whose encryption you trust. The way that public key cryptography works is that a website like google.com will have a public key, and when I encrypt something using their public key, only Google can read it because only Google knows its own private key. However, in order for that to work, I need to trust that the public key I'm using is really Google's – otherwise, a man in the middle could advertise a fake public key that they know how to decrypt, and I could see all of your encrypted data. The solution to this is Certificate Authorities, which are organizations like VeriSign that can say "that actually is their public key. It's not a hacker faking the key." Web browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox will come with certificate authorities built in so that you can trust that there isn't a man in the middle between you and the CA.
However, there are a lot of problems with that. If my web browser has over 100 CAs built into it and just one of them is hacked, then the people who hacked it can do an attack on me. This happened to DigiNotar once, and a lot of people in Iran were hacked. The government of China owns a trusted CA, so they could hack me even without having to compromise a CA. There wasn't one simple solution to this problem.
For each of these problems, you need to get many stakeholders involved since the internet is a voluntary network and if someone involved (security people, government, corporations, etc) doesn't agree with a proposal, they can just ignore it. These stakeholders will be in many countries, and one government alone can't fix it.
That means that the implications on sovereignty are big: a government can't just secure the border. The government can create a sense of urgency and get people moving towards security, though. Also, even aside from issues of censorship and surveillance, the implications on free speech are big because online, people can be both speakers and listeners.
Joshua Stern + Jesse Young - Envaya
Envaya is an organization that provides a technology platform for civil society organizations in developing countries.
Their big idea is that working with community based organizations can achieve long term change where a lot of international organizations fail because, while foreign development workers leave and initiatives expire, the communities stay there over time. Thus, it would probably be a good idea to give those community based organizations the resources to succeed and to collaborate with one another..
At that point, a lot of the emphasis is on making sure to understand and design around the users' constraints. Many people don't have credit cards or online payment methods; some don't have email; most use old web browsers or their phones, and they will have limited bandwidth in either case; SMS might be a better interface; and since they are working with the leaders of community based organizations, most are literate, but not necessarily in English.
One of their products was a web publishing platform (like WordPress) that was designed around those constraints. So, for instance, it made it easy to resize an image before uploading it so that you would only need to use 100kB of bandwidth rather than 2MB.
Another product allows forwarding text messages between the internet and phones. Twilio and Clickatell only work in the US, partnering with mobile phone companies takes a lot of time, and using FrontlineSMS takes a lot of technical expertise (and it's low throughput and fragile). They made an Android app that does all of that very easily.
Ramesh Srinivasan
Ramesh Srinivasan is a professor at UCLA in design and information studies (in addition to being a Stanford alumni). He runs a lab that does lots of anthropological work in using technology to bring people together and help them tell their stories. He had a very strong understanding of the cultural implications of technology, which I respect.
He talked about using video to spread knowledge about biodiversity, social media for public political critique and private political organizing, attempts to bridge networks (in current social networks, we hang out with people who are like us rather than people in different networks. He's trying to figure out how we can bridge networks together), and different ways to represent knowledge (two people might have different ways of thinking about the world. It would be nice to have a system that could recognize the different ways that people talk about similar concepts and the different nuances that people put on similar words).
Sam Gregory + Brian Nunez - Witness
Witness empowers human rights defenders to use video to fight injustice. One of the case studies in Urban Studies 132 was on Witness, so I was excited to see their program director and technology manager. They talked about technical challenges in the space of human rights videos.
One was privacy. Some researchers used facial recognition software and tried to find the real names of pseudonymous people (people who might have some information about themselves, a picture in this case, but who don't provide their real name) on match.com. Using facebook, they were able to identify about 1/3 of the people. It's not hard to see that if you're a human rights activist, the videos that you take might be used by authoritarian governments to personally identify people and persecute them.
As a result, Witness and the Guardian Project made Obscura Cam, an Android app that lets you easily blur faces. You can blur faces individually (ie, if there's one person who wants to remain anonymous), or you can do a background blur (ie, if one person is publicly speaking, but you don't want to reveal the identities of all of the listeners at a rally).
Another problem is validation. If video is being used as evidence for human rights abuses, then it's a problem if people can upload fake videos. Some of the ways to validate videos include looking at multiple sources or multiple cameras, putting up an ID card or something else in the video to verify the identity, having someone aggregate many videos and curate them, and using Storyful to see what people are tweeting about on videos and checking it against facts about the situation. None of those solutions are terribly robust and scalable, though.
Paul Kim - Global Inequalities, Achievement Gaps, and Mobile Innovations
Paul Kim is the Chief Technology Officer and Assistant Dean for the Stanford School of Education.
He started by talking about some problems in education. Often, women are denied education. Undocumented kids might not be able to go to school. There are food crises, and hungry kids don't learn well. Many kids have to do manual labor like get water for their families, which takes a lot of time away from education. Many kids have to go through checkpoints, and others are geographically distant from their school so that the commute to school is as long as the school day. Plus, there's the whole problem of getting qualified teachers and facilities. All of this is a big deal because education is important.
A lot of people are trying to use technology to solve these problems. Many of these initiatives focus on delivering low cost, open source technology to as many people as possible. However, they often don't focus on the educational aspects of what they're doing, so there ends up being little education. There can be pedagogies in education that heavily utilize technology, but the technology needs to be specifically designed for the pedagogy.
Dean Kim had been involved in a lot of very cool and successful projects. A lot of them involved dedicated mobile devices with educational games. The materials would be specific to the context of the learners (ie, there would be mathematical word problems using examples of interest payments on agricultural microloans). The devices would also include tracking mechanisms. They would probably be powered by a bike. They tended to work best when students were in groups of three – it was counterproductive to give everyone their own device. In the end, students were able to learn in 20 minutes what would have taken weeks using more traditional pedagogies.
He also discussed some collaborative projects. One was where kids that don't have access to science experiments can do them remotely (basically via Skype). Another was kids writing their own practice problems for each other by remixing stuff from the textbook (which also increases learning outcomes because teaching is hard, so when you're teaching something, you learn it well).
Danny O'Brien - What Journalism in Syria, China, and Iran Tells Us about Silicon Valley's Future
Journalists need protection. If you're in an authoritarian country, or if you're reporting on local mafia or drug cartels, then you might be in danger. Traditionally, journalists would work in large media companies, which would protect them. Now that blogging is a bigger part of the landscape, that avenue is less useful. As a result, half of all journalists who are jailed for their work (50 or 60 people) did that work online. There are lots of tools made for activists and vulnerable communities (using websites in SSL, using Tor), but journalists often don't think of themselves as vulnerable, so they don't use these tools.
Student Projects
There is a class called Designing Liberation Technology where students work with NGO partners in Nairobi to make mobile phone apps to help people. One week of class, a few of these student groups presented their projects.
M-Maji was one project. The problem they addressed was that it takse hours to find water in Kibera, a lot of people don't have consistent access, and several times every month, there is a shortage that drastically increases prices. Their solution was a mobile marketplace that connects water vendors with people in need of water.
Nishauri wanted to get people better information on sexual health, so they provide a mobile counseling service. Since a counselor could have an SMS conversation rather than make a house visit, it reduced the cost to provide counseling from dollars to pennies.
Many women are unable to go to work because walking on the streets in the morning and at night could be unsafe. Makmende is addressing this problem by helping people coordinate groups of 5-10 people to walk with. This includes a group leader and a route.
Take Taka wanted to address sanitation problems by using bucket toilets and sending the waste to biocenters that would convert it into fuel. The person presenting for this group was an anthropologist, and they spent a lot of time criticizing the fact that the class was focused on technological (mobile phone) solutions to problems when the solution might be a bucket and not an SMS. However, each of the other groups were continuing work on their projects and maintaining the relationship with their NGO, whereas Take Taka didn't continue working, so they broke off that relationship. Also, Take Taka's solution was something that Oxfam, which already has things like a presence on the ground, relationships, and expertise, was already doing. And Take Taka indicated that there wouldn't be enough biocenters to actually implement their project.
While I agree with the critique of being overly focused on technology (which happens way too often in Silicon Valley), I also enjoy the bias towards action and solutions that many engineering disciplines teach and that many engineers embrace. One of the reasons that I wound up in computer science rather than in the social sciences or humanities is because I only found that bias towards action in computer science. In other words, I don't think that computers are always the solution, but I think that some solution is better than none. As Amnesty International says, it's better to light a candle than to curse the dark.
Jeff Klinger - Benetech
Benetech works on technology serving humanity. I had heard them give a few talks since they do lots of cool stuff. In this instance, Jeff Klinger gave a talk about Martus, one of their human rights software solutions.
Human rights informations put a high value on their information. It's their primary asset, often. If the information is on paper or on a local computer, you can easily lose that information due to natural causes. Also, in both cases, they're vulnerable to seizure by people not friendly to your cause. Thus, it's important to have backups, secrecy, and integrity (so that data can't be forged).
The software seems to practice all of the security best practices, but that wasn't anything new. Martus' selling point is usability. They make it look like an email client since most people have used email. Instead of calling things "encrypted," they call it "private." "Private key" is "key," "public key" is "public account ID," "cryptographically signed" is "sealed," etc.
CS547 - Human Computer Interaction Lecture Series
Ed Cutrell - Microsoft Research for Emerging Markets
Ed Cutrell and the Emerging Markets group at Microsoft do really cool things. The projects that he talked about:
-developing a tablet to use dead-tree paper as a data input method (because people don't have or don't know how to use normal computers and keyboards). This improved accuracy without compromising usability, and it got them their data much faster, which was cool. It empowered workers by showing them their financial information rather than forcing them to trust a bank.
-developing a phone broadcast (robocall) system for urban sex workers. There are a lot of design challenges based on the population even though the project is not computationally complex. It also helped nonprofits interface better with their constituents by developing a personal connection.
-developing a voice-only news wiki, CGNet Swara. A lot of people are illiterate and/or only speak a local language, but these people need to have voice and hear news. A voice wiki is hard to make, but it gives a voice and that voice can be heard on the BBC and make real change.
Lada Adamic - To Friend and Trust
This lecture was mostly about data mining social networks for demographic data, which wasn't terribly interesting. There were some interesting (if intuitive) tidbits. For instance, people are more likely to give a positive review when they are reviewing someone that can reciprocate with a negative review (so that doesn't happen when reviewing products). People are more likely to give a long review when not anonymous.
Paul Sas - The Quantified Self
The first part of the talk was about gathering data about yourself and doing stuff with it. That's what "quantified self" means. Recently, people have been good about getting the data and bad about doing stuff with it.
There are a lot of data sources: genome, web browser, speech, activity, sleep, biological stuff. More cool sensors are coming out. Ie, Green Goose makes stickers that can measure the movement of things (like your toothbrush); Withings has a wifi scale that tracks your body fat; there are galvanic skin sensors.
Data sources can be collaborative. Ie, CureTogether is a community of people who generate quasi-clinical data based on joining studies to measure the effectiveness of different treatments.
We are in a culture of data nudists. People are willing to make data about themselves publicly available. Some people get their genome through 23andMe and post it online. Other people put their phone number as public on their facebook profile.
Most of his talk was more about behavior change.
When changing behavior, providing an incentive is less effective than removing a barrier. Adding a map of tetanus shot locations is 10x more effective than telling people why getting a tetanus shot is good for them.
Reduction of choice overload is important.
Providing the correct defaults is good (people will often leave things at the default, so choose whether something is opt-in or opt-out accordingly).
Up front cognitive load is bad. Let people sign up easily and then have them add more customizations later.
The Delmore Effect: people spend more time forming goals for less important priorities. People have fewer goals for more important activities. Thus, they end up spending less time and effort on the things that are most important to them. To fix this, a person can do self-affirmations -- if I know that I can succeed, then I'll focus on what's most important to me. However, self-affirmations about the most important goal still leaves people more likely to focus on other goals because that gets them thinking about failure (ie, "I have done well at Code the Change" makes me think about the times that I have done less well with it). Thus, the best is to have self-affirmations about a subject that doesn't evoke fear of failure (ie, "I have done well planning events for other activities" will make me stop fearing planning an event for Code the Change and won't make me fear failure).
Thus, you can't just ask people what is important to them or how to change their behavior. you have to work hard to extract what is important.
People are able to use their higher minds when planning more in advance. I'm more likely to watch a documentary if I plan it two weeks in advance, whereas I'm more likely to watch a low brow action film if I plan it for tonight.
People suffer decision fatigue when making too many choices. Thus, automate the choices. Ie, most of my charitable donations are made automatically every month without my continued input.
Andruid Kerne - Creativity
Kerne focused on making interfaces that facilitate creativity.
One interface was zero touch – you could interact with stuff in the air and sensors would figure out what you were doing. Kind of like the Kinect.
They tried for trans-surface interaction – getting multiple devices to talk to one another for a shared experience. Ie, we could play a game of cards using each of our phones (to keep track of our hands) and a tablet (so that everyone could see the cards that were already down).
Kerne also talked about design decisions for creativity. One was information composition. People use different parts of their brains for text and images, so it's easier for people if you include both.
Warren Sack - Video and Open Government
In the scientific community, to be taken seriously, your work should be peer reviewed. That way, if one scientist reaches a bad conclusion because they misinterpreted some data or forgot some basic premise, then other scientists can catch their mistake (it also makes biased and unscientific things harder). Right now, scientific testimony before congress doesn't have that peer review process. Warren Sack is using video to bring peer review to scientific testimony.
Before Sack worked on video stuff, he did a political language game. You win points by using words or phrases that get adopted by other people. You win by moving to the center – controlling everyone's vocabulary. This was made to demonstrate how political parties think about word crafting
Wendy Mackay - Creativity
A lot of cool technologies involve computers and people working together (ie, Google Instant completing your query). The human can do stuff when they know what they're doing, and when they hesitate, the computer can fill in the gap.
After that, Mackay talked about a lot of ways to integrate technology with paper (Lightscribe Pen, Knotty Gestures, and Musink).
Scott Klemmer, one of the people running the lecture series, asked some questions about why her paper interfaces were better than some specific computer interfaces, and Mackay's justifications were more or less nostalgic. I wasn't very convinced of her points about the awesomeness of paper.
Chinese Typewriter
It's easy to type in English because we only have 26 lowercase characters, 26 uppercase characters, 10 digits, and a few symbols. Chinese is harder. There are three approaches:
1. Common usage: take the most commonly used characters and put those in a typewriter. Don't represent the whole language.
2. Pieces: each key wouldn't represent a whole character, but rather a line segment. You would then type multiple keys to get one character. This has never been implemented.
3. Encode it: give each character a number between 0 and 10000. This is how they did the telegraph.
The common usage typewriter was an early example of predictive text. Early typewriters were organized by radicals (the character parts) rather than words. People could type 20 characters per minute with these. Then, someone took the same machine and reorganized the characters so that characters used together were put together and tripled the output. There was never one single keyboard layout for Chinese typewriters – different people needed a different set of characters and would type different words together commonly, so each person would have their own layout.
Chuck Clanton and Jon Fox - Interactive Body Gestures in Public Multiplayer Games
Clanton and Fox made video game advertisements for malls. For instance, there might be a soccer ball and field projected onto a part of the floor, and when you kick a goal, Nike flashes on the display.
They were able to get very good brand recognition after they reorganized when the brand would appear. It needs to be readable, draw your attention to it, and be at a time when you have time to read it. So, a logo flashing on the screen with some sound after you kick a goal in and can pause for a moment is good (85% brand recognition rather than 10% when the field is just normally branded).
The game element helped a lot, too. People spent almost 10 minutes playing some games, whereas they would only spend 2 seconds looking at a billboard or a tv screen. Also, even though only a few people might be playing, the onlookers experience the ads too.
One problem is that empty games tend to remain empty. You need an ice breaker – the game needs to notice that you're there and draw you in. Then, the game needs sustainers to make sure that the game doesn't become unoccupied later on. In other words, there needs to always be people waiting in line (or in a crowd) to play the game next.
CS193A - Android
Android is a smartphone operating system that Google develops. According to Wikipedia, almost three times as many Android phones are being sold as iPhones, and Android passed iOS in popularity in 2010. It's nice because it's a free operating system, so you aren't locked down like you are with an iPhone.
CS193A was about making Android apps. It was good as an introduction, but there weren't any particular apps that I have wanted to make, so I haven't done anything with it.
Code the Change
Intro
I have put off talking about Code the Change for a year now, which is a shame because it has been bigger than anything else for me; it has been my life for the last year. In short, Code the Change helps computer scientists use their skills for social change. It is the evolution of Dance Marathon Hackathon, which I have written about before. It is an idea whose time has come, and I am doing my best to cultivate it until it has grown to fruition and no longer needs me. Tons of people are interested in supporting it. We are well established at Stanford, and we're in the process of spreading to other schools, so if you know anyone who might be interested in starting a chapter, let me know!
Much of Code the Change is public facing, so I have stuff up on our website. For instance, the history of Code the Change, where I talk about how I started the organization and grew it from a once per year event to a twice per quarter event, is available at
http://codethechange.org/about/history. You can read about what we do at
http://codethechange.org/about (that page also links to our media and values pages). You can learn about the projects we have worked on in the past at
http://codethechange.org/projects. Once I find someone who's good with media, you'll be able to see some photos and videos, too.
Originally, I put off writing about Code the Change because I was trying to do it like my normal verbose letters. I was trying to write about each significant experience. I was unable to do this because it would have been too much (even by my verbose standards). Also, it was unnecessary to do this because Code the Change is already public facing. When we have a success or an event or when we learn a lesson, we post it on our website and send an email out to our list. Many of my meetings involve helping one specific nonprofit, which might be private and which probably wouldn't be interesting to a reader. One reason that I write so much in these letters is because I want to share the things that I learn in the classes I take and talks I go to; with Code the Change, we already distill our learnings onto our website.
Thus, the role of this section of the verbose letter is to discuss my interactions with the organization – what I do, why I made the choices that I made regarding the organization's structure, and how the organization has changed me.
My Job
When we were the Dance Marathon Hackathon, my job was putting up fliers and sending emails to get computer scientists to attend an annual event, working with nonprofits to figure out good projects for the programmers to work on, and dealing with event logistics. I'm not particularly good at any of those. Weird, huh? Now, other people take care of our core activities, so the organization that I inherited would continue to operate at full speed without me.
My job is dealing with the organization. I came up with the name, mission, vision, and values. I worked on a business plan. I helped us get a logo. I set up our bank account. I think about what our next goal should be as we expand. When there's a gap in the organization, I fill that role (for instance, making our website before we had webmasters). I sit next to people on airplanes and tell them about what we do and give them business cards. I represent the organization in interviews. I talk to students that want to program for social change and to nonprofits that need help. I apply for awards and funds. I try to get people to start new chapters and join our team. I say "no" when the organization drifts too far from its core purpose and say "yes" when we need to experiment on new things.
One piece of advice I got in Urban Studies 133 when starting Code the Change was to become the expert. After hearing that, I started meeting with people on the subject of CS and social change every week. I talked with experts in the field and learned best practices. After doing that for a year (and doing things in the space since my sophomore year), I have become something of an expert on the subject, and I find myself spending more time in meetings sharing my expertise than learning things that I haven't already heard. One part of my job is being a credible expert on the subject of CS and social change.
The reading, "Freeing the Social Entrepreneur" by Chantal Laurie Below & Kimberly Dasher Tripp in the Stanford Social Innovation Review describes five roles that companies need on the leadership team: the evangelist, the scaling partner, the connector, the program strategist, and the realist. Personality-wise, I am very much a program strategist and realist: I like being an expert in my focus area and being on the ground running an effective and measured program, and I am good with finances and organization.
My personality is least like that of an evangelist or connector, but those are the roles that I have stepped into the most. Code the Change is central to my life, so any conversation with me will relate to the organization, so I pretty much evangelize it full time. I am happy to speak about any part of the organization at any time to any one. I meet lots of people and convince them of the importance of the idea of Code the Change. Because of that, I am acquainted with a large amount of the people involved in CS and social change, so I connect people with each other when someone is getting into the space.
I say that my personality is not that of an evangelist or connector because both of those roles are extroverted, and I grew up an introvert. My time as a debater taught me how to talk, but my style of debate was heavy on logic and light on persuasion. I have never been a socialite. I have had a lot of friends since high school because I try to be a nice guy, so I avoid being cliquish or making enemies, but I have never been a partier or schmoozer. The reason that it is so natural for me to fulfill those two roles is because I am simply acting as a representative for an idea whose time has come. I could talk all day about Code the Change, and I can be persuasive and passionate. I can talk about it at dinner parties or when I just have 30 seconds to meet someone.
I wrote about a lesson I learned in Urban Studies 133: fundraising isn't begging for money, but giving someone a chance to put their money towards something that has a huge impact on the world. Similarly, networking isn't dispassionately trying to meet people so that I can further my own success, but rather meeting cool people doing cool things so that I can help them make the world a better place in the future and help them find other likeminded people. Those two roles are typically filled by extroverted people is because being good with people makes them easier. To be good at those roles, though, passion is both necessary and sufficient. As my passion for and understanding of Code the Change grew, I stepped into those roles naturally and seamlessly.
The role of scaling partner is in the middle for me. I started out as the realist and program strategist because those roles are necessary to further our core mission. This past year, I continued to play those roles because I wanted to refine our operations and get our best practices rock solid before trying to spread those practices elsewhere. I am just reaching the point where I think that those roles -- making sure that everything runs smoothly and that we continue to experiment and learn more about how to best help computer scientists use their skills for social change -- can be done by other people, which is why I transitioned them. However, as a result, I haven't yet done much work on scaling. Next year, everything is in place for scaling full throttle, so I will be putting much more of my time on that, as well as working with our campus coordinator.
The Organization
Mission
See
http://codethechange.org/about
Code the Change helps computer scientists use their skills for social change.
Deciding on a mission and vision is hard because that is an organization's focus. It's like choosing a major. There is the general idea of computer science and social change, but is our focus on hackathons or computer scientists or nonprofits or what? Our goal is to engage computer scientists, and we are working to make the world a better place.
I didn't specify one particular activity because there are many complementary activities that we can engage in that feel like they're within the scope of our organization. That includes hackathons, but it might also include giving computer scientists career advice and connecting them with nonprofits for internships or helping them with social change related startups. Computer scientists want to make the world a better place. If there's something that I can do to help computer scientists help them with that, that's good.
I didn't specify a particular end goal aside from social change because, as the Haas Center for Public Service says, service is for all. There isn't just one way to make the world a better place. I might have some ideas, but what gets me excited isn't what will get everyone else excited. Our organization is generally progressive, which is to say that I don't want to support something that I think will make the world a worse place, but apart from that, we're open.
People also thought that the wording could be stronger. "Code the Change empowers computer scientists to use their programming skills to accelerate social change" -- ugh! I have written extensively about the value that I place on simplicity. The mission that I have is short, avoids pretension, and says everything important about the organization in an understandable way.
I am Sam King, and I help computer scientists use their skills for social change.
Vision
Code the Change envisions a world where social change is an integral part of computer science culture.
I'm less satisfied with this than the mission. The mission is a beautiful marriage of the supply side (computer scientists want to help make the world a better place) and demand side (the world needs computer scientists to work on social change). The vision is focused on the supply side. I think that's okay because I believe that if social change is an integral part of computer science culture, there will be enough computer scientists working on social change to address the demand.
Name + Tagline
Our tagline is "you must code the change you wish to see in the world." It's supposed to evoke Gandhi's "you must be the change you wish to see in the world."
In the 2011 computer science commencement at Stanford, Mehran Sahami, my advisor, mentioned me and called on the graduates to code the change that they wished to see in the world.
The name works, but people also think that the name is "Code for Change." Even immediately after I introduce the organization as "Code the Change," hand them a business card with the name "Code the Change," and when I am wearing a shirt that says "Code the Change."
Values
See
http://codethechange.org/about/values
I looked at Google's 10 values as a model for these. The values are guiding principles by which a company will be managed; the mission is to the organization's external product as the values are to the organization's internal process.
Some of the values have to do with things that I think are necessary to avoid burnout (fun), others with being a successful organization (move fast, think big, flat hierarchies), and the rest are about the focus on social change (social change, our relationship to the world, both/and, service for all, people first).
When I was a junior in high school, debate made me wonder about the ambiguity of values. I would have still felt fine about the first two categories, but I wouldn't have known how to resolve the question of the good that our social change values try to address. In particular, setting our relationship to the world as preserving human dignity (as outlined in the UDHR) would have been too absolutist. Now, I feel no such qualms. Describing the change is something that would require a much more complete description of my philosophy (which is coming in a verbose letter soon!). I also would have been offput by both/and, service for all, and people first because I was focused on finding the highest impact form of social change. Now, on the other hand, I realize that humans are susceptible to burnout, so finding the greatest impact that each individual can have on the world has a lot to do with what they are passionate about.
Activities
Our main activity is putting on Code Jams, which connect computer scientists with nonprofits. These events are 8-24 hours long, and at an event, nonprofits will pitch projects to help their organizations, computer scientists will choose the project that seems the most interesting and start talking with the nonprofit representative, and then they'll program for the duration of the event. These projects will be bite-sized, usually involving a prototype of something that doesn't have any existing code written, so that progress is possible even during such a short event. We also encourage programmers and nonprofits to stay in touch after the event.
We also work on longer-term forms of support. We provide career counseling to computer scientists who are interested in volunteering, interning, or getting a full time job in the social sector. We also help nonprofits reach out to computer scientists, and we're investigating starting a nonprofit tech consulting group.
Types of Projects
Nonprofits pitch all types of projects at our events. We work with about 8 organizations per event and have about two events per quarter, so we have worked with a bunch of different organizations, and their needs are just as diverse. The organizations are in education, public health, basic infrastructure and governance, democracy and activism, entrepreneurship, energy and the environment, agriculture and development, and plenty of other subjects.
One project was working with a university in Uganda to make an Android app that did agricultural disease detection by doing computer vision on cassava plants. Some of the projects are setting up basic web sites with content management systems so that the nonprofit can update the site themselves. Others involve databases, data visualization, facebook apps, and mobile websites. Our programmers have made fundraising flash games similar to FreeRice and Arduino applications to help people with small businesses in the developing world manage their electricity.
One of the best parts about running Code the Change is being exposed to so many different organizations doing so many great things and being able to get them the help that they need.
Manhood
In my first year at Stanford, I was talking with my debate coach, and made a comment like "when I grow up." He responded, "You don't think of yourself like an adult?" No, I didn't. To me, adulthood means commitment to your child or commitment to an idea greater than yourself. I had nothing to which I was committed. I considered myself a boy, not a man, and this was true up until spring quarter of my junior year.
Now, I am Sam King, the director of Code the Change, which is the manifestation of an idea whose time has come. By the time I'm done, I will be the world's expert on the intersection of computer science and social change. My organization will be as well established in computer science as Doctors Without Borders is in the medical profession or Teach for America is for college graduates. As a result of my work, thousands of nonprofits will have saved millions of dollars on technical projects, and thousands of computer scientists will be activated to work on social change full time.
If that goal seems audacious, it is: I would attach my standard to nothing less. But I also have all of the skills, energy, and opportunities necessary to make that happen. I am an optimist – it does not seem to be much use to be anything else (Churchill). I made a commitment to the world not to let this idea die. Now, I have a place in the world, and I am steadfast. Now I am a man.
Culture
Books
How to Win Friends and Influence People
My first time seeing "How to Win Friends and Influence People" was in an episode of Daria. At the end of an episode where Daria and Jodie are invited to a prep school of elitist kids, Daria is reading "Heart of Darkness" and Jodie is reading "How to Win Friends and Influence People."
With a title like that, I had all of the wrong assumptions about it. Most of the book is about being nice to other people. There are three sections, and he summarizes the principles himself, so you could find most of this replicated everywhere. A few of his chapters are repetitive, but his summary is pretty good.
Fundamental Techniques in Handling People
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1.Don't criticize, condemn, or complain.
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2.Give honest and sincere appreciation.
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3.Arouse in the other person an eager want.
Six Ways to Make People Like You
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1.Become genuinely interested in other people.
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2.Smile.
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3.Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
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4.Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves.
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5.Talk in terms of the other person's interest.
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6.Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.
Twelve Ways to Win People to Your Way of Thinking
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1.The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.
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2.Show respect for the other person's opinions. Never say "You're Wrong."
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3.If you're wrong, admit it quickly and emphatically.
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4.Begin in a friendly way.
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5.Start with questions to which the other person will answer yes.
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6.Let the other person do a great deal of the talking.
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7.Let the other person feel the idea is his or hers.
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8.Try honestly to see things from the other person's point of view.
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9.Be sympathetic with the other person's ideas and desires.
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10.Appeal to the nobler motives.
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11.Dramatize your ideas.
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12.Throw down a challenge.
The book was very good. It reinforced the idea that everything important is taught in kindergarten. Unfortunately, I skipped kindergarten, so I had to read the book. It did a very good job of reminding me of the importance of many obvious things. I highly recommend it.
The Warded Man
Once upon a time, there were demons, and humans learned how to fight back. Then humans won and spent a few thousand years developing modern science. Then the demons came back and crushed modern civilization. Humans can't fight back, so they spend a few hundred years cowering in fear. The book is about some kids who start fighting back.
I liked the book. In the last letter, I wrote that I disliked "World War Z", "Locke Lamora", and "Game of Thrones" because there were too many points of view, so I couldn't get behind the characters. This book had three different points of view that don't join together until the last part, so I don't think that was the issue. I think that in the previously mentioned books, I just couldn't get behind the characters.
In those books, there weren't really heroes. And the books didn't feel like a commentary on why there weren't heroes (as "Slaughterhouse Five" or "The Plague" are). I just didn't care about the characters.
The heroes in "The Warded Man" are heroic. They reject society's exaltations (as Camus' heroes do) because they think that people need to stop waiting for a hero to come and need to be their own hero. They mostly behave as people should. The author paints a picture of humanity as having the potential of overcoming obstacles. And it is good.
I believe that, in this world, people suffer, that is bad, and we should stop it. I like books that are consistent with that message or that inform some part of that message. The books that I didn't like seemed mostly ambivalent towards it.
Slaughterhouse Five
Structurally, this book behaved well. Like many books that I like, it wasn't about suspense. The first chapter tells the reader the story and the end, and the important part of the book is what is gained by actually reading the book.
Vonnegut writes, in the first chapter:
["Slaughterhouse Five"] is so short and jumbled and jangled [...] because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.
The body of the book was meaningless to me. I think that it was supposed to be.
Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Confessions of an Economic Hitman is the 2004 autobiography of John Perkins. He spent most of his life as an economist working for international economic development corporations (Haliburton's competitors). He talks about how they would practice predatory lending (encouraging countries to take loans that they couldn't repay so that they would get political and economic favors in the future) with the knowledge that their recommendations would lead to economic regression across the world for the benefit of a few companies in the US.
It's very compelling as the story of an insider. I highly recommend it.
The Dragonprince
I saw a sale on Amazon for two books for one dollar. This was over winter break, and I wanted some books to read, so I bought them both. One was Taming Fire by Aaron Pogue. It was a fairly quick read, and I bought the next one also. It's a fantasy series about a human that uses dragon magic to save the world from the coming dragon swarm.
The second book, The Dragonswarm, has some interesting commentary on power. It's mostly just a fun read, though.
When I was writing the first draft of this verbose letter, I checked out Aaron Pogue's blog to see when the third book would come out. I discovered, to my delight, that he was releasing ARCs (advance reader copies) of his third book, The Dragonprince's Heir, to the first 100 people to post a comment on that blog post. What timing! Well, I got one (my first ARC!), and here is my review.
The Dragonprince's Heir is unexpected and strong. It breaks the narrative of the first two books, and it satisfies all along the way.
Coming in, I expected to read about Daven fighting off the dragonswarm in his fortress after solidifying the base of his power in the previous book. In the very beginning of the book, it becomes evident that the dragonswarm is 10 years passed, and Daven is nowhere to be seen! Thus, discovering that the protagonist is Daven's son, Taryn, is very unexpected.
Much more interestingly, though, Taryn is among the first protagonists that I have read who is both the primary protagonist and primarily a foil. Yes, the story is about his development and coming of age, much in the same way that the first two books were about Daven's development and coming of age (and with similar plot elements along the way), but that story is familiar enough to leave out details. In Taryn's role as the protagonist, we observe him as he travels the world and grows. However in Taryn's role as the foil, we observe the world that has grown over the years as Taryn travels.
The book is not without some rough spots. The second book had Daven constantly growing his power and struggling with it, as well as with enemies. That was a fine premise for some epic conflicts. The Dragonprince's Heir abandons much of that power-based conflict for emotional conflict and worldbuilding, which leaves the book feeling a bit slow at times. The book also seems a little short, with a few too many loose ends for me to feel completely happy at the end of a trilogy. None of these points, however, detract from my enjoyment of the book.
Overall, The Dragonprince's Heir is very different from the first two books in the series, but it is no worse for wear. If you read the second book, felt that it was the pinnacle of fantasy, and want a repeat, you will be disappointed. If you enjoyed Pogue's writing, the characters that he created, and the world of the FirstKing, you will find The Dragonprince's Heir to be a satisfactory conclusion.
Blacksmith's Son
The other one dollar series was The Blacksmith's Son by Michael Manning. At first, I thought the book was poorly written. Then, I thought, "Oh, this isn't poorly written; it's just a children's novel, and I didn't realize it." Then, I realized, "Nope, it's not a children's novel. It's just written by someone with the writing skills of a child." Part of the issue was numerous errors that should have been caught by an editor but weren't. Part of the issue was an uncompelling child protagonist. Overall, though, it was just bad writing. I didn't buy the subsequent books in the series.
Gardens of the Moon
On the prodding of my friends, I read Gardens of the Moon by Steven Erikson. It was okay. It took about 400 pages before I started knowing the many characters and before action started happening. According to my friends, it starts getting good around the second book (there are ten books in the series now). I haven't read it yet, but I can see that. There are a bunch of gods, and there are a bunch of non-gods with the power of gods, so it seems like things will get very epic, which I like. The book doesn't go in depth on any one protagonist, but there are a sufficient number of compelling characters that I don't hate the author.
Dresden Files
I earlier commented on reading books 1-3 of the Dresden Files. Between March and May, I read books 4-13. While the books are still fairly modular, they have pretty much what I want in a book. The important part is the journey, not the ending. There are conflicts and gray areas, but the protagonist is fighting the good fight with a righteous fury. The villains are sufficiently powerful to create epic conflicts and to evoke the essence of the protagonists. And the writing is fairly good, if not innovative.
As the series progresses, much of the magic and factions in the world have been established (faeries, undead, vampires, demons, white council and their associated types of magic), and most of the characters stick around, so there's a lot of development between each person and group. Also, because each book takes place a year or so after the previous one, there is a sense of meaningful character development between the books (ie, in the earlier books, Dresden wasn't a very good runner, but he starts jogging at some point, and he gets better as he series goes on, and he views on political things change, and he gets a bit better at magic).
Jim Butcher also wrote a few short stories also (compiled in the book Side Jobs), and I was really impressed by the three of the later ones (Backup, The Warrior, and Aftermath), each of which focus on a different minor character. Aftermath is among my favorite short stories, especially when reading it after Ghost Stories since it feels very pertinent and deep in the context of that book.
Rethana's Surrender
Rethana's Surrender is about Rethana caring for her sister, dealing with interpersonal conflicts between herself, her townsfolk, and the ruling clerics, and learning magic.
The good:
The book deals with some social issues, particularly the sexist double standards that many women face, in a way that should be more present in more works.
The system of magic is well done. It seems to be well thought out and have a fairly subtle effect on the plot and the world rather than just being deus ex magicka.
The focus on relationships and emotions lets the reader get immersed into Rethana's confusions and triumphs.
Many books have a larger than life protagonist who is able to overcome all obstacles due to their birthright, power, exceptional intellect, skill, or strength. Rethana is very human and subject to human limitations. She has an edge over the average person and is courageously headstrong, but it doesn't feel like she is much stronger than anyone else. It is nice to see a human protagonist.
The bad:
I often felt left in the dark when reading. Part of this was an awkward passage of time, where it wasn't always clear how much time had passed after a break in the narrative. Part of this was the language. In the first part, it's hard to deal with the speaker's accents. After that, there are a lot of words in the cleric's language sprinkled in, and I get the sense that Rethana knows a lot of the words and, in some cases, the reader was even told what the words meant, but I could never keep track of more than two or three of them. As a result, even though the story was told in the first person, it had much of the awkwardness of a third person narrative where the reader never quite feels immersed into the world.
Rethana's emotional state seems more repetitive and less developed. She has internal emotional conflicts regarding romantic relationships, loyalty to her sister, and desire to rebel and go to her family versus desire to learn and stay with the clerics. Each of these conflicts feels about the same at the end of the book as it did towards the beginning even though there are plenty of events and opportunities for emotional development. Rethana is confused and courageous at the beginning and confused and courageous in roughly the same ways at the end.
The worldbuilding and action are both light. That is, the focus of the book is on emotional issues to the exclusion of all else. The world seems like it probably has some unique flair, but we only get to learn about a small part of it, so it has a cookie-cutter medieval fantasy feel (religious ruling class, small towns with some larger cities, hereditary elemental magic without much mechanical explanation, some wandering nomads and witches). And there are only about four different parts of the story, two of which have any action in them.
Overall, I feel like there's a lot there and that there will be some interesting relationships and events in the second book, but the first book doesn't develop much to a satisfying conclusion.
The Black Prism
Goodreads recommended that I read The Dark Prism, and the book was very good. In the book, magic works by turning light into matter. Each person can use a different color of light. Some people who are really good can use multiple colors. The prism is a person who can use all colors and who can split white light into its component colors (normally, people have to actually see blue to use blue, for instance), which makes them very powerful.
Normally, I don't like books that switch around between a bunch of point of view characters. This book has two main ones that it switches between plus a few others that it goes to sometimes. However, it's very well done. The characters are all working on the same issues at roughly the same times, and they're often in close proximity with one another, so a transition from one character to another usually doesn't break the action.
The characters are each endearing in different ways. A 15 year old kid, Kip, is hardworking and determined, but he provides much of the comic relief in the book. He's the awkward kid who alternately mouths off and puts his foot in his mouth, made all the more awkward due to the chip on his shoulder. Not that I have ever been that kid or anything, but I must say that it is done remarkably well and that I love every moment of his narrative.
Gavin Guile is the other main character. His parts involve less awkwardness and more tragic political intrigue. He is the prism, which means that he's the most powerful person in the world. He's also the best prism in centuries. And, his family raised him to be hypersuccessful politically, so he's also at the center of politics. Combine that with living a lie within a lie, and there's plenty of interesting stuff to go around. You learn more of his lies as time goes on, and you love him despite all of the lies because it seems like he mostly is doing the right thing.
The other characters, in this book, are mostly foils, but even that is well done, and they are set up to have pivotal roles in future books.
All of that makes the book a very enjoyable read, which is sufficient to merit it 4 stars. However, it didn't go very deep into any political, philosophical, or cultural issues. There was a shallow coverage of some virtues (hard work, trying to do the right thing), some social and political issues (hierarchical social castes, drug addiction, just war, occupation, freedom versus security), and some ethical philosophy (ethics of killing and of lying), but it didn't go deep enough into any issue to make me feel like I got anything new out of it or came to any deeper understanding.
Stop Stealing Dreams
Seth Godin is a marketing guru, entrepreneur, and Stanford graduate. He has a free book called Stop Stealing dreams: download it in your favorite ebook format at
http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams. It's a series of one page rants about the education system.
The basic brunt of it is that rote memorization isn't useful because computers exist, that school is institutionalized to produce obedient workers rather than people who are passionate and engaged, and that passionate people are important. He is a fan of online education and the inverted classroom.
I agree with his basic premise, but I disagree on a lot of the finer points. For instance, he seems to have a classist notion of what a good job is. I am much happier as a computer scientist than I would be as a manual laborer, but that isn't true for everyone. Some people like farming or pipefitting or running a family store, and there's nothing wrong with that.
His view of higher education also doesn't match my own. He says that, since online classes give everyone in the world the same content, a stereotypically good university just gives you a tribe and a fancy credential. Before going to Stanford, that was what most people around me said, and if it weren't for Stanford's excellent financial aid, I might never have went there even though it was my top choice. However, Stanford has given me a lot of things that I don't think that I would have gotten at many other schools. The attitude among teachers is, "you got in to Stanford, so you're pretty much the best, so I'll assign you a ton of work, and you'll be able to get it all done and done well." The students do a ton of things. There's a network of highly motivated and intelligent people, and there's instant respect in many circles. Also, Stanford provides resources, financial and otherwise, to do pretty much any cool endeavor under the sky. All of that contributes to an atmosphere where everyone is dreaming big and confident that they will change the world because they can see examples of success all around them. Godin argues that dreams are one of the most important parts of an education, and more than anything else, Stanford has given me confidence in my dreams.
The Last Unicorn
Per the recommendation of Patrick Rothfuss, I read Peter Beagle's
"The Last Unicorn." The book wasn't fast moving or motivational enough to make it a favorite, but it was extremely interesting. I'm not sure that I understood everything in it. I's the type of book that I'll probably have to read again or read with a pen to understand.
The book follows a unicorn. She discovers that she is the last of her kind, and she journeys to find and free the rest.
Rothfuss recommended the book as a story about stories, and that seems to ring true. In the book, the stories that people believe have power (much like Planescape: Torment).
When humans see the unicorn, they often see a beautiful horse because they don't think that unicorns exist. A witch in a traveling show convinces people that she has beasts of legend on show because they are willing to believe that. When a normal spider believes in itself, it is magical. When a band of bandits isn't proud of the work that they do, they can't continue: they don't want to tell a story that they don't believe in, and they would rather be something real. A town is cursed with abundance that will end when someone from their town kills an evil king, and because they believe that their abundance is good, they make themselves miserable preserving it. The belief that another being is powerful inspires fear even if that being can do nothing. Believing that you have changed leads to change, and playing a role fulfills that role. Belief in something beautiful and free can make heroes, and belief in heroes can make a wizard. Belief in one's own power or in duty is sufficient to do the impossible.
Video
Children of Men and Camus
"Children of Men" is a 2006 movie about a world in which humans can't reproduce and society crumbles (modeled after the eponymous book). The protagonist works to help the first pregnant woman in several decades. I saw this movie a few years ago, but I think I fell asleep partway through, so I decided to watch it wholeheartedly. I liked the movie primarily because I subscribe to the ethical philosophy set out by Camus in "The Plague," and I think that the protagonist represents that philosophy very well.
This analysis of the movie will include spoilers up the wazoo, but the movie is no less beautiful for having been spoiled.
In "The Plague," Dr. Rioux does what he must in order to help the people in the city, and duty is a strong and recurrent theme. In "Children of Men," the protagonist only steps into his role reluctantly, but he was not hesitant to do his duty.
At the start of the movie, he is disenfranchised. He is living in a hopeless society. There is suffering all around him, and he does little to stop it. It would be very hard to stop the root of the suffering -- people don't know how to reverse human infertility -- but there are still people working to ease the suffering and people working to reverse human infertility, so I don't think that his excuse for apathy is particularly good. He also never got over the death of his child. He doesn't seem very happy.
I read a paper ("
The End(s) of the Intellectual: Ethics, Politics, Terror") about Camus arguing that his philosophy was "save bodies." A kid criticized Camus for not supporting the FLN, terrorists bombing people for justice and democracy in Algeria, against the French government, which was torturing and killing people. Camus said that he supported democracy and justice, but that when terrorists might kill his mother, he would defend his mother before justice. The paper argues that Camus has the ethical principle of valuing human life above all else, including political appeals to justice and freedom that require sacrificing human life. In this sense, he rejected the government for torturing, and he rejected the terrorists for bombing.
When the pregnant woman reveals to the protagonist that she is pregnant, he quickly assumes the philosophy just described. He rejects the government for their cruel treatment of immigrants, and he rejects the terrorists for their callous treatment of innocent lives.
In his first meeting with the full group of terrorists, they are all deciding what to do with the pregnant woman: try to get her to "The Human Project" to take care of the baby, or lay low and wait. The protagonist rejects those options. "She's about to have a baby. We need to take her to a hospital." He continues this way throughout the rest of the movie.
Children of Men and Negotiation
I also analyzed the same movie for my negotiation class. I included the analysis below. Once again, spoilers up the wazoo. Also, this might be more interesting if you have read my writeup of the negotiation class.
The movie is set against the backdrop of the protagonist's relationship with his ex-wife, the leader of a terrorist organization that works on behalf of immigrant rights. There are three notable conversations between the two.
The first is a positional negotiation. She wants him to talk to a friend to get a passport for a third party to exit the country. They don't talk about many of the relationship issues or about objective criteria. In that scene, they may as well not have known each other at all. They each play into tactics. The wife brings him into the conversation using some of her thugs who threaten him (she probably didn't want them to be anything other than nice to the protagonist, but the scene still comes off as good cop / bad cap). He goes to his BATNA (they aren't holding him by force, and he could live without the money that they're offering him). Neither of them explore many options -- it's pretty much just "passport for money -- that's it." They do both get down to interests -- the wife needs to get someone out of the country, and the protagonist needs money. They don't resolve any of the difficult emotional issues that are preventing them from talking. One thing that the wife does well is, as described in "Negotiating Without a Net," she gives him the opportunity to save face, walk away, and still go forward with the deal.
The second is a difficult conversation. After the protagonist gets the papers, he goes with his wife to her organization's headquarters. On the way there, they talk about their past relationship. It turns into a shouting match very quickly. They both do many of the things cautioned against in "Difficult Conversations" such as saying "you always walk away" and "you don't understand -- you never reacted to our son's death, and I couldn't deal with it." Their relationship improves after (not during) the conversation because the protagonist learns more about what happened: his wife can't deal with it either.
The third is a happy conversation. They both remember their happy times, and they share their experiences with the people around them. Here, they weren't working out any particular issues, so the framework from class doesn't seem to apply.
After his wife dies, the protagonist's negotiations with the terrorist group take a very different turn. His wife, as the leader, said that the protagonist should protect the pregnant woman because even when his wife was separated from him, she still trusted him. Despite conflict, their ongoing relationship was still solid. However, the terrorist group didn't seem very willing to listen to him. In class, it was argued that the framework still applied to negotiating with terrorists because they are rational and have interests. In this movie, their interest is immigrant rights, and their position is violent uprising and using the pregnant woman as a political symbol. The protagonist's interest is making sure that the pregnant woman gets the care that she needs. Aside from discussing those interests, the protagonist and the terrorists don't engage in much productive negotiation. In the end, they go with the objective criteria of deferring to the pregnant woman. They spell out details of how they will implement their agreed on commitment. However, the terrorists decide that their BATNA, killing the protagonist and using the pregnant woman as a political symbol, is more advantageous. As a result, the protagonist goes to his BATNA: stealing all of their car keys in the middle of the night and getting himself and the pregnant woman away.
Because he was with those terrorists when they killed a cop, he is not in a position where he can go to the government or civilization for protection since he would have no BATNA when going into a negotiation with them and they would have a good BATNA (arrest him). As a result, he conspired with his friend to get someone to smuggle him out of the country. This shows how an organization that does not have a reputation for negotiating with people who turn themselves in (the government) can yield results that are suboptimal for them (people committing more crime).
After the woman has her baby, people have mixed reactions. The protagonist's friend (the smuggler) sees hope for the future and is willing to sacrifice himself. This is easily the most common reaction. A midwife also sacrifices herself. People in poverty sacrifice themselves. Soldiers put down their guns in a battle zone. This reflects the idea in "Difficult Conversations" that emotions and identity are often at the core, and getting at those issue can be the most direct way to resolution.
The reactions of the terrorists play into the corollary of the importance of emotions. One section in "Difficult Conversations" talked about how being purely rational might seem desirable, but it might also be like a movie without music (or something). In the movie, the viewers empathize with the government soldiers who lay down their guns even though they are part of an institution that treats immigrants as subhuman because they can accept their emotions. We are made to feel contempt for the terrorists even though their goal is noble because they try to fit a newborn child into their existing confrontational, emotionless framework rather than seeing it as evidence that a new world is possible using peaceful means. That is, emotions and rule-based ethical systems like nonviolence are made out to be indications of the true state of the world, and ignoring emotions leads to poor decisions. The best demonstration of this comes towards the end when the terrorist leader is crying after hearing the baby's cry but continues to shoot at the government and to hold the protagonist, woman, and baby hostage. He says that hearing him (the baby) cry made him emotional. The protagonist corrects his worldview: "the baby is a girl."
It also shows the importance of high-bandwidth communication. I believe completely that email and purely text-based communication can be as high bandwidth as phone calls or in person conversations (books have made me cry as much as movies and plays and more than live conversations), and the scene in "The Plague" where a child dies is as heart wrenching as this scene in "Children of Men." Regardless, my point is that in this scene, a baby's cry has high bandwidth, and that incites peace as much as any negotiation of substantive issues or well written novel.
12 Angry Men
We watched 12 Angry Men at the end of my negotiation class. The one part that the teacher said was a bad negotiating move was, near the start, when the protagonist says that he will step down if everyone else still wants to vote guilty. In general, he said, it's bad to make such a big gamble in a negotiation.
It's a good movie that you should see if you haven't.
Hugo
Hugo was one of the best movies that I had seen in a while. The characters were endearing, the acting was good, the artisticness of the movie itself (especially the intro scene that goes over the whole station and city) was nice, and the integration between the movie and the artistic elements that the movie portrays were good.
I felt like the class commentary in the movie was fairly shallow. In the middle of the movie, Hugo looks out at a bus of children being taken to the orphanage and wants to avoid that fate. In a conversation with the female lead, he identifies as a person who tries to help other people. Those two scenes together were perfect foreshadowing for him doing something to make society better for poor people or orphaned kids. Then the movie ends as a heartwarming rags to riches tale where the lens is focused on one family and the few characters that feature prominently in the movie. Issues of class, privilege, and injustice are swept under the rug.
50/50
50/50 was a so-so cancer comedy. I generally like anything with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and dislike anything with Seth Rogen, so they kind of balanced each other out and left me with a mediocre movie.
The Avengers
I hadn't seen a lot of the superhero movies that came before the avengers (I had seen Iron Man and Captain America, but I hadn't seen the others), so it was cool to see them all. I come to action movies without expecting anything but action (probably a good thing in this case), and the movie was pretty good. I particularly enjoyed Thor's hammer banging down against Captain America's shield and fighting the dragons.
Thor
Thor was okay. There was too much time dedicated to the plot and not enough time dedicated to action. I'm fine with plot, but action movies typically don't have very good plots.
21 Jump Street
Nonstop hilarity with a heartwarming bromance.
Seriously, this is a great movie. Not much depth to it, but it's very funny.
Prometheus
The plot was mildly interesting even though it didn't really make sense. The action was okay. It could have used more flamethrowers.
Chronicle
Superpower drama turns into teen angst turns into psycho killer movie. What's not to love? Well, at least it had more car crashes than Prometheus.
American Beauty
Believe it or not, I only recently saw the iconic American Beauty.
The Stanford professor on happiness (I wrote about one of his lectures that I heard in summer 2011) says that people are unhappy when they want what they don't have and that they are happy when they want what they have.
In American Beauty, the viewer sees different pursuits of happiness. The husband wants to relive the days of his youth with fancy cars, jobs without responsibility, and a young woman. His love interest wants to be special. His wife wants to live in a future where she has material wealth. His daughter's boyfriend sees beauty all around him, but only through a camera lens and never until the end as a part of the unadulterated world. I think that, at the end, his daughter sees herself as beautiful.
I see beauty in human dignity.
Wonder Boys
Bizarre.
Battlestar Galactica
At the prodding of numerous people, I finally watched Battlestar Galactica. I had put it off for a long time because, while lots of people said it was interesting, one of my friends years ago told me that it was Mormon propaganda. After seeing it, I believe that they were both right: it's interesting propaganda.
There are lots of cultural references to Mormonism in BSG, but I don't really have any problem with that. The only issue that I have with religion and BSG is that, in the show, there is a world similar to ours with science and rationality, but having faith in a mysterious god is made out to be the correct course of action. In the universe of BSG, they can only live in peace and harmony when the president convinces the populace to believe in prophecy (that is true) and to vote for her because she has a divine right to rule, when a miraculous birth leads to miraculous knowledge, and when an angel comes down and converts an atheist into a believer. In the universe of BSG, prophecies are literally true, so it is reasonable to suspend rationality and believe in them (or, put in other words, it is rational to believe in god). The issue I have with that is that, in our world, if there is a god, they aren't as heavy handed, so it isn't reasonable to suspend rationality. I can accept it in a world with vampires, demons, and wizards because there isn't an expectation that our world is similar to that world, but in a Sci Fi context, it becomes much more problematic.
The technology elements in BSG were funny. For instance, they don't allow any "networked computers" because then the Cylons, apparently, could hack into them. That doesn't make very much sense. If I plug my phone into my computer and neither of them are online, that doesn't make it any easier for someone in a different room to hack into either of them. It is true that a virus can spread from one computer to another if there are lots of security holes in one of the computers and if the other computer has a virus on it, but if they, in the sci-fi future where they have made sentient robots, have security that's just a little bit better than I have access to today, even that wouldn't be much of a problem. There were a number of other computer science things that were just wrong.
The show itself was good, though. It's long enough to have a fairly rich portrayal of the human condition. I enjoyed the critiques of technology. The conflicts between humans and Cylons provide a good social critique of people being bigoted towards other people. A lot of the episodes are very political, which was especially pertinent as a critique of the Bush administration when the show was released (the Cylons occupy human civilization under the guise of peace and development, and the protagonist humans are terrorists).
Avatar: The Last Airbender + Avatar: The Legend of Korra
A few years ago, I watched all of Avatar: The Last Airbender, a show on Nickelodeon. It is a kids show, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.
Some kids shows are boring to an adult audience because they are very heavy handed with moral themes. I remember watching an episode of the animated remake of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I liked the original series, but the remake sacrificed plots and nuances for monologues on why you should listen to your parents or something. I read an excellent article in the LA Review of Books' blog
http://tumblr.lareviewofbooks.org/post/24379111143/better-to-light-a-candle-than-to-curse-the-darkness) that talked about how parents should probably try to find books that their kids like rather than trying to find books that will teach them a good lesson and that their kids will like (because the former will encourage kids to read, and maybe the lessons that they need aren't the ones that the parents think they need). I mostly agree with this sentiment.
One of the reasons that I enjoyed Avatar was that the ethical elements were integrated seamlessly into the show. Moral issues were presented as challenging problems to work through where the right answer wasn't always clear at the outset, much like in a show with social and political commentary like BSG.
One issue with many shows, though, is that the characters have very flimsy ethical philosophies (which is, perhaps, symptomatic of our society as a whole). That is, the protagonist in a drama made for adults will often want to do the right thing, but in many cases, they wander aimlessly to try to get to this right thing. They might plan an assassination attempt for their own survival and, after 20 minutes of soul searching in the show, decide that "it's not enough to survive. One has to be worthy of surviving" (that's a BSG reference) and call the assassination off. The characters haven't analyzed their values or figured out what they believe to be right or wrong, so they keep changing deep-seeded beliefs. More than anything else, these shows promote the idea that it's okay to go through life without figuring out what you believe until the last minute. I think that's bad.
Avatar succeeds on both of these notes because the world isn't simple, and choices are hard to make and deal with complicated ethical issues, but the characters have consistent ethical philosophies and when a character changes one of their beliefs, it only happens with hours worth of development and in few instances. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one character that had a major change in values, and that was the result of three full seasons of character development. The protagonist, for instance, is a humble monk (in many ways, an allusion to the Dalai Lama), secure in his vegetarianism, his refusal to kill, and in his search for peace.
As far as I'm concerned, the movie adaptation, "The Last Airbender," doesn't exist.
Just this year, though, a sequel to the animated series was released. This was the first time in a long while that I have watched a TV series that was still being aired and produced while I watched it (meaning I can't always just go to the next episode). The sequel, Avatar: The Legend of Korra, is good. It's very different, and I haven't seen enough of it to write a good critique, but I like it.
Video Games
Cave Story
Cave Story is a fairly standard platformer with action/adventure and RPG elements. That is, you have to jump around on platforms, and the primary challenge is your skill in jumping on them (like Limbo), but you also have a gun (well, several different weapons, actually, one of which is a water gun), so you need to be skilled in beating bosses in addition to jumping on platforms (like Mario), and there is also a story with a character that you are role playing (like Bastion). It's challenging enough to keep things interesting without being painful. It doesn't do anything too unique – it just does it well. There is also a lot of content in it, so it will keep you busy for a while.
Sequence
Sequence is a rhythm game. That's the same genre as Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution. Sequence takes it one step beyond those and gives you an actual character who has to win battles. You need to type the keys in time with the music, or you'll lose health and won't be able to cast spells on the enemy to deal them damage. There was a plot (the protagonist was a computer programmer!), but that wasn't the focus. The game got very challenging by the end. If you can appreciate dubstep music and enjoy rhythm games, give Sequence a try.
VVVVVV
VVVVVV (the name is meant to look like a bunch of spikes) is a platformer. Unlike Cave Story, it has very little in terms of action or RPG elements. VVVVVV feels very unique because it chose to go with a unique mechanic: you can't jump, but you can reverse gravity so that you go up.
The game is wonderful. Getting around and advancing the story is fairly easy, so you never feel stuck. However, there are 'shiny trinkets' that are much more difficult (and unnecessary) to get, so there is still ample challenge. There are also challenge modes that are nearly impossible.
One of the nice things about the game is that a lot of the challenges are very challenging, but they give you very frequent restart points, so you don't feel like you lose a lot of progress when you die doing a hard challenge. There are two notable exceptions to this. One of them is a shiny trinket that is in plain sight and that, if you could jump, you could easily get because the only thing inbetween you and it is a small block the size of your foot. However, instead, you have to go up and down 7 full screens of spiky traps without pausing (because you can't pause gravity or reverse it while you're in the air, and there isn't any ground in those 7 screens. Just spikes). This challenge is called "Doing things the hard way" and you can see a video of it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CtiY5D6HCs.
Solar 2
In Solar 2, you begin life as an asteroid. You can fly around in outer space and crash into other asteroids to become bigger. Eventually, you can become a planet, absorb more asteroids to become bigger, become a star, absorb planets to become bigger, become a black hole, absorb everything to become bigger, and eventually do the whole big bang thing.
There are a lot of hard things to do in the game – challenges where you have to dodge lots of missiles or achievements for being a star with a bunch of plants all revolving clockwise around you. I didn't really do any of the hard things except one. The game was fun to play, and the challenges probably offer a bit more.
Terraria
I sunk a lot of hours into Terraria. If you're familiar with MineCraft, Terraria is like a 2D version of that, I think. You get resources from the world and from killing monsters, and you can build stuff. It has an open world feel (since the world is fairly open and you can go anywhere you want to at any time), but there's also a very clear progression (first you get the bronze pickaxe and then you can more easily find iron, and then you can mine iron and get an iron pickaxe, and then you can get deeper and more easily find silver...). There are clear and achievable goals, which make the game very enjoyable.
The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion
I had played The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind in high school (middle school?) and enjoyed it. Oblivion is more or less the same game with a few minor changes. There is an open world with lots of quests. There is also a main quest that I never really did because I got distracted by all of the side quests and by increasing the power of my character. Both of these games were also fairly easy.
My roommate wrote his thesis on video games and narrative. He talks about the idea of an implied protagonist – the idea that the game player, not the game designer, constructs a protagonist that is personalized to them; in an open world, the game designer doesn't make any one-size fits all protagonist, and instead they let the player make their own protagonist. That got me thinking about different styles of video games. That thesis holds well in American-style games like Oblivion where there is barely any story line. It doesn't hold very well in Japanese-style games like Final Fantasy where there is a clear story line, a continuous narrative, and where the protagonists actually have depth and character development to them. Many of those games are very much like books (well, they have pictures and songs, so more like movies. Plus the whole interactivity thing).
Avernum
When I was very young, my parents bought me a game called Exile. It was really complicated. You would talk to someone, and they would give you a paragraph of text, and you, the player, would have to intuit the exact right question to ask to advance the dialog so that you could figure out more about the world. I didn't play that very much.
Several years later, my friend, River, showed me a game called Avernum. I didn't immediately realize it, but Avernum was a remake of Exile. They made it so that you could press a button and it would advance the dialog. Plus some other nice stuff.
The Avernum series of games puts you in the middle of a wide world. Well, a dungeon at least, amidst an underground nation of exiles and political outcasts. You can go wherever you want, and if you develop your characters correctly, you can overcome any challenge.
I loved the games then and played them through and through. They got very epic. Every time you learned a new spell, your power would go up dramatically. After you learn all of the spells at their most powerful levels, You would kill dragons, demons, emperors, and warlords. You would get powerful artifacts. By the end, you can (and do) take on armies. It was and is great.
A remake of the remake called Avernum: Escape from the Pit came out on Steam recently, so I had to buy it. The remake added a lot of nice features. One of the most annoying things about the original Avernum was the inventory system, but in Escape from the Pit, you have a junk bag for all of the stuff that you want to sell. There's also a quest list, you don't have to pay to identify your items, and the boss monsters are a little more interesting. And they added teleporters and made using the mouse nicer. All nice features.
One of the annoying things was that they toned down the power level. You used to be able to cast Haste on yourself from the very start, which gave you two moves in combat. Now, it only gives you two moves once every three turns. And you can't move after attacking. And you can't delay taking your turn until the end of the round so that you can re-haste your party after the enemy wizards slow it. And there's no Divine Warrior spell to make you invulnerable and get 4 attacks per round.
As a result, the game was a bit more difficult. It used to be easy to play on the hardest difficulty mode even when playing with only one character rather than four. In Escape from the Pit, I played with a party of four and struggled through every encounter. Of course, I was playing on Torment in order to get the Steam achievement for beating the entire game on Torment without ever turning the difficulty down. And there was still epicness in terms of the progression in power and the artifacts and the demons and dragons and whatnot.
Overall, it was a very different game, but it was still very good. Also, only one tenth of a percent of people who played that game on Steam got every achievement in that game.
Braid
Braid was added to a Humble Indie Bundle. All of my friends had heard about it, but I never heard about it before playing it.
The game intermingles little philosophical bits with interesting game mechanics. I didn't really get the philosophical bits. The game mechanics were very good, though.
Each of the game mechanics messes with the flow of time in some way. You can always turn back time (so death isn't very permanent). After you turn back time, your shadow will re-do the things that you just did, and you can interact with that shadow (sort of). For instance, in one level, there's a key on the right side of a spiky pit, and the door to it is on the left side of the spiky pit. You start out above the pit, and you can go on whichever side you want, but you can't jump the pit. So, you need to fall down to the right, pick up the key, jump the pit, and plummet to your doom. Then, rewind, go to the left, and right as your shadow is making the jump, you meet the shadow halfway and take the key out of its hand to unlock the door.
There are other interesting mechanics. Some things will continue progressing when you reverse the flow of time. You get a ring that can slow the flow of time around it. There are some levels where time doesn't just flow – it depends on how far to the right or left you are (so going right moves time forward, going left moves time backward, and staying still freezes time).
I found all of the game very enjoyable. It's a quick play through, and every time I finished a puzzle, I thought, "Oh, that was really cool!" It wasn't like some platformers (ie, VVVVVV) where you have to spend a ton of time just on execution even after you figure out the puzzle. I highly recommend it.
Music
I got into dubstep recently. I liked the song "Wildcat" by Ratatat and made a station for it on Pandora. Then, I discovered that there was a lot of good music there, a lot of music that I could study to, and a lot of music that I was familiar with through the video game Sequence. Skrillex is pretty cool, too.
Two bands that I heard a lot of on my Decemberists station on Pandora are Iron & Wine and Mumford & Sons. They are very similar, stylistically, to The Decemberists, especially to "The King is Dead." There is a lot of folkey stuff, a lot of nature imagery, and a lot of focus on human virtues and challenges. My favorite song by Mumford & Sons is probably "Little Lion Man."
I also started listening to Florence + The Machine. I first remember thinking about them when my roommate kept listening to Seven Devils, one of their songs that is on the HBO series Game of Thrones. Then I started noticing them on my Pandora and bought their music. They have a lot of good songs. I also like their cover of Addicted to Love.
Chiptune music, which uses 8-bit synthesizers, makes me feel like I'm playing old nintendo games when I'm listening to it.
Spaces
Cactus Garden
Apparently, Stanford has a cactus garden. My sister went there when she first saw me to Stanford, but I didn't even know that it existed until she came again for my birthday.
It's far away from everything. It's also almost as old as the university. It went out of maintenance for a while, but folks started caring about it again. Overall, it's a very nice space. The plants are much more well suited to the environment than the lush grass and oak trees that they have around the rest of the campus. There are a lot of interesting cacti of all sizes, shapes, and colors.
Cantor Arts Museum
I also went to the museum with Kawa. We were greeted by lots of Rhodans. They got boring after a short bit. After that, they had exhibits from a bunch of different cultures. I can recall African, Chinese, South American, and European exhibits. There was also a mix of modern and ancient in each of them, which was nice.
OMSI + BodyWorlds
When I saw Kawa for winter break, we went to OMSI and saw BodyWorlds, the exhibit about the human body. I really enjoyed it.
They had a bunch of people that were mostly whole and that were sliced up in different ways to showcase different organs. They also had plenty of organs on their own or just present as pictures or slices.
They had all of the standard stuff (smoker's lung versus non-smoker's lung). They also had infoblurbs about human development, animals, muscle use, and just about everything else. It was also nice to see the construction of the models – they had some blurbs about how they did everything, and you could also see the pins and such that they used to keep the people upright.
One funny thing was the walls. It seemed like they had a bunch of stock pictures and stock quotes, paired randomly. For instance, there was a Nietzsche quote paired with a picture of a laughing woman.
At the end, there was a skinless giraffe. I didn't realize that they were so huge.
Library of Congress
I toured the Library of Congress in Washington, DC on my first weekend there. It was fairly cool. I didn't go in to see the stacks, but they had a lot of famous books there. For instance, they have one of three perfect condition original Gutenberg bibles. They also have every book (and other work) that has been copyrighted in the US, so they have all of the historic American works. There were a few other historic artifacts, but most of the tour focused on the architecture. It seemed like every single ceiling, floor, and wall was made for some symbolic purpose. A lot of the rooms would have a certain theme. One room had 8 virtues (there used to only be 7, but they added patriotism to make the room symmetric), other rooms would have ancient and modern sports, others would have professions, others would have political systems, others would have cultures, and the list goes on. It might be one of the most historically embodied spaces that I have ever been to.
Smithsonian Folklife Festival
I discovered the folklife festival because the one time I got in a car in DC, we ran into massive traffic around it. The festival itself wasn't too amazing. They had one section with the AIDS quilt and some LGBT stuff – it was cool to see it, but nothing new for me.
Another section had a bunch of universities talking about random cool stuff they're doing. There were a lot of environmental projects, a lot of educational projects, and a few other miscellaneous ones. I quickly managed to fall into my Code the Change role, and I gave a few of them my card and connected a few others with folks I know.
They had one stage with some rappers (very loud and not my preferred style of politically-engaged and melodic rap).
They had another stage with various acts throughout the day. I enjoyed a traditional Hawaiian hula showing. Hula was, apparently, very sexually explicit.
Natural History Museum
My roommate wrote up random words on the whiteboard last year when other folks were studying with said whiteboard. It would be a theme for their problem set. One of those words was "titanoboa," a massive ancient boa constrictor like thing. Well, when I visited the Natural History Museum, they had a special exhibit on the titanoboa. They're also making a movie about it, I think. It was big.
A lot of the museum was dedicated to teaching very basic science. They had a, "yes, evolution is real" exhibit. They had a "global warming is, too" exhibit. They had a "people are pretty much the same, so don't be racist" exhibit. They were slightly interesting, but it felt kind of sad that they had to spend their resources counting pseudoscientific myths.
I also saw the Hope Diamond, dinosaurs, ice age animals (they had the air conditioning cranked way up in the ice age section. It was kind of annoying), regular mammals (they had a pangolin! The current edition of Ubuntu Linux is called Precise Pangolin. It was awesome), and probably some other stuff.
I wasn't terribly impressed.
Air and Space Museum
The Air and Space Museum has pretty much the whole history of the United States' efforts in the air and in space. They had lots of historic airplanes (they also went back to people who dreamed about planes before the 20th century). They had videos that were shot in the early 1900s when the first air races were being held. It went forward through planes used in each major US war to modern commercial planes. I didn't find much of that interesting, but I really enjoyed the exhibit on how aerodynamics works. It was made for kids (and many of the adults were just kind of standing by while their kids went through), but it was also very interesting and educational. Especially since I didn't have a good physics teacher in high school.
The space stuff was much more interesting. In one room, they had a Google Moon machine. You know the Google Earth machines where you have a lot of really big screens and can browse around Google Earth (if not, see
http://media.glassdoor.com/m/22/f8/dc/83/the-google-earth-machine.jpg for instance)? Well, they had one for the moon. I'm always impressed by Google.
They had moon rock that you could touch. They had space vessels where you could see how much it was burned up by the atmosphere. There was astronaut gear. It was awesome. I love seeing technology.
There was also an exhibit on astronomy, telescopes, looking out into space, how colors and sound waves work, etc. For this one, you could get an audio tour on your phone. You just dialed a phone number and pressed the number corresponding to where you were in the exhibit, and it would narrate to you historical tidbits and interviews with folks. I was impressed – I hope that they do that for more exhibits in the future. I learned a bit about dark matter and the universe at that one.
The one thing I didn't like about this museum was the food. I was hungry at 5 and it closed at 7:30 and I still hadn't seen the second floor, so there wouldn't be time for me to eat somewhere else and come back, so I wanted to eat in the food court. But all that I could find was McDonalds. The Natural History Museum seemed to have some good food. No such luck at Air and Space. I went through the second floor quickly and then went to a very nice (and fairly cheap) restaurant called "Teaism."
Harpers Ferry
Stanford in Washington had a trip to Harpers Ferry. It was supposed to be a hike, but it started raining as we were about to start. As a result, we spent our time in the town. They had a bunch of rinkydink museums and a slightly less rinkydink John Brown museum.
American Indian Museum
This was my favorite museum yet!
The museum is run by a bunch of Native Americans, so it was very honest. They talked about colonization, death, genocide, and broken treaties. I liked the quote by Justice Black: he was writing a dissenting Supreme Court ruling when the majority said that it was okay for the US to break treaties with Native Americans. He wrote, "Great nations, like great [people], should keep their word."
I also liked that it was a living museum. Yes, they had an exhibit about the history of horses and colonization and whatnot, but the museum brought in modern relevance to everything. They had exhibits about using traditional knowledge to combat climate change. They had art from school kids. They discussed blood quantum and identity. They discussed poverty and casinos. They discussed language and culture. Each of the exhibits that examined the values of a tribe would relate them to how they are enacted today. There were also people there rather than just exhibits. They had a cook off. They had artists selling their works.
That's what a museum should be.
First World Problems
Ergonomics
At Google, they had lots of information about ergonomic computer use. I guess that if an engineer gets injured by programming too much, it isn't good for business. As a result, I was conscious of that for my own desk at Stanford this year. The main thing that I noticed was that my keyboard, when on the desk, was way too high, so my elbows (and probably my shoulders) were strained. After moving my keyboard into the tray in the desk, things were much nicer. Also, I have more room on my desk now.
Here are the basics of how to make your computer set up ergonomic:
- Relax your shoulders. Bend your elbows 90 degrees. That's where your keyboard and mouse should be. Otherwise, you'll have to strain your elbows and shoulders constantly when typing and mousing.
- When you are typing or mousing, your wrists should NOT be on the desk. They should be elevated. If your wrists are on the desk, that means that you'll move your mouse entirely with your wrist instead of with your whole arm. That will cause wrist strain.
- Sit back in your chair. Bend your knees 90 degrees. Your feet should be on the ground. If they are too high, you can get a foot rest. If they are too low (such that you have to bend your knees at a different angle), then you might need a taller chair.
- Sit down with your back straight. Look straight ahead. Your computer monitor should be at eye level. If it isn't, you'll use your neck a lot when looking around at your computer.
- Sit down. Stick your arm straight out. Your computer monitor should still be at least a few inches away from your finger tips. Otherwise, you might get eye strain.
In addition to the set up, there are some bad habits that can make things worse. First, looking at a monitor for hours on end can be bad, so you should look at something far away for 20 seconds every 20 minutes. Second, you should touch type and not hunt and peck. If you look at your keyboard when typing, you'll look up and down a lot, which is bad for your neck. Third, if you type in QWERTY, you should switch to Dvorak. QWERTY was designed to be inefficient (so that typewriters didn't jam), whereas Dvorak was designed to be efficient. That means that a Dvorak typist will move thing fingers less and be less likely to get wrist strain. It only takes about 2 weeks to learn if you practice.
Netbook
Early in the school year, I decided that having a computer with a one hour battery was annoying. As a result, I bought a $200 computer that I use to take notes in class, to browse the internet, and not much else. Since it was completely unnecessary, I also made a $500 donation to Oxfam.
Having it has been nice. It's light and has lots of battery life, so it's useful for doing basic stuff, so it's my main computer when I'm not at my desk. It has meant that I don't need to lug my laptop around everywhere, and I can leave it at my desk.
It has made me appreciate Google products more. Having to transfer my notes from my netbook to my computer would be annoying, but with Google Docs, I don't need to transfer anything.
It has also been nice to have a second computer. When my roommate needs a computer for an open-laptop exam, he can borrow it (he has a desktop instead of a laptop). Also, since it doesn't really have any important files on it and it's cheap, I have no emotional investment in it and feel completely okay with other people using and abusing it. When I just have too many windows open for my laptop, I have occasionally had my netbook open next to it. And when my main computer was having issues, it was nice to have a backup.
Online Backup
I have had a backup system for a while. However, that system was me plugging in my external hard drive every few months and copying files over, which still would leave me with a lot of data loss. I decided to switch to an online backup with the idea that it would be more robust (if an earthquake swallows up my laptop, it might also swallow up my external hard drive) and also more frequent because it would be automatic.
Originally, I used JungleDisk because I wanted something cross-platform that used Amazon Web Services. Since then, I switched to using Ubuntu as my main operating system, and I switched to Ubuntu One for my backup. Ubuntu One is a much better user experience than JungleDisk. I can see all of my files online at one.ubuntu.com (in case I need to download something on another computer), the sync happens seamlessly, and it's cheaper. It also works on Windows.
Now, if someone drove a spike through my hard drive, I would lose nothing that I cared about (aside from the time to replace the disk). I would just get on another computer, and all of my files would be there. It's very comforting.
Wrist Watch
My dad gave me a watch when I was very young. I wore a watch for most of my life. When something would happen, I would replace the battery or just get another cheap Casio watch. I had more or less the same watch on my wrist for about a decade with little interruption. Some people feel naked without their clothes; I, who typically wore my watch even in the shower, would feel naked without my watch.
In my first year at Stanford, my watch broke. I got a new one. Then, my debate partner borrowed my watch and lost it. My dad bought me a cheap replacement, and it broke. With all this bad luck, f
or several years, I went without a watch. I had a cell phone, but a pocket watch just isn't the same as a wrist watch.
For my birthday, my sister got me a solar powered wrist watch, and once again the comfortable weight has settled onto my wrist.
Razor + Beard
Shaving has been among the least favorite parts of my day roughly since I started in my senior year of high school. That was around the time that I started growing more than peach fuzz, so I had never been anything other than clean shaven.
Well, mostly. One of the problems is that if I didn't shave for one day, I would have a hearty amount of stubble the next.
I decided to try the technological solution to this problem by getting an electric razor. My dad got me one for my birthday. It was a definite improvement, but it was still annoying.
Over winter break, I stopped shaving. I only looked grubby for a few days. After that, everything was fine. In the six months since then, I haven't shaved, and I haven't looked back. I feel better this way.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux. Linux is a free operating system (free as in freedom, meaning anyone can make it better or make it their own, and free as in free beer, meaning it doesn't cost anything). Windows and Mac are two operating systems that you might have heard of.
I have become familiar with Linux over the past few years, and I teach a class on it, CS1U. However, I only used it for programming, and I still used Windows for my general computing tasks. I had plenty of excuses to stay with Windows. I play games that are only available on Windows, and Windows has the best applications in general (for instance, Microsoft Office for Windows is significantly better than Libre Office or Microsoft Office for Mac. And all of those are better than Google Docs at everything aside from collaboration). Also, the user interface for Windows 7 was very nice.
Then my computer started having problems, and I decided to go with a scorched earth policy.
I reinstalled Windows since I would still want to play games, but I also installed Ubuntu and decided to use that as my main operating system. It turns out that the problems with my computer were hardware related, so I didn't fix anything, but I'm glad that I made the switch. Everything feels snappier on Ubuntu. Plus, there's the warm, fuzzy feeling of freedom.
Teaching
Debate Coaching
This year was the last year of the policy program at Palo Alto High School (due to the parents taking away support; they said that their kids were spending too much time on debate), so I couldn't recruit new novices or anything. As a result, this year was mostly just about letting the seniors on the team finish their debate careers.
Unfortunately, that led to less of a community of policy debate, and two of the seniors weren't very interested in debate, so the third, who was very interested and talented, didn't have a partner for most tournaments and wasn't able to go. As a result, the few tournaments that they did end up going to didn't turn out very well.
I did write letters of recommendation for a few of my debaters, though, and they all got into top colleges that they were very happy about.
Also, there is an annual debate banquet at the end of the year, and the debaters get their coaches gifts. I'm fairly hard to buy a good gift for because I'm kind of anti-materialist. That is, if I need something, then I'll buy it for myself because I need it, and if I don't need something, then it wouldn't make much sense to get it for me because I wouldn't use it. Thus, if someone wants to buy a gift for me (rather than make one), they can make a charitable donation, buy me something that I don't know that I need, or buy me something that I know I need but can't find (like a comfortable, vegan pair of shoes that wasn't made in a sweatshop... but I just found Hersey Custom Shoe, so I'm good on that now).
My debaters got me a donation to Oxfam and a bike seat cover. That's just about the perfect gift (well, at least in terms of things that can be bought with money rather than made or gained or whatnot). My bike seat had been destroyed by weather over the years, so it had gaping holes in the plastic covering, absorbed rather than repelled water, and wasn't very comfortable. The new cover is awesome. It makes me proud that they had that much emotional intelligence and perceptiveness.
CS1U
CS1U is the class on the Linux operating system that I designed last year, taught for the first time in spring 2011, and continued to teach this past year in fall and spring quarters. I brought Emin on to help out, and we reconstructed the course in fall quarter. It went very well – there is still a lot of work to do, but I think that the course is fairly stable now.
The course is still available online at cs1u.stanford.edu
CS Section Leading
In winter quarter, I decided to do section leading instead of CS1U. I was an SCPD section leader, which meant that videos of my section were online for all of the distance learning students.
Sophomore College
When I was a sophomore, I took Sophomore College, SoCo. SoCo is from the start of September until school starts, and SoCo students just take one class to get to know the professor. The class sizes are capped, and it is a great introduction to sophomore year.
Since I had such a great experience as a sophomore, I decided to TA it this year. It was a good experience.
The courses were still cool. I already knew the baseline material, but I caught on to new nuances
It was rewarding to be able to help the students understand the material. There was one student that had a hard time but worked extremely hard.
When I took the course, one of the best parts was the close interactions with Mehran and with the TAs. Since at that point, I was just getting oriented in computer science, it was nice to talk to people that had already taken a bunch of CS courses and had internships. Now, I was that person. There was one day where class was canceled because Mehran and Eric were in Colorado for a computer science education meeting, and during that day, the other TA and I talked about our experiences with courses and experiences. I also evangelized about computer science and social change.
The tours weren't bad. We went to Google on my birthday, so I went to the delicious vegan lunch place. The Facebook tour was much less impressive than in the past -- Zuckerberg didn't talk to us! At the Computer History Museum, I put my name in a punch card.
Go Stanford!
There are, apparently, a lot of folks who want Stanford tours and to talk to Stanford students.
I have discussed Project Motivation in the past, which helps get underrepresented kids motivated to go to college by giving them tours and panels with college students. I have continued that, and I have also talked with them about getting their operations more streamlined since I've been doing ProMo stuff for longer than several of the people on their leadership team.
There have also been a bunch of people interested in Stanford computer science that I have chatted with and given tours to.
Stanford has an admitted students weekend where admitted students visit Stanford and have fun to see if they want to go here or another school. I attended when I was a prospective frosh even though I had already accepted my admission to Stanford. It was a very good time. There were a lot of events, a lot of cool people, and it seemed like everyone was happy. It certainly solidified my happiness about getting in to Stanford. In past years, I had enjoyed being a room host, letting a prospective frosh stay in my room during admit weekend. This year, I wasn't living in a dorm with frosh, which typically means that there won't be any prospective frosh staying with people in my dorm. I ended up with a student anyways, took him to some plays, and let him explore the campus. It was a good.
Splash
Stanford has a program called Splash, which lets college students teach classes to middle and high school students over a weekend in fall and spring.
I taught a class on CS and social change in the fall. It was a lecture on different types of opportunities in the field to show people that there are a lot of ways to make the world a better place if they're interested in computer science. The talk was well attended, and people seemed to like it.
I taught a class on ethical decisionmaking in the spring. I wanted it to be a mix of lecture and discussion, but the discussion ended up dominating, so I didn't get through what I wanted to. I probably should have made it longer.
ACM Tech Talks
ACM is the main computer science organization that has student chapters on college campuses. They have a weekly tech talk series. I wrote earlier about giving an ACM tech talk on programming in Cambodia. This year, I gave one tech talk each quarter.
Fall quarter, my topic was computers, exploitation, and empowerment. I wanted people to see that not all apps make the world a better place, but there are plenty of ones that do. I switched off talking about some of the ways that computers lead to exploitation. A laundry list: many are made in sweatshops, the materials in computers fund the people who use child soldiers, IBM managed the Nazi's death camps and today's tyrannical regimes are heavily using technology, there are lots of issues around privacy and free speech, lots of people who make applications don't respect their users (read the article on Cow Clicker for one of these people's autobiographical take on the issue), and plain old computer viruses.
On the other hand, computers can be very empowering: blogs and Microsoft's voice wiki system for India give people a voice, lots of technologies increase access to knowledge (including both search and traditional education like Khan Academy), social technologies bring people together (see peace.facebook.com or consider the "It Gets Better" YouTube project), computers can let people do things they wouldn't otherwise be able to do (ie, screen readers for blind people), and they can also help people economically empower themselves.
I ran this talk in a very discussion-oriented manner. I introduced each topic, got the audience to chime in, and tried to work with folks to distill principles of ethical action in computer science. The talk seemed to go over very well.
Winter quarter, I gave a talk on social change and traditional CS research topics. A lot of programmers know that there are ample opportunities to make websites for nonprofits, but they might not think of that as very interesting, so I wanted to show some of the ways that more traditional computer science topics can benefit the world. I went through some of the Stanford CS concentrations as my roadmap.
With biocomputation (looking at proteins, genes, and medical stuff), the applications are obvious.
Some of the applications in education are seeing more of the light of day, so they might be obvious too. For instance, increasing access to education through systems like Khan Academy or Coursera, making programming languages that help people learn math and other subjects like Alice, Scratch, and Logo, specific mobile applications for the developing world, and curricula that involve fabrication (ie, 3d printers and laser cutters) are all pretty interesting.
Since human computer interaction focuses on design, people often think of making nonprofit websites as falling under this category, but there is also cutting edge research in HCI like making a paper-like interface so that people are more comfortable with data entry, which allows people in the developing world to more easily manage their small businesses.
Everything needs security, especially humanitarian applications. For instance, crisis response software like Ushahidi is often insecure, which means that spammers can reduce the usefulness of the crises response and bad people can steal people's data and use it against them (for instance, there was an open crisis map when responding to the floods in Pakistan, and a terrorist organization threatened the people that were trying to distribute aid). Human rights and journalism software also especially needs good security.
Artificial intelligence can make new things possible. For instance, Code the Change worked with a university in Uganda on an Android phone app that can analyze a picture of a cassava plant and figure out if it's diseased. They're using this to profile the agricultural diseases in the country (which only a few experts in the country could do before the app). There are lots of medical applications for disease diagnosis. And when autonomous cars become more mainstream, one of the biggest causes of death in the US will be dramatically reduced.
There are a lot of applications for games, particularly education, health, and social health. The Redistricting Game (it's free online) forces the player to gerrymander some districts, which gives the player an intuitive hatred of our current districting system that is hard to get otherwise because gerrymandering is a complicated subject. Exertion games (games that get people active like Dance Dance Revolution) can get games active, which increases their fitness. And games can bring people together, cement friendships, and help people relax.
For spring quarter, I gave a talk on Benetech's Social Coding 4 Good initiative and Drupal. Social Coding 4 Good is an attempt to get computer science professionals to program for humanitarian open source projects. I worked on their Drupal site for my senior project in winter quarter. Since Drupal is so ubiquitous, I thought that some of the people might be interested in learning some of the sticky points of Drupal development in case they ever needed to do it on their own. The talk was, hopefully, useful, but I wasn't able to successfully incorporate much pizazz into it. I think it was kind of boring.
High School CS
One of my debaters at Palo Alto HS is a programmer, and I've been working with him for a while. I gave him a server that I got off of CraigsList last spring but never used since he didn't really have access to any Linux servers or any machine to just play around with. I also continued working with him on programming stuff and got him thinking about colleges.
Musings, Life, Etc
Awards, Honors, Etc
I got a lot of awards this year.
Bill Clinton selected Code the Change for an award at Clinton Global Initiative University.
Pando Daily featured me as one of Stanford's top 5 computer scientists.
The Haas Center for Public Service gave me the Walk the Talk award for my commitment to Code the Change.
I'm an engineer with a sufficiently high GPA, so I'm in Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honors society. I'm also the service chair for next year since I'm kind of involved in engineers doing service for the world.
Stanford Change Makers, a group of seniors who are student leaders, chose me for the 2012 cohort.
The Alumni Association gave me the pretentiously-named Award of Excellence.
Lifehacking, Productivity, and the Value of Hard Work
What Is Lifehacking?
A lifehacker is someone who tries "hacks" to improve their life. There was a group at Stanford that wanted to be more efficient. They read some of my verbose letters and thought that I managed to get a lot of stuff done, so they invite me to their group.
Recently, I was chatting with Mehran, and he commented that he read an email and left it in his inbox, which he said that I told him was inefficient at some point in time. The "hack" is that if you ever read something and leave it in your inbox, that means that you'll have to read it at least twice before you reply, so you're being inefficient. I responded that that didn't seem like something I would say, and I certainly have that inefficiency (if you respond to each email immediately, then you probably aren't allowing sufficient time to mull it over and respond in the genuine depth that an interaction with a human merits).
It didn't sound like something that I would say because if someone asked me what to do to be more efficient or to improve their life, I would probably talk about the value of elbow grease, ethics, or introspection (which is useful only insofar as it is instrumental to elbow grease or ethics). But people, especially in a society like America, often want a shortcut to success that doesn't put hard work and ethics in the center. Thus, lifehacks.
That isn't to say that being efficient is bad. I try very hard to be efficient because it makes my hard work more effective. Many of the people in this group were similarly in it for good reasons, and I don't fault them for their attention to efficiency. Thus, I joined the group and tried chatting with them.
My Productivity Solutions
When I was in middle school and high school, I put a lot of effort into being efficient. I tried a lot of technical solutions. I downloaded and tried out a bunch of productivity applications. I never found anything that worked better than low tech solutions. In terms of keeping track of what I had to do in my day, my solution was writing the things I had to do during the school day on a sticky note and putting it in my lunch box. To keep track of homework, I would put all of my assignments and syllabi in one place and look at them when I got home. To get all of my work done and still have enough time to get a full night of sleep, I would simply finish my work before watching TV or playing video games. I tried everything that was out there to help me manage my life, and the only things that worked were pen and paper.
Since then, three things have changed. First, I use Gmail now, and their user interface and keyboard shortcuts are wonderful. Second, I use Google Calendar to keep track of my commitments instead of sticky notes. This is useful because I can look back 8 months and see what I was doing on each day when writing a verbose letter and also because if I still used sticky notes, I would consume a full pad every week. Third, I have a smartphone. Mostly, this means that I can access my Gmail and Google Calendar when I don't have my computer out and need to remind myself of something. It also functions as a camera, MP3 player, calculator, note pad, and alarm clock. The Google Maps functionality means that I don't have to spend as much time planning where to go before I go there. And, as I have noted before, having my library and newspaper in my pocket has dramatically increased the amount that I read. However, if all of these changes seem minor, that's because they are all minor. If none of these technologies seems very different than its pen and paper analogue, that's because none of them are very different than their analog analogue.
I will briefly comment on how my system of organization works. When I need to physically be somewhere at some time, I make a calendar event for the time that I need to be there (including time for transportation). If I need to do something like a homework assignment, I enter it as an all-day calendar event. For a homework assignment or anything similar (work that needs to be done), I will enter it as an event when I want to do the work, not when it is due. If I enter an event and need to put it off until later, I just move the event until later; usually, that means that I keep postponing work until the hard deadline, and I do it then. I always make the hard deadline (that's what makes it a hard deadline). When something doesn't have a hard deadline and I postpone it enough, I move it to a document of stuff to do when I have free time. That document is "write once; read never," which means that I almost never do anything that ends up in that document because if something is unimportant enough that I postpone it a bunch, then it isn't important for me to do. Maintaining my calendar is basically choosing what I will do and when, so I need to have a good grasp of how important each thing is and when stuff really needs to get done.
I am good at context switching. In other words, if I have a half hour free, I can easily jump right in to writing emails or programming or reading. Thus, if I ever have free time, I can sit down anywhere with my computer or phone and be productive.
In my email, I don't ever have more than I can see on one screen. I spend a lot of time on email, so I have learned Gmail's keyboard shortcuts. If you want to learn, you can enable them in the settings, and you can press "?" to make it pop up what all of them are. The only keys that I use are j (down), k (up), x (select), e (archive), ` (that's the backtick, to the left of 1, not the quotation mark. If you use priority inbox, it switches between your priority inbox and your regular emails), Shift+U (mark unread), / (slash; move your cursor to the search box), s (star), gi (go to inbox), gd (go to drafts). I usually only read emails on my phone, and I rarely write emails on my phone because it's a pain. I usually only respond to emails once per day (which often takes 2-4 hours), and I don't feel obliged to respond to non-urgent emails more frequently than that. I also don't feel obliged to respond to non-urgent emails over the weekend.
I keep my workspace focused. My physical desk might be messy, but usually the only windows open on my computer are my email, my music, my calendar, and whatever task I'm currently working on. If I have a lot of tabs open in Google Chrome and am not done with a task, I sometimes save them using TabCloud (there are dozens of other programs that do the same thing for every browser). I have an external monitor that usually has my calendar in the left half and my music in the right half. My main monitor has my email in the left half and whatever I'm working on in the right half. In Windows and Linux, you can easily make something take up half of your screen by dragging the window to the left or right edge of your screen. The keyboard shortcut in Windows is Windows + Left / Right. In Ubuntu, the shortcut is Windows + Ctrl + Left / Right (if you're using a mac or other keyboard, substitute whatever other special key for the Windows key).
I have plenty of human distractions because I think that human interaction is valuable and I make little effort to minimize it. I avoid inhuman distractions. Thus, the only things that make noise on my phone are phone calls and text messages
I also know where everything is in my physical spaces. That is, there is a place for my clothes, a place for my stapler, a place for my keys, a place for my water bottle, a place for my computer, etc. I always put things in the same place, so I never lose anything.
The above paragraphs are the extent of my productivity solutions. And none of them are important – the important thing is that I have some habit for each of them. In summary, if you have a habit for the following things, you will be as organized and productive as I am: I have a system for organizing my time, I have a system for responding to emails, I have a system for organizing my digital workspace, and I have a system for organizing my physical things.
In the previous section, I also mentioned ethics and introspection. In this section, I discussed the machine that is my organization. At every step, I also run it through the machine that is my decisionmaking. I consider decisionmaking synonymous with ethics. I make sure that each use of my time is ethical and that it is something that I value. I use things like verbose letters to think about pretty much everything that I do and whether or not it is ethical or valuable. If it isn't ethical or valuable, I try to avoid doing it.
Similar to my views on productivity, I don't necessarily think that there is a best way to achieve ethics or introspection. With ethics, I think that there are probably a few simple principles that people should try to consistently follow. But, in any case, I for the purposes of this section, what's important is not the ethical theory or the means by which you achieve introspection, but rather whether or not you have an ethical philosophy that you consistently follow and whether or not you do introspective stuff in some way.
My Interactions With Lifehacking
You may notice that what I emphasize in my productivity solutions is not very related to what I describe as lifehacking. In my opinion, good productivity is almost entirely about the character of the person (hard work, ethics, and introspection), not the tool that the person is using. I argue that any habit for organizing your time can be successful as long as you integrate that habit into your daily life and stick with it, but the lifehacking group had a lot of emphasis on analyzing particular solutions to the things I outline above. In other words, I think that Google Calendar can work as well as pen and paper or Remember the Milk or Getting Things Done or any other productivity app, and the only important thing is that you create the habit, but they thought that the tool was more important than the person using the tool.
In most of our discussions, I would talk about what I did (and they would ask some questions), and they would talk about what they did and ask for my input. As a result of our different philosophies, my input would almost always be, "I tried that in middle school, and it didn't work for me. I don't really think that matters as long as you make it a habit."
There were two lifehacking solutions that they advanced that I disagreed with, detailed in the next two sections.
Drugs are Bad
The first thing I disagreed with was the use of nootropics, experimental drugs that, the user claims, are perfectly safe and even legal in some other countries. My reason for disagreeing with the use of nootropics is more philosophical than scientific, and that is a question that deserves to be answered scientifically, so I recognize that my reasons for rejecting nootropics are poor. I believe that humans don't understand how humans work. That is true about the body and especially true about the brain. As a result, I avoid the use of all drugs.
Drugs are things that are obviously drugs. If you are pedantic and want a more rigorous definition, I consider a drug any physical substance that directly causes a chemical reaction in a human in a way that is not mediated by or in a way that directly effects dietary metabolic processes. That is, carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and veggies are not drugs because those are mediated by normal metabolic processes; coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes are drugs because caffeine, ethanol, and nicotine directly interact with the chemical processes in the brain. I think of it like a computer. Stuff that you eat (or inject or inhale) is like downloading something off the internet and opening it. If I download a million text files from sketchy sites on the internet, the state of my computer will be unaffected (I won't get a virus) because text files only cause reactions (spread of textual information) in ways that are mediated by normal processes (your text editor). If I download a single executable file from a sketchy site on the internet, the state of my computer will probably be effected (I will get a virus) because executables effect my computer in ways that are not mediated by normal processes. Our bodies are similar, though it's easier to sneak an executable into our bodies.
I tend to think that the product of millions of years of evolution is more robust than most of the things that humans have invented and discovered. If my body is sending a signal that it's in pain, I don't want to take pain killers because I should probably pay attention to that signal. If my body is sending a signal that it's tired so strongly that I can't power through on my own vim and vigor, I should probably sleep rather than do whatever else was on my docket. Humans do have some shortcomings (injuries and illnesses that can kill or debilitate us), and in the rare cases when something like that comes up and humans have invented a solution, I am happy to use it.
I don't think that being unproductive is a shortcoming in human evolution that drugs can fix. Humans often make decisions irrationally, but that's because we have a very sophisticated heuristic (a heuristic is a best-guess that is often, but not always, correct) decisionmaking system that works very well instead of a rationality engine. When humans are being unproductive, that typically means that they rationally believe that they would be better off in the long term if they took one action, but their heuristics say that video games or alcohol or sports or facebook sound better now. Alternately, people might have other emotional issues that they want to mediate through the use of drugs. In both of those situations, I think that there are deep-seeded problems that need to be addressed to have any hope of a good solution and that drugs would only act as a quick fix that could mess up other things along the way.
In other words, I don't think that drugs can help. I do think that drugs can mess things up in our brains in ways that we don't understand.
Also, I sometimes irrationally believe in Nietzche's "that which does not kill you makes you stronger." In other words, I believe that I am a stronger person if I am able to mediate my sleep schedule without caffeine, my pain without pot or aspirin, my emotions and social inhibitions without alcohol, my immune system without pharmaceuticals, and my productivity without nootropics. I think that to use drugs would introduce weakness into my self on a chemical level. I don't see myself as a weak person, so I don't do drugs.
People are Good
The second lifehack that I disagreed with was outsourcing. There is a site called ODesk that lets you outsource tasks to people who want to do them. In other words, it's a general purpose marketplace of skills.
I don't have much of a problem with buying and selling labor as long as it's done in such a way that humans are being respectful of each other and that the labor is intrinsically fulfilling to the people doing the labor. For me, that justification is sufficient to denounce most unjust labor practices, from slavery to sweatshops (two situations that are similar in some ways, different in many important ways, and for which there are many other good justifications for rejection). I think that there are many uses of ODesk that don't pass that bar.
On the first note, it is easy to see that ODesk facilitates people not being respectful to each other. At one point in time, one of the lifehackers that was a big proponent of ODesk sent out an email asking for programming services. He said that he tried to outsource it but that he wasn't very happy with the results he got on ODesk. He proceeded to talk about the person who he contracted on ODesk in terms that would be very rude to say to another person's face. The geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic distancing intrinsic in most ODesk jobs makes it easy to be disrespectful.
On the second note, I don't think that most ODesk work is intrinsically fulfilling. Many of the jobs are rote labor where the person doing the labor can't see the fruits of their labor. Many elites will counter that rote labor must be done for society to function. I disagree with that on two levels.
First, people don't have to do rote labor. What one person considers rote labor, another person considers creative (I have done the same programming job twice; once, it was interesting, and the next time it was boring). Also, technology can make much rote labor unnecessary (electronic word processing software has made the rote labor of human word processing jobs largely unnecessary).
Second, rote labor can be fulfilling. In the context of a cooperative house, for instance, the rote labor involved in cleaning the bathroom can be fulfilling because you are a member of the community whose space you are cleaning. Knowing how to cook my own food and doing my own laundry is rote, but it's fulfilling because I get to eat the fruits of my labor and experience the wonderful feeling of sleeping on sheets fresh out of the dryer. Putting up fliers to advertise Code the Change events is rote, but it's fulfilling because I get to see the results. ODesk, along with many assembly-line type jobs, facilitate people working on one small part such that they don't see the overall result of their labor and, thus, don't feel fulfilled. My dad does what many elites would consider rote manual labor, but he doesn't consider it rote because he uses his skills to do the job well and he recognizes the skilled element, and feels fulfilled because at the end of a job, he can say, "I built this hospital" or house or courthouse or whatever the case may be.
Thus, I think that ODesk (and outsourcing small tasks in general) facilitates labor that is bad, and it trades off with labor that is good (if I hire someone off of ODesk, then I won't hire a person that I can have a physical conversation with to do the same job).
What Stanford Means to Me
At Stanford, there is the Senior Gift, which is an attempt to get Stanford seniors to donate to Stanford so that they get used to donating and continue to donate to Stanford in the future. Senior Gift has been very successful because they ask people to reflect on what Stanford means to them and to donate because of that. I thought that I would take the opportunity to reflect for myself.
Stanford has turned me into the person I am today, and I am happy about that. I have had some bad and mediocre teachers along the way, but I have been satisfied for the most part. I have an advisor and friends that I care about and that care about me. My teachers have encouraged me to be more philanthropic and to read The Plague, both of which were important to me. I learned how to program. I got better at listening, teaching, and negotiating. I became more organized to cope with my busy schedule. I learned about entrepreneurship. I found my limits.
Mostly, what Stanford gave me was confidence. I was good at what I did in high school, but I saw myself as a big fish in a small pond. I hadn't seen the real world, work, or experts. Thanks to debate, I had a healthy arrogance, but I was far too ready to put that down at the start of my Stanford career. My first humanities teacher at Stanford didn't like my writing style, and I humbly accepted that it was a problem with me and tried to adapt. That made it worse. The problem is that I was listening to her criticism.
Since then, I have learned that if you don't ask for something, you probably won't get it, so I should go ahead and make that cold call when necessary. I've learned that I have an incredible capacity for hard work, so I shouldn't be afraid of tackling most any challenge. In other words, Stanford made me cocky enough to believe that I will succeed with flying colors at whatever I do, so I should go forward and do amazing things.
One significant part of that is that I learned that my values are very solid. I feel comfortable about the actions that I base on those values and against critiques. I am confident in my dogma and feel absolutely no compulsion to make any ethical compromises. Yes, I donate to charity as a student. Yes, when people ask me what I want to do with my life, I still respond "save the world." Yes, I will be an ally to every progressive social movement. No, I don't think that social justice nonprofit should feel okay about polluting or that an environmental nonprofit should feel okay about using t-shirts produced in a sweatshop to advertise. No compromises on the straight and narrow path.
Faux Friendships
William Deresiewicz wrote an article called Faux Friendship:
http://chronicle.com/article/Faux-Friendship/49308/. Dereciewicz argues that the internet is killing friendships. I think that the internet hasn't done much either way, but it could be a powerful force for friendships.
The article starts with the (western) history of friendship, from intense Greek bonds to monastic subservience of friendship to god, to Renaissance loyalty, to modern individvualism, to 60s communes and bands, to Facebook.
He argues that "friendship is devolving... from a relationship to a feeling." There is no longer an intense bond between people, just a vague feeling that two people are friends.
One of his assertions is that one on one is better than one on many because it the former is individually tailored: a facebook post is flawed because everyone sees the same post. He says that people are becoming data nudists, putting their personal lives in public rather than keeping them private.
I actually think that's good, not bad (surprise surprise from someone who gets a lot of value from a one to many medium!). I think that one of the biggest problems our society faces is a lack of moral consistency, and it's easier to be inconsistent when you don't have to maintain one consistent image of your self. It's easier to be two faced when you show a different face to every different person that you meet.
Certainly, it is possible to be internally consistent and still tailor your message. When talking to an environmentalist friend, I might mention the environmental organizations that Code the Change has worked with, whereas when talking to a public health interested friend, I might mention the public health organizations that we have worked with. However, from writing my verbose letters, I suspect that much of the code switching that goes on has more to do with internal than external factors. People comment that they would feel very uncomfortable posting something like my verbose letters publicly. That sense isn't a desire to give people only the content that is most relevant to them rather than 80 pages of text. I suspect that sense comes from people lacking one consistent sense of self that they are willing to project to the world.
I also think that this weakness in Dereciewicz' argument is present in his own article. He idealizes
Sex and the City as a one to one form of communication that would be difficult in a one to many facebook generation. However, the narrative of
Sex and the City is one woman writing a one to many article about her experiences. Her articles may not be the same as her friendships, but her experiences are mediated by her articles. That one to many representation is her thoughts. The one to many representation is her representation of her self.
His other argument is that facebook makes people write short bits rather than anything meaningful. However, I think that he mistakes correlation for causation. Certainly, the medium shapes the message, and the type of message that facebook mediates is short, but we live in a culture of impersonal relationships. Marriages don't last. News media are mostly sound bytes. Phone calls and live meetings are short.
These trends are not new. Facebook is what it is because we are a generation of people who don't represent ourselves to each other. We aren't willing to listen, and we aren't willing to talk, so facebook lets us do what we want. Dereciewicz also idealizes
Seinfeld as better than now because we have facebook now, but
Seinfeld was practically a show about how impersonal relationships have become.
Dereciewicz also takes down some straw person defenses of facebook, but I don't think that his arguments or the arguments that he's taking down are particularly good, so I won't talk about them.
I recently read another article (on my smartphone... in your face, Dereciewicz!) where a researcher said that the three components of meaningful friendship are proximity, spending unplanned time together, and deep conversations where people "let their guard down and confide in each other" (
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/fashion/the-challenge-of-making-friends-as-an-adult.html). If those are the three components of friendship, then maximizing those is a design challenge. Rather than criticizing the internet, we should ask "how can the internet facilitate proximity, unplanned interactions, and deep conversations?"
One reason that friendships happen in college is because people are living in dorms with each other, so proximity is high. That makes unplanned interactions much easier. I suspect, in fact, that proximity only matters insofar as it leads to those interactions.
The internet can lead to those interactions. When I was in a cafe, one person tried to recruit me to his startup that was using cell phones to facilitate people having that same college-style unplanned interaction with each other even when they don't live with in the same dorm. Something like that can create real friendships.
Even absent that, though, things like instant messaging, Google+ Hangouts, and online multiplayer video games facilitate similar unplanned interactions. One of the reasons that I'm close with my friends is because we play League of Legends together. Historically, that happened through sports. Online media need not be less effective.
Deep conversations is a separate challenge. I wrote about that people are afraid of having deep conversations in public because they aren't willing to represent themselves in one way. However, people are no better in person. Last summer, someone showed me a ragecomic that argued that people speak shallowly when sober and deeply when drunk (
http://ragecomics.memebase.com/2011/08/13/rage-comics-classy-drunks). In many cases, this is true: people are often afraid of taking the risk involved with opening themselves up, so conversations are shallow. The common excuse for drinking (in college) is reducing social inhibitions that prevent them from having those deep conversations. I think that those inhibitions are bad, that they're leading us to be impersonal, and that we shouldn't have them at all, sober or otherwise. And, for the record, as a nondrinker, I wish people would have more conversations like that with me when they were sober.
I think that the internet can help. People have different psychological inhibitions when their interactions are mediated by a screen. On the one hand, that leads to hateful YouTube comments. On the other hand, you get people opening up about their honest opinions and expressing the things that make them feel vulnerable. I don't think that this verbose letter would exist in the offline world, and many of the deepest conversations that I have had from middle school to now have been over instant messaging or similar technologies.
I will admit, though, that my interactions online aren't necessarily typical, and even with these interactions, I feel that something is lacking in friendship. But again, these problems exist in society as a whole. Since it's better to light a candle than to curse the dark, our question should be how we can design social interactions that are more frequent and more meaningful.
So who wants to get to know me better?
Who wants to move beyond mobile social apps and towards genuine social apps?
Fortune Cookies
My dad saved some fortune cookies when he would get them. There's one fortune pinned up on the living room door at my house in Cottage Grove. "At the end of bitterness comes sweetness."
My cooking teacher in high school taught some of the history of fortune cookies. There was an occupying force. The locals ate a particular type of dough that the occupying elite didn't eat. Thus, to pass messages about their insurgency efforts, the locals would put notes inside of, basically, fortune cookies. In retrospect, though, I never verified that story.
His problem with fortune cookies was that nowadays they often aren't fortunes. "At the end of bitterness comes sweetness."
I have, occasionally, gotten accurate fortune cookies. Right before I was at Clinton Global Initiative University, I got a fortune cookie that said that I would win a prestigious award within the month. On the other hand, in high school, I got a fortune cookie before going to the Cal debate tournament, and it said that people would find it hard to resist my propositions (what a fortune to get before a debate tournament!), and I kind of lost.
Right before my Stanford graduation, I was at dinner with my family and Mehran, my advisor, at Jing Jing's. At the end, I opened up the fortune cookie and found no piece of paper inside. The world is open, and no single path is prewritten. I could think of no fortune more fitting.
Books and Spoilers
I prefer books where there's nothing to spoil. That's why The Plague and Name of the Wind are my favorite books.
The Plague is about a plague ridden city. Of course the city will get better, as all plague ridden cities eventually do. Of course it won't be the last plague. Of course not everyone will make it out alive. Of course people will fight it. The personalities that you see in the final chapter of the book are more or less the same as the personalities that you see in the first chapter. The important part not any suspense about the ending, but the journey itself.
Same deal with Name of the Wind. The protagonist is a famous hero. You don't even need to make it to the first chapter – the back cover of the book introduces you to half of the conflicts and events in the series. Not only that, but characters within the story tell stories about events that occur in the story. Again, the important part is not suspense about Kvothe jumping through a blazing inferno to save the girl. The important part is that, when he's a the hospital bed later, he discounts the act, saying that "anyone would have done that."
Perhaps it's me being all existentialist. We all know how the story will end, so perhaps we should spend our lives breathing rather than holding our breaths until the final page, waiting for what's coming next. I'm not concerned with death; I'm concerned with a life worth living.
Books and Narrative
In an earlier verbose letter, I wrote that I didn't enjoy books that switch between a bunch of point of views. I read an interview with Patrick Rothfuss that gives a much more nuanced and intelligent point of view on this and similar subjects:
http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/patrick-rothfuss-the-mercury-interview/Content?oid=3588162.
Birthdays
Nick's 21st birthday was 9/9, and my 21st birthday was 9/15.
I showed up without a present for Nick's birthday, but he happened to get emails from a dozen video game developers after I warned him that such an event might happen, so he assumes that I had something to do with it.
I was thinking about what to get Nick. I thought, "I could get a gift card for the video game that we play," but then I thought "what could I do that would be better?" Instead, I got a majority of the people running that video game company to send him birthday wishes, along with developers from a few other game studios. He's writing a thesis on stories in video games, so it should also help for that.
His reaction wasn't even the best part. Don't get me wrong -- he was ecstatic. He still asks me how I managed it. The best part, though, was his parents' reactions. When I arrived in San Mateo for his birthday dinner, his mom talked with me for 10 minutes about how excited he was. I guess I managed to do something right.
Kawa came down for my 21st birthday. She got me cake at the Cheesecake Factory and I introduced her to all of my friends and advisors. I had dinner at a vegan place in Palo Alto. I didn't drink, and I still don't.
QSA
In previous years, I talked about all of the events that QSA put on. We put those events on this year, too. Now, though, my role was handing the reins over. This year, we had a strong president and good recruiting. QSA was in good hands this year, and it will be in the future.
Branner Finances
There were a few emails at the beginning of the year indicating that Branner, my dorm, didn't have a financial officer. These emails went on for a few weeks. I have been a financial officer in the past, so I know that it doesn't take much effort to be one and that when one doesn't exist, people aren't getting reimbursed. I decided to take on the extra job.
While it isn't much work, it is annoying. There are a lot of little rules to follow (like the exact types of documentation that people can bring in for their expenses and the exact form to fill out and the fact that they need to print out forms rather than giving electronic documentation). Also, this wasn't anything new to me, so I didn't really learn anything.
I did get some excitement, though. We canceled some big ticket items in spring quarter, so we had a surplus. After I told everyone, everyone knew we had extra money, but they didn't make a new budget (and I didn't force them to make a new budget), so everyone overspent. As a result, we ran out of money, and much of that happened in the very last week, so I didn't know in time to rein the spending in. I managed to get us fiscally solvent by the end, but there were some frantic conversations and negotiations.
It was nice developing a closer relationship with the dorm staff and the resident fellows, though.
The End
This will likely be the last verbose letter produced in this format. I don't intend to change my writing style, but I want a faster turnaround time (and, from what I hear, so do you). I'll probably still try to sum things up at the end of the quarter, but I'll probably also write up books, talks, and other musings as they come. After this, verbosity will probably move to
samking.org (not .com... someone else owns that domain).
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