Work and Workings of a Nerd

A personal blog about what's on Kevin's mind.

November 3, 2011

Why We Don’t Need to Worry About Robots’ Rights

Filed under: nonfiction,technology — kevin @ 10:48 pm

Last Thursday, I went to a panel discussion being held at the Stanford Law School by The Center for Internet and Society on “Legal Perspectives in Artificial Intelligence.” My mind is mostly buried in the AI, but since I have recently become more interested in policy in general and the social impact of technology, I thought it could be interesting to see where the crossover is.

There were a lot of possible intersections, such as the use of AI in assisting lawyers put together cases or IP rights to AI code and programs. The topic they mostly discussed, however, was the possibility of AI being considered a legal person and what the implication of that was. It was an unfortunate angle to take because AI equal to a human doesn’t exist, so it was mostly non-answers, roughly of the form, “Interesting; we’ll see what happens.” They also chose not to jump into the philosophical aspects too much, with only minor discussion of philosophical zombies (a being that behaves exactly like a human but has no consciousness), and instead left those as largely open questions as well.

Disregarding how unsatisfying those answers were, I was also disappointed by the conversation as a whole because I found their conception of AI somewhat narrow, and that limited the topics they could consider. Instead of considering the state of technology as it is today and the issues surrounding that, they mostly clung to the more fantastic view of AI. This view, perpetuated largely by popular media, is best represented by robots like C-3PO that are human in all except form. More generally, this view treats AI as a system with intentions, self-motivation, and more psychological properties similar to humans. And that AI doesn’t exist.

Stepping back from that, however, and we already have some forms of AI, and I will make the stronger claim that what we have now will be the form of AI for the foreseeable future (with respect to legal rights; of course we’re making great progress in the nitty-gritty). So, I think that this panel was appropriate for us now, but for different reasons than what the organizers likely considered. AI is here now and it has plenty of problems surrounding it. For better or worse, though, I think it’s largely invisible in our lives. Let me give a few examples of AI in our lives, what its role is, why I don’t see it changing into HAL, and what the legal implications of it are.

First, AI in the market. The panelists discussed the legal status of AI as a trustee, an advisor to a trustee, or as a business operator. I don’t see this coming soon because AI don’t have their own desires, so it doesn’t make sense for them to be in charge. AI can be a tool to make recommendations and crunch the numbers, but the last mile will be all blood and guts. And this form of AI already exists. Take algorithmic trading: a computer is executing trades for a fund or some other trader based only on the numbers and often faster than humans are capable of. On the whole, it’s a black box. Very smart physicists and computer scientists can build models to make it run, but once it’s going, it’s past our ability to actively monitor it. Just last year, the Dow Jones crashed, which was largely blamed on algorithmic trading. The SEC ended up changing some rules based on this, so this is a problem being dealt with right now. I haven’t followed the situation, but I imagine that there are questions about liability when AI runs havoc on the market.

Second, health care. This came up in the discussion of Watson, the Jeopardy playing AI that IBM claims it wants to retool for health care. They were concerned about the possible issues here, as health as least as touchy of a topic as the market. I’m not scared about it, though, because we still have doctors. Doctors may receive advice from computers, but the final decision is going to be in the hands of a human. We don’t send our brightest to school for a decade just to let them defer judgement: they’ll still sit between a patient and AI. Even so, this is again already happening today. In fact, we apparently even have a journal dedicated to this topic. As it is, we can use probabilistic models to diagnose various illnesses by telling a computer what the various symptoms are, and it’ll spit back the likelihood of various possibilities. AI researchers will tell you that they’re actually better than doctors since they have the accumulated knowledge of many more cases than any 1 doctor could ever know. Importantly, AI here is just a tool, not a legal person. We do have questions today, such as patient privacy when the data are being aggregated into a single machine, and these will be the questions moving forward.

To wrap this up, let’s bring this around to an example of AI that you must be familiar with to be reading this: web search. On the surface, it seems like this is a task that humans are performing, any non-trivial search engine you’ll encounter has all sorts of interesting AI in it, such as trying to figure out if you meant the scooters, the mice, the hygiene product, or the phone when you type in, “Why isn’t my razor working?” The net result is that people usually click on the first link, which means that we’ve already deferred a lot of our choices to AI in picking the “best match” to our search terms. But that’s a far cry from R2D2, and hopefully, no one will ever sue a search engine for giving them bad results.

And it’s everywhere else, too. Google translate, autonomous cars, Bing flight search, Amazon search recommendations, and Siri are all examples of what AI really looks like today, and frankly,  it’s not that scary. None of it may sound that impressive or very AI-like, but that tends to be a funny problem with AI as a field of research: once we figure out how to do it, it’s not AI anymore.

I think it’s important that all of those things I just rattled off are tools, not independent agents. We build things that we want, and for the most part, we want things done for us while leaving us in control. This means that we build wonderful systems that use AI to make our lives easier, but that last mile is still human.

Given that this is what AI is and what it will be (so I claim), then the issues are already in front of us now. And if they don’t seem like issues, it’s because they aren’t. Do we worry about incorrect diagnoses from AI? A doctor may blame a computer, but it’s still the doctor’s call. What about an autonomous car getting into an accident? Assuming it’s entirely autonomous, it’s no different than trams that have a preset schedule. Cars aren’t going to have their own desires (such as to tailgate the jerk who cut them off), and since we’ll understand how they work, the mystery is gone.

So in summary, AI is here now, and it’s as it will be. There are legal issues to consider with respect to AI, but we shouldn’t be worrying about AI as a legal person. And appreciate and understand how important AI already is in your lives. As tools.

October 30, 2011

Being a Stanford Football Fan

Filed under: personal — kevin @ 11:43 am

(Author’s Note: check out one of the recaps at ESPN or Go Mighty Card if you’re interested in the details of the game this post came from. It shouldn’t be too important, so read on if you prefer)

A few minutes after Stanford beat USC 48-38 and we had a chance to recover from triple overtime, my roommate Joe commented that it had been the “most nerve-wracking game” he had even watched. I pointed out that it was only so because we won: had we lost, it would’ve been the most devastating game ever. Cue the camera panning over fans with their hands on their hand.

This year, Stanford football, only 5 years from going 1-11, came into the season as a top-1o ranked team with aspirations for and a shot at a national championship. So far, it’s gone very well. Coming into the game last night, Stanford had won their last 10 games by more than 25 points, were on a 15 game winning streak, and, through 7 games this year, were never behind at any point in a game. It may have been close a few times, but we never needed to come from behind.

Even so, I was scared in a few games when we were only winning by less than a touchdown at the half. Unlike teams of the past, we were expected to win, and that changed my attitude towards the games. Before, I could be happy just that we were playing well and winning. Now, in a season where we could go to the Rose Bowl or beyond, each game isn’t a step forward: it’s another chance to lose.

So watching us go to the half only leading by 4 point was worrying, but being down 10 points in the 3rd quarter was frightening. And when Andrew Luck, our star quarter back, threw an interception that USC ran back for a touchdown late in the 4th quarter to put us behind by a touchdown, I had a scary realization: our season could be “over” so quickly. Everything we hoped for could disappear, and I was looking at the score on the TV by which that might happen.

But the team showed the poise that matches their tunnel vision and “one game at a time” mentality that makes them far better and stronger than their fans, many like me who are aware of every scenario for how things play out. The offense put together 4 consecutive touchdown drives (3 in OT), and the defense forced a fumble that linebacker A.J. Tarpley jumped on top of. And that was the shocking end to a game that left all fans in disbelief, some better and some worse.

I sometimes wish we were back in the old days, when the only fans were true die-hards to a team that didn’t have any big expectations. But as easy as that life was, it didn’t drive the same intensity in me. It was easy because I wasn’t invested, even if I was watching. Stanford’s upset of then #2 USC in 2007 was great, but had we lost, I’m sure I wouldn’t have any particular memories of the game. NOw, I can experience all of the highs and lows of a game developing before me, tracking other teams and feeling every moment of the season.

I would never wish a game to come as close as this last one did, but it was probably good for us. The team showed their ability to endure a long and physical game against a tough opponent. But for the fans, we felt a fear that we hadn’t really in the past 10 games. Instead of thinking to the next few games after the team had a huge lead in the first quarter, we were intently watching every moment of the game. We saw every tackle, every reception, every juke through the game. For that game, we weren’t the fans of a possible future: we were the fans of the game of football itself that we claim to be.

October 16, 2011

How My Desktop Follows Me

Filed under: personal,technology — kevin @ 11:23 pm

In my last post, I mentioned that I have been transitioning out of a single machine mindset into having everything at hand with terminals where I go. I have largely stuck with it for the last month and a half, and it works very well. My backpack is oddly out of balance now that I’m mostly carrying around little items like my iPod Touch without the monster.

In any case, I promised a follow-up post where I discuss how I’m managing to do it. Here’s the list of computing tasks and needs that I have and the services that have me covered:

  1. stickies, random text documents, and other notes: Evernote. Until recently, I was very dependent on the stickies on my computer. It had my todo list, various details of interest, important addresses, and anything else I needed off-hand. I couldn’t survive without it. As evidence, when my motherboard got fried and I didn’t have a computer for a few days, the most important thing I needed to get off my external backup was my stickies: all other documents, music, code, etc were secondary. Beyond that, my “Documents” folder on my computer was also largely random notes and lists. All of these transferred cleanly into notes in Evernote, which syncs these to the cloud and offers desktop, mobile, and web integration. Now, without my stickies, I can’t live without it.
  2. music, podcasts: Pandora, Spotify, iTunes syncing. There are too many good services online nowadays to stream music, and since their libraries are mostly bigger and better than mine, it works. Podcasts are still dependent on having my one iTunes account on my machine to keep track of which ones I have listened to, but since I can sync it to my iPod, they’re with me everywhere. Recently, I put a pair of speakers in my kitchen and have been listening to podcasts while doing dishes and cooking. So, this is even more portable than the setup I was fixed in before.
  3. movies/media: Netflix. I never did have many movies or TV shows, so netflix streaming is another improvement. I like to think it’s not completely down the drain paying for the service, since it is saving me from buying another season of 30 Rock on DVD every year.
  4. documents: Dropbox. But to be honest, I don’t really use documents anymore and haven’t really used dropbox. Weird.
  5. bookmarks: Chrome syncing. Without this, I could have never made the switch, but between the computers I use regularly, I’m largely in exactly the same state since I spend so much time in the browser. This, along with Google+ (as discussed here), stopped my delicious usage almost entirely. Instead, I can keep a “To Read” folder on my bookmarks toolbar and leaves interesting but long sites in there.
  6. calendar: iCal. Someday, I might switch to Google Calendar, but since it syncs up to my iPod, this has worked out fine.
  7. email: gmail. I haven’t used a desktop mail client since getting my gmail account 7 years ago.
  8. video games: no solution needed. My games are only on my home machine, but that’s fine. I don’t need them anywhere else anyways. This also happens to be the only thing that I do that requires my computer to have any juice whatsoever. Since I usually manage to keep the number of open browser tabs relatively low, everything else runs fine and could on much less hardware.
  9. software development: ssh. I don’t do any development on my local machine: everything I do is on servers that I log into.
  10. homework: none. This largely sits on my home machine since this is where I do my homework, though I could just as easily copy them into my dropbox folder. The only downside would be that I wouldn’t have them appear on my desktop, so this is probably another relic.

Even for all these changes, however, I actually have been moving my computer pretty regularly. In my school year housing, my room and the common room are separate, so I end up carrying my computer downstairs to plug it into the TV whenever I want to stream any movies or sports games.

I don’t necessarily have any problems or need my life more fragmented, but let me know if you have any suggestions for other services that might be useful. I’m definitely interested to hear how others have transitioned with more cloud services or have compelling reasons for not changing.

September 7, 2011

My Desktop Everywhere

Filed under: personal,technology — kevin @ 8:57 pm

Back in my high school days, I wondered why computing wasn’t more portable than it was. Although laptops were popular, they still weren’t that convenient. I myself had a 64MB flash drive that I carried in my backpack that I used to sneak prohibited files onto school computers. It got most of the work done, but it wouldn’t be too much worse to carry around an entire hard drive with me if it could maintain the total state of computer between home and school. This clearly seemed like the dream setup to have: carry around, say, a 1 lbs device that could be plugged into any terminal and give you the exact same setup on any hardware.

In between then and now, I found a pretty good substitute in my Macbook Pro. Coming in at 5.4 pounds, I could carry my life around with me between my dorm room, home, class, library, and wherever else I needed it. It was pretty ideal, and for awhile, I believed that the best way to live was with a single machine. No hassle with trying to sync multiple devices or reconfigure anything: just pick it up and go. My dad insisted that I have a laptop for when I went off to college, and I still agree that this was the easiest way to do things.

Having finished my 4 undergraduate years, though, I’m thinking that this is no longer such a good setup. First, it actually isn’t as wonderfully portable as it could be. When I travel, I have to switch out to use my laptop backpack, and it and peripherals dominate what i can carry. Second, it isn’t very comfortable to use. My current setup has it linked up to an external keyboard and mouse with the actual laptop perched on a board game so that the screen is closer to a comfortable viewing angle. Even better would be a larger external display, but at that point, I’m not using any of the built-in input or output functionality of the laptop.

Third, I don’t actually need to be that portable nowadays. Most of my work is done at desks, and I don’t need a laptop to work at a desk. I don’t go home that often, and the only other time I can think of that I really need a laptop is when I’m working with someone else on, say, a group project. Continuing on that note, my fourth reason is that I probably shouldn’t be carrying my laptop around with me anyways. For the first 2 years of college, I almost never moved my computer from my desk. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say it was less than once a month. It was fine because I wasn’t distracted while I was in class. Beginning my junior year, I started lugging it around, thinking that I would be able to do some work at various times. Inevitably, though, I would find another good distraction and never get around to what I meant to do. And fifth and finally, the specs are very good for the price.

Even though the laptop doesn’t seem to fit my needs as well anymore, it’s okay because my original dream has been accomplished, though perhaps in a form I wasn’t expecting: the cloud. It’s a buzzword, but simply, that complete setup on any hardware exists and is even lighter than I thought it would be. Now, I can sit down at a computer, pull up a few online services, and have access to all of my music, documents, applications, files, and everything else I typically use on a computer. And thanks to Google Chrome syncing, my effective “desktop” is the same everywhere as my bookmarks, extensions, and other browser configuration follow me around.

I’ll get to describing the suite of services I use to do that in another post, but the conclusion that I’ve drawn from this is that I don’t need to carry around a physical object with me to make my computer use portable: I just need the internet, and other than airlines and fancy hotels (the cheap ones always offer free wifi; go figure), wifi is pretty much everywhere I would sit down to use my computer.

Still, there are situations where I would like to carry around a device with me, such as plane rides or trips home, and I’m thinking about getting myself a tablet (specifically, an iPad) to cover my bases there. In many ways, it doesn’t have good features that a PC would have, but I don’t think it needs it. My conception is that using a tablet is a fundamentally different method of computing, and I think I’m willing to take the plunge and see if it works when I get one.

In the meantime, I have stopped carrying my computer back and forth to work, instead leaving it at home as my “desktop” here and using another box at work. I couldn’t quite get away from the convenience of UNIX for development and am learning how to use Ubuntu on it, but in spite of a different operating system, I’m using it in almost the exact same way as my MacBook Pro sitting at home. As for portability, I’m carrying my iPod Touch around with me at all times now after basically leaving it untouched for the past 3 years. It’s limited, but it’s unnoticeable to carry and comes in handy in a few spots.

My transformation isn’t complete, but I’m excited to see how I adapt to this new setup over the next few months while I wait for another round of better hardware to come out. It may not be instantiated exactly as I imagined, but it looks like technology has snaked past the road bump of laptops and passed my dream of portability.

August 31, 2011

Deep Fried Day

Filed under: food,personal — kevin @ 8:54 pm

(Author’s Note: I’ll be moving my food writing from the group blog back to my own blog now that the summer is over and I’m trying to keep my writing regular)

Beginning the summer after my freshmen year of college, I have hosted an annual deep-fried day. Having heard of delicious deep-fried twinkies and snickers from the Texas State Fair, I insisted that I could do the same, and for the past 3 years, I have worked on my technique. As of yesterday, I think it finally paid off.

The theme for our weekly potluck this past week was “deep-fried food” to continue my tradition. Sensing that others might be tired of this, I presented this as an opportunity to think of other things we might deep fry, traditional or not. It worked out perfectly, with falafel, goat-cheese wontons, fried cheese in a salad, and sweet potato fries as good options. What worked best about it, though, was that all of these required different sauces and ingredients to accompany the deep-fried bits. Our dessert, though, was twinkie, oreo, and snicker-ful.

Given the improvement that we’ve managed over the years, I thought I might put together a few thoughts on deep frying. I tried to organize them, but the topics overlapped too much, so it’s just paragraphs.

You can use just a regular pot to do it and use a canola or vegetable oil for it. You can buy a deep fryer, but it isn’t necessary as long as you’re careful. As far as the size of the pot, I have been using something about 8 inches. Bigger takes a lot more oil, and smaller doesn’t give you enough space (though don’t worry about that too much as I will explain soon.
Have a thermometer with you and try to keep the heat between 350 and 375. You can be on the 350 for things that need to cook through but won’t soak too much grease (falafel) but hotter on the things that will soak it up (oreos). On my slow electric burner, I can get to 375 below medium, so you don’t need to crank the heat too much.

What will happen, though, is that when you put things in the oil, the temperature will drop. Thus, my strategy for deep frying has been to keep the heat just below medium until I get to the desired temperature. Immediately after adding things to fry, I turn the heat up a little, then watch the thermometer. When I start approaching the original temperature, I bring the heat back down.

As far as adding things to the pot, always do batches so you know how long things have been in the oil. If you try to stream items in and pull them in and out over time, you can’t maintain a steady temperature. Similarly, try to keep the batches small (that’s why an 8 inch pot works) so that the temperature doesn’t drop too much.

As far as adding and removing things, dumping in with a slotted spoon (even plastic) should work just fine. I tried to move things in and out with chopsticks before, but gripping battered food will coat the chopsticks in a layer of fried batter quickly. As far as other equipment goes, have lots of paper towels around and try to pat dry things immediately after coming out of the pot. Things cool very quickly, so don’t be too afraid about burning yourself on the food.

For the batter, pancake mix works just fine. It should just barely be thick enough to coat things. Make sure all surfaces of the food are covered, but don’t worry too much about getting a thick coat; as soon as it hits the oil, it’ll puff up and harden.

Go slow with it. You can only eat so much fried food, but you’ll feel better about it if you spread it over a few hours. Or maybe even days. As long as the oil doesn’t get too hot and go rancid, you can reuse it a few times.

And to be intentionally didactic, make sure you do it safely. A pot of oil can ruin your day quick. Keep the lid nearby in case you need to cover the pot at any point. Don’t put water/ice/water-based stuff into the oil, or else it might begin to sputter.

You can google around to look for things to deep fry (pretty much everything), but here are a few things I or my friends have done. Most are successes, but failures are notable too

  • twinkies – they work fine even if you don’t freeze them. Batter and top with powdered sugar.
  • oreos
  • PB & J sandwiches – battered. It’s delicious
  • Snickers – I’ve only done frozen before, but I think that’s the way to do it
  • Onions & mushrooms – great with BBQ sauce
  • gummy worms – these disintegrated quick, but liquified gummy worms are delicious
  • ice cream – haven’t done, but I hear it’s delicious. These take preparation
  • falafel – good as a meal on its own. Pair with traditional things
  • sweet potato fries
  • goat cheese
  • fried wontons

August 2, 2011

Getting Past Plans

Filed under: personal — kevin @ 5:05 pm

After playing racquetball and eating dinner with Ben last week, I found myself with nothing to do for the evening. I pulled up my Stickies on my computer, but my green to-do sticky note was empty. My eyes drifted over to my procrastination list, and after rejecting any intensive reading, I decided to play “No One Lives Forever,” a PC shooter themed after a goofy, James Bond-style spy flick. I rebooted my computer into Windows and settled in for an evening of video games.

Playing it didn’t go so well. It’s a well-designed funny game, but I didn’t find myself enjoying it, and after a few minutes, I just quit the game and tried to figure out what else I wanted to do. I visualized my procrastination list and went through the items. Again rejecting all of the reading, I decided to instead chip away at a very long “Movies To Watch” list. I moved the coffee table in my living room out of the way and dragged the couch to 5 feet in front of the TV for Julie & Julia, the Nora Ephron dramedy. In my defense, I mostly wanted to watch the movie because it was about food.

I admit, however, that I enjoyed it far more than I would have just for the food. The acting was good, there were some laugh out loud moments, and I was engaged by Julie Powell’s plan to cook the 500-something recipes from Julia Childs’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year and blog about it. With a cooking blog myself (that I’m not ashamed to plug), I imagined how much fun it would be to have a project like that. Thinking through the whole year, though, I could never do that myself. Julie couldn’t have had time for anything other than her day job and this cooking project; what about the rest of her passions in life?

Julie had a single-mindedness that I have had a lot of difficulty finding. I fill my life with plans, like an activity tonight, dinner tomorrow night, a weekend trip a week from now, my class schedule a month from now, my living situation a year from now, and my life goals a decade from now. And my procrastination list fills the time in-between all of those events. Apparently, I even plan for when I don’t have plans.

The lists and planning are good, until they become the goals themselves. Lists can conveniently list things to get done, but in the end, the list is just the representation of the goal. I think there’s a small satisfaction in crossing off an item from a list, but that’s peripheral to the reason why it was on the list in the first place. For example, about 3 weeks from the end of the school year, I wrote down every academic commitment I had left. I was excited every time I could scratch off a line, and I even liked throwing the entire list in the trash. All of that, however, was a slow march towards graduation, another step to the big payoff.

Reviewing my procrastination list and how I treat it, I think I might be using it the wrong way. Once, the list was a memory aid for things I might enjoy, but when my focus turns to the list itself, I end up playing video games not for the fun they actually are, but for the goal of deleting that line out of my Stickie. If I finish that item, and the next item, and the next item, all the way to the end in the same fashion, I might successfully complete my procrastination list at some point, but I would have also missed the reason it exists a long time before.

So I have tossed a few lists, like my reading and video game lists, and trimmed a few, like my procrastination list and movie list. My friend RJ mentioned the other day that he had finished watching a TV show and was wondering what might be up next. If he can get by without a backlog, I think I’ll manage with only 3 TV shows to finish. I still need to offload some of my memory into a usable form.

In trimming these lists and plans for my life, I still don’t think I’ll find the same single-mindedness that Julie did in cooking through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but I’m a step closer to relieving myself of the items on the backburners and throwing myself wholeheartedly into a yearlong project on a whim. On some level, even those 500-something recipes for her were put together as a plan in a list. I’m sure she had her share of breakdowns and moments of disillusionment, but I guess those are the moments to see through the plan for the goal behind it and figure out why the plan existed all along.

 

(Author’s Note: this post is a sliver of some bigger things I’ve been thinking about recently, and for awhile, this post was going to turn far more intense than either I’m comfortable with or what you likely care about. Even so, here are a few nuggets and insights into my writing process that didn’t make it into the final cut)

In some ways, plans are just like lists, too. I enjoy planning events and figuring out details. I also have panicked and fretted when plans don’t pan out, but often, things turn out fine anyways, and the only problem was worrying about the plan.

I should appreciate the fact that I have the capacity to be juggling the various things I’m doing at all times, but this mindset also means that I’m always juggling things. Since the end of my freshmen year, I have had no fewer than 2 jobs at any time and have been averaging more than that. I always think that things are going to get better soon, but because I believe that, I jump at the opportunity to be doing more, and things stay just about the same.

  • I have my life in plans and lists
  • I’m willing to finish things
  • always have a backburner
  • need to do less to do more
  • get by without it all

July 30, 2011

My Podcasts

Filed under: personal — kevin @ 9:52 am

I enjoy sharing my interests on this blog, and I noticed that I particularly enjoy sharing the media that I regularly consume. You know that TV isn’t a big part of my life, but that my feeds are. The other big media sources I subscribe to are podcasts. About 2 1/2 years ago, my sister introduced me to “Stuff You Should Know“, and since then, I’ve picked up and dropped many podcasts. Currently, I’m listening to about as few as I ever have, but let me give you a rundown on what I am listening to:

Baseball Today (iTunes) – daily during the baseball season and less frequent during the off-season, Baseball Today is the only way I stay up to date with baseball news and analysis. As much as I enjoy baseball, I’m pretty bad at following the sport as a whole. One of the more amusing things I’ve noticed recently is how much they point out misperceptions about how good teams or certain players are. These are largely lost on me because I don’t follow the game well enough to have thoughts. Produced by ESPN, the hosts are very knowledgeable and offer up the quirkiness you might expect from radio hosts. Eric Karabell anchors the show, and his shtick is to vigorously (and sometime angrily) express what a happy person he is. The producers have always done a great job of pairing him with negative, cynical co-hosts for the expected hilarity

Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips (iTunes) – my love of grammar probably isn’t so surprising to those who know me in part through reading my blog, and Grammar Girl offers short segments on topics or questions about English grammar. Listening to these hasn’t noticeably improved my command of the English language, though it has made me unjustifiably confident and stubborn in my beliefs about English. Don’t be surprised if I use this podcast as a reference in debates in conversation

Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! (iTunes) – produced by NPR, Wait Wait is an hour-long weekly radio show wrapped up as a podcast and lovingly listened to by me just as often. Setup as a game show, Peter Sagal asks 3 panelists and listener contestants about current events, with many jokes and hilarious news stories along the way. Like Baseball Today, this show helps to fill in the gaps for me about how the week goes

State of the Game (iTunes) – also weekly, this podcast, hosted by JP McDaniel, features several professional Starcraft 2 players talking about Starcraft 2, news about eSports and professional Starcraft, and typical jabbering in a free-for-all format. This podcast is the final remnant of a time when I listened to many game podcasts (mostly for Magic: the Gathering) and has the same format of mostly 18-34 year old males, sitting in a Skype call and talking passionately about their game, immaturity flaring up at any chance. Since the beginning of the summer, I haven’t followed or watched professional Starcraft 2 quite as much, and like the other podcasts, it keeps me up to date on what I’ve missed

TEDTalks (iTunes) – about a year ago, someone from The Unofficial Stanford Blog mentioned that he was a big fan of TEDTalks and was surprised that not everyone else also religiously followed them. I had seen a few along the way, but sometime soon after, I started watching and enjoyed them immensely. The TED format is short (less than 20 minute) lectures, demonstrations, or performances about some idea or creation that people want to show off. When I first started watching, I was very impressed about what people were doing and how many world-changing ideas people had. Since then, my interest has decreased significantly, though I still subscribe. This might be the influence of being in Silicon Valley, but I don’t appreciate ideas as much as I used to. We need good ideas, and without one, many projects will fail. Even so, good ideas are cheap and plentiful, and with the number of world-changing ideas I’ve listened to, I haven’t seen the world changed that much. Execution is very important, too, and perhaps that’s where the secret is. Anyways, if you want to peek in, I recommend listening to these podcasts, cherry-picked for quality. I might not be as enthusiastic about them as before, but they’re still fun to listen to

Radiolab (iTunes) – Radiolab is awesome, and I have difficulty describing it. An hour-long radio program broadcast nationwide on NPR, it explores broad topics in science and philosophy with shorter segments, often with a slight human interest influence and presented in a very accessible format against a strange audio backdrop. Most of my interest in it came from my background in cognitive psychology, and even when I’m familiar with phenomenon they mention, I’m still enjoying how they put it together. Even better, they do it right: I will often snobbishly dismiss science writing for being shallow, overstating findings, or just being wrong, but Radiolab is pretty solid. Just recently, I finished going through and listening to the entire archives of Radiolab podcasts, something I haven’t done for any other podcast, because it’s just that good.

60-Second Mind (iTunes) – from Scientific American, this is a quick hit on recent findings in brain sciences. It’s so-so, but for a minute of my life at a time, I can listen in

Overall, a lot of my podcasts get filtered out since I listen to them while I’m working on something else (except Radiolab, which I absolutely must be paying attention to). It’s probably not the best way to do it, but since I don’t really watch TV or listen to radio, it’s just about the best non-print media I can find.

July 10, 2011

4 things I learned at Bing

Filed under: personal,psychology — kevin @ 10:29 am

This past quarter, I spent one morning every week in a classroom at Bing Nursery School, basically working as an assistant teacher for a class I was taking. The class focused on the development of young children (3 to 5 years old), and our journal entries (posted on this blog) and weekly discussions were structured around our experiences in the classroom. Going into the class, I only cared about the children’s cognitive development: their ability to make inductive leaps, learn new skills, and progress towards literacy. I quickly learned that there’s a lot more to school than just how children think: they also interact with each other, develop emotionally, and become a complete person. As a teacher, I learned a few techniques with dealing with different situations. Some are a little cliche, others depends on the naivety of children, but all are good to know for children, if not people in general. I don’t know whether these are really useful in real life, but you can kind of see where I think the extensions are.

1. Don’t pose a question if you don’t intend on giving them a choice.

It’s typical politeness, I think, for people to pose orders as questions. “Would you open the door for me?” “Can you grab that book off of the shelf?” It turns an order into a request, and you expect them to be polite enough to follow through with it. Often, it actually is a request, but in a classroom, there’s a hierarchy, and orders are meant to be followed. When posed as a question, however, an order might be declined. “Would you like to clean this up?” “No.” Well, there’s not much left after that.

Instead, give a limited choice. Children live in a controlled environment, and they do appreciate having choices or power*. To appeal to this and make them far more compliant, give a smaller choice. “Would you like to walk to the toilet, or would you like to fly to the toilet?” It sounds silly, but it totally works. At the end of the day, we needed to clean up the blocks, and the children had built 2 prisons. Instead of telling them to clean up directly again (they had already been told), I instead asked, “Would you rather put away this big prison first, or the small prison first?” Things got cleaned up quickly.

2. Don’t give judgmental feedback on creative activities.

Bing is an unstructured, play environment, so children are free to move between activities. Within those activities, many are creative in nature, and even in more structured activities, they’re allowed to make what they want of it. We’re very careful never to assume or judge a painting or other piece of art. I think the classic joke is a child showing a parent a painting, and when the parent says, “What a nice cat!”, the child responds, “It’s a dog.”

Admittedly, it’s sometimes very hard to tell, and frankly, not everything is good. To tell them, “Your picture is amazing!” or something positive like that sends the wrong message. In creative activities, they aren’t working towards receiving praise; they should be working towards developing their own abilities and creativity.

Instead, make observations about what they have accomplished. Since Bing is so focused on developing skills, you can absolutely respond to what they show you, or engage with them during creation, by discussing what they’re doing. “I noticed you blended the colors along the edge here.” “Your circles are rounder here than they are over here.” “You used a lot more finer lines around the head here.” This way, the children are attending to what they’ve done and the specific techniques that they can compose into a creative piece.

3. Always explain why.

Schools have a lot of policies, and Bing’s #1 policy is to always be safe. Different teachers have different comfort levels for what the children do, but when they hit a boundary, we have to be firm, but also explain why. We don’t want children running inside because it’s crowded and there are lots of things they may break or hurt themselves on. We don’t take toys that other children are playing with because it’s not a sustainable way to play, especially if it happened to the taker his or herself. And for the teachers, it’s a good reminder why policies and rules exist.

An interesting extension of this is that rules don’t always have to be consistent in all situations. Many books recommend absolute consistency, but frankly, the world isn’t consistent, and rules exist in context. For example, running is bad above for the reasons mentioned, but is fine outside in the grass area. The children seem to do pretty well with these rules as long as they have a reason.

4. Don’t worry about screwing up.

In the first 2 weeks, we got lots of suggestions on how to deal with the children, and most of them were “don’ts,” not “dos.” I myself ended up being very paralyzed by this and slowly needed to recover a more natural interaction with the children. When I mentioned this to one of the instructors for the course later, she recommended simply that I not worry about it.

A lot of what I posed above are also “don’ts,” but frankly, most of the time, it doesn’t matter. If you say that a sand castle is “very nice,” you’re not going to permanently hurt the child. If you can’t resolve a conflict between two children or tell a child something that isn’t true, it’s fine. They’ll get over it, and it’s life.

 

So those were some of the things I learned. It was a great experience being able to discuss techniques and topics, then immediately try them out in the classroom, and I appreciate the opportunity to do that. For any Stanford students, psych 147 is highly recommended.

*in early education, people seem to agree that boys pretending to play with guns is a manifestation for this need for power; I don’t entirely know how I feel about that

July 3, 2011

Fresh Server Install

Filed under: personal,technology — kevin @ 12:05 am

Due to some very poor decisions earlier, I managed to completely screw up the OS on this server, resulting in some downtime. Since then, I have decided to use a clean install, especially since my server was horribly configured anyways and probably needed a clean slate.

I tried hard to get everything put back together, but I probably missed something. Email/contact me if you notice any strangeness or problems with services from this server, and I’ll try to address them as soon as possible.

July 1, 2011

First Thoughts about Google+

Filed under: personal — kevin @ 12:50 am

If you haven’t heard about it, Google+ is Google’s new foray into social networking after a few disappointments in-between. For all its world domination-like qualities, a lot of Google products haven’t fallen flat recently, and its new Facebook competitor (as described by The Times) has the same sort of possibly ephemeral feel, but I think Google should be feeling lucky about this one.

I consider myself a late adopter. I like to pay attention to new technology, but because I’m cynical, cheap, and comfortable with what I have, I’m usually not too pumped up about things until I see how other people have used it to some benefit. This mentality even affects how I view entire movements as I’m still not too keen on social networking as a whole. I check Facebook daily but probably won’t write but a handful of times over a year (not counting my birthday). I just don’t think its added that much value to my life.

What is Facebook good for? Honestly? Stalking. Especially right now as I’m curious what all my friends are doing post-college. It’s a lot of work to go through the typical wall post and comment exchange to ask questions that they might be embarrassed addressing in a public setting anyways. I just hope that they’ve updated their education or work history in their profile.

So why am I optimistic about Google+? Because it’s actually kind of nice. At first, the set of available components seems like an odd mish-mash, but when I think about what I want, it actually seems to kind of work, without all the junk.

First, it forces you to put all connections into various circles. Presumably, one can “Facebook” it and just put everyone in one circle, but it’s actually kind of nice to have these divisions in place: it matches my real life social life. My family in Toronto probably doesn’t care about a local event on Stanford campus, but a greater proportion of my close friends do.

Interestingly, this feature is already available in Facebook, but as I discussed with some of my friends in a “Hangout” (spoiler: good words to come), they just didn’t hit it quite right. For me, maybe Facebook can do all of this, but when they added it, I had no desire to filter through hundreds of friends and put them in the right place. Ultimately, it’ll be more work to connect with all of my friends again in Google+, but it feels a lot more natural and necessary. Just like in humor, timing is everything in technology.

A big aspect of Google+ seems to be that the site is built around a lot of external content. Of the 4 buttons at the top, one is devoted to photos (which seem to be automatically collected from Google services like Picasa and Blogger), and the “Share” box in the upper right allows one to always share pictures, videos, links, and their location. “Spark” is a discovery tool for content. To me, it feels like Google+ is built entirely around external topics.

Again, yes, Facebook has all of this, but the culture has very much turned to a focus on wall-to-wall posts and status updates, and frankly, I don’t care that much. For me, it’s amusing to a point, but the most interesting things are about interesting links people come across and want to discuss. My friend George has posted a few interesting links to Politico, and so far, I’ve liked seeing it.

In fact, I like it enough that I’ve considered switching over from my 4 years of delicious usage to simply posting links to Google+. For me, there are basically 4 rough groups of things that I bookmark in delicious, and I think my need for delicious is diminishing:

  1. Recipes. I mark these as private to avoid spamming my friendfeed (and subsequently my fb), but I’ve got quite a few from food blogs. Even so, I have a replacement ready for whenever I stop procrastinating
  2. To Read links. This could easily be done in my actual bookmarks in my browser
  3. Reference. Delicious is still the best for this, in my opinion, but the alternatives aren’t significantly worse.
  4. Interesting stuff. Keep reading

I have been bookmarking interesting stuff for years now because I think I might refer back to it, but to be honest, the list of things I’ve gone back to is very short. In fact, in the history of my delicious usage, I can really only think of one thing that I’ve gone into delicious for, and that’s just because it was at the moment easier than searching for it. And nowadays, search is so good, I might as well just try to find it again if it comes to mind. Otherwise, I really just mark them because I would like others to see it, which is why my delicious is linked to my friendfeed, which is linked to my fb. And Google+ does that great.

It’s possible that simply right now, I like Google+’s offering of interesting links simply because my set of friends there is better (well, more immediately interesting to me, let’s say) than my friends on fb, and the apparent filtering of content is a strange product of that. That probably builds off of my smugness of exclusivity being on invite to Google+ and having most of my currently closest friends on it too thanks to a close Google-Stanford connection. Even so, I like to think that’ll smooth out too, since Circles can keep me feeling as though I’m in my ivory tower for as long as necessary.

The final component I want to discuss is hangout, which is simply awesome. Basically, it’s group video chat where friends can come go as they please. There are two big aspects to this. First, it’s group video chat. And it works and isn’t hard to use or setup. That fact alone is great.

Second, friends can come and go. It’s casual, and it’s fun. Most of us are sitting at our computers for large parts of the day anyways: we might as well drop in and chat for awhile. Earlier tonight, I hoped in a hangout with a few friends, including George, who is currently across the country. I’ve IMed with him, but I probably would’ve never gotten around to calling him on the phone, even though I know he’s on his computer a lot even still. But we both joined a hangout, and it was like he was sitting in the same room as me. Trust me: the idea for hangout may not sound that revolutionary, but it just works so well with how I want to interact with my friends.

The kicker in it is a built-in youtube watching mode where you and your friends can all watch a youtube video together. That feature is just as good as you can imagine.

To the Google+ developers: please build in an embedded shared browser for hangout, too. When I saw the youtube button, I wondered whether it supported shared screen as well, but today, especially with Chromebooks, internet browser sharing would be just as good. Surfing the web together would be tons of fun, and being able to support webapps inside hangout is probably as good as, if not better, than the fb platform. It means that every existing web application is “ported” into Google+, and it opens up all sorts of possibilities for building games into Google+.

Okay, so it might be late now, and I might be a little tired, wild-eyed, and almost 2 hours past my bedtime from the past 2 weeks. Even so, I’m optimistic about this. I’ve been on Facebook for 5 years and never really gotten into it. In 2 days, Google+ has showed me some innovative, but intuitive and pleasantly good features that make me want to use the internet differently. It might not have all the wingdings that Facebook has built in over the years, but I like to think we’re past most of that. I don’t know how to make the equivalent of a wall-to-wall post, but I haven’t wanted it yet. There doesn’t appear to be Events, but I have always kind of disliked Facebook events (I pretty much disregard them nowadays, except as an announcement, which can be done more efficiently). Anyways, huddle as group texting and sharing within circles can do it, too.

So yes, I’m optimistic, and even more so than before I started writing. There’s the question about whether I would use this instead of Facebook, and reviewing this post about every Facebook feature/culture aspect that dislike and how Google+ has managed to improve on it, I think I’m already a convert.

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