How to succeed as a student

Well, I've just finished my first semester in grad school. Well, not my "first" really, because I got a master's degree 15 years ago, but I had a very different attitude towards that experience, and I got very different things out of it. Here's what I've learned so far this time around:

Grad school, at least the way Oregon State does it, is not so much about learning ideas as it is about learning to communicate ideas clearly and engagingly. I took one graduate-level class, and participated in several research groups, and we were repeatedly asked to present our own projects, or our understanding of papers we'd read, to the group. It was remarkable how quickly some people improved over the course of even our short 3-month term, and how easily you could tell second-year from first-year students. (As for me, I was thinking more about content than presentation, so I'm really not sure if I improved or not. I may need to ask for some feedback.)

I also did grading of exams and projects an undergraduate "writing-intensive" software engineering class, and quickly discovered that I was asking too much of myself to attempt to grade the students' "understanding" of the material -- all I can do is evaluate their presentation of it. My math-teacher friends Matt and Jenni told me the same thing: they constantly have to remind students that they're grading their work, not their understanding of concepts: teachers are not mind-readers.

Students would do well to think of studying in terms of practicing their performance, rather than checking their understanding. I think there was a time that I would have rankled at that suggestion; that somehow it was noble to increase my understanding of the world, and that practice was secondary. But understanding reaches a dead end quickly without practice; it's ephemeral and ungrounded and forgettable. We delude ourselves into thinking our understanding is firmer than it really is; only in practicing it and explaining it to others are we confronted with the holes and contradictions.

Another thing I learned is that articles written for conferences and journals are not so highfalutin' as I thought they were. They're glorified term papers. Like term papers, they're required of certain people and they represent about a term's worth of work. They're original and interesting at their best, but they don't all get picked up by the New York Times, turn the scientific establishment on its head, or win Nobel prizes. They're just updates on what you're working on, and they keep you on track and in communication with your colleagues. I guess I had the notion before that "publish or perish" was a critique of the shallowness of academic bureaucracies, but it just doesn't seem that way from what I'm seeing at OSU: paper submissions are simply a way to chunk and organize this otherwise vague process called "research". If someone is researching but not publishing, they're making the same mistake as the student who thinks understanding the material is more important than communicating it. If you discover the wheel but can't think of a way of demonstrating its usefulness to other people, then your discovery won't make any practical difference in the world. Anyway, that's how things look to me as a newbie; we'll see how I feel after a few rejections :-)

So far I love being a graduate student. I love being paid to think about stuff that used to be a hobby. I don't love every single thing I'm working on, but I don't hate any of it. I have some serious, but I think healthy and natural, uncertainty about how I'm going to position my perspectives and passions within the corner of the academic world I've chosen to start in. I can't just pursue any crazy cool idea I come up with, because everyone around me has their own interests and perspectives, and I have to learn how to collaborate. My adviser is a proficient cat herder, and I want to learn that from her, and let myself be herded a little; but I still want to stay in touch with my cat-nature.

(thanks Westernlady and Tiger for the picture!)

Bike Reflector Art

I took my brother and sister-in-law to see the building I work in, late at night after dinner. There's this artwork on one wall, about 10 feet wide and three very tall stories high, made of different colored bike reflectors. My brother, Handy MacGyver, had a flashlight/laser pointer readily at hand, and he quickly discovered that if you brace the flashlight on your forehead and walk back and forth across the atrium, you see shiny waves of light crossing the piece. Of course, everyone had to try it, including a baffled professor who discovered us staggering around in the lobby. Here's my blurry sister giving it a try:

Left and Right Brains

The LA Times reports on a study of brain differences between liberals and conservatives. They showed people an "M" or a "W", and they had to click a key only when an "M" showed up. M's were much more common than W's. Liberals did better on average than conservatives at holding back from clicking when a W appeared. The implication the Times draws is that conservatives are more prone to making decisions without considering new information.

If this is an accurate report, it makes me wonder how to find a game where conservatives would do better than liberals. My guess might be some test of field dependence, like the embedded figures test. If conservatives are more likely to wrongly fixate on a pattern when asked to look for exceptions, maybe they're more likely to correctly identify a pattern when distracted.

I'd rather this kind of research be used to figure out how people can broaden themselves, than to pigeonhole people or belittle their beliefs as poor brain functioning. Is it possible to train the brain to be more field-dependent or independent at will? Can we learn to adopt a liberal or conservative mindset when one or the other is advantageous? Maybe there's a scientific bias against studies asking people to "do" things mentally and observing the results; since internal "doing" is so hard to describe and to measure. But maybe improving brain scan technology will allow more exploration of the ways people can choose to change the way they go about thinking and emoting.

Taking night pictures with a cell phone camera

In my explorations of what you can do with a cellphone camera, the most interesting challenge is night pictures. I find brightly colored lights at night to be really beautiful, but the cell camera doesn't capture it well. Here's a snapshot of what was a brilliant traffic light my last night living in Denver:



You can see some redness in the "don't walk" sign across the street, but the traffic signal just shows up white next to the streetlight. I think it was green at the time, but it's hard to tell here. Should I photoshop it to fix the color to what I remember seeing?

Here's a photo of the Man and the moon from Burning Man last week. The man was bright green -- here he shows up white. The green canopy under it shows up as green though. Must be something about intense green getting washed out more than other colors.



Also the moon is a lot less dramatic. I took several moon pictures and they always look tiny. Why is that? Must be related to the effect that makes the moon look bigger on the horizon. I don't think I'll bother with moonshots any more without a telephoto lens.

Here are our water bottles: we put glow sticks in them so we can carry them around and not lose them and not get hit by bikes. The green looks fine here.



One final example: I tried to get a picture of the Thunderdome; this is a huge geodesic dome where the audience climbs on the outside and people fight inside hanging on bungee swings. I was trying to just get a straightforward snapshot of the fighters with audience in the fore- and background, but obviously the shutter speed had to be too slow for all the motion and my unsteady hand (snapping at arms length over my head). Plus my aim sucked. But I kinda like it anyway; it captures a sense of anarchy and chaos. I guess night photos with a cell phone have to be either still lifes or lomographic motion shots like this.

Sky-blue Mohawk

I also got some good pictures last week of Andrew in his blue mohawk and dustpunk coiture. We had to scrunch up the fabric covering the dome to create larger openings, when a windstorm/dust-whiteout came up and the dome got blown about 10 feet. Opening up holes cut the wind resistance a little, but our stuff got incredibly dusty.



He was frustrated with how quickly the blue hair faded in the sun, but I think it looked good that way.

The world from my window

I took some pictures at Burning man with my new camera phone. Most pictures come out crap with it, but occasionally I really like one. Andrew keeps telling me this should inspire me to get a better camera, but I really like the convenience of this one, and it seems like the fun part of art is to see what you can make with the medium you're working with, rather than obsessing about better equipment.

This is looking out at the sky from the doorway of our geodesic dome home.

Wildlife of Corvallis: The Llama

The Willamette valley of Oregon is, geographically speaking, the northernmost reach of the greater Bolivian Altiplano. As such it is home to the Desert Jaguar, the Flamingo, the Northern Capybara, and of course the deadly Llama.

In the mid- to late northern summer, the llama flocks begin to arrive from the southern parts of their habitat, to lay their eggs and feast on the abundant ripe blackberries. Here is a young hatchling, or llambkin, spotted in a nearby field:



Despite their majestic beauty, the llamas are considered pests in the valley. Farmers spray for them at the start of blackberry season, and homeowners employ netting on their chimneys to avert the nuisance of cleaning up sooty llama prints between the fireplace and kitchen every morning.

Wildlife of Corvallis: Black-capped Chickadee

The Willamette valley has a lot of plants and animals that are new to me, so I wanted to blog photos of some of them. I have a new phone with a camera in it, which I love very much, but you'll have to pardon the quality of some of the images.

Today's find is called a "black-capped chickadee" by the folks at the Audubon society booth. My own name for it is the "white-cheeked seed pig", because of it's white cheeks and it's cookie-monster-like eating habits. I've circled it in blue below. If you compare the photo with bird books, it doesn't look that great. But if this were a picture of Bigfoot, this photo would be considered SHOCKING PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE. So I ask you to judge it by those standards.



Here's another photo of the same bird by a guy on flickr named prariedog:



I think you can see the resemblance.

We have three of these seed-pigs that visit the yard as a group. Are they a breeding pair and a brother-in-law? A menage-a-trois? Three hot chicks out on the town? I can't tell because I'm a lousy chickadee sexer, and know nothing of their chickadee ways.

Chris and Andrew Go to Oregon

I live in Oregon now. I live in a house. I have a yard. It is very thirsty. I have bad plants. I have to cut them. The spiders live in the bad plants. They bite me. We are not the best of friends.

We have a kitchen. It is pink. It has mirrors. It is tacky. But I love my kitchen.



Here is my boyfriend. He is sitting in the pink kitchen. Sit, boyfriend, sit! Enjoy your pink kitchen! The spiders do not bite you.

How to never lose a war

As long as they keep a heart-lung machine going, no one can say the patient has died.

As long as I keep a copy of Gravity's Rainbow on my nightstand with a bookmark on page 17, no one can say I'm not an intellectual.

As long as we keep sending soldiers to die to Iraq, no one can say we've lost the war.



(Thanks Nana Rose for the image)

Reinterpreting Failure

Blogging live today from Ogden, UT, where my barbershop quartet, Baseline, went belly up last night in the semi-finals of the Rocky Mountain District preliminary competition. We were a little shakier than usual on our first song ("Listen to that Dixie Band"), but then halfway through the second ("Each Time I Fall in Love"), we inexplicably segued into four different keys, and couldn't pull it back together until the very end. We tied for 17th out of 18 quartets.

Afterwards we went out to Dee's, one of the only restaurants in Ogden that stays open after the sun goes down. We drank hot chocolate, ate hash browns with gobs ranch dressing and pepper, analyzed our performance, and discussed the breasts of other late-night restaurant patrons.

The barbershop world is strangely numerical and anal retentive: although there are no time limits on quartet or chorus performances, the contests are scheduled to the minute, and every deviation is lamented by the MC. Scores from 1-100 are assigned by a panel of 6-8 judges, where a 50 means you officially don't suck (you can sing in public with the blessing of the society), and a 76 means you "qualify" (you can compete at the international competition in Denver in July)

Well, we scored a 51.5 overall, and a 56.5 on "Dixie". I suspect that one and a half points is not statistically significant, so, strictly speaking, it is impossible to conclusively determine whether we suck or not. However I would like to mention that one of the judges said that we looked very sharp in our tuxes.

I really like this group of guys I'm singing with and I'm sorry to be leaving them soon to move out of state. We were all pretty philosophical about the results, trying to find what we could learn from the experience, willing to share the blame about what went wrong, and the credit for what went right. I think we've gotten to the point where we're really singing approximately the right notes with confidence (except last night, of course), and we're ready to pay closer attention to musicality and presentation issues. I'd be pretty excited about that if I were staying; but sadly they'll be needing to bring a new baritone up to speed, and I'll be back to singing in the shower for a while (where I sound great, I should mention, but I don't look so sharp without the tux hiding 40 years of gravity).

We get what will probably be our last chance to sing together tonight at the afterglow party. For me, that's the fun part; I like the supportive camaraderie of the afterglow far more than the competitive spirit of the prelims. I think we'll claim the ancient right of do-overs on Each Time I Fall; then we've got a couple other songs that are sounding pretty good, so I think we'll be able to redeem ourselves a little bit.

Teaching a soldier to escalate violence

It's true, as everyone is saying, that this video of a German soldier being trained shows racism and Bronxism. The guy tells the trainee to imagine that a bunch of black guys have gotten out of a van in the Bronx, and are insulting his mother, and that he's should shoot them and yell obscenities at them.

But there's something else offensive about it that no one seems to be taking note of: Soldiers ought to be trained not to escalate situations. If someone is yelling insults about your mother, it's not appropriate to shoot them. Am I naive to think that army training ought to include some skills about staying cool and rational in difficult situations, so you can make judicious decisions about when to use deadly force? This is exactly the kind of macho, video game attitude that the good guys should be discouraging in recruits. Why isn't that part of the scandal?

(Thanks to dariuszka for the image!)

Why we need hate and ignorance on the radio

One of my favorite bloggers, Brad Warner, (whose blog happens to be posted on a non-explicit section of a porn site, so maybe don't click on this at work:) talks about the Imus affair. Imus was a radio talk show host who got fired for saying some racist stuff on the air.

Warner, to summarize, is basically saying that he doesn't care much about what Imus said on the air, and that we should take responsibility for ourselves rather than fretting about what other people say. Many of his commenters are disagreeing, saying that Imus is perpetuating racist attitudes in society, and he's rightfully being held responsible for his words by being fired.

I think there's a deeper point here, that hopefully Warner is getting at. When we stop people from saying offensive things on the grounds that it will have some general effect on the "public mind", we're encouraging people to value the state of this "public mind", rather than being skeptical of it. It's vitally important for the health of a society, for people to think skeptically. They must be able to hold onto their beliefs and opinions despite appeals to mob mentality, despite crazes and manias, despite panic and terror and lies and promises. We have to know that the "public mind" is untrustworthy, so we will never be tempted to use it to excuse ourselves from moral behavior.

When we attempt to scrub the airwaves of any bad ideas that might influence people, we cause the same sort of problem as overuse of antibiotics. People accustomed to hearing only socially acceptable stuff on the radio will not get much practice in distinguishing what they hear from what they have seen to be true with their own eyes. Their defenses will be down. But people who are used to hearing a lot of bullshit on the radio will get practice at questioning everything they hear.

Advice to Any Random Tourist

Advice to Any Random Tourist
Instead of trying to understand
concise
or the scent of everything

keep trying to magnify 
your soul lost and little
like a mustard bean
soft and little

set ever so carefully
in the center
of a lone placemat
scuffed and brittle

   --Nicole Marie Beatty

(Wow -- ain't the internet great? I saw this poem on a bus, years ago, as a tourist in San Francisco, and jotted it down because I liked it. I just found that piece of paper and decided to type it up so I could throw out the paper. But I googled the title, and found it here!)

Sports Rivalry -- I don't get it

There is a great article on The Situationist about March Madness and sports fandom.

For some reason, this enthusiasm for one team over another is something I don't experience very strongly. I occasionally go to a football game with my boyfriend, and once I identify what colors "our" team's uniform is, I do find myself watching the game from their perspective and hoping they win. But it's just not a very strong preference -- I'll find myself cheering after an impressive run or something by the other team.

I'm not sure why I'm like that. Seems like a pretty normal thing for people to strongly identify with a team, nation, university, or any other in-group that presents itself. It's obviously irrational, and my boyfriend, for example, will happily admit that it's irrational but that it's fun to get caught up in it anyway. But he's pretty balanced about it, compared to some other fans I see. We sat behind a guy at a Crush game the other night who was on his feet the whole time, yelling, red in the face, looking genuinely upset and angry with every referee call that went against the Crush. He was disturbing for two reasons: he seemed incapable of believing that his team was capable of an error; and he wasn't equally gleeful when things went his way. I wonder if for a guy like that, his whole life isn't just one bad day after another.

Must be some personality trait that you just kind of have or don't have, and I come up deficient. I guess I sometimes get a little smug about thinking I'm more rational that everyone else, but the fact is most of the sanest, most rational people I know are sports fans, and they can easily separate the fun of boosterism from rational analysis of a situation. I wonder if there's some benefit to that mental trait, that I'm missing out on.

Forgetting my life

I started digging through my filing cabinet today, throwing old stuff away. The thing was full, and I'm moving out of state, so I need to lighten my load quite a bit.

Flipping through folders of business proposals, 401K brochures, copies of tax forms; I ran across evidence of things I did long ago that I barely remember and rarely think about. I'm 40 years old, which doesn't seem very old to me, but maybe that's because I forget so much. It's a little scary to throw some of this stuff out, knowing that without any evidence, I may never think of some of these old jobs again. Jobs that were my whole life at the time and that I obsessed about every detail.

I've never been good at telling my own story because I tend to think about the present and the future a lot more than I think about the past. So when someone asks, "what kind of jobs have you had" or "what did you do this weekend", I really have to stretch to remember because my rememberer doesn't get much exercise.

It's funny how quaint some of this stuff looks. I found a nastygram I got from the IRS in the early 90's, and it was printed on multiple pages with carbon in between, with holes along both sides, for feeding into a printer. And I found old resumes I typed on an actual typewriter. I found a letter from a professor mentioning that he'd found "interesting" comments in some code I'd written -- I'm meticulous now about not putting smart-ass comments in code, but at the time I guess I must not have been quite as professional about that kind of thing.

I should be more careful not to save things now, because this will be even harder when I'm 80. The pull of nostalgia will be stronger and I'll want to spend my days reading old blog posts and scrutinizing yellowed grocery receipts, longing for those exotic foods we used to eat back at the turn of the century.

The Law of Spam Attraction

My recent post on The Secret and the Law of Attraction seems to have attracted the attention of a few people hawking related self-help products. They try to post comments which make a passing reference to what I said, then go on to plug their wares.

I'm forced to admit that maybe if you are very focussed on your goal of making money by selling a book, you might be more effective if you set aside socially beneficial, but limiting, beliefs like "I don't want to be an annoyance to people" or "it's rude to post lame comments as an excuse to insert marketing". This technique probably works, to the benefit of your bottom line, but to the detriment of the quality of conversation that goes on on the internet.

I said recently it might be OK if The Secret was urging people to get clear with themselves, by tempting them with material wealth. But this reaction makes me question that. If The Secret is "you can get rich by removing all mental resistance to your greed", then it might be better for it to stay a secret.

More on Bardo Barbie

The Last Psychiatrist makes use of the same quantum mechanics metaphor I did recently, and suggests that what we call "identity" is really just our own and other people's expectations of us, combined with our desire to live up to those expectations. Change those expectations, and you'll find yourself very motivated to change your behavior.

Can you change those expectations? Are you free to redefine yourself as The Last Psychiatrist claims? Can Barbie return to the Bardo at will? I've been perusing another blog called The Situationist, which makes the rather depressing argument that we're so influenced by our environment that it's a stretch to say we're free at all.

There's plenty of people out there struggling and failing to lose weight or fight addictions. Are they free to change but choose not to, or are they not free? Some people do change, others do not. I don't understand why.

Liberals and Conservatives

"One form of mental illness is obsessive behavior in which all observations are interpreted in terms of some emotional component. I even suspect that the liberal - conservative political spectrum is based upon ones inherent emotional bias. Liberals tend to think everything is their fault (or their group's fault) while conservatives think nothing is their fault (or their group's fault)."

-- unknown, quoted by Chris Chatham.

Pseudoscience and the "Law of Attraction"

David Monk talked in a recent blog entry about a movie called The Secret. I haven't seen it, but I've Steve Pavlina's descriptions of its topic, the Law of Attraction: it's essentially a New Age, power of positive thinking message, sometimes expounded in terms of physical concepts such as quantum mechanics, energy, and vibration.

On one hand, I find the underlying concept essentially a good one. There are a lot of things we claim to "want", but we don't behave the way you'd expect a good wanter to behave. We say we want to drink beer and have six-pack abs -- and we end up frustrated one way or the other (you know the model in the photo at left dropped that beer like a red-hot snake after the photo was taken -- he knows which side his bread is buttered on). I think the underlying message of the Law of Attraction is about being conscious of conflicting goals and realizing that you have to clarify your desires or you'll be sabotaging yourself.

But why is it that this stuff gets couched in pseudoscience? You hear people talk about this in terms of vibrations, quantum mechanics, energy, force, even nonsensical combinations like "energy force". To be fair, a some of it is clearly metaphorical: it's common to talk about "vibes" and "resonance" as a metaphor for detecting having something in common with another person, in the same way that a tuning fork will resonate along with another tuning fork of a close enough resonating frequency. (I abused quantum mechanics myself in a previous post.) But there's also an element of snake oil, especially with quantum mechanics, in movies like What the Bleep that are seriously trying to sell us on the idea that quantum phenomena can be observed on the macroscopic scale.

How we think influences how we act, and how we act influences the world. I guess it makes sense that if you adopt a belief in a shortcut directly from our thoughts to the world, it provides a simpler conceptual framework that can make necessary introspection appear to be more rewarding in the short term. That's probably why some very effective people have had good luck with this kind of mental framework. But for essentially lazy people without the habit of getting their hands dirty, it allows for the possibility of a sterile sort of magick where you lie around on a couch wishing really hard for something good to happen. When nothing comes, it's because you didn't wish hard enough.

Monk also questions The Secret's emphasis on manifesting wealth and shiny consumer goods. I'm not sure that's bad in itself -- if someone is pursuing material wealth, and they're not succeeding because they're confused and conflicted, giving them tips for getting richer through introspection may be the spoonful of sugar they need to make the medicine go down. Getting clear with things is good for you whatever your goals are, although it will certainly cause you to reconsider what your goals are.

Thanks to taijofj for the cat photo: may he manifest a big bowl of tuna.