tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-291720852024-03-18T12:29:12.912-07:00updated sporadically at bestJeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.comBlogger389125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-25098875036649550322019-01-03T21:35:00.002-08:002019-01-03T21:46:02.589-08:00The Evolution of What I Call Work: A Google Calendar Memoir<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
“I never do <i>real work</i> anymore,” a fellow professor used to complain to me.<br />
<br />
“People have to be ready to work,” someone once told me about startup hiring.<br />
<br />
For better or for worse, conversations often revolve around it. <i>What do you do for work? How did you come to do the work you do? How much do you work? Are you working on anything interesting? Oh, please don’t ask me what I do for work. Excuse me, I have to go do some work.</i><br />
<br />
Work has also been a major subject of conversation as I have been recruiting. Many of the people I talk to are at a life crossroads, deciding what work identity to take on next. They ask what it was like for me--to be a PhD student, to be a professor, and then to start a company. The questions range from the philosophical (“are you glad you did it?”) to the logistical (“how often did you exercise?”).<br />
<br />
In these conversations I often struggle, as work means such wildly different things to different people. This is all well and good when people are trying to find common ground at a cocktail party, but it can be problematic when people are using metrics taken in different contexts to make important life decisions. The nature of my work has completely transformed between when I was an undergraduate and now--and that is something important to acknowledge when people are asking questions, especially ones around “how much.”<br />
<br />
This post, then, is an attempt to establish context about what I mean when I talk about work. In 2007, I started using Google Calendar not just for scheduling, but also for documenting what I did with my time. What this means is that I’m able to give you a rough overview of how I spent most of my days from 2007 until now. I show representative time blocks from representative weeks, chosen to give you the most accurate picture of my life without overwhelming you with data. What’s important is not so much the precise number of hours, but the evolution of the content of those hours over the years. Here we go.<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Late Undergrad/PhD: Back When I Used to do "Real Work"</h3>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1BnqFwDKpFhYt5LvkcS5yGmc-Veu99fPK9nN-MBhyGS2albVdoeEib2MZwMi8HcehYc4hTNxe9rOYOXYYHhmW8sgAgrnwhgLo4-rgxoDrkqKPyb3MRWXnxikLRJ4O3dfj7gy6/s1600/Jean+calendar+blog+post+-+2007.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="939" data-original-width="997" height="375" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1BnqFwDKpFhYt5LvkcS5yGmc-Veu99fPK9nN-MBhyGS2albVdoeEib2MZwMi8HcehYc4hTNxe9rOYOXYYHhmW8sgAgrnwhgLo4-rgxoDrkqKPyb3MRWXnxikLRJ4O3dfj7gy6/s400/Jean+calendar+blog+post+-+2007.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fall 2007, first semester of my senior year of college.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Here I show a week from fall of my senior year of college. Before I continue, I should explain how I’ve chosen to display my week. I’ve divided up my time into three categories: work, recovery, and life upkeep. From college until fairly recently, I did not consider meetings or talks to be work: my labeling of “work” on these calendars reflects this early misconception. I chose 7am to 10pm on weekdays only not because work only happened during these periods of time, but because they are the most representative and well-documented. I like to keep late nights and weekends unstructured.<br />
<br />
This was one of my easier semesters: I was taking three courses (computational linguistics, randomized algorithms, and an art class) and working on an honors thesis. I had just handed over leadership of the Harvard College Engineering Society, which I had help start my freshman year. I was not TAing that semester. All this gave me the freedom to spend a lot of time working on two things I was excited about: my senior thesis and projects for my studio art class. This is a representative week from late undergrad and when work was going well during my PhD: relatively little structured time and lots of time to produce output.<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Mid-PhD: I Learn to Make Good Use of Recovery Time</h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLa-3UaR5xrjyG89kRGLOywgFbaEk_g9t88nJixguoCbXjs-MyyK5DX1F3LGjPRKwkjjzmiFh-Y827SLg2gq2O4ZJFrk-AZpcfJ9ra_8Pj_MvPT7vy8SEl9LgIY-oIFwGqrxHz/s1600/Jean+calendar+blog+post+-+2012.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="939" data-original-width="1005" height="372" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLa-3UaR5xrjyG89kRGLOywgFbaEk_g9t88nJixguoCbXjs-MyyK5DX1F3LGjPRKwkjjzmiFh-Y827SLg2gq2O4ZJFrk-AZpcfJ9ra_8Pj_MvPT7vy8SEl9LgIY-oIFwGqrxHz/s400/Jean+calendar+blog+post+-+2012.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fall 2012, mid-PhD.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
When work was not going as well, the previous schedule turned out to be completely wrong. Here is a week from fall of 2012, when I was in between the first and second major projects of my PhD thesis and was coming off a three-month sprint of an internship. I was tired and lost, so I spent my time making progress in ways outside of my main output-producing work. During this week, my periods of work are heavily broken up and interspersed with meetings. Some are research meetings: with my advisor, with existing collaborators, and with potential collaborators. Some of the meetings were outside of research: Tuesday afternoon I had a “Positivity@MIT” that I organized to combat bias on campus; Thursday evening I had a Graduate Women at MIT social. (I had started Graduate Women at MIT with a couple of fellow students in 2009.) Around this time, I also became more deliberate about working on my writing skills, often scheduling at least one evening a week to write (as I do the Wednesday of this week). I did not see most of these activities as “work” at the time, but they turned out to be valuable work, both towards recovery and towards building my career.<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Learning to Find Time for "Real Work" as an Assistant Professor</h3>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI4_qHvT8YSfUgNoxMoZ-Piqa_WBUgUKbUWhWZ8-JWLL5l4I3euazKTCSOBw2A3lF3z4JT1dEBmJzXnIpkg2BlQnbLlYA4_KSOflfEZMBTMrDXQ-Asne_tvgZ1-MeIbWbYbO_B/s1600/Jean+calendar+blog+post+-+2017.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="934" data-original-width="996" height="375" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI4_qHvT8YSfUgNoxMoZ-Piqa_WBUgUKbUWhWZ8-JWLL5l4I3euazKTCSOBw2A3lF3z4JT1dEBmJzXnIpkg2BlQnbLlYA4_KSOflfEZMBTMrDXQ-Asne_tvgZ1-MeIbWbYbO_B/s400/Jean+calendar+blog+post+-+2017.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Spring 2017, second semester as an Assistant Professor at CMU.</td></tr>
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It turns out that scheduling lots of meetings during the recovery periods of my PhD prepared me for being a professor, which mostly consists of meetings and very little time for what I would call “work.” Here is a week from the spring of my first year at Carnegie Mellon. That week I had two visitors I hosted for talks, one on Monday and one on Friday. I taught Tuesday and Thursdays. That week I was working on producing a v<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baMtq7MJSaw" target="_blank">ideo with fellow computer scientist James Mickens</a> about my research, so I blocked on Wednesday morning to work with him on that. (It turns out James has very high artistic standards, so I worked on the video for most of that weekend too. You know your life is not so bad when you tell people you’ve been losing sleep looking for the right clips of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” for your research talk video.) Here, I’m doing much less of the output-producing work I consider to be “real work” and spending much more time enabling others to do that kind of work, with what I hope will be higher impact.<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Starting a Company: Even More Meetings</h3>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibzPDwpuQekZtVxPxNF7FWugUu_1LyXTzAhN8xRQWYsQQIY7dT0gf_LWeA5lhab3Y2Gis9g4_-e9FEffPhV4Lh8_v_jlPSuQDVOhDbOBc4c5y1Io5NfV9lvWnAxAeTwLmFYAkK/s1600/Jean+calendar+blog+post+-+2018.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="940" data-original-width="994" height="377" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibzPDwpuQekZtVxPxNF7FWugUu_1LyXTzAhN8xRQWYsQQIY7dT0gf_LWeA5lhab3Y2Gis9g4_-e9FEffPhV4Lh8_v_jlPSuQDVOhDbOBc4c5y1Io5NfV9lvWnAxAeTwLmFYAkK/s400/Jean+calendar+blog+post+-+2018.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fall 2018, a few months into starting my company.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
People say that being a professor is like running a small business. This has proven to be somewhat true as I’ve been setting up my actual company. The main difference is that there is even less of what I would call actual work. Here I show a particularly meeting-intensive (but not particularly anomalous) week from this past fall. During this week, I went up to the city from Palo Alto/Menlo Park three times (Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday). Some of it was for recruiting, some of it was for meetings with potential customers, and some of it was for networking (coffees or meals with people I had been introduced to; actual networking events). That Friday, two of the remote part-time people I work with were in town, so I spent most of Friday through the weekend working with them. This week was during a period of heavy recruiting, so I had many recruiting/interview calls. The work that week consisted mostly of emails to schedule and follow up with meetings. I was also developing the ideas for our initial product, both in terms of use cases and the underlying technology. Most of my work now involves meetings that potentially enable other people to work.<br />
<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
Closing Thoughts</h3>
It turns out that I, too, don’t do very much of what I used to consider <i>real work</i> anymore, but I spend more of my time working. I thought I had maxed out on my capacity for work as an undergraduate. In some ways this was true, but as the nature of my work changed this turned out not to be true. What I remember my work life to be (for instance, similar to the first week I showed you throughout my PhD) is not always accurate. My capacity for output-producing work has probably diminished, but my capacity for meetings and total overall work has increased. My entire life is meetings now. I should spend less time in transit.<br />
<br />
So there we have it. I’m quite voyeuristic about how other people spend their time, so I’d love to see yours.<br />
<br />
<i>With thanks to Kayvon Fatahalian, Aliza Aufrichtig, and Dean Hachamovitch for comments.</i></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com197tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-41661033699699051332018-12-09T13:43:00.000-08:002018-12-10T00:20:28.870-08:00A Tribute to Scott Krulcik<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Yesterday morning, I read a news article that my former student Scott Krulcik had died. Surely they’ve got the wrong guy, I thought.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAwui9061z_brmdCzP6_1rjt5e-65tZQZVtfhP3ijClzPjUPYAIzj3d9BwHpJY0eIenLDfLlmXDjPIgi3rqge5faBHgP84Np2spX_PjaeoUTJ_tVMXloAj_XfE35t07uzFobDT/s1600/00000IMG_00000_BURST20171001140755_COVER.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAwui9061z_brmdCzP6_1rjt5e-65tZQZVtfhP3ijClzPjUPYAIzj3d9BwHpJY0eIenLDfLlmXDjPIgi3rqge5faBHgP84Np2spX_PjaeoUTJ_tVMXloAj_XfE35t07uzFobDT/s320/00000IMG_00000_BURST20171001140755_COVER.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scott on an apple-picking trip that he helped organize.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Almost comically wholesome, Scott was what probably every parent dreams their kid will grow up to be. He was the kind of person who remembered not just your birthday but also your dairy allergy and made a dairy-free dessert in celebration. Not only did Scott cook many of his own meals (an impressive feat for a college student!), he also carried around his own silverware to minimize his impact on the environment. Scott’s stories of fertilizing his lawn by hand and fixing things with his toolbox impressed us so much that we came to call him the “Dad” of the research group, despite the fact that two other members of the group were actual fathers.<br />
<br />
It’s very confusing when someone who has no business dying dies. And Scott, in particular, should have had absolutely no business with death. This was supposed to be the beginning of everything for Scott. We had celebrated his graduation from Carnegie Mellon just seven months ago. He recently moved into his first post-college apartment in the West Village. He seemed to be excelling at the transition to the working life, spending his spare time running, exploring restaurants, and reading books at the wooden desk he had built for himself the summer after graduation. Days before the news, he sent me a picture of the holiday lights he and his roommate had just put up in their apartment. It was supposed to be the first of many iterations of his holiday decorations.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPPfitZA6wpLX-EmfTAbzYCHm_A0sVBryvCBkLC-MDWVXLNizhYLpHOZBZDW6A8pLgc74ldgpbckBfJEKVCRFTJtoy3UJ8Dzf5e2fhJPi-u15TSu1AwvlZdZg4o2zMgvNld-gr/s1600/IMG_20171118_180520.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPPfitZA6wpLX-EmfTAbzYCHm_A0sVBryvCBkLC-MDWVXLNizhYLpHOZBZDW6A8pLgc74ldgpbckBfJEKVCRFTJtoy3UJ8Dzf5e2fhJPi-u15TSu1AwvlZdZg4o2zMgvNld-gr/s320/IMG_20171118_180520.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scott at a Thanksgiving dinner he helped organize, with<br />
the turkey he made.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
The best way to describe Scott is that he was a really, really great person. (The past tense is still a shock here.) I met him because he was enrolled in the security course I was teaching with Matt Fredrikson spring of 2017. As part of the first assignment, Matt and I had asked the students to email us introducing themselves and telling us why they were taking the course. Scott had a particularly memorable self-introduction. He talked about trying to be a good human who wants to help other humans and explained the connection with computer security. In his words, if he’s producing software that helps people in some other way but leaves them vulnerable to identity theft and blackmailing, then the software isn’t really helping people. Here, I thought, was a student who really got it.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSOKEaHSC6FCiBAX5A8cOkj9ZI_mMjdtUojHjggUoeYPzXsnXIhI7SpGfeqLprJ0jTSmKh9CenXXy5vpMtTxDAs5HYvoYQa4VbVFlqOjMjr6rTAO2_g3Dc7hG0WBLsXNrT-O7Z/s1600/IMG_20171213_121808+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSOKEaHSC6FCiBAX5A8cOkj9ZI_mMjdtUojHjggUoeYPzXsnXIhI7SpGfeqLprJ0jTSmKh9CenXXy5vpMtTxDAs5HYvoYQa4VbVFlqOjMjr6rTAO2_g3Dc7hG0WBLsXNrT-O7Z/s320/IMG_20171213_121808+%25282%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scott presenting his senior thesis project as a poster.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Over the course of the semester, it became clear that Scott was both incredibly committed to doing good and preternaturally adept at seeing connections. The day we taught the class about information flow security, he discovered and reported such a bug in Instagram that leaked people’s private photos. (The other students became more motivated to pay attention after they learned of his success with Facebook’s bug bounty program!) After he emailed the course staff observing similarities between reference monitors in computer security and repair proteins he was learning about in biology, I asked him if he had thought about writing a senior thesis. Scott showed up with admirable requirements: he needed to be able to explain the importance of the project to his mother, who was nontechnical and whose opinion he cared about deeply, and he needed to work on a project that could really help people. After exploring a breathtaking range of topics, ranging from using programs to model history (Scott <i>loved</i> military history) to detecting bugs in Facebook access policies, we finally settled on an idea that Scott came up with himself, combining ideas from my prior research with the work he had been doing at Google as an intern. The project was so compelling that even before it was finished, he was already attracting attention from people in industry.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2QSZzG_H3dzsXw_sn6-laFJ3wMf4-jqts2fwDWwvqZ4fiB850AjuIT-TewKXGR_QyX-rVtFVF4j9YZrmdVUJhbpqmvzjECkCUNR9hdUcH-k_2Mxu0rYsxNe58m6Vd9oRfrxvp/s1600/IMG_20180304_011414+%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2QSZzG_H3dzsXw_sn6-laFJ3wMf4-jqts2fwDWwvqZ4fiB850AjuIT-TewKXGR_QyX-rVtFVF4j9YZrmdVUJhbpqmvzjECkCUNR9hdUcH-k_2Mxu0rYsxNe58m6Vd9oRfrxvp/s320/IMG_20180304_011414+%25281%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Scott celebrating success in building the movie screen.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Once I got to know Scott, I discovered that he brought an equivalent level of effort and creativity to make people’s lives better in an immediate way. Scott’s positivity and energy was infectious in our research group and beyond. When our French group member asked about Thanksgiving, Scott insisted that we have a group Thanksgiving dinner complete with a turkey. I told him we could have a turkey if he took the lead on it, fully expecting him to let that requirement drop, but Scott got instructions from his mother and executed beautifully on brining, roasting, and carving the bird. When another group member suggested we host a Lindsay Lohan movie night, Scott took my somewhat joking suggestion that we should build our own movie screen and ran with it, showing up with his “Dad” toolbox and corralling fellow group members to work late into the night to realize his vision. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, <i>The Parent Trap</i> was one of his favorite movies.) One of my favorite memories of Scott is when he convinced me that, as a faculty judge of the CMU hackathon TartanHacks, I should come push the snack cart with him at midnight, citing how happy tired hackers are to get refreshments at that hour. The reactions across campus when people saw us approaching with clementines and cookies surrounded by a cloud of bluetooth-powered ice cream truck music confirmed that Scott knew just how to make people smile.<br />
<br />
With Scott’s passing, the world has lost someone with enormous potential for using their capabilities for good. It is sad enough to lose Scott as a former student and friend. On top of that, I am also sad that the world will lose a rare software engineer who is deeply thoughtful about the process and purpose of software. After Scott graduated, he became a significant source of interesting reading for me: I regularly received notes and articles from him about software engineering or cybersecurity. He was thinking hard about how people should create robust, secure software. He was thinking hard about what it meant to build things that would help people. He was a protector of people’s personal information and was critical of processes and practices that seemed irresponsible with data privacy. And his ideas were spot on: he had an understanding of ecosystems and the implications of different approaches far beyond what I could say of myself at that age. In many respects, I saw Scott more as a peer than as a mentee and would seek his insightful feedback on ideas and drafts.<br />
<br />
If life were one of the movies that Scott loved, we would not have lost him so early. This would have been the point in the story when he faced the first obstacle, only to overcome it swimmingly and go on to defeat all the bad guys and save the entire world. The group “Dad” would have gotten the chance to become an actual father. He would have become known for helping people in some big way while maintaining an impressive level of humanity and making the people around him happier. But real life doesn’t play by these rules, and Scott is gone.<br />
<br />
Since hearing the news, I have been thinking a lot about one of my favorite books, Virginia Woolf’s <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i>. In the book, Clarissa Dalloway’s views are shaped by having watched her sister get killed by a falling tree. From that moment onward, Clarissa no longer believes in any higher order and instead lives her life to make things better in small ways each moment. I found her reaction to senseless tragedy inspiring when I first read the book and even more inspiring now. The least we can do to honor Scott is to remember to leave things better than we found them. Without Scott, it’s on us to carry on the legacy he was just starting to build.<br />
<br />
<i>With thanks to Jacob Van Buren for collaboration and Aliza Aufrichtig for edits.</i></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com88tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-83655351080403541082017-09-16T08:57:00.001-07:002017-09-17T05:20:13.228-07:00The Genius Fallacy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
During our department's PhD Open House this past spring, a student asked what I thought made a PhD student successful. I realized that my answer now is different than it would have been a few years ago.<br />
<br />
My friend Seth tells me I need to build more suspense in my writing*, so let me first tell my life story.<br />
<br />
The whole time I was growing up, I was slightly disappointed that I wasn't some kind of prodigy. It seemed that my parents were telling me every day about so-and-so's toddler son who was playing Beethoven concertos from memory, so-and-so's daughter who, as an infant, had already completed a course on special relativity. In order to give me the same opportunities to demonstrate my genius, my parents spent all their money on piano lessons, gymnastic classes, writing camps, art camps, tennis camps, and extracurricular math classes. Unfortunately, nobody ever said, "This is the best kid I have ever seen. I must take her away from her family to train her for greatness."<br />
<br />
"Child prodigies have hard lives," my father would tell me, probably trying hiding his disappointment. "It can be difficult for them to make friends because others can't relate to how gifted they are."<br />
<br />
"Just work hard, be a nice person, and try to be happy," my mother would tell me. "You didn't know how to cry when you were born. I'm glad you're able to talk in full sentences."<br />
<br />
Despite the comforting words from my parents, there was always a part of me that held out hope of discovering a secret prodigious talent. But the angst of not being a prodigy was small compared to the existential angst of being newly alive and so I mostly tried to work hard, to be a nice person, and to be happy. This got me all the way to college, where I thought I could leave all this prodigy nonsense behind me.<br />
<br />
In college, I discovered that the pressure to be immediately and wildly gifted came in another form. In my first two years of school, I attended many talks and panels by professors telling us what we should do with our lives. I attended a research panel in the economics department, where one of the professors kept repeating the word "star."<br />
<br />
"You have to be a <i>super star</i> to succeed in a department like ours," he said about what it meant to be on the tenure track in the economics department. "I want undergraduate researchers who are <i>stars</i>."<br />
<br />
I didn't know what a <i>star</i> was and I didn't presume to be one, but I liked the professor's research, so I emailed him my resume and said I would like to work with him.<br />
<br />
He never wrote back.<br />
<br />
I resigned myself to not being a star<i>. </i>I took hard classes with people who had medaled in math, informatics, and science olympiads, wondering how it would feel to do the problem sets if I had such a gifted, well-trained mind. I also became concerned about my future. What was my place in a world that worshipped instatalent?<br />
<br />
It all began to change when I began to talk more with the professors in the Computer Science department. Despite my lack of apparent star quality, my professors seemed to like answering the questions I asked them. They pitched me projects I could do, and before I knew it I was applying to PhD programs and preparing to spend the next few years doing academic research. As I was graduating, I spoke with my one professor to get advice about my future in research.<br />
<br />
"Research isn't just about smarts," my professor told me. At the time, I thought this was a white lie that professors told to their students who weren't prodigies.<br />
<br />
Then she told me something that turned my worldview upside down. "My biggest concern for you, Jean, is that you need to start finishing projects," she told me. "You need to <i>focus</i>."<br />
<br />
It was then that I began to realize that maybe the myth of the instagenius was but a myth. I had gone from interest to interest, from project to project, waiting to find <i>It</i>, that easy fit, that continuous honeymoon. With some projects I had <i>It</i> for a while, long enough to demonstrate to myself and others that I <i>could</i> finish. Then I moved on, waiting to fall in love with a problem, waiting for a problem to choose me. What I had failed to see was that this relationship with a problem didn't just <i>happen</i>: I had to do my share of the work.<br />
<br />
Still, I clung to the dream of the easy problem. At Google, employees get to have a 20% project: a side project they spend the equivalent of one day a week working on that may or may not make its way into production eventually. In graduate school, my 20% project was looking for an easier project--a project with which I had more chemistry, a project with fewer days lost to dead ends and angst. One of my hobbies involved interviewing for internships in completely different research areas. Another one of my hobbies was fantasizing about becoming a classics PhD student, despite knowing no ancient languages. (I once took an upper-level literature seminar on Aristotle with the leading world scholar on Homeric poetry and I thought he had a pretty good life.)<br />
<br />
But because I like to finish what I started, the PhD became a process of learning to persevere. Instead of indulging the temptation to switch projects, advisors, or even schools, I kept going. I endured something like five rounds of rejections on the first paper towards my PhD thesis, and multiple years of people telling me that maybe I should find another topic, because I didn't seem <i>in love</i>. Eventually, I learned that every problem that looks like it might be easy has hard parts, every problem that looks like it might be fun has boring parts, and all problems worth solving are full of dead ends. I finally learned, in the words of my friend Seth, that "the grass is brown everywhere."<br />
<br />
And this shattering of my belief in instagenius has shaped my conception of what makes a student a <i>star</i>. There was a time when I, like many people, thought that the superstars were the ones who sounded the most impressive when they spoke, or who had the most raw brainpower. If you asked me what I thought made a good researcher, I may have said some other traits like creativity and good taste in problems. And while all these certainly help with being a good researcher, there are plenty of people with these traits who do not end up being successful.<br />
<br />
What I have learned is that discipline and the ability to persevere are equally, if not more, important to success than being able to look like a smart person in meetings. All of the superstars I've known have worked harder--and often faced more obstacles, in part due to the high volume of work--than other people, despite how much it might look like they are flying from one brilliant result to another from the outside. Because of this, I now want students who accept that life is hard and that they are going to fail. I want students who accept that sometimes work is going to feel like it's going to nowhere, to the point that they wish they were catastrophically failing instead because then at least something would be happening. While confidence might signal resilience and a formidable intellect might decrease the number of obstacles, the main differentiator between a star and simply a smart person is the ability to keep showing up when things do not go well.<br />
<br />
It has become especially important for me to fight the idolization of the lone genius because it is not just distracting, but also harmful. Currently, people who "look smart" (which often translates into looking white, male, and/or socioeconomically privileged) have a significant advantage for two main reasons. The first reason has to do with self-perception. Committing to hard work and overcoming obstacles is easier if you think it will pay off. If someone already does not feel like they belong, it is easier for them to stop trying and self-select out of a pursuit when they hit a snag. The second reason has to do with perception by others. Research suggests that in fields that value innate talent, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/cracking-gender-gap-why-genius-fields-tend-snub-women-n287161">women and other minorities are often stereotyped to have less of it</a>, leading to unfair treatment.<br />
<br />
And so I've written this post not just to reveal my longstanding delusions of grandeur, but also to start a discussion how the myth of instagenius holds us back, as individual researchers and as a community. Would love to hear your thoughts about how we can move past the genius fallacy.<br />
<br />
Related writing:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-structured-procrastination-trap.html">The Structured Procrastination Trap</a></li>
<li><a href="http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-angst-overhead.html">The Angst Overhead</a></li>
<li><a href="http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2016/09/five-things-more-important-about.html">Five Things More Important About a Research Project than Being in Love</a></li>
<li>On Quora: <a href="https://www.quora.com/How-common-is-it-for-PhD-students-to-do-work-in-projects-that-theyre-not-passionate-in">How common is it for PhD students to do work in projects that they are not passionate in?</a></li>
</ul>
<br />
<i>* Seth also tells me the main idea of this blog post is the same as Angela Duckworth's book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-Duckworth/dp/1501111108">Grit</a>. I guess I should tell you that you could read that instead of this. On the subject of the lack of originality of my ideas, you should also read <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/jobs/follow-a-career-passion-let-it-follow-you.html">what Cal Newport has to say about the "passion trap."</a></i></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com244tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-85569406371413879302017-08-09T19:01:00.000-07:002017-08-09T20:24:47.915-07:00Guest Post: The Real Problem Isn't Gender; It's the Modern Media<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This guest post by <a href="http://sethsd.com/">Seth Stephens-Davidowitz</a> was adapted from a comment he wrote on a Facebook post of mine sharing <a href="http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2017/08/outraged-about-google-diversity-memo-i.html?spref=tw">this essay</a>.</i><br />
<br />
While gender in tech is certainly an issue, a lot of the controversy over it is unnecessary. What recently happened with the <a href="https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evzjww/here-are-the-citations-for-the-anti-diversity-manifesto-circulating-at-google">Google memo</a> is a classic case of Scott Alexander’s <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/">Toxoplasma of Rage</a>, one of the most brilliant pieces I have ever read. Read his post. Then read it again.<br />
<br />
The stories that go viral are those that maximize anger and foster the most disagreement.<br />
<br />
Guy writes a memo with a lot of true statements but an aggressive tone bound to infuriate some people. Within two days, everybody is predictably furious.<br />
<br />
My hypothesis is that an overwhelming majority of people actually agree on many of the points of contention--or would agree if they were phrased a little less aggressively, in a tone less likely to create controversy and less likely to go viral.<br />
<br />
How many people, for example, agree with the following statement?<br />
<br />
"We do not know why CS majors are 80% male. It is possible that, even though millions of women have a passion for computer science, there are, in aggregate, fewer women than men who have this passion. We don't know since computer science is kind of new. And also we don't really understand why female CS majors rose to 40% and then plummeted. Since it is possible that discrimination and stereotypes play a role, we should devote resources to making sure everybody with interest in these high-status jobs has ample opportunity to pursue them. Also, everybody should be judged based on their own interest and aptitude in a job, not how many people of their gender would want that job. Finally, the majority of women in tech--as well as many other high-powered fields--have said they have faced sexism, and we should work really hard to stop that."<br />
<br />
This addresses many of the controversies that were raised by the James Damore memo and the responses to it, but is phrased in a way such that few people would find it objectionable. Perhaps we should stop falling for these traps that maximize rage and instead try sober analysis. We may find a surprising amount of consensus.<br />
<br />
Lastly, no young person, man or woman, should actually be training for anything--driving cars, teaching kids, diagnosing diseases, or writing programs--because AI will soon do all that for us. ;)<br />
<br />
<i>For 352 pages of sober analysis on even more controversial topics, you can check out Seth’s book </i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Lies-Internet-About-Really/dp/0062390856">Everybody Lies</a><i>.</i></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com65tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-41203353083785751362017-04-01T07:52:00.002-07:002017-04-11T10:39:52.945-07:00Techniques for Protecting Comey's Twitter: A Taxonomy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvlqQ3ZBKq6Y4nUIJIs9ZJenNXAhRFosV4DyeknuQEphbeB1xOP52BC4L8HVLLgYBpz15xOeLWIyQUVquF1Vqr6XCJw0hhdhwnnmWvo85leji7WqJHYmrN9dRalcW6F2xi2ZHa/s1600/arjun_dp.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="98" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvlqQ3ZBKq6Y4nUIJIs9ZJenNXAhRFosV4DyeknuQEphbeB1xOP52BC4L8HVLLgYBpz15xOeLWIyQUVquF1Vqr6XCJw0hhdhwnnmWvo85leji7WqJHYmrN9dRalcW6F2xi2ZHa/s320/arjun_dp.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Person in the know calling me out.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
After my <a href="http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2017/03/five-research-ideas-instagram-could.html">post about how the Comey Twitter leak was the most exciting thing ever for information flow security researchers</a>, I had some conversations with people wanting to know how to tell between information that is directly leaked and information that is deduced. Someone also pointed out that I didn't mention differential privacy, a kind of statistical privacy that talks about how much information an observer can infer. It's true: there are many mechanisms for protecting sensitive information, and I focused on a particular one, both because it was the relevant one and because it's what I work on. :)<br />
<br />
Since this Comey Twitter leak is such a nice example, I'm going to provide more context by revisiting a taxonomy I used in my <a href="https://cmu-15-316.github.io/">spring software security course</a>, adding statistical privacy to the list. (Last time I had to use a much less exciting example, about <a href="https://theconversation.com/building-privacy-right-into-software-code-67623">my mother spying on my browser cookies</a>.)<br />
<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_control">Access control mechanisms</a> </b>resolve permissions on individual pieces of data, independently of a program that uses the data. An access control policy could say, for instance, that only Comey's followers could see who he is following. You can use access control policies to check data as it's leaving a database, or anywhere in the code. Things people care about with respect to access control is that the access control language can express the desired policies while providing provable guarantees that policies won't accidentally grant access, and can be checked reasonably efficiently.</li>
<li><b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_flow_(information_theory)">Information flow mechanisms</a></b> check the interaction of sensitive data with the rest of the program. In the case of this Comey leak, access control policies were in place some of the time. For example, if you went to Comey's profile page, you couldn't see who he was following. How the journalist ended up finding his page was by looking at the <i>other</i> users suggested by the recommendation algorithm after requesting to follow hypothesized-Comey. (This was aided by the fact that Comey is following few people, and In this case, it seems that Instagram was feeding secret follow information into the recommendation algorithm and not realizing that the results could leak follow information. An information flow mechanism would make sure that any computation based on secret follow information could not make its way into the output from a recommendation algorithm. If the follow list is secret, then so is the length of that list, people followed by people on the follow list, photos of people from the list, etc.</li>
<li><b><a href="http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/3/183595-designing-statistical-privacy-for-your-data/abstract">Statistical privacy mechanisms</a> </b>protect prevent aggregate computations from revealing too much information about individual sensitive values. For instance, you might want to develop a machine learning algorithm that uses medical patient record information to do automated diagnosis given symptoms. It's clear that individual patient record information needs to be kept secret--in fact, there are laws that require people to keep this secret. But there can be a lot of good if we can use sensitive patient information to help other patients. What we want, then, is to allow algorithms to use this data, but with a guarantee that an observer has a <i>very low probability</i> of tracing diagnoses back to individual patients. The most popular formulation of statistical privacy is <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy">differential privacy</a></i>, a property over computations that allows computations only if observers can tell the original data apart from slightly different data with very low probability. Differential privacy is very hot right now: you may have read that <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/06/apples-differential-privacy-collecting-data/">Apple is starting to use this</a>. It's also not a solved problem: my collaborator and co-instructor Matt Fredrikson has an interesting paper about the <a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mfredrik/papers/fredrikson-usenix14-genomic.pdf">tension between differential privacy and social good</a>, calling for a reformulation of statistical privacy to address the current flaws.</li>
</ul>
<div>
For those wondering why I didn't talk about encryption: encryption focuses on the orthogonal problem of putting a lock on an individual piece of data, where locks can have varying cost and varying strength. Encryption involves a different kind of math--and we also don't cover encryption in my spring course for this reason.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicCgG13vgTV7lheSu2fNsqHDB7D1votzkE7u_egw5jAO9GdGZflZEVVQv5PHU4AqIyhStnRts1AMN-0PmTfbych1nfZWkYS0fJgEMjuyxRpGNzLyGjdduzDlcqsclZyyolAG9I/s1600/aldrin_dp.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="156" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicCgG13vgTV7lheSu2fNsqHDB7D1votzkE7u_egw5jAO9GdGZflZEVVQv5PHU4AqIyhStnRts1AMN-0PmTfbych1nfZWkYS0fJgEMjuyxRpGNzLyGjdduzDlcqsclZyyolAG9I/s320/aldrin_dp.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Another discussion I had on Twitter.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<b>Discussion. </b>Some people may wonder if the Comey Twitter leak is an information flow leak, or some other kind of leak. It is true that in many cases, this Instagram bug may not be so obvious because someone is following many people, and the recommendation algorithm has more to work with. I would argue that it squarely is in the purview of information flow mechanisms. If follow information is secret, then recommendation algorithms should not be able to compute using this data. (Here, it seems like what one means by "deducible" is "computed from," and that's an information flow property.) We're not in a situation where these recommendation engines are taking information from thousands of users and doing something important. It's very easy for information to leak here, and it's simply not worth the loss to privacy!</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOwEO5L0b63-MoKr-GUZCURhnEwHMcDlgmxqXulti9A52-Hz44PWodHU4AWnNjFy8PbRD0GlvQhhi0RorRgI7vLyqdp6UG3m127VYT9ConLZYItmao43svBUe77uGxEKfp5pT6/s1600/ch_data.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOwEO5L0b63-MoKr-GUZCURhnEwHMcDlgmxqXulti9A52-Hz44PWodHU4AWnNjFy8PbRD0GlvQhhi0RorRgI7vLyqdp6UG3m127VYT9ConLZYItmao43svBUe77uGxEKfp5pT6/s320/ch_data.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Poor, and in violation of our privacy settings.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div>
<b>Takeaways. </b>We should stand up for ourselves when it comes to our data. Companies like Facebook are making recommendations based on private information all the time, and not only is it <i>creepy</i>, but it violates our privacy policies, <i>and</i> they can definitely do something about it. My student Scott recently made $1000 from Facebook's <a href="https://www.facebook.com/BugBounty/">bug bounty</a> program reporting that photos from protected accounts were showing up in keep-in-touch emails from Instagram. If principles alone don't provide enough motivation, maybe the $$ will incentivize you to call tech companies out when you encounter sloppy data privacy practices.</div>
</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com91tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-17427096212353589122017-03-31T16:56:00.002-07:002017-05-05T14:24:20.423-07:00Five Research Ideas Instagram Could Have Used to Protect Comey's Secret Twitter<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Even though cybersecurity is one of the hottest topics on the Internet, my specific area of research, information flow security, has remained relatively obscure. Until now, that is.<br />
<br />
You may have heard of "information flow" as a term that has been thrown around with terms like "data breach," "information leak," and "1337 hax0r." You may not be aware that information flow is a specific term, referring to the practice of tracking sensitive data as it flows through a program. While techniques like access control and encryption protect individual pieces of data (for instance, as they leave a database), information flow techniques additionally protect the results of <i>any computations on sensitive data</i>.<br />
<br />
Information flow bugs are usually not the kinds of glamorous bugs that make headlines. Many of the data leaks that have been in the public consciousness, for instance the <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/22/news/companies/target-credit-card-hack/">Target</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_hack">Sony</a> hacks, happened because the data was not protected properly at all. In these cases, having the appropriate access checks, or encrypting the data, should do the trick. But "why we need to protect data more better" is harder to explain. Up through my PhD thesis defense, I had such a difficult time finding headlines that were actually information flow bugs that I resorted to general software security motivations (<a href="https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/">cars</a>! <a href="https://www.wired.com/video/2015/08/these-guys-can-hack-an-e-skateboard/">skateboards</a>! <a href="https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-can-disable-sniper-rifleor-change-target/">rifles</a>!) instead.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYcfqHi-J_Zdvbt2qH4e5Ycxoi8iIUzb0jM_EKDlT6dvt4f5kJUrbU6FCYVjYiRAyAi5MoMPOJP9wsmI63Sac7DI8ZcNcPJyasOy3MXE-jAjaGxsEko9GiztQtnDD681tkWqvY/s1600/cwtxpt19klysecxafny5.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYcfqHi-J_Zdvbt2qH4e5Ycxoi8iIUzb0jM_EKDlT6dvt4f5kJUrbU6FCYVjYiRAyAi5MoMPOJP9wsmI63Sac7DI8ZcNcPJyasOy3MXE-jAjaGxsEko9GiztQtnDD681tkWqvY/s400/cwtxpt19klysecxafny5.png" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From the article.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Then along came "<a href="https://gizmodo.com/this-is-almost-certainly-james-comey-s-twitter-account-1793843641">This Is Almost Certainly James Comey's Twitter Account</a>," an article I have been waiting for since I started working on information flow in 2010. The basic idea behind the article is this: a journalist named Ashley Feinberg wanted to find FBI director James Comey's secret Twitter account, and so started digging around the Internet. Feinberg was able to be successful within four hours due to being clever and a key information leak in Instagram: when you request to follow an Instagram account, it makes <i>algorithmic suggestions </i>based on who to follow. And in the case of this article, the algorithmic suggestions for Comey's son Brien included several family members, including James Comey's wife--and the account that Feinberg deduced to be James Comey's. And it seems that Comey uses the same "anonymous" handle on Instagram as he does on Twitter. And so Instagram's failure to protect Brien Comey's protected "following" list led to the discovery of James Comey's Twitter account.<br />
<br />
So what happened here? Instagram promises to protect secret accounts, which it (sometimes*) does. When one directly views the Instagram page of a protected user, they cannot access that person's photos, who that user is following, and who follows that user. This might lead a person to think that all of this information is protected all of the time. <i>Wrong! </i>It turns out the protected account information is visible to algorithms that suggest <i>other</i> users to follow, a feature that becomes--incorrectly--visible to <i>all</i> viewers once a follow is requested, because, presumably, whoever implemented this functionality forgot an access check. In this case the leak is particularly insidious because while the profile photos and names of the users shown are all already public, they are likely shown as a result of a computations on secret information: Brien Comey's protected follow information. (This is a subtle case to remember to check!) In information flow nomenclature, this is called an <i>implicit flow</i>. When someone is involved in a lot of Instagram activity, the implicit flow of the follow information may not be so apparent. But when many of the recommended follows are Comey family members, many of them who use their actual names, this leak becomes more serious!<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEvlipTZY2RtvG_DyvGHGHJKhl3UipVDY8UbKoouGEcuOOtmCygT0pnucVZkwgAzdFKgHA8E__aAZD13u2AMsUF0VH_3bQvo9wJiJL0zHCLyRQ5P7mgJKmIWAys60M2zCniTIm/s1600/Creepy-Facebook-Changes-Facebook-UK-Creepy-Change-How-To-Use-Worst-Searches-on-Facebook-Graph-Search-Facebook-Graph-Search-Worst-529700.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="140" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjEvlipTZY2RtvG_DyvGHGHJKhl3UipVDY8UbKoouGEcuOOtmCygT0pnucVZkwgAzdFKgHA8E__aAZD13u2AMsUF0VH_3bQvo9wJiJL0zHCLyRQ5P7mgJKmIWAys60M2zCniTIm/s320/Creepy-Facebook-Changes-Facebook-UK-Creepy-Change-How-To-Use-Worst-Searches-on-Facebook-Graph-Search-Facebook-Graph-Search-Worst-529700.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Creepy Facebook search, from <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/667052/Creepy-Facebook-Graph-Search-Friends-Photos">express.co.uk</a>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In the world of information flow, this article is a Big Deal because it so perfectly illustrates why information flow analyses are useful. For years, I had been jumping up and down and waving my arms (see <a href="http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3005356">here</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/building-privacy-right-into-software-code-67623">here</a>, for instance) about why we need to check data in more places than the point where it leaves the database. Applications aren't just showing sensitive values directly anymore, but the results of all kinds of computations on those values! (In this case it was a recommendations algorithm.) We don't always know where sensitive data is eventually going! (As was the case when Brien Comey's protected "following" list was handed over to the algorithm.) Policies might depend on sensitive data! We may even compute where sensitive data is going based on other sensitive data! In a world where we can search over anything, no data is safe!<br />
<br />
Until recently, my explanations have seemed subtle and abstract to most, in direct contrast to the sexy flashy security work that people imagine after watching <i>Hackers</i> or reading <i>Crypto</i>. By now, though, we information flow researchers should have your attention. We have all kinds of computations over all kinds of data going to all kinds of people, and <i>nobody has any clue what is going on</i> in the code. Even though digital security should be one of the main concerns of the FBI, Comey is not able to avoid the problems that arise from the mess of policy spaghetti that is modern code.<br />
<br />
Fortunately, information flow researchers have been working for years on preventing precisely this kind of Comey leak**. In fashionable BuzzFeed style, I will list exactly five research ideas Instagram could adapt to prevent such leaks in the future:<br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><b>Static label-based type-checking.</b> In most programming languages, program values have types. Type usually tell you simple things like whether something is a number or a list, but they can be arbitrarily fancy. Types may be checked<i> </i>at <i>compile time</i>, before the program runs, or at <i>run time</i>, while the program is running.<b> </b>There has been a line of work on static (compile time) label-based information flow type systems (starting with <a href="https://www.cs.cornell.edu/jif/">Jif</a> for Java, with a survey paper <a href="https://www.cs.cornell.edu/andru/papers/jsac/sm-jsac03.pdf">here</a> describing more of this work) that allows programmers to label data values with security levels (for instance, secret or not) as types, and that propagate the type of a program that makes sure sensitive information does not flow places that are less sensitive.<i> </i>These type systems give guarantees about any program that runs.<i> </i>The beauty of these type systems is that while they look simple, they are clever enough to be able to capture the kind of <i>implicit flow</i> that we saw with algorithms leaking Brien Comey's follow information. (We'd label the follow lists as sensitive, and then any values computed from them couldn't be leaked!)</li>
<li><b>Static verification. </b>Label-based type-checking is a light-weight way of proving the correctness of programs according to some logical specification. There are also heavier-weight ways of doing it, using systems that translate programs automatically into logical representations, and check them against the specification. Various directions of work using <i>refinement types</i>, super fancy types that depend on program values could be used for information flow. An example of a refinement type is {int x | canSee(alice, x)}, the type of a value that exists as an
integer x that can only exist if user "alice" is allowed to see it
according to the "canSee" function/predicate) Researchers have also demonstrated ways of proving information flow properties in systems like <a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2685062">IronClad</a> and <a href="http://flint.cs.yale.edu/flint/publications/security.pdf">mKertiKOS</a>. These efforts are pretty hardcore and require a lot of programmer effort, but they allow people to prove all sorts of boutique guarantees on boutique systems (as opposed to the generic type system guarantees using the subset of a language that is supported).</li>
<li><b>Label-based dynamic information flow tracking.</b> Static label-based type-checking, while useful, often requires the programmer to put labels all over programs. Systems such as <a href="http://www.scs.stanford.edu/histar/">HiStar</a>, <a href="https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/flume-sosp07.pdf">Flume</a> (the specific motivation of which was the OKCupid web server), and <a href="http://hails.scs.stanford.edu/">Hails</a> allow labeling of data in a way similar to static label-based type systems, but track the flow of information dynamically, while the program is running. The run-time tracking, while it makes it so that programmers don't have to put labels everywhere, comes at a cost. First, it introduces performance slowdowns. Second, we can't know if a program is going to give us some kind of "access denied" error before it runs, so there could be accesses denied all over the place. Many of these systems handle these problems by doing things at the <i>process</i> level: if there is an unintended leak anywhere in the process, the whole process aborts. (Those who haven't heard of processes can think of the process as encapsulating a whole big task, rather than an individual action, like doing a single arithmetic operation.)</li>
<li><b>Secure multi-execution. </b><a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1849969"><i>Secure multi-execution</i></a> is a nice trick for running black-box code (code that you don't want to--or can't--change) in a way that is secure with respect to information flow. The trick is this: every time you reach a sensitive value, you execute the sensitive value in one process, and you spawn another process using a secure default input. The process separation guarantees that sensitive values won't leak into the process containing the default value, so you know you should always be allowed to show the result of that one. As you might guess, secure multi-execution can slow down the program quite a bit, as it needs to spawn a new process every time it sees a sensitive value. To mitigate this, my collaborators Tom Austin and Cormac Flanagan developed a <a href="https://users.soe.ucsc.edu/~cormac/papers/popl12b.pdf"><i>faceted execution semantics</i></a> for programs that lets you execute a program on multiple values at the same time, with all of the security guarantees of secure multi-execution.</li>
<li><b>Policy-agnostic programming. </b>While all of these other approaches can prevent sensitive values from leaking information, if we want programs to run most of the time, <i>somebody</i> needs to make sure that programs are written not to leak information in the first place. It turns out this is pretty difficult, so I have been working on programming model that factors information flow policies out of the rest of the program. (If I'm going to write a whole essay about information flow, of course I'm going to write about my own research too!) Instead of having to implement information flow policies as checks across the program, where any missing check can lead to a bug, type error, or runtime "access denied," programmers can now specify each policy <i>once</i>, associated with the data, along with a default value, and rely on the language runtime and/or compiler to make the code execute according to the policies. In the policy-agnostic system, the programmer can say that Brien Comey's follows should only be visible to followers, and the <i>machine</i> becomes responsible for making sure this policy is enforced everywhere, including the code implementing the recommendations algorithm. That policies can depend on sensitive values, that sensitive values may be shown to viewers whose identities are computed from sensitive values, and that enforcing policies usually implementing access checks across the code are all challenges. Our semantics for the <a href="http://jeeveslang.org/">Jeeves programming language</a> (paper <a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/kuat/papers/jeeves.pdf">here</a>) addresses all of these issues using a dynamic faceted execution approach, and we have also extended this programming model to handle applications with a SQL database backend (paper <a href="http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jyang2/papers/p631-yang.pdf">here</a>). We are also working on a static type-driven repair approach (draft <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.03445">here</a>).</li>
</ol>
I don't know how much this Twitter account leak upset the Comeys, but reading this article was pretty much the most exciting thing that I have ever done. Up until now, most people have thought about security in terms of protecting individual data items, rather than in terms of a complex and subtle interaction with the programs that use them. This has started to change in the last few years as people have been realizing just how much of our data is online, and just how unreliable the code is that we trust with this data. I hope that this Comey leak will cause even more people to realize how important it is to reason deeply about what our software is doing. (And to fund and use our research. :))<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* A student in
my <a href="https://cmu-15-316.github.io/">spring software security course</a> (basically, programming languages applied to security), Scott, had noticed earlier this
semester that emails from Instagram allowed previews of protected
accounts he was not following. He reported this to Facebook's bug bounty
program and made $1000. I told him to please write in the course reviews that the course helped him make money.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** Note that a lot of other things are going on in this Comey story. The reporter used facts about Comey to figure out the setup, and also some clever inference. But this clever inference exploited a specific information leak from the secret follows list to the recommendations list, and this post focuses on this kind of leak.</span></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com306tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-57306589403712967612017-03-08T18:52:00.002-08:002017-03-08T19:04:19.494-08:00Autoresponse: Striking: A Day Without a Woman<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgge3X23cWuj4wAX8nk-LZ-bJBEEFHxncpUVaHLkpy_79WI7vKu0ZFdnNkSzeZsTrI0CKsC1K5VZ0IfEZX_al5QJzzg1IJlp_KZvUzVdjJRwNUOI-3oSTEFd-7sXs5mgtIHSgCf/s1600/IMG_20170308_211121_338.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgge3X23cWuj4wAX8nk-LZ-bJBEEFHxncpUVaHLkpy_79WI7vKu0ZFdnNkSzeZsTrI0CKsC1K5VZ0IfEZX_al5QJzzg1IJlp_KZvUzVdjJRwNUOI-3oSTEFd-7sXs5mgtIHSgCf/s320/IMG_20170308_211121_338.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">In front of the Federal Building, Pittsburgh.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Dear Message Sender,<br />
<br />
I am not responding to email on March 8, 2017 because I am observing <a href="https://www.womensmarch.com/womensday/">A Day Without a Woman</a>. In the afternoon, I will be joining students at CMU in a silent protest and attending a rally at the City-County building in downtown Pittsburgh.<br />
<br />
Despite the efforts and progress made towards gender equality, women do not have an equal voice, and we are not appreciated equally in society. For example:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>The gender wage gap persists, and two-thirds of minimum wage earners are women.</li>
<li>The House and Senate are currently 19% women. This means an 81% male group is making decisions that affect women's health and lives.</li>
<li>The United States still has not had a female president, even though many countries we'd like to think we are more progressive than have a woman <i>currently in power</i>. </li>
<li>Only 24 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Money is power, and women have less of it.</li>
</ul>
Some may say that women are simply less ambitious, or don't want to be in positions of power and influence as much as men do. Study after study--and I'm happy to talk in more detail--have shown that women who do have the ambition face far more obstacles than men do. Also, my statistics above focus on what people like to call "privileged" women, but the undervaluing of female labor (including domestic and emotional labor) make life even harder for those in less fortunate circumstances.<br />
<br />
There are many ways you can show support. The first is to attend local rallies, especially if you have an employment situation where you will have few consequences. Even if you are not a woman and/or not striking today, here are some things you can do:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Listen to women, and call people out when women's voices are not heard.</li>
<li>Question your own biases. (You can have biases even if you are a woman!)</li>
<li>Vote for women. Champion women. Mentor women. (In that order.)</li>
<li>Support people who are striking, and who are more actively fighting for women's rights and the appreciation of women's labor, both financially and by amplifying their voices.</li>
</ul>
<br />
Yours in solidarity,<br />
Jean
</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com62tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-78667239097733838102016-12-23T21:49:00.002-08:002016-12-24T08:37:29.264-08:00Let's Talk About How We Talk About Science<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>A while ago, Brian Burg <a href="https://twitter.com/brrian/status/757662372790054912" target="_blank">commented on Twitter</a> that he would like to see more discussion of marketing in academia. I decided I'd rather write a meta-post about how we need to talk about how marketing is affecting our evaluation of science.</i><br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/64/22/34/64223452b70ddff40c07919cba099fae.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Image result for beyonce magazine cover" border="0" height="200" src="https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/64/22/34/64223452b70ddff40c07919cba099fae.jpg" width="147" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;">Beyonce.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://static.celebuzz.com/uploads/2014/11/14/kim-kardashian-glamour-magazine-february-cover-010310-1-491x656-419x560.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="Image result for kim kardashian magazine cover" border="0" height="200" src="https://static.celebuzz.com/uploads/2014/11/14/kim-kardashian-glamour-magazine-february-cover-010310-1-491x656-419x560.jpg" width="149" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8px; text-align: center;">Kim.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
If you want to be on the cover of <i>Glamour</i> magazine, you know what to do. Put your hair in glamorous waves, wear something small, and stare directly at the camera with slightly open lips. It helps if you have the Look. (Has anyone else noticed that Beyonce and Kim are being airbrushed to look more and more like each other all the time?)<br />
<br />
If you want to be on the cover of a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/09/how-journals-nature-science-cell-damage-science" target="_blank">glamour journal</a>, things are not much different. Open with a deep-sounding but incontestable vision of where you think the world is going. Hone in on a specific problem. Make the problem sound hard. Make your solution easy for a casual reader to understand. Write with the voice of a winner. It helps to have picked a topic that a science journalist might drool over. Oh, and if you are going for the cover: make sure to have good images.<br />
<br />
But, you might say, fashion magazines are frivolous, and science is Serious*. I'll be the first to agree that the investigation of the fundamental truths of reality is a worthy endeavor requiring brilliance, hard work, persistence, and all kinds of other positive qualities. (Side note: <a href="http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/beauty/news-features/TMG4794544/Effortless-beauty-is-seriously-hard-work.html" target="_blank">beauty is also hard work</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beauty_Myth" target="_blank">used to oppress women</a>.) But <i>people</i> determine what science is higher-profile than other science. People live in society, and it is widely acknowledged that society is superficial. Many a fairy tale involves a causal relationship between the changing of clothes and the changing of fortune. In Thomas Carlyle's satirical novel <i>Sartor Resartus</i>, religion itself is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sartor_Resartus#Themes_and_critical_reception" target="_blank">matter of clothing</a>.<br />
<br />
In fact, a major part of my metamorphosis into a Real Researcher has involved accepting that appearance matters. When my advisor and I used to get papers rejected in the beginning of my PhD, we would spend a long time thinking about how to make the work so good that the paper was not rejectable. I have come to realize that this is the equivalent of failing to impress on a first date and hoping that soul-searching will address the issue for the future. Looking deeply into one's soul, while usually good in the long term, often does not address the problem of first impressions.<br />
<br />
Sure, part of preparing one's research for wider dissemination involves doing what everyone would expect of good communication: having a clear description of the goals, clear explanations of the solutions, and a clear explanation of the context with respect to previous work. Good logical reasoning goes a long way. Good evaluation of results does as well. But if we look at the papers that do--and don't--make it into the "glamour" conferences and journals, we begin to suspect that there are other factors at play.<br />
<br />
If we look more closely, we can see that American** science replicates patterns of elitism and gatekeeping that we see in the rest of American society. In <i>Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite</i>, Columbia sociology professor Shamus Khan reports on behavioral traits that characterize the new elite. Khan describes how, rather than stemming from family prestige, the social status of the boarding school students he observes comes from an ease of moving through social situations and a cultural omnivorousness (embracing both the high-brow and the low-brow). Especially since these behaviors are learned at elite institutions, they serve a gate-keeping function similar to explicit markers of socioeconomic status. People look for this ease and this omnivorous, for instance when interviewing candidates, justifying their choice with some idea that such traits somehow make people more deserving. There is also a mythology about hard work that serves more as a justification than an explanation for elite status: students feel that they are receiving the benefits they do from society not because they were born into it, but because they "worked so hard to get there."<br />
<br />
As it turns out, the training of elite scientists also involves learning gatekeeping behaviors. In science there is, a <a href="http://www.fastcoexist.com/3057674/exploding-the-myth-of-hard-work" target="_blank">similar mythology about hard work</a> being responsible for differential success. In Computer Science, the privileged behaviors I've observed include having research vision (as opposed to making solid technical contributions), being aggressive about imposing that research vision upon others, and having a "<a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/01/belief-some-fields-require-brilliance-may-keep-women-out" target="_blank">genius quality</a>," which involves pattern-matching on similarities to previous successful scientists (often white men). Like ease of interaction and cultural omnivorousness, these traits are often <i>associated</i> with people deserving of recognition, but their presence does not mean the work will be good. I would not be surprised if having research vision and exhibiting genius quality were more correlated with being educated in an elite American institution than with potential for long-term scientific impact. With this premise, the recipe for academic fame involves not only marketing one's work as making positive contributions to science, but also demonstrating a combination of privilege and flash. The privilege here is more subtle than that of having cover-girl looks, but it is a very real kind of privilege nonetheless.<br />
<br />
But how, you may wonder, do people not see through the shiny exterior? Those who have been following American politics in the last year may be familiar with the answer: insufficient attention. Publications are reviewed by researchers under increasingly high demands to pass quick judgments. Between December 2015 and February 2016, for instance, I had accidentally agreed to be on two concurrent major conference Program Committees, and had a reviewing load of over 60 full-length (12-page, 9-10 pt font) papers. (And I am not the only person who had such reviewing volume!) Had I only been on one Program Committee, the reviewing load would have still required me to evaluate, on average, a paper every two days over the course of two months. Under such reviewing pressure, it is easy to succumb to flash judgments, emotional first responses to a paper's Introduction section. It is easy to accept the paper with the good story over a paper with a deeper but more subtle result.<br />
<br />
Despite all this, I believe in the future of science, and that we can shift back to a situation where we are making space for "real" science, what science looks like before the makeup and airbrushing. To do so, we need to wage a similar campaign to the one people waged on unreasonable beauty standards. We need to teach people to recognize--and be skeptical--of "Photoshopped" results: all that is too slick, too inspiring, and too good to be true, in both individual papers and in the story of a scientist's career. We need to raise more awareness about what "real" science looks like: the incremental results required on the way to big discoveries, the science that is foundational, necessary, and often with subtleties difficult to communicate to non-experts. Making structural changes that reduce reviewing loads and allow for deeper evaluation also reduces the incentives that have led to the proliferation of these current practices.<br />
<br />
Elite institutions are much more than a finishing school for scientists, but we have been moving to a model where the marketing is coming to dominate the science. To protect the pursuit of truth, we need to admit that people can be shallow when it comes to evaluating science. We need to talk about how we talk about science so we can make space for science that is slow, science that is subtle, and science that is outside the mainstream.<br />
<br />
<i>With thanks to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who told me my first draft lacked a cohesive point, and Adeeti Ullal, who very patiently helped me with the last paragraph.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* I don't believe fashion magazines are blanket frivolous, but you might.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** I don't have the depth of experience to comment on how this generalizes to other cultures.</span></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com47tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-28687972945376602882016-12-17T13:17:00.000-08:002016-12-17T15:29:15.898-08:00The Structured Procrastination Trap<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A wise professor once told me to take advice with a grain of salt, as it is mostly highlights and wishful thinking. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Art-Procrastination-Effective-Lollygagging-Postponing/dp/0761171673" target="_blank">Structured procrastination</a> is a prime example of wishful thinking doled out to students eager to ease growing pains.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Structured procrastination promises a productive life with minimal pain. The basic premise is that if you always do something <i>other</i> than the task you are supposed to do, you will be able to always be doing something that you want. Don't want to write that report? Play ping-pong with your students instead, and people will be impressed with how easy you are taking life. Don't want to respond to emails? Read papers you like instead, and people will be surprised you make time to read papers. If you keep waiting, you will <i>want</i> to do that thing that you have been procrastinating, and then you can live a completely pain-free life!</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now let's look at the premises for structured procrastination. It requires that there is always a task that you can and want to do that is productive. It requires that deadlines make tasks miraculously desirable, and it is the fact that something is due soon that makes a task easier to do, more so than other factors (like how easily you are able to do the task). It requires that you have a good sense of how long tasks should take. For structured procrastination to make sense, you need to be at a point where life is simply a matter of execution.</div>
<div>
<br />
In my many years of being alive, I have discovered that these premises often do not hold. When I was a graduate student and looking for shortcuts to the Productive Life, I felt like I was doing something wrong. When I aggressively tried to apply structured procrastination to my life, I produced a lot of bad work. There were long periods of time when I would try to get into immersive <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)" target="_blank">"flow states"</a> where I could have pleasurable levels of focus, but <i>everything </i>felt difficult. I've spent a cumulative total of days, maybe weeks, of my life wondering why it takes me so long to write a paper, or to prepare a talk, or to debug my code. For years I thought that it was possible for life to always be easy, but I had somehow not figured out how to do it.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
What I realized is that life is hard, and especially hard if you want to do things you have never done before. If you are doing something that requires you to grow, what you need is a lot of time, and the discipline to force yourself to keep doing something even when it feels like the most painful thing in the world. If you are doing a high growth activity, you need to abandon the idea of structured procrastination. You need set hours that you are going to sit down (or stand up, and lay down) and stare at your notebook, or laptop, or the wall, where you are dedicated to making progress on the Very Important Task. Limiting these hours makes it psychologically bearable. Making these hours the same time every day makes it more likely you can keep this.<br />
<br />
Of course, structured procrastination is not all bad. I have recommended this technique to many people, as it is a great way to get oneself out of unproductive loops when a looming deadline kills all desire to do anything. If you allow yourself to admit that you are not going to work on your Very Important Task, then you can at least do "productive" things (like make <a href="http://haskellryangosling.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">Ryan Gosling memes</a>) instead of sitting around angsting (which could also be productive according to some value systems). Procrastination is also a good way to trick yourself into doing more things, because deadlines often <i>do</i> make people more efficient.<br />
<br />
While structured procrastination provides a useful execution framework, there are times in life when you need to suck it up and do the Very Important Task. In fact, structured procrastination may be most seductive when what you need most is structure. For this reason, you should always think before you procrastinate, and avoid the trap of false busyness.</div>
</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-30183955551054463072016-12-14T15:07:00.002-08:002016-12-14T15:20:10.292-08:00What Professors Can Do About the Collaboration Problem<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A few weeks ago, I wrote a <a href="http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2016/11/why-we-need-to-talk-about-collaboration.html" target="_blank">blog post about the "collaboration problem"</a> that sparked a significant amount of discussion among my colleagues in academic computer science, in large part because many people had observed the same problem, without ideas for great solutions. Here are some emails I've exchanged with <a href="http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/" target="_blank">Ben Zhao</a>, a professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, and my colleague <a href="https://clairelegoues.com/" target="_blank">Claire Le Goues</a> in the School of Computer Science at CMU about how to address the problem in the courses we teach. (Ben recently posted <a href="https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/why-do-so-many-women-leave-engineering/?utm_content=buffer6f99a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer" target="_blank">this article</a> on social media and had quite extensive discussion with many people in the field about how to address the problem.<br />
<br />
I hope this will generate even more discussion that brings us closer to solutions.<br />
<br />
--<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" class="ajC" style="background-color: white; border-spacing: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 44.0057px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;"><span class="gD" email="ravenben@cs.ucsb.edu" name="Ben Zhao" style="display: inline; font-size: 12.8px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;">Ben Zhao</span></span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 44.0057px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">Justine Sherry,<br />Jean Yang</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 44.0057px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 1:50 PM</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">hey Justine, Jean.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Random email out of nowhere, hope you’re both doing great, and happy holidays!! :)</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">So I’ve been thinking and reading a fair bit on group dynamics in CS classes, esp. w.r.t. female students, with a fair bit coming from you guys. There aren’t that many in my classes (I teach undergrad networking and OS, so they’re almost all juniors/seniors by the time they make it to my class). So I’d like to make sure that I’m not contributing any more to the gender imbalance.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">I need help. As strong women in CS, would love your take on a couple of key questions (but also would love any general advice you want to share, period). And I know you’re busy super busy, but hopefully this is something that won’t take too much time. Either way, your advice would immediately impact 10s of female students in the coming quarter...</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Key questions on my mind right now are:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">- How should I do group assignments for larger classes with moderate to heavy projects? About half of my networking class homeworks are in groups of 2, and nearly all of my OS class homeworks/projects are in groups of 2-3.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">- From what I have thought about and seen in past classes, I think my past practice of letting students choose their own groups doesn’t work. I recall something like 1/2 of all groups with at least 1 female student experiencing some type of malfunction, either due to the male student(s) flaking out or just failing out.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Right now, I’m considering something like the following:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;"> - Beginning of quarter, I reach out individually to all female students in the class (maybe 10-15, 20 if I’m lucky), and I ask them to attend an open discussion with me on campus.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;"> - I ask them for their experiences and concerns in the class, and esp. for group projects</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;"> - I lay out what I think are challenges that they could face</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;"> - I give them the option to find partners within the group, before the overall group formation process starts.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">What do you think? Would this work? Would female students react negatively to being singled out? What happens if they don’t care and don’t show up?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Thanks in advance, and again, I’d love to hear any thoughts on this or on any other topic..</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">thank you thank you!</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Ben</span></div>
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<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 58.5511px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;"><span class="gD" email="jyang2@andrew.cmu.edu" name="Jean Yang" style="display: inline; font-size: 12.8px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;">Jean Yang</span></span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 58.5511px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;"><span email="ravenben@cs.ucsb.edu">Ben Zhao</span></span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 58.5511px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">cc:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;"><span email="justines@andrew.cmu.edu">Justine Sherry</span>,<br /><span email="clegoues@andrew.cmu.edu">Claire Le Goues</span></span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 58.5511px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 12:16 PM</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Hi Ben,</span><br />
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Thanks for writing! These are great questions, I'm glad you're asking them. I'm looping in Claire Le Goues, another professor at CMU, because we've been talking about how we could address some of these collaboration issues with curricular changes, and about proposing an audit of the curriculum to make sure students are learning collaboration skills.</div>
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Here are some things I learned from people after my blog post about the collaboration problem:</div>
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- It's important to keep in mind that all students have trouble with collaboration. It may disproportionately affect female and other minority students because 1) there are already so many factors that wear away at their desire to participate, and 2) students without strong social ties within Computer Science may not have access to as desirable of a partner pool. But an important take-away is that all students struggle with learning how to collaborate well, that we don't teach it in lower-level courses, and that in upper-level courses collaboration ability becomes important for academic success all of the sudden.</div>
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- There is strong evidence that self-selected groups are not as good as instructor-assigned groups.</div>
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- There are many resources out there for helping students work in teams more effectively. I was given this as a starting point:</div>
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<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/Oakley-paper(JSCL).pdf&source=gmail&ust=1481842755400000&usg=AFQjCNFE7PrUL13uWd_KnTAhlqZ72Qfx9A" href="http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/Papers/Oakley-paper(JSCL).pdf" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/<wbr></wbr>lockers/users/f/felder/public/<wbr></wbr>Papers/Oakley-paper(JSCL).pdf</a></div>
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- There are ways to get students to more actively work on their collaboration skills. Claire addresses this in the software engineering course she teaches. Some professors have reported having students assess how collaborations went, and docking points for students who didn't collaborate well.</div>
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- Several women, including myself, said that their best collaborations during undergraduate were with other women. I'm still not sure what to make of this in the context of other findings.</div>
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Given this, I have the following thoughts about your proposed plan:</div>
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- I like the idea of talking to students about collaboration issues, but there are two main reasons I wouldn't do it only with the women. First, collaboration is an everyone problem, and not just a women's problem. It also affects people along lines of race, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, etc. Second, even if the problem were only one of gender, it's a problem to be addressed by people of both genders. I've long believed that in order to solve the gender problem, we need to address the stereotypes associated with both femininity and masculinity. Only involving one of the genders in the conversation places all of the burden on that gender, and when it's the women, we are burdening an already burdened group. For these reasons I'd encourage a discussion about collaboration with the entire class, and then support to ensure collaborations are going as smoothly as possible throughout the semester.</div>
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- It doesn't hurt to check in with women and minority students, but without making them feel like they are being singled out, or because you are interested in them primarily because of the women in CS problem. My undergraduate professors paid a lot of attention to me, and I always assumed it was because I was a woman, and in fact this made me feel like I was less deserving of attention.</div>
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- I do like the idea of making it easier for minority students to find each other, but I don't know that it's your place to do it as the instructor. I don't know if there's a non-awkward way to bring this up during the whole-group discussion. Also, based on what people say it actually seems better to assign the partners as the instructor, and then it would not seem appropriate to assign people to work together based on their minority status. I'm still really not sure how to think of partner choice vs. partner assignment, and welcome discussion about this!</div>
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Curious to hear your thoughts after your Facebook post about this topic blew up. :)</div>
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Best,</div>
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Jean</div>
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P.S. This discussion is interesting. What do you think about me posting this to my blog, maybe after Claire/Justine chime in?</div>
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<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 44.0057px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;"><span class="gD" email="ravenben@cs.ucsb.edu" name="Ben Zhao" style="display: inline; font-size: 12.8px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;">Ben Zhao</span></span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 44.0057px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;"><span email="jyang2@andrew.cmu.edu">Jean Yang</span></span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 44.0057px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">cc:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;"><span email="justines@andrew.cmu.edu">Justine Sherry</span>,<br /><span email="clegoues@andrew.cmu.edu">Claire Le Goues</span></span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 44.0057px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 1:27 PM</span></td></tr>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">hey Jean.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Great thoughts.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">I’ve been learning a lot from the various viewpoints on the FB post, but I’m slightly frustrated by the lack of consensus as to the right solution. First, I agree with all the viewpoints that the problem is broader (re: your point on everyone having collaboration issues and others’ points about male students sharing in the solution), and any effort to address it should be more inclusive. That I think is very doable: I can talk about the issue early on in the class with some of Sarita’s slides she shared on the FB post. Hopefully I can do it in a tactful way that doesn’t alienate any group.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">By beyond that, I’m sort of torn. It’s clear that different personalities play into how different women reacted to my suggestions. Some, like my senior colleague Linda Petzold, reacted fairly negatively because (I think at least in part) she has a really strong personality, and perhaps had less of an issue handling those situations herself. Perhaps I’m generalizing too much based on a sample set of maybe 2-3, but I’m guessing there might be an inverse relationship between a student’s own ability to deal with these challenging situations and their sensitivity to being singled out. In other words, is it possible the women (or other minority groups) who are most vulnerable to the negative situations (because they’re less assertive or more introverted) would be less concerned about being singled out as a group? I don’t want to downplay comments from you or Linda (and a couple others on the FB thread) about being singled out, but do you think that then sensitivity might be less of an issue for less assertive students? Given my slightly biased sample of strong female colleagues, I’m not quite sure how far off I am on this line of thinking.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">My overarching concern is that a broader discussion, while very positive and definitely much better than nothing, is still not quite enough. I worry that individual students will find it difficult to reach out to me the professor to discuss group issues. This has been very much my experience in the past, that students don’t want to appear like they’re a hassle, and no matter how I try to make myself approachable and less intimidating, there’s always a high barrier to overcome (especially for those more shy/introverted students). So all those comments/suggestions that involve groups reaching out and giving me feedback about their own individual group dynamics, I think they’re somewhat naively optimistic.</span><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;" />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">So I will definitely do what I can for the broader class. But I worry that won’t be enough. Beyond that, I can do random group assignments. But there I foresee lots of complaints by students unable to work with their friends, and any personality conflicts will be blamed on me (which is ok). There I worry that the disruption to the class group formation as a whole will produce more issues, and I haven’t convinced myself that random assignment is a better solution in general. The other option is more proactively reaching out to female students. There the question is do the ends justify the means: would the potential benefits of helping women students form self-selected groups outweigh the initial discomfort of being “singled out”?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Any/all thoughts welcome, and thanks for spending your time on this. I’m fine with whatever you want to post on your blog about the issue. I think more exposure can only help, as I’m pretty sure that most (if not all) of my male colleagues in the dept have no idea group dynamics is even an issue.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">thanks,</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">Ben</span><br />
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<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 58.5511px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;"><span class="gD" email="clegoues@cs.cmu.edu" name="Claire Le Goues" style="display: inline; font-size: 12.8px; font-weight: bold; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;">Claire Le Goues</span></span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 58.5511px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;"><span email="ravenben@cs.ucsb.edu">Ben Zhao</span></span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 58.5511px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">cc:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;"><span email="jyang2@andrew.cmu.edu">Jean Yang</span>,<br /><span email="justines@andrew.cmu.edu">Justine Sherry</span></span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2" style="color: #999999; margin: 0px; padding: 6px 16px 6px 0px; text-align: right; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap; width: 58.5511px;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2" style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 0px; vertical-align: top; width: auto;"><span class="gI" style="cursor: auto; vertical-align: top;">Wed, Dec 14, 2016 at 5:46 PM</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">I don't think that the following response is by any means complete, but here are some offhand thoughts:</span><br />
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
I also wouldn't single out female students. I do think you can signal that you are a supportive ally in various subtle and not-so-subtle ways, especially at the start of class. For example, giving the students a survey wherein you ask for their names, preferred names/nicknames, and pronouns indicates that you are a person who understands that pronouns are a thing worth asking/caring about. This can indicate to marginalized students that you are more likely to be educated/aware of gender dynamics overall and thus they may feel more comfortable approaching you with concerns. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
My take is: Many women or other members of underrepresented groups *know* that life can be challenging as a woman in homework groups. Having someone tell me those challenges neither solves them, nor makes me feel much better. On the other hand, having you publicly talk to everyone, men included, about challenges that groups face, covering elements like subconscious bias, diversity/groupthink, etc, and the ways those forces hinder effective teamwork, might frankly resonate more with the women than singling them out, and might actually get the guys to think about their lives/privilege/behavior a little bit.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
What you might do, if you don't necessarily want to go the random route, is ask *all* the students at the beginning (as part of a start of semester survey) if they have someone they want to work with. You can say something like "I haven't decided yet how to assign groups but I am willing to entertain suggestions, so let me know by filling out this form; I will not share your answers with anyone." If all the women pick someone reasonable, and all pairs are matched (like I say Jean and Jean says me), then you let them pick their own. That way you're neither saying "HEY WOMEN YOU ARE BEING SINGLED OUT" but you can still get at the information you want.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
We do assign students to groups pseudo-randomly, which is honestly pretty consistent with the literature. We ask for schedule availability (there's an online tool for this I can dig up) and use that to assign groups, looking to maximize times they can work together while honestly trying, when we can, to split up known cliques.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
This is all made easier by the fact that I teach a class explicitly about software engineering, including teamwork and process, and so we can very easily and truthfully say: You will go work for a company and get assigned to work with a team of people you do not know, and so being able to do that effectively is one of the learning goals of this class. The students are generally receptive to this argument, even though there are always a dysfunctional team or two. Teaching a systems-y class lends itself to the same line of argumentation: either they're going to industry or academia, and regardless, they need to learn to work with people who are not their friends.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
The literature is mixed on group composition. There is some evidence that putting members of underrepresented groups together is good in early classes (100-200 level), and additional evidence that past that, it doesn't really matter (because if you haven't dropped out yet, group composition is unlikely to be the deciding factor?).</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Other thoughts on what we do: </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
(a) We provide opportunities for individual assignments/assessments, ideally with each group assignment or milestone (so the first part is group work, and a smaller component is to be done individually). This lets us identify malfunction and ensures that we are actually assessing individual as well as group performance, </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
(b) We do not do peer grading by default but reserve the right to start if teams report serious problems. Peer grading skews incentives within groups in a way that interferes with our particular learning goals in an SE context. However, it might work in your context where the "learn to work in teams" is less explicitly a goal of the course. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
(c) (speaking to your concern about students being hesitant to surface or discuss issues with you) At various points in the semester we specifically survey the groups about how they think they're doing and aggregate the feedback from everyone to send it back to them (these are teams of 3--5, so it's easier to do anonymously than teams of 2). The form we used is based on literature on assessing group performance; I can find it if you're interested. We then reach out to students who are reporting problems. We talk to them individually and then also reach out to the whole group as appropriate (if the individual student says they're OK with it). We do encourage them to try to sort it out by talking about it amongst themselves, and regardless, we follow up with the individual students to see how they feel after a week or so. We do not use those feedback forms for grading in any way (and we tell them so). I have found that about half the time, the frustrated students just want to vent for a half hour and then say "yeah I feel better, no need to do anything else." ;-) When we bring them in as groups, we try to make them do as much of the talking as possible. Like "Hey everyone, how's it going? What do you think you're doing that's working well? What are you doing that's not working well? How can you fix it?"</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
(d) We cover effective teamwork in class at the start of the semester; practices like "have specific roles that you rotate; document agreements and assignment of responsibilities" (also from the literature---I think the Oakley article Jean linked). I'd emphasize both the explicit assignment as well as the "rotation" aspect of the roles---otherwise, the female students tend to get "scribe" duties all the time. We've debated ways to enforce those practices (like asking for documentation of who does what), but have never formally done so. </div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Honestly, I've never heard anyone say that having the students pick their groups worked out particularly well, frankly. There are profs who say "Oh, but they complain if we assign them randomly!" And perhaps I'm too cavalier, but my response is: so? They also complain if the tests are hard and if we give them too much homework, and we do it anyway because it serves our pedagogical goals. I feel the same way about assigned groups.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
Assigned groups don't solve all sources of team dysfunction, of course, and so I think we should as a curricular point do more to mitigate the risks that groupwork poses particularly to marginalized students and to teach students how to work together. They spend their childhoods being told they're not allowed to work with others, and then we throw them into teamwork situations with no training, and then are surprised when they're terrible at it. I think covering those challenges and strategies to mitigate them and proactively paying attention to team dynamics over the course of the semester is important to help them learn, though I by no means think we have a complete answer on that.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8px;">
-CLG</div>
</div>
</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-2976175460146427442016-11-29T20:13:00.002-08:002016-11-30T19:51:59.101-08:00Why We Need to Talk About the Collaboration Problem<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Today I spoke with a Computer Science professor who is finishing a semester of teaching a notoriously challenging advanced undergraduate course.<br />
<br />
"I figured out the problem with my female students," he told me. "It's their <i>partners</i>."<br />
<br />
All semester, this colleague--let's call him Albus Dumbledore--had been telling me about the strange phenomenon of drama with his female students and their project partners. The course has a significant project component, and successful completion of the project usually depended on both partners pulling their weight. Mediating partner disputes became the responsibility of the instructor. And what the instructor noticed was that an alarming fraction of the disputes seemed to happen when one of the partners was female.<br />
<br />
After wondering all semester how bias might contribute to the drama of the female students' partners, Albus had a relevation. The female students complaining about their partners all seemed to have better overall grades than their partners. Not only did the partners have lower GPAs, but many of them were from outside of Computer Science. Albus surmised that these partners were, in fact, probably not pulling their weight, and that the students had every right to complain.<br />
<br />
"But why would these strong students choose such bad partners?" he asked.<br />
<br />
That female students had bad partners was, to me, not surprising. After all, nobody had asked me to work on any problem set until the second semester of my sophomore year, and a fellow student only asked me after obtaining an unprotected copy of course grades on our department servers and discovering I had the second-highest midterm score in one of our courses. I told Albus about how a friend once confessed to me that before she had gotten to know me, she had forbade her boyfriend from working with me. I told him about how problem set partners often preferred to solve problems <i>for</i> me rather than <i>with</i> me. My best collaboration in college had been with another woman, and she had been so initially skeptical of my abilities that it took me at least half of a semester to win her over with how fast and how correct my code was.<br />
<br />
"So it's not by choice," Albus concluded. "What can we do about this?"<br />
<br />
Important question. For my first few years of college, the collaboration problem had left me feeling so isolated and so much in doubt of my abilities that I often thought about switching away from Computer Science. If not for a chance encounter with a friend, one year behind me and facing similar problems, I might have left. What began as a quick hello as our paths intersected on the way back from class turned into a long discussion about the difficulties we both had in finding people who would collaborate with us. I had graded this woman's homework in multiple classes, so I knew the problem was not that she was not capable. This was when I began to realize that the problem may not be with me, but with the way people perceived me--and other women.<br />
<br />
Years later, when I was starting Graduate Women at MIT, this conversation led me to put together a panel on collaboration--specifically, on collaborating as women in male-dominated fields. I felt so validated when the panelists--three women at various stages in their careers, each at the top of her field--said what I had observed for years, but had never dared to say out loud. It can be hard to collaborate with men, one panelist said: they often talk <i>at</i> you rather than <i>to </i>you because they are socialized to impress women. It can be harder to collaborate with two men, another panelist said: they will often talk only to each other while trying to impress you. (<span style="font-size: small;">I don't like to make blanket statements about all
people of a gender, just like I don't like to make blanket statements
of all people from a culture, but these kinds of conversations
can be helpful for recognizing patterns.</span><span style="font-size: small;">)</span> While much of this advice was unsurprising, and also depressing, it felt incredibly powerful to hear someone else say these statements out loud. Talking about this explicitly seemed like the first step towards solving the problem.<br />
<br />
In the intervening years, I've collected much more evidence of the problem than I have solutions. It is undeniable that collaborations account for much of people's success in technical settings. Albus talked about how, in his class, the students with subpar partners struggled to complete their projects. A recent study I read* cited female academics' ability to travel for international collaboration as one of the biggest determinants of their success. Yet collaboration seems to remain a problem. At a recent lunch of Women@SCS in my department, I spoke about my experiences with Graduate Women at MIT, including about the collaboration panel, and the student kept returning to the issue of collaborating in a male-dominated field. Students asked about how to find collaborators who would take them seriously. Students asked about what to do in groups when people may not be listening to them. A student asked what to do if she has had so many negative collaboration experiences she is reluctant to collaborate anymore. A student said that she, too, felt like male collaborators were often trying to impress her rather than work with her, but she had thought it was in her head.<br />
<br />
After the recent lunch, a student asked me about the benefit of talking explicitly about these issues. Wouldn't it be better, she asked, to not draw attention to gender and wait for the problems to go away? I, too, would love to live in a post-gender world where people can just be people. Unfortunately, it seems that collaboration is a topic we need to address explicitly. Not only do these cross-gender/culture problems not seem to be going away on their own, but they also seem to be increasing certain inequalities. Especially in Computer Science, smart people have done an excellent job of solving many other problems of gender equality. I have full confidence that once we recognize this as a problem, we can find good solutions. I would love to hear your ideas.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* In the process of looking for this citation... Let me know if you have it!</span></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-72454103571997502062016-11-12T12:10:00.003-08:002016-11-12T12:21:13.608-08:00A Post-Election Email Exchange on Academia and Politics<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div>
Since Tuesday, I've been thinking about what we could be doing better--in terms of encouraging civil participation, in terms of satisfying the needs of the people who did participate in the last election. I don't yet have fully-formed thoughts, but in the meantime here's a recent email exchange.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
--<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" class="ajC"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI"><span class="gD" name="Jean Yang">Jean Yang</span> </span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Robert M Ochshorn,<br />Chinmay Kulkarni <chinmayk andrew.cmu.edu=""></chinmayk></span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 8:27 AM</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">subject:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Academia and politics</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
In an email thread the other day, a colleague wondered whether we should be more like the "universities of the
60s" and take a more active role in politics. I had thought then that
this wasn't the case, that the issue was these rural voters we couldn't
reach, but then I learned that only 1/3 of millenials voted. I came upon this thread on
Twitter today:<br />
<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=https://twitter.com/FuckTheory&source=gmail&ust=1479067106902000&usg=AFQjCNFFXMZa0AeC80txOBRTf2kp7xJEzw" href="https://twitter.com/FuckTheory" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/FuckTheory</a><br />
It's
not *quite* my experience, but I think it's useful to talk more about
the politics associated with science, and not just the politics of how
we talk about science.<br />
<br />
<div>
An underlying theme of my
seminar has been "politics is everything," but previously the scope had
been limited to discussing why papers were written the way they were,
why certain papers were considered important, the actual impact of
papers with respect to some notion of "real world." Yesterday we spent
the first thirty minutes talking about the election, and I made a point
to talk about the mechanics of the electoral system the way we've been
talking about the mechanics of the publication system--something I've
gotten pretty worked up about is voter protections. Later we talked about the relationship between science and funding, and how projects could be for both good (e.g. curing disease) and sinister (e.g. surveillance) purposes.
The students seemed to appreciate this discussion, and my one student
had that nice quote: "We <span class="il">may</span> be solving biological cancer and creating a social cancer."</div>
<div>
I
previously didn't know how far to push things when it came to talking
about the social aspects of science, especially since this is a class in
the Computer Science Department, but the students have seemed to appreciate it when I've talked about systems, hierarchies, and the
underlying reasons things happen the way they do. I've been thinking
about how to connect my relatively narrow academic activism to more
generalizable messages and lessons for students who are going to
graduate and be the technical/scientific elite.<br />
<br />
--<br />
Jean Yang<br />
<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://jeanyang.com&source=gmail&ust=1479067106902000&usg=AFQjCNEMaxBSKGzj9v5ari2S9xOPimaRoQ" href="http://jeanyang.com/" target="_blank">website</a> | <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://twitter.com/jeanqasaur&source=gmail&ust=1479067106902000&usg=AFQjCNH2UAnO1UvuylHvhjqG04GCKBIr5Q" href="http://twitter.com/jeanqasaur" target="_blank">twitter</a><br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" class="ajC"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI"><span class="gD" name="Chinmay Kulkarni">Chinmay Kulkarni</span> <span class="go"></span> </span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Jean Yang,</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">cc:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Robert M Ochshorn</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Fri, Nov 11, 2016 at 10:13 AM</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">subject:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Re: Academia and politics</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="ajy">
Activist
campuses are great, if they know what they are activating. The 60s
coalesced around peace and civil rights, but what do we want now?<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I've
been reading a lot into social disenfranchisement, and I worry that
things are only going to get worse. Automation is an exponential
process, so we're kinda screwed if we don't figure out what people who
don't have jobs should do. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
To me, this translates to two actionable things:</div>
<div>
1.
We've got to start teaching students to take initiative. You can't be
the elite if you are a cog. We've got to start thinking about how to
make students more entrepreneurial so they don't have to face a time
when they have no "job"</div>
<div>
2. we are currently letting
mathematicians and engineers run the world without a clue about how to
reason about ethics or about the social fabric that ties us together.
That has to stop. <span class="_3oh- _58nk">We've got to go beyond "You just tell me the utility and I'll maximise it" to one that is a lot more examined.</span> Otherwise the
masses who get left behind are going to be (rightly) electing Trumpian
candidates. </div>
<div>
3. Finally I agree with your actions. Academics
got divorced from morality as a result of governmental crackdowns on
activist campuses: <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://www.irwinator.com/124/123.htm&source=gmail&ust=1479067106913000&usg=AFQjCNEV8QAfbhdMYb1Ui_vE0nGmzD0wAQ" href="http://www.irwinator.com/124/123.htm" target="_blank">http://www.irwinator.com/124/<wbr></wbr>123.htm</a> And look where it's got us. We cannot train an intellectual elite without moral values.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span class="il">Chinmay</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-52024455451138898672016-10-30T17:32:00.000-07:002016-10-30T20:40:39.257-07:00Dropbox Selective Sync Bug, or How It Took a Whole Evening to Update My Profile Photo<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I encountered a pretty bad Dropbox bug today. I'm wondering if anybody else has encountered anything similar, and also wanted to share how I got around it in case it happens to anybody else.<br />
<br />
This evening I was changing my Twitter profile photo back to the usual photo, as one is wont to due on a Sunday evening while procrastinating work. I was horrified to discover that <i>the photo was nowhere to be found</i>. In fact, my entire "photos" folder containing all of my key photos of the last few years was gone. It was not in my machine's Dropbox folder, not in <i>any </i>of my machines' Dropbox folders, and not on the Dropbox website.<br />
<br />
I was not entirely surprised. Over the last few months I've been having some problems maintaining a <a href="http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/share-your-dropbox-folder-between-windows-and-linux-using-a-data-partition" target="_blank">shared Dropbox folder between my Linux and Windows partitions</a>. I think the main problem is that Dropbox for Linux is simply not very good, but the fact that my use case is so fringe probably doesn't help. My trajectory of use has gone something like this: set things up according to some blog post; enjoy file sharing across partitions for some time; start getting strange error messages about starting Dropbox on Linux; <i>sit helplessly and watch as something strange happens</i>. Previously, the "something strange" involved Dropbox failing to work anymore. This time, involved my files failing to exist anymore.<br />
<br />
<b>Bug: selective sync doesn't uphold its end of the bargain. </b>This latest episode of something strange happening had to do with my using the "selective sync" feature. This feature supposedly allows users to select which folders each machine syncs with Dropbox, allowing users to store terabytes of data on Dropbox (because that's what we're paying for) without needing to eat up terabytes of data on each machine. When you choose to selectively sync, an icon appears assuring you that the files are disappearing only from your machine, and not from all of Dropbox. Except, in my case, <i>the files disappeared from all of Dropbox</i>. I assume what happened was that the selective sync had registered as a deletion, but not a proper deletion, or otherwise it would have made it easier for me to retrieve the files.<br />
<br />
<b>Fix: do sketchy things to get at files. </b>After sending Tech Support a strongly worded note about how-could-they-lose-all-my-files, I started poking around the Dropbox website. I discovered a "Deleted Files" section that allows you to restore files you deleted up to a month ago. Restoring here recovered<i> </i>many of the missing files, but not all of them. (After all, I had lost the files through a bug, and not in some normal way of deleting files.) I then went to the "Events" page and confirmed that there had been an event October 2, after syncing my Linux partition, that involved the deletion of over 1000 files. (Thanks, Dropbox, for not sending me a message asking if I was sure this was something I wanted to do.) Still no sign of the "photos" folder and the desired new/old profile photo. All I needed was a link to the folder. Once I had that, I could request to restore the files.<br />
<br />
After this, I was almost out of ideas when I realized that some of my Dropbox "shared" folders had been subfolders under the "photos" folder, and that the Dropbox website has a separate section for managing "shared" folders. (When other people share folders with you, you can choose whether to actively add the folders to your Dropbox. I had un-added most of my folders before I upgraded to more space.) So I went there and and restored these folders. Then I looked in the "Recents" tab and <i>there it was</i>, a link to the "photos" folder, corresponding to a notification that subfolders had been re-added to my Dropbox. Now that I had a link to the "photos" folder, I was able to click on the "show deleted files" icon. Once I was able to see the deleted files, I was able to restore them. (And I've been doing them one subfolder at a time, while writing this post, because there are bugs when I try to do multiples at a time...)<br />
<br />
And this, ladies, gentlemen, and people who identify as neither ladies nor gentlemen, is the story of how I changed back my Twitter profile photo.<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusions. </b>All software has bugs, so I can't be particularly angry with Dropbox, but there are many ways in which Dropbox can improve user experience with respect to this particular situation. Here are my main takeaways:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Until Dropbox pays more attention to their Linux product, one should be wary of selective sync. (Dropbox! We're paying so much money for this! The least you could do is to not put us through these emotional roller coasters by deleting our files after promising not to.)</li>
<li>If you're not getting what you want out of a user interface, it may be possible to do sketchy things until you can get where you want to go. But Dropbox could also improve its interface for accessing files that may have been disappeared against the will of the users.</li>
<li>There are tradeoffs to using something like Dropbox instead of managing your file backup yourself. On the one hand, you give up control and are subject to their bugs wiping out your entire digital photo archive. On the other hand, respectable companies do keep a lot of backups and with some work you should be able to recover things. So, thanks Dropbox for not deleting these files altogether, even though you really didn't make it easy for me to find them.</li>
</ul>
<div>
And, of course, this brings us to my main points in life. We need to understand our software better! Better languages and tools would allow programmers to better understand what is going on, making these kinds of strange bugs less likely! Allowing programmers to express high-level policies about consistency and desired system behavior would also decrease the prevalence of these kinds of situations! Instead of funding Dropbox, maybe people should fund programming languages research kthxbai!</div>
</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-52973979232916743802016-09-30T17:28:00.001-07:002016-09-30T21:45:15.219-07:00On Avoiding Stress Culture<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div>
I've been at Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor for a little over a month now, and the students tell me we're approaching "Deep Semester." The glow of summer vacation has worn off. People are skipping classes and skipping meals in pursuit of Excellence. A pall of Seriousness has descended upon the Gates Hillman Complex. (Many days this week, the Seriousness has physically manifested as heavy rain.)<br />
<br />
Now is a good time to remind myself that I can stay out of it*. Jim Morris, the former Dean of CMU's School of Computer Science, once told me, "Stress culture is worst among junior faculty. <i>Avoid it</i>." Jim seems to live by this advice. He teaches a course called <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/changecarnegiemellon/home" target="_blank">Campus Stress as a Wicked Problem</a>**. My friend Chinmay, who is in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute with him, tells me Jim is one of the few professors on campus who isn't "so busy" all the time.<br />
<br />
At first glance, it may seem difficult to avoid stress culture as a junior faculty member. After all, everyone knows that being junior faculty means working all the time, never sleeping, and having so little of a life outside of work that you can only keep plants alive if they are in the office. But people also seem to think being a PhD student means working all the time, and there are many examples of successful people who did not work all the time as PhD students. Thus I'd like to posit the hypothesis that the idea that one must work "all the time" as junior faculty comes more from a culture of stress than necessity for success.<br />
<br />
But why, you might wonder, would this stress culture exist among junior faculty members if it were <i>unnecessary</i>? I speculate below:</div>
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Your responsibilities are much more divided than they were before and it's difficult to juggle. It's possible to spend <i>all</i> time doing any of the following: teaching, advising, writing grant proposals, and attending committee meetings. Also note that this list does not include the reason you presumably became faculty in the first place: doing <i>research</i>. The solution is not to implode, but to compromise.</li>
<li>The closer you get to the top of a hierarchy, the more intense people get. When I go out into the real world people find me to be a total megalomaniac. My academic peers don't seem to think the same thing about me.</li>
<li>A lot of people who made it all the way to becoming faculty did get there by working all the time. Though not the only way, this <i>is</i> a legitimate way of working.</li>
<li>As humans we're not engineered to say "no" too often, and there are infinite things to say no to as a faculty member. If I said yes to every meeting and answered every email I'd die of not eating and not sleeping very quickly. (This might be a harder thing for women because we're socialized to be agreeable.)</li>
</ul>
<div>
<br />
In support of my hypothesis that stress culture is something to be eschewed rather than embraced, I present a list of my role models when it comes to finding space and balance:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>My undergraduate professor Radhika Nagpal. This recent <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602100/robo-swarm/" target="_blank">excellent profile of her</a> talks about how, as junior faculty, she avoided politics and made it a rule not to check email on weekends. She wrote the most-read post on <i>Scientific American</i>'s website about her approach to the tenure track called "<a href="https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-awesomest-7-year-postdoc-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-tenure-track-faculty-life/" target="_blank">The Awesomest 7-year Postdoc</a>."</li>
<li>Turing Award winning MIT professor Barbara Liskov, who famously worked only 9 to 5 on weekdays, working an evening here and there only if there was a deadline.</li>
<li>The aforementioned Jim Morris, and also my friend Chinmay, who seem to make time to do the things they want to do.</li>
<li>My postdoc advisor Walter Fontana, who lives by the Goethe quote "Do not hurry; do not rest." He seems to have always found the space to do the science he wants to do. He once told me it is important to have a "strong internal compass" and know when <i>you</i> believe your work to be good so you can avoid pressures to hire more and publish more.</li>
</ul>
Stress culture might not be bad for everyone***, but it certainly is not productive for me. (My friend Seth once observed that I seem to work best in the complete absence of pressure.) So though I could be doing more work, right now I'm going to go read a book. Good night. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* In <i>Influence</i>, Robert Cialdini says if you want to do something, tell the entire world. Then you'll feel more accountable and be more likely to do it.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** The course focuses on problems at CMU, but in terms of pressure CMU is not so different from the other elite higher-education institutions I've experienced.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">*** A student once told me I needed to put <i>more</i> pressure on him so he would get more work done! </span></div>
</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-31785803692878456542016-09-24T19:12:00.003-07:002016-09-24T21:39:43.581-07:00Some of My Niceness Role Models<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Yesterday my friend Grzegorz asked me if I knew how to prevent promising students from becoming "brilliant jerks," and I <a href="http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2016/09/question-correcting-brilliant-students.html" target="_blank">opened up this question to the Internet</a> because I didn't know. One theme in the responses is to set a good example, demonstrate that you value niceness, and make visible examples of people who are both brilliant and nice. This made me realize that niceness is high on my list of qualities I appreciate in people, and that I keep in mind a growing list of "niceness role models" who remind me to be not-a-jerk in different ways. Here is a subset of those people.<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><b>Margo Seltzer</b>, my undergraduate academic advisor at Harvard. Despite being so busy, famous, important, etc., Margo always made time for us. She took meetings with me whenever I asked, responded to my long angsty emails with similarly long emails of advice, and took me to lunch every now and then to make sure I was doing all right. When our robotics team was in the RoboCup World Cup in Germany, she came to Germany to cheer us on (though it probably didn't hurt that the real World Cup was there at the same time) and even brought me German gummy bears, because she knew of my love for candy and bears. And this was not because I was particularly special--other students I've talked to are in awe of how much time and space she makes for us. My friend Diana once said that if Margo is not too busy and important for us, then who are we to ever think we are too busy or important for anybody else.</li>
<li><b>Armando Solar-Lezama,</b> my PhD advisor at MIT. As a PhD student I was something like a research cat, always bringing in random ideas and visitors I had "hunted" into Armando's office to see how he might engage with them. Throughout my PhD Armando was incredibly generous with his time and attention, always engaging with whatever--or whomever--I brought, and never telling me that I had wasted his time, or to stop. Whenever I'm inclined not to listen to an idea or person, I think of how patiently Armando listened to us--and with genuine curiosity.</li>
<li><b>Martin Rinard</b>, my other thesis committee member at MIT. Martin has a reputation in our field for being loud, controversial, and not necessarily the warmest person on the planet, but he also has a reputation among the PhD students for being an incredibly supportive advisor and mentor. Martin goes above and beyond to train students in creative ways. He once made one of his international students practice his speaking skills by "re-lecturing" every one of his morning lectures in the evening for the class he was teaching one semester. Throughout my PhD, Martin felt I needed to learn to fight better, so he put me in situations of needing to defend myself whenever possible (most publicly throughout my entire thesis defense). Whenever I'm inclined not to care about other people's growth, I think about how generous Martin was with his time and advice.</li>
<li><b>Max Krohn</b>, who co-founded Spark Notes, OKCupid, and Keybase. Max did his undergrad at Harvard and his PhD at MIT and is now worth so much money that when I hosted him to speak at MIT I had to meet several times with the handler MIT assigned him because they had identified as a potentially high-impact donor. While many people of Max's profile are too important to be nice to anybody, Max is incredibly nice, and also generous with his time and attention. I had first met Max when my friend (and co-founder of a company that never ended up existing) reached out to Max for advice, and Max has continued to impress me with how unassuming he is, how much he listens, and how much he genuinely tries to be helpful. My interactions with Max reinforce the lesson that I should not ever view myself as too successful to be nice, and to pay it forward when it comes to supporting younger people.</li>
<li>My friend <b>Alison Hill.</b> Alison is a brilliant and very successful HIV researcher who, at a fairly early point in her career, received a prestigious Gates Foundation grant to run her own lab. How I've always known her, though, is as the friend I could always count on to say "yes" to fun things, and to be there to talk if I needed it. Most recently, Alison spent over 30 hours designing, choreographing, and organizing the rehearsals for a dance-skit for our friend Adeeti's wedding. Whenever I think I am too busy for my friends (which happens all the time), I think about what Alison would do.</li>
<li><b>Dominic Mazzoni<i>, </i></b>someone I worked with when I interned at Google in 2007. He was not my mentor, but I interacted with him quite a bit because I used the (very useful and well-engineered) machine learning tools he was developing. I was so impressed with how <i>nice</i> he was in all of his emails and code reviews: he would thank the sender for the correspondence, be complimentary about legitimately good things, and convey what seemed like genuine joy about the interaction. I especially appreciated that he took my questions seriously, even though I was some random intern--and not even his intern. Interacting with Dominic reminded me of how nice it can be when someone tries to make interactions pleasant, and whenever I remember to do so (which is not often enough), I try to be more like him. </li>
<li><b>Einstein</b>. Every time I feel like I am too busy to engage in correspondence to a stranger, I think about <a href="http://www.themarysue.com/albert-einstein-little-girl/" target="_blank">Einstein's letter to a young girl interested in science</a>, and how if Einstein wasn't too busy and important changing the world to respond to people, then I shouldn't be either.</li>
</ul>
I feel grateful that I know so many people who are simultaneously so brilliant and so nice! (And there are so many more nice, brilliant people in my life!) Obviously I would die if I tried to be as nice all of these people combined (and most of the time I forget to try to be nice at all), but it's very useful to have people like these in mind to remind myself to be nicer. And I think that for all communities I'm in, it would improve overall morale to give more credit for niceness and not just brilliance.<br />
<br /></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-72538614281489815042016-09-23T08:22:00.001-07:002016-09-23T08:27:24.054-07:00Question: "Correcting brilliant students"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A question for all of you.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" class="ajC"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI"><span class="gD" name="Grzegorz Kossakowski">Grzegorz Kossakowski</span> <span class="go"></span> </span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Jean</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 10:51 AM</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">subject:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Correcting brilliant students</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Hi Jean,<br />
<br />
<div>
</div>
<div>
I know from your tweets you're busy so I'll
get right to the point. I'm looking for examples of academic teachers
who try to edify brilliant freshmen students in hope to steer them away
from the unfortunate path of a brilliant jerk. Based on your blog posts,
I thought you might be the right person to ask and you would find the
subject interesting.</div>
<div>
</div>
<br />
I'm asking about this in
context of a recent conversation with the head of algorithms and
datastructure research at University of Warsaw. He's called here in
Poland as father of our ongoing successes in ACM competitions. He have
heard that University of Warsaw has a reputation of graduating people
who are really good but not pleasant to work with and he's looking for
ideas to correct that. I promised to try to help hence my email.<br />
<br />
<span class="HOEnZb adL"><span style="color: #888888;">-- </span></span><br />
<div data-smartmail="gmail_signature">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<span class="HOEnZb adL"><span style="color: #888888;">gkk</span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<span class="HOEnZb adL"><span style="color: #888888;">
</span></span>
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" class="ajC"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI"><span class="gD" name="Jean Yang">Jean Yang</span> <span class="go"></span> </span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Grzegorz Kossakowski</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 10:54 AM</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">subject:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Re: Correcting brilliant students</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Haha, you mean you can tell from my Tweets that I've been procrastinating work? ;)<br />
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div>
</div>
<br />
This
is a very good question. Hm! Could I turn this email into a blog post
and solicit suggestions from people? This is indeed an interesting
question to me and I don't know the answer.</div>
<br />
Jean</div>
</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com268tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-18458618039543731952016-09-17T11:53:00.001-07:002016-09-17T17:55:05.838-07:00Five Things More Important About a Research Project Than Being in Love<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I recently talked to an early PhD student trying to decide between two projects: one they were in love with, and one with a much longer list of "pros" including "more likely to go somewhere" and "the faculty involved have experience working in the area." I was surprised to learn that I was the <i>only person</i> (out of faculty and students alike!) who told her I would pick the second, more reliable project.<br />
<br />
It's not that I'm not a romantic*, but I do believe advice to make decisions based on feelings rather than facts can be dangerous. Apparently my point of view is so much in the minority that I need to write a blog post to elucidate my position.<br />
<br />
Like most of you, I am a sucker for stories about people finding meaning, love, etc. When I watched movies as a kid, I would always be so confused when the female lead turned down a proposal from a perfectly eligible paramour**. But they look so good together! But they are <i>in love</i>! As time passed, however, I learned that there is this thing called happiness, that happiness is important, and that happiness depends on many more factors than looking good and being in love.<br />
<br />
And as I came to learn that all things in life are the same, I learned that these lessons also apply to research. For me, the following things are as important, if not more important, than the specific dream I am chasing in any given research project:<br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><b>The day-to-day.</b> I'd love to be a lab scientist for the glamorous photographs of me in my lab (and of course the direct contributions to science, etc.), but I am pretty sure I would die if I had to spend my days doing wet lab experiments. (In high school my "will become" in my senior yearbook was "a better lab partner." This unfortunately never happened. In college I loved studying organic chemistry but I would do things like accidentally shatter our sep funnel and throw it away, leaving my lab partner confused about why we were missing half our experiment.) What I love doing is coding, formalizing things every now and then, and apparently, spending days and days writing grant proposals and Powerpoint presentations. Hence my present set of projects.</li>
<li><b>Collaborators.</b> For some reason people love this idea of the lone scholar. (Maybe because it's hard enough to imagine one person who wants to work on such obscure stuff??) In reality, most science (and probably all other things in life) moves forward not only through single people sitting alone in their attics, but through conversations between people sitting in attics. It's good to know whether you like working by yourself, with a small handful of collaborators, or on massive collaborations where you can't ever tell how many other people are on the same Skype call. There are tradeoffs to each of these situations: the fewer people you collaborate with, the more "out there" your work can be. The more people you collaborate with, the bigger the project can be (for different senses of "big"). Especially when you are working hard, your collaborator interactions are most of your entire world, so it is important to like both the collaboration format and the collaborators.</li>
<li><b>Community.</b> People tell you that the PhD is about the relationship between a student and their advisor, but it's really about the student entering into a set of conversations within a community. My happiness certainly depends on my position within a community: how much the community accepts me/my work; how much my community values my work and similar work. I like being part of a research community that shares my values; I like it when my community accepts me as one of them and engages with me about my work. As a young researcher, your community is especially important because these are the people who will shape your values and your ideas about what it means to do research.</li>
<li><b>Evaluation.</b> I used to think that once work was good enough, it would be universally recognized as good, and then we could all celebrate and move on. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and each community has its own customs about how it evaluates work. The evaluation mechanisms determine what work gets recognized as good and ultimately how people work. I much prefer my work to be evaluated on things that feel more objective than subjective, and I want to believe the evaluation is demonstrating something about a universal truth, rather than being a measurement of a particular artifact. (For these reasons, I prefer to be evaluated on correctness--in the form of theorems--than user studies or performance numbers.) This determines what I choose to work on and what I emphasize when communicating about my results, decisions that play a large role in my work-happiness.</li>
<li><b>Resources.</b> Behind all things in life there is the question of money. While most people would certainly not like their work to be completed dictated by what funding is available, how much funding there is and where it comes from determines many things about your work: whether you have funding to travel to conferences; whether you have additional funding meetings where you are to present concrete deliverables. There are also other resources besides the financial. How many people at your university could give you feedback on this project? How many other people could contribute to actual work on the project? For young researchers, there is also the question of how much attention the advisor would provide on a project, and also the attention other researchers in the field might provide.</li>
</ol>
Of course, everyone has their own happiness function. I'm sure many other people value the idea of being in love with their research more, and value some of these less. No matter what your value function, it is important to think about the dimensions of your happiness, and how project decisions fit.<br />
<br />
Supplementary reading:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Cal Newport's "<a href="http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-passion-trap-how-the-search-for-your-lifes-work-is-making-your-working-life-miserable/" target="_blank">The Passion Trap: How the Search for Your Life's Work is Making Your Working Life Miserable</a>."</li>
<li>"<a href="https://www.quora.com/How-common-is-it-for-PhD-students-to-do-work-in-projects-that-theyre-not-passionate-in" target="_blank">How common is it for PhD students to do work they are not passionate in?</a>," on Quora with an answer by me.</li>
<li>"<a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/" target="_blank">In the Name of Love</a>," a <i>Jacobin</i> article critiquing the "do what you love" mantra from a different perspective.</li>
</ul>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* Hm, people have called me the "least romantic person they have ever met."</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** Hey, it's not my fault the movies I watched conformed to heteronormative tropes.</span></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-82981837118936791092016-09-10T09:37:00.000-07:002016-09-10T09:52:09.337-07:00A Small Reading List for New PhD Students<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
It's my first semester being on the other side! Giving advice is so fun because it validates all of my life choices! I put together a list of reading for my own students and thought others might find it useful too.<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><a href="http://www.cs.virginia.edu/%7Erobins/YouAndYourResearch.html" target="_blank">You and Your Research</a>, a talk by Turing Award winning mathematician Richard Hamming with so much good advice: work hard; don't be afraid to work on small problems; learn to tolerate ambiguity.</li>
<li><a href="http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-passion-trap-how-the-search-for-your-lifes-work-is-making-your-working-life-miserable/" target="_blank">The Passion Trap: How the Search for Your Life's Work is Making Your Working Life Miserable</a> by Georgetown Computer Science professor Cal Newport, on how you should expect to do work and <i>then</i> fall in love with it, rather than the other way around.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/david-allen-on-how-to-fix-your-life/263883/" target="_blank">David Allen on How to Fix Your Life</a> by a journalist at <i>The Atlantic</i>, on setting up your life so you can focus.</li>
<li><a href="http://mybiasedcoin.blogspot.com/2008/12/what-should-grad-students-be-learning.html" target="_blank">What Else Should Grad Students Be Learning?</a> by Harvard Computer Science professor Michael Mitzenmacher, on important non-technical skills PhD students should learn.</li>
<li><a href="http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2012/11/on-productivity-in-grad-school.html" target="_blank">On Productivity in Grad School</a> by me. It's harder to summarize your own writing.</li>
</ul>
I would also like to reiterate advice from my undergraduate professor Radhika Nagpal that it's important to take all advice with a grain of salt, as most of it is wishful thinking and highlights. I would like to add that taking productivity advice from other people is about as useful as taking diet advice from fashion magazines. Everyone has different goals and everyone is working with different biology and a different environment. The concept of "productivity" seems to also be subject to various strange fads.<br />
<br />
Even so, I would love to hear your recommendations.</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-37122115839295042016-09-07T19:00:00.001-07:002016-09-07T19:30:13.793-07:00Yet Another Blog Post on Industry vs. Academia<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I recently had the following chat conversation with a Former Student about the possibility of doing a PhD in Computer Science*.<br />
<br />
<b>FS: </b>What's the value of grad school if I don't want to stay in academia (other than "grad school might be fun")?<br />
<b>FS: </b>There, I *think* that's the question I've been trying to ask<br />
<b>Me: </b>Oh<br />
<b>Me: </b>Enrichment<br />
<b>Me: </b>You learn to think differently when you go so deep into one thing<br />
<b>Me: </b>You also learn to execute<br />
<b>Me: </b>It's very challenging to do a project start to finish<br />
<b>Me: </b>Maybe I'll write a blog post for you<br />
<b>FS: </b>That's a good reason, but it isn't something I haven't gotten in industry<br />
<b>FS: </b>In fact actually I thought that one advantage of grad school would be that id get to do a more diverse set of things<br />
<b>FS: </b>Than I do now<br />
<br />
So here is the blog post in which I expand on my point and explain what I see as some skills one may develop more while doing a PhD** than working at a company. (I have this other "<a href="http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2011/12/reasons-to-pursue-phd.html" target="_blank">academia is fun</a>" post about the PhD.)<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Commitment. </b>A defining characteristic of a good PhD thesis is that it solves a problem of sufficient scale and initial uncertainty ("a big enough research problem"). This usually involves commitment in at least two dimensions, time and emotion. Especially in non-theory areas of Computer Science, problems worth solving can take years before yielding satisfactory results. This kind of timeline seems quite different from what I've seen in industry. Committing to a research problem also means committing to uncertainty and faith that you will one day find a solution. This often involves believing in ideas that many other people don't believe in--in fact, Great Work is often met with initial disapproval. Learning how to become robust to other's lack of approval is useful for most of life. (And not something companies necessarily train you to do. In fact, it's in their best interest to train you for the opposite.)<br />
<br />
<b>Execution on open-ended problems. </b>The point of having a company is to build a product that makes money. A product is more likely to make money if it actually works. Thus, in companies, a lot of the focus seems to be on getting the details right on things we already know we can build. The more time I've spent at a company, the better of an engineer I've become, and the better at Engineering Process. In research groups, much of the focus is on collecting evidence that you could build things you previously weren't sure could really exist. While engineering is certainly a useful skill here, more important skills include prototyping ability, and the ability to deal with significant uncertainty during the research process. (This is perhaps why research code so often does not meet engineers' standards.)<br />
<br />
<b>Self-direction. </b>For many, the PhD involves long stretches of time working on one's own. (In the very least, the dissertation is a document that you are expected to write on your own.) Most advisors will not micromanage this time, especially in the later stages of a PhD. As a result, sooner or later PhD students will need to manage the relationship between work and time day-to-day and also month-to-month and even year-to-year. Though my industry internships have all been pretty self-directed, in which I was given a project and told to make as much progress as possible, I've been told this is not usually the case in companies. Self-direction makes you a more independent employee if you want to return to industry. On the one hand, people may feel comfortable giving you more responsibility. On the other hand, you may have trouble working for other people after getting used to working for yourself.<br />
<br />
<b>Emotional resilience. </b>There are three parts of most (many? my?) PhD experience(s) that do not seem to be part of most industry experiences: 1) solitary work, 2) long periods of thinking without doing, and 3) long periods of doing without having much to show for it. This leads to many existential crises, as the emotionally difficult nature of the process causes one to Question Everything. I'd like to think that people emerge stronger from these existential crises. One of my college roommates has been getting a PhD in Comparative Literature and during our PhDs we often discussed how our research situations forced us to deal with questions about our values and goals, and how we felt that this process of questioning led to important emotional growth. The existential crises that a PhD exposes you to seem more similar to the experience of starting a company than that of being employed by one.<br />
<br />
And on diversity of topics: in graduate school you will get breadth from classes, you will get to see a breadth of work in your field through reading papers, attending talks, and talking to other researchers, but depending on how your PhD is structured you may work on very few different projects. The Computer Science PhD provides a certain kind of intellectual breadth, rather than breadth of work.<br />
<br />
I'd like to add that the "graduate school vs. industry" debate is like the "public school vs. private school" debate, or other debates that make no sense in a vacuum. Yes, in principle there are many ideological differences, but there are very applied research groups and very experimental industry groups. In practice, it really depends on the specific circumstances. Even so, one way to look at a PhD is as an investment into having greater access to experimental groups. There may be industry groups now that let you do out-there things, but without a PhD you rely on certain companies continuing to exist.<br />
<br />
Anyway, as much as I would like said Former Student to do a PhD (and specifically with me :)) it really depends on FS's particular situation, hopes, and dreams. And since everyone's situation is different, I'm also curious to hear what others think they "get" out of a PhD (other than "fun," and the opportunity to continue on the academic track).<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">* I wrote this post with programming languages/systems research in mind. I'm curious how well it generalizes.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">** What I say definitely applies for students in top CS PhD programs with advisors who give them certain kinds of freedom. I'm not sure how it applies to everyone else.</span></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-57583407732744121562016-08-19T11:54:00.002-07:002016-08-19T11:55:56.659-07:00Ten Recipes for the Beginner Cook<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This blog post is dedicated to my college roommate Brigit, who has been ramping up her cooking efforts.</i> <br />
<br />
This week I've been on vacation with my college roommates and we've been having many conversations about how we've come a long way since learning how to boil water--for some of us, a skill acquired post-college. Being someone who likes food but is lazy about cooking, I've developed a repertoire of easy recipes over the years. Here are ten of them. <br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><b><a href="http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/aarti-sequeira/massaged-kale-salad-recipe.html" target="_blank">Massaged kale salad</a>.</b> Salads are kind of a loophole to adulthood: as long as you spend the time and money on good ingredients, all you have to do to "cook" a salad is wash some things and maybe chop some things. Massaging kale makes it feel a little less like cheating. (And kale is much better massaged.) </li>
<li><b><a href="http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/arugula-pear-salad-with-toasted-walnuts" target="_blank">Arugula walnut salad</a></b>. This salad is even less effort. Putting random fruit and random nuts into a salad always makes the salad better, both in terms of nutrition and how fancy it looks. Some weeks when I am really busy I just stock my kitchen with greens, fruit, and nuts. Sprouts (especially flavorful ones) are a nice touch, as well as thinly sliced radish.</li>
<li><b><a href="http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/oven-baked-salmon-recipe.html" target="_blank">Baked salmon</a>.</b> Good salmon (or any kind of fish, really) can be quite inexpensive and be really easy to make. (My college roommate Aliza says salmon is expensive in New York, but in Cambridge I usually spent $5-7 on half a pound of quite good salmon at my local Whole Foods.) Once you learn how to do it you can do variations on the different marinades to make it feel like a different dish every time.</li>
<li><b><a href="http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/skillet-roasted-spiced-okra" target="_blank">Skillet-roasted spiced okra</a>.</b> I love okra, but for a long time I did not realize how easy it is to cook for yourself. The recipe I linked to includes lots of spices (and is similar to <a href="http://www.vegrecipesofindia.com/bhindi-masala/" target="_blank">bhindi masal</a>a), but okra can be quite good with only cumin and turmeric, or even only with salt.</li>
<li><b><a href="http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/quinoa-tabbouleh-395939" target="_blank">Quinoa tabouleh</a>.</b> This is a really delicious and nutritious prepare-your-own lunch food. For a while I quit quinoa due to ethical concerns and used couscous instead, but these concerns <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/03/31/472453674/your-quinoa-habit-really-did-help-perus-poor-but-theres-trouble-ahead" target="_blank">turned out to be unfounded</a>.</li>
<li><b><a href="http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ellie-krieger/pasta-puttanesca-recipe.html" target="_blank">Pasta puttanesca</a></b>. This is a nice emergency hunger recipe because you can make it completely out of backup ingredients that last forever in your kitchen. One time I made pasta puttanesca completely out of found ingredients in the London apartment of my college roommate Marianne's uncle, to which I had been given a key and was instructed to wait for Marianne's post-midnight arrival.</li>
<li><b><a href="http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1014721-shakshuka-with-feta" target="_blank">Shakshuka</a></b>. This is a great brunch recipe that seems to impress people. It is one of those recipes that has a lot of ingredients (and there are many variations you can find online), but once you have the ingredients it's not very much work.</li>
<li><b><a href="http://www.jamieoliver.com/news-and-features/features/healthy-lentil-tomato-spinach-soup/#hQ1eDvZbgMPI1kD9.97" target="_blank">Lentil soup</a>.</b> This one takes a little more time, but none of the steps are difficult and you can make a batch that lasts a really long time and you can freeze parts of it.</li>
<li><b><a href="http://allrecipes.com/recipe/202380/chinese-sticky-rice-cake/" target="_blank">Chinese sticky rice cake</a>.</b> Every time I've made this, people have been amazed by both how delicious it is and how easy it was to make. You pretty much just put the ingredients together and stir. I substitute almond or soy milk and the recipe is still fine.</li>
<li><b>Noodles.</b> Those who have spent extended time with me know that they are an important staple of the Jean Yang diet. I wrote <a href="http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2009/09/skinny-on-asian-noodles.html" target="_blank">this blog post</a> about cooking with noodles in 2009. My college roommate Aliza wrote <a href="http://aliza.aufri.ch/tig/5-noodles" target="_blank">this essay</a> about how I got her into noodles.</li>
</ol>
Would be curious to hear yours. Enjoy!</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-39412097553069113002016-08-08T16:46:00.000-07:002016-08-08T20:24:59.738-07:00A Starter Reading List About Asian America<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Race in America isn't something I talk a lot about online, but it is something I think a lot about. Today I was giving my friend Seth a short reading list about being Asian American when I realized that 1) I have such a list and 2) other people might like to see it too.<br />
<br />
Here are some essays I like:<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li>Wesley Yang's <a href="http://nymag.com/news/features/asian-americans-2011-5/" target="_blank">"Paper Tigers"</a> in <i>NY Mag</i> about the "bamboo ceiling" and the culture clash between American and Asian-American values when it comes to achievement.</li>
<li>David Byunghyun Lee's <a href="http://gawker.com/transformed-into-white-gods-what-happens-in-america-wi-1494266254" target="_blank">"Transformed Into White Gods: What Happens in American Without Love,"</a> a beautiful and moving essay about the frustration, hopelessness, and hope of his immigrant experience. </li>
<li>Jenny Zhang's <a href="http://www.rookiemag.com/2015/04/far-away-from-me/" target="_blank">"Far Away From Me"</a> in <i>Rookie Mag</i> about the stereotypes people project onto Asian women.</li>
<li>Tracy Chou's <a href="https://medium.com/little-thoughts/the-uncomfortable-state-of-being-asian-in-tech-ab7db446c55b?source=user_profile---------7-" target="_blank">"The uncomfortable state of being Asian in tech"</a> on Medium about how we need to start talking about what it means to be Asian in tech.</li>
<li>Alton Wang's <a href="https://medium.com/@altonwang/when-i-grow-up-i-cant-be-president-b2e8aa83d6eb#.owbtjb298" target="_blank">"When I Grow Up I Can't Be President"</a> on Medium, about the Chinese-American experience.</li>
<li>Chenxing Han's <a href="http://www.lionsroar.com/were-not-who-you-think-we-are/" target="_blank">"We're Not Who You Think We Are"</a> on <i>Lion's Roar</i> about the marginalization of Asian-American Buddhists. (Chenxing also happens to be the first friend I made after moving to America.)</li>
</ul>
For a much longer read, I really liked Helen Zia's book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Asian-American-Dreams-Emergence-People/dp/0374527369" target="_blank"><i>Asian American Dreams</i></a>, about the formation of Asian American identity. (<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tea-That-Burns-Family-Chinatown/dp/0743236599" target="_blank">Tea that Burns</a> </i>is another good one about Chinese-American history. Fun fact: I wrote my high school junior history essay about the Chinatown that used to be in Pittsburgh. Yes, there was one until the city government put a highway through it.)<br />
<br />
Apparently our friend <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/natehilgeronline/research" target="_blank">Nate Hilger</a>, an economics professor at Brown, is doing research on discrimination against Asian-Americans. He has a working paper, "Upward Mobility and Discriminations: the Case of Asian-Americans," <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8J_qdFYwNJ6QVZxemc5c0NWTDA/view" target="_blank">here</a>. <br />
<br />
Of course, I've also been really enjoying the proliferation of TV shows featuring Asian-American immigrant family experiences: <i>Fresh Off the Boat</i>, <i>Master of None</i>, and <i>The Mindy Project</i> among them. <br />
<br />
Would love to hear your suggested reading/watching.</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-4488095618559896872016-06-25T10:34:00.003-07:002016-07-16T22:15:50.122-07:00Counter-Advice for the PhD<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Recently I attended the <a href="http://conf.researchr.org/track/pldi-2016/PLMW-PLDI-2016" target="_blank">Programming Languages Mentoring Workshop</a>, a program to introduce advanced undergraduates and early-stage PhD students to research in general and research in our field. (By the way, this is a fantastic workshop and I highly encourage students to attend!) While listening to advice from other academics and talking to the students about their questions, I realized that I have come to disagree with much of the conventional wisdom and advice for PhD students, some of which I have been guilty of re-dispensing. I express my dissent here.<br />
<br />
<i>Clarification: The workshop was not the source of all of the quotes! It was simply what got me thinking about the dangers of taking any one piece of advice too seriously. (The workshop itself is great for showcasing different points of view.)</i> <br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<i>"To decide what to work on, read lots of papers and then choose the best problem."</i><br />
One of my undergraduate professors once told me, "Take all advice with a grain of salt. Most advice is highlights and wishful thinking." This was one of the best pieces of advice anyone has ever given me. It is easy for people to give this kind of advice about choosing research problems <i>after</i> they have learned what makes a good research problem. The advice is far more difficult to follow for people who are still developing their research taste. While some people probably have chosen research problems this way and while it is helpful to more deeply understand your area, early-stage researchers sometimes just have to jump in, do things, and learn from the confusion.<br />
<br />
Also, in the early stages of a PhD, developing research skills (project management, time management, and communication of results) can be far more important than working on the best problem. In this case, I would recommend working on a problem that a mentor is sufficiently invested in to help you gain the skills you need.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<i>"Choose an advisor you are completely compatible with."</i><br />
This advice goes in the same category as the previous one. Once you have gone through the PhD and developed a deep understanding of who you are and who your advisor is, it is easy to think that a good situation can be easily recreated or a bad situation could have been more easily avoided. While you should look enough into your soul and do enough due diligence to make sure there are no glaring red flags, you should not worry if you do not feel like you know enough about your working style or preferences to choose a perfectly compatible advisor. Advisor-advisee relationships, like all other human relationships, depend a lot on many factors, only some of which are under the control of the two main participants, and also can evolve quite a bit over time.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<i>"Do a PhD because you are in love."</i><br />
<i> </i>I completely agree that doing a PhD out of love of learning, love of discovery, or love for a discipline is a much better reason than doing a PhD for the money, fame, or glory. But I've seen many students get stuck in the "<a href="http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/10/16/the-passion-trap-how-the-search-for-your-lifes-work-is-making-your-working-life-miserable/" target="_blank">passion trap</a>," the idea that you need to be completely in love with something before you invest significant amounts of time and energy into it. According to Cal Newport, who has written extensively about this, passion is something that often comes later, after you have become an expert and people recognize you for your contributions.<br />
<br />
What I have noticed is that people often differ more in the narratives they have about their relationships with their work than in their actual relationships with their work. In my <a href="https://www.quora.com/How-common-is-it-for-PhD-students-to-do-work-in-projects-that-theyre-not-passionate-in/answer/Jean-Yang" target="_blank">Quora answer</a> to the question "How common is it for PhD students to do work they are not passionate in?" I talk about how one's relationship with a project often follows a trajectory similar to a romantic relationship: infatuation, followed by a steady state that comes sometime later, often much later, with a period of confusion and negotiation in between. I've seen every researcher I know well experience the confusion phase, but some researchers are more open than others to talking about it.<br />
<br />
A side observation is that relationships with research seem to vary culturally: for instance, being blanket positive about one's own research seems to go along with the American tendency to be blanket positive about one's own life.<br />
<br />
<i>--</i><br />
<br />
<i>"Superstars are born, not made."</i><br />
No one has said this specific phrase to me, but many people have implied it with the qualities they value in students. Once a professor told me that some students "just can't cut it." I've seen professors pick favorites based on internal metrics they have (often, it seems, based on how much a student reminds them of themselves). I've seen students decide someone is the smartest among them because of confidence, or some other "star" quality that doesn't necessarily correlate directly with research skill. While there is a baseline level of intelligence, curiosity, drive, and tolerance for uncertainty that someone needs to be a good researcher, many of the qualities that make a great researcher--discipline and persistence, to name two--are not entirely innate and definitely not strongly correlated with the confidence and charisma that seem to build many star reputations. (Note: confidence and charisma can also be learned.)<br />
<br />
<i>--</i><br />
<br />
<i>"The PhD is lonely without a significant other, especially if you are a woman in a male-dominated field."</i><br />
I was surprised that people have told me this--and that, at least when I was starting my PhD, there was a common conception that having a romantic partner was somehow necessary for enduring the trials of the PhD. While it is important to nurture healthy relationships with supportive people, a significant other does not need to be one of them. Especially in relationships between people of similar levels of ambition, it can become tricky to negotiate coevolution and colocation, thus adding unnecessary pressure to the PhD experience. (And, unfortunately, because of society's insistence on holding on to gender roles, women who date men often find themselves with more pressure to conform to their partner's desires.) During my PhD, I had many friends, some of them women in male-dominated fields, many who ended up becoming stars in their fields, who were happily single for significant portions of their PhD.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<i>"The most successful PhD students work all the time."</i><br />
See my answer (and other answers) to the Quora question "<a href="https://www.quora.com/Do-Ph-D-students-get-time-to-pursue-their-hobbies" target="_blank">Do Ph.D. students have time for hobbies?</a>" Nurturing a relationship with a significant other also counts as a hobby, so you can do that too if that's what you want.<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<i>"If it's not hard, it's not worth doing."</i><br />
There is something to be said for only doing things that help you grow in some way, but there is necessary challenge and then there is unnecessary challenge. During the PhD, it is necessary to come to terms with uncertainty, confusion, and possible rejection of your ideas from the community. This is crucial for one's development into a full-fledged researcher. What is less necessary, however, is depriving yourself of food or sleep, always working to the point of exhaustion, or mismanaging your time so that you are always under deadline pressure. For some people it may be necessary to endure toxic advisor or collaborator relationships, but I would encourage those people to seek ways out of that if possible--abuse does not need to go hand-in-hand with growth. Self-inflicted struggle only makes the necessary struggle more difficult.<br />
<br />
<i>--</i><br />
<br />
I hope you realize by now that there is no single right way to do the PhD and that there are many valid--and sometimes conflicting--views on what a good path is. Have fun with the confusion. :)<i> </i></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-27757360423946456772016-05-22T15:18:00.002-07:002016-05-22T20:10:22.768-07:00"We run things, things don't run we"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Yesterday was Porchfest, an annual event where local musicians perform on their porches all around Somerville, MA. My friend Stefan Anderson, who performs as the solo act <a href="https://www.facebook.com/The-Stefan-Banderson-34689637435/" target="_blank">The Stefan Banderson</a>, played his cover of Miley Cyrus's "We Can't Stop," which is my favorite cover of all time. (Summer 2013 I heard him perform the cover before I heard the actual song.)<br />
<br />
Something I like about Stefan's covers is how they highlight the absurdity of pop song lyrics. During this performance I became obsessed with the line "We run things, things don't run we." After I spent far longer thinking about this line than a serious adult should, I had the following enlightening email exchange with the friends I went to Porchfest with.<br />
<br />
This is another post in the <a href="http://jxyzabc.blogspot.com/2016/05/cultural-shorthand-for-money-and-time.html" target="_blank">series where I experiment with publishing emails the way RMO does</a>. This post is about not being able to stop. It is also about what happens when science PhDs close-read Miley lyrics.<br />
<br />
(While we're on the topic of Porchfest I'd also like to plug my friend Christiana's band <a href="https://www.facebook.com/5paperwaves/" target="_blank">Paper Waves</a>. Check them out--they're great!)<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" class="ajC"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><table cellpadding="0" class="ajC"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI"><span class="gD" name="Jean Yang">Jean Yang</span><span class="go"></span> </span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Alison Hill,<br />Elizabeth Brown,<br />Ali Rabi</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Sun, May 22, 2016 at 10:46 AM</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">subject:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">We run things, things don't run we</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><br /></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><br /></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><br /></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2">Guys I looked this up and this is a real lyric of the song. I really like it. I think I'll make it my new life motto.</td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><br /></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><br /></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><br /></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2">---</td><td class="gG" colspan="2"><br /></td><td class="gG" colspan="2"><br /></td><td class="gG" colspan="2"><br /></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" class="ajC"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI"><span class="gD" name="Elizabeth Brown">Elizabeth Brown</span><span class="go"></span> </span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Jean Yang</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">cc:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Alison Hill,<br />Ali Rabi</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Sun, May 22, 2016 at 11:05 AM</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">subject:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Re: We run things, things don't run we</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Oh my god that is wonderful. It makes a great motto!<br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" class="ajC"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI"><span class="gD" name="Alison Hill">Alison Hill</span><span class="go"></span> </span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Elizabeth Brown</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">cc:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Jean Yang,<br />Ali Rabi</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Sun, May 22, 2016 at 12:55 PM</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div>
<div>
Ahh but it's more subtle that that .. see the full stanza below:<br />
<br />
<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://genius.com/Miley-cyrus-we-cant-stop-lyrics%23note-1889168&source=gmail&ust=1464033687172000&usg=AFQjCNHZeZfE7hOaKp43phB-ZRzUFH43Bg" href="http://genius.com/Miley-cyrus-we-cant-stop-lyrics#note-1889168" target="_blank">And we can’t stop<br />
And we won’t stop</a><br />
<a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://genius.com/Miley-cyrus-we-cant-stop-lyrics%23note-1897311&source=gmail&ust=1464033687172000&usg=AFQjCNEFHRZwp0fdnMpQti3JkmLyfgo4Kw" href="http://genius.com/Miley-cyrus-we-cant-stop-lyrics#note-1897311" target="_blank">We run things, things don’t run we<br />
Don’t take nothing from nobody</a></div>
<br />
the final "we" of the third line also serves as the subject of the fourth line .. optionally .. or you could interpret the lines separately, and then the last one is not a statement but an imperative<br />
<br />
but all this just makes me like it even more!
</div>
<br />
--<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" class="ajC"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI"><span class="gD" name="Jean Yang">Jean Yang</span><span class="go"></span> </span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Alison Hill</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">cc:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Elizabeth Brown,<br />Ali Rabi</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Sun, May 22, 2016 at 3:18 PM</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Yeah, one can also interpret as a fight to control the forces that control us.<br />
<br />
I read this article about how "We Can't Stop" is actually a sad song:<br />
<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/why-miley-cyrus-we-cant-stop-is-actually-the-saddest-song-of-the-summer-2013-8" target="_blank">http://www.businessinsider.com/why-miley-cyrus-we-cant-stop-is-actually-the-saddest-song-of-the-summer-2013-8 </a><br />
<br />
This particular stanza is particularly interesting as a commentary on the power you give up when you enter into a super glam life--whether it's partying or academia. You act like you run the show but you've already bought in to something much bigger and you "can't stop." "Don't take nothing from nobody" and maybe you can escape the greater forces.<br />
<br />
SO MUCH SUBTLETLY I LOVE IT.
</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-28635062137045025072016-05-20T21:17:00.002-07:002016-05-21T06:31:00.041-07:00A Recent Exchange on Money and Time<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Below is a recent exchange with my friend <a href="http://rmozone.com/" target="_blank">Rob Ochshorn</a>, who often writes emails instead of blog posts to work out his thoughts. Here I am borrowing not only his technique, but also his thoughts, on a topic I have recently begun to think about and would like to think about more.<br />
<br />
Seth and Aliza were included non-consensually. I continue to include them for context: this conversation happened with an audience.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" class="ajC"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI"><span class="gD" name="Jean Yang">Jean Yang</span> </span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Aliza Aufrichtig,<br />Robert M Ochshorn,<br />Seth Stephens-Davidowitz</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Sun, May 15, 2016 at 10:57 AM</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">subject:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Cultural shorthand for money and time</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div>
Our society has a widely used abstraction for things that cost money ($$$) but there's not similar concept for time.<br />
<br />
<div>
I started thinking about this because I wanted a way to express things that are time-expensive (was thinking<code> <img alt="⌚" class="CToWUd" data-goomoji="231a" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/e/231a" style="margin: 0 0.2ex; max-height: 24px; vertical-align: middle;" /></code><code><img alt="⌚" class="CToWUd" data-goomoji="231a" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/e/231a" style="margin: 0 0.2ex; max-height: 24px; vertical-align: middle;" /></code><code><img alt="⌚" class="CToWUd" data-goomoji="231a" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/e/231a" style="margin: 0 0.2ex; max-height: 24px; vertical-align: middle;" />)</code>.</div>
</div>
<br />
Related to this, it would be nice if people could tell me how much time things cost, rather than just how much money. Thinking about this made me wonder how much our lack of shorthand for this idea is a result of our entire society not caring about time as much as money, or because the people who shape our cultural shorthand (for instance the people running Yelp) care more about money than time.<br />
<br />
Zooming out even further, isn't it interesting that Silicon Valley has become so obsessed with helping people live forever--while perpetuating a culture that steals people's time and youth in an unprecedented all-consuming way? (Based on how you think about it, it is or isn't unprecedented. Let's discuss.) I wonder what this <i>means</i>...<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" class="ajC"><tbody>
<tr class="UszGxc ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">from:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI"><span class="gD" name="Robert Ochshorn">Robert Ochshorn</span><span class="go"></span> </span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">to:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Jean Yang</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">cc:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Aliza Aufrichtig,<br />Seth Stephens-Davidowitz</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">date:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Mon, May 16, 2016 at 2:33 AM</span></td></tr>
<tr class="ajv"><td class="gG" colspan="2"><span class="gI">subject:</span></td><td class="gL" colspan="2"><span class="gI">Re: Cultural shorthand for money and time</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div>
If only the singularity-upload fantasy of an eternal life were
based on a mature understanding of leisure! I’m using “leisure” to mean
the non-financialized use of time. This distinguishes it from the manner
of time that Silicon Valley loves to “save” you. I mean, most of these
stupid startups justify their work in terms of saving you time. Some
startups allow you to convert your money into somebody else’s time
(InstaCart, TaskRabbit, Magic), while others use automation and
interface, in the grand tradition of the dishwasher, to let you do your
work/chores faster (“so you can focus on …”). </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I
would dispute your claim that our society cares about money more than
time. I think it’s worse than that: much tech marketing and ideology[0]
is based on the myth of a temporal-financial relativity: the conversion
of money into time (the inverse, time->money, being what we call a
job).</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Your Yelp example is interesting. It
makes me think of the 50s fantasy of “fast food.” Silicon Valley has
proposed a modernization of this concept (Soylent), which should make
clear what the purpose of this time-saving is: that we will have more
time to work! In other words: what is the point of “saving time” if not
to prepare or enjoy a nice meal?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Iconographically,
there’s some design precedent creeping into popular consciousness.
Medium, for example, numerically estimates the time an article will take
its average user to ingest (“5 min read”). I’m kicking myself for not
introducing you to my friend Tristan, who just passed through Cambridge
for a Berkman lecture and runs a <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?hl=en&q=http://timewellspent.io&source=gmail&ust=1463890222194000&usg=AFQjCNElTZFhOPoCF5_JawY0yjVAAzJLXA" href="http://timewellspent.io/" target="_blank">Time Well Spent</a> movement that sees itself as a time-respecting “Fair Trade” equivalent for tech. What I like about your “<code><img alt="⌚" class="CToWUd" data-goomoji="231a" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/e/231a" style="margin: 0 0.2ex; max-height: 24px; vertical-align: middle;" /></code><code><img alt="⌚" class="CToWUd" data-goomoji="231a" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/e/231a" style="margin: 0 0.2ex; max-height: 24px; vertical-align: middle;" /></code><code><img alt="⌚" class="CToWUd" data-goomoji="231a" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/e/231a" style="margin: 0 0.2ex; max-height: 24px; vertical-align: middle;" /><span style="font-family: "helvetica";">”</span> </code>is
that it implies a depth and prestige to a potential long-form
experience—it makes me feel like I will be taken out of my normal,
fragmentary, hectic existence and transported into a deep, coherent, and
focused place for a while. The watches culturally suggest wealth and
tradition. It’s a very different feel with hourglasses (<img alt="⌛" class="CToWUd" data-goomoji="231b" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/e/231b" style="margin: 0 0.2ex; max-height: 24px; vertical-align: middle;" /><img alt="⌛" class="CToWUd" data-goomoji="231b" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/e/231b" style="margin: 0 0.2ex; max-height: 24px; vertical-align: middle;" /><img alt="⌛" class="CToWUd" data-goomoji="231b" src="https://mail.google.com/mail/e/231b" style="margin: 0 0.2ex; max-height: 24px; vertical-align: middle;" />)—perhaps the difference between being in control of one’s time verses our lives slipping away from us.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
There’s
a media-theoretical concept that’s important here: Marshall McLuhan’s
notion of the reversal. The automobile makes us faster, but when you
extend the concept as far as it goes, we’re stuck sitting in traffic.
Ivan Illich took this even further, making a brutal calculation[1] of a
car’s speed based on <i>all </i>of the factors that allow us to occasionally sit in a car cruising down the open road.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So
for precedent I would propose McDonald’s, the dishwasher, and the
automobile. Think about the ways they play together: teenagers working
at McDonald’s to buy a car while their mothers enter the workforce,
aided at home by the dishwasher.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Warm greetings from Ramallah! Time definitely seems to work differently here.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Your correspondent,</div>
<div>
R.M.O.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
[0] This is slightly off-topic, but it’s too lovely to omit. From Levy’s <i>Inside the Googleplex</i>, a great snapshot how time and latency are discussed/traded within Google (emph mine):</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "times";">After
the Code Yellow, Google set a companywide OKR (the objective key
result metric Google uses to set goals) to fight latency. To help meet
its goals, the company created a market-based incentive program for
product teams to juice up performance—a cap-and-trade model in which
teams were mandated latency ceilings or maximum performance times. If a
team didn’t make its benchmarks, says Hölzle, it accrued a debt that had
to be paid off by barter with a team that exceeded its benchmarks.
“You could trade for an engineer or machines. Whatever,” he says. <b>The metric for this exchange was, oddly enough, human lives.</b>
The calculation goes like this: average human life expectancy is
seventy years. That’s about two billion seconds. If a product has 100
million users and unnecessarily wastes four seconds of a user’s time
every day, that was more than a hundred people killed in a year. So if
the Gmail team wasn’t meeting its goals, it might go to the Picasa team
and ask for ten lives to lift its speed budget into the black. In
exchange, the Gmailers might yield a thousand servers from its
allocation or all its massage tickets for the next month.</span></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
[1] From Wikipedia:</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "times";">…the
concept of counterproductivity: when institutions of modern industrial
society impede their purported aims. For example, Ivan Illich calculated
that, in America in the 1970s, if you add the time spent to work
to earn the money to buy a car, the time spent in the car (including
traffic jam), the time spent in the health care industry because of a
car crash, the time spent in the oil industry to fuel cars ...etc., and
you divide the number of kilometres traveled per year by that, you
obtain the following calculation: 10000 km per year per person divided
by 1600 hours per year per American equals 6 km per hour. So <b>the real speed of a car would be about 3.7 miles per hour</b>.</span></div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29172085.post-90347194332959167492016-05-13T18:05:00.003-07:002016-05-13T20:23:15.252-07:00Networking Tips for Younger PhD Students<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>This post was a collaboration with <a href="http://people.csail.mit.edu/polikarn/" target="_blank">Nadia Polikarpova</a> and <a href="http://www.cs.tau.ac.il/~shachar/" target="_blank">Shachar Itzhaky</a>, done while we were supposed to be collaborating on other things.</i><br />
<br />
A younger student in the group where I did my PhD is going to his first conference next week and my advisor sent him my way for advice. Nadia, Shachar, and I had already been discussing research (and attending a BBQ) for hours at this point, so we welcomed the opportunity to discuss something else. Here's what we came up with.<br />
<ul style="text-align: left;">
<li><b>Be prepared to show off your research.</b> A main goal of attending a conference is to get your name out there, associated with good work. At a conference, you'll be lucky to get more than five minutes in with someone, especially somebody established. It would serve you well to prepare a succinct, memorable elevator pitch for your work. If you have a demo, it doesn't hurt to have that ready in case someone wants to see. Bonus: if you can tailor your pitch based on the interests of who you're talking to, they'll like it more.</li>
<li><b>Make your networking bingo sheet--and play it. </b>Make a list of people who you'd like to talk to: people about whose work you have questions, people whose work you cite/whose papers your read, people you'd like to tell about your work, and people whose work you admire in general. You may want to consult your advisor and/or collaborators for a good list. Having a list helps keep you on track for making the most of your time at the conference. I also like feeling like I'm on a mission.</li>
<li><b>Don't be afraid to ask for introductions.</b> While most people in my community (programming languages) are pretty friendly, it can often be easier to talk to someone if you get introduced. Don't be afraid to ask people if they are able to introduce you to someone on your bingo sheet.</li>
<li><b>Don't sit with the same people twice. </b>This is a conference, not vacation with your best friends. My former advisor Saman Amarasinghe liked to tell his PhD students to split up at all meals so they can meet new people. It's fine to have a friend you go around the conference with, but make sure you're talking to new people during each break and meal.</li>
<li><b>Prepare questions and talking points. </b>When I was a first-year PhD student attending my first POPL, my friend Luke and I were so excited to see Xavier Leroy, one of our research heroes, standing by himself during the break that we ran up to him and introduced ourselves. As we had no further game plan, we answered the questions he asked us about who we were and then we ran away. At the next conference, PLDI, I was determined to do better. I asked his student, Jean-Baptiste, if I could have lunch with them on one of the days. I figured that since Jean-Baptiste was my friend, Xavier could become my friend by transitivity. The conference flew by and we ran out of lunches, but Jean-Baptiste said I was welcome to walk with them while Xavier fetched his suitcase and walked to get a cab. Again, I was very excited, but again, I had nothing to say and the conversation more or less consisted of me answering questions that Xavier politely asked me. Ever since, I've always made sure to prepare a couple of questions and/or talking points if I really want to talk to someone. It also doesn't hurt to prepare a couple of general stories/talking points to break the ice when you sit at that lunch table full of people you don't know.</li>
<li><b>Listen more than you talk</b>. It is well known that Level 1 networking for graduate students involves ambushing innocent passers-by with a well-rehearsed elevator pitch. While this more or less does the job, there are greater heights to aspire to. The next level involves listening to and interacting with the other person. In <i>How to Win Friends and Influence People</i>, Dale Carnegie talks about how much more people like you if you let them talk first and figure out what they want to talk about. This is also true in research settings. I, for one, tend to be much more impressed with someone if they can ask insightful questions/offer useful suggestions about my work than if they simply presented to me interesting ideas about their own work.</li>
<li><b>Dress appropriately. </b>Dressing appropriately increases one's efficacy in all situations and conferences are no different. Your main fashion goals at a conference are 1) not to stand out too much, 2) to be sufficiently mobile to move between groups and between the conference venue and evening activities, and 3) to be sufficiently comfortable that you can last from the morning until late at night. For 2), make sure your backpack isn't too big and you don't have too much stuff but have your jacket/comfortable shoes if you're going to head out with a group for dinner and/or drinks.</li>
<li><b>Carry a notebook. </b>If you're doing it right, you'll be having lots of conversations. It will be useful to write down things you learn and things to follow up on. Notebooks are also useful for drawing figures to describe your research.</li>
<li><b>Always wear your nametag.</b> People are going to remember who you are a lot better if they see your name every time they look at you.</li>
<li><b>Mind your manners.</b> You want people to remember you for your research without being distracted by poor manners. It's a good idea to be careful not to interrupt people and not to make a mess when you eat. I also try not to make too big of a deal out of my dietary restrictions when we're making decisions about where to eat. It makes it a lot easier, especially in large groups, if you try to be agreeable and go with the flow.</li>
</ul>
Finally, have fun. Conferences have helped me solidify friendships with many people in my research area. Especially as you spend more time in a community, conferences can become more like a family reunion than a serious networking event with faceless paper authors.<br />
<br />
As always, let us know if you have other tips!</div>
Jeanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10589732756618196545noreply@blogger.com11