Link of the day: Rainbow Mansion

I've often thought that it would be a neat idea to live in large house with other people. You would give up a little privacy for the benefit of living in a community. One well-known group living situation is the "Rainbow Mansion." The Rainbow is located in Silicon Valley and its residents are ambitious (mostly technology) people who "want to change the world." This might be a bit extreme for me, but it's an interesting idea. I enjoyed living in a co-op in college and I like the idea of group living.

Link of the day: How to declutter your Facebook homepage

An essential link for heavy Facebook users -- "How to De-Clutter Your New Facebook Homepage." I didn't know about the feed preferences page. There's a person who posts updates that I'm not interested in, but I don't want to hurt the person's feelings by de-friending him. So I went to the feed preferences page and put him in my "less about these friends" list.

Public communication, web 2.0, and all that

I'm not the most wired person out there, but I think I'm definitely above average. The web presents enormous opportunities to communicate with the general public and connect with people who have specific interests. This is very different from personal, one-on-one conversation, which I discussed in an earlier post. The idea of an interactive, user-defined internet is frequently called "Web 2.0."

I'll discuss some of my personal experiences with Web 2.0. (See Tim O'Reilly's article for an in-depth discussion of what Web 2.0 means.)

• Blogging
  Well, this here is a blog! Blogging is a great way for me to practice writing and expressing myself. If you're a really popular blogger like Tim Ferriss, you can have very lively conversations with your internet audience. No one really talks to me about my blog. Not that I really expect anyone to, given that I write about random topics of personal interest and make no effort to connect with a target audience. But if you want to communicate with people via blogging, you can definitely make that happen. Even if it's on a small scale like sharing infant photos with the family.
  I really like using Blogger because of the tags, anonymity, and free storage space.
  
• Facebook
  I like Facebook a lot. I will frequently double-post on Facebook and Blogger. I post on Facebook to let my friends know about a link I like. It's much less intrusive to do so via Facebook than via email. I also get faster feedback. When people log onto Facebook, they know consciously that they are having fun and blowing time. They are in the mood to respond. Facebook is viral in the sense that when people see one or two comments to a posted link, they themselves feel compelled to join in the discussion. In contrast, email is this awful catch-all for communication. My email is probably sandwiched in between a reminder about a meeting and a message from the boss. I also post on Blogger so that I can have a personal record for myself.
  The main difference between Facebook and other Web2.0 tools is the sophisticated privacy tools on Facebook. So depending on the user, Facebook is not as "open" as other platforms.
  
• Flickr
  Photography is only a minor hobby of mine, so I don't spend too much time on Flickr or not as much time as some people do. I use Flickr pretty much the same way I use Blogger, to keep personal records that happen to be public. The main reason I chose Flickr is the excellent interface for tagging and viewing photos.
  Sometimes I'll get some nice, unexpected comments on my (amateur) photographs. That's the magic of tagging and geotagging on Flickr. It's so easy for people to find photographs of a specific location or specific tag. Two of my photos have been chosen for the Schmap online travel guides. I think it's because I did such a detailed job of tagging my photos. There are probably better photos out there, but mine were easy to find. I'm glad to pitch in my bit to make Web 2.0 the great resource it is. Flickr allows me to explore other people's interests and photographic creativity. Many photos, including mine, are licensed under Creative Commons so they can be re-used for non-profit purposes. I'm not too familiar with the social aspects of Flickr, but it appears there's quite a community there. You can join all sorts of groups. I was asked to submit photo to a Sharpie pen group!
  
• Forums
  I'm a member of the ModSquadHockey forum and I used to hang out a lot in musical forums like Finishing the Chat and BroadwayWorld. Reading forums is a fantastic way to quickly acquire knowledge for a new hobby. I figured out how to pick my own hockey equipment and learned what theatregoers look for when they attend a play or musical. I'm still a member of the hockey forum because I really liked the atmosphere on the board (vigilant administrators are a must) and I periodically answer questions. I try to give back.
  
• Wiki
  Wikis can be interactive but not on the level of blogs, Facebook, Flickr, and forums. The interaction is with the members of the wiki who write and modify the contents of the wiki. My only experience so far is submitting reference cards to the Starting Strength Wiki. I did get a nice note from the Starting Strength Wiki administrator, praising my contribution. I'm interested in doing more with wikis but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Update on "The disadvantages of an elite education"

Previously I composed a personal response to William Deresiewicz's piece on "The disadvantages of an elite education." In addition to my post, I also wrote directly to Dr. Deresiewicz. (I call him doctor and not professor, because he's no longer with Yale.)

Here is the text of my email sent on 29 July 2008.

Dear Dr. Deresiewicz,

I'm currently a [university name] physics graduate student and I read your essay "The Disadvantages of an Elitist Education" with great interest.

For those of us who don't want to turn into elitist zombies, what do you suggest? Your essay discusses the problems of an elitist upbringing with incredible thoroughness, but you don't propose any solutions.

Travel? Read great literature? Go camping, Thoreau-style? Take up hobbies that bring us into contact with non-elitists? Protest? (hopefully, not with GESO)

Sincerely,

[name]

Note: GESO is a Yale graduate student union which is infamous for conducting pointless protests against supposed mistreatment of Yale graduate students.

Here is Dr. Deresiewicz's response dated 2 August 2008. [He tried to respond by email, but it didn't work (?), so he sent a letter to my department mailbox!]

Dear [name],

My e-mail kept getting bounced back, so I'm sending this the old-fashioned way.

I'm glad you found my piece interesting. Your question is not easily answered. Graduate school, especially, can feel like a little bubble, and I think you need to make an effort to get outside it, maintain social and intellectual interests that go beyond your specialization. Your proposed answers are actually not bad. Obviously, knowing there's a problem and keeping your mind open are already the beginning of a solution. But it's a long-term project. I wish I could be more helpful, but I think everyone needs to find their own answer.

Yours,

Bill Deresiewicz

Link of the day: An anthropological introduction to YouTube

Professor Michael Wesch of Kansas State University does research on the YouTube phenomenon. He presents a summary of his findings in this hour long YouTube clip.

Amazing presentation! Fun, smart, poignant, insightful. I wasn't sure I wanted to spend an hour on this, but Michael Nielsen said it was great and I believed him. I thought it was pretty funny to learn about "first vlog" syndrome -- the feeling that you're talking to everyone and no one at the same time. It's very awkward and I felt the same when I made my first podcast.

I had no idea that YouTube was such a deep and diverse community, that the hardcore users care about each other. Is YouTube the solution to the "bowling alone" syndrome, to our modern age alienation as Professor Wesch seems to suggest?

Undergrad community in the Carleton physics department

A few years ago, I complained about the lack of community in my department. This morning, I read a post by Prof. Melissa Eblen-Zayas about the undergrad community in the Carleton physics department. Carleton College is a prestigious liberal arts college in Minnesota.

In particular, she notes the distinction between tightly knit and loosely woven communities. Tightly knit means the stereotypical hard core physics majors who do all their problem sets in the student lounge until midnight and try to sneak into lab to get more data. (I know, my undergraduate department was like that.) Loosely woven means people who just do physics as a major and spend time on other extracurricular activities, for example, being on an athletic team or being part of a theater group. Prof. Eblen-Zayas thinks there should be both a tightly knit and a loosely woven community in her department. She speculates that women science majors prefer a loosely woven community, so they end up choosing a major like biology or chemistry instead of physics. I'm not sure if there's room for two types of communities in a small school like Carleton.

I was always part of a tightly knit community from birth (nuclear family) to college (my living group, undergrad physics department), so I have always preferred my work and social circles to be tight. Maybe that's why I had problems in grad school. Our department is loosely woven, though some experimental groups can be tight. I'm getting more used to the loosely woven scheme, though I can definitely say that tight knit is a better fit for me.

Link of the day: "The disadvantages of an elite education"

I recently read an essay called "The disadvantages of an elite education" written by a former Yale English professor, William Deresiewicz. The essay is a thorough and damming harangue on the Ivy League university system.

Many of the author's major points are familiar. Yale and other elite colleges are just a mill for taking the children of upper-class parents and turning out more upper-class citizens. The purpose of going to a school like Yale is to develop connections to other powerful people (Yale's Master Teas with celebrities come to mind). The students grow up to become people who can't relate to anyone who doesn't have an Ivy League degree. They are, in fact, taught that if you didn't attend an elite university, you are not worth meaningful conversation. Deresiewicz cites how at age 35, after 14 years in the Ivy League, he was unable to communicate with his plumber. Moreover, undergraduates at elite colleges are pampered and coddled to the point that they feel entitled to such treatment for the rest of their lives. The pampering naturally engenders a strong allegiance to the school brand, so that alumni donate millions and keep the system going. I'm sure there will be Ivy League alumni who take exception to these broad characterizations (and they should), but I think there is probably substantial truth to these statements.

What is my personal response to this? I went to an elite university, too, but it was an elite science and technology school. Scientists tend to be much more down-to-earth, so we avoid some of that "elitism stuff" but not all of it. In retrospect, I've noticed that quite a few of my undergraduate professors believed that their institution trained the best scientists/engineers and that other places were "lesser schools." (Yes, a professor actually said that.)

Can I talk to non-elite people? Yes. Do I feel entitled? No. I think that's a product of my family upbringing. My mom and dad always made it a point to pay attention to mail carriers, receptionists, and all the people who keep our society glued together. As for entitlement, my parents have a typical immigrant outlook which is you can always lose what you have, don't stop working. So non-entitlement was drilled into my head for years.

Deresiewicz does have some thought-provoking ideas that go beyond the usual elitism rant. These are both interesting and relevant to me.

I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

I've always been surrounded by elite people. I grew up in an elite, highly-educated part of the country. I went to an elite undergraduate institution. I attend an Ivy League graduate school. It wasn't until I got to graduate school when I started to meet people who went to places like University of Kentucky. I found that there are many people who went to state schools who are smarter than people who went to elite schools like me. The reason is that people from "lesser" institutions have to work much harder to make up for the disadvantage of not having an elite degree. I also learned that it can be pretty intimidating for these same people to go to graduate school and find themselves surrounded by people with elite undergraduate degrees.

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic... But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense.

The other forms of intelligence matter more and more to me as I get older. I find that I like people best when they have more than just the standard "analytic" ability. My favorite people are the ones who can talk to both the elite and the plumber, the ones who can talk to both humanists and scientists, the ones who are both outstanding scholars and charismatic leaders, the ones who can both unravel long trains of analysis and yap some down-to-earth, practical talk.

The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

I worry about this a lot. If I spend all my time being busy and working to keep up in the rat race, I have no time to talk to my family or meet new people or even see people who are my friends. In grad school, your job is to produce work and papers, so you feel constant guilt about not working. If you're not working all the time, you feel like you don't deserve to be in grad school.

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort.

It sounds really stupid, but I feel the burden of an elite education sometimes. What my parents say if I wanted to become a homemaker? (They would probably kill me.) What would my parents's friends think if I wanted to become a social worker? I know someone who got a law degree from Harvard and consequently decided she'd rather work with horses. The career track to becoming a physicist is very regimented, cut-throat, and self-absorbed. Is that really what I want? Do I want to pay my dues for 15 years and then finally have the freedom to say, do, and think what I want?

Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.

The professor who supervised my master's thesis said that he had students break down in tears during his undergraduate physics lab course. I have a strong fear of failure, too, and I know it comes from my parents and the environment I grew up in. Failing is hard for me, but I'm trying to learn from it. It's hard for me not to think that failure is a reflection of my character. It's not, but I think it is. Failure in my career is a major worry, but a more subtle area where failure shows up is in my relationships. Sometimes I'm afraid to make my friend unhappy, for example, asking for their help or calling them out on behavior that made me unhappy. This is an area I'm working on -- having the courage to take risks with people and not worry about the consequences as much. If the relationship breaks, it probably wasn't a very strong one in the first place.

Of all the people I know, my mom is the one person who is terrified of failure. She hikes tall mountains to prove to herself that she's strong. As she has gotten older and her body has declined, she's turned to Buddhism as a way to find peace of mind. The whole situation seems overblown to me.

But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual... Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework. If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Exactly. But how do you stop the hoop-jumping and more importantly, the worrying about the hoop-jumping? I'm under so much pressure; saying you should stop worrying about your career is much easier said than done.

My friend Peter has taught introductory electromagnetism several times. The classes are bi-weekly and 90 minutes long, so he usually allows for a five minute break halfway through. He told me that when he stopped class, the students would just sit in their chairs obediently. Almost no one got up. Peter also told me about a student who emailed him at the beginning of the semester and asked for a list of assignments, saying that he needed to finish all the work early so he could presumably take care of his numerous extra-curricular activities. Unbelievable. I guess this guy is not in college for a love of learning.

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade... Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile. It means foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage. “I am not afraid to make a mistake,” Stephen Dedalus says, “even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, too.” Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them.

Deresiewicz later suggests that going to a "second-tier" college or liberal arts college may be a lot better for a young person's human spirit. I imagine that the student body would be less "competitive," so you could spend less time on required work and more time on personal growth. I wonder if that's true. If I had chance to do it over again, maybe I would have opted for a liberal arts college. Still, I think I did pretty well as an undergraduate.

I remember finding out for the first time, in college, that I loved science. Before that, I had just been programmed by my parents and society to study. I treated math and science competitions as a competitive sport. Even with that heightened awareness, I found that it took a lot of work to have independent thoughts. My time was so consumed by problem sets that I traded socializing for deep intellectual thoughts. By deep thoughts, I mean that I would go through my lecture notes a second time and try to understand the bigger picture. Doing this made my studies so much more meaningful and as a nice side benefit, really impressed my teacher. No one told me to put in this extra time. I just knew in my gut that if I really loved physics, this is what I needed to do.

My teacher Bob was a big influence on me. He's the best physics teacher I've ever had, but that wasn't the only thing that impressed me. The campus newspaper published an interview with him. I learned that you shouldn't be afraid to "empower" yourself and seek allies to do things you think are important and true. I learned the principle of "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission." It's a powerful life lesson that I still use today. Using these ideas has led me into many leadership projects. I started the tradition of having undergraduates invite a colloquium speaker once and a bimonthly happy hour in my graduate department. I also tried to start an undergraduate physics study group where we think about big ideas in physics. It was only semi-successful, but I'm glad I did it.

Of course, I don't want to rest on my laurels. I expound a little amateur philosophy on my blog now and then. I've always been interested in trying to become a better person, perhaps the bildung ("upbuilding of the soul") mentioned in the essay. Maybe when I get out of this grad school rat race, I can return to some of my "trouble-making."

There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference... The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

I bemoaned the trend towards universities as corporations in a post last year. It's disturbing to see Yale and Harvard throw tons of money at building new science facilities. I can't help thinking that the only purpose is to get more grant money, which will keep the wealth engine going. You may recall an infamous quote from the president of Harvard:

"One thing we all must worry about — I certainly do — is the federal support for scientific research. And are we all going to be chasing increasingly scarce dollars?" says Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's new president. Not that Faust seems worried about Harvard or other top-tier research schools. "They're going to be—we hope, we trust, we assume—the survivors in this race," she says. As for the many lesser universities likely to lose market share, she adds, they would be wise "to really emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious" as those of Harvard and its peers.

The most interesting section of Deresiewicz's essay comes at the very end, where he discusses the reactions of undergraduates in his literature classes to philosophic questions.

What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a paper, I do it at a friend’s. That same day, as it happened, another student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend?

Is this really true? If so, what a bizarre cultural phenomenon. Hmm, I'm not sure what to say to that. Being a scientist requires lots of solitude, both to get your work done and to concentrate on long trains of analysis. If anything, I have too much solitude.

However, I know a lot of people who want to live in an elite, rich community like Seattle, Boulder, the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston, or Manhattan. That's where many elite undergraduates end up. Sure, the culture there is ten times more rich than other places, but if you want to live in such a place, you must have money. And you earn that much money you have to join the elitist, careerist rat race. What's wrong with Kansas? (Pure speculation, as I've never lived in the Midwest.) I do think people need to find the courage to create and live an independent life, rather than perpetually hanging out with a crowd raised like themselves. It's not the end of the world if you don't live in San Francisco. A disclaimer here: There's nothing wrong with wanting to live in New York City or Boston. Of course, I want to live in those places, but I'm open to living somewhere else, too.

In some further analysis, Deresiewicz goes on to say:

“To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?”: my student was in her friend’s room writing a paper, not having a heart-to-heart. She probably didn’t have the time; indeed, other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy. What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude?

I'm not sure that all the sociability is bad. Of course, that comes from me, a loner who doesn't socialize much. I've always had some disdain for small talk and want to leap into deep philosophical one-on-one conversations. But I've come to realize that sometimes it takes a long time to get to know someone. You have to be patient.

The busyness is a huge problem for me. If you're on an elitist career track like me, you're automatically surrounded by people who are too busy running the rat race to help you. This is why people have to go into therapy. Their friends and family are too busy and self-absorbed to help them, so they have to pay someone to listen to their problems.

That ends my quote-by-quote analysis of the essay. So, for those of us who don't want to turn into elitist zombies, what do we do? Deresiewicz discusses the problems of an elitist upbringing with incredible thoroughness, but he doesn't propose any solutions.

Travel? Read great literature? Go camping, Thoreau-style? Take up hobbies that bring you into contact with non-elitists? Protest? I'll keep thinking about it.

Perspective on a successful physics undergraduate program

Many people, including myself, have remarked on what a great experience we had as physics majors in my undergraduate program. In this post, I explore why the program was so successful.

First, there was a core group of professors in the department who loved undergraduates. There were faculty who liked to hang out with undergrads and talk to them. Some of them were really charismatic, funny, and inspiring. Those guys (no gals unfortunately) were our heroes. The last year I was there, a professor, who I had previously worked with on a research project, came to me with the idea of having the physics undergraduates pick one of the colloquium speakers. I was Society of Physics Students (SPS) president at the time, so I jumped on the idea. Apparently, the physics majors are still inviting colloquium speakers five years later, so the idea must stuck. This sort of stuff happened frequently. An enthusiastic professor and an enthusiastic student working together to make something happen.

There were a few faculty in the department who were always thinking of ways to get undergrads involved. That way of thinking was highly encouraged at our institution in general. I think that when I was an undergraduate there, the institution was in the middle of a 10+ year campaign to improve the undergraduate experience. (I think the university leadership is pretty happy with their work and now they're trying to improve the graduate experience.)

There was a lot of incentive for professors to be nice to the undergrads in their classes because there was always "free" institution-wide funding to hire undergraduate researchers. In fact, if you were an assistant professor in the physics department at our institution, your chances of getting tenure are highly enhanced by hiring a bunch of super-bright undergrads to do your research for you.

Teaching in the physics department was highly emphasized, to the point where apparently there were young professors tenied tenure because they didn't teach well enough. (I guess the chair and associate chair of the department at the time were super-pro-undergrad-education.) For most courses, lectures were taught by one professor (frequently junior faculty) and sections were taught by another professor (frequently senior faculty). So that doubled our exposure to the faculty. It was not unusual for the senior professor teaching section to sit in on the junior professor who was lecturing. The culture seemed to be that the senior faculty demanded great teaching from their younger colleagues. It was also apparent that the faculty discussed teaching amongst each other and that they would trade ideas and use each other's notes.

Having a great physics department for undergraduates is wonderful, but there are costs. Our classes were so hard that everyone had to work together or go to office hours or both. So our lives really revolved around the physics major. I'm not sure if most undergraduates want to have that kind of life.

The postdoc I worked with complained that he was short-changed. He claimed that there was too much attention devoted to undergrads and that the grad students and postdocs suffered. I was also under the impression that the faculty were overworked since they wanted to (or were expected to?) do both great research and great teaching. The fact that great teaching was expected for tenure probably scared off a lot of potential job candidates who just wanted to do research.

Is it possible to have a department that is good to everyone? I don't know. But if you want something to happen, you need great leaders with a vision and a culture that fosters that vision.

Link of the day: Colloqium talk on community-based data management

I learned about a really interesting talk via Dave Bacon's blog. Here Raghu Ramakrishman talks about the emergence of social websites (e.g. flickr, del.icio.us, etc) and how the future of the web may lie in leveraging community input to improve data extraction. In the beginning, we had the web which was just static text and pictures. Then Alta Vista and other search engines used anchor text to improve searching. After that, Google came up with the concept of page rank. By looking at the many levels of linkage and giving more reputable sources a higher weight, you can come up with the most relevant search result. The next step in the evolution of the web may be using the direct input of users (e.g. tags) to improve data extraction.

Ramakrishman has been doing research on a very small-scale example called DBLife. It is a site that tries to extract data about academic researchers in the field of databases. If you search for a particular researcher, DBLife will attempt to generate pictures of the researchers, his/her list of publications and talks, and other information. You (the user) can then submit input on whether you think the information is accurate. So Ramakrishman's great hope is that we can develop software that is easily maintained by a community of users, that it will be easy to abstract the underlying structure of DBLife and apply it to other communities like Hollywood (e.g. HollywoodLife). In other words, one could give the software to another community without them having to look at any code.

The video of the talk is available here.

What are blogs good for?

[I seem to be on a writing binge today.]

I still remember an email exchange I had with a former mentor of mine. He said that blogs were narcissistic and that most people (including him) didn't really have anything worth saying.

I was pretty mad at the time. I read blogs all the time. Is that a comment on me?

In the months since that email, I've lingered over this issue. I'll write up a few thoughts here.

• Yes, most blogs are silly and narcissistic. I still remember the blog about raising a baby and the blogger posting pictures of the amount of breast milk they went through daily (complete with graphs.) A lot of blogs are diaries (and if you post that on the web, you are by definition a narcissist.) But then again, so is the majority of TV, books, and other media. Blogs are mostly a form of entertainment.
  
• There are serious people who write blogs. I haven't read them, but I assume there are some interesting blogs about politics. Michael Nielsen writes my favorite science blog. Unfortunately, you have to either be really smart or have a lot of time to write anything meaningful.
  
• Blogs can be a useful way of obtaining hard-to-find information. If you want to get a review of an obscure or just-released gadget, blogs are an excellent resource. I've also found many interesting links to articles in blogs. Plus, it's fun to see what "smart" people are reading.
  
• Blogs can foster a sense of community. It cheers me up when I read about a fellow grad student struggling to finish her thesis. I guess it's a little sad if you're reading blogs to get a vicarious thrill, but maybe there are some people out there who are lonely and live in the middle of nowhere.

Most of my posts are of several forms: comments on other things people have written, links to things other people have written or created, explanation of an idea (my way of teaching myself), and my original thoughts (rarely). You can see a pattern here. This blog is mostly me writing to myself! It's like my personal scrapbook, so I don't publicize it. Hmm, maybe I am a little bit of a narcissist.

Encouraging community in graduate school

I've been in graduate school for almost two years now. Thus far I have found graduate school to be far more isolating than my undergraduate college. That is not to say that my current situation is horrible, but it could be better.

At my old undergraduate place, people certainly worked just as much but they just seemed friendlier. I find that the harder I work, the more I need a kind word of encouragement to keep it up. So I try to be open-minded and gregarious with everyone I meet. Unfortunately, most of my fellow graduate students act like typical real-world adults. They go to work in the office and they have their own social lives outside the university. It's sad but the only really cohesive groups are the graduate union, which heckles the administration for better grad student benefits, and the few dozen social people at my dorm.

The situation is even a little worse in my department. Many scientists are fiercely anti-social and when I try to talk to these individuals, the conversation seems forced and awkward. One solution is to recruit friendly people to the department, but that takes a lot of work and probably also a great location (e.g. Berkeley or Boston).

I suppose this state of affairs is probably typical in graduate schools. But isn't the model of a university supposed to be one that encourages community, collaboration, and common purpose? Here are some ideas to move towards that goal:

1) Build many (decent) graduate dorms so that students from different departments can mix.
2) Start a prestigious lecture series where famous people come to talk about interesting topics to a general audience.
3) Build a university where the buildings of the different departments are connected together so you have to walk through other departments to get to your own building.
4) Throw a party or happy hour for several closely related departments. For instance: physics, electrical engineering, and chemistry.
5) Put lots of money into graduate activities and clubs. Of course, this success of this effort depends on the self-motivation of the graduate students themselves.
6) Create a graduate student government council and give it a large amount of money, independence, and responsibility.
7) Encourage interaction between undergraduates and graduate students. In my experience, this interaction usually benefits everyone. It also creates a larger groups of students with similar interests.