Government inherently imposes morality on its society. Laws define what is morally acceptable and unacceptable, and the enforcement of those laws in turn constrains society to the particular aspects of morality manifest in said laws.
A democratic society should theoretically have laws that represent the morality of its population. Things get a little trickier with representative democracies like the United States. While the United States has a complicated and nuanced system of government, I think we all agree that its laws should be supported by a large portion, if not the majority of its population.
So, for the sake of simplicity, let's presume that this idea (that a democratic society should have laws that represent the morality of its population) holds for all democracies, direct or representative. The people vote for laws and policies, or elect individuals to govern, such that the resulting government matches their own values as closely as possible.
To recap: anything relating to the governance of a society is a moral issue. This includes the definition of rights. The problem with moral issues is there is no right answer, except through consensus--that's just the way we work. A philosophy is only as good as its strength in obtaining adherents.
You see, moral issues, while the can be argued logically, are predicated on some premises, which, when you get to the core of things, have an emotional basis. A good debater can construct an argument to prove anything given the right set of premises. That same debater can also dismantle any argument if allowed to disregard or redefine the premises.
So what does this all mean? Let's consider an example: the laws and rights pertaining to marriage, which seems to be such a popular topic these days. Some people have the emotional premise that marriage should only exists between and man and a woman. Other people have different emotional premises that lead to the conclusions that marriage should be able to occur between any two willing adults. There are also folks who think marriage shouldn't exist as a government construct, based on the premise that government should be minimal. There are many more variations in opinion and other complicated aspects like rights outside of marriage, but I'll leave itemizing all the permutations and complexities to you.
How do we decide what to do as a society in the US? We vote, courts make decisions, laws are passed. In the case of courts, judges have a set of legal premises in addition to their own options. Again, it's a complicated system, and in the case of same-sex marriage, there are strong opinions in either side.
I believe that same-sex marriage will be legalized eventually, since the primary purpose of modern marriage is individual fulfillment. (There are more personal premises and opinions related to whether or not that should be the case.) The question is whether it will happen at the state level or the federal level. In general, I'm more in favor of state level laws, but there are tricky questions regarding recognizing marriage from other states.
What I really wanted to drive home is that when people make arguments that seem totally illogical to you, it's probably because they have a different set of emotional premises. (Though it's entirely possible that they have faulty logic.) I've read many articles about how there are no good arguments against gay marriage. Of course there aren't if you don't share your opponents' premises! Opposing same-sex marriage is hard in particular because there is no argument: the opinion is the premise. Proponents, on the other hand, can dig for deeper premises relating to equality, and thus make more compelling arguments.
20130517
incorporating computer science into K-12 curriculums
Math, Science, History, English--the four staples of American education. Sure, maybe there's Art (performance or studio), foreign languages, physical education, health, and electives in there as well. Sometimes there's the token technology class or the computer science AP you can take as a junior or senior in high school.
But computer science is huge, and deserves more time than it usually gets in classrooms. I got my bachelors in CS and am working on my PhD in CS, so obviously I think the world revolves around it, because mine actually does. But that doesn't mean that CS isn't huge, because it is. There are the big names: Google, Apple, Microsoft. Wanna buy stuff? Amazon and eBay. There are the social media guys like Facebook and Twitter. There are the folks doing websites and apps: Etsy to Instagram. There are game companies like Blizzard and EA. There are movie companies like Pixar and Dreamworks. Adobe, IBM, Yahoo. The list goes on and on and on.
So we should teach our kids more about computer science, because it's crucial to so many industries. Even if they're a digital artist, they'll still need to know a little about hexadecimal. So let's teach them!
Recently, I did a demo at an elementary school science fair in which I brought a balance scale and had a dozen containers of various weights. The task for the kids was to put the containers in order using as few comparisons as possible. The older kids got it very quickly, and the patient younger kids got it too. I was teaching quicksort to 2nd graders, and they didn't even know what hit them!
Kids are more than capable of learning basic computing concepts. Elementary school kids could pick up counting in binary and hexadecimal, symbolic logic and basic satisfiability problems, sorting algorithms, and deterministic finite automaton. These topics range in difficulty equivalent to mathematic problems they cover in elementary school: counting to pre-algebra.
I've got so many ideas of how to teach this to kids, and I'm not the only one. High schoolers could do regular expressions, circuits (and, or, not gates), and maybe transistors. And programming! Ugh! Why doesn't everyone learn how to program? I know that it's not everyone's cup of tea, but neither is math, and I can't tell you how may people I've encountered that say, Oh I really need to learn how to program...
I was showing a middle-school kid from church how to program in Python, and when he left he told his mom, I wish they taught this stuff in school. Me too, buddy, me too.
So what has to give in order for this to happen? Not much. It can be taught alongside math and science in elementary school. We can overhaul the terrible "technology" classes taught in some schools and offer more serious computer science electives. It's totally possible, but it needs to happen at the school or district level for real change to happen. Going up any higher might just result in more crap "computer" classes.
Part of the problem is that second grade teachers usually don't know how to count in binary--that is, that the concepts that would be so easy to teach aren't yet known by the teachers. That won't change until everyone starts needing to know this stuff, which wont happen until the system is changed. It's tautological. Maybe I'll start by contacting my local schools and see if they'd like me to come in for a computer science day or something. If I do, I'll let you know how it goes.
But computer science is huge, and deserves more time than it usually gets in classrooms. I got my bachelors in CS and am working on my PhD in CS, so obviously I think the world revolves around it, because mine actually does. But that doesn't mean that CS isn't huge, because it is. There are the big names: Google, Apple, Microsoft. Wanna buy stuff? Amazon and eBay. There are the social media guys like Facebook and Twitter. There are the folks doing websites and apps: Etsy to Instagram. There are game companies like Blizzard and EA. There are movie companies like Pixar and Dreamworks. Adobe, IBM, Yahoo. The list goes on and on and on.
So we should teach our kids more about computer science, because it's crucial to so many industries. Even if they're a digital artist, they'll still need to know a little about hexadecimal. So let's teach them!
Recently, I did a demo at an elementary school science fair in which I brought a balance scale and had a dozen containers of various weights. The task for the kids was to put the containers in order using as few comparisons as possible. The older kids got it very quickly, and the patient younger kids got it too. I was teaching quicksort to 2nd graders, and they didn't even know what hit them!
Kids are more than capable of learning basic computing concepts. Elementary school kids could pick up counting in binary and hexadecimal, symbolic logic and basic satisfiability problems, sorting algorithms, and deterministic finite automaton. These topics range in difficulty equivalent to mathematic problems they cover in elementary school: counting to pre-algebra.
I've got so many ideas of how to teach this to kids, and I'm not the only one. High schoolers could do regular expressions, circuits (and, or, not gates), and maybe transistors. And programming! Ugh! Why doesn't everyone learn how to program? I know that it's not everyone's cup of tea, but neither is math, and I can't tell you how may people I've encountered that say, Oh I really need to learn how to program...
I was showing a middle-school kid from church how to program in Python, and when he left he told his mom, I wish they taught this stuff in school. Me too, buddy, me too.
So what has to give in order for this to happen? Not much. It can be taught alongside math and science in elementary school. We can overhaul the terrible "technology" classes taught in some schools and offer more serious computer science electives. It's totally possible, but it needs to happen at the school or district level for real change to happen. Going up any higher might just result in more crap "computer" classes.
Part of the problem is that second grade teachers usually don't know how to count in binary--that is, that the concepts that would be so easy to teach aren't yet known by the teachers. That won't change until everyone starts needing to know this stuff, which wont happen until the system is changed. It's tautological. Maybe I'll start by contacting my local schools and see if they'd like me to come in for a computer science day or something. If I do, I'll let you know how it goes.
20130516
harnessing the power of educated stay-at-home moms
A few weeks ago, I was having a discussion with a colleague whose wife is extremely well-educated but stays at home with their two kids. This is a quite common story, with many stay-at-home moms having bachelors from prestigious colleges all the way to moms with PhDs. I'm sure it happens with blokes too, but it is much more common route for women.
We then talked about how hard it is to find part-time work. In 2010, I was pre-grad school doing research part time (so my schedule was super flexible), and I couldn't find a second part-time gig that worked and was worth it. It's just hard.
So we came up with a startup idea: basically a high-end Amazon Mechanical Turk for connecting people with part-time work. It would have to be less sketchy than craigslist jobs, and on a per-task basis. The idea is that employers could break tasks down into small chunks--1 hour, 15 minutes, etc., have a deadline, and a minimum skill level in certain areas. Individuals could accomplish tasks, "level up," and make money. In addition to skills, you could have an optional review process to accept a task or request a redo/edits before payment. There could bonuses for doing N tasks for a company, or doing a certain number of variations on the same task, accomplishing a task early, or for doing an excellent job.
This would require re-imaging how tasks are assigned and reviewed in the work environment, but I'd like to hope that it wouldn't be too hard. What would be good candidates for this? There'd be many boring tasks, certainly. Data entry, ugh. But writing summaries could be fun, as could be tagging photos and participating in user studies. If I were a user of this system, I could write web-scraping scripts for folks, do web development, or accomplish other small programming tasks.
There could be a competition component for some things, like the various logo/website design sites out there. For example, a company could judge from the first three submissions and accept one or none.
Regardless of the details, there should be a web service like this, that pays more and has harder, more skilled-based tasks than AMT. This wouldn't help just SAHMs, but it would be good for the unemployed or partially-employed, in general. As for the companies? I don't think they'd mind getting more work done.
We then talked about how hard it is to find part-time work. In 2010, I was pre-grad school doing research part time (so my schedule was super flexible), and I couldn't find a second part-time gig that worked and was worth it. It's just hard.
So we came up with a startup idea: basically a high-end Amazon Mechanical Turk for connecting people with part-time work. It would have to be less sketchy than craigslist jobs, and on a per-task basis. The idea is that employers could break tasks down into small chunks--1 hour, 15 minutes, etc., have a deadline, and a minimum skill level in certain areas. Individuals could accomplish tasks, "level up," and make money. In addition to skills, you could have an optional review process to accept a task or request a redo/edits before payment. There could bonuses for doing N tasks for a company, or doing a certain number of variations on the same task, accomplishing a task early, or for doing an excellent job.
This would require re-imaging how tasks are assigned and reviewed in the work environment, but I'd like to hope that it wouldn't be too hard. What would be good candidates for this? There'd be many boring tasks, certainly. Data entry, ugh. But writing summaries could be fun, as could be tagging photos and participating in user studies. If I were a user of this system, I could write web-scraping scripts for folks, do web development, or accomplish other small programming tasks.
There could be a competition component for some things, like the various logo/website design sites out there. For example, a company could judge from the first three submissions and accept one or none.
Regardless of the details, there should be a web service like this, that pays more and has harder, more skilled-based tasks than AMT. This wouldn't help just SAHMs, but it would be good for the unemployed or partially-employed, in general. As for the companies? I don't think they'd mind getting more work done.
20130502
being happily busy
Are you terribly surprised that I've taken a bit of a hiatus from blogging? No, you are not. Three of my meager ten posts for this year have been about work. This makes four.
In early April, I read this post about not being that busy, and it made me angry. I did the mental tally at the time of what I was supposed to be doing: 20 hrs/week teaching, 20 hrs/week research, 20 hrs/week coursework, 10 hrs/week study for generals, 8 hrs a week for various Church commitments, let alone commuting, managing the community garden, taking care of domestic stuff, and doing things like sleeping and eating. If you give yourself a frugal 9 hours a day for sleeping, eating, and getting ready, then you have all of 105 hours a week to do everything else. There just wasn't enough time in the day.
Something had to give, and unfortunately the thing that took the brunt of it was my research and prepping for generals, which was arguably the most important stuff of all. (That said, I've been pretty terrible at all of my obligations.) But how did it happen that the my highest priority got left behind? Because there was just too much stuff, the urgent but less important stuff got the air time. Students need answers now and homework needs to get handed in today. Generals, which was way off in May, had plenty of potential time. Well, happy May everyone!
It came to a head relatively recently, and after several discussions with my advisor and other faculty, as well as some soul searching (Do I even want a PhD?), I decided to postpone my generals until October. My advisor was incredibly supportive, and I'm really happy with the decision.
Since that turning point, I've been kicking up the research and studying back to the level they should have been at, and so I'm even busier now. But I'm less stressed; how does that work? I think that it has to do with several things.
Before postponing generals was even on the table, while I was sorting through what bothered me about the I'm not actually that busy article, I realized that there was a difference between busy and stressed. I like to be busy and I hate to be stressed. I don't think it's bad to glorify productivity, but I do think it's detrimental to glorify being stressed out all the time. I think it's also not good to glorify busyness for the sake of being busy; streamlining and efficiency are important. It's also important to slow down for the right moments.
Another facet to this is in how we convey our lives to others. If you do it poorly, talking about all your obligations can be very selfish. (I know I did exactly that above, but this is my soapbox; get over it.) On the other hand, people that care about you actually do want to know what is going on in your life. So we're left with a tactful balance of revealing the right amount of information: not so much as to pass on the stress or bore the audience, but enough to engage friends and colleagues in your life and give them a springboard into talking about their lives. We should never be so busy as to forget to care about others, even (or especially) in casual conversations.
(As a side note, I'm not angry at that not-busy post any more; I just think they had the wrong angle on the problem.)
I'm going to be busy for the foreseeable future. But that doesn't mean I won't have time to talk with friends, play in the garden, or make a nice dinner. I does mean that I need to manage my time well and be productive when it's time to work.
In early April, I read this post about not being that busy, and it made me angry. I did the mental tally at the time of what I was supposed to be doing: 20 hrs/week teaching, 20 hrs/week research, 20 hrs/week coursework, 10 hrs/week study for generals, 8 hrs a week for various Church commitments, let alone commuting, managing the community garden, taking care of domestic stuff, and doing things like sleeping and eating. If you give yourself a frugal 9 hours a day for sleeping, eating, and getting ready, then you have all of 105 hours a week to do everything else. There just wasn't enough time in the day.
Something had to give, and unfortunately the thing that took the brunt of it was my research and prepping for generals, which was arguably the most important stuff of all. (That said, I've been pretty terrible at all of my obligations.) But how did it happen that the my highest priority got left behind? Because there was just too much stuff, the urgent but less important stuff got the air time. Students need answers now and homework needs to get handed in today. Generals, which was way off in May, had plenty of potential time. Well, happy May everyone!
It came to a head relatively recently, and after several discussions with my advisor and other faculty, as well as some soul searching (Do I even want a PhD?), I decided to postpone my generals until October. My advisor was incredibly supportive, and I'm really happy with the decision.
Since that turning point, I've been kicking up the research and studying back to the level they should have been at, and so I'm even busier now. But I'm less stressed; how does that work? I think that it has to do with several things.
Before postponing generals was even on the table, while I was sorting through what bothered me about the I'm not actually that busy article, I realized that there was a difference between busy and stressed. I like to be busy and I hate to be stressed. I don't think it's bad to glorify productivity, but I do think it's detrimental to glorify being stressed out all the time. I think it's also not good to glorify busyness for the sake of being busy; streamlining and efficiency are important. It's also important to slow down for the right moments.
Another facet to this is in how we convey our lives to others. If you do it poorly, talking about all your obligations can be very selfish. (I know I did exactly that above, but this is my soapbox; get over it.) On the other hand, people that care about you actually do want to know what is going on in your life. So we're left with a tactful balance of revealing the right amount of information: not so much as to pass on the stress or bore the audience, but enough to engage friends and colleagues in your life and give them a springboard into talking about their lives. We should never be so busy as to forget to care about others, even (or especially) in casual conversations.
(As a side note, I'm not angry at that not-busy post any more; I just think they had the wrong angle on the problem.)
I'm going to be busy for the foreseeable future. But that doesn't mean I won't have time to talk with friends, play in the garden, or make a nice dinner. I does mean that I need to manage my time well and be productive when it's time to work.
20130406
General Conference Sentence Generator
Thanks to Ziff at Zelophehad’s Daughters, who curated a great dataset of General Conference talks and generously shared it with me, I was able to code up a General Conference random sentence generator.
Using 3-grams (use the last three words to predict the next word) worked best, since it maintained some gramatical structure, but still allowed for substantial variation.
I still need to polish it up, but I'll put it online at some point, and allow the options of picking particular sessions, years, or speakers. In the meanwhile, here are some of my preliminary results. I've included some ones that I think are funny, but also some that aren't.
Manning and I embraced, and thanks were expressed for his service, not only to their homes, and ponder upon the majesty of the gospel of love and union is with us, so I guess we'd better study and ponder the scriptures.
They have gone into the waters of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost, even the Comforter, which is the great physician.
I speak of is lacking.
To my horror, I could see I was willing to share.
They need the strength that has bound their family together every day to read the manual.
He understands how hard it would be if we would accept every assignment to the Prophet Joseph Smith in 1820.
I think I should shoot them, but my mom doesn't.
But we can forgive whatever may have caused us not to condemn him.
What if the commitment is already there and were so hard they couldn't or wouldn't eat.
Rather, I believe our meeting was an answer to every man according to his will, according to his own mother and father.
Lowering his voice, he told us that he sent his divine Son, our Savior, to show us how to establish peace and happiness, but no matter how advantageous it may seem to others.
There are times in the standard works with the area conferences in Mexico, Central America, South America, the Philippines, and we were about to pass through on dry ground.
And don't you go along home.
Fundamental to this is no, of course not, provided it is done in harmony with God.
Then he had the courage to respond almost unanimously to a man and a woman outside of marriage.
In all of our people, with eighty wagons and hundreds of thousands of footnotes would require many hundreds of thousands of Heavenly Father's plan of happiness.
As noted by Moroni, this perfect love comes as a product of that, because when my mother's advice.
Lehi said in the April 2007 Ensign and Liahona To avoid so-called 'incompatibility,' they should be removed in a genuine Christian spirit.
Today my plea is to those members already inside but whose discipleship is casual, individuals whom we could call to be president of twelve deacons.
It may be difficult to tell the world something a thousand times more educated or more serviceable to our fellowmen.
This is our responsibility to break the Sabbath day.
What mother would not want to know about its eternal journey to know where it is possible to send letters, tapes, and pictures, particularly where distances are great and varied.
I've been very proud of my husband.
Jesus used this common illustration of his day and times, but ours as well; they have communicated with us as I speak to you tonight, I was sitting in his robe reading Gospel Doctrine, by President Joseph F.
People didn't like it, she would say, 'O my son, how great iniquity ye brought upon the Zoramites; for when they saw the placard that Elder Schreiter had posted on the airline communication board by the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach.
Arms are tangible, and we use them to achieve his goal.
Does it seem reasonable to cure leprosy by telling a story: 'A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell among thieves and was left half dead.
One spring when we opened up those islands for the preaching of the word of knowledge by the same covenant, volunteered to defend their families and make sure they were all from Idaho stakes affected by the flood opened their homes and by the gif.t and spirit of his message and investigated the Church for their faithfulness.
Thereafter, every time I approached the reception desk of a large lion' s head roaring.
She held her well-worn Personal Progress book and said she had forgiven her unrepentant adversary.
Do you see, Sister Anonymous.
I have mentioned the lives of those who held it when the Savior is known to the church to which we have on hand this year's General Women's Meeting.
He did not place a demand or order for the Church.
If a rope had only one window, we would see one.
That judgment will consider not only your actions, but also for the young man, I can remember the excitement I felt as though heaven and earth and the universe itself seems shattered and the shards of our world.
Such individual blessings are part of a mistreated soul.
He understood, and he could not be evacuated.
In the Andersen home, the Sabbath day holy, maintaining personal purity, and the other prophets of this new approach even a glassful could cause a drowning.
It has been our experience that if you practice these virtues, you will be unable to make its way back into the presence of thousands and thousands of them working together in productive pursuits.
Let us now return to our Father in Heaven reserves for them every promised blessing for His people: a belief, a testimony, patience, obedience, charity, wisdom, and faith in His timing.
Sorrowfully, she answered them, ' Because they have taken away my Lord, and I am grateful for the opportunity to take a careful inventory of their annual increase.
I had the help and blessings of the priesthood would have power, through faith, to govern and direct all of his hopes seemed doomed to scorn and destined for extinction.
On Sunday, April 11th, 1830, Oliver Cowdery preached the first public meetings in the local ward while his team played without him.
The Holy Ghost is to bear witness of the Spirit came to him: he had made a special study of the scriptures and the revelations, they would find Elder Cruz, the mother clasped his hands in bringing individuals into the Church, and so forth.
We gather each week for forty years, lest they should be as concerned with the rising divorce rate.
May we all repent and become active during this coming year of jubilee offers an excellent time to work out the infinite and eternal sacrifice for all mankind, or are the first in England to lure away British girls and make slaves of its citizens.
And there were deep shadows in which the ordinances and direction of Divine Providence reaching out after them and drawing them back to meet the extremely demanding time requirements of his profession as a heart surgeon.
The first and thousandth time this question is invariably asked, particularly by members of this church, which testimony I leave, in the name of Jesus Christ.
I have been coming to conference, I have been to the end.
Using 3-grams (use the last three words to predict the next word) worked best, since it maintained some gramatical structure, but still allowed for substantial variation.
I still need to polish it up, but I'll put it online at some point, and allow the options of picking particular sessions, years, or speakers. In the meanwhile, here are some of my preliminary results. I've included some ones that I think are funny, but also some that aren't.
Manning and I embraced, and thanks were expressed for his service, not only to their homes, and ponder upon the majesty of the gospel of love and union is with us, so I guess we'd better study and ponder the scriptures.
They have gone into the waters of baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost, even the Comforter, which is the great physician.
I speak of is lacking.
To my horror, I could see I was willing to share.
They need the strength that has bound their family together every day to read the manual.
He understands how hard it would be if we would accept every assignment to the Prophet Joseph Smith in 1820.
I think I should shoot them, but my mom doesn't.
But we can forgive whatever may have caused us not to condemn him.
What if the commitment is already there and were so hard they couldn't or wouldn't eat.
Rather, I believe our meeting was an answer to every man according to his will, according to his own mother and father.
Lowering his voice, he told us that he sent his divine Son, our Savior, to show us how to establish peace and happiness, but no matter how advantageous it may seem to others.
There are times in the standard works with the area conferences in Mexico, Central America, South America, the Philippines, and we were about to pass through on dry ground.
And don't you go along home.
Fundamental to this is no, of course not, provided it is done in harmony with God.
Then he had the courage to respond almost unanimously to a man and a woman outside of marriage.
In all of our people, with eighty wagons and hundreds of thousands of footnotes would require many hundreds of thousands of Heavenly Father's plan of happiness.
As noted by Moroni, this perfect love comes as a product of that, because when my mother's advice.
Lehi said in the April 2007 Ensign and Liahona To avoid so-called 'incompatibility,' they should be removed in a genuine Christian spirit.
Today my plea is to those members already inside but whose discipleship is casual, individuals whom we could call to be president of twelve deacons.
It may be difficult to tell the world something a thousand times more educated or more serviceable to our fellowmen.
This is our responsibility to break the Sabbath day.
What mother would not want to know about its eternal journey to know where it is possible to send letters, tapes, and pictures, particularly where distances are great and varied.
I've been very proud of my husband.
Jesus used this common illustration of his day and times, but ours as well; they have communicated with us as I speak to you tonight, I was sitting in his robe reading Gospel Doctrine, by President Joseph F.
People didn't like it, she would say, 'O my son, how great iniquity ye brought upon the Zoramites; for when they saw the placard that Elder Schreiter had posted on the airline communication board by the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach.
Arms are tangible, and we use them to achieve his goal.
Does it seem reasonable to cure leprosy by telling a story: 'A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho who fell among thieves and was left half dead.
One spring when we opened up those islands for the preaching of the word of knowledge by the same covenant, volunteered to defend their families and make sure they were all from Idaho stakes affected by the flood opened their homes and by the gif.t and spirit of his message and investigated the Church for their faithfulness.
Thereafter, every time I approached the reception desk of a large lion' s head roaring.
She held her well-worn Personal Progress book and said she had forgiven her unrepentant adversary.
Do you see, Sister Anonymous.
I have mentioned the lives of those who held it when the Savior is known to the church to which we have on hand this year's General Women's Meeting.
He did not place a demand or order for the Church.
If a rope had only one window, we would see one.
That judgment will consider not only your actions, but also for the young man, I can remember the excitement I felt as though heaven and earth and the universe itself seems shattered and the shards of our world.
Such individual blessings are part of a mistreated soul.
He understood, and he could not be evacuated.
In the Andersen home, the Sabbath day holy, maintaining personal purity, and the other prophets of this new approach even a glassful could cause a drowning.
It has been our experience that if you practice these virtues, you will be unable to make its way back into the presence of thousands and thousands of them working together in productive pursuits.
Let us now return to our Father in Heaven reserves for them every promised blessing for His people: a belief, a testimony, patience, obedience, charity, wisdom, and faith in His timing.
Sorrowfully, she answered them, ' Because they have taken away my Lord, and I am grateful for the opportunity to take a careful inventory of their annual increase.
I had the help and blessings of the priesthood would have power, through faith, to govern and direct all of his hopes seemed doomed to scorn and destined for extinction.
On Sunday, April 11th, 1830, Oliver Cowdery preached the first public meetings in the local ward while his team played without him.
The Holy Ghost is to bear witness of the Spirit came to him: he had made a special study of the scriptures and the revelations, they would find Elder Cruz, the mother clasped his hands in bringing individuals into the Church, and so forth.
We gather each week for forty years, lest they should be as concerned with the rising divorce rate.
May we all repent and become active during this coming year of jubilee offers an excellent time to work out the infinite and eternal sacrifice for all mankind, or are the first in England to lure away British girls and make slaves of its citizens.
And there were deep shadows in which the ordinances and direction of Divine Providence reaching out after them and drawing them back to meet the extremely demanding time requirements of his profession as a heart surgeon.
The first and thousandth time this question is invariably asked, particularly by members of this church, which testimony I leave, in the name of Jesus Christ.
I have been coming to conference, I have been to the end.
20130326
you don't understand
Ugh, that title sounds like some awful teenager. Luckily, there no teenagers in this post.
Today I had the opportunity to listen to a guest lecture by the famous machine learning theorist Vladimir Vapnik. Since he lives locally, I've heard him talk about the same topic three times now: in this class, at the annual NYAS Machine Learning Symposium, and at general Princeton CS Lecture. (These are more-or-less the slides he used today.)
Warning: this next paragraph is geeky; skip it if you aren't interested.
The theory he presents is interesting, as are the results; he proposes that information other than input and result can be used in training a machine learning algorithm. The idea is that some description of how we get from input to output, even if the description isn't enough to reproduce the result exactly, helps us learn. He gives an awesome example of labeling OCR numbers with essentially poetry, describing the personalities of the writers in flowery, adjective-heavy text; each digit in the training set had some text written exclusively for it. He shows that providing that text when training the algorithm (in addition to the input pixels and labeled outputs, of course) results in better OCR recognition than just providing the standard training data exclusively. Permuting the text associations got rid of the improvement. Crazy stuff.
During the lecture, he said to the class several times "you don't understand." It wasn't a question, nor did he always attempt to re-explain, perhaps deeming us incapable of understanding those particular points at all. I've often found that the most brilliant people have a hard time explaining themselves so that everyone can understand--they just can't understand not understanding, and so can't see the path people need to follow in order to obtain understanding.
It seemed like Vapnik has reached a point in his life were he is comfortable with people not understanding him; he's a very well-established individual and is possibly entitled to that luxury. At this point, it's on us to try and understand him, instead of the usual more balanced responsibilities of teacher and student both needing to do their best to teach and understand, respectively.
That isn't to say that Vapnik isn't a good lecturer; he's fairly clear and entertaining, but there are some details that could use more illumination. Perhaps I'm not being fair, though, since everything is in contrast to the usual lecturer for the course Rob Schapire, who is possibly the best lecturer I've ever encountered. I also contrast it to my own teaching, where I've been thinking hard about how to explain simple computer science concepts like objects or static methods to students that have never seen the material or anything like it ever before. It's a lot of fun, but it's also exhausting to some extent.
Anyway, I find it funny that I felt the need to write a commentary about the teaching style of the lecturer whose talk was entitled Learning with Teacher: Learning using Hidden Information. Maybe there was something hidden in there...
Today I had the opportunity to listen to a guest lecture by the famous machine learning theorist Vladimir Vapnik. Since he lives locally, I've heard him talk about the same topic three times now: in this class, at the annual NYAS Machine Learning Symposium, and at general Princeton CS Lecture. (These are more-or-less the slides he used today.)
Warning: this next paragraph is geeky; skip it if you aren't interested.
The theory he presents is interesting, as are the results; he proposes that information other than input and result can be used in training a machine learning algorithm. The idea is that some description of how we get from input to output, even if the description isn't enough to reproduce the result exactly, helps us learn. He gives an awesome example of labeling OCR numbers with essentially poetry, describing the personalities of the writers in flowery, adjective-heavy text; each digit in the training set had some text written exclusively for it. He shows that providing that text when training the algorithm (in addition to the input pixels and labeled outputs, of course) results in better OCR recognition than just providing the standard training data exclusively. Permuting the text associations got rid of the improvement. Crazy stuff.
During the lecture, he said to the class several times "you don't understand." It wasn't a question, nor did he always attempt to re-explain, perhaps deeming us incapable of understanding those particular points at all. I've often found that the most brilliant people have a hard time explaining themselves so that everyone can understand--they just can't understand not understanding, and so can't see the path people need to follow in order to obtain understanding.
It seemed like Vapnik has reached a point in his life were he is comfortable with people not understanding him; he's a very well-established individual and is possibly entitled to that luxury. At this point, it's on us to try and understand him, instead of the usual more balanced responsibilities of teacher and student both needing to do their best to teach and understand, respectively.
That isn't to say that Vapnik isn't a good lecturer; he's fairly clear and entertaining, but there are some details that could use more illumination. Perhaps I'm not being fair, though, since everything is in contrast to the usual lecturer for the course Rob Schapire, who is possibly the best lecturer I've ever encountered. I also contrast it to my own teaching, where I've been thinking hard about how to explain simple computer science concepts like objects or static methods to students that have never seen the material or anything like it ever before. It's a lot of fun, but it's also exhausting to some extent.
Anyway, I find it funny that I felt the need to write a commentary about the teaching style of the lecturer whose talk was entitled Learning with Teacher: Learning using Hidden Information. Maybe there was something hidden in there...
20130321
goodbye, google reader
Last week, Google announced that they were closing up shop on Google Reader. Earlier this week, I attempted the transition to Feedly, which is a fine service, but I need to re-tweak my reflexes. Today, they removed Reader from the general "more" dropdown menu, which is exactly what I needed to finalize the transition.
Feedly isn't quite right for me, at least not yet, so I might end up starting my own RSS/Atom reader projet. There are all sorts of great machine learning techniques that could be applied to feeds, and I've worked on some myself. Feeds could also be integrated into a massive life management application that handles email, calendaring, todo lists, etc.
This hypothetical app could spoon feed you exactly what you need when you need it. For example, I'm not a morning person, and I tend to read a few webcomics over breakfast to warm up my brain. While opening a new browser tab, getting to feedly, and clicking comics really isn't that hard, I do the same three clicks almost every day. And then I usually check my email. This could certainly be streamlined manually, but why not automate it and make the whole process easier for everyone?
Ideally, we'd be able to detect importance and urgency of emails, posts, or other messages, and figure out when someone would like to be interrupted for something (or a batch of somethings). If work was automatically paced like this, would some people be more productive? I probably would. I hate email clients that ding or give you a popup every time you get an email. But I also hate the feeling that I'm missing something important if I go for a while without checking my email.
This has turned into a rant about tools for streamlining productivity instead of an obituary for Google Reader. Reader was good, but not perfect, and it obviously wasn't well-used enough to survive. Hopefully Google will spend their energy on bigger and better things, and maybe it'll force me to write some awesome productivity app. Regardless, I used Reader a lot, and I'm a little sad to see it go. Goodbye, old friend.
20130318
winter to spring
Last week, the weather was gorgeous, so I spent a bit of every morning prepping the community garden for spring. And then, in an attempt to be as contrary as possible, mother nature gave us snow this weekend. Now, we have a strange wintery mix going on as I type. Inside, my poor little tomato seedlings look out at the snow and shudder. Don't worry my dears, it'll be warm soon.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)