Lee Kai-Fu, from CMU, and me (from something you + i know you see)
Sometimes I feel as if I do live in interesting times, and perhaps today will be one of those days that stands out in my memory, being ordinary to my optic nerve and yet extra ordinary to my other, hidden ways of sight.
Earlier in the day, I told PH that I wouldn't be attending SIGGRAPH this year.
It would have been My First SIGGRAPH...
(the closest I have been to attending a real live SIGGRAPH would be either be when I was visiting MSR-Seattle (then perhaps just MSR) and Harry Shum let his students present their work from MSR-China (now MSR-Asia), or when I finally got to meet (but not pet) the Stnaford bunny. Marc told me that people have asked to have their picture taken with the little inorganic fellow, and I'll say I was tempted, but my hair was a mess and I didn't want to feel too much like a tourist. Of course, now that I have access to the Stnaford graphics lab, I can always sneak in and play the part of some blogging paparazzi, but I digress.)
...but, like some of the folks described in a book I came across today, I have had some other duties to consider when making the decision as to whether to attend this year's 'GRAPH.
Instead, I have been fulfilling other obligations, reading code (djb) and text (lots), and refining the way I derive and explain "distributional algorithmics".
Last night, I told sliceofpizza that I came up with a game called "immunize the donkey" and after I replied to my zeroth year adviser telling him I wouldn't be, alas, taking the Chinatown bus to Boston next week, I wrote him a beta version of a blog entry that I have yet to write.
In this beta blog entry, I explain how to play "immunize the donkey" and use it as a way of introducing what I have started to call (as of yesterday, when I was at Home Depot), donkey sort.
I'll explain another time, but I realized, after writing this note to pH, that it might make sense to teach donkey sorting right after bubble sort in CS 1x1 (where x is a small constant), or, perhaps even more rebelliously, I wondered if we ought to be teaching donkey sort /first/ to anyone interested in modern algorithmics, whether they aim to be (un)professional computer scientists, or are mainly interested in "computer science as a second language".
We'll see what folks think of this quasi-random order, donkey sort, bubble (bobble) sort, quick (as a fox) sort, and triple-u sort. (To be consistent with the animal farm-y theme, triple-u sorting may also be pronounced, with some non-trivial probability, as triple-ewe sampling.)
(As I told my adviser, either it's obvious that we ought to mash-up volumes two and three of Knuth when we think algorithmically, and folks just aren't into making things "just", or it's one of those things that's not obvious until someone points it out, after which it becomes completely duh'obvious'really? to time travelers from the future and little kids trained in statistical and algorithmic methods for social justice. But I digress again. More on donkey another day, when, like a good zeroth year grad student I'll be able to say truthfully to my adviser that I have run experiments and made pretty pictures, but actually as of the moment, all my emperical studies and tidy graphs exist only in the theoretical part of my brain, which is of course, theoretical.)
It'd be nice to say that Walt Whitman and his leaves of grass helped stir something in me, but really, I was just looking for shoes at the Walt Whitman mall with my mom, and timeslicing myself between donkey sort and other sordid things. On that note, I do wonder what Walt Whitman would say to Turing if he were alive today and still living on TheIsland.
I have yet to read a bio on Mr. Whitman, but I'd like to think he'd say something utterly unpoetic, such as, "Let's go clubbin'!"
Mr. Whitman, as far as I can tell, isn't alive, and so after dropping my sister off at ISP, my mom and I went to the bookstore (B&N) across from Walt Whitman's historic place of birth.
I was going to take a look at Hello Mr. Anderson's latest book (The Long Tail) as I want to show how distributional sampling (and thus ranking and schemes such as triple-u sorting or even good ol' (new) donkey sort) seems like the Right Thing(s) to do.
Instead, I came across a new hardcover titled Guanxi (The Art of Relationships): Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates [etc.]. I'm glad I looked through it, as a large part of the book is about Lee Kai-Fu who I wrote about previously...
(note to those-who-wrote-blogger, why can I not save ill-formed HTML as a draft? It kind of breaks your flow if everything must be perfect. On the topic of flow, try doing a Yahoo search for 'WriteRoom' and buy a OS X box/laptop if you can afford it. Anyway, I have mentioned Lee Kai-Fu before.)
...even if the authors don't seem to realize this! Some folks like to say that stereotypes exist for a reason, and sometimes the truth value of this statement is actually between zero and one exclusive, which in this context has to do with the fact that the two guys who wrote this book seem strongly MIT-TechReview-ish.
I'm not their editor, agent, or their narrative writing teacher, but if I were some convex combo of the three, I might suggest that they:
- Focus on Lee Kai-Fu rather than grind up some quasi-historical quasi-research as a pseudo-business book that really feels like a reallly long MIT TR article.
- Good stories generally involve people, and describe where they came from, where and who they are now, and where they are going, in a way that is often conscious of change as constant as change, of description and dialogue and :o narrative tension. Much as writing stories about numbers is cute (even if you swear they are surreal!) it's tough to pull off.
- Figure out who they're really writing this book for. I'm not sure MIT TR readers are a good audience to lob a pseudo-business book at, and even though it's okay to try to describe, let's say, wavelet codecs in a single paragraph or two for a magazine article, if you want to make the research accessible to a larger audience, you need to work harder to explain it.
- If you don't care about a greater audience, then try to get the book tech reviewed more carefully. Any HCI researcher might point out that what the authors describe as wheel thingies (thingies being my word, to be fair) are probably "pie menus" and if they're not, they're probably closer to pie menus than most other things. The questions mentioned as "MSR-China" interview questions, modulo the culture-specific vectors of questioning authority meta-questions, aren't anything special. I know for a fact that first-year undergrads interviewing for MSFT internships State-side get asked the same questions.)
- If this is a business book, why are the authors in the "business" of "critiquing" Lee Kai-Fu's vision for the future, looking backwards? The critique seems fairly limited in scope anyway, so I'll go on.
- From a social justice lens, this work lacks any deep analysis of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and the Chinese-American experience. I didn't get to read the whole book as my mom wanted me to hold off on buying it and the store was closing (we were there late!) but I think that's therein lies the true story of what's going on. Not some transliterated Chinese characters that will get butchered knowingly or unknowingly by large chunks of the intended audience, and then forgotten because they don't know how to tell their friends about the book (what was it called? something in some Asian language I don't know and thus will quite quickly forget, with a forgettable cover and a really long subtitle?)
Anyway, it is worth reading if you are interested in learning more about this Lee Kai-Fu fellow. If I seem a bit angry now, it's because I also wanted to mention that Lee Kai-Fu hails from CMU, and I have an Angry Little Asian Girl story of my own to tell about someone else who hailed from CMU (and will remain quasi-anonymous).
A wide nibble time ago, in a place called Cambridge MA, I worked for a not-so-little company near the river.
This was before I met Lee Kai-Fu, from CMU, at a BillBQ, before I spent a summer working for LKF's ex-boss, Rudder-san, around 98052.
The pasty fellow who sat to my right at the time now works for a certain Mountain View based search engine company, and two of my teammates ended up, eventually, as PhD students at Berkeley and Yale. (I don't know what happened to the fourth member of our team, but goods are odd that the odds are good that he's up to something good.)
But, at the time, we were but wee undergraduates who liked to play frisbee and complain as we filed bugs against gcc and the Mozilla pre-1.0 codebase.
One day, in a nearby hallway, a white male teammate of my white male Pasty Friend happened to talk to me for a while. I didn't know much about him, but I'm fairly certain he was or had been a PhD student at CMU.
He asked me, "What school do you go to?"
I told him, and my answer was not in the set {Stnaford, CMU, ...} but rather in the set {...}.
I don't remember his exact body language, but I very much remember exactly what he said to me.
"Why don't you go to a real school?"
And I, being unlike him (a seemingly alpha white not-so-alpha male from CMU; as opposed to me, a not-quite white, not-quite male, not-quite choosing to sleep in dorms full of CMU men even though I (gasp) was (un)officially offered such an undergrad "deal") didn't know quite what to say.
I've had a number of years to think about what that little interaction has meant to me, in many contexts, and have talked to my mom and a few BerkeleyBearWellesley friends about it. If Stnaford offered therapists to incoming PhD students in Engineering, I'm sure I could spend many a session constructing and deconstructing, analyzing from and synthesizing out of that one (ugh) memorable incident...
I don't know what I would have told CMU Guy if I could travel back in time and appear then at that instant, or even what I would have told myself shortly afterwards (although I have many an idea as well).
I don't know either, what I would say if I ran into this Dude again, but if I had to say something to the folks that run the CMU CS department, I would ask them what kind of values do /they value/ in a future-possible professor or researcher. It's not just about what the department values, but about what the department values in the character of their students.
That said, I'm sure there are nice people from, at, and going to CMU. Same goes for, uh MIT and stuff (as well as any other school I mention).
While I'm on the subject of school and Chinese characters, I have been wondering if I ought to take more Mandarin Chinese at Stnaford. It'd be nice to understand, for example, more of what LKF et al. have to say (write) without relying on my mom to mostly translate, but I also have thought about taking Russian (less practical, perhaps, for my personal and immediate future, but possibly useful in reading primary sources for work on statistics and cybernetics and fields I have yet to hear of) as a non-primary language.
Phew, I suppose that was, a bit of cartharsis once more. This ASIN 0743273222 book isn't bad, but I just wanted to suggest a few areas for improvement. Perhaps if they can find a co-author that groks intersectionality and can write as fluidly about the complexities of growing up and working as a k-th generation Chinese-American (for k in the range (1.0, 2.0] -- LKF seemed k=~1.3 from what I can remember, and I might be considered more or less k=2 by some (North-)East Coast standards) as they can clearly explain expected probability to an eight year old.
I guess tomorrow I'll try to see if "The Long Tail" is worth citing more than twice, and see if I can debug, dev, and pushpromote my donkey-sort blog entry from beta to prod.
Earlier in the day, I told PH that I wouldn't be attending SIGGRAPH this year.
It would have been My First SIGGRAPH...
(the closest I have been to attending a real live SIGGRAPH would be either be when I was visiting MSR-Seattle (then perhaps just MSR) and Harry Shum let his students present their work from MSR-China (now MSR-Asia), or when I finally got to meet (but not pet) the Stnaford bunny. Marc told me that people have asked to have their picture taken with the little inorganic fellow, and I'll say I was tempted, but my hair was a mess and I didn't want to feel too much like a tourist. Of course, now that I have access to the Stnaford graphics lab, I can always sneak in and play the part of some blogging paparazzi, but I digress.)
...but, like some of the folks described in a book I came across today, I have had some other duties to consider when making the decision as to whether to attend this year's 'GRAPH.
Instead, I have been fulfilling other obligations, reading code (djb) and text (lots), and refining the way I derive and explain "distributional algorithmics".
Last night, I told sliceofpizza that I came up with a game called "immunize the donkey" and after I replied to my zeroth year adviser telling him I wouldn't be, alas, taking the Chinatown bus to Boston next week, I wrote him a beta version of a blog entry that I have yet to write.
In this beta blog entry, I explain how to play "immunize the donkey" and use it as a way of introducing what I have started to call (as of yesterday, when I was at Home Depot), donkey sort.
I'll explain another time, but I realized, after writing this note to pH, that it might make sense to teach donkey sorting right after bubble sort in CS 1x1 (where x is a small constant), or, perhaps even more rebelliously, I wondered if we ought to be teaching donkey sort /first/ to anyone interested in modern algorithmics, whether they aim to be (un)professional computer scientists, or are mainly interested in "computer science as a second language".
We'll see what folks think of this quasi-random order, donkey sort, bubble (bobble) sort, quick (as a fox) sort, and triple-u sort. (To be consistent with the animal farm-y theme, triple-u sorting may also be pronounced, with some non-trivial probability, as triple-ewe sampling.)
(As I told my adviser, either it's obvious that we ought to mash-up volumes two and three of Knuth when we think algorithmically, and folks just aren't into making things "just", or it's one of those things that's not obvious until someone points it out, after which it becomes completely duh'obvious'really? to time travelers from the future and little kids trained in statistical and algorithmic methods for social justice. But I digress again. More on donkey another day, when, like a good zeroth year grad student I'll be able to say truthfully to my adviser that I have run experiments and made pretty pictures, but actually as of the moment, all my emperical studies and tidy graphs exist only in the theoretical part of my brain, which is of course, theoretical.)
It'd be nice to say that Walt Whitman and his leaves of grass helped stir something in me, but really, I was just looking for shoes at the Walt Whitman mall with my mom, and timeslicing myself between donkey sort and other sordid things. On that note, I do wonder what Walt Whitman would say to Turing if he were alive today and still living on TheIsland.
I have yet to read a bio on Mr. Whitman, but I'd like to think he'd say something utterly unpoetic, such as, "Let's go clubbin'!"
Mr. Whitman, as far as I can tell, isn't alive, and so after dropping my sister off at ISP, my mom and I went to the bookstore (B&N) across from Walt Whitman's historic place of birth.
I was going to take a look at Hello Mr. Anderson's latest book (The Long Tail) as I want to show how distributional sampling (and thus ranking and schemes such as triple-u sorting or even good ol' (new) donkey sort) seems like the Right Thing(s) to do.
Instead, I came across a new hardcover titled Guanxi (The Art of Relationships): Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates [etc.]. I'm glad I looked through it, as a large part of the book is about Lee Kai-Fu who I wrote about previously...
(note to those-who-wrote-blogger, why can I not save ill-formed HTML as a draft? It kind of breaks your flow if everything must be perfect. On the topic of flow, try doing a Yahoo search for 'WriteRoom' and buy a OS X box/laptop if you can afford it. Anyway, I have mentioned Lee Kai-Fu before.)
...even if the authors don't seem to realize this! Some folks like to say that stereotypes exist for a reason, and sometimes the truth value of this statement is actually between zero and one exclusive, which in this context has to do with the fact that the two guys who wrote this book seem strongly MIT-TechReview-ish.
I'm not their editor, agent, or their narrative writing teacher, but if I were some convex combo of the three, I might suggest that they:
- Focus on Lee Kai-Fu rather than grind up some quasi-historical quasi-research as a pseudo-business book that really feels like a reallly long MIT TR article.
- Good stories generally involve people, and describe where they came from, where and who they are now, and where they are going, in a way that is often conscious of change as constant as change, of description and dialogue and :o narrative tension. Much as writing stories about numbers is cute (even if you swear they are surreal!) it's tough to pull off.
- Figure out who they're really writing this book for. I'm not sure MIT TR readers are a good audience to lob a pseudo-business book at, and even though it's okay to try to describe, let's say, wavelet codecs in a single paragraph or two for a magazine article, if you want to make the research accessible to a larger audience, you need to work harder to explain it.
- If you don't care about a greater audience, then try to get the book tech reviewed more carefully. Any HCI researcher might point out that what the authors describe as wheel thingies (thingies being my word, to be fair) are probably "pie menus" and if they're not, they're probably closer to pie menus than most other things. The questions mentioned as "MSR-China" interview questions, modulo the culture-specific vectors of questioning authority meta-questions, aren't anything special. I know for a fact that first-year undergrads interviewing for MSFT internships State-side get asked the same questions.)
- If this is a business book, why are the authors in the "business" of "critiquing" Lee Kai-Fu's vision for the future, looking backwards? The critique seems fairly limited in scope anyway, so I'll go on.
- From a social justice lens, this work lacks any deep analysis of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and the Chinese-American experience. I didn't get to read the whole book as my mom wanted me to hold off on buying it and the store was closing (we were there late!) but I think that's therein lies the true story of what's going on. Not some transliterated Chinese characters that will get butchered knowingly or unknowingly by large chunks of the intended audience, and then forgotten because they don't know how to tell their friends about the book (what was it called? something in some Asian language I don't know and thus will quite quickly forget, with a forgettable cover and a really long subtitle?)
Anyway, it is worth reading if you are interested in learning more about this Lee Kai-Fu fellow. If I seem a bit angry now, it's because I also wanted to mention that Lee Kai-Fu hails from CMU, and I have an Angry Little Asian Girl story of my own to tell about someone else who hailed from CMU (and will remain quasi-anonymous).
A wide nibble time ago, in a place called Cambridge MA, I worked for a not-so-little company near the river.
This was before I met Lee Kai-Fu, from CMU, at a BillBQ, before I spent a summer working for LKF's ex-boss, Rudder-san, around 98052.
The pasty fellow who sat to my right at the time now works for a certain Mountain View based search engine company, and two of my teammates ended up, eventually, as PhD students at Berkeley and Yale. (I don't know what happened to the fourth member of our team, but goods are odd that the odds are good that he's up to something good.)
But, at the time, we were but wee undergraduates who liked to play frisbee and complain as we filed bugs against gcc and the Mozilla pre-1.0 codebase.
One day, in a nearby hallway, a white male teammate of my white male Pasty Friend happened to talk to me for a while. I didn't know much about him, but I'm fairly certain he was or had been a PhD student at CMU.
He asked me, "What school do you go to?"
I told him, and my answer was not in the set {Stnaford, CMU, ...} but rather in the set {...}.
I don't remember his exact body language, but I very much remember exactly what he said to me.
"Why don't you go to a real school?"
And I, being unlike him (a seemingly alpha white not-so-alpha male from CMU; as opposed to me, a not-quite white, not-quite male, not-quite choosing to sleep in dorms full of CMU men even though I (gasp) was (un)officially offered such an undergrad "deal") didn't know quite what to say.
I've had a number of years to think about what that little interaction has meant to me, in many contexts, and have talked to my mom and a few BerkeleyBearWellesley friends about it. If Stnaford offered therapists to incoming PhD students in Engineering, I'm sure I could spend many a session constructing and deconstructing, analyzing from and synthesizing out of that one (ugh) memorable incident...
I don't know what I would have told CMU Guy if I could travel back in time and appear then at that instant, or even what I would have told myself shortly afterwards (although I have many an idea as well).
I don't know either, what I would say if I ran into this Dude again, but if I had to say something to the folks that run the CMU CS department, I would ask them what kind of values do /they value/ in a future-possible professor or researcher. It's not just about what the department values, but about what the department values in the character of their students.
That said, I'm sure there are nice people from, at, and going to CMU. Same goes for, uh MIT and stuff (as well as any other school I mention).
While I'm on the subject of school and Chinese characters, I have been wondering if I ought to take more Mandarin Chinese at Stnaford. It'd be nice to understand, for example, more of what LKF et al. have to say (write) without relying on my mom to mostly translate, but I also have thought about taking Russian (less practical, perhaps, for my personal and immediate future, but possibly useful in reading primary sources for work on statistics and cybernetics and fields I have yet to hear of) as a non-primary language.
Phew, I suppose that was, a bit of cartharsis once more. This ASIN 0743273222 book isn't bad, but I just wanted to suggest a few areas for improvement. Perhaps if they can find a co-author that groks intersectionality and can write as fluidly about the complexities of growing up and working as a k-th generation Chinese-American (for k in the range (1.0, 2.0] -- LKF seemed k=~1.3 from what I can remember, and I might be considered more or less k=2 by some (North-)East Coast standards) as they can clearly explain expected probability to an eight year old.
I guess tomorrow I'll try to see if "The Long Tail" is worth citing more than twice, and see if I can debug, dev, and pushpromote my donkey-sort blog entry from beta to prod.
posted by L. Wu @ 8:14 PM
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