A Weblog

About a year ago, I was at the Park Street station on my way back to Cambridge. As I waited for the train to come, I did what I always do when I’m waiting without a book: I paced the end of the platform. Rather than slowly pass my foot over the knobs of the textured, yellow safety strip,—a favorite pastime of mine—I kept to the flat brick on a well-defined route that visits the supporting columns which dwell nearest to the tunnel’s opening.

Normally I’m not struck by public graffiti, but every once in a while something unexpected crops up. This time one of my columns read: “Kill all yuppies.”

I was very excited by this message. No, I’m not in favor of killing all the yuppies. That suggestion’d put me too close at risk. There’s a very good chance, indeed, that I’m a yuppie. So, no. Please be kind to the yuppies. But here’s what’s different. Normally the graffiti that I’ve encountered are either some sort of tag—you know, a personal statement of existence and potential ownership, “Kilroy was here” or “AlL St*R” or something along those lines—or alternatively they are some commitment of love or hate (often accompanied by a slur or two). You seen them, something like “Joe is a fag” or “I love Tiffany.” Anyway, all of these examples are personally directed. They don’t extend beyond an individual. Sometimes I’ll find one that condemns a whole group of people, like my yuppies example, scrawled on a public alleyway. But those even those are gang-related or race-related. Yuppies represent something new.

Whoever wrote it got my attention because his hatred was not race-directed. It points to a larger social movement. The new segregation, if it is really new, will be intellect. And these upwardly mobile persons are central enough to earn the distinguished role of spokesperson. But what exactly are yuppies mascots of? Well, that sort of brings me to some more recent graffiti.

The Ashmont train station is undergoing some pretty hefty repairs. Officials have suspended the Mattapan High Speed Line service for a year, and the train station is hidden from plain sight by several, several ton mounds of dirt. Like most other forms of transportation in the city, the Ashmont station is going underground. It’ll take some time before things are back in order. For now, there are lots of make-shift wooden structures to take the places of the bus depot and station entrance. And that means there’s plenty of board space for community art—I mean graffiti.

The last time I was at Ashmont I noticed some of the newer pieces as I walked by one of the wooden panels. This time a website caught my eye. I haven’t seen many hypertext tags outside of the internet, but there it was: a link to someone’s myspace page. Kilroy has entered a new age and he’s updated his message. Now the statement is “I am not here, I’m here. Come find me.” It’s a revolution. Personalization on the web is at an all-time high, and movers in the field want more of it. Collaborative filtering, social navigation, blogs! They’re all in style, and they don’t look like they’re going to go away any time soon. I can’t say I mind it, either. In fact, I want to be more a part of it.

This is not the same technological revolution that your slightly older brother talked about only decades ago. No, the paradigm is different: we can read the writing on the wall. Literally. Before technology brought with it an increased level of impersonality. The assembly-line metaphor bled into everything—it’s still around, of course. Don’t worry, the transactional framework driven by the glory of mass manipulation of raw goods to form an endless supply of identical product is still very much alive. And people are still applying manufacturing-inspired methods completely out of context. And the effect is still very isolating. But lo! the very same push to maximize profit that once aimed to cut time and kill interpersonal relationships has turned a corner. Personalization is the new rage.

But will personalization help build bridges among people; won’t it keep us even more securely glued to our seats in front of our computers? I’m afraid that it can. Technologically-backed social ventures, like AOL Instant Messenger and other chat programs, have made it easier for the quiet kids to remain quiet and alone. Chat tools give the user the appearance that they’re interacting with other people. But some researchers suggest that the analogy is only that: apparent. The real satisfaction one gains from honest-to-goodness, face-to-face conversation is so much greater than its virtual manifestation that it’s almost silly to make the comparison. So, what’s going on?

The invitational nature of MySpace is different than AIM. A person’s page is like his home. Each click to that site is really a visit. That’s why it makes the news so often. Sometimes the visits aren’t just virtual. And everyone uses it: college kids, little kids, married couples. The range of demographics represented by MySpace’s users is enormous. Unlike Friendster, which originally withheld a user’s access to a stranger’s page by default, MySpace let everyone see everyone else from the get-go. Friendster was a place for people who were already friends. MySpace, I believe, was built to get people to go to and listen to new bands in concert. The idea that you’d actually meet strangers was the founding idea. Now it’s just a place find others you’d like to bone à la Craig’s List’s personals but less so. But the idea that you might meet the person attached to the website is still very much there. Isn’t that exactly what that graffiti from Ashmont Station was all about? The internet takes all the scariness out of meeting a stranger, because you don’t physically meet, and the meeting is still completely anonymous. (There’s a trade-off, though. The relationships that form are even more tenuous than those so-called and ever important “weak bonds.” Online relationships tend to be superficial and sometimes socially damaging. Like I said before, they permit the loners to find each other and stay alone. Even those of us who aren’t loners end up as loners the longer we stay online rather than outside.)

So we’ve found a cause for our mascots. Like the term itself, today’s yuppies herald the dawn of a new form of impersonalization: isolation through personalization. Technology is poised to use what it knows about you and your preferences to make a friendlier, easier experience. In the process, you get to interact with others—real or not. The interaction is deep enough to convince you that you’ve done something meaningful. You’ve made a friend or learned a new fact. (Wikipedia is a blessing and curse.) But have you really; can you rely on your friend or apply your fact?

Your iPod list has exactly the music you want to hear. And so now, people go through life not listening to each other but to themselves, plugged into a clean, white box whose world revolves around the most important person—its only person: its master is me. Time Magazine got it wrong. The person of the year is not You; it’s me. This is the society recorded in graffiti today.

Technorati Tags:isolation, technology, personalization, individual, myspace, friendster, blogs, online, community, sociology, graffiti, tagging, kilroy, web, internet, ipod, wikipedia, aim, chat, collaboration, boston, mbta, yuppies

For my birthday/Christmas—they’re essentially one and the same—I received what is perhaps the most wonderful card game ever. Apples to Apples is a group adventure in forced classification, and its parallels to data mining techniques are vivid, fun, and revealing. Its power is so subtle that my sister almost didn’t realize just how much of her bedroom practices she had revealed in a single card. My dad caught it, though. Let’s hold back a moment. You need to know how to play the game first.

There are two kinds of cards: red apple cards—each player holds seven of these at all times—and green apple cards, which stay in the middle. Both cards have a single word printed on each of them. The red cards have nouns like The Godfather or exorcism. The green cards get adjectives like scenic or cold. Like the name suggests, the gist of the game is to match Apple to Apple.

Each round one person reveals a green apple card. This person is the judge for the round. He gets to choose which person comes up with the best pair. Let’s pretend the word for this round is ‘flirtatious.’ Everyone else looks in her hand of seven red cards and picks the one which is the most flirtatious. Here’s a list of the seven cards in my hand:

• The Olympics
• Plane Crashes
• The Ozone Layer
• The Opera
• Gossip
• Fast Food
• Family Reunions

I select the ozone layer card because that little strumpet has been trying to get everyone to pay attention to it since the early 90s and I’m sick of it. I place my card face-down so that the judge doesn’t know which card is mine—we want at least to feign impartiality, right? Everyone else does the same. We mix up the cards and the judge chooses which card is most flirtatious. Someone else had the KKK. The judge, because he’s nuts, chooses that one. That was DJ’s card, so he gets the point for the round. Now someone else takes her turn as judge and we continue like that until things get out of hand and we stop. The player with the greatest number of green apple cards at the end wins.

It’s really neat to see the sort of patterns that develop after a couple of rounds have passed. People learn to “play to the judge.” We like to have the judge talk through his choice so that we can get a sense of the convoluted thought processes our friends have. Each round is training. People pick up what works with whom and why others don’t. Strategies emerge. Battles ensue. Complex word associations form. You get the idea.

The way people adapt after a few rounds of the game is basically the same way an artificial neural network (NN) learns. It has some training data. In this case, the training data are the red cards. The problem is to match the right red card with a specified green card. In general an expert will figure out what the right pairings are. The NN will come up with a guess, which is a lot like picked a red card. Then the expert will tell the neural net whether it got the answer right or wrong—in this case, whether it selected the right card or not. In our game, the judge tells us what went wrong during the talk aloud portion of judging. Maybe he thought that only living things could be flirtatious. Perhaps the more bizarre, the better in the judge’s mind. Whatever the case, talking through the solution gives us an opportunity to revise our plan of attack. Next time, we’ll weight one sort of connection over another.

Neural nets do the same thing. They look at the expert’s answer and its answer and compare the difference to calculate the error. The nets use the error to readjust the internal weights so that chance of getting the right answer is better next time. When a net is good at getting a proper response on the training set, then it’s ready to tackle new data that doesn’t yet have a right answer. Apples to Apples is a game that is built around the same premises used to train a neural net. And it’s remarkably fun. But how do we get beyond training; when do we get to have a shot at untamed data? Well, we came up with some new rules.

In this version of the game, the set-up is the same. One person judges against a green card, the rest offer up a matching red card. This time, though, the judge has to guess whose card is which. After playing with the normal rules, you should have a feeling for what sort of answer each person is likely to give. Now you have to work backwards. If you can successfully match a card with a person you get that point. But should you guess wrong, the person who successfully dodged identification gets a point. So, you stand to get a lot of points if you’re the judge. If you’re not, you still could earn one more. And over time, that’s the way to go.

So how did my sister embarrass herself? Well, I was the judge and the word was ‘dirty.’ I said, “Maybe this says a little too much about me, but I’m going to pick ‘handcuffs.’ Whose is it?”

It was my sister’s card. Seeing that, my dad asked, “Janice?”

She floundered a bit. “Well, I like,” she started. The room immediately fell silent. She had the floor. Realizing what she had begun to say, she grasped for words. “At school we were talking, and…”

I cut her off quickly. “Can somebody pass me a cookie?” I asked loudly to DJ, who broke into laughter.

Who knew that computer science could bring a family together like that?

Technorati Tags:apples to apples, family, classification, data mining, neural network, neural net, judging, card game, association, classification, word game, card game, education, learning, training, expert, ozone layer

For one of my final projects, I wrote the first of three lesson plans for a high school course on plane geometry. When designing learning environments, it’s important to work around four dimensions that affect learning. They are to what extent your classroom is knowledge-centered, learner-centered, community-centered, and, of course, assessment-centered. Sadly there is no absolute consensus about what those words actually mean. And even worse, there has been considerable emphasis on learner-centered and assessment-centered environments to the near exclusion of the other two. And even worse still, many politics have tricked the general population into thinking that there is a zero-sum binary between learner- and assessment-centered classrooms. The fact of the matter is, a good instructor will make sure to provide classroom that is well balanced among all four components.

Knowledge-centered is perhaps the easiest of the four concepts to pin down. Make sure there is substance to what you’re doing. Teach something. Knowledge-centered environments require just that: knowledge. My lesson guides to geometry are filled with—you guessed it—geometry. Passing mention of concepts from real analysis and abstract algebra show up. Were I to write a fourth installment, you’d read about symmetry groups, group representations, and addition. A proper discussion about measurement would dive deep into the definition of number itself, equivalence relations, and probably prove Euclid’s so-called Common Notions. (That A=A; if A=B, then B=A; and if A=B and B=C, then A=C. Yes, students should be able to explain why self-evident facts are true, too.)

Student-centeredness takes into account what the learner already knows—or doesn’t know, or misunderstands for that matter. For this reason, my lessons are written for the instructor but led by the students. I use a list of questions that the teacher can use as a model. Taken together they form a cohesive mathematical narrative. But since the point of student-centered environments is that each classroom ought to be tailored to the individual needs of the particular students in the seats, the idea of a student-centered lesson plan that has been blindly written and mass-distributed is somewhat antithetical to its own aim. The Socratic question-and-answer method gets around that. Instructors have both the license and responsibility to dovetail the lessons in a way that best suits the students in the class.

Because of the individual nature of the plans, assessment becomes a problem. How do you figure out if the students have figured out the material if there is not one but several possible right answers? There are over 350 published proofs of the Pythagorean theorem, for example. And all of them are equally correct.

Student-directed learning has assessment built right into it. The teacher can constantly monitor student responses to gage their depth of understanding. The count of prompting questions (given by the teacher) to achieve a particular response can be used an index of mastery over the material. This sort of examination is not obvious to the students and therefore relaxes the pressure associated to more conventional means of testing. Moreover, sustained dialogue between students and the teacher promotes a collaborative, community atmosphere within classroom. Students and instructor exchange roles dynamically, which fosters all sorts of other leadership qualities and instills intrinsic motivation and proactiveness within the students. Having students talk and draw on the board takes care of three of the target components all at the same time.

So, all that you really need my plans for are the knowledge. And the notes are pretty insightful, if I do say so myself. At least have a gander at the very pretty marginal glosses. I employed some artful information mapping techniques. You’ll find that the diagrams are rather palatable. I’d be interested to know what other teachers have to say about them, how I should change them, and if I should write more.

Geometry Lesson Plans 1–3

Technorati Tags:education, mathematics, geometry, lesson plan, lesson guide, creativity, student, assessment, knowledge, high school, euclid, postulate, construction, teaching, socratic questioning, socratic method

The weather has been non-compliant this winter. And as a result, it’s as if everyone in the city has been forced to do something against his will. Normally I’d cheera Winnie the Pooh blustery kind of day, but Christmas rain really ought to be snow. Today at a public rink I witnessed a man in hockey skates, a white turtle neck, Patriots sweatshirt, and summer shorts. Bostonians trudge on.

This has been the least festive Christmas holidays within memory: no tree, no cold, no snow. Just a weak rain. It makes the air clammy and uncomfortable. Usually the harsh winter light glows a pale blue. This year, everything has been painted in corpse gray. I’m starting to internalize the color palette a full two months ahead of schedule.

This is my first birthday without my mother. In two days it will be the first Christmas without her. My emotions rage so high that I don’t have the energy to show them. I’m angry at her, at my father, at my sister, and certainly at myself.

Life is full of regrets. I had always wanted to bring my grandmother to a fine photographer’s studio for some portraits. That never happened. Same with my mother. Another missed opportunity, I suppose. I try to sleep off my undirected anger. Now I scream in my sleep. My dreams are filled with tears. I can’t tell if my psyche’s catharsis really is carthartic at all. Chances are it’s not.

People warn you not to lie. Lies, they say, multiple at an alarming rate. Not so true. Skilled liars need only utter one, maybe two. But regrets fester, burn, and grow. I’ve fallen into a state that cherishes my regrets and seeks out more.

It makes sense. People are fundamentally afraid. They long for misery and sorrow. Because the reality of self-inflicted misery isn’t so bad. You can’t loose what you don’t have. If I allowed myself to be happy, I could lose it. Psychologists have documented self-handicapping pretty well. There’s nothing new about it. A kid might become sick “all of a sudden” before a big test. Why? Then if he performs poorly, he’s escaped his failure. The circumstances were beyond his control, after alll. How could it be his fault?

This line of thought rejects personal responsibility. Life is a cruel game of chance. It can deal some pretty bad hands, or so the reasoning goes. The trick to winning the game is a good poker face. And that’s a matter of individual choice. Still, neither the weather nor I really feels like smiling right now.

I don’t know why I want to be alone when I know that the problem is that I feel alone.

Some holiday cheer.

There’s been a Sam Smith’s oatmeal stout hanging out in my fridge for the past couple of days. I’m not sure where it came from. It might be one I bought and forgot about. It might be someone else’s. My best guess is Santa brought it for me. I’m going to have to investigate the matter more fully. Anyone have any elf leads?