Ceaseless Student

[Alt + Shift] Man I’m not getting any practice with this whole Dvorak thing… arghh… I think I’ll switch outright in the summer, but time is too pressing now…

Anywho. I’m writing at this time because I was talking to Mel about everything ever. Man we covered sooo much. What I’m most excited about is archiving Olin. This is going to be my big college-building thing this summer and into whenever. I already registered a domain (olindocs.com) and that domain currently holds absolutely nothing. Mel was thinking along similar lines once upon a time and she happened upon a couple of apps; the one that;s closest to doing what I want seems to be dspace, but I honestly wouldn’t know because I haven’t had time to look through it yet. It needs to be searchable and taggable and probably provide some default hierarchy. It needs to hold all of the documents from past and current classes.

Most importantly, I think we need something like a lab notebook. We are supposed to be an experiment. We should have a record of what we do so that it’ replicable beyond Olin. Also, this information should be easy to access for anyone that’s interested. Hopefully it’ll also mean that students can find stuff from old classes more easily, but that’s secondary to the idea of archiving to document our experiments.

I’d love to write more, but I (yeah, even Boris) need sleep.

In another thing that came from our conversation about archiving, I think I’ll give Stikkit a try. I’ve read about it and it always seems cool, but I’ve yet to try it… odd. I’ll see how I fare. If what I’ve read is true, I might give up my first two tabs on netvibes and my always open editpad for this… I’ll definitely say something if it ’s that good.

I went to the social justice reading group tonight. It was pretty cool; I think I’ll be a regular in the future. We’d read a chapter on multicultural education by Amy Gutmann. She’s kinda old-school. I don’t really like her writing or the numerous assumptions that she seemed to like so much. The main point she was driving was that, [Alt + Shift] in a democratic society, the goal of education is to educate people such that they are capable of having and exercising civic equality.

This was pretty much her only standard. In fact, the whole chapter on multicultural education seemed completely superfluous; it wasn’t treated any different than any other issue would be.

The goal of democratic education is to further civic equality.

If something furthers that goal, it is good; if something hinders progress towards that goal, it is bad. Supremely simple. Caryn even told us that Amy Gutmann is against (private/magnet/etc.) schools because they do not properly prepare people to be civic equals.

Her other big thing, although it didn’t come up in our conversation is the importance of open debate. Here I agree with her wholeheartedly. Debate and argument and disagreement and expression of differing opinions rocks. It moves things along. And in that spirit, I will proceed to take some potshots at her way of thinking.

According to Gutmann, our democracy has a duty to attempt to educate it’s residents in such a way that they can have and use civic equality.

Let’s see… our democracy? I think not. We live in a republic. The system was originally designed such that electors would choose a president. This has since been perverted to a situation that gives us the illusion of living in a democracy. Despite this, there are many things that keep it from being a democracy. If we were democratic, our government would represent the people. Thus, we’d expect to have 2 or 3 senators from the green party and an analogous number of representatives in the house. This is not the case.

Our current system would theoretically allow for a 49% minority to be fully unrepresented if they were uniformly distributed. Our system of election relies on clumping of people with similar viewpoints; it’s a fair bet, but kinda dumb.

As for educating students to be and act with civic equality, I don’t think this is a good goal. My school for example, had a part of it’s mission statement that says we are seeking to produce leaders. This is good insofar as I’m concerned. I like it. I don’t want to have the ability to exercise civic power equal to everyone else’s. I wan to have more. I think I should have a greater influence.

Everyone at Olin represents a large societal investment. We have, by and large, gone to good schools with good teachers. We are currently not paying tuition to learn. Why is this worth it? because society expects us to give a large return. If we only give back an equal amount, we wouldn’t be worth suh a huge, sustained investment of time, money and effort. So yeah. We also talked about lots of other stuff… oh liberals (says the socialist).

One of the neatest things was when Caryn guessed that I was a Gemini. I said something along the lines of I really have two views on everything… Oh well. I guess astrology is true. By two views I mean that I like to have an ideal view and a pragmatic view. For example, I think socialism is ideal, but I think socialism would be a huge mistake in our current society. i think some socialist things can be incorporated, but we’ll generally be better off working off of the strengths of our capitalist republic. Also, Caryn makes yummy food.

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Man. It seems like I have less and less time nowadays. Today I will talk about divestment.

I have heard a lot of very smart people express views that divestment is a great cause. I have heard a lot of very smart people claim that divestment isn’t going to work or even that it’s actually bad. So what’s up?

The theory behind divestment is to put pressure on companies in Sudan by driving their stock prices down. In particular, activist groups target specific companies that end up having their profits flow into the government (mostly Chinese oil companies). The idea is that the companies will in turn pressure Khartoum (the government) by considering leaving the country unless action is taken to get investors to put money back into the company (by ending the genocide).

Lets run down some reasons why people have said divestment might be a bad idea:
-Opportunity cost of helping is high
-It’s too indirect and won’t be effective
-Taking money away from the economy harms the people
-If money becomes an issue, Khartoum might not continue giving southern Sudan oil money

Opportunity cost. This refers to the idea that one might be able to do more good by hurting people to gain money if you can help more people in the end. The idea is completely sound, but I doubt many people would actually do this in such a way that it’s actually more helpful (assuming that divestment is helpful).

Indirectness. OK. So this is the one I consider strongest by far. It just won’t work. People can take their money out of companies operating in Darfur, but the market is self-correcting. If a company becomes undervalued, someone will buy up its stock. It’s the smart thing to do. The game plan of divestment involves having companies’ stock be grossly undervalued. It won’t happen. There will be people who’d rather make money. I guarantee that.

Taking money away from the economy. Yeah this will harm people. That being said, the companies targeted are not companies that are being the livelihoods of the common folk. They are having their profits go to Khartoum. On the other hand, in a longer view this could cause cause more abuse to make up for the money lost.

This was a new one to me. Evidently Khartoum’s peace deal with the south involves the south operating autonomously and receiving a hefty portion of the oil money. Cutting the total oil money might cause Khartoum to keep all the revenue instead of sharing it as per the agreement. This of course, would not be fun.

Anyhow, just some thoughts. Please discuss.

Lalala. Quick post.

Rice rocks. It’s becoming an institution. I sent out an e-mail for rice at 22:00. I got to my room at 22:00. 2 people were waiting. By 22:03, the line had expanded to 7 people. We ate all 10 cups and all that was left over yesterday. [Alt + Shift] Then people wanted more. This is insane. The lounge was left crowded for about an hour with people from rice. Soooo awesome. I hope things like this will be enough to reinstate lounge culture in East Hall…

/me crosses fingers.

Yawn. Oh man. I’m gonna have me some more fun (read: work) and then head to bed for a few hours before more fun-times.

My brother came up from VA to wreak havoc on my studies. It’s pretty bad. I didn’t do any work Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday. I have about 16 hours of awake left today. Let’s see how many I can make work hours…

I know I’m a bit weird, but I visualize mechwarrior right about now… “all systems online”

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So the other day Meta watched a movie called “A Private Universe.” We also watched some other video, but I forget what that one was named. Anyhow, the movies were all about how traditional teaching methods fail. The movie was the result of an NSF study and was really quite striking. For example, they asked 23 Harvard students, alumni, and professors “What causes the seasons?”

Two of them got it right. Two. That’s so sad. Most people cited the elliptical orbit of the earth and claimed that winter was when the earth was farther from the sun. I’d bet anything that every single one of these people knew that the southern hemisphere has summer when we have winter, but they never caught that fallacy. The most interesting part was their theory on how these people arrived at this misconception: The people doing the study proposed that the way textbooks diagram the seasons is what causes the misconception. In order to show the tilt of the earth, textbooks regularly show the diagram from an angle. This perspective drawing makes the orbit of the earth seem very elliptical when in fact it’s just barely shy of being circular.

There were other examples including questions about what causes the phases of the moon and whether or not sight depended on the presence of light. My other favorite one was one about lighting a bulb using a battery and a wire. The interesting part was where all of the people were sure they could do it. And then they couldn’t. Teehee.

A quote from a friend: “Think about the median person in America. Now think about how 50% of the people are dumber than that.”

So I got a few responses to my little rant. Just to emphasize apathy at Olin, I got to see all of 16 people go to my class election assembly. Sad. Truly sad. Only about a third of our school votes in the Honor Board. Oh so sad. What do we really expect out of a representative government like our nation purports to have when we don’t even vote in a situation where our vote does matter. It matters very visibly. btw - about half of voting-age Americans vote in presidential elections. That’s not that much, but at least it’s more than our tight-knit community can muster.

Not to worry. I still love Olin. I understand people are really really busy. In fact I accounted for 16 people at class elections and about half of that again had good excuses. And I wasn’t really asking around or anything. Yay busyness, yay overload, yay Olin! (yay burnout??)

Late: [Alt + Shift]

So today I wanted to rant about Olin. Particularly apathy at Olin. So I was at an spc (strategic planning committee) meeting and looked around the room. During the meeting there were 8 people who were current members of the e-board or candidates for the e-board. There were as many as 27 people and as few as 19 people total at the meeting. That’s not so bad. The real problem is that it’s always these same people who go to all of the committee meetings, town meetings, informal discussions etc. etc.

We are a school of 300 people. There is no reason that people should be completely unrepresented. I don’t know how one even goes about trying to represent people who do not show up to discuss their opinions. We end up with systematic bias.

Guess what? The people who go to meetings about strategy for the school want things to change. No duh. I’d really like to know what the silent majority thinks. What do they see Olin as?

Are we a school that pumps out great engineers? Engineers with context? Leaders? Socially conscious world citizens? Are we a school that wants to effect change in engineering education? Is our main goal to influence other schools through our experimental methods of education? Or are we looking to better the world via graduates who help out?

I think the students at Olin do not matter. We are not the focus. There is a higher cause. 300 students don’t matter at all when compared to all of the students that stand to gain from our ability experiment. This doesn’t mean that I think our students should get a bad education; we need well-educated students to have meaningful experiments.

I just think we should be aware that our education won’t be perfect because we will be experimenting. I don’t think we want to have good proven classes. This is against our nature. We are meant to experiment. We can try a method, document its progress, do some tweaking and come up with results on what we thought. Then we can move on. Stable classes that are only taught one way year after year should not be our realm. Leave that to MIT and friends. We are quick, we are nimble. We can be inspirational. We can change engineering education and the world. If we have graduates who serve their communities, great. This is the proof that some of our experiments went right. This proves our credibility in the field of experimental learning.

At spc they asked us what we’d like to see our graduates doing in 10 years for us to consider Olin successful. I’d be satisfied with nothing short of our graduates being emulated.

My big bro is coming tomorrow for 4 days. Man… when am I going to get my work done. Oh well. I trust I’ll get it done at some point. I generally do.

This is a bit different. Today I bring you one of my favorite hacks ever. I’ve been reluctant to let go of Opera in favor of Firefox for one reason: I want my tabs along the side and not the top! But now it’s all better. [Alt + Shift] It does, however get kinda hairy…

Step 1: Move your tabs
Navigate to the chrome folder in your Firefox profile and add a css file.
-Go to run and run %APPDATA%
-Navigate to mozilla and profiles etc until you get to chrome here’s where I ended up:
–C:\Documents and Settings\bdieseldorff\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\k5ok4umo.default\chrome
-Now add a neat little css file to do what you want. I have one up for any interested people here. The name must be userChrome.css
-Chuck that into your “chrome” folder and restart Firefox.
Well damn. That needs work.

Step 2: Make it actually do what you want
Get Tab Mix Plus and set your options to work well
-The options we care about at the moment are under display
–Tab width: choose something between 100 and 250 ish. I
–Use bookmark name as tab title is nice too.
–Restart Firefox

Not too shabby. But the weird gradient needs to go. Up until here I’d been following guides more or less, but I got myself a lucky hack…

Step 3: Make it look nice
Get PageStyle2Tab and wonder why it makes everything all better.
-Restart Firefox
-That’s the only step. While I have pseudo-educated guesses, I don’t really get why or how it works. But it works and I haven’t found anything else that turns the trick. *shrug*
SCORE!!! css hacking, Tab Mix Plus and PageStyle2Tab FTW!!!!

Man that felt awesome. I should also take a quick moment to endorse All-in-one Gestures. It was the other part that I needed to switch from Opera and was substantially easier to implement (read: basically done for me by Mozilla). w00t!! Anyhow, I’ll miss a couple of things, but Firefox also has a trick or two that Opera can’t touch so I think I’ll be OK.

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After writing this post I noticed that I didn’t rant about how good netvibes is. That would not do so here’s the appropriate rant:

It is good. Oh so very good. It is my homepage. It owns a huge portion of my life. Thankfully, Outlook, netvibes and Moleskine have still left me with a 30% share in my life.

Eeek. Forgot to post yesterday. I have to keep up with this better. So I came up with a neat idea about creating netvibes modules that can be used by Olin students. The idea is super-simple and a basic level of implementation is ridiculously easy. I made a collection of links level module for sigsys: and one for circuits: . These modules are currently just collections of links but I’m working on making ones that will use rss. For example, there could be one that updates every time Brad puts up a new circuits handout. Pretty neat I think, but I doubt I’ll have a lot of time to put into this until the summer.

Yesterday some Meta ppl ended up going to 7-Eleven. It was pretty awesome cuz we totally brought back the 90s w/Marco’s music. Nice. 4 and a half weeks left. 5 projects left for meta. Sweet.

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So I haven’t been writing b/c I’ve been out of town. I went home to NJ as a staging area for a trip to NYC with some friends. Alli, Beto, Molly, Bryce and I had loads of fun and were basically keeping busy from the time we woke to the time we got to bed. We went to Chinatown, the American Museum of National History and, of course, Les Miserables!

Les Mis was substantially different this time around. There was far greater emphasis on intonation of speech than there usually is (sadly, this came at the cost of some raw power in the singing). There were lots of little word or even verse changes here or there, but the single biggest change struck our group close to our communal heart: Molly’s favorite song was completely left out.

Man. I’ve spent about 2 hours tidying up e-mails and reading rss feeds and stuff b/c I wasn’t here for one weekend. I was out for 48.5 hours and checked my e-mail for urgent stuff twice in that time, but I still managed to have 2 solid hours of stuff to sort through. There’s also my weekly figure out what’s up that got completely skipped; I should do that tomorrow… along with lots of homework. Yay!

I had Indian food again today. Raghu had lots of people over to his house and there was a bit of an adventure when Joe’s car broke down and my car got an extra passenger. At the end of the day though, the food was great. I’ve decided that Indian deserts rock my socks. They had something, I think it’s called kir, that one would drink. It had almonds and stuff (dairy?rice?) and was really awesome. Anyhow, good times; great food.