cproctor

Slightly off topic, but I'd like to argue for keeping your information in (backed up) local-filesystem files in the first place. I work with collaborators at several universities. Google seems to be pushing defaults toward institutional ownership of documents. I can see why institutions would like that, but there's no way I'll make my long-term access to files dependent on someone else's permissions (or Google randomly, unaccountably deleting my account).

In a big tree, no tags. It has taken a little while to figure out the shape of my life, but things now fit pretty nicely. I think the work of figuring out the one place where each thing fits is mostly valuable, not overhead. Having a deep tree allows me to incrementally organize files by pushing them partway down toward their final destination when I don't have time.

The biggest current challenge is all the tools that are trying to pull me away from a filesystem. Google Docs has pretty much been a disaster for organization, and I don't use--even for collaboration--unless I absolutely have to. Similarly, Evernote has lost its charm for me. I guess I'm in a minority here, preferring organizing to searching. It gets hard for me to make sense of old documents when they're out of context.

    - Documents
      - 1-Education
      - 2-Teaching
      - 3-Software-Engineer 
        - Unfold-Studio
          - unfold_studio
            - .git
      - 4-PhD
        - Research
          - Active-Projects
            - Text-And-Code
              - Studies
              - Publications
      - 5-Consulting
      - 6-Personal

I can't help but wonder whether quadcopters will be where governments finally legislate control over general computation. Having access to bare metal means nobody can stop inexpensive and socially-disruptive quadcopter applications. How many years before quadcopters join rats and pigeons as the scourge of urban life, always on the prowl for unguarded power outlets or perches on power lines?

Governments and/or corporations have control of the bottom layer of cell phones and TCP/IP networking. Not so for firmware and cryptography, though not for lack of trying.

As many have pointed out before, this is straightforward with email. My communication with Amazon goes to amazon.com@accounts.mydomain.com, and I can stop listening on that socket whenever I like.

This is much harder on social media because (1) you don't control the platform and (2) there's often an emphasis on linking in-platform identities to who we are in the real world. The strategy of social media is to get you into a relationship where they hold all the power.

I agree with the other responder--it's better to have the jar covered. However, fermentation produces CO2, so you can't have it sealed. Fermentation crocks have a water ring for the lid to sit in so excess gas can bubble out, but you can also just put a jar lid on but not screwed tight.

It's pretty flexible, but I'll usually cut up a dozen jalapeños, half a head of garlic, some coriander and cumin, pack it down in a jar, and cover it with water and somewhere around 3% salt by weight. If you don't have a scale, just mix up some water that's saltier than you would really want to drink, but not so salty that you'd be unable to drink a few cups of it.

Ideally nobody is sticking up out of the water, as that's where mold will form. You can use a plate or some kind of weight, or stir it all once a day, or just let it sit and throw out anything that starts getting moldy.

Let this sit on the counter for a week or two until the brine and the peppers get sour from lactobacillic fermentation. It's up to you. When you like the taste, blend it all smooth and put it in a jar in the fridge. You'll get the same sour spiciness you're used to in hot sauce, but much more umami and depth in the flavors. Vinegar-based hot sauce is quite one-noted in comparison.

Note: I really recommend Katz's "Art of Fermentation" as a source of inspiration. I used to get annoyed by the fact that he doesn't actually give recipes, but have come to realize that you don't really need them. There are really only a few core processes with infinite variations, and precise measurements would most likely just lead you astray because you'll invariably need to respond to different produce and different temperatures.

Troubleshooting: Sometimes the brine starts to get cloudy, or a thin layer of surface yeasts forms. It's harmless but can lend a funk to the flavor. If you don't like this, change the conditions to select for the desired bacteria: make the brine saltier and/or keep it somewhere cooler. You can even keep it in the fridge, but then fermentation will be much slower. Also, sometimes the garlic turns blue. Also harmless.

Bonus: Sauerkraut couldn't be easier: Shred a bunch of cabbage (it's such a pleasure to use a mandoline for this) and add 1.5% salt by weight. Squeeze and knead the cabbage until it feels like wet laundry. Pack it into a jar; there should be enough liquid to submerge the cabbage. Again, find a way to keep it covered and wait 7-10 days. If you keep the brine from an old batch, you can dramatically speed up the next batch by mixing some in.

Fermented hot sauce (instead of vinegar) is a revelation, and not hard to get right!

> He said that passenger feedback was “overwhelmingly good” during a five-month trial at Charles de Gaulle last year, where the system operated so seamlessly that some customers were not even aware a robot had been involved.

Reading this, I was reminded of Herb Simon's "Sciences of the Artifical," which makes the point that often complexity is the result of interaction with the environment. His example is of an ant walking through sand. The ant follows a complex path, even though its behavior is governed by simple rules. This seems like the same lesson, at another level.

I got some good advice about a decade ago, which I've used for guidance and, on reflection, has served me well. You're not well-positioned to understand the core nature of problems, and which are most important, from the outside. Until you have this clarity, do what you can to become part of the core community driving the thinking in your field of choice. There's a strong case for the social importance of many problems in energy and AI, and likely enough there are problems that would interest you in healthcare. So my answer is to not worry so much about which field you dive into, and focus more on trying to get to the center.

As someone who has been orbiting two poles of education and CS for my whole career, I'd also suggest reflecting on why energy and AI are currently more attractive to you than healthcare. There doesn't have to be a reason, but sometimes I feel like the attraction of pure science fields is that they don't involve the messy human issues that come with social science, like identity and culture, power and your own positionality.

I don't think I'd choose Ink for parsing open-ended responses. Ink is an interesting language--it gives up some elegance in its programming syntax to gain more of a prose-like feeling. (I think the level of tradeoff is roughly comparable to HTML templating languages like Jinja2--it's an open question how an interface like Ink compares to block-based languages for beginners, but I'm optimistic). I am planning to include the ability to prompt for text input in an upcoming release, but the intent is more to support in-game identity-building. For example, you could prompt for the player's name and then refer to it later.

I haven't looked much in to languages for open-ended interactive storytelling, but I thought Nick Montfort's dissertation was pretty interesting--a technical treatment of a system for heavy-duty worldbuilding.

I'm also interested in using this system for language learning, particularly in multilingual classrooms/contexts. In some of the early classroom workshops, students were exploring how they get treated differently (and some people open up more) when speaking different languages.

Ah--probably a result of Google deprecating Google Plus APIs. I thought I had a little more time; Google said "On March 7, 2019, all Google+ APIs and Google+ Sign-in will be shut down completely. This will be a progressive shutdown beginning in late January, with calls to these APIs starting to intermittently fail as early as January 28, 2019." Thanks!

Huh--sorry! It just worked for me; i'll check the logs later today. Thanks for letting me know.

I'm currently finishing my PhD on interactive storytelling--how rhetoric works in interactive stories, how they can function as models or simulations of social realities (and thereby help us understand the dynamics of positionality, race, etc.), and how they represent a broadened view of what K-12 CS might look like.

I'd love to talk more if anyone's interested!

* [Unfold Studio](https://unfold.studio/) is a web app for reading and writing interactive stories, using the programming language Ink.

* [A draft](http://chrisproctor.net/media/publications/proctor_2018_unfo...) article offering a conceptual framework, documenting the web application, and analysis of how student authors used it.

The fun of the game is that it's played at two levels--tactics during gameplay and strategy as you tune your deck. To get this effect without pay-to-play, you can get some friends together, deal twenty cards to each player, and then take turns drafting more cards from a shared pool of a few hundred. Everyone gets to build their deck from their pile of cards. After each round, everyone can update their deck and the loser gets to draft some more cards from the shared pool.

Future interview question for a company with a mission statement it takes seriously: "I see that you worked at fb from 2018 on. Tell me about your broader career goals and how that fits into them."

If employers publicized such questions now, it could discount the future value of having worked at fb.

This article takes one finding from a survey (that most Americans feel "political correctness is a problem") and runs free with broad interpretations that are not supported by the study. The article borrows the study's credibility, but not its broader point about polarization.

My instinct, on seeing this finding, was to unpack how people might understand the term "political correctness" and the rhetorical contexts in which it is used. Considering how much the article relies on one survey question, there is very little unpacking of the term--just one paragraph which poses two slanted alternatives and concludes that people probably mean what the author thinks they mean. I'm open to discussing how some activism might be more valuable to the activists than to anybody else, but this article doesn't make a very strong case.

I wonder how Americans feel about "chain migration" or "fake news." Meh.

I applaud the authors of this letter. It's an open question whether an open, democratic society can exist in the world of computational media. If it can, we'll either need a well-educated citizenry or a benevolent oligarchy of people who are skilled, knowledgeable, and wise in the use of computers. We have done a lousy job of ethical political leadership so far, preoccupying ourselves with profitably dismantling what's left of the old paradigm. I would love to see more folks in tech running for office.

I find particularly interesting the claim that

    the literary novel ha[s] quit center stage of our culture and [is] in the process, 
    via university creative writing programs, of becoming a conservatory form, 
    like the easel painting or the symphony.

Drawing on Bakhtin, ­­we can see BDDM (bi-directional digital media) as having precisely the qualities previously celebrated in the novel:

    Among genres long since completed and in part already dead, the novel is the only developing 
    genre. It is the only genre that was born and nourished in a new era of world history and  
    therefore it is deeply akin to that era, whereas the other major genres entered that era as 
    already fixed forms, as an inheritance, and only now are they adapting themselves-some 
    better, some worse-to the new conditions of their existence. Compared with them, the novel 
    appears to be a creature from an alien species. It gets on poorly with other genres. It 
    fights for its own hegemony in literature; wherever it triumphs, the other older genres go 
    into decline.
    ...
    The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role as genres); it exposes the 
    conven­tionality of their forms and their language; it squeezes out some genres and 
    incorporates others into its own peculiar structure, re­-formulating and re-accentuating them...
    Those genres that stubbornly preserve their old canonic nature begin to appear stylized...
    Parodic stylizations of canonized genres and styles occupy an essential place in the novel...
    What are the salient features of this novelization of other genres suggested by us above?
    They become more free and flexible, their language renews itself by incorporating extraliterary 
    heteroglos­sia and the "novelistic" layers of literary language, they become dialogized, 
    permeated with laughter, irony, humor, elements of self-parody and finally-this is the most important thing-
    the novel inserts into these other genres an indeterminacy, a certain semantic openendedness, 
    a living contact with unfinished, still­ evolving contemporary reality (the openended present).

I don't know, I'm excited about computational media and the new kinds of reading and being we're developing. I wish we could make space for this in school without having to wait another 50 years.

I feel like he's right on. No denying that growing up in US schools is a bad experience for a lot of people. After teaching for six years and developing ed-tech for two, I thought the most effective path would be doing a PhD, which is where I'm now.

A few quick terms and ideas for how these are being pursued today in the world of education... I'd love to hear other folks' thoughts on this too. We have such a deep tradition of idealistic, socially-engaged computer scientists imagining new technical and social futures.

1. "Stay in the class where you belong." [1] persuasively makes the case that there's not a pedagogical justification for tracking and offers strategies for enacting change. But it's a political issue; we're still in the aftermath of Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), which contributed to white flight and setting up separately-funded school districts. Integration through busing, etc. led to schools which were integrated on paper, but were segregated internally with tracking. There are a couple of pretty powerful This American Life episodes on the issue [2].

2, 3, and 4: ("Turn on and off like a light switch," "surrender your will to a predestined chain of command," "I determine what curriculum you will study") feel related. There are awesome school models focused on connected learning [2], project-based learning, constructionism. I don't know of a successful strategy for scaling these in the US, though Ole Iverson [3] leads some really exciting work integrating design into the curriculum at all levels in Denmark. The Summit schools seem to have decided to focus more on scaling than on answering the critiques in 2, 3, 4; they're partnered with Facebook to develop an online school platform. We'll see.

5, 6: ("your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth," "I teach children that they are being watched.") also go together. I've suggested [4] here before; it's a Foucault-inspired analysis of how states exert power by insisting on legibility. For schools, this means centralized accountability. There's a new spin on this with learning analytics; [5] is an ethnography of the quantified self, exploring how things like fitness trackers become authoritative inner voices shaping our phenomenological experiences. Definitely a design consideration to keep in mind. I think there are strategic opportunities in the move to make CS a core part of the primary and secondary curriculum. One strand of this is developing critical computational literacies--undertanding the ways tech mediates our everyday experiences, imagining and enacting alternatives. Everything that's been said about (textual) literacy as a foundation for a participatory civic society increasingly applies to computation as well.

[1] Burris, C. C., & Garrity, D. T. (2008). Detracking for excellence and equity. ASCD. [2] Ito, M., Gutiérrez, K., Livingstone, S., Penuel, B., Rhodes, J., Salen, K., ... & Watkins, S. C. (2013). Connected learning: An agenda for research and design. BookBaby. [3] http://www.engagingexperience.dk/ [4] Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press. [5] Dudhwala, F. (2017). Doing the self: an ethnographic analysis of the quantified self (Doctoral dissertation).

> Like the other guilds, teacher training probably has a lot of inertia and indoctrination. Teaching instructors teach student teachers how they managed their classrooms, not realizing that the actual "traditional" approach to education in America was the one-room schoolhouse.

This is an uninformed generalization that I see around here quite a bit.

Gatto's ideas are actually not particularly fringe. There are certainly many teachers who are resistant to change for various reasons [1]. But there are also are many smart, dedicated people working hard to improve our schools, inside them and outside of them. I know several who have given the larger part of their careers, and given up much more lucrative opportunities, to create new models of schools. So why do our schools seem to be stuck?

The comment above implicitly makes the "Scott Walker" hypothesis: that schools are staffed by unmotivated, low-quality humans.

I'd like to offer a few other possibilities. [2] argues that schools are pinned between three competing goals: "democratic equality (schools should focus on preparing citizens), social efficiency (they should focus on training workers), and social mobility (they should prepare individuals to compete for social positions)." What looks like an intractable mess is really just the current political equilibrium of these goals.

[3] chronicles how schools became dominated by the values and structures of business over the 20th century--Taylorism, not the qualities of business celebrated on HN. The same forces that sometimes cause huge companies to become lumbering uncompetitive behemoths were imported into schools, most recently with the centralized technocratic accountability movement. It is hard to make change from within such an organizational structure.

The reason I took the time to write this, after a full day of work in a teacher preparation program, is that all this is intimately connected to tech. If you buy "Scott Walker," the prevalent anti-labor ideology that teaching is a routine low-skill job, you might also believe in disruption, that systemic change in education will come from technological solutions. Silicon Valley has no shortage of wealthy fools trying to automate education. (Ask where they send their kids to school.) [4] documents the lousy track record of educational technologies promising disruptive change; anyone working in ed-tech ought to have a story for why it's different this time. I'm more hopeful for design-based research and design-based implementation research approaches, but that's for another post.

Anyway, teaching and software development have a lot of similarities: they're deeply collaborative, creative activities which require balancing priorities on many axes and scales. The complexity of the work is often invisible to outsiders. It takes a long time to get good at it, there's a fair amount of personal style involved, and skill is hard to measure. I get that they're in pretty different socioeconomic positions at present, but I wish there were more thoughtful and supportive discourse between the two.

[1] Lortie, D. C. (1977). Schoolteacher: A sociological study. [2] Labaree, D. F. (1997). Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American educational research journal, 34(1), 39-81. [3] Callahan, R. E. (1964). Education and the cult of efficiency. University of Chicago Press. [4] Cuban, L. (2009). Oversold and underused. Harvard University Press.

As a middle-school CS teacher, I wrote a networking simulation [1] to help my students get a sense of how the packets get routed to their destinations. Importantly, it's vulnerable to spoofing, snooping, and censorship... students figure out how to do this mischief on their own, which leads to some great discussions of technical, policy, and ethical aspects of the Internet.

[1] https://github.com/cproctor/tcp-ip-simulation

Maybe it's time for a raw materials recycling startup. Cruise around the city with a van, pick up bikes, and sell them for scrap.

Congratulations! These look really nice! If you wanted to make them more useful and inspiring to other teachers, it would be wonderful to pair them with an essay on how they can be used effectively in class. Do students use them to explore, like microworlds? Do you use them during classroom discussions, for posing hypotheses or consolidating several ideas? Do students use them as evidence during debates? Do students get used to having these and think up others they wish they had? Do they become touchstones students use to remind themselves of something they previously understood?

Supporting social practices is an important part of a technology--folks without experience in schools (or informal learning environments) sometimes picture educational technologies being used alone in a vacuum, the mooc high school. I'm pretty hopeful about using educational technologies to help teachers grow their teaching practices.

Anne Applebaum's "Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956" documents the process of imposing authoritarianism. Particularly important is the combination of surveillance and the threat of violence. You can't have a thug with a baton on every street corner, but with enough information, you can credibly extend the threat of violence far beyond the number of thugs available. The number of nodes in a tree grows much faster than its depth.

How should we compare this kind of upstream oppression--heading off free expression, movement, association before they happen--with more localized forms of assault? More concretely, what should we make of the software developers, designers, salespeople, and managers who collaborate in building these kinds of systems?

Agreed! Though it's still about 80 pages. If you want to experience Moby Dick but don't feel like a strong reader or haven't found a way to enjoy this kind of literature, I'd recommend the audiobook while you're driving or doing something else for extended periods. The language is meant to wash over you and feel overwhelming.

cogs

"The preceding sections have attempted to develop the thesis that the properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought" (378).

I've been working through "Seven Sketches in Composability" [1], posted here a few weeks ago, and thinking about how much math relies in diagrams which are somewhere between drawing and writing. In research meetings, I often see people reasoning with diagrams and mathematical notation. In the vein of this article, I wonder whether it would also be possible to formalize mathematical pictographs to the point where they could be computable--a not-strictly-textual programming language. iPython notebooks often toggle between symbolic expressions and their implementation in code.

One thing that might be missing is context. Diagrams are indexical (pointing to contextual meaning) even more than text, often illustrating a problem that has previously been defined. This feels to me like potentially-fruitful design problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16677395

It's not that hard to do your taxes on your own, especially if you have last year's as a model to check yourself. For computationally-oriented folks, I imagine you probably want to have a mental model of how you're presenting yourself tax-wise (instead of just blindly trusting Turbo Tax). In that case, most of what you're getting with Turbo Tax is UI.

It's not about which subjects build on each other. These two are the subjects that have mandated federal testing in the US [1]. Low test scores in reading and math have consequences for schools and their leaders, so they get the priority slots.

[1] https://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/every-student-succeeds-act/...