Memory Memorandum: Forget College

Point 01: Optimizing human memory
Point 02: For some, college is a rip-off

Not that any of it matters in the end, but we are constantly filling our feeble brains (consciously or otherwise) with an inordinate amount of information. But perhaps 'feeble' is an educated choice of word.

Our brain is a marvel. It is capable of processing a constant, uninterrupted stream of analog data with such speed that it would make Blue Gene weep were there a programmer who, through the use of affective computing, would code a shame subroutine into its software bank. This incredible speed is achieved through massive parallelism which gives the brain its processing power. Software developers know the difficulties of writing parallel systems. These systems are usually only semi-independent as each task works on small chunks of a larger problem. The brain, on the other hand, is able to achieve parallelism in a completely independent way. It regulates all our involuntary functions (breathing, heartbeat, etc), while interpreting signals from our sensory organs, while directing our muscles, while recalling hundreds of facts and thoughts. Not only that, but the brain is able to program itself; the result of which is memory and other associations we make from all this data we collect (connections!).

Nevertheless, according to Piotr Wozniak, there are only a few million items we can commit to memory within a lifetime. That is, information that we can store and be able to recall at any given time. An amazing article on Wired introduces us to this brilliant man whose goal in life is to maximize his ability to remember. He does this by using a piece of software he himself developed called SuperMemo. This program implements an amazing discovery about human learning that was made in the late 1800s. The discovery was a phenomenon called the spacing effect.

What is the usual way in which one tries to remember anything? We are all taught that repetition is the mother of all learning. But as was discovered and later shown to be true, the naive method of constant repetition is not the most effective and efficient one. In fact, the best time at which to repeat something one wishes to be recalled later is at a point right before one forgets it. As it turns out, we forget exponentially. Thus, this interval increases over time and thus one requires less and less repetitions as you go along. Eventually, the piece of information is nearly permanently ingrained into your memory, and available for immediate recall.

Piotr Wozniak was completely unaware of this phenomenon, nor its discovery when he re-discovered it on his own. He did so by meticulously studying and quantitatively measuring his own quest to learn (in particular, he wanted to learn the English language). He kept records of how often he would repeat vocabulary words and how often he forgot them when tested at a later time. Based on the data he collected for over a year, he was able to essentially quantitatively express the spacing effect and derive an algorithm to simulate it. Wozniak took his new-found knowledge and wrote SuperMemo, a program that implements the spacing effect algorithm. The user begins by inputting the bits of knowledge into the program that he or she wishes to remember. The program will then test the user's memory so as to properly adjust the "forgetting curve" and properly space out the review intervals. At this point the program takes over and notifies the user when it is time to review a given piece of knowledge.

One of the things in the article that seemed rather odd and somewhat sad was how the academic community failed to pick up on this incredible innovation. Imagine if your college professor told you about this system for learning facts, dates, etc. How much more efficient would your use of study time had been?

But let's take a step back for a minute. Maybe you should not have gone to college in the first place (at least not a four-year program). According to an eye-opening and at the same time seemingly obvious opinion piece, colleges are doing an abysmal job when it comes to taking care of its customers students.

Overall college enrollment has been steadily increasing over the past decade, while graduation rates have stayed more-or-less flat. A statistic in the article points out that a stunning two thirds of students who were in the bottom 40 percent of their graduating high-school class, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, had not received any degree eight-and-a-half years after enrollment. The article points out that very often, students are stuck with buyer's remorse after leaving their institutions of higher learning. Despite having learned little in terms of actual real-world skills (supported evidence is in the article), these disheartened and defeated souls are left with immense debt and an unrealized sense of self-worth. Paying back a six-figure loan on a bartender's salary is a position no one would want to be in. However, these bastions of knowledge continue to hand out acceptance letters and BAs like they were going out of style. And why not? Colleges are businesses after all and will gladly take your money should you choose to give it to them. This is why one-hundred-plus seat lecture halls are filled to the rafters with students and smaller classes are taught by "rock-bottom-cost graduate students."

If you fail to attain meaningful employment upon exiting these ivory towers: no returns, no refunds. As a result, the value of the piece of parchment that you receive upon graduation is diluted by all those who failed to rise to the challenges that a college education posed. At the end of the article, the author Marty Nemko, offers some pointers on ways to improve this crippled system. For the schools, he proposes a set of statistics that should be collected and published for each college as a true indication of its worth. For students, he offers some basic guidelines on how to decide what type of college program is right for them, if at all. In our current times, higher education is no longer seen as a privilege, but as a right and the well-thought out, common sense ideas presented in the piece aught to be implemented by all colleges and universities so that students know before they buy. I'm not holding my breath, but hoping for some honesty in advertising.

"I am always ready to learn although I do not always like being taught."
- Winston Churchill

Geek Is *Not* Chic

Point 01: Geek counter-culture
Point 02: NULL pointer exploit

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when it started, but it did. All of a sudden, 'geek' was the new 'cool.' Why did this happen? What sort of Twilight-Zone-Screetch-Is-Zack-Morris wormhole did we travel through?

Some of us think back to the geek, nerd, spaz, dweeb, pointdexter caricatures of Revenge of the Nerds, Family Matters, and Saved By the Bell. There was no uncertainty in these movies/shows. On one side were the cool kids: popular, athletic, attractive, go-getters; and then there was the rest: quirky, spasmatic, socially awkward, occasionally smart, outcasts. While these geeky characters were surely popular, they certainly weren't setting any trends or serving as role-models to young, impressionable viewers.

Then I recall a timid, unassuming, Ed-Grimley-looking, civil engineering student from UC Berkley humbly slink his way in front of a 3-judge panel and about 20 million viewers and proceed to create a cultural phenomenon. Following that, some genius TV executives figured out that there's gold in those dere hills and we saw a slew of geek-themed programming in the form of original, new shows. Sometimes we laughed at the geeks: Beauty and the Geek, The Big Bang Theory. Other times, we laughed with the geeks: The IT Crowd, Freaks and Geeks.

So there was the turning point. Geek becamse synomimous with cool. However, as with any over-used, over-hyped meme it has completely diluted and devalued the original idea it was supposed to represent. In a way, geeks were the counter-counter-culture hippies of the 90s and 2000s (in the 90s, the counter-culture was grunge and in the 2000s it was... still waiting on that one). Then all of a sudden the counter-culture gets a brand name sticker slapped on its carefully-starched, overly-tight, pocket-protected polo (metaphorically speaking) and everyone wants to be part of the geek revolution. We now have books and websites that celebrate the once-shunned.

If you're a computer science geek like me, you become unexplicably, and--to be completely honest--frighteningly excited about recent work done over at IBM. Mark Dowd was able to document a reliable, cross-platform, virtually undetectable NULL pointer exploit in Flash. Even for some hardcore CompSci geeks the original paper may be a little daunting so I recommend this little writep if you're confused. I recommend you read the writeup and then read the white paper to fill in the details. As we in the computer business know, when an application tries to access and/or dereference a NULL pointer, the application crashes. In addition, many application crashes and/or bugs can be linked back to NULL pointers. However, until now, even though they were everywhere, many had thought that trying to exploit them was pointless or even impossible. Afterall, what can you do with it if it's just going to crash the application anyway. This is why most of today's application exploits deal with buffer overflows instead. Mark Dowd has shown everyone that they were just lazy, stupid and just plain wrong about NULL pointers.

To me, as I read this paper, it was like peering into the brain of Einstein as he was figuring out relativity. It is a glimpse into the mind of a genious. I only wish more people could understand what this man was able to figure out. As I read it, I decided that the word 'geek' gets thrown around a little too casually nowadays. Therefore I am going to reclaim this word for the true geeks out there so that it does not become the next 'extreme.'

If you see someone claim geekiness because they check their local weather on Google or upload their birthday pictures to Flickr, let them know that it takes far more ability than that to be truly one of us. You may be chic with your BSOD t-shirt and frapaccino specs, but you are *not* geek because of it.

"It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
- Arthur C. Clarke

Passing The Proverbial 'Buck'

Point 01: Barack Obama
Point 02: Bill Cosby

There has been much hoopla surrounding some comments that Barack Obama had made during a closed San Francisco fundraiser. If you haven't been following this latest circus, do not fret, the good people at the Washington Post have been following "Bitter-gate" for you. Also, here is the original quote that caused all the commotion:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothings replaced them…And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Barack Obama Speech in San Francisco April 6th.


While it can certainly be characterized as a gaffe, a flop, a political misstep, if you will, I would argue that its basic premise is sound. It goes to the heart of a huge problem that we have in this country, which is the complete and utter lack of personal accountability.

To that point, I read a great article in The Atlantic: "How We Lost to the White Man" about Bill Cosby's message to Black America (it is quite long, but worth the read). Dr. Cosby has become quite the provocateur as of late. He travels around the country preaching self-reliance and personal accountability to African American crowds. A message that resonates quite well with black conservatives. While some label Cosby an 'Uncle Tom' others--especially those who grew up during the Civil Rights movement of the 60s--are supportive of his message and his cause.

I realize it may be difficult to take seriously a white man trying to write about the plight of African Americans in this country, which is why I strongly urge you to read article from The Atlantic. It gives a great historic overview of the various black movements throughout the 20th century and gives a somber portrayal of its current state. I will not go much further on this specific point, but instead move on to the general thesis of this post.

Personal accountability is a quality that is held in high esteem by all, but practiced by few. The article I mention above does a wonderful job recounting how self-reliance helped bring African Americans in this country into a post-Jim Crow America. I would like to further generalize that point.

In my (albeit short) experience with working in the corporate world, I have found that personal accountability and self-reliance are much-coveted and very scarce resources. All too often people do just enough work, or just the right kind of work that when the hammer comes down, allows them to point the finger elsewhere while bemoaning "I did my part. I did all I could. I did all I was supposed to do." And so it goes with Obama's quote and Cosby's message. Whether it's the immigrants or the white man, it is always easier to put the blame elsewhere. It is a sad reflection on the state of our nation when these are the types of people we encounter everyday.

The most valuable piece of advice I can offer to anyone looking to succeed in their personal and/or professional life is this: take ownership.

Taking ownership means you are responsible for the failure and the success. It means the buck stops with you. It means you refuse to go through life trying to artificalially insulate yourself from failure. When things don't go your way, blaming a third party will not alter your course towards failure. In the end you must bear the cost and the burden. By taking ownership of all your decisions and actions and you in turn free yourself from the misguided decisions and actions of those that would try to point the finger at you and shoot you down along with them. In essence, you will have taken away their ammunition against you.

"A duty dodged is like a debt unpaid; it is only deferred, and we must come back and settle the account at last."
- Joseph Fort Newton

P.S. I realize this is supposed to be a tech-centric blog so here's a how-to on downloading YouTube videos in MP4 format [via Googlesystem].

The Audacity of Charity

Point 01: New flash filesystems.
Point 02: Children in developing nations.

I was reading some technical literature on two new filesystems developed for flash storage. Flash chips present some unique challenges to OS developers that make conventional, disk filesystems incompatible with the functionality of these solid state devices. The first is a filesystem developed by engineers at Nokia called UBIFS. The other, LogFS, was developed by a kernel hacker (in the good sense) Jörn Engel. In the development of these filesystems, both were tested on OLPC machines. These (cheap) laptops were designed to be used by children in developing nations. They were built to be rugged in order to withstand being dropped, dragged, and generally suffer abuse. These extreme conditions would wreak havoc upon traditional magnetic storage, which are still too fragile to be able to withstand some serious punishment. Flash media, on the other hand, has no moving parts, which makes it perfect for this application. The OLPC project and its incredible journey since its inception in 2005 is the topic of the following mini writeup.

For those that aren't familiar with it, OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) is a non-profit association started by faculty members of the MIT Media Lab and headed by Nicholas Negroponte. It was set up to oversee The Children's Machine project whose mission is to put a cheap ($100), reliable, easy to use, environmentally friendly laptop into the hands of children in countries where access to and the state of education is inadequate and sometimes nonexistent. The project received its funding from many prominent, technology companies: AMD, Google, eBay, Red Hat, Brightstar Corporation, Marvell, News Corporation, SES, Nortel Networks, and for a brief period Intel.

This project gives credence to the phrase "no good deed goes unpunished." It's vision was bold indeed and the problem was daunting. Helping to solve the world's education problems presented a Herculean task, to say the least. Nevertheless, OLPC took its XO-1 model laptop, turned, faced the headwind and began to march towards its goal of improving children's education in the developing world. Throughout its life, OLPC had to endure setback after setback. Some are chronicled here (in no certain order):

On came the flood of criticism and nay-sayers. Some argued that the project is ecologically irresponsible. Others said that it doesn't solve the problem it set out to. During a UN summit in 2005, the initiative was lambasted by the leaders of Cameroon and Mali as a waste of money and effort. "We know our land and wisdom is passed down through the generations. What is needed is clean water and real schools," said Marthe Dansokho from Cameroon. India rejected the program because it was too expensive and the government refused to let their nation become a guinea pig for an untested program. In November 2007, a Nigerian company, Lancor, sued OLPC for $20 million for alleged patent infringement related to the XO's multilingual keyboard design. The suit has been making its way through the Nigerian court system and refuses to go away.

Intel jumped ship in January of this year following a bitter feud with Negrponte over its own sub-$350 laptop offering: the Classmate PC. Negrponte wanted Intel to drop the Classmate PC and instead focus its energy on OLPC's XO-1 model. Intel, however, did not want to abandon the resources it had already devoted to Classmate and decided to resign from the OLPC board. In March of this year, following some internal restructuring, the chief security architect for OLPC resigned, because in his view the changes lead to a "radical change in [the program's] goals and vision."

Despite all the brouhaha, OLPC has had some direct and indirect successes. The XO pilot program is currently deployed in countries such as Peru, Mexico, Nigeria, Mongolia, Uruguay, and others. Many nations are participating in the highly successful Give One, Get One program, which allows people to purchase an XO laptop for themselves for $399 and as a result a child in a developing nation receives one as well. In addition, there have since been many spin-offs of this project. Companies and institutions are trying to compete with the XO and provide better, cheaper computers to children in developed and developing nations. One example of this is Intel's Classmate PC, and there is also news that Indian universities as well as a Philippino company is working on an XO competitor.

What can be learned from this venture and its struggle to change the world? One thing to take away is that in order to solve big problems, you need big and bold solutions. OLPC may not solve the hardships seen by children growing up in developing nations, but it has started the conversation and got people thinking about the problem. This will help bring new, better, and bolder ideas to help tackle one of the most daunting problems facing the world today. The OLPC story also teaches us that you can succeed even when you fail (I'm not calling the program a failure, just making a point). I, for one, applaud Mr. Negroponte and his effort. It is tough business changing the world, but he made the hard choices and sacrifices to try and make the world a better place.

In a global society we are all connected and must help pull each other out of the gutter. If not, all of us will be dragged down in the end.

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

Genesis - On Connections

It begins with a point.

By itself it is completely and utterly dull. Get a bunch of points and draw imaginary lines in between and now you're getting somewhere.

There is something to be said about connections and the way they influence the universe. They can hold extreme power over us, but at the same time they are the most fragile things: created and destroyed on a whim. We all deal with connections in our daily slog: physical, logical, spiritual, temporal. And as we navigate this web of the tangible and the non, we seldom think about the consequences of the connections that we make and break every instant of our existence. Nor do we really examine whether all these connections that we make are improving our lives or are corrupting our very existence.

I am an engineer. I write software. I begin with an idea and I break it up into pieces that are interconnected by logic and a stated purpose. When connected, these conceptual entities combine to bring the idea to life. I transform these pieces into instructions that can be understood by a machine and that are connected by the concepts of logic and flow. The instructions grind down to electrical pulses that race between pieces of silicon connected by wires only a handful of atoms in width. In the end, the tiny, racing electrons that I have sent on their journey run through LCD monitors, WAN routers, keyboards, etc all in the hopes of establishing connections that are meaningful to us: an e-mail to a potential employer, a picture sent to a secret crush, a video of a friend who is on the other side of the globe. It is an orchestra that I've helped to compose and leave to you to conduct.

Connections do not exist solely in the physical realm, they permeate the realm of our own conscious and subconscious. What does it mean if two people "don't connect?" As if they were puzzle pieces that have since gotten too bent and damaged to be snapped together. How are these metaphysical connections established, maintained, and tested? With the myriad of ways for us to connect, the complexity of keeping track of these links seems to increase exponentially. It seems as if this fact would cheapen the connections we experience with people and things. However, I believe that it enables us (those who are still able) to place a higher value on the very few connections we have that are truly important to us. With a 1,000 friends on your Facebook, do you feel that much closer to the ones you knew since you were growing up? After days of instant and text messages exchanged with your love, does a simple hug, the feeling of flesh on flesh feel that much more profound?

This post began with a point, but doesn't seem to end with one. At least not yet. The theme of this blog will be "connections" and how the things that happen around us help us create new ones, improve the ones we already have, or realize that it all doesn't really matter in the end. Since I am a tech geek it will all somehow revolve around or relate back to technology. But I will, from time to time, elevate the discussion to a more cerebral level. This will help in my frustrated efforts to put my thoughts down on... paper? Because somewhere within me there is a writer eager to break out of his cage of laziness and procrastination. In any case, the goal will be to try to point out connections where none seem to exist and that is what I will try to do in future posts.

"The only person who can live apart from others is a Sage or an idiot."
- Plato