Frontiers of Research and Education in Computing: A View From the National Science Foundation

Went to "Frontiers of Research and Education in Computing: A View From the National Science Foundation", hosted generously at Google Seattle. Essentially the associate director came by and spent 1.5 hours talking about the various initiatives that the group has.

My takeaways:

• The NSF is welfare for academia. I hadn't quite realized how blatant it was until I heard this presentation.
• There is almost no accountability. There is no attempt made to "invest" money in proposals based on the likelihood of a good outcome (granted, this would be quite a difficult thing to be good at, but at least try). Instead, money is distributed under a peer review system where scientists submit proposals and a peer group decides which proposals get funded - politics at its best.
  This is not to say that the people involved don't have the best of intentions. That being said, being exposed to bad incentives and bad organizational design make the best of intentions turn sour.
• There is rampant pointless acronym usage. I know from experience, this is a very, very bad sign.

Science on Tap with John Medina

Went out to Ravenna to hear John Medina speak about how stress affects the brain. It's always nice to listen to someone who is an accomplished speaker; it's also always nice to listen to someone who thinks clearly and scientifically. The two together are fabulous.

John Medina talked about two subjects: marriage and child raising; he got his data on both these topics from John Gottman, who runs the "love lab".

Apparently the one major predictor of divorce is whether or not the wife feels "heard" by the husband, which is connected to the wife being able to explain to the husband her emotional state.

For raising children, it's all about understanding the child's emotional state over time, helping him to verbalize said emotional state when overwhelmed, making few rules that never change once made, empathizing with the child and one other thing.

Trying to mesh this stuff in with what I understand to be true is a bit difficult, but it strikes me that most of these behaviors being described are those of mature, self confident parents, perhaps a rarity today.

Warrior Poet

I can only aspire. My arm is recovering nicely. Still swollen, it has returned all but the most extreme function to my grasp. Perhaps some footwork is in order?

The Descent of a Man

My first serious fall since I started biking a few years ago.

I was with the UW critical mass people heading over to Westlake to join up with the other critical mass people, and I tried to go up a curb. It had a bit more of a ridge on it than I thought and I went for a spill. The critical mass folks were quite kind; I think I came out of it all right, although the joints in my right arm are quite uncooperative. I also got some nice road rash.

There are a few times that I don't bike with a helmet on, but those days are over. I took a lot of the fall on my helmet, which survived quite nicely. I suppose I'll just have to intensify my search for a helmet that I don't loathe.

Another busy day

Toastmasters. Specifically, Husky Toastmasters. Another session. I get frustrated because, although there are supposed to be 3 speakers every week, there have been, on average 2, and a lot of that is because people (including me) do impromptu speeches at the last minute. Makes me want to pull my hair out.




Afterwards, I bummed around on campus a bit before heading over to the CS department for Operating systems for 1000+ core computer chips, when space sharing replaces time multiplexing. On the web, it says that the talk was in room 503, but it was actually in 303. Frustrating.

Once I actually got down there, it was pretty good. The speaker really needed to be much more forceful about shutting down the peanut gallery, which was busy making largely tangential comments. Interesting post-talk conversations, though.

Unfortunately, I couldn't wait too long and I ended up going off to Lunch 2.0 in Pioneer Square at Evri. It was pretty good. I met a few awesome people there, and ran into a bunch of people I already know. The salmon was crazy delicious.

I got out of Lunch 2.0 at about 1830 and headed over to Amazon to hang out with Ryan at his office by King Street Station. He showed me around, a bit, and we ended up going back to the U district for a delicious meal of Fish and my first real game of Concurr.

In which no one gets seriously hurt

Around noon-ish yesterday, I went to an interesting talk at UW called Thoughts on Social Tagging. More on that here.



Later on, I went off to fencing. On the way, I passed a car that was mysteriously sitting still in the road. On closer inspection, I noticed glass all over the road.

I stopped and directed traffic until the situation was cleared up and could talk to the guy inside. Apparently someone had rear-ended a Vietnamese man and then run off. Unfortunately, he had only gotten the first three digits of the license plate. Thankfully, he was unhurt. I ended up talking to 911 for him and staying with him (it took a while to convince him to pull off the road) until the police showed up.



After that bit of excitement, I headed off for a rousing several hours of fencing (less than half of that time with an actual sword in my hand, though). It was great.

Venture Capital Unplugged: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Redux

The presentation wasn't that bad. It was almost totally question and answer, though, so it seemed to be quite a bit less informational than I had hoped. I think it could have been way, way better if the speaker had done a coherent, organized into to Venture Capital, instead of what ended up happening, which was an ad-hoc intro to Venture Capital.

Regardless, it was pretty neat to hear all of the information from someone who is currently making investments. It makes it all a bit more real, a bit more believable.

The people who came were also pretty awesome. I've been going to events in the area enough to start recognizing a fair number of people, which makes things way easier on me - it's much easier to learn the name of the two new people in the room (more like 20) than everyone.



Afterwards, I called up Ryan who was over at the Mariner's game going on at Safeco. He was nice enough to get me in with a spare ticket he had. I hadn't been to Safeco before, and actually was confused at first as to which stadium was Safeco. Looking down at the field, from the nosebleed section, it was still pretty good. I must confess that I don't particularly care for baseball, probably due to my lack of domain knowledge. Nonetheless, for the time I was there, the game was pretty exciting. The Mariners scored their first two points a few minutes after I arrived. Perhaps, for the fans' sake, I should attend more often.

Venture Capital Unplugged: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I'm off to Venture Capital Unplugged: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly at Startpad in Pioneer Square. I've been to every one of the presentations except for the first, and so far, I have never been let down. My favorite presentation by far has been the talk given by Craig Sherman of WSGR called Corporate Structures, Common Problems. He was amazingly knowledgeable about a topic I know very little about. I definitely came away with a much better understanding of the how and the why of corporate structure.

The talk sounds like it has the potential to eclipse Startpad #9 in pure awesomeness. I'll let you know after the commercial break.

Proposed Bike Path

Around the Lakes Loop

On the map it looks monstrous. I tried to follow the route using the terrain view and it doesn't look like there are huge hills there, but I've had to learn the hard way that looks can be deceiving.

Even though it looks huge, it's only about 10 more miles than just the I-90 Loop. I'm hoping that without some of the truly huge hills going over I-90, that I'll be able to hang a bit better, doing things this way.

nPost Networking Event

Went to the nPost Networking Event yesterday. It was pretty good. Apparently there was an iPod Touch that has yet to be handed out.

One of the most awesome parts was that TimeLope, a startup that I helped to incubate as part of Six Hour Startup, was demoed. I put hardly any work into it, especially compared to Anders and Aviel, but it was still strangely satisfying.

... and I'm running out of business cards. Good thing that it only costs me $0.08 per sheet to print more. One of these days I'm going to have to get real cards but until then...

Also, I ended up biking to the Columbia City Theater where it was held. That was a bit of a bad choice - unbeknownst to me, there is a huge freakin' hill between the University District and there. I was planning on taking the bus back, but I couldn't figure out where the bus stop was (I didn't end up looking very hard) so I ended up biking back. At least I'm getting some good practice.

Six Hour Startup

We've taken over the entire back end of the Bar (Collins Pub). There must be 20 people here. Madness.

Busy Day

After I saw Ryan off on the STP, I hacked around a bit and then biked off to Social Media Camp in downtown Seattle. The official even was pretty much a bust. The opening speaker, Erica O'Grady was pretty good. The rest of them were somewhat uninspiring (excepting Eric Weaver at the end)

I thought that the conversation-oriented track might be better, but that was pretty much a bust as well. They were playing some sort of game about generating business ideas around company names made from a set of random words. Powerpoint Karaoke would have been 1000x better.

On the other hand, I had some informal conversations there that were simply amazing.

At the very beginning of the event, I happened to be sitting (I always sit in the front row) next to a security consultant (?) named Andrew Becherer who pointed me towards some interesting computer security groups local to the Seattle Area which look absolutely amazing.

Later on, I had a quite lengthy discussion with a man named Jim Benson who is one of the most awesome people I've had the pleasure of meeting in quite a while. He runs a firm that does organizational design, a concept that I've been trying to immerse myself in for a while now, based around what he calls Marine Corps leadership principles - deferring decision making until the last possible moment, empowering low level personnel to make decisions, etc. He even knew about John Boyd! His existence give me hope for the future, and a bit of reassurance that I'm not completely off my rocker.

I also talked to a gentleman for a bit along with a nice young lady, both of whose names I have since forgotten (and neglected to get a card from). We talked a bit about some of her problems convincing her superiors that new media marketing campaigns are worthwhile. I struggled with trying to explain my ideas about new media for a bit. Mostly I was just practicing being empathic and less overbearing than I usually am. I'm getting better, but that isn't saying much.

I finished off the day with a nice hour long chat with the Fabulous Eric Weaver - someone who has a great deal of industry expertise and is willing to let me bounce ideas off of him. It was during this talk that my ideas about New Media really solidified - exploring the idea of what exactly is Trust and Identity? How does it change when moving to the new environment and how is it different? He was quite patient with me as I repeatedly went off on wild tangents, until he had to get up and give a talk at the end of the session.

I regretted having to leave early, but I headed out to Saturday House to try to catch the tail end of the Django training session. Instead, I had a multi-hour long chat with Lion Kimbro about who he thinks I am as a person, the nature of society, religion, and assorted diverse topics.

After that, it was off to Mashable's party which pretty much sucked. I talked to a few interesting people and got a 1 gb USB drive out of it... and a bunch of rock candy, but it would probably have been better if I had just gone home.

I left mashable and took off to Denny's in SoDo (on 4th?) to hang out with the rest of the Saturday House crowd who had taken off 45 minutes before me. Interesting discussions.

I Wish I Was There

Just saw Ryan and Dennis off on the STP. I chickened out at the last moment and ran a marathon instead. I wish I was there with y'all. Take care and be safe.

In other news, I'm going to be spending the day at Social Media Camp, and then possibly at Saturday House learning a bit about Django.

Seattle International Beer Festival

Awesomeness.

I biked there, and had to change a flat tire on the way. I got there just before the place opened up - I got stuck behind the mead booth, which actually worked out really, really well.

There were four kinds of mead - HoneyMoon Nectar, Agave, Spice and Cranberry, all from Mountain Meadows (OR). They wouldn't let us taste the stuff before we were done, so I had no idea what was going on at first. It was pretty obvious which of the meads were the most popular after the first half hour, though.

A few observations:

1. Serving was amazingly fun. Almost constantly, I had a line of people in front of me. I was serving mead so fast it was ridiculous. I definitely fell into a state of flow, concentrating on making sure I got tickets, pouring mead as quickly as possible, managing my inventory (making sure I didn't run out of spare bottles below, had enough bottles on ice, had enough bottles open, etc.). The guy next to me (I was on the very left [clockwise] edge of the stands) was really awesome as well, opening bottles for me without me even asking him to.

2. People want to be lead. Part of the way through the day (I did a double shift), I realized that a lot of people came to the beer festival and didn't know what to get. Even though I didn't know what any of the meads tasted like, I did a lot of people a huge favor by just telling them that they wanted the Cranberry Mead. It was a small page taken from Barry Schwartz' "The Paradox of Choice". I could have told people to get anything and they would have been happy. Indeed, as the afternoon wore on, I became more and more aggressive at telling people what they wanted to drink, and most people seemed quite happy to be lead. I figure it's two separate effects that reinforce each other: people don't want to feel responsible for making a choice, and they don't want to not get the best choice. They sort of rationalized taking my advice by thinking to themselves that they could just blame me if I recommended them a bad drink. Practically that wouldn't have worked: they wouldn't get their money back, but their ego was no longer at stake. THEY wouldn't have made a bad choice.

After I was done, the result was an absence. My feet were still giving me some pain from running in the Marathon. I'll probably still be dealing with that for a few weeks. I managed to sit down for a bit (finally), and I also ended up drinking 24 oz of mead plus 16 oz of beer. I ended up getting smashed. I don't plan on repeating that again, ever.