Now with music.
Beauty | Function
View more presentations from kvlcek2.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
multimedia sneak peek
I've selected my images (and my music, but haven't done anything with it yet) and started putting the whole thing together... it's not done yet, and this version of the upload messed up a bit of my formatting... but here's a quick glimpse of my multimedia project coming together:
Beauty | Function
Let me know what you think!
Beauty | Function
Let me know what you think!
Saturday, November 28, 2009
book review version 3.0
A major reworking of most of it. Completely re-edited with a focus on flow, tweaked/added transitions and moved a few things around to that end. The introduction was rewritten again. I tried to be sharper on the idea that Gladwell seemed to be stepping out of his journalism shoes and pretending to be a scientist, but wasn't actually providing evidence like a scientist needed to. Somewhat clarified my paragraph on Nate as a Maven. Lots and lots of editing grammar, sentence structure, and picking better words. Overall... I'm a lot happier with this.
--
There exists an academic definition of smart. It indicates that an individual has a good grasp of studied concepts and is able to correctly answer questions about those concepts. Institutions measure this idea through the use of evaluations such as tests or grades. This is a simple, objective way to measure 'intelligence.' Those who score well are deemed 'smart,' and smart individuals are subject to different treatment. I qualified as one of these students growing up. I was placed in honors classes and still got straight A's in all of my classes. I was a good student. I did very well as far as my school was concerned. This did not, however, mean I was a good person or otherwise 'good' in a general sense. In particular, I had problems with people.
People did not take to me naturally. I was a loner. I wasn't a leader of any groups nor was I otherwise considered popular. I was definitively not a "people person." From elementary school through even high school, there was rarely more than a couple people that I actually considered friends. This was not from a lack of people in my environment, nor because I was particularly uninteresting or awkward. I just didn't really stick to any of the people, and they didn't stick to me.
The concept of me being so without friends would be downright laughable to my current friends. Not only is working with people part of my job, it’s also something I do easily and willingly. I am also no longer a straight-A student. I sometimes get C’s in classes these days, but I’m a leader in a number of student organizations. I’d still consider myself successful at school, but I’ve lost a lot of the traditional markings of being an academically “smart” kid. For a different definition of the word though, I’m a lot smarter than I ever was growing up. Smart isn’t a one-dimensional concept. Smart, as it turns out, can also refer to being smart at people and understanding relationships and dynamics that can’t be tested in the traditional sense.
The large change in my life probably came from coming to college. And it came quickly, though not a lot else seemed to change. I became subtly more interesting, gained a tiny more experience in dealing with people, and was exposed to a few more people than I had been most of the time in previous years. I grew less concerned with grades and more concerned with experiences. There were no giant life-changing moment, but nevertheless I transformed very significantly.
A similar process is the premise of Malcom Gladwell’s bestselling book, The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell argues that many large phenomena can be explained by a few small factors. He weaves a story about the science of change around anecdotes, witty titles, a smattering of science, and incredibly persuasive writing. Gladwell names three rules in his book: “The Law of the Few,” “The Stickiness Factor,” and “The Power of Context,” and he claims that they are all that is needed to understand how social epidemics start and spread. For the most part, the Law of the Few talks about the “who”s of epidemics, The Stickiness Factor talks about the “what” of epidemics, and the “Power of Context” talks about the “where” of epidemics, including a healthy dose of how the people in those environments impact them. Gladwell makes a case for being incredibly "people smart," and his book certainly reads so, but at the same time it comes off as entirely dumb in the “traditional” sense.
Being a “people person” myself, it is people that fascinate me, and Gladwell’s chapters on people and their role in these epidemic phenomena that I found both most interesting and troubling. This is particularly true in the second and fifth chapters, on “The Law of the Few” and the second half of “The Power of Context,” respectively. Both of these chapters have a large focus on people, special people and people in groups, if I’m being specific, but I mostly just picked them because they were the two I related to most when reading the book. Each of these chapters, besides being interesting, does a good job of highlighting the general themes of Gladwell’s writing that I feel a need to comment on.
As a side note on Gladwell's writing in and of itself, I should establish that The Tipping Point wasn’t the first of Gladwell’s books that I read. It was the second, and I was incredibly excited when I picked it up, because I had loved the first. Gladwell is an incredibly entertaining journalist. The science is transparent to a non-technical audience, and the anecdotes shared are always intriguing and sometimes something more – Gladwell does a great job of telling a story that his audience will care about even without a personal connection. If he were to write a fiction novel, it would probably go on my must-read list.
But here’s my problem with Gladwell. A lot of the time it seems that he’s not writing anything more than fiction. I said that his stories were interesting, and I stand by that statement. However, sometimes they seem to be little more than padding around a supposedly important point that he doesn’t have enough evidence to actually establish. I also said that his science was transparent. I feel that too often his science is transparent because it’s incredibly flimsy. As an engineer, I respect data, and a lot of the time, Gladwell just doesn’t have it. If the context of his pieces was journalism, I wouldn’t critique. But it feels like he’s attempting to pass them off as science. Science that has hasn’t bothered to fully understand before writing about. He makes compelling observations, yes, but even observing the same thing five times in a row doesn’t make it a fact. Obviously, the study of human behavior is not the exact science that physics is, but I feel as though Gladwell takes too many liberties. That said, I finished the book with interest, and can’t help but see the themes that Gladwell points out in my own life.
Returning to the themes in the book itself, Chapter Two of Gladwell’s book, “The Law of the Few”, is a section detailing a few special people that Gladwell calls Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. There’s a few people in my life who I think illustrate these categories beautifully. Each of these people have affected my life in various ways, but past my own life, I see the traits that Gladwell identifies as impacting many other people too. Let’s tour Gladwell's main points through talking about these special people: the Connectors Laura and Peter, Maven Nate, and the great Salesman Anthony.
Peter really became apparent as a Connector shortly after I moved out to Seattle for a summer internship. A couple of my newfound friends took me out for a night on the town. We met up with some of their friends from back at school, and when I was introduced, I was met with, “Oh, you go to the University of Illinois? Do you know Peter?” In fact I did know Peter, and I wasn’t particularly surprised that these random strangers did also. I had a similar experience at school when I went to visit my boyfriend at his dorm one night and found a bunch of my friends from high school there. They were hanging out with Laura who I’d met the first week of classes. Gladwell introduces Connectors as people with incredibly large social networks, people who are masters of something he terms “the weak tie,” an ability to remain acquaintances with an incredibly large number of people across time and space. These people, Gladwell claims, are incredibly important to a social epidemic, because they have they contact with an incredibly large number of people, the number of people necessary for an idea to gain enough spread quick enough to take hold.
Of course, even if an idea reaches the critical number of people, it doesn’t go anywhere if someone doesn’t collect and process the associated information. Gladwell coins another term for the type of people who hoard information constantly, passing it out as necessary. He calls them Mavens. Upon reading his description, I couldn’t think of anyone else but my friend Nate. Nate is the guy I call pretty much anytime I have a question or one of my friends has a question, or someone poses a question online and I don’t know the answer. It doesn’t matter what it happens to be about, I’ve gotten good advice about technology, design, business, and law to name a few topics. Nate has an opinion about everything, and he can back it up with at least two distinct references. He’s also happy to go to dinner with anyone to talk about any issue more thoroughly. In fact, I can’t really imagine making any major decision these days without consulting Nate. I know that, whatever my original opinion, I’m going to receive a lot of good information to think about. People like Nate, claim Gladwell, are what gives an idea enough weight to actually mean something and succeed.
That isn't to say that Nate is always someone I agree with even after consuming his wealth of knowledge. But Anthony is. I met Anthony late one Wednesday night, after a meeting for an organization that I had just joined. He asked if I would be interested in taking on some responsibilities in the organization. I tentatively said yes. Less than twenty-four hours later, not only had my responsibilities quadrupled, I was ecstatic about it, and hoping for more. This is what Anthony did to people. He was contagious, and he could convince you of just about anything. Gladwell calls people like my friend Anthony “Salesmen” and I couldn’t agree more. For an epidemic to stick, you need more than just the spread of an issue, and more than just information about that issue. You need the issue to matter, and that is what Anthony did. He made me care about something that I had been completely unaware of an hour before and care in a way that it suddenly became the center of my life.
I can’t deny the effect that all of these people have had on my life. Have they gotten me involved in social “epidemics” because of their presence? This I’m not sure about. Certainly, Anthony was able to get me into something that I didn’t care about before, but it was mostly for his benefit (the work I was doing was, in reality, his work that he had delegated). Nate is definitely my go-to source for information, and I’m sure that I’ve learned things from him that I wouldn’t otherwise. And I know perfectly well that Laura and Peter have touched many, many more lives than I probably ever will. And yet, I can’t think of a single epidemic that I have been a part of because of their direct effects on my life. Maybe these people aren’t perfect examples of Gladwell’s special “Few,” but I guess I sense motivation issues behind the whole question. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen certainly could start a social epidemic – if they were so inclined. Are these just the type of people that are always motivated?
Even though I generally agree with Gladwell on his subject matter, I also have a few critiques of Gladwell and some of his methods. My issue is that I see these people in my life after the topic is on my mind seemingly only because I've been reading about them. Would I otherwise? Additionally, most of the chapter is anecdotes about a few people. While stories are a very nice place to start, I feel that after introducing them, Gladwell generally doesn't switch to hard data, he just makes his conclusions off of his stories. I'm not trying to say that these three types of people are not essential in causing epidemics (after all, they have had noted effects on my life), but I feel like I could probably make up a fourth or fifth individual and get readers to agree that these people also exist in social epidemics. Journalism certainly has different standards for evidence than science, but again, I don’t feel like Gladwell is attempting to pass himself off as a journalist. I don't disagree with Gladwell, but I also don't tend to assume that we have the whole picture about a scientific concept, even a social science concept, from seven or eight data points.
There are topics I support and recognize outside of the context of the book though. Gladwell spends a later chapter of his book talking about the "Rule of 150." This was something I was familiar with before reading the book and have seen in a number of other contexts. In particular, it's one of the main topics that came up at an interview I did last year with a University alumnus who now works at a data visualization company out in California. It feels less like a cool concept that Gladwell used buzzwords to describe and more like an actually verifiable finding with data behind it.
While I liked the topic, I did have a problem with Gladwell’s placement of the chapter. He calls it part II of a study of context. He claims it is an example of how environment impacts ideas. And yes, the number of people in an environment is definitely a factor. The chapter still felt like a stretch. Group size is an incredibly well-studied phenomenon, and it definitely affects the relationships between those in said group. But I’d call it a study on group dynamics rather than environment. This maybe a subtle distinction, but it seems to be lost in Gladwell’s drive to make his ideas neat, pretty, and easy to turn into soundbites. People are messy sometimes. Ideas are messy. A book about them has to be a little messy if it wants to be correct.
Side notes aside, I totally believe that the Rule of 150 is valid. When I interviewed my alumnus friend, he talked about how his company had changed as it grew. He joined the company in its start-up phase as one of its early employees. The company has since grown to over that magic 150 number. My friend mentioned how weird the day was when he walked past someone in the hall that he didn’t know. He had always been an extroverted person and had connections all across the company. And yet, when they hit 150 employees, he just couldn’t know everyone. It was actually a bit of a minor crisis for him to realize that he was now pouring his life into a company along with some complete strangers. My friend was book-smart, people-smart, extraverted and out-going, but he couldn’t keep up with an endlessly growing social network.
Gladwell talks about this 150 number, and the effect it has on social networks. Study after study, Gladwell tells us, has shown that we, as human beings, are just not capable of maintaining social connections of the same level with a group beyond this number. They start breaking down beyond that as my friend had experienced. Gladwell talks about the effects that the breakdown and lack of communication have on a group. They are no longer cohesive; they can no longer act as a unit with unified purpose. In order to start an epidemic, Gladwell claims, groups of this 150 size are essential. Too much bigger and suddenly they’re not all talking about the same thing, the groups splinter, and the momentum dies. In another sense, groups of 150 people or less can be smart. Past that, they start getting dumber.
My own social network, depending on what source you ask, is either eight people or around one hundred twenty or almost six hundred. Even in this isolated incident, Gladwell's claims are true. I do believe that within the first two groups, I could identify the Salesmen, Mavens, and Connectors, and I could accomplish a mission. Our social ties are strong. But not the 600 person network. It’s too big and too fractured. It’s not a real social network; it’s a representation of a bunch of networks that I belong to, and the common ties are just too weak.
It’s been a number of months since I read “The Tipping Point,” and I still find that there are days when I’m thinking or talking about Gladwell’s ideas. I loved a lot of what Gladwell had to say about people. I don’t know if I loved it because it was “true” or “smart” or “correct,” but I was generally able to agree and relate it to the people in my life. A lot of what he said I was even able to relate to myself. I don’t know if it’s because I spend a lot of time studying myself or because my social network, at this point, is pretty big. At the same time, the book bothered me because it wasn’t traditional “smart” – it doesn’t follow a rigorous scientific method at pretty much any point, but it tries really hard to pretend it’s good science.
But just like people can be different types of “smart”, so can this book. Without proving most of what it says, it manages to produce ideas that generally ring true to identify types of people that we all know. Huge groups don’t work; we know that. Some people are better at people than other people. Connectors can keep properly sized groups cohesive, Mavens can spread information between them, and Salesman can get them to act. So if Gladwell’s book isn’t the straight-A student, it’s probably that kid in the back who is maybe goofing off a little, but has got real and profitable ideas. That kid is worth talking to, and overall, this book is worth reading, but only if you've got someone to sit down and think critically through it with you.
--
There exists an academic definition of smart. It indicates that an individual has a good grasp of studied concepts and is able to correctly answer questions about those concepts. Institutions measure this idea through the use of evaluations such as tests or grades. This is a simple, objective way to measure 'intelligence.' Those who score well are deemed 'smart,' and smart individuals are subject to different treatment. I qualified as one of these students growing up. I was placed in honors classes and still got straight A's in all of my classes. I was a good student. I did very well as far as my school was concerned. This did not, however, mean I was a good person or otherwise 'good' in a general sense. In particular, I had problems with people.
People did not take to me naturally. I was a loner. I wasn't a leader of any groups nor was I otherwise considered popular. I was definitively not a "people person." From elementary school through even high school, there was rarely more than a couple people that I actually considered friends. This was not from a lack of people in my environment, nor because I was particularly uninteresting or awkward. I just didn't really stick to any of the people, and they didn't stick to me.
The concept of me being so without friends would be downright laughable to my current friends. Not only is working with people part of my job, it’s also something I do easily and willingly. I am also no longer a straight-A student. I sometimes get C’s in classes these days, but I’m a leader in a number of student organizations. I’d still consider myself successful at school, but I’ve lost a lot of the traditional markings of being an academically “smart” kid. For a different definition of the word though, I’m a lot smarter than I ever was growing up. Smart isn’t a one-dimensional concept. Smart, as it turns out, can also refer to being smart at people and understanding relationships and dynamics that can’t be tested in the traditional sense.
The large change in my life probably came from coming to college. And it came quickly, though not a lot else seemed to change. I became subtly more interesting, gained a tiny more experience in dealing with people, and was exposed to a few more people than I had been most of the time in previous years. I grew less concerned with grades and more concerned with experiences. There were no giant life-changing moment, but nevertheless I transformed very significantly.
A similar process is the premise of Malcom Gladwell’s bestselling book, The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell argues that many large phenomena can be explained by a few small factors. He weaves a story about the science of change around anecdotes, witty titles, a smattering of science, and incredibly persuasive writing. Gladwell names three rules in his book: “The Law of the Few,” “The Stickiness Factor,” and “The Power of Context,” and he claims that they are all that is needed to understand how social epidemics start and spread. For the most part, the Law of the Few talks about the “who”s of epidemics, The Stickiness Factor talks about the “what” of epidemics, and the “Power of Context” talks about the “where” of epidemics, including a healthy dose of how the people in those environments impact them. Gladwell makes a case for being incredibly "people smart," and his book certainly reads so, but at the same time it comes off as entirely dumb in the “traditional” sense.
Being a “people person” myself, it is people that fascinate me, and Gladwell’s chapters on people and their role in these epidemic phenomena that I found both most interesting and troubling. This is particularly true in the second and fifth chapters, on “The Law of the Few” and the second half of “The Power of Context,” respectively. Both of these chapters have a large focus on people, special people and people in groups, if I’m being specific, but I mostly just picked them because they were the two I related to most when reading the book. Each of these chapters, besides being interesting, does a good job of highlighting the general themes of Gladwell’s writing that I feel a need to comment on.
As a side note on Gladwell's writing in and of itself, I should establish that The Tipping Point wasn’t the first of Gladwell’s books that I read. It was the second, and I was incredibly excited when I picked it up, because I had loved the first. Gladwell is an incredibly entertaining journalist. The science is transparent to a non-technical audience, and the anecdotes shared are always intriguing and sometimes something more – Gladwell does a great job of telling a story that his audience will care about even without a personal connection. If he were to write a fiction novel, it would probably go on my must-read list.
But here’s my problem with Gladwell. A lot of the time it seems that he’s not writing anything more than fiction. I said that his stories were interesting, and I stand by that statement. However, sometimes they seem to be little more than padding around a supposedly important point that he doesn’t have enough evidence to actually establish. I also said that his science was transparent. I feel that too often his science is transparent because it’s incredibly flimsy. As an engineer, I respect data, and a lot of the time, Gladwell just doesn’t have it. If the context of his pieces was journalism, I wouldn’t critique. But it feels like he’s attempting to pass them off as science. Science that has hasn’t bothered to fully understand before writing about. He makes compelling observations, yes, but even observing the same thing five times in a row doesn’t make it a fact. Obviously, the study of human behavior is not the exact science that physics is, but I feel as though Gladwell takes too many liberties. That said, I finished the book with interest, and can’t help but see the themes that Gladwell points out in my own life.
Returning to the themes in the book itself, Chapter Two of Gladwell’s book, “The Law of the Few”, is a section detailing a few special people that Gladwell calls Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. There’s a few people in my life who I think illustrate these categories beautifully. Each of these people have affected my life in various ways, but past my own life, I see the traits that Gladwell identifies as impacting many other people too. Let’s tour Gladwell's main points through talking about these special people: the Connectors Laura and Peter, Maven Nate, and the great Salesman Anthony.
Peter really became apparent as a Connector shortly after I moved out to Seattle for a summer internship. A couple of my newfound friends took me out for a night on the town. We met up with some of their friends from back at school, and when I was introduced, I was met with, “Oh, you go to the University of Illinois? Do you know Peter?” In fact I did know Peter, and I wasn’t particularly surprised that these random strangers did also. I had a similar experience at school when I went to visit my boyfriend at his dorm one night and found a bunch of my friends from high school there. They were hanging out with Laura who I’d met the first week of classes. Gladwell introduces Connectors as people with incredibly large social networks, people who are masters of something he terms “the weak tie,” an ability to remain acquaintances with an incredibly large number of people across time and space. These people, Gladwell claims, are incredibly important to a social epidemic, because they have they contact with an incredibly large number of people, the number of people necessary for an idea to gain enough spread quick enough to take hold.
Of course, even if an idea reaches the critical number of people, it doesn’t go anywhere if someone doesn’t collect and process the associated information. Gladwell coins another term for the type of people who hoard information constantly, passing it out as necessary. He calls them Mavens. Upon reading his description, I couldn’t think of anyone else but my friend Nate. Nate is the guy I call pretty much anytime I have a question or one of my friends has a question, or someone poses a question online and I don’t know the answer. It doesn’t matter what it happens to be about, I’ve gotten good advice about technology, design, business, and law to name a few topics. Nate has an opinion about everything, and he can back it up with at least two distinct references. He’s also happy to go to dinner with anyone to talk about any issue more thoroughly. In fact, I can’t really imagine making any major decision these days without consulting Nate. I know that, whatever my original opinion, I’m going to receive a lot of good information to think about. People like Nate, claim Gladwell, are what gives an idea enough weight to actually mean something and succeed.
That isn't to say that Nate is always someone I agree with even after consuming his wealth of knowledge. But Anthony is. I met Anthony late one Wednesday night, after a meeting for an organization that I had just joined. He asked if I would be interested in taking on some responsibilities in the organization. I tentatively said yes. Less than twenty-four hours later, not only had my responsibilities quadrupled, I was ecstatic about it, and hoping for more. This is what Anthony did to people. He was contagious, and he could convince you of just about anything. Gladwell calls people like my friend Anthony “Salesmen” and I couldn’t agree more. For an epidemic to stick, you need more than just the spread of an issue, and more than just information about that issue. You need the issue to matter, and that is what Anthony did. He made me care about something that I had been completely unaware of an hour before and care in a way that it suddenly became the center of my life.
I can’t deny the effect that all of these people have had on my life. Have they gotten me involved in social “epidemics” because of their presence? This I’m not sure about. Certainly, Anthony was able to get me into something that I didn’t care about before, but it was mostly for his benefit (the work I was doing was, in reality, his work that he had delegated). Nate is definitely my go-to source for information, and I’m sure that I’ve learned things from him that I wouldn’t otherwise. And I know perfectly well that Laura and Peter have touched many, many more lives than I probably ever will. And yet, I can’t think of a single epidemic that I have been a part of because of their direct effects on my life. Maybe these people aren’t perfect examples of Gladwell’s special “Few,” but I guess I sense motivation issues behind the whole question. Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen certainly could start a social epidemic – if they were so inclined. Are these just the type of people that are always motivated?
Even though I generally agree with Gladwell on his subject matter, I also have a few critiques of Gladwell and some of his methods. My issue is that I see these people in my life after the topic is on my mind seemingly only because I've been reading about them. Would I otherwise? Additionally, most of the chapter is anecdotes about a few people. While stories are a very nice place to start, I feel that after introducing them, Gladwell generally doesn't switch to hard data, he just makes his conclusions off of his stories. I'm not trying to say that these three types of people are not essential in causing epidemics (after all, they have had noted effects on my life), but I feel like I could probably make up a fourth or fifth individual and get readers to agree that these people also exist in social epidemics. Journalism certainly has different standards for evidence than science, but again, I don’t feel like Gladwell is attempting to pass himself off as a journalist. I don't disagree with Gladwell, but I also don't tend to assume that we have the whole picture about a scientific concept, even a social science concept, from seven or eight data points.
There are topics I support and recognize outside of the context of the book though. Gladwell spends a later chapter of his book talking about the "Rule of 150." This was something I was familiar with before reading the book and have seen in a number of other contexts. In particular, it's one of the main topics that came up at an interview I did last year with a University alumnus who now works at a data visualization company out in California. It feels less like a cool concept that Gladwell used buzzwords to describe and more like an actually verifiable finding with data behind it.
While I liked the topic, I did have a problem with Gladwell’s placement of the chapter. He calls it part II of a study of context. He claims it is an example of how environment impacts ideas. And yes, the number of people in an environment is definitely a factor. The chapter still felt like a stretch. Group size is an incredibly well-studied phenomenon, and it definitely affects the relationships between those in said group. But I’d call it a study on group dynamics rather than environment. This maybe a subtle distinction, but it seems to be lost in Gladwell’s drive to make his ideas neat, pretty, and easy to turn into soundbites. People are messy sometimes. Ideas are messy. A book about them has to be a little messy if it wants to be correct.
Side notes aside, I totally believe that the Rule of 150 is valid. When I interviewed my alumnus friend, he talked about how his company had changed as it grew. He joined the company in its start-up phase as one of its early employees. The company has since grown to over that magic 150 number. My friend mentioned how weird the day was when he walked past someone in the hall that he didn’t know. He had always been an extroverted person and had connections all across the company. And yet, when they hit 150 employees, he just couldn’t know everyone. It was actually a bit of a minor crisis for him to realize that he was now pouring his life into a company along with some complete strangers. My friend was book-smart, people-smart, extraverted and out-going, but he couldn’t keep up with an endlessly growing social network.
Gladwell talks about this 150 number, and the effect it has on social networks. Study after study, Gladwell tells us, has shown that we, as human beings, are just not capable of maintaining social connections of the same level with a group beyond this number. They start breaking down beyond that as my friend had experienced. Gladwell talks about the effects that the breakdown and lack of communication have on a group. They are no longer cohesive; they can no longer act as a unit with unified purpose. In order to start an epidemic, Gladwell claims, groups of this 150 size are essential. Too much bigger and suddenly they’re not all talking about the same thing, the groups splinter, and the momentum dies. In another sense, groups of 150 people or less can be smart. Past that, they start getting dumber.
My own social network, depending on what source you ask, is either eight people or around one hundred twenty or almost six hundred. Even in this isolated incident, Gladwell's claims are true. I do believe that within the first two groups, I could identify the Salesmen, Mavens, and Connectors, and I could accomplish a mission. Our social ties are strong. But not the 600 person network. It’s too big and too fractured. It’s not a real social network; it’s a representation of a bunch of networks that I belong to, and the common ties are just too weak.
It’s been a number of months since I read “The Tipping Point,” and I still find that there are days when I’m thinking or talking about Gladwell’s ideas. I loved a lot of what Gladwell had to say about people. I don’t know if I loved it because it was “true” or “smart” or “correct,” but I was generally able to agree and relate it to the people in my life. A lot of what he said I was even able to relate to myself. I don’t know if it’s because I spend a lot of time studying myself or because my social network, at this point, is pretty big. At the same time, the book bothered me because it wasn’t traditional “smart” – it doesn’t follow a rigorous scientific method at pretty much any point, but it tries really hard to pretend it’s good science.
But just like people can be different types of “smart”, so can this book. Without proving most of what it says, it manages to produce ideas that generally ring true to identify types of people that we all know. Huge groups don’t work; we know that. Some people are better at people than other people. Connectors can keep properly sized groups cohesive, Mavens can spread information between them, and Salesman can get them to act. So if Gladwell’s book isn’t the straight-A student, it’s probably that kid in the back who is maybe goofing off a little, but has got real and profitable ideas. That kid is worth talking to, and overall, this book is worth reading, but only if you've got someone to sit down and think critically through it with you.
first thoughts on the multimedia project
I've been thinking about the multimedia project over break. I had a couple ideas, but the one I'm having the most fun with is about the clash that I sometimes see between designers and engineers. Here's a rough draft / early sneak preview of the captions that I see going along with my video:
certain people design
to make things better
more aesthetically pleasing
by abstract standards
certain people build
to make better things
more functional
by technical standards
two sides
different perspectives
abstracts cant be documented
beauty is in the eye of the beholder
functionality isn't always pretty
what function does "pretty" have
meaning is lost
confusion created
frustration abounds
everyone speaks
in different languages
translation requires patience
compromise is possible
designers convince engineers
that beauty has a function
engineers convince designers
there is beauty in function
--
Speaking of writing projects... Halfway through a new draft of the book review, finally. Will be posted tomorrow. Edit: I meant later tonight!
certain people design
to make things better
more aesthetically pleasing
by abstract standards
certain people build
to make better things
more functional
by technical standards
two sides
different perspectives
abstracts cant be documented
beauty is in the eye of the beholder
functionality isn't always pretty
what function does "pretty" have
meaning is lost
confusion created
frustration abounds
everyone speaks
in different languages
translation requires patience
compromise is possible
designers convince engineers
that beauty has a function
engineers convince designers
there is beauty in function
--
Speaking of writing projects... Halfway through a new draft of the book review, finally. Will be posted tomorrow. Edit: I meant later tonight!
Friday, November 20, 2009
discovery
It took me until my sophomore year to really start hanging out in the big office that takes up three rooms on the first floor of the computer science building. I'd seen people there before, and stopped in a couple of times, but I wasn't quite sure if I belonged. After all, I was only a computer science minor, not a computer science major.
Luckily, I got pulled into a club that met in the office through my actual major towards the end of my freshman year, and actually started finding myself in this office for more and more hours of each week. It was the office for the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM for the rest of this piece, because gosh, that's a long name), and beginning to hang out there was one of the best decisions of my life.
One evening, as my bioinformatics club meeting was wrapping up, another meeting was ramping up. This meeting was for something that everyone just called "conference" and I was sort of interested, having been dragged to said "conference" the year before by some friends for a few of the talks. There was a guy in chrage who I'll call Anthony, because that's his real name and I forget the fake one that I gave him in my book review, and he encouraged me to stay for the meeting.
(I wrote about this a bit in my book review (which I still need to polish up a bit). It's frequently something that comes up, because it was probably the turning point for me, both college-wise and career-wise.)
Anyway, he got me involved in conference staff, which further pulled me into ACM, which got me being vice chair of the group, and conference chair, and corporate chair, and soon I was spending enough time in the ACM office that if they were even paying me minimum wage, I'd be making pretty good bank.
Anthony helped me find what I was good at. It was a lot of the same stuff that he was good at: talking to people, negotiating, organizing people and events. Later he started talking to be about careers and the future and what I'd maybe be interested in. Even later he pointed me in the direction of the recruiters for the company I work at, and made a personal recommendation on my behalf.
I can't honestly say that I would have found this job that I love so much, or even known the type of work that I was going to love this much, had it not been for Anthony and the guidance I found at ACM. In turn, I know that I've provided the same sort of mentoring to other kids in similar positions, at least ones with similar skillsets and passions to my own. So... is it available? Yes, I have to say that it is. The question is more whether students are capable of finding it. I feel incredibly lucky to this day for the series of events that led me to meeting Anthony and getting involved with ACM.
I know a number of CS majors that have gotten lucky in similar ways, a number of people I've watched grow from annoying freshmen to juniors and seniors getting incredible job and internship offers, and I've watched them grow up because of the people they've met in ACM. I also know a lot of people that have never really stopped inside the office, and a number of people that have graduated feeling lost, or not really finding their passion.
That's one of the reasons that I think the part of the class project I'm involved in could be so helpful. There is a wealth of information on this campus, and a wealth of students who want to share it. With such a large campus, there's probably always someone, somewhere, that's already answered the exact same questions that any freshman might be coming across.
The problem, as I see it, is not a lack of mentoring programs, or of information. It's a lack of communication and information transfer problem. We are attempting to design a system that lets information flow a little more freely and find the right people. I wish I could talk to everyone who was feeling as lost as I was freshman year, particularly those students lost in the same ways that I was, not sure how to connect their passions with a valid career. I would probably be up for talking to and informally mentoring each and every one of them. I just don't have any idea who they are.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
she's crazy
Disclaimer: Lots of assumptions and generalizations in this post, it's just a few quick thoughts I wanted to get down before break.
Sometimes, he seemed less than thrilled about receiving my phone calls, and he rarely replied to my (multiple) emails a day. Looking back, it's probably because I was creepily obsessive, but at the time, I didn't really understand. That was how I wanted to be communicated with. Constantly. With fervor. I loved hearing every time someone thought about me. (As I said, creepy.) And if that was what I wanted, why didn't he work the same way?
This is something I've been thinking about a lot, the differences between people and situations, and how one person, who thinks they're making total sense looks like a nutcase to someone else. We saw it with Felicity and Rebecca, I've seen it in my own relationship... in fact, I see it everywhere.
I think there's a lot of "me-centric" thinking in the world, and assumptions that everybody acts the same way. I think one of the greatest benefits of the "systems perspective" that we've talked about is that it forces us a little more outside of our own personal view and into a wider world view, where maybe it becomes easier to start thinking about the sorts of factors that make us seem "crazy" to everyone else.
There is, always, a wider perspective. And yes, sometimes we need to drill down and concentrate on the details. But sometimes forcing ourselves to think broader also helps us recognize that what we want likely isn't what everyone else wants. And maybe shouldn't be what they want. Because maybe sometimes our motivations and values and backgrounds are so different, that when we can't understand why another person wants something different, it's not because they're wrong. It's because we all have different versions of right.
Friday, November 13, 2009
being practical
I've been asked what my favorite classes during college were a couple of times, and depending on the audience, I've got a couple of different answers. Like, I loved my second computer theory class, where all of the homeworks just seemed like a couple hours of puzzle solving.
But I think the most honest answer about my favorite classes were the two Bioengineering senior design classes I took last year. They started out as normal lectures, though the topics weren't the stuff we usually covered in my engineering classes. Instead, we learned about Gantt charts and Six Sigma. But the new material wasn't why they became my favorite classes. They became my favorite classes when we got out of the classroom, stopped having lectures and tests, and started having to actually apply what we'd learned to a six-month long project.
For me, learning isn't real until I've applied it. And until I've applied it, I can't tell you if anything I've learned has actually stuck. It doesn't matter the content or type of the material. Did I learn anything from that book on meditation? I don't know, how are my stress levels doing these days? Was I able to take what I'd read and make some concrete changes? Did I learn anything from that Bible Study I led a few weeks back? I don't know, have I thought about it since? Have I reacted differently because of it? Did I learn anything in that biology lab on Monday? I don't know, put me in a new lab, give me an objective, and see if I stand there blankly or can take what I've supposed learned and put it into practice.
I don't know how many times I've been studying for a test, looking over material, skimming class notes, going "Yup, makes sense, got this." Then I got to the test, pulled out my pencil, found a slightly different application of the same material that I'd been nodding along to a couple of hours ago and stopped in my tracks. Earlier, my brain had been telling me that it recognized the general concepts that I'd bee reviewing. Now it was telling me that I hadn't actually learning them; it didn't have a deep enough understanding of the material to really apply it. For me at least, recognition of something isn't the same as learning. It's one reason that I can ace multiple choice tests on material that I would have never told you that I understood and won't remember a lick of come next month. I have a decent memory, can cram with the best of the them, and my grades aren't bad. I have hardly learned anything in a good chunk of my classes because they let me pass without ever asking me to actually do anything with all that stuff they'd been teaching me.
Earlier in one of our class discussions, I mentioned Bloom's Taxonomy. I don't remember the context now, but once again it seems appropriate. Bloom's Taxonomy is a system for classifying levels of intellectual behavior involved in learning. I was first introduced to it in third grade as part of Discovery, our gifted education curriculum. I can't imagine why I'd remember it so well all these years later, except that we'd been encouraged to continually apply it in my four years of the program. It wasn't just introduced once, something for us to memorize and answer a couple of multiple choice questions on. Our four years of Discovery were constantly asking to remember the higher levels of learning (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation) and pushing us to apply them in all our lessons.
Because of Discovery, I can tell you a lot about physics as it applies to toothpick bridges and socio/political/economics systems as they apply to medieval Europe, but I can also talk at length about these subjects outside of their original specific context. They made us take our book learning and make it real. Made us analyze, synthesize, and evaluate every piece of information we came across before storing it in our brains.
To this day, I find my learning a lot more "real" if it forces me into those higher levels. That's why I loved Senior Design so much. It felt real and it felt worthwhile and I actually felt like I was learning something for once. I had to learn something for once, because I couldn't get a decent grade my walking into a test and picking out some answers that seemed semi-likely. The way to get a decent grade was to actually understand the project in a deeper way, and use that knowledge to create something new.
For me at least, it's obvious if I've actually learned something in a class. Ask me to apply that knowledge. Ask me to do something with it that isn't a pencil and paper test. Make me a "real-world" situation where I need this knowledge, and see if I fail. If I can't successfully use my supposed learning in the real world, then I haven't learned anything at all, because I can't imagine too many situations in life where it's going to be important for me to pass tests on information in a closed room with a set time limit.
Does it put a larger burden on the professor? Yes, probably. Is it worth it? In my mind, yes, but I'm not a professor. Furthermore, it gives me an idea of how I might answer last week's prompt. Should we remove courses from a curriculum? Yes, if a professor isn't able to give a real-world situation with their teaching as the main focus. I've taken a few too many courses where it seems like all the "learning" could have been replaced with a well-indexed manual. And that's showed in the exams that were pretty much just testing how well we'd memorized what we'd been told to. There's "learning" in that, but I'm not sure that it really belongs at the college level.
(Disclaimer: I know that for most professions, there's probably a set of knowledge that really should be memorized, because it's needed so frequently and there's just not time to need to look it up constantly. I'm not suggesting that no one should ever have to memorize anything, but I would posit that most of the material that does fall into this category could still be tested in a practical setting, because it's usually the sort of knowledge and skills that further learning relies on.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
