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Learning is awesome

My favorite part of just living is how much I learn.

Here are some pieces of advice you might find useful, some cool skills I’ve acquired (maybe you’ll be inspired), and a couple other things, too:

Because lists are awesome, too…

• A GPS is only helpful in localizing large vehicles, particularly when you’re trying to use the GPS to direct navigation. When your vehicle is smaller than the error margin of plus or minus two meters (e.g., an RC car), it doesn’t work so well! (This from last summer, at NASA Langley.)
• Pens with lights attached are a fantastic invention. I got a combo flashlight-pen at GHC last year. It writes. It lights up. This pen lives next to the pad of sticky notes by my bed. Now all my middle-of-the-night ideas are legible!
• If you’re working on a big important project, always work on it, every day. Could be a thesis. Could be a novel, or a software project. Even on the days when you really don’t want to work on it and you’re entirely unmotivated, work on it anyway. Do a tiny little bit, then do a tiny little bit more, and maybe you’ll convince yourself that you are in the mood to work on it after all. If not, at least you did a little bit, right?
• Just how cool people think NASA is. Specifically, how cool people think it is when they find out I interned there, twice. I continue to be surprised. Quite seriously. Are my standards for what counts as super awesome too high? Do I just expect everyone else to be similarly awesome, making my accomplishments average on the scale of awesomeness? Maybe I do … everyone has the capacity for brilliance. Maybe not everyone fulfills that capacity, but I think you’re suppose to take this as your cue to go be brilliant.
• I earned my Amateur Radio Technician’s license. I am now qualified to talk on the HAM radio bands! I know more than I used to about electronics, antennae, and radio frequencies. I’m still working on learning Morse Code.
• Philosophy of mind. I know a decent amount on the subject from my cognitive science background, but there’s always more to learn! A friend and I have delved into some fun readings: Aristotle’s conception of matter and form, Aquinas on the immateriality of mind, Lawrence Shapiro on embodiment and reductionism, and many more. I’m re-reading Shapiro’s The Mind Incarnate, which I initially read in my second cognitive science class ever, some three and a half years ago.
• How to successfully relocate to a new city in a new state. Yeah, I did that. It involved a lot of talking to people, a lot of driving, and a lot of paperwork and standing in lines.
• Just how flexible my sleep schedule can be. I used to be a stickler for getting my full eight hours every single night of the week. I realized over the summer that I can function just fine on a weird schedule of eight hours, then three hours, then seven hours, then maybe five, followed by nine or ten hours to catch up… I’ll write more on this sometime. Carol Worthman wrote a particularly relevant chapter on sleep for Evolutionary Medicine and Health that I plan to outline for you.
• The rudiments of tae kwon do. According to the instructors at the Goddard Tae Kwon Do club, I have a decent roundhouse kick. I’d like to learn more — I’m still very much the beginner white belt.

And a whole slew of technology-related items:

• - Octave, essentially an open-source Matlab.
• - R, a statistical computing language and environment.
• - The rudiments of time series analysis.
• - ROS, an open-source platform for robotics work
• - Mobile Robotics Programming Toolkit (MRPT) libraries, also open-source and also for robotics work.
• - PCL, the point cloud library, useful for feature detection in point clouds.
• - Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms, as well as other common mapping and path planning algorithms.
• - How to use subversion.
• - Random little things about Ubuntu, including the “alt-f9″ shortcut to minimize the current window
• - How to use the Tobii T60 eye tracker.
• - And so much more …

I wonder if I can double this list by this time next year..?

Gender, scientists, and reductionism: Why Vassar is special

This fall, for the first time in four years, I’m not returning to Vassar. What better time to muse on the college’s specialness?

Over the summer, a couple divisions became more apparent to me than they had been previously:

1. Gender in technology fields – I worked in a lab at NASA Goddard of fifty-some interns/apprentices with a large number of mentors who dropped in on a regular basis. I was the only female on my project; I generally worked in a room with fifteen guys. Only one of the mentors I knew was female, and she was a professor from a collaborating university, not from NASA.

   I should emphasize that the difference I’m focusing on here is not in treatment but in sheer numbers. Why is it that fewer women end up in technology fields? The fact that so many prominent organizations focus on promoting women in technology — including WIT, the Women in Technology project, NCWIT, and of course the Grace Hopper Celebration, which I attended last year — suggests there’s a problem. It’s at the point where it doesn’t even feel weird to be the only female in the room. Is there something wrong with that?

2. Science vs engineering – I mentioned this recently. There is a clear division between those who have been trained as scientists and those trained as engineers. Yes, each have their own goals and purposes, but why isn’t there more crossover?
3. Reductionism vs dualism – As elaborated in one of the first essays I wrote here, I’m a reductionist. A prominent place to finds dualisms is in many of the world’s fine religions. Some of the conversations I had with people this summer have accentuated just how different that point of view is from my own.

The fact that I noticed these differences now — not during a previous summer or semester — highlights just how special a place Vassar is, and how different being at an undergraduate liberal arts college is from being in the rest of the world.

My closest friends at Vassar were also reductionists; Vassar’s mix of genders is unique enough to begin with that the ratio in technology-related majors continues to be unique; Vassar lacks an engineering department and is generally full of scientists.

The rest of the world has different ratios of people and mixes of beliefs. I’m finding it fascinating to explore.

A month after graduation, I’m well on my way to learning all sorts of crazy new things.

This summer, I’m learning about…

• HAM radio. On Tuesday, I attended the first of a summer-long amateur radio FCC licensing class. I know very little about radios and their components – the president of GSFC’s amateur radio club told a story about how easy it was to build a circuit to convert 5 volts down to 3.3 volts, and kept throwing out electronics jargon. I’m looking forward to increasing my knowledge of the subject!
• Computer innards. On a similarly technical note, my laptop’s hard drive stopped spinning up last week. With the help of a computer engineering friend, I opened up the laptop and replaced the drive. Didn’t even lose a screw! It’s a small step into the world of computer hardware, but that was the first time I’ve opened up a computer, so it counts for a lot.
• Multiple realizability. That is, that people can take entirely different paths to the same place. People with ridiculously different beliefs can still be thinking exactly the same thing at exactly the same time on ridiculously frequent occasions.
• Tae Kwon Do. An activity I’d never done before: martial arts! All the interns/apprentices in my lab this summer were encouraged to try it out, since the GSFC club is so friendly. We’ve learned miscellaneous self-defense maneuvers and more ways of kicking than I remember names for – I even got to kick through a board!
• And software… My lab group is using a variety of software tools and open source code libraries that are new to me: ROS (the Robot Operating System), a code repository via SVN, the MRPT libraries, the point cloud library (PCL), and many more. I’m remembering C++, delving into path planning algorithms, and reading up on SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). Yes, it’s a whirlwind of acronyms.

Last week, I attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

It was fantastic. Here are my top ten highlights (in an arbitrary order):

1. Everyone’s friendliness. We were all in “network!” mode. It was easy to strike up conversations anywhere and everywhere – in line for food, waiting for panels to start, sitting at the same table at breakfast – because we all already had something in common.
2. The schedule in the program. Color-coded, clear, concise. What more could I need? It made figuring out what panels to attend and what rooms to go to remarkably easy. The map helped, too. Better yet, the GHC ’10 wiki has notes on many of the talks I had to miss!
3. An unplanned interview. I was chatting with a recruiter about my past research experience, expecting to be directed to the company’s careers website if I was interested in applying for a post-graduation job. I was – as expected – but at the end of the conversation, the recruiter asked if I’d have time the next morning for an official interview! My interviewing skills are a little rusty, and as long as I don’t change my mind again about taking time off before grad school, I’ll definitely be applying for a job at the company. On that note, I should mention:
4. The tabling. Universities, tech companies – I’m their target soon-to-be-graduating-college market, and they were all recruiting. I handed out copies of my resume, signed up for mailing lists, and collected a veritable stack of brochures. I even got to watch one recruiter look over my resume, nod, smile, and say to a fellow recruiter, “No worries here!” (Ego-boosting moment, indeed.)
5. Thursday’s keynote speaker. Duy-Loan T. Le, a Senior Fellow at Texas Instruments, spoke brilliantly about the difficulties she has faced (and overcome) as a woman in technology. She focused on camaraderie and cross-gender collaboration, weaving stories from her own life into her counsel. I’m pretty sure members of the audience cried – she was that good of a speaker.
6. The swag. 3 flash drives (4gb total), 5 t-shirts, 21+ writing utensils, tape measures, screwdrivers, lip balm, a pair of Google sunglasses, and some other stuff. How could I not mention all that as a hightlight?
7. Free wireless. It was particularly useful on Friday after the Sponsor Night festivities, when several of my classmates and I needed to ssh into our CS department accounts to work on homework for our AI class.
8. Georgia Tech’s HCI and HCC research. I attended Elizabeth Mynatt’s introduction to human-centered computing (HCC), in which she presented examples of how current research at the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability (GVU) Center at Georgia Tech enables creativity, wellness, learning, and more. I also showed up to the later panel on new HCI research, which was followed by a field trip to the GVU Center! A large group of us wove our way through Atlanta (the weather was beautiful) over to the research center, where we got to see demos of tons of cool projects. Haptic passive learning, computer programs you can control with your brain, multi-touch tables for manipulating searches and information – very cool stuff!
9. Sponsor Night’s pasta. One of the many dishes served at the Sponsor Night buffet was this fantastically delicious squash-stuffed ravioli smothered in creamy alfredo. It was really good. I’d like to find the recipe.
10. Good advice. And lots of it! Being one of the younger women in the crowd, I was in the perfect place for everyone’s words of wisdom. Advice on grad school, advice on early careers and job-seeking, advice on interviews, advice on life in general. Stay tuned – I’ll relay some of the best nuggets in an upcoming post!