Don't Let the College Board Send You Stuff

I took the PSAT a few months ago and was naive enough to fill in the box that allows the College Board to send me "college opportunities" via e-mail and snail mail. This also allows them to share my contact info with colleges who are interested.

It turns out that every college ever (except the ones that I'm actually interested in attending) is "interested", at least interested enough to flood my inbox, both virtual and physical, with the same unpersonalized junk all day every day. Half of these seem to be offers for some sort of guide to finding the right college, many say something like "find your ____ at _____", and still others are "people" wondering whether I got their first e-mail and/or waiting for a response.

I delete them all.

There is absolutely nothing useful about these e-mails. They are literally all the same. When I need to decide what I'm looking for in a college, I can go to my high school's college counselor. At least she actually knows (roughly) what fields I'm interested in. I'm not sure why these colleges market themselves to me as "liberal arts" when I am (and marked on the optional "possible college major" section that I am) a math/CS/physics/science/anything-but-liberal-arts person.

It is interesting that some colleges set up "individual" "web sites" for me: subdomains of their web site, named after me. Unfortunately for them, I understand exactly how this works, and it requires zero nonautomatable work: have a wildcard "*.whatever.tld." DNS entry that goes to your site and use URL rewriting (ISAPI) to mash the requested URL into a page request that results in the auto-generation of a "personal" page.

I've been clicking the tiny, sometimes almost invisible, "Unsubscribe" links for a while now, but the e-mails still keep coming in. Sometimes, the link is broken (404 error) or even nonexistent. I've considered reporting the latter to the FCC, but I don't understand the complaint form.

Anyway, the lesson you can learn here is don't check that box. You'll regret it.

Preparing a House for Refugees

Several members of my school's National Honor Society did some volunteering with World Relief, the organization through which we distributed Christmas gifts to refugee families in the area. This time, our job was to set up a house for a refugee family from Burma (Myanmar) that will be arriving later this week.

I noticed several things upon entering:

• The kitchen tiles are the dirtiest tiles I had ever seen in my life. Additionally, one of them smack dab in the middle of a doorway (that doesn't have a door) threatens to flip over or break in half if you step on it wrong.
• The stairs down to the basement are wooden and wet (which makes me afraid they're just going to break apart one day) and also really steep. The stairs up to the second floor are much more solid but just as steep. (I almost fell down them once.)
• There are scribbles, dents, and places where the painter missed a spot all over the walls and cabinets.
• There are at least three generations of phone line in the basement.
• The water faucet in the bathtub cannot be turned off.

Let me expand on that last part a bit. As far as I can tell, water had been running in the bathtub for days. The faucet can't turn it all the way off, even what should be the "off" position produces a strong flow. When I arrived, the people already there were trying to figure out how to stop it. I located the main water valve and closed it, solving the constant-waste-of-water problem, but making it hard to do dishes.

World Relief sent two of its staff; they were very helpful, bringing supplies and a checklist of what needed to be done. My first task was setting up beds from frames. Since I actually read the instructions, this wasn't too hard - the trickiest part was getting the mattresses up the very steep and very narrow stairway. After a little bit of furniture rearrangement, the room layout seems to make sense.

I then went on to cleaning the kitchen. I used some wet rags to wipe down the inside and outside of cabinets, drawers, and the refrigerator. This actually took quite a while. I had to take a break because I reached a cabinet that was so dirty the rags needed to be cleaned almost constantly, and the water situation was not such that we could do that. (By then, World Relief had called a plumber and he was working on it.)

So, I went over to the living room and moved a bunch of furniture around until I got a layout that seats everybody in the family and that I think makes sense. This involved moving certain gaudy plastic chairs upstairs where they wouldn't destroy the reasonably nice look of the living room.

We all took a short break to let the plumber finish his job. Apparently, the pipes had frozen and one had burst, resulting in the constant gush of water into the bathtub. I then finished scrubbing the kitchen's storage areas and made an effort to remove the crayon and pencil scribblings from the walls.

The final stage was to wash the dishes. Actually, by the time I got there, they had already been washed with soap - we just needed to rinse, dry, and store them. While I worked on drying them, the kitchen floor was mopped, significantly improving its appearance.

The house could still use a good vacuuming, but we didn't have one. It looks better than when we got there, and I think we did a pretty good job.

Shen Yun 2015

A banner from Shen Yun's web site

Tonight, I attended the Quad Cities performance of the Shen Yun performing arts tour at the Adler Theater. Shen Yun is a dance and orchestral organization dedicated to sharing Chinese culture and history with the world. I went to the performance with my Chinese class and teacher, and we were fortunate enough to get excellent seats in the second row of the upper level.

It was an amazing experience. The dancers (of which there were at least 16 female and 10 male) were always in perfect sync and had really brightly colored clothing, sometimes using sleeve- or ribbon-like things that fly around and look really neat. They changed outfits between dances, to fit the theme or specific ethnicity being represented.

Behind the stage was a wall on which images and animated video were projected to augment the story and setting. Sometimes they were just static images (which looked really nice), but many dances had video that "pushed" objects into the world. There was a short wall behind which dancers could hide and jump out when a virtual character in the animation was about to "exit" into the real world - it must have required amazing precision. In two dances, real-world objects were "applied" to the background to "cause" things to happen on it (like writing). That timing was pretty amazing.

There seemed to be a half-and-half mix of dances that tell a story from Chinese mythology and ethnic dances from a particular region of China. There were also three solo performances, two singers and one player of a two-stringed violin-like Chinese instrument.

An interesting thing to note is that the Shen Yun performances are banned in China. That's because they depict a particular form of meditation that the current Communist government wants to suppress, thereby throwing out the old and gaining complete control of the culture. In fact, two dances contained overt references to the Communist Party in a very negative light. (In the final dance, Communism caused a volcano to erupt and end the world.)

After the performance (which lasted two and a half stunning hours), I and my class were ambushed by news reporters asking us our opinion of the show. I attempted to express my impressedness, as did my classmate. As we were attempting to exit the vehicular deadlock in the parking complex, I saw some nuns leaving the theater. Hooray for cross-cultural experiences!

Introducing Ineffable Learning

Tonight at my school's annual Academic Fair, I presented a new idea for a large collaborative project. I call it Ineffable Learning, and it will be an online learning website where students can explore advanced topics in computing at their own pace and in subject areas of interest to them.

Most schools' computer literacy courses cover the typical peripherals, the Office suite, web browsing, e-mail, basic file system concepts, and maybe something like computer art or drag-and-drop video editing. However, there is so much more - computing is such a fascinating and deep subject - that is immensely helpful to know. For example, archive file formats, networks, privileges, local and Web paths, system administration tools, and network/Internet layout are excellent things to know about. And, there are always shortcuts that save time and effort; they should be more well-known.

I've talked about a model for class progression based on "skill trees", and I think that would be extremely helpful here. Students will follow a core curriculum assigned by teachers or suggested by the site's defaults, but every lesson creates a subtree of more advanced exploration of the topic. For example, when studying Microsoft Word, a student may choose to stick around to explore more advanced uses, like mail merges or use of the built-in bibliography tools.

The second major feature I propose is drill-down explanations. Students learn at different paces: an explanation of a certain length may be entirely repetitive and boring for one student but confusing and overcompressed for another. Therefore, a little "what?" or "why?" or "what's a ___?" link at the bottom of explanations would allow quick students to save time and the others to get more examples and basic review to help them understand.

Finally, I would like to see "infusions", broad subjects like security, ethics, or history that can apply to everything in the course. A student interested in one of those could choose to have it infused into the course, injecting extra paragraphs and lesson branches into the content.

I got two volunteers to help make this a reality, one graphics designer and one programmer/IT person. Doing this alone would take huge amounts of time, so I'm glad there are some people interested in helping. Everybody I talked to seemed really interested in this style of education.

Mute

For the past six days, I have had a cold that includes coughing, soreness, and headaches. For the past four days, I have been unable to speak above a whisper, and only then very slowly and not too long. Though I have been at home most of the time, it has been a slight inconvenience.

Hand signals and large gestures have certainly been useful. (I still need a way to indicate that I can't talk.) Asking people for things hurts my throat too much, so I found myself getting up to do it myself. Spurious communications such as "OK" or "Thank you" have been mostly eliminated, damaging politeness but saving information density and my throat.

In public places, I haven't spoken up very much at all. Doing so would probably produce a discussion, and I can't handle that. Instead, I've just listened to the speaker and probably understood more of the message than those busy formulating their next response. I reacted with appropriate nonverbals, of course, but not having to do anything in a conversation is really relaxing.

This entire experience has made me realize that I really don't have to say much to do life. Of course, school is pretty important and recommends communication, but there are always notebooks and computers. I think this whole ordeal has had a positive aspect, despite the headaches and coughs.

Maybe I'll visit a monastery and take a vow of silence.

Complicated Citations: Just Stop

Every high school and college student has had the displeasure of wrangling bibliographies (or "works cited" sections, excuse me) for whatever citation format their discipline and educational institution embraces. Whether it's MLA, APA, Chicago, or whatever Ms. Turabian decided to unleash upon the world, no citation format is easy to write or intuitive to read, especially if you're trying to cite an Internet source that isn't a periodical or a database.

Nobody has time for that

If the point of citations and a bibliography is to help you find stuff, then just use the universal identifiers and dispose of all the other cruft that can easily be looked up. Don't bother including all these weird fields like publishing city; just provide directions to find what you're talking about. If certain fields to need to be included (like author or date), don't use some crazy FORTRAN-style blob; use a table with headers for what the fields mean or, you know, words.

For web pages (which are overwhelmingly what students are going to want to cite), URLs should be all we need. Of course, the world isn't forever, URLs change. Maybe freeze it in the Wayback Machine or provide some search keywords that produce the desired page as the first result.

For books, include an ISBN and optimally a link to an eBook/PDF. Hunting down a rare book or one with a super-generic title is not fun.

For scholarly articles, anything worth citing should have a DOI. Include a URL of at least the abstract. Hopefully the actual article isn't behind a paywall!

Sadly, it isn't likely that schools are going to give up formal citation schemes soon. Accepting multiple formats would be a doable step in the right direction.

Chamber Orchestra

I am currently taking a Music Appreciation class at the local community college (something to do during winter break) and one of the assignments is to attend and report on a concert. There was only one such event reasonably close to me being held before the assignment is due, so I went to that event tonight. It was a chamber music performance in a local church's chapel. There were two performers, one on the violin and one on the acoustic guitar. They played several classical pieces (from around the 17th century), including ones from Bach and Dowland. During the performance, I wrote notes in a notebook so that I could compile the report intelligently. I enjoyed the event and I might go to another such thing outside of this class - that should be even more relaxing because I won't have to be constantly writing!