Newly Ancient

Playing life as a straight white male

2012-05-17T05:15:35-04:00

John Scalzi offers an excellent explanation of privilege through the conceit of a video game:

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, "Straight White Male" is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the "Gay Minority Female" setting? Hardcore.

Although I didn't choose it, I'm lucky enough to be playing life on the easiest difficulty setting. Still, I'm trying to use the many starting points handed to me to explore new parts of the map where I'm not necessarily playing on the lowest difficulty setting. Hopefully, this can help me to make other difficulty settings a little less hard, with the side effect of making a pretty easy game a little more fun.

This excellent explanation was recommended by Jason Kottke.

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Delicate Decisions

2012-04-26T16:29:46-04:00

This fall, I will fly halfway across the globe to attend college as a member of the third graduating class of NYU Abu Dhabi. This is a choice which neither my friends nor family could have predicted, and not just because the college was only opened two years ago. Yet, here I am: choosing the road less travelled which not even I could have envisioned myself on a year ago. I'll be turning down offers from some of the most well-know and well-established universities in the world, and not for financial reasons. Rather, I am choosing to seize the reigns of my own education and embark on an adventure across the globe.

Culture and its Consequences

This decision was, in fact, significantly influenced by my visit to Dartmouth, my other top choice. It probably represents the apotheosis of an American college education: on a beautiful New England campus,Dartmouth's campus was described by President Eisenhower as what a college should look like and I quite agree. highly intelligent students talk and learn from world-class faculty. Assured of a job post-graduation by the extensive alumni network, Dartmouth students are free to enjoy their life in a Hanover bubble. NYUAD lacks most of these features—it has no alumni to speak of and the academic program is still taking shape—but it also lacks two things which made the difference for me:

Demographic gravity and
Institutional inertia

Gravity & Grounding

To elaborate on my first physical fear,According to my statemate at UWC-USA, I am overly fond of speaking in terms of physics and technology, despite the fact that science is my weakest subject. at Dartmouth you feel an overwhelming center of gravity. White, upper middle class Americans dominate the social atmosphere of the school, and even those who don't come from that background feel a certain pressure to adopt its cultural norms.Indeed, there are more students from New England alone than from all other countries combined. As a member of that demographic group, it would be all too easy to blend into the crowd, join a fraternity, maintain my current worldview, and graduate—possibly with a drinking problem. However, having attended international school for the past two years, I don't want things to be that easy. I would miss the thrill of constantly reassessing my place in the world through the lenses of friends from dozens of countries.

Thankfully, as NYU president John Sexton is fond of pointing out, NYUAD lacks a center of gravity. With no central demographic to revolve around, as the school's 450 students hail from dozens of countries, students are constantly thrown into different cultural combinations and forced to adjust their norms accordingly. This ability to rapidly recalibrate in diverse cultures is expanded by opportunities for extensive study abroad—by graduation, I could have studied in upwards of five different countries. In an increasingly globalized world, I believe the opportunities for intensive internationalism which NYUAD affords will become increasingly valuable, even if I might begin to lose my cultural center.

Above: NYUAD students hail from all corners of the globe.

Inertia & Innovation

Although internationalism is certainly valuable to me, the sense of innovation at NYUAD is even more alluring. The centuries of history which our country's greatest institutions point to as their strength is also their greatest weakness. With that history comes a tremendous amount of institutional inertia which makes substantive change and innovation highly challenging—just look at the difficulties Dartmouth faces in dealing with hazing. Yet, the modern era increasingly requires entrepreneurship and innovation in all sectors. As Carl Schramm emphasized in a lecture I attended at Dartmouth, academic institutions do not teach entrepreneurship properly or take it seriously, instead emphasizing rigidity and channeling them into careers in established fields (especially Wall Street).

Of the universities which do focus on innovation, perhaps the most famous is Stanford. With its close connections to Silicon Valley, the university has a rich history of entrepreneurs emerging from its faculty and students. Thus, the curriculum and culture places a far greater emphasis on innovation than many of the great East Coast universities. While this is certainly admirable, in the process the university has perhaps lost its way as an educational institution, as a recent New Yorker article highlights. Close ties between the industry and the university have become almost too close, with pragmatic innovation becoming the driving force of the university, rather than higher learning. In short, it seems that Stanford is simply allowing innovation in education.

In contrast, NYUAD is truly emphasizing innovation on education. The curriculum remains firmly rooted in a liberal arts core, including such non-utilitarian courses as Becoming Human. In concert with this liberal arts curriculum, significant educational innovations are encouraged, including pushing the power of technology while simultaneously recognizing the importance of place through study trips within the Middle East. Thus, NYUAD encourages innovation on the traditional liberal arts education in an interconnected world.

Students & Support

Of course, the students are responsible for much of this innovation. Starting a school from scratch, we are pioneering in developing its culture, clubs, and credentials. While this is truly exciting, it is only made possible through the support provided by such an intimate school. NYUAD students are truly given the resources to succeed. Some of this comes from the substantial funding and small classes (the student–faculty ratio is 3–1), but it is also driven by the mentality of everyone associated with the school. The school's success is entirely contingent upon the success of its students, and with only 450 students every single one can receive the individualized attention necessary to succeed. In the process of making a decision, I have been treated with genuine care by everyone associated with the university, as have my future classmates. NYUAD has gone out of its way to ensure that I can make a well-informed choice, even offering to help coordinate with other college visits. As an example of their dedication to students, when my flight back from an accepted student event was cancelled, an admissions officer worked with me on his Sunday night (well past midnight) to ensure I was taken care of. In short, I truly feel that my individual needs and desires will be fully respected at NYUAD. Or, as John Sexton would likely put it, I'll be loved.I don't even know the names of the university presidents at other schools, while at NYU the president personally hugged each accepted student.

Right: The skyline of my future home

So, I am ready to embark on an adventure to the Middle East. But I choose NYUAD not for its generous financial aid, its small classes, or its location, but for the opportunity it presents: the chance to reimagine education.

But before I embark on a new adventure, I must wrap up my current one, which I will be hopefully reflecting on a little more now that classes have concluded. So, if you want to know about living with 200 students from 70+ nationalities in New Mexico, just ask.

A Return to Reflection

2012-04-10T01:50:39-04:00

People tend to write—and, thus, think—the most at the beginnings and endings of things. Whether that thing is a job, life, or education, the middle just isn’t that interesting. At the beginning, we are filled with excitement over the newness of the experience and anticipation for its possibilities. Bursting with enthusiasm, we are eager to share about our new experiences with anyone who will listen.

I’ve certainly seen this with posts by students at NYU-Abu Dhabi. They post prolifically in the early days, but eventually their frequency deteriorates due to the inverse correlation between life and sharing. Still, as I contemplate attending college across halfway across the globe their posts help to make the prospect less remote.

Thus, I hope that by renewing my writing here and cataloguing the memories of my last ~~fifty~~forty-four days at UWC-USA, I might be able to offer a similar resource to students (my zero-years!) contemplating this experience which I have lived and loved for the past two years.

Of course, writing here will also help me to reconcile that I have finally reached an ending. By reflecting on this amazing breakneck experience of the past two years, I hope to gain some insight into how exactly it has impacted me and where I see myself going from here. Hopefully, this might even help me to decide where to attend university.

I thus promise to be an endblogger, posting regularly on the resolution of my life and investigating the future through pontifications on the past.

Also, please excuse the current state of the blog. I actually wrote this post several days ago, but got sidetracked with trying to restore the previous technically-advanced site. Failing that, I’m shipping my writing with this minimum viable product until I find the time to make the blog beautiful again.

Smart People Cause Problems

2009-10-14T14:53:52-04:00

If you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence...

That sentence, paraphrased: smart people started working on Wall Street. For most of its existence, Wall Street was mundane, run by Ivy League jocks with old money. It wasn't run by idiots, but it also wasn't run by geniuses. Then, with the rise in college costs and Wall Street income, truly smart people started showing up—the kind of people who would otherwise be doing precedent-setting legal work or breakthrough physics research. These geniuses weren't content with the easy wealth old Wall Street afforded—they wanted to experiment, they wanted to use their tremendous brainpower. And if they made boatloads of money in the process, that was just an added bonus.

The problem came when all that complicated math started collapsing under the weight of excessive greed and ignorant bosses.By ignorant, I don't mean ill-mannered. I mean truly ignorant of how their companies were working. An already complex global financial system become a tangled web of math which eventually unraveled. Some things, particularly economic and physical infrastructures, are best run by conservatively intelligent people who won't experiment. I don't want a genius doing my plumbing and I don't want one doing my taxes.

This excellent Op-Ed from the New York Times was recommended by Jason Kottke.

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Morgante Pell: The Making Of

2009-10-11T22:53:54-04:00

What follows is a poorly written exposition of my recent activity. If you're not in the mood for self-congratulatory bullshit, here's the gist: I made morgante.net. It's cool. It's me.

I made myself last month. Rather, I made the online version of myself: morgante.net. I'd been meaning to do this for months, but #sitesprint finally gave me the motivation to do so.

Before doing so, I created numerous designs, from the gaudy to the overly-subdued. One was entirely primary colors, another was pure black-and-white. With respect to the design, I feel I've reached the ideal equilibrium with respect to the Goldilocks Principle: interesting, but not garish.

As my online home on the web, it of course links to all my profiles on various sites (I have too many). Most notably, I've added a link to Lemnos, my lab. Its name comes from the island upon which the great engineer-god Hephaestus wrought his creations. Within the lab are all my various technical projects. Its powered by Habari and a plugin of my own devising. The project pages are almost entirely automated: metadata is extracted from the plugin source, downloads are built from the subversion repository, and support is powered by the Habari Forums. Overall, I'm quite satisfied with the result.

Back on my hub, I did my best to keep things jovial. Building a website entirely devoted to myself is inherently rather pompous, so I was sure to have a healthy dose of self-mockery. The about page is a tongue-in-cheek tale of my life, while the Twitter widget in the sidebar features my occasionally whimsical wordplay. Meanwhile, the contact page is fully AJAXified, using my AlienContact plugin.

In the future, I plan to have a fully integrated lifesteam, à la Sweetcron. It will have all my activity from various places around the web, in addition to random life achievement bits: school awards, projects I start, etc.—the idea is that I will be able to programmatically generate a resume from the data. Though I currently have something similar here, I would like to eliminate a lot of the superfluous material from Newy Ancient and move it to my hub. The next iteration of my blog will put my best content up front, while also integrating newer (short) link posts.

Stay tuned for more exciting things as I finally get some priorities straightened out. My goal is to write at least one article a week, when the hellish load of AP English allows it.

Billions & Billions

2009-09-30T20:36:13-04:00

Every day, the news media confronts us with enormous budgets: $3,000,000,000,000 for the Iraq war, $2,800,000,000,000 for the financial recovery, $16,000,000,000 for Facebook. Except they're usually reported with the ambiguous numerical categories of trillion and billion. When your daily budget is a dollar, $10 billion and $10 trillion both look astronomically large—but difficult to compare. While I think listing out zeroes is helpful, despite the added space required (Hey, everything is online now anyways!), visualizations can make that comparison even easier. David McCandless has put together a good visualization of various world budgets. Though I would disagree about some of the categorizations, since government stimulus money is not actually lost, the boxes themselves are relatively useful.

Right: Visualization of budgets and other big numbers.

(Via John Gruber)

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In Pursuit of Meritorious Advertising

2009-09-25T00:02:41-04:00

My friend Joe Thibault recently emailed me about a new site he has started with Sean Behan (a crackerjack Ruby programmer). Their site, called PostLearn, is essentially an affiliate job board for education. While I wish them success in their endeavor, I won't be joining as I believe this model suffers from a couple of major flaws.

Right: Graph of PostLearn affiliate traffic, lead by freetech4teachers.

The greatest flaw is immediately visible from the affiliate graph: one site drives a vastly disproportionate amount of the traffic; Free Technology for Teachers alone accounts for over 90% of the traffic, and consequently will receive far more affiliate revenue. Except it will probably receive all of the revenue. In an affiliate model, there is a certain base amount of traffic required before you can get a single sale, a minimum that I doubt many of the others on the long tail (including yours truly) would reach. Effectively, the entire pot of affiliate money is controlled by a tiny oligarchy of sites.

This would be acceptable (it's a free market, after all) were it not for the fundamental flaws in the Internet economy. This flawed economy is controlled by a small oligarchy of noisemakers. This oligarchy isn't particularly hard to enter: just abandon journalistic ethics and post lists of the top n ways to write lists.Paul Graham, one of the few who has an audience and integrity, wrote about this phenomena in a must-read essay. Boom! Traffic.

Unsurprisingly, just as in the larger Internet, the most popular PostLearn affiliate simply rehashes merit-less news stories and tips.This isn't a condemnation of the site's manager. If he is happy with poor design and meaningless content, that's his decision. Looking down the page, lo and behold, we find a list of the aforementioned variety. Sadly, this content is rewarded far more generously than potentially more deserving comment.

Google AdSense grants us some slight freedom from this paradigm by democratizing advertising. Though the most trafficked sites still receive the vast majority of the revenue, smaller sites do share in some of the revenue, potentially enough to offset minimal publishing expenses. In this way, Google AdSense resembles most modern democracies: while the elite still maintain most of the power, the little guy does get a small voice. It's not perfect, but it's better than an oligarchy of the unthinking elite.

Above: The exemplary Fusion Ads logo.

However, we can do one better with a meritocracy. Rather than being a detriment, advertising can be a force for good on the web. Fusion Ads and The Deck are prime examples of this. Instead of rewarding breadth of content, these networks focus on finding blogs which consistently post material with depth. By handpicking their members these networks ironically end up leveling the playing field and giving quality content a chance to shine. I truly believe this is the advertising model that will save the web.No, I'm not a shill for Fusion, just a fan.

With that in mind, I offer this challenge to Joe and Sean: devise an advertising platform which will improve the quality of the edublogosphere. In my opinion, such a model should observe three crucial principles:

Popularity doesn't necessarily correlate with merit. Meaningful blogs with strong reader relationships will, in the end, provide greater long-term benefit.
Be selective. The quality of small, niche groups is more easily controllable, making them more marketable.
Know the audience. Most readers are going to be job seekers (teachers) not job posters. The billing and payment strategy should reflect this.

Whether they choose to implement these ideas or not, I wish Joe and Sean the best of luck and look forward to their response.

Memorization Spacing

2009-09-07T04:49:12-04:00

Jack Cheng elaborates on a learning method developed by Paul Pimsleur for memorizing language vocabulary:

[Pimsleur] observed that the first time you learned a new word, you’d forget it almost immediately. But if you reviewed it again as you were about to forget it, each subsequent review would exponentially increase the staying power of the word. To put it another way, if you could only remember the word for 5 seconds at first, reviewing it after those five seconds would boost your retention time to 25 seconds, then 2 minutes, 10 minutes, and so on. At this rate, the tenth review wouldn’t have to take place until about four months after the first.

I've been employing a similar method for building my vocabulary (in preparation for the unavoidable SAT). Essentially, whenever I run across an unfamiliar word, I note it as an alarm in iCal set to go off 5 minutes later. Once prompted, I try to recall the word (and look it up if I forgot), then change the alarm to go off in 10 minutes, gradually increasing until it's up to a year. Right now, I'm working on writing some software to automate this process, including the ability to add words from my iPhone.

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La Premiere

2009-09-05T14:22:28-04:00

La Premiere is an excellent short film chronicling the invention of the cinematograph by the Lumière brothers, whose last name appropriately translates from French as light. Watching it was delightful way to spend twenty minutes.

(Via Shawn Blanc)

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The Paradox of Craigslist

2009-08-29T17:48:06-04:00

Wired has published an in-depth article about Craigslist that exposes the peculiar personality of the site, and its founder. I have never been a fan of Craigslist—its usability is terrible. The Craiglist management has a somewhat hypocritical stance. Supposedly, the site is simple because business growth isn't a priority; it's all about the users. Yet those same users (or potential ones) complain about how backwards the site is, with extremely poor technology running it. Worst yet, Craigslist actively discourages innovation by not offering any kind of API to external clients. Hopefully, just as newspaper classifieds were defated by newer media, Craiglist will eventually fall to companies willing to innovate.

(Via Merlin Mann)

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