New House and Kitties

Life moves too quickly.

A few weeks ago, I graduated, and moved off campus to a five bedroom house with a few friends. Sarah also got two kittens.

Here's Ada, the girl.


















And here's Babbage, the boy.


















Here's a virtual tour of the house:

(These pictures were taken two weeks ago, so there's more furniture in the house now, and things the spaces are much more cleaned up!)


What you see when you first walk in the door:


Looking to the right, the living room. The biggest differences now between the picture and real life are (1) there's a couch behind the bean bag, and (2) there's a speaker system set up on the mantle and the little entertainment table.


The kitchen! It's blue!



















Our garage turned game room. This room has also been significantly cleaned up.


















And along the side of the house is lots of space and a storage shed!


















The backyard. Notice the palm tree on the right edge! There is also a plum tree and a nectarine tree in the backyard!


















My room:

Wolfram Alpha Launches Today

As I mentioned before, Wolfram Alpha will launch some day in May. That day is today. Watch for it at 5PM PST!

Affirmative Action in Computer Science, A Hiring Perspective

I am now in the midst of hiring the next class of Stanford CS106 section leaders for the fall quarter. Section leaders (SLs) here at Stanford are typically undergraduates (and occasionally graduate students) who teach a small section of a larger lecture class. These classes often also have a head TA who will help coordinate the high-level academic aspects of the class.

CS106 is Stanford's introductory computer science sequence, and includes CS106A, CS106B, CS106X, and CS106L. The enrollment is so high that we now maintain an active pool of around 60-80 SLs who will teach every quarter. The entire teaching program even gets its own course designation: CS198. You can read more about the semi-complex structure of the teaching program on the CS198 web site.

I am one of the co-coordinators of the CS198 program, and as such am responsible for hiring SLs to try to maintain an appropriate number of staff every quarter. Most SLs return quarter after quarter, so we only typically hire between 10-15 now per quarter out of a pool of around 80 applicants.

This puts me in an interesting position. Stanford's CS department has around 4 men for every woman. [Please correct me if this statistic is incorrect or outdated.] Many of the students who go into Computer Science, especially girls, cite the CS106 courses, and especially their amazing section leaders, as their initial impetus to pursue the subject. Many women especially see female SLs as role models in their pursuit in a field so dominated by men, and with a culture so defined by men. So, an obvious question is, should I pursue a policy of affirmative action?

I have always been completely supportive of efforts to fill in the gender gap in engineering, but have always been against affirmative action in hiring, admissions, and other similar decisions. The main problem is that the affirmative action can cause the fallacy that women are bad at computer science to become a self-fulfilling prophecy much too easily. Imagine an admissions scenario. A woman is accepted to fill some gender ratio quota, whether implicit or explicit, but otherwise would not have been accepted. She may do well, but statistically, she will likely do worse than her male peers. Then, the proportion of women in the program doing badly will be greater than the proportion of men doing badly, and this gets noticed by people both within and outside the program. The prophecy is fulfilled.

Yes, I know the whole argument of affirmative action is that, if you believe it, if we give many women a chance, some will overcome the barriers and encourage other women to pursue the field. But realistically, unqualified women will just reinforce the gender fallacy, and successful women will inspire, but successful men will inspire as well, and overall, affirmative action does more harm than good. What we really need is something that is much more difficult to implement than a quota. We need to change the culture surrounding engineering, as well as to encourage those women with high potential to pursue engineering.

This is what I am doing now in hiring. The final hiring standard for both sexes are exactly the same, but during the application period, I try especially hard to seek out women who would make great section leaders and encourage them to apply through personal emails, and even allow slightly longer extensions on the application. But, once past the application stage, the entire interview and decision process is gender-blind.

Using this strategy, the ratio at the final round of interviews last quarter was almost 50%, and the final pool of SLs hired was 30% female. We hope that this quarter, we can push even closer to breaking that 50% mark.

Keeping and Firing Teachers

I have always been against teachers' unions. If you do form a teachers' union, it should be formed around the mission of education rather than blindly protecting jobs. This article makes me sick.

Teaching jobs and pay should be merit based. Public school districts and their teachers have always bemoaned the fact that that lacks equality and oversight and is difficult to assign merit accurately, but please, just suck it up. The best teachers will almost always be recognized, and rewarded under a merit-based system. True, some teachers, good and bad, will slip through the system, but that system sounds much better than the current system in many districts where bad teachers stay for years, and good teachers lose interest because they are only paid by seniority and gain no more resources or influence even after years of inspirational teaching.

Contra Costa County's Grand Bluff

About a week ago, I, along with some friends, read a shocking article in the SF Chronicle detailing a plan by the Contra Costa County DA to stop prosecuting misdemeanors and certain drug felonies. To quote the article, "People who are suspected of misdemeanor drug crimes, break minor traffic laws, shoplift, trespass or commit misdemeanor vandalism will also be in the clear," but that "prosecutors will still consider charging suspects with certain misdemeanors, including domestic violence, driving under the influence, firearms offenses, vehicular manslaughter, sex crimes and assault with a deadly weapon." The full article is here.

Hey criminal breathren, want a new hard drive? Go to Contra Costa County's Best Buy and steal one! You won't be prosecuted! Hey rapists, want to grope people? Go to Contra Costa County! If it's not too egregious, no one will prosecute you! Need a place to stay? Just sleep on any private property in Contra Costa County! The police won't prosecute you for trespassing!

You get the idea.

Of course, we were skeptical when we read this. No DA in his/her right mind would do this. Yet, this was an article in the Chronicle. They wouldn't even do this on April Fools Day. I later checked Google News for more news, and found that this was indeed, shockingly, true.

I checked for updates on the situation every few days to see how the major public outcry would affect the DA's decision, and to see if Contra Costa County would spiral down to what may be later referred to euphemistically in the history books as "America's Dystopian Experiment of the Economic Crisis of 2009."

Fortunately, as another Chronicle article (and many other sources) later reported, this was all a huge bluff that DA Robert Kochly engineered to force the Board of Supervisors and the general public to recognize law enforcement's need for a basic level of funding, even during economic downturns.

I do feel sympathetic for Kochly and his strained organization.

The REMIX Culture

This is one of Lawrence Lessig's classic speeches. I'm sure most people who read this already hold the viewpoint that copyright law needs a major overhaul, so this video will just be a friendly and clear reminder of why that is true. For those of you who believe that copyright law needs no change, hopefully this video will explain why so many people believe firmly that the current system is broken.



The highly ironic part of this is that Warner Music has issued a DMCA take-down notice on the presentation.

Really?

Nasal Adventures: A Timeline

Thank you everyone for your help and concern regarding the 5 ER visits the last week or so. I feel like I owe a lot of you in many ways after this is all over, but for now, I think I at least should give you an update on what is going on. Here is the approximate series of events:

Friday, March 27: I started bleeding in my right nostril in the morning while I was cleaning my room and watching the last few episodes of Battlestar Galactica. It stopped about an hour. It then bled several more times that day, and the episode that started at 4:30 or so caused me some concern because it wasn't slowing down. I was supposed to preflight a road trip for the CS106 section leaders at 6PM, but I decided that I probably couldn't go, and went to the ER. With some magic (nasal clamps and cream), the ER stopped the bleeding, and discharged me.

Saturday, March 27: At around 1AM, it started bleeding again. I eventually decided to return to the ER at around 3AM. While waiting in the examining room, I started to feel faint and called out to the attending staff. I then remember feeling warm and bright and paralyzed while several people called out "Mr. Wang, Mr. Wang, are you with us?" before passing out. I woke up on a hospital bed as a nurse was putting in an IV of fluids. There were lots of leads coming from my chest and arms and legs, going to a monitor and an EKG. My blood pressure slowly crept from a low 80-over-40 to a much more normal 100/80. They examined my nose, told me I should just apply Bacitracin to it for the next few days until they make an "urgent" ENT appointment for me, then discharged me at around 7:30AM. Chris got back mid-day Saturday, and was surprised to hear of my ordeal. I started bleeding again at 5 or so, and Chris took me to the ER at around 7. They decided to put a Rhino Rocket up my nose--an extremely unpleasant and painful procedure. The nurse called the Rocket a "nasal tampon"--it essentially is a tube of material that doesn't stick to blood that the doctor can stick into your nose and inflate. Then, when the Rocket gets wet, it expands, applying pressure to bleeding. Just when you think they've stuck the thing as far up as it can go, seemingly brushing against your brain, they push it even further. Then, quite surprisingly, after they put it in, I fainted again. Same routine. I was discharged about two hours later.

Thursday, April 2: I followed up with the ENT and got the Rhino Rocket out. They then put a tiny camera in my nose, and game me these sweet goggles so that I could follow along what was inside my nose while the doctor examined. My left nostril was like the Amazon river basin, but surprisingly, was not bleeding. The right nostril had a pretty big vein protruding, which the doctor cauterized, then sent me on my way with lots of instructions. I thought I was all done.

Saturday, April 4: I had some very minor bleeding on Thursday and Friday, but the ENT doc told me that was to be expected. However, there was another episode of unstoppable bleeding on Saturday starting at around 5PM in which I was continuously swallowing blood. Jessica took me to the ER at around 7, and I was discharged at around 10PM after they put another Rhino Rocket in my nose. Back to another uncomfortable few days.

I went to bed almost immediately. At 3AM, I woke up to go to the bathroom, and suddenly felt dizzy and faint after urinating. Andrew Rominger walked in just as I was leaning down to try to get more circulation into my head. I don't quite remember what happened after that, but I felt all my muscles weakening, and when I came to, I was sitting on the toilet, and Andrew had called 911. My feces were on the ground, but they were mostly just the blood I had swallowed. I could barely lift my head or speak, so I told him to get Jessica from my room who could explain things to the paramedics when they came. I spent the entire ambulance ride with a blood pressure hovering around 65/40. At the ER, they put in two IVs to give me about 4 liters of fluid and some drugs to counter the waves of nausea I was experiencing. After a blood test, they found that I had lost about 50% of my blood the past week putting me well within the range of anemia, which clearly explains my fainting and frequent feeling of cold. Hence, I spent until 11:30AM or so being monitored and receiving two units of blood transfusions. Jessica stayed with me the entire night. Most of that time was spent talking semi-lucidly to Jessica, or sleeping. I was discharged at around 1:30, and Micki drove us home. My parents flew in at around 6:30PM, and are helping me with life in general.

I'm scheduled to see the ENT again on Wednesday. Until then, there's nothing to do but continue to ride the painful rhino rocket and sleep 14 hours a day. Thanks everyone who have helped in this ordeal so far, especially Jessica, Chris, Andrew, and my parents.

Petaminx Puzzle for Sale

Now this looks amazing.



It's for sale. Anyone have a few thou lying about and want to help me out?

Wolfram Sets the Timer, Will Blow Away Factual Search in May

Go take a look at Wolfram Alpha.



It's a "computational knowledge engine." Sounds impressive, doesn't it? It definitely has the potential to completely blow away any factual search engine that has come previously, of which the most prominent example may be Powerset.

The brains behind this, Stephen Wolfram, is an acclaimed computer scientist that has had many incredible creations already, including the heavily used software package Mathematica, which adds jaw-dropping features in every release, and the stunning if controversial book A New Kind of Science, so he definitely has the background and the resources to create a good factual search engine. In fact, Wolfram has frequently posited, both in A New Kind of Science, and other sources, that he believes computation can be a valid representation of knowledge and science. Hence, Wolfram Alpha is based on what VentureBeat describes well as "terabytes of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms" to create a representation of computable human knowledge.

While I can't say anything to the efficacy of this--it may blow all of us away come May, or it could be the next Cuil--it will definitely be a step forward in the problem of factual search. With Wolfram's entire focus behind this project, and with the concession that this is still a work in progress, I do hope that this will actually work much better than Powerset (which is not to say anything bad about Powerset--they were a little underwhelming, but technically, I can see the incredible technology and useful research that went into building it).

If anyone can get me early access to Wolfram Alpha, I would owe you a big one.

Slums

This online exhibit on slums in the world is a masterfully executed piece of art.

http://www.theplaceswelive.com/