Author Archives: zephoria

on advisoring

After a conversation yesterday, it occurred to me that the relationship i’ve had with my advisors and mentors is not necessarily typical. I’ve been thinking about how much is rooted in a disciplinary distinction and how much is rooted in me.

As an undergrad, i had the most amazing advisor. He took on a parental role almost immediately. He was there for me intellectually and in moments of crises. He was always making sure i was OK, the kinds of check-ins that are so important to an 18-year-old going through identity crisis. He taught me how to be a professor, how to be a mentor and gave me a level of expectation that i still hold today. At MIT, my advisor was not that much older than i and while she didn’t take on a motherly role, our relationship was certainly more than simply advisor/advisee.

My current relationship with my advisor is far more like my relationship with my undergrad advisor. He’s very much of a father to me and i love him dearly, both intellectually and personally. How he’s doing and where he’s at is very important to me.

Advisor as parent-figure is something that many of my friends have. One of them we jokingly call daddy (or Bosley depending on how goofy we’re being). Many of us are deeply dependent on our advisors for funding, departmental support, collaboration and sanity, especially those of us in fields that don’t have clear distinctions.

In the humanities, students publish alone while we’re so used to publishing with our advisors. Students get by via TAing while we’re connected to research grants. Advisors in other fields are off writing sole-authored books while ours are all working on publications with us.

I’ve spent the day thinking about how much my advisor means to me and i feel very fortunate to have such a relationship with him – i cannot imagine grad school any other way.

my life as a techno-idiot (and why constants suck)

Once again, i managed to find wacky behavior in technology. I went to create a blog entry this morning and only half of it uploaded. It didn’t save to database and crash like normal – it just saved half. It was weird. I flipped out (like always) and whimpered (like always). Boris once again came to the rescue.

It appears as though my comments template has a lastn of 5134 (which y’all exceeded). And it appears that my Atom template is trying to find 1M entries (which i haven’t written yet). What’s up with the constants? Why do we need constants in code. ::groan::

The wireless in my apartment still isn’t working right even though my angelic roommate has spent a bazillion hours trying to hack the firmware to amplify the antenna and now he’s trying to buy a new antenna because it can’t reach to the other end of the apartment. I feel completely clueless.

Everyone around me is obsessed with camera phones and i still can’t figure out how to take a goddamn picture and get it to send. Worse: i have zero motivation to take a picture.

I realized something this evening: in terms of techno-capability, i’m your generic user and completely techno-clueless… I am not capable of using any interface and i think that the black box should just work but it never does. The only difference is that i adopt early and pay attention to what people are doing, even if i think it’s completely pointless. But i don’t have the mind of a technologist and i can’t figure out how anything works (or, as my roommate likes to tell me, i refuse to try).

Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?

There’s nothing like science humor to brighten my day so i was laughing hysterically when a friend read to me from Can a Biologist Fix a Radio? – or, What I Learned while Studying Apoptosis.

How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size. We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, roundshaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we will investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio’s performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some people can discern some distortion), this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate…

[Note: said friend sees this article as a call-to-arms, not simply science humor… apparently i’m not as big of a nerd as i think.]

Social Software in the Academy Workshop

I am helping organize a workshop on social software in the academy along with Sarah Lohnes. Todd Richmond, Mimi Ito, and Justin Hall. It will take place at USC’s Annenberg Center on May 13-14.

We are currently looking for papers, panels and demos on all aspects of how social software affects and reflects academia (deadline: March 31). Please check out the Call for Participation for more information.

fuck SMS.ac

I have zero tolerance for company bullshit and threats. First, SMS.ac had all of my friends spam the hell out of me with their scam-like service (most of whom apologized immediately afterwards). Now they’re sending cease and desist letters to friends who apologized publicly, calling this defamatory. It’s not defamatory – it’s an apology for inappropriate social behavior brought on by autistic software. SMS.ac’s C&D is uncool, inappropriate and a complete abuse of the legal system to threaten people into submission. I was annoyed before, now i’m outright pissed.

simpsons, gay marriage & kids

In the NYTimes article covering last nite’s Simpsons, the president of the Parents Television Council is quoted as having said: “You’ve got a show watched by millions of children. Do children need to have gay marriage thrust in their faces as an issue? Why can’t we just entertain them?”

My immediate reaction was to laugh my ass off. So, in other words, we’re supposed to teach when it’s a conservative value that the Council supports but supposed to only entertain when it’s a value that the Council doesn’t share? Hmm… But seriously, when did a parent’s council ever support media that just entertains? ::laugh::

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crash course in professing

At the request of my advisor and department, i took over his undergraduate class last week – “Foundations of New Media” (co-taught with another professor). I always knew that i wanted to teach and i absolutely love undergrads but this wasn’t quite how i envisioned myself beginning this process.

So, i spent a chunk of time last week trying to catch up on where the class was. I had only read a fraction of the actual texts before (mostly for fun when i was at MIT). Thus, i had to do a lot of catch-up. Luckily, i found that i was familiar with 95% of the concepts and that many of the texts were just overviews of things that i knew and loved – gotta love Open University textbooks.

I prepared lecture slides and gave my first lecture on Thursday. It was almost stunning how much i remembered about teaching. My years of teaching computer science at Brown paid off and it was fun to be in front of the classroom, particularly since some of the students were already accustomed to speaking up. We talked about culture, ethnography, bias, interpretation, etc. They had just come back from their first effort at interviewing (in preparation for doing truly user centered design).

And now i’m off and running, preparing assignments, grading and trying to figure out how to narrow down the gravity force field of a course reader to something manageable (since it’s kinda clear that the students aren’t actually reading the material since it’s far far far too much). The course is both completely in place and still at flux – a foundation i can work with but also changes that i can make. And conveniently, i’m not entirely on my own – there’s another professor and two TAs, all of whom rock.

As odd as this all is, it’s going to be a great learning experiment (although it will kill my time in unprecedented ways). This is certainly a trip of a way to start professing. One day, it will be real.

[Unfortunately, though, my brain is chewing on things like Foucault and Saussure instead of blogging and email so i don’t know when i’ll be back to dialogue again.]