Power Dynamics

This week I started taking some programming and math classes as pre-requisites for my Comp. Sci. Degree and, as I suspected, they’re really difficult. Why am I working so hard (and spending so much money) to get a degree in Computer Science anyway? Well there are a few reasons:

I need a marketable skill in order to compete in this job market. The job market for recent college grads in the US is DIRE. I was really lucky to find a job when I first graduated from college, finding another one has been truly challenging. I was unemployed then underemployed then unemployed again, accruing debt the whole time. With this degree at least I’ll be accruing debt with a purpose. Even if I can’t get a job that is different from one I’ve had before, I’ll probably be able to automate it somehow. Do it faster and more efficiently with the help of computers.

I think women and minorities are underrepresented in technology which affects the products we have the world we live in. Women and minorities have always been underrepresented in technology, what’s most worrisome to me now, is that our numbers are actually going down. There are half as many women in tech now than there were in the 80s. I don’t know how technology would be different if it were designed by women, but if I don’t participate in it, I never will.

I’m really uncomfortable with not knowing how computers work. More and more, we spend most our time on computers and dealing with technology. If knowledge is power, I am not comfortable giving that power and control to someone (or something) else. It’s MY computer, it should do what I tell it to. It’s not a person, it doesn’t have free will, if it isn’t doing what I tell it to it’s because I’m not saying it correctly. Computers have astounding potential, but if I’m not using it, what the point?

I need the knowledge to work on the (geography) problems I care about. In high school I fell in love with Calculus, in particular, I remember spending hours working on one problem, how best to display a sphere (3D) on a page (2D), a problem of map projection. I was (and am) convinced that there is a way to minimize distortion with the magic of calculus. Taking more math classes now I am getting excited about different problems that I can use computers to solve. Problems with access to information (geography/IT/translation), women’s issues, 1st world problems, 3rd world problems etc. Computers can help.

These (compelling) reasons aside, I’m not a computer scientist and I’m not really interested in becoming a programmer (unless I can make a lot of money doing it, which is possible). Partly I’m using computer science to help me figure out what I really want to do with my life. It’s hard going through all these math and programming classes, and to be honest, I might not last. But I think every minute is worth it, each class is one more computer skill that most people don’t have, a leg up on the competition. Plus, the harder it is to accomplish something, the more pride I feel when it’s done. With math and computer science it’s more than pride, there’s a power in mastery, when you can take a tool that almost everyone uses in a general way to do something specific and helpful to you, you make it your own.

“Between the ages of 20 and 40 we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.”

-W.  H. Auden via Gretchen Rubin

Articles in my Digital Age

This morning I got a chance to do one of my favorite things, browse at a bookstore and buy some new magazines. Ever since I got into the masters in computer science program it’s hard not to think of everything I do and how I could experience it digitally. For me, the experience of a magazine consists of 3 parts; finding, reading, and processing.

The first part is finding the magazine or article. In this case I judged completely based on covers, I bought Under the Radar because Yeasayer (my favorite band of the past 5 years or so) was on the cover, the cover also mentioned an interview with the beloved Aubrey Plaza. I also bought Good Magazine because it is their Migration issue, and I am interested in contemporary Geography, I love Good mag (I used to subscribe), and I hadn’t read it in a while. I also read that they recently let go of their editorial staff and I suspect the magazine might be really crappy for a while.

We live in the digital age, so I know that some of this content is available online but how would I go about finding it? Most people enter the internet through google; I googled Yeasayer and got some articles from the usual suspects, SPIN and pitchfork, announcing their new album and tour dates. Google-ing geography and migration is similarly useless. None of these things would have led me to these interesting articles. I read most of my news and content from my googlereader feed, which does give some suggestions based on what I’ve read and the things that I have liked. But it didn’t suggest these articles and I’m not sure how it could have.

In terms of reading, the experience on paper, on computer and iPad I find remarkably similar in most respects. I do find it convenient to be able to look up words, concepts and references. If I’m reading an article on paper I like to have my ipod touch nearby for references, otherwise I won’t look them up (and I won’t get smarter). If I’m reading on a computer it’s easier to look things up, but it’s also easier to get distracted and stop reading the article.

For me, the most exciting articles I read are able to identify sociological trends before I do. I see myself in them, and I see myself as a part of a whole; a great articles helps me feel unique, but also points out the overarching themes of our time. Once I’ve finished the article, what do I do about it?

I might like the article enough to share it with someone, with the paper article I can mention it to someone and tell them to buy it, I can let them borrow it, or I can tell them about it*. The easiest way to do this is to find the article online and email the link to someone or share it on facebook or twitter. I might want to clip out the images from the article and put them on my wall (pinterest is a digital version of this process). As Nick Hornby says “It’s what you like not what you are like.” Interest magazines are one way of creating a community of like-minded people. As magazines fade, sharing things with people helps us to create online communities based on mutual interest rather than physical proximity. This is one of the questions I want to explore in computer science, as globalization increases, and the physical borders between countries begin to wear away, the virtual connections between cultures become more and more important. How do we model these connections? How do we maintain our traditions, our individuality, but also share new ideas and maintain respect and diversity? How is our experience of culture changing?

*I was reminded, recently of a story I heard about the Gettysburg Address. Since the speech was made before voice recording devices, and no one had a pen and paper handy, we know the words from Lincoln’s own notes and from what people wrote down after they got home. It is impressive that 3 different people were able to write down such a long speech and there were few discrepancies, but it makes me wonder about how we process and record information these days. We don’t teach people to remember things in that way anymore, nor do I think we should. But how do we cut through the noise? How do we know if someone’s voice is important when everyone is being recorded?

Day 6

On Tuesday we went to Killid media group and met with Najiba Ayubi, the Media Director there. Radio Killid was the first free media after the Taliban, now they have 8 radio stations, 3 magazines (news, women’s, and culture), as well as a website and TV station. Her aim was to have the international news about Afghanistan come from the Afghan media.

Later we went to the National Gallery to see more modern paintings including this famous painting depicting the last British survivor of the Anglo-Afghan War in 1842.

We visited this mosque

Took pictures of the Kabul Wall

And thanks to our fearless driver, drove some treacherous streets up Guzarga mountain to take pictures from the the top where a cannon used to set off at noon every day.

Panjshir Valley

If you read the FAQs post you know that my camera got stolen with most of my pictures on it. I did have some other pictures on a separate memory card though and my friend just lent me his cardreader so here they are.

These pictures are all from one of the last days of my trip when we drove outside of Kabul to the Panshir Valley.

This is the Panjshir River. The Panjshir valley translates to 5 Lions, and refers to a family from there than had 5 brothers.
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We stopped to eat kebabs at a restaurant by the river. I stuck my hand in the water, it was…not warm. In early March the snow was just starting to melt.
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This valley is famous for being the birthplace of Ahmad Shah Massoud – an Afghan hero in these parts. This village had his picture on their bridge.
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We were relieved when our tour guide told us that it was duck season and the men we kept seeing with rifles were just duckhunters.
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From Massoud’s tomb you can see the Panshir valley. The crops were just starting to come in, I’m sure now it’s very green.
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These are some pictures of the monument and the tomb where Massoud is buried.
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You can see they were doing some construction to build a museum and a new parking lot.
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These are some views from the top of the hill.20120412-144805.jpg

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No More Usury

I had a bunch of energy this morning and decided to work on a side project that I’m calling ‘No More Usury.’

I’ve been interested in the idea of usury for a long time, essentially since I learned what it was. Usury is the practice of charging interest for loans and it’s a sin in all of the Abrahamic religions. But all of our banks charge interest on loans, otherwise they wouldn’t make any money. I wondered what happened, did usury stop being a sin? Did people just stop caring?

In the West, with Christianity, it seems they just changed the definition of usury so that it meant charging excessive interest. In the Middle East, Islamic banks don’t charge interest on loans, but they take a share of any profits made by the business or entity. These religions have figured out a way around this sin so that banks can make money.

But if the bank wasn’t trying to make a profit it wouldn’t need to find a loophole around usury. What if there was a bank that had an entirely different business model; a non-profit bank wouldn’t need to charge interest.

In light of the student loan debt I am about to take on, and this recent Bill Moyers Segment I’ve decided to take some steps towards starting such a bank. Even if nothing happens, I think it’s a fun project to work on for my computer science masters.
I think the idea will appeal to conservatives who want a moral, usury-free bank, and liberals, who want to overthrow our current banking system. I think it’s a pretty good idea. Come visit my site and sign up for my email list if you think so too.

Framing the Conversation

I arrived in Kabul this morning. Two days ago I was in New York staying with a friend from high school. He is a highly skilled craftsman who makes, among other things, gorgeous wooden frames. He recently found a rare New York apartment that let him set up a small woodworking studio downstairs and he’s saving up for a bandsaw.

Today I visited another place that makes frames; Golestan Sabak. This school, run by a wonderful widow named Fatima Akbari, teaches women and children. The students learn not just literacy but also vocations like embroidery and carpentry. In particular we visited the workshop where disabled people learn woodcarving, calligraphy and frame-making. 3 weeks ago a big snow dump caused her tent to collapse, destroying their electric saw.

Another recent New York conversation echoes in my head. My friend and I were eating lunch at Columbia where some students were protesting the settlements in Gaza. I asked my friend how he felt about the protest and he said essentially ‘Think Globally Act Locally’ that there are plenty of problems to deal with in New York. But one of the problems is misinformation. People just don’t know about the settlements or about women’s carpentry workshops in Afghanistan. Well maybe a couple people do now.

The pen is mightier than the keyboard

I’m out of town for my brother’s graduation, which hasn’t stopped me from participating in a month of letters. I’ve said previously that I like letters best. And it’s true, I love stamps, and fountain pens, calligraphy, stationary, envelopes, and as you probably know by now, babbling about minutia. Letters are one of my favorite types of future garbage. I’m not going to rant about how kids these days can’t write in cursive, or how sad it is that the USPS is going out of business (oops, too late?), I just hope the letters speak for themselves.

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Access to Education

Lately I’ve been thinking about education, the Russian and I had a heated discussion this weekend about it, she’s starting school again after winter break and I’m applying to a masters program. Also, it has been in the news because of President Obama’s recent State of the Union speech. Lack of access to education, I feel, is one of the biggest global problems. I don’t have any solutions right now, but I wanted to express my gratitude towards the people and institutions who contributed towards mine:

My mom is the one who filled out all the financial aid forms growing up, and taught me how to make the system work for me. She has worked, and continues to work tirelessly to make sure her children get the chances she didn’t get. My mom’s (now) husband started this blog for her which is probably worth checking out (if you didn’t grow up within earshot of my mother): Zen of Folding

The branch of the Oakland Public Library by my house was influenced by the Black Panther movement and the Black Muslims in the neighborhood. Without all those books about little black girls I am sure I wouldn’t have the confidence to achieve what I have so far. (Bill Cosby explains what can happen when you don’t get this kind of enforcement: A Boy Like Me)

Addendum 5-27-12: This branch was the African American Museum and Library which later moved to downtown Oakland. Explains a lot.

The Crowden School was my first summer camp. I met the Russian there and I learned that I could make music too (it wasn’t just for big kids like my brother).

A shoutout to A Better Chance (ABC), for paying for my testing, my first trip to a college campus (USC), and helping students of color get a fair shake.

The East Bay French American School
was where I learned the French language, French culture, and as my mother says, where I learned to hate French people.

Head-Royce
Middle School sucks. It sucked for me, and it sucked for a lot of others, but without it, none of us would have any soul. And if I hadn’t hated middle school so much I never would have ended up at my high school.

Interlochen Arts Camp
was awesome, my first sleep away camp. I won the ‘Honor Camper’ award and played in piano quintet, piano for 10 hands. My first experience of a humid summer where I got stung by all manner of mosquitos for the first time. My scholarship there was sponsored by Kellogs. Thanks for the corduroy knickers!

Walden
a music composition camp in New Hampshire. I got the best music theory education, made some great friends and wrote a couple pieces of music. Not bad for a 12-year-old.

Putney
little Putney, my hippie farm school. When I heard that Seventeen Magazine came to do a profile on the school and the students protested their body image perpetuation, I was sold. I couldn’t really have gone anywhere else.

Center for Talented Youth
really should been called Center for Privileged Youth, if I remember correctly you have to take a pretty expensive test to get in. But the scholarship I got there was all-inclusive, they told me if there was a pair of flip flops that everyone had, and I couldn’t afford (Havaianas anyone?), that they would help me pay for them. I had been at Putney for a few years though, so I was pretty anti-consumerist.

Summer Intensive Language Study
(SILS) at Northfield Mount Hermon; it looks like this program is now defunct, which is a bummer. By now you can probably tell that my mother believed that summers were a time for learning, not lazing. If we weren’t taking a class over the summer, we were supposed to get a job.

University of Chicago
Where fun goes to die. I was cold, miserable and well educated.

Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship
When I went in to interview I went on a long rant about how I didn’t believe in affirmative action and I hated teaching, how did I get this fellowship?

After finals in Chicago I began calculating how much money I had been given by these institutions over the years and it came out to over $500,000. I don’t have enough money to pay it back yet, but hopefully the things I learned will help me earn enough to pay it back soon.

There are many ways we rationalize the bounty we all receive in our lives but first and foremost I’d like to say just say “Thank You”. I feel very lucky to have had these opportunities.

That said, I hope these institutions feel lucky to have had me as well. All that money I got for being a poor black girl doesn’t negate the fact that I am a poor black girl with all that entails (though I’m working on the poor part). A friend once suggested that I’ve repaid the money I was given in unpaid diversity photo-ops and other marketing. In addition, I worked hard for my scholarships, maintaining a GPA, trying to be a model minority since I was the only black person for miles, and being the only black person for miles, these tasks aren’t easy for anyone, especially a young person.

I tend to think that someone’s sex, race, socio-economic background, religion, age, etc. is about as important as their shoe size, but I wouldn’t think this way if it weren’t for my education, which I got because people thought otherwise. We should live in a world that doesn’t need affirmative action, but we don’t.

p.s. I also like to think I got into some of these places because I’m smart, but who knows.

Visages

I’ve been reading a book about provincial life set in the mid 19th century and became curious about the descriptions of peoples’ faces. To me, Byronic locks and a noble chin don’t give me a good picture of someone at all. Maybe that’s because I grew up in a world with pictures and movies and internet and I’m not used to using my imagination. Maybe words are just not the best medium to describe the human face. Maybe it’s because there is more variation in face shape in 21st century California; in 19th century England, most people looked fairly similar, so a description could easily conjure up the type of face that this person might have. But lately I’ve been toying with the idea that description says more about the describer than the described.

To a disturbing extent we see what we want to see. In college I took a class in which we talked about the Portuguese discovery of Africa and America. The most advanced maps that the Portuguese had were based on world travelers, who were fairly accurate about the places they were familiar with, and less accurate about the communities on the periphery. The borders of these maps were full of fanciful monsters (one of whom used his extra large foot as a parasol to shade himself from the African sun). The explorers were so willing to believe that Africans and Native Americans were not human because they were expecting monsters that when they found people who didn’t look like them, they assumed that they must have found these monsters.

On this week’s Culture Gabfest, Stephen Metcalf recommends a genre of poems where the narrator is a person who sees someone else and fills in what they don’t know about them with their own imagination.

What is the best way to describe someone’s face? How do we use other peoples’ faces to project our own beliefs?

“Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.—This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you paint her voice, pray? But her voice is much diviner than anything you have seen of her.”
Middlemarch, George Eliot

“You see us as you want to see us, in the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions.”-The Breakfast Club, John Hughes

Update 1/28: a great description of a face

“To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.”
Middlemarch, George Eliot

Update 2/4

more monsters

Scattered

I try to write a new post every week, to keep me in the habit, but I don’t really like writing blogposts, what I really like writing are letters. Today, instead of writing this post (or working on my personal essay for grad school) I wrote 4 postcards using my new christmas gift from the Russian (Pantone postcards) and a letter using stationary I made in a workshop taught by Barbara.

Here is a piece from the notes for my personal statement:

I once got into a debate with a friend at the University of Chicago, he was a couple years younger than i was and deciding on a major. He said he had decided on economics because it helped ‘explain the world’, I laughed and said, George, everyone says that about their major, you talk to a French lit major and they’ll say, ‘I really think French literature is the best way to help explain my world’. My mom used to say ‘it all comes down to Geography,’ but after studying it, I disagree. You can’t tell everything about a person by where they come from (I’m not a huge believer in the idea that Californians are lazy and dumb), but it does explain a lot. Tobler’s first law of geography, that everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things does still seem to have many applications.

Can someone tell me if there is a second law of geography?