Tag Archives: technology

San Quentin Avon Walk

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My mother is a nurse at San Quentin State Prison. She’s worked there for 4 years but for security reasons I’ve never had the opportunity to visit her there. This weekend a group of San Quentin inmates and staff partnered with Avon for a walk to end Breast Cancer in the San Quentin Yard. This is one of very few opportunities for inmates to interact with civilians. We didn’t really know what to expect going in.

First there were some ground rules: we weren’t allowed to take anything in except our IDs and car-keys. We weren’t to take anything out with us either. When interacting with the ‘men in blue’ the only physical interaction allowed was a handshake. We were also reminded never to run on grounds as the gunmen in the towers were instructed to shoot anyone running. When we walked in and the bars clanged behind us there was no doubt that we were in prison.

In the yard (which my mother can see from her office), men were lifting weights, playing tennis and basketball and generally enjoying what turned out to be a very nice day. It didn’t feel all that different from a very ghetto park, except with more barbed wire, and everyone had on blue (except the other walkers in pink shirts and the guards). As we sat in a back room we were told that there was a delay with the opening ceremony as we were waiting for prisoners to be let out of lockdown.

After meeting the inmates involved in SQ CARES, we took one silent lap around to remember those we’d lost to the cancer. We were told that 5 laps around the baseball field was 1 mile. While we wouldn’t be able to complete the 39 miles because we were only allowed on grounds for a few hours, the inmates would do just that over the 2-day weekend.

As we walked, men began to recognize my mother, their nurse. The first man who walked some laps with us had seen my mother for some back problems he’d been having. My mother told him we had waited for some guys to get let out of their cells, ‘Who was on lockdown?’ she asked. ‘Whites’ he answered. As he said this, I noticed how racialized the yard was. There were maybe a couple hundred men around, the vast majority of whom were African-American. There were a few whites, latinos and Asians but mostly black men socializing with other black men.

After a bit, a man about my age (mid-twenties) asked if he could walk with me. He told me about his favorite music (Tupac) and I tried to keep up with the conversation as he talked about Rap and Hip-Hop artists he liked. I noticed that some of the men in the yard had discmen with headphones in. He said they could borrow cds from the library and he had some friends who had lent him different albums. I noticed that most of the songs he mentioned were popular in the mid-ninties, making me wonder how long he had been incarcerated. But after a few laps I think he realized I was mostly a pretty boring nerd and wandered off to walk with someone else.

Most of the rest of the time I walked with a man named ‘Luke’ who initially asked me for a quote, he was on staff at the San Quentin Newspaper. He walked around with a handheld wordprocessor which he typed with one hand. I learned that had also played Hamlet in a recent play (recorded by KQED). I talked to him for for some time, he was very well versed on current events and had interesting things to say about Barack Obama, Governor Jerry Brown and the state of the American economy. When I told him I was in Computer Science he told be about a project he had been working on. Like any newspaper there were always some articles that were submitted but unpublished. He said he wanted to start a website to put up the articles that couldn’t get published in the newspaper, so that the people could feel like their words weren’t going to waste. I told him a little about HTML and that I would do what I could to help him, though this might not be very much, since I couldn’t exactly come in and get a flash drive from him.

The walk ended with a closing ceremony on a small stage in the middle of the field. There were announcements as we’d reached the $10,000 goal and some prisoners performed a rap they had written about walking to fight breast cancer. The experience was truly unique. I certainly had many moments of anxiety, but unlike my experience in the Afghan refugee camp, I was with my mother. She knew all the guards (who joked with her about her chronic tardiness, CPTime), all the inmates who knew her were happy to see her, and we kept the mood light, in intense environment.

When I got home to my computer, I realized that San Quentin News was already online at SanQuentinNews.com but Luke didn’t know because they didn’t have internet access on grounds. While I was online researching San Quentin News I started to look up what these people had done to end up in San Quentin, but I stopped myself. Remembering that the worst thing you do is not the truest thing about you, and that these moments we shared were as true as any others.

Talking about Math and Science

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Like I’ve mentioned before, I have been taking some online math and programming courses as pre-requisites (or rather, requisites) for my Masters program. In my blog, I like to write about what is going on in my brain during the week, the thoughts I can’t seem to stop thinking about. Lately I’ve been thinking about math and science, but not writing about it. Why am I so loathe to write about math? I think it’s because I assume, like so many others, that no one wants to hear about math and no one wants to talk about math. If this is true, I want to try to change it.

I talked to a woman the other day who is a very successful lawyer. She said that in high school she loved physics, and going into college (UC Berkeley if I remember correctly), she wanted to be a physicist. She said it wasn’t poor teaching or intimidating classes that steered her away, she said she wanted to study something that she could talk about. It’s easier to talk about ideas you’ve read because they are in the same form as the way we speak (words), but how do we talk about math? I think it’s important for people, women especially, to learn how to talk about math and science in our everyday conversations. Why is it that we think these ideas are boring? Probably because we don’t talk about them.

In the spirit of talking about math/science and computers I’ll talk a little about my experience taking these courses the past couple weeks. As a student of the humanities (Near Eastern Studies and Geography), I have written many papers. I am really familiar with the process of writing a paper; formulating an argument, writing an outline, doing research, writing and editing drafts. I have done problem sets before, but I am re-learning the process. First off, I am relearning how to type. This is frustrating since I am a very quick typist in English, however, in html and LaTeX markup languages I use keys I’m unaccustomed to (like \ / |^$), I make mistakes and I have to type slower. It reminds me of learning to type in another language like Persian (well I guess it is another language). Typing isn’t the only part of the process that’s slower in computer science, since I haven’t done as many math problem sets or written many programs I don’t have a good idea of how long they are going to take. I’ve found that problem sets and programming code require more time at the end, whereas papers require more time at the beginning. Thinking about a paper and making an outline take the most time (for me at least), but with a math problem set, the first few problems are generally easier, it’s usually the last few that are hardest and take some time. With programs, well I don’t totally know how they work since I’ve only written a few, but I heard someone say that programming consists of writing bugs and fixing them, you have to allow yourself time to write all the bugs and fix all the bugs, and right now it’s really difficult for me to estimate how long it might take to do this. I have faith that given time and practice, this process will become as familiar to me as writing papers.

In the business world (especially in magazines and publications) there seems to be a schism between ‘creative types’ and ‘business types,’ a line I’ve always sought to straddle. People who write and work with art and ideas are considered ‘creative’ and people who work with computers, numbers and spreadsheets are considered ‘business/engineering types.’ I don’t think I should have to pick a side. As a woman of color, though, I do feel some pressure to go where I feel more underrepresented. I’ve never felt the pull of writing that others talk about, but I think I could express myself in the language of computers if I learned it.

Power Dynamics

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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