Archive for the ‘People’ Category

Ada Lovelace Day: remembering Shirley Theis and Evelyn Silvia

Friday, October 7th, 2011

In case you didn’t know it – today is Ada Lovelace Day!

Now, as any self-respecting Computer Science degree-wielding person should, I, too, think it’s important to celebrate the day named after the world’s very first programmer.

For me, the first math teacher I remember making a big difference was Shirley Theis – who taught me Algebra in 8th grade at McKinley Middle School in Redwood City, CA. Mrs Theis, an energetic dynamo in her mid fifties, was a deeply motivated and caring teacher, who expected a lot out of her students, but never in a disciplinary manner. She was full of enthusiasm, which projected out and infected even the most timid or disaffected student: in her class, you couldn’t be just a sack of potatoes planted in your seat.

She often lead class in a nearly theatrical manner – pacing back and forth, egging students on by eagerly repeating their partial responses, getting exponentially more excited if the student was on the right track, barely containing herself from jumping up and down in anticipation of that lightbulb going off — and yet just as quickly waning in her enthusiasm,becoming a personified caricature of hopelessness and despair to let you know the instant a response was starting to go astray.

It may have been the only math class I’ve ever taken where there were group assignments – we would work with a partner or a few classmates in trying to figure out an assignment, first trying it solo, and then putting our heads together to figure out why our answers disagree and which is the right one. I believe it was Mrs. Theis who succinctly captured a value I hold in high regard: “it’s not about how far you go – it’s about how many people you bring with you.”

There was one other mathematics teacher I had in my life who clearly stands out: it was Professor Evelyn Silvia who had a comparable level of enthusiasm and energy, and from whom I had the pleasure of taking the first upper-division math course (Math 108 – Intro to Abstract Math) during my second quarter at UC Davis. Dr. Silvia was the real deal – she cared, gesticulated, encouraged us to question why something was true, and had an approach which demanded we each take ownership of our education. The book for the course, Introduction to Abstract Mathematics: A Working Excursion by D.O. Cutler and E.M. Silvia was a blue workbook – each of us had our own copy, and there were blanks left out for us to write our own answers to the exercises. The fact that the book had blanks for me to fill in was so inviting, there was a kind of “working mathematician” approach that came with it with that it made me really enjoy and look forward to working through the material. I still have mine.

Dr. Silvia was incredibly sharp, not just intellectually but also interpersonally. Not only could she gauge when the class was lost, but she also had a knack for spotting if something was affecting you outside of class. She was really committed to helping you not just as a student, but as a person. I remember spending hours at Mishka’s, or Cafe Roma, or the CoHo, reading and writing, wanting to do well and not let Silvia down, because she invested so much energy in placed a great deal of trust in us.

So thank you both, Shirley Theis and Evelyn Silvia – you both encouraged me to grow a lot as a person, challenged my concept of what it means to be a student, and by your example provided a template of what it means to be an effective teacher, which I’ve imitated and embraced with pleasure in my own teaching.

(tagged scipy to spread word of Ada Lovelace day to Planet SciPy)

Money and CA Propositions

Monday, June 7th, 2010

Since tomorrow we’ll be having another one of those practice democracy drills here in California, I thought I’d put together a few bar charts.

There are five propositions on tomorrow’s ballot. In researching them, Lena came across the Cal-Access Campaign Finance Activity: Propositions & Ballot Measures.

Unfortunately, for each proposition, you have to click through each committee to get the details for the amount of money they’ve raised and spent. Here’s a run-down in visual form, the only data manipulation I did was round to the nearest dollar. Note: no committees formed to support or oppose Proposition 13.

Here’s how much money was raised, by proposition:

Money Raised

Just in case you didn’t get the full picture, here is the same data plotted on a common scale:

Money Raised (common scale)

And the same two plots for money spent1:

Money Spent

Money Spent (common scale)

It could just be my perception of things, but I get pretty suspicious when there’s a ton of money involved in politics, especially when it’s this lopsided.

The only thing I have to add is you should Vote “YES” on Prop 15, because Larry Lessig says so, and so do the Alameda County Greens!

Update #1: Let me write it out in text, so that the search engines have an easier time finding this. According to the official record from Cal-Access (Secretary of State), as of May 22nd, 2010, there were $54.4 million spent in support of various propositions, most notably $40.5 million on Prop 16, $8.9 million on Prop 17, and $4.6 million on Prop 14. Compare that with a “grand” total of less than $1.2 million spent to oppose them, with a trivial $78 thousand (!!) to oppose Prop 16′s $40.5 million deep pockets.

Update #2: The California Voter Foundation included more recent totals (they don’t seem to be that different), as well as a listing of the top 5 donors for each side of a proposition in their Online Voter Guide.

Also, here’s the python code used to generate these plots (enable javascript to get syntax highlighting):

# Create contributions and expenditures bar charts of committees supporting and
# opposing various propositions on the California Ballot for June 8th, 2010
# created by Paul Ivanov (http://pirsquared.org)

# figure(0) - Contributions by Proposition (as subplots)
# figure(1) - Expenditures by Proposition (as subplots)
# figure(2) - Contributions on a common scale
# figure(3) - Expenditures on a common scale

import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import locale

# This part was done by hand by collecting data from CalAccess:
# http://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Measures/
prop = np.array([
     4650694.66, 4623830.07    # Yes on 14 Contributions, Expenditures
    , 216050, 52796.71         # No  on 14 Contributions, Expenditures
    , 118807.45, 264136.30     # Yes on 15 Contributions, Expenditures
    , 200750.01, 86822.79      # No  on 15 Contributions, Expenditures
    , 40706258.17, 40582036.58 # Yes on 16 Contributions, Expenditures
    , 83187.29,	78063.91       # No  on 16 Contributions, Expenditures
    , 10328675.12, 8932786.06  # Yes on 17 Contributions, Expenditures
    , 1229783.79, 965218.48    # No  on 17 Contributions, Expenditures
    ])
prop.shape = -1,2,2 

def currency(x, pos):
    """The two args are the value and tick position"""
    if x==0:
        return "$0"
    if x < 1e3:
        return '$%f' % (x)
    elif x< 1e6:
        return '$%1.0fK' % (x*1e-3)
    return '$%1.0fM' % (x*1e-6)

from matplotlib.ticker import FuncFormatter
formatter = FuncFormatter(currency)

yes,no = range(2)
c = [(1.,.5,0),'blue']  # color for yes/no stance
a = [.6,.5]             # alpha for yes/no stance
t = ['Yes','No ']       # text  for yes/no stance

raised,spent = range(2)
title = ["Raised for", "Spent on" ] # reuse code by injecting title specifics
field = ['Contributions', 'Expenditures']

footer ="""
Data from CalAccess: http://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Measures/
'Total %s 1/1/2010-05/22/2010' field extracted for every committee
and summed by position ('Support' or 'Oppose').  No committees formed to
support or oppose Proposition 13. cc-by Paul Ivanov (http://pirsquared.org).
""" # will inject field[col] in all plots

color = np.array((.9,.9,.34))*.9 # spine/ticklabel color
plt.rcParams['savefig.dpi'] = 100

def fixup_subplot(ax,color):
    """ Tufte-fy the axis labels - use different color than data"""
    spines = ax.spines.values()
    # liberate the data! hide right and top spines
    [s.set_visible(False) for s in spines[:2]]
    ax.yaxis.tick_left() # don't tick on the right

    # there's gotta be a better way to set all of these colors, but I don't
    # know that way, I only know the hard way
    [s.set_color(color) for s in spines]
    [s.set_color(color) for s in ax.yaxis.get_ticklines()]
    [s.set_visible(False) for s in ax.xaxis.get_ticklines()]
    [(s.set_color(color),s.set_size(8)) for s in ax.xaxis.get_ticklabels()]
    [(s.set_color(color),s.set_size(8)) for s in ax.yaxis.get_ticklabels()]
    ax.yaxis.grid(which='major',linestyle='-',color=color,alpha=.3)

# for subplot spacing, I fiddle around using the f.subplot_tool(), then get
# this dict by doing something like:
#    f = plt.gcf()
#    adjust_dict= f.subplotpars.__dict__.copy()
#    del(adjust_dict['validate'])
#    f.subplots_adjust(**adjust_dict)

adjust_dict = {'bottom': 0.12129189716889031, 'hspace': 0.646815834767644,
 'left': 0.13732508948909858, 'right': 0.92971038073543777,
 'top': 0.91082616179001742, 'wspace': 0.084337349397590383}

for col in [raised, spent]: #column to plot - money spent or money raised
    # subplots for each proposition (Fig 0 and Fig 1)
    f = plt.figure(col); f.clf(); f.dpi=100;
    for i in range(len(prop)):
        ax = plt.subplot(len(prop),1, i+1)
        ax.clear()
        p = i+14    #prop number
        for stance in [yes,no]:
            plt.bar(stance, prop[i,stance,col], color=c[stance], linewidth=0,
                    align='center', width=.1, alpha=a[stance])
            lbl = locale.currency(round(prop[i,stance,col]), symbol=True, grouping=True)
            lbl = lbl[:-3] # drop the cents, since we've rounded
            ax.text(stance, prop[i,stance,col], lbl , ha='center', size=8)

        ax.set_xlim(-.3,1.3)
        ax.xaxis.set_ticks([0,1])
        ax.xaxis.set_ticklabels(["Yes on %d"%p, "No on %d"%p])

        # put a big (but faded) "Proposition X" in the center of this subplot
        common=dict(alpha=.1, color='k', ha='center', va='center', transform = ax.transAxes)
        ax.text(0.5, .9,"Proposition", size=8, weight=600, **common)
        ax.text(0.5, .50,"%d"%p, size=50, weight=300, **common)

        ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(formatter) # plugin our currency labeler
        ax.yaxis.get_major_locator()._nbins=5 # put fewer tickmarks/labels

        fixup_subplot(ax,color)

    adjust_dict.update(left=0.13732508948909858,right=0.92971038073543777)
    f.subplots_adjust( **adjust_dict)

    # Figure title, subtitle
    extra_args = dict(family='serif', ha='center', va='top', transform=f.transFigure)
    f.text(.5,.99,"Money %s CA Propositions"%title[col], size=12, **extra_args)
    f.text(.5,.96,"June 8th, 2010 Primary", size=9, **extra_args)

    #footer
    extra_args.update(va='bottom', size=6,ma='left')
    f.text(.5,0.0,footer%field[col], **extra_args)

    f.set_figheight(6.); f.set_figwidth(3.6); f.canvas.draw()
    f.savefig('CA-Props-June8th2010-%s-Subplots.png'%field[col])

    # all props on one figure (Fig 2 and Fig 3)
    f = plt.figure(col+2); f.clf()
    adjust_dict.update(left= 0.06,right=.96)
    f.subplots_adjust( **adjust_dict)
    f.set_figheight(6.)
    f.set_figwidth(7.6)

    extra_args = dict(family='serif', ha='center', va='top', transform=f.transFigure)
    f.text(.5,.99,"Money %s CA Propositions"%title[col], size=12, **extra_args)
    f.text(.5,.96,"June 8th, 2010 Primary", size=9, **extra_args)

    extra_args.update(ha='left', va='bottom', size=6,ma='left')
    f.text(adjust_dict['left'],0.0,footer%field[col], **extra_args)

    ax = plt.subplot(111)
    for stance in [yes,no]:
        abscissa=np.arange(0+stance*.30,4,1)
        lbl = locale.currency(round(prop[:,stance,col].sum()),True,True)
        lbl = lbl[:-3] # drop the cents, since we've rounded
        lbl = t[stance]+" Total"+ lbl.rjust(12)
        plt.bar(abscissa,prop[:,stance,col], width=.1, color=c[stance],
                alpha=a[stance],align='center',linewidth=0, label=lbl)
        for i in range(len(prop)):
            lbl = locale.currency(round(prop[i,stance,col]), symbol=True, grouping=True)
            lbl = lbl[:-3] # drop the cents, since we've rounded
            ax.text(abscissa[i], prop[i,stance,col], lbl , ha='center',
                    size=8,rotation=00)

    ax.set_xlim(xmin=-.3)
    ax.xaxis.set_ticks(np.arange(.15,4,1))
    ax.xaxis.set_ticklabels(["Proposition %d"%(i+14) for i in range(4)])
    fixup_subplot(ax,color)

    # plt.legend(prop=dict(family='monospace',size=9)) # this makes legend tied
    # to the subplot, tie it to the figure, instead
    handles, labels = ax.get_legend_handles_labels()
    l = plt.figlegend(handles, labels,loc='lower right',prop=dict(family='monospace',size=9))
    l.get_frame().set_visible(False)
    ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(formatter) # plugin our currency labeler
    f.canvas.draw()
    f.savefig('CA-Props-June8th2010-%s.png'%field[col])

plt.show()
  1. I don’t fully understand what these numbers mean, as some groups’ “Total Expenditures” exceed their “Total Contributions” and still had positive “Ending Cash”

Standing up to the Madness is an excellent read

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

Standing up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary TimesMy labmate Tim sent me an email on Wednesday (April 15th) saying that Amy Goodman “Democracy Now! fame, and my heroin” [sic] was speaking on campus at noon. The place was packed, and it’s the best way I could have imagined to snap back out of the Qualifying Exam bubble I’ve spent the last several months in, and re-engage with the world at large.

One of the excuses for the tour is the paperback release of Standing up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times by Amy and David Goodman.

Now that I’m a tenured grad student, I can actually allow myself to read for pleasure – guilt free! So I went to the library that Thursday, and picked up the hardcover, which came out last year.

What I liked about this book is what sets it apart from other political books of today. Amy and David don’t just provide us with a laundry list of wrongdoing by the Bush administration, congress, various governmental agencies, as well as highlighting some of the ongoing local struggles. Though the book is chock-full of such details, they are all provided in the context of a particular vignette. What’s more – instead of simply stating the problems, or providing an outline of the authors’ opinions regarding what course of action should be taken, the book highlights the work average citizens have already done to oppose injustice, censorship, racism, etc. One example is T-shirt “terrorist” Raed Jarrar, who wore a shirt with the words “We will not be silent” – written in both English and Arabic – a reference to the White Rose – and was forced to put another shirt over it because JetBlue customers were threatened or offended. With the help of the ACLU, Jarrar sued the TSA and JetBlue, who ended up paying $240,000 to settle the discrimination charges.

Like Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost1, this book is non-fiction that reads like fiction. Not because it is well-written, though it is, but because of the shocking realities of the content. Leadership cannot be taught, it can only be revealed. Standing up to the Madness gives us dozens of snapshots of the ongoing work of ordinary heroes.

  1. which, after I first read it in 2001 became my measuring stick for gauging the quality of non-fiction

My first foray into the production of motion pictures

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

I want to thank Curt Siffert for granting me permission to use his song “All Aboard (v2)” which you can download (for free) here. This is the first video1 I’ve ever made, but I’ve wanted to make films for as long as I’ve been writing2 (even before Sally said “Hey guys, I’m going to make movies!” and then did), so I’m glad I’ve finally started.

I put this together for a video contest here at I-house. You can see all of the videos for the contest here, the winner was Life At I-House, A Glimpse by KirstyandEliana.

  1. yes, okay, it’s more of a slideshow with an intro, but my brother Mike told me that Ken Burns would be proud
  2. creatively, which would be 1999warning: link contains some extremely cheesy content, including an early version of what evolved into this journal

Weinberger’s talk and OLPC

Wednesday, August 8th, 2007

Here’s David Weinberger talking about Everything is Miscellaneous (the book I reviewed here and many others did here). The hour-long talk stands on its own and covers much of the book, though I don’t recommend watching it if you’re planning to read the book.

I went to Linux World Expo today and played with one of these upcoming One-Laptop-Per-Child project’s XO-1 laptops at the Creative Commons booth.
OLPC XO-1 at Linux World
Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid (cc)

While OLPC is a noble effort, I think it still feels like another example of trying to solve a problem with technology where technology is not the bottleneck. For example, I was bummed that they took away the hand-crank power-supply a while back because I think this severely limits who’ll be able to eventually use these. The UI and networking stuff is pretty novel, but my overall impression is that it’s too gadgety. I felt pretty lost in all just the buttons on the keyboard, but then again I only used it for 20 minutes and this wasn’t made for me. With that said, I’m not holding my breath, but it could be a great thing if this takes off. I say “could” because technology by itself just isn’t enough1. This is a point I keep coming back to again and again.

  1. A point the OLPC project acknowledges in their vision.