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 to the 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 could 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)

You can either use the Flash player below, or download the OggVorbis file (14MB) update: vim-ipython ‘shell’ demo (9.6MB). The blog-free form of this post is here.

If you like what you see and want to try it, you can get the details from the vim-ipython github page and it currently requires 4 line changes to IPython, which are currently in this pull request. (Fixed to work on IPython trunk with no changes).

Big thanks to Min for walking me through the new IPython kernel manager during the SciPy2011 sprints.

UPDATE: 2011-08-02

vim-ipython ‘shell’ mode.

Just in case, here are the same videos as above, but hosted on Youtube:

If you’re have any issues, try searching for your error on the vim-ipython github issues page, and if you don’t find it, please file a new one, and I’ll help you out there.

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”

Arizona sucks!

It turns out that even documented immigrants agree, and I have the graphs to prove it!

You see, it all started when I took a great Visualization course this past term which was taught by Maneesh Agrawala. Maneesh gave enough structure for the assignments, but also left some aspect of each open ended. For example, our first assignment had a fixed dataset which everyone had to make a static visualization of, but the means by which we did that was entirely up to us. A lot of people used Excel (in graduate level CS class? gross!), some people wrote little programs (I wrote mine in python using matplotlib and numpy, and did some cool stuff that I will have to post about another time and contribute back to matplotlib), there was even a poor sap who did it all in Photoshop, as I recall, but anything was fair game. Turns out we could even just draw or make something by hand and turn it in!

The second assignment, the source of my graphs which quantitatively demonstrate the suckiness of Arizona, required us to use interactive visualization software to iteratively develop a visualization by first asking a question, then making a visualization to address this question, and going back several times refine the question and make successive visualizations.

On thing to keep in mind is that, overall, naturalized citizens are both an exclusive and a discerning lot. In most cases, you have to be a permanent resident (have a Green card) for 5 years before you can apply. And there are quotas for how many people can get a Green card every year, so there are lots of hoops to jump through. Given the
amount of effort involved, wouldn’t it be nice to look at a breakdown of naturalized citizens by state? Because that would give us an idea about which states immigrants percieve as, for lack of a better word, “awesome”, or if you’re
not so generous, “least sucky”. I bet you’ll feel that this second description is more appropriate once you take a look at the data, but keep my “least sucky” premise in mind as you read my original write-up which focused on a different angle (but from which we can still draw some reasonable conclusions). I’ll return to make a few more comments about the title of this post after the copy-pasted portion.

here’s my original write-up:

begin cut —>

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

As an immigrant, I’ve always had the subjective feeling that about half of the people I’m acquainted with are either themselves immigrants, or the children of immigrants. The US prides itself in being a melting pot, a country built by immigrants, so I wanted to dive into the data that would help me understand just how large of a role immigration plays in terms of the entire country. The question I started with, for the purpose of this assignment is this:

What’s the relationship between naturalizations and births in the US?

But what I really wanted was to find out was what kind of question do I need to ask to get the answer that would be consistent with my world view. :)

To do this, I started with the DHS 2008 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, which was linked from the class website.

The file I started with was natzsuptable1d.xls, which required cleanup before I could read it into Tableau. Turns out that even though “importing” to tableau format is supposed to speed things up, it seems very fragile and would regularly fail when I tried converting type to Number (there were some non-numeric codes, like ‘D’ for ‘Data withheld to limit disclosure). **NOT** importing to Tableua’s desired format also had the added benefit of allowing me to change the .xls files externally, and having all the adjustments made in Tableau, without having to re-import the data source.

Frustratingly, the last column and last row kept not getting loaded in Tableau! I also ran into an issue which I think had to do with the ‘Unknown’ country of origin and ‘Unknown’ state of naturalization which made the totals funky. It took a while to figure out, but there was a problem with Korea, because there was a superscript 1 by it, indicating that data from North and South Korea were combined.

I was trying to use the freshest data possible, so I used the CDC’s National Vital Statistics System report titled Births: Preliminary Data for 2007. I just had to copy paste the desired data, and massage it to fit the proper order columns in the excel table I already had handy. I put zeros for U.S. Armed Services Posts and similar territories which is probably not accurate, but this data was not available in the reports that I found. Interesting factoid: according to NVSS (CDC), in 2007 there were more people born in NYC than the rest of the state combined. (about 129K vs 126.5K). The only caveat with this data is that it contains only 98.7% of the data. The states with some missing portion of their data tabulated are Michigan (at 80.2% completeness), Georgia (86.4%), Louisiana (91.4%), Texas (99.4%), Alaska (99.7%), Nevada (99.7%), Delaware (99.9%). Thus, state-level analysis for MI, GA, and LA may be distorted.

The data I had from DHS is for Fiscal Year 2008, which, as it turns out, goes from October 1st, 2007 – Sept 30th, 2008. Thus, no matter which combination of NVSS and DHS datasets I used, there would necessarily be a mismatch in the date range covered by each, so I settled with describing my visualization as “using the latest available data”, noting the actual dates for each dataset in the captions. Also, the NVSS report contained a graph of births over time, which fluctuates very modestly from year-to-year, thus the visualization would not change qualitatively if I had 2008 birth data on hand.

I was having a really hard time trying to get a look at the data I wanted to see in one sheet, and ended up trying to make a dashboard that combined several sheets. I couldn’t figure out a good way to link the different states across datasets. I struggled for quite a while to pull out the data that I wanted to look at, and ended up having to copy past everything from DHS and NVSS (transposed) onto a new sheet in Gnumeric.

Here’s the result:

Initial visualization

So, in all of the US, about 1 in 5 new american citizens is an immigrant, or for every four births, we have one naturalization. That was kind of unsatisfying. I’ve lived in California the entire time I’ve been in the US, and I feel that at least California is more diverse than that. There’s all those states in the middle of the country that few people from the rest of the world would want to immigrate to, yet the people living in them are still having babies, throwing off the numbers which would otherwise support my subjective world view…

So I decided to look at the breakdown by state.

Broken down by state, what’s the relationship between naturalizations and births in the US?

my second iteration

I added the reference lines so that you could both read off the approximate total easier, and be able to do proportion calculations visually, instead of mentally. This started looking promising, as I’ve only lived in California, and it looks like it’s got quite a lot of immigrants as a portion of total new citizens.

It was still kind of hard to see the totals, so I decide to create my very first calculated field – which would had the very simple formula [Births in 2007]+[Total Naturalized]. Using this new field, I could now make a map, to see the growth broken down geographically. This was just a way of reaffirming my earlier bias against the middle states having babies without attracting a sufficient number of immigrants to conform to my world view.

gratuitous map (was too easy to do using the software)

In the breakdown by state bar graph, it was also difficult to visually compare the total births by state, because they all started at a different place, depending on the number of naturalizations for that state. So I decided to split the single bar and make small multiples for each state.

back to something more interpretable

It’s interesting that the contribution of naturalizations slightly changes the ordering of the growth of states. For example, Florida has fewer births than New York, yet it’s total growth is larger, because it naturalized 30,000 more people than New York. With this small multiples arrangement, it was now possible to do positional comparisons across categories, not just between naturalizations and totals. Turns out that more people get naturalized in California than are born in the entire state of New York. And since New York has the third highest number of births annually, more people got naturalized in California than are born in any state other than CA and TX.

This was too large of a graph, and the story I’m interested in is really the ratio between the birth and naturalizations (the closer to 1:1, the better), so I made another calculated field, which is exactly such a ratio, multiplied by a factor of a thousand, so I could give it a sensible description (Naturalizations per 1000 births). This refines my question

For every 1000 people born in the US, how many many immigrants become naturalized?

I then ordered on these ratios, and decided to filter the top states. Guam would have made the cut, but it is not a state, and (though I didn’t mention it earlier) it’s NVSS birth data was only 77% complete, so I excluded it. Fifteen is a nice odd number, but it actually marked a nice transition, as after Texas, everything else is less than 200 naturalizations per 1,000 births.

The small multiples bar graphs still looked too busy, and there was redundancy in the data, which didn’t tell a succinct story. So I switched to just look at the ratios alone. This revealed, that, indeed, the fact that I’ve been living in California makes my perspective quite unique, as it is one of three states, along with Florida and New Jersey, to have an outstandingly large number of naturalizations compared to births. It is so high, indeed, that it puts the naturalization per births rate in these three states at more than twice the national average!

Looking at ratio alone tells us about the diversity in each states growth, but carries more meaning in the context of total growth . Thus, added the combined totals (naturalizations and births) as a size variable, for context. The alternating bands to both make it easier to read off the rows, and to aid the comparison of sizes by framing every data point in a common reference window. It obviates that California is the state with 864,261 new citizens because fills the frame completely.

Final question: What are the Top 15 “Melting Pot” States?

almost done, would be nice to include context from the visualization I started with

Ordering the data in this way also shed light on the small but still very diverse states that would not have otherwise made the cut (and did not pop out in any manner on my previous bar graphs). Rhode Island and Hawaii got it going on, in terms of attracting immigrants.

Certainly the fact that I’m an immigrant myself also greatly influences whom I associate with, further skewing my world view towards a 1:1 ratio, but I’m actually quite impressed with just how close to that ratio is in California – 1:1.9. Of course, the data I’ve analyzed does not include the American-born 1st generation of children, nor does it take into account the number of immigrants living in the US that do not have citizenship. All of these factors would surely push the ratio even closer toward 1:1.

I decided to combine the US total growth information, since it’s gives further perspective on the entire data set, such as the fact that California accounts for about 16% of total US growth. It also sheds light on how the US average was calculated. A new “twice the nat’l avg” line makes explicit the three most diverse outlier states mentioned before. I also changed the colors to match the convention used in the bar charts made earlier. The US combined total line semantically links the data plotted with the national growth bar chart – i.e. the green dots are formed by the sum of born and naturalized citizens.

What are the Top 15 "Melting Pot" States?

<—- end of cut

Ok, so, to be honest, it turns out that I wrote a large chunk of this post (Arizona suckage included) before I actually looked back at my visualizations, only going off my memory that it wasn’t in the top 10. So Arizona is just below the national average in this “Melting Pot” ratio (a measure I made up, the number of naturalization per 1000 births). Since it is #12, some might say, “Paul, Arizona’s on your top 15 list”, to which I’ll reply: “So’s Texas.”

I guess I just wanted to share these purdy graphs I made a few months back, and it seemed like there was a somewhat topical angle on them a few weeks back, when I remembered that I hadn’t posted them on here yet. Anyway, I’d love to hear back your thoughts.

Notifications was the way I was planning to announce my departure, because the “app” I created for that purpose would still be around after I deleted my account. But I was only able to send out a few of these notifications before facebook would not let me anymore.

Here’s the message (with the cool icon I made) as it appeared on Facebook:.

But that wasn’t going to stop me: so I made a status update – which contained essentially the same message:

Hey guys,
as I alluded to in a status update a few weeks back:

I’m leaving Facebook.

This walled garden isn’t the way the web was meant to be, and I *refuse* to continue participating in it.

You can always find me by either searching for “Paul Ivanov”, or through the various means listed on my website.

best,
-pi

And then I was off to “Deactivate” myself. Beware – Facebook will play on your heartstrings by telling you that a couple of your friends will miss you – putting their photos right there and beckoning you to message them – but I was prepared to deflect this Faustian bargain.

Though after I said “yes, really”, it asked me for my password, and following that also sent a CAPTCHA! (“the escapade” indeed!)

and then, just like that: POOF! I vanished. Without any trace. The fake temporary account I created had no friends – my last (and all) status updates lost in the ether (at least as far as facebook users are concerned). But rest assured that the data lingers – permenantly – as facebook was immediately suggesting that my new fake account, who now had no friends to speak of – connect with the people I had been friends with, even though my account was gone.

For most of my friends, I got your birthdays, schools and jobs, as well as the most recent photo, and all of the friend-to-friend connection among you. For most – I actually had a stale copy (of everything but the photos) from 2007, which when I originally wrote the export scripts I used, and Facebook was just starting to open up its API and quickly devolving to a MySpace clone. It’s not like I even frequently used the site – but reading about this reminded me to quit for good.

So I finally did.

I’m finally getting to the point where I realize it’s a problem that, for example, even when I’m texting someone, I try to get all of the spelling and punctuation correct.

It’s slowing me down.

I’ve had a lot of half-written blog posts that, after stepping away from them for a short while just don’t seem significant enough. I try to only publish pieces that either I think about for a while, or that I’m not hearing/reading others write about. But I’m always mindful about adding noise. The way I see it, when it became super easy for anyone to publish online, a lot of content flooded in that I simply don’t care for. Same idea with web 2.0 – because of Ruby on Rails, Django, and other web frameworks, writing a fancy (but useless) website became super easy – and now we’re oversaturated with them¹. So there’s this internal tension: I think there’s too much crap-content out there but at the same time my internal filter keeps me from publishing anything. I rarely express my thoughts about what I find important in writing anymore. Others don’t seem to make such a big deal about self-filtering, and are much more prolific writers/bloggers/coders, etc.

So here’s a new acronym-sized motto to help correct this behavior, which is starting to get sprinkled in comments in the software I’m writing for my research: LTS. Life’s too short.

LTS has been showing up in my code coments

I wasn’t always this careful about what I publish. I’ve had some form of internet presence (as embarrassing as it may seem now) since I was in middle school. It started in one of those geocities neighborhoods, I don’t even remember any details right now, probably because my brothers helped me to set it up. I didn’t use my real name until I started a poetry website freshman year in high school.

I used my full name, because I wanted to express my thoughts and have them be connect back to my persona, not a pseudonym that I might grow tired of. I was quite explicit about this at the time. And I didn’t filter myself, I just counted a total of 20 poems on there which were written in the course of a year. None of them really make me cringe, and some I’m still quite proud of.

I had nothing to gain by hiding behind an alias. I think that attaching my real name somehow made my thoughts sincere. I started blogging socially my senior year in high school (livejournal), and looking back on the first entry there, I was just trying to capture day-to-day events and thoughts. Vim, THE editor, is mentioned five times in the first two entries . But there are some very candid and thoughtful remarks in there, too.

It’s kind funny to have your more than 10 year old website cited in a Yahoo! Answer to the question: “What is the best way to live life to the fullest?”.

My first website recently cited in Yahoo! Answers

And I’m very grateful for my many friends and colleagues who, by their example, continue to give me the courage to release my thoughts and code out in the open. Thank you.

As I was putting my finishing touches on this post, I found a recent entry on Scot Hacker’s blog titled “(I Don’t Care About) Facebook and Privacy” that covers similar ground: “For me, it’s simple: If what you have to say shouldn’t be said to the whole world, then don’t say it online.” I agree, and it’s a more sensible standard than my “everything you say will forever be connected to you, so don’t screw it up!” But just to be clear, this should only apply to things you intend to write up and release: I absolutely oppose Eric Schmidt’s dismissal of privacy. Eric says, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” Due to its construction, it bears striking similarity to Scot’s quote above with which I mostly agree. But to me, Eric’s statement is a 1984-sized world apart.

Anyway, hopefully I’ve adequately explained my “publisher’s block”, and there are many related topics left to explore, but this is where I’ll have to end this post for now. LTS.

1. Though this problem will probably sort itself out with time. I didn’t intent to write about this now, so I’ll just keep that remark without developing it further
2. in fact, Elaine absolutely refuses to read anything on that site anymore, despite the fact that frequently, her google search string is verbatim the same as the question which comes up as one of the top results

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

I find it very difficult to engage in debates about national politics because the average citizen has so little influence over these matters. I think that it’s much more worthwhile to get informed about and involved in local politics, because that’s where someone like me can actually have influence.

Nevertheless my own answer to the question is that it’s probably not a good thing. There’s this high-dimensional landscape of issues that people care and have different ideas about – reproductive rights, gun control, immigration, education, social programs, the size of government, taxation, the list goes on and on. Yet that gets projected down to this one dimensional line with just “Left” and “Right” with optional “far” and “center” prefixes.

And, sadly, the common consensus is that on election day you have only two possible boxes to check. A single decision. One bit. 0 or 1.

The Democrats and Republicans are playing a small concessions type of game. They sort of shuffle around slightly to appeal to enough of those voters who aren’t already automatically voting for them. If you only vote for one or the other, they have no reason to change – they already have your vote.

Voters in safe rarely contested states, have the unique opportunity to vote their conscience without fear¹. When I twittered about Obama’s support for the FISA Compromise, Philip, a disappointed California voter replied: “our voting system forces us to vote strategically and i’ll be voting obama .” This doesn’t make any sense to me! Obama will carry California. Democrats almost automatically get California² .

So why give in? You’re not happy with the Democratic candidate³, the candidate who will carry California regardless of how you vote, yet you still feel unable to voice your disapproval in the electoral arena. David wrote: “I’m not going to throw away my vote on the green party,” but aren’t you just throwing away your vote to the democrats, instead?

The role of third parties is to emphasize new and different ideas, to bring folks who’ve given up hope back to the table, and to make the major parties shift in MEANINGFUL ways. Here are some great YouTube clips on the role of third parties in the US: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five.

If you still have doubts about voting for a third party candidate and/or you live in a swing state – consider the votepact.org proposal: find a fellow kindred heart on the other side of the political spectrum who’s also unhappy with the candidate on their side, and together vote for a third party (fill out your absentees together over coffee).

1. Electoral College: bug or feature?
2. The only way the Democrats might not get California is if Arnold runs as VP for a moderate Republican, and that just is not happening this year.
3. There are more reasons to not be happy

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 1999 – warning: link contains some extremely cheesy content, including an early version of what evolved into this journal

I’m about to give this Lightning Talk at SHDH20.

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.

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.

23:37 May 10th, 2007 Thursday

So what good is all of this if we don’t engage one another – on a very real level? “Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes,” man – so let’s get off the condescending trips and the polarizing anti-discourse. Let’s use our full range – zero, one, two, five, seven, eight, ten, etc and not just on or off – there’s an infinitude of wonder in between and out in every dimension.

I resolve to hesitantly dip my toes in, from time to time, instead of being all in or all out. Talk to a beat stranger – but not every beat stranger. Give up some left over food to the guys on Bancroft and Telegraph (the Shattuck hobos are too hip for me – but I hope they aren’t for someone else — I know they aren’t). I can just eavesdrop on the world from time to time – I can’t always be wide-eyed gulping from the fire hydrant of information flowing at 100 terabits per second eyes glazed over passed out exhausted gasping for a sense of self disoriented head-spun hours or days later. Just a drinking fountain or a tap and a few cups or liters a day would be fine. No need to parch yourself and dry up like a raisin all the time. It’s ok to wrinkle and shrivel – and you don’t need to burst, either – just be uncomfortably sincere.

I think I’m going to try that.

Related brief thought:

17:36 June 22nd, 2007 Friday

Bumper Sticker Activists (Telegraph in Berkeley)
The last thing we need is more Bumper Sticker Activism. Wearing a clever T-shirt does not constitute civic participation.

The basic gist of the book is that knowledge is no longer tied to the physical (e.g. books), which used to limit how one went about organizing and finding it (e.g. Dewey decimal system). Now we can attach as much metadata as our hearts desire, which technology helps us sift through to help us find what we want. Instead of each book having a particular place, as in a warehouse, or a relative position (alphabetical within a subject), an individual leaf of information lives on a multitude of trees simultaneously, and the trees themselves are dynamically created and rearranged for each user on the fly.

The first few chapters focused on how knowledge has been historically organized over the centuries. I did skim through a few of the middle chapters, it seemed to be pretty straightforward commentary on the digital lives most of us now lead – user created content, social tags and lists, auto-recommendation, etc. Some over-simplified, in that sometimes unavoidable awkwardness that comes out of describing something neat and complex yet obvious to those leading digital lives. It was refreshing to read about the downsides of scientific publications like Nature and Science (e.g. good science isn’t enough² to publish because of how few articles get in, the research has to be “sexy”) and how the new comer PLoS One aims to correct these shortcomings. Because this was just the topic that was discussed at the Neuroscience retreat last year (in a lecture about the then-upcoming PLoS One), scientists care about this stuff and it comes back every so often.

Although I never considered it myself, I totally got it when Danae started her Master of Library Science. I would argue that more than anything else, what we’re producing most of in the world today is information. Perhaps capture and disseminate is a more appropriate description. Information, by itself, is agnostic to how it gets used (or abused). But the Cliff Stoll-ian side of me says that we should be weary of the exponentially growing amount of information, and not just for the obvious Big Brother / privacy reasons (e.g. “Plate reader draws objections of ACLU“).

The non-obvious threat of information is that we’re drowning in it (my claim). Here I’m glad Weinberger mentions Cass Sunstein’s book Republic.com³, the basic thesis of which⁴ is that with more and more information out there, we can all end up listening, watching, and reading only that which reinforces our world view – drowning out everything else without even having to plug up our ears and going “LALALALALA”, but by finding podcasts, channels, and blogs where others are doing the “LALALALALA” for us.

In many ways, this leads to huge portions of the population nonsensically parroting something like “Evolution is just a theory” to one another. Scientific theories both explain observed phenomena (why living organisms share so much of their DNA) and make predictions about future observations (my niece’s hair color based on that of her parents, or maybe one you don’t hear about so often: regular use of antibacterial soap might be a bad idea, placing evolutionary pressure on the bacteria to evolve immunity to the soap). Moreover simpler or more elegant, straightforward theories are preferred (aka Occam’s Razor). Which is why Intelligent Design is on par with Flying Spaghetti Monsterism, not science. But this has been better described in other places and elsewhere (suggestions welcome). The point is that I’m worried that there’s no way anyone get through to the people that end up isolating themselves in their own feedback loops. I worry that not enough people engage enough to think on their own. Technology can’t fix this problem. No amount of metadata will ever be enough⁵.

In this entry, I’ve linked to Wikipedia a few times, and while I agree it should not be regularly used for primary research, I also welcome the explicit uncertainty inherent in a publicly editable wiki, as it reflects the tentative nature of information, and I think we should be somewhat skeptical about a great deal. I have also been recommended, though I have not yet read Manuel Castells’ The Internet Galaxy, though perhaps it is more topical for a future post I’ve been brewing for a while. Has anyone read it? …Anyway, this is my first pass at processing this stuff, hope it’s not too scatterbrained⁶.

1. In three evening sittings at Moe’s Books
2. some might even argue “isn’t required”
3. Republic.com starts with a succinct vignette: “the daily me“
4. on my quick skimming at the UCD bookstore this past Picnic Day.
5. a point I think the book misses
6. Cory Doctrow does a better job reviewing the book.

So I finally bit the bullet and put up my own blog. It was just one of those wait and see things for a while, but now I find myself reading most things via rss feeds, so I really had no excuse not to move on from my livejournal. I was afraid of abandoning my lj-friends – but Yuan found a happy medium with cross-posting back to her lj (though now that she has an rss feed I read her entries first in Thunderbird, sometimes days ahead of visiting my friends page)

I’m still getting settled in, so this isn’t quite live yet.

Anyway, I’ve had a couple of entries on the back burner that I’ve been working on, and they feel serious enough to warrant having their own place, instead of being a part of a corpus I started almost six years ago (in high school, no less). More and more people I know host their own blogs and it’s always nice to have a fresh start (though I’ve reposted a hand full of my most recent LJ entries to get a running start).

last year and this year.

After watching the videos, you can play with Gapminder yourself as it is a web-based tool.

More info and tool links at gapminder.org.

View of the Golden Gate Bridge from I-house Cafe

Oh yeah, feel free to drag the little man around the blue highlighted streets, and then rotate / zoom in the overlaid photo. Here’s the official demo (cheesy video).In San Fracisco, almost every street is completely covered. They also did much of Mountain View, Palo Alto, San Jose, and all of Manhattan, that I’ve checked.

Rediculous.

The practical: After getting lunch with Robert and Jon on Saturday, I got the chance to hear recent UCSB alum Logan Green talk about Zimride, this new cool webapp he’s just put together. Carpooling made easy and safe. Here’s what it looks like:

Zimride integrates with facebook, so you actually get to know something about your potential drivers/hitchers, and they might even end up being someone you know! Moreover, you can advertise your ride via those facebook stalker feeds.

worst. planning. ever.
(…and I don’t buy their propagnda – next to the green arrow on the map above, you could be on N W Temple, between W N Temple and W S Temple [or is it E S Temple?])

I imported these pictures using F-Spot, which has a decent tagging interface that I should make use of to catalogue a bunch of old photos. F-Spot also happily resized and exported them to Flickr, tags and all (other stuff also supported). Hopefully this also means I’ll start taking pictures again.

I-house is a pretty fun place to live (I’m off on the right side).

P.S. с наступающим старым новым годом! happy old new year!

Sure, there’s a changelog that tells me all the neat bug fixes from the last version, but what good does that do me if I can’t tell whether the software was last updated 8 years ago or 8 days ago? It’s such a simple thing, but I can’t believe at the number of projects out there that have no mention of release dates on their website.

… changing topics… Anyone have a gui svn client they particularly like? I’ve started playing with eSvn (0.7.0 testing version), it’s clean and simple (someone else came to the same conclusion). It looks like this:

Subcommander has a neat looking log graph (bottom), and kdesvn has a history browser, anyone use stuff like that?

I’ve also tried subclipse. Yep, I finally bit the bullet and started trying Eclipse and other GUI stuff, like Inisght (gdb gui), although I continue to live in Vim (which has an CVS/SVN integration plugin I’ve found useful)

It became a really familiar place, the same classical music, the same new book smells. I never really had to talk to anyone, or say anything, so it very much became a place where I could go and clear my head, just sort of process my thoughts. Then it went out of business and closed, which really made me sad. Luckily, Tower Books, nearby, had just started operating, and though it didn’t have as large of a selection, I migrated over there, and got used to the music, atmosphere, and the staff there. So Tower, too, became familiar with time, and they were open till midnight, which suited my fancy more. Going down there at night became a ritual, whenever I was feeling uninspired, I’d just head over to there and immerse myself in some new book, if only for a few hours. I think I’m kind of different that way. If you’ve ever been in a bookstore with me, you’ll know that I always want to stick around for a while, even though I usually have no specific book in mind, I just like to go and sit and read something new for a while. For example, I always like to drop by Borders whenever I’m on University in Palo Alto, but also usually overlook that whoever it is that I’m with, whether it’s Elaine, or Philip, or Jon, doesn’t have the same approach to visiting bookstores.

Cody’s Books on Telegraph closed earlier this year, though Moe’s is still around. Now Tower’s closing up shop, I just walked around the all of the empty shelves and saw very few books that’d be of any interest to me. Ended up picking up two DVDs: Before Stonewall, and Брат (Brother) for $6 each. It’s really makes me uncomfortable and sad knowing that I won’t have that little place to escape to, anymore. I’m not a big fan of changes like these.

I’ve started getting involved with the (currently small) Campus Greens organization (which meets Mondays at 7:10 in 200 Wheeler).

So today I heard Todd Chretien, Green senatorial candidate speak to a group of about 30 as part of the ASUC Speaker Series. Todd titled his talk “Why Students Should Never, Ever Vote for the Democrats,” which I think is somewhat unfortunate. Todd has an eloquent platform and I share a lot of the same views, but I also think that the title incites the type of reaction that eliminates any possibility for reasonable discussion or discourse.

I think that people don’t want to listen to you if you insult them, or just say something shocking – the novelty (if any) quickly wears off (it’s taken me a while to figure this out, but I think I learned the difficulty in trying to actively engage those who support the Democrats when talking (ranting?) to Janet on the streets of Brussels over the summer).

I think that we need more boring nitty-gritty politics, because no one will hand over the helm to people with big ideas (even if they are the right ideas). The big picture is important, but it has to be negotiated with real, tangible, local progress.

Todd gave a short run through of his top three issues ( war in Iraq, education, the two party system), and then opened it up for Q & A. In answering the questions, he covered a lot of ground in both domestic and foreign policy, but I felt like it was a discussion of issues larger than those someone who admitted he had no chance of winning could hope to influence….

So as the last question for the night, after expressing these sentiments I asked what we could do locally, that’s within our power, mentioning current choice voting efforts in Davis and Oakland. Unfortunately, Todd stuck to his anti-war protest-in-the-streets approach (even taking an outlandish pot shot at proportional representation by mentioning something about Hitler getting elected).

Most of my life I, too, have been a big ideas person, but I can’t say I’ve accomplished much with them, which is why I’m trying something new…

Until I came to UC Davis, I had never realized that there *could* be different voting systems. Choice voting is a way of reaching a majority (greater than 50%) consensus.

Choice voting allows everyone to vote their conscience without the fear of having your vote “wasted.” After the polls close, if your top-ranked candidate, Alice, has the least amount of votes, she is eliminated and your vote transfers to your next choice, Bob, in your order of preference. This process (“instant run-off”) continues until candidates reach enough votes to be elected (the threshold). This consensus building mechanism ensures that the elected officials will represent the greatest possible proportion of the voters.

Contrast this with the current system: candidate Mallory and Minnie, representing a minority of the population could get elected when multiple similar candidates (Alice, Bob, Chris, and Debra) representing the viewpoints of the majority of the population split the vote between one other.

This would not happen under choice voting, because when Alice is eliminated, those votes would go to the next choices of her supporters. This would provide more votes for the remaining majority candidates, ensuring that one of them gets elected.

I encourage Davis voters to vote yes on Measure L this November so that the City can continue looking into this effective system.

Paul Ivanov
UC Davis Class of 2005

(cute choice voting promotional video)