Tweeting (and Old Men)

When Bishop Burton talked about “tweeting” in Tuesday’s campus devotional, I was only mildly surprised as the girl sitting next to me confessed she didn't know what Twitter was. It’s impressive, especially for how old they are, that the leaders of the Church are so in-touch with the latest technology. Texting and blogging are regularly mentioned in General Conference, even from the older members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles or First Presidency. I find this especially fascinating when my own father—a computer science professor—occasionally demonstrates ignorance to such developments. On the other hand, the horrible encounters I frequently had with the Church's email on my mission make me question the reality of its progression. I especially get a kick out of Church leaders like Brother VanDenBerghe who enthusiastically support electronic greeting cards as “a quick and easy way to let [a sick friend] know [they are] concerned.” Now that I think about it, isn't it somewhat ironic that Bishop Burton decided the best format for the tweets from his latest General Conference talk was in twenty-five pages of printed text?

"Am I Addicted?"

Sometimes I wonder if I have an addiction. In reference to this self-proclaimed obsession, I told myself a few months ago, “If I can find a girl with whom I enjoy spending more time than I do with [my addiction], I’ll get married to her quick.” Dr. K’s Ensign article gives several factors for identifying an addictive tendency, and quite a few of them fit. I do “play” compulsively, often for longer periods than I had planned. Frequently, I “have difficulty stopping,” and even when I am not “playing,” I find myself “[obsessing] about the game, plotting and planning [my] next opportunity to play.” Occasionally, my schoolwork suffers because of the time and energy I spend with this activity, and my sleep patterns have changed since I “became involved.” Perhaps I should seek help or counseling, but I don’t think my research mentor would approve—after all, the more time I spend on this “addiction,” the closer we’ll get to another publication.

Although perhaps this “addiction” is worse than I pretend...

Swine flu? Bah. What about real viruses?

I’ve been extremely frustrated with my Internet connection for the last few months. Apple Care blamed the problem on my ISP, and my ISP told me it's a problem with my computer. To make matters worse, obtaining relevant support from tech guys is nearly impossible (most of them aren’t native English speakers and the ones that do speak clearly are incredibly incompetent). So when I finally got a guy on the phone last night who actually knew what he was talking about, I was incredibly relieved. After spending a long time troubleshooting, he informed me I probably had a virus causing a "DNS flood attack." Internet security has changed a lot in the past few years. Before, it was sufficient to not download strange files and avoid a pornography or gambling addiction, but now you have to worry about strange Internet security threats and your wife becoming addicted to online chess. There’s no telling what will happen in the next twenty years.

Column A and Column B

I recently took the GRE. Again. I think I was hoping that by some stroke of luck, the gods would show their favor and grant me the knowledge I needed to ace the darn thing without studying. You can imagine what happened. Returning from the whole ordeal quite frustrated, I was pleasantly surprised with the slightly vindicating lecture given in my Computers and Ethics in Society class on “The Orders of Ignorance.” I quickly concluded that, while I could feel the strain of first-order ignorance many times during the GRE, I was rarely allowed to show my capacity with second- or third-order ignorance problems, which meant that the test did not show a true characterization of my intellect.

Which is funny, now that I think about it...

In Thomas Friedman’s "The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century" (which is neither brief nor a complete history), the author describes the “flattening” of the world as the product—and future—of the 21st century. With a thorough flattening, businesses will perfect the practices of outsourcing, insourcing, and off-shoring. Technology and businesses will spread to other countries in an entirely symbiotic relationship.

Why is this so funny? Well, let’s look at the future of the flattened world. If Friedman is right, the world is progressing on a course of ultimate flatness. Eventually, open-source software will rule, putting money-hungry companies like Microsoft into the dust. Outsourcing for super-giants like Wal-Mart will be taken to an extreme: having completely exhausted the supply of cheap labor in developing nations, they will turn to robotic labor, which is both cheap and entirely obedient. Because of global expansion and the need for a unified language, the "one tongue to rule them all" will incorporate major sounds from every culture on this planet. When everything seems like it’s running the smoothest, the South Africans will suddenly realize nobody can pronounce their favorite clicking words. The wealthy Singaporean doctors will realize they’ve been replaced in the operating room by a twenty-dollar automated surgeon. Soon even the open-source programmers formerly playing with projects in their "spare time" will realize that, upon loosing their day job at the industry giant, they’ve been forced to take three part-time jobs flipping burgers at McDonalds (the only company who refused to hire robots).

Looking back on this madness, the world will see that while standardized testing like the GRE has the intention of providing an even playing ground for everyone, it only serves the purpose of making everyone homogenous. What the world really needs is not an enormous department store selling everything as cheap as it can get. Nor does it want every computer be a Dell because they can ship them the fastest. What it needs, instead, is innovation. A grocery store that sells only eggs because that’s its specialty. A computer store that sells computers of such high quality it can only make a few in a year. And especially, the world needs individuals who, on occasion, can see how the information displayed in “Column A” really is greater than “Column B” even though the practice GRE says otherwise.

That’s why I’m going into academics.

"Shawty fire burning on the dance floor..."

Interesting. I don’t quite understand it, but just a few days ago, I found myself frustrated that my carillon professor had assigned me a very simple song. “Me? A Clement? Being assigned a piece I could easily perfect in a week? That’s it. I quit.” And I set the music aside. Frequently, I've noticed that when I have no desire to perform, I always do poorly. I was reading an article with the abstract topic of LINUX design and realized the quintessential characteristic for designing an impressive piece of software is motivation. Sure, you need to be able to conquer second or third order ignorance, but burning the midnight oil and waking up before your roommates on a Saturday morning will place you further in line than anything else.

Perhaps the reason my carillon playing went over poorly is that I'm just burned out with school. Homework and studying is almost too much for me. Reading something uninteresting is about as much fun as straining spaghetti noodles for a living: a lot goes through, and you get a little bit of money for it, but nothing ever sticks.

So how do I get the motivation?

MP3's are the devil?

All my life, I've been taught that any form of music sharing is illegal. Borrowing a CD from your friends, getting music from KaZaA, searching Google for (illegally) free songs, or even using the RealPlayer Downloader to rip flash video files from Pandora... All of these violate copyright infringement laws in some fashion. With this in mind, today marked the first time I've read an article that almost supports mp3 stealing. But here is where my story departs from the mp3-blogging norm. What fascinated me most was not the encouragement to steal (Orson Scott Card isn't exactly the most conservative writer, and I'm sure there are a million more left-wing articles supporting his stance) but our class's changed opinion about stealing. Everyone had licked their chops and devoured this "new" idea so thoroughly you could almost see Brother Card on their "evil record company"-smelling breath. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately. How much are we influenced by what we read, listen to or view? And how often are we really in control?

Technology is not the devil

No, technology is not the devil. Or is it? One of Satan's greatest tools is deception. Like Nephi prophesied, "[a]nd others will he pacify, and lull them away into carnal security..." So perhaps Toyota's new flower, intending to "offset the CO2 created by its Prius assembly operations" is only a distraction. I can just picture it now. The huge Prius factory, pumping millions and millions of dollars into a "greener" facility, secretly plotting for world domination.

I guess in the wake of declaring in a mock trial that texting is the devil, I have become a little pessimistic. Or maybe the article claiming that text messaging "temporarily knocks up to 10 points off the user's IQ" has me wary of technology I once thought of as a harmless improvement.

Nope. The Prius factory is intentionally kept warmer in the summer. Case closed.

Title IX: A Technical Approach

On June 23, 1972, "Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972" was made a law[1]. Since this day, many changes have been made to increase the power and scope of Title IX. In 1979, the Carter administration developed a "three-prong test" to determine an institution's compliance to Title IX. According to this test, an institution must 1) have opportunities in proportion of gender ratio of the student population, 2) be seeking to expand athletic opportunities for the underrepresented sex, or 3) accommodate the underrepresented sex according to their interest. In general, Title IX covers several areas including access to higher education and employment among the sexes, education for pregnant and parenting students, education in math and sciences, sexual harassment, and standardized testing [2]. In the 1992 case of Franklin v Gwinnett County Public Schools, the US Supreme Court ruled that schools not supporting Title IX could be sued for compensatory and punitive damages. Title IX encourages institutions to give equal scholarship funding for each sex, even though most athletic programs do not receive Federal funding. Today, the many aspects of Title IX seek to provide equal opportunities for individuals regardless of gender in athletics, academics and the workforce.

Let's hear it for communism!

Mike was right. By simply becoming communists, we will quickly and efficiently solve the issue of privacy. Currently, employers are advised to "reserve their right to search as broadly as possible." But if nothing we own is really ours, then such blanket statements will come de facto. Privacy would be a thing of the past: if you don't own anything, then the term "stealing" can be redefined as a softer "replacement of ownership." Without the excitement of being hunted by the law, crime would cease to exist and everyone would love his neighbor. If communism were further developed to a worldwide governing system, research ideas would be shared globally and all aspects of life will be positively affected. Nobody would worry that China is "ratcheting up its cyberspying operations against the U.S.," because a "firm involved in high-technology development" in the US would be developing for China as well. Outsourcing could be perfected to such a point that the only workers in the US would be illegal aliens, leaving us time to pursue the true American dream: watch TV, browse the internet, and Twitter promising research leads to overseas sweat-shops.

Could life get any better? I submit that it could not!

The laundry fight

I'm not a left-wing liberal, but neither do I consistently agree with the conservative right. In fact, I've sometimes been known to take issue with authority figures. It's not that I don't trust them, it's just that I follow a strict code of conduct: If you want my respect, you have to be 1) taller and 2) more intelligent than me. Otherwise, it's on a case-by-case basis. It's not that I've got a problem with taking advice or showing respect to my elders, it's just that, as a general rule, the bureaucratic I'm-your-superior rarely show concern for the little man (or the big man, if you're like me).

Case in point: BYU's Laundry Facilities. Remember a while back when, in order to play basketball in the Richard's Building, you needed a BYU-issue T-shirt? Or perhaps you remember forgetting clean socks for your early-morning workout and simply requesting an issue pair with your order? Sometime around April of this year, BYU decided to change this policy. Instead of supplying clothing and laundry services, they (the bureaucratically superior) agreed that it would be much cheaper to require everyone to provide their own clothing. So, with all the pomp and circumstance they could muster, they sold all the formerly-issue clothing and began to make everyone wear ridiculous plastic wrist bands. I fought it good and hard: "They're dangerous. When I'm dunking the basketball, I might catch my wrist on the rim and tear it off." I even tried just putting the silly rip-your-arm-hairs-out wristband on my shoe–they could see I was wearing it and I didn't find it too obnoxious. But it didn't fly.

It's been a long hard fight between BYU's laundry facilities and me. Apparently, they'll still wash your towel if you rent a locker from them, but that's about the extent of their service. Where did the money they saved go? Probably to the doubled number of students they've hired to send you from the gym for not wearing a wrist band. Perhaps a better solution could have been to ask each student to pay an extra dollar for tuition. I'm sure they'd be able to cover the washing of shirts for 20 grand a year, and we, the student population, would only need to give up one Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger every six months...

As I come down from my rant, I acknowledge that perhaps I need to be more understanding. A plastic wrist band isn't an incredible hassle, and I've felt the disgust when foreigners have come to use the pool at our apartment complex and routinely destroy the hot tub with a measure of bubble bath. Maybe the bureaucratic bigwigs really are there for our benefit, and, in spite of the occasional lack of help from some three-letter agencies (thanks, Cliff), they really do protect our rights.


Just don't get me started on parking enforcement. Class is in 20 minutes.

The bigger they are, the harder they move

Small companies or individuals can often provide great advances (like Bill Gates, a Harvard dropout), but sustained innovation is tough. It comes from continually looking outside the box and constantly making changes that quite often become epic fails. I'd like to think Google's growth during this economic recession is not solely based on the company's size, but has also gained momentum from employees' pet projects. And yet, what impresses me most is that they don't just leave old ideas for new ones, otherwise the traditional Google search engine would die. Instead, they recognize their weaknesses ("search needs to get better ... faster"), and are improving past projects as well as new ones (like the upcoming Chrome OS). Fortunately--or unfortunately, as the case might be--I can focus the entirety of my research on innovation. Maybe someday I'll be a billionaire and need to fix security threats in previously-developed software.

"Family History, I am doing it..."

Today is the day of technology. Nothing has been able to avoid its influence--including the Church (meaning The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). For a massive religious organization established in the early 1800's, this is no small feat, especially when most of its leadership grew up in the pre-PC era. That's why I love it when my grandpa shows me his "latest and greatest" from the Family History Center. Sure, he may only view his iPhone as a somewhat cumbersome wireless landline, but to seek out technological advances and attempt to teach them to others? That's what makes him my hero. I can only hope I don't ever feel like the technologically primitive who, as described by Elder Nelson, "...secretly hope that they can slip through their remaining days on earth without ever having to touch a computer" ("A New Harvest Time").

Facebook Reaches the World

"Facebook's user base is nearly as large as the US population," states the headline. And of course, this announcement was made by Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook's CEO) on the company's blog. Technology is taking over the world--and apparently, so is Facebook. But if Facebook is so important to staying up-to-date with technology, why not Twitter? And LinkedIn? And Squidoo, Flikr, YouTube and a million other networks that are equally "vital?" I think that's why I've shied away from them for so long. Yeah, they might serve a purpose every now and then (I used LinkedIn to try and contact a girl from my mission), but most of the time the only purpose they serve is to make you feel just a little better about your supposed social status. After all, who doesn't love to find out that "[t]here are a total of 3 messages awaiting your response"? Even if some of them are from Prince Albert Kohl who "am [sic] a Singaporean citizen," there's something exciting about personalized messages. It's only too bad Google's Autopilot was only an April Fool's Day joke. :)

Getting to The Edge

I'm a bioinformatician, and very much so.  I am of the opinion that, through the proper application, computer science can solve all of our medical problems.  Unfortunately, I am not the only one with this opinion which leads me to my aggravation with the Age of Technology.  With scientific data following a greater-than Moore's-Law growth, so must the programs analyzing and using the data.  Which means that, in order to achieve anything significant, one must also be on the edge of an ever-increasing bubble.  They must achieve the best the soonest, forcing me to fight for position and prestige with the learned PhD and professional individuals who have had far more experience than I have.  Perhaps all of this fighting and knowledge in the Age of Technology will further the goals of a bioinformatician, and that of humankind as a whole, but all I've seen is a lot of back-biting, an overprotection of one's underdeveloped ideas, and, worst of all, a huge degrade in the product in order to ship on time.  In my humble opinion, this is the real problem the Age of Technology is facing:  When agencies are willing to dish out millions of dollars to the very few who claim to be able to "perform the best" or "get results the quickest" (and rightfully so), what happens to those of us who are concerned about accuracy?  About relevance?  And about finally creating a product that is not intended just to put us in position to fight for a Nobel Prize, but will actually produce something that will benefit humanity?

Which makes me wonder, if my education is designed to place me on the "outskirts of the bubble," why should we wast a week learning about UML design in a Software Design and Testing class?  But that's a topic for another day.

...Just Created...

It's been a long time coming--this blog has. But finally it's here. There's about three reasons I can think of for my creating a blog:

1) Sometimes I like to soap-box. But I've found that not everyone is as knowledgeable (or perhaps I should say "interested") as I am in certain topics. So a blog provides a perfect platform to satisfy my ranting itch.

2) My CS 404 class requires us to create one. Enough said.

3) I can get my mother to subscribe to my blog. This will not only let her know what's going on in my life, but will also help her to be more trusting of the ever increasing amount of "new-age" technology. Maybe one day she'll have the art of texting perfected.

I'll let you guess what the title has reference to...