Accidentally in Code

Tag: Thesis

  • Dropping Out

    Dropping Out

    The sky isn't falling
    Credit: Geek and Poke / http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/2008/10/optimists—part-2.html

    I wrote the post Being Human at around 5am having stayed up most of the night to get my edits in for the deadline. I don’t normally work like that – I think I forgot to tell my co-supervisor I was in the UK. Oh well. I never really made it off Canadian time whilst I was there. It’s been blissful to come home and be a morning person again.

    I hadn’t been feeling too well, but thought it was mostly jetlag. But then, edits done, I crashed. I got the flu really badly – I don’t remember the last time I was that sick – followed by post-viral exhaustion. My boyfriend got sick too, about 3 days behind me. Result was the laziest holiday ever; we didn’t go to Iceland, or Paris for New Year – we stayed home with tissues and hot tea and Harry Potter Lego (Amazon) – which, frustratingly, I had to leave 98.8% completed.

    Still, being sick over the holidays gave me two things. The first – a real break – not just from work, but from the guilt of not working. Secondly, it gave me time to think about what I want and what I’m doing.

    The person I emailed at uOttawa, of course, never got back to me. This is what I have come to expect, but it’s still frustrating. I’m so tired of this, and of uOttawa being so for-profit when they insist I must register full time, at international rates, but like a non-profit when they try and cut my TA’s hourly rate by a third (with no notice) because “it’s for a good cause”. And so I haven’t registered, haven’t paid any tuition. Is this how you drop out? I’m looking into transferring because having time to think, I realized that if nothing changes then it’s unlikely that another semester is the answer. The problem is not, I think, time. It’s direction.

    On January first (great start to 2011), our education paper got accepted – it’s about the curriculum design for the workshop we were running and is called “Four Hours to Smash the CS Stereotype and Create Something Beautiful”. This brings me up to three papers coming out this year – on widely divergent topics. The IBM paper is on text analytics. The paper I’ll present in Switzerland later this month is called “Following the Conversation: A More Meaningful Measure of Engagement” and is about applying visualization and graph theory to social network analysis. The citation in SIGCHI? That’s a paper on Usability of IDEs and programming languages for teaching.

    I look at this, and I think – this is why I’m doing well at life, and failing at grad school. I’m interested in a lot of different things, and apparently I’m creating value in a number of different areas. I’m an incrementalist. I can try and fight it, but on reflection, I get more value and I’m happier when I partner with someone who complements me instead. Having come to this conclusion, there was a post on Escape the Ivory Tower that talks about “mismatches” – and that that’s exactly what the grad school experience so far has been for me.

    So, I’ve been talking to people about my options, and I’m looking at transferring to another school, and maybe a slightly different program. They all seem to get it – and nobody has been judgemental. My parents tell me they want me to be happy, but think I do deserve the piece of paper. My friend (who had the same supervisor, and left after a similar experience) tells me that transferring saved her years to finish. It’s interesting, because I have enough work – it’s just not focused enough to create a thesis with.

    Really what it comes down to, is I have enough publications and an awesome enough job that I’m prepared to hold out and try and do something that works for me, than try and fight with myself to work within a system that doesn’t.  I’m confident enough, given everything, that the problem isn’t lack of work, or ability on my part. Lack of focus, probably. Making it work at this point, seems like a lot of effort with very little return – I’m not on board with the level of ROI in terms of the tuition I’m paying, or, more importantly, the time I’m investing.

    So, I guess I’m dropping out.

  • Being Human

    Being Human

    I Say R2
    Credit: flickr / stu_wp

    It’s the day of my paper deadline, I have a horrible throat infection (complete with headache and rasping cough) and I’m just FREAKING OUT because it all seems like TOO MUCH and why why why did I not just hole myself up in my apartment and get on with things? Why did I come back to Europe with the plane bacteria and the jetlag and the horrible horrible weather that I’m afraid to drive my Smart car in and somehow seems worse than in Canada because it never used to be that bad when I lived here.

    My friend IM’s me and I just freak out on her. I tell her that I’m stressed about this paper deadline, and I’m sick, and that I’m not going to be finished this semester and honestly I haven’t even looked at when the date I had to re-register by was. She’s great, and says, well what do you need to do? I’m going to stay here whilst you do it. And she says,

    It’s a relief to discover that you’re human.

    Which shocks me – because this is someone who I respect hugely, who I consider a mentor, and find incredibly inspiring. Honestly, I’ve been convinced since a few days after I met her that she is super human. She is so frickin’ awesome.

    And then my dad comes home, randomly in the middle of the day to pick something up, and he asks me how I am and I cry some more and tell him that I feel so ill and that I’m a total failure and that I’m so sorry that I’m not going to be finished this semester but will need to register for another one. And he tells me it’s OK, he’s not mad at me, he’s frustrated by the university (chronically disorganized and terrible at communicating dates etc) and my “supervisor” who, ah, doesn’t actually supervise me.

    I’ve been thinking about this lately, because we all seem to think that other people are doing better than we are. They’re more together, more organized, more capable, just doing better at life whilst we flounder though, making it up as we go along.

    If I were to sit down with someone else and they’d been having the experience that I’ve had, I would be horrified, angry on their behalf, and probably taking up their cause and trying to find someone to complain to. But, me, I think I should just be getting on with it, graduating in fewer semesters than typical (this is my 5th if you don’t count the one I spent in Shanghai) and somehow just knowing how you write a paper, how you get it published, and how you write and submit a masters thesis without having to ask anyone HOW THE F**K DO YOU DO THAT BECAUSE I HAVE NO F**KING IDEA?!?!?!?!?!

    It’s one thing to hold yourself to higher standards than others. That’s how you strive to be nicer, more honorable, more organized, whatever. And, if you’re striving hard, it’s probably necessary to cut others some slack if you want any friends. But allowing other people to be human and thinking that I should be some kind of cyborg is not healthy, or helpful. Let’s be honest, it’s insane.

    Other people tell me I’m doing a lot because they see the three papers I submitted this semester, the blog posts I produce every week. I don’t see the day I worked near non-stop from 10am to 3:30am the following morning or the days I work fewer hours, but with furious intensity. I fixate on the weekend I spend in my PJs with my boyfriend playing through my new LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 game (Amazon). Or the days I slept in. Or that day I just read a novel when I had so much to do, I mean – what was I thinking?!?

    I’m not a cyborg. I have to accept that I will have to register for another semester. I have to forgive myself and acknowledge that if it were someone else in my place, I wouldn’t be judging them for it.

    But next semester will be the last one. If I’m not done by then, I don’t think it’s worth it any more. I have a great job. I’ll have an academic paper published (come Feb), an industrial one (don’t know when that will be out) and something I wrote (class paper, didn’t try to publish it) is going to be cited in SIGCHI. One more academic paper (working title: Exploring Transient Communities on Twitter) and isn’t that all you’re supposed to get from a MSc anyway? Do I need a fancy piece of paper and a picture of me in a stupid hat to certify that I paid uOttawa a ridiculous amount of money for the privilege?

    I can’t beat myself up about this any more than I already have. I could be more focused. I could work harder. I could be more organized. But, I hope the truth of it is that my failings here are pretty insignificant compared to the failings of the system. The guy who was supposed to be my supervisor told me my work was worthless. He hasn’t read anything I’ve done. When I helped my office-mate transform their non-sense “framework” into a cycle he refused to let my office-mate put my name on the paper (it got published, my office mate hated it slightly less after I fixed it). He gave me away saying he didn’t know what I was doing and I should just work with my co-supervisor (who is amazing, but at a different university which means he can’t help me with some things).

    If I’m going to be angry, and frustrated… I don’t necessarily have to start by being angry and frustrated at myself.

    So, there it is. I’m human. Flawed. Inadequate. Scared. Overwhelmed. Angry. Exhausted. Lost.

    Not a cyborg. And I think that’s for the best. Because if I never melted down, I wouldn’t be pushing myself. And I would never have those moments where someone else reaches out to me and they understand, or sympathize, or help in some way. And it seems to me like they have a super power, that cyborgs will never, ever have.

  • Fighting Incrementalist Tendencies

    Fighting Incrementalist Tendencies

    The Ladder
    Credit: flickr / rodricar

    I originally posted Making Ideas Happen: The Dreamer, the Doer, and the Incrementalist as a not-so-subtle hint to one of the dreamers in my life, and a reminder to myself to be aware of the downsides of being an incrementalist. And then Meggin left this great comment (emphasis added):

    I’m an incrementalist, through and through. Urgghhh. I was on a leadership course awhile back and we had our work personality types tested and I came out in extremes an innovator and a finisher (exactly equal). And I totally agree with the above – one would think that being an incrementalist is the ideal position, but it isn’t, it’s just another position. I constantly have this feeling that my creative ideas are not getting the time they deserve to see them through and the projects I need to finish are not getting the creative energy they deserve.

    The real kicker of being an incrementalist is that people expect you to be both creative and to finish things, and that at any point the unexpected happens, so you don’t have the time you thought you did (which is very common in all our lives), you are inevitably letting someone down in not meeting creative or deadline expectations (as you have to usually sacrifice one for the other in times of crunch). I’m in release mode – so that might explain why I am venting. Thanks for post.

    I headed back to Europe to see the doctor, get a new passport, and focus. I need to be in hardcore doer mode in order to finish my thesis. I thought part of the problem was that I was bored of it and fighting to go back to being in a dreamer phase. And then I finished the IBM publication (no more patents to read – yay!) and the education paper my TA and I were working on, made some good progress on my thesis, and did the bulk (I hope) of the editing for my accepted paper.

    And then I faced this new problem. Other projects. CompSci Woman is not being updated lately because neither Maggie nor I have capacity to hustle for submissions. I’m letting myself off feeling guilty about that – there’s a limit to what I can do (but if you’ve been thinking about contributing, but haven’t – please do). Then there’s some half-an-hour task that is just weighing on me because it involves writing up something and I just have this feeling of can’t. Can’t be creative with that. Can’t rearrange that into a coherent story. Can’t take that on as my problem and I really, really wish someone else would just step up and do it.

    But why would they? Normally I’m fine being an incrementalist. Normally I’d say, “it’s just half an hour, just do it and it’s gone”. Normally it falls under that class of delegation where it’s less work to just do it myself. My inner control freak just loves that – getting comfortable delegating has been tough for me and so I give it these small pleasures. Honestly, being an incrementalist comes so naturally to me that I don’t think people notice what I do, how much I’m taking care of. Just get on with it. Just check it off. Oh, no it wasn’t a big deal. Because usually – it isn’t.

    This whole doer thing means one project. One. That project is my thesis. Everything else is for someone else to take care of, or on ice.

    So – deep breath – I handed off that nagging task. And the person I spoke to was totally understanding. What was I worrying about?

  • Being Present

    Being Present

    my fuzzy nuts
    Credit: Chris / http://www.rudecactus.com/2010/09/

    I hate what I’m working on lately. That’s probably been apparent from the moaning on Twitter and somewhat angsty blogposts. It’s nearly done… but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels endless.

    What I’ve noticed, is how much of a struggle it is to be in the moment, working on whatever it is that I should be doing. My mind wonders – email, twitter, RSS feeds – but also to new, brilliant ideas, that I could work on… if only I didn’t have to work on whatever it is I’m doing right now. Maybe later. Then there will be time.

    I get frustrated with myself, if I could just concentrate I could get this thing done in a day, two tops. But I hit the point beyond which I can’t concentrate… and it takes longer than I think it should.

    02-Vantagebot-739971
    Credit: Christopher / http://www.thisischris.com/2006_06_01_archive.html

    When I’m stressed, it’s obvious, because I do things that I don’t normally do. Like, read novels, or watch TV. Reading a novel, I get absorbed. The things I should be doing – what I wish I was doing but might get to next month, fades away. Watching the season opening for Brothers and Sisters – tears are streaming down my face, and, for once, I’m not wishing I was anywhere else.

    182; I'm Here!!
    Credit: flickr / Sara. Nel

    Living in the future, thinking about what will be next rather than what is now, is exhausting. I don’t find it easy to be fully in the moment, at peace, even at the best of times, but lately it’s worse than usual.

    When I was in China, on Thursday mornings we used to go into the national park and do Qi Gong. You do a series of movements and are meant to reach a meditative state. I never found it. I never felt anything other than cold. The closest I come to that kind of state is skiing – at 30kmph your mind better be where you physically are right now; ditto on a mogul field. Kickboxing is good for that too, as is spinning, you reach a certain level of exhaustion and you have to be present, to force yourself to keep going.

    Perhaps the answer is to find other ways to be present – sports, or a novel, or a great TV show. And then, when I’m supposed to be working, acknowledge when my mind goes wondering, think, yes, I hate this, but I have to keep going because the future where I have time to do the stuff that inspires me? That doesn’t happen until this stuff is DONE.

  • Shipping

    Shipping

    a great girl
    Credit: flickr / cambiodefractal

    To mark my 4 week anniversary in Kitchener, I didn’t have a party (as suggested by AY), I instead had a week long crisis. I think AY had the better idea…

    It was a number of things. Moving. Change. The stress and difficulty of dealing with the appalling Goodlife (there’s some deep irony in that name). The clocks changed and I started waking up when it’s still dark, and having nowhere to go. Freaking out over my thesis. Two years in grad school, remarkably unworried about it (I’m told) and panic finally set in. I spent far too much time contemplating the webpage of a guy in graduate admissions at Carleton who suggested a couple of times – joking I’m sure – that I transfer. I was very close to emailing him and asking how joking was he.

    I’m not panicking about writing my thesis. I’m panicking about what I do with it when I’ve written it. I have no idea – and frankly, I’m terrified of finding out.

    The biggest thing, though, was some jackass being patronizing and disparaging of something I was concerned about. I’m told – by other engineers, who understand why I’m worried – that my concern is valid. It’s now being addressed through other means. However. This one person, ignoring my question, finally calling to “answer” it – only to try and make me feel stupid for asking it… threw me off completely. He didn’t make me feel stupid for asking it. He did make me furious, and start questioning some big decisions I’ve made lately. It resulted in me not exploring another option – not because I’m so happy of where I am and what I’m doing, but because I feel like it’s too late and if I’ve made a horrible mistake… I don’t need any more information about that to make me feel bad.

    So I spent a lot of time in tears. And I kept getting up, feeling like I wasn’t ready to face the day yet, and napping on the couch until it was light. In the midst of this, my trainer annihilated my thighs to the point where I could barely walk for two days, so no gym.

    Just me, completely overwhelmed by everything, wracked with indecision.

    no one can hear you!
    Credit: flickr / g-mikee

    I’m reading Making Ideas Happen at the moment. And something in there struck me. Shipping. And I realized, that typically I ship things every day – blog posts, draft work, emails… and I’d stopped. Nothing had left me.

    I booked into the spa for a mudwrap. But first, I read this huge paper (a warm up to being productive) and sent the email I’d been agonizing over. Then afterwards, I made myself ship some academic work in the form of a blogpost.

    I still feel overwhelmed. I still napped again this morning. But then I finished a blogpost I’d been struggling to write. Now this one is flowing more. I have a plan for what I will work on later – and I’ll aim to ship a draft of a document I need to write.

    And – I said no to my escape route, because I don’t want to run away. And the situation with the jackass will work itself out – someone else is taking it seriously, and now some circumstances have changed making it a different problem of known size.

    Finally, I’m overwhelmed by grad school and the dreaded thesis. But, I think if I just keep shipping stuff towards that goal, day in, day out, it’ll be OK.

  • Exploring a Conference Hashtag

    Exploring a Conference Hashtag

    My supervisor had the idea of grabbing a conference dataset by hashtag, specifically the Eclipse Conference 2010 (hashtag #ese) which took place in Ludwigsburg, Germany, November 2nd to November 4th.

    You can get an idea of what people were talking about in the wordle, below (applet is here):

    ESE All Tweets

    Apparently there were a lot of RT’s. We’ll explore that later…

    I started off with HTML files that he had grabbed for me, and extracted all the tweet ID’s (regular expressions ftw) and then downloading all the information for each tweet from the API (rate-limiting is the new compiling). Finally I had a spreadsheet with a total of 640 tweets (only one couldn’t be retrieved) from 181 different users.

    One user has a total of 26 tweets in the dataset, however the majority just tweeted the hashtag one time. The frequency distribution is shown in the chart, below.

    tweet count frequency

    The web and Tweetdeck were by far the most popular clients, as per the chart below. Of course, this can be skewed by users posting more.

    Twitter Clients

    To reduce this, I eliminated duplicates of user/source combinations to create the chart below:

    Client Usage (User Duplicates Removed)

    TweetDeck now seems slightly less popular! It’s interesting giving the tech-savvy of the users – Eclipse is an IDE, amongst other things, and is also Open Source that the web is so prevalent, and Android less so. Although Twitdroid and Twitter for Android are there they are both dominated by Twitter for iPhone.

    Just 38 of the 181 users use multiple clients, although one user uses 5 (!)

    Client Usage (User Duplicates Removed)

    Below is a heat map of the locations of the users for the tweets in the dataset. The conference took place in Europe, so many of the participants were from that area but we also see users from North America.

    [iframe: src=”http://www.openheatmap.com/embed.html?map=PheromonesMotherboardNightstick” frameborder=”0″ width=”600″ height=”450″ scrolling=”yes”]

    Only 8 tweets (out of the 640 tweet dataset), 1.25% had geo-location data, and just 75 or 11.7% were replies. 55 of user accounts (out of 181), or 30.4% are geo enabled.

    I filtered the dataset to keep just one tweet per user (the last one they posted with the conference hashtag).

    The location heatmap with the reduced dataset:

    [iframe: src=”http://www.openheatmap.com/embed.html?map=HypercriticallyThesaurussStruts” frameborder=”0″ width=”600″ height=”450″ scrolling=”yes”]

    Despite the worldwide locations, the vast majority of users have their language set to English:

    Languages

    How do people at the Eclipse Conference describe themselves? Wordles have limitations in terms of statistical significance, but I find them useful for picking out specific themes. The wordle for user’s bios is below (applet here), “Eclipse”, “software”, “Java” and “Developer” feature prominently.

    Bio Wordle

    The earliest user joined in December 2006, but some joined relatively recently – in the chart below, we see a spike around February/March 2009 (this makes sense, given the astounding growth of Twitter at that time).

    Joined Since

    Personally, I use my favorites to collect things I mean to read. So I had a look at how these users were favoriting too. Users had between 0 and 2366 favorites. A median of 43.9, median of 3, and mode of 0 suggest that many of these users don’t use favourites at all. Standard Deviation was obviously large – 204.23.

    I graphed follower/following with size proportional to number of lists using Many Eyes.

    24e29d64-f34a-11df-a448-000255111976

    Blog_this_caption

    Finally – URLs. I was surprised that 54 (29.8%) of users did not have a URL in their profile. 3, shockingly, have a Facebook URL (one of which does not have the vanity URL). Blogspot (22 users) is more popular than WordPress (5 users).

    Next I’ll be looking at temporal rhythms and mapping @ mentions.

  • Timing is Everything

    Timing is Everything

    The young asian girl
    Credit: flickr / My name's axel

    I had the best time in Extreme Blue. I learned so much. I met such cool people. It was awesome.

    The summer though, was a terrible time to take off from my thesis. So close to the end. So clear on what I was doing. So motivated to ESCAPE and move on to the real world…

    And then I spent the summer in the real world, and it was everything I hoped for. And now I’m back in my windowless office, back in my grad student life – others also desperate to get away, some hiding from the military (yes, really), some viewing it as a life-style choice (OK those I mostly avoid).

    Meanwhile, I’ve been stressed by situations like this. Saddened by this. My personal life – let’s not go there. And rushing about like a crazy person – I just spent my first 7 days straight in Ottawa since the start of August. I’d say it was bliss, but I was so exhausted by everything I promptly got sick.

    I’m moving at the end of this month, and I keep asking myself (and those around me) “How do I do this?” How do I pack everything in that I need to do? I’ve been trying to split my day into sections – prioritize working out in the morning, grad school during the day, and friends during the evening.

    This works up to a point, but mostly I just feel overwhelmed. Packing my life into boxes, again, is hard – and hasn’t got that much easier with practise. Saying goodbye to people is sad, and the number of places I’ve left just means I’ve learned how few people stay in touch. Finishing a thesis is hard. And made harder by the fact that my supervisor said, “I don’t know what you’re doing so you’ll just work with your co-supervisor” – I have literally been given away.

    The next few weeks are going to be rough. I know that I can’t do it all, but I have no idea what I can cut.

  • The Trade-off Between Useful and Interesting

    Brown Betty Teapot
    Credit: flickr / clevercupcakes

    I don’t think I’m cut out for graduate school.

    I say this as someone who just spent half an hour hiding in the bathroom in tears, so take what follows with a pinch of salt. I’m not giving up quite yet.

    Today, my supervisor told me my work made no contribution. I admit, that I haven’t exactly defined in my own head what my contribution is, but given the interest in my work from a couple of companies, the people I talk to, the requests for talks, and the traffic stats for my website I thought it was clear that I’d made something that was potentially useful. I thought that would imply a contribution.

    Perhaps the reality is that I have not made a contribution to computer science. I’ve taken stuff that already existed, and arranged it in a different way. My innovation lies in the combination, not the creation, of technology.

    However, if we look at the people who are innovating they’re innovating at the edge. Facebook innovates in technology, but their greatest innovations are in the social aspect. Apple innovates where hardware meets great design (fascinating post on the design of the iPhone and the upcoming Apple Tablet). Google innovates where technology meets utility. Google docs, for example, innovates in Javascript but the biggest game changer is being able to work on your documents online, from anywhere, with anyone. Whilst Google came from academic research, the thing that made them the big player they are in technology today was AdSense, not the content of the seminal paper that started the search engine. Google is a great example of what I’m talking about. Everything they innovate seems to bring some new innovation that’s not just technical. Even speeding up searches – whilst I don’t notice that my single search takes less time, the search API is infrastructure underling things like Google Squared, so I will notice when a square takes much less time to generate.

    The people whose work I admire most are working at the intersection of tech and art (Sep Kamvar, Jonathan Harris, Gilad  Lotan), or organization in creating tech (Joel on software). The academic work I admire is coming from places where technology enables, but are not necessarily technology-focused, like danah boyd at Microsoft Research, Clay Shirky (NYU prof and author of “Here Comes Everybody” – Amazon) and the MIT Media Lab (I particularly like Mycrocosm).

    This  disconnect between real world and university is frustrating me. In design, there’s the ideal that something can be both beautiful and functional (see Don Norman’s TED talk and his post about teapots). In creating software, my ideal is something that is both interesting and useful. As a compromise, I’ll take useful. The university ideal is interesting.

    I was confident because I thought I’d hit the interesting and useful jackpot. I’ve read so many papers about Twitter, the bar seemed low, I thought it would be easy even. Papers proposing the addition of semantics (I never saw the point of this, the power of Twitter is it’s simplicity), making simplistic errors like saying you could only @ someone if you followed them. Papers proposing a system of vast complexity in order to facilitate how people used instant messenger asynchronously or their status to send a message… and then Facebook came and blew that idea away by just inviting people to set their status and then displaying it in a stream friends can dip in and out of.

    This search for interesting above utility has the potential to spawn research that’s like trying to find the fastest way to ski on old-fashioned straight skis. What’s the point in that? If you goal is to ski as fast as possible, you need to get a pair of parabolics and learn how to master the parabolic technique. This research has a very limited audience. It is not where I want to be.

    In this analogy, University is like the ESF (Ecole du Ski Français), an institution so steeped and stifled by unionization and protectionism they will take you, on your parabolic skis, and teach you to ski upright with your legs jammed together, rendering it impossible to take advantage of the parabolic edges.

    I need to be skiing parabolically. I want to be heading to what I think is important – usefulness, and interesting. But if I have to compromise, I’d sooner be working on making better hairbands (useful, but not that interesting), than making better straight skis (interesting, but not useful). This means that I want to be at the edge of Computer Science, not in the middle of it. Because that’s where I think the innovation is. Perhaps grad school is not the place for me as a result of this.

    Yes, what a terrible time to realize this.

    In any situation, there are options. What are mine?

    • Give up, drop out.
    • Work harder to determine a “contribution” I can claim to make.
    • Stop trying to publish and just write a thesis.
    • Something else I’ve yet to think of.

    Advice welcome.