Author Archives: Michael

Not Cold at All

Leave a reply

My peer group largely consists of people who are deemed “cold” or “aloof” in social interaction. I too have received this label several times. But what I am beginning to find is that these people, most of whom type INTP or INTJ on the MBTI, are actually the most sensitive, emotional people I’ve ever met. And, almost universally, they have been hurt again and again by society.

Why they confide in me is a bit of a mystery – I’ve been knocked around by society quite a bit myself – but for someone who is called “cold”, I too have an uncanny ability to empathize, so perhaps others are drawn to me for my ability to listen, support, and offer pragmatic advice at the same time.

I’m beginning to wonder whether the “cold” label really indicates distance, or whether it indicates a disinterest in irrelevant social mannerisms in favor of authentic interactions. As a rule, it seems almost universally levied at those least deserving of it.

And that is utterly insufferable.

Learning Teaching

Leave a reply

Seems almost like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Of course, far from being antithetical, teaching and learning go hand in hand. I’ve learned quite a bit from teaching, not all of it related to the subject I was teaching. But I’ve come to a conclusion I’m a bit ashamed to admit: I’m not yet a very good lecturer.

On my good days, I can be excellent. I thought I did a great job on the hash table lecture. Other times I think my wording was very off but the students seemed to enjoy it nevertheless, such as with Huffman coding. And then there are just times when I know I’m doing a bad job of explaining something, yet all I can do is forge ahead and try to do my best. On paper, the presentations all look great. Verbally, however, I can talk too fast, I can select a poor choice of words, I can sound repetitious, I can sound like I’m emphasizing the wrong points, and so on…

I still have a really good excuse for this pattern: it’s my first semester teaching. I still don’t know how best to structure a lecture, how to present that lecture, what pace to set, etc., because I just don’t have enough student feedback to see what is working yet. There’s also the issue of my tight schedule occasionally interfering with my ability to prepare the lectures as long as I would like.

But I’m going to be teaching the course a second time in the Spring, and by then, I’d like to have this down a bit better.

I think the students like me, at least; partially on account of my age – I’m not much older than they are, so I innately understand them a bit better – but also due to my approachability and refusal to put people down. But though that is a necessary condition for student learning (students pay much more attention to you when they respect and admire you), it is far from sufficient. I need to work on my teaching skills more.

Social Bookmarking a Bit Out-of-Hand?

Leave a reply

There are relatively few innovators and many people who like to copy and make incremental advances, but I didn’t quite realize how out-of-hand it was getting in social bookmarking until I looked into actually adding those buttons (via the Add to Any widget) to one of my sites. It looks nice and innocuous at first, but click on the down arrow in the popup menu and see just how many sites are listed, all serving the same function.

Share/Save/Bookmark

MBTI types of generalists?

Leave a reply

I’m a member of several groups on polymathy and on harnessing talent in multiple areas (it’s something I’m interested in myself, after all). One of the more interesting things I’ve noticed is that when asked about their MBTI types:

1. Everyone knows them already.

2. Almost everyone is an INTJ. Next common is INTP, then ENTP.

3. Most historical polymaths are thought to be INFJs. (What happened to cause the shift? Did thinking types suddenly become more in-tune with their artistic sides recently, or was there something cultural to it?)

How much faith one can put in MBTI types is questionable, but it does support my hypothesis that nonlinear intuitive thought, not straight logic, is required to see the connections between disciplines.

A Meta-Idea

Leave a reply

From penicillin to global warming, ideas require two people to flourish: one to generate the idea and another to popularize it. Very seldom are these functions performed by the same person. In fact, it’s common for a great deal of time to elapse between generation and popularization.

False negatives in animal tests.

Leave a reply

Lots of treatments work very well in mice but fail to show benefits in human trials. They’re false positives, and they get lots of people excited over treatments that never end up working in humans.

(Why do they work so well in mice, I wonder? Is it because so much of our research uses them? I wonder, if we were willing to completely throw morals out the window, could we get those sorts of results in humans by experimenting on them directly? Not that I’m advocating this.)

I just realized something blindingly obvious: there are false negatives too. But how are these handled? Treatments that don’t work in mice never make it to human trials, even though they may work in humans. Without doing human trials on treatments that failed to work in mice, we can’t evaluate a false negative rate, but it could potentially be high. Certainly it’s nonzero in any case.

This is another example of snap judgments shooting down ideas, but this is far less clear-cut than most criticism because failing to analyze the treatment prior to human trials can endanger people’s health.

I think that what we need are better computer models.

Patent

Leave a reply

Apparently the recent work I’ve done for my dissertation is patentable and the team wishes to apply for one. On the one hand, I disagree with the very concept of patenting an algorithm; on the other, this is a huge addition to a CV which would very definitely put me ahead of others when I seek a research position.

Maybe I can get the patent then license it freely?