Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, everyone!

Blessings in 2009!

Apologies

@Miguel: Oops! My bad. Sorry!

The good year

@Mike: I have to ask: Are you sad because you're not an Obama fan or because we're stuck with our current leadership? If it's the latter, I share in your sadness.

***

Recent morning shows and news magazines are issuing their usual retrospectives. 2008 was an amazing year all around, from Madonna's split to Obama's election. When 2008 began, I predicted that it would be a good year for me and with two days left before 2009, I think it's safe to say I was right. I turned 40 (yes, that's in base 10), two grant proposals were approved, I got my Fulbright.

If 2009 is half as good as 2008, my cup would once again run over.

Anti-Obama sentiment

Someone in the apartment across mine has a hand-made poster plastered on his/her window:

OBAMA IS NOT MY PRESIDENT!

Dude, get over it!

Awwww.... Sniff!

To the JTA folks again,

Thanks for the comments and the updates. And for all the credit you are throwing my way. Honestly, I would love to say the program was solely borne from my brilliance and insight but the truth is it was the brilliance, insight, and hard work of Rudy Ang, Dr. Angeles, Dr. Intal, Dr. Cuyegkeng, Glenn de Leon, the very hard-working troops of the OIP, and so many other people that put this all together. I was just jumping on the bandwagon and was being carried along by intertia. But if you insist on giving me the credit, then ok, you're welcome--hahaha!

I'm so, so happy that your experiences have been positive (at least I haven't heard anything negative yet). I think most of you know I'm on my own sort-of JTA--I'm spending second sem on a research visit at Carnegie Mellon. I'll be back in ADMU by June. When you get back, though, and when you have time, kuwento naman diyan! Let me know how things went. Who did you meet. Where did you go. Anyone cute? Hahaha! And did you learn anything, both computer science/MIS-y or not? Was the visit worth it (thoguht from your notes, I take it the answer is yes.)

Looking forward to hearing from you.

@The JTAers

Hey guys!  Nice to hear from you.  I'm glad you're ok.

Wimbie, is Christmas a big deal in Japan?  We were in NYC for Christmas and the way people were shopping you wouldn't think there was a recession.  Even the jewelry stores were packed.  Made you wonder if Tiffany's had layaway.

Mika, Pittsburgh has been spared some of the harshest weather--it was 70 degrees F yesterday, if you can believe that!--but I hear we're going to be back to the seasonal chills by tomorrow.

Happy New Year, everyone! 

Hey, JTA!

I guess it can be argued that worrying about them is no longer my job--it is the job of the Chair. However, I can't help wondering whether they are doing ok. Many of this year's JTA kids were freshmen or sophomores under me, so my mother hen instincts are in gear and I find myself thinking about them.

If the JTAers are reading this, post me a note! Let me know how you are! And I hope you're enjoying the holidays!

Black Friday again

Today, December 26, is yet another Black Friday. There was a dress I bought one month ago for the NSF talk. If I wanted to get a second one, I could buy it for about 35% of what I had originally paid. That annoys me, but there would have been no sense hesitating because I needed it when I needed it. My only consolation is that I contributed to the US economy.

While the sales are great for consumers such as myself, the recession that prompts them shadows every discount.

During another recession a few years back, my Fil-American aunt told me that the most patriotic thing that Americans can do is shop. I guess the same wisdom holds true today.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I Heart New York?

People say that you either love New York or you hate it. This is my third visit here, my first in about 17 years. The first couple of times, I didn't really like it. This time, well, my opinion hasn't really changed. I don't hate the place, but I'm not sure I love it, either.

I like cities, but New York is like the quintessential urban jungle. It doesn't get more urban than this. Big, crowded, dirty, expensive, and lots of chutzpah, New York has me missing the "small town feel" of Manila (or for that matter every other major capital, including DC).

I generally like big cities, but I think New York is a little too big for me--or maybe that just means I'm too much of a country mouse.

Les Halles

I've been a big fan of Anthony Bourdain for some years now. I love his non-fiction books, particularly A Cook's Tour. Hence, a visit to New York would not have been complete without a meal at the place where it all started: Les Halles. Note that Bourdain is no longer connected with Les Halle. In fact, he was never connected with the branch we visited. But let's not nitpick.

In this day and age of nouvelle and fusion, Les Halles provides wonderful, traditional French bistro food--rich escargot, a hearty cassoulet, blood sausages on mashed potatoes, and a cinnamon-heaven tarte tatin. Sigh...

Social cost

To produce high-impact research, you need a lot of money and a team with an almost monastic devotion to the work. Anything less and you'll forever be publishing quaint little pieces that look good on a resume but will never be cited.

The research culture that seems to be most productive is something I think I've mentioned before--this culture of "soft money" where researchers live from one grant to the next. They're forever writing proposals, doing research, and writing papers, in order to substantiate even more proposals...and the cycle continues.

While this culture keeps the troops hungry and their institutions on the cutting edge, this dog-eat-dog world comes at a cost. Researchers have no job security and very little institutional loyalty. You can argue that this is the nature of today's workplace--success belongs to the fleet-footed.

I wonder, though, where this culture leaves institutions like the Ateneo, where tenure is sacred and personalities and personal relationships sometimes count more than rules. With such a staid, traditional environment, how can we realistically compete with those who are much more ready and willing to damn the social costs.

Desire over pain? If anything, we need to think about what it is that we in fact desire. Who are we as an institution? What are the characteristics about our culture that define us? Which of these must we retain to stay who we are? Which of these are we willing to sacrifice?

Good writers

In keeping with my "all about envy" theme, let me say that I do so envy people who write well. RayVi Sunico, Karen Cardenas, Rofel Brion, Guss Rodriguez, even Mike Gonzalez--if I could bottle and sell their talent, I'd make millions. Everything they write, even emails and Facebook comments, capture both thought and feeling. They know how to choose just the right words or turns of phrase to manipulate your emotions like puppetmasters. Moreover, they do actually have something to say, which makes their work about substance, not just form.

Sigh...I hate you.

Keeping in touch

It was in 1990, while taking my MS CS that I was introduced to the wonders of email. At the time, email was not widely available. In fact, as far as I knew, only people working or studying in universities (specifically the programs that needed computers) had email access. Therefore, I could only stay in touch with friends who, like me, were enrolled in some tech-related grad program.

If I wanted to touch base with family or less tech-enabled friends, I had to resort to old-school paper, pen and stamped envelopes or expensive long distance phone calls.

Soon enough, though, everyone had Internet access and email. I remember the indignation with which the scientific community greeted the first AOL newbies. It was funny.

Now, there is so much connectivity available and so many cheap ways in which to communicate that you can pretty much keep up to date with just about anyone, even people you don't really know that well. Instant messaging, text messaging, VOIP phones, Facebook, blogging--there are so many ways to keep in touch.

Thank God.

Horizons

I don't recall if I blogged about this before but a couple of years ago, I saw my entire life flash before me in an odd sort of way. There was one day when I spent part of my morning with a young faculty member needing some career advice (to be honest, I don't even remember who it was) and I spent the afternoon honoring people who were about to retire. The honorees were given a few moments to speak and they all began their speeches with, "I've been with the Ateneo for the last 32 years..." In that day, I saw myself at the beginning and at the end. And it struck me. It moved me. It disturbed me. Seeing how the story ends--and it's not a bad ending, mind you--I really started to wonder whether this is in fact ending I want for myself.

As an adult (so that's like, oh, the last six years of so) being with the Ateneo has been less about following a set path as it has been making deliberate choices at various forks. At each juncture, I chose to stay with the Ateneo for a variety of reasons, some more noble than others--shared values, convenience, intellectual freedom, a desire to contribute, etc. With each fork, the issues varied. The most recent fork as my term as chair drew to a close. I had written three grant proposals that, to me, were the determining factor of whether I would stay after my term or whether I would move on. I wasn't bargaining with God, mind you. My point was that the grants represented work that I felt I had to do in order for life in Ateneo to stay interesting. Without them, then it was back to routine. I wasn't going to be doing anything that the other faculty couldn't do as well or better. As luck would have it, I got all three, which keeps me in Ateneo until at least 2011.

What happens after the 2011 horizon is difficult to predict. Again, there are many factors to consider. I'm not sure how long I want to be in the publish-or-perish rat race. I think Computer Science is a young person's game. I think that when the younger faculty get their PhDs and start publishing and getting grants independently, maybe my work will be done. A friend here in Pitt suggested that at that point I could start building my research empire. Well, I'm not sure want an empire. And I really want to get that romance novel started...

Anyway, the next fork comes in 2011 and the road to then promises to be interesting.

Questioning authority

@Joseph: Thanks for your comment.

You make a very Confucian point. Some students engage in an argument with the teacher for the sake of getting into an argument, maybe they're bored. Some students use participation as a venue to show off. They want to show how much more they know, how much smarter, wiser or more capable they are. As a student, I've participated and I have been quiet. I have mocked and have been mocked. So I kind of know both sides. These are not the kinds of discussion I mean because these types are just plain annoying.

The kind of discussion that is delightful is the discussion that brings the learning forward. For example, during CS 21 A lab, people ask me questions all the time. They don't know how to change their workspace. They can't figure out a bug. They don't know how to use a for-loop. That's participation. That's discussion. It's respectful. It's not sipsip. It's appropriate and necessary. (Of course, this type of participation is very particular to our context and it does not transfer organically to the very lecture-based subjects like Philo or Theo.)

I think the bottom line, though, is that if your intention is to learn and have something to say, say it. If you have a question, ask it. Make your point or ask the question respectfully. And to hell with what other people think.

New dog

Our eldest chow chow, Chesa, is no longer in good health. Before I left for the US, she contracted leptospirosis. It was touch-and-go for about two weeks. She eventually recovered enough to get back to a somewhat normal routine but we know she's not her old self and will never be.

Redg and I have been discussing the possibility of getting a new dog. He wants to get two more chow chows. I'm ok with getting one, but for the second, I was thinking of trying out another breed. I want to avoid breeds with reputations for biting (though chows are like that)--so no rots or dobies or pitbulls. I've always loved BIG dogs and have always wanted a great dane or saint bernard.

(Pictures taken from the Web)

Redg asked, will they eat a robber who tries to break into our house?

I answered, one look at these dogs and do you really think the robber will wait to find out?

Congratulations, Beth!

I am very happy to announce that, after 5 revisions (to my count) Beth Anglo's dissertation proposal entitled, "Can Affect be Detected From System Interaction Data" has been approved!

My thanks to her panelists:

Dr. John Paul Vergara, DISCS, ADMU
Dr. Proceso Fernandez, DISCS, ADMU
Dr. Ryan S. Baker, Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon Univeristy
Dr. Genaro Rebolledo-Mendez, Serious Games Institute, University of Coventry

Please note that five revisions is not at all bad. The panelists agreed that the problem and method were dissertation-worthy ages ago. Approval was a process refining the methodology, of formative rather than summative evaluation. The proposal is much more robust now than it was when it started. Furthermore, the process has helped Beth make headway in her work.

Congratulations, Beth, and I look forward to your results!

New favorite

My all-time favorite type of junk food is plain salted potato chips. I recently came across a brand that is now my current favorite: Cape Cod Robust Russet.

Yum!

Feeding the troops

It's become a tradition of mine to give candy to my students after their program defenses. Apparently, I am not alone in my custom of feeding the troops. It's exam week here at CMU and there was a table of cookies laid out in Hamburg Hall:

I may do this when I get back. Hmm...

State vs. trait

To know people is to sometimes end up not liking them.

When people do things we don't like, we're taught to condemn the act but not the person. The act may have been forced by circumstance. It may have been intended well. It may have been misguided. It might have been a mistake.

Sometimes, though, the act stems from character--traits, priorities, world view, paradigm, values, the core that directs the person's intentions or actions. In cases like these I'm pretty sure we're allowed to maybe not condemn but maybe intensely dislike the person.

I have a few of those anti-favorites. I don't like philandering husbands or wives; gold-diggers; people who can't keep their commitments; people who don't think rules apply to them; people who are much too fresh or who take too many liberties; and there are others. When someone does something that speaks to character and I find that character ugly there's an emotional wall that goes up inside me that, well, takes far more energy to take down than to set up.

I try not to interact with these people because I don't have the maturity it takes to be civil to them for more than a few minutes at a time. I know that probably speaks to my character but well. I try very hard to keep my biases to myself and I generally do that through avoidance. I figure I do less harm this way.

Just don't expect them to be among my Facebook friends.

Choosing advisees

In recent years, I've been rather picky about the people I take on as thesis or dissertation advisees. I tend to advise people who are working on parts of my own projects. I don't like taking on one-off theses that don't feed into anything I'm doing or won't have a shelf-life beyond the thesis defense. I do take on some of those, mind you, out of necessity, but I'm not as involved in them as I am with my own stuff.

The one-off project people, I admit, get off a little easier because I give them more autonomy and basically just check to make sure that nothing heinous is going on.

I'm much stricter with the people who work on my stuff. They get access to more resources (read: books, grant money, travel, data, and my network of collaborators) but the situation also ends up being far more demanding. They have to deal with me being somewhat controlling of their direction and their writing because I am familiar with the current work in the field, I know where I want the research to go and because I insist on having at least one foreign scientist on the panel, someone with international expertise on the subject.

Working with me is not easy, but I hope that it's also not futile. Each individual work contributes to a larger picture, or at least that's the intention.

Favorite things

There are many people and things I miss from home but let me just mention two:

I miss my baby boy:

Redg says Xiao Long misses me, too. Can you tell from that picture?

And I miss my regular massages. I swear, if the single most trivial thing that might drive me to go home early is my hankering for a good massage.

Monitor envy

I'm all about envy nowadays.

When I got here, I was stunned to see that everyone--EVERYONE--had at least two monitors on their desk. The Alice team had THREE plasma-screen sized monitors per person. Sigh. But, I figured, they needed the equipment for their work and, really, what is it that I do that warrants more than one screen?

Well, with all the lit reviewing that I've been doing, my screen is feeling a little cramped. A PDF on the right and a Word file for notes on the left...I needed more space.

For the last six weeks, I'd been wondering about a monitor that was left all by its lonesome in my office. It's not being used. It just kinda sits there.

Finally, yesterday, I approached Michael Bett, the director of the PSLC, and asked for permission to use it. He said, Of course!

This morning, I launched my dual-monitor desktop and now I feel like I'm cooking with gas!

Measuring a life

Several years ago, I went to see the Philippine production of the musicale Rent. I didn't like the storyline (what storyline) but the vocal performances were fantastic. The one big song that everyone loves from Rent is Seasons of Love. It asks the question how do you measure a life and suggests that we measure it in love.

Well, in my case, I am measuring the time here in episodes of Gossip Girl and House; in number of papers written (2 so far) and amount of data yet-to-be processed (a lot); in number of meetings to attend (about one per day for this week); in number of people I have yet to meet before I go (at least three); in amount of money spent on essentials like food and warm socks and on things that make me happy (not to be revealed); in number of meals left in my freezer (good for about one week); and mostly in the number of days before I see Redg and Socorro again (12).

Socorro worries that counting down is not healthy for my spirits, but I assure her that it is. It adds to the anticipation and it underscores the importance of attending to the now because it all goes by so, so quickly.

And the countdown continues.

Panic phone calls

Each year, around late November or early December, I make tamales for my parents. The Filipino version of tamales is made with rice flour and coconut milk--very different from Mexican tamales. The process is long and complicated so I won't attempt to describe it here. I inherited my tamales recipe from my paternal grandmother; this is heirloom intellectual property.

Tamales-making this year hit an impasse as I am far, far away. My dad still wanted the event to proceed, though, so Redg, my hero, swooped in to save the day. He assembled the ingredients and started the process. It was really funny, though, because he kept calling me every few minutes to verify ingredients, proportions, and procedure. It was cute.

We should put a label on each tamales that says: Brought to you by AT&T and BayanTel.

An update on Asian food; Asking questions

In an earlier post, I admitted to a bias against Asian food in non-Asian countries. I have to amend my bias. Over the Thanksgiving break, my relatives treated me to lots and lots of Asian food: dim sum brunches, a Thai dinner, and even chicharon bulaklak (deep fried pork intestines). All American-made. All delicious. I enjoyed every single bite. My biases aren't completely gone but it's good to know there is always good food to be had pretty much anywhere you go.

***

To Alfred: I think part of the reason that students can't ask questions is because they aren't really attending to what we are teaching them. The people I've met here are paying attention and have a real desire to understand, right at that moment. I think our students figure that they won't get the concept during classtime and so they put off the understanding to right before the test.

That's just a theory, mind you. Maybe my students can comment?

Math envy

I have math envy. I wish I had taken stat, data mining, machine learning--all those different flavors of math that I just weren't options back when I was a student.

You can't attend a meeting or discussion here without being hit by "natural logarithm"-this or "A-prime"-that. They discuss modifications to the principal component analysis algorithm. Next week, there's a dude defending his dissertation on (if I understood this correctly) modifications to the SVM so that it can process multimedia data. And you know what? I actually want to attend it.

Oh and I learned a new word: ipsitive. It is an adjective that describes data taken repeatedly from the same source, i.e. repeated measures.

What is comforting, though, is that even the most senior attendees of these meetings do not know everything. They're forever interrupting presenters, asking for explanations of the many, many things that the don't understand. That, of course, is how they stay so smart.

Before I left Manila, I invested (as in I literally paid for) 20 hours of one-on-one stat tutorials. That was one of the best investments I ever made because everything I learned is being used to its maximum and there is still so much... When I get back, I'm going to sign up for at least 20 hours more. Me and the tutor are going to be real tight.

Ethnic identity

I was reading an article yesterday about affective factors that have an impact on computer science student achievement. Emotional intelligence, personal competency, trust in one's instincts, positive acceptance of change and control and spiritual influences are examples of non-cognitive predictors of learning outcomes.

One of the most interesting indirect predictors was something called "ethinic identity", defined as part of an individual's self-concept that is derived from his/her knowledge of membership in a social group, compounded by the value and significance the individual attaches to that membership." High ethnic identity lead to high emotional intelligence which then leads to higher achievement.

Ethnic pride can help students maintain happiness and better cope with stress. It makes some amount of sense, therefore, that ethnic pride leads to greater resistance to assimilation. A strong sense of identity and identification with a group raises barriers to identification with other groups. What this means for CS enrollment is that students who don't identify with the CS group and have a strong sense of ethnic identity with another group are likely to shift out.

Note that this does not necessarily mean that these students are low achievers. It just means that they don't feel that they belong.

The take home message for educators and student home orgs? If you want to keep your students, make sure they feel like they belong.

For more:

Lewis, T. L., Smith, W. J., Bélanger, F., and Harrington, K. V. 2008. Determining students' intent to stay in it programs: an empirical model. In Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGMIS CPR Conference on Computer Personnel Doctoral Consortium and Research (Charlottesville, VA, USA, April 03 - 05, 2008). SIGMIS-CPR '08. ACM, New York, NY, 5-11. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1355238.1355241

Technical terms

I attended Roger Azevedo's talk on recent research on self-regulation and metacognition. Dr. Azevedo was making that point that some student learning strategies were helpful while others were were not helpful. For example, he said, task difficulty was not helpful.

Task difficulty? What is "task difficulty"?

He answered, that's when the student just says, "This is hard."

Someone from the audience said, so that's like an indicator that the student is giving up?

He said, Yes, exactly.

Then, Jack Mostow chimed in saying, so the technical term for that is whining?

Who the...?

To Vader: Bobet, is that you???

Honestly, the acronym never occurred to me! But now that you mentioned it, I guess it is appropriate. Happy holidays to you, too!

Memories from the Mushroom Pit

To Virgil: Yup--good times. My one year in SBI helped crystalize 4 years of college education.

To Carlo: You were in prep??? Oh, gawd, now I really feel old!

Optimal negative affective states

One of the tricky aspects of studying affect in learning is that any affective state can be both positive and negative. There is a brand of confusion that is healthy because it denotes deep learning. When I once complained to a grad school professor of mine that I was perplexed, he said being perplexed was good because it implied that I was at the place where new things were happening. On the other end, students can also be hopelessly confused--they're stuck in a rut and don't know how to get out.

Frustration is particularly tricky. In entertainment, for example, you shouldn't make a goal too easy to attain or else there's no challenge. Indeed, frustration seems built into challenge. You try and fail and iteratively find your way to the right answer. Frustration is a sign that the field of options is narrowing. In a learning situation, I suppose frustation, like confusion, can turn hopeless. If no other options present themselves in the learning process, then students are stuck in a rut.

I guess the trick is to find an optimal level of negative affect to keep things interesting but not hopeless.