Hi all, here are notes on the MIT reunion 2006. It's probably going to turn into a general blog on education at MIT. I'll be adding more over the next few months, so check back every now and then (or tell me how to add RSS to twiki).

I'll be at MIT about once every month or two as part of the "Self-Appointed Visiting Social Systems Hacker" Program.

IHTFP (Friday)

In Cambridge, for the MIT 15th reunion. Lots of feelings, mostly pain and anger. I'm reminded of the Dixie Chicks song "not ready to make nice." The thing that I'm still angry after 15 years is being lied to as an undergraduate. The two lies that I was told was that "MIT wants undergraduates who are well-rounded in the both the sciences and the humanities" and "there will be a lot of job openings for physics professors in a few years." They weren't malicious lies, but they were lies nevertheless.

In the first case, it turns out (as I found out applying to graduate schools) was that people who are well rounded in the sciences and the humanities have trouble getting into graduate school. It was both painful and humiliating to see my peer group getting into the big name physics graduate schools, and me getting rejection letters because I put a lot of effort into learning the humanities. My grades were not horrible, but I was getting B's rather than A's. What this does is favor people who are put a huge amount of effort and focus into physics to the exclusion of all else. One has to wonder if this is a good thing.

The second lie was that there would be a shortage of physics professors when the Sputnik generation retires. When the Sputnik generation either didn't retire or they retired and then there positions were closed.

The thing that is annoying about the second lie is that MIT STILL is telling a variant of them by issuing reports that there is a shortage of science and engineers in the United States. There isn't. There is a massive oversupply (or massive underdemand) of scientists.in the United States. One suggestion I have for the NSF is the next time they issue a blue ribbom report *try to get someone that has tried to find a physics job in the last few years*.

The irony is that had I been told the real situation, I probably would have made the same decisions, but I would have been less traumatized than I ended up being. It took a while for me to realize that I wasn't broken, and that what was broken was the academic and scentific system. Part of what helped in this realization was all of the humanities and social science stuff that I did, that got me graduate school rejection letters.

And to be fair to MIT, the lies it tells are nowhere as prenicious as the one the University of Texas at Austin tells its science freshmen and sophomores which is "you are too stupid to be a mathematician or a physicist" where as the truth is "we are too stupid to figure out how to figure out how to teach large numbers of people to be mathematicians and physicists and also too stupid to figure out what to do with all of these people once we have taught them."

26-100 - Addicted to physics (Saturday)

Took my kids to see some physics demonstrations in 26-100. It was a little scary seeing how fascinated they were at the pendulums and the Faraday cage. I showed the the junior lab, and talked about all of the cool experiments that one could do. That evening in the hotel, they were all excited and trying to get me to show them how to do some simple algebra problems.

I'm trying not to let my cynicism infect them. Telling them what physics and academia really is like is like letting them know about the non-existence of the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. Besides, I have about ten years or so before they enter college, and if I've done anything correctly, it will be less bad for them.

One of the things that amused me is the sign in front of the problem set turn in boxes that says "TAKE TIME TO SLEEP." It's amusing and a little scary because one the persistent frictions I have with my wife is that she thinks that I don't sleep enough. She's right, I don't.

I'm pretty sure that if you look at what goes on in my head when I solve a nasty partial differential equation or fix a bug, and a crack addicts head when he inhales cocaine vapors or shoots up with heroin, you'll find the same dopamine receptors and neural pathways being activated, and unfortunately you have an academic system that can result pretty devasting personal costs.

There are two things that keep me sane. One is a wife that gets very, very, very annoyed if I don't sleep enough. She grew up on a farm, and thinks that my sleep habits are unhealthy (and she's right). The other interestingly is the amount of social and humanities that I picked up. It gives me the sort of self-reflection (i.e. why do I really want to be a physics professor? what are the ethics involved to be a physics professor? what is the correct balance between work, family, and health?).

The other thing that humanities training gave it is the confidence and arrogance to question the power structure. A lot of what happens in academia and other hierarchies of power is that they are able to get other people to accept their own shortcomings (i.e. the problem is that you can't learn physics not that we can't teach it.) I've gotten old enough to realize that this is nonsense. I'd make a damn good astrophysics professor and a damn good quant. The reason that I'm not a professor or a quant is what the power structure terms a "lack of commitment" (i.e. an unwillingness to play by their rules), and having some humanities background allows me to come to the conclusion that their rules are often stupid, and that the "right" thing to have happen is for "them" to change to accomodate me rather for "me" to change to accomodate them.

The nice thing about this is in both the cases of business, politics, and academia there are objective measures of success. In business it's bottom line profits. In politics, it's implementing your political programs and keeping your opponents from implement theirs. In academia, success is harder to measure but "you know it when you see it." In all three cases, if someone can give me a cogent argument how the system as it is produces success, I'll change my views and "get with the program," but I've found that when people actually have that discussion they find it really hard to defend the system.

I suppose that's one of the differences between being 21 and 36. Over the last 15 years, I've seen enough cases of total "power system incompetence" that I'm not going to back down just because the power system says they know what they are doing, because its clear that sometimes that just don't.

The other thing that I have at 36 that I didn't have at 21 is resources. I have letters after my name, money in the bank, and lines of credit.

If at 18, I say that the academic system is a mess and physics undergraduates should sleep more and weed out classes are fundamentally a sign of academic incompetence on the part of the teachers, well then "that's nice but you really don't know what you are talking about." If I go to an job interview, and tell a company that their hiring practices are silly and that they are being self-destructive, "well then, that's nice but you are being unreasonable."

At 36, people can't make those arguments, or if they do, it doesn't matter. One of the main things that kept me going in graduate school was the knowledge that if I dropped out, I'd be marked as a "loser" and none of my complaints would be taken seriously. The same goes true for doing quant puzzles or learning STL. If you can't compute these things, well you just aren't smart enough so shut up about how the job interviews are silly.

We know what we are doing, you don't, so shut up.

Well now. I now have the letters in the back of my name, I've got code that says that I can program finite differences in C++.

I'm still talking. What's your excuse now for not listening.

Now take a deep breath, and I need tell myself that if I find myself in the old power structure or in the middle of a new power structure, not to ever, ever forget all of the bad stuff that happened to get there, and to never, never yield to the temptation to inflict damage now that one can.

Usefulness of a humanities background, once again.....

IH Harvard even more than TFP (Saturday before Tech conference)

Here is a fun trick if you ever are in Cambridge. Get off on Massachusetts Avenue in from MIT. Walk to Memorial Drive and walk toward the West. What do you see? A big flat plain of grass. Now get back on the number one bus, ride up Massachusetts Avenue to Harvard Square. Walk north. What do you see? A fence.

For all of the complaints I have about MIT, it's going to have a much easier time to deal with the 21st century than Harvard, and that bit of architecture is why.

There is a basic difference between power based on technical excellence, and power based on social relationships. Suppose I want to convince you that I'm a brilliant C++ programmer or a brilliant string theorist so that you give me money and power. The obvious way for me to do this is to write a C++ program or author a paper on string theory, and have you evaluate it. This poses a problem if you don't know C++ or string theory. However, the more people that know some basic C++ or string theory, the more people there are that can recognize brilliant code, and the more money and power accrue to me. (This assume that I really am a brilliant C++ coder or string theorist. If I'm merely pretending to be one, then that I really have problems.)

Knowledge is not a limited resource, and the more people have technical skills and get exposed to MIT, the more people will realize that it really is a cool place and that translates into wealth, power, and influence. The less mysterous MIT makes its education, and the more transparent MIT is the more wealth, power, and influence it has.

Now suppose, my power is based on an exclusive brand. Then the more people who share that brand, the less powerful I become. The more people understand what goes on inside, and the secret codes and handshakes, the less powerful I become. So it is in my interest to increase the mystique of the place, to make people in awe of it, and to separate the elite from everyone else.

Social connections are limited resources.

The trouble with this is that the internet makes this more transparent and makes it harder to enforce exclusivity. I think MIT is going to thrive in this environment. Harvard is going to have serious problems, and it should. (And it's not a conincidence that the internet and open source came from MIT and not Harvard, or why there is a public blog on the MIT reunion, and not Harvard.)

These sorts of basis of power have huge social ramifications. If power is based on mass distribution of technical knowledge then I want as many people as possible to get exposed to the knowledge. You want every to be a have. If power is based on creating a small number of have's and keeping out the have not's, then you end up with a very, very stratified society.

And stratified socities are very unpleasant to live in. Chances are that you are a have not. But even if you are a have, you are in constant fear or being a have not. And if you don't know, then there is a nasty game of musical chairs in which everyone tries really hard to get into the have queue.

And you start building fences and hiring gatekeepers.

This is not the type of world I want to live in, and fighting against a world in which a few people are haves and everyone else is a have not is one of the reason the William Barton Rogers moved from Virginia to Massachusetts to start MIT around the time of the Civil War.

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/heq/45.1/angulo.html

I hate fences, and I hate barriers whether it is the fence outside Harvard yard or the one they are talking about building with Mexico. I hate gatekeeping, whether its the old man that checks the ID at the Science Building Library or the border agent that stands between Brownsville and Matomoros.

Let them in. Let them all in.

And if you can't let them all in, fix things so you can.

It's nice to be back.... (Sunday)

The thing that has been most nice about the reunion is a reaffirmation of values which I hold and which MIT shares, but which the rest of the world does not. There are things like openness, originality, curiosity, technical competence, a willingness both to take and receive constructive criticism, and a strong commitment to egalitarianism which had been challenged.

These values are not shared by the rest of the world, including much of the business world. I worked for a while somewhere where curiosity, a willingness to share information, and constructive criticism were punished, and in order to stay sane and meet my mortgage payments, I had to shut off parts of my brain. I spent quite a bit of time looking for a job on Wall Street, which doesn't have a commitment to open information, and which has what I find to be a distasteful fascination with school pedigree. One does what one has to do to survive, but it's refreshing to be somewhere, where I don't have to fight the system or shut off parts of my brain. A torrent of observations and ideas are coming out of my mind, and I think it will take weeks if not months to sort through them all.

The other thing that I found refreshing is a willingness to admit that the MIT curriculum has some fundamental problems and that a rethink is necessary. I'd go further and say from my point of view, the entire academic system is broken, and everything needs to be rethought. What happens in these situations is that people think that they are asking fundamental questions when they aren't.

Let me give you an example....

The reason I didn't go out for a post-doc was that when my wife was pregnant with our first kid, I was at a Baby's R' Us being utterly depressed because we couldn't afford any of the stuff in the store on a graduate student's salary. My kids don't deserve this, and I don't deserve this.

Now my kids looked at the physics demonstrations at the reunion and they are totally enthused about science and math. I spent that evening teaching my eight and six year old some basic algebra, and explaining the basics of simple harmonic motion. They think that MIT is a playground and they want to go back. Wonderful!!!!

Now, I don't want to be telling my kids ten years from now that to get into MIT they have to go through some BS elite university admissions process. I've seen the non-sense that both parents and kids have to go through in order to get into an "elite" university, and its disturbing. I also don't want my kids to get in because I got in. That's just wrong. If I have to compromise my principles to get what my kids deserve, of course I'll do it, but I won't if I don't have to.

The question that I want to ask is instead of tweaking the admissions process, lets ask ourselves why we have an admissions process at all. What keeps MIT from touching the lives of merely thousands of young men and women, but billions? Not everyone can live in Cambridge? Who says we have to have full time students. Maybe the whole concept of the undergraduate student is obsolete. Maybe my kids can register at Austin Community College and come to MIT for one week training sessions or summer programs. If it's good enough for CEO's, why not 18 year old. Maybe 18.01 and 18.02 can be beamed worldwide via satellite. Maybe one can set up thousands of satellite MIT's. I don't know the answer. But finding the right answers involves first asking the right questions. Should MIT even offer degrees at all? What can MIT learn from University of Phoenix and Capella University? What can MIT teach UoP^? and Capella? What partnerships can MIT form with community colleges? two-year technical universities? public universities?

What is a degree? What's an undergraduate? What's an alumni? What's a professor? What's a teacher? What's a student?

The good news is that I don't think MIT is afraid of asking these fundamental questions, because "we have an admissions process to keep the riff-raff out and to maintain our brand identity" is not an answer that is consistent with MIT's core values. What happens when you do get a threat to core (if unstated) values, is that you come up with pseudo-answers that keep you from thinking deeper. I've seen time and time again the statement "it can't be done" which really means "we want to assume that it can't be done because the consequences of doing it are too disturbing."

That's what will happen if Harvard and Princeton asks that question, but that's not how I think MIT will react. Eventually they'll come around, but the time they spend fighting their cultural instincts means that they will be following MIT's dust.

MIT and the Long War (Sunday)

One thing that was missing from President Hochfield's speech was the role of MIT in the Long War. Some of MIT's finest hours were given in the service of fighting World War II and the Cold War. We are now a world at war, but I haven't heard much said about MIT's role in this war.

It's not explicit, but it is implicit. The basic driver for the Long War is poverty in the third world, and elimination of poverty is not merely a nice humanitarian thing to do, but it is the basic technological, economic, and managerial challenge in winning the Long War.

And don't underestimate our adversaries....

One thing that came up in the side conversation at the Technology Day conference was how incredibily gifted people are in the developing world at making devices. It is amazing the amount of technical skill that people display in trying to solve practical problems.

And the thought occurred to me, how sad it is that these brilliant skills are being used to manufacture improvised explosive devices, send out scam e-mails, to hack machines to steal credit card numbers, and to use box cutter knives to bring down skyscrapers.

If we (the good guys) don't figure how a way to get these clever, intelligent, brilliant minds on our side, there is plenty of work that the bad guys have for them.

This relates to two of the speakers at the the technology forum. One of them mentioned that one of the lessons of environmental science is that "all systems leak" that chemicals end up everywhere. At that point, I was thinking about the fact that there are tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium sitting out there. The other was on using nanotechnology to cure diseases. It was a wonderful optimistic talk, but I'm sure that the bad guys have some pretty interesting ideas for nanotechnology.

Why I almost didn't come here.... (Sunday)

Why am I the only undergraduate physics major graduated in the 1980's and 1990's here at the reunion? The other thing that worries me is how few people in the list of attendees had a "Dr." in front of their name.

That really bothers me because one of the ways you create knowledge is by creating community, and if there isn't a bunch of recently graduated course eight majors here, there isn't knowledge creation. One of useful bit of information would be to simply get a bunch of early career course eight majors together and see what they are doing. I'd be really interested in seeing what people are doing, how they are balancing work and family, what they think of the academic system.. etc... etc... etc....

So the next question is why I almost not come here.....

The main thing is that it is expensive. I have to dip into my home equity line of credit to get the $2K it takes to come here. The much bigger expense is time. I have to take a few days of vacation time (which is enormously precious) to come here.

It's also painful and potentially humilating. Being a college student is a difficult time and there are a lot of painful memories of things that happened between 1987 and 1991. The nightmare coming here was that I'd find myself in a room full of young enthusiatic tenure track faculty, talking about the wild and cool research they are doing. It would be just like in Spring of 1991 finding out that I was the only one in the room that couldn't get into Harvard or Princeton graduate school.

So my working hypothesis is that a course 8 graduating in 1991 is either working as a software programmer somewhere and doesn't want to be reminded that they aren't tenure track, or they are either post-doc or tenure track and they don't have the time, money, or energy to come.

(Hint for alumni office: One thing that you can do is to do a data analysis of who did come by year and course. I'm sure that this would be a VERY revealing diagram. This idea comes from studies of the Chinese political bureaucracy which are really interesting.)

As far as some fires that I want to light....

1) One of the questions that the speaker on environmental studies had was why students didn't take environmental courses. I can answer that. I did a lot to make myself well-rounded, and I got severely punished by graduate school admissions committees.

2) I need to be start convincing people in the Open Courseware project to convince faculty to license their course and lecture notes under something like the GNU Free Documentation License which allows people to cut and paste and create derivative works. The problem is that without a piece of paper saying that people have permission to copy or create derivative works, there is no "clear title" and this makes it impossible for the armies of people to rework, improve, adapt, copy edit, peer review, translate, and index the articles.

The final arbiter of what license to put OCW material should be the faculty member, and if a faculty member really doesn't want to put something under an open source license, they should have that right. However, I think the main issue is that people aren't aware of how much a barrier "clouded title" is to creating massively collaborative works.

(The analogy which should be familiar to people in third world development is Hernando de Soto's ideas on how people in developing countries remain poor because their title to land is clouded. More generally there is a deep connection with between agricultural property rights and intellectual property rights.

One big problem in the third world is that the "toilers of the fields" really often don't get very much return from their efforts and the money goes to the wealthy landowners. It's interesting that its very rare for a scientist to make any money publishing textbooks, but the publishers are making beaucoup bucks.

When I look at the code I've checked into QuantLib^?, I imagine a tiny private garden that a peasant makes as opposed to a tenant paying huge amounts of rent to a landlord. It's not only morally questionable, it's also highly economically inefficent. Right now, there is some old petrophysical software that is wasting away, that I can do something useful with, but I can't because I don't own the copyrights and the company that does is too utterly incompetent to do anything useful with it.

I think the reason people don't make this connection is that it is too disturbing to think about.)

3) The other insight I think I can bring is *do not define education reform in terms of what is in the course list*. The course list is a SACRED DOCUMENT whose main purpose in any university is to distribute status, power, and money among faculty. (And the equation in academia is indeed status -> power -> money.)

It has very little to do with the educational process, and referring to the list of courses in any discussion about education will destroy any chances you have of getting anything useful done.

The other problem is the rachet effect. It is much easier to put something in the course list than to take something one. So the easy political compromise is to put something in, but not take anything out. This is wonderful for the departments since it avoids nasty political fights, but it means with you end up with overworked students and zero flexibility.

4) The problem isn't money. It's time and status. From a money standpoint, it should be possible for scientists work part-time to fund themselves, use that money to pay for their living expenses, and then do research on the side. The trouble is that people are just not use to that idea.

To do what the research I want to do, I don't need money. I have a job that takes care of that. What I need is a title that I can show my boss and my wife so that I can get time to do research, and a database that has my name in it so that I can put that title on my resume. I need a broom closet that I can call my office, and an e-mail address.

(raw notes)

Raw notes on MIT Tackles Global Challenges

President Hockfield

Architecture open flow of information between buildings. Two important themes for MIT. Energy. Convergence between life sciences and engineering.

Energy. Report of Energy Research Council with forum laid out framework for next step. Energy club. Eight hundred people talking about forum. A lot of enthusianism. What can MIT bring to energy.

* combination of economics, urban design, effective collaboration with both government and industry, * major technological obstacle to alternative energy is battery power * new technology for photovoltaics * nuclear power - number of majors in NE 20 to 55 - CO2 emmissions

Convergence of life sciences and engineering

* combination of physics and engineering in the 1930's and 1940's -> rad-lab * biology -> molecular genetics * Vassar + Ames street <-> Great circle - (goes through architecture) caludron of collaboration - 145 biotech industry - 10 minute walk MGH

Education and the world. Challenges -> work expensive -> Federal support less -> spends a day a month in Washington in competition with schools which with higher endowments

Charge to graduates - Information army - Transmit values that MIT holds to other communities. Leadership common good. Integrity. Pursuit of truth, and values of hard work. Inspire generation with possibility and opportunity for the future. We need to kindle in others with the love of truth and problem solving. Share the news and the passion.

Questions -> Assumption that MIT are Manhattan project but how do you scale things to the right size. Open our doors. Answer: One solution, but all possible solutions.

Question: How do you narrow between tenured and talented amateur. Open courseware

A liberal education at MIT

(Wow as far as

Please help us change.

Cultural change - big and scary

please listen

be afraid

have hope

explain and story

2.70 introduction to design

gracious professionalism

2.70(2.007) alive and well

Dean Karen

market pull

Societies get the best of what the celebrate Drunk on celebity Maize Craze

100,000 high school FIRST events

FIRST lego league FIRST vex challenge

Scholarship

robots and gracious (YES!!!!)

cultural

MIT and "noveau nerd pride"

however

Careers of Alumni of the MIT

ME Graduate 1992-1996

Professional skills - not learned at MIT ME core

learned and not used learned but seldom used

right stuff? learned?

have hope

loud/cloud/signals

The world is tilted

watch behind you

Pink architechure

Olin College

down the river? - Harvard has $20 billion

many innovatie programs

Leadership center 20+ international programs

"presence" for education

other methods for training

Learning PDE is training

most efficient model?

we pretend we learn what they say.

cover it all -> bury all

Direct experience

Active learning

do with over talk about

"woodit flowers" "new media"

"drapers labs for learning