I happened to find a lot of stuff I like this morning, and I’m not sure where to post them, so here they are:
Hillary Nut Cracker and Bill Corkscrew
Review of SF Bay Area Winter Beers
Calabaration Syncs iCal and Google Cal
uTest: A new way to test your software
Ways Women Can Hold Their Own in a Mail Male Dominated Company
Now, there’s 2546 new comments on my blog…who wants to bet none of them are relevant to any of my postings?
Today is the BIG DAY! And as always, I like to talk about the very unique experience of voting in California. In no other state can any citizen put a proposition on the ballot, so today I, not only voted for the President of the United States, but I also voted on 12 State Propositions and 22 City Propositions. The # of Propositions was very overwhelming, so my roommate and I hosted friends over on Sunday night to sift through all of them to figure out how to vote. We accomplished the impossible; we educated ourselves on all of them. Some of the highlights:
I’m sure I’m missing some other important ones, but this was just meant to be a review! My notes were written down on one of many pieces of garbage (political mailings):
Onto the voting experience itself: I walked out this morning to find that the Tango Vida was open to offer free Dunkin Donuts (my fave) coffee to all passerbys.
I noticed that the line for the first voting station on my way to my own voting station was pretty busy at 8 in the morning. Lets note that most voting stations in San Francisco are in people’s garages!
Now onto my own voting station. I didn’t want to take a picture of the girl I’m about to talk about because of privacy, but let me just say this: San Francisco Public Schools are Failing our Children! I recognized these two girls from the primary election; they’re job is to locate each voter’s name on the list of voters and give us our ballots. Of course, the name are listed alphabetically by last name, and of course she has a problem finding T-A both times that I have voted. I literally have to lean over the table and point out my name to her. And of course, my neighbor walks in and gives her last name, and the girl has a problem again: M-C-G…come on, really?
Once you get your ballot, you have to wait in line until there is a “secret-voting-desk” to actually cast your vote.
But, so many people were excited to vote that, to speed up the process, people began using the washer and dryer in the garage as tables on which to vote. I voted on top of a washing machine! Literally!:
Voting in California is not like voting in Pennsylvania. Voting in Pennsylvania requires pulling a bunch of levers on a 1970’s-esque robotic-arm machine behind a curtain. Voting in California entails coloring in a bunch of arrows next to the politicians’ names you want to vote for, or in the case of Propositions, next to Yes or No for each one.
After you fill out your multiple sheets of propositions and politicians, you have to feed each sheet into a machine. It’s like feeding $1 or $5 bills into a change machine. When I first arrived, I already saw a man having a problem feeding his ballot in, and a co-worker just told me that his polling place had serious enough problems to require emergency assistance.
The best part of voting, of course, is getting your “I Voted” sticker, which for California comes in multiple languages! With this sticker you can go get yourself a free cup of coffee from Starbucks, a free ice cream cone at Ben and Jerry’s and a free donut at Krispy Kreme. Nothing like the most patriotic duty of it all (voting) to encourage more patriotism (consumerism)!
Happy Voting to All, and to all a great day!
That’s it. I hate the spam and probably get 10-15 spam comments everyday.
Just watched this video this morning and I wanted to share with anyone that comes across this blog. It’s absolutely hilarious and worth the 5 minutes. Don’t miss the part where the narrator says:
“everytime barack obama speaks an angel has an orgasm”
Enjoy! And Digg!
read more | digg story
A couple months ago I started receiving Glamour magazine at work and had no idea why. Was this a cruel joke? I don’t really like getting these magazines because they have women I don’t look like, clothes I don’t want to buy and advice not worthy of my ears. In general, I think these magazines make women feel bad about themselves, and make women ascribe to certain values that are not important in our current times.
A good friend of mine, someone particularly special to me, Clare Ondrey, took the initiative to start a petition on the website ThePoint.com. Please join!
You can read more by following the links in this badge, or read about Clare and her initiative on Jezebel.
I want to thank Amir Mizroch, News Editor at The Jerusalem Post, for his website, Forecast Highs. I began today a little stressed as I need to rethink my research proposal, and I was happy to find his website when searching IDF, information security, YouTube & Facebook. I found a few interesting articles, here, here and here, that could help me better develop my proposal.
The first article addresses the fact that classified military information has made its way onto Facebook & YouTube. Mizroch hypothesizes that its due to a certain sense of ego & machismo from soldiers wanting to brag about their experiences. I can only relate slightly, as I do still have a picture of me in IDF’s Gadna, a bootcamp for teenagers, in fatigues with an M-16 : )
The questions that come to me first are not necessarily “why” soldiers are compelled to post, but what happens to them? the content? and the consequences? Does the IDF have any mechanism in place to regulate online content? And, even if they do, with all the content sharing websites out there, outside of Facebook & YouTube, would a regulatory committee be enough?
The “why” now comes after. Is it really a selfish need to feed the ego that drives soldiers to post content that’s classified? Do they even know that it is not permissible? And if they know its not permissible are they taking a risk for the adrenaline or because they see it filling a greater objective? …and then, what is that objective? I could hypothesize that possibly one man publishes classified content because he wants to put Israel and the army at risk, but I do not know if this is true.
One thing that comes to mind is a problem that plagued many high schoolers and college students when they first joined Facebook. They did not really understand who their audience was and who could see what they posted. I often find now that I am able to access photo albums belonging to people I am not friends with, in networks I don’t belong to, in countries I don’t live in. Do these people know who can access their content? And, if they do, are they choosing to make it accessible?
To help high schoolers and college students, education institutions began instructing students about the site during orientation sessions. Does IDF do this for its soldiers? If it doesn’t, and it is clearly needed, what would that course look like?
My Dad has been telling me this my entire life: In order to be outstanding, you have to be willing to stand out. Well, that’s what I did the past couple days. I sent my project statement for my Fulbright out to the professors that said they were willing to write me recommendation letters. As soon as I sent them out, I got this huge rush of adrenaline, followed by intense nerves. Did what I send represent quality work on my part, or was it crap?
Well, more the latter than the former. A friend, from a field outside Information Sciences, said it was enjoyable to read, and a friend from within the field said it wasn’t total crap,and was a good draft to work from
One professor said I had a long shot and this project wasn’t something US taxpayers should be paying for and the other said it wasn’t at par with the quality of my other work.
So what do I need to do? Scope, scope, scope. Right now, I’m on Fulbright Take 2. I bookmarked a bunch of articles pertaining to the IDF and Information Security issues. I’m hoping to hone in on issues like that of Gilad Shalit and supporters posting his photo as their avatar, as well as IDF’s proposal for rules pertaining to proper internet conduct.
The journey begins…again. 1 month to go.
Anyone that knows me knows that Child Overweight is a passion of mine. Having grown up overweight myself (I peaked at 173, 4′10″ at the age of 14), I find it so heart breaking to see child overweight spreading around the country. I know the consequences can be attributed to American culture and consumerism, as well as socio-economic status, micro-cultures and race; I know these things from my own research in developing a product for overweight children. You can read the paper here.
I battled through many hard ships (sorry, no pics, this was before digital cameras) to be the person that I am today, but it sure was not easy. I, thankfully, had the help of financially-able parents who were able to send me to Camp Pocono Trails. I also was able to join the tennis team and the wrestlerettes in high school, and eventually obtained my Group Exercise and Personal Training certification from AFAA.
So in today’s NYTimes there is an article about 12 year old Tiffany that won an essay contest so that she could attend CPT free this summer. She’s lost almost 50 lbs, and that is fantastic for this 5′0″ 300+ lb little girl. My heart really goes out to her, because no matter how overweight any child is, the emotional and psychological affects of growing up overweight can be so hard to shed, even until adult life.
But the question in the article is really about whether the government or health insurance should subsidize camps like CPT. And, as an alumni (both as a camper and counselor), my gut reaction is not a resounding yes, but a tentative maybe. I say this because while I turned out okay, I have seen way too many campers who have not. If you have watched the MTV specials on CPT, you know that many campers lose weight in the summer, only to gain in back during the year, so that they can repeat the cycle again next summer.
It’s possible that campers that take this camp for granted are also those that know their parents can afford to send them back the following summer. So campers like Tiffany might not gain the weight back. because they don’t know for sure if they can come back next year. But that is really dependent on the transition her mother facilitates for her upon her return home and back to school.
A friend’s sister went to camp while I was a counselor, and she worked very hard to lose the 20-30lbs she lost in the 8 weeks she was there. Her parents obviously sacrificed a lot to send her to camp (it is very expensive) but I couldn’t help but drop my jaw when they picked her up with a trunk full of sugar-filled Snapples. I said to the mother, who was overweight herself, “Why do you even have that around your daughter?” and she said “This is for my husband, not for my daughter.” The parents can really make or break the future success of weight loss for their children. To add to this, no one, fit or naturally thin, should be drinking sugar filled drinks! But, believe me, I have many more stories just like this. How can parents think a young teenager can self regulate and restrict? It’s only bound to create more problems.
When I look back at my journey as a child and teenager to try to lose weight, I can’t help but think that if I was only made to commit to a sport league when I was younger, and if my family ate more consistent and healthy meals together, that the food and weight would be less of an issue. In our research, my team and I found that children want to be active, they really do. But, in our age of video games, tv and movies, and where parents are using these to babysit their children while they do other things, the thought that our children want to be playing and to be active seems revolutionary.
So while I do think government subsidies for programs like weight-loss camps or dance-dance revolution for gym class are important for the immediate future, I think that with an “all hands in” mentality, families can help their children succeed in a much cheaper and easier way.
Its been a long time coming, and it is finally here. My former research adviser and always mentor Bob Glushko has finally taken on all of his research and created an end-to-end design course to be taught at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley.
Here’s the syllabus!
As you can see, yours truly (along with Prof Glushko) is featured as the first reading. You can find “Bridging the Front Stage and Back Stage of Service Design” here.
I found this JPG on Digg (the original) and loved it. Probably have had this conversation at least 30 times in my life.
