Day 6

With my wife back in Japan for a couple of weeks on family business, and me at home with the kids, I'm at my halfway point. In time, that is. I have a whole new level of respect for people to have to go it alone full time.

Some not-so-new observations, always worth reminding yourself:
* There's no such thing as a free lunch. You feed kids sugary snacks and let them watch DVD's for a while, you'll pay for that short-term peace and quiet, many times over.
* Kid's videos are *unbelieveably* inane. Kid's music designed to be memorable for kids becomes torturous in your memory if you listen to it a few times. Prototypical example: Barney the Dinosaur and the "Happy Family" song.
* McDonalds (with Playland) should always be the last resort. Save it for hot days when you're exhausted, don't feel like cooking, and there's absolutely nothing for them to do. There will be enough of those days in the summer without wimping out when you're not already at wit's end.
* Kids probably don't need that last spin on the tire swing, no matter how much they think they do. Not even the last two or three spins if there have been any cookies in the recent past.

I've started reading for fun again, or for sanity, depending on how you look at it. Of course, not just one book at a time, but several. Mostly, it's "Freakonomics" and "Ringworld's Children". The former has the feel of a Parade sunday supplement, but the writers do actually have the credentials to back it up. The latter... I feel almost obligated to read each installment: they pop up once a decade since the original "Ringworld" novel appeared in 1970.

Freakonomics, on the other hand, is a relatively quick read if you've done economics and public policy coursework-- it's a pure digest of stats, theory, and policy. Counterintuitive, maybe. Well-researched-- presumably so, though I'm personally too lazy to dig that far into summer reading. But I finished the book in about three readings. Among the findings: most of your contributions in parenting are genetic. Everything else is a correlation, though not necessarily a causality between parenting and "successful" kids. (However, they don't seem to measure their happiness.) I suppose there's still roon to screw up, but not reading "Goodnight Moon" one night isn't going to cost your kids Harvard. OTOH, neither will that Wiggles DVD. Maybe there's still hope. :)

Now to start with the *other* projects I planned to finish in the next week. Like installing 3 more window a/c units...

The War on Privacy Continues

I ran across this in the morning in Government Computer News: Too much for NSA to mine?. A little look at whether the NSA can actually *use* any of the data it's collecting on American phone calls. Yes, it is the same government that can't keep the potholes patched that is collecting highly invasive data that it cannot even use to detect terrorists. In addition to flaws in its basic premise (it only detects recent electronic communications for starters) its approach in social network analysis means extremely high computational demands, beyond existing technology in performing real time analysis against all accumulated historic data.

So the problem is this: government cannot use the data in real time as needed to perform the stated task of detecting communication patterns that might indicate terrorist activity. In that, it's presumably Middle Eastern Islamic terrorists from al-Qaeda who presumably are linked to other people who communicate with locations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

We're not apparently trying to detect domestic environmental terrorists, organized crime, or just people cheating on their spouses. You can't pull that just from phone networks. Even so, for any analytic model to work, you'd have to create digital profiles of every person living in the United States. You can't even get phone service without a credit report. How about buying a computer? You have to either buy with cash or a credit card. Cash? How are you going to move around a lot of cash without using the banking system, that tracks and reports large flows of money? No point talking about credit cards here.

Your birth certificate, driver license, postal mailing address, marriage records, tax forms, and any other legal documents are online and available for building a profile about you. Without a profile, calling logs are meaningless. How else would the NSA know whether you're calling your Mom, your friends, your secret mistress, or the leader of a terror cell?

And it misses another fundamental truth about terror cells: the so called "sleeper cells" do not communicate at all. Not until it's time to act, and at that point, the links will be too brief and too quick to ever detect in the enormous noise that is the casual chatter of modern life. The War on Terror isn't against people like us, clutching Blackberries, cell phones, and incessantly chatting away like teenagers getting ready for the prom. It's against the fundamentalist fanatics who we (the CIA) trained and armed in a decade-long insurgency against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, without the benefits of our little electronic gadgets.

But without protocols to guarantee rapid destruction of this compiled chatter in our daily lives, this data will live on through the years, and form the basis of an oppressive personal scrutiny that the Soviet Union could have only dreamed of. You cannot analyze all the data in memory simultaneously, but you can easily mine it for individuals, offline, when it suits your purposes.

Cleaning like a madman

At the end of the semester, my house is an absolute mess. About the only household duty I stay on top of is kid stuff.. making sure they're fed, clean, off to school, and all that other stuff. Then there's everything else that's been neglected for a while, like laundry, the kitchen, the bathrooms, floors, etc. Not bad enough to merit a call to County Services, but it's still a long way away from being visitor-friendly. (Ok, it's about college-student clean, the end-of-semester, forget-about-your-deposit level of cleanliness.) Until last weekend, that is.

As of Friday, I turned into a fiendish cleaning machine. It's got a long way to go, including the fact the entire kitchen needs to be emptied, fixed, and selectively restocked. A lot of the stuff from the basement is now in the garbage. But it's a huge relief. (Want to know why guys don't clean until everything is absolutely filthy and disgusting? Because when you do clean, it looks like a heroic accomplishment.)

And the laundry-- I did a few loads a day for a few days. It's hard to believe that a human less than 3 feet tall can generate so much dirty laundry, but it's true. But it's all done. For now, that is.

Forget all the papers written this semester (150 pages, maybe?). I know what I *really* accomplished this Spring: about 120 loads of laundry, 90 loads of dishes and cleared 20 square feet of basement floor. Damned if I knew what I have to show for the rest of it. :)

It's the end of the work as we know it...

I finished my last required class *ever*. In the fall, I might take some elective about Reserach Methods, because I'm told it's a good idea to do so. That, and it's good to stay in contact with the rest of the PhD community and faculty, in some way. Learning is a social event, in many ways.
I may or may not have passed my exam question. We all had to retake one question, due to some issues with the exam, and being just physically unable to write fast enough to write more than 10 pages within a 3-hour exam period. And I ain't talking about blue book pages, either-- ten typed pages, single spaced, as in the days of yore.
Now it's research time, starting with my fun little 40 page literature review. In some manner, I've gathered a lot of material already-- I'm guessing about one-third to one-half the total articles needed before lining up at the chalk line for the official start of the dissertation. I can't formally start until I've passed this retaken question, the General Comprehensive Exam in August, and written some kind of publishable paper on Group Decionmaking or something like that. *Then* I can formally start the process.
Or in other words, it's my way of saying thanks for four semesters of almost killing msyelf under work, research, and keeping up a household. So rather than dwell on the negative, here are some positives:
* I watched my kids grow up over two years from toddlers into little kids, been home to see them leave for school and return home, schedule permitting. Had we stayed in New York, there would be days I wouldn't have seen them at all.
* A home of my own, not a cramped, crappy apartment a third the size and almost double the cost of a full mortgage.
* The chance to pursue a life goal, and a dream, instead of being trapped in a dead end career. (Ok, I got pretty far, but it was still the end of the line-- the same thing until retirement, like colleagues who'd been doing the same damn job as me for 20+ years.)
* Teaching. I'm wrapping up my third class, and it has been a good experience for me. Hopefully for my students too. At least one former student implied that my class helped her get a better job, and if anyone got that quick a return on their tuition, the course couldn't have been *that* bad...
* Being back in Albany and making new friends. New York is pretty isolating. Ok, I'm not supposed to admit that the Center of the Universe that is Manhattan gets a little old after a while, and there are people and places I miss, but, sorry to say, Albany is just a little more comfortable for me.
* The feeling of accomplishment. I feel like I make a difference here.
{emotional sigh}
Yea, and I still have a bunch of work to get out in the next few days. Just wondering what the dissertation process will be like-- it's one thing to try to crank out a 10 page paper overnight, quite another for a 300-page dissertation. :)

Posterrific...

We had our first ever conference yesterday at the school, and my assignment was to construct/present a conference poster, along with a few other students. The problem? I'm behind on my real research because of mandated department research requirements that got tacked onto my graduate assistanceship this year, along with the teaching load. The faculty I was assigned to has nothing to do with my research area, so the result, a school year later, was standing up in front of my department presenting a topic only vaguely related to my real research on transporation information systems.

Damn near all the faculty stopped by. One reaction pretty much summed it up: "I thought you were doing ?" "I am," I replied. "So why are you spending your time on this?" "Department requirement." Puzzled look, walked away. Swell. Now I think I have to do damage control and possibly rebuild my program committee-- that poster probably cost me one member, since my work now looks like fluff.

I didn't realize until the conference that presenting a poster makes a used car salesman out of you (thanks for the analogy, Matt!). Though here, it's trying to sell academic legitimacy rather than broken down cars for top dollar. On the good side, I have a small stack of business cards to hand out at other conferences.

But other parts of the conference were good, including the other posters presented, and the presentations. Seeing old professors was good, though was a little surprised when someone apparently remembered me from a comment I made in class nearly 12 years ago (which I had long forgotten about). Makes me wonder what memories my current students are going to have of me in a decade.. :)

Time to get back to my real work-- the last two papers to finish before my semester is really over. And a final exam I have to finish making...