Tales from Miscellanea

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:16:56 GMT

Quickie note - my LA photos site has change servers. It's now over here. (It may also be changing names one of these days; I haven't decided yet.) I'll be dumping new photos on it sporadically for the rest of the month, and then fleeing to Mexico. ;)

Why not?

Sat, 01 Sep 2007 06:14:19 GMT

(snagged from ellenmillion)

I'm slightly disappointed at my science/math score, but it's probably because I haven't seen an integral in a decade.

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 04:46:49 GMT

Ben and I are both back in our respective states. :( However, I still have Albuquerque photos! These were all taken at the University of New Mexico. (You can start here if you've already seen the Sandia Peak ones.)

Recipes

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 01:59:00 GMT

If you like cooking and sharing recipes, head over to recipecllctn and start posting. (You can also use the tags list to find interesting food, but please add your favorite dishes too.)

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 04:56:54 GMT

Added Sherman Oaks pictures to Portraits of a City (aka "that LA photos site"). Also put frames around the image galleries in the hopes of making navigation easier. Let me know if anything weird shows up.

Trees and Clouds

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 02:28:14 GMT

Ben and I drove up to Sandia Peak a couple of days ago. (That is to say, he was doing the driving.) Here are pictures!

Also, can anyone identify this insect? They were all over the place.

Lookie! Photos!

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 04:06:27 GMT

If you've spent any time in LA then you know that it feels less like a coherent city and more like a big amoebalike sprawl of different cities, languages and lifestyles, oftentimes spilling into each other at the edges. That's something I find fascinating about it.

For the longest time I've wanted to make a photo site based around that idea and this summer I finally had the time to put it together:

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~lia/laphoto/

This will be an ongoing project -- it's partly to show off photos, but also my own way of exploring a city I grew up in but never really knew. Granted there's very little actual content at the moment, but I'm gradually sorting through the mess of old photos on my computer so updates will happen (even if I'm not actually in LA ;) ).

In the meantime, enjoy!
(Oh and let me know if you think of an alternate title.)

Summer Update

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 16:23:24 GMT

I'm in Albuquerque now, spending the rest of the month with Ben -- probably the longest stretch of time we've had together since grad school started. He's been busy with school/grading and I've been raiding his campus library for research material and we've generally just been doing mundane things together and enjoying the spectacular New Mexico summer thunderstorms. So happy. Oh yes, and I'm now addicted to the Phoenix Wright series; you can probably guess whose fault that is.

Also been working on another project (related to the flickr question in the previous post) but that'll get a separate post later today.

Flickr

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 22:05:26 GMT

Have you used Flickr? What do you think of it? What's it good at, what's it bad at? What sort of funky stuff have you done with it? And what's up with that map thing?

Also how customizable is the site design? (Not LJ-style insane tweakability, obviously but can you at least change the background color?)

I'm considering getting an account for a little project I've been working on. Their online tour makes it sound awesome (of course), but what's it like to actually use?

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 06:46:28 GMT

Hey, looks like I'm on the alumni e-newsletter -- guess that MA counted for something after all. Fundraiser calls will be interesting:

"Hi, would you care to make a small contrib--"
"Sorry, poor graduate student here. Come back in ten years."
"Yes we know grad students don't have much, but if you'd like to sign up for our deferral plan --" [1]
"No, you don't understand, I'm still paying tution to YOUR university.[2] That degree ain't helping my paycheck much."

Or I could just say "I'm already contributing to the university by teaching people like you. Have you ever taken an introductory anthropology course? What do you mean you're an English major - that's no excuse!" :D

[1] Not making this up. They bill you at the end of the quarter, when your stipend comes in.

[2] Not entirely true. TAships cover tuition -- or "registration fees," as they are being called now. But we also get dinky salaries and can't take outside jobs so I like to think of it as paying in labor rather than cash. Not that I'm complaining.

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 06:35:29 GMT

I'm breaking my month long streak of consistent notposting with a link:

On making 911 calls from cell phones.
(Posted by labile, a 911 dispatcher in Florida.)

Thu, 17 May 2007 17:26:21 GMT

Quick FYI for AIMmers - I'll be in Berkeley until probably Tuesday and internet may be scarce. See you next week!

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 14:20:11 GMT

I'm on campus right now. It's really quiet without all the students around -- I should do this more often. Yeah, right. :)

Spring Break update

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 06:09:18 GMT

For those who have not been told already, I have finally achieved my Master's!

The thesis was filed earlier this month, barely making the deadline for Winter quarter. Ironically enough, my laptop died the weekend before said deadline. However[1], it revived long enough to retrieve my thesis so nothing was lost except a dozen bibliographic entries which were sitting in a pile by the computer anyway. It was also under warranty (us grad students do occasonally learn from our mistakes). All in all, I feel pretty fortunate and am now a better educated member of society by three years and two letters.

[1] My advisor says that starting a sentence with "however" is bad form. But it's a really hard habit to break. Come to think of it, so is writing footnotes.

After that was the week of grading hell (60 five-page essays on the exact same subject and nearly 300 versions of the exact same two exam questions) so celebration had to wait for a few days and eventually came in the form of sleep.

Celebration and unproductivity ensued, in the form of....
- receiving laptop back from repairs,
- hanging out with my brother, (hi Ed!)
- (starting and) finishing Myst,
- cleaning my room and sorting a year's worth of papers and notes,
- reading several novels,
- reading CLAMP manga in Spanish,
- doing laundry,
- sorting finances and figuring out tax related stuff,
- sleeping.

The near future includes cleaning the bathroom, possibly drawing, and a trip to visit Ben. ^^

Myst was much smaller and not nearly as difficult as I'd expected (expecially given my frustrations over Riven back in college). Of course, approaching the game like an obsessive cartographer may help. The laptop is doing fine and the repair guys were kind enough to replace the keyboard as well, so my touch-typing skills are no longer nearly as impressive.

Ed is in town for grad recruitment. He currently has several excellent physics programs fighting over him and just received an awesome fellowship. Yes, shameless boasting, but big sisters are allowed. :)

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 22:39:48 GMT

Things are pretty low-key here. As a couple people already know, we ended up cancelling our usual New York trip for reasons I won't go into in a public post. (But rest assured - everything's fine and more importantly everyONE is fine.) The immediate family is all here, though -- Ed (bremsstrahlung) flew down for a couple weeks and has been gradually taking over the kitchen. And I get to spend more time with Ben (byackley), so it's been a pretty good holiday overall. :)

We took a post-Christmas trip to Fry's and came home with a mini-blender (for me) and a wireless router (for everyone). Ed set up the router last night so now we have joined the 21st century and can pack up the 50 foot red ethernet cable that's been wandering all over the place. :D He also got the DS online which means...well, we'll see what that means.

I should go and get some actual writing and/or reading done.

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:10:44 GMT

ZOMG MIDTERM!

(And I don't have to take it!)

kthanxbye

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 22:05:48 GMT

FYI I'm back in the US.

Summer went well, got a lot done and got to spent some time with friends. Of course, now I have to sit down and actually write my thesis, but at least half the job's done.

Classes start on Thursday and this marks my first year as a TA so any suggestions on what (not) to do would be much appreciated. The university is pretty good about training us, at least -- this past week we've all been workshopped and oriented to death and given useful (and sometimes contradictory) tips and tricks. First-time TAs also have to sign up for a quarter-long dept-specific training class ... which is meeting at 8 in the morning this year because we all have crazy schedules. >-<

Tomorrow we have a meeting with the prof and get to wrestle each other for the cushy afternoon discussion sections.

EDIT 9/27: Thanks for all the advice -- I'm taking notes! Will write responses after the prof meeting once I have a clearer idea of what the heck we're supposed to be doing.

EDIT 9/29:
Okay it sounds like discussion sections are going to be partly review of lecture and partly going over the homework (which is basically study questions from the textbook). Fairly straightforward -- except we're apparently supposed to go over the material from the *previous* week, not the current one, which will make Thursday and Friday sections a bit confusing.

Because it's such a big class, the prof wants to keep material standardized across all 18 sections. So we divvied up the syllabus and every week one TA will prepare a "module" (generalized lesson plan) for the following week's sections and give it to everyone else along with handouts, exercises, etc. Which means less work (assuming one's fellow TAs write good lesson plans ;) ) but also less room for innovation. So I may have to save some of your ideas for use in other classes later on in the year. :)

Hasta Luego!

Sat, 22 Jul 2006 05:50:01 GMT

Leaving for Mexico. Will return end of August. I won't be posting in this journal but can be contacted in the usual ways. (If you don't know what those are, leave a comment here - they get emailed.)

In the News....

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 05:09:01 GMT

For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Resume

Those of you going on the job market might want to clean up your Myspace first. (And we all know about Google, right? -- me, I'm wondering about those old art pages.)

The New York Times
June 11, 2006
For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé
By ALAN FINDER

When a small consulting company in Chicago was looking to hire a summer intern this month, the company's president went online to check on a promising candidate who had just graduated from the University of Illinois.

At Facebook, a popular social networking site, the executive found the candidate's Web page with this description of his interests: "smokin' blunts" (cigars hollowed out and stuffed with marijuana), shooting people and obsessive sex, all described in vivid slang.

It did not matter that the student was clearly posturing. He was done.

"A lot of it makes me think, what kind of judgment does this person have?" said the company's president, Brad Karsh. "Why are you allowing this to be viewed publicly, effectively, or semipublicly?"

Many companies that recruit on college campuses have been using search engines like Google and Yahoo to conduct background checks on seniors looking for their first job. But now, college career counselors and other experts say, some recruiters are looking up applicants on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga and Friendster, where college students often post risqué or teasing photographs and provocative comments about drinking, recreational drug use and sexual exploits in what some mistakenly believe is relative privacy.

When viewed by corporate recruiters or admissions officials at graduate and professional schools, such pages can make students look immature and unprofessional, at best.

"It's a growing phenomenon," said Michael Sciola, director of the career resource center at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. "There are lots of employers that Google. Now they've taken the next step."

At New York University, recruiters from about 30 companies told career counselors that they were looking at the sites, said Trudy G. Steinfeld, executive director of the center for career development.

"The term they've used over and over is red flags," Ms. Steinfeld said. "Is there something about their lifestyle that we might find questionable or that we might find goes against the core values of our corporation?"

Facebook and MySpace are only two years old but have attracted millions of avid young participants, who mingle online by sharing biographical and other information, often intended to show how funny, cool or outrageous they are.

On MySpace and similar sites, personal pages are generally available to anyone who registers, with few restrictions on who can register. Facebook, though, has separate requirements for different categories of users; college students must have a college e-mail address to register. Personal pages on Facebook are restricted to friends and others on the user's campus, leading many students to assume that they are relatively private.

But companies can gain access to the information in several ways. Employees who are recent graduates often retain their college e-mail addresses, which enables them to see pages. Sometimes, too, companies ask college students working as interns to perform online background checks, said Patricia Rose, the director of career services at the University of Pennsylvania.

Concerns have already been raised about these and other Internet sites, including their potential misuse by stalkers and students exposing their own misbehavior, for example by posting photographs of hazing by college sports teams. Add to the list of unintended consequences the new hurdles for the job search.

Ana Homayoun runs Green Ivy Educational Consulting, a small firm that tutors and teaches organizational skills to high school students in the San Francisco area. Ms. Homayoun visited Duke University this spring for an alumni weekend and while there planned to interview a promising job applicant.

Curious about the candidate, Ms. Homayoun went to her page on Facebook. She found explicit photographs and commentary about the student's sexual escapades, drinking and pot smoking, including testimonials from friends. Among the pictures were shots of the young woman passed out after drinking.

"I was just shocked by the amount of stuff that she was willing to publicly display," Ms. Homayoun said. "When I saw that, I thought, 'O.K., so much for that.' "

Ms. Rose said a recruiter had told her he rejected an applicant after searching the name of the student, a chemical engineering major, on Google. Among the things the recruiter found, she said, was this remark: "I like to blow things up."

Occasionally students find evidence online that may explain why a job search is foundering. Tien Nguyen, a senior at the University of California, Los Angeles, signed up for interviews on campus with corporate recruiters, beginning last fall, but he was seldom invited.

A friend suggested in February that Mr. Nguyen research himself on Google. He found a link to a satirical essay, titled "Lying Your Way to the Top," that he had published last summer on a Web site for college students. He asked that the essay be removed. Soon, he began to be invited to job interviews, and he has now received several offers.

"I never really considered that employers would do something like that," he said. "I thought they would just look at your résumé and grades."

Jennifer Floren is chief executive of Experience Inc., which provides online information about jobs and employers to students at 3,800 universities. "This is really the first time that we've seen that stage of life captured in a kind of time capsule and in a public way," Ms. Floren said. "It has its place, but it's moving from a fraternity or sorority living room. It's now in a public arena."

Some companies, including Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Ernst & Young and Osram Sylvania, said they did not use the Internet to check on college job applicants.

"I'd rather not see that part of them," said Maureen Crawford Hentz, manager of talent acquisition at Osram Sylvania. "I don't think it's related to their bona fide occupational qualifications."

More than a half-dozen major corporations, including Morgan Stanley, Dell, Pfizer, L'Oréal and Goldman Sachs, turned down or did not respond to requests for interviews.

But other companies, particularly those involved in the digital world like Microsoft and Métier, a small software company in Washington, D.C., said researching students through social networking sites was now fairly typical. "It's becoming very much a common tool," said Warren Ashton, group marketing manager at Microsoft. "For the first time ever, you suddenly have very public information about almost any candidate."

At Microsoft, Mr. Ashton said, recruiters are given broad latitude over how to work, and there is no formal policy about using the Internet to research applicants. "There are certain recruiters and certain companies that are probably more in tune with the new technologies than others are," he said.

Microsoft and Osram Sylvania have also begun to use networking sites in a different way, participating openly in online communities to get out their company's messages and to identify talented job candidates.

Students may not know when they have been passed up for an interview or a job offer because of something a recruiter saw on the Internet. But more than a dozen college career counselors said recruiters had been telling them since last fall about incidents in which students' online writing or photographs had raised serious questions about their judgment, eliminating them as job candidates.

Some college career executives are skeptical that many employers routinely check applicants online. "My observation is that it's more fiction than fact," said Tom Devlin, director of the career center at the University of California, Berkeley.

At a conference in late May, Mr. Devlin said, he asked 40 employers if they researched students online and every one said no.

Many career counselors have been urging students to review their pages on Facebook and other sites with fresh eyes, removing photographs or text that may be inappropriate to show to their grandmother or potential employers. Counselors are also encouraging students to apply settings on Facebook that can significantly limit access to their pages.

Melanie Deitch, director of marketing at Facebook, said students should take advantage of the site's privacy settings and be smart about what they post. But students may not be following the advice.

"I think students have the view that Facebook is their space and that the adult world doesn't know about it," said Mark W. Smith, assistant vice chancellor and director of the career center at Washington University in St. Louis. "But the adult world is starting to come in."

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 03:29:03 GMT

I

Got

Data!!

WTF

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 00:12:09 GMT

I just now went searching for a text file I wrote a couple days ago (this is why I type everything into the computer - my bookcase does not have a search option) and the first thing that popped up was "God is not happy about this.doc"

Um, okay. Even God uses a computer, I guess.

(It was in the attachments folder, which just goes to show the weird spam mail I get sometimes.)

The Monthly "Yes, I Am Still on the Internet" Post

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 06:05:22 GMT

Thursday was the first group meeting with all three of my advisors, which means it's been a horribly busy week overall, of the "Okay, that's enough work for today -- oh, wait, I should've been asleep two hours ago!" variety. (And, Ben, I'm really sorry I spent more time with the handouts than with you on Val Day)

Friday afternoon I was a complete and utter slacker and loved every minute of it.

There is now a nice neat pile/directory of articles to be read/printed and my video tapes are in order. There is also biscotti baking in the oven.

EDIT: Forgot to add the other bit of news -- new stuff at EMG!

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 04:10:40 GMT

I just noticed a number of "first day of school" posts on my list today. I've been in school a whole week, so nyah! Okay, I shouldn't complain -- if it weren't for the semester system I wouldn't have gotten to see Ed last weekend and hear about his trip to Japan. Post photos, man!

Anyway, for those interested.....

.	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Saturday
8:45-10			Colab	CHAMPS
10-11	App Ling		AppLing
11-12	App Ling		AppLing
12:30-1		Talk
1-2		Talk
2-3		Lang Soc
3-4	Psy Anth Disc
4-5	Psy Anth Disc		Ling Lab<
5-6			Ling Lab<
6-7			Figure Drawing
7-8:30			Figure Drawing

App Ling = data analysis class.
Lang Soc = anthro class taught by my advisor.
Forum = interdisciplinary talk series that I really should have been going to last year but didn't because of schedule conflicts and now people are yelling at me about it.
Psy Anth Disc = a psych anthro discussion group (which I may be dropping if I get a time crunch).
Ling Lab = Ditto except it's ling anthro (and unlikely to be dropped).
Colab = a little workshop thing my other advisor puts together. We talk about our work and stuff.
Figure Drawing is what it sounds like. :D
CHAMPS = teen mentoring

Not posting my (out of class) study schedule because it's just too scary.

Gotta go get a sketchbook now.

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 05:16:42 GMT

Back in town and back in school. (Actually I got back in LA last week but had more important things on my mind.) And too freakin' tired to write up anything new yearsy or anything about the trip or anything coherent at all ... so you get a meme instead.

Four jobs you've had in your life: Half my jobs were called Administrative Assistant. :P Database Script Writing, Data Entry (transcripts), Non-Commission Retail and Grad Student (hey, I get paid for it!)

Four movies you could watch over and over: Hum de hum, so many movies. Princess Bride, Howl's Moving Castle, Twin Signal (it's only one DVD, it should count!), and Princess Mononoke. Ask me tomorrow and I'll have a different list.

Four places you've lived: Los Angeles (actually two places -- Studio City and Sherman Oaks); Berkeley; Mexico City; and Fremont, CA (oh god!).

Four TV shows you love to watch: Haven't had a TV in years. Fruits Basket (in Spanish if possible!), DS9 (the Jadzia era), Mystery, Card Captor Sakura.

Four places you've been to on vacation: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Albuquerque.

Four websites you visit daily: Narbonic and Digger (I tend to read the rest of my comics in weekly chunks), weather.com, and Google.

Four of your favorite foods: spicy tuna sushi, chicken mole, crabcakes (oddly enough, I don't much care for crab), tuna salad.

Four places you'd rather be: In bed; with Ben; still on vacation; and somewhere in Japan. Why Japan? Because I've never ever been there -- and I could bug bremsstrahlung. :D

Four albums you can't live without: I don't really think of my music in terms of albums -- it all gets dumped onto one big playlist and chosen from there. Keiko Matsui - "Deep Blue" (wonderful background music for writing/studying) and Evanescence - "Fallen" (bus/destress music) get a lot of milage, though. iTunes' play count says I really like Ben's music. :D Aaaand.... Paul Simon - "Graceland", I guess. Or Queen.

Mon, 26 Dec 2005 19:56:41 GMT

FYI, I'm in New York at the moment. Checking email on my uncle's computer but won't be online otherwise.