Dr. Shellie

I think I had heard that someone was trying to make a $100 laptop for kids in the developing world. I even knew that they were bright green or orange to discourage adults from stealing them. But it was just this week that I realized what an incredibly huge, visionary idea this project is.

Go take a look at this map, which shows the countries planned for the pilot program: they span the globe–Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, China, Thailand, Nigeria, and Egypt. The vision is to ship FIVE MILLION laptops to kids in these countries by early 2007, with 250 million to follow in the next year. If the vision pans out, the impact will huge– completely transformative on the global level.

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the group behind this initiative, is a non-profit organization spun out of the Media Lab at MIT. They’re taking an unusual approach to the project. Their focus is on the laptop itself– by completely rethinking the hardware requirements, they aim to come up with a cheap, rugged, durable laptop that is uniquely suited to classrooms in the developing world. The screen will be readable in full sunlight, for kids who have classes outdoors. The case will be rugged and durable to survive dust and rainstorms, and a foot pedal on the AC adapter will allow recharging without access to an electrical power supply.

In a way, this project is totally crazy. I think I can believe they can make a laptop– or even 5 million. But what about the other issues? How useful will they be without reliable Internet connections throughout the developing world? Will there be useful software available for them? What if they break– will there be cheap repair services in, say, Nigeria? OLPC is taking the approach that they will worry about these things when the time comes– until then, onward! Since the entire project is non-profit and based on open-source software, anyone who wants to help is encouraged to do so. From OLPC’s wiki:

People say that OLPC has no plan for recycling the laptops, or training teachers, or getting software into local languages, or preventing wholesale theft and resale of the machines, or a host of other things that we clearly should plan for. The fact is that it is too soon to have an announced plan for any of these things. But lack of an announced plan does not equate to lack of planning. Significant numbers of people are putting their best thoughts and other efforts into these problems, and will have much to say at the appropriate times.

So, crazy or no, I really admire this iniative… it’s thinking really big about how technology can have a positive impact on society world-wide. I will be watching with interest to see how it does.

I would have thought that using your digital camera to take pictures of people’s presentation slides was rude. Nevertheless, it is a growing trend. Some do it surreptitiously, some do it openly. Some people even use videophones to record the whole talk. What do they do with all that information? I am busy enough doing my own research without watching reruns of conference talks!

Today I met Mr. Pessimistic Physicist. PP has been affected by a string of bad luck. While he is interested only in fundamental research questions involving the accurate formulation of mathematical methods for the description of physical phenomena, he has reluctantly financed his research career by pretending to be interested in engineering applications. Sadly, the engineering applications he purports to be addressing have a bad habit of running out of promise just when it is time for him to renew his contract. Now he is entering his late thirties with two children to support and no permanent position. Poor PP. He is starting to confuse (rather, equate) the lack of an obvious "killer app" in his current field with his lack of an obvious salary income three months hence. He is realizing for the first time that there is more to science than just doing science. There are politics involved. And while heretofore he has been able to hide in his cubicle and compute, oblivious of such concerns, such a life is no longer possible. Aaaah… physicists. Why so dense?

One.

I ate lunch at a very pleasant restaurant today. The hostess was quite glamorous. She had overbleached blond hair swept back in a wispy bun, and was wearing a black silk halter top with a pleated, black silk skirt. She looked kind of art-school bohemian meets Grace Kelly. to top it off, she was wearing a pair of 3-inch black stiletto heels. Since I just bought a pair of low heels to wear to conferences and am trying to figure out whether I can make it through the day in them, shoes are on my mind. When she stopped by to check on my table, I couldn’t resist asking whether her feet hurt. "Oh yes," she said. "By the end of the day they get numb. I take two Tylenol every morning before coming to work."

Two.

At the place I went for dinner, the teenage hostess was wearing a white linen dress, belted with a rope(!) just under her breasts and covering about three inches of her upper thighs. Midway through my meal, a friend of her mother’s wandered by and asked rather pointedly whether it was a shirt or a dress.

Unlike Lizard Guy, who started out with a deep curiosity for lizards, I did not start out with a deep curiosity for my research subject. That would have been quite impossible, since I had never heard of it before starting graduate school. How then, did I get into my subject and start finding problems to solve? As I commented in an earlier post, beginning grad students in my field only rarely identify their own research problems; generally they are suggested by the PhD advisor. Skookumchick asked me to elaborate on this idea:

I’m interested in this “problem-defining” thing you wrote about. How do the professors learn to define problems that are original? Is it just through experience with the field? Or do they just know what the field considers an appropriate PhD-level “problem?”

Generally, each professor or lab has its own expertise– experimental techniques, equipment, theoretical tools, etc. Once you have worked in an area for a while, you generally know what the "big limitations" and challenges of your research area are. Suppose you drill ice core samples in Antarctica, and use them to read out a record of the ambient gasses. You know that the deeper into the ice you are, the farther back you are in time, but that your dates are only accurate plus or minus one hundred years. And suppose EVERYONE you know working on ice core samples has the same problem, and that the ice-core methodology is actually a major method of tracing climate change. And then, one day you have an idea of how to reduce this error to twenty years. Immediately, you start thinking of all sorts of implications of this reduced error for models of global climate. And so even if your idea only has a small chance or working, you see it is a big pay-off problem, and you are motivated to work harder on it.

This is what you gain through experience– an appreciation for which problems (if solved) could have long-range implications. Of course, you are not always correct. Sometimes very obscure problems turn out to be important later on, and seemingly important problems turn out to be relatively useless. Nevertheless, you gain a sense of conviction about what areas are promising, and potentially "worth" working on. (Not to mention: which problems you can get funding for and publications on! Here, the long-range implications are the selling point.)

While an individual grad student might be able to go choose an area of science, start reading relevant papers, and eventually find some problem to solve (whether experimentally, theoretically, or computationally), there is a high chance of either unknowingly duplicating previous work or solving something that no one else seems interested in. This seems to be the case in most areas of physical sciences (chemistry, physics, geology, materials science), chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering, and applied math. It is particularly the case for highly theoretical fields that require years of training just to approach the subject, like theoretical particle physics. I have known a very few scientists or engineers in these fields who were able to completely define their own problems, starting in grad school, but only a VERY few. It helps to be quite independent and also insensitive to criticism. I also know a few others who found there "was nothing interesting to study" in their grad departments and stayed home all day "working on their own things," e.g. programming increasingly complex computer games, or writing their own economics textbook despite no formal background in the subject. In other words… they followed their own ideas, but never made it to the PhD.