O/T: How to visit colleges

Off-topic... I recently took a great college-visiting trip with my daughter recently. (She was a Junior.) We saw about 12 colleges in four days of driving from Rhode Island to Washington, D.C. It was a wonderful, eye-opening time. She had gone to a couple college fairs, but there was no substitute for seeing the schools live.

Here are several lessons I learned...

• When to go: Junior year... or maybe even earlier. Visiting colleges and talking to students there changed the concept of college from hypothetical to very real, and desirable. Not only did my daughter start getting some ideas about where she'd like to go to college and (maybe) what she'd like to do at college and beyond, but also she learned for herself why grades matter re college.
  
  After the trip, I decided that I'd like to take my younger daughter to visit at least one college when she's a Sophomore -- to give her some idea of what college is about, early on.
  
  
• When to go: when the college is in session. This is obvious, right? The students at the college, and the professors and courses being taught, are essential parts of the experience.
  
  Unfortunately there's a large overlap between regular high-school calendars and college calendars. We were able to go during spring break (April).
  
  It's easy to check colleges' calendars online, to see where there are times without overlap.
  
  It's also worth checking whether colleges will be fully focussed on pre-applicants when you go. April was a slightly tough time -- some of the colleges were catering to high-school Seniors they had admitted who hadn't yet decided whether to accept admission. I would guess August is similarly an odd time for colleges since students are only just getting into the swing of things -- it may be difficult to line up tours and stay-overs and class visits. And many colleges have long breaks in December, and exams in January.
  
  
• Who should go: as few people as possible. The real point is for the student to figure out makes sense for them. Parents are chauffeurs and tag-alongs and sounding boards. If more than one parent goes, they inevitably start sharing their impressions with each other -- and influencing the student. I found my daughter quite sensitive to my opinions, to the point where I made an effort to keep them to myself.
  
  During this trip, the student has to be self-centered. That's the whole point -- he or she is working toward a very big step of self-identification. "Who do you want to be?"
  
  Therefore, leave siblings home, if feasible. A sibling, particularly one that's more than a couple years younger, will interfere with the college-applyer's efforts at self-discovery. (However, two parents and two children might make it work, by having one parent in charge of each child and never the twain shall meet.)
  
  
• Where to go: multiple colleges per day. At the risk of sounding like a glutton for punishment, it's worth going to at least two colleges per day to get the comparative opinions flowing.
  
  It's probably worth going to at least one aspirational school and one safety school, as well as multiple schools the student expects to be able to get into. Urban/rural, large/small, homogenous/diverse, artsy/techie -- it's worth exploring all of these dimensions. The results can be surprising.
  
  In our case, my daughter realized she didn't want to go to a small school or a rural one.
  
  
• How to go: map out the trip. Google maps makes it very easy to create personalized maps. I created "Top Liberal Arts Colleges in the NE" to figure out the locations of about 30 top colleges, which then helped us figure out what was desirable and what was feasible.
  
  I made the map open for collaboration, so I think anyone can view it. To find it, click here or go to Google Maps, click on My Maps in the upper left, and "Browse the directory." (Already it's had 170 views in the few months since I created it.)
  
  
• How to go: Be flexible, and take a GPS! Maybe it would work for some people to have all of their maps and directions printed out in advance, but it was very useful for us to have some flexibility as we went. We dropped a couple colleges from our itinerary en route (when my daughter realized she didn't want to a small college), and added one or two in.
  
  We often got online in the evenings to confirm the exact addresses of the admissions offices we wanted to visit the next day.
  
  (It would have been helpful to have a smartphone to be able to check this en route. We were able to do check addresses from a regular cellphone, however, by texting to 46645, "googl".)
  
  We also had an evening to visit some family friends, an evening driving around New York City and an evening driving around Washington D.C.
  
  (By the way, our GPS got a little confused in among the skyscrapers of New York, sometimes thinking we were going the other direction! This was news to me -- presumably the GPS signal was getting bounced off the buildings?)
  
  Being flexible also meant we needed to bring with us the "bible" of applying to colleges: US News and World Report's America's Best Colleges, ranked by several criteria (and with basic data about hundreds of colleges). Much of the data is online, but I think it's worth having the print edition too.
  
  
• How to go: sign in at admissions office, and take notes. One of the key lessons I got from this trip is that admissions offices use, as one of many criteria, the length of the relationship between the applicant and the school. In other words, colleges are maybe a little more reluctant to admit someone they've never heard from before.
  
  What I think this means is it's worth signing in at the admissions office of every college you visit, even if you just want to wander around the campus by yourself.
  
  (It is definitely worth going on at least a few student-guided tours, however.)
  
  Also -- take notes! The advantage of seeing several colleges in a short span of time is that it forces you to start making comparisons and realizing what really is important to you. The disadvantage obviously is that it can all become a jumble.
  
  What worked for us was while I drove on to the next college, or we stopped for a bite to eat, my daughter wrote down everything she could remember about the college, then underlined the important stuff. We learned that it helped for her to do this first, before discussing the school. That way she was sure to have her own ideas on paper.

Honestly, I haven't figured out financing yet! Best of luck to all...

- Bruce

Don't panic

J: Man, we ain't got time for this #$%$... I don't know whether or not you've forgotten, but there's an Arquillian Battle Cruiser that's about to --

K: There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their lives is that they Do Not Know About It.

One of the key jobs of a project manager is to keep things calm -- to absorb stress rather than reflecting it (or, worse, generating it).

The project manager probably shouldn't be trying to cover things up as in this quote from Men in Black, but this scene correlates with a situation where an eager team member is about to get everybody riled up, before the project manager calms things down by reminding the exciter what the real objective and groundrules are.

There are plenty of times where listening to a team member's concerns privately (and seriously) will avoid an awkward meeting where the concerns are brought up out of the blue to unsettle the group as a whole.

And yes, there will always be crises to be addressed, in a project of any size. But it will always be better to address the crises calmly.

Basics of speech recognition

I worked with an early speech-recognition start-up in the first few years of this decade.

(I say "early" because this really was the current system of speech recognition, but we were ironing out the kinks, including working closely with the actual speech-engine vendors to improve their products.)

A primer on speech recognition:

• There are two main types, speaker-dependent and speaker-independent. Speaker-dependent speech recognition has been optimized for a given user. In other words, one person uses it, mainly, and the system should be very, very good at understanding what that one person is saying. Many people have this on their computers and use it for dictation (e.g. Dragon NaturallySpeaking). David Pogue of the New York Times has been pretty happy with it.
• Speaker-independent speech recognition is set up to handle anyone talking to it, whatever accent or speed or tone of voice. This is what you'll encounter on the telephone, e.g. at most airlines. It's generally very good, but understandably not quite as good as speaker-dependent speech recognition -- say, 95% instead of 98% (note these percentages are illustrative, they're not supposed to be exact, I haven't seen recent good data on this subject).
• ASR -- acronym for automated speech recognition, the system that compares the speech to its vocabulary and decides what was said.
• DTMF -- acronym for dual-tone multi-frequency. Basically refers to touchtone keypad-punching.
• Voice recognition -- recognizing the identity of the person who is speaking. This is different from speech recognition, but the term is often used incorrectly as a synonym.
• Voice authentication -- verifying the claimed identity of a person using their speech. Again, this is different from speech recognition.

- Bruce

hello, computer!

A quick first posting, which will also lay out a little of what I'll try to do in this blog...

Before I even start, let me detour. In the Star Trek 4 movie, the crew goes back in time and has to use a computer from the 1980s. Scotty, the Star Trek chief engineer, says "computer!" to it a couple times with no response. Someone hands him the mouse to use. He says "ah", and speaks into the mouse, "hello, computer!"

(Unfortunately the clip isn't available on Youtube.)

The point is not to rouse Trekkies or mock speech recognition (which has come a long way since the mid-80s, even), but to show a "naive" interaction with technology. He interacted with it the way he always has -- indeed, in what is sometimes* the most intuitive way possible, talking to it the way he'd talk to a person.

We need to design products that are immediately, intuitively usable. A person uses it without thinking about the fact that they're using it, without wondering how to use it.

This is a simple but deep concept. All the time we build products with interfaces determined by the way the features are set up in the system, not by the way people will use them. We talk about "users" and "interaction", for that matter.

I feel very strongly that technology should adapt to people, not the other way around.

A common example of the wrong way of doing things -- the other day I called a utility and was told "say 'one' to talk to maintenance..."

1. Why should I say "one" instead of e.g. "maintenance"? What the system designer did was simply port over the touchtone system to a speech-rec system, changing the input resulting from "press one" to that from "say 'one'." No thinking involved by the system designer.
   
   This asks the caller to make that mental connection, 1 = maintenance, I want maintenance so I say 1. When touchtone was all we had, that was a necessary step. Now, it shouldn't be.
   
   
2. Very simple (but common) problem with the order of what was said to the caller: "say 'one' to talk to maintenance". This makes sense from a flow-chart perspective (the caller says "one" -> they get put through to maintenance). But it also requires the caller to listen to the whole phrase, then remember the beginning of it. OK, that's right, I want maintenance... what was that number again? And remember, this was one of 7 or 8 options that the caller was hearing. The system designer could have easily avoided this by phrasing it "to talk to maintenance, say 'one'." With this wording, the caller hears and thinks, right, I want maintenance, and then hears what they're supposed to do.
   
   In other words, when we're listening to instructions, they need to be in the order "to accomplish this, say this" rather than "say this to accomplish this". The second way requires the user to remember what it is they're supposed to say until they hear whether it leads to what they want to accomplish.

(A sidebar re order-of-listening issues: I hope the traffic-radio folks pick up on this. It's not so useful to hear 60 seconds of traffic with "there's a four-car accident and a major back-up on Route 880 northbound in Fremont" when the driver who's half-listening hears only Route 880 northbound in Fremont -- oh no, what was that again? Instead, the traffic-radio announcers should give the location first, allowing their listeners to pay close attention when it matters.)

'Nuff said.

- Bruce

* I'll discuss in a later post where speech recognition should work and where it shouldn't -- not because of technology but because of how our minds work.